I’d never heard of STIR/SHAKEN…but after looking into it, supposedly T-Mobile was one of the first mobile carriers to implement it…and I’m on T-Mobile…but for the past several years, I keep getting unwanted spam calls to my cell phone that appears to be originating from very regional local numbers (area codes and number prefixes that are local to my area)…because of that I just assumed that they had to be spoofed since the calls are always an unwanted telemarketing robo call and never involve an actual business that is local to me.

So I don’t know how they are still doing it, but somehow telemarketers are causing calls to route through exchanges that are completely local to me.

I think it’s too late for this to be useful. Number spoofing is ultra-common these days and most of the unwanted calls I receive are from spoofed numbers that appear to come from local areas.

If we start blocking the spoofed numbers then eventually we’ll just be blocking every possible combination of digits that can exist.

What we really need first is better detection and blocking of calls using spoofed numbers.

I tried a similar scenario: The phone has a nfc reader built in, so I put the tag on the charger and tried letting the phone read it, but quickly discovered that android can’t/wont read nfc tags unless the phone is unlocked, which defeated the elegance of the solution. I hadn’t considered buying a standalone reader and attaching the tag to the phones, that sounds a lot more complicated.

Using an Automation APP like Tasker to turn off a Home Assistant-controlled smart plug when the battery exceeds a reprogramming threshold, might be a more reliable method & works for any device.

This is the method I have been using for years and it works great. I use Home Assistant to manage the automation, the Home Assistant client app for Android (you could use tasker for this) to collect the device telemetry to send to Home Assistant (how it knows when the battery hits 85% or drops below 70%).

I do want to point out there is one small downside to this method: your device charger (and I’m using an Anker wireless phone charging stand as my charger) only works for one device. Example, say my personal phone is charged up to 85%, so I take it off the charger, but my work-issued phone needs to be charged, but when I put my work phone on the charger nothing happens and it doesn’t charge because the charger is connected to a smart plug that’s turned off because my personal phone is charged up.

As much as I would LOVE to see them waste their money on this, we know they are all talk and no action and won’t actually contribute anything.

To keep the analogy going, they would have to have raped and beheaded the occupants of the death star before actually blowing them up…and the Death Star would have to have been an Imperial tourist destination with not just Imperial citizens, but also visiting citizens from all across the galaxy…but if that’s what George Lucas had filmed, I think there would have been a lot less sympathy for the rebels.

Every pair of boots I’ve owned have needed breaking in before becoming comfortable, and then they remained comfortable for the duration of their life.

If our eyes had the concept of shutter speed, then there would be shutter speed amount of delay before our brains could process the collected image (keeping the analogy of how a camera works). The penalty of a delay before the brain can process the image would be way worse than what we currently experience, which is degraded night vision.

Perceiving and reacting to motion quickly is way more advantageous than perceiving a high quality image (for survival).

5 times total in the past 2 years…and the latest 3 times were because of posts like this in the past month…so basically, almost never.

Im a little shocked and in a bit of disbelief that some people think about it daily or even weekly.

Oh yeah! I forgot about the ranching culture. That’s a great point. I’ve actually been to the Calgary Stampede (decades ago).

I’ve always heard that Alberta is the ‘Texas of Canada’ (presumably for the oil & being politically conservative). But since Canada only has 10 provinces, I guess that would mean each province needs to represent 5 different US states.

If Alabama and Texas are two of them, what are the other 3 for Alberta?

My story, and my motives, will probably be different from a lot of accounts posted here.

I started smoking in 1988 and ultimately quit in 2009…so a run of about 21 years, which means I’ve been free from it for 14 years.

