101–110 of 303 posts
There are good reasons why WhatsApp and the like are replacing phone calls in many countries.
I actually would like a regulatory solution for this. Mandate a way for me to say whether incoming calls were spam. Require my phone company to pay me money every time I get spammed. Allow my phone company to, at their option, proactively block calls from specific upstreams and/or pass the charge to the specific upstreams. Now from those incentives, the fines will naturally follow the upstreams to the source of the s…
In germany robocalls are illegal and the caller can get a huge fine.
Instead of figuring out a more measured approach they just made them all illegal :(
AFAIK, it's still the case that I can't block everything but numbers in my contacts, right? That's all I'm asking, and it can't be that hard. Add that simple feature that should have been there ten years ago and the problem is solved for me.
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You can do this, just set your phone to Do Not Disturb and then set it to "allow calls from my contacts"
This is only partially true on iOS. It doesn't take into account when you're using the phone, then it just lets everything through. Which is SUPPERRRRR annoying.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not. Robocalls are one of those things that really upsets a small subset of people either because they are overly sensitive to robocalls or that they are a member of that unlucky subset that does receive a very high amount. Like most things in the social media era, the grievances of a very vocal minority appear to be a larger group than they actually are. For example, the title of the article tells us that roboc…
> Robocalls are one of those things that really upsets a small subset of people either because they are overly sensitive to robocalls or that they are a member of that unlucky subset that does receive a very high amount. And you never get Robocalls?
And I have shared my number in a lot of places
About a year ago I put my phone on DND and have left it on ever since. My wife and the kids school are in my favorites so they can get through. If I have to make business calls I will initiate the call or just remember to turn it off if I get a calendar reminder for an incoming call. Maybe it will bite me in the ass at some point but it has been really nice to feel like I actually have some control of my phone again.
"At the telelphony-infrastructure level, it’s a supremely difficult problem that lacks a short-term fix because the underlying protocol is hopelessly insecure." This is only partly true. Technologically the solution is difficult, but it's easy from the social side as carriers can blacklist the smaller carriers that allow this fraud to take place. The real problem is that everyone except the consumer benefits from thi…
There already is a proposed technological solution to this: https://transnexus.com/whitepapers/stir-and-shaken-overview/ The FCC has recently "demanded" US telecoms to implement this [0], but at this point I don't believe there is actually a regulatory requirement to do so. [0] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-354933A1.pdf
I bet that a law like this would get the problem fixed fast.
"At the telelphony-infrastructure level, it’s a supremely difficult problem that lacks a short-term fix because the underlying protocol is hopelessly insecure." This is only partly true. Technologically the solution is difficult, but it's easy from the social side as carriers can blacklist the smaller carriers that allow this fraud to take place. The real problem is that everyone except the consumer benefits from thi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
”I actually would like a regulatory solution for this.” The UK has a solution. It does actually work, mostly: https://www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/index.html
It doesn't work, and i'm in the UK too. Bad actors simply ditch their LTD Co when they eventually get a small fine and some use it as a whitelist of active numbers to use. IIRC there was an idea about making directors of companies who flout this personally responsible, I wonder if this happened?