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#phone#number#sim#without#government#need#more#spam#card#phones
Discussion (243 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express
Ran a quick search and found a whole bunch of news articles, but nobody includes info that makes it easy to route your comment. Feels like the beginning of Hitchhiker's Guide:
> It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/26/2026-10...
One alternative is that Trump can do it at will. Or, to add a few more steps, Trump can fire the FCC head at will, replace him with a lackey, and then do it at will.
(Why is it called a 1 pager you ask? Because your elected officials won't read more than that.)
I made a grand total of one hill visit.
I told them I'm tired of repeating the same things over and over, and if you make my interns come back here ever again, I'll see to it if you're lucky you only lose your seat, not face a mob outside your window, and when that happens lose my fucking number because I'll be sitting by the TV with popcorn.
Exactly that happened, a few years later.
Whether you're a public interest lobbyist or just another activist, we need to be more willing to TELL congress things. Not ask. Not lobby. TELL THEM.
We need to remind them that the Soviets raced to Berlin to seize brains like ours, that we will flourish whatever regime is in power, and that you can ignore us at your but we, the hackers, will no longer grovel before narcistic neurotypicals to stop misunderstanding on purpose.
Politics is like poker -- soft play is unethical.
Play to win.
Because the pushback works, for a spell.
It's odd that I can repeatedly jump from +2 into the negative, and not once when I've begun calling out this pattern have I had anyone willing to engage.
I don't particularly care about my points, but the pattern is telling and tiresome, and feels like one set of people is reacting genuinely, another is trying to use the voting system as a disagreement button.
The companies paid to flood the FCC with fake comments get to do it as long as they're willing to give the government a cut of the action (https://www.engadget.com/new-york-ag-fines-companies-that-sp...)
It'll only stop when the people hiring those companies to spam the FCC end up behind bars.
While there is ~zero chance that commenting can help you, it absolutely is used against you as their lawyers sharpen their claws by crowdsourcing possible sources of challenge and use your comments to predict them and determine how to undermine such positions.
Even EU countries seem to require an ID now. When I traveled to France and Belgium in 2024, I bought a French tourist sim card, and the carrier kept sending me some rather insistent messages that my line would get disconnected if I don't upload my passport in 30 days.
I heard something similar about Russia after recent changes actually, it could as well be impossible for non-residents so tourists just stick with international roaming and public wifi. IIRC there's a catch-22 situation where you need a Gosuslugi (online government services portal) account to buy a sim, but you need a Russian phone number to sign up for one. As a citizen, you just need your ID (internal passport).
You can only use specific applications downloaded from walled gardens. You cannot write and execute arbitrary code.
If you are an engineer, all code must be generated via LLM and it passes through some verification through a centralized security and compliance authority on the way to you. You must be fully licensed.
This will be, the end of malware.
You get better deals with local carriers if you actually use the potential of eSIM, which is to be able to switch ! Every other carrier in most parts of the world now supply eSIMs that you can sometimes activate from home before your trip
Canada has Lucky Mobile, central Europe has A1 mobile, France and Portugal have Lycamobile, Italy has Windtre, UK has no service,...
Getting a SIM is typically the thing on which you can save 20$ just by asking a local person
Canada isn't the only country in which foreign cards don't work everywhere, and it seems like it's rarely tested
Much of EU requires ID for some time now. France is a bit strange, requires registration after 23 days or something. Germany, Italy, Spain it's basically impossible.
The US is rather unique in that it does not require registration.
EU countries have had these requirements for years and years and never moved to actually enforce them.
Last I traveled the shop required a passport or uploading one to get an eSIM ahead of time.
The US isn't in the EU
I don't see the connection. This is also how it works in China, which means... when you grab a SIM card at an airport kiosk, they take a picture of your passport. You obviously have your passport with you, because you just arrived in China and haven't left the airport yet.
What part of that isn't also true of Australia?
