... and why do they have applications with trackers on them?

Which means, it's urgent that more and more people realize there are alternative to the everything-on-the-phone situation they live in. And that owning one is not mandatory and should not be (by the way, politicians should also wake up).

Or if you want to play a bit, have a browser with some extension that breaks websites and show them "it doesn't work on my phone". Pranks apart, in my experience, I always got a paper menu when I asked for it.

This assumes that the host name you want has been recently queried. If it's not cached, good luck...

TL;DR: If it's not cached, does it really matter if it's offline for some time?

Long version:

If you're so popular all around that you really really want a very very short TTL, people will query all the time from all the places that "count", won't they? So it's gonna be cached.

If you're not so popular or not all around, what does it matter even if you had a very very short TTL? You're not loosing much.

> The same is true in a physical card wallet.

Except that I can mark the actual cards in some way... plastic labels work perfectly fine on credit/debit cards.

Same here... actually I think most HN submissions with an interesting title and coming from "microsoft.com" are his.

Most people outside the field don't know much about all the internals of phones, SIMs, etc., unfortunately...

Reminds me two articles about SIM cards autonomously sending SMS messages (found here on HN long time ago, probably)

https://medium.com/telecom-expert/what-is-at-t-doing-at-1111... https://medium.com/telecom-expert/more-proactive-sims-f8da2e...

Some Logitech drivers installation program (not sure which version or what product) did it too... found a file named NULL on my HD, and of course there was a BAT file with something > NULL.

I remember looking into BASIC sources to figure out how they did some things I had no idea how to do with BASIC... and finding POKE statements with weird numbers, it was looking a bit like magic... (I was probably 10 or so, though)