• S&T Forum Guidelines
  • S&T Moderators: VerbalTruist | Skorpio | alasdairm

Technology Dumbphones

Do you have or are you interested in dumbphones?

  • Yes

    Votes: 6 28.6%

  • No

    Votes: 5 23.8%

  • I'm interested

    Votes: 8 38.1%

  • I'm not interested

    Votes: 2 9.5%
  • Total voters
    21
Like that Cricket wireless shit right? Nah, not about it.
 
Mysterier said:
There seems to be a return (for millennials mostly) to pre-smartphone-era-style devices (before the iPhone in 2007) to create a boundary and disconnect from the online world.

Do you have or would you get a dumbphone?
Click to expand...
This gives me some hope. IVE NEVER WANTED A CELLPHONE LET ALONE A SMARTPHONE, BECAUSE Smartphones are actually pretty dumb. And siri gets dumber by the day. I only got a cell phone in 2006 because the whole entirety of the world was giving me crap. My boss at the time basically kidnapped me and took me to T-MOBILE. My boyfriend was also upset that he couldnt get a hold of me ALL THE TIME.

I sometimes wish I could just have a landline. Every single situation you think you need a smartphone for... I was able to navigate without one. It is because of cellphones that I can take a huge dump on the subway and no one would even notice.

I knew this in the beginning and I know it still now. This was the original plan... Everyone is so wrapped up in social media and their ego and image that they arent paying attention to whats going on around them. They are effectively now self-concerned sleep walkers, and no worries, there wont be any sort of social change anytime soon.

I cant even ask people if its okay if we spend this 10 minute walk without our cellphones without there being serious backlash and attitude.
Excuse me for asking you to leave your identity at home.

also, I NEED TO BE REACHABLE AT ALL TIMES AND RESPOND IMMEDIATELY? no thanks. I NEED TO BE ABLE TO KNOW THE ANSWER TO ANYTHING IMMEDIATELY,

this rectangle thing, does not curve too my face like a landline. But i cant do anything in life anymore without it. YES. LETS GO BACK TO LANDLINES. YOU DONT GET TO KNOW WHERE I AM AT ALL TIMES. You dont get to completely derail my attention span, interrupt what im doing, every few seconds, and justify it by the possibility of emergency. Very rarely have I received a call that required my immediate action or else catastrophic results would ensue.
 
arrall said:
What if you're in Timbuktu and don't know the towing company's number? :LOL:
Click to expand...
wHAT IF YOURE IN TIMBUKTU and have no data service to look up a towing number? I mean how did people live prior to 20 years ago.
To answer you seriously though, you would just accept Timbuktu as your new home forever, and live there, and allow the rest of your loved ones to conclude that youre dead. THATS what life before cellphones was like!!
 
No, at the very least I can't imagine not having the immediate access to information that is accessible on these devices. It really isn't about connectivity to others for me, it's more about having a second brain. As an endlessly curious person who at any random moment will feel the need to know the depth of Lake Baikal or what preceeded the Han dynasty, I am firmly attached to these devices

In the future we will of course see an ever increasing degree of integration between us and these devices.
 
negrogesic said:
In the future we will of course see an ever increasing degree of integration between us and these devices
Click to expand...
Neuralink simultaneously fascinates and terrifies me.

I can’t wait for Elon Musk to start inserting Tesla ads into our minds.
 
