idk where to really put this (might turn into a blog post later or something). it’s what you might call a “hot take”, certainly a heterodox one to some parts of the broader #fediverse community. this is in response to recent discussion on “what do you want to see from AP/AS2 specs” (in context of wg rechartering) mostly devolving into people complaining about JSON-LD and extensibility, some even about namespacing in general (there was a suggestion to use UUID vocab terms. i’m not joking)

1/?

  • blaine@mastodon.social
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    2 months ago

    @by_caballero @trwnh this would work except for the specific way that number portability is implemented. 😅 At least historically, and very likely still today, the “database” used to map phone numbers as assigned by exchange blocks (i.e., to a given carrier) to phone numbers that have been ported to a different carrier by the customer (under number portability laws) was a set of spreadsheets synchronized by FTP at intervals. Access to said “databases” is entirely contractual.

        • blaine@mastodon.social
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          2 months ago

          @[email protected] @[email protected] since tel: is extremely fraught, especially nowadays with insane phone spam etc, a Signal/WhatsApp/etc address might be a good alternative example?

          I particularly like the “established encrypted messenger” example because the wf->[rel=messenger]-> lookup could get Fedi encrypted DMs “for free.”

          (obviously lots I’m glossing over that make it more complicated, but in theory it’d be less complicated than many alternatives)

          • blaine@mastodon.social
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            2 months ago

            @[email protected] @[email protected] (one thing to note is that it’s not possible to declare an alias, e.g. a phone number in a wf or other profile, and then use that alias in reverse as a way to look up the original profile. I mean, one could do it, but with questions of identity at play it would be an incredibly very extremely bad idea to do that from every conceivable security perspective.)