Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FCC fines robocaller record $120M

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 175 posts

Re: FCC fines robocaller record $120M

#71

Post by buckminster »

rayiner wrote: post #61
bradleyjg wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don’t understand is why no major mobile carrier is offering a solution to this. It’s a pretty competitive market and this could be a big selling point. When the isp wars were going strong, before broadband put everyone under the thumb of monopolists and also before gmail, spam filtering was a serious competative advantage. Why can’t phone companies take an RBL like approach? If your VoIP service garners too ma…

Blocking calls from certain VoIP services is almost certainly going to be a violation of common-carrier rules (which still apply to phone service no matter what happens with broadband). At a technical level, spam filtering relies heavily on analyzing email text. Doing similar analysis on voice calls is way harder. Also, there's UI issues. You can redirect suspected spam emails to a folder the user can inspect for fal…

Worse than that, international telecommunications are governed by treaties and the ITU. There is much bureaucracy in the way of a fix.

Re: FCC fines robocaller record $120M

#72

Post by criddell »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #34
post_break wrote: post #30

Can we please get phone OEMs to enable a feature to only allow calls from people in our contact list? Baked in. No apps that scrape your phone book to do it. If you're not on my contact list, go to voicemail and I'll decide if you're legit. And have an option like DND where if you call in rapid succession then I'll pick up.

I'd prefer an open source software solution but, either way, they'd start leaving voicemails, which is still annoying to manage. However, a lot of them already leave a 3 second blank voicemail, so that would at least eliminate the ignore/reject call step and the rude interruption.

Why do voicemail systems even notify me of a 3 second silent message? Just delete them.

Re: FCC fines robocaller record $120M

#74

Post by mikeash »

bradleyjg wrote: post #58
lend000 wrote: post #3

The real problem is the lack of security and authentication on telephone networks, which enables number spoofing with virtually no chance of reprisal -- foreign callers (realistically out of the FCC's jurisdiction) use VoIP services to create calls that originate from an IP address from the telephone network's perspective, and the phone network makes no attempt to authenticate the metadata (like the phone number that…

What I don’t understand is why no major mobile carrier is offering a solution to this. It’s a pretty competitive market and this could be a big selling point. When the isp wars were going strong, before broadband put everyone under the thumb of monopolists and also before gmail, spam filtering was a serious competative advantage. Why can’t phone companies take an RBL like approach? If your VoIP service garners too ma…

AT&T has a Call Protect app which attempts to do this. It misses some, but my spam call volume has dropped quite a bit with it.

Re: FCC fines robocaller record $120M

#75

Post by rconti »

mikeash wrote: post #74
bradleyjg wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don’t understand is why no major mobile carrier is offering a solution to this. It’s a pretty competitive market and this could be a big selling point. When the isp wars were going strong, before broadband put everyone under the thumb of monopolists and also before gmail, spam filtering was a serious competative advantage. Why can’t phone companies take an RBL like approach? If your VoIP service garners too ma…

AT&T has a Call Protect app which attempts to do this. It misses some, but my spam call volume has dropped quite a bit with it.

Thanks, looking into it now. iOS and Android app. I'm curious to see how this works. Probably can't get in the way of the calls on the device itself; pushes changes to the network maybe?

https://www.att.com/features/security-apps.html

Re: FCC fines robocaller record $120M

#78

Post by hbosch »

doikor wrote: post #33
post_break wrote: post #30

Can we please get phone OEMs to enable a feature to only allow calls from people in our contact list? Baked in. No apps that scrape your phone book to do it. If you're not on my contact list, go to voicemail and I'll decide if you're legit. And have an option like DND where if you call in rapid succession then I'll pick up.

In iPhone enable do not disturb 24/7 and only allow calls from contact list. Only bad/good thing is that all notifications get disabled too.

I use this and consider the lack of notifications a positive.

Re: FCC fines robocaller record $120M

#79

Post by glentaka »

hbosch wrote: post #78
doikor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In iPhone enable do not disturb 24/7 and only allow calls from contact list. Only bad/good thing is that all notifications get disabled too.

I use this and consider the lack of notifications a positive.

I concur. If anything, I have these spammers to thank for making my life so much better. I check my phone at least 75% less now

Re: FCC fines robocaller record $120M

#80

Post by nikanj »

bradleyjg wrote: post #58
lend000 wrote: post #3

The real problem is the lack of security and authentication on telephone networks, which enables number spoofing with virtually no chance of reprisal -- foreign callers (realistically out of the FCC's jurisdiction) use VoIP services to create calls that originate from an IP address from the telephone network's perspective, and the phone network makes no attempt to authenticate the metadata (like the phone number that…

What I don’t understand is why no major mobile carrier is offering a solution to this. It’s a pretty competitive market and this could be a big selling point. When the isp wars were going strong, before broadband put everyone under the thumb of monopolists and also before gmail, spam filtering was a serious competative advantage. Why can’t phone companies take an RBL like approach? If your VoIP service garners too ma…

Should be technically possible to have ”these numbers can originate from this operator”. I’ve learned that if a phone looks to be from my area code, it’s actually from China. No idea what the robocaller is saying.

My operator should be able to have a short list of teleoperators in this zip code, and drop other calls.

Post reply on HN