What are the features required on the user's phone? I expected this could all be implemented on the carrier side.
It's not so simple anymore. Remember the big hoopla a few weeks ago over the emergency broadcast system? that's not just a "text" you're implementing, but something that Android and iOS must expect from the carrier, and place appropriate options for in the GUI.
I never got bothered by one of those semi-mandatory alerts on my older phone running Android 4 because there was no hardware support on the phone side and nothing the telco could do would force me, since the commands wouldn't be understood.
My breakage-replacement phone ended up being an intro-level non-Samsung Android a couple years back that happened to run the newish version 7. I was disappointed to find that root is required to edit the system xml file that allows "ignoring" the broadcasts enabled by this government-centric carrier / OS pairing. The non-root OS allows me to disable all but the presidential alerts, for instance. Again, the feature is carefully planned some work
Then there are little things like * GPS support for 911 calls (I recall that prior to some specific boating-related death in the US, GPS wasn't even a must on dumb cellphones) * Wifi calling (this is stupid for the most part but makes some sense if your carrier allows one of the few rare plans with international support when you go abroad and don't want a local phone sign-up --or just have a poor signal at home and need your router) * High Quality voice support (Not sure how much closer it is to that ol' landline quality since actual music still won't come thru like we all took for granted with our wires decades ago... it seems to require the same company on both ends for me so far, but I've had this work with a friend who uses iOS on a newish iPhone while mine runs version 7) * Video calls from the built-in dialer app (another same-company (in my small sample-sized experience so far) but it's cool that the option is there without needing to add stupid ephemeral apps from Google's ecosystem for tracking)
That is a feature you can turn on or off. As is the even better feature "Scam Block" where instead of saying "Scan Likely" they just drop the call.
The "scam likely" marker is free and convenient, and a default on some Tmobile phones, but still manages to tantalizingly wave at your face. That interrupts a few seconds of your life, and if you're playing music or listening to text-to-speech, there's not always a smooth transition back from that. IIRC the scam "block" feature is an upgrade that requires a monthly payment [~$5?] for their "effort." It's a bit like the old trialware and demo days where all the non-stupid features were behind a paywall...
On call for anyone, or just the company / selected corporate customers?
You can set an audible ringtone for those in your contact list - (if the number of legitimate callers are limited) and have "silence" as the default ringtone for others.
If something goes wrong and they're missing in action for a technical failure of their own making, it's not good enough to scapegoat an employee's unexpected / secret whitelists. Blame avoidance doesn't work that way.
Being on call requires being able to handle unforeseen circumstances, including getting non-silent calls from some vicepresident* stepping in for an answer while Rome is burning on your watch.
* eg: people whose personal numbers you'd never have been allowed to know in advance... and who have all right to swap said "known" numbers without prior notice after they get a new shiny smartphone.
True, but probably around 50% of the spam calls I get are spoofed from my own NPA/NXX, presumably because it looks familiar
Mobile: Not sure if you use a smartphone, but in mid 2018 F-droid added a "Blacklist Blocker" app (com.kaliturin.blacklist). "Blacklist" is a misnomer -- even the official description shows coverage for whitelisting or contacts-only or blacklisting. I am a new user and see that there are combinations of some of the above possible.
Setting the blacklist filter to "contains" for your 6 significant digits should help kill those obvious 10k neighbor spoofs. The "starts with" blacklist should block whole area codes, but I haven't tested if the 1 or the "+" are required in the input string --I get quite a bit of unique area codes so it'd take a long time training against the obvious, and then finding creative ways to block swathes without killing local calls from people who aren't close enough to be in my contact list yet but have received by personal business card... or (gasp!) resume.
It would be nice if phone apps would just do a straight hangup. The voicemail door should be sacred --not completely dropping a "blocked" caller is stupid and I suspect the Android APIs are designed to be limited.
Landlines: Fake caller ID is are bigger pain for my landline than my cell, even before finding blocking features in the past couple years. The cableco and the my expensive decade-old house phone fail to include regex support. Nomorobo's design forces a lingering single ring for blocked calls.
I've not done enough research but am fairly close to getting a combo of a Raspberry Pi plus an Obi 110 or similar model (I'm not sure if I missed any converters). Blocking neighbor calls isn't a new thing as seen a 2012 post mentioning blocking "xxx555xxxx" https://toao.net/503-blocking-...
There are some devices that force a sort Robot test on ALL non-whitelisted calls. One must manually enter "1" or some pre-configured number before the landline even rings, but some legit robocalls would be impacted and I'm not sure about multilanguage language support, and false positives / logging.
If this Tmobile thing proves to be as widespread as DKIM was for email, then perhaps in 10 years we'll be able to notice some positive changes (but predictably, better robots and human-assisted dialing will be involved)
The problem is there are getting too many competitors in the middle class market. Where it use to be just Samsung, we have Google, Ericson, LG... All jumping into that market too.
Back in 2014 I would cringe at Android phones imitating Apple and by pricing themselves at 450 to 600 without necessarily being high end. Now they're almost double the price and missing some key features while gimmicks are added... and no public backlash occurred against those market leaders in the US, sadly.
Lots of value brands sell overseas in the third world, but there's evidence that unneeded 6"+ screens, notches and other garbage are starting to taint them too
Unlike with Vivaldi and other forks of Google Chromium, Mainline Firefox extensions are not always available on its forks and you will lose some of the more obscure functionality, needing to research for replacements.
The addons store itself sometimes leaves you without a download link and shows a silly "Get firefox" link that obscures the actual download package --this kind of misdirection is one reason I hate mainstream app store control-freaks with a passion. The situation is compounded on mobile, because you soon realize that even the standard Firefox build for Android has unexplained lack of extensions that you know by name on the desktop. Extension stores are unashamedly hiding results without any warning, but that has been a practice copied over from Android's app store silently hiding results without telling you it's your device that is getting filtered out.
I've found myself messing around with page source code, old version hunting (because you must now also deal with the 2017 Quantum split and find an elusive pre-quantum version to download from the "previous versions" link) or "hacking" the extension to lie about browser compatibility to try make the browser allow the extension anyway.
I hate the scant performance improvements of quantum and leave it as a thirtiary option or worse. Palemoon does house support for adblock, Greasemonkey, Firegestures, etc. but you will sometimes find disappointment in assuming that the fork will be treated as a first-class citizen by sites and extension markers.
So the idea that people giving notice will make employers act better has been tried and failed. The fact is, companies can and do fire people without notice or severance, so why should employees not "fire" the companies in the same way?
