telephone – Dan Q

Your phone is not the problem

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Jeff says that he is a better person without his phone.

Widdershins says they’re the same with or without their phone.

I think they’re both right because when Jeff gets on his phone, he doomscrolls. When Widdershins uses his phone, he contacts his family, uses it as a digital planner, music and taking photos.

Jeff is a better person without his phone because Doomscrolling on X (formerly called Twitter) has no benefits. News outlets and social media make more money the more time we spend on them. Good news don’t catch our attention. Negative news keep us worried. They concern us so we want to be updated as much as possible on them.

But as Widdershins’ example shows: your phone is not the problem, its how you use it.

…

Antonio Santos, in Your phone is not the problem

I’ve been following this series of blog posts with interest and I think that Antonio’s hit the nail on the head.

There’s nothing inherently dangerous about phones. But they do introduce risks, and the severity of those risks varies from person to person.

Me: I’m pretty disciplined about my phone. I don’t think I have or use any “endless stream” services: the closest thing would be my feed reader, which is curated down to my chosen providers, not by an attention-craving algorithm. I keep very few games installed and don’t play them when I’m doing anything else so they’re not a distraction from any kind of communal activity (in fact, I keep relatively few “apps” installed too: if there’s a Web-based version that works even remotely as well, I’ll use that… and if it keeps trying to “push” me towards an app version, I’ll just use it less rather than cave!).

I don’t even always pick it up for every notification bell (and I keep many of those suppressed, so they’re only “when I’m checking anyway” messages): if I’m doing something else, I’ll get to whatever ‘bing’ that was later, and yes that even includes instant messengers (if you absolutely require an immediate response and need to know whether you’ll get one, why didn’t you call me, hmm?).

This feels to me like a healthy relationship with my phone. I’m not saying it’s impossible to have a healthy relationship with yours if you don’t do these things: but it’s got to be harder. I’ve people who, seconds after the conversation slows or show ends or whatever will immediately, unthinkingly, pull out their phone and disappear into it, and that seems like such an unhealthy habit.

It’s for these people, as well as for those who’ll endlessly-scroll instead of sleeping or socialising, that downgrading to a brickphone might be a sensible move, at least in the short term.

For the rest of us, it’s probably sufficient to be mindful of our screen usage, remember that it’s valuable to disconnect and let your brain rest, too. As Lyteforce observes, you can start by not using your phone while you poop. Then, once you’ve got the hang of that, get Marie Kondo on those settings and prune the notifications that don’t bring you joy. Soon you’ll be leaving your phone behind when you get up to stretch your legs or make yourself a drink. And you’ll be happier for it.

That’s just what I think, anyway.

Hint Line 93

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Australian Centre for the Moving Image, in Hint Line 93

With thanks to Marcin Wichary for introducing me to it, let me share with you… Hint Line ’93, a project of the awesome-sounding museum ACMI (the Australian Centre for the Moving Image). Originally pitched by Yarn Spinner, the concept of the exhibit was:

…a visual novel on screen, where you’re working a fictional hint line, with critical information in The Compendium, a dog-eared binder full of official docs mixed with handwritten notes from previous counselors who figured out what actually works.

So yeah. It’s a bit like… Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, except instead of bomb defusal, you’re working on a computer game hint line in their heyday of circa 1993. Customers call you, and you have to help them with their video game problems, ideally in accordance with company policy to try to guide the customer to their own answer rather than telling them the solution outright. Oh, and also sometimes people call up about products that aren’t covered and you need to identify this promptly and get on to the next caller.

Obviously you’ve already got an encyclopaedic knowledge of all the games already? No, you don’t, because before they could even start on making Hint Line ’93, the creators first needed to invent a fictional video games company, a catalogue of fictional games (including faked screenshots, history, lore, and BBS posts), and more. But it wouldn’t matter anyway, because you get a thick manual – the compendium – of hints and tips to refer to (also code wheels, post-its, and lots more).

The exhibit is designed to be experienced in-person, but – given that I live on the other side of the planet – I was delighted to see that the museum put a (less-tactile) version online for visitors around the world to play.

Also: speaking as somebody with an awesome name, there are so many people with awesome names involved with this project. Mars Buttfield-Addison and Paris Buttfield-Addison are perhaps my favourite. Excellent names.

Even if you don’t feel up to playing the game, have a flick through the (digital version of the) compendium. That’s where the real art lies!

