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I disagree with the posted page that the telecoms are interested in stopping spam. If they really cared, they would have addressed it by now. I suspect they a

I disagree with the posted page that the telecoms are interested in stopping spam. If they really cared, they would have addressed it by now. I suspect they are somehow making money from the spam callers.

BLKNSLVR 3y ago
I can't see how it can be any other way than you mention. Is it conceivable that they don't have control of who is using their network, and how they're using it? It's not like they've just landed on the planet with this big telecoms network to manage. They created them, they set the rules, they own the gates. It's purely profit driven, no question. In the exact same way that Google and Meta claim to not be able to police advertising on their own fucking networks.
- jcrawfordor 3y ago
  The architecture of the telephone network was designed by a complex series of historical monopolies (across multiple countries), federal regulators, and state regulators. Because of this history, the providers have a surprisingly small degree of control over the traffic that passes through their network. This is, in a regulatory sense, what it means to be a common carrier.
  - BLKNSLVR 3y ago
    My admittedly cynical view, then, is that the structure has outgrown it's usefulness. Features are being added, which enable phone number spoofing and other shenanigans, at some point deep in the network, such that common carriers, at the tips of the network, have no control over. Thus creating a scammers/spammers paradise.
drdaeman 3y ago
> telecoms are interested in stopping spam. If they really cared, they would have addressed it by now I'm not so sure about this. No one (except for, obviously, spammers) benefits from email spam, every mailhost and network admin is most certainly interested in stopping it (to some extent), and yet my mailbox can prove that spam is still very much alive. Solving spam problems in a highly distributed large federation of networks is not simple. However, I think there are less telecoms than LIRs and mail systems out there, and they typically have better control over who their clients are (less hacking, though I could be wrong), and there's not enough pressure on them (spammy mailhost's gonna get banned by every RDNSBL real quick, telcos - I don't know, but I guess not so much?), so I can certainly agree that telecoms have issues with their incentives. I could be wrong about this, though - I don't really know much about the telephone industry.
- dylan604 3y ago
  When you consider that most of this stuff originates from places outside of jurisdictions of any place that would ever consider doing something about it, you realize that legislation is worth much less than the paper it's never printed on.
  - viraptor 3y ago
    It's that time I get to repeat: The US is a big enough destination that threatening to drop incoming calls would work. Much like the EU online privacy regulations has international effects, the US can play the game too. It's extremely unlikely that a legit telco anywhere in the world would choose to continue spam and lose the ability to call the US. (Telcos peer to other telcos/interconnects explicitly and can force custom agreements)
    - koolba 3y ago
      > The US is a big enough destination that threatening to drop incoming calls would work. They should threaten to drop outgoing calls too. That’d eliminate all the useless offshore call centers.
      - freeone3000 3y ago
        Some sort of quite tall wall, perhaps made of fire…
        dylan604 3y ago
        i don't know about being tall. by any definition i'm familiar within context, 1RU is about the smallest possible.
- calamari4065 3y ago
  The analogy doesn't hold because anyone can send an email to anyone else on any service at any time. You can't exactly just climb up a telephone pole and tap off a few phone numbers for yourself. You have to explicitly enter into a contract with a service provider to use their infrastructure. Spammers and scammers are wasting infrastructure resources that the telcos could be allocating to users. The telco can just cut your access off if you abuse it. If I spin up an email server, no one entity can stop me sending email to anyone else. Gmail or Outlook or other services can block me individually, but there is no centralized network and no central authority that can refuse my connection. [0] I suspect that telcos don't want to do anything about abuse because it's a very large fraction of their total traffic. The artificially higher utilization of the network gives them more justification for their prices or gives them some sort of good boy points for having x number of users. I don't really know how any of that works, just a wild guess. [0] There are centralized blacklists and other ways to communicate that a sender should be widely blocked, but that's not the same as a telco refusing to physically connect you
batch12 3y ago
A few questions (in good faith) for discussion: - How do you feel about the telcoms reading/filtering your texts? - Where do you feel these controls would be most appropriately applied? Sender or recipient or both? - How would you define SMS spam for filtering? Should the messages be manually reviewed or automatically filtered based on volume/content? - Should recipient telcoms filter potentially malicious or spammy voice calls?
- mynameisvlad 3y ago
  Texts are not encrypted anyway, your telecom can already read and filter your texts, and there’s been several instances of it happening. Eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/17aqv1z/tmobile_linksurls_not_sending_do_this/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/17aqv1z/tmobile_li...