Funny, I have a tab open from the historical/. sidebar about 2005 slashdotters' negative consequences of resigning professionally for what was basically a considerate deed: giving your boss notice (2 weeks or more)
Maybe job ghosting is the logical next step in the arms war, though I don't condone it. Not long ago we had a post here about new hires who just did not bother with their first day. Ironically there is a dissonance as society becomes both a) more aware of our personal lives at scale (blunders/petty crimes following you forever beyond your local neighborhood, personal life reaching your boss thru social networks or doxing ) b) and impersonal (robocalls, callcenter volume declines while SOP discourages any phone contact because they can substitute emails, websites and apps)
I would settle for the Maps functionality from Android 2.2, but at some point they started replaced AOSP offerings with proprietary Google offers to integrate and almost demand signing in to enable random features.
It's a good time to make a reminder that there are alternative apps out there. They are inferior, mind you. Maps.me I haven't used, but OsmAnd for F-Droid doesn't require the same level of payments that IIRC the Android version does. It has downloadable state-by-state maps, various configurable options, path logging and not half the onerous requirements that Google Maps enforces (the latter boldly lies about needing location services to run properly). It's clunky, though.
That refers to an Android phone. If you do all that and get malware on your Android phone, you deserve it.
HALT! These steps are the gateway to alternative other app stores when you want to avoid the malware that is GOOGLE's constant tracking. I use F-Droid and had to follow the steps --which cannot really be reversed because of the problem later on this paragraph. Others use the Amazon store and must do so too. Just cloning a trusty local APK that you are hoarding and KNOW is fine (or using an App store to do the downloading for you --same problem) fails the installation process and IIRC Google's OS itself leads you on the way to correct that: follow the "computer, disable all Holodeck safeties" steps that were described.
What looks like a willing shot in the foot to you and iOS users becomes a less deliberate choice and more of an only resort if you are managing your own installs.
You block callers not on your contact list? Right...... so when that Hospital calls to tell you that insert-loved-ones-name-here has been in a terrible accident, you're sending the call to the bit bucket?
I'd say yes. As a policy, I ignore unknown numbers. Trained professionals will leave a professional message that will not say much, but will get my attention. Family members will too, even if the message is less secure. 99% of scammers will not leave a message, because the long life of their continuing con demands that no individual mark be given the opportunity to call back at our convenience and report a long-lived landline to the police. So all voicemail is potentially true (or super-rare scams where the con points to an ephemeral website).
When someone you know is sick or dying, there will be multiple calls anyway. Your blood will not save them, so your presence will not result in a life-giving choice... more of a comfort visit. If important enough, one of the callers is going to be your mother or sibling. They will be in your whitelist our your eye will recognize those numbers. Ignoring numbers does cause frequent anger from my loved ones, but I won't budge. Appealing to an emotional plea to open a backdoor for events with a lottery-ticket frequency of, say 1 / 10,000 odds / year requires my budging 100%.
I'm not opening a front door attack-surface by picking up robocalls. They are a proven annoyance from a source programmed to call me tirelessly once per day using different fake numbers. This is like the NoScript decision to block everything because so little is worth it and we prefer manual we approve of instead of the industry's move toward relentless push of every little random notification and promo offer.
Interestingly to your point, there HAS been an increase of the presence of loved ones in the scammers' toolset in the past decade. Old folks tend to be targeted because their age and household is known public data that anyone can release with a name and address for a couple bucks online. Someone I know who is of retirement-age got a call from someone young that apparently imitated a teen acquaintance living a few thousand miles away. After a couple calls from both sides for the important-sounding accident or tragedy, something clicked before the money got lost. In trying to trace things to a culprit, they only found that the young guy in question apparently knew nothing about the tragedy when a second phone number got involved. The would-be victim concluded that either he tried to scam her and making accusations to the guardians wasn't worth it in the greater scheme of things because their families aren't all that close...or this youngsters' friends (known hooligans) posed as him. In most cases I've heard about on the web, the scam comes in the form of online dating where an enthusiastic girl overseas becomes interested in you and soon into this long-distance relationship will suffer these "unfortunate" needs and ghost the victim after they get a few thousand bucks.
Many savvy slashdotters may detect these. Pros don't target our demographic for the same reasons we don't trust in "Microsoft says you have a virus" popups and recent phone calls. Again, age-data exists that allows calling retired old folks. But I still don't just pick up the phone for odd-looking numbers because the neural net is trained to look negatively on unsolicited numbers.
There is also a psychological toll to robocalls that we're not going to come back from --ever. We don't even pick up the phone, even for known callers sometimes. Just looking at the ringing device's phone screen is a drag when we know it's a dud 50/50.
After slowly seeing the ramp up in the past 10 years, it's hard for tech savvy people to ignore the peace-of-mind workarounds. We can switch off the ringer or go on airplane at odd hours of the day, use contact list-only whitelists 24/7...
Even if the US somehow succeeded in some way where email's can-spam act and the do-not-call lists* have failed, and call volumes return to 1990 levels, people won't bother to ever pick up again or delete their blocklists for good.
Smartphones are oppressive. There is precious LITTLE in tech which is different, sadly. I've watched in pain as more and more choices are removed from GUIs, and more and more unobtrusive power-user options are blocked claiming disuse, or needs-of-the-many... or " our 'maintaining' this mature 0.0001% of the codebase is a pain, so let's DELETE it while we add unneeded new Pocket & Friends bloat here every month" and web standards and browsers do things like blocking user agent protections from manual user choices (the anti-bookmarklet fiasco), blocking "insecure" iframes, while they push for security and privacy nightmares like webRTC's leaking your private IP, beacons, css and JS empowerment for tracking, webUSB and "powerful features", near-unblockable location and notification APIs even on desktop browsers... the stupid scrollbar devolution from thin to molecule-sized to on-demand despite our desktop and mobile screens getting *bigger*...
I digress. So when phones come with no rooting options, I am more and more painted back into a small corner. Got a too-cheap chinese phone 12 months ago that is somewhat crippled but I haven't dared to root it because the xda forums show no definitive rom to do it. Even my dead rooted LG phone required several long hours of research for me to root it 3 years ago. It WAS glorious to have control over privacy and systemwide ad blocks. Nowadays, I still can't block calls properly other than number by number, but at least ads are somewhat managed with DNS66 and disabling javascript on Firefox Mobile... and a home router where ddwrt refreshes hostfiles APK-style thanks to a cronjob on the web somewhere.
If there were some true linux in your hands option as pervasive as iOS or Android, things would be different. The ability to "patch" our crummy phones with what used to be a standard computer command just isn't there. I have to do some heavy content edits on my PC before taking entertainment on the go because there are no viable CLI or API-exposing commands on Android. If you look on the web, many one-liner solutions exist for Windows and Powershell, and even MacOS for various nuisance. But just blocking facebook's IP on mobile or "unlocking" the supported theme API requires root-like prerequisites. That's a bit like "applying this command is only available to approved|registered users".