30 Years Of Notices

This telegraph pole in the centre of Eynsham carries the scars of hosting countless community announcements, notices, and flyers over the last 30 years.

Note #27434

Somebody just called me and quickly decided it was a wrong number. The signal was bad and I wasn’t sure I’d heard them right, so I followed up by replying by text.

It turns out they asked Siri to call Three (the mobile network). Siri then presumably searched online, found Three Rings, managed to connect that to my mobile number, and called me.

If Siri’s decided that I represent Three, this could work out even worse than that time Google shared my phone number.

Google Shared My Phone Number!

Duration 6:06

Podcast Version

This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.

Earlier this month, I received a phone call from a user of Three Rings, the volunteer/rota management software system I founded¹.

We don’t strictly offer telephone-based tech support – our distributed team of volunteers doesn’t keep any particular “core hours” so we can’t say who’s available at any given time – but instead we answer email/Web based queries pretty promptly at any time of the day or week.

But because I’ve called-back enough users over the years, it’s pretty much inevitable that a few probably have my personal mobile number saved. And because I’ve been applying for a couple of interesting-looking new roles, I’m in the habit of answering my phone even if it’s a number I don’t recognise.

Dan sits at his laptop in front of a long conference table where a group of people are looking at a projector screen. — Many of the charities that benefit from *Three Rings* seem to form the impression that we’re all just sat around in an office, like this. But in fact many of my fellow volunteers only ever see me once or twice a year!

After the first three such calls this month, I was really starting to wonder what had changed. Had we accidentally published my phone number, somewhere? So when the fourth tech support call came through, today (which began with a confusing exchange when I didn’t recognise the name of the caller’s charity, and he didn’t get my name right, and I initially figured it must be a wrong number), I had to ask: where did you find this number?

“When I Google ‘Three Rings login’, it’s right there!” he said.

Google Search results page for 'Three Rings CIC', showing a sidebar with information about the company and including... my personal mobile number and a 'Call' button that calls it! — I almost never use Google Search², so there’s no way I’d have noticed this change if I hadn’t been told about it.

He was right. A Google search that surfaced Three Rings CIC’s “Google Business Profile” now featured… my personal mobile number. And a convenient “Call” button that connects you directly to it.

Some years ago, I provided my phone number to Google as part of an identity verification process, but didn’t consent to it being shared publicly. And, indeed, they didn’t share it publicly, until – seemingly at random – they started doing so, presumably within the last few weeks.

Concerned by this change, I logged into Google Business Profile to see if I could edit it back.

Apparently Google inserted my personal mobile number into search results for me, randomly, without me asking them to. Delightful.

I deleted my phone number from the business listing again, and within a few minutes it seemed to have stopped being served to random strangers on the Internet. Unfortunately deleting the phone number also made the “Your phone number was updated by Google” message disappear, so I never got to click the “Learn more” link to maybe get a clue as to how and why this change happened.

Last month, high-street bank Halifax posted the details of a credit agreement I have with them to two people who aren’t me. Twice in two months seems suspicious. Did I accidentally click the wrong button on a popup and now I’ve consented to all my PII getting leaked everywhere?

Such feelings of rage.

Footnotes

¹ Way back in 2002! We’re very nearly at the point where the Three Rings system is older than the youngest member of the Three Rings team. Speaking of which, we’re seeking volunteers to help expand our support team: if you’ve got experience of using Three Rings and an hour or two a week to spare helping to make volunteering easier for hundreds of thousands of people around the world, you should look us up!

² Seriously: if you’re still using Google Search as your primary search engine, it’s past time you shopped around. There are great alternatives that do a better job on your choice of one or more of the metrics that might matter to you: better privacy, fewer ads (or more-relevant ads, if you want), less AI slop, etc.

Rosgill Crossroads

I’m in an extremely rural area and I needed a phone call with my lawyer about my recent redundancy. Phone signal was very bad, so I resolved to climb a nearby hill and call him back.

“I’m at a crossroads,” I said, when I finally found enough bars to have a conversation with him.

“In your life?” he asked.

“I guess,” I replied, “But also, y’know, literally.”

Yr Wyddfa’s First Email

On Wednesday, Vodafone announced that they’d made the first ever satellite video call from a stock mobile phone in an area with no terrestrial signal. They used a mountain in Wales for their experiment.

It reminded me of an experiment of my own, way back in around 1999, which I probably should have made a bigger deal of. I believe that I was the first person to ever send an email from the top of Yr Wyddfa/Snowdon.

