Kind of. If you have a dump of email/phone combos lying around then it's just a dragnet operation against vulnerable institutions.
If you're pointing out that you said "random" phone numbers, I think it's worth mentioning that the techniques mentioned in this thread can let you target your favorite million numbers, but even just having a pool of a random numbers is still valuable -- for any account you want to compromise you have a 1/10k chance of controlling the number needed. That's an annoying cost but not prohibitive even for accounts only worth pennies on average.
> As I read this, it involves sending messages from random numbers, not reading messages that get sent to random numbers?
Send and receive (since you need to know which people would respond to obvious scams). As I say that though, I don't think there's much if any benefit over the other SMS spoofing scams which just use a link as the payload.
> "if the data exists, it must be valuable" is not a particularly strong argument.
True, but that wasn't _quite_ the implied argument. People mostly view phones as private, and in 1M person hours you're likely to capture admissions of crimes, cheating, and all kinds of things. If for no other reason than pure blackmail those should have value to an adversary; the question at hand is more about how much value exists and how hard it will be to find and exploit. Private comms are qualitatively different from, e.g., the twitter firehose.
> Insider trading doesn't really work, since by hypothesis you have no idea who the people are whose messages you're reading.
I don't think that's actually a requirement. If somebody confidently asserts they're personally doing [important thing] tomorrow (as opposed to you just sniffing a text saying they think doge is going up) then that can be a strong signal that [important thing] is going to happen. Since most texts probably aren't actionable on the stock market, you probably won't get many such signals, so you can probably afford to actually look up the owners for any matches you get to double-check your hunches.
I still don't think that'd be super easy to turn a feed of texts into insider trading (some ballpark math suggests you might not get much if any actionable intelligence in a reasonable period of time even if you could sift through it), hence my lack of confidence when I proposed it, but there aren't any fundamental barriers that would prevent texts from a pool of randomly selected numbers from being indicative of stock movements.
Kind of. If you have a dump of email/phone combos lying around then it's just a dragnet operation against vulnerable institutions.
If you're pointing out that you said "random" phone numbers, I think it's worth mentioning that the techniques mentioned in this thread can let you target your favorite million numbers, but even just having a pool of a random numbers is still valuable -- for any account you want to compromise you have a 1/10k chance of controlling the number needed. That's an annoying cost but not prohibitive even for accounts only worth pennies on average.
> As I read this, it involves sending messages from random numbers, not reading messages that get sent to random numbers?
Send and receive (since you need to know which people would respond to obvious scams). As I say that though, I don't think there's much if any benefit over the other SMS spoofing scams which just use a link as the payload.
> "if the data exists, it must be valuable" is not a particularly strong argument.
True, but that wasn't _quite_ the implied argument. People mostly view phones as private, and in 1M person hours you're likely to capture admissions of crimes, cheating, and all kinds of things. If for no other reason than pure blackmail those should have value to an adversary; the question at hand is more about how much value exists and how hard it will be to find and exploit. Private comms are qualitatively different from, e.g., the twitter firehose.
> Insider trading doesn't really work, since by hypothesis you have no idea who the people are whose messages you're reading.
I don't think that's actually a requirement. If somebody confidently asserts they're personally doing [important thing] tomorrow (as opposed to you just sniffing a text saying they think doge is going up) then that can be a strong signal that [important thing] is going to happen. Since most texts probably aren't actionable on the stock market, you probably won't get many such signals, so you can probably afford to actually look up the owners for any matches you get to double-check your hunches.
I still don't think that'd be super easy to turn a feed of texts into insider trading (some ballpark math suggests you might not get much if any actionable intelligence in a reasonable period of time even if you could sift through it), hence my lack of confidence when I proposed it, but there aren't any fundamental barriers that would prevent texts from a pool of randomly selected numbers from being indicative of stock movements.