Something is wrong when the ‘telephone app’ on your phone becomes 3rd party
martinruenz.de
martinruenz.de
The video helpfully has a transcript: https://github.com/jwise/28c3-doctorow/blob/master/transcrip...
It's like those futurist ads from the 50s (and 80s/90s) AT&T that soon there will be phones capable of amazing things everywhere in our lives, except they aren't all AT&T branded and most of them started with the name "personal computer". (Though savor the irony that Ma Bell's legacy lives on in Linux by way of Bell Labs' contributions to Unix.)
Then again, I'm also strongly for renaming 3D Printers to facsimile machines because the word fax is too useful to lose to ancient toner-based modem printers.
Then maybe we really will be able to "receive a fax at the beach"[1] in the future!
[1]: http://mentalfloss.com/article/50105/you-willsend-fax-beach
I wouldn't be surprised. I suspect that a smartphone is the only computer very large majority of today's children has ever used.
By the way, when you make the off/end button big and red, it is nigh impossible to convince a little boy not to press it. Over and over.
I think that was pretty spot on. Touch is a very primal way to interact with things.
Then I realized I have installed Dragon on this computer, and there wasn't even a reason for me to type this reply. So I will risk a guess and assume that in the future essays will be spoken, not written. No doubt there will be an epic fight over this, as people try to defend why children of the future will have to learn to type. I will hazard one more prediction: they will lose.
Integer main open parenthesis void close parenthesis open squigly brace. Newline.
Bob, find some earphones and stop complaining. I'm not the one that pushed for open-plan.
Computer, please delete the previous paragraph.
Standard colon colon cee out less than less than double quote capital hello world exclamation point double quote semi-colon. Newline.
Close squigly brace.
Hello computer
new function returning void print hello world end function
> In a fast-paced live demo, I will create a small system using Python, plus a few other languages for good measure, and deploy it without touching the keyboard. The demo gods will make a scheduled appearance. I hope to convince you that voice recognition is no longer a crutch for the disabled or limited to plain prose. It's now a highly effective tool that could benefit all programmers.
Turns out it's doable, you just need to invent your own language.
Given good enough voice recognition and good enough touch interfaces that work in concert (and ignoring the many situations where speaking is an issue), it's possible. But it's not an easy path.
I suspect in the future we'll have curious historians trying to figure out how the phrase "personal computer" ended up being shortened to "phone".
I really like your idea of nano and picocomputers. It's consistent, and really reflects on the miniaturisation that we have seen since since the invention of the computer.
In British English, they've always called cellphones "mobiles", which is also a nice short name for mobile computers.
Mobile could work, though, and I've heard it used.
(Which is apparently a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Ullo_John!_Gotta_New_Motor%3F)
I think as a usage it's regarded as vaguely old fashioned and twee.
For comparison here's https://www.mobiles.co.uk/ - again, in every instance the noun is either "phone" or the fully qualified "mobile phone".
As an American, "car" and "phone" are definitely the norm. The only time I've ever heard "mobile" is as a prefix to phone, so "mobile phone". It's sometimes used on forms to distinguish between home, work and mobile numbers (like I just did).
"Landline" is seeing a resurgence as general parlance for the thing gathering dust, which used to be simply _the_ phone.
Having said that, this is probably only modern usage. The AA (Automobile Association) and RAC (Royal Automobile Club) both feature "automobile" in their names and are both well over 100 years old.
I suppose (without doing any research) car is probably short for carriage.
Handy could work in the UK except that it is extensively used already as an adjective eg: "that's a bit handy" or "you'll find this handy" etc. "That's a handy handy" would be a bit weird and as we already have mobile then there is no need for it. I suspect that "cell" will creep in eventually but not yet.
Etymology can be quite interesting 8)
Cf. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaking_tube#Domestic_use.
Without any research whatsoever I'll also venture that "blowing" is what people used to do when they had to rush downstairs to answer the new fangled telephonic device and ended up out of breath. However, again without research, there is a good chance that the RN and co would have referred to the voice tubes on ships as "blowers" because that is the sort of word they would pick. I know a lot of modern matelots and that theory fits nicely.
Although blower is slang for a phone in the UK.
Besides referring to the actual product (iPhone or Android etc), I'm not aware if we have a term to replace phone
But, if so, it's like the reverse of Americans talking about their "fanny pack" while in England.
There was a (funny) local news story in Australia when comedian Will Ferrell accidentally made an off-color "fanny" joke not knowing what the word meant abroad. Shows how slight differences in the same language can mean worlds of difference.
Yes, as an adjective. As a noun (which is what is being discussed here) there's only one commonly known meaning, and it's that one.
the transistor and information theory are both the foundation for these phones we're talking about
That said, it sucks as a hand terminal, because everything it does everything through vendor-locked, cloud-enabled shitty apps with almost no interoperability. If this is how future of computing is going to look, then I'm sorely disappointed.