It's possible to buy a 'dumbphone' for little kids. They come in yellow and pink and only cost £5. At that price one can use such a phone just once and then destroy it. 'Burners' are a fact of life. Much better than any encryption because use of encryption means that those able to intercept calls will KNOW you have something sensitive to say.
If you use a phone once with simple codewords, any listener will be unable to get any 'depth' i.e. knowledge of what the user is doing, even if it's encrypted.
I'm also suspicious of encryption. Supposedly secure systems have been broken time and time again. I guess the best security is to use burners and use the type of 1-time pad system used by Numbers Stations. Actually, if one could broadcast your numbers, who is to say WHO had the pad to decode.
That is why such systems are used by all sides in the cold war. Short wave radio means potentially hundreds of millions of people can hear the 1-time pad being read out, but only ONE person knows what it means.
So I would be interested as to how one can broadcast on the web. I guess a GOOD video that millions will watch for entertainment that just has a box in one corner with the number in it would make it impossible to find the recipient of the coded message.
 
acklac7 said:
The scary thing is you can't buy true "dumbphones" anymore...
Click to expand...
That's true.
AND scary!

Maybe almost as scary the idea of not having SMART phones might be for so many, many, many people!
They'd be lost.
Probably starve, too.
 
I was amazed at what smart phones (iphone) could do when I got one. And that wasn't until 2019. I didn't like the idea of being able to search the internet on a phone.
 
lecroute said:
That's true.
AND scary!

Maybe almost as scary the idea of not having SMART phones might be for so many, many, many people!
They'd be lost.
Probably starve, too.
Click to expand...

Why scary - it's a way of people knowing that their conversation isn't being tracked. Not BECUASE they know you are up to no good, but because the services who monitor phone calls listen to people randomly. It's a etching out of personal freedom.
 
Fertile said:
Why scary - it's a way of people knowing that their conversation isn't being tracked. Not BECUASE they know you are up to no good, but because the services who monitor phone calls listen to people randomly. It's a etching out of personal freedom.
Click to expand...
The technology to track people's conversations exists, and it will not cease to exist until something big and bad happens. Even if your dumbphone doens't come with all the gimmicks smartphones do, who's to tell they can't be still be tracked?

I think often of who or whatever happens to scan my conversations. Wouldn't like to be in their position :LOL:
 
ions said:
I was amazed at what smart phones (iphone) could do when I got one. And that wasn't until 2019. I didn't like the idea of being able to search the internet on a phone.
Click to expand...
2019 - That's the year I was walking along the beach, waiting for a friend, and suddenly someone from behind tapped my should and said: "you are culebra" - that was my phone's name at that time.
I had no idea who that person was then, and it surely scared the living shit out of me. How can a middle-aged woman I've never seen before know my phone's name?
Later I learned this was my friend's stakler-neighbor, which didn't really help, I think.
But since I always make sure to switch off anything from location tracking to even the whole thing (and still I;m convinced I can be tracked.)
 
The feds can use the patriot act to get phone records. Where some senators were trying to get it to expire, so it goes back to needing a search warrant issued by a judge to acquire phone records, or metadata. Yeah, that would scare me too. But stalkers don't play by the rules, lol. @lecroute
 
'Smartphones' will usher in a form of authoritarianism. Give it a few more years.
 
I held out until 2012. I do miss the highly pixellated clip art pics you could send to pretend you were playing golf etc, they were thoroughly convincing and proof positive of claimed activity.
 
Would like a flip dumb phone as a backup or if I’m away somewhere and afraid of losing this one (13 Pro Max).
 
acklac7 said:
The scary thing is you can't buy true "dumbphones" anymore...
Click to expand...

Behold.


A $12 mobile phone that uses open-source code in it's baseband processor. The source code of the application processor is also available.

Of course a SIM is a microcontroller in it's own right. It uses the JavaCard subset of the Java bytecodes. In days gone by most SIMs actually contained an ARMv5TEJ processor so the bytecode is read, converted into a single ARM instruction and executed. I'm told that now people have actually designed and implemented much more streamlined solutions in which an 8-bit RISC processor designed specifically to integrate into JavaCard.

If that last sentence sounds a bit odd, all I mean is that the CPU only has 76 instructions so that it can execute JavaCard in natively but those extra instructions manage things like I/O, memory management and messaging. A very neat trick.
 
Do you think it's still available? The linked blog post is from approximately 12 years ago.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top