> phones in […] Kosovo may be reached by dialing the country calling code for Serbia (+381), Slovenia (+386), or Monaco (+377) That can't be right. When will Americans learn basic 4th school year geography?
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Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
151–160 of 209 posts
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#152>1. An individual has a phone number Requiring a phone number one way for me to ignore your website or service (ie, Signal) forever. But if you do it I'm probably not your target demographic anyway.
Requiring a phone number still reduces fraud a lot.
It also enables it. All while being an ugly friction point for many users.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#153I have/had a Facebook account with a phone number. The account was left unused for a few years. Recently, I used my E-mail to reset its password, unfortunately, since the account was abandoned for a long time, the system flagged my activity as "suspicious" automatically, and asks me for confirmation using my phone number. But I no longer own that number. And from the customer Q&A forum, I realized I was not the only…
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. Customers of Skype or Facetime or Slack or Hangout cannot simply contact each other across services.
Yes, phone numbers need to be replaced. They need to be replaced by an open solution, not a proprietary solution like Skype.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#154> phones in […] Kosovo may be reached by dialing the country calling code for Serbia (+381), Slovenia (+386), or Monaco (+377) That can't be right. When will Americans learn basic 4th school year geography?
Considering the US has states that are larger than those countries, can 4th year students from those countries fill in a map of all the US states?
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#155I have/had a Facebook account with a phone number. The account was left unused for a few years. Recently, I used my E-mail to reset its password, unfortunately, since the account was abandoned for a long time, the system flagged my activity as "suspicious" automatically, and asks me for confirmation using my phone number. But I no longer own that number. And from the customer Q&A forum, I realized I was not the only…
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…
> making phone numbers a passport of sorts (a proprietary, insecure, easy to lose passport, over which you have basically no control)
Phones are an imperfect solution for two-factor authentication but nothing else is as widely available.
There are also very well-supported ways to recover access to your phone number if the physical device is lost or stolen: Contact your phone company, present legal ID and get a new sim card.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#156"Phone numbers are numbers" - I've come this multiple times integrating phone numbers into a product. Currently I just store phone numbers in E.164 format as a string with max length of 25 just to be safe and index them. This really takes up no additional space and can easily handle extensions. I can't tell you how many times I've run into people storing phone numbers without normalization eg: "(555) 444 - 3333" etc.…
I assume why they store them as entered is because it's hard to convert them between formats. In North America you format the number that way, but other countries do it differently. Maybe the phone number is a local number (without area code) or maybe it has an extension?
If you are just storing the phone number to display to a user at a later time, it is a lot simpler just to save it as text field with no validation.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#157> phones in […] Kosovo may be reached by dialing the country calling code for Serbia (+381), Slovenia (+386), or Monaco (+377) That can't be right. When will Americans learn basic 4th school year geography?
Geography and dialling codes aren’t necessarily aligned. So none of those countries share a border - it doesn’t mean there was never a weird issue with international dialling codes at some point (and, after I did a bit of searching, it seems that there was)
> none of those countries share a border
Precisely. That should give the reader pause to think that there's something wrong.
You're missing that the author mixed up Monaco with Montenegro (Kosovo's neighbour) because they sound similar. That's the perennial Austria/Australia confusion writ small.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#158For a copious list of falsehoods you or other programmers might believe, see also: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
What a great link! Thanks!
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#159I would, from personal experience, construct a quite different list. Some of mine would be: * Every other country's telephone numbering is like one's own. * Every other country's telephone numbering is like that of EU countries, or like the NANP. * The last 10 digits are the subscriber number. * Geographic numbers are actually geographic. * 123456789 is a perfectly fine number to use for test calls. * STD is exactly…
> Calls can only be traced whilst the caller is on the line. You just punched a hole in the plot of every procedural crime drama. :)
You can add "Calls take a non-trivial amount of time (i.e 60 seconds) to trace" to that list. It's immediate.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do wonder how EU's "right to be forgotten" comes into the play here. Could it be used in your case?
Eu's GDPR defines several rights and obligations, one of which is : Personal data shall be [...] accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date; every reasonable step must be taken to ensure that personal data that are inaccurate, having regard to the purposes for which they are processed, are erased or rectified without delay (‘accuracy’); OP could contact Facebook's Data Protection Officer, that they are required t…
But how will he verify that he actually is the person who owns the account?
Well, in this case, he still owns the email so it should work.