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Show HN: Phone verification at no cost

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Re: Show HN: Phone verification at no cost

#31

Post by Symbiote »

wfunction wrote: post #28
finnn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My SIP provider passes whatever number I send, for most of the numbers. No talking to them required. Particularly fun for Android phones that do Google Maps lookups for caller ID, so calling from 2024561414 shows up as "The White House" Just for fun i went ahead and verified 2024561414 with the demo of this thing. It gave me a nice little check mark showing that I was definitely the White House

Sorry, what's an SIP provider? I've looked it up and still don't understand what it is. Is it a residential service? Can anyone get it? Is it some form of VoIP? Or a classical phone line? I've seen it in multiple places but don't understand what it is or which companies it relates to.

It's the open standard for VoIP.

It's used in many places, but mostly offices. An office might have an exchange system, with features like voicemail and routing different types of call over different networks.

I have a personal account which gives cheap international calls, which I added to my android phone. I can receive calls at my SIP address, from anyone on any provider. When I make a call, I'm given the option of using the mobile network directly, or SIP.

Naturally, neither the phone networks not the big tech companies want you to use SIP. They'd rather you used normal calls, or their proprietary system.

Re: Show HN: Phone verification at no cost

#32

Post by pjc50 »

wfunction wrote: post #28
finnn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My SIP provider passes whatever number I send, for most of the numbers. No talking to them required. Particularly fun for Android phones that do Google Maps lookups for caller ID, so calling from 2024561414 shows up as "The White House" Just for fun i went ahead and verified 2024561414 with the demo of this thing. It gave me a nice little check mark showing that I was definitely the White House

Sorry, what's an SIP provider? I've looked it up and still don't understand what it is. Is it a residential service? Can anyone get it? Is it some form of VoIP? Or a classical phone line? I've seen it in multiple places but don't understand what it is or which companies it relates to.

It's telco VOIP. Anyone can get it, e.g. https://www.sipgate.co.uk/basic/

And there are various providers which will let you do 'trunking' into the phone system, so you can have any number of handsets with the same origination number appearing on outgoing caller ID.

Re: Show HN: Phone verification at no cost

#35

Post by neil_s »

Haha, this is the digital version of the Indian phenomenon of 'missed calls', used as 1-bit 0-cost notification mechanism. It's become such a cultural artifact, that big companies are now advertising numbers you can 'missed call' and get a callback from.

https://gigaom.com/2011/12/13/indias-missed-call-mobile-ecos...

Re: Show HN: Phone verification at no cost

#36

Post by k_ »

kevindeasis wrote: post #7

Hi, there's a free phone verification using facebook. It's account kit. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/accountkit/overview What do you guys think?

As great at this probably is, I don't think adding yet another dependency to facebook is a good thing.

I'm getting tired of services that only accept facebook users. Having a facebook login or any other facebook service requiring the user to be a facebook user is not bad in itself (and can be pretty useful), but it should _always_ have an alternative.

That's why I think projects like Dial2Verify Twilio are a great thing. They're still not perfect though, as some said here on HN.

Re: Show HN: Phone verification at no cost

#38

Post by zeroxfe »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #26
geocar wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would really love to hear a telecom engineer explain why the true origin info isn't accessible to the called person. A telephone call is a two-way connection -- the path in both directions must be known otherwise you won't have a two-way conversation. Telephone isn't really like IP routing. If D wants to call P, the connection might get set up like this: D -> K -> H -> V -> P P only knows that they are speaking t…

>"Caller ID" isn't the "source of the message", just some data transmitted along with the ringing sound, and as you can see the circuit doesn't have a globally unique identifier. // The companies could enforce the side channel info as the actual call origin, but they don't want to. Just like snail-mail spammers they're paying more money than residential customers will pay to require that info. It's broken because it…

Nice speech, but creating a new side channel on the PSTN is really hard to do. It requires standardization and the coordination of telcos, operators, device manufacturers, world-wide, many of which only have partially digital networks. (Think about how hard it would be to add a new field to TCP.)

Re: Show HN: Phone verification at no cost

#39

Post by koolba »

neil_s wrote: post #35

Haha, this is the digital version of the Indian phenomenon of 'missed calls', used as 1-bit 0-cost notification mechanism. It's become such a cultural artifact, that big companies are now advertising numbers you can 'missed call' and get a callback from. https://gigaom.com/2011/12/13/indias-missed-call-mobile-ecos...

It's not Indian specific either. I've seen it in a number of places throughout the world. It works anywhere that does not charge to receive calls (i.e. any sane place outside of the U.S.A.) as long as the caller doesn't get billed for cancelling.

You can get more than 1-bit of information as well if you sync the clock on your phone with the recipient. That gives you approximately 3.3 bits of information if you use the minute modula 10. This only works if you previously agree upon a meaning for values (Mod 0: Yes, Mod 5: No, etc).

Re: Show HN: Phone verification at no cost

#40

Post by ikeboy »

MichaelGG wrote: post #23
cantrevealname wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's known as "caller ID" is just an add-on that phone companies glued onto the system to have a feature to sell to the public. Another such feature is ANI[1] which was originally meant for billing purposes but is a feature sold with toll-free (800) numbers. It is much harder to spoof, but even ANI is not guaranteed to be present. I would really love to hear a telecom engineer explain why the true origin info isn't…

Outbound traffic (placing a call) is entirely separate from the inbound path. This is similar, in a way, to IP. You can send a packet with any source IP from basically anywhere on the Internet. The difference is that with IP, any return packets are routed separately, to the source IP. With a call, return voice just goes along the established channel. Each provider along the way will know who they received the call fr…

All it would take is providers refusing to connect to anyone that supports spoofing. Let users report spoof calls, then blacklist those providers. Everyone will fall in line real quick. (You could also just fine them for each spoof, not cut them off completely, but enough so they won't want to offer it a service to their customers. Also, of course you announce this months in advance so everyone has a chance to stop supporting it first.)

Call forwarding is fine as long as the spoofed number is also associated with the caller. But anyone that lets people call using a number that's not theirs at all should be booted off.

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