Dragging Telephone Numbers Into the Internet Age 239
azoblue writes with this teaser from Ars Technica, presenting a tempting suggestion for online consolidation: "E-mail, IM, Facebook, phones—what if all of these ways to reach you over a network could be condensed into a single, unique number? The ENUM proposal aims to do just that, by giving everyone a single phone number that maps to all of their identifiers. Here's how it works, and why it isn't already widely used."
It's not the same (Score:5, Funny)
Jenny, I got your number
I'm gonna make you mine
Jenny, I got your number
86.75.30.9
Re:It's not the same (Score:5, Funny)
Jenny, I got your number
I'm gonna make you mine
Jenny, I got your number
3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf
Re:It's not the same (Score:5, Funny)
You don't want to call nobody else
Send it off in an email, to yourself
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Steely Dan? Oh, I thought he fucked up the Phil Collins song.
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You, too? Last visible hop 10.226.70-86.rev.gaoland.net gaoland.net seems to be slashdotted already.
One ring to find them all, one ring to bind them. I wish had the graphics talent to rework that scene where the Nazgûl rider is sniffing the tree roots for sneaky hobbits, and his phone goes off with some super goofy ring tone. We could redo Orthanc as a wifi repeater and that eyeball as a Pringles can.
I'd rather have ca
Re:It's not the same (Score:5, Interesting)
Impress your friends with geek AND music knowledge. In addition to being the phone number in the Tommy Tutone song, 867-5309 is also a prime number. It's also a prime twin, so (I think) 867-5311 is also a prime number
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Dzubin P-1 CUR ALLOC 20193 . . .5804M
rodtsasdt llllllreport*
well yeah (Score:2)
if jenny is worth writing a song about her phone number, you just know she is a prime cut of female finery
as for the issue of prime twins, oh man, are her twins prime!
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Really? Seems to me that it factors into 5, 887, and -1
Spam spam spam... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Spam spam spam... (private# and aliases) (Score:5, Insightful)
i've thought about this before - i think what one needs is a single PRIVATE number - that never gets given out to anyone - and you have a bunch of private ALIAS/Reference numbers which you yourself point to your private number - then you only give out the aliases - and if one of the aliases gets overloaded, you pull the plug on the alias, create a new alias, and then direct that new alias towards your private number.
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i've thought about this before - i think what one needs is a single PRIVATE number - that never gets given out to anyone - and you have a bunch of private ALIAS/Reference numbers which you yourself point to your private number - then you only give out the aliases - and if one of the aliases gets overloaded, you pull the plug on the alias, create a new alias, and then direct that new alias towards your private number.
I do that in Gmail with plus-addressing. For instance, if I get spam from Simetrical+dontsendhere@gmail.com, I can just block all mail from that address. Haven't had it happen yet, though.
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Ironically, current telephone architecture is better than current Internet technology (any telephone number, anywhere, can be portable; IPs-- NOT!), and they want to "marry telephone numbers to the Internet"? Why not marry the Internet to telephone numbers instead?
People, numbers are ADDRESSES. They're supposed to imply location, otherwise, why not use a more intuitive identifier, like [you
Please no!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
All I can think of is SPAM. I understand the idea and sometimes I think it'd be a great tool (especially if you move ISP's etc, everything would move with you kind of like redirecting your real mail when you move house but with less hassle) but I consider my privacy (what little we have left in this world) way more important than having a single identifier.
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A public key specification can prevent this.
The public key is your address. Nobody knows your public key directly however, just your alias. So your alias can be an email address, your nickname, whatever.
The private key is your decrypter and the only way to access them.
(in before that spam form).
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How does what you've described prevent spam in any way?
Re:Please no!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
C'mon, if we can't convince the normals to use decent-strength passwords in their hotmail, and to stop saying "yes" to everything on Facebook, you want them to use public key crypto??
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How about using IP6? (Score:4, Interesting)
A single IP6 address could be enough for all those things.
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Do you really want to have to dial +DEAD:BEEF:CAFE:123:4567:890A:BCDE:F?
This uses a well understood system (DNS, and in the future, DNSSEC) to use the same numbers you already have to link to other online identifiers, including IP addresses. So we get all the benefits of IPv6 without having to switch everyone to potentially 39 digit addresses in their phone.
