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

The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 432 posts

Re: The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

#321

Post by ripdog »

philipkglass wrote: post #88
Semaphor wrote: post #68

I have a question, why are robocalls such a problem in the U.S.A.? As far as I know, they aren’t in Germany (or if they are, not on that level, I never got one).

There are a lot of people living outside the USA who can speak English. Both legitimate and fraudulent English-language call centers are easier to set up internationally than German-language call centers. The robo part of the call can obviously be automated from anywhere but there are actual humans pretending to be from "Apple Support" when a target responds. That raises another question: are other Anglosphere countr…

I live in NZ and I've received maybe 1 or 2 in my lifetime. I'm not aware of any particular legal/technical measures in place here to stop them.

Re: The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

#323

Post by PhasmaFelis »

cheez wrote: post #273
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Convicted child sex offenders doing what? I googled "drag queen story hour" and I have no idea how it connects to call blocking and telecoms.

Example of slippery slope.

I'm still not following. What do you consider "drag queen storytime" a slippery slope to/from? For that matter, which end of the slope is it?

Are you aware that the "slippery slope argument" is a logical fallacy? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

Re: The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

#324

Post by dao- »

wpskidd wrote: post #278
Scoundreller wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Creating a proactive system might be difficult, but the apparatus is all there for being reactive. Yet this has been going on for years, so I suspect shenanigans by providers too happy to continue charging their Tier7 peers for access.

I think this a great challenge to propose to the HN crowd. Who wouldn’t pay for a system that truly eliminates the annoyance of spam calls? What about a private network that people could subscribe to that uses a decentralized social credit system? Or one that uses a monitoring gateway to track the number of calls originating from a number (either internal or external to the subscriber group), and treats mass callers…

> Who wouldn’t pay for a system that truly eliminates the annoyance of spam calls?

Anyone in a region with sensible legislation.

Re: The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

#325

Post by sj4nz »

lukebuehler wrote: post #274

A lot of people point out that telecom companies should do something but aren't because it's lucrative for them or too expensive to fix. Are telecom companies not realizing how much they are hurting themselves with this in the long term? People will stop using phone numbers altogether. Using the phone has become such a pain, at least in the US, that whenever I can, I used different ways of communicating. WhatsApp, iM…

I'm already there wanting to stop using phone numbers. So. Much. There.

I haven't had a "land line" in multiple-decades. My short list of "the next thing" requires:

- Ability to install on a mobile device without any connection to a "phone number." Phone numbers in my mind are dead. - Skip the synchronous social convention of calling. Everything should be async by default. You don't ever cause someone's device to interrupt them. This is already culturally "accepted" with SMS. Unopened messages are deleted after some number of days. - With permission, these asynchronous messages should be forwardable. You give permission in advance of course, and then you can avoid having to repeat yourself again and again. - TMDA style whitelisting for unknown public keys wishing for contact. Addresses need some kind of seniority (older than 30-days) and some reasonable integration into the network at large (vouching connections between other people with "skin in the game", akin to a shared reputation--If I could remember the name of that early social network that tried to do this, avogato.org? Something like that.) - Mesh networking forever. Decentralize it all.

This is not something that I think can be a "startup," because this needs to be a protocol, not tied to any firm. If anyone's software works with the protocol, then let the "best installable" win. The closest thing to this right now is Scuttlebutt protocol and if someone could re-introduce contact sharing via "bumping" (using the accelerometer and GPS location and time together) devices together to exchange public keys, that particular bit of UX could go a long way to making it easier to adopt. However, the worst part of Scuttlebutt's capabilities has been the storage consumption for very popular identities that often consumes all the available memory on smaller devices. It needs data-storage hygenics--some way for the end-user to state what kind of data they want to keep and what they wish to ignore.

Re: The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

#326

Post by hippich »

teddyh wrote: post #307

So many knee-jerk “obvious” solutions in comments here, some with gratuitous violent fantasies to boot. Might I suggest that you look at how your proposed solution compares to other, older, suggestion on how the then-new email spam problem used to be suggested to be fixed: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt Also, this is a mostly exclusively a U.S. problem. In Europe, we basically just don’t ever get “robocalls”…

Who is paying for the incoming call in Europe (honest question)? If it is caller only - perhaps it is a reason? In my home country, where receiver of the call does not pay for the call, robocalling would be uterly unprofitable.

