That's just about the most insulting and belittling tagline that could possibly be chosen for this. The man put children in cages, lost them, and thinks that climate change is a hoax invented by China and disproven by snowfall.
Come on now. We all, left and right, agree that Trump is worse than robocalls.
> We all, left and right, agree that Trump is worse than robocalls.
I'm having trouble imagining Republicans have have >89% support for robocalls, so I have doubts of your proposed left-right consensus on Trump vs. robocalls.
Are you referring to me? The article's author is clearly the troll here! The only thing above the fold is a statement baked in hateful ideology, clearly meant to anger and upset the readers. I'm not the troll here, I'm standing to defend basic human decency.
> I'm having trouble imagining Republicans have have >89% support for robocalls
Really? Why though? I would assume they do. Robocalls are the maximum free-market ideal communication / ad mechanism. Aren't Republicans constantly trying to get less regulation in the US? Constantly removing laws around protecting consumers from this stuff?
I would assume most Republicans are in favor of Robocalls.
I sure don't. I'd like to, but most Republicans seem to want me to die. They vote out the very existence of people like me, denying our right to safety and to live as freely and openly as they do. So it's quite scary, talking in person with people who encourage me to commit suicide based on my beliefs or identity, and even pass laws that seem to serve no purpose but to cause pain to others.
I'll be here to talk to Republicans, or anywhere really. But they'd have to meet halfway and stop the intentional causing of pain on minorities before that can happen.
The last time I sat in a restaurant with Republicans they both encouraged me to stop breathing and kill myself, because "that would be the best thing for the environment right?" as I wouldn't be exhaling CO2 any more. No thanks. I've tried hard but it's too dangerous.
he didn’t lose any of them. the ones that are “lost” are with guardians related to them that refuse to answer the phone because they are probably illegal. look it up
What confuses me about this is that Apple could solve this in two seconds by allowing contact whitelists where only incoming calls in your contacts are accepted and everything else is sent to voicemail or dropped.
Is there a law against this or something?
Nomorobo, Robokiller, Hiya all do an okay job as blacklisting applications but that seems like the wrong way to go about it.
Some suggest using do not disturb to do this, but that blocks all notifications (including from texts) so it is not a viable solution.
Voicemails are still annoying, I have a red alert badge on the home screen and have to go in, check that it's not real, and delete it.
Would love to be able to junk filter incoming voicemail based on the transcript. Anything with "card services calling about your credit card account" or "qualify for a medical grade back or knee brace" goes straight to trash.
Of course that only works for a few months until scammers adapt and somehow make their calls less understandable to the speech to text or vary up their script more often, but we fought the same battle with email and seem to have done pretty well. Couldn't say when the last time I got a spam email in my inbox was.
I downloaded an app that automates the process of disabling voicemail entirely. I don't need it. Anyone whose call I miss can just send me a text or email.
Unfortunately, I don't _think_ this propagates to other Apple devices that are set to alert you to incoming calls. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong on this).
You'd still miss out, like with the surgeon's example of a patient calling.
It doesn't need a technological solution at all. In the UK and Germany, there were some calls, but it was rare, not even once a month. Do-not-call lists are enforced, and e.g. the ICO can fine directors of companies, not just the companies. Reporting nuisance calls can be done on a website, immediately.
Then again, in the US, everything requires a phone number, which is problem number 1, even having mail sent to my house. Why exactly? Second, I would pay for a wildcard phone number service that forwards to my mobile, and lets me track leaked info like I do with wildcard email domains.
The UK system is good, but there are still robocalls and scam calls occasionally.
If you can make your scam calls from a foreign telephone network with spoofed caller ID, or your scam is good enough you can profitably do it from prepaid anonymous SIMs, regulators claim they're powerless.
Agree, there's still room for blocking tech. Blocking calls from outside the country is simpler though.
I still think privacy laws are more effective. The only time I've had really bad robocalls was when I transferred a domain. Now, ICANN are muppets and wilfully ignore GDPR et al. Okay, so WHOIS "protection", right? But insultingly, transferring domains doesn't work with WHOIS protection, and you need to supply a real number.
(Oh well, at least in the UK I can still buy pre-paid SIM cards with only cash in every major supermarket chain.)
> Then again, in the US, everything requires a phone number, which is problem number 1, even having mail sent to my house. Why exactly?
