And vacation sweepstakes, and shitty recruiters, and IRS scams, and...
This must be the elephant in the room. Traditional telephony has become dominated by bad actors. They hit a critical mass and now my phone app is a waste of space.
I've always found it weird how everyone I know seems much more cautious about phone usage than me: for example, I've never understood why people don't answer numbers they don't recognize.
I'm slowly realizing that this is because apparently people are inundated with spam calls? I think I may have received one solitary spam call in my entire life. I can't really account for the discrepancy
In my case it seems to be a random anxiety. I don't want to make calls. Oddly, I'm basically OK with receiving them, thought spam calls are unreasonably annoying.
What would you expect me to do if it were important?
It seems to me I can either call, which most likely causes a loud and persistent ringing noise that signals "someone wants to talk to you right now, please pick up the phone". Or I can send you a text which will make a quick beep on your phone and then go away.
I can deal with the text when I want -- or not at all. Whereas the call arrives when you want.
I actually adopted the "don't answer the phone" strategy about 20 years ago, when first I got voice mail. I wish everyone had. But nowadays I don't even listen to my voice mail.
> I wouldn't say I'm cautious, it's simply that if it were important, why would you call?
Claiming this in general is trivially rebuttable by the fact that I know many people who feel precisely the opposite: if it's important you call, if not you text.
If anything, that view is less irrational than yours: a mode of communication that's immediate, loud, sustained for many seconds, and hits a device that most people have on them constantly fits far more easily with realtime urgency than any other mode of communication.
On top of THAT, there are still stupid legacy systems (that are nonetheless important) that use old forms of communication. My insurance was cancelled while I was on a backpacking trip and they called me and sent me a letter without bothering to send me an email. The fact that Blue Shield are fucking idiots doesn't change the fact that I was without proper medical insurance for th rest of the year (due to ACA enrollment limits). I could easily see the same being true of phone calls.
This must be an American thing. In New Zealand I still use the phone app for talking to people. I've never recieved a spam call - a few calls from companies I already donate too asking for more etc, but that's it.
How many "bad" calls do you get a month?
I don't think it is specific to only US, in India i get on average 10/week, I never had a problem in Germany though.. it depends on regulations i guess
It is an American thing. I had 2 degrees and Telecom (or Spark or whatever the fuck they are now) and never had any spam that I recall. Coming back to the US, my number got text spam on a number I literally gave to no one. -_-
I get more of those on my Google Voice/Hangouts number than my actual phone number .. and I still get them on my actual phone number, even though I have given that information to NO ONE! -_- ... fuck you Cricket (really ATT).
I'd only notice when other people start complaining they can't get hold of me... which frankly I'd be okay with 99% of the time. The thing I hate about the phone is the expectation that I'll reply right away and participate in a phone call that's intrusive of my time. Frankly, I find a lot of people feel the same way about texting or emails. I have quite a lot of people that text me and if I haven't replied within a minute or two I get the "well?" or "can I get a response?"... "Yes, and I'll respond when I'm good and ready! Lest I need to remind you that my phone is for my benefit, not everyone else's!"
Or that just means that we still call the device in our pocket a "phone" for legacy reasons.
If we are okay with having a third party handles our messages, VoIP etc, why not the phone app?
I've been joking lately that there is a new one syllable word for "personal computer": phone. At the current rate that's how the language will shift. I suppose we'll know if people start referring to things like "macOS deskphones" and think "laptop" always meant "laptop phone". :)
It's like those futurist ads from the 50s (and 80s/90s) AT&T that soon there will be phones capable of amazing things everywhere in our lives, except they aren't all AT&T branded and most of them started with the name "personal computer". (Though savor the irony that Ma Bell's legacy lives on in Linux by way of Bell Labs' contributions to Unix.)
Then again, I'm also strongly for renaming 3D Printers to facsimile machines because the word fax is too useful to lose to ancient toner-based modem printers.
> Then again, I'm also strongly for renaming 3D Printers to facsimile machines because the word fax is too useful to lose to ancient toner-based modem printers.
Then maybe we really will be able to "receive a fax at the beach"[1] in the future!
Ever seen a two year old use a tablet? Don't be shocked if in ten to twelve years we have teenagers who can only use a touch interface and can't type or hate using a mouse.
That is exactly my grandchildren. My grandson is four and has been using smartphones for three years. He's had his own for one. Color me shocked when, at three, he asked me to connect his phone to my wifi. They're bright enough kids but far from exceptional/genius. Its just how it is now.
By the way, when you make the off/end button big and red, it is nigh impossible to convince a little boy not to press it. Over and over.
Interesting - especially the using the mouse/trackpad part. They're going to want pro tablets. Some of those two year olds of yore are now seven - and elementary schools in the U.S. are still very tablet focused. It'll be interesting to see what happens in four or so years when they start middle school and are expected to use traditional laptops.
I recently caught myself holding my finger on a paper book and waiting for the translation dialog to pop up. Guess too much time spent reading on a Kindle.
I was about to comment, it is very annoying to write on a tablet for any kind of school length work. I would hate to write an essay on a tablet.
Then I realized I have installed Dragon on this computer, and there wasn't even a reason for me to type this reply. So I will risk a guess and assume that in the future essays will be spoken, not written. No doubt there will be an epic fight over this, as people try to defend why children of the future will have to learn to type. I will hazard one more prediction: they will lose.
> In a fast-paced live demo, I will create a small system using Python, plus a few other languages for good measure, and deploy it without touching the keyboard. The demo gods will make a scheduled appearance. I hope to convince you that voice recognition is no longer a crutch for the disabled or limited to plain prose. It's now a highly effective tool that could benefit all programmers.
Turns out it's doable, you just need to invent your own language.
You're assuming writing is a highly linear process, which has pretty much never been the case. When dictating memos was a thing, even that took practice. Anything more complex has always involved huge amounts of cutting and pasting--whether literally or digitally.
Given good enough voice recognition and good enough touch interfaces that work in concert (and ignoring the many situations where speaking is an issue), it's possible. But it's not an easy path.
I like how minicomputer used to mean "computer that's only as big as a chest freezer." Every now and then I hear laypeople use the term "mini-computer" to mean a computer that's really small by their standards, like a raspberry Pi.
In Swedish, the term "stordator", literally "big computer" refers to a mainframe.
I really like your idea of nano and picocomputers. It's consistent, and really reflects on the miniaturisation that we have seen since since the invention of the computer.
Since "computer" pre-dates digital, it might be a good time to come up with a more apt base term too. It's not as if most people's usage of them (at least as far as they know!) is performing arithmetic.
It's not a strong requirement in my mind, but again I'm posturing that the original term fax was far too explicitly framed when it is more useful as a very generic term.
Mobile phones are called "Handys" in German. It's become such a satisfying and appropriate name for handheld computers, as distinct from traditional personal computers.
In British English, they've always called cellphones "mobiles", which is also a nice short name for mobile computers.
In Argentina is "el celular" as in "teléfono celular", or sometimes like in Spain "el móvil" which I like better because it means "the mobile", which in the long term could mean "the mobile computer".
I think this usage is dying out in British English in much the same way as the word "auto" for car. People still speak of "mobile networks" and "auto dealerships", but they buy "phones" and "cars".
Maybe this is a regional thing, but I'm British and I'm not sure I've ever heard a first language British English speaker use the word "auto" for a car. I'd have said that was purely an Americanism.
I'm a native speaker of American English (California dialect) and I have never heard another native speaker use "auto" for a car except in the context of "auto dealership".
I think you're right. I am dual nationality US/UK so sometimes I tend to cross my metaphors. Perhaps a better, British example would be the word "motor" instead of "auto". Used in words like "motorway", but I've never heard anyone actually use it to mean "car" outside of 80s cockney rap.
