7 ms·

I find it astonishing that robocalls are still an issue in 2021, especially those coming from abroad. How can it be that hard to force authentication to use the

by belval 5y ago

I find it astonishing that robocalls are still an issue in 2021, especially those coming from abroad. How can it be that hard to force authentication to use the phone network and permanently block malicious carriers?

TheJoeMan 5y ago
I cannot attest as an expert, but I learned something about your phone carrier would actually be punished by the FCC for not connecting the call of a scammer. It’s possible your carrier knows it’s fishy but has to let it through due to large government getting in it’s own way.
- cma 5y ago
  Any source on this? I heard carriers let them through because their spam call filtering service was a cash cow (i.e. they didn't have to let them through, otherwise no anti spam service could exist from them, they maybe did have to by default, but could have offered the service free with opt-in and advertised it). https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/stop-unwanted-robocalls-and-texts https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/stop-unwanted-robocalls...
  - paulmd 5y ago
    guessing he's thinking about human-assisted text-to-voice services for disability, where there is indeed a requirement that your text be read aloud unaltered and thus they cannot warn you even if it is obviously a scam
_jal 5y ago
> How can it be that hard to force authentication Without partitioning world telephone connectivity? Easily. > and permanently block malicious carriers? By any reasonable definition involving unwanted traffic, ATT is a malicious carrier. Do you see the problem?
- belval 5y ago
  If someone from the US wants to sell me a vacuum cleaner sure, but when "Michael" from "Microsoft" is calling me from a call center in India to tell me that my computer has a virus, how many legitimate phone calls can come from India anyway? How about the solution is to allow me to block any call not made from North America/Europe and be done with it. If you have family in India you can just not block the country and that should be good enough for everyone? Of course my solution that I came up in 5 minutes is probably not the one we'd actually want to implement, but this has been an issue for probably half a century at this point, I'd hope this is enough time to find one decent mitigation implementation.
  - vkou 5y ago
    > how many legitimate phone calls can come from India anyway Spoken with the hubris of someone who has never been more than five miles from the town they were born in, and who can't imagine why anyone else would do such a thing. India isn't Mars, there are over a billion people living in it, most of whom have telephones, many of whom using them to talk to their friends and relatives who live abroad. The Indian diaspora is 18 million people, but I guess we should just write all of them off, their needs and desire to communicate doesn't matter. You're going to need to come up with a better solution than 'Blackhole the entire country'.
    - justin66 5y ago
      The person you're responding to wants the ability to block callers in India from reaching him. I don't think he wants the ability to block callers in India from reaching you.
      - dotancohen 5y ago
        Let's try a Gedankenexperiment. Consider Albert, white, who was mugged twice by black men. Now when strangers turn to him - say to ask the time - he'll tell them the time if they are white but will put his head down and walk away quickly if they are black. Is Albert racist, or is he responding to past trauma as you are suggesting by blocking all Indian calls?
xxpor 5y ago
How hard is it to migrate to IPv6? Now imagine the phone network, which hasn't seen a major core upgrade since SS7 in the 70s. It's Hard.
- belval 5y ago
  Migrating to IPv6 is hard because there is hardly any real will to do so. Most people don't need a unique IP address and don't mind being behind some ISP-level NAT. So it will happen as bigger companies are forced into it. The phone network on the other hand could work with a very simple reputation list. If you carrier fails to act against malicious actor they lose access to everyone else and that's it. Once they have a financial interest that forces them to look into it the problem would solve itself. Just today I've had 2 calls from "the government of Canada" telling me that there was a warrant out to my name.
ta1234567890 5y ago
Is not that they can’t, is that there’s no money in it for them, at least not yet. At the same time that these companies don’t do anything about spam calls, they formed a consortium to push something called A2P-10DLC on services like Twilio, to force smaller businesses to pay more money for the privilege of texting their own customers. They say it’s for protecting the end users from spam, but clearly they don’t really care about that, instead they realized they were not getting a big enough piece of the pie of texting services and want to get more.

by belval 5y ago

TheJoeMan 5y ago

I cannot attest as an expert, but I learned something about your phone carrier would actually be punished by the FCC for not connecting the call of a scammer. It’s possible your carrier knows it’s fishy but has to let it through due to large government getting in it’s own way.

cma 5y ago
Any source on this? I heard carriers let them through because their spam call filtering service was a cash cow (i.e. they didn't have to let them through, otherwise no anti spam service could exist from them, they maybe did have to by default, but could have offered the service free with opt-in and advertised it). https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/stop-unwanted-robocalls-and-texts https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/stop-unwanted-robocalls...
- paulmd 5y ago
  guessing he's thinking about human-assisted text-to-voice services for disability, where there is indeed a requirement that your text be read aloud unaltered and thus they cannot warn you even if it is obviously a scam

_jal 5y ago

> How can it be that hard to force authentication Without partitioning world telephone connectivity? Easily. > and permanently block malicious carriers? By any reasonable definition involving unwanted traffic, ATT is a malicious carrier. Do you see the problem?

belval 5y ago
If someone from the US wants to sell me a vacuum cleaner sure, but when "Michael" from "Microsoft" is calling me from a call center in India to tell me that my computer has a virus, how many legitimate phone calls can come from India anyway? How about the solution is to allow me to block any call not made from North America/Europe and be done with it. If you have family in India you can just not block the country and that should be good enough for everyone? Of course my solution that I came up in 5 minutes is probably not the one we'd actually want to implement, but this has been an issue for probably half a century at this point, I'd hope this is enough time to find one decent mitigation implementation.
- vkou 5y ago
  > how many legitimate phone calls can come from India anyway Spoken with the hubris of someone who has never been more than five miles from the town they were born in, and who can't imagine why anyone else would do such a thing. India isn't Mars, there are over a billion people living in it, most of whom have telephones, many of whom using them to talk to their friends and relatives who live abroad. The Indian diaspora is 18 million people, but I guess we should just write all of them off, their needs and desire to communicate doesn't matter. You're going to need to come up with a better solution than 'Blackhole the entire country'.
  - justin66 5y ago
    The person you're responding to wants the ability to block callers in India from reaching him. I don't think he wants the ability to block callers in India from reaching you.
    - dotancohen 5y ago
      Let's try a Gedankenexperiment. Consider Albert, white, who was mugged twice by black men. Now when strangers turn to him - say to ask the time - he'll tell them the time if they are white but will put his head down and walk away quickly if they are black. Is Albert racist, or is he responding to past trauma as you are suggesting by blocking all Indian calls?

xxpor 5y ago

How hard is it to migrate to IPv6? Now imagine the phone network, which hasn't seen a major core upgrade since SS7 in the 70s. It's Hard.

belval 5y ago
Migrating to IPv6 is hard because there is hardly any real will to do so. Most people don't need a unique IP address and don't mind being behind some ISP-level NAT. So it will happen as bigger companies are forced into it. The phone network on the other hand could work with a very simple reputation list. If you carrier fails to act against malicious actor they lose access to everyone else and that's it. Once they have a financial interest that forces them to look into it the problem would solve itself. Just today I've had 2 calls from "the government of Canada" telling me that there was a warrant out to my name.

ta1234567890 5y ago

Is not that they can’t, is that there’s no money in it for them, at least not yet. At the same time that these companies don’t do anything about spam calls, they formed a consortium to push something called A2P-10DLC on services like Twilio, to force smaller businesses to pay more money for the privilege of texting their own customers. They say it’s for protecting the end users from spam, but clearly they don’t really care about that, instead they realized they were not getting a big enough piece of the pie of texting services and want to get more.