So they have the option to SMS-spam you and resell your info (thus creating robocalls), of course. Even the coffee shop near my office wants me to register with them for a "rewards card" now. It's disgusting.
I'm in the UK, and while it's true that almost all calls from within the UK have ceased, I still periodically get a lot from outside of the UK. Usually they seem to be from India, and are pulling a tech support scam, claiming to be from Microsoft, my ISP, BT etc
Patient calls surgeon's professional number, and their office switchboard forwards it to the surgeon from the "Incoming Patient Call" number, which is whitelisted in the surgeon's phone.
Why would a patient be dialing their doctor directly, anyway? Any reason I can think of would still allow for the physician to whitelist that person in their contact list. Most of the time, the doc would probably want the call recorded and transcribed for the medical records, and also billed to the patient's insurance as a patient consultation. A direct call couldn't do that without an app to help out.
All of the "business" contacts in my phone are for the main dial-in number for a company. I don't need to dial direct to Joe the mechanic or Trudy in accounts receivable or Jean-Pierre on the help desk. The business's automated switchboard can enforce business hours and vacations, and still connect me to whomever I need to speak to for that call. And if an employee needs to contact me, they don't even need to know my phone number. They can speed dial the company employee outbound number and punch in my work ticket number, and be connected automatically, from the company number. The identity authority is delegated to the individual business, instead of the proven-untrustworthy phone company.
It isn't that difficult for a business to set up their own call-management server these days.
We found out that a business we asked to call us shows up with no caller id, it was because of Google services. Plus in many cellular networks its not common for the caller id information to be passed.
While I would like more tools on phones by various providers this problem as a whole needs to be solved by those routing the calls. How that works I don't know, I always thought ANI was the end all solution but IP calling circumvents that?
I've been saying for a while that Phone UX on our handheld computers is an amazing mistake. There's no other application on any computing device that we allow to be an uneasily dismissable, focus stealing modal with sound alarms in 2019. Sure, phone calls have historical weight behind them, but it is past time to rethink the UX for current usage.
If you want to see how good UX can be on a mobile device, download Microsoft Remote Desktop for android and remote into a Microsoft Windows Server instance. I just want that experience, though preferably with a Linux system, that happens to have a "phone" application.
Microsoft Lumia 950 got incredibly close to being a "desktop" phone. Continuum was ahead of the curve. It was really cool being able to Miracast to any capable screen and expand the phone out onto a larger screen, even if you still only had access to "mobile" apps on that larger screen, most just worked fine. Add a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse for even more of a "desktop phone" experience.
The interesting part too is right now people are playing with Windows 10 on ARM on the Lumia 950 hardware (which is supposed to be a generation too old in ARM processor, but seems in practice to work just fine). The latest Windows 10 on ARM builds have x86 emulation and Win32 support and suddenly you also have access to 32-bit Windows apps going back forever on the device. (One video has someone load up even Steam and Fallout 1 on that hardware.) So they truly are "desktop" phones today, just maybe too late for that to be useful to phone market.
> What confuses me about this is that Apple could solve this in two seconds by allowing contact whitelists where only incoming calls in your contacts are accepted and everything else is sent to voicemail or dropped.
Now you missed the reminder from your dentist, a call from that relative whose new number you forgot to save, and you have 600 recruiters and other stale business contacts in your address book because you wanted to hear from them but you're still getting spam calls because the spammers were smart enough to start spoofing numbers like the local utility companies for your area code.
There are many technical fixes which sound good until you think about what an adversary with a profit margin would do to work around them. What will work is fixing the underlying telephone system so Caller ID / ANI are reliable enough to use for filtering and law enforcement. The major telephone companies didn't want to spend the money last time, and they profit from all of these calls now, but if it became a regulatory requirement that would change.
… and? The point is that trying to maintain a 100% accurate list of numbers from which you want to receive calls from is a non-trivial amount of work AND it's useless as long as the spammer can just forge the number of someone legitimate.
In my experience, the robocallers are more likely to leave voicemail. You just get the first 10 seconds of their recording chopped off and the rest in your mailbox. So now you've just moved your issue from live calls to having to check your mailbox periodically to see if there's anything important mixed with the spam. Plus the added possibility that a legit caller doesn't leave a message, and something important gets delayed due to an inability to contact you.
I don't care about any of those automated reminders (most come via text and email anyway). In my solution they'd also go straight to voicemail which is fine.
