9 ms·

Good. But really, why did this take this long? It should be relatively easy to identify the bad actors here and I don't mean the spammers, I mean the telcos th

• kbuck 7y ago
  Regarding robocalls from political campaigns: I removed my phone number from my voter registration, because honestly I don't want any calls or texts from campaigns. I left my email address in case they want to spam that. I recommend doing the same (although at least with Gmail I find that several of the political emails end up in the spam folder...)
• throwanem 7y ago
  I mute the mic and mash the keypad until the other end disconnects, no matter how long that takes. I find I get far fewer such calls than I did when I started, and the occasional hopelessly snarled-up IVR system is a nice bonus.
  • gcb0 7y ago
    i'm afraid there is an option that legally allows them o call me non-stop if I press 1 or something :) so i just mute and leave the phone on the desk to add some noise to their voice learning (and they have to pay for the call if it is over 4s)
• prawn 7y ago
  I'd noticed that initial silence thing as well, but mostly because I answer and speak immediately. The spammers generally have a lag on their software and connect shortly after my greeting. Then while I'm waiting in silence, they've missed that sign of life and sit there doing nothing.
  • cletus 7y ago
    So again, I don't really have a provable basis for this, but I don't want to give positive proof that they've reached a live human. I feel like that's a recipe for getting continually called.
• nimish 7y ago
  It took this long because the fcc is run by people who simply do not believe in using government to enforce oversight.
  • dantheman 7y ago
    This has been going on for a long long time - while the FCC was trying to expand it's mandate to net neutrality instead of actually doing it's job.
    • chrisfinazzo 7y ago
      Well, actually... That kinda/sorta was the mandate, until we put a telecom shill in charge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_Open_Internet_Order_2010 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_Open_Internet_Order_2010
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • dantheman 7y ago
        Where did congress grant the FCC the authorities for that order?
        • chrisfinazzo 7y ago
          Ahem. "An independent U.S. government agency overseen by Congress, the commission is the United States' primary authority for communications law, regulation and technological innovation." Source: https://www.fcc.gov/about-fcc/what-we-do https://www.fcc.gov/about-fcc/what-we-do You can have arguments until forever about what they should or shouldn't do, but their raison d'être is to set policy according to these overarching objectives. Oh, and just to be clear, the lack of an Oxford comma in that quote is inexcusable :)
          • dantheman 7y ago
• omgwtfbyobbq 7y ago
  The DOJ obtained injunctions against those bad actors a few days ago. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/district-court-orders-injunctions-against-two-telecom-carriers-who-facilitated-hundreds https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/district-court-orders-injunct...
• Aloha 7y ago
  It took a while for the carriers to bring themselves into compliance with the technical requirements to make it work.
  • fitzn 7y ago
    Yup - good call. I thought this was a nice post by the Twilio CEO last year: https://www.twilio.com/blog/your-phone-your-call-eliminating-robocalls https://www.twilio.com/blog/your-phone-your-call-eliminating... Basically, he walks through the history of the phone system and how it never really considered bad actors, and then what they are working on now and what it'll take to deploy it.
    • api 7y ago
      A lot like the early Internet. Hopefully we've learned that systems must be designed security-first to scale.
• zw123456 7y ago
  um... cuz they get paid per call. So, just like ISP guys or Google or anyone else who is happy to irritate the fuck out of you for $.0001 per whatever useless crap that yields one in a million sales of some crap people don't need.
• moron4hire 7y ago
  >> A human calling will wonder what is happening and fill the silence by saying something. A machine will not. I've encountered robots in the last 6 months that have started with "Hello?" when I didn't say anthing. It tripped up my Turing Test at first, but eventually hit an ALICEBot-like moment that crashed the whole thing down.
• cableshaft 7y ago
  > Auto-dial systems will route the call to a person when they get a "live" response. I don't know the criteria but I'm pretty sure it's them detecting noise on the call (which could be voicemail). I work with phone systems. It's usually determined by how long they hear a continuous sound at the start of a call. If it's relatively short (and it can be adjusted by settings), it assumes it's a live voice (like someone saying "Hello?" is usually pretty short). If it's continuous for a certain period of time, it assumes it's a voicemail. For our speech applications we have different behaviors depending on which call disposition is detected (that's the term for this, also determines things like invalid phone numbers). Sometimes when testing speech applications I'll pick up and scratch the receiver continuously or speak without taking a pause until the voicemail disposition is triggered so I can test a voicemail message without having to check voicemail. We make these calls on behalf of health insurance companies for health reminders and surveys, so our calls are more legitimate than most, but we do use an autodialer to reduce the load on our live agents.
