Hi !
I am currently visiting Moldova and many hours after activating a local SIM card (orange) I received the following SMS. Is that SPAM or does it come from chatty? If it’s SPAM, does it make sense?
I hope you know something like this and can classify it.
Taking a guess…
It looks like the network where you are operating is a bit different.
I think it is a discovery message. A mere probe to see what type of service can be available.
That is only a guess.
Interesting. The German authorities’ secret services use a so called “Silent SMS” (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#Silent_SMS) to do a PING to the holder‘s SIM, track its localization and make a complete profile of its movement. If this is what happened in your case it’s interesting that chatty is able to detect it.
@SipMonster That’s a valid point, that can certainly be a reaction to internal communication with the provider.
I fear that @guru is right though. Of course, it would be desirable if Chatty would display the “Silent SM” like this, but I don’t know if that’s the case.
Maybe a developer can say something about it, but i belive the code of chatty contains nothing about SIlent SM.
I cloned the sources with
git clone https://salsa.debian.org/DebianOnMobile-team/chatty.git
but could not see any evidence for the handling of “type 0” SMS.
Would be important to verify and ACK this in the sources because this, detecting Silent SMS, would be another strong example for how the L5 protects your privacy. Please, @dos.
Could also not find anything in source code. Was looking 3 times and searched for “detect”, “supposed” and “invisiable”. None of those gave any code with context to this topic. I was not looking for the whole sentence to find any context related to such single words.
However, I like the idea to make invisible SMS visible in such way. Chatty just should mark it in a way that’s clear it came from Chatty itself.
How about “silent,” or “invisible” instead of “invisiable?”
All words should be present since this message has to be displayed in any way. If not in code itself than in language files. So I’m sure this function does not exist.
But I also checked “invisible”, because it could already be updated/corrected in source code.
Is is not present in the source code because this is the content of the SMS.
I could found exactly one person with Google who had the same message with the same incorrect spelling: https://gasetes.blogspot.com/2020/05/1090-this-is-detect-sm-its-supposed-to.html?m=1
You can translate it with Google translate. The person also does not know why this occured. Silent SMS is possible, it could also be some provider configuration thingy.