Hello, welcome to the Tuesday, November 19th, 2019 edition of the Sandcent Storm Center's Stormcast.

My name is Johannes Ulrich.

And today I'm recording from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Just a quick note today on the Storm Center.

I wrote up a quick diary based on some personal experience recently that it is more

difficult than it used to be to send SMS messages from applications. Now applications to send

SMS messages are not just used for two-factor authentication, which of course is somewhat controversial, but also a lot of

system monitoring tools or such tend to use SMS messages and usually use some kind of

API service in order to send these messages. Well, about a year ago, the FCC, the Federal Communication Commission in the US, actually

did allow carriers the right to filter SMS messages, and a few of them now have started

to restrict messages specifically if they are sent from automated applications.

So what you may experience is that your message will just not arrive.

For my own personal experience, you don't always actually get an error message from the carrier

if the message is filtered.

This is most likely going to happen if you're using as a from number, a 10-digit

long-distance number. Now, your options are to either switch to a very expensive shortcode

or to use a not-so- expensive toll-free number to send your messages from.

Some carriers, like for example Verizon, announced that they will have special A2P, as they

call it, application to person programs that will charge special, of course, higher rates

for these messages.

And users at Vogons.org, a website dedicated to essentially dealing with old and end-of-life

hardware, have noted that Intel has become pretty aggressive in removing old-bias versions for systems that are no longer supported.

...