3 ms·

He was talking about landline numbers.

• joe_the_user 9y ago
  Back in the day, there were a variety of ways to enter the landline network anonymously, from phone booths to whistling the right tones for call routing. For quite a while, there was a race between those seeking free long distance and companies trying to stop them.
• rb808 9y ago
  Given the amount of spam calls I get now, landlines are pretty much anonymous too.
• Bartweiss 9y ago
  Even so - if 'cybercrime' and 'industrial espionage' are made possible by the lack of personal identifiers online, how are we supposed to understand telephone scams and pre-digital espionage? Landlines may have been unique identifiers in common usage, but they weren't identifiable when someone was seeking to misbehave. Which is exactly the problem with the metaphor.