It is more that the broad userbase doesn't care, and there isn't enough "putting money where your mouth is" to get good economies of scale on freedom respecting computer hardware, regardless of form factor.
So the lockdown of "phones" is more a symptom of broad technological illiteracy rather than a cause.
I can still make/receive occasional calls on it via Google Voice. But I use it much more as a mobile computer, and appreciate the bigger screen.
For instance in Myanmar, where they have only had widespread mobile phone service for a couple of years, the most popular phone plans from Oodooroo are sold as data-only, and include info for downloading a VOIP app for legacy calls. I had an amusing time in one of their stores watching a perplexed staff try to deal with an older foreign man who frustratingly demanded to know how much he would need to pay for 100 "minutes". They just keept referring him to the chart that showed plans ranked only by the number of GBs.
Doing FaceTime audio or a VOIP service is at most half-a-MB per minute, and th call quality usually way better than regular cellular. Cheap over LTE, and inconsequential over wifi.
Because of the privacy implications, as the author wrote in the article.
- Representing a person by a country-specific number is a horrible UX. All of my contact methods besides phone number remain the same no matter where I am in the world. Several of my contact methods (Facebook, LinkedIn) enable directly "dialing" my real name and intelligently locating me by social proximity instead of asking the customer to program in a stupid number (or multiple numbers) for every contact. A few (Skype, Hangouts) at least allow for alphanumeric, easy-to-remember identifiers instead of numbers. Aren't we in 2017 already?
- I want information to flow with me, not be tied to a particular device. Ideally, I should not have to carry any particular device, but rather present my credentials to any device I own (be that a computer, one of my many phones, tablets, or smartwatches). All of my contact methods besides phone number and WeChat are device-independent and align with this vision.
- E-mail replaces SMS. It supports >140 bytes. In fact, it can comfortably support several MEGAbytes per message! Isn't that mind-blowing? There is ZERO reason to continue to use a stupid old technology with a 140-byte limitation. As part of the deprecation process, I have all SMS go to my e-mail inbox instead of using the SMS interface on the phone.
- I don't take unscheduled voice calls. In general, if my day is going as planned, 95% of the time I am doing something where I shouldn't be picking up a phone (either for my own safety or due to etiquette). That includes machining metal, having dinner with real people, listening to concerts, meditating, coding, hiking (usually without reception), biking, whatever. Unscheduled voice calls are incompatible with my lifestyle.
- When scheduled, I do video calls more often than phone calls.
As such I'm totally fine with a phone app being third-party. A phone number is not the main reason I have an LTE device in my pocket.
In fact, of my multiple LTE-capable devices, only one is capable of receiving phone number calls. The rest have data-only SIMs.
Phone numbers (and physical addresses) are examples of semi and fully federated systems. You use the standard and establish contracts and your teleco or post office and connect to anyone else in the world.
Your Google Hangouts/Skype/Facebook are closed, walled garden, proprietary systems.
Keep that in mind.
But from a UX standpoint they are vastly superior to having to deal with people trying to reach me on my US number while I'm in China, or trying to reach one cell phone when I'm carrying another.
Also, the telco operators love to nickel-and-dime consumers for things like roaming charges. I'd love to see more competitors come out and overthrow those rascals by doing everything over IP, creating worldwide MVNOs and slashing all roaming charges to essentially zero. Google Fi has done a nice job. Granted they exist to promote Android, but when I tell friends I have LTE data in 100+ countries without roaming charges, international voice calls for pennies directly from my cell phone, and viewing voice charges in real-time, they are all astounded. Unfortunately yes they too are a walled garden, but the user experience is amazing.
That said, while phone calling has fallen out of favor, phone numbers are still the main form of 'identity' people have, and if anything the dominance of WhatsApp/Messenger has made it more common in my circles to share a phone number rather than a FB username.
This is one example; there are dozens more.
Remember when they added Google calendar to Play to fight Samsungs BS?
My device is a Wiley Fox Swift.
I've never had a problem with 3rd party dialers on Android. But I can smell a scam and I'm technically literate.
To the best of my knowledge there's never been a major dialler related security mishap. In fact much of the panic about Android's "malware ridden ecosystem" seems overblown. Nobody I know has ever had an issue to the best of my knowledge.
But it's definitely a possibility and it's highly probable that eventually something bad will happen on a large scale without some better controls - albeit hopefully not the type that Apple imposes. Cost vs benefit and all that.
Well, pack it in, fellas. We're done here. :D
But it doesn't, and the stress of choice is only undergone voluntarily when someone volunteers to choose. Otherwise, defaults are king.
Some of the improvements (just top of my mind): crowd-sourced list of scammers, telemarketers. For outgoing calls: automapping phone numbers to business/user names, automatically using the best way to route the call based on call rates (WiFi vs cellular vs. multipath TCP) etc.