It'd give me the power to cull down my contacts to what I want and solve the problem.
Neighborhood spoofing is an issue, but if you have a pretty clean contacts list they're unlikely to get an exact match.
The outfits doing this don't tend to be the wealthiest and won't be spending insane amount of money with Google anyways since they're relying on phone advertising.
And anyways, Google isn't some new organization struggling to keep the lights on. They're pretty far in the black and they can afford to forgo a little bit of revenue if it means they can improve their product moat.
Our company actually has a really good view into where robocalls are coming from and what they are doing because we own a tremendous amount of phone numbers in the US (100s of thousands - millions at peak). We can basically see when this is happening and a robo-caller is targeting an area code, zip code, state, etc...
When we get called from a number we don't know we used to simply reject the call. Now, as of this week, we are publishing the metadata to a kafka topic so that we might be able to do some post-processing on these events which might help identify these robot callers earlier. We've already learned that the volume of robo-calls decreases dramatically on the weekends.
The hope is that we'd at the very least learn something about how they operate but at the very best possibly provide an api that allowed people to check if a number was currently considered a robo-caller or if their city, state, zip was currently under attack. That way, for example, the makers of robo-killer, etc... could provide better protection. Perhaps we could even create a live map of the attacks.
I'll follow up when we do and post something to HN.
So, AFAICT, Hustle provides a service that's nearly as bad as robocalls. From their front page: "Hustle works because people read and respond to texts—and to communication that feels more human." So it's a bait and switch, just like a robocall: you contact me in a way that makes you feel personal, approachable and reasonable to me so that you can gain my attention.
Look, try to see this from my perspective. Without saying anything about the honor and motives of those behind Hustle, it's like I'm being attacked from all sides - Facebook, Robocalls, and now Hustle - to gain my attention. This has always been the case, perhaps, but our modern technology – coupled with a knowledge of human psychology – is a powerful tool (weapon?) for gaining access.
Here's an idea: I don't want to be assaulted all the time via the always-on electronic device I have in my pocket!
I still want to have access whenever I want it. Maybe I can't have it both ways?
I am currently being hammered by robocalls, in relative terms at least.
I can't remember the last time I got an unsolicited text.
An anecdote to be sure, but I don't hear anyone complaining right now about unsolicited texts, so it doesn't seem like Hustle is the problem.
"I still want to have access whenever I want it. Maybe I can't have it both ways?"
You can, actually, and it isn't that hard. I have a strict "one strike and you're out" policy with my apps; if I see a notification I don't want, I either fix the notification preferences in the app right away, or if the app doesn't permit what I need, nuke the app's ability to notify. My phone is pretty quiet.
> I can't remember the last time I got an unsolicited text.
There's some bullshit law that allows political parties to harvest voter telephone numbers in my state, so I get pummeled by unsolicited text messages from political campaigns.
For the ones that actually have a human on the other end monitoring it, replying with 'I cannot vote, I'm a felon' (regardless of what the actual law is for voting and felons in my state) is a good way to get them to leave you alone.
You're going to quickly find that the robocallers (that don't spoof their number) only use numbers for a very short period of time before moving onto another number. Then you'll have legitimate numbers that you've never seen before all of a sudden start blasting out calls such as school delay/cancellation calls and community crime/amber alerts.
This has made me so frustrated with my phone. I see it as only an entertainment device at this point and only use the phone with a small select group of people, rejecting all other calls as its gone insane.
Shoutout to Google and their "Screen Call" feature in android. I screen every call from an unrecognized number. If I see it's my Doctors office I pick up. If not, mark as spam. I can do this in the middle of a meeting without interrupting anything.
Hiya handles this for me so it's not a problem https://hiya.com/. It will block spam calls and whitelist contacts. It's kind of annoying that the caller can still leave a voicemail but at least you don't get bothered by your phone ringing.
Haha. 10 years ago the carriers were flogging the voip ISPs over putative origination fraud and _robocalls_. Lots of us in the industry proposed solutions(mine)[1]. We also built some interesting and very effective ML systems to detect the originators in real time.
Here we are 10 years later no further down the road. Sad.
Lots of feel good ideas in the post, but no actual good ideas. Back when Congress created the Do Not Call Registry, and then forced law abiding companies to pay $10,000 for it, they pretty much just compiled an amazing list of active phone numbers that non-law abiding companies could acquire for a pretty good price and then sell them in batches to smaller companies that couldn't afford the full thing.
