311–320 of 405 posts
It was a tough time to be a kid. I’m just happy so many of us made it through.
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There are alternatives to 2FA that don't require phones. But, yeah, at some point you become the weird person who refused to have a smartphone (or a cell phone at all) and, unless you're really special in some way, you probably have a target on your back.
For my workplace it was a choice of downloading duo on the phone or getting sms codes. In the past year they cut out the sms codes, now you get a temporary code from the duo app you need to enter into the login portal vs just a push to duo.
Technically it is pretty much like a phone but it is not used as a phone. No number, no sim card.
I am pretty sure some of these apps could work on waydroid too if needed.
So in the end all this discussion really depends if we are talking about the mobile device as a whole that you carry with you nearly all the time or some parts of the ecosystem that you may have at home.
In the 90's, I was a project manager for a software consulting company. I carried a beeper onsite so my superiors could reach me when needed (e.g. to discuss growing the account). During a lunch meeting one day, two of my bosses at the consulting company suggested that I upgrade to a cell phone, like they had done. I said I was reluctant to do that, because I valued my independence and didn't want to be on a short le…
I had the same thought process in the 90s, and it is the reason why I still don't have a smartphone :)
The same way people somewhat adapted to urban noise by better insulation and noise proofing, having a phone in dnd most of the time is I think a must nowadays.
You still can pay attention when you want, potentially at some regular intervals you set for yourself, and ignore it the rest of the time.
In the 90's, I was a project manager for a software consulting company. I carried a beeper onsite so my superiors could reach me when needed (e.g. to discuss growing the account). During a lunch meeting one day, two of my bosses at the consulting company suggested that I upgrade to a cell phone, like they had done. I said I was reluctant to do that, because I valued my independence and didn't want to be on a short le…
I had the same thought process in the 90s, and it is the reason why I still don't have a smartphone :)
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> The only acceptable way to be white these days is to agree with everything that is in vogue in SF and Cambridge in the last 6 months. I feel sorry for you if this is your lived experience. This isn't normal, even in HCOL left-leaning US cities. You might be the problem.
It really upsets me that the VHF pager networks were shut down. VHF pagers were the last way you could recieve notifications without having to offer up your location to surveillance. All satellite pagers require transmit-before-receive, and of course LTE requires that plus actively cooperating with the towers' triangulation of the receiver. VHF POCSAG over large urban areas is something we never should have let go of…
Hams still have and use them.[1] I'm not a ham, because I don't want to hang out with self-appointed cops, so I got a new Chinese pager made up with a center frequency of 433.5MHz (ISM, unlicensed), then configured it to work with a Pi-Star rig radiating well under the EU/Irish legal power limit, and receive messages infrequently enough not to run afoul of duty cycle limits. Because I know there's some ham who's just…
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No, iridium is definitely transmit-before-receive. The only thing you can receive without transmitting is a one-bit "message waiting" indicator, so you don't waste uplink bandwidth polling the satellite unless there's something there for you. Basically the satellite broadcasts a list of terminals that have messages waiting for them. I recall there being some kind of bloom filter, so technically it's less than one bit…
No, the original Iridium paging service really is (was?) one way. You had to manually update your paging location by dialing some number or by using a web interface when moving significantly, or link an Iridium phone to your pager, which would then automatically update the paging area (MDA) every time you made a call. What you mean is probably Iridium SBD, but that’s a different, bidirectional service (also used for…
I did not know about Global Data Burst; I think that's what you're referring to. Holy cow it's expensive though, although I guess it has to be since you're using a lot more bandwidth*footprint. Like $6.00 per message per delivery area expensive. And they're kinda vague on how big a "delivery area" is.
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Have you found any that still have service over a significant area in the US? Particularly the one-way (RX only) pagers. Very interested in this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40070092 > - Basically 2 companies, operating with antequated websites (and prices) still provide service at the historic prices If you get a chance to add the names/links of these companies I would really appreciate it.
Iridium still offers it, I believe — 100% global coverage!
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Bystander here, but I think you should open your horizon a bit.. or maybe you're a troll, who knows?
And have you tried to open _your_ horizon past the usual slogans ("mass imprisonment", "school-to-prison pipeline", etc.)? Try it. It might help you. Or not.
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That is funny, in a way that I feel hard to explain. Something about it being a simpler, more innocent time?
I love that too. You definitely don't see as many of them these days. By 2006 they were kind of a punchline (cf the TV series "30 Rock" and their portrayal as a goofy dead-end tech for weirdos, sold by Dennis Duffy). This might or might not be an interesting digression (apologies if it's the latter!) but many medical professionals still carry beepers or pagers of some kind. Not like "an app on their phone that will r…
At least twice, I've accidentally set my iOS devices to the Do Not Disturb focus mode. First time made me miss a job interview calendar reminder, leading to me (1) learn there's no way to disable this 'feature', the 'do not disturb' focus cannot be deleted, and (2) setting the DnD-focus-mode-specific wallpaper to something radically different from normal just so I'd spot it faster next time. It did happen again, but the second time I knew what was up even on the lock screen and turned the focus back to normal before it did any harm.