This is the problem with choice. All your choices are secretly malicious and have incentives to violate your privacy. Remember those flashlight apps that ran in the background consuming CPU/data and stole users' personal information? It's just generally a bad idea to rely on untrusted third parties for core functionality.
I would argue that, if you really want to talk about people "having a choice", you need a similar concept: that you are "free to choose" if-and-only-if your choices are indeed what you understand them to be. Which means some form of regulation or curation needs to happen to enforce that.
Of course, this doesn't have to be at all the same thing as the sort of "curation for quality" that the iOS App Store gets up to. Instead, more like FDA labelling requirements on drugs: list your active ingredients or get out.
Consider a hypothetical policy: "whatever misapprehensions a consumer has, due to your marketing, are your fault; a complaint about misapprehensions about your software that cites your own marketing, and which we ascertain as being valid, will result in a ban of all your apps from the store."
Can you make the "I Am Rich" app? Sure; it does what it says on the tin—proves you're rich with a $10k IAP. Can you make a Flashlight app that asks for your contact info? Nope; customers weren't expecting the app to ask. Banned. Even if you never send that info anywhere.
- Someone said having multiple options for a phone dialer is a wonderful thing.
- Someone else pointed out that the article isn't about a choice, the dialer was forced on the user.
- The parent asks if it is bad that Google updates apps in a tone that strongly hints that they can't imagine how the answer could be yes.
Far too many conversations go like this here.
To (try to) get back on topic, of course the Google can update their apps. I'm pretty sure the number of people here who would answer this negatively at a rounding error away from zero. But that is entirely beside the point.
The point is the author of the article doesn't want a dialer that surveils them and spews their private conversation details (along with everything else of note stored on the phone) to the "trusted partners" of the surveillance firm who wrote it. And yet it was forced on him.
This is ironic and sad to anyone who considers phones to be things that one might have private conversations on. (Insert opportunity to talk about how old-school talking on phones is.)
And again, it is just another reason to be very, very careful with whom you "do business" (which includes third-party private-surveillance firms, the names of which you may not have a way of determining before purchase).
For me, this dictates I won't use consumer software from a large number of current producers. Google included. Not everyone has my requirements, I get that, and that's fine.
But there is exactly nothing wrong with wanting a phone that doesn't spy on you.
If you want the phone to come with a dialer (I think most people do), then some dialer will inevitably be forced on people. And unless you think phone calls are an optional feature, it makes perfect sense that the dialer cannot be deleted.
The only complaint I can see here is that phone manufacturers can make bad choices for their default, undeleteable dialers. Well, yes, just like they can make bad choices for other software on the phone. The only reasonable remedy for that is to buy a phone from a manufacturer that makes software choices you like.
That phone manufacturers can make bad software choices is not an argument against having replaceable dialers. Quite the opposite. A manufacturer can make the exact same bad dialer choice if the dialer isn't replaceable. The only difference is that if the dialer is replaceable you might be able to do something about their bad choice some of the time.
I don't see the connection here. Why shouldn't people be able to delete the dialer if they don't like the phone company's choice? I understand preinstalling one, but preventing people from choosing another if they want seems unnecessary.
You bought a Google phone and don't want to use Google services, but complain that the dialler can be provided by a third party? Isn't that a good thing?
The search feature should not be any more than an optional point of integration. Is nothing sacred anymore?
and no, i'm pretty sure there's nothing "sacred" about your phone.
The act of punching in a number should not require any outside services or assistance or requirements. If there are value-added components to add then they can manifest as modular extras or in another part of the device. This is a violation of user expectations and runs contrary to 75+ years of muscle memory. (And to add... dialing a phone should be a core, fundamental, and inviable aspect of smartPHONE and its OS, not something OEMs can swap out)
Watching technology companies supplant (erm, "disrupt") established and proven tech with their crap is extremely depressing. We had nice things, and then we threw them away because we are stupid and lazy. Why do "technologists" ruin everything?
"Smart" my ass.
This is YOUR problem with the technology. Normal muggles care for none of this conversation. They want something that works, which is what modern smartphones do. They like that the dialer provides fancy stuff like visual voicemail, automatic transcription, phone-number-to-business-name mapping, etc.
Most people don't care about trying to avoid Google Services, in fact most people don't use smart phones as phones. In a way, luddites that hate techologists have it nice. You can use an old flip phone that is just a phone and that thing will last forever! It's use assholes who need to keep charging them every day.
If only because the same companies are training users to require all these extras, by effectively (and mostly inadvertently) erasing past knowledge. I'm sure Google would love it if their engineers could remove dialing entirely, what number could you possibly want to call that's not listed in Google somewhere?
A lot of those same muggles were/are fine before these services came along and many likely want it to stay the same.
