How do you justify this assertion of yours? I would contend that the most efficient method is written down and shared widely in a doc. Otherwise, everyone is relying on their memory of what was spoken. For anything non trivial, I would want it written down.
They all want to be the WeChat of the rest of the world. They want a platform that people live inside and all other companies just become apps inside their store (where they collect a tax of course).
None of the mentioned apps have managed to do this. Maybe that is because there is no consumer interest, but it doesn't make the goal any less appealing.
They all seem to be missing the part where WeChat played out this way because the Chinese government mandated it, not because people have an inherent desire to do everything in a single "app". WeChat is an island of Chinese-controlled services and content within a sea of Western-run mobile platforms.
Only one of those doesn't require your phone number.
It'll be nice when we get to the point where we can have a proper working chat app that doesn't require one. Hangouts used to be great but Google has to always make sure their chat doesn't work.
You 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.
People 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.
I 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.
These 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.
> 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.
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.
I 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.)
A 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.
It'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.
From 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.
It'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.
If you're going to go out in the mountains in winter, learn about avalanches - where and under what conditions they happen, how to read a slope, and so on. This applies more to cross-country skiers, but a snowshoer might need it too.
But Paul is probably a better source than I am. Paul, do snowshoers need to know about avalanches out here?
So sorry for the delay. I have been completely buried putting together some chess events. I will respond today with next steps. Thank you for your interest!
Thanks for your patience... I got over 30 emails from HN folks, which is awesome but it's taking me slightly longer than expected to handle the volume. Will reach out to everyone before signing off the weekend, for real this time :-)