Once virtual phone services were invented, companies didn't even have to worry about dodging the Feds, they just moved all their operations overseas. Feel good laws will not solve this problem, it's going to take actual technological solutions.
Between this and email, I wonder if we need to start over with an opt-in system for contacts. I know that brings in a whole mountain of other problems. But maybe if we slowly adapted to that rather of the mountain of problems with our current blacklist (if that) approach, the outcome will be preferable.
- opt-in (just you)
- referrals (some of your friends)
- delegation (a business you trust to do screening)
- reputation (some segment of society you care about)
- free for all
I have a really tough time comprehending why it is such a difficult problem to solve. The FCC could have solved it by now, independently of congressional legislation, considering the fact that they regulate the issuance of phone numbers. Those overseas companies still have to get their US phone numbers from an FCC regulated body.
1) Most of the spam calls are spoofing numbers, so it doesn't really matter who issued the numbers.
2) Spam calls could come from overseas numbers instead, I've certainly gotten a few. I'd rather they come from US numbers, so at least when people call back, they're not paying an arm and a leg for the call if they don't realize the number is non-US.
#1 is a key point here, and understanding it is essential to solving this problem once and for all. It's not just caller ID that they're spoofing. PSTN works a bit like the internet: there are "good faith" peering agreements between telephone companies, and they rely on each other to report truthfully where a call is coming from.
However, there are many companies, especially overseas, that either deliberately shirk these duties or simply lack the funds, technology, and infrastructure to authenticate the sources of telephone calls. The result is something akin to IP address spoofing.
Without imposing major infrastructure overhauls on foreign nations, there's little the US government can do to eliminate these problems.
Here in the UK, nowadays almost all robocalls and scam calls are coming from outside the UK. Mostly India as far as I can tell (they've sworn at me in Hindi).
The massive global installed base of ss7 phone system/pstn equipment nobody wants to pay to replace or upgrade. Most solutions to securing ss7 or authentication of call origin require new custom software extensions built on top of something that is mid 1980s technology.
SS7 is from an era when big phone companies all trusted each other and interconnected without any of the modern crypto or authentication built into a modern network.
My guess is that it's a motivation problem. With email there was a huge motivation for email providers to fix spam. Email providers don't make money based on the quantity of emails sent and it's a well functioning market. The cost of moving your inbox to another provider is pretty low and there are many competitors. Contrast to this problem: telcos make more money if more calls get placed; there aren't many alternatives; barrier of entry to the market is very high; switching provider is painful; you cannot just try a different telco like you could for email.
What you are missing is, the people abusing the phone number are typically not the owners. For example you can get a phone number from Twilio for $1/mo, and spam people from it. Just like you can upload a copyrighted song to YouTube, or download an MP3 from your ISP-provided internet. Owning the "platform" puts some responsibility on you, but it's not expected that you can stop ALL bad activity in its tracks.
What can be done though, is monitoring for massive calling patterns at the PSTN level, but big telcos are not interested/incentivized in stopping Robocalls because it generates a lot of $$ when the calls travel over the legacy phone network.
When Twilio gets a $100k fine for abuse of the $1/mo number, they'll govern the behavior of their customer better and probably eliminate 80% of the bad actors in hours. You could also modify the regulation of interstate carriers to make it expensive to spam entire exchanges with junk calls, or even require licensing to utilize the PSTN. (Which allows you to punish licensees for bad behavior.)
These are all solvable problems, big companies respond quickly to sticks and over time to carrots.
That's bullshit. Telcos can stop it on a dime but they don't because they profit from it. We just need regulation with teeth. Your attitude that only "innovation" can save us and we should get rid of regulators is what led us to where we are now.
Verizon has my cell phone in some kind of trial for a new service that's supposed to filter out robocalls.
They'll want to charge me for it soon, I'm sure. I'm betting that as soon as the trial is up (one that I never asked for, btw) that the number of bogus calls will skyrocket, and I'll be forced to whitelist.
My response will be letters to the FCC [nothing will happen] and the FTC [nothing will happen]. Companies and powerfully-placed individuals make a lot of money from these calls. I don't know how difficult the ESS-level work is for call filtering, but fixing the landscape of corrupt practices is a LOT harder.
