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Simple: it's time to stop using phone numbers. I use Apple's Messages. If someone spams me, I report them. They're blocked and have to go through the extra wor
by johnklos 4y ago
Simple: it's time to stop using phone numbers.
I use Apple's Messages. If someone spams me, I report them. They're blocked and have to go through the extra work of setting up a new account to try again.
Compare this with, say, Google. Gmail lets spammers / scammers have limitless accounts and they don't do shit when an account is reported for spam. You can block and report Gmail spammers all day long and you'll get nowhere.
WhatsApp apparently still uses phone numbers, and they're owned by a company that wants engagement at ANY price. Are any of us really so dumb that we think they're going to do the right thing?
- ntoskrnl 4y agoI'd give anything to get rid of my phone, but almost everyone you do business with (DMV, electric/gas/water company, etc) expects you to have one. Same thing with USPS and their paper spam. At this point they're little more than government-mandated spam delivery channels. Private companies are handling the spam situation infinitely better.
- 0des 4y agoYou aren't mandated to have mail or phone. Edit: Noting a lot of downvotes on this comment, which is odd. I can only conclude one thing- don't be Amish on HN. Perhaps this could be an opportunity to explore a different way of life, and a different community structure. It is not all horse buggies and barns. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6SlJZk5guI&list=PLEyPgwIPkHo7lOk-72-tXJ-NjahfkNF_r https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6SlJZk5guI&list=PLEyPgwIPkH...
- ntoskrnl 4y agoSure, I could move to the woods and live off wild berries for the rest of my days. But if you want to be part of modern society, your bank will mail you your credit card, and your water company will text you a code to login and pay. Realistically, what choice do you have?
- the_only_law 4y ago> Sure, I could move to the woods and live off wild berries for the rest of my days You'd probably just be removed from someones property eventually.
- 0des 4y agoDo you not encounter Amish people where you live?
- ntoskrnl 4y agoI wasn't offended and didn't downvote you. But the Amish do receive mail and use phones. First article I found: https://amishamerica.com/do-amish-use-telephones/ https://amishamerica.com/do-amish-use-telephones/
- 0des 4y ago> But the Amish do receive mail and use phones. I am assuming you don't mean to generalize to the degree that is being conveyed at first glance in your explainer comment. Amish people are not a monolith. As a culture it is quite a spectrum, from Beachy to Swartzentruber.
- ntoskrnl 4y agoMy experience is based on visits to an Amish town in Ohio when I was growing up in the 2000s. I distinctly remember being surprised to see they used phones and rode in cars. But that was a long time ago and only one town of many. I didn't mean to generalize all Amish communities.
- 0des 4y agoNo worries. It takes all kinds. Who knows, maybe you re-examine the culture and find some things you'd like to take home to your community.
- zdragnar 4y ago
- pessimizer 4y agoI'm pretty sure you are mandated to have mail in the US, or rather the mails are mandated to deliver to you. IIRC it's constitutional.
- 0des 4y ago> I'm pretty sure you are mandated to have mail in the US, or rather the mails are mandated to deliver to you. IIRC it's constitutional. You'd be incorrect. Ask your postmaster.
- criddell 4y agoThey are correct. The USPS has a universal service obligation. If you send a letter or parcel to any address in the US, the post office must deliver it.
- 0des 4y agoI respectfully disagree. The postal service is held to a standard of service by a USO - Universal Service Obligation. [0] This means it is an org mandated to accept your request for service at a reasonable price regardless of your location of residence. There is an important distinction between that, and being mandated to receive mail service. That is not a stipulation of being alive in USA. [0] - https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/postal-service-and-its-obligation https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/postal-service-and-its-obligati...
- zdragnar 4y agoJust imagine, every drifter, nomad and homeless person were required to set up a mailbox. It's just silly.
- nobody9999 4y ago>Just imagine, every drifter, nomad and homeless person were required to set up a mailbox. It's just silly. They don't have to. Just have mail sent to: Joe/Jane Drifter General Delivery TownNearWhereYouSquat, <State> <ZipCode of post office> Or at least that's how it's been done for decades.
- philwelch 4y agoI can understand the concept of Amish communities not having telephones or mailboxes, but that lifestyle seems inconsistent with the behavior of arguing for the merits of that lifestyle on Hacker News.
- 0des 4y agoBeachy Amish, it's fine.
- kube-system 4y agoI don't think I agree with that. I rarely get scams via USPS, never get explicit or potentially damaging content, the senders are all in my legal jurisdiction, and the spam arrives once per day in a manageable format. Almost all of the content is from businesses in my local area, businesses that I have previously shopped at, or political ads. Electronically from private companies I frequently get a larger volume of spam, malware, scams, explicit content, and most of them originate outside of my legal jurisdiction to evade the law. And it's a steady stream all day, on multiple mediums. I'd take 10x the amount of spam in my mailbox if I could get rid of all of the rest of the garbage I'm bombarded with. I obviously would rather not have any of it, but the hoops you have to jump through to send snail-mail inherently filters out most of the worst garbage.
