We all hate robocallers and scammers. We all hate getting called every day by them. But did you know there's something worse? My wife recently discovered a not so fun side effect of spam calls... Scammers have this popular trick of spoofing the caller ID for a number local to you. People are more likely to pick up the call if it's a number that seems familiar to them (like, the first 6 digits are the same as your pho…
I’m totally ignorant here, so I’m sure there’s a good reason: why is secure caller id so hard?
This worked OK when the only operators were the various national phone monopolies (Cap’n Crunch notwithstanding), but today that level of access is much easier to get and abuse, and is difficult to trace.
There are efforts to bolt-on security to the telephone network but it’s really hard.
I think it’s more likely that (over the next handful of decades) the phone network fades into obscurity as more voice calls are connected over data links which offer much improved security models.