Sounds like you've been opted-in to a trial of SHAKEN/STIR[0], which is a new government mandated technology that phone companies have to install to block robocalls this year. I believe it will be free to all because it will be required by the gov.
"I believe it will be free to all because it will be required by the gov."
This is an industry that already sticks in "regulatory compliance" fees. Why would you think they'd make it free when they can charge you for it with no way to opt out of the fee?
I'm currently working on a tool that would force callers to answer a small math problem (similar to a CAPTCHA) before the service would forward the call to you. Effectively robot call screening. https://callshield.io/
I've always been impressed with how professional they sound. I want to know where is this seedy marketplace of robocall scam companies and desperate voice actors.
Is this generating a lot of revenue for the service providers? I think it must be or they wouldn't allow it to go on. Surely if one provider marketed themselves as blocking robocalls, they would get a large influx of business.
IIRC one of the main selling points of gmail when it started was that it had a much better spam filter than other services at the time.
Phone companies are required to connect all phone calls in the US. So they can't really do anything about it. Spam callers can go to any disreputable carrier and all other carriers have to connect their calls.
There was actually a really weird phone scam going back a while that was just making calls that tried to keep people on the line as long as possible to make money off of the interconnect fees companies can charge each other.
Been experiencing robocalls too. I use Hiya, but it's not a complete solution. Now I just let every call I don't recognize go to voicemail unless they call twice. It really sucks for the elderly, the sick, and the otherwise vulnerable because they're more desperate to hear from a doctor or caretaker or somebody without saved contact information / less technically savvy or on a landline / otherwise more likely to fall to these scams.
I'm wondering, is VoIP easier to call block than general call service? If it is, the inability or unwillingness by the telecoms to address this issue might prove to be a systemic disadvantage (though I'm pretty sure they make most of their margin nowadays from selling cellular data).
I used to do what you do and let the call through if they call back. Sometime in the past year I've gotten on some autodialer list that will hit me up 6 times within a 30 second period if I reject the first call, so now I pretty much have to send anyone not in my address book straight to voicemail. It's not convenient, but at least I don't have to conduct a lot of business over the phone anymore.
Agreed. Ever since I moved my number to Google Voice, I was able to create an "Accept Calls" white list. It was even easier since my contacts were already in Google.
interesting. my robocall numbers dropped significantly when I stopped forwarding my google voice number to my phone. I still get the voicemails, missed call list, and texts when I log in to the voice portal, and get to see what I missed - they just aren't going to my phone anymore.
I just realized since moving to Vietnam and getting a Vietnam number, no more robocalls. Zero. Nilch. Maybe everyone in the U.S. should buy a sim card from a poor international country for a few months time. If enough people did this, I bet the feds would magically find a solution that starts to work.
I'm a long time user of "Should I Answer" Android app which is a godsend. It works by allowing people to categorize numbers that called them, so next time number X tries to cold call you or scam you, you get overlay with sign that's probably a nefarious or at least spammy number.
What I don't quite understand is, how can the NSA and/or other three letter agencies reliably collect meta data on calls and how can the telcos reliably charge for calls and services, yet we are unable to stop robocalling...
Legally carriers are required to connect all calls in the US. That provision is pretty important but leaves the system open to abuse. I hope we can find a way to block out robocalls without allowing the phone system to balkanize.
Federal law also says you can't sell marijuana. However the government has pretty much decided to not prosecute that for some time. In general it's hard to believe that any law such as that would not defacto allow an exception for what can be shown as an abusive behavior. Under the theory that the law says 'you are required to connect all calls' you could say that carriers could not legally block someone who keeps calling a phone number in an abusive manner (with or w/o the permission or at the request of the customer).
The big companies aren't going to move until they get some guidance on where the line between blocking some numbers and systematically blocking numbers deemed to be 'abusive' based on the companies own criteria. Of course today you can request specific number be blocked from calling you of course but no one is currently trying that because the dangers of crossing the blurry line can be severe.
Your comparison isn't much more useful than 'prosecutorial discretion exists therefore do any crime you want.' Multibillion dollar companies aren't going to just go out and blaze a trail like that. We even see this in the (spurious) comparison to marijuana, the first companies to step out and test the state vs federal divide were small and local and only after those companies figured out some of the issues did we get large and larger companies coming in. (Though they're still all independent arms because of the difficulties accessing banking because of the federal laws still in place!)