callalex 3y ago
Carriers could solve the spam problem overnight by disconnecting about 3 or 4 countries from the rest of the world. However popular that action may be, it would not be legal.
- grecy 3y ago
  The world has already decided to disconnect 5 countries from the global banking system, effectively keeping them locked in the dark ages....
- pennybanks 3y ago
  ya but now they are the racist carrier. racism hunts. witch hunts. in the far future these 2 events will look no different
lostlogin 3y ago
With booking systems that use texts for appointment confirmation, several companies end up using the same group of phone numbers due to the service that sends the text having limited phone numbers. Some of the companies are quite spammy. It’s frustrating as blocking the number risks blocking real ‘you have an appointment at xxx’ type messages.
naravara 3y ago
I think you underestimate how ineptly run a lot of these highly-regulated, legacy industries actually are. They care, but in the way most people care about not being fat. They still can’t make the necessary lifestyle changes to do anything about it even if it is their most ardent wish.
- pbj1968 3y ago
  [flagged]
gwbas1c 3y ago
(This is a US-based response response about the US phone system.) Because it's a political problem, not an engineering or business problem. In order to prevent monopolies, we have very strict requirements about carrying all calls that enter the network. Otherwise, phone companies would randomly block each other as part of anti-competitive tactics to push each other out of business. The telephone spammers take advantage of these laws, because it is very difficult to legally block a spam call. Your phone provider must carry all phone calls without any prejudice! (So I'm about to get very close to the line about hacker news's "no politics" guideline. Please consider that spammers "hack the law" and "hack politics" before you flag me. Instead, I would appreciate it if you take a minute or two to fact check my opinion disguised as fact.) The primary way out of this is by a legal change, not by an engineering change or culture change: We must update our laws so that it is very difficult to make and carry spam calls on the telephone network. I personally believe that one way to do this is to require that all phone calls provide rich metadata to the phone that is ringing. I really should know who is calling me, and the phone company that originates that call should be responsible for verifying it. I would even consider a requirement that makes it trivial, or automatic, to "lift the corporate veil" on who owns the company that is calling me. Otherwise there should be strict penalties for a phone network that allows originating calls with phony or spoofed metadata. (I also don't think anyone has a right to make a 100% anonymous phone call. I think we can figure out how to allow people who need to make anonymous phone calls to make them, without exposing the entire phone network to SPAM.) Ultimately, every phone call that enters the phone network needs to have a strict and auditable chain of liability. In reality, if our laws included a requirement for strict metadata, and then a requirement to make an "abusive phone call" button really obvious, we could figure this out pretty quickly: at this point it becomes a simple reputation system. Finally, we need laws that prohibit co-opting the phone network for marketing. We may want to start with prohibiting unsolicited commercial and political calls. We need to make sure that there are no loopholes, where the company you bought something from 2 years ago is still free to call you as if you have an ongoing relationship. We need to recognize that pulling out one's phone and looking at who is calling is really a significant burden to us, and that our government should protect us from companies and politicians who think that they have the right to interrupt our day at any moment to listen to a sales pitch. If you really care and want to put time into this, advocate politically. (And remember that hacker news is not supposed to be political.) Don't waste your time reading instructions about how to report spam.
pbj1968 3y ago
All the responses to this post have been an amusing read. Apparently this forum is too young to remember all the Guyana phone sex scam numbers from the 80s and 90s…
cortesoft 3y ago
> If they really cared, they would have addressed it by now. They care, but not enough to spend what is required to address it.
mock-possum 3y ago
Less that spam makes them money, more than doing nothing about spam doesn’t cost them money.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Reason077 3y ago
In some cases it definitely seems to be the carriers making money. I’ve never really had any issues at all with SMS spam in the UK and Europe - but I’m currently in Thailand where it’s awful! When you buy a new SIM card at the airport, the spamming starts within an hour or so. I count 18 sent yesterday alone, once every hour or so during the day. I believe it is actually the carrier (true.th) sending them as they all follow a similar format and seem to arrive with a somewhat predictable regularity. They even have an automated number (*137) you can call and supposedly turn off spam, but it doesn’t work: “System will cancel spam SMS within 24 hour. Thank you for using!”. Yeah right. Only solution on iOS seems to be to disable notifications for SMS from unknown senders in System Settings. Then, at least, they only annoy you when you actually look at the messages app.