> They want something that works, which is what modern smartphones do.
Ha! You're funny.
Look at one process I'm sure most of us are familiar with: getting a cute girl's (or guy's) phone number. With flip phones this was simple- pull up the dialer, punch in the number, hit save instead of dial, done (or just dial and save later). No waiting, no fuss. Now with my smartphone that same process is:
* key in my passcode / fingerprint / whatever
* wait for UI to animate, notifications to process, and for the OS to catch up (cause powersave is now off). 3-10 seconds on average of awkwardly staring at the screen and apologizing for the phone's slowness
* hit phone icon, wait another second for my touch to register than another 5-20 seconds for phone app to start
* enter number, hit Add To Contacts, meanwhile all inputs are lagging about a half second behind my actions. Wait for contact screen to appear (another 3-10 seconds)
* enter her name, maybe snap a photo (about the only real value-add in this process), hit Save, again waiting half a second or so for UI lag after each touch
If going out with a flip phone didn't make one such a large target socially you can be sure more would be rockin' it.
Look at John Deere.... we went from "software on tractors" to what is shaping up to look like a massive battle over intellectual property rights. Those new Deere tractors are superior in almost every appreciable way and yet we have another case of the OEM inserting themselves way too far into something that they do not belong in. Are farmers luddites for rejecting Deere's bullshit?
It's a long-held belief of mine that (what society considers) neurotypical people, enjoy making their lives more complicated. They pursue things that do so. (It's half the point of the societal encouragement to have kids the moment you get married: it keeps life challenging by adding complexity faster than the added stability of life-partnership can take complexity away.)
> Are farmers luddites for rejecting Deere's bullshit?
I'm not totally sure; don't know that much about this story. (Do you have a link? Maybe submit it as an article!)
My entirely-uninformed intuition is that agro-tech generally is such a different thing now than it was in the past, that legal precedents from the past won't serve us very well.
We don't just have fancier tractors now; we effectively have "a crop-growing+harvesting system in a box—just add ops staff." The modern large-scale farmer is now doing a job that bears less resemblance to the act of classical subsistence farming, than it does to the act of being a feudal lord with serfs. The serfs are robots made by John Deere. Does that give John Deere some different rights than they had when they just made tools for humans to operate? I'm not sure. I can be certain that it's not an "easy, obvious" question, though.
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/07/25/farmers-fight-for-rig...
https://www.law360.com/articles/830803/farm-tool-dealer-can-...
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/08/17/432...
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/04/09/523...
This looks a lot like the relationship between Apple or Google and their customers.
More likely, I think driverless cars will just be rented to people. And most of them won't even be that; the manufacturers will just build pools of them and hire them out, in the mode of taxis. The owner and "driver" will be the manufacturer; the people benefitting will be purely passengers.
I don't see what invalidates that logic when translated over to agro-tech: there's no reason John Deere will end up selling tractors, when they could instead contract them out, just as a temp agency contracts out their employees. They'd be the owner and the operator, insofar as they programmed the things and they're mostly running on automatic. The control buttons on such robots would just be for making "requests", and the owner would be free to ignore them. ("Don't like it? Hire someone else!")
Of course, for now, they're trying to get the benefits of being in that hypothetical world, while still existing in our own, which seems a bit silly. :)
I go to great lengths to keep Google and the like out of my life, and I find it really strange how accepting, and even defensive, people are with these intrusive services. It's a Brave New World, and Stallman was right.
I have run all kinds of app loads, with stock and hacked operating systems, and things ALWAYS end up this way. The only way to avoid it seems to be to install barely anything.
People still get phone numbers? I just get LINE user names (which you exchange by scanning a QR code). I'm sure in other countries it's WhatsApp or Facebook accounts...
As it is, if I'm sitting at my desk with my iPhone and get a call from a number I don't recognize, I literally take a second to Google the numbers on my laptop before accepting the call on my phone. I wish iOS (or any VoIP app for iOS; I use Bria) had this integration, optional or not.
Whoscall is one example and is pretty popular in Asia.
A phone number is an identifier that you use once when obtaining a contact (or it gets shared by someone, so you don't enter it even that one time). If a phone actually required you to dial a number, for many people it wouldn't be usable as a phone to call their friends.
This means that integration with wherever users have stored their contracts (and right not it's generally one of the cloud services) is a key component of the dialer app, possibly the main one - a contact app without phone features can be used to communicate with everyone (using the multitude of VOIP services available, skype calls or whatever) but a dialer without contacts isn't sufficient for communication.
Lawyers, doctors, and bail-bondsmen still advertise via their phone number. Entire generations still go to phone numbers as their primary means of reaching someone remotely.
Like, thinking about this I understood that don't know the phone number of my wife. I (probably?) have it written down somewhere outside my phone, I had known it by heart many years ago, but life was different back then, and as far as I recall it may be that I have not used it in any meaningful way for more than full ten years.
