On the Trail of the RoboCall King

To give them a special name, in and of itself, raises phonecall spam to a new level of shenanigans, when this is something of a script kiddie skill. Same as email, this is a mild nuisance. It's not some crisis tearing at the fabric of society.

It's sort of like complaining about how windows are transparent, and that you shouldn't need curtains to prevent people from looking inside. It's like there's this expectation that it should just be illegal to look inside any window.

If it's a phone number, people are going to call it. If you don't want to be disturbed, don't let your phone ring? If you only want to be disturbed by familiar individuals, only ring for those numbers, or screen voice mail?

Seems... almost too easy to deflect this sort of thing.

Not to mention every other person is actively bothered in the real world by a real alarm instead of just scrolling past while checking their email. Email spam vs robocalling is not even comparable in terms of the effects. I miss real phone calls from people, such as job offers, due to spammers forcing me to send everything to voicemail. I'm not a hateful person by any means, but I honestly wish the absolute worst on anyone who is behind scamming robocalls purely due to the amount of minor annoyance built over time.

  Robocalls have been around 
  since at least the 1980s, 
  when someone first thought 
  to attach a tape deck to a 
  phone. In the analog age, 
  the hardware was clunky, 
  expensive, and difficult to 
  operate. The tapes had to be 
  rewound, and they eventually 
  wore out.

Case in point, the push button prompts used by call centers to funnel phone calls to specialists (which became truly unavoidable in the 1990's) are enough of a gateway to eliminate robocalls from a business context, and it's as simple as answering with a recording that prompts the user to press a number to proceed. It requires less of a barrier than a CAPTCHA.

Robocalls are probably as much of a plague as pre-roll trailers bundled with movies purchased on optical disc formats. For the most part easily skipped, but if you paid to own your own copy, why on earth would anyone lock that copy into showing the same advertisements every time the disc is viewed?

Do they smoke cigarettes near the oxygen tent too?

Doctors indignantly cling to old-school beepers and telcom pager services more out of a desire for status than any anxiety of life-threatening technical vulnerabilities.