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T-Mobile: Are you blocking specific words and suspending accounts?
- Someone1234 6y agoThere's two different but both problematic things here: - Really poorly written spam detection. - Failure to notify customers/no remediation procedure. No doubt people will bring up "but then the spammers will know!!" Or similar, but honestly spammers are already limited by the cost of buying SIM cards ($5/ea), and I feel like customers being negatively impacted outweighs the minor benefit to spam-fighting (particularly when spammers could buy a single second number and detect this 100% of the time anyway). Plus I'd be pretty upset if I was a customer paying for service, and I lost access to a part of that service for 10 days because I sent the word "butt" in a conversation. I'd feel particularly irritated if I wasn't told that my messages weren't delivered, and vital ones were just going into a void.
- drtillberg 6y agoFor SaaS like Strava or something, I'm agnostic whether the notice should come before the shut-off alleging a TOS violation. For cellular service though, SMS is integral to life. 911 even accepts SMS. Imagine T-Mobile silently dropping 911 SMS communications because someone texted the wrong word? Which isn't even in the TOS? This is like dangling chum in the water, waiting for a big shark to chomp your leg, T-Mobile and whatever individual engineer came up with this.
- ThePowerOfFuet 6y agoDid anyone allege that sending SMS to 911 was affected?
- edoceo 6y agoNo, we were just asked to imagine the effects of this poor implementation on emergency services.
- t-writescode 6y agoWhich is something that should be considered before writing this stuff and hopefully a T-Mobile engineer reads Hacker News to be encouraged to think about that and check it.
- makethetick 6y agoBulk SMS spam would most likely come from someone with direct signalling access and not from individual SIM cards which would be trivial to detect and block by the operator.
- Geezus_42 6y agoThe only SMS spam I ever get is from email addresses...
- jasonjayr 6y agoIt is trivial, even for someone not that technically oriented to send a mass SMS from Android, with the appropriate app. Since it's easier to sideload on Android, it would be even easier for a malicious spammer to pay people to install sketchy APK's that spam from the user's phone relentlessly.
- makethetick 6y agoThis would be simple for the user to execute but it would very quickly be spotted by the operator as it's all from a single originating MSISDN. Spreading the load over many users like your latter example would be a lot harder to spot, as would spamming through multiple SMS providers as you're diluting it (but it might also get picked up by the provider e.g. Twilio, MessageBird etc). My point was that most spam originates from people with SS7 access and not SIM cards. It can also come through low cost SMS providers but is short lived as it's blocked the moment it's discovered or there's a complaint.
- jasonjayr 6y agoHow does one even obtain SS7 access w/o a AUP forbidding this kind of abuse? Or are the Telco owners making more money not caring @ that connection level?
- seba_dos1 6y agoWhat's more, all you need is a broadband dongle and you can send SMS with a simple script straight from your PC - but as others already said, it's hardly a real source of spam.
- Scoundreller 6y agoBell and Telus in Canada we’re doing this. But only if your SMS contained the term « secure message ». Strange to say the least.
- lgats 6y agodo you mean 'we are doing this' or 'were previously doing this' ?
- chevman 6y agoT-Mobile has also not been approving new short codes on their network since earlier this year. Frustrating for folks trying to execute legit SMS comms.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoUse case(s)? I’ve have success working with financial services firms moving their comms from short code to push notifications in app. Always curious who is still using bulk SMS and for what.
- ryukafalz 6y agoAs someone who dabbles in alternative mobile OSes (and would like to switch to one full-time again soon), it's frustrating when there isn't a fallback option to standard protocols. Thankfully email/SMS are still fairly ubiquitous, but I don't like the idea of that going away for something important like banking and being locked into one of the big two platforms.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoGodspeed. SMS is unlikely to ever improve, consider more durable alternatives.
- ryukafalz 6y agoEmail is fine too! Or maybe RCS in the future, though I’m not sure if there’s a free RCS stack anywhere yet. But honestly, though I rarely use SMS for personal communication these days, it makes a pretty good fallback, and it’s damn near ubiquitous.
- zachrose 6y agoI’ve been developing SMS chatbots and using my T-Mobile phone for testing. They will also drop messages that contain URLs, although the rules for which TLDs are allowed are hard to reverse engineer, much less rationalize. Last I remember, .club URLs are blocked, .com is allowed, and bit.ly is allowed.
- foob 6y agoI recently ran into this sort of filtering when trying to share an AI Dungeon .link URL with a friend. It's kind of crazy that entire TLDs are blocked without any indication or warning.
- vincentmarle 6y agoHmm I suspect this could be related to Branch links, because their default deep link domain is app.link
- willvarfar 6y agoTangent: tell us about your dungeon! How does it work, are you happy with it etc? Links you can share? Show HN of course!
