5 ms·

telecom industry here, honestly, nothing. SS7/PSTN are horribly broken. only thing that will fix it is burning it to the ground. fcc regulations and penalties

telecom industry here, honestly, nothing. SS7/PSTN are horribly broken. only thing that will fix it is burning it to the ground. fcc regulations and penalties mean nothing to shady offshore grey market scam call centers in india using suspicious/unethical voip providers and methods of getting phone traffic to the US/Canada. shaken/stir is a joke set up a voip based system with IVR on your incoming DIDs that asks the caller to input a short series of digits to be connected, then have that series of digits ring your real line. it will filter out about 98% of the crap

calvinmorrison 4y ago
I want to use my old desk phone, but I want to screen all calls to basically "known" numbers. Is this something I can do fairly easily? I'd also like a traditional voicemail system with playback (does not have to be cassette)
- walrus01 4y ago
  spoofing caller ID is too trivially easy to rely upon known numbers on the incoming side as a filter, unfortunately.
  - calvinmorrison 4y ago
    This is probably true... but I've never had a spoofed call that pretended to be my mom, dad, wife, or family. That's basically the entire list I care about...
- toast0 4y ago
  I've been looking at this lately as I setup new phone service for my MIL who's moving to a place with unreliable power. Some phone companies have whitelist services, although if your telco is like CenturyLink of Washington state, they don't appear to want to actually be in the phone business anymore and all the useful services are grandfathered, ordering a phone line is an ordeal and pricing is crazy (OTOH, the line quality seems to be good if you can get it). If you've got a voip line, you've got way more options though; I think most providers should give you options to whitelist. Assuming your telco won't help you with whitelisting, your options are maybe? getting a new cordless system with caller id whitelisting, it seems like maybe some of the newest panasonic dect systems can do it (that will take care of the answering machine needs as well). Or getting an external box, most likely inline with your phone. I don't have either yet, but it seems like reasonable options include the Digitone proseries II [1], or the Sentry call blocker[2]. Both are more expensive than they should be (IMHO), but offer some amount of whitelisting and blacklisting. The Digitone has a longer history in the industry, and what looks like a clumsier interface; the Sentry has a good, but slightly messy feature for handling inbound calls from numbers that aren't 'known', for those calls, it answers and plays an outgoing greeting (customizable in the 3.x device, prerecorded in 2.x), if the caller presses 0, their number is added to the white list and they can call back; from reviews, I gather on the 2.x series pressing 0 add you to the whitelist and then hangs up on you; on the 3.x series, pressing 0 generates a fake ringback, makes the device ring (but not phones on the line) and after 9 fake rings will let the caller leave a message on the sentry device (2 message capacity, FIFO). This is like not quite right; the recommendation from reviewers is to record a message asking people to press 0 and then hangup and call back, rather than having them go through the weird ringing stuff. There's some negative comments about recording quality. [1] https://digitone.com/ https://digitone.com/ [2] https://www.telsentry.com/ https://www.telsentry.com/
  - calvinmorrison 4y ago
    79 bucks? This is perfect...
    - toast0 4y ago
      Please email me a review if you set one up. I'm currently waiting for the welcome packet so I can try the CenturyLink options, but I'm not holding my breath and will need to get something soon, cause junky calls are already coming in. (surprising noone)
  - CapOneCustomer 4y ago
    I've tried both of these devices. The Digitone (and anything similar) is useless, as it requires you to press a button every time you receive a call from a "bad" number. I did this for about a week, logging hundreds of incoming calls, and I rarely saw a duplicated number. So you'll just be pressing the button all the time - might as well just pick up the phone and hang up. The Sentry is much better, but has some notable flaws. The Sentry works as a whitelist, so it blocks all calls by default. After you enter your whitelist (family, friends, etc.), you'll get three types of calls: -Good Calls: From people on your approved list. These calls ring through as normal. -Bad Calls: From idiots (aka robocalls). The idiots aren't smart enough to press a button, so they don't, and then the Sentry hangs up the call. -Other Calls: From humans who are (ideally) not idiots, but aren't (yet) on your list. This third item is where the Sentry really needs improvement. Other callers hear a (horrible quality) outgoing message, so they can either hang up, or press a key to leave a message - on the Sentry, not your answering machine/voicemail. The message they leave is only 20 seconds, and you can only receive two messages. And you can't screen these calls - you don't actually hear the person leaving the message, and you can't pick up the call if it turns out it's valid. And the Sentry doesn't timestamp the message. There's a log of calls, but you have to work to figure out who actually called, especially if the caller's message was cut off. (What I would prefer is to have callers press a button, then my phone rings like normal.) If you don't get a lot of "new" numbers calling you, the Sentry isn't bad. But you will miss some calls, especially at first. Thankfully, there's an on/off toggle for those times when you're expecting an important call from an unknown number (delivery guy, hospital).
