random strings - phoneshttps://blog.randomstring.org/2023-03-06T09:18:37-05:00fingerprints2023-03-06T09:18:37-05:002023-03-06T09:18:37-05:00-dsr-tag:blog.randomstring.org,2023-03-06:/2023/03/06/fingerprints/
<p>I have had phones with fingerprint unlocks on the back, side and
in-screen.</p>
<p>Back is best.</p>
<p>-30- </p>
<p>I have had phones with fingerprint unlocks on the back, side and
in-screen.</p>
<p>Back is best.</p>
<p>-30- </p>
new phone, who dis2019-10-29T20:06:22-04:002019-10-29T20:06:22-04:00-dsr-tag:blog.randomstring.org,2019-10-29:/2019/10/29/new-phone-who-dis/The Google Nexus 6P was an excellent phone, until it developed severe
battery issues when it was about a year old. Google did me the courtesy
of replacing it with the Pixel XL, which was a reasonably good phone
until two years in, when it developed moderate battery issues which were
worsening rapidly.<p>The Google Nexus 6P was an excellent phone, until it developed severe
battery issues when it was about a year old. Google did me the courtesy
of replacing it with the Pixel XL, which was a reasonably good phone
until two years in, when it developed moderate battery issues which were
worsening rapidly.</p>
<p>The Google Pixel 4 XL was unveiled last week and… it did not impress
me. For about the same amount of money, I acquired a OnePlus 7Pro – and
a spare charger, and a protective case, and a 24 month
nearly-no-questions-asked warranty. I’ve had it for a few hours now:
this is the first impressions review.</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>Phones are now too big. I am 6’5” tall and have big hands. This
phone is excessively large.</li>
<li>There is effectively no speed difference between state-of-the-art
from 3 or 4 years ago and the current champions.</li>
<li>The curved edges are a gimmick, reducing usability slightly. I would
trade them in an instant for a pair of notification LEDs, one on the
upper left corner and one on the lower right corner.</li>
<li>Charging times, however, have improved. Though some of that is
likely subjective and due to the deteriorating battery of the
Pixel.</li>
<li>If you ship a phone made of glass, it is unconscionable not to put a
protective case in the box. OnePlus supplies such a thing.</li>
<li>The glory of a headphone jack is that you can unplug your music
device and plug in your phone so you can have a private conversation in
a noisy environment. Whoops, no more headphone jacks. Jerks.</li>
<li>I wish Google had imposed a requirement for specific button
positioning on phones. But only a little; I’m sure I will eventually get
used to it.</li>
<li>The automatic transfer between Android phones of package information
is pretty good, but not perfect.</li>
</ol>
<p>My general advice: don’t buy a flagship unless somebody else is
paying for it – and is also paying for insurance.</p>
<p>Not a bad phone. Very pretty.</p>
tracing calls2017-02-28T11:09:17-05:002017-02-28T11:09:17-05:00-dsr-tag:blog.randomstring.org,2017-02-28:/2017/02/28/tracing-calls/Nobody likes you when you’re 23 / And are still more amused by prank
phone calls / What the hell is caller ID?<blockquote>
<p>Nobody likes you when you’re 23 / And are still more amused by prank
phone calls / What the hell is caller ID?</p>
</blockquote>
<p><cite>Blink-182, “What’s My Age Again?”, 1992</cite></p>
<p>You probably already know that Caller ID is useful, and that it can
be faked. If you want to know how it works and how it fails, read
on.</p>
<p>Once upon a time (prior to 1980-2, when AT&T was broken up),
everything was simple. All calls in the United States, to a first
approximation, were handled by AT&T or one of its daughter
companies. They kept track of who called whom by number, date, time
started and time stopped. Your bill would arrive in the middle of the
month after the calls were made, and everything would have a cost
assigned. Costs for long distance were quite high, and costs for
cross-oceanic calls were sky-high.</p>
<p>The 1980 <em>MCI v Illinois Bell</em> decision started the breakup of
AT&T, which was finalized in <em>United States v AT&T</em>
1974-1982. After that, each of the possible local telephone companies
had to come to arrangements to bill each of the possible long distance
companies and vice versa.</p>
<p>Prior to 1987, there were no Caller ID systems, either. You picked up
the phone when it rang or let your answering machine or fancy voice-mail
service handle it. If people told you who they were and what their
number was, you now knew it. Otherwise, you wouldn’t find out until the
bill arrived – assuming you could find the particular call in the
haystack.</p>
<p>That led to the problem of “cramming”. Cramming emerged when the FCC
decided to stop enforcing rules on billing and collection in 1986.