Retaking the robocall topic I'll say that there's an ongoing experiment at my house in its 4th week. Everyone else is traveling and I unplugged the phone to see if it throws off the daily callers by flagging our phone inactive. A week ago I realized that nomorobo and other protections at the ISP level need to be disabled if I wanted ALL the callers to go not get the courtesy "you've been blocked" messages. Around the same timeframe since it was a robocall-free day (Sunday) I surfaced for about 3 hours last around 5pm. Got 2 random calls even then, so I am not holding my breath.
I also attribute the increase of smartphone robocalls to flashlight apps selling our data where personal numbers and friend data from our and their contact lists is ripe for the taking. No thanks to Google's lack of per-access UAC popups prior to Android 6. So even if I'm watching what apps I and my friends install, our numbers are already out
Kinda handy actually; didn't have to bother hitting pause
Thanks for the confirmation and the additional anecdote. In hindsight, a better term than "urban legend" would have been more adequate for my GP comment. I haven't experienced it myself, but can think of "known issue"... unfortunately I've been lurking lots on Hackernews and sub-consciously avoided what there would have been a sure-fire citation-needed reply:)
I laughed at the happy note on your workflow. It reminds me of what happens when software fixes this kind of thing in an un-skippable update. Couldn't find the exact XKCD I had in mind but this one is funny too https://xkcd.com/1172/
Also, tin foil doesn't work. A box lined with steel wool might be a cheep way to go. A microwave oven with the door closed also would work
Speaking of microwaves, I am puzzled as to why we consider them shielded enough for human safety --haven't done any research though. There is a kindof urban legend I've heard here from the days of wifi B and G that congested home routers sometimes drop connections whenever someone's zapping food in the nearby ovens.
More personally, owning recent tech shows motive for worry whenever I walk by an active set (2 different brands thru the years) while listening to various bluetooth devices (headphones, speakers). My audio playback starts stuttering till I walk away. So are all of them poorly shielded and leaking acceptable non-cooking radiation?
Until you no longer can because there is no choice at any vendor. As your post demonstrates, today's tech industry is full of fans who don't realize they are proverbial boiling frogs. Long gone are the days of choice. We lose hardware and convenient models are retired while the prices just stall for years or rise (texas graphing calculators, anyone?).
Small form factor products (minis, tablets, phones) are a window into the PC market's future. We will be running tpm locked down OSs and mobile apps on our desktops because those are current Apple and Windows and Google goals. And we will be made to like it.
Apple just looks slightly more ridiculous doing it because they are in full dark dominatrix regalia. Her whip creates a new industry fetish from scratch every 18 months. Then we the masochists just crouch down llicking her boots and call it trendy, and she starts planning something even kinkier just to hold our attention while other attention-starved harsh mistresses copy her moves and notches. And drain our willing wallets. Did I mention there is no choice?
The walled gartden was set up shop and walled our towns in without consent, but we all just stayed willingly. We can never live this lotus eater trap. Noticing the Stockholm syndrome is hard for the victim
I'm still waiting for OLD tech to reach my phones. My home router was high end costing 125$ 11 years ago. Wifi N (draft), with the 5ghz band. My first smartphone in 2011 cost double, but was single band. A poorly researched Bestbuy laptop a year later cost 850 but lacked both the 5ghz band and bluetooth. It's on the last legs of its second battery refresh and some hardware and functions are impacted / falling apart, but I can't replace it for a newer one, especially losing Windows seven in the process.
But I digress. The current cheap Android 7 phone 1 year ago cost as much as my router from a decade earlier but the Android mfrs still don't see fit to Support the second band. On the Samsungs and LGs that do, I see the 40mhz high speed modes are incompatible, so the commoditized chips are least-effort implementations. If I truly want to hold off just to get THAT crippled version of 5ghz tech that isn't anywhere near today's Wifi AC offerings, I'll have to hybernate a long while. And sadly, I am pining for the time when Wifi 6 and/or WPA3 drafts have obsoleted anything available today for security reasons. I am hurting for a camera replacement, but hear even AC only comes with the multi-thousand dollar DSLRs, and a handful at that. Guess I'll never be able to retire my lousy, router 2.4ghz band at this rate...
As for GPS, I only care that it cold boots quickly and not jerk around too much. My cheap phone's implementation is failing at both, and it is a pipe dream for me to expect 0-year old tech that offers little more than higher precision for the old functionality to cascade to my needy hands faster than the more functional wifi flavors. I only get satisfaction if I go out there and pay top dollar, though... but diligent research can't be ignored or you end up with a moderate midrange purchase that you consider a sunk cost, like my semi-inadequate 2.4ghz band laptop.
Not unfinished on Apple's side though. Works fine in Europe.
All that is unfinished is the U.S. carrier side, where carriers are dragging feet. I think Apple has done the right thing, which is to release it as is and let carriers start to take support calls based on shoddy or incomplete network support for what is a standard feature is many other countries...
This is informative, thanks. More examples for "perfect" is the enemy of the good, but leaving each company to implement things on their own led us to almost two decades of randomness. Prior to ubiquitous Android and Apple accounts every phone switch kept making us face the question "will my next phone support my previous one's SIM card so I can carry my contacts without manual regeneration of my address book? will it even have a sim slot?"
With this dual-sim situation we'll have another 2 decades of annoying disparate arrangements. The US yet again fosters intentional levels of functional fragmentation on phone service because of greed. From what I hear under other threads, the problem isn't extant in Europe and Asia. Standards in those lands have apparently been implemented properly all across the markets so you don't have to go "Oh, you're on $cheap_provider so I can't do $activity with you there" (though I find it weird that this perfection reportedly requires turning the second SIM into a receive-only call sink)./. historical posts also state that Europe apparently has no fragmentation when it comes to taking any regular non-premium phone / sim across the continent as you travel and just connecting it to any provider.
I am also thinking of Android fragmentation since the economics follow a similar "we the providers won't establish nor follow nice standards... they are anathema to our business models of vendor lock-in, planned obsolescence."
Numbers coming out at this particular point in history are not selfless, especially so soon after the last standard started shipping. Numbers are ALL about an upgrade threadmill. They're trying to set us up for the camera megapixel wars all over again. Or the Chrome vs. Firefox versioning wars. Eventually you end up losing the numbers and gaining them again (Windows is a terrible example of this)
In a world where we end up with fragmentation and planned obsolescense is a system where security theater has a profitable cry for easy, mandatory upgrades. WPA 3 is coming out soon. Without real research this late into the night I'd guess that's Wifi 6 material. Except, my router is 2 versions behind. And not a single Wifi camera out there* actually comes close to version 4, if you count the 5Ghz band. I bought a cheapo Android v7 phone 12 months ago to replace my 4 year old v4.4. The latter has had lots of time to catch up, but still failed to acquire support for that band, among several other things.