What an absolutely moronic way to make a point by taking a dig right off the top at the President by saying "Finally, something worse than Donald Trump".
Just an observation, unless Congress includes political calls in this legislation then I am not truly impressed. They are no more welcome to call me than the knee brace lady is.
Just because I voted in an election; and why do they know which party/who I vote for; does not give them the right to call me. I don't care if they are in office or not.
Yeah, I noticed that the bill was called "Stopping Bad Robocalls", implying that there are "good" robocalls too, and I knew immediately that it wouldn't help with the political ones.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadThat's just about the most insulting and belittling tagline that could possibly be chosen for this. The man put children in cages, lost them, and thinks that climate change is a hoax invented by China and disproven by snowfall.
Come on now. We all, left and right, agree that Trump is worse than robocalls.
I'm having trouble imagining Republicans have have >89% support for robocalls, so I have doubts of your proposed left-right consensus on Trump vs. robocalls.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ra...
The author is the troll.
Really? Why though? I would assume they do. Robocalls are the maximum free-market ideal communication / ad mechanism. Aren't Republicans constantly trying to get less regulation in the US? Constantly removing laws around protecting consumers from this stuff?
I would assume most Republicans are in favor of Robocalls.
I'll be here to talk to Republicans, or anywhere really. But they'd have to meet halfway and stop the intentional causing of pain on minorities before that can happen.
The last time I sat in a restaurant with Republicans they both encouraged me to stop breathing and kill myself, because "that would be the best thing for the environment right?" as I wouldn't be exhaling CO2 any more. No thanks. I've tried hard but it's too dangerous.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Is there a law against this or something?
Nomorobo, Robokiller, Hiya all do an okay job as blacklisting applications but that seems like the wrong way to go about it.
Some suggest using do not disturb to do this, but that blocks all notifications (including from texts) so it is not a viable solution.
People have phones that are not smart phones.
Caller ID is frequency faked.
Would love to be able to junk filter incoming voicemail based on the transcript. Anything with "card services calling about your credit card account" or "qualify for a medical grade back or knee brace" goes straight to trash.
Of course that only works for a few months until scammers adapt and somehow make their calls less understandable to the speech to text or vary up their script more often, but we fought the same battle with email and seem to have done pretty well. Couldn't say when the last time I got a spam email in my inbox was.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.teltech.nov...
All unanswered calls get forwarded to it.
I get an email mp3 of voicemails.
They don’t get deleted. And I can still access my voicemail easily if i’m Overseas or need to reference them in the future.
Costs about $1/month.
And for people I really don’t like... I just hand out that straight to voicemail number.
- Pay $1.99 to buy a silent ringtone from the ringtone store.
- Make that your default ringtone.
- Give everyone who you want to be able to call you an audible ringtone.
I would refuse to do that on principle.
- Phone calls still come in and take over the phone
- I can't use vibrate anymore? Now I have to use audible rings?
It doesn't need a technological solution at all. In the UK and Germany, there were some calls, but it was rare, not even once a month. Do-not-call lists are enforced, and e.g. the ICO can fine directors of companies, not just the companies. Reporting nuisance calls can be done on a website, immediately.
Then again, in the US, everything requires a phone number, which is problem number 1, even having mail sent to my house. Why exactly? Second, I would pay for a wildcard phone number service that forwards to my mobile, and lets me track leaked info like I do with wildcard email domains.
If you can make your scam calls from a foreign telephone network with spoofed caller ID, or your scam is good enough you can profitably do it from prepaid anonymous SIMs, regulators claim they're powerless.
I still think privacy laws are more effective. The only time I've had really bad robocalls was when I transferred a domain. Now, ICANN are muppets and wilfully ignore GDPR et al. Okay, so WHOIS "protection", right? But insultingly, transferring domains doesn't work with WHOIS protection, and you need to supply a real number.
(Oh well, at least in the UK I can still buy pre-paid SIM cards with only cash in every major supermarket chain.)
So they have the option to SMS-spam you and resell your info (thus creating robocalls), of course. Even the coffee shop near my office wants me to register with them for a "rewards card" now. It's disgusting.
Why would a patient be dialing their doctor directly, anyway? Any reason I can think of would still allow for the physician to whitelist that person in their contact list. Most of the time, the doc would probably want the call recorded and transcribed for the medical records, and also billed to the patient's insurance as a patient consultation. A direct call couldn't do that without an app to help out.
