How attached are you to your mobile device? (2025 Edition)

[Scott5114]

I will say that text messages don't feel like a secure platform (and email is only marginally better) based on the scams and phishing attempts that get through to me. Not a fan of text-based 2FA either, but some places don't give you an alternative.

That's a little like saying the postal system isn't secure because you get junk mail, isn't it?

[ZLoth]

Worth noting, my desktop PC at work was replaced with a laptop.  The idea seems to be that would take the laptop home with me so I could do work away from the office or on work travel.  Why would want to do my work from home during my off time when I haven't had to for past twenty-four years?

I've had a work laptop for multiple years. Most of the time, it was hooked up to a docking station so that I could use a 27 inch monitor, regular mouse, and full-size keyboard. Due to Covid and Adult Caretaker, I've had to work from home since 2020. I don't like it because it blurs the border between work and home environments. Yes, there have been times where I had a work emergency, plus it was my turn to work on-call overnight. Unfortunately, I had a bad manage4r who did not respect any of my work boundaries. His reputation is... not good.... around the company because of what he did to me.

[MikeTheActuary]

Why would want to do my work from home during my off time when I haven't had to for past twenty-four years?

Business continuity planning.

When COVID lockdowns hit, the US division of my employer was able to adapt with minimal headache, because it was the norm for employees to have laptops, and the network engineers had planned for the potential for everyone to be using the corporate VPN.  The lockdown announcement was, essentially, "take your laptops home, and here's how you can forward your desk phone".

Our Canadian division, however, wasn't so lucky.  Desktop PCs were the norm, as only folks who needed to travel, or who had been identified as particularly critical for business continuity purposes had been assigned a laptop, so there was a whole process of procuring laptops, scaling up the VPN, etc.

Even before COVID, there were a couple of times where a local office was shut down for various reasons (9/11, Sandy, the late October blizzard in Connecticut), and we were able to continue functioning without much of a disruption because most employees were on laptops.

Any serious computing/experimenting I do is with my 2 laptops for the most part.

FWIW, more often than not, I travel with two laptops -- one for work, and one for not-work. The work laptop is locked down, for corporate security reasons, making it impossible to keep up with personal email, etc....and even if it weren't, I prefer to keep my non-work stuff completely separate from work stuff.

Besides that, as I noted above, I prefer having a real keyboard over having to tap stuff out on a phone display.

If a trip is just for a day or two, I'll leave one or both laptops at home.  Otherwise....

Due to Covid and Adult Caretaker, I've had to work from home since 2020. I don't like it because it blurs the border between work and home environments.

However, as someone who has taken care of a disabled wife for over 20 years, and who spent a few years working part time from another city to help/keep an eye on a parent...it's been a godsend.

Also, now that I work primarily with people in the UK and India....I would hate needing to commute into an office for the occasional 6am meeting.

[Rothman]

I think I can count the times I've gotten spam text messages on one hand.

[1995hoo]

I will say that text messages don't feel like a secure platform (and email is only marginally better) based on the scams and phishing attempts that get through to me. Not a fan of text-based 2FA either, but some places don't give you an alternative.

I've always found that method particularly nonsensical in the case of mobile banking apps. If someone's stolen your phone and gotten access to your password, then sending a code via text message does nothing whatsoever to enhance security.

[ZLoth]

Due to Covid and Adult Caretaker, I've had to work from home since 2020. I don't like it because it blurs the border between work and home environments.

However, as someone who has taken care of a disabled wife for over 20 years, and who spent a few years working part time from another city to help/keep an eye on a parent...it's been a godsend.

Also, now that I work primarily with people in the UK and India....I would hate needing to commute into an office for the occasional 6am meeting.

I don't argue with working-from-home being a godsend. Once, I heard my mother fall as I was going into a online customer meeting. Fortunately, these were customers who I had excellent relations with, and were perfectly understanding while I took care of my mother, and then compressed at 30 minute meeting into twenty minutes.

On the other hand, I moved into my current home to walk to and from work, and was only able to utilize that opportunity for only a couple of months.

[Max Rockatansky]

I only ever worked from home once during the COVID years.  I'm not willingly opening the door to always being on call for work at home.  I'm also at the point of my career where I have the seniority not to be available like that.

[JayhawkCO]

I think I can count the times I've gotten spam text messages on one hand.