I've most commonly heard motor as referring to an engine (UK english). I'd say a good example might be from french, with the formal and correct "voiture" not commonly being used, with the less formal "bagnole" being much more common.
Nah, still pretty widely used in certain circles - even to the extent that you can have a car sales site called motors and it be obvious: http://www.motors.co.uk/
I think you misinterpreted the point. As I read it, "car" and "phone" are the terms Americans (and others) use, and that the British sometimes used "auto" and "mobile" but that usage is dying out (which doesn't conflict with you not having heard it).
As an American, "car" and "phone" are definitely the norm. The only time I've ever heard "mobile" is as a prefix to phone, so "mobile phone". It's sometimes used on forms to distinguish between home, work and mobile numbers (like I just did).
I concur - native en_GB speaker here. Auto(mobile) is probably avoided as a general synonym for car because we use "automatic" to differentiate from the default "manual" AKA "stick-shift".
Having said that, this is probably only modern usage. The AA (Automobile Association) and RAC (Royal Automobile Club) both feature "automobile" in their names and are both well over 100 years old.
I suppose (without doing any research) car is probably short for carriage.
In the U.K. I'd say it's mobile and phone pretty much interchangeably (possibly more phone than mobile nowadays as proposed by ancestor comment). If anyone says cell phone then you can immediately spot that they're american.
I think everyone here calls them cellphones. I call them mobiles and everyone gets it. Handy... wouldn't work in Canada, and I suspect not in the U.S. either.
Handy (CA, US etc) == handjob (GB etc). Presumably handy is an abbreviation of handjob. I know blowjob is in common parlance at least on both sides of the pond. Perhaps it is just as well DE didn't pick blowey or blowie (those are in use over here in a similar way to handy on the left edge of the pond.)
Handy could work in the UK except that it is extensively used already as an adjective eg: "that's a bit handy" or "you'll find this handy" etc. "That's a handy handy" would be a bit weird and as we already have mobile then there is no need for it. I suspect that "cell" will creep in eventually but not yet.
A mildly interesting dovetail to all that is that a vernacular for phone used to be "the blower". I suspect through comparison of early phones with [ships] communication voice-pipes.
Good catch - "blower". I still use that term myself and so do several others in my acquaintance. Even kids understand what I mean so it is definitely embedded in the national conscience here still or at least they get the idea by reference and context.
Without any research whatsoever I'll also venture that "blowing" is what people used to do when they had to rush downstairs to answer the new fangled telephonic device and ended up out of breath. However, again without research, there is a good chance that the RN and co would have referred to the voice tubes on ships as "blowers" because that is the sort of word they would pick. I know a lot of modern matelots and that theory fits nicely.
That's not too well known in American slang, in my experience. I'd never heard that usage before now. Edit -- lots of people here recognize that usage, so I guess I'm just sheltered. Regardless, I hear 'handy' used in the US as an adjective meaning convenient quite often.
But, if so, it's like the reverse of Americans talking about their "fanny pack" while in England.
> But, if so, it's like the reverse of Americans talking about their "fanny pack" while in England.
There was a (funny) local news story in Australia when comedian Will Ferrell accidentally made an off-color "fanny" joke not knowing what the word meant abroad. Shows how slight differences in the same language can mean worlds of difference.
I'm pretty sure this will Baader-Meinhoff it into recognition for you. It's in the A1 level vocab, and I would see it on signs outside of Spätis and phone stores on a daily basis.
That said, it sucks as a hand terminal, because everything it does everything through vendor-locked, cloud-enabled shitty apps with almost no interoperability. If this is how future of computing is going to look, then I'm sorely disappointed.
What sort of interoperability are you lacking? I have apps on my phone that can view or edit most of the file formats I use regularly, and transferring files is easy enough (with or without a network connection). The apps are not as full featured as the equivalent desktop program, but I don't need them to be.
In the early 2000s I was excited about the potential of networked handhelds. Then disappointed when it turned out they'd be phones. I wonder if there's some branch of the wave function where an open PC-style architecture won.
Not sure if having the public consciousness think of these devices differently would help to stop the gross freedom violations they impose. Even traditional IBM PCs are trending towards draconian lockdown to one OS with an extraordinary amount of proprietary code run in firmware and even in the CPU itself, much like how cellular modems (and SSD controllers) work.
It is more that the broad userbase doesn't care, and there isn't enough "putting money where your mouth is" to get good economies of scale on freedom respecting computer hardware, regardless of form factor.
So the lockdown of "phones" is more a symptom of broad technological illiteracy rather than a cause.
For me, the feature that keeps it in my pocket every day, versus being able to ditch it when I feel like being in the real world, is the phone part. If it was just a PDA I'd leave it at home most of the time.
I carry a small personal computer with a data-only cell-tower connection, that sometimes receives voice calls by talking to an SIP server over the Internet, which I pay for separately to my cell service. At this point, the "phone" is more the SIP app itself than the device it's on.
Same in phone "portable" for "telephone portable" (portable can also refer to laptops, for "ordinateur portable"). The word convergence is coming, and the answer might be neither computer nor phone.
Imagine the same situation with other "core" component of smartphone — browser. That you have TrueExplorer Pro that sends each visited url and form data to central server and has broken https. And that you can't replace it with Chrome/Firefox/Opera. It will be worse than custom caller.
Actually, I don't think this is true - I think safe browsing is implemented via checking a bloom filter locally first and then checking google if a match is made on the bloom filter.
I mostly use data-only SIMs on my phone and make/receive the very few calls I need to via VOIP, which is almost certainly the near future.
For instance in Myanmar, where they have only had widespread mobile phone service for a couple of years, the most popular phone plans from Oodooroo are sold as data-only, and include info for downloading a VOIP app for legacy calls. I had an amusing time in one of their stores watching a perplexed staff try to deal with an older foreign man who frustratingly demanded to know how much he would need to pay for 100 "minutes". They just keept referring him to the chart that showed plans ranked only by the number of GBs.
So.. even data-only sims have an actual phone number right? That's baked into the GSM/HSDPA protocols right? (IIRC only WiMAX and LTE allow IP only without a number). So even those data-only plans must still have a number, that either never connects or cost something insane like 100MB worth per-min?
Yeah there is a phone number. Usually it doesn't work for calls or SMS, or you can have that blocked for it. It's not worth using or thinking about. IMessage and Facetime work with email addresses, whatsapp and signal can be associated with any phone number, and don't need to use the one on your SIM card.
Doing FaceTime audio or a VOIP service is at most half-a-MB per minute, and th call quality usually way better than regular cellular. Cheap over LTE, and inconsequential over wifi.
I've mostly deprecated phone numbers as a way of reaching me for the following reasons:
- Representing a person by a country-specific number is a horrible UX. All of my contact methods besides phone number remain the same no matter where I am in the world. Several of my contact methods (Facebook, LinkedIn) enable directly "dialing" my real name and intelligently locating me by social proximity instead of asking the customer to program in a stupid number (or multiple numbers) for every contact. A few (Skype, Hangouts) at least allow for alphanumeric, easy-to-remember identifiers instead of numbers. Aren't we in 2017 already?
- I want information to flow with me, not be tied to a particular device. Ideally, I should not have to carry any particular device, but rather present my credentials to any device I own (be that a computer, one of my many phones, tablets, or smartwatches). All of my contact methods besides phone number and WeChat are device-independent and align with this vision.
- E-mail replaces SMS. It supports >140 bytes. In fact, it can comfortably support several MEGAbytes per message! Isn't that mind-blowing? There is ZERO reason to continue to use a stupid old technology with a 140-byte limitation. As part of the deprecation process, I have all SMS go to my e-mail inbox instead of using the SMS interface on the phone.
