I'm sure it's on your list, but I think it would be helpful if I could click into the timeline in order to add an event/period of my life. I think there could be a really cool interface expanding years and drilling into certain time periods.
Also, as I get older I remember events, but I'm not sure when they happened. I remember being in a certain city on St. Patty's Day, but can't remember what year that might have been.
I got a little obsessed with this idea of journaling my life during the pandemic. I would record videos for my kids to watch in 20+ years. I figure they'll get a kick out of seeing their dad young and talking about current events. I built a site and made my parents record stories about their life - viography.co (try it free functionality is currently being rebuilt and not working. If you want a code dm me).
For the life in weeks, I think the more information that can be saved makes it more valuable. Personally I'm playing around with the idea of turning my site into a weekly video journal. It seems like everyone is putting a ton of content online, it's mostly ephemeral and clickbait-y and as we all get older we'll wish we made more substantial recordings of ourselves and our situations.
The first book I thought about from this prompt is The Fountainhead. It's fiction and was written in the 1940's, but is very relevant to modern times. Very well written and in my opinion this book is better than Atlas Shrugged.
Aren't they doing a 12 days of Christmas thing where they release new features for 12 days? This would fit into that idea.
I was thinking earlier today that an agent listening to my calls would be helpful. I was on the phone with a financial institution that will require some followup. Being able to sync in an agent to transcribe and remind me would be valuable.
You can feel ok about replying STOP to text messages from shortcodes. It's not impossible, but it would be an extremely bad process for an organization to have their OTP and their marketing messages (let alone spammy stuff) on the same short code.
There are short codes that are dedicated to OTP. Replying STOP to this number should not affect the ability for you to receive OTP for a different company login.
There are cheaper and less risky ways to understand if a number is valid. STOP will legitimately unsubscribe the recipient from messages from this phone number.
There aren’t more reliable ways to know if the number is valid and actively used. Relying means that number will receive spam from many other numbers later.
Text messages don't have an "open" action. Replying STOP will unsubscribe the recipient from future SMS from this number. I have never seen an organization use an unsubscribe as a positive action in their funnel. There are less expensive and less risky ways to confirm that a phone number is valid for sure.
I reply STOP (or whatever the capitalization is that the text asks for) to every political spam text I get that says "STOP to unsubscribe" or some such. I've been doing this for years.
I got 7 political spam texts today. I don't think the STOP is working.
Not really true, if you have an iPhone, at least. URL previews are loaded on message open. A network request to the url they sent you. They know when you opened it
Previews are generated by the sender. The only network requests for the receiver are to Apple. Quoting from a January 2021 Project Zero blog post⁽¹⁾ on BlastDoor:
As an example, consider what happens when a user sends a link to a website over iMessage. In that case, the sending device will first render a preview of the webpage and collect some metadata about it (such as the title and page description), then pack those fields into an NSKeyedArchiver archive. This archive is then encrypted with a temporary key and uploaded to the iCloud servers. Finally, the link as well as the decryption key are sent to the receiver as part of the iMessage. In order to create a useful user notification about the incoming iMessage, this data has to be processed by the receiver on a 0-click code path. As that again involves a fair amount of complexity, it is also done inside BlastDoor: after receiving the BlastDoor reply from above and realizing that the message contains an attachment, imagent first instructs IMTransferAgent to download and decrypt the iCloud attachment.
The STOP keyword is mandated as unsubscribe at the carrier level (Verizon, ATT, TMo) not just the vendor level. So if you reply STOP, it's very likely that you will not receive another message from that number.
This will be true for any programmatic SMS vendor. There could be smaller scale & more manual approaches, but that would be rare.
There has been a big effort in the last year+ to clean up the space and require consent before any SMS is sent.
FWIW, somewhat surprisingly, my google pixel has an amazing spam filter for SMS and I rarely get SMS that I don't want.
What I want to know is, what's the purpose of those random texts that just say something like, "How's it been?" from a number that I've never communicated with? What's the angle there? Anyone know?
> What I want to know is, what's the purpose of those random texts that just say something like, "How's it been?" from a number that I've never communicated with? What's the angle there? Anyone know?
My understanding is that they will pretend it's a wrong number, but then make a joke or talk about some innocuous hobby and try to build up trust over weeks/months to eventually phish or scam you. I forget where I read it (maybe reddit?) but there was a poster who mentioned a personal experience with one such scam, basically a fake romance scam that led to them losing tens of thousands of dollars wiring money to a fake person who pretended to have fallen in love with them over weeks of back and forth texting.