Re: The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

#327

Post by tooney712 »

Diesel555 wrote: post #310
lukebuehler wrote: post #274

A lot of people point out that telecom companies should do something but aren't because it's lucrative for them or too expensive to fix. Are telecom companies not realizing how much they are hurting themselves with this in the long term? People will stop using phone numbers altogether. Using the phone has become such a pain, at least in the US, that whenever I can, I used different ways of communicating. WhatsApp, iM…

"Are telecom companies not realizing how much they are hurting themselves" After seeing cable companies fail to get into the internet, I'm convinced companies try to stop progress instead of embracing it. They don't see progress as an opportunity, but rather as a threat. They don't realize how much they are hurting themselves. I read an interesting article on here about the rise of the cell phone camera, the amount o…

The go to example of this will always be Kodak.

Steven Sasson invented the first digital camera (and a device to display it on) in 1975 while working at R&D at Kodak. He had a fully functional DSLR by 1989, complete with memory cards. Kodak never released his work, never manufactured that camera. They kept the patent of the work and sat on it, and when others tried to innovate and create a digital camera, Kodak sued them with that patent and kept suing people right up until the patent ran out in 2007. By 2012, the company was bankrupt.

Innovation, true innovation that really pushes technology forward, is anathema to the average business.

Re: The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

#328

Post by teddyh »

ikeboy wrote: post #308
teddyh wrote: post #307

So many knee-jerk “obvious” solutions in comments here, some with gratuitous violent fantasies to boot. Might I suggest that you look at how your proposed solution compares to other, older, suggestion on how the then-new email spam problem used to be suggested to be fixed: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt Also, this is a mostly exclusively a U.S. problem. In Europe, we basically just don’t ever get “robocalls”…

There's no real email spoofing problem anymore because we have signatures proving the source on every email. There's a phone spoofing problem because carriers are allowing spoofing, when they don't have to.

> * There's no real email spoofing problem anymore because we have signatures proving the source on every email.*

(I assume that you are referring to DKIM, and not OpenPGP or S/MIME, since the latter two are obviously not frequently used.)

DKIM signatures (not to mention DMARC to actually require a signature) are not actually that common either. Spoofing is mostly still rejected by a combination of plain old SPF and spam filtering of the mail contents. All in my experience, of course.

> There's a phone spoofing problem because carriers are allowing spoofing, when they don't have to.

Is this what Europe is doing which the U.S. isn’t? If it is, then you’re probably right. I don’t actually know. I’m just saying that whatever Europe is doing is evidently working, and any other proposed solution would have some significant benefit and proof of efficacy to be considered over a proven concept.

Re: The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

#329

Post by onetimeusename »

lukebuehler wrote: post #274

A lot of people point out that telecom companies should do something but aren't because it's lucrative for them or too expensive to fix. Are telecom companies not realizing how much they are hurting themselves with this in the long term? People will stop using phone numbers altogether. Using the phone has become such a pain, at least in the US, that whenever I can, I used different ways of communicating. WhatsApp, iM…

They are slow to act because it is unclear whether it is justified in the law for them to block what they believe is spam or if a customer wants to receive a call.

Section 202 of Telecommunications Act details that telecoms cannot discriminate connections so they have been unwilling to block spam if it can lead to breaking the law[1]. The FCC has been trying to change that by rolling out new guidance on what can definitely be blocked[2]. One of the new rules defines a new legal safe harbor for carriers that block calls that are unauthenticated using a new protocol that is expected to be rolled out by year end, 2019.

[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/202 [2]: https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-affirms-robocall-blocking-d...

Re: The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $208M, Collected $6,790

#330

Post by scythe »

Lots of clever ideas about catching robocallers with technology here. But I don't think that technology is the solution.

I suggest placing bounties. Information leading to the assessment of a fine will result in a proportional reward to the informant. Someone knows who is making these calls. We just have to get them to talk.

Post reply on HN