Australia has a “do not call register”. It seems to mostly work, but telcos are having trouble with calls originating from outside the network with spoofed caller ID. We still get spam/scam calls from India among other places.
Even if they’re not calling you directly, they are still using your phone number to link you to things and create a shadow profile behind the scenes.
A plan like this would actually work if it were capped at the same price as an unlimited plan.
It never is though. Once I was lucky enough to exploit 1TB from a $70/month 5GB plan back in the days that my ISP didn’t offer anything competitive. I ran that hustle for years.
I’m running a PCIe 4.0 GPU in a 3.0 socket… and I swear I just bought the thing!
The beat feature was the “0” button being in the corner of the device, and it would dial 000 several times per week while in my pocket. There was no way to lock the keypad.
We called it “Sidetalkin’”.
I owned the N-Gage and the 5510. I probably would have bought this.
90% of USB cables are 480Mbps and it’s not even included. This will be useless.
I got a new Android TV for offline use. Most people say you get an OK experience if you don’t connect the TV into a network.
The biggest remaining annoyance is that it takes 45 seconds to cold-start. Almost as if it’s booting an OS desgined for a phone or something.
We need email. It’s one of the few protocols that are 100% in the user’s control. I run my own mail server. I can’t do the same for whatsapp.
We’ve added a lot of checks to email (SSL, DKIM, DMARC, SPF) so it’s very easy to identify spam these days. It’s also easy to avoid giving any two companies the same email address. That’s something much harder to avoid with a phone number.
For 2FA, per-account email addresses and authenticor apps are the best approach for privacy.