Again, I don't want some kind of standards board demanding that I support Wifi N+1 lest we get disconnected because nothing really supports N-1 fully. I want people to suck it up and do it like a job posting where someone sits down and clearly states the demands, and I pick one device for the job, even if it's partly outdated. Until all new phones in a month can be guaranteed to ship on a specific version "number", I can't trust the dumbing down. After all, your Samsung Note version 9 is different feature-wise from the Samsung J's sold the same year, so no single standard should be allowed till we're ready to put the production-line where their mouths meet our wallets.
* short of 2 expensive topend DSLR models (read, not at all pocketable)
Replying to myself to clarify that I *do* agree with the GP post's apparent position that Firefox shouldn't NEED tweaking for sane defaults in the first place.
"Yes" and "no." Tools do not decide how they are used, but software is in the unique position of being heavy-handed with dark patterns when it comes to hiding defaults.
By doing things for us like Apple does, the spirit of "getting things done" is perverted by those who pretend they are the only ones capable of deciding what gets done. Outright removing options is why all browsers are at best on my "reluctant use" list. My former "Trust" is long gone because power users do NOT get a say anymore. I have seen dozens of bugtrack submissions to Firefox and Chrome where "won'tfix" and "this works as designed" show the ridiculous nature of software failing to do things for us because "right and wrong" changes over time. It would sure be offensive if your hammer autoupdated one day and refused to continue being useful nailing anything that didn't look like a nail just because it's "wrong" or deprecated in the eyes of the designer. I know my use case, and how to protect myself.
* insecure http iframes? blocked by devs. * running javascript scriptlets from the addressbar? blocked in some of them. Don't care to test now They treat their power users as if they were all mindless users with no option to stop the warnings.
0) features being discouraged and then removed or chrome's requiring long command line switches that they silently deprecate on a random version upgrade. 1) pasting scripts into a console, like when you're troubleshooting? major pain on Firefox where you take it like a slave and have to use "allow pasting" because some jerks in the industry these days believe the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few requires tons of naggy handholding. https://stackoverflow.com/ques... 2) Trying to apply the fix above requires going into about:config where the browser yells at us slaves again with big fat warning at some point. It makes us humble ourselves picking "I'll be careful, I promise!" 3) injecting my own extensions into the browser? outright blocked or subverted by dark patterns. When I'm using recent versions of chrome there's a big fat warning on every startup stating the browser is endangered by my conscious choice. I'm not aware of a way to disable the warning. I have an older version of Chrome on a different boot OS where no such warning was required some years back. That version is too old to even see Google's extension store so I can't download new ones there. 4) one thousand papercuts that make the life harder for someone focused on control, chipping away at our entitlements every new release... we now have the "Not secure" labels appearing everywhere, the "your self-signed certificates are death incarnate!!!1!!!!" attitude and others.
So true! Ok, here's something painful and tangential:
SINGLE band Wifi N devices are here to stay, just like B and G stubbornly refused to leave*. I hate upgrading, but I've been itching for the goal of shutting off the 2.4 band for good ever since buying a ~$120 Dlink router in 2007!
Pure dual band is still an unreachable goal everywhere that isn't apple-centric (and you'll likely still have visitors on older phones). There's always that new phone and printer and almost every low and high end DSLR camera quietly ships with the 2.4Ghz band and lower speeds. Even if you have that ONE new device to keep around, it'll force drag you back along the rest of our neighbors in noisy 2.4 bands and away from progress for another 10 years.
* Reminds me of the manner we put up with Android 2, then 4.4, now 5 (when 8 has been around for 10 months) and IE6 and Windows XP
"You still bought it" assumes that the client was aware of the adapter minutiae at purchase time rather than unboxing time. NOPE.
When you buy that expensive smart tv, samsung phone or iPhone you do not get to choose the type of adapter --there may be some outcry when Apple changes ports to kill your historical investments, but there is only ONE Apple just like there is only one Samsung. You do not get to vote with your wallet.
So if you want the device, you buy it and sigh. There is no interchangeable parts standard for power cords like there is in PC land. Most devices (microwave ovens, washers, refrigerators, standing fans, toasters) have a single cord that you are not free to cut away safely and replace. There is also no descriptive system to find out which fat adapter orientation or slot consumption size you'll get with your device in advance (like when you freely research your AGP cards for taking 16x slots in your PC versus 1x slots).
This issue happens with most tech these days. Mid-range point-and-shoot cameras now offer some kind of Wifi option. So do most cheap phones and laptops. What they don't officially say is that they never plan to add dual-band support (and you'll need have that shameful lesser-devices 2Ghz band open for them despite the congestion). This is part of why impulse purchases and blind switcheroos are bad --sometimes even long-running research and forum questions say little about the hardware when you need something like Linux chipset support.
I pay extra whenever I can to get my devices with a built-in PSU.
I've noticed with alarm that more and more non-laptop devices are forcing these on us. Cableco boxes and smart tv shouldn't be reminiscent of laptops. The brick will likely end up hanging badly from a corner and have one of the brick-touching segments end up tearing itself. This will either stop the power transit altogether one day, or cause a short circuit.
Those plugs are designed to contain the transformer, and give it space to cool.
also to keep your derpness from plugging 12 things into a single outlet and burning your house down.
Sounds fishy. It's like saying those javascript bitcoin miners are not "designed" by lazy, greedy people and instead had an imperative to even consider keeping my computer "safe" by alerting me indirectly (via slowdowns and subtle 100% CPU results --only if someone technical knows where to look) when I get myself too many tabs mining and watching videos on multiple sites all at once.
Replace this well-known maxim so you put goodwill and profits in place of malice and stupidity: Never attribute to *malice* what can be explained by *stupidity*.
The adapter guys just design something to power their own hardware and cover their butts by leaving a subtle label saying "1.5 amps", "0.5 amps" and perhaps add the ground prong at most. Remember that time when everyone making cheap USB 3 cables that burned down non-approved devices was forced to pay for someone else's damages due to ill-advised user action? Nope
The hole here is that every product fends for itself because liability / lawsuits. Miniaturization is expensive^W^W shaves profit margins. All that they're required by law to do is done, and nothing more. Nobody designs to protect someone else's hardware except for the power strip and ATX power supply makers themselves.
Nobody babies us by even suggesting to protect your investment thru buying your own power strip. They assume you have a reliable mains power circuit brakers.
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What are the features required on the user's phone? I expected this could all be implemented on the carrier side.
It's not so simple anymore. Remember the big hoopla a few weeks ago over the emergency broadcast system? that's not just a "text" you're implementing, but something that Android and iOS must expect from the carrier, and place appropriate options for in the GUI.