I recall that I have given her phone number to others on some occasions, but it involved sending a contact - possibly the number was displayed at the screen during that process, but neither I nor the receiver really read it, and it that way even before smartphones were a thing and sharing a contact happened over SMS.
And no. It's not "paranoid" to want to dial your phone without onerous terms of service.
And yes. There is something sacred about our phones and their privacy. It's 2017. Without privacy on your mobile device, you effectively have no privacy at all.
I'm not sure your comment could have a higher degree of wrongness. Every single part of it is wrong.
Running cyanogenmod here, stock dialer.
Open up the dialer. Go to settings. Oh, look: "phone number lookup". I wonder what that could be. Hmmm.
Click. What is that? "Forward lookup - Show nearby places when searching in the dialer". Ticked on by default.
"People lookup"? On by default.
Reverse lookup? On by default.
Default lookup provider? Google.
By default, it looms like the standard dialer app in android sends every call made or received to Google.
Also, none of those options appear on my phone in the dialer settings (Android 6, Motorola phone), so either they've been moved or we're looking at different software. (Per another comment, likely I'm using the AOSP dialer, which thankfully lacks those "features")
This keeps some of my information away from Google. No normal person will go through this process.
Google phones have use a different launcher (Which might be a modified version of the AOSP launcher, haven't used AOSP in a while) that provides unknown number names, access to the voicemail-to-text feature of Project Fi (and probably Google Voice), and probably a couple more things.
BTW, from the little I know, seeing google contacts in the dialer doesn't mean that it's talking to google. Google services adds the contacts to the phone's centralized contact management and the dialer gets them from there.
Wileyfox make their own phones and Android rom. It's not really a Google phone (it may have Google Play Services, but that's different).
The third party dialler app in this case was not provided by the ROM maker, but by a third party who gathers tracking data from usage of the dialler app. The ROM maker disabled/removed the stock dialler app from their ROM.
If it was an opt in feature, then I believe OP would be happy with that.
While WF's choice is perhaps sad, the plug gable architecture should allow the poster to switch --- but the dialer can't be switched!
I'm fairly certain Wileyfox didn't make the dialer that previously came with his phone, either. (They're a smaller OEM.) They probably just used the one provided by the ODM assembling the device for them.
Google in 2017: Skynet didn't build itself people! We need more ML training data!
Or will it? If it's an AI intent on approximating human speech processing, why should it be any good at programming? See also https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9658524/1/Branches-on-the-Tree-....
The next step in programming is probably not anything like programming. Machine learning certainly isn't. Creating a neural net that achieves superhuman image recognition takes 30 lines of code in keras. And terabytes of training data. But the programming doesn't look anything like someone in the 90s would have thought. Except maybe for a bunch of AI researchers.
I dont think that an AI will program itself anything like we program computers.
People who "program" themselves really just provide good data. Positive reinforcement, "healthy thoughts", "gaining valuable reference experiences", things like that. When you want to learn a new language, at the simplest level, you can immerse yourself in that countries culture and you will learn automatically. You don't hop inside your brain and move the axons around. You just provide good data and let the engine do its job, and why would an AI be incapable of doing that?
They already do that. "Backprop" is that mechanism. Not yet on a really advanced level, but a machine learning algorithm already introduces its learning back into itself and incrementally improves on that.
That's largely because you haven't looked. Infants are constantly developing and pruning pathways and connections in their brain, which effectively changes both the hardware and the software.
My new prediction is Skynet will come out of the financial bots. It solves the money problem, because those bots will become financially self-sufficient quickly.
Regrettably, the target function is "make money" which will cause our next-gen species to be psychopathic and uninterested in human life, except, in the short term, as a market to be plundered. Not a good outcome.
Exactly! Any sophisticated machine will be as full of errors as a human, just different kinds of errors. Unless it's a Godel machine [1].
v. 0.1 was based on the chip from the Terminator that had been sent back in time by Skynet. Humans otherwise were decades away from being able to design something like that.
I think it's reasonable to say that Skynet built itself.
But ... ugh, rationalist fiction always makes me a little sad. I share the motivation, the annoyance at how pervasive the plot driven unrealistically stupid decision is in fiction. I want to like it, but it's always so saturated with authorial naivete, inexperience and smugness.
I guess I just wish they'd revere Iain M. Banks more and Yudkowsky less.
Definitely. Though Banks doesn't have quite the Internet following, possibly because he was publishing before the Internet took off and compounded by the fact that I can't link to a free, online copy of his work.
Speech recognition ain't like dusting crops, boy.
>UNRIVALLED PRIVACY AND SECURITY
>Choose precisely the data you wish to share; protect apps with additional PINs; prevent spam with Truecaller Integrated Dialler.
