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What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

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Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#51

Post by cool_dude85 »

ctoth wrote: post #23

Terrified to consider what happens when these scammers get hold of large language models here in a year or so. Rather than fading into the background as this article posits, I expect people to have models finetuned on convincing them to make purchases/send money. Probably trained by being pitted against other models which have been trained on the mark's social media feeds. Train the scambot to perfectly push your but…

They have, per the article, buildings full of slaves to do the selling. I doubt GPT-4 will be able to compete on price with that.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#53

Post by gnopgnip »

cglong wrote: post #22
johnklos wrote: post #2

Simple: it's time to stop using phone numbers. I use Apple's Messages. If someone spams me, I report them. They're blocked and have to go through the extra work of setting up a new account to try again. Compare this with, say, Google. Gmail lets spammers / scammers have limitless accounts and they don't do shit when an account is reported for spam. You can block and report Gmail spammers all day long and you'll get n…

> Compare this with, say, Google. Google Messages proactively detects spam texts and sends them to a spam folder, so I don't get notifications about these messages at all :)

Google voice has a poor shaken stir implementation that only blocks the most egregious spam calls and sms and does not let users choose to be more strict. It also does not support blocking phone numbers by pattern/prefix.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#54

Post by creeble »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #47
idiotsecant wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want one company to be the arbiter of all communications everywhere. Phone numbers work fine.

It would be good if phone companies weren't quite so complicit in hiding companies behind anonymous phone numbers, and relaying numbers for which they don't have verified origin info.

Supposedly today is the day that even the small carriers that were previously exempt from not having to comply with STIR/SHAKEN will now have to.

But its meaninglessness is demonstrated by the fact that I have received two spam calls (complete with "accurate" caller ID) since starting to read these comments.

So yeah. The phone companies are all complicit.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#55

Post by criddell »

0des wrote: post #27
pessimizer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure you are mandated to have mail in the US, or rather the mails are mandated to deliver to you. IIRC it's constitutional.

> I'm pretty sure you are mandated to have mail in the US, or rather the mails are mandated to deliver to you. IIRC it's constitutional. You'd be incorrect. Ask your postmaster.

They are correct. The USPS has a universal service obligation. If you send a letter or parcel to any address in the US, the post office must deliver it.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#58

Post by walrus01 »

johnklos wrote: post #2

Simple: it's time to stop using phone numbers. I use Apple's Messages. If someone spams me, I report them. They're blocked and have to go through the extra work of setting up a new account to try again. Compare this with, say, Google. Gmail lets spammers / scammers have limitless accounts and they don't do shit when an account is reported for spam. You can block and report Gmail spammers all day long and you'll get n…

saying stop using phone numbers and then going directly into

"hey, use this one proprietary vendor's closed source walled garden messaging app"

is NOT a solution.

people should be looking at things like Signal or custom implementations of Matrix/Element/Synapse or similar if they want real control of their two way chat communications.

Re: What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?

#59

Post by walrus01 »

eropple wrote: post #39
idiotsecant wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want one company to be the arbiter of all communications everywhere. Phone numbers work fine.

Phone numbers have the same problem as email, though: because "everyone" is responsible, no one is responsible. The deluge of spam texts and calls to my public phone number is genuinely unpleasant and frustrating to deal with as, like, a person living in the world . I practically don't use email anymore for those reasons, and a phone number hangs around only because right now I can't not have one for legal-type reaso…

email, at least, you can fully implement your own antispam solution in whatever way you want

at one extreme, you can just point the mx records for your domain at office365 or gsuite or similar and let them handle it

at the other extreme, you can point the mx records at your own mailserver you admin yourself and do absolutely anything you want with the incoming smtp mail flow for antispam measures, sorting, filtering, categorization, risk analysis.

the ordinary person even if they work for a telecom cannot implement their own phone number at one of the most fundamental levels of the pstn, because they don't run their own ss7 switch.

if you control your own DID and interface with it from a sip trunk to a trusted provider, running your own voip system, you can do a lot with custom routing/antispam measures on incoming call flow, but nowhere near to the extent that you can with email.

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