Overnight, companies sprang up to supply services that could be billed
to your telephone number. The obvious ones were 1-900 numbers, where the
mere fact of calling enables a high pass-through charge. Not so obvious,
but even more harmful: anyone who knew your telephone number could pass
it to a telco and claim that you had signed up for a service at $Z per
month. The GAO reported that some vendors had simply copied chunks of
telephone directories and started billing for nonexistent and unordered
services.</p>
<p>The good news, such as it is, is that cramming requires an
identifiable endpoint to receive the money. You can track them down,
eventually.</p>
<p>That’s not the case for random telephone calls, and has led to the
spam problem that we have today. Here’s why:</p>
<p>There is no central database of names and numbers.</p>
<p>What’s missing? Names. Every receiving telco is responsible for
deciding what name, if any, goes with the number that is sent.</p>
<p>When a call originates, the first switch in the path sets up the
calling record, and sends along the number that will be billed, the
number that is calling and the number to be called. That first switch
used to always belong to a telco. It could cost an awful lot of money,
require an expert to program it, and be fed only from expensive fixed
circuits.</p>
<p>Now it can belong to anybody, including a person sitting at home with
a consumer Internet connection and a $10 Raspberry Pi running Asterisk
PBX software. The interconnection to the PBX can happen at tens of
thousands of VOIP service providers all across the world. It doesn’t
cost more to ship your voice call over the Internet to another country
and then use a local VOIP provide – it costs less. Much less.</p>
<p>As a result, it become economically feasible to hire lots of English-
speaking people in a call center in an economically disadvantaged part
of the world and have them talk to random phone numbers in the US in the
hopes of convincing some poor grandmother to give up her credit-card
number or access to her computer. The Caller ID information is simply
forged. The billing number is established with the VOIP account, and as
soon as the VOIP company kills the account for fraud, it is all set up
again with another one - or the same one, under a new name. It’s not
like physical lines need to be installed. Data can be bounced through
relays in several data centers, defeating an IP lookup to blacklist bad
actors.</p>
I recommend Google Fi2017-02-24T09:36:06-05:002017-02-24T09:36:06-05:00-dsr-tag:blog.randomstring.org,2017-02-24:/2017/02/24/i-recommend-google-fi/This completes a year of using Google Fi for cell service. Fi is a
meta-provider which uses both Sprint and T-Mobile for underlying cell
service. The downside is that you must buy a phone from Google, and
there are only 3 options. They are very nice options, though, if you
don’t need an iPhone.<p>This completes a year of using Google Fi for cell service. Fi is a
meta-provider which uses both Sprint and T-Mobile for underlying cell
service. The downside is that you must buy a phone from Google, and
there are only 3 options. They are very nice options, though, if you
don’t need an iPhone.</p>
<p>(Other perks: they bill automatically; they charge you $20 for base
phone service and $10 per GB of data; they properly fractionate that
down to a unit of 10 MB.</p>
<p>They include a thing called Google Assistant, which looks for wifi
networks in your area, and connects to them if it recognizes them. Then
- this is key - it sets up a VPN back to Google, because it doesn’t
trust the generic wifi network. If you don’t have a VPN service, this is
pretty good. It coexists with other VPN services, too. I have one for
work and one for home.</p>
<p>The total cost included $700 for the top-end phone, plus an average
monthly cost of 31.50, for a total of $1078.</p>
<p>I have good wifi at home (I should know, I maintain it) and at the
office (I should know, I maintain it). Fi is happy to switch to wifi for
calls and data, so I basically only consume billable data while in
transit or otherwise travelling. If you are out on the road all the
time, this may not make sense for you.</p>
<p>The cost of my Sprint service in 2015 was $1054, but that does not
include the cost of the phone, which was an additional $300, spread over
two years. I <a
href="https://blog.randomstring.org/blog/2016/03/16/how-can-you-listen-with-those-bananas-in-your-ears/">wrote