Nowadays, that’s an easy thing to do. You pull your phone out and send it. But back then, I needed to use a Psion 5mx palmtop, communicating over an infared link using a custom driver (if you ever wondered why I know my AT-commands by heart… well, this isn’t exactly why, but it’s a better story than the truth) to a Nokia 7110 (fortunately it was cloudy enough to not interfere with the 9,600 baud IrDA connection while I positioned the devices atop the trig point), which engaged a GSM 2G connection, over which I was able to send an email to myself, cc:’d to a few friends.

It’s not an exciting story. It’s not even much of a claim to fame. But there you have it: I was (probably) the first person to send an email from the summit of Yr Wyddfa. (If you beat me to it, let me know!)

The Right Prop

Sometimes you just gotta have exactly the right prop for a presentation…

Transferring to a new phone network, 2022 edition

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

…removing a SIM tray is harder than it looks when you don’t wear earrings. I had to search everywhere to find one of those little SIM tools…

Stuart Langridge

Stuart writes a fun article about his experience of changing mobile network. It’s worth a read, and there’s only one “Dan pro tip” I’d add:

If you have a case on your mobile phone, tuck one of those SIM extractor tools into the case, behind your phone. It’s exactly where you need it to be, if you need one yourself (you probably need to remove the case to access the SIM tray anyway), but beyond that: it means you’re always carrying one for when a friend needs one. They’re also useful for pressing those tiny “factory reset” buttons you see sometimes.

A SIM extractor has been sneakily part of my “everyday carry” for about a decade and it’s proven its value time and time again.

Note #20645

Unable to sleep, I found myself wondering whether anybody with a retro-hipster vibe had built a smart pocketwatch. All your smartwatch features, but in pocketwatch format.

Then I realised I was describing a mobile phone on a keychain.

Note #19590

Called @Tesco Abingdon for a #flujab but fell down a black hole in their menu system. Had to choose the “continue to hold” option several times… and then nobody answered anyway…

Review of Vodafone

This review of Vodafone originally appeared on Google Maps. See more reviews by Dan.

Vodafone, 3 Cornmarket St, Oxford OX1 3EX, United Kingdom.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Like most mobile phone shops, this one enjoys a confusing layout and less-than-completely-helpful staff.

If you know exactly what you want then you can have a reasonable experience, but if you know exactly what you want then you’d be better to go online. If you’re not sure what you want, you’re going to have an unhappy time full of upselling and jargon… so you’d do better to go online.

The network itself is good: broad coverage, good data speeds, nice international deals. But this shop is a perfect example of why their shops ought to already be a relic of history.

Looking for red phone boxes in Oxford. Can you help?

This self-post was originally posted to /r/oxford. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.

I’m trying to index the location of red telephone boxes in Oxford, for a project I’m doing. I’m especially interested in ones outside of the city centre (it’s easy to find the ones on Broad Street, High Street, Parks Road, St. Giles, etc.). If you’re aware of any, or if you’re e.g. willing to keep your eyes open for them on the way to and from work/class/wherever for the next couple of days, I’d really appreciate it. Also happy to throw Reddit Gold at people who are particularly helpful.

Want me to send you a reminder in a few days, once you’ve been looking for them? Leave a comment, and I’ll PM you a few days later. Want to know what the project is? Find a box for me that I haven’t got on my list, and I’m happy to PM you the details.

Thanks!

Pocket Searching

Pocket dialling was bad enough. I once received a phone call from a friend whose phone called me – as the last number he’d dialled – just as he was putting on a harness in anticipation of doing a bungee jump. So all I got to hear was rustling, and shuffling… and then a blood-curdling scream. Nice one.

But in this age of smartphones, the pocket search has become a new threat. Thanks to the combination of touchscreens, anticipatory keyboards (I use SwiftKey, and I’m beginning to think that it knows me better than I do myself), and always-online devices, we’re able to perform quite complex queries quite accidentally. I’ve got a particular pair of trousers which seems to be especially good at unlocking my phone, popping up a search engine, typing a query (thanks to the anticipatory keyboard, usually in full words), and then taking a screenshot and saving it for me, so that I can’t later deny having searched for… whatever it was.