It doesn't have to work on everyone to be profitable, just the once-in-a-while lonely pensioner!
It's called pig butchering. You kidnap people, hold them in Cambodia or whatever (lots of locations where local criminal gangs rule) so the locals don't bother checking for literally kidnapped slaves.
If police stop by, pay them off and make up a story about debts and punishment.
Then you use the slaves to scam others in pig butchering scams. If the slaves refuse, you beat them until they comply.
Just to clarify the terminology, pig butchering refers to the scam to steal money from fake romantic partners. The SE Asian kidnapping/slavery shops that run pig butchering scams are referred to as fraud factories.
Yeah a lot of it happens in office buildings in places like Nigeria. People wearing business casual clothes and everything. At first glance it just looks like a normal company.
So reply asking if they want you to notify authorities in their city. I doubt that the kidnappers are reading every message. And even if they are, better to let the kidnappers know that they are being encroached upon.
According to Wikipedia it seems like China arrested a few of them. It’s a fairly big concern for them since Chinese citizens are often the victims of these foreign “business opportunities”. They will warn you if you’re going to those areas.
1. Someone texting the previous owner of my number (John). I got all kinds of traffic for him, including debt collectors, friends, ex-girlfriends, employers, etc. I gather John ran into a spot of financial trouble, dropped his phone-number, and skipped town.
2. An old high-school classmate trying to find my mom found my number on one of those people search sites, probably associated with her address.
3. A random girl who just wanted to chat. I talked to her for a few messages, but didn't progress to a romance scam. She seemed real to me, but who knows?
Could be, yeah. I'm a bit skeptical though. This took place months ago, and the conversation ended in a pretty reasonable place, something like "nice to meet you, take care" from me. I would have expected a few more engagement attempts from her if she wanted to scam me.
Well that's part of the romance scam game, you don't want to seem too needy. The best romance scammers will play a little bit of "hard to get" and a little bit of "good cop bad cop" if you know what I mean. The aloofness that you describe here was not an accident.
>What I want to know is, what's the purpose of those random texts that just say something like, "How's it been?" from a number that I've never communicated with? What's the angle there? Anyone know?
I inadvertently replied to one of those spam messages because the number coincidentally matched the location a relative had recently moved to (I figured it was them trying to joke around while informing me of their new number, it was something along the lines of "Can you guess who I am?"). They replied with a picture of a girl and some question trying to start a conversation. So, I figure they're just fishing for easily tricked or lonely people to manipulate into sending them money.
FWIW I didn't notice much of an uptick in scam texts/calls after that.
Unfortunately political messages have an exception in the laws involved here.
Also, my understanding is that this isn’t even a case of the politicians making an exception for themselves but for this being protected speech, so there are legal issues with blocking it without the kind of majorities American congress is not capable of anymore.
I don't see how there could be an argument for protected speech here. The constitution protects your ability to petition the government, not the government's ability to petition you.
I don’t know if the claim is true, but if it is, it’s likely an intentional loophole because the people writing the laws would want to exempt themselves.
Yes this is what happened. There are specific carve outs for various uses that don’t fall under the legal definition of “spam.” Of course political advertising is one of them.
Just like for the longest time it wasn’t insider trading if you were a politician.
You need to up the swag on your online persona. I get this message from "rich horsey lady" periodically:
>I'm Alyssa. are you the equestrian instructor that Tina referred me to?
>I'm very sorry, I just checked the number and it was my assistant who sent the wrong number, I hope I'm not disturbing you.
>Thank you for understanding, you are a friendly person, I have found the right number, your number and the riding instructor's number are only one number away, haha, it was a wrong encounter, but it was a kind of fate. Let me introduce myself, my name is Alyssa Chow what is your name?
Also got it from a "Lillian." I do hope they and her assistants find Tina's equestrian instructor.
Just to screw with them, you should make a fake business website for Tina the Trainer, with that phone number listed and everything and AI photos of fake lessons with Alyssa.
CVS sent me a spam today because I gave them my number to know a prescription was ready. STOP got a reply offering to only send status notifications. We'll see if it means anything to them.
For short codes in the USA, it technically does not have to be. And in fact businesses have to regularly check for requests even like "please don't send me messages" to be compliant.
