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The Route of a Text Message (2019)
[Note: Find the more polished, professionally illustrated version of this piece at Motherboard|Vice!] This is the third post in my full-stack dev (f-s d) series on the secret life of data. This ins…
7 (SS7) are a set of protocols used by cell phones to stay in constant contact with their local tower; they need this continuous connection to know when to ring, to get basic location tracking, to check for voicemail, and communicate other non-internet reliant messages. As Richard Feynman eloquently put it in 1983, it’s a bit like the cell tower is a little blind bug resting gently atop the water on one end of a pool, and based only on the frequency and direction of waves that cause it to bounce up and down, it’s able to reconstruct who’s swimming and where. The friendly marketers at Samsung call my screen a Super AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode) display, which is somehow both redundant and not particularly informative, so we’ll ignore unpacking the acronym as yet another distraction, and dive right into the technology.
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