- I don't take unscheduled voice calls. In general, if my day is going as planned, 95% of the time I am doing something where I shouldn't be picking up a phone (either for my own safety or due to etiquette). That includes machining metal, having dinner with real people, listening to concerts, meditating, coding, hiking (usually without reception), biking, whatever. Unscheduled voice calls are incompatible with my lifestyle.
- When scheduled, I do video calls more often than phone calls.
As such I'm totally fine with a phone app being third-party. A phone number is not the main reason I have an LTE device in my pocket.
In fact, of my multiple LTE-capable devices, only one is capable of receiving phone number calls. The rest have data-only SIMs.
> Representing a person by a country-specific number is a horrible UX
Phone numbers (and physical addresses) are examples of semi and fully federated systems. You use the standard and establish contracts and your teleco or post office and connect to anyone else in the world.
Your Google Hangouts/Skype/Facebook are closed, walled garden, proprietary systems.
I do hate the walled garden aspect of them. I agree they are far, far, far from innocent.
But from a UX standpoint they are vastly superior to having to deal with people trying to reach me on my US number while I'm in China, or trying to reach one cell phone when I'm carrying another.
Also, the telco operators love to nickel-and-dime consumers for things like roaming charges. I'd love to see more competitors come out and overthrow those rascals by doing everything over IP, creating worldwide MVNOs and slashing all roaming charges to essentially zero. Google Fi has done a nice job. Granted they exist to promote Android, but when I tell friends I have LTE data in 100+ countries without roaming charges, international voice calls for pennies directly from my cell phone, and viewing voice charges in real-time, they are all astounded. Unfortunately yes they too are a walled garden, but the user experience is amazing.
Anecdotally everything has moved to WhatsApp and the like even for voice calls. Even more interesting, there seems to be a trend to not even make calls and just go for chat most of the time!
That said, while phone calling has fallen out of favor, phone numbers are still the main form of 'identity' people have, and if anything the dominance of WhatsApp/Messenger has made it more common in my circles to share a phone number rather than a FB username.
>Choose precisely the data you wish to share; protect apps with additional PINs; prevent spam with Truecaller Integrated Dialler.
So their idea of privacy is privacy from everyone except the manufacturer (and "trusted" third parties)
>Of course, you can always root the phone and install custom roms. But this process takes some time and the development and compatibility with these roms is less than satisfactory.
Maybe he shouldn't have bought a device with such a small userbase?
> Maybe he shouldn't have bought a device with such a small userbase?
Yes, I think I did a mistake there. On the other hand, there are small brands which are incredibly open about hardware and software development, such as [1]. I want to stress that the current state of compatibility to smartphone operating systems is really not satisfying.
FWIW their phones originally ran CyanogenOS. They're in the process of updating to stock android [1], after cyanogen's recent layoffs/pivot/rebranding/disaster [2].
CyanogenOS couldn't make money, and WF has trouble making money, because everyone else subsidises the cost of the handset and software by selling data.
If you want to provide what they claim - unparalleled security and privacy - you have to charge more, or charge a phone subscription fee for updates, or something.
One can't expect to get subsidized-by-data-selling prices, and have no data selling.
It's a real problem. Are there any voice dialing programs for Android phones which do voice recognition locally and don't require Google services? That's the way it used to work until Google broke it so they could monitor all your dialing.
I wonder what makes people think that an AI needs to be able to code to improve itself. I don't see infant brains "programming" themselves to get better.
The next step in programming is probably not anything like programming. Machine learning certainly isn't. Creating a neural net that achieves superhuman image recognition takes 30 lines of code in keras. And terabytes of training data. But the programming doesn't look anything like someone in the 90s would have thought. Except maybe for a bunch of AI researchers.
Thinking about the way we learn, I'd say it is a LOT like programming ourselves. Study and Practice both have aspects of learning to do steps in a mechanism to achieve an outcome, and each of us has to build that mechanism from scratch. The difference is that not all of us need to be self aware for the process to continue working. However, the best of us seem to have very detailed systems worked out for "programming ourselves".
But we are talking about literal programming here. Not conceptual programming.
I dont think that an AI will program itself anything like we program computers.
People who "program" themselves really just provide good data. Positive reinforcement, "healthy thoughts", "gaining valuable reference experiences", things like that. When you want to learn a new language, at the simplest level, you can immerse yourself in that countries culture and you will learn automatically. You don't hop inside your brain and move the axons around. You just provide good data and let the engine do its job, and why would an AI be incapable of doing that?
They already do that. "Backprop" is that mechanism. Not yet on a really advanced level, but a machine learning algorithm already introduces its learning back into itself and incrementally improves on that.
The most obvious source of runaway (as opposed to incremental) improvement would be an AI written by humans that is better at writing AIs than humans are. It could then write an AI even better than itself recursively until diminishing returns are reached, causing a near instantaneous jump in its intelligence.
> I wonder what makes people think that an AI needs to be able to code to improve itself. I don't see infant brains "programming" themselves to get better.
That's largely because you haven't looked. Infants are constantly developing and pruning pathways and connections in their brain, which effectively changes both the hardware and the software.
They don't do that consciously (with an agenda). Infants are just being infants. If an AI just needs to keep doing AI things to "reprogram" itself, then theres no barrier for it to do that.
im just saying that infants are learning a whole lot without consciously making an effort to do so. they just provide data through their sensors by existing.
You build a metaoptimizer. The metaoptimizer decides which new layers are necessary, and whether the cost of "buying new neurons" ( adding compute instances & storage ) is worth the benefits to the high level optimization functions. ( or pruning / reallocating ). Meta-optimization is clearly a thing, it's in the research papers, and once you build a good one, you're done programming.
My new prediction is Skynet will come out of the financial bots. It solves the money problem, because those bots will become financially self-sufficient quickly.
Regrettably, the target function is "make money" which will cause our next-gen species to be psychopathic and uninterested in human life, except, in the short term, as a market to be plundered. Not a good outcome.
v. 0.1 was based on the chip from the Terminator that had been sent back in time by Skynet. Humans otherwise were decades away from being able to design something like that.
I think it's reasonable to say that Skynet built itself.
That's a pretty interesting interpretation of the Terminator story and rules. I hadn't seen that one before, thanks for the link!
But ... ugh, rationalist fiction always makes me a little sad. I share the motivation, the annoyance at how pervasive the plot driven unrealistically stupid decision is in fiction. I want to like it, but it's always so saturated with authorial naivete, inexperience and smugness.
I guess I just wish they'd revere Iain M. Banks more and Yudkowsky less.
> I guess I just wish they'd revere Iain M. Banks more and Yudkowsky less.
Definitely. Though Banks doesn't have quite the Internet following, possibly because he was publishing before the Internet took off and compounded by the fact that I can't link to a free, online copy of his work.
Generally speaking, people aren't out there to screw you over. Voice recognition happening on Google servers is many many times better than what can be achieved on your tiny phone. Your phone doesn't even have the storage to store the models used for phoneme decoding on state of the arts speech recognition systems.
I completely disagree with the title. The fact that "telephony" can be an app on the phone is a WONDERFUL thing. It means that the author of this article has a choice, as opposed to NOT having a choice.
To be fair, the "Samsung BS" was them trying to setup a separate ecosystem that was just as good in case they needed to break from Google. I really hope Samsung does this at some point too. I feel there are enough people that don't want eyeProducts that we'd finally see some innovation in 3rd party markets ... or everyone would just install Samsung/Google/Amazon stores ..
I'll be Mr. Reasonable Compromise. It's both a wonderful thing and a risk. Which of those two it becomes depends on the entire ecosystem around installable apps, trust and verification.