This morning, while cycling to work, I searched for the following (which I’ve reformatted by inserting line breaks, in order to transform it into the sort-of poem you might expect from sombebody both insane and on hallucinogens):

thanks again
and it all goes on
and I will Also
Also A bit LIKE THAT
THE ANSWER is
That you are looking at your Local Ryanair
and a ripening
and a ripening
I can assure are a BIT
and see the new template by clicking here
for
for YOU GUYS
GUYS HAVE YOU ANY COMMENTS
ON MY WAY BACK FROM YOU
And the other side and I will have the same
as a friend or relative
relative humidity
humidity
to you
you are here car
car
and
and embarrassing
embarrassing
the best thing is the first three years and over
over?

Maybe my phone is gradually becoming sentient and is trying to communicate with me. I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

Phone Security == Computer Security

The explosion of smartphone ownership over the last decade has put powerful multi-function computers into the pockets of almost half of us. But despite the fact that the average smartphone contains at least as much personally-identifiable information as its owner keeps on their home computer (or in dead-tree form) at their house – and is significantly more-prone to opportunistic theft – many users put significantly less effort into protecting their mobile’s data than they do the data they keep at home.

Nokia E7, showing lock screen. — Too late, little Nokia E7: I’ve got physical access to you now.

I have friends who religiously protect their laptops and pendrives with TrueCrypt, axCrypt, or similar, but still carry around an unencrypted mobile phone. What we’re talking about here is a device that contains all of the contact details for you and everybody you know, as well as potentially copies of all of your emails and text messages, call histories, magic cookies for social networks and other services, saved passwords, your browsing history (some people would say that’s the most-incriminating thing on their phone!), authentication apps, photos, videos… more than enough information for an attacker to pursue a highly-targeted identity theft or phishing attack.

Pattern lock configuration on an Android mobile phone. — Android pattern lock: no encryption, significantly less-random than an equivalent-length PIN, and easily broken by a determined attacker.

“Pattern lock” is popular because it’s fast and convenient. It might be good enough to stop your kids from using your phone without your permission (unless they’re smart enough to do some reverse smudge engineering: looking for the smear-marks made by your fingers as you unlock the device; and let’s face it, they probably are), but it doesn’t stand up to much more than that. Furthermore, gesture unlock solutions dramatically reduce the number of permutations, because you can’t repeat a digit: so much so, that you can easily perform a rainbow table attack on the SHA1 hash to reverse-engineer somebody’s gesture. Even if Android applied a per-device psuedorandom salt to the gesture pattern (they don’t, so you can download a prefab table), it doesn’t take long to generate an SHA1 lookup of just 895,824 codes (maybe Android should have listened to Coda Hale’s advice and used BCrypt, or else something better still).

iPhone showing the PIN lock screen. — An encrypted iPhone can be configured to resist brute-force attacks by wiping the phone after repeated failures, which replaces one security fault (brute-force weakness) with another (a denial of service attack that’s so easy that your friends can do it by accident).

These attacks, though (and the iPhone isn’t bulletproof, either), are all rather academic, because they are trumped by the universal rule that once an attacker has physical access to your device, it is compromised. This is fundamentally the way in which mobile security should be considered to be equivalent to computer security. All of the characteristics distinct to mobile devices (portability, ubiquity, processing power, etc.) are weaknesses, and that’s why smartphones deserve at least as much protection as desktop computers protecting the same data. Mobile-specific features like “remote wipe” are worth having, but can’t be relied upon alone – a wily attacker could easily keep your phone in a lead box or otherwise disable its connectivity features until it’s cracked.

A finger swipes-to-unlock a Samsung mobile phone. — The bottom line: if the attacker gets hold of your phone, you’re only as safe as your encryption.

The only answer is to encrypt your device (with a good password). Having to tap in a PIN or password may be less-convenient than just “swipe to unlock”, but it gives you a system that will resist even the most-thorough efforts to break it, given physical access (last year’s iPhone 4 vulnerability notwithstanding).

It’s still not perfect – especially here in the UK, where the RIPA can be used (and has been used) to force key surrender. What we really need is meaningful, usable “whole system” mobile encryption with plausible deniability. But so long as you’re only afraid of identity thieves and phishing scammers, and not being forced to give up your password by law or under duress, then it’s “good enough”.

Of course, it’s only any use if it’s enabled before your phone gets stolen! Like backups, security is one of those things that everybody should make a habit of thinking about. Go encrypt your smartphone; it’s remarkably easy –

Android
iPhone – just enable PIN lock, but consider also encrypting your backups
BlackBerry
Windows Phone – encryption is “coming soon”, apparently.