If they want to know what tourists are posting about their country that's good enough.
Also, if you have restrictions of speech in the country, it's great way to de anonymize any speech government says is illegal.
I thought about getting a SIM when Germany was about to introduce ID requirements. I quickly realized this being a moot point.
Not that we didn’t get anything in return but the idea that the worlds foremost military industrial complex just gave this to the world because they loved us is laughable.
Guess these guys are going to make more money in the near future.
Everybody had to go to a store and have their ID read by the system, and if they didn't, the phone number would be shut down.
Unsure how that worked for MVNOs though.
Now I live in the USA and am well-familiar with the spam calls. I wonder if this new rule will reduce/prevent them. I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled. Someone from India should not be allowed to call me with a caller ID from Mayo Clinic.
This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones and the proposed changes won't do anything to change that.
~5 years ago there was a big push (in the USA) to try and solve it with STIR/SHAKEN but I've not been involved or paid attention since then, so don't know if anything came of it. It's a legitimately hard problem to solve though. Lots of engineering and backwards compatibility technical problems, but also political, logistical and commercial issues are abound. You've also got some turtle issues too; it's attestation all the way down.
That is not correct. There a phone farms operating purely on burner phones / disposable sims. Even for legit use cases, this path is often way easier/cheaper than go through official channels.
Use cases range from carrier-NAT proxies at < $1 per GB to text message spam.
A burner phone is a phone number whose owner is not officially registered somewhere as the owner.
A spoofed phone number is a false declaration that you're calling from number XXXXXXXXXX when in fact you're calling from YYYYYYYYYY.
You might notice that there is absolutely no relationship between these two ideas. You can be registered and lie about your phone number. You can be unregistered and not lie about your phone number.
If anyone's eager to do podcast archaeology, IIRC one of the angles was investigating dead government agency phone numbers, and some lady entrepreneur in the 80s. Might have been Reply All, but the market regulation angle makes me think Planet Money.
of course, politicians exempt themselves from the spam call category. Political speech is the most important speech!
~~I _think_ this is the one.~~
God I miss this podcast.
Edit: this IS the one.
(NB: the notion of having to register to read content strikes me as equally reprehensible as requiring KYC for access to the telephone network.)
If you really need a burner you can still get one - there are people who activate SIM cards in bulk using their ID and resell them without collecting IDs. The practice itself is either gray area legally or straight up illegal depending on the country
>Scan this QR code to install the app to cross the border.
Would this be a national border? I haven't traveled internationally for a while, but this would be quite troubling.
>Install the app to board the bus.
Is there no option to pay without an app?
>Install the app to get your filing status with department xyz.
Surely the government also allows you to just call and get an update?
Your bank already knows everything about you; why not your operating system, too?
Soon your ISP will only let you online if your OS sends them the "right" information: your government ID.
We should also abolish cash while we're at it. The government needs to know every purchase you've ever made, no exceptions.
Of course, then we should tear down used bookstores. They're the biggest risk of all. Anyone can walk in and pick up pieces of paper that teach them dangerous ideas. Other religions. Philosophies. Poetry. How to make things.
What we really need is a nation of drones walking to and fro in the image of our rulers, thinking their thoughts, practicing their religions, and parroting their words. It's the only way to be truly safe.
The Thiels of the world are already past wanting an obedient consumer.
They don't need us for the utopia they imagine for themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
- There are networked webcams everywhere: DoT cameras, 18 wheeler fleet cameras, traffic cams, etc.
- Local PD doesn't want to make a deal with Flock
- For average jane and joe citizenry: great, no Flock in town!
- For ongoing negotiations with Flock and the PD: ok, sure, kick us out of town. But we'll just pull the 18wheeler feeds with the vendor we have an agreement with, as they roll through town. Or the DoT feeds via the State contract we have or the...
- As such, negotiations could land as does local PD at least want the control of the feeds already going through their town with each Sysco big rig delivery?