about Sprint previously</a></p>
<p>I’m planning on keeping Fi service, and in the next year I expect the
bill to look much like this year’s – which is to say I’ll pay about $380
for the year of service, and nothing new for the phone.</p>
<p>For two years of service and the hardware cost:</p>
<p>Sprint: $300 + $1054 + $1054 = $2408</p>
<p>Fi: $700 + $380 + $380 = $1460</p>
<p>Looks like a pretty good deal. I recommend it.</p>
reflections on black mirrors2016-01-23T16:34:59-05:002016-01-23T16:34:59-05:00-dsr-tag:blog.randomstring.org,2016-01-23:/2016/01/23/reflections-on-black-mirrors/My first cellphone was insanely expensive: the phone was expensive,
the airtime was expensive, and the voice quality was awful. It was large
and heavy and needed to be plugged in about every other day, even if I
had not used it. My workplace bought it and issued it for me and I was
stupid enough to accept it as a 24/7 leash.<p>My first cellphone was insanely expensive: the phone was expensive,
the airtime was expensive, and the voice quality was awful. It was large
and heavy and needed to be plugged in about every other day, even if I
had not used it. My workplace bought it and issued it for me and I was
stupid enough to accept it as a 24/7 leash.</p>
<p>My second cellphone was probably insanely expensive, but work paid
for all of it and I never even saw the bills. The voice quality was OK
and it still wanted to be recharged every day or two but it only weighed
a few ounces, maybe five or six, and it fit in my pocket instead of
demanding a bag on my belt. On average I probably used it once a
week.</p>
<p>There are a succession of phones in the late 1990s that I really do
not recall clearly. Candybars, flips, CDMA, GSM, all moderately
expensive but deemed worthwhile business expenses.</p>
<p>Then I got my first smartphone: a Handspring Treo 600. This was a
PalmOS PDA that could also make phone calls and very slowly run a web
browser. The screen was in color, but only 160x160. Icons are larger
than that these days. It turns out that this is technically large enough
to be used as an ereader, although not comfortably.</p>
<p>Next was a Danger Sidekick 2, notable for having a transflective LCD
screen that pivoted out of the body up above a surprisingly useful
keyboard, the ability to glow a notification LCD in a dozen colors, and
the first useful SSH client I had ever used on a handheld device. I hear
the Deaf community loved it for the low cost data plan, great keyboard
and excellent multi-channel AIM chat client.</p>
<p>Naturally, Danger was purchased by Microsoft and burnt to the
ground.</p>
<p>It seems possible to me that I reversed the order of the Treo and the
Sidekick.</p>
<p>We now enter the era of the black mirror devices, starting with the
original Motorola Droid, an upgradeable, unlocked Android device with a
slide-out keyboard, 256MB of RAM, a micro SD slot, and enough battery
power to get through most days. I decided I liked Android quite a lot.
All my subsequent phones have been Android. Now, pay attention: at this
point, Google had not introduced the Nexus program, and the Droid was
effectively a Google-supported flagship.</p>
<p>I held on to the Droid until there was a clearly improved successor:
the Google (Samsung) Galaxy Nexus. 720P AMOLED screen, overclockable TI
ARM processor, and an astounding 1GB of RAM. All of those features were
great for the time, and are in fact still pretty good. The fatal flaw of
the Galaxy Nexus was battery life. Even with the extra-cost high
capacity battery, underclocked/undervolted CPU and the brightness
dimmed, 4 hours of screen-on time was the best that could be hoped for
in a day.</p>
<p>My most recent phone is an LG G2, brother to the Nexus 5. The G2 had
the best available battery life: I occasionally got 9 hours of screen-on
time, and usually picked it up at 6:30AM and put it back down at 10:30PM
with a good 30% remaining. CPU was fine, screen was adequate (1080P LCD,
large and crisp) and I was very much satisfied with it… until about a
week ago, when the touchscreen digitizer started to break down. I got
more than two years out of it, but not by much.</p>
<p>It is now time for me to think about a new phone. I had hoped to put
off the necessity until the springtime, when the Snapdragon 820 CPU
would be available in a bunch of phones, but I cannot wait that
long.</p>