I never got bothered by one of those semi-mandatory alerts on my older phone running Android 4 because there was no hardware support on the phone side and nothing the telco could do would force me, since the commands wouldn't be understood.
My breakage-replacement phone ended up being an intro-level non-Samsung Android a couple years back that happened to run the newish version 7.
I was disappointed to find that root is required to edit the system xml file that allows "ignoring" the broadcasts enabled by this government-centric carrier / OS pairing. The non-root OS allows me to disable all but the presidential alerts, for instance. Again, the feature is carefully planned some work
Then there are little things like
* GPS support for 911 calls (I recall that prior to some specific boating-related death in the US, GPS wasn't even a must on dumb cellphones)
* Wifi calling (this is stupid for the most part but makes some sense if your carrier allows one of the few rare plans with international support when you go abroad and don't want a local phone sign-up --or just have a poor signal at home and need your router)
* High Quality voice support (Not sure how much closer it is to that ol' landline quality since actual music still won't come thru like we all took for granted with our wires decades ago... it seems to require the same company on both ends for me so far, but I've had this work with a friend who uses iOS on a newish iPhone while mine runs version 7)
* Video calls from the built-in dialer app (another same-company (in my small sample-sized experience so far) but it's cool that the option is there without needing to add stupid ephemeral apps from Google's ecosystem for tracking)
That is a feature you can turn on or off. As is the even better feature "Scam Block" where instead of saying "Scan Likely" they just drop the call.
The "scam likely" marker is free and convenient, and a default on some Tmobile phones, but still manages to tantalizingly wave at your face. That interrupts a few seconds of your life, and if you're playing music or listening to text-to-speech, there's not always a smooth transition back from that. IIRC the scam "block" feature is an upgrade that requires a monthly payment [~$5?] for their "effort." It's a bit like the old trialware and demo days where all the non-stupid features were behind a paywall...
I have to answer because I'm always on call,
On call for anyone, or just the company / selected corporate customers?
You can set an audible ringtone for those in your contact list - (if the number of legitimate callers are limited) and have "silence" as the default ringtone for others.
If something goes wrong and they're missing in action for a technical failure of their own making, it's not good enough to scapegoat an employee's unexpected / secret whitelists. Blame avoidance doesn't work that way.
Being on call requires being able to handle unforeseen circumstances, including getting non-silent calls from some vicepresident* stepping in for an answer while Rome is burning on your watch.
* eg: people whose personal numbers you'd never have been allowed to know in advance... and who have all right to swap said "known" numbers without prior notice after they get a new shiny smartphone.
True, but probably around 50% of the spam calls I get are spoofed from my own NPA/NXX, presumably because it looks familiar
Mobile:
Not sure if you use a smartphone, but in mid 2018 F-droid added a "Blacklist Blocker" app (com.kaliturin.blacklist). "Blacklist" is a misnomer -- even the official description shows coverage for whitelisting or contacts-only or blacklisting. I am a new user and see that there are combinations of some of the above possible.
Setting the blacklist filter to "contains" for your 6 significant digits should help kill those obvious 10k neighbor spoofs. The "starts with" blacklist should block whole area codes, but I haven't tested if the 1 or the "+" are required in the input string --I get quite a bit of unique area codes so it'd take a long time training against the obvious, and then finding creative ways to block swathes without killing local calls from people who aren't close enough to be in my contact list yet but have received by personal business card ... or (gasp!) resume.
It would be nice if phone apps would just do a straight hangup. The voicemail door should be sacred --not completely dropping a "blocked" caller is stupid and I suspect the Android APIs are designed to be limited.
Landlines:
Fake caller ID is are bigger pain for my landline than my cell, even before finding blocking features in the past couple years. The cableco and the my expensive decade-old house phone fail to include regex support. Nomorobo's design forces a lingering single ring for blocked calls.
I've not done enough research but am fairly close to getting a combo of a Raspberry Pi plus an Obi 110 or similar model (I'm not sure if I missed any converters). Blocking neighbor calls isn't a new thing as seen a 2012 post mentioning blocking "xxx555xxxx" https://toao.net/503-blocking-...
There are some devices that force a sort Robot test on ALL non-whitelisted calls. One must manually enter "1" or some pre-configured number before the landline even rings, but some legit robocalls would be impacted and I'm not sure about multilanguage language support, and false positives / logging.
If this Tmobile thing proves to be as widespread as DKIM was for email, then perhaps in 10 years we'll be able to notice some positive changes (but predictably, better robots and human-assisted dialing will be involved)
The problem is there are getting too many competitors in the middle class market. Where it use to be just Samsung, we have Google, Ericson, LG... All jumping into that market too.
Back in 2014 I would cringe at Android phones imitating Apple and by pricing themselves at 450 to 600 without necessarily being high end.
Now they're almost double the price and missing some key features while gimmicks are added... and no public backlash occurred against those market leaders in the US, sadly.
Lots of value brands sell overseas in the third world, but there's evidence that unneeded 6"+ screens, notches and other garbage are starting to taint them too
Unlike with Vivaldi and other forks of Google Chromium, Mainline Firefox extensions are not always available on its forks and you will lose some of the more obscure functionality, needing to research for replacements.
The addons store itself sometimes leaves you without a download link and shows a silly "Get firefox" link that obscures the actual download package --this kind of misdirection is one reason I hate mainstream app store control-freaks with a passion. The situation is compounded on mobile, because you soon realize that even the standard Firefox build for Android has unexplained lack of extensions that you know by name on the desktop. Extension stores are unashamedly hiding results without any warning, but that has been a practice copied over from Android's app store silently hiding results without telling you it's your device that is getting filtered out.
I've found myself messing around with page source code, old version hunting (because you must now also deal with the 2017 Quantum split and find an elusive pre-quantum version to download from the "previous versions" link) or "hacking" the extension to lie about browser compatibility to try make the browser allow the extension anyway.
I hate the scant performance improvements of quantum and leave it as a thirtiary option or worse. Palemoon does house support for adblock, Greasemonkey, Firegestures, etc. but you will sometimes find disappointment in assuming that the fork will be treated as a first-class citizen by sites and extension markers.
So the idea that people giving notice will make employers act better has been tried and failed. The fact is, companies can and do fire people without notice or severance, so why should employees not "fire" the companies in the same way?
Funny, I have a tab open from the historical /. sidebar about 2005 slashdotters' negative consequences of resigning professionally for what was basically a considerate deed: giving your boss notice (2 weeks or more)
Maybe job ghosting is the logical next step in the arms war, though I don't condone it. Not long ago we had a post here about new hires who just did not bother with their first day. Ironically there is a dissonance as society becomes both
a) more aware of our personal lives at scale (blunders/petty crimes following you forever beyond your local neighborhood, personal life reaching your boss thru social networks or doxing )
b) and impersonal (robocalls, callcenter volume declines while SOP discourages any phone contact because they can substitute emails, websites and apps)
I would settle for the Maps functionality from Android 2.2, but at some point they started replaced AOSP offerings with proprietary Google offers to integrate and almost demand signing in to enable random features.