  • anon9001 7y ago
    Neat job. Question you might know the answer to: I've noticed it's a pretty common practice to get appointment reminders with caller ID from the doctor's office. I like that feature. I'd imagine there are plenty of other legitimate use cases for caller ID spoofing as well. Do you have any idea how that's going to work with STIR/SHAKEN? I'd guess it's going to be some kind of oauth for your phone number, where you own it and can grant spoofing access to other entities? Google seems to be supporting it: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1119583115056/2018-11-19%20Google%20SHAKEN%3ASTIR%20Letter%20(WC%2017-97).pdf https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1119583115056/2018-11-19%20Goog... (via https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication)
    • emiliosic 7y ago
      It's going to be a problem for some systems for sure, but as the STIR framework is used to attest the number, the caller itself doesn't need to do anything. The originating carrier then attests with a level certainty A, B or C who the caller is, and adds a crypto signature to the signaling. The key here is the attestation. If the calling carrier (usually the provider of the DID in retail but in commercial, not necessarily the same carrier) can attest by the caller, then the call will go through regardless. So tele-center company can agree with the calling carrier that, basically, tele-center company really owns the number (A) or it's more or less certain of it (B) and the call will be sent attested.
• Autowired 7y ago
  > A human calling will wonder what is happening and fill the silence by saying something. A machine will not. This is a naive assumption. I've come across robocallers that do exactly this. It is sort of trivial, if you think about it.
• m101 7y ago
  My strategy has been to do the exact opposite. I've claimed to have had the accident, spoken to the real person, asked them to hold the line whilst I finish something off some "urgent" work, received the follow up call after they hang up and asked them to call me back in a couple hours, again kept them waiting a few minutes. It really wastes their time and turns me in to an expensive call for them. Yes, it's wasted my time, but if we all did this they'd quickly run out of money.
  • frereubu 7y ago
    A friend of mine used to actively enjoy doing this. Most of the calls he got were of the "we hear you've had an accident" variety, and he would start with a generic story about something like a car accident. The story would slowly get more and more bizarre until he's eventually telling them a story like how he hit a lorry full of miniature circus animals, with loads of tiny tigers and giraffes bouncing off his windscreen. He'd see how deep he could get them into the story before they realise they'd been had.
    • amelius 7y ago
      You can find lots of similar stories here: https://www.419eater.com/ https://www.419eater.com/
    • notahacker 7y ago
      If it was actually a real person calling me about the accident, I'd love to respond with a furious "no it's YOUR fault' and try to convince them I'd literally just had an accident answering the phone whilst driving. The time I told the robocall bot that this was very worrying because I was on my way to a driving test was actually true though. :D
    • gouggoug 7y ago
      I did something similar to this a while ago, but the scam was happening via text messages. I spent a full weekend texting back and forth with the scammer. Although I never went as far as your lorry of circus animals, I did give _many_ hints to him that he was being played with. Now, the more interesting part is that I was particularly fed with scammers and wanted to see if I could out scam one, which I did. On the Monday after that weekend, I managed to get my scammers to provide me with his bank account username and password. Once I got this information, I checked that they were correct credentials and stopped all and every contact. I also did nothing with it as I didn't want to myself be on the wrong side of the law, nor did I want to mess too much with a scammer and get myself in trouble.
• mtgx 7y ago
  Isn't it obvious? It's the NSA - same reason they haven't fixed the SS7 flaws. I'll bet anything that even this "authentication" requires some sort of man-in-the-middle attack for the NSA before implemented, otherwise we wouldn't be seeing this announcement.
• dhimes 7y ago
  The iPhone has a setting that has you route unknown callers to VM ("silence unknown callers"). I used to do the silent-answer trick, but this is so much better. If it's important,I get a vm and I'll call right back. The times it has failed me is, actually, right now. I put in a call to have a delivery, maybe the last four digits are 4700- I've plugged that number in. But the guy calling me back calls on 4709 and gets VM. So I have to remember to turn this off if I'm expecting a delivery.
• darkarmani 7y ago
  > My response to picking up a number is to answer the call and say nothing. Auto-dial systems will route the call to a person when they get a "live" response. I don't know the criteria but I'm pretty sure it's them detecting noise on the call (which could be voicemail). I do the same thing. I moved and my old number is forwarded through google voice. Everytime i get a call from my old area code I know it is a neighbor spam call as no one calls me from that area code anymore. It's gotten so bad i let my calls go to voicemail now.
• logfromblammo 7y ago
  Telephone numbers are a synchronous interactive channel. If someone calls you to have a chat, they pay for your attention with their own. They can say something to you, and you can in turn say something back to them. Robocalls shove someone else's voice into your ear, without offering you an ear in return. They signal a synchronous communication, and then reneg on that promise with a spammed asynchronous message. "Political speech" is the same as every other kind of speech. There should be no exemptions for policy just because someone running for office is involved. They have the same duty of courtesy as everyone else, and we have the same right to block our ears from their spam messages as businesses and scams.
• PhilosAccnting 7y ago
  While I haven't taken the time to research further, I figured I'd try to brick the algorithm by speaking absolute gibberish. I also tell everyone else I know. Since machine learning is still "dumb", I figured that enough people babbling incoherently would require the spammers to hand-scrub the data or make more training rules, both requiring more work. No idea if it worked, but it was the least I could do to halt progress in the wrong direction.
• chillacy 7y ago
  > Good. But really, why did this take this long? I know nearly nothing about telco software but after working at enough big places I suspect one likely answer is "because it's monstrously complex for both technical and human reasons, moreso than it might seem at first".