Smart phones; a discussion

[Outrunner]

3 minutes ago, FlyinFlynn said:

Talking about secondary identification, why do sites demand you perform secondary identification on your mobile by the way - surely, if your card has fallen into the hands of some nefarious character then your mobile might well have done so as well, would it not be better to perform secondary identification by ringing a fixed line at your home?. I would have thought if you are out and about when you 'lose' your cards you have more important things to do than continue shopping.

We no longer have need for a land line in our house and we got rid of it over a year ago.

Moving with the technology of the times.

[Rich Griff]

Rubbing off the numbers on the back of your bank card, good idea...number easy to remember, easy to write down and store is your secret place at home, hidden in plain sight.

[Cuban8]

1 hour ago, Outrunner said:

We no longer have need for a land line in our house and we got rid of it over a year ago.

Moving with the technology of the times.

Our land line remains silent and unused for 95% of the time - it comes as part of our TV and internet package and as far as I know our provider doesn't offer an opt out.

It's the same few people who ring us on the LL and I never give that number out anymore - calls on the LL from someone I don't know I treat with suspicion - they are usually from telesales who presumably still have my info on their database. I am registered with TPS.

I took a routine call on my mobile/smartphone from a hospital specialist on Friday - I didn't need to sit around all day at home waiting for it and could even have taken it hands free if I'd been driving via the car's audio system. As it happened, the doctor rang just before I was going to pop out to run an errand. My wife used her smartphone to send a picture of her healing ankle injury that's been treated by our local clinic. No need for any physical treatment by a nurse etc but they only need now to check that the injury is looking ok and continuing to heal. No need to use up an appointment.

 

[PDB]

3 hours ago, FlyinFlynn said:

Talking about secondary identification, why do sites demand you perform secondary identification on your mobile by the way - surely, if your card has fallen into the hands of some nefarious character then your mobile might well have done so as well, would it not be better to perform secondary identification by ringing a fixed line at your home?

 

Do you not have as a minimum a PIN or better still some form of biometric authentication to access your phone?

 

Fixed line? What's one of them?

[Learner]

55 minutes ago, Cuban8 said:

Our land line remains silent and unused for 95% of the time - it comes as part of our TV and internet package and as far as I know our provider doesn't offer an opt out.

It's the same few people who ring us on the LL and I never give that number out anymore - calls on the LL from someone I don't know I treat with suspicion - they are usually from telesales who presumably still have my info on their database. I am registered with TPS.

I took a routine call on my mobile/smartphone from a hospital specialist on Friday - I didn't need to sit around all day at home waiting for it and could even have taken it hands free if I'd been driving via the car's audio system. As it happened, the doctor rang just before I was going to pop out to run an errand. My wife used her smartphone to send a picture of her healing ankle injury that's been treated by our local clinic. No need for any physical treatment by a nurse etc but they only need now to check that the injury is looking ok and continuing to heal. No need to use up an appointment.

 

Although being app averse I did opt in for the nhs app as was told it saved time and money. However now I get the full set of text, email ,app and letter,sometimes even a phone call as well to postpone my appointments!

Edited January 21 by Learner

[Cuban8]

I had to laugh when I heard this morning that an AI driven customer service line flipped its lid and swore at a customer, while also bad mouthing the company it was representing. 😄

 

For fun, I asked my daughter's Alexa whether it was planning to take over the world -  it replied with something like "I don't think you're taking me seriously" - not sure if that comforts me or not!

[Geoff S]

54 minutes ago, PDB said:

 

Do you not have as a minimum a PIN or better still some form of biometric authentication to access your phone?

 

Fixed line? What's one of them?

 

It's the way I access the internet 99% of the time. 

[EvilC57]

2 hours ago, Cuban8 said:

Our land line remains silent and unused for 95% of the time - it comes as part of our TV and internet package and as far as I know our provider doesn't offer an opt out.

 

The only people who ever call our landline are a 96 year old cousin, and spammers (junk calls). The only time I ever make outgoing calls on it are to call Virgin to check the status of their broadband if I’m having trouble, or once in a while to call them to try and haggle down their regular price increases. I’ve told them I don’t really need the landline any more, but it seems there’s no opt out - unless I leave them completely.

[Cuban8]

4 minutes ago, EvilC57 said:

The only people who ever call our landline are a 96 year old cousin, and spammers (junk calls). The only time I ever make outgoing calls on it are to call Virgin to check the status of their broadband if I’m having trouble, or once in a while to call them to try and haggle down their regular price increases. I’ve told them I don’t really need the landline any more, but it seems there’s no opt out - unless I leave them completely.