It's a good time to make a reminder that there are alternative apps out there. They are inferior, mind you. Maps.me I haven't used, but OsmAnd for F-Droid doesn't require the same level of payments that IIRC the Android version does. It has downloadable state-by-state maps, various configurable options, path logging and not half the onerous requirements that Google Maps enforces (the latter boldly lies about needing location services to run properly). It's clunky, though.
That refers to an Android phone. If you do all that and get malware on your Android phone, you deserve it.
HALT! These steps are the gateway to alternative other app stores when you want to avoid the malware that is GOOGLE's constant tracking. I use F-Droid and had to follow the steps --which cannot really be reversed because of the problem later on this paragraph. Others use the Amazon store and must do so too. Just cloning a trusty local APK that you are hoarding and KNOW is fine (or using an App store to do the downloading for you --same problem) fails the installation process and IIRC Google's OS itself leads you on the way to correct that: follow the "computer, disable all Holodeck safeties" steps that were described.
What looks like a willing shot in the foot to you and iOS users becomes a less deliberate choice and more of an only resort if you are managing your own installs.
You block callers not on your contact list? Right...... so when that Hospital calls to tell you that insert-loved-ones-name-here has been in a terrible accident, you're sending the call to the bit bucket?
I'd say yes. As a policy, I ignore unknown numbers. Trained professionals will leave a professional message that will not say much, but will get my attention. Family members will too, even if the message is less secure. 99% of scammers will not leave a message, because the long life of their continuing con demands that no individual mark be given the opportunity to call back at our convenience and report a long-lived landline to the police. So all voicemail is potentially true (or super-rare scams where the con points to an ephemeral website).
When someone you know is sick or dying, there will be multiple calls anyway. Your blood will not save them, so your presence will not result in a life-giving choice... more of a comfort visit. If important enough, one of the callers is going to be your mother or sibling. They will be in your whitelist our your eye will recognize those numbers. Ignoring numbers does cause frequent anger from my loved ones, but I won't budge. Appealing to an emotional plea to open a backdoor for events with a lottery-ticket frequency of, say 1 / 10,000 odds / year requires my budging 100%.
I'm not opening a front door attack-surface by picking up robocalls. They are a proven annoyance from a source programmed to call me tirelessly once per day using different fake numbers. This is like the NoScript decision to block everything because so little is worth it and we prefer manual we approve of instead of the industry's move toward relentless push of every little random notification and promo offer.
Interestingly to your point, there HAS been an increase of the presence of loved ones in the scammers' toolset in the past decade. Old folks tend to be targeted because their age and household is known public data that anyone can release with a name and address for a couple bucks online. Someone I know who is of retirement-age got a call from someone young that apparently imitated a teen acquaintance living a few thousand miles away. After a couple calls from both sides for the important-sounding accident or tragedy, something clicked before the money got lost. In trying to trace things to a culprit, they only found that the young guy in question apparently knew nothing about the tragedy when a second phone number got involved. The would-be victim concluded that either he tried to scam her and making accusations to the guardians wasn't worth it in the greater scheme of things because their families aren't all that close...or this youngsters' friends (known hooligans) posed as him. In most cases I've heard about on the web, the scam comes in the form of online dating where an enthusiastic girl overseas becomes interested in you and soon into this long-distance relationship will suffer these "unfortunate" needs and ghost the victim after they get a few thousand bucks.
Many savvy slashdotters may detect these. Pros don't target our demographic for the same reasons we don't trust in "Microsoft says you have a virus" popups and recent phone calls. Again, age-data exists that allows calling retired old folks.
But I still don't just pick up the phone for odd-looking numbers because the neural net is trained to look negatively on unsolicited numbers.
I agree with your points.
There is also a psychological toll to robocalls that we're not going to come back from --ever. We don't even pick up the phone, even for known callers sometimes. Just looking at the ringing device's phone screen is a drag when we know it's a dud 50/50.
After slowly seeing the ramp up in the past 10 years, it's hard for tech savvy people to ignore the peace-of-mind workarounds. We can switch off the ringer or go on airplane at odd hours of the day, use contact list-only whitelists 24/7...
Even if the US somehow succeeded in some way where email's can-spam act and the do-not-call lists* have failed, and call volumes return to 1990 levels, people won't bother to ever pick up again or delete their blocklists for good.
Smartphones are oppressive. There is precious LITTLE in tech which is different, sadly. I've watched in pain as more and more choices are removed from GUIs, and more and more unobtrusive power-user options are blocked claiming disuse, or needs-of-the-many... or " our 'maintaining' this mature 0.0001% of the codebase is a pain, so let's DELETE it while we add unneeded new Pocket & Friends bloat here every month" and web standards and browsers do things like blocking user agent protections from manual user choices (the anti-bookmarklet fiasco), blocking "insecure" iframes, while they push for security and privacy nightmares like webRTC's leaking your private IP, beacons, css and JS empowerment for tracking, webUSB and "powerful features", near-unblockable location and notification APIs even on desktop browsers... the stupid scrollbar devolution from thin to molecule-sized to on-demand despite our desktop and mobile screens getting *bigger*...
I digress. So when phones come with no rooting options, I am more and more painted back into a small corner. Got a too-cheap chinese phone 12 months ago that is somewhat crippled but I haven't dared to root it because the xda forums show no definitive rom to do it. Even my dead rooted LG phone required several long hours of research for me to root it 3 years ago. It WAS glorious to have control over privacy and systemwide ad blocks. Nowadays, I still can't block calls properly other than number by number, but at least ads are somewhat managed with DNS66 and disabling javascript on Firefox Mobile... and a home router where ddwrt refreshes hostfiles APK-style thanks to a cronjob on the web somewhere.
If there were some true linux in your hands option as pervasive as iOS or Android, things would be different. The ability to "patch" our crummy phones with what used to be a standard computer command just isn't there. I have to do some heavy content edits on my PC before taking entertainment on the go because there are no viable CLI or API-exposing commands on Android. If you look on the web, many one-liner solutions exist for Windows and Powershell, and even MacOS for various nuisance. But just blocking facebook's IP on mobile or "unlocking" the supported theme API requires root-like prerequisites. That's a bit like "applying this command is only available to approved|registered users".
