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Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

More minor nitpick... the telephone analogy is a bit silly. You can get a burner phone, and networked computers are identifiable by a number: it's called an IP. It could even be persistently identifiable if it weren't for IPv4 address space exhaustion.

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Yeah, I have to scratch my head about the whole anonymous lack of a unique number. Were IP addresses not part of early packet switched networks like ARPA net?

Still, worse than IP addresses are IMEI numbers, on your person frequently, as you move from place to place, trackable in crowds, and from aircraft overhead.

Furthermore, changing IMEI numbers is some kind of terrible federal crime.

He was talking about landline numbers.

Back in the day, there were a variety of ways to enter the landline network anonymously, from phone booths to whistling the right tones for call routing.

For quite a while, there was a race between those seeking free long distance and companies trying to stop them.

Even so - if 'cybercrime' and 'industrial espionage' are made possible by the lack of personal identifiers online, how are we supposed to understand telephone scams and pre-digital espionage?

Landlines may have been unique identifiers in common usage, but they weren't identifiable when someone was seeking to misbehave. Which is exactly the problem with the metaphor.

Given the amount of spam calls I get now, landlines are pretty much anonymous too.

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