I've never had a problem with 3rd party dialers on Android. But I can smell a scam and I'm technically literate.
To the best of my knowledge there's never been a major dialler related security mishap. In fact much of the panic about Android's "malware ridden ecosystem" seems overblown. Nobody I know has ever had an issue to the best of my knowledge.
But it's definitely a possibility and it's highly probable that eventually something bad will happen on a large scale without some better controls - albeit hopefully not the type that Apple imposes. Cost vs benefit and all that.
More choice always means more responsibility. You could argue against democracy with the same idea - what happens if the voters choose someone not worthy? A lunatic or someone downright malicious?
Every choice induces stress. Sometimes we really need to be able to make that choice, but requiring choice or having too much choice overwhelms people.
The problem is that it was switched to a 3rd-party app that collects and shares data without the user's knowledge or permission, and is rather difficult to switch back.
I agree. There could be a lot of improvements that can be done to telephone. Of course, they might have tradeoffs (privacy vs. convenience). That's where providing multiple options to the user comes handy.
Some of the improvements (just top of my mind): crowd-sourced list of scammers, telemarketers. For outgoing calls: automapping phone numbers to business/user names, automatically using the best way to route the call based on call rates (WiFi vs cellular vs. multipath TCP) etc.
The tl;dr is the manufacturer of OP's phone just used some random app as the dialer. The app was stealing all of OPs data and selling it to who knows who. They admit to doing this in the privacy policy of the app. But as it was installed by default, OP never agreed to it. And he had a lot of trouble removing it from his phone and finding a replacement.
This is the problem with choice. All your choices are secretly malicious and have incentives to violate your privacy. Remember those flashlight apps that ran in the background consuming CPU/data and stole users' personal information? It's just generally a bad idea to rely on untrusted third parties for core functionality.
Part of the requirement for the contract made by a sale of goods to be valid is a meeting of the minds: that both parties share the same concept of what is being transferred by each party to the other.
I would argue that, if you really want to talk about people "having a choice", you need a similar concept: that you are "free to choose" if-and-only-if your choices are indeed what you understand them to be. Which means some form of regulation or curation needs to happen to enforce that.
Of course, this doesn't have to be at all the same thing as the sort of "curation for quality" that the iOS App Store gets up to. Instead, more like FDA labelling requirements on drugs: list your active ingredients or get out.
Consider a hypothetical policy: "whatever misapprehensions a consumer has, due to your marketing, are your fault; a complaint about misapprehensions about your software that cites your own marketing, and which we ascertain as being valid, will result in a ban of all your apps from the store."
Can you make the "I Am Rich" app? Sure; it does what it says on the tin—proves you're rich with a $10k IAP. Can you make a Flashlight app that asks for your contact info? Nope; customers weren't expecting the app to ask. Banned. Even if you never send that info anywhere.
So when Google updated the Nexus dialer to include search-based "Caller ID" that was a bad thing? Or when Google upgraded Messenger to include RCS support?
The author explicitly chose to avoid Google because for him, the data protection was insufficient. So I'd say, yes, for privacy-conscious users, it was a bad thing.
- Someone said having multiple options for a phone dialer is a wonderful thing.
- Someone else pointed out that the article isn't about a choice, the dialer was forced on the user.
- The parent asks if it is bad that Google updates apps in a tone that strongly hints that they can't imagine how the answer could be yes.
Far too many conversations go like this here.
To (try to) get back on topic, of course the Google can update their apps. I'm pretty sure the number of people here who would answer this negatively at a rounding error away from zero. But that is entirely beside the point.
The point is the author of the article doesn't want a dialer that surveils them and spews their private conversation details (along with everything else of note stored on the phone) to the "trusted partners" of the surveillance firm who wrote it. And yet it was forced on him.
This is ironic and sad to anyone who considers phones to be things that one might have private conversations on. (Insert opportunity to talk about how old-school talking on phones is.)
And again, it is just another reason to be very, very careful with whom you "do business" (which includes third-party private-surveillance firms, the names of which you may not have a way of determining before purchase).
For me, this dictates I won't use consumer software from a large number of current producers. Google included. Not everyone has my requirements, I get that, and that's fine.
But there is exactly nothing wrong with wanting a phone that doesn't spy on you.
> - Someone else pointed out that the article isn't about a choice, the dialer was forced on the user.
If you want the phone to come with a dialer (I think most people do), then some dialer will inevitably be forced on people. And unless you think phone calls are an optional feature, it makes perfect sense that the dialer cannot be deleted.
The only complaint I can see here is that phone manufacturers can make bad choices for their default, undeleteable dialers. Well, yes, just like they can make bad choices for other software on the phone. The only reasonable remedy for that is to buy a phone from a manufacturer that makes software choices you like.
That phone manufacturers can make bad software choices is not an argument against having replaceable dialers. Quite the opposite. A manufacturer can make the exact same bad dialer choice if the dialer isn't replaceable. The only difference is that if the dialer is replaceable you might be able to do something about their bad choice some of the time.
> And unless you think phone calls are an optional feature, it makes perfect sense that the dialer cannot be deleted.
I don't see the connection here. Why shouldn't people be able to delete the dialer if they don't like the phone company's choice? I understand preinstalling one, but preventing people from choosing another if they want seems unnecessary.
As a practical matter, I don't think either the phone manufacturer or the phone company want to be in the position of certifying that every replacement dialer meets regulatory requirements (911, for example). If customers can always roll back to the preinstalled one, they don't need to.
My main point is actually that I am forced to use this dialler without my consent. I am not trying to say that users shouldn't be able to customise the system but I am opposed to manufacturers forcing data-hungry 3rd party programs on customers.
Define core functionality. We are carrying computers that happen to have a radio that can communicate with cell towers. The phone functionality is just as "core" as any other service that the OS exposes. (Camera, Web Browser, GPS)
It's still called a "phone", and it really sucks at being a computer (it is a good entertainment device though). Since a lot of things are still done over phone calls and every citizen in a civilized country is expected to be in possession of a phone number, I'd qualify it as core functionality.
But you aren't forced to use it. That's the whole point of having a dialer you can install.
It seems like the alternative you're suggesting is that vendors be able to lock you into their own dialer, which was probably produced by an outsourced firm anyway.
Or are you advocating that Google prevent people who download and modify the Android source from modifying that particular aspect of it?
Granting permissions seems pretty clear. If a dialer asks for too many, use a different dialer. If a manufacturer preloads data-hungry apps, buy a device from someone else.
I fought having a phone through to 2008 - now I'm reconsidering wanting one again
if there was a pure messaging device right now with no voice - I'd bite their hand off
I don't need a mobile browser or even apps - all they do is stop me from disconnecting from work for a few minutes or hours - I don't think always-on is good for anyone over time
Manufacturers are under no obligation to provide you with a device to your particular specification, unless of course you are the one paying them under contract them to do so.
Free markets are just a tool we came up with to serve us, the general public. Where they don't, we don't let them operate. A public utility should not be operating in a free market (and I'm glad they don't).
>A niche that appeals to almost no one and alienates the telcos that manufacturers partner with.
So it looks like the free market is working in this case.
Okay? Who on earth said it wasn't? The original comment wasn't even particularly bitter about it. Saying you wish something existed doesn't preclude understanding the market-based reasons it doesn't.
not sure why such negativity on that comment - I've met many people who see a phone as a distraction, but want to retain some instant communication capability
there is a real hivemind phenomenon on HN that mobile apps are everything next - what if that's not the case - what if people don't want to be tracked, profiled, remarketed to 24/7 - what if they just want the 4 messages they get in a day that are worth reading?
It's not a HN hivemind, but there are voices saying that indeed.