Retaking the robocall topic I'll say that there's an ongoing experiment at my house in its 4th week. Everyone else is traveling and I unplugged the phone to see if it throws off the daily callers by flagging our phone inactive. A week ago I realized that nomorobo and other protections at the ISP level need to be disabled if I wanted ALL the callers to go not get the courtesy "you've been blocked" messages. Around the same timeframe since it was a robocall-free day (Sunday) I surfaced for about 3 hours last around 5pm. Got 2 random calls even then, so I am not holding my breath.
I also attribute the increase of smartphone robocalls to flashlight apps selling our data where personal numbers and friend data from our and their contact lists is ripe for the taking. No thanks to Google's lack of per-access UAC popups prior to Android 6. So even if I'm watching what apps I and my friends install, our numbers are already out
On a closer look after posting, I think that was the right xkcd link all along.
Thank you for the informative reply and presenting sources, Sarten-X. It's nice to continue seeing the banana-related measurements.
They pop up in tech circles often, and I like propagating knowledge of the handy XKCD chart at https://xkcd.com/radiation/
Kinda handy actually; didn't have to bother hitting pause
Thanks for the confirmation and the additional anecdote. In hindsight, a better term than "urban legend" would have been more adequate for my GP comment. I haven't experienced it myself, but can think of "known issue"... unfortunately I've been lurking lots on Hackernews and sub-consciously avoided what there would have been a sure-fire citation-needed reply :)
I laughed at the happy note on your workflow. It reminds me of what happens when software fixes this kind of thing in an un-skippable update. Couldn't find the exact XKCD I had in mind but this one is funny too https://xkcd.com/1172/
Also, tin foil doesn't work. A box lined with steel wool might be a cheep way to go. A microwave oven with the door closed also would work
Speaking of microwaves, I am puzzled as to why we consider them shielded enough for human safety --haven't done any research though. There is a kindof urban legend I've heard here from the days of wifi B and G that congested home routers sometimes drop connections whenever someone's zapping food in the nearby ovens.
More personally, owning recent tech shows motive for worry whenever I walk by an active set (2 different brands thru the years) while listening to various bluetooth devices (headphones, speakers). My audio playback starts stuttering till I walk away. So are all of them poorly shielded and leaking acceptable non-cooking radiation?
If you don't like it then don't buy one.
Until you no longer can because there is no choice at any vendor.
As your post demonstrates, today's tech industry is full of fans who don't realize they are proverbial boiling frogs. Long gone are the days of choice. We lose hardware and convenient models are retired while the prices just stall for years or rise (texas graphing calculators, anyone?).
Small form factor products (minis, tablets, phones) are a window into the PC market's future. We will be running tpm locked down OSs and mobile apps on our desktops because those are current Apple and Windows and Google goals. And we will be made to like it.
Apple just looks slightly more ridiculous doing it because they are in full dark dominatrix regalia. Her whip creates a new industry fetish from scratch every 18 months. Then we the masochists just crouch down llicking her boots and call it trendy, and she starts planning something even kinkier just to hold our attention while other attention-starved harsh mistresses copy her moves and notches. And drain our willing wallets. Did I mention there is no choice?
The walled gartden was set up shop and walled our towns in without consent, but we all just stayed willingly. We can never live this lotus eater trap. Noticing the Stockholm syndrome is hard for the victim
I'm still waiting for OLD tech to reach my phones. My home router was high end costing 125$ 11 years ago. Wifi N (draft), with the 5ghz band. My first smartphone in 2011 cost double, but was single band. A poorly researched Bestbuy laptop a year later cost 850 but lacked both the 5ghz band and bluetooth. It's on the last legs of its second battery refresh and some hardware and functions are impacted / falling apart, but I can't replace it for a newer one, especially losing Windows seven in the process.
But I digress. The current cheap Android 7 phone 1 year ago cost as much as my router from a decade earlier but the Android mfrs still don't see fit to Support the second band. On the Samsungs and LGs that do, I see the 40mhz high speed modes are incompatible, so the commoditized chips are least-effort implementations. If I truly want to hold off just to get THAT crippled version of 5ghz tech that isn't anywhere near today's Wifi AC offerings, I'll have to hybernate a long while. And sadly, I am pining for the time when Wifi 6 and/or WPA3 drafts have obsoleted anything available today for security reasons.
I am hurting for a camera replacement, but hear even AC only comes with the multi-thousand dollar DSLRs, and a handful at that. Guess I'll never be able to retire my lousy, router 2.4ghz band at this rate...
As for GPS, I only care that it cold boots quickly and not jerk around too much. My cheap phone's implementation is failing at both, and it is a pipe dream for me to expect 0-year old tech that offers little more than higher precision for the old functionality to cascade to my needy hands faster than the more functional wifi flavors. I only get satisfaction if I go out there and pay top dollar, though... but diligent research can't be ignored or you end up with a moderate midrange purchase that you consider a sunk cost, like my semi-inadequate 2.4ghz band laptop.
Apple is rolling out unfinished technology.
Not unfinished on Apple's side though. Works fine in Europe.
All that is unfinished is the U.S. carrier side, where carriers are dragging feet. I think Apple has done the right thing, which is to release it as is and let carriers start to take support calls based on shoddy or incomplete network support for what is a standard feature is many other countries...
This is informative, thanks. More examples for "perfect" is the enemy of the good, but leaving each company to implement things on their own led us to almost two decades of randomness. Prior to ubiquitous Android and Apple accounts every phone switch kept making us face the question "will my next phone support my previous one's SIM card so I can carry my contacts without manual regeneration of my address book? will it even have a sim slot?"
With this dual-sim situation we'll have another 2 decades of annoying disparate arrangements. The US yet again fosters intentional levels of functional fragmentation on phone service because of greed. From what I hear under other threads, the problem isn't extant in Europe and Asia. Standards in those lands have apparently been implemented properly all across the markets so you don't have to go "Oh, you're on $cheap_provider so I can't do $activity with you there" (though I find it weird that this perfection reportedly requires turning the second SIM into a receive-only call sink). /. historical posts also state that Europe apparently has no fragmentation when it comes to taking any regular non-premium phone / sim across the continent as you travel and just connecting it to any provider.
I am also thinking of Android fragmentation since the economics follow a similar "we the providers won't establish nor follow nice standards... they are anathema to our business models of vendor lock-in, planned obsolescence."
Numbers coming out at this particular point in history are not selfless, especially so soon after the last standard started shipping.
Numbers are ALL about an upgrade threadmill. They're trying to set us up for the camera megapixel wars all over again. Or the Chrome vs. Firefox versioning wars. Eventually you end up losing the numbers and gaining them again (Windows is a terrible example of this)
In a world where we end up with fragmentation and planned obsolescense is a system where security theater has a profitable cry for easy, mandatory upgrades. WPA 3 is coming out soon. Without real research this late into the night I'd guess that's Wifi 6 material. Except, my router is 2 versions behind. And not a single Wifi camera out there* actually comes close to version 4, if you count the 5Ghz band. I bought a cheapo Android v7 phone 12 months ago to replace my 4 year old v4.4. The latter has had lots of time to catch up, but still failed to acquire support for that band, among several other things.
