In case you didn’t know, this media group was started by Sofia Schmidt, Daughter of Eric Schmidt. It focuses on tech stories from other countries besides the USA.
I don't understand the dismissive attitude. It's very much an all or nothing argument that completely ignores the middle ground.
I personally think this is a fantastic gateway. I'd love to have a better global perspective, but I simply don't have the resources (or time) to build a deeply informed opinion. This type of media gives me access to foreign tech within easy reach. Honestly, it gives me exposure to topics that I wouldn't even know exists. If it's a topic that piques my interest, I can certainly find alternative coverage (hopefully with less bias).
I recall reading this article about Bangladesh[1] from the site. Even for someone who know basically nothing about Bangladesh, it wasn't hard to notice major inconsistencies in their narrative; my analysis at the time[2]. It seems they took something fairly ordinary and tried hard to spin it into a "look how different these people are" (different in a bad way, for the most part, from my impressions) story to sell to Americans. Needless to say I take what they write with a big grain of salt.
>> (but written from a distinctly US point of view)
Yes and no.
The US audience is important but its not the only audience. If you look at the authors of those articles you will see that most of the writers are based outside of the US and (as much as in possible) in the areas/countries being reported on.
The goal is to increase that metric as much as possible.
* Fighting brain drain and creeping authoritarianism in Russia’s techno-utopian village
- By Leonid Ragozin who is based in Latvia (as far as I know)
* A defamation lawsuit in Singapore sets a dangerous precedent
- By Kirsten Han, a journalist based in Singapore.
* Peru’s surprise presidential front runner has fewer than 8,000 Twitter followers
- By Jimena Ledgard, based in Lima, Peru
* The mysterious user editing a global open-source map in China’s favor
- By Vittoria Elliott, based in USA, and Nilesh Christopher in Bangalore, India.
Full-disclosure: I work there. Writing from personal knowledge.
We also had an understanding of the number of based on the number of rings, too: 1 ring and hang up was when my aunt got home and 2 rings was my cousin got home. They could call us long distance to let us know they got home OK.
Yeah this was big among my age group in Australia too, in the late 80s early 90s. Pay phones only charged if the other end picked up, so it was an easy way to tell dad to pick you up or that you’d be late.
I used to just say my message really fast when I was using the French equivalent (PCV France). So my dad would get a call saying something like “you are receiving a PCV call from: canyoupleasecomefetchmeatschoolloveyouthanks. Do you accept it?”. He would then hang up.
Pay phones (the yellow ones) in Melbourne in the early 90s let you both hear each other for under 1 second. Calling multiple times you could let your parents know to pick you up from wherever you were :)
When I was young I used to use the 1800-REVERSE number, which would require the person answering the phone to pay. I thought it was a great way to contact my parents if I had run out of phone credit.
I recall in Ukraine in nienties some mobile operators did not charge for the first few seconds of a call (I think it was 2 or 3). There was an art of communication around that...
We had something similar as recently as in 2005 in Poland. I don't know the specifics, because I got my first mobile phone in late 2007, but I think that either there was a flat fee incurred when someone picked up or the first minute was charged in advance - in any case the practice died off with the advent of cheap text messages in pre paid plans.
Oh, and it served as an equivalent of Facebook's "poke" among teenagers.
Ah, memories. Visiting India, my company driver used to get upset if I actually answered his calls, since that would cost him money. I soon learned to decline the call and call him back instead.
Heck, even today it’s the polite way to communicate with drivers and maids. Don’t answer the call, but immediately call back and ask them if everything is ok. They won’t call you if it’s not urgent and important.
It's interesting to read this article in these times of side-channel security exploits --- and remind yourself that covert channels are very difficult to completely eliminate, not just inside computers.
UK Pirate radio had this too. If you liked a song you could upvote by calling a number, they could count how popular a song was by the number of missed calls.
YI wonder if that's where Drake (or one of his ghostwriter s) took the phrase 'hotline bling' from. Before his song I only ever heard that on late 90s pirate radio in London (to describe the Nokia screen lighting up with missed calls)
In Austria the former provider "one" had a prepaid plan, where you where not billed for listening to your mailbox and talking to the mailbox of others using the same provider. You can imagine that they did not earn much among teenagers.
In Eastern Europe when cellphones became widely popular I remember a plan in which the first 3 seconds were not added to the bill and we as teenagers were making the best use of those seconds. Text messages weren't really a thing back then.