Maybe I'm weird, but I'm utterly disappointed with apps. Each piece of functionality is being partitioned into vendor-locked blobs that do much more on the cloud that they reasonably should, and almost none of that is interoperable with each other. If we call smartphones mobile computers, then we're throwing away 90% of power that comes with having all that compute on your person.
I'm sure you can find an android device that has a physical keypad, root it and disable any call or mobile data functionality while keeping SMS intact.
Actually, that's not that easy. There are not many android phones with keyboard, and even less with a proper community for rooting it. I wouldn't know a single one.
I don't think there's anything decent with a physical keyboard anymore. It's sad. I'd seriously welcome the extra thickness for something like the old HTC Evo Shift.
Well in the end modern smartphones are just general purpose computers which have some artificial restrictions on what you can do with them and happen to have a touchscreen/modem/speaker/microphone etc.
So the dieler just being a app is a direct consequence from smartphones not being any kind of "special/magical" embedded device.
Through silently overriding the Dialer with a program I would normally suspect to be malware which sneaked on my phone is a horrible think to do...
You purchased a Chinese mobile phone and it installed spyware in an update.
Anybody who's ever purchased a mobile from eBay or AliExpress has already seen that. They need to get their revenue from somewhere. Next time stick to a known, trustable brand.
Isn’t this sweet? I am searching for a dialling application for my smartphone. A DIALLING application.
Does this mean he can't practically call someone outside his contacts list as there's no way to key in phone numbers? Or would he still be able to make regular voice calls?
He can't make calls, because he disabled the dialer app. The functionality is still there in the phone, but he has no app that exposes it.
Android truely does provide enough "rope" to hang yourself if you start to disable apps you shouldn't.
Yeah, the thing is, if dialer is an app you "shouldn't disable", then it also should not be silently replaced by the vendor with third-party service, with no easy way to revert that.
"When You install and use the Services, Truecaller will collect personal information from You and any devices You may use in Your interaction with our Services. This information may include e.g.: geo-location; Your IP address; device ID or unique identifier; device manufacturer and type; device and hardware settings; SIM card usage; applications installed on your device; ID for advertising; ad data, operating system; web browser; operator; IMSI; connection information; screen resolution; usage statistics; default communication applications; access to device address book; device log and event information; logs, keywords and meta data of incoming and outgoing calls and messages; version of the Services You use and other information based on Your interaction with our Services such as how the Services are being accessed (via another service, web site or a search engine); the pages You visit and features you use on the Services; the services and websites You engage with from the Services; content viewed by You, content You have commented on or sent to us and information about the ads You see and/or engage with; the search terms You use; order information and other usage activity and data logged by Truecaller’s servers from time to time. Truecaller may collect some of this information automatically through use of cookies and You can learn more about our use of cookies in our Cookie Policy"
and
"We transfer information to trusted vendors, service providers, and other partners who support our business and Services, such as providing technical infrastructure services, bug testing, analyzing how our Services are used, measuring the effectiveness of ads and services and facilitating payments as well as potential partners who may wish to work with us to provide other services."
Again, if the dialer is a system component does this and you can't remove it, you are out of luck.
Since the dialer is an app, if for some reason you don't like it, you can deactivate it (you can't uninstall preloaded apps since they are on a private system partition, but disabling it is enough : it does not appear in the app least and can't startup).
So you just have to install another that suits you better.
Disabling it is every bit as effective as removing it, though. It can't be removed because it's on a read-only partition that pulls double duty as the factory reset partition. But once disabled it's as good as removed. It doesn't run. It doesn't get loaded. It basically doesn't exist outside of the button that restores it.
My iPhone is my pocket computer. It's on a tablet plan (data only - up to 1GB for $20 CAD) because voice and text is something I would hardly use. TextNow worked fine for me in past for phone calls and texting non-apple devices but I've since switched to Hushed as my go-to. I've never used the built in "Phone" app.
Apple's record on privacy and business model give me pretty high confidence on this one.
Google may have an incentive to add call info to the profile they keep on you, but surely you're not thinking that they are as big of a privacy risk as some random third-party that puts a dialer up on the play store.
Edit: I couldn't get the article to load, so I'm going by the other comments to assume this was about scammy dialers tricking regular users on Android into installing them. Obviously a dialer on a custom ROM modified for extra privacy is a justifiable reason for making it replaceable on Android.
He's actually writing about the dialer that comes with the device OS (in this case an OTA, I believe, but still, it's the default / 1P dialer. It just happens to be a branded one rather than the "usual" white label dialer a smaller OEM might provide.
I have never heard of a "Wileyfox Swift". If you need an awesome and capable Android 7.0 based dual SIM phone with zero carrier crapware/bloatware and a close to stock Android experience, the OnePlus 3T (64 or 128GB version) is a good choice.
Since Oneplus' falling out with Cyanogen Inc, and the financial failure of Cyanogen, Oneplus' own OxygenOS is essentially a re-implemented CyanogenMod that has all of the same features.
I've almost buyed the Wileyfox Swift last week, but I'm glad that I've seen discussions around Truecaller and the Zen ads, which changed my mind and opted for a BQ Aquaris X5 Plus instead.
The thing about that was, Cyanogen stayed very silent and OnePlus's entire advertising strategy was very dodgy. I suspect Cyanogen was just sick of OnePlus's shit when they signed with that 2nd Indian distributor.
Now that the Cyanogen company is dissolved, who knows what the truth was.
Lately I've started using CarbonRom. It's pretty nice.
no, it's actually the reverse, oneplus got sick of cyanogen's shit when cyanogen threatened to sue them for selling oneplus phones in India, which is a huge market. Cyanogen (Incorporated) claimed they had an exclusive agreement with an Indian company called Micromax to sell cynaogenOS phones in India. Oneplus got fed up and re-implemented all of the great features of cyanogenmod in their own fork of android (OxygenOS/HydrogenOS, respectively for english and chinese language markets).
Cyanogen Inc ran themselves into the ground with dodgy business practices and threatening all of their partners, which resulted in no reputable phone manufacturer wanting to put their OS on any new models of phones.
Many have already posted about how the phone is less important than email/browser which we're ok with being 3rd party.
I didn't really think there could be a difference between phone apps until I got project fi from Google. Their phone app comes with voicemail transcription and spam detection. Some of that is obviously from the service itself, but these features seem like things that I'd want to be able to acquire even if I had an AT&T Samsung (which is what I moved from and didn't have by default). Third party seems fine with me.
It's always been a "telephone app", on smart phones. And in many cases, it's already been somewhat "3rd party" because in reality it's from the ODM who made your phone or the SOC vendor, not the company that branded your phone. The author is only just becoming aware that this is "3P" because he happens to have a branded dialer added on his phone, versus a "white label" dialer that was already there.
I'm fairly certain Wileyfox didn't make the dialer that previously came with his phone, either. (They're a smaller OEM.) They probably just used the one provided by the ODM assembling the device for them.
344 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] threadFrankly if the telephone app on my "phone" stopped working I wonder how long it would take me to notice.
This must be the elephant in the room. Traditional telephony has become dominated by bad actors. They hit a critical mass and now my phone app is a waste of space.
I'm slowly realizing that this is because apparently people are inundated with spam calls? I think I may have received one solitary spam call in my entire life. I can't really account for the discrepancy
I have 27 from random numbers/places that I know from experience are scams. This is a US number.
If you find your life lacking opportunities to get in to obscenity shouting matches with random con artists, it is great! Otherwise, not so much.
I wouldn't say I'm cautious, it's simply that if it were important, why would you call?
I basically consider phone calls as unimportant as paper letters. Check in on them every few weeks.
It seems to me I can either call, which most likely causes a loud and persistent ringing noise that signals "someone wants to talk to you right now, please pick up the phone". Or I can send you a text which will make a quick beep on your phone and then go away.