So their idea of privacy is privacy from everyone except the manufacturer (and "trusted" third parties)
>Of course, you can always root the phone and install custom roms. But this process takes some time and the development and compatibility with these roms is less than satisfactory.
Maybe he shouldn't have bought a device with such a small userbase?
Yes, I think I did a mistake there. On the other hand, there are small brands which are incredibly open about hardware and software development, such as [1]. I want to stress that the current state of compatibility to smartphone operating systems is really not satisfying.
[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/12/31/after-cyanogen-colla... [2] http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/11/28/cyanogen-inc-will-sh...
CyanogenOS couldn't make money, and WF has trouble making money, because everyone else subsidises the cost of the handset and software by selling data.
If you want to provide what they claim - unparalleled security and privacy - you have to charge more, or charge a phone subscription fee for updates, or something.
One can't expect to get subsidized-by-data-selling prices, and have no data selling.
Frankly if the telephone app on my "phone" stopped working I wonder how long it would take me to notice.
This must be the elephant in the room. Traditional telephony has become dominated by bad actors. They hit a critical mass and now my phone app is a waste of space.
I'm slowly realizing that this is because apparently people are inundated with spam calls? I think I may have received one solitary spam call in my entire life. I can't really account for the discrepancy
I have 27 from random numbers/places that I know from experience are scams. This is a US number.
If you find your life lacking opportunities to get in to obscenity shouting matches with random con artists, it is great! Otherwise, not so much.
I wouldn't say I'm cautious, it's simply that if it were important, why would you call?
I basically consider phone calls as unimportant as paper letters. Check in on them every few weeks.
It seems to me I can either call, which most likely causes a loud and persistent ringing noise that signals "someone wants to talk to you right now, please pick up the phone". Or I can send you a text which will make a quick beep on your phone and then go away.
I actually adopted the "don't answer the phone" strategy about 20 years ago, when first I got voice mail. I wish everyone had. But nowadays I don't even listen to my voice mail.
Claiming this in general is trivially rebuttable by the fact that I know many people who feel precisely the opposite: if it's important you call, if not you text.
If anything, that view is less irrational than yours: a mode of communication that's immediate, loud, sustained for many seconds, and hits a device that most people have on them constantly fits far more easily with realtime urgency than any other mode of communication.
On top of THAT, there are still stupid legacy systems (that are nonetheless important) that use old forms of communication. My insurance was cancelled while I was on a backpacking trip and they called me and sent me a letter without bothering to send me an email. The fact that Blue Shield are fucking idiots doesn't change the fact that I was without proper medical insurance for th rest of the year (due to ACA enrollment limits). I could easily see the same being true of phone calls.
However, in both cases, it was nearly 100% spam. I talk to family via video chats, and friends via facebook, hangouts, whatsapp, etc.
Since Oneplus' falling out with Cyanogen Inc, and the financial failure of Cyanogen, Oneplus' own OxygenOS is essentially a re-implemented CyanogenMod that has all of the same features.
Hopefully, Zen can be disabled with the next update: https://www.reddit.com/r/wileyfox/comments/64xga8/it_should_...
Now that the Cyanogen company is dissolved, who knows what the truth was.
Lately I've started using CarbonRom. It's pretty nice.
Cyanogen Inc ran themselves into the ground with dodgy business practices and threatening all of their partners, which resulted in no reputable phone manufacturer wanting to put their OS on any new models of phones.
Next time someone tries to harvest my personal data using an "all-inclusive" EULA I'm going to sue his ass in EU-land.
[0] - http://www.eugdpr.org
their privacy policy is scary.
https://carnet.vw.com/web/vwcwp/privacy-policy
dealer refuses to disable or remove this carnet module. their "solution" is to tell me just not to sign up for the services. ummm..lol no. needless to say i'm taking matters into my own hands via vw message boards and:
http://www.ross-tech.com/vag-com/
may have to physically remove the module and/or neuter the antenna.
Only today I was joking about how absurd it is that I was struggling with such a fundamental feature.
Here's the cached version: http://archive.is/vs4a7
While this is bad, it's not really unexpected.
It allows exactly what the author wants with his specific desire for a dialler that does not rely on play services or true caller.
"When You install and use the Services, Truecaller will collect personal information from You and any devices You may use in Your interaction with our Services. This information may include e.g.: geo-location; Your IP address; device ID or unique identifier; device manufacturer and type; device and hardware settings; SIM card usage; applications installed on your device; ID for advertising; ad data, operating system; web browser; operator; IMSI; connection information; screen resolution; usage statistics; default communication applications; access to device address book; device log and event information; logs, keywords and meta data of incoming and outgoing calls and messages; version of the Services You use and other information based on Your interaction with our Services such as how the Services are being accessed (via another service, web site or a search engine); the pages You visit and features you use on the Services; the services and websites You engage with from the Services; content viewed by You, content You have commented on or sent to us and information about the ads You see and/or engage with; the search terms You use; order information and other usage activity and data logged by Truecaller’s servers from time to time. Truecaller may collect some of this information automatically through use of cookies and You can learn more about our use of cookies in our Cookie Policy"
and
"We transfer information to trusted vendors, service providers, and other partners who support our business and Services, such as providing technical infrastructure services, bug testing, analyzing how our Services are used, measuring the effectiveness of ads and services and facilitating payments as well as potential partners who may wish to work with us to provide other services."