BLKNSLVR 3y ago

I can't see how it can be any other way than you mention. Is it conceivable that they don't have control of who is using their network, and how they're using it? It's not like they've just landed on the planet with this big telecoms network to manage. They created them, they set the rules, they own the gates. It's purely profit driven, no question. In the exact same way that Google and Meta claim to not be able to police advertising on their own fucking networks.

jcrawfordor 3y ago
The architecture of the telephone network was designed by a complex series of historical monopolies (across multiple countries), federal regulators, and state regulators. Because of this history, the providers have a surprisingly small degree of control over the traffic that passes through their network. This is, in a regulatory sense, what it means to be a common carrier.
- BLKNSLVR 3y ago
  My admittedly cynical view, then, is that the structure has outgrown it's usefulness. Features are being added, which enable phone number spoofing and other shenanigans, at some point deep in the network, such that common carriers, at the tips of the network, have no control over. Thus creating a scammers/spammers paradise.

drdaeman 3y ago

> telecoms are interested in stopping spam. If they really cared, they would have addressed it by now I'm not so sure about this. No one (except for, obviously, spammers) benefits from email spam, every mailhost and network admin is most certainly interested in stopping it (to some extent), and yet my mailbox can prove that spam is still very much alive. Solving spam problems in a highly distributed large federation of networks is not simple. However, I think there are less telecoms than LIRs and mail systems out there, and they typically have better control over who their clients are (less hacking, though I could be wrong), and there's not enough pressure on them (spammy mailhost's gonna get banned by every RDNSBL real quick, telcos - I don't know, but I guess not so much?), so I can certainly agree that telecoms have issues with their incentives. I could be wrong about this, though - I don't really know much about the telephone industry.

dylan604 3y ago
When you consider that most of this stuff originates from places outside of jurisdictions of any place that would ever consider doing something about it, you realize that legislation is worth much less than the paper it's never printed on.
- viraptor 3y ago
  It's that time I get to repeat: The US is a big enough destination that threatening to drop incoming calls would work. Much like the EU online privacy regulations has international effects, the US can play the game too. It's extremely unlikely that a legit telco anywhere in the world would choose to continue spam and lose the ability to call the US. (Telcos peer to other telcos/interconnects explicitly and can force custom agreements)
  - koolba 3y ago
    > The US is a big enough destination that threatening to drop incoming calls would work. They should threaten to drop outgoing calls too. That’d eliminate all the useless offshore call centers.
    - freeone3000 3y ago
      Some sort of quite tall wall, perhaps made of fire…
      - dylan604 3y ago
        i don't know about being tall. by any definition i'm familiar within context, 1RU is about the smallest possible.
calamari4065 3y ago
The analogy doesn't hold because anyone can send an email to anyone else on any service at any time. You can't exactly just climb up a telephone pole and tap off a few phone numbers for yourself. You have to explicitly enter into a contract with a service provider to use their infrastructure. Spammers and scammers are wasting infrastructure resources that the telcos could be allocating to users. The telco can just cut your access off if you abuse it. If I spin up an email server, no one entity can stop me sending email to anyone else. Gmail or Outlook or other services can block me individually, but there is no centralized network and no central authority that can refuse my connection. [0] I suspect that telcos don't want to do anything about abuse because it's a very large fraction of their total traffic. The artificially higher utilization of the network gives them more justification for their prices or gives them some sort of good boy points for having x number of users. I don't really know how any of that works, just a wild guess. [0] There are centralized blacklists and other ways to communicate that a sender should be widely blocked, but that's not the same as a telco refusing to physically connect you

batch12 3y ago

A few questions (in good faith) for discussion: - How do you feel about the telcoms reading/filtering your texts? - Where do you feel these controls would be most appropriately applied? Sender or recipient or both? - How would you define SMS spam for filtering? Should the messages be manually reviewed or automatically filtered based on volume/content? - Should recipient telcoms filter potentially malicious or spammy voice calls?

mynameisvlad 3y ago
Texts are not encrypted anyway, your telecom can already read and filter your texts, and there’s been several instances of it happening. Eg: https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/17aqv1z/tmobile_linksurls_not_sending_do_this/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/17aqv1z/tmobile_li...