- ta1234567890 6y agoVerizon also blocks messages based on the urls they contain. Not sure about specific TLDs, but surely whole domains. Discovered this by running a service that sends a lot of messages through Twilio. Not sure if you would ever be notified of the block when sending from your phone. In my opinion is not really to block spam, but instead to push message senders to buy the carrier's more expensive shortcode option.
- rsync 6y ago... which can’t be reached from twilio, since twilio Numbers are not actual mobile numbers.
- 6y ago
- jasode 6y agoFrom the scant details about the word "BELLY" triggering the blocks, it looks like some hypothesize it's a "Scunthorpe" type of programming bug: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
- jessaustin 6y agoI don't see "cunt" or any similar string anywhere in the string "belly". As mentioned at TFA, this is more likely some sort of naive Bayes filtering since "belly" is often seen in "lose belly fat fast!" etc.
- dogma1138 6y agoAre US carriers even allowed to do this?
- speedgoose 6y agoFacebook Messenger does the same with some porn links.
- Hippocrates 6y agoThis is a great reminder to switch from SMS to something that is e2e encrypted.
- gallego2007 6y agoI was thinking the exact same thing. I need to convince a few family members to ditch SMS... unfortunately some businesses (like apartment buildings) still use SMS to communicate, so it’ll probably be a while before we fully move away from this medium.
- tyingq 6y agoPayPal has a similar problem. They do really loose string matching on the OFAC list[1], for any data, in any payment field...even a comment. Match a magic string in a comment, and your PayPal account gets locked down in a way that's very hard to undo. [1] https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/sdn-list/pages/default.aspx https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/sdn-list/...
- andybak 6y agoHow loose is the string matching? That list looks full of incredibly common names from around the world.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agothat's what the SDN list really is, just some common names of people, organizations and countries. it's up to you to figure out how to turn that into not selling to the wrong people and going to prison.
- tyingq 6y agoTrue, but that doesn't seem like a good excuse for a dumb grep-ish solution on all fields. Some smart terrorist is going to legally to change their name to "Thank You" and screw PayPal :)
- tyingq 6y agoIt seems pretty damn loose, but of course, it's hard to test since the outcome ruins your PayPal account. I found this: https://m.imgur.com/a/RnpRm https://m.imgur.com/a/RnpRm
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoBecause there's no downside to doing it this way while a lot of upside for 'being tough on terrorism'. Good luck if someone sends you a payment for 'Cuban food' or 'Iranian Weapons of Mass Destruction'
- loeg 6y agoTangentially related, Reddit deletes posts and suspends accounts for three days if the address "[redacted]" (rot13) is posted. (It's the not-very-secret address of the Seattle Mayor's giant lakeside house.)
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoDoxxing is disallowed...
- freehunter 6y agoYeah and Reddit’s definition of doxxing includes names, even of public figures, so the home address (secret or not) of a public figure is not going to be allowed under that same policy. That’s why you’ll see Twitter handles blacked out in Reddit posts, because otherwise the post will be deleted.
- timeinput 6y agoI ran into this a few months ago when texting the phrase "work from home" it was really strange. We rationalized it with the spam / phishing thought process, but it still seems wrong for the carriers to block messages so poorly. It makes me wonder if I really want them filtering 'spam' calls. tinfoil hat maybe that's their end game!
- dzhiurgis 6y ago“Learn to code” is harassment on twitter
- dredmorbius 6y agohttps://old.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/i1fk1z/tmobile_are_you_blocking_specific_words_and/ https://old.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/i1fk1z/tmobile_are...
- wdr1 6y agoTL;DR: spam detection is hard
- njarboe 6y agoCharge people not in your contact list 10 cents to message you. 5 cents goes to you and 5 cents to the carrier. Problem solved. I would love this for messages and phone calls (and emails while we are at it).
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoT-mobile is a joke. I lost my @simon Twitter account [0] because of T-mobile's and Twitter's utter incompetence, and it took me more than 3 months to regain control of it. The way the attacker gained control of my phone number should have never been possible. I'm still a customer, why? Because there's no better alternative in the US, although I'm pondering Google Fi at the moment. Thoughts? [0]: https://medium.com/@simon/mobile-twitter-hacked-please-help-2f65c691edf8 https://medium.com/@simon/mobile-twitter-hacked-please-help-...
- organman91 6y agoIt's just a single phone, but google fi has worked pretty well for my use case. I was impressed how well it worked when I went on vacation to Canada last year. If you don't need to have a half-dozen devices on one account there's really very little that gets you as much bang for your buck - unless I'm really burning through data my bill is usually $30/month.
- woofie11 6y agoIf you don't mind losing your phone number forever, Google Fi is a great option! If Google Pay suspects fraud, it locks your account. Google Fi isn't paid for. Google locks your phone number from being ported out forever. Empowered human support wouldn't be Googley, so it's usually locked out forever. T-Mobile isn't very competent, but at least, they provide humans who can fix things, eventually, once they figure out what they're doing.