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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Thank you for such a long and detailed post! I indeed did not know about things beyond the SIM, and I didn’t know about the extra details about the country codes either. That is extremely interesting to me.

    With the phone spoofing though, does that mean two factor with a phone number is basically useless? If I had authentication based on a MAC address, it would take seconds to break it. But I think, and sure hope, that auth based on phone numbers is more secure.

    I think your domain name answer – that for the most part computers didnt need them – is a very satisfying answer.


  • If I’m understanding correctly, you’re saying that right now the network doesn’t have an exhaustive table of IP addresses to physical locations. It has a cache, and a hierarchy, and the path to a location of the IP is fluid.

    But a system where every device could be directly contacted/identified like a Sim card, would effectively require a complete table of “what network is device ABC at”. A table that is updated every time the device changes network connections. It would be like trying to change domain name to point to a different IP address.

    The problem is, updating a domain to point to a new IP takes hours or days not seconds, so doing that every time a phone changes WiFi is not practical.

    Is that a good summary?


  • Finally :D thank you so much!

    So basically VOIP is “cheating” because its not actually handled by the network directly, the phone company pays for always-online servers, and phone(s) reach out to those server every time they change networks, in order for servers to be able to route calls to them.

    Which also means! it is possible to do the same thing for computers, but it requires having

    1. A static IP
    2. An always online server
    3. The device needs a daemon that tries to connect to an always online server, and authenticates itself
    4. That server needs to manually reroute traffic (through a VPN or some other means) from the static IP address to the device, wherever it might be

    Which also explains why general network providers wouldn’t want to create the infrastructure. Even if universal addresses were given to each device, which simplifies DHCP and address-leasing, and shortens time it takes to handshake with the network, all of that is less of a cost than the infrastructure needed track of devices as they change networks. (And that’s on top of ISP’s being slow to change from the legacy approach of local networks and desktops).

    ^ which is more the conversation I wanted to have but didnt really get with this post.

    Thats a sizable edit!

    Yeah 😅 I didnt want it to be this complicated of a question, but I didnt see how else to explain that current addressing systems don’t meet the same need as a phone number.