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Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

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Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#81

Post by yesenadam »

krick wrote: post #64
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…

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…

Well, I don't have a phone - have never had a mobile phone. So..I have other problems instead I guess. But not that one.

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#82

Post by segfaultbuserr »

angel2 wrote: post #74
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can answer my original question - Google has been actively blacklisting all forms of VoIP numbers to their best efforts, so it's almost impossible to register one account without putting in your personal information. The last time I've checked it, there's only one workaround - you can purchase a real phone number connected to a computer from a cryptocurrency freelancer developer... Many stories from the U.S media a…

"you can purchase a real phone number connected to a computer from a cryptocurrency freelancer developer..." Where do I start looking for such a person? I very much dislike the privacy aspect of the whole phonenumber game and also the environmental impact of burner use.

His name is James Stanley. His personal blog is https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/, and it has many good articles about privacy and cryptography applications, such as Tor and IPFS, some has made to the HN homepage. You can obtain such an anonymous physical phone number from his personal service, https://smsprivacy.org/, by paying 0.003 Bitcoin, at the current market price, about ~12-15 USD, per day. Such a high cost can be justified by very nature of a physical phone number.

But I have to say that It's not a complete solution, it has its own limitations. Once a phone number expires, it just expires, and I don't think you can get your previous number back retroactively... So it can only be used as a workaround for verification code to register your account. If the service decides to issue a SMS challenge to you in the future, you'll have my Facebook problem, as I mentioned in the comment section.

Perhaps I can write to him to see whether he can implement a solution for this problem.

I don't personally know him, I'm just a reader in the field of security and privacy, and he happens to have a nice blog and an interesting service.

> I very much dislike the privacy aspect of the whole phonenumber game and also the environmental impact of burner use.

Then, you should also care about the environmental impact of cryptocurrency, Proof-of-work literally works by burning the energy, and in order the secure the network, it must burn as much energy as currently available for general computing.

I personally don't have problem with it, as I think a global consensus mechanism is genuinely expensive, and merely using it does not directly contribute to its energy use, but I acknowledge that criticisms based on the environmental ground has a strong and valid point. Perhaps for you, using a burner phone is still a better option for your philosophy?

Meanwhile, looking forword to GNU/Taler, an PayPal-like anonymous payment system, which is not a currency, so it doesn't need to burn energy.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10258312

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#83

Post by kome »

yesenadam wrote: post #81
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…

Well, I don't have a phone - have never had a mobile phone. So..I have other problems instead I guess. But not that one.

same, i don't have a phone number. my biggest issue is with one of my two banks, but the other one works just fine without any cellphone.

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#84

Post by kome »

krick wrote: post #64
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…

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…

pro tip: Telegram requires a phone number for registration, but then you don't need a phone to use it. You can link an account to a burner phone and then you can set up a password. With that password, even if the phone number get reassigned, they can't have access to your account.

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#85

Post by yesenadam »

kome wrote: post #83
yesenadam wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I don't have a phone - have never had a mobile phone. So..I have other problems instead I guess. But not that one.

same, i don't have a phone number. my biggest issue is with one of my two banks, but the other one works just fine without any cellphone.

Hi there! I thought it was just me. I do have a couple of older friends aged 70+ without mobiles, but that's all I knew of. :-)

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#86

Post by DoctorOetker »

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…

too big to be polite

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#87

Post by geuszb »

More:

* "A mobile phone knows its phone number." The phone cannot know its own phone number without making a call or sending a text message. Some SIM cards carry an "own phone number" record but it is not authoritative and sometimes inaccurate.

* "A SIM card is permanently assigned to a phone number." SIM cards to phone number relationship can be many:many and change over time.

* " requires phone number to sign up, so we should too." Users actually react very differently when a messaging app asks for their phone number (useful to find contacts) vs a calculator app or a game or an app where they want to be anonymous.

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#88

Post by Thlom »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #71
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…

What pisses me off to no end is the local (very popular) app Vipps for sending other people cash, e.g. to split a bill or buy something at a garage sale or whatever. Not only does it use phone numbers to identify the people you send money to, but it explicitly disallows two people with different phone numbers to have a shared bank account. Husband and wife with common debit account? Sorry, unsupported. WTF? What happ…

I don’t think bank account numbers are re-used. So in that case the transaction would just fail. And no one changes phone number in Norway. With a few exceptions of course.

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#89

Post by JdeBP »

pkaye wrote: post #9

So basically phone numbers are one or more alphanumeric fields.

Just looking at a real telephone immediately disabuses one of the idea that they are numeric or even alphanumeric.

Go look at the keypad of a POTS touch-tone telephone. You'll see 10 digits and 2 non-numeric non-alphabetic symbols.

In fact, there are at least 16 possible characters at the signalling level, considering just DTMF alone, and not counting punctuation added at the human-readable level like hyphens, spaces, dots, and brackets. Then there's SIP. (-:

Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)

#90

Post by kome »

yesenadam wrote: post #85
kome wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

same, i don't have a phone number. my biggest issue is with one of my two banks, but the other one works just fine without any cellphone.

Hi there! I thought it was just me. I do have a couple of older friends aged 70+ without mobiles, but that's all I knew of. :-)

hi! indeed, i don't know many other people without a cellphone, but it's not like I ask every time. there should be dozens of us, dozens.

Do you know low tech magazine? https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/

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