One hand would be full for me from messages in the past week. Survey stuff, political stuff, crypto stuff, "Hey, long time no talk" from a complete stranger stuff, etc.

[jeffandnicole]

I think I can count the times I've gotten spam text messages on one hand.

One hand would be full for me from messages in the past week. Survey stuff, political stuff, crypto stuff, "Hey, long time no talk" from a complete stranger stuff, etc.

Over the past week or two, these messages have significantly increased for me as well.

[Rothman]

*shrug*

Be careful who you hand out your number to.

[kphoger]

Did you enable text messaging within your profile? Pretty sure you have to opt in.

Profile?  What profile?  I bought a plane ticket from the American Airlines website.  Did I have to set up a profile in order to do that?

But, can you view the status of the flight via text message? Remember, I'm comparing flying from the 1970s verses now.

No, I can't view the status of my flight via text message.  But, if I'm already on the flight, then I already know its status, so I don't need to look at my phone to figure it out.

I'm comparing flying with a dumbphone to flying with a smartphone.

Funny how, with most of your responses, you are dependent on your spouse to make up for the lack of smart phone. How about those of us who will be forever single?

Believe me, the irony is not lost on me.  It did turn out that there were zero things she called me about that actually ended up mattering.  The contact tracing thing might have been, if it were still a requirement in force and if nobody mentioned it at the ticket counter in Tampico.  But, as it is, my trip would have gone no less smoothly if I hadn't talked to her at all.

For me, lots of things I could do without by phone if I really tried, but it would be an unnecessary complication.

To me, it's the expectation that everyone has a smartphone that creates a lot of the unnecessary complications.

I still don't do to-do lists or shopping lists on my mobile.

Funny, shopping lists are one thing we have switched over to the cell phone.  We plan our meals for two weeks at a time, then my wife enters them all into a site/app called Plan to Eat.  We have all our recipes loaded into the site/app, and we add new ones as we try them out.  Plan to Eat then generates a shopping list for us.  We shop at two different stores every other week, and just one store on the off weeks;  we can pin specific ingredients to a specific store, move them from one store to the other ahead of time or on the fly, or push them back a week as needed.  All we have to do after choosing our meals for the next two weeks is to remove items we already have in stock and double-check that things are assigned to the right store.  They show up on my wife's phone in the order of the aisles in the grocery store, and she marks them off on her phone as we go along.  It's awesome, and we've got a few of our friends using it and loving it too.

I suspect kphoger and I probably align fairly closely more often than not as to what we both view as superfluous gadgetry.

Probably.  I've also never used a sat-nav device in my car or owned a DVR.

Worth noting, my desktop PC at work was replaced with a laptop.  The idea seems to be that would take the laptop home with me so I could do work away from the office or on work travel.  Why would want to do my work from home during my off time when I haven't had to for past twenty-four years?  Even with work travel I haven't had much trouble finding a desktop PC if I really needed to use one. 

My take on that changed a little bit because of Covid.

My first experience with Covid was when everything shut down while we were on a mission trip in Mexico in March 2020.  When we got back, I wasn't allowed to come to work for two weeks, even though I was completely healthy.  I had to tell my boss everything I needed from my desk, then she packed it all up in a big box and left it on our front porch.  PC tower, dual monitors, binders and clipboards, everything.  Then I had to plug it all back in after we started working from the office again a few weeks later.

Then, maybe a year ago, our family got the virus for the first time, and it knocked a few of us down pretty hard.  But while I was stuck at home, an issue or two came up that I needed to solve.  Figuring out how to do that from my home computer, where I don't even have my work stuff saved, wasn't easy, and it would have been easier if someone had simply brought me my work laptop at the beginning of my illness.

I've now switched to a laptop as well, but I'm working on getting my full-sized dual monitors hooked up.  I still boot up the PC tower with those monitors every day, but it's mainly just a music player right now.

Not a fan of text-based 2FA either, but some places don't give you an alternative.

At work, I use two different 2FAs.  For one, I have a widget on the computer to generate the code.  For the other, I have the code texted to me.  I love the desktop widget because I can just copy-and-paste the code.

[JayhawkCO]

Did you enable text messaging within your profile? Pretty sure you have to opt in.