I actually adopted the "don't answer the phone" strategy about 20 years ago, when first I got voice mail. I wish everyone had. But nowadays I don't even listen to my voice mail.
Claiming this in general is trivially rebuttable by the fact that I know many people who feel precisely the opposite: if it's important you call, if not you text.
If anything, that view is less irrational than yours: a mode of communication that's immediate, loud, sustained for many seconds, and hits a device that most people have on them constantly fits far more easily with realtime urgency than any other mode of communication.
On top of THAT, there are still stupid legacy systems (that are nonetheless important) that use old forms of communication. My insurance was cancelled while I was on a backpacking trip and they called me and sent me a letter without bothering to send me an email. The fact that Blue Shield are fucking idiots doesn't change the fact that I was without proper medical insurance for th rest of the year (due to ACA enrollment limits). I could easily see the same being true of phone calls.
However, in both cases, it was nearly 100% spam. I talk to family via video chats, and friends via facebook, hangouts, whatsapp, etc.
The video helpfully has a transcript: https://github.com/jwise/28c3-doctorow/blob/master/transcrip...
It's like those futurist ads from the 50s (and 80s/90s) AT&T that soon there will be phones capable of amazing things everywhere in our lives, except they aren't all AT&T branded and most of them started with the name "personal computer". (Though savor the irony that Ma Bell's legacy lives on in Linux by way of Bell Labs' contributions to Unix.)
Then again, I'm also strongly for renaming 3D Printers to facsimile machines because the word fax is too useful to lose to ancient toner-based modem printers.
Then maybe we really will be able to "receive a fax at the beach"[1] in the future!
[1]: http://mentalfloss.com/article/50105/you-willsend-fax-beach
I wouldn't be surprised. I suspect that a smartphone is the only computer very large majority of today's children has ever used.
By the way, when you make the off/end button big and red, it is nigh impossible to convince a little boy not to press it. Over and over.
I think that was pretty spot on. Touch is a very primal way to interact with things.
Then I realized I have installed Dragon on this computer, and there wasn't even a reason for me to type this reply. So I will risk a guess and assume that in the future essays will be spoken, not written. No doubt there will be an epic fight over this, as people try to defend why children of the future will have to learn to type. I will hazard one more prediction: they will lose.
Integer main open parenthesis void close parenthesis open squigly brace. Newline.
Bob, find some earphones and stop complaining. I'm not the one that pushed for open-plan.
Computer, please delete the previous paragraph.
Standard colon colon cee out less than less than double quote capital hello world exclamation point double quote semi-colon. Newline.
Close squigly brace.
Hello computer
new function returning void print hello world end function
> In a fast-paced live demo, I will create a small system using Python, plus a few other languages for good measure, and deploy it without touching the keyboard. The demo gods will make a scheduled appearance. I hope to convince you that voice recognition is no longer a crutch for the disabled or limited to plain prose. It's now a highly effective tool that could benefit all programmers.
Turns out it's doable, you just need to invent your own language.
Given good enough voice recognition and good enough touch interfaces that work in concert (and ignoring the many situations where speaking is an issue), it's possible. But it's not an easy path.
I suspect in the future we'll have curious historians trying to figure out how the phrase "personal computer" ended up being shortened to "phone".
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_computer
I really like your idea of nano and picocomputers. It's consistent, and really reflects on the miniaturisation that we have seen since since the invention of the computer.
In British English, they've always called cellphones "mobiles", which is also a nice short name for mobile computers.
Mobile could work, though, and I've heard it used.
(Which is apparently a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Ullo_John!_Gotta_New_Motor%3F)
I think as a usage it's regarded as vaguely old fashioned and twee.
For comparison here's https://www.mobiles.co.uk/ - again, in every instance the noun is either "phone" or the fully qualified "mobile phone".
As an American, "car" and "phone" are definitely the norm. The only time I've ever heard "mobile" is as a prefix to phone, so "mobile phone". It's sometimes used on forms to distinguish between home, work and mobile numbers (like I just did).
"Landline" is seeing a resurgence as general parlance for the thing gathering dust, which used to be simply _the_ phone.
Having said that, this is probably only modern usage. The AA (Automobile Association) and RAC (Royal Automobile Club) both feature "automobile" in their names and are both well over 100 years old.
I suppose (without doing any research) car is probably short for carriage.
Handy could work in the UK except that it is extensively used already as an adjective eg: "that's a bit handy" or "you'll find this handy" etc. "That's a handy handy" would be a bit weird and as we already have mobile then there is no need for it. I suspect that "cell" will creep in eventually but not yet.
Etymology can be quite interesting 8)
Cf. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speaking_tube#Domestic_use.
Without any research whatsoever I'll also venture that "blowing" is what people used to do when they had to rush downstairs to answer the new fangled telephonic device and ended up out of breath. However, again without research, there is a good chance that the RN and co would have referred to the voice tubes on ships as "blowers" because that is the sort of word they would pick. I know a lot of modern matelots and that theory fits nicely.
Although blower is slang for a phone in the UK.
Besides referring to the actual product (iPhone or Android etc), I'm not aware if we have a term to replace phone
But, if so, it's like the reverse of Americans talking about their "fanny pack" while in England.
There was a (funny) local news story in Australia when comedian Will Ferrell accidentally made an off-color "fanny" joke not knowing what the word meant abroad. Shows how slight differences in the same language can mean worlds of difference.
Yes, as an adjective. As a noun (which is what is being discussed here) there's only one commonly known meaning, and it's that one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joymaker
the transistor and information theory are both the foundation for these phones we're talking about
That said, it sucks as a hand terminal, because everything it does everything through vendor-locked, cloud-enabled shitty apps with almost no interoperability. If this is how future of computing is going to look, then I'm sorely disappointed.
It is more that the broad userbase doesn't care, and there isn't enough "putting money where your mouth is" to get good economies of scale on freedom respecting computer hardware, regardless of form factor.
So the lockdown of "phones" is more a symptom of broad technological illiteracy rather than a cause.
I can still make/receive occasional calls on it via Google Voice. But I use it much more as a mobile computer, and appreciate the bigger screen.
For instance in Myanmar, where they have only had widespread mobile phone service for a couple of years, the most popular phone plans from Oodooroo are sold as data-only, and include info for downloading a VOIP app for legacy calls. I had an amusing time in one of their stores watching a perplexed staff try to deal with an older foreign man who frustratingly demanded to know how much he would need to pay for 100 "minutes". They just keept referring him to the chart that showed plans ranked only by the number of GBs.
Doing FaceTime audio or a VOIP service is at most half-a-MB per minute, and th call quality usually way better than regular cellular. Cheap over LTE, and inconsequential over wifi.
http://www.worldcat.org/title/imperial-earth/oclc/978140493&...
Because of the privacy implications, as the author wrote in the article.
- Representing a person by a country-specific number is a horrible UX. All of my contact methods besides phone number remain the same no matter where I am in the world. Several of my contact methods (Facebook, LinkedIn) enable directly "dialing" my real name and intelligently locating me by social proximity instead of asking the customer to program in a stupid number (or multiple numbers) for every contact. A few (Skype, Hangouts) at least allow for alphanumeric, easy-to-remember identifiers instead of numbers. Aren't we in 2017 already?
- I want information to flow with me, not be tied to a particular device. Ideally, I should not have to carry any particular device, but rather present my credentials to any device I own (be that a computer, one of my many phones, tablets, or smartwatches). All of my contact methods besides phone number and WeChat are device-independent and align with this vision.
