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The Valentine’s Day Text Message Mystery
- basch 7y agosome previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21474961 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21474961
- danso 7y agoApparently the NYT since then was able to coax a possible explanation from Verizon, and from the company that Verizon et al uses: > On Thursday afternoon, after many unreciprocated emails were sent to carriers, a spokesman for Verizon suggested that the answer might lie with a third-party text message service provider called Syniverse Technologies, in Tampa, Fla. > Was Syniverse the vendor responsible? > “You really need to ask them that,” the Verizon spokesman said. > ...Late in the afternoon on Thursday, a spokesman for the company, Kevin Petschow, said in an email: “During an internal maintenance cycle last night, 168,149 previously undelivered text messages were inadvertently sent to multiple mobile operators’ subscribers.”
- basch 7y agoLooks like that was speculated here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21478218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21478218
- dmix 7y agoThey even got the company name Syniverse right. That's cool.
- prawn 7y agoThat reads like someone with specific inside knowledge IMO.
- blotter_paper 7y agoNote that it's currently the only comment from that user, and the username looks like a random throwaway (unless vb6sp6 is a big fan of Visual Basic 6.0, Service Pack 6). But maybe it's an obvious guess to a wide number of people with knowledge of that general ecosystem of companies.
- prawn 7y agoI'm guessing it was someone within Verizon up-stream, given they were thrown under the bus. They'd know who was to blame, would potentially resent their employer being linked, and could pass off their comment as a guess if pressured.
- toast0 7y agoThat's plausible. But it also could be a good guess. Lots of messages from valentines day gives us a good hint that we have a time capsule from february. Machine with time capsule reboots and then sends everything is plausible for SMS systems (smtp too). No strong carrier affiliation for senders or receivers suggests an intermediary. Not a lot of those in the US; Syniverse, maybe SAP (Sybase 365); I don't think Bandwidth does intercarrier work.
- prawn 7y agoMaybe. But do you create throwaways to speculate for a single comment? I know I don't.
- seba_dos1 7y agoWorth noting that SMS does not guarantee delivery in any way and can take unspecified amount of time to deliver. I've often seen messages delivered days or weeks after being sent.
- zamadatix 7y agoSMS delivery reports
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoSMS DRs are themselves SMSes, and subject to the same problems. Remember how in the olden days, you sometimes got multiple copies of a single text? That was because the sender had marked "DR required", and some system along the way was dropping the receiver's DRs, so the SMSC kept retrying.
- zamadatix 7y agoThat's how all "reliable" protocols work when the message fits in a single transport unit. See the Two Generals Problem for why and how no protocol can tell you when to stop validating (though for practical purposes probability and the speed at which we can send messages allows us to proceed as if the problem were solvable)
- toast0 7y agoSome networks will not deliver delivery reports. Worse still, some networks fake delivery reports.
- mike_hock 7y agoWe need TCP over SMS!
- jolmg 7y agoBut then you can't send texts if the other person's phone is off, out of range, or otherwise without service... and I think you mean backwards, SMS over TCP.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Frondo 7y agoOddly enough, I just saw this pop up on Reddit, as an awkward consequence of the vanishing/reappearing text messages: https://www.reddit.com/r/relationship_advice/comments/dsyzo1/29f_i_received_a_text_from_my_boyfriend_29m_that/ https://www.reddit.com/r/relationship_advice/comments/dsyzo1... tl;dr: someone thought her boyfriend was cheating because a message he'd likely sent months ago appeared in the middle of the night
- lostlogin 7y agoThere could be some very pretty big consequences to this screw up. It would seem the a prompt message of explanation might be a good idea. But it’s a teleco, so that would seem unlikely.
- thephyber 7y ago> to this screw up While it's likely explained by other commenters as a possible replay of previously sent messages, AFAIK there is no SLA for the guaranteed windows of SMS delivery. Also, "pretty big consequences" rarely apply when you enter into a "binding arbitration" clause with your cell phone provider.
- degenerate 7y agoNon-paywall link: http://archive.is/0v5YA http://archive.is/0v5YA
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y agoThis is one of the reason why the Apple iOS messaging app is so popular. IIUC, when sending messages among users who have iPhones, SMS is not used.
- maest 7y agoOr WhatsApp, if you want to message people who aren't on ios.
- krustyburger 7y agoAnd don’t mind Facebook having your data.
- twothamendment 7y agoKeybase is where it is at. Even my parents are on it. Group messages that work and some attempt at security and privacy - all for free-99.
- rthomas6 7y agoDon't forget about Signal. It works great as an sms replacement
- rthomas6 7y agoOr signal, which has similar functionality but is always end to end encrypted and open source.
- seba_dos1 7y ago...or Matrix, or XMPP, which are decentralized and where attaching your phone number to account is optional.
- NoodleIncident 7y agoIt sounds like this company only exists to transfer text messages from one carrier's network to another. If that's the case, then any monoculture would have prevented this, it wouldn't have to be Apple's walled garden.
- Analemma_ 7y agoThere was an amusing story on the most recent episode of the Verge's podcast, where they mentioned that when they assigned a reporter to cover this story, the bulk of the time he spent on it was just making sure it wasn't some kind of viral marketing scheme for an upcoming romcom film or something.
- arminiusreturns 7y agoThird party doctrine is a known loophole to the surveillance state for getting around pesky privacy laws, and my gut instinct tells me this third party sms gateway is a goldmine for whatever prism has become these days. TOS/EULAs probably say they can do whatever they want with your data including sharing with third parties so they have a legal out because it's not just the corporations influencing congress via K-street, but because the military industrial congressional complex has a vested interest in providers not protecting our privacy, and will railroad any provider that tries to stand up to them (see: Quest). Congress on both sides is utterly corrupt and unrepresentative and until America wakes up to that fact and stops playing the two-party game nothing will change. (duvergers law has many weaknesses)
- Spooky23 7y agoThe carriers keep everything anyway.
- arminiusreturns 7y agoThis is true but slightly different regulations will apply to the data.
- twothamendment 7y agoRegulations? Those rules the government makes? I bet they look the other way when they are the ones asking for data.
- xwdv 7y agoIt’s crushing when these phantom texts come back from people who had died or had long been missing.