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Without a phone number how do you prevent abuse and spam?
by flangola7 3y ago
Without a phone number how do you prevent abuse and spam?
- rkho 3y agoYou can purchase access to phone numbers for the purposes of verifying accounts. While phone numbers are a method to prevent easy sybil attacks, it is not effective when dealing with a determined actor.
- irl_chad 3y agoIt raises the cost for any spammer, including determined actors. More code, more complexity, plus the cost to actually rent the numbers. A lot of tech bros need to touch grass and realize that the rest of the world doesn’t mind giving their phone number to a chat app.
- KomoD 3y ago> More code, more complexity, plus the cost to actually rent the numbers Not a big deal, there's sms verification services, they have APIs and premade libraries, cost is about ~$0.06/verification depending on which service you use, and less with bulk discounts.
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoAnd spoiler: you can’t use those for spam.
- KomoD 3y agoHuh?
- nicce 3y agoThere is a ToS in these services as well. And you can't use many from those services to actually register an account for a meaningful service. E.g. have you created Instagram account with them? Seems like there is a determined will to blacklist as many as possible.
- derefr 3y agoI believe you're thinking phone numbers from legitimate VoIP services like Twilio, or the "texting app" service-providers that build on top of them. The GP is talking more about phone numbers from purpose-built (usually Russian) "secondary market for other people's credentials" marketplaces, where people sell the use of their own personal phone numbers (usually through cloud remote-control software they run on an old Android device with the SIM in it.)
- KomoD 3y agoNo there is not. 5sim.net, sms-activate.org, smspva.com, I'm talking about these, they're specifically made for that purpose, you can pick a country and a service
- herbst 3y agoIt starts from 4 cents per number. If my bot isn't going to make that 4 cent within its first few hours I am in the wrong business.
- happymellon 3y agoThere are scenarios, such as communicating with my children, where someone doesn't have a phone number. Hangouts worked great until Google got bored and trashed it with Duo/whatever the other one was, that's all I was saying.
- blitzar 3y agoGoogle talk worked great until Google got bored and trashed it with Hangouts which worked less great until Google got bored and trashed it with Duo. The sad part of it all ... Google Talk - by orders of magnitude their best chat offering was just xmpp/jabber the whole time.
- shortcake27 3y agoPeople shouldn’t be expected to give up their privacy and anonymity and put themselves at greater risk of identity theft because big tech can’t be bothered figuring out a different way to solve spam. Just because the rest of the world doesn’t mind giving out their phone number, it doesn’t mean it’s harmless. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to get sim swapped and have all of my bank accounts drained because some random company with zero security measures demands I provide my phone number to use their app.
- shitpostbot 3y ago[dead]
- viraptor 3y agoI think you're misplacing your annoyance here. A lot of the world is not constantly affected by Sim swapping. Your phone number is not a secret either. The problem is the minimal verification that allows sim swapping to exist in the first place.
- FormerBandmate 3y agoUnless you have beef with a state sponsored actor, you’re safe with Signal. Possibly even then If you have beef with a state sponsored actor I’m not really sure what you’re doing on HN. The Taliban uses WhatsApp lmao
- derefr 3y agoThese companies don't expect you to give up privacy and anonymity. They expect you to pay $1 to rent a phone number. To these companies, a phone number is an externalized reusable proof-of-stake in the PSTN NFT market — nothing more, nothing less.
- smittywerben 3y agoIt's not perfect. I've gotten accounts suspended from phone verification services. I don't want to share numbers with spammers and drug dealers for this reason.
- babypuncher 3y agoA given practice does not need to be 100% effective in order to provide value. Simply imposing a financial barrier of any kind is often enough to reduce malicious activity by a considerable degree.
- happymellon 3y agoI can pick up PAYG Sims for verifying for essentially nothing (I think the cheapest I've seen here is 10p). A phone number proves, and stops nothing. If you can't detect spam from either the message, the volume or from other users reporting, then you have bigger problems.
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoBut you can’t automate that trivially
- happymellon 3y agoIf I wanted to automate I would use a bulk VoIP service. You are focussing on the wrong point, I only mentioned that because I could get on these services with a disposable number.
- tinus_hn 3y agoSo if you are so well versed in the matter, what’s keeping you from starting a chat service that doesn’t require phone numbers? Apparently people are willing to invest a lot of money, that could be yours!
- pc86 3y agoFrom a technical standpoint it's trivial to identify and block voip services. Phone verification isn't designed to stop spam, it's designed to make it prohibitively expensive to scale spamming, and it seems pretty good at that. If you want to get around phone verification in a quick one-off fashion, yes it's going to be really easy. But there's no way to automate that one-off end run at scale without a lot of money and/or a lot of people. That's the whole point.
- derefr 3y agoIt's trivial to identify and block VoIP prefix allocations. That's different from identifying/blocking VoIP services, which — especially in the case of blackhat services — can operate entirely by buying and porting one-off numbers from residential cellular ISPs.
- juiiiced 3y agoMy phone number itself gets a lot of spam.
- ssss11 3y agoCharge a fee
- foul 3y agoEntry fee and extra cash required for posting when the user is flagged. Can't make it without moderators, but it's phone independent.