All of the "business" contacts in my phone are for the main dial-in number for a company. I don't need to dial direct to Joe the mechanic or Trudy in accounts receivable or Jean-Pierre on the help desk. The business's automated switchboard can enforce business hours and vacations, and still connect me to whomever I need to speak to for that call. And if an employee needs to contact me, they don't even need to know my phone number. They can speed dial the company employee outbound number and punch in my work ticket number, and be connected automatically, from the company number. The identity authority is delegated to the individual business, instead of the proven-untrustworthy phone company.
It isn't that difficult for a business to set up their own call-management server these days.
No you wouldn't. It would go to voicemail where they could leave a voicemail. Then you return the call if you want.
Common sense? In what universe is that a solution?
While I would like more tools on phones by various providers this problem as a whole needs to be solved by those routing the calls. How that works I don't know, I always thought ANI was the end all solution but IP calling circumvents that?
Enough information for them to bill my provider, but not enough to let me know who’s calling.
Did anyone ever make a "desktop" phone?
The interesting part too is right now people are playing with Windows 10 on ARM on the Lumia 950 hardware (which is supposed to be a generation too old in ARM processor, but seems in practice to work just fine). The latest Windows 10 on ARM builds have x86 emulation and Win32 support and suddenly you also have access to 32-bit Windows apps going back forever on the device. (One video has someone load up even Steam and Fallout 1 on that hardware.) So they truly are "desktop" phones today, just maybe too late for that to be useful to phone market.
Now you missed the reminder from your dentist, a call from that relative whose new number you forgot to save, and you have 600 recruiters and other stale business contacts in your address book because you wanted to hear from them but you're still getting spam calls because the spammers were smart enough to start spoofing numbers like the local utility companies for your area code.
There are many technical fixes which sound good until you think about what an adversary with a profit margin would do to work around them. What will work is fixing the underlying telephone system so Caller ID / ANI are reliable enough to use for filtering and law enforcement. The major telephone companies didn't want to spend the money last time, and they profit from all of these calls now, but if it became a regulatory requirement that would change.
These are the types of people who leave voicemails. Robocallers are not...
It'd give me the power to cull down my contacts to what I want and solve the problem.
Neighborhood spoofing is an issue, but if you have a pretty clean contacts list they're unlikely to get an exact match.
And anyways, Google isn't some new organization struggling to keep the lights on. They're pretty far in the black and they can afford to forgo a little bit of revenue if it means they can improve their product moat.
When we get called from a number we don't know we used to simply reject the call. Now, as of this week, we are publishing the metadata to a kafka topic so that we might be able to do some post-processing on these events which might help identify these robot callers earlier. We've already learned that the volume of robo-calls decreases dramatically on the weekends.
The hope is that we'd at the very least learn something about how they operate but at the very best possibly provide an api that allowed people to check if a number was currently considered a robo-caller or if their city, state, zip was currently under attack. That way, for example, the makers of robo-killer, etc... could provide better protection. Perhaps we could even create a live map of the attacks.
I'll follow up when we do and post something to HN.
So, AFAICT, Hustle provides a service that's nearly as bad as robocalls. From their front page: "Hustle works because people read and respond to texts—and to communication that feels more human." So it's a bait and switch, just like a robocall: you contact me in a way that makes you feel personal, approachable and reasonable to me so that you can gain my attention.
Look, try to see this from my perspective. Without saying anything about the honor and motives of those behind Hustle, it's like I'm being attacked from all sides - Facebook, Robocalls, and now Hustle - to gain my attention. This has always been the case, perhaps, but our modern technology – coupled with a knowledge of human psychology – is a powerful tool (weapon?) for gaining access.
Here's an idea: I don't want to be assaulted all the time via the always-on electronic device I have in my pocket!
I still want to have access whenever I want it. Maybe I can't have it both ways?
I can't remember the last time I got an unsolicited text.
An anecdote to be sure, but I don't hear anyone complaining right now about unsolicited texts, so it doesn't seem like Hustle is the problem.
"I still want to have access whenever I want it. Maybe I can't have it both ways?"
You can, actually, and it isn't that hard. I have a strict "one strike and you're out" policy with my apps; if I see a notification I don't want, I either fix the notification preferences in the app right away, or if the app doesn't permit what I need, nuke the app's ability to notify. My phone is pretty quiet.
