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Comment by irl_chad | Hacker News Reader

It raises the cost for any spammer, including determined actors. More code, more complexity, plus the cost to actually rent the numbers.

A lot of tech bros need to touch grass and realize that the rest of the world doesn’t mind giving their phone number to a chat app.

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People shouldn’t be expected to give up their privacy and anonymity and put themselves at greater risk of identity theft because big tech can’t be bothered figuring out a different way to solve spam.

Just because the rest of the world doesn’t mind giving out their phone number, it doesn’t mean it’s harmless. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to get sim swapped and have all of my bank accounts drained because some random company with zero security measures demands I provide my phone number to use their app.

I think you're misplacing your annoyance here. A lot of the world is not constantly affected by Sim swapping. Your phone number is not a secret either. The problem is the minimal verification that allows sim swapping to exist in the first place.

These companies don't expect you to give up privacy and anonymity. They expect you to pay $1 to rent a phone number. To these companies, a phone number is an externalized reusable proof-of-stake in the PSTN NFT market — nothing more, nothing less.

Unless you have beef with a state sponsored actor, you’re safe with Signal. Possibly even then

If you have beef with a state sponsored actor I’m not really sure what you’re doing on HN. The Taliban uses WhatsApp lmao

> More code, more complexity, plus the cost to actually rent the numbers

Not a big deal, there's sms verification services, they have APIs and premade libraries, cost is about ~$0.06/verification depending on which service you use, and less with bulk discounts.

And spoiler: you can’t use those for spam.

Huh?

There is a ToS in these services as well.

And you can't use many from those services to actually register an account for a meaningful service. E.g. have you created Instagram account with them?

Seems like there is a determined will to blacklist as many as possible.

I believe you're thinking phone numbers from legitimate VoIP services like Twilio, or the "texting app" service-providers that build on top of them.

The GP is talking more about phone numbers from purpose-built (usually Russian) "secondary market for other people's credentials" marketplaces, where people sell the use of their own personal phone numbers (usually through cloud remote-control software they run on an old Android device with the SIM in it.)

No there is not.

5sim.net, sms-activate.org, smspva.com, I'm talking about these, they're specifically made for that purpose, you can pick a country and a service

It starts from 4 cents per number. If my bot isn't going to make that 4 cent within its first few hours I am in the wrong business.

There are scenarios, such as communicating with my children, where someone doesn't have a phone number.

Hangouts worked great until Google got bored and trashed it with Duo/whatever the other one was, that's all I was saying.

Google talk worked great until Google got bored and trashed it with Hangouts which worked less great until Google got bored and trashed it with Duo.

The sad part of it all ... Google Talk - by orders of magnitude their best chat offering was just xmpp/jabber the whole time.

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