Yes, Virgin Media. Get quite a good deal from them all taken into account. You're right about haggling for a better deal - I've not had a significant  price rise for years and our package has been improved by more channels and streaming apps on the 360 wireless box that they upgraded us to a while ago. I loathe football, and Formula 1 has become a monumental bore to me but I value having BT Sports included in my package for Moto GP which myself and Mrs C8 follow closely along with World and British Superbikes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

y

[EvilC57]

I’d happily leave Virgin and go to our new local ‘Fibre to your front door’ ISP instead, but I do like the convenience of Virgin’s TiVo box and its ability to pause and rewind live TV - very useful when Mrs EvilC comes in and talks to me at the vital part of a program!

[Martin Harris - Moderator]

Won't the TiVo box work as a standalone PVR?  The BT equivalent certainly does...

[EvilC57]

News to me if it does. As far as I know (and I’ve just had a look at the back) there’s just in RF connector straight off the Virgin network.

[Philip Lewis 3]

31 minutes ago, EvilC57 said:

Very useful when Mrs comes in and talks to me at the vital part of a program!

I can totally sympathise with that, no use to me though because if I did that, I'd never finish watching anything!

[John Lee]

1 hour ago, EvilC57 said:

The only people who ever call our landline are a 96 year old cousin, and spammers (junk calls). The only time I ever make outgoing calls on it are to call Virgin to check the status of their broadband if I’m having trouble, or once in a while to call them to try and haggle down their regular price increases. I’ve told them I don’t really need the landline any more, but it seems there’s no opt out - unless I leave them completely.

 

I opted out of the landline with Virgin a few years ago & just have their broadband connection. It only saved a couple of pounds a month but the landline was becoming more trouble than it was worth with the number of junk calls.

 

My smartphone was bought outright and £6 monthly to GiffGaff gives unlimited calls & texts plus 2Gb data which is more than enough. I kept my old phone as backup when I bought the new one, that has a pay as you go SIM that costs 20p per year - I just need to send a text to myself @10p every six months to keep it active.

[Martin Harris - Moderator]

25 minutes ago, EvilC57 said:

News to me if it does. As far as I know (and I’ve just had a look at the back) there’s just in RF connector straight off the Virgin network.

A bit different then...

[Geoff S]

I think the main reason retired people are less confident with new technology is that they don't enjoy the group synergy that comes with being employed or, especially, with a crowd of enthusiastic schoolmates.

 

When we first started working with microprocessors back in the 1970s, none of the engineers in what was then the electronics and instrumentation dept knew anything abut them apart from the data sheets.  We used them for logic replacement in embedded instrumentation. We learned programming in machine code (MC6800), which meant conditional jumps had to be counted - the s/w did nothing for you, until we got Assemble, development systems and eventually higher level languages like PL9, and C.  We learned from each other and made rapid progress in both h/w and s/w design, though it was all a bit crude at first but huge fun.  I've used a variety of editors, operating systems and hardware (at least we were eventually able to ditch C90 tape cassettes for program storage, but it took a while).  I'm afraid, at 84, I've got a bit bored with it all and elect to use only what I find useful.  My smartish phone is only used when I don't have access to my desk-top PC (laptops are a pain because they're all different and almost as hard to repair as smartphones).

 

It happens to us all eventually 🙂  At least I still know enough to be able to repair/replace the oven grill element as I've spent the afternoon doing (the new element arrives in a few days).  But I used my PC to research/source the element and the method. It would have been a pain using the small screen on my phone.

[Engine Doctor]

8 hours ago, Outrunner said:

We no longer have need for a land line in our house and we got rid of it over a year ago.

Moving with the technology of the times.

Its all very good moving with the times , technology etc but rembering the storm in 87. We had no power etc for days roads were blocked and villages in kent were cut off. Only contact with the outside world was the land line that kept going . Even some of those faded when batteries at the exchanges died and roads were still blocked with fallen trees . How long will the modern system hold up in a similar event ? Weve had power cuts locally and masts have shut down after a few hours. Now most land lines are run through wifi and any powercut will cause on outage. So in an event of anything like the big storm most of  us will be unable to calk assisrance if needed. Thats progress !

