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Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

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Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#41

Post by Alterlife »

realusername wrote: post #5

I would personally add one (maybe I'll do a PR): Phone number formats never change for a particular country. Vietnam just removed a few months ago one digit of all the mobile phones making all the previous number recorded for the country invalid.

+1 from India.

There's popular app in Bangalore that you can use to rent bicycles. I can't use it because my phone number (which has a relatively newly released starting digit series) doesn't pass their signup validation.

So frustrating.

It's frustrating indeed.

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#42

Post by markdown »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #16

I 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…

> I've heard Google has similar issues, if the machine works, then everything is fine, until you need a human...

I have had great support via phone, chat, and email with google a number of times over the past 3 years, and I live on an island foreign to Google in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. My experience has been that if you're using a paid Google product, the support is excellent.

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#43

Post by macintux »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #40
aasasd wrote: post #38

> googlei18n > Some people do not wish to provide you with their telephone number when asked Well, you don't say! Next in the series, “Falsehoods programmers believe about 2fa, or: just use HOTP/TOTP, dammit.”

A challenge - try to register a Google account without providing personal information.

Heck, last time I tried to register a Twitter account I couldn’t do so without a phone number to receive a PIN, and a burner number wouldn’t do it. C’est la guerre.

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#44

Post by segfaultbuserr »

markdown wrote: post #42
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #16

I 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…

> I've heard Google has similar issues, if the machine works, then everything is fine, until you need a human... I have had great support via phone, chat, and email with google a number of times over the past 3 years, and I live on an island foreign to Google in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. My experience has been that if you're using a paid Google product, the support is excellent.

I have similar experience with most paid services online, so I think the point is clear - you have to be an actual customer with your payment, although it won't guarantee that you will be treated nicely as a customer, but otherwise, it's certain that you are almost always the product.

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#45

Post by darpa_escapee »

AnaniasAnanas wrote: post #22
wongarsu wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as you don't try to validate the email address I entered. The list of gotchas for email address parsing is impressive too. (e.g. "Cool Address"@example.store is a valid email)

These might be valid but nobody uses them and nobody will complain if you do not support them.

It's very rare that you get to confront the bane of your online existence, but here we both are.

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#46

Post by mikekchar »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #39
newscracker wrote: post #37

> An individual has a phone number > Some people do not own phones, or do not wish to provide you with their telephone number when asked. Do not require a user to provide a phone number unless it is essential, and whenever possible try and provide a fallback to accommodate these users. Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram are spectacular design failures on this point because they assume that every person has a phone number…

> Signal As I understand it, Signal is always intended to be the "StartTLS" of telephone communication, so naturally it explicitly targets mobile phone users. I only use Signal to call or text someone I would otherwise call directly. But I agree with your general opinion. For most services I found it's ridiculous to be hardlinked to my phone number. Why on Earth you have to expose your phone number to some random peo…

> Signal is always intended to be the "StartTLS" of telephone communication, so naturally it explicitly targets mobile phone users.

This doesn't make sense to me. If I have telephone service and the person I want to talk to also has telephone service, why do I want to use Signal to communicate from my telephone device to their telephone device? Aha! Because I want to communicate privately and the telephone service does not allow me to communicate privately. So why do I have telephone service? To allow me to use the service that doesn't use the telephone service?

This always struck me as a particularly poor argument. While it is true that most people have data services through their telephone provider, why do we want to encourage this behaviour. I mean, I could even understand implementing it initially out of convenience, but it's been years and they still haven't provided a means for authenticating with the service without using a means that will publicly identify you. As much as I wish to believe otherwise, I do not think this is unintentional :-( And if it's not unintentional, I'd really like to understand the reason.

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#47

Post by macintux »

sly010 wrote: post #29

Programmers don't actually believe in such falsehoods, nor do they just decide to be lazy about implementation. In fact if anything programmers are generally more aware of such things. A better name for these lists would be "falsehoods businesses insist on despite their engineers warnings".

There are several of those I didn’t know, and wouldn’t likely have discovered them all even with research.

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#49

Post by techsupporter »

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 mobile phone...but it is a VoIP-backed system so the numbers show up as VoIP. (BTW, Verizon's "My Numbers" feature also show up as VoIP numbers, not mobile.)

Even more annoying: "Oh, but a bunch of people we know who are also technology professionals happen to use Google Voice / Google Fi so we'll just whitelist them." Grrr. So now I have to care what my "mobile" provider uses for its underlying network or just use Google.

And the last one: My credit union just sent out a terms of service update saying I "cannot use Google Voice, VoIP, or similar numbers with Zelle." OK, but I already have a number like that registered, what now? "Your Zelle access is suspended until you give us your mobile number." But that is my mobile number. "Too bad."

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