callalex 3y ago

Carriers could solve the spam problem overnight by disconnecting about 3 or 4 countries from the rest of the world. However popular that action may be, it would not be legal.

grecy 3y ago
The world has already decided to disconnect 5 countries from the global banking system, effectively keeping them locked in the dark ages....
pennybanks 3y ago
ya but now they are the racist carrier. racism hunts. witch hunts. in the far future these 2 events will look no different

lostlogin 3y ago

With booking systems that use texts for appointment confirmation, several companies end up using the same group of phone numbers due to the service that sends the text having limited phone numbers. Some of the companies are quite spammy. It’s frustrating as blocking the number risks blocking real ‘you have an appointment at xxx’ type messages.

naravara 3y ago

I think you underestimate how ineptly run a lot of these highly-regulated, legacy industries actually are. They care, but in the way most people care about not being fat. They still can’t make the necessary lifestyle changes to do anything about it even if it is their most ardent wish.

pbj1968 3y ago
[flagged]

gwbas1c 3y ago

(This is a US-based response response about the US phone system.) Because it's a political problem, not an engineering or business problem. In order to prevent monopolies, we have very strict requirements about carrying all calls that enter the network. Otherwise, phone companies would randomly block each other as part of anti-competitive tactics to push each other out of business. The telephone spammers take advantage of these laws, because it is very difficult to legally block a spam call. Your phone provider must carry all phone calls without any prejudice! (So I'm about to get very close to the line about hacker news's "no politics" guideline. Please consider that spammers "hack the law" and "hack politics" before you flag me. Instead, I would appreciate it if you take a minute or two to fact check my opinion disguised as fact.) The primary way out of this is by a legal change, not by an engineering change or culture change: We must update our laws so that it is very difficult to make and carry spam calls on the telephone network. I personally believe that one way to do this is to require that all phone calls provide rich metadata to the phone that is ringing. I really should know who is calling me, and the phone company that originates that call should be responsible for verifying it. I would even consider a requirement that makes it trivial, or automatic, to "lift the corporate veil" on who owns the company that is calling me. Otherwise there should be strict penalties for a phone network that allows originating calls with phony or spoofed metadata. (I also don't think anyone has a right to make a 100% anonymous phone call. I think we can figure out how to allow people who need to make anonymous phone calls to make them, without exposing the entire phone network to SPAM.) Ultimately, every phone call that enters the phone network needs to have a strict and auditable chain of liability. In reality, if our laws included a requirement for strict metadata, and then a requirement to make an "abusive phone call" button really obvious, we could figure this out pretty quickly: at this point it becomes a simple reputation system. Finally, we need laws that prohibit co-opting the phone network for marketing. We may want to start with prohibiting unsolicited commercial and political calls. We need to make sure that there are no loopholes, where the company you bought something from 2 years ago is still free to call you as if you have an ongoing relationship. We need to recognize that pulling out one's phone and looking at who is calling is really a significant burden to us, and that our government should protect us from companies and politicians who think that they have the right to interrupt our day at any moment to listen to a sales pitch. If you really care and want to put time into this, advocate politically. (And remember that hacker news is not supposed to be political.) Don't waste your time reading instructions about how to report spam.

pbj1968 3y ago

All the responses to this post have been an amusing read. Apparently this forum is too young to remember all the Guyana phone sex scam numbers from the 80s and 90s…

cortesoft 3y ago

> If they really cared, they would have addressed it by now. They care, but not enough to spend what is required to address it.

mock-possum 3y ago

Less that spam makes them money, more than doing nothing about spam doesn’t cost them money.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Reason077 3y ago

In some cases it definitely seems to be the carriers making money. I’ve never really had any issues at all with SMS spam in the UK and Europe - but I’m currently in Thailand where it’s awful! When you buy a new SIM card at the airport, the spamming starts within an hour or so. I count 18 sent yesterday alone, once every hour or so during the day. I believe it is actually the carrier (true.th) sending them as they all follow a similar format and seem to arrive with a somewhat predictable regularity. They even have an automated number (*137) you can call and supposedly turn off spam, but it doesn’t work: “System will cancel spam SMS within 24 hour. Thank you for using!”. Yeah right. Only solution on iOS seems to be to disable notifications for SMS from unknown senders in System Settings. Then, at least, they only annoy you when you actually look at the messages app.