- dataflow 4y ago
  I think Google Voice has the ability to enable/disable call screening for a group of contacts. Maybe try it out and see if it has enough options to let you achieve the effect you want? (Assuming you don't specifically wants POTS though.)
clhodapp 4y ago
Can... can the telecom industry do that for all of us please? At this point, retrofitting CAPTCHA in as an expected part of the telephone system seems like the only option that will make a significant dent.
pishpash 4y ago
So, phone CAPTCHA, yeah that's going to get attacked just as easily when scam money is involved.
criddell 4y ago
I'd love it if I could set up my phone with a whitelist and every caller that isn't on my whitelist should get a busy signal.
- codazoda 4y ago
  You can kinda do this on your mobile phone (works on both android and iOS) by automatically silencing all calls that are not in your contact list. Works a treat for me.
  - criddell 4y ago
    I think callers still get voicemail. I want them to get a busy signal.
    - xienze 4y ago
      Are you sure that’s what you want? There’s also times when you get legitimate calls from people not on your whitelist (think, submitted info to a contractor online, they call you back later from their personal cell phone, etc.).
      - Retric 4y ago
        It’s triage time, people are seriously considering giving up their phones as not worth the hassle. 100% blocking all not whitelisted calls is a more convenient alternative.
      - smegsicle 4y ago
        that is true- completely blocking all numbers not on a whitelist would completely block all numbers not specifically on the whitelist
      - criddell 4y ago
        I'm absolutely sure that's what I want. It would make my phone more useful. For every 300 calls I get, maybe 1 isn't spam. I probably get 5 spam calls per day and under 10 legitimate calls per year. There are so many simple things carriers could do. The biggest would be simply deleting silent voicemails would help a lot. I kind of wish a company that actually cares about voice phone calls would come around. Give me the highest fidelity calls possible, give me features for recording, give me the option to block all non-authenticated callers, show me the actual call data and not just the caller id, etc...
dredmorbius 4y ago
Understanding that you don't know everything about or speak for the industry, the question I've had for a few years now is whether this is a deliberate tactic (I've little doubt telcos want to shed wireline service), or just a mess with no clear out? Because the problem's not just with landline but with any direct-dialed PSTN telecoms system. I don't want a landline or mobile phone any more. The situation's well past simple cord-cutting. It's been about three years since I stumbled across this quote which confirms that at least someone on the inside is aware that the present situation is eroding all trust in the system, and that this is an existential threat: [S]ince mid-2015, a consortium of engineers from phone carriers and others in the telecom industry have worked on a way to [stop call-spoofing], worried that spam phone calls could eventually endanger the whole system. “We’re getting to the point where nobody trusts the phone network,” says Jim McEachern, principal technologist at the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS.) “When they stop trusting the phone network, they stop using it.” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/how-to-stop-spam-robocalls-with-stir-shaken.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/how-to-stop-spam-rob... (From an earlier HN comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542926 Stir-Shake may have reduced levels of spam, I've no way of knowing. But the level it's at remains intolerable and a real financial risk to individuals and businesses. I'm personally aware of several people who've been scammed of thousands of dollars within the past year. Cut phone service and that threat disappears, along with all the attendant billing bullshit and customer service nightmares. Is the industry aware of this and what if anything does it plan to do?
- walrus01 4y ago
  my personal opinion is that there is simply too much legacy SS7/PSTN junk out there to change the protocol/traffic exchange between carriers in any significant way that will result in anything ever being fixed. it's a legacy of the 1950s and 1960s era of the monopoly bell system when all of the phone system trusted itself. the whole way that traffic moves between telcos in the PSTN is built on lack of crypto authentication, total trust between two phone switches, in a way that would be absurdly terrible if run on the modern internet (imagine all your online banking as http only, for example).
Symbiote 4y ago
But this isn't a problem in other countries. My British and Danish mobile phone numbers get less than one junk call per year.
- BHSPitMonkey 4y ago
  Is the reason for that actually technical, or is it that U.S. numbers/datasets are the most attractive targets for scams (i.e. due to the supply of victims, access/availability of data, ease of not having to worry about i18n/l10n for your scam tactics, etc.)?
  - walrus01 4y ago
    also the extreme number and variety of number of weird small CLECs, foreign SS7/PSTN operators, and grey market voip operators that interface into the US phone system vs a much smaller market like the UK or Denmark or somewhere.