What you propose would be the death of picking up girls in bars, that's for sure. How do you propose to convince them to spend that much time writing do
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You've ferretted out our evil plan to make everyone else as unable to pick up girls in bars as slashdotters are. Bwa ha ha ha... (twirls miserable imitation of bad-guy mustache)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't want a "number" (Score:5, Insightful)
DNS (Score:3, Informative)
The ENUM proposal is essentially asking for DNS lookup as a public service run by government or other regulatory bodies. First of all, as you said, why don't we just use names? And second, I'm not sure we want public DNS run by government or regulatory bodies. We already have community-run free DNS service such as http://freedns.afraid.org/ [afraid.org] or commercial free service like http://www.dyndns.com/ [dyndns.com] or http://www.zoneedit.com/ [zoneedit.com]. If you're worried that free services would go away, a lot of domain name registries a
Re:DNS (Score:5, Informative)
I didn't RTFA, but it's not a new idea, and both you and the submitter seem to be missing the point. You can store arbitrary contact addresses in NAPTR records in DNS, so you can store email, SIP, POTS addresses, or anything else that can be represented by a URI. The other part of this is allowing reverse mappings, from telephone numbers to something less archaic.
Telephone numbers, like IP addresses, are globally unique network endpoint identifiers. They are assigned by the UN (specifically the ITU-T, which assigns prefixes to countries) and allow you to call any telephone from any other telephone in the world. The problem comes when you have an endpoint that is really a SIP account, for example. Currently, that mapping has to be done in quite a static way.
The idea of the proposal is that the e164.arpa. domain will be reserved for resolving telephone numbers to domains, just as in-addr.arpa is used for resolving IP addresses to names. This doesn't need to be government run, but it does need to be authoritative. That means that e164.arpa will be controlled by the ITU, 1.e164.arpa will be controlled by the USA, 4.4.e164.arpa by the UK and so on. You will then get a subdomain of this. Telephone companies that have large assignments of phone numbers get large ones, individuals may get a single 15-digit number. This can then map to any other resource.
It's not intended as a long-term solution. Eventually, the POTS network is going away (large chunks of it are IP internally already) and you will just use DNS to map directly to SIP, but while interoperability with the POTS network is desirable - say, for the next couple of decades - this lets people with POTS phones initiate calls to SIP phones without having to define a specific bridge or static routing. You'll dial a number on your phone, your telco will look up the SIP address and then route the call there via their bridge.
I currently have a phone number connected to a SIP address, but it only works from POTS lines because my SIP provider operates a SIP to POTS bridge. With this proposal, anyone can operate one trivially. You will just need to get an e164 number assigned to you and configure the DNS entries to point to your Asterisk (or whatever) server.
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I didn't RTFA, but it's not a new idea
It certainly is not, 1996 just called and wants their Universal Internet Numbers back (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ#UIN)
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I didn't RTFA.....
You must be old here!
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VoIP providers are in the business of running the bridge, which duplicates the functionality of telephone number to IP address mapping like ENUM. You configure the bridge to r
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This is exactly what the .tel TLD is for, and it's already live.
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For individuals, I think a number would be a cleaner approach. The overhead of DNS shouldn't be wasted on something like this when you can already associate phone numbers with contact lists on your cell phone or PDA. When I call someone, I just go to their name in my address book; I barely know the cell phone numbers of anyone in my family.
If you were at a payphone after the battery on your gadgets runs out what would you be more likely to remember, a phone number, or a dns name?
Doing the name to number mapping on your cellphone only fixes the problem from that one phone. DNS for phone numbers fixes it everywhere.
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If you were at a payphone after the battery on your gadgets runs out...
What's a "payphone"? Is that like a charging station for gadgets? Why would you need a phone number for that? Don't they take credit cards?
Some questions (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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You mean... (Score:4, Insightful)
Like a social security number or tax id?
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I was just providing an example of a numbering system for a large location that everyone in said location uses.
However, this would be silly to do IMO (like the SSN). You get owned on one account and you are owned everywhere. There are advantages to having different systems for different resources.
And (Score:2)
Tattooed on our foreheads
Why would you want to keep the telephone number? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would you want to keep the telephone number?
The telephone number is a good example of a situation where the technical factor prevailed over the human factor. Numbers are abstract and difficult to remember for most people. And since its invention we have needed to use lists to associate these numbers to things we actually can remember, such as names.
I think it will go completely the other way, and that in 50 years people will never have heard of phone numbers. The identifier will be the email address, and if I want to call someone I select that address and press "call", and a VOIP connection will be made. If I want to IM or mail, I press other buttons.
