Comment by lisper
1 year ago
This is a specific example of what should be a much more general practice: having separate protocols for establishing an initial contact and establishing a communications session with an already existing contact. My email spam filter is based on this. It does a first-stage separation between email from people I've corresponded with in the past and everything else. That simple heuristic is enough to achieve >99% accuracy all by itself.
Stepping back a bit, I find it kind of strange that knowledge of a 7-digit number is all that's required for anyone in the world to (by default) immediately interrupt someone.
Here's a thought. If the concept of a phone was never invented, and nobody knew what one was, and then suddenly here in 2024, an app company invented an app where:
- 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.
Calling used to be expensive.
In the prehistoric era (and continuing into the present day), all that's required to interrupt someone is a set of vocal chords you can use to talk to them, or a finger you can use to tap them on the shoulder, or a fist you can use to knock on their door. The universe isn't naturally shaped in a way that makes interrupting difficult, and never has been.
I'm pretty sure that if the phone system didn't exist, no one from a call center in South Asia would have ever come all the way to rural Canada to try to tell me I have a computer virus that they can fix for a few hundred dollars.
1 reply →
You also have to by physically near them.
> 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.
5 replies →
Technology reducing distance kinda changes the game though.
That's a local phone number in the US. It's 10 digits nationally. More internationally.
so I always thought that but weirdly a bunch of countries are just on the US exchange system. It's still billed as an international call but for example Bermuda is just 441. The American in me chuckles a bit at the idea of the UK's monarchs needing to dial 1 first to call their own territory
5 replies →
Interesting point. 7 digits was in part chosen because people used to have to remember phone numbers.
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.
I navel-gaze that if we redesigned communications from the ground up we could handle this better. When you greet someone physically you can add each other as known trusted contacts immediately. And when you sign up to some service online and have to put in your contact info, which likewise prompts you to add them as contact. And you can't share along a contact you know to someone else without that contact ID uniquely identifying you.
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.
I do this with my email. I have a bunch of different emails under my own domain, and I use info+uniqueidentifier@domain.org for registrations which do not warrant their own actual email handle.
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.
iCloud’s Hide My Email is perfect for this. No “+” convention, it just generates a random @icloud.com email address specifically for whatever website/app you’re signing up for, and forwards it to your real email. The random addresses are indistinguishable from real iCloud.com email addresses, there’s no naming convention a website can reject.
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.
5 replies →
I heard about the +, but don't some sites reject it? Or can't bad actors just strip it? You'd need your own domain with a large amount of unique identifiers for it to work if it became popular.
11 replies →
Apple has this as a service now. It's more automatic than the GMail process and works well.
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.
1 reply →
It seems like this approach is really popular. Have no spammers/data brokers caught on and started stripping the +identifier?
2 replies →
I've though a little bit about what a good successor to email would look like, and in addition to things like native support for encryption and authentication, one of the big features I wanted was to put not allow sending a message unless the recipient had added you to their list of contacts. And maybe have a way to to send a request that someone add you to their contacts, that would be processed differently than a normal message.
That eliminates a huge class of genuinely useful use cases for email.
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.