Very, very tricky terrain to solve.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/school-shooting-...
Why do you think all the rich people (and by extension the oligarchy running this country) are pushing Crypto?
That being said, many countries across the world already do this to eliminate burner phones. And many messaging apps require a phone number anyways so this basically locks down anonymous messaging through a phone.
It's much more concerning when said practices are undertaken by the U.S.
Just because other countries do something isn't a justification to bring the practice into the U.S. despite that being a justification used with increasing prevalence these days.
Yes they occur. Yes the US does it. Every violation of it should have lost in court already but courts have a way of interpreting things based on their beliefs rather than original intent.
I need to know whether these other countries are rich western europe before I know whether to agree with you or to cook up some snide rebuttal.
Joking, obviously. And by "joking" I mean mocking a specific type of person and set of beliefs that is who is a) bad b) too common around here.
Also, apparently ends there, too.
matrix, wire, deltachat, threema, maybe jabber/xmpp (depends on their support of encryption). any others?
But not all, so what's the actual point?
I don't know any way to avoid this.
they call that "anarcho-tyranny"
In the name of “national security” and “protecting the children” and all.
Just putting it out there on how quickly this tech turned against the population.
That said, I don’t think its a problem whatsoever and we shouldn’t have laws restricting it.
It seemed to me like they wanted to make sure they could tie the phones to an individual through activation.
Some of the LTE tablets even powered up and put you into a walled garden with data (heh, DNS tunneling worked out of it) to let you sign up for a mobile plan out of the box.
When I did some activations with PagePlus with an actual dealer-level account, it cost me nothing to activate a 'customer' handset and the only info I had to provide on the activation screens was the phone's serial number and the requested ZIP/area code for activation.
And fine, okay, the FCC will force American telecoms to require IDs, but nothing's stoping Redtea Mobile's foreign eSIMs from roaming into the US for data connections. You're just one eSIM global roaming provider away from bypassing all of it!
Something about no taxes without representation
AT&T's efforts to thwart effective government regulation and mitigation stand out especially. The industry oranisation ATIS (<https://atis.org/>) has been central to blocking any effective action. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_for_Telecommunication...>.
Anyone still has any doubts? Or is it to ... protect the children?
The real issue is whether government's should have the right to metadata or the content of remote communications.
Government's don't claim the right to monitor face to face communications so why should they have the right to do so for remote communications.
This is similar to the situation that already exists for PSTN voice comms currently: Whatsapp, Signal, Jitsi, or similar voice- or video-messaging systems. They'll run over an arbitrary network, through VPNs, etc.
Mind, the major comms-apps/social networks might have their own ID requirements forced on them, but there's far less a capability to keep people from defecting from these.
I continue to think that global PSTN networks are pretty close to general collapse, given spam, robocalls, harassment, tracking, and similar forms of abuse. Millennials & GenZ are already notorious for their reluctance to make or take phone calls.
<https://theconversation.com/young-people-hate-making-phone-c...>
Context: Voter ID Laws may seem like a good idea, but they’re actually pretty terrible! On the surface, these laws appear to be a reasonable way to stop people from pretending to be someone else when they vote. But the reality is that this kind of voter fraud almost never happens!!! Instead Voter ID Laws primarily prevent the poor, the elderly, and people of color from voting. They way they’ve disenfranchised people of color is part of a very long history of voter suppression and is a classic example of structural racism.
Which, often, does not include exclusively people who think "Voter ID is racist" as plenty of unhinged libertarians hate make great points about why you shouldn't want the government to have access to 100% of your daily data points 100% of the time.
You can't make the desk clerk in a ghetto cell phone store care.
I say this speaking as someone who has a T-Mobile account under the name George Washington with a Valley Forge, Pennsylvania address.
The other ones are simple and/or deluded and think these sorts of policies won't ever come for _them_. (To their credit, under the current regime they're actually correct about that to a certain extent.)