Since the dialer is an app, if for some reason you don't like it, you can deactivate it (you can't uninstall preloaded apps since they are on a private system partition, but disabling it is enough : it does not appear in the app least and can't startup).
So you just have to install another that suits you better.
Of course if NSA has my data its only fair that FSB also gets some too...
maybe what we need is a 3rd party dialer that pledges privacy.
Anything bound to any companies' services or doing any data collection should be entirely user-controlled and user-replacable.
It seems like the alternative you're suggesting is that vendors be able to lock you into their own dialer, which was probably produced by an outsourced firm anyway.
Or are you advocating that Google prevent people who download and modify the Android source from modifying that particular aspect of it?
When I bought my Wileyfox Swift 18 months ago it came with Truecaller as an app already installed, and it integrated with the standard dialer well - ie I could use the dialer app to make calls, and incoming calls would show info from Trucaller. Not sure why they couldn't keep it like that.
I didn't really think there could be a difference between phone apps until I got project fi from Google. Their phone app comes with voicemail transcription and spam detection. Some of that is obviously from the service itself, but these features seem like things that I'd want to be able to acquire even if I had an AT&T Samsung (which is what I moved from and didn't have by default). Third party seems fine with me.
If it's supported by LineageOS, use that instead. If not - perhaps consider buying a phone that is. If you're really privacy conscious, perhaps look at the CopperheadOS options - they're specifically known for privacy.
Other than that, this is the sad state of big data and advertising. Unless you fight back agasint it, everything about you is going to be poked, proded, and collected for futher processing and aggregation. Hell, a lot of you probably work in that industry here.
You should not assume that any device manufacturer has your interests in mind, as the trends have overwhelmingly shown that anything proprietary always leads to them finding a way to further line their pockets as interest for their product wanes, or their investors get greedier.
These are facts of life; take action but don't be surprised when you're being misled and taken advantage of when you're putting the trust of something so integral in a proprietary party.
Godspeed.
That may now have changed, because the user instructions for iPhone say (translation mine):
"iPhone can be used to make emergency calls in many locations, if mobile services are available, but you should not trust on it in cases of emergency".
Yes, apparently iPhone user instructions say that when you're in an emergency, don't count on iPhone. You should carry a phone with you in addition to iPhone.
When dialing 112, the phone goes to a special mode: the call is prioritised (if the cell is full, another call is dropped) and if carrier's network is not there, the phone tries any other network.
(I've seen this work on my phone, but that time it didn't help, the guy died.)
You can do an emergency call without even unlocking the phone. At least in Australia I'm pretty sure it is a requirement to be able to make emergency calls immediately.
Even though my phone has a pattern lock, there's an icon of a telephone handset that you can swipe to make an emergency call without unlocking.
Thus I am not surprised that this is happening, although I had not heard of WileyFox until today. It's also possibly WileyFox is greedy, but I'm going with incompetence; I will believe first that someone made a mistake in pricing and planning, and they're looking for the best outcome for customers, company, brand.
I am, perhaps uncomfortably, saying that "you got an unexpectedly low price" going with a company like WileyFox. They gave you a cheaper phone, and frequent updates, and now they need to pay for it. They could either start charging subscriptions for the 7.1.1 update ( which would be fair, no? ), or they could do what they are doing by making a deal with what sounds like a shady dialer company, or they could bail out and not provide the updates they promised ( like most handset providers do ).
I could get all high-horse about software consumers being trained to expect free software. That expectation being set by the billions of dollars in VC money that has been spent to capture markets - markets that later require "exploitation". But I won't go there - it's a complicated argument, there are other market forces, there are models that work, companies can be "up front" about data-driven business models.
My way of saying - you do have to pay for software, you took the 7.1.1 update, you should expect to pay..... right?
Did the popularity of Facetime, WhatsApp, etc. have anything to do with this? I have seen claims from carriers that WiFi calling "improves coverage".
At some stage, will anyone question what is the point of the cellular network? Especially in urban areas.
What is the difference between
a. a "smartphone" and
b. a portable, pocket-sized computer with rechargeable battery where the user chooses what to install and can remove any pre-installed software, where user gets a choice of 1. using pre-installed software and default settings or 2. using her own bootloader, kernel and userland, and where the user can easily open the case and tinker.