The email address is easy to remember, it has build-in identification of the purpose you want to use it for (private, business, ...), can already be used for several types of communication (mail, jabber) and is completely transparent to location
Re:Why would you want to keep the telephone number (Score:5, Insightful)
The user-friendliness of having to select something from a 150 entry drop-down or having to press every key (a different) multiple times is vastly overrated.
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And you'r not able to search the list using the 10 digit keypad on your phone?
I'm able to call noob only by pressing 666 :P
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I prefer to google a phone number and just click "call."
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Re:Why would you want to keep the telephone number (Score:4, Informative)
A number is very easy to give over the phone. Easier than an e-mail address. This as so many letters sound very similar and so.
In practice I have been giving my fax number over the phone so they could fax me their e-mail address. Works great! Particularly considering I am often working with Chinese and other Asians with sometimes very poor spoken command of English. Numbers then go remarkably easy.
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Why would you want to keep the telephone number?
Long term? You don't. But as the world moves to SIP or some other telephony solution that runs on the internet, some people in the world will be stuck for some time on a POTS exchange with a simple phone that can only dial numbers. So what if that exchange didn't have to use the normal international phone network but could use DNS to find a SIP server to route the call to directly over the internet?
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in 50 years people will never have heard of phone numbers
Considering that today, we still know of the phonograph, telegraph poles, and telegrams.... human nature and socities memory doesn't change as quickly as you think, even when it comes to outmoded technology.
X.400 all over again (Score:4, Insightful)
This is making many of the mistakes X.400 did, albeit on a smaller scale.
People want tokens that are easy to remember. Email addresses like "myname@example.com" are much more memorable than "C=US/OU=Example/FN=My/LN=Name" or "+1 234 456 6789". If someone's using this service, they're using an internet-capable device, so they can enter an alphanumeric address and don't need to remain compatible with Strowger's switch.
Cute hack... (Score:5, Insightful)
ENUM seems like the sort of thing that would happen if you got a bunch of fairly sharp techies together and told them that it was an axiomatic, foundational, truth that telephone numbers must remain relevant and central to communication. Within those constraints, they seem to have come up with a good solution. Those constraints, though, seem irrelevant. The internet, and its design philosophies, is simply better.
Been done: .tel domain (Score:5, Informative)
You mean like the .tel domain?
Why on earth.. (Score:4, Insightful)
would you use the phone number as a universally unique id?
One user might have several phone numbers, while the one phone number might have several users.
Additionally, the phone number is not portable across national borders. You can not bring your Norwegian phone number and use it with an american registrar.
Additionally users might be forced at regular basis to change their phone numbers. Me for one, had to change my phone number when I changed employer.
Database designers have known this for ages. Always assign a new unique id to any row in a table. Ids that seem unique and stable might change. Even social security numbers might change.
Oh.. Who would want all their contact info to be collected in one global system available for all?
why backword? (Score:2, Interesting)
Single person != single identity (Score:5, Insightful)
I do not want a single number, because I do not have a single identity.
I do not want my work to call me on my personal phone, so they don't have that number. But my job naturally requires some amount of phone work, so they all have *that* number. Makes sense, right?
Re:Single person != single identity (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with you completely on this notion of a person having multiple identities. I often run into other people who I wish would get the message.
At best, we need two identities. Basically, a work identity and a personal identity. (Of course in reality its quite common to have multiple work identities depending on your specific situation, but they're rarely all actually necessary.)
One thing that makes no sense to me, however, is all the people out there who use their work identity *as* their personal identity. Often these people may be the same types who "don't use a computer at home" and thus do all their computing at work. Or maybe they simply don't understand that its actually a good idea to keep them separate. Probably the only thing that'll knock them in-line is a surprise hostile layoff. (which may not be likely everywhere, but you always have to expect it as a possibility)
Re: (Score:2)
As time goes on and our culture evolves, there will be fewer people using their work identity as their personal identity for the simple reason that they've changed jobs a few times and understand what a bad idea it is. (Especially when one of those "surprise hostile layoffs" is termination for personal use of a company computer.) Becoming an employee @example.com and remaining there for the rest of your life is a quaint 20th century notion, and I'd be really surprised to see anyone under 30 (or even 40) t
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I wonder why more techno-savvy people don't get this point. A computer doesn't have to have only one network address/interface, why should people?
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Perhaps a Grand Central/Google Voice setup would be in order then. With Google Voice (previously Grand Central), I can give everyone a phone number and it will ring all of my phones. However, I can also specify some rules. For example, if someone from my work calls me on my Google Voice number, I can have it only ring my work phone and cell phone and not my wife's cell phone or my home phone. If I call the Google Voice number, it will call my wife's cell and our home phone, not my cell or work phone. S
Re:Single person != single identity (Score:4, Funny)
I do not want a single number, because I do not have a single identity.
