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)

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...

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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 there... sadder is the fact that if I go the phone company to cycle numbers, we'll just get someone else's number. With that come the old owner's debt collectors (which are chasing after people who are ghosts for all intents and purposes), assorted robocalls... I owned a number for a decade just 1 area code digit off from that of a clothing company. Real people would mis-dial once in a blue moon. Back then, though, cellphones were untouchable by scams and robocalls. Not so for the past 5 years. And that's with my new number being on the donotcall list.

* and now the European GDPR which at least here in the US hasn't stopped what it was aiming to curtail in the data collection dept., but just added clickthru "here be dragons" warnings to delay the issue till a horror-filled future date successfully tests the law in worldwide courts

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/

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/

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?