- E-mail replaces SMS. It supports >140 bytes. In fact, it can comfortably support several MEGAbytes per message! Isn't that mind-blowing? There is ZERO reason to continue to use a stupid old technology with a 140-byte limitation. As part of the deprecation process, I have all SMS go to my e-mail inbox instead of using the SMS interface on the phone.
- I don't take unscheduled voice calls. In general, if my day is going as planned, 95% of the time I am doing something where I shouldn't be picking up a phone (either for my own safety or due to etiquette). That includes machining metal, having dinner with real people, listening to concerts, meditating, coding, hiking (usually without reception), biking, whatever. Unscheduled voice calls are incompatible with my lifestyle.
- When scheduled, I do video calls more often than phone calls.
As such I'm totally fine with a phone app being third-party. A phone number is not the main reason I have an LTE device in my pocket.
In fact, of my multiple LTE-capable devices, only one is capable of receiving phone number calls. The rest have data-only SIMs.
Phone numbers (and physical addresses) are examples of semi and fully federated systems. You use the standard and establish contracts and your teleco or post office and connect to anyone else in the world.
Your Google Hangouts/Skype/Facebook are closed, walled garden, proprietary systems.
Keep that in mind.
But from a UX standpoint they are vastly superior to having to deal with people trying to reach me on my US number while I'm in China, or trying to reach one cell phone when I'm carrying another.
Also, the telco operators love to nickel-and-dime consumers for things like roaming charges. I'd love to see more competitors come out and overthrow those rascals by doing everything over IP, creating worldwide MVNOs and slashing all roaming charges to essentially zero. Google Fi has done a nice job. Granted they exist to promote Android, but when I tell friends I have LTE data in 100+ countries without roaming charges, international voice calls for pennies directly from my cell phone, and viewing voice charges in real-time, they are all astounded. Unfortunately yes they too are a walled garden, but the user experience is amazing.
That said, while phone calling has fallen out of favor, phone numbers are still the main form of 'identity' people have, and if anything the dominance of WhatsApp/Messenger has made it more common in my circles to share a phone number rather than a FB username.
http://paulgraham.com/tablets.html
>UNRIVALLED PRIVACY AND SECURITY
>Choose precisely the data you wish to share; protect apps with additional PINs; prevent spam with Truecaller Integrated Dialler.
So their idea of privacy is privacy from everyone except the manufacturer (and "trusted" third parties)
>Of course, you can always root the phone and install custom roms. But this process takes some time and the development and compatibility with these roms is less than satisfactory.
Maybe he shouldn't have bought a device with such a small userbase?
Yes, I think I did a mistake there. On the other hand, there are small brands which are incredibly open about hardware and software development, such as [1]. I want to stress that the current state of compatibility to smartphone operating systems is really not satisfying.
[1] https://www.fairphone.com/en/
[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/12/31/after-cyanogen-colla... [2] http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/11/28/cyanogen-inc-will-sh...
CyanogenOS couldn't make money, and WF has trouble making money, because everyone else subsidises the cost of the handset and software by selling data.
If you want to provide what they claim - unparalleled security and privacy - you have to charge more, or charge a phone subscription fee for updates, or something.
One can't expect to get subsidized-by-data-selling prices, and have no data selling.
Google in 2017: Skynet didn't build itself people! We need more ML training data!
Or will it? If it's an AI intent on approximating human speech processing, why should it be any good at programming? See also https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9658524/1/Branches-on-the-Tree-....
The next step in programming is probably not anything like programming. Machine learning certainly isn't. Creating a neural net that achieves superhuman image recognition takes 30 lines of code in keras. And terabytes of training data. But the programming doesn't look anything like someone in the 90s would have thought. Except maybe for a bunch of AI researchers.
I dont think that an AI will program itself anything like we program computers.
People who "program" themselves really just provide good data. Positive reinforcement, "healthy thoughts", "gaining valuable reference experiences", things like that. When you want to learn a new language, at the simplest level, you can immerse yourself in that countries culture and you will learn automatically. You don't hop inside your brain and move the axons around. You just provide good data and let the engine do its job, and why would an AI be incapable of doing that?
They already do that. "Backprop" is that mechanism. Not yet on a really advanced level, but a machine learning algorithm already introduces its learning back into itself and incrementally improves on that.
That's largely because you haven't looked. Infants are constantly developing and pruning pathways and connections in their brain, which effectively changes both the hardware and the software.
My new prediction is Skynet will come out of the financial bots. It solves the money problem, because those bots will become financially self-sufficient quickly.
Regrettably, the target function is "make money" which will cause our next-gen species to be psychopathic and uninterested in human life, except, in the short term, as a market to be plundered. Not a good outcome.
Exactly! Any sophisticated machine will be as full of errors as a human, just different kinds of errors. Unless it's a Godel machine [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_machine
v. 0.1 was based on the chip from the Terminator that had been sent back in time by Skynet. Humans otherwise were decades away from being able to design something like that.
I think it's reasonable to say that Skynet built itself.
But ... ugh, rationalist fiction always makes me a little sad. I share the motivation, the annoyance at how pervasive the plot driven unrealistically stupid decision is in fiction. I want to like it, but it's always so saturated with authorial naivete, inexperience and smugness.
I guess I just wish they'd revere Iain M. Banks more and Yudkowsky less.
Definitely. Though Banks doesn't have quite the Internet following, possibly because he was publishing before the Internet took off and compounded by the fact that I can't link to a free, online copy of his work.
Speech recognition ain't like dusting crops, boy.
This is one example; there are dozens more.
Remember when they added Google calendar to Play to fight Samsungs BS?
My device is a Wiley Fox Swift.
I've never had a problem with 3rd party dialers on Android. But I can smell a scam and I'm technically literate.
To the best of my knowledge there's never been a major dialler related security mishap. In fact much of the panic about Android's "malware ridden ecosystem" seems overblown. Nobody I know has ever had an issue to the best of my knowledge.
But it's definitely a possibility and it's highly probable that eventually something bad will happen on a large scale without some better controls - albeit hopefully not the type that Apple imposes. Cost vs benefit and all that.
Well, pack it in, fellas. We're done here. :D
But it doesn't, and the stress of choice is only undergone voluntarily when someone volunteers to choose. Otherwise, defaults are king.
Some of the improvements (just top of my mind): crowd-sourced list of scammers, telemarketers. For outgoing calls: automapping phone numbers to business/user names, automatically using the best way to route the call based on call rates (WiFi vs cellular vs. multipath TCP) etc.
This is the problem with choice. All your choices are secretly malicious and have incentives to violate your privacy. Remember those flashlight apps that ran in the background consuming CPU/data and stole users' personal information? It's just generally a bad idea to rely on untrusted third parties for core functionality.
I would argue that, if you really want to talk about people "having a choice", you need a similar concept: that you are "free to choose" if-and-only-if your choices are indeed what you understand them to be. Which means some form of regulation or curation needs to happen to enforce that.
Of course, this doesn't have to be at all the same thing as the sort of "curation for quality" that the iOS App Store gets up to. Instead, more like FDA labelling requirements on drugs: list your active ingredients or get out.
Consider a hypothetical policy: "whatever misapprehensions a consumer has, due to your marketing, are your fault; a complaint about misapprehensions about your software that cites your own marketing, and which we ascertain as being valid, will result in a ban of all your apps from the store."
Can you make the "I Am Rich" app? Sure; it does what it says on the tin—proves you're rich with a $10k IAP. Can you make a Flashlight app that asks for your contact info? Nope; customers weren't expecting the app to ask. Banned. Even if you never send that info anywhere.
- Someone said having multiple options for a phone dialer is a wonderful thing.
- Someone else pointed out that the article isn't about a choice, the dialer was forced on the user.
- The parent asks if it is bad that Google updates apps in a tone that strongly hints that they can't imagine how the answer could be yes.