> And in fact businesses have to regularly check for requests even like "please don't send me messages" to be compliant.
That's only vaguely true. The FCC has effectively said "here's a list of words that are considered reasonable opt out words and let the courts decide what is reasonable when there is a dispute." [0] They're basically deferring to the courts to determine reasonableness.
Obviously it's a good practice to remove people who are intentionally obtuse, but the courts really don't like people who don't follow the instructions, especially because sending "please don't send me messages" is more inconvenient than sending "STOP":
> The court held that “[t]he totality of the plausibly alleged facts, even when viewed in Plaintiff’s favor, militate against finding that Plaintiff’s revocation method was reasonable.” It also rejected the notion that there is something improper about prompting called parties to text “STOP,” explaining that “heeding Defendant’s opt-out instruction would not have plausibly been more burdensome on Plaintiff than sending verbose requests to terminate the messages.”
[1]
That said, it's reasonable to expect that replying "stop" regardless of case should stop those messages from coming through.
> The FCC has effectively said "here's a list of words that are considered reasonable opt out words and let the courts decide what is reasonable when there is a dispute." They're basically deferring to the courts to determine reasonableness.
Yikes. The lawyer dog comes to mind (a Fifth and Sixth Amendment Supreme Court case). Suspect speaks voluntarily to police until he realizes they suspect him of a crime. He stops and says, "I want a lawyer, dawg." What is meant to happen then is that the interrogation is stopped until that point. Police carried on the interrogation, and the Court ruled that statements he made in that period of time were admissible in securing a conviction against him.
When this was appealed, the Louisiana Supreme Court declined to hear it, saying, with a completely straight face, that there was ambiguity, and that since the police could reasonably believe that he was in fact asking for a canine lawyer, i.e. Lawyer McDog, Esquire, and that they couldn't find such an attorney, there was no invocation of counsel that warranted a termination of the interview.
Don't forget the Supreme Court ruling that your right to remain silent needs to be vocally exercised. If you just stay silent, you're not exercising your right to remain silent, you need to state out loud "I am exercising my right to remain silent." You can only exercise your right to remain silent by speaking.
Something something greatest legal minds of their generation.
No, this is specifically for the case of someone intentionally signing up to receive the texts first. Had they been unsolicited, the outcome would have been the exact opposite. The take away is don’t sign up for SMS spam, send obtuse opt out messages, and then expect a payday in court.
> No, this is specifically for the case of someone intentionally signing up to receive the texts first.
How do they know I consented vs the person who had the number prior to me? I recieve texts I didn't sign up for all the time for companies I've never heard of for people with names and addresses that are different than mine.
I really feel the burden of consent should be on the sender vs the receiver.
Think of it this way, the receiver must carefully read what they have received in order to correctly opt out but the sender can just run a regex for "STOP" and call it a day. The more difficult burden should be on the sender. They should have to validate every message received to see if it is requesting to opt out. Put another way, the consent is retracted even if your regex didn't detect it.
When it comes to sex consent doesn't work that way; "She didn't say the safeword I texted her a year ago your honor so I had consent!"
In a world where companies clamor for customer engagement, it seems absolutely fucked to me that it would seem burdensome, somehow, to monitor replies to SMS messages.
Valid question, but I've tried capitals too. Check the image now. Oddly enough, Rite-Aid changed their message to mixed case, but this time did confirm the opt-out (which was requested with "STOP").
But then they continued spamming three weeks after saying they wouldn't. Pathetic.
You can verify a phone number is real and active without needing them to reply, or without someone even receiving a notification.
1) SMS supports receipt functionality, which means the sender can be notified when a message is delivered to a handset. This happens at the carrier level, so you can't turn it off.
2) SMS supports 'silent' messages which are a different message class that is not shown to users.
Yes, can confirm about the Pixel. I occasionally check my spam folder and it's always just spam, which I otherwise never get. So either no or rarely false positives or negatives.
Also on a side note, the scams are really horrific. Although obviously scams I can imagine especially the older people getting tricked with "hello grandad here's my new number". Makes me wonder what I'll be getting tricked with when I am old.
It's well worth the watch, but tl;dr: it's a long-con scam. They invest as long as it takes to establish a relationship with you, and then engage you to do something (crypto mostly, apparently) involving cash online. They will say they made a bunch of money, and point you at the super-easy online exchange they used. You buy the crypto, you see the crypto increase in value (because it has in the real world) so you buy more, and more and more.
