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Comment by Nbox9 | Hacker News Reader

> Having a physical object the embodies your phone's identity

A SIM is not a embodiment of an iPhone’s identity. Maybe it was in the 90s, but today it’s so much more. The SIM is more like your iPhone’s credentials for accessing one network. You can change SIMs, change your access token for one network, but you are making no bigger impact on your phone’s “identity” than if you were to change Wi-Fi networks.

List of Identity related things that change when you change your SIM

  * Network Access Layer data associated with the cellular  networks

  * Phone Number

List of Identity relates things that do not change when changing your SIM

  * All data stored on the phone (messages, photos, apps)

  * Two Factor Authentication apps like Duo, PingID, Authy

  * ICloud Accounts

  * Stored passwords

  * Login tokens for various apps like email, social media, etc

  * Browser Cookies

  * Applet Wallet Data

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They were correct. They're saying your phone service identity (I am X number on Y network plan). Not your personal identity (pictures of your kids and passwords).

Today if your phone fails, you can pop a sim in another phone and regain your phone service identity within minutes. No SIM, it could take days or even weeks.

Yes, I don't understand how this could be welcomed by anyone else than Apple. It gives flashback from time when Verizon had CDMA network and their devices did not have SIM.

What is the similarity to Verizon CDMA non SIM days if the phone is not locked to a carrier?

Connecting to ATT/Verizon/T-Mobile/Vodafone should be as easy as choosing a Wifi Network.

In the CDMA days your non-carrier locked phone had trouble handling travel across the US, and forget about service in another country.

Carriers (Verizon and Sprint?) tried to improve it, but never really worked and the expense was high.

ATT/Tmobile users did not have a problem with service in another country, as they were not CDMA.

CDMA phones (early 2000's) had to be manually configured to attach to a network, I did support for Verizon at the time and I talked many people through the steps of reprogramming their phones onto the network. If you wanted to use your CDMA phone on another network you had to program it and re-program back when you were done. The steps were not public nor easy to navigate as it was not intended to be a user serviceable feature.

Compared to AT&T's "take the card out and put it in the new phone" reprogramming it was night and day.

You can say that eSIM is easier than the old CDMA days but it still isn't as easy as SIM swapping.

Technically, I do not see why eSIM cannot be even easier than SIM swapping.

I go to a conference or hotel, and they can figure out how to have me login to the wifi and pay them. Or not pay them if I am a certain level member of their rewards program or part of a certain group of people attending the conference.

Other than legacy business contracts or lack of will by mobile networks to allow easy switching, it seems it should be just as easy to change which mobile network you are using.

As a side note, I love the cash grab by ATT/Verizon/Tmobile right now where changing your device entitles them to collect an extra $30 "activation" fee from you. Zero labor cost, almost zero compute cost other than changing IMEI in their database, and you still have to part with $30.

> Today if your phone fails, you can pop a sim in another phone and regain your phone service identity within minutes. No SIM, it could take days or even weeks.

This doesn’t make any sense. Anything that can be done using a physical sim, you can do faster with e-sim (input data into fields).

What if you don’t have another physical sim ready to go? It’s the middle of the night and stores are closed. Your car won’t start. You lost your wallet and don’t have currency. Traveling in a foreign nation and don’t know where the SIM store is. (Yes these are extreme situations, but that’s exactly when you need your phone to work)

You don't need a new SIM to which phones, that's the point. You only need a different phone.

Who can do it faster? Me? Or the dude I just waited on hold for for 45 minutes (on someone else's phone i borrowed because I'm lucky enough to be around someone who is there to let me use their phone for 45 minutes) sitting in a call center somewhere?

If I want to replace my phone now, I can pop the SIM card out of the slot, and slide it into the new device. Takes 3 minutes and importantly requires no contact with the carrier.

With an eSIM, I'd have to-- at the very least-- do some sort of migration process through a carrier-provided resource. Maybe it's a web-based thing where I can sign in to their site on the old phone and get a QR code to scan on the new one, but I'd be unsurprised if at least some carriers say "gotta come into a store" or put up some sketchy "for your protection" roadblocks. This could be technical incompetence or a dark pattern, but I'm sure they want to keep anything related to bring-your-own-device to be a bit arcane and scary, to encourage customers to buy through the carrier.

>> Having a physical object the embodies your phone's identity

> The SIM is more like your iPhone’s credentials for accessing one network.

That's what I meant. Anyone with any familiarity with SIM cards knows it's no personality chip that brings everything over with it, and if it were such a thing it would probably be pretty annoying.

Actually, the SIM card use to be a “personality chip” in the 1990s. It stored your phone number and your contacts. There’s a scene in The Wire where a drug dealer confuses the police by changing the sim card of his phone when talking about criminal activity, which evades electronic surveillance (changing the phone’s ID on the network) and physical surveillance (sims are very small and concealable). I was specifically calling out how the use of a cell has grown in the last 30 years specifically as it related to identity.

I’ve spent a lot of time engineering login pages and thinking about questions of user identity.

But the phone hardware also has an IMEI, which it also tells the network: https://weartotrack.com/imei-number-blocked/

So it might be you're basing your knowledge from some fictional show where the writers got it wrong.

I don't know the story, but I'm wondering if IMEI wasn't introduced because of that. If SIM offered an identity in the network, why would phone need to have an unique number?

IMEI identifies the device, SIM identifies the subscriber. IMEI is used to block stolen phones, but it's also how phones are locked into specific carriers (which used to be a much bigger part of the business model, "$0 phones" and all).

Imei can be changed on some phones, and are not secure. The sim card needs to be logged to from the phone (usin PIN for uset-level login), contains non readable secrets and provides a completely separate execution environment with its own memory and cpu.

What I was saying is that it doesn't look like IMEI is essential part of the protocol and perhaps was added because of that and similar cases? Without any identifiable ID of the phone, you wouldn't need a burner phone, just a burner SIM.

SIM stands for "Subscriber Identity Module". IMEI stands for "International Mobile Equipment Identity". One identifies the account/person connecting (your plan, usage, etc.) while the other identifies the phone (and its capabilities on the network).

What I was trying to say, I don't believe IMEI would be needed for the phone to call/receive calls, and perhaps was invented after the incident.

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