My Story: My tobacco of choice was ‘Drum’ and I hand-rolled and smoked without filters. I liked Drum because it tasted great to me, I liked the idea of hand-crafting each and every cigarette I smoked, and it was a pretty cool party-trick to be able to produce perfect hand-rolls out of tobacco or whatever - where ever I was, I was always the designated roller. It was also WAY cheaper than traditional cigarettes - I could buy a can of Drum that would produce 250 cigarettes for $12 - and that was due to a loophole in the state’s cigarette tax. Prior to 2009, the state only heavily taxed cigarettes, but not the individual supplies to make cigarettes (like loose tobacco). That loophole got closed in 2009 and the cost of a can of loose tobacco went up from $12 to $49 over night. I’d known for a while that I should probably quit, but I just never got to that mental acceptance of doing it, until this new tax came along. Ultimately, I decided I just wasn’t going to pay that new tax and so I didn’t really decide to quit smoking, I decided I was going to quit buying tobacco (which has the same end result). At first, I started cutting back, to make my remaining supply of tobacco last as long as possible. The lower my stock got, the farther back I cut down. At first it was limiting myself to 4 a day… then 2 a day (that I would smoke over 4 sessions), then 1 a day that I’d light and inhale a few times and put out and save for later. I stretched this out for months…and then one day it was gone. I didn’t use any medical aids, I didn’t use any substitution with something else. I just quit. I should also mention that I’d also always enjoyed cigars…and typically enjoyed about 6 cigars a year, but I’d decided to cut that out also. Shortly after quitting, I told myself that I’d treat myself to a cigar only after I could go 1-full-month without thinking about smoking. This went on for months, and I actually thought about smoking all the time. At first, several times a day…and then several times a week, and then eventually just once in a while. It actually took about a year after quitting that a friend and I were talking about it (he was quitting also) and I realized I hadn’t thought about smoking for several months. Finally, I seemed to have fully broken both the physical and mental addiction. It was about six months after that that I decided to treat myself to a cigar. These days, I have about 3 cigars a year (all on special occasions) - which is a small enough number not to re-kindle my desire to smoke more.

It’s nice to be escaped from the habit, the financial burden of it, and the negative health aspects. The other great side effects: lower life insurance premiums, whiter teeth (and easier/quicker dental cleanings), clothes that don’t smell like smoke.

That’s the part of the point of the comment you are replying to. The fines are neither a deterrent nor an inconvenience to those wealthy enough to cover the cost. They use their money, power, and influence to continue to violate law without any other consequences other than pulling out their checkbook. The fines are meaningless to people that wealthy.

I don’t think anyone disagrees with that…I just think it’s important to be realistic here. For niche communities to thrive the way they thrive on reddit, it’s just a numbers game. They have the numbers. Lemmy doesn’t. Lemmy is about two orders of magnitude short of the numbers of users needed to achieve the critical-mass / synergy that would be needed to make most niche communities actually viable here. And even then…it’ll probably take even more users than that because the very nature of lemmy is fragmentation/distributed - so having the total numbers still might not be enough.

I think the entire message of my comment escaped you. Especially the beginning part, the middle part, and the end part. If you re-read what I wrote, the gist is that I’ve only ever seen one system in the US that does what people are wanting but I don’t think that’s what they had in mind…and then I follow up with a request for someone to point to a working model for how they are expecting it to work.

Your comment…is just an attack on my personal experience that I cited as a reference. It’s offensive. Your comment comes across as unnecessarily hostile. I am not sure if it’s because you didn’t understand what I was getting at, or if you just wanted to be intentionally argumentative.

When Jerboa was having their version number problems, all of Lemmy was having version numbering problems

Well, not really. This was JUST a problem for Jerboa. There were some other 3rd party apps available for Lemmy and they didn’t suffer from the same problems. In fact, it wasn’t even a technical limitation of Jerboa itself… if you had previously installed and configured Jerboa when the instance version and the jerboa version matched, and then upgraded your jerboa app when your instance didn’t upgrade their version, it magically worked. The problem was when you installed Jerboa fresh and tried connecting it to a slightly outdated instance version - or if you wrecked yourself by clearing your jerboa cache/data folder without realizing that it would behave like it was starting fresh and break. The problem was solely in over-aggressive version checking during Jerboa startup…a total rookie mistake.

That’s about the time that half of all Lemmy users suddenly learned about the availability of some competing apps that didn’t have the same problems.