Exactly. At home, I am a cop. In an internet chat room, I am a 15 year old girl who's parents have gone away for the weekend.
Re:Single person != single identity (Score:4, Funny)
am a 15 year old girl who's parents have gone away for the weekend.
OHAI! How do you feel about robes...and wizard hats?
Oh joy, another Universal ID (Score:3, Insightful)
that corporations, governments, and scammers, can use to track us.
Obsolete (Score:2)
Easy to remember numbers or email addresses or anything else are obsolete. Everyone uses an address book built into the phone or other device and never has to remember anything other than your name or what ever they filed it under. People almost never exchange email addresses or phone numbers. You send someone as email so they have your address. They add your phone number from caller id to their address book.
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Not only do we have directories but they all have personalised names!
My precious! (Score:2)
One ring to rule them all!
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Who will be the Sauron of this tale? Google? MS? USDoJ?
With Saruman played by Apple? Napster? TSA?
heh.
Not good enough (Score:3, Funny)
"Oh my number? Sure, no problem. Do you have a pen? Here we go: f3a9d4c1-0bff-4792-bf3b-09513ef61af8. It forwards to my home, though, so don't call too late. You can also use it to text me, or IM me. Looking forward to hearing from you!"
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Also, to save complications, we could all be given a number at birth. Maybe we could share part of our number with our parents to aid family tracking.
i.e. My first born son's number would probably be "Cletus Inda 01/05/2010" sans the caps and slashes.
Think it would work?
I am not a number! I am a free man! (Score:3, Insightful)
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Just guessing, but maybe because that was the better part of half a century ago?
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Digital stone age (Score:3, Interesting)
Reminds me of Compuserve almost 20 years ago (Score:2)
Who could forget the PITA it was to transcribe someones compuserve number, so that they can send a email later?
Hell I forgot my Compuserve number...
It almost reminds me of the old telegraph days (My office used telegraph to send message to ships). I had a telegraph number and an answer back.
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Who could forget the PITA it was to transcribe someones compuserve number, so that they can send a email later?
Or, the nightmare that was EasyLink.
Numbers? That's what URLs are for! (Score:3, Insightful)
We should rather use DNS for phone numbers, and then allow something like:
phone:cowboyneal@slashdot.org
Similar to “mailto:”.
Or one of
^(phone|voip):(//)?(cowboyneal@slashdot\.org|slashdot\.org/~cowboyneal/?)$
By the way: Why are URLs (URIs) so inconsistent?
I guess the voip and @ version is the cleanest one. But I’m not sure about the point of the “//”.
Enum: why you want it (Score:3, Informative)
I'm the author of the piece. Most comments in my opinion make the mistake of saying: I want this or that to be my identifier. Or I don't want a universal identifier.
The reality is: there are two identifiers that are on most business cards. Phone numbers and e-mail adresses. Both could be used in a much more advanced way. No matter which way you look at it the telephone number won't go away. ENUM would enable you to use it in multiple ways.
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No matter which way you look at it the telephone number won't go away.
No matter which way you look at it, the horse and buggy won't go away.
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Also, my email has an automated spam filter. My phone doesn't.
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But why would you want ENUM when .tel already does it in much more generalized way, and with encryption to boot?
The simple guide to make money online (Score:2, Insightful)
1. Join an adult affiliate network and choose a website for promotion
2.
for (enum=0;enum=OVER9000;enum++)
{
SendMessageToEnum(enum,"Hi! Check out my new website: www.chickswithdicks.com");
}
3. ???
4. PROFIT!
What we really want though (Score:3, Insightful)
I would really not want to have one number misused that would also give my email address, skype, google chat and website to everyone!
Isn't this backwards? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why, in this day and age, are we talking about NUMBERS? Do we address websites via IP address? No, we have DNS.
Why isn't there a DNS for phones? I pick a name, perhaps even something as simple and unique as MY EMAIL ADDRESS, and then anyone who knows my email address can contact me. Or, just like DNS, I can set up any number of unique names for various things (my-recruiters@gmail;) that point to some sort of numeric based phone.
You could even call it Phone Name System.
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End Times (Score:4, Funny)
I can't believe nobody's figured out that ENUM is simply the Mark of the Beast and is going to be burned into chips that will implanted in our brainstems.