Profile?  What profile?  I bought a plane ticket from the American Airlines website.  Did I have to set up a profile in order to do that?

Well, I don't buy a plane ticket without setting up a frequent flyer account, so I have a "profile" on every single airline I fly. I'm about 90% certain that when buying a ticket from aa.com, there's an option near the end of the booking process where you can select how you want to be notified about ticket changes. I'll do a dummy booking right now and see.

-------------------------------------------------------

Edit. It doesn't look like you have the option to select how you get notified when booking as a guest. But when I go to My Account on aa.com, I get this page:

[kphoger]

It doesn't look like you have the option to select how you get notified when booking as a guest. But when I go to My Account on aa.com, I get this page:

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Sweet, thanks for looking at that.  Even when I had a smartphone, I never used it for e-mails, and I certainly didn't have e-mail notifications turned on.  So, whenever I fly next, I'll make sure to keep this in mind.

[vdeane]

Work laptops aren't just useful for work from home.  Honestly, there I times I wish I had one and not a desktop.  It would be nice to be able to type notes at meetings rather than rely on trying to decipher my (horrible, and it only gets worse if I don't have time to carefully shape every letter) handwriting.  Also, of the conference rooms that have ways to project something on a screen, almost all of them only have HDMI hookups, so if you have a desktop, you're just screwed unless you're in the one (and possibly only one) room with its own computer.

Being the tech guy was never for me.

Being a tech guy is for me, and that's why I reject mobile devices—they're toys under the control of big corporations and do not permit me to do what I need to do.

Hell, lately I've run into apps that somehow disallow you from taking a screenshot, and the OS goes right along with this like it's a reasonable thing for an app to do. Any serious OS would consider this a security violation and machine-gun the app for overstepping its boundaries—once an app has rendered something, that's the OS's to do what it wants with it, not the app's.

Reminds me of a German court case where one side argued that client-side alteration of a web page (such as running an ad blocker or using the browser's developer tools) should be considered illegal software hacking.

[Roadgeekteen]

I think I can count the times I've gotten spam text messages on one hand.

I've gotten a few, a few that I'm not sure if they are legit or spam. I have been getting a lot more spam calls lately, often from Iowa.

[hbelkins]

Hell, lately I've run into apps that somehow disallow you from taking a screenshot, and the OS goes right along with this like it's a reasonable thing for an app to do. Any serious OS would consider this a security violation and machine-gun the app for overstepping its boundaries—once an app has rendered something, that's the OS's user's to do what it wants with it, not the app's.

FIFY.

[Scott5114]

Hell, lately I've run into apps that somehow disallow you from taking a screenshot, and the OS goes right along with this like it's a reasonable thing for an app to do. Any serious OS would consider this a security violation and machine-gun the app for overstepping its boundaries—once an app has rendered something, that's the OS's user's to do what it wants with it, not the app's.

FIFY.

Yes, you're right in the end. However, my post was speaking at a technical level: A program can render all sorts of lovely pixels for the user, but if the user has another window on top of that program, well, the OS (or, on Unix the window manager, but on Windows that's part of the OS) simply won't give them to the user because the user said they didn't want them.

[kkt]

I will say that text messages don't feel like a secure platform (and email is only marginally better) based on the scams and phishing attempts that get through to me. Not a fan of text-based 2FA either, but some places don't give you an alternative.

That's a little like saying the postal system isn't secure because you get junk mail, isn't it?

The postal system charges for every piece of mail, so it's not practical to send of millions of pieces of mail with a scam only one in a million will fall for.

[kphoger]

I will say that text messages don't feel like a secure platform (and email is only marginally better) based on the scams and phishing attempts that get through to me. Not a fan of text-based 2FA either, but some places don't give you an alternative.

That's a little like saying the postal system isn't secure because you get junk mail, isn't it?

The postal system charges for every piece of mail, so it's not practical to send of millions of pieces of mail with a scam only one in a million will fall for.

But that's not the point.  People abusing a system doesn't mean the system isn't secure.  Those scam and phishing text messages arrive to your phone securely.  And, if for some reason somebody did send out a million scam postcards through USPS, then it wouldn't mean the post office is any less secure:  the mailman would deliver one to your house just as securely as he delivers your birthday cards and Christmas cards (which means he'll probably deliver it to your neighbor instead).