The problems start when you say you want to cash out. They switch from "buy more, it's going up" to "there are fees to withdraw, just deposit another <whatever> and then you'll get the withdrawal amount plus <whatever>" and of course no money ever comes out.
Oliver interviews people who have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars this way, some of whom still believe that if they just toss in another <whatever> it will all be resolved and they'll get their money back. It's very sad, and I'm not doing the video justice.
Totally agree Only thing to add is for the U.S. its pretty easy to spin up a bunch of numbers so generally this will work only for a while. On the latter they are farming you for information Just confirming who you are is a mistake IMHO
"What I want to know is, what's the purpose of those random texts that just say something like, "How's it been?" from a number that I've never communicated with? What's the angle there? Anyone know?"
Some people are seriously lonely - eager to pick up any chance of real interaction. And those scams prey on that.
On telegram those spam usually comes together with a profile picture of a pretty women. With text only, it targets the imagination.
> The STOP keyword is mandated as unsubscribe at the carrier level (Verizon, ATT, TMo) not just the vendor level. So if you reply STOP, it's very likely that you will not receive another message from that number.
Is that just for programmatic messages, or all messages?
I could see problems if it was all messages. For instance suppose a relative coming to visit for weekend and due to arrive around 5 pm Friday. You get a text from them that afternoon saying that there was an accident that has blocked traffic and police say it will be several hours before the road reopens.
They ask if you would prefer that they continue as soon as the road reopens, which will probably mean they will arrive around 1 am Saturday, or stop and spend the night with another relative who lives near where they are currently stuck, and then come Saturday morning which will get them to your place around 9 am.
You text back "stop" to indicate the latter option, and now texts from that relative are blocked. Oops.
It only applies to programmatic and automated messages
When a company or service sends text messages using an automated system like SMS marketing software or bulk messaging service), these platforms are by design and mandatorily programmed to recognize keywords like "STOP" as a signal to unsubscribe the recipient from future messages. This is a requirement for all such systems under Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).
Text messages to your friends do not go through such platforms and so are not subject to that law.
It’s just programmatic vendors. The problem as someone else in the thread pointed out is that shadier carriers won’t honor it or only pay lip service to it. And people that are doing spam campaigns will be forging numbers and rotating numbers constantly so actually blocking the numbers does very little.
How would you drip the assets out in the future? What's the mechanism and how would it trigger (in the event of your unfortunate or unexpected demise)?
I love the "unfortunate OR unexpected" demise phrasing.
I've created a document several years ago, after getting married, that outlines what I want to be done with my company, my products, my IP, my devices, and so on.
Now that you mention it, I need to update it a bit.
But yes, the idea is that I'm setting a bit of money aside for my executor to hire somebody to drip-feed the videos with whatever the technology of that year is.
During the pandemic I started recording videos for my young kids. I imagine they will watch them when they are 25 years old. I think it will be cool to see the young me (then) and get a first hand, 'historical' account of covid, Trump etc - it's just me, talking to the camera.
The tricky part is thinking about how to get them the videos at the right time. I plan to be very alive in (less than) 25 years, but who really knows what devices and formats we'll be using.
I took this idea and applied it to my parents - asking them to record their life story on video so that I have their stories and our family history. It's taken some urging for them to do it, but I figure that every video will be valuable at some point. Once I got my parents moving on this, I created an app to productize this idea - viography.co. It hasn't found the right fit or messaging yet, but it's inexpensive to run so I'm planning to keep it going as long as I'm using it for my family.
Also, as I get older I remember events, but I'm not sure when they happened. I remember being in a certain city on St. Patty's Day, but can't remember what year that might have been.
I got a little obsessed with this idea of journaling my life during the pandemic. I would record videos for my kids to watch in 20+ years. I figure they'll get a kick out of seeing their dad young and talking about current events. I built a site and made my parents record stories about their life - viography.co (try it free functionality is currently being rebuilt and not working. If you want a code dm me).
For the life in weeks, I think the more information that can be saved makes it more valuable. Personally I'm playing around with the idea of turning my site into a weekly video journal. It seems like everyone is putting a ton of content online, it's mostly ephemeral and clickbait-y and as we all get older we'll wish we made more substantial recordings of ourselves and our situations.