calvinmorrison 4y ago

I want to use my old desk phone, but I want to screen all calls to basically "known" numbers. Is this something I can do fairly easily? I'd also like a traditional voicemail system with playback (does not have to be cassette)

walrus01 4y ago
spoofing caller ID is too trivially easy to rely upon known numbers on the incoming side as a filter, unfortunately.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  This is probably true... but I've never had a spoofed call that pretended to be my mom, dad, wife, or family. That's basically the entire list I care about...
toast0 4y ago
I've been looking at this lately as I setup new phone service for my MIL who's moving to a place with unreliable power. Some phone companies have whitelist services, although if your telco is like CenturyLink of Washington state, they don't appear to want to actually be in the phone business anymore and all the useful services are grandfathered, ordering a phone line is an ordeal and pricing is crazy (OTOH, the line quality seems to be good if you can get it). If you've got a voip line, you've got way more options though; I think most providers should give you options to whitelist. Assuming your telco won't help you with whitelisting, your options are maybe? getting a new cordless system with caller id whitelisting, it seems like maybe some of the newest panasonic dect systems can do it (that will take care of the answering machine needs as well). Or getting an external box, most likely inline with your phone. I don't have either yet, but it seems like reasonable options include the Digitone proseries II [1], or the Sentry call blocker[2]. Both are more expensive than they should be (IMHO), but offer some amount of whitelisting and blacklisting. The Digitone has a longer history in the industry, and what looks like a clumsier interface; the Sentry has a good, but slightly messy feature for handling inbound calls from numbers that aren't 'known', for those calls, it answers and plays an outgoing greeting (customizable in the 3.x device, prerecorded in 2.x), if the caller presses 0, their number is added to the white list and they can call back; from reviews, I gather on the 2.x series pressing 0 add you to the whitelist and then hangs up on you; on the 3.x series, pressing 0 generates a fake ringback, makes the device ring (but not phones on the line) and after 9 fake rings will let the caller leave a message on the sentry device (2 message capacity, FIFO). This is like not quite right; the recommendation from reviewers is to record a message asking people to press 0 and then hangup and call back, rather than having them go through the weird ringing stuff. There's some negative comments about recording quality. [1] https://digitone.com/ https://digitone.com/ [2] https://www.telsentry.com/ https://www.telsentry.com/
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  79 bucks? This is perfect...
  - toast0 4y ago
    Please email me a review if you set one up. I'm currently waiting for the welcome packet so I can try the CenturyLink options, but I'm not holding my breath and will need to get something soon, cause junky calls are already coming in. (surprising noone)
- CapOneCustomer 4y ago
  I've tried both of these devices. The Digitone (and anything similar) is useless, as it requires you to press a button every time you receive a call from a "bad" number. I did this for about a week, logging hundreds of incoming calls, and I rarely saw a duplicated number. So you'll just be pressing the button all the time - might as well just pick up the phone and hang up. The Sentry is much better, but has some notable flaws. The Sentry works as a whitelist, so it blocks all calls by default. After you enter your whitelist (family, friends, etc.), you'll get three types of calls: -Good Calls: From people on your approved list. These calls ring through as normal. -Bad Calls: From idiots (aka robocalls). The idiots aren't smart enough to press a button, so they don't, and then the Sentry hangs up the call. -Other Calls: From humans who are (ideally) not idiots, but aren't (yet) on your list. This third item is where the Sentry really needs improvement. Other callers hear a (horrible quality) outgoing message, so they can either hang up, or press a key to leave a message - on the Sentry, not your answering machine/voicemail. The message they leave is only 20 seconds, and you can only receive two messages. And you can't screen these calls - you don't actually hear the person leaving the message, and you can't pick up the call if it turns out it's valid. And the Sentry doesn't timestamp the message. There's a log of calls, but you have to work to figure out who actually called, especially if the caller's message was cut off. (What I would prefer is to have callers press a button, then my phone rings like normal.) If you don't get a lot of "new" numbers calling you, the Sentry isn't bad. But you will miss some calls, especially at first. Thankfully, there's an on/off toggle for those times when you're expecting an important call from an unknown number (delivery guy, hospital).
dataflow 4y ago
I think Google Voice has the ability to enable/disable call screening for a group of contacts. Maybe try it out and see if it has enough options to let you achieve the effect you want? (Assuming you don't specifically wants POTS though.)