No, you’re not paranoid. I’d call it diligent.

The premise of the statement you quoted is faulty to the core. A device internal to your home network knows a lot about the design of your home network and it knows a lot about the other devices on your network, and it can be used to facilitate/relay malicious access to your other devices if it becomes compromised.

Wyze has always struggled with security problems…and I’ll admit that I do have several wyze cameras…but long ago decided their security was not trustworthy and created an entirely new virtual lan to run just my IOT stuff from. That, at least, reduces the exposure for some of their security issues. I certainly would never have interior cameras built by wyze - that’s too risky even with robust network security on my side of it.

It may have been rock-solid in the last few months since, but back when they were having their version numbering issues, I was a very new lemmy user and didn’t understand what the problem was (not that I should have had to)- the only thing I knew at the time was that other clients that I’d just learned about somehow didn’t have the same finicky version number problems as jerboa. It kind of wrecked my entire new-lemmy-user experience - especially since (as far as I know) Jerboa is kind of the semi-official client for Lemmy - it doesn’t need to have all the bells and whistles baked into more robust 3rd party clients - it just needs to be rock solid and run reliably as its only job, and it failed.

Jerboa used to hilariously break every time it was updated if your home instance was even a minor-sub-dot version number behind absolute latest. I couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. Connect and Liftoff are both great clients, I just happen to like Sync more. But, I do still keep Liftoff installed beccause it’s got some outstanding diagnostic tools if you are trying to see all pieces of data related to a post or comment.

It lacks the critical mass of users needed to make even moderately niche communities feasible; basic examples are: City communities, State communities, communities based on car make/model - these are types of communities that Reddits excels at having and it’s because of the size of the user base. The only point I’m making with this is that Lemmy is a very long way off from being a viable replacement for Reddit.

Next big problem is: Lemmy has a HORRIBLE new user experience…which I’m sure is significantly responsible for slowing Lemmy adoption. Single biggest issue is content discovery (which is just-ok if you got lucky and joined a super-massive Lemmy instance when you first joined, all the way to an atrocity if you got unlucky and joined a small instance when you first joined.

There’s also a lot of complicated activities needed just to be a functional Lemmy user: like regularly backing up your user/instance preferences (including subscriptions) and replicating those preferences into another account/instance in case something happens to your current account/instance or your instance becomes temporarily or permanently inaccessible. This is asking too much of your common non-technical user, but it’s still currently necessary just because of how often instances have problems. Think about all the user accounts on all the .ml instances that had to be re-created from scratch because there’s no built-in way for users to do it. Users should be able to sync their user accounts similarly to how instances sync their content with each other.

For the record, the first instance I created an account on (when I was a brand new Lemmy user months ago) was a very small instance (but recommended on the very first page of the official join-lemmy.org site), and there just wasn’t functional content discovery at all on that instance. It was a barren wasteland. The fact that servers aren’t even aware of what content is out there on federated systems until some user on that system already happens to know about the content/community and subscribe to it is setting a lot of new users up for failure. Once I realized that it sucks being on a small instances, the second account I created was on Lemmy.world, but that instance suffers from it’s popularity and is the frequent target of DDOS and was going down for me several hours a day. So, there’s also a penalty for joining a big instance. I ultimately had to create numerous accounts on numerous instances and then try to keep the user preferences in sync across multiple accounts on multiple instances so that I can easily swap to a different account when an instance had problems.

Elitist user base: I swear, some lemmy users are worse than the old BSD forums and worse than stack exchange when it comes to taking criticism about the platform. Guaranteed, this comment will get downvoted, and I’ll be mansplained about how content discovery is facilitated through having to have foreknowledge about some 3rd party websites that keep track of communities (which don’t always work because not all instances can be indexed yet do to a laundry list of other problems), and what an idiot I am for not knowing this, etc, etc.

Having to go to this length just to use a reddit alternative - that’s unacceptable to most non-technical users. Lemmy doesn’t stand a chance of gaining momentum until these issues are solved.