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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

It also enables a lot of surveillance and prevents innovation in cell phone business models. Imagine what things would be like if you could connect any compatible device to the phone network for the same price.

The land line network used to work like the cell network does today. Early home computer networks, and then later, home internet were enabled by the court ruling that said the phone company couldn't block you from plugging modems in (or charge more for the same copper wire if you did plug a modem in).

California network neutrality laws supposedly ban discrimination against devices as well as against web sites, but it's either unenforced, or there is a loophole.

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> Imagine what things would be like if you could connect any compatible device to the phone network for the same price.

Can't you already do that today? Just swap your sim card.

you are way out of date on how bad things are.

just moving sim card to another phone will completely block you any access until you "reactivate" in the majority of telcos around the world.

>just moving sim card to another phone will completely block you any access until you "reactivate" in the majority of telcos around the world.

Mind listing those countries? One source[1] for the US says that statement is only true for 1 of the 3 major telecoms. One of the other two requires an approved device to activate the sim, but otherwise doesn't care, and the other doesn't care as long as the device supports VoLTE.

[1] https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/United_States#...

So -- to a large degree you're right.

But also, with the history of actually open protocols such as SMTP, the opportunity for abuse is enormous. The mobile phone system is abused right now by manufacturers, vendors, and "the surveillance state", but being open may just end up with us in a state where all that is true and there's a limitless slurry of effluent from semi-anonymous bad faith actors.

SMTP has no authentication, authorization, or encryption built in. GSM and the verizon standard do. SMTP abuse is entirely down to you being able to fire and forget a message without any sort of acceptance criteria for downstream systems.

Anyone abusing the mobile network runs the risk of their provider pulling the plug and disabling their access.

I think Signaling System 7 (what the phone networks use) might be the only widely-used communication protocol that's more open to abuse than SMTP.

With SS7, not only can you spoof any phone number, but you can cause the other end of the network connection to wire money without getting their prior authorization!

This is improved somewhat by STIR/SHAKEN, but, even with that, the state of the art is worse than SMTP.

In a prior life, I did a lot of work with SS7. I was dumbfounded by how insecure it is.

Like SMTP, BGP or most "ancient" network protocols, it was built on completely different assumptions about who was actually allowed to connect to the network, and therefore trustability.

Unfortunately, there is way too much old gear around, probably hundreds of billions of dollars worth, so instead of actually rebuilding communications systems we're forced to bolt on security (and features, like with IPv6) onto an extremely large pile of ossified bull dung.

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