Does a computer need to have any association with the company selling internet access? Today's "phones" are manufactured for carriers (who are often ISP's, too), not for users. The carriers in turn sell these customized "phones" to users.
* https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT203032 WiFi Calling, which is (AFAIK) prioritised VoIP. Helps offload some calls from the provider's network which may help in congested areas
* https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT203124 VoLTE. Voice over LTE, rather than GSM (?) channels. Highly prioritised VoIP over LTE data. Should improve call quality via better voice codecs. Seems to simplify tower equipment for the telcos - Telstra in Australia has some "4G Only" towers in a few places where "standard" voice calling is unavailable. VoLTE isn't particularly widely available here.
Really happy to be corrected here - this is interesting stuff.
Google may have an incentive to add call info to the profile they keep on you, but surely you're not thinking that they are as big of a privacy risk as some random third-party that puts a dialer up on the play store.
Edit: I couldn't get the article to load, so I'm going by the other comments to assume this was about scammy dialers tricking regular users on Android into installing them. Obviously a dialer on a custom ROM modified for extra privacy is a justifiable reason for making it replaceable on Android.
I understand all the reasons why manufacturers add these apps to the phone. But still, I would gladly buy a phone that came with a stripped down version of Android, no bloatware, and received regular updates and security patches.
Sure, you can root your phone, and there are various ROMs out there that you can install. But as someone who's never done this it seems kind of complicated and annoying.
I want a simple experience where it just works right out of the box. Heck, I'd be happy if to buy a phone from someone who just resells devices after flashing a decent ROM onto them and makes updates easy somehow.
Sadly this would be useless without Google Apps and it's license forbid it. Google doesn't care as long as you install GApps on your own device, but anyone who try to sell would clearly trigger lawsuit.
Isn’t this sweet? I am searching for a dialling application for my smartphone. A DIALLING application.
Does this mean he can't practically call someone outside his contacts list as there's no way to key in phone numbers? Or would he still be able to make regular voice calls?
AOSP dialer. Done. Don't want the truedialer app? Run CM, like it says in the post.
Running Cyanogen (which has now no longer developed) nor 'GAPPS' (Google's standard package of apps that gives you access to the Play Store, and the stock dialer) is a pretty fringe use of Android.
So the dieler just being a app is a direct consequence from smartphones not being any kind of "special/magical" embedded device.
Through silently overriding the Dialer with a program I would normally suspect to be malware which sneaked on my phone is a horrible think to do...
People expect these devices to accept sim cards, will this break the confusion? My Smartglasses are a personal computer that also has phone functionality.
It struck me as a portable computer, with "cellphone" functionality added as an almost afterthought.
Guess that's still the case if you think about it.
- unlock
- install minimal 3rd party ROM (ie LineageOS)
- choose what you want from Google via Open Gapps or use F-droidI don't understand why some people compare a $650 iPhone 7 with cheap phones loaded with some half-assed vendor fork of Android?
If you wanted stock Android, you should have bought a $650 Pixel phone.
I have a 3G modem in my ThinkPad X220 and i am fairly sure it is technically capable of doing and receiving phone calls.
Anybody who's ever purchased a mobile from eBay or AliExpress has already seen that. They need to get their revenue from somewhere. Next time stick to a known, trustable brand.
if there was a pure messaging device right now with no voice - I'd bite their hand off
I don't need a mobile browser or even apps - all they do is stop me from disconnecting from work for a few minutes or hours - I don't think always-on is good for anyone over time
I need a 2 week battery life, LCD screen, SMS/pager thing, with a Blackberry physical keypad and no voice or apps - and a simple mute switch
Manufacturers are under no obligation to provide you with a device to your particular specification, unless of course you are the one paying them under contract them to do so.
I don't think wishing that a niche was filled constitutes assuming that manufacturers have any obligation.
So it looks like the free market is working in this case.
That is not necessarily a good thing.
a) they think manufacturers have any obligation (moral or legal) to do so
b) that it should exist
c) that more people would use it
Maybe OP was just 'thinking out loud'.
Okay? Who on earth said it wasn't? The original comment wasn't even particularly bitter about it. Saying you wish something existed doesn't preclude understanding the market-based reasons it doesn't.
not sure why such negativity on that comment - I've met many people who see a phone as a distraction, but want to retain some instant communication capability
there is a real hivemind phenomenon on HN that mobile apps are everything next - what if that's not the case - what if people don't want to be tracked, profiled, remarketed to 24/7 - what if they just want the 4 messages they get in a day that are worth reading?
Maybe I'm weird, but I'm utterly disappointed with apps. Each piece of functionality is being partitioned into vendor-locked blobs that do much more on the cloud that they reasonably should, and almost none of that is interoperable with each other. If we call smartphones mobile computers, then we're throwing away 90% of power that comes with having all that compute on your person.
I'm sure you'll find a good reason to argue why this isn't what you want/need.