[Geoff S]

2 minutes ago, Engine Doctor said:

Its all very good moving with the times , technology etc but rembering the storm in 87. We had no power etc for days roads were blocked and villages in kent were cut off. Only contact with the outside world was the land line that kept going . Even some of those faded when batteries at the exchanges died and roads were still blocked with fallen trees . How long will the modern system hold up in a similar event ? Weve had power cuts locally and masts have shut down after a few hours. Now most land lines are run through wifi and any powercut will cause on outage. So in an event of anything like the big storm most of  us will be unable to calk assisrance if needed. Thats progress !

 

We had a similar storm in 1990 when wet freezing snow collected on power lines and the increased windage pulled then down. The overhead mains power wires to our house pulled out, so we knew we wouldn't get reconnected until something was done.  I was still partially paralysed from a cycle accident a few months earlier and I was instructing my wife how to rewire the gas boiler electrically powered gas valve to a 6v dry lantern battery so we could have hot water and heating.  Luckily, being campers, we were able to cook using either our Trangia meths stove or a Calor gas burner we used when we car-camped.  Our mains power is now supplied underground.

 

I think the phone lines stayed operative.

[Outrunner]

15 minutes ago, Engine Doctor said:

Its all very good moving with the times , technology etc but rembering the storm in 87. We had no power etc for days roads were blocked and villages in kent were cut off. Only contact with the outside world was the land line that kept going . Even some of those faded when batteries at the exchanges died and roads were still blocked with fallen trees . How long will the modern system hold up in a similar event ? Weve had power cuts locally and masts have shut down after a few hours. Now most land lines are run through wifi and any powercut will cause on outage. So in an event of anything like the big storm most of  us will be unable to calk assisrance if needed. Thats progress !

Our "land line" was provided via Virgin Media fibre so it relied on power anyway. We've moved away at last from the awful VM to another provider using using a BT fibre and we chose a deal that did not include a landline that we no long use.

Edited January 21 by Outrunner
Typo

[Peter Jenkins]

The whole point of a separate land line is that it has its own power and uses a separate run from the electricity wires - at lease out in the shires!  If I lose electrical power, my land line still works.  I have never had both the electricity supply and the land line fail simultaneously although a major storm could do that.  I don't always get good mobile reception in my house so when the electricity goes and I lose my BT Hub, I'm left with trying to cope with an iffy mobile signal.  Thank goodness for my land line is what I say as that's how I report my electricity outage to the supplier.

Dual redundancy is good!

Edited January 21 by Peter Jenkins

[kc]

Wouldn't it be marvellous to have a tiny phone that would easily fit in your trouser pocket?   Like those phones we had decades ago...........

[Outrunner]

10 minutes ago, Peter Jenkins said:

The whole point of a separate land line is that it has its own power and uses a separate run from the electricity wires - at lease out in the shires!  If I lose electrical power, my land line still works.  I have never had both the electricity supply and the land line fail simultaneously although a major storm could do that.  I don't always get good mobile reception in my house so when the electricity goes and I lose my BT Hub, I'm left with trying to cope with an iffy mobile signal.  Thank goodness for my land line is what I say as that's how I report my electricity outage to the supplier.

Dual redundancy is good!

Land line days are numbered as BT are phasing them out and a home phone will be via IP so a power source will be required.

[EvilC57]

1 hour ago, Geoff S said:

We learned from each other and made rapid progress in both h/w and s/w design …

This is where I think all this ‘work from home’ that’s been going on since the Covid lockdowns falls down. Before I retired I worked in a similar systems design and test department, and there were countless occasions when you would overhear something relevant to the job in the adjoining office ‘pig pen’ or in the tea room, where you would think ‘Ah yes, I need to take that into account’ (or whatever). Or you could pop down the office at a moment’s notice and bounce ideas off a colleague - none of which you can do easily if you’re working on a laptop in the kitchen, with the distractions of a cat/dog that wants to be let out, or a washing machine that’s beeping at you because it’s waiting to be emptied!

[Rich Griff]

Small phones that will fit in a pocket....

 

Where is the street cred and status symbol in that ?

 

Sprayed on jeans and the £500 fashion accessory just asking to be nicked or bent...

 

I keep my cheapo Tesco phone well hidden and secure.

[Peter Jenkins]

1 minute ago, Outrunner said:

Land line days are numbered as BT are phasing them out and a home phone will be via IP so a power source will be required.

Yes, so I understand.  A retrograde step in my view and increases the impsct of a msjor cyber attack.  The Russians have a track record in this type of attack so I hope GCHQ has the antidote to hand when this happens in about 8-10 years time.