clhodapp 4y ago

Can... can the telecom industry do that for all of us please? At this point, retrofitting CAPTCHA in as an expected part of the telephone system seems like the only option that will make a significant dent.

pishpash 4y ago

So, phone CAPTCHA, yeah that's going to get attacked just as easily when scam money is involved.

criddell 4y ago

I'd love it if I could set up my phone with a whitelist and every caller that isn't on my whitelist should get a busy signal.

codazoda 4y ago
You can kinda do this on your mobile phone (works on both android and iOS) by automatically silencing all calls that are not in your contact list. Works a treat for me.
- criddell 4y ago
  I think callers still get voicemail. I want them to get a busy signal.
  - xienze 4y ago
    Are you sure that’s what you want? There’s also times when you get legitimate calls from people not on your whitelist (think, submitted info to a contractor online, they call you back later from their personal cell phone, etc.).
    - Retric 4y ago
      It’s triage time, people are seriously considering giving up their phones as not worth the hassle. 100% blocking all not whitelisted calls is a more convenient alternative.
    - smegsicle 4y ago
      that is true- completely blocking all numbers not on a whitelist would completely block all numbers not specifically on the whitelist
    - criddell 4y ago
      I'm absolutely sure that's what I want. It would make my phone more useful. For every 300 calls I get, maybe 1 isn't spam. I probably get 5 spam calls per day and under 10 legitimate calls per year. There are so many simple things carriers could do. The biggest would be simply deleting silent voicemails would help a lot. I kind of wish a company that actually cares about voice phone calls would come around. Give me the highest fidelity calls possible, give me features for recording, give me the option to block all non-authenticated callers, show me the actual call data and not just the caller id, etc...

dredmorbius 4y ago

Understanding that you don't know everything about or speak for the industry, the question I've had for a few years now is whether this is a deliberate tactic (I've little doubt telcos want to shed wireline service), or just a mess with no clear out? Because the problem's not just with landline but with any direct-dialed PSTN telecoms system. I don't want a landline or mobile phone any more. The situation's well past simple cord-cutting. It's been about three years since I stumbled across this quote which confirms that at least someone on the inside is aware that the present situation is eroding all trust in the system, and that this is an existential threat: [S]ince mid-2015, a consortium of engineers from phone carriers and others in the telecom industry have worked on a way to [stop call-spoofing], worried that spam phone calls could eventually endanger the whole system. “We’re getting to the point where nobody trusts the phone network,” says Jim McEachern, principal technologist at the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS.) “When they stop trusting the phone network, they stop using it.” https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/how-to-stop-spam-robocalls-with-stir-shaken.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/how-to-stop-spam-rob... (From an earlier HN comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542926 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21542926 Stir-Shake may have reduced levels of spam, I've no way of knowing. But the level it's at remains intolerable and a real financial risk to individuals and businesses. I'm personally aware of several people who've been scammed of thousands of dollars within the past year. Cut phone service and that threat disappears, along with all the attendant billing bullshit and customer service nightmares. Is the industry aware of this and what if anything does it plan to do?

walrus01 4y ago
my personal opinion is that there is simply too much legacy SS7/PSTN junk out there to change the protocol/traffic exchange between carriers in any significant way that will result in anything ever being fixed. it's a legacy of the 1950s and 1960s era of the monopoly bell system when all of the phone system trusted itself. the whole way that traffic moves between telcos in the PSTN is built on lack of crypto authentication, total trust between two phone switches, in a way that would be absurdly terrible if run on the modern internet (imagine all your online banking as http only, for example).

Symbiote 4y ago

But this isn't a problem in other countries. My British and Danish mobile phone numbers get less than one junk call per year.

BHSPitMonkey 4y ago
Is the reason for that actually technical, or is it that U.S. numbers/datasets are the most attractive targets for scams (i.e. due to the supply of victims, access/availability of data, ease of not having to worry about i18n/l10n for your scam tactics, etc.)?
- walrus01 4y ago
  also the extreme number and variety of number of weird small CLECs, foreign SS7/PSTN operators, and grey market voip operators that interface into the US phone system vs a much smaller market like the UK or Denmark or somewhere.