FBI cyber cop: Salt Typhoon pwned 'nearly every American'

Technically not. But not having a working phone number will quickly become a problem when you need to interact with authorities, banks, insurance companies, the legal system etc. I remember when cell phones were becoming affordable and I thought I was clever by ditching my land line. That got me no end of trouble, then bit by bit it became more normalized to the point that if you have a landline now people look at you a little funny. Not having a phone number today would be the same as not having a landline would have been in the early 90's, and probably much worse than not having a phone was back then.

Even worse is that a lot of these services block the google voice VoIP numbers, so you can't even get away with that.

Imagine if they could block the banks of numbers that bad actors use.

Which is crazy, since that's the only service that even PARTLY filters some of the insane level of spam that gets sent to my unused prepaid number that everyone contacting is clearly an automated spambot.

This is one of the more annoying things I'm dealing with at the moment. Some bad actor (a Belgian company called Voxbone) that has thousands of numbers in NL keeps calling me with all kinds of obviously scammy proposals. They're abusive, rude and just won't get lost and they just keep switching to new numbers.

Six years ago when I obtained a mortgage I tested just this. Correct email and address but no phone number. What happened is that the documentation and all that with the lender was submitted fine without one. And my broker didn’t need one (we used email after our first in-person visit). But once I logged in to manage the mortgage (after a few payments already) it insisted on a number. I put in a null number and it was fine.

This only became a problem when the mortgage was paid off last year and despite getting emails about it, I got a registered letter saying they must talk to me and that haven’t been answering my phone. So I call them as instructed and it was just a “you’re done. We’ll be mailing you documents to send to your insurer. Thanks for your business.”

FWIW: I’ve never personally owned a land line. The last time I ever lived somewhere with one was 19 years ago.

This can't be happening.

There are easily hundreds of comments on HN from people in Europe who assure us all that this is solely an American problem, and that it never happens anywhere else.

That's what it is? As a Belgian, I've got these calls for a few months now, from France or the Netherlands. Some robotic french female voice says something incomprehensible, then the call stops. Got about 8 of these in the last 2 months. I assumed this was mostly a US problem, but it appears over here now.

My bank's two-factor authentication system lets the user select the communications method before logging in, so I set my phone number to a 555 exchange, making it invalid, and it hasn't cause any trouble. A teller did once notice it, but agreed it was a good idea.

There's no way the legal system could require a phone number, because the government overplays their support for the homeless, and being able to work with people that don't have phone numbers is a big part of that.

That's what I do use, when a phone number is needed. The only placed that seemed to notice was OpenAI, but my GPU has 16 GB of RAM, so I run all my inferencing locally, using open models, which is a good idea anyway.

The bigger problem with Google Voice is that Google's email gateway for SMS is awful. It cuts off outgoing messages after two carriage returns, strips out single carriage returns, and won't send me group messages, instead sending me a link to the message, and even that only rarely, usually not even notifying me that I received a group message.

I've found a few alternatives, and I wouldn't mind paying a few dollars a month for one, but every one I've looked into requires I upload a copy of my photo ID, and I'm definately not going to do that.

Europe usually lags the USA on such subjects by about a decade.

Not a bad score, paying off your mortgage in 6 years. Congratulations!!

Jmp.chat is superb (time tested, open source, great support)... And cheogram (their mobile app) can be a UnifiedPush distributor!