Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

Post by arthurfm » Sat, Feb 23, 2019, 5:00 AM UTC

rsync wrote: post #188

techsupporter wrote: post #49

Flying Spaghetti Monster I hate that this is real: > Only mobile phones can receive text messages > Some service providers support sending and receiving text messages to fixed-line numbers. There are also online services like Skype that can send and receive text messages. "Oh but not-mobile-number phone numbers are always fraudulent so we don't accept them!" Great, I love getting caught in spam traps because I have a…

It's worth noting that a CLEC (or other provider) can , in fact, denote a non-mobile number (or block of numbers) as "mobile" so that it can do things like receive text verifications from short codes (like your bank, or gmail, uses). This is expensive and time-consuming, however, and almost no CLEC (or other such provider) will do it - you have to petition and register your number(s) with every single mobile provider…

Post by young_unixer » Sun, Feb 24, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

loudmax wrote: post #153

krick wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, as much as I hate Facebook: fuck phone numbers. The idea of using phone number as a personal identification tool is so bad, I'm struggling to believe this is not some kind of conspiracy designed for the solely purpose of mocking the user. It is bad enough that phone numbers exist at all in the eyes of the end user by the year 2019, 15 years after Skype with user-friendly logins appeared and when about a half of t…

> a proprietary, insecure, easy to lose passport > 15 years after Skype I agree with your general sentiment, but the two phrases I picked out are where you have it backward. Phone numbers are not proprietary. They're difficult to move, but if you're a customer with one phone company you can call a customer of a different phone company using a phone number. Skype is proprietary. It belongs to a single company. Custome…

Post by rsync » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 6:02 AM UTC

arthurfm wrote: post #202

rsync wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that a CLEC (or other provider) can , in fact, denote a non-mobile number (or block of numbers) as "mobile" so that it can do things like receive text verifications from short codes (like your bank, or gmail, uses). This is expensive and time-consuming, however, and almost no CLEC (or other such provider) will do it - you have to petition and register your number(s) with every single mobile provider…

> I have this problem because my main, personal number is actually a twilio number (as I built my own personal telco within twilio) and this means I cannot receive validation messages from shortcodes (like a bank) Why does Twilio work for me for SMS 2FA? Is it because I m using an '07' number in the UK? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19227631

Post by lgp71 » Mon, Feb 25, 2019, 11:26 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #190

DrScump wrote: post #96

Note: USA-specific Not even 20 years ago, before any number could be ported to mobiles, landlines in some (all?) Baby Bell regions had their prefix determined by geography. In other words, you could know what "zone" a given phone number was in by its prefix. Take Silicon Valley. A (650) 960-xxxx number meant Mountain View. (408) 733-xxxx meant Sunnyvale. Etc. Zones roughly respected cities, but boundary conditions ab…

Early BBS networks used to do this, too. Around 1984 the ARB (named for its author, Arthur Richard Brock, R.I.P.) BBS system did store-and-forward e-mail from one ARB BBS to the next, covering a good portion of the New England and Mid-Atlantic states. Back then toll charges were pretty high, but there were gateway nodes that had phone numbers which had free calling that spanned area codes and LATAs. ARBnet was pretty…