Again, I don't want some kind of standards board demanding that I support Wifi N+1 lest we get disconnected because nothing really supports N-1 fully. I want people to suck it up and do it like a job posting where someone sits down and clearly states the demands, and I pick one device for the job, even if it's partly outdated. Until all new phones in a month can be guaranteed to ship on a specific version "number", I can't trust the dumbing down. After all, your Samsung Note version 9 is different feature-wise from the Samsung J's sold the same year, so no single standard should be allowed till we're ready to put the production-line where their mouths meet our wallets.
* short of 2 expensive topend DSLR models (read, not at all pocketable)
Replying to myself to clarify that I *do* agree with the GP post's apparent position that Firefox shouldn't NEED tweaking for sane defaults in the first place.
The point of software is to do things for us.
"Yes" and "no." Tools do not decide how they are used, but software is in the unique position of being heavy-handed with dark patterns when it comes to hiding defaults.
By doing things for us like Apple does, the spirit of "getting things done" is perverted by those who pretend they are the only ones capable of deciding what gets done.
Outright removing options is why all browsers are at best on my "reluctant use" list. My former "Trust" is long gone because power users do NOT get a say anymore. I have seen dozens of bugtrack submissions to Firefox and Chrome where "won'tfix" and "this works as designed" show the ridiculous nature of software failing to do things for us because "right and wrong" changes over time. It would sure be offensive if your hammer autoupdated one day and refused to continue being useful nailing anything that didn't look like a nail just because it's "wrong" or deprecated in the eyes of the designer. I know my use case, and how to protect myself.
* insecure http iframes? blocked by devs.
* running javascript scriptlets from the addressbar? blocked in some of them. Don't care to test now
They treat their power users as if they were all mindless users with no option to stop the warnings.
0) features being discouraged and then removed or chrome's requiring long command line switches that they silently deprecate on a random version upgrade.
1) pasting scripts into a console, like when you're troubleshooting? major pain on Firefox where you take it like a slave and have to use "allow pasting" because some jerks in the industry these days believe the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few requires tons of naggy handholding. https://stackoverflow.com/ques...
2) Trying to apply the fix above requires going into about:config where the browser yells at us slaves again with big fat warning at some point. It makes us humble ourselves picking "I'll be careful, I promise!"
3) injecting my own extensions into the browser? outright blocked or subverted by dark patterns. When I'm using recent versions of chrome there's a big fat warning on every startup stating the browser is endangered by my conscious choice. I'm not aware of a way to disable the warning. I have an older version of Chrome on a different boot OS where no such warning was required some years back. That version is too old to even see Google's extension store so I can't download new ones there.
4) one thousand papercuts that make the life harder for someone focused on control, chipping away at our entitlements every new release... we now have the "Not secure" labels appearing everywhere, the "your self-signed certificates are death incarnate!!!1!!!!" attitude and others.
p>Starting at $899 for the 802.11g model.
So true!
Ok, here's something painful and tangential:
SINGLE band Wifi N devices are here to stay, just like B and G stubbornly refused to leave*. I hate upgrading, but I've been itching for the goal of shutting off the 2.4 band for good ever since buying a ~$120 Dlink router in 2007!
Pure dual band is still an unreachable goal everywhere that isn't apple-centric (and you'll likely still have visitors on older phones). There's always that new phone and printer and almost every low and high end DSLR camera quietly ships with the 2.4Ghz band and lower speeds. Even if you have that ONE new device to keep around, it'll force drag you back along the rest of our neighbors in noisy 2.4 bands and away from progress for another 10 years.
* Reminds me of the manner we put up with Android 2, then 4.4, now 5 (when 8 has been around for 10 months) and IE6 and Windows XP
"You still bought it" assumes that the client was aware of the adapter minutiae at purchase time rather than unboxing time. NOPE.
When you buy that expensive smart tv, samsung phone or iPhone you do not get to choose the type of adapter --there may be some outcry when Apple changes ports to kill your historical investments, but there is only ONE Apple just like there is only one Samsung. You do not get to vote with your wallet.
So if you want the device, you buy it and sigh.
There is no interchangeable parts standard for power cords like there is in PC land. Most devices (microwave ovens, washers, refrigerators, standing fans, toasters) have a single cord that you are not free to cut away safely and replace.
There is also no descriptive system to find out which fat adapter orientation or slot consumption size you'll get with your device in advance (like when you freely research your AGP cards for taking 16x slots in your PC versus 1x slots).
This issue happens with most tech these days. Mid-range point-and-shoot cameras now offer some kind of Wifi option. So do most cheap phones and laptops. What they don't officially say is that they never plan to add dual-band support (and you'll need have that shameful lesser-devices 2Ghz band open for them despite the congestion). This is part of why impulse purchases and blind switcheroos are bad --sometimes even long-running research and forum questions say little about the hardware when you need something like Linux chipset support.
I pay extra whenever I can to get my devices with a built-in PSU.
I've noticed with alarm that more and more non-laptop devices are forcing these on us. Cableco boxes and smart tv shouldn't be reminiscent of laptops. The brick will likely end up hanging badly from a corner and have one of the brick-touching segments end up tearing itself. This will either stop the power transit altogether one day, or cause a short circuit.
Those plugs are designed to contain the transformer, and give it space to cool.
also to keep your derpness from plugging 12 things into a single outlet and burning your house down.
Sounds fishy. It's like saying those javascript bitcoin miners are not "designed" by lazy, greedy people and instead had an imperative to even consider keeping my computer "safe" by alerting me indirectly (via slowdowns and subtle 100% CPU results --only if someone technical knows where to look) when I get myself too many tabs mining and watching videos on multiple sites all at once.
Replace this well-known maxim so you put goodwill and profits in place of malice and stupidity: Never attribute to *malice* what can be explained by *stupidity*.
The adapter guys just design something to power their own hardware and cover their butts by leaving a subtle label saying "1.5 amps", "0.5 amps" and perhaps add the ground prong at most. Remember that time when everyone making cheap USB 3 cables that burned down non-approved devices was forced to pay for someone else's damages due to ill-advised user action? Nope
The hole here is that every product fends for itself because liability / lawsuits. Miniaturization is expensive^W^W shaves profit margins. All that they're required by law to do is done, and nothing more.
Nobody designs to protect someone else's hardware except for the power strip and ATX power supply makers themselves.
Nobody babies us by even suggesting to protect your investment thru buying your own power strip. They assume you have a reliable mains power circuit brakers.