In Eastern Europe this method was called "mayak" (beacon) and disappeared when calls became practically free even when SMS services was free much earlier because calling has a higher possibility to be noticed by callee.
Long before cell phones and answering machines my Dad was a pharmacist in a small town. He was happy to drive down to the drugstore when a customer called our home needing an after-hours refill, except on Sunday which was his recharge day. On Sundays we were instructed never to answer the phone unless it rang twice, paused, then rang again. Close family members knew the secret code; customers just learned Dad wasn't available on Sundays.
My (now retired) pharmacist said he got a call on Christmas Day because someone got someone a surprise travel holiday that left the next day and they didn’t have enough meds to be away that long.
He doesn’t believe they realized he was half in the bag filling their prescriptions.
Same here. Even if my dad wasn't on call, his job would call every saturday and sunday with some dumb emergency caused by their own cheapness. So we pulled the phone plug at night, and at daytime we counted the rings.
I wrote a "ring knocking" tool back in my college days so that I could connect to my Linux box at home from the labs at school since I was on dial-up. I'd go to the payphone, put in a quarter, call my line and let it ring the requisite number of times, hang up, get my quarter back, then go to the lab and check my school email account. The ringconnectd daemon would detect the rings, wait a few seconds, connect to my ISP, and mail me its current IP address.
I tried to do something similar not too long ago. Different application really, but I wanted to do something on the other end depending on how often it rang. Sadly I discovered that apparently in all-digital "modern" phone networks (SIP, VoIP etc.) the ringing tone you hear as a caller is simply ingested by your network operator and the tone you hear as the one getting called is basically just some audio file that plays over and over, triggered by a single "hey, someone is calling now!"-message sent by a modem unit, which to my surprise are still using AT commands to this day. Bummer. Turns out even the duration of how long it rings depends on too many factors, so what you hear on one end (ringing) might be off by multiple seconds on the other end.
At least it explains the "You only heard it ring once? I let it ring like five times before I hung up! Seriously!"-anecdotes I keep picking up. :)
This is also true with silences. When we switched from analogue phone calls to digital phone calls in the 90's, SIP began to ingest white noise during silences due to discomfort perceived by the users thinking they got hung up or the network has been disconnected.
> the ringing tone you hear as a caller is simply ingested by your network operator
In my experience this depends on the network in question: SIP supports "early media" and I've seen it in action a few times. You can tell by the fact that phone UIs usually don't count connection time in that state, yet you can hear a prerecorded announcement, music mixed with the dialing tone etc.
I remember some creative uses of this as well: If you controlled the signalling stack, it was possible to keep a connection open in this state indefinitely without either end getting charged.
The early media can still be generated at any point of the calling chain. It doesn't have to correspond to actual ringing, if ringing does happen on the POTS side.
(For a test, you can call someone in the UK and check if you hear Pink Floyd style beeps)
Missed calls still signal a lot in this day and age.
One example: you send a couple serious texts to a close friend or partner after an argument. They stay unread and you get no response. You then call and see if they pick up after a few rings. If not you hang up and wait or maybe write it off. If the other person is there (and often you know they are there monitoring their phone) maybe now they respond (via txt or call) because they see it as important. If they don’t that says something about where things stand.
Another: you call someone first and get no answer. You then send some texts explaining why you want to chat and the urgency or context. From there you can gauge if the other person cares enough to respond quickly or ignore.
Obviously this all assumes an always online context for both parties, which can cause its own issues when that may not be the case.
Missed calls still hold a lot of important signal in an age of “I only txt” always connected people.
To people reading from India, The story is not about picking up unknown numbers (premium services scam) about which we receive advisory every other day; It's about missed calls to avoid call charges and the economy behind that before the WhatsApp days.
I remember one mobile operator in late 2000s charged for a call only after first second. So we used to call each other, saying something really fast and hang up to not get charged.
Reminds me of childhood. We'd do this when we didn't have enough balance. Expecting the reciever to call back. This would work only within the state. Out of state we used to have something called roaming charges. Charged even when receiving a call. We don't have that anymore these days.
It’s also used by receiving parties that don’t want to accept calls but need a signal and/or those with toll free numbers that may receive numerous calls — voting on some competition shows uses this mechanism. Some campaigns have also used this to collect the number of people “signing a petition”.