Far too many conversations go like this here.
To (try to) get back on topic, of course the Google can update their apps. I'm pretty sure the number of people here who would answer this negatively at a rounding error away from zero. But that is entirely beside the point.
The point is the author of the article doesn't want a dialer that surveils them and spews their private conversation details (along with everything else of note stored on the phone) to the "trusted partners" of the surveillance firm who wrote it. And yet it was forced on him.
This is ironic and sad to anyone who considers phones to be things that one might have private conversations on. (Insert opportunity to talk about how old-school talking on phones is.)
And again, it is just another reason to be very, very careful with whom you "do business" (which includes third-party private-surveillance firms, the names of which you may not have a way of determining before purchase).
For me, this dictates I won't use consumer software from a large number of current producers. Google included. Not everyone has my requirements, I get that, and that's fine.
But there is exactly nothing wrong with wanting a phone that doesn't spy on you.
If you want the phone to come with a dialer (I think most people do), then some dialer will inevitably be forced on people. And unless you think phone calls are an optional feature, it makes perfect sense that the dialer cannot be deleted.
The only complaint I can see here is that phone manufacturers can make bad choices for their default, undeleteable dialers. Well, yes, just like they can make bad choices for other software on the phone. The only reasonable remedy for that is to buy a phone from a manufacturer that makes software choices you like.
That phone manufacturers can make bad software choices is not an argument against having replaceable dialers. Quite the opposite. A manufacturer can make the exact same bad dialer choice if the dialer isn't replaceable. The only difference is that if the dialer is replaceable you might be able to do something about their bad choice some of the time.
I don't see the connection here. Why shouldn't people be able to delete the dialer if they don't like the phone company's choice? I understand preinstalling one, but preventing people from choosing another if they want seems unnecessary.
Of course if NSA has my data its only fair that FSB also gets some too...
maybe what we need is a 3rd party dialer that pledges privacy.
Anything bound to any companies' services or doing any data collection should be entirely user-controlled and user-replacable.
It seems like the alternative you're suggesting is that vendors be able to lock you into their own dialer, which was probably produced by an outsourced firm anyway.
Or are you advocating that Google prevent people who download and modify the Android source from modifying that particular aspect of it?
if there was a pure messaging device right now with no voice - I'd bite their hand off
I don't need a mobile browser or even apps - all they do is stop me from disconnecting from work for a few minutes or hours - I don't think always-on is good for anyone over time
I need a 2 week battery life, LCD screen, SMS/pager thing, with a Blackberry physical keypad and no voice or apps - and a simple mute switch
Manufacturers are under no obligation to provide you with a device to your particular specification, unless of course you are the one paying them under contract them to do so.
I don't think wishing that a niche was filled constitutes assuming that manufacturers have any obligation.
So it looks like the free market is working in this case.
That is not necessarily a good thing.
a) they think manufacturers have any obligation (moral or legal) to do so
b) that it should exist
c) that more people would use it
Maybe OP was just 'thinking out loud'.
Okay? Who on earth said it wasn't? The original comment wasn't even particularly bitter about it. Saying you wish something existed doesn't preclude understanding the market-based reasons it doesn't.
not sure why such negativity on that comment - I've met many people who see a phone as a distraction, but want to retain some instant communication capability
there is a real hivemind phenomenon on HN that mobile apps are everything next - what if that's not the case - what if people don't want to be tracked, profiled, remarketed to 24/7 - what if they just want the 4 messages they get in a day that are worth reading?
Maybe I'm weird, but I'm utterly disappointed with apps. Each piece of functionality is being partitioned into vendor-locked blobs that do much more on the cloud that they reasonably should, and almost none of that is interoperable with each other. If we call smartphones mobile computers, then we're throwing away 90% of power that comes with having all that compute on your person.
I'm sure you'll find a good reason to argue why this isn't what you want/need.
So the dieler just being a app is a direct consequence from smartphones not being any kind of "special/magical" embedded device.
Through silently overriding the Dialer with a program I would normally suspect to be malware which sneaked on my phone is a horrible think to do...
Next time someone tries to harvest my personal data using an "all-inclusive" EULA I'm going to sue his ass in EU-land.
[0] - http://www.eugdpr.org
Anybody who's ever purchased a mobile from eBay or AliExpress has already seen that. They need to get their revenue from somewhere. Next time stick to a known, trustable brand.
Isn’t this sweet? I am searching for a dialling application for my smartphone. A DIALLING application.
Does this mean he can't practically call someone outside his contacts list as there's no way to key in phone numbers? Or would he still be able to make regular voice calls?
While this is bad, it's not really unexpected.
It allows exactly what the author wants with his specific desire for a dialler that does not rely on play services or true caller.
"When You install and use the Services, Truecaller will collect personal information from You and any devices You may use in Your interaction with our Services. This information may include e.g.: geo-location; Your IP address; device ID or unique identifier; device manufacturer and type; device and hardware settings; SIM card usage; applications installed on your device; ID for advertising; ad data, operating system; web browser; operator; IMSI; connection information; screen resolution; usage statistics; default communication applications; access to device address book; device log and event information; logs, keywords and meta data of incoming and outgoing calls and messages; version of the Services You use and other information based on Your interaction with our Services such as how the Services are being accessed (via another service, web site or a search engine); the pages You visit and features you use on the Services; the services and websites You engage with from the Services; content viewed by You, content You have commented on or sent to us and information about the ads You see and/or engage with; the search terms You use; order information and other usage activity and data logged by Truecaller’s servers from time to time. Truecaller may collect some of this information automatically through use of cookies and You can learn more about our use of cookies in our Cookie Policy"
and
"We transfer information to trusted vendors, service providers, and other partners who support our business and Services, such as providing technical infrastructure services, bug testing, analyzing how our Services are used, measuring the effectiveness of ads and services and facilitating payments as well as potential partners who may wish to work with us to provide other services."
Since the dialer is an app, if for some reason you don't like it, you can deactivate it (you can't uninstall preloaded apps since they are on a private system partition, but disabling it is enough : it does not appear in the app least and can't startup).
So you just have to install another that suits you better.
Here's the cached version: http://archive.is/vs4a7
Google may have an incentive to add call info to the profile they keep on you, but surely you're not thinking that they are as big of a privacy risk as some random third-party that puts a dialer up on the play store.
Edit: I couldn't get the article to load, so I'm going by the other comments to assume this was about scammy dialers tricking regular users on Android into installing them. Obviously a dialer on a custom ROM modified for extra privacy is a justifiable reason for making it replaceable on Android.
Since Oneplus' falling out with Cyanogen Inc, and the financial failure of Cyanogen, Oneplus' own OxygenOS is essentially a re-implemented CyanogenMod that has all of the same features.
Hopefully, Zen can be disabled with the next update: https://www.reddit.com/r/wileyfox/comments/64xga8/it_should_...
Now that the Cyanogen company is dissolved, who knows what the truth was.
Lately I've started using CarbonRom. It's pretty nice.
Cyanogen Inc ran themselves into the ground with dodgy business practices and threatening all of their partners, which resulted in no reputable phone manufacturer wanting to put their OS on any new models of phones.
AOSP dialer. Done. Don't want the truedialer app? Run CM, like it says in the post.
I didn't really think there could be a difference between phone apps until I got project fi from Google. Their phone app comes with voicemail transcription and spam detection. Some of that is obviously from the service itself, but these features seem like things that I'd want to be able to acquire even if I had an AT&T Samsung (which is what I moved from and didn't have by default). Third party seems fine with me.
I'm fairly certain Wileyfox didn't make the dialer that previously came with his phone, either. (They're a smaller OEM.) They probably just used the one provided by the ODM assembling the device for them.