ENUM spelled backwards is MUNE and it's on the MUNE that they have the secret military bases where they're going to send those of us that won't use our ENUMs.
The only thing that can save us now is when the prophesied "Woman of the North" comes down from Alaska to use her secret mental powers to organize the Wolverines(!) so we can defeat the forces of ZOG and usher in the return of Jesus and Ronald Wilson Reagan where they will reign together for 1000 years.
Don't you guys read your bibles and World Net Daily? megamerican, where are you when we really need you?
Good idea...i think (Score:2)
Seriously, I do see the advantage...of which your universal number could also become your ssn, and tie into your phone number and drivers license, even your passport, then again why stop there, you could have it easily accessible through a chip or a barcode tattoo...
wait a minute, i think i heard of this story before...link here [wikipedia.org]
Just say no (Score:3, Insightful)
Danger of single numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
A single number to identify people would be just as powerful as a SSN or driver's license number. It would make fraud so much easier. Eventually people would compile databases tying these IDs to SSNs and would distribute those online. Then we would start seeing advisories to keep your single contact number a secret!
On the positive side, perhaps this would help to convince financial institutions that simply knowing someone's SSN and mother's maiden name doesn't prove anything about identity.
On SSN fraud, and identifiers vs. authenticators (Score:4, Insightful)
A single number to identify people would be just as powerful as a SSN or driver's license number. It would make fraud so much easier.
While you are right in practice, it doesn't need to be so in theory.
On /. you are "CopaceticOpus". That is, in the slashdot universe you have a single number which identifies you. Does that make you more vulnerable to /. fraud?
No, you have a password which you use to prove that you are the person identified by the name CopaceticOpus.
The problem with SSNs is that they don't have a password.
Using a single identifier isn't a danger in itself; it just magnifies the underlying problem of not having a secure way to establish which people the identifiers identify (and which they don't).
Bit of PC in the article (Score:3, Funny)
"Using numbers made it easier to train people to operate the exchanges. (Women were chosen because their voices worked better in exchanges.)"
No Women were used because the messenger boys they replaced were proto-hackers and kept doing nasty tricks to the customers.
old news (Score:2)
This is already done. It's called an email address.
Import your gmail contacts to find new friends on facebook. this concept is applied many ways.
I already have a unique ID (Score:4, Insightful)
I already have this. Its my email address. Everything I do on the Internet is keyed to an email address.
Email is email, obviously.
XMPP for IM, uses my email address.
Facebook I don't use, I actually have a live so I don't have time to sit around and convince others that I have one or to collect friends for the popularity contest.
Phones - If I email you, you'll get my phone number. This won't be an issue for too much longer I don't think, its just going to take everyone finally going to VoIP (cringe)
So uhm, this is a solution searching for a problem I take it?
$0.02 from an XML geek (Score:2)
As far as the Spam issue many have brought up, I don't think security through obscurity is ever going to be adequate protection so worrying about the public registry of IDs seems like a waste of time- the evil marketers will only either derive your ID via brute force or buy the ID from somebody else. Using finer grained sender authentication at the user level (combined with cry
Re:$0.02 from an XML geek errata (Score:2)
Here's my number (Score:2, Funny)
Changing numbers? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Problem with Enum (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with ENUM is that the data is stored in DNS. Which means it is harvestable and intended to be cached. I don't _want_ to share my email addresses, Facebook ID, work, cell and home phone numbers and IM addresses with anyone and everyone. That's just stupid.
ENUM is a Bell-Head protocol invented before spam. It was meant to be easily mirrored between carriers, with the standard behaviour of "caller pays".
What we really need is a protocol that will ask _my software_ where the call should be sent. The software is then able to decide based on the originating details if I want to receive the call, and what endpoint/protocol it should be sent to.
That's what I want. Invidividualised call control at the point of address resolution.
Why numbers? (Score:3, Insightful)
In the really, really, REALLY old days of telephony, there were no numbers. You rang up the operator and asked to be connected to the Smith house, and the operator connected your plug to their socket.
Once that stopped scaling, numbers were used because it made looking them up on a plug board a lot faster. When automatic dialing came, that scaled similarly because you could cascade stepper relays to do the dialing.
But nowadays telephone switches have more in common with Cisco routers than they do the old gear. There's no reason that you have to number stuff anymore. The instant messaging folks - particularly jabber - are closer to what we need than the old tired PSTN numbering scheme.
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I like moving and losing a few "friends" who aren't really my friend. I suspect a few of them are happy when I relocate as well.
Is that you Osama?