271–280 of 449 posts
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If everybody who received spam calls wasted 5 minutes of the caller's time, then the whole problem would not exist.
Here's a great podcast episode where the guy tracks his phone scammer to India and pays him a visit. https://gimletmedia.com/episode/long-distance/
Preach it. Also, has call quality completely tanked in the last decade or is it just me?
Yes, it's all shitty low bandwidth mobile phone voice codecs or VOIP stuff. Good old digital trunk lines (8 bit 8 ksample/sec mu-law -- the same as the .au file encoding, I think) sounded really quite good.
Opus will hopefully end the mish-mash of codecs that currently permeate telephony, as it is much higher quality at lower bitrates, and unlike GSM, ulaw, and even G722 (which some call HD Voice) it can handle packet loss gracefully. Makes all commonly used codecs look terrible in comparison.
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Because it is the most simplest and the most spread one? You don't need to sign up for yet-another-communication-service; you are not dependent on corporations like Facebook to conduct your business; you don't need to install an app. What else would you use?
Chat on their website?
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I also receive a lot of those (around ~5 a day, for more than 5 months already). It is really annoying and makes me wish I could just block numbers on my phone.
Try listening to the end, there is often a number to press to have them stop calling. The internet myth is that this marks you as someone to keep calling (because you listened), but really they will stop.
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Even if you subscribed to this bizarre principle that it's rude to call someone unannounced, you could always just ask by text.
That's better but it's still kind of imposing. We are not socially wired to be compatible with the technology to magically steal people's attention from space.
Face-time can be magical. Especially around the holidays. When clusters of your tribe gather in geographically disperse points. But you can still experience a simulacrum of "presence". But author has a point about banks being particularly egregious offenders of phone dependency. They are progressing. With voice print and zelle. As well as iris scans. But I still need face to face in person meetings about once per mon…
I ran a business for several years that never quite grew large enough to support additional technical staff, so I was always on call. It didn't happen often, but I got enough calls (or pages, since that was how I dealt with it in early couple of years) in the middle of the night to where I literally had nightmares about a phone ringing for a while. Even today sometimes my stomach hurts and I feel angry when the phone…
It messes you up.
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Try listening to the end, there is often a number to press to have them stop calling. The internet myth is that this marks you as someone to keep calling (because you listened), but really they will stop.
That you had some luck being removed from some legitimate call lists does not mean that you can dismiss these extremely common tactics as "Internet myths." There's a whole spectrum of spam callers that ranges from respectable businesses all the way to outright scammers. Some use illegal tactics like the ones you're trying to say are a myth and literally everyone I've ever talked to in person about the issue has had a…
I mean, I get ~1 unwanted call a week across a couple of phone numbers (that I answer and ask to stop). Other people are saying that they get a dozen a day and giving up on their phones. My anecdotes work for me.
My changed relationship with the telephone became weirdly apparent when I watched the original WarGames movie recently. There's a scene where David (Matthew Broderick) is alone with McKittrick (Dabney Coleman) in his office being interrogated separated by an office desk. While they're sitting there the telephone on McKittrick's desk starts ringing, which he silently ignores keeping his eyes glued on David, who grows…
The 5:4 timing of the ring in the UK was designed to create tension and a sense of urgency to make people answer it quicker.