- xmprt 4y ago> I'd take 10x the amount of spam in my mailbox if I could get rid of all of the rest of the garbage I'm bombarded with I for one would not. Digital spam is easy to deal with. There are automated filters, easy ways to block them, and the few that slip through are simple to deal with. Mailbox spam is physically painful to deal with and it's a massive waste of paper.
- kube-system 4y agoEmail is the least of my problems. If you know of any good filters for SMS, phone calls, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram, etc, I'd be very interested. I have to mute all of them because it is a constant stream of garbage from all of them.
- rglullis 4y agoFor Snapchat/LinkedIn/Instagram: just close your account and put email filters?
- kube-system 4y agoIn that case, the problem is just as easy to solve with snail mail. Remove your mailbox and your mail will be returned as undeliverable.
- idiotsecant 4y agoI don't want one company to be the arbiter of all communications everywhere. Phone numbers work fine.
- eropple 4y agoPhone numbers have the same problem as email, though: because "everyone" is responsible, no one is responsible. The deluge of spam texts and calls to my public phone number is genuinely unpleasant and frustrating to deal with as, like, a person living in the world. I practically don't use email anymore for those reasons, and a phone number hangs around only because right now I can't not have one for legal-type reasons.
- walrus01 4y agoemail, at least, you can fully implement your own antispam solution in whatever way you want at one extreme, you can just point the mx records for your domain at office365 or gsuite or similar and let them handle it at the other extreme, you can point the mx records at your own mailserver you admin yourself and do absolutely anything you want with the incoming smtp mail flow for antispam measures, sorting, filtering, categorization, risk analysis. the ordinary person even if they work for a telecom cannot implement their own phone number at one of the most fundamental levels of the pstn, because they don't run their own ss7 switch. if you control your own DID and interface with it from a sip trunk to a trusted provider, running your own voip system, you can do a lot with custom routing/antispam measures on incoming call flow, but nowhere near to the extent that you can with email.
- nijave 4y agoThere's still a little bit of control near the client end with things like call screening and phone apps that checks numbers against a database. You can't reject the initial connection (like DNS blocklists) but it's still something
- rglullis 4y agoThe way to solve this is by educating the people in your network about better security practices, not by giving away control over your communications just because of "convenience".
- CharlesW 4y agoI don’t know how effective it is, but I report all SMS spam to my carrier (for T-Mobile, send content to 7726). Does anyone here have inside knowledge about whether this does any good?
- quadyeast 4y agoApple Messages breaks if you temporarily use a different phone number on your cell. All chats in old threads were broken off into different threads. It was a disaster. You would think that since Apple knows this is still the same user that this would not happen?
- jthrowsitaway 4y agoAssuming you're talking about iMessage, comparing that to E-mail (GMail) is literally apples and oranges.
- ilololed 4y agoThey're comparing it to SMS and voice calling on Android (and apples and oranges are very similar)
- cglong 4y ago> Compare this with, say, Google. Google Messages proactively detects spam texts and sends them to a spam folder, so I don't get notifications about these messages at all :)
- gnopgnip 4y agoGoogle voice has a poor shaken stir implementation that only blocks the most egregious spam calls and sms and does not let users choose to be more strict. It also does not support blocking phone numbers by pattern/prefix.
- vorpalhex 4y agoAnd when Apple bans you.. what is your plan exactly?
- teawrecks 4y agoApple Messages could have become an open standard to replace SMS, but they deliberately chose not to in the interest of locking in existing users, and locking out anyone too poor to own an iPhone. I'm not exaggerating, this is public knowledge. https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/mn2qyj/apple_declined_imessage_for_android_in_order_to/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/mn2qyj/apple_decli... So which one is "owned by a company that wants engagement at any price" again?
- verall 4y agoDo you just, not talk to people electronically who do not own Apple devices?
- walrus01 4y agosaying stop using phone numbers and then going directly into "hey, use this one proprietary vendor's closed source walled garden messaging app" is NOT a solution. people should be looking at things like Signal or custom implementations of Matrix/Element/Synapse or similar if they want real control of their two way chat communications.
- johnklos 4y agoI'm sorry that you can't see how I could be making an example. I didn't say anything like, "do this instead". I said, "I've done this".
- oefrha 4y agoThese days I get a lot more spam through Apple services, mostly in the form of iCloud shared albums, than I get SMS spam.
- jsmith45 4y ago>Simple: it's time to stop using phone numbers. So don't be like Google Pay? (Which originally used proper accounts but was switched to be based on phone numbers, specifically because the new google pay was developed targeting India, where phone number based login is considered normal thanks to apps like WhatsApp.)
- sircastor 4y agoI’m a new WhatsApp user. My exchange students and Au Pair use it as their primary communication. I have been fighting tooth and nail to avoid giving it access to my contacts. You can’t do much without that, even though it’s totally adjacent to purpose of the service.