124 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 188 ms ] threadTop stories on the front page right now:
* Fighting brain drain and creeping authoritarianism in Russia’s techno-utopian village
* A defamation lawsuit in Singapore sets a dangerous precedent
* Peru’s surprise presidential front runner has fewer than 8,000 Twitter followers
* The mysterious user editing a global open-source map in China’s favor
No thanks - I'll stick to reading international media.
I personally think this is a fantastic gateway. I'd love to have a better global perspective, but I simply don't have the resources (or time) to build a deeply informed opinion. This type of media gives me access to foreign tech within easy reach. Honestly, it gives me exposure to topics that I wouldn't even know exists. If it's a topic that piques my interest, I can certainly find alternative coverage (hopefully with less bias).
[1] https://restofworld.org/2020/bangladesh-economy-runs-on-face...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23915629
Yes and no.
The US audience is important but its not the only audience. If you look at the authors of those articles you will see that most of the writers are based outside of the US and (as much as in possible) in the areas/countries being reported on.
The goal is to increase that metric as much as possible.
* Fighting brain drain and creeping authoritarianism in Russia’s techno-utopian village
- By Leonid Ragozin who is based in Latvia (as far as I know)
* A defamation lawsuit in Singapore sets a dangerous precedent
- By Kirsten Han, a journalist based in Singapore.
* Peru’s surprise presidential front runner has fewer than 8,000 Twitter followers
- By Jimena Ledgard, based in Lima, Peru
* The mysterious user editing a global open-source map in China’s favor
- By Vittoria Elliott, based in USA, and Nilesh Christopher in Bangalore, India.
Full-disclosure: I work there. Writing from personal knowledge.
We also had an understanding of the number of based on the number of rings, too: 1 ring and hang up was when my aunt got home and 2 rings was my cousin got home. They could call us long distance to let us know they got home OK.
Another trick was to place operator-assisted person-to-person calls with the names of different fictional people representing different messages.
For example, Harvey Jones could mean "Pick me up at the diner."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JxhTnWrKYs
Resulted in such wonders as a famous "itsbobwehadababyitsaboy" commercial .
https://youtu.be/9JxhTnWrKYs
The trick was to say that your name is "come pick me up mom" or something like that.
I still wonder what was the reason for that free window, was it a technical limitation?
It used to be 10 or even 15 seconds in the very beginning of GSM service here (I have never used an NMT or DAMPS device so not sure about them).
10 seconds used to be plenty for a meaningful discussion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26760891
ring ring, ring ring, MUM ring ring, ring ring, PICK ring ring, ring ring, ME UP
Oh, and it served as an equivalent of Facebook's "poke" among teenagers.
He doesn’t believe they realized he was half in the bag filling their prescriptions.
It was my second open source project: https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/network/daemons/rin...
I was still getting support requests for it in the late 2000s from people who were using it in South Africa :)
At least it explains the "You only heard it ring once? I let it ring like five times before I hung up! Seriously!"-anecdotes I keep picking up. :)
A simple experiment: let your counter party put a metronome next to their microphone, and enjoy the time distortion.
That's an amusing typo - I suppose that should be 'injected', but Pac-Man pops to mind ...
In my experience this depends on the network in question: SIP supports "early media" and I've seen it in action a few times. You can tell by the fact that phone UIs usually don't count connection time in that state, yet you can hear a prerecorded announcement, music mixed with the dialing tone etc.
I remember some creative uses of this as well: If you controlled the signalling stack, it was possible to keep a connection open in this state indefinitely without either end getting charged.
Here's a relevant RFC: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3960
(For a test, you can call someone in the UK and check if you hear Pink Floyd style beeps)
One example: you send a couple serious texts to a close friend or partner after an argument. They stay unread and you get no response. You then call and see if they pick up after a few rings. If not you hang up and wait or maybe write it off. If the other person is there (and often you know they are there monitoring their phone) maybe now they respond (via txt or call) because they see it as important. If they don’t that says something about where things stand.
Another: you call someone first and get no answer. You then send some texts explaining why you want to chat and the urgency or context. From there you can gauge if the other person cares enough to respond quickly or ignore.
Obviously this all assumes an always online context for both parties, which can cause its own issues when that may not be the case.
Missed calls still hold a lot of important signal in an age of “I only txt” always connected people.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/toque#Portuguese