> The universe isn't naturally shaped in a way that makes interrupting difficult, and never has been.
Yes it is... physical space is shaped to keep most people from being able to interrupt you. Being able to call anyone around the world changed that.
- I had my own room as a kid. My parents and brother banged on the door whenever they pleased.
- I worked at a tech company, had my own desk, and wore headphones. Coworkers still sent me Slack messages and tapped me on my shoulder.
- I've lived in a home in the burbs. People came to my home and rang the bell.
None of them were hard for the interruptor to do, and all of them happened frequently. In fact, I would argue that they are more frequent than the number of phone calls I get nowadays, which are actually easy much easier to screen/ignore than any of the above interruptions.
I would say depending on how bad someone has it they could get 1 to 3 spam calls a day, I assume if someone was getting consistently more than that they'd use a screener to lower it. That's a significant amount.
I'm not here defending spam calls. They are annoying AF.
Nor do I disagree that hypothetically more people on Earth have access to us than ever before. Of course they do.
Nor do I find being interrupted pleasant. I personally find it very annoying, even when it's a loved one.
I'm just making the point that this idea of world where people weren't easy to interrupt never existed.
I am not saying people couldn’t interrupt before, there are simply more ways for more people to interrupt you than ever before.
I'm trying to change this, however, and make a lot more local friends. Despite the higher potential for being interrupted.
1 is north america's calling code.
- The user could type in a N digit number and hit a button...
- This would cause another user's device to instantly stop doing what it was doing. ring and buzz with a modal popup window...
- With no authentication whatsoever or often even no identification...
- And then if that other user pushed a button, it allowed the initial user to be able to instantly start sending them voice
This thing would never make it past any app store's guidelines, and would likely be unacceptable to users. It's intrusive, invasive, and practically invites abuse and spam. Yet, since The Phone is an actual historic invention that goes back decades, it's culturally acceptable for I guess legacy reasons.
So.. add a few digits and suddenly spammers would have trouble.
On the hand, add a few digits to phone numbers and Y2K might look like a walk in the park.
That way, everyone who should contact you can do so and if someone else gets their hand on your contact info you can figure out who leaked it.
This way, I can easily filter incoming email, and I can see where an email came from if any party sells my data.
This also works with GMail by the way, you can use youraccount+anyrandomstring@gmail.com and emails will still be delivered to you.
I use a separate email handle that I only hand out to actual human beings, never to companies and never use for account registrations.
This has worked really well for the past 15 years or so.
A weakness with the GMail process is that spammers are able to remove the + part (even if most don't), and your credentials or identity can be aligned across leaked credential databases by removing the + part.
On the stripping of the + and suffix, yeah, bad actors who recognize your scheme can do that, but spamming is about quantity, not quality, so they just aren't going to put in the effort.
(I still have some email handling rules for my domain that understand the - aliases I created.)
I think that both conventions are flawed, as adversaries that know the convention can just remove the distinguishing part. If someone signs up with the email address real+spam@example.com, then they're just going to spam real@example.com. Apple's thing where it creates a987dfc429be@icloud.com is much better. Maybe that's the username I selected. Maybe it's an anti-spam forwarding address. There is no way of knowing. (Actually, I think it does something like relay.icloud.com? So yeah, they know it's not your real address. Apple just says "if you reject this, you can't have an iPhone app", which is what makes it work.)
(Personally I use a dedicated catch-all domain now, and the username is the distinguishing part – try to remove that!)
[0]: https://cock.li/, they do have SFW domains though
Unfortunately, this is only for email no such thing for phones or anything.
Still trivial to detect. Random letter/number combinations, letter combinations that don't exist in the dictionary, no dictionary word? Pretty detectable.
By equal token, you can't be sure that the email address doesn't actually just contain a plus sign.
I was disappointed to find out at work recently that the plus convention was not configured. It made testing account signups more difficult. This is when I dug in a bit and found it that it depends in the mail server for whether those are unique addresses or not.
I never worry about sites that require signups any more, I just autogenerate an email for them and use a fake name. I couldn’t give a shit less if they get hacked or leak data, because the email and password are randomly generated. If they turn out to spam me I just disable that email address and never hear from them again.
The only people who have my “real” email addresses are people I know personally.
That's not remotely true.
The very very very vast majority of actual iCloud email addresses are going to have "dictionary" names. It's quite trivial to detect a randomized address (and at that point, you probably don't even care about a couple of false positives).
Multiple instances of letter-number-letter-number ("b2y4r")? Coupled with letter combinations that don't exist in most languages ("ytbn")? And no dictionary words ("john", "smith", "booklover")? Random address.
Now, whether you care to do business with someone who detects this is a different question altogether.
But they are absolutely distinguishable.
Same with Private Relay: here's one of mine (with one character changed) - 2he5rs923s@privaterelay.appleid.com
I just looked at my alias list in iCloud and every single “hide my email” alias looks like a plausible @icloud.com address with dictionary words, and every “sign in with Apple” address is using the privaterelay address with the super random characters. There are no addresses that look like a987dfc429be@icloud.com.
I faced that with Costco support. My method is custom email on personal domain name. Had to setup email alias in gmail to do so. Was a pain.
Part of the usefulness is that you can write and receive to addresses without prior permission.
I've had wonderful conversations with authors, academics, politicians and other strangers around the world thanks to the permissive ability of email.