Only robot calls I get is after contacting customer support they autocall you and ask the enter a rating of the call.
Really? You must not be listening. Do a quick Google News search and you'll find dozens of articles about it.
My T-Mobile hotspot has 133 unsolicited (and unread) text messages in it right now because spammers think it's a cell phone.
During the last election I received 50 or 60 unsolicited political text messages from both parties on my work phone.
Unsolicited text is a problem.
There's some bullshit law that allows political parties to harvest voter telephone numbers in my state, so I get pummeled by unsolicited text messages from political campaigns.
For the ones that actually have a human on the other end monitoring it, replying with 'I cannot vote, I'm a felon' (regardless of what the actual law is for voting and felons in my state) is a good way to get them to leave you alone.
> Our simple web and mobile apps allow your team to text 1000+ people an hour. Your contacts see a normal SMS from a local number.
Does that mean you would appear on your own live map of attacks?
Here we are 10 years later no further down the road. Sad.
[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20080240082A1/en
Once virtual phone services were invented, companies didn't even have to worry about dodging the Feds, they just moved all their operations overseas. Feel good laws will not solve this problem, it's going to take actual technological solutions.
What am I missing?
1) Most of the spam calls are spoofing numbers, so it doesn't really matter who issued the numbers.
2) Spam calls could come from overseas numbers instead, I've certainly gotten a few. I'd rather they come from US numbers, so at least when people call back, they're not paying an arm and a leg for the call if they don't realize the number is non-US.
However, there are many companies, especially overseas, that either deliberately shirk these duties or simply lack the funds, technology, and infrastructure to authenticate the sources of telephone calls. The result is something akin to IP address spoofing.
Without imposing major infrastructure overhauls on foreign nations, there's little the US government can do to eliminate these problems.
SS7 is from an era when big phone companies all trusted each other and interconnected without any of the modern crypto or authentication built into a modern network.
What can be done though, is monitoring for massive calling patterns at the PSTN level, but big telcos are not interested/incentivized in stopping Robocalls because it generates a lot of $$ when the calls travel over the legacy phone network.
When Twilio gets a $100k fine for abuse of the $1/mo number, they'll govern the behavior of their customer better and probably eliminate 80% of the bad actors in hours. You could also modify the regulation of interstate carriers to make it expensive to spam entire exchanges with junk calls, or even require licensing to utilize the PSTN. (Which allows you to punish licensees for bad behavior.)
These are all solvable problems, big companies respond quickly to sticks and over time to carrots.
It's not like these are long-term government employees, they are taking big paycuts in anticipation of getting private sector gigs later.
They'll want to charge me for it soon, I'm sure. I'm betting that as soon as the trial is up (one that I never asked for, btw) that the number of bogus calls will skyrocket, and I'll be forced to whitelist.
My response will be letters to the FCC [nothing will happen] and the FTC [nothing will happen]. Companies and powerfully-placed individuals make a lot of money from these calls. I don't know how difficult the ESS-level work is for call filtering, but fixing the landscape of corrupt practices is a LOT harder.
[0]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/02/ajit-pai-orders-...
This is an industry that already sticks in "regulatory compliance" fees. Why would you think they'd make it free when they can charge you for it with no way to opt out of the fee?
IIRC one of the main selling points of gmail when it started was that it had a much better spam filter than other services at the time.
There was actually a really weird phone scam going back a while that was just making calls that tried to keep people on the line as long as possible to make money off of the interconnect fees companies can charge each other.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/251
https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/104-case-phantom-calle...
I'm wondering, is VoIP easier to call block than general call service? If it is, the inability or unwillingness by the telecoms to address this issue might prove to be a systemic disadvantage (though I'm pretty sure they make most of their margin nowadays from selling cellular data).
Then the hunt will get efficiently crowdsourced.
After few well publicized cases the problem will greatly diminish.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/251
Your comparison isn't much more useful than 'prosecutorial discretion exists therefore do any crime you want.' Multibillion dollar companies aren't going to just go out and blaze a trail like that. We even see this in the (spurious) comparison to marijuana, the first companies to step out and test the state vs federal divide were small and local and only after those companies figured out some of the issues did we get large and larger companies coming in. (Though they're still all independent arms because of the difficulties accessing banking because of the federal laws still in place!)
Just because I voted in an election; and why do they know which party/who I vote for; does not give them the right to call me. I don't care if they are in office or not.