Meanwhile, here in Australia ... It used to be as bad as others describe here, if not worse. A few years ago my 92 yo mother disconnected her land line because she was getting 20 calls a day. The spammers had figured out the number range of her retirement village, and hammered it mercilessly. But other day I was reflecting on how oddly silent it has become on the phone spam front. This article made me wonder - just h…
FCC bars providers for non-compliance with robocall protections
221–230 of 281 posts
Re: FCC bars providers for non-compliance with robocall protections
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean the donotcall.gov database? What changes have they made?
When they are screening a call, if I push the button to answer the call, the call comes to me immediately. They used to play back a 10 to 20 second "polite" message that just annoyed everybody.
But I'm not sure what that has to do with the Do Not Call database.
Re: FCC bars providers for non-compliance with robocall protections
#223At this point I'm firmly of the opinion that "leak this 10 digit code and anyone on the planet can call me relentlessly" is just a broken model. Maybe that worked better when the calls carried a significant cost, but clearly the scammers are able to do this sort of thing at scale. In practice of course, my phone is 100% permanently in "do not disturb" mode and does not ring at all unless I've added you to my contact…
Yup. I didn’t realize how bad it got until my father stopped answering calls. It turned out he was getting (no hyperbole) 90 calls a day from spammers and vendors he had no relationship with. I used the iOS filter, the AT&T filter, and turned on the shortcut so the phone doesn’t ring unless the caller is in his contacts. The problem is that it already changed his behavior. He doesn’t answer the phone anymore, even if…
Re: FCC bars providers for non-compliance with robocall protections
#224Meanwhile, here in Australia ... It used to be as bad as others describe here, if not worse. A few years ago my 92 yo mother disconnected her land line because she was getting 20 calls a day. The spammers had figured out the number range of her retirement village, and hammered it mercilessly. But other day I was reflecting on how oddly silent it has become on the phone spam front. This article made me wonder - just h…
> Yet now in 2025, they had a total victory, they've annihilated all phone spam, and I didn't notice for months. No media release, no trumpeting from the roof tops. They just quietly and effectively did their job. How?
But if I was to speculate ... The ACMA effectively killed email spam originating from Australian businesses years (decades?) ago. The government passed legislation allowing ACMA to impose big fines on companies that sent spam, they then set set up a web form you could upload spam emails to, and a couple of years later there was no email spam ... from Australia. It didn't reduce email spam much, as most spam originated outside of Australia. The other possible choke point was email Inbox suppliers like Google and Hotmail, but they are also located outside of Australia, beyond the ACMA's reach. Still, it did mean when I set up an email / web server for a local club, if I black listed most of the world's IP addresses outside of Australia, it killed all email spam.
The question in my mind was: if they could do it for email, why couldn't they do it for phones after years of trying? They had stopped Australian business from sending phone spam of course, so it all came from internationals just as with email. But this time they did have jurisdiction over the equivalent of the "inbox providers" - the Australia telco's. Most of the overseas spam did come from Australia phone numbers. If it didn't people would just ignore it.
I can only guess those telco's fought the good fight to be allowed to send and charge for spam successfully for a long time. I don't know why they were successful in that fight for as long as they were, but the timing does look suggestive. The USA equivalent of the Republicans run the place federally during most of that time. Now, partly due to example set by Trump, they lost in a landslide to our equivalent of Democrats. These "Democrats" won three years ago too, but now they look to moving as if they have a mandate to do whatever they want.
While this mob speaks in woke tones, there looks to be an iron will fist behind their "kind" words. They are getting the ACMA(?) to enforce age verification scheme internet access for example, something I think is worse than a waste of time. But they are hard and determined taskmasters, so they may make it stick.
Re: FCC bars providers for non-compliance with robocall protections
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. I didn’t realize how bad it got until my father stopped answering calls. It turned out he was getting (no hyperbole) 90 calls a day from spammers and vendors he had no relationship with. I used the iOS filter, the AT&T filter, and turned on the shortcut so the phone doesn’t ring unless the caller is in his contacts. The problem is that it already changed his behavior. He doesn’t answer the phone anymore, even if…
Can you share those countermeasures you mentioned? I haven’t been able to find anything for the iPhone.
Re: FCC bars providers for non-compliance with robocall protections
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Comparing PSTN to instant messaging walled gardens is interesting, but I’d argue the real parallel is email: a federated, open standard that also suffers from spam and abuse, yet still manages to limp along thanks to heavy filtering and layered trust systems. I think you're absolutely right to draw that parallel. But, today's email landscape isn't much of a federated open standard. It's a web of trust and distrust,…
Yes, absolutely — I’m not suggesting email is anywhere near perfect or free of abuse. But at least collectively, the layers of filtering, reputation systems, and standards make it usable for most people most of the time. The key difference for me is that the PSTN moves at a snail’s pace, maybe because of regulatory entanglements, maybe because of interoperability constraints. The result is that problems which have be…
Re: FCC bars providers for non-compliance with robocall protections
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
> at least you get more signals to work with (headers, DKIM/SPF/DMARC, filtering, etc.) than just a string of 10–12 digits with no real context. For most people it is a distinction without a difference because they know about as much what to do with a DMARC policy as they do an SS7 frame. DKIM/SPF/DMARC as bandaids just as much as STIR/SHAKEN are, they just need to get a kick in the ass to implement them -- on both f…
Sure, but my point still stands — you have more tools to work with in email. For what it’s worth, I can usually contextualize a message from the subject line and the sender’s address without needing to dive deep into headers. (Phishing is definitely a real problem, but it’s not unique to email in this discussion.) Now compare that to the PSTN: what does 555-123-4567 really tell you? Not much. It’s just a string of di…
Re: FCC bars providers for non-compliance with robocall protections
#228At this point I'm firmly of the opinion that "leak this 10 digit code and anyone on the planet can call me relentlessly" is just a broken model. Maybe that worked better when the calls carried a significant cost, but clearly the scammers are able to do this sort of thing at scale. In practice of course, my phone is 100% permanently in "do not disturb" mode and does not ring at all unless I've added you to my contact…
I've received I think two total spam calls in the years since I ported my cell number to a voip service and set up an IVR in front that just says to press any number. It also blocks the very, very few robocalls I might actually want, and occasionally some company will refuse to accept a voip number as a cell number, but most everything just works fine.
Re: FCC bars providers for non-compliance with robocall protections
#229On a side note, today and yesterday I've been bombarded with spam calls. Even got one while writing this comment. All of which have my same area code, which is for a location I haven't live at for over 15 years. No voice mail, nothing. It's not even this bad around election time. Btw, if you haven't already, you can sign up for the FCC's Do Not Call list[0]. While obviously this isn't going to solve everything, it do…
I have an app on Android called SpamBlocker. I added a regex rule to deny any call from my area code - like you, I haven't lived there for a long time. I'd 100% recommend this approach.
Re: FCC bars providers for non-compliance with robocall protections
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, absolutely — I’m not suggesting email is anywhere near perfect or free of abuse. But at least collectively, the layers of filtering, reputation systems, and standards make it usable for most people most of the time. The key difference for me is that the PSTN moves at a snail’s pace, maybe because of regulatory entanglements, maybe because of interoperability constraints. The result is that problems which have be…
Why are you so eager to give up interoperability when it’s not the problem? Spam exists within walled gardens too. Interoperability and spam are orthogonal.
If the only way to preserve interoperability is to accept decades of unresolved abuse and perpetual patchwork fixes, then that’s not a trade-off I find compelling. At that point we’re not debating facts, we’re debating tolerance levels — and mine is lower. I think that’s a good place to leave it.