311–320 of 367 posts
Similarly, I don't understand why people answer the front door when they can hear or see (through peephole or Ring) that it's a stranger. I don't need your magazines, your house-painting services, your church, or whatever else. If you're lost and looking for your friend's house you're supposed to be at, sorry I'm not gonna be able to help you anyway.
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No, but prepaid wireless services may charge you for incoming calls.
Are there any services that actually charge you additional fees for incoming long distance calls though? That seems to be the primary concern here.
If anyone knows of a scam in which simply picking up a call can produce extra costs, they should definitely share!
I feel like if FCC/Telephone providers don't fix this soon, traditional cell phones will become unreliable and we will need to adopt a new system or just use existing framework (facetime, whatsapp, etc.). If every cell phone has LTE and internet connection, why the fuck do we need traditional cell phone number? I never use it except for calling my pharmacy, customer support or restaurants/shops. All conversations wit…
Of all of them, I think T-mobile is the most willing to actually improve the industry for everyone's benefit.
When we receive a SIP invite (incoming call) from one of our upstream carriers, the amount of metadata information they're able to provide us is often very limited (largely due to interop issues in my opinion). If you think about IP spoofing, BGP, and the state of egress filtering on the internet, it's a very similar situation.
Since this is related to my work, obviously all of the above is just my personal opinion.
As someone who has worked in the telecom space for nearly 20 years, I really think we need to remove other countries from country code +1. People in any country should have confidence when they dial a number that it isn't unexpectedly billing them for international calls. This applies to people in any of the +1 nations, not just the United States. Otherwise, we need to set the rules and pricing conditional for being…
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My strategy is: if I don’t know the caller they can leave a voicemail. If it’s not important enough for a voicemail, it’s not important.
The problem with this for me is my voicemail is now so full of spam messages from numbers I don't answer or block that I can't ever get any useful messages if there are any. A lot of the time my inbox remains full and I can't actually receive new voicemails. It's just gotten to the point where the new voicemail icon has become a permanent fixture on my notification bar I totally ignore.
I get calls from scammers occasionally, but they don't ever leave VM.
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The problem with this for me is my voicemail is now so full of spam messages from numbers I don't answer or block that I can't ever get any useful messages if there are any. A lot of the time my inbox remains full and I can't actually receive new voicemails. It's just gotten to the point where the new voicemail icon has become a permanent fixture on my notification bar I totally ignore.
That's weird. I get calls from scammers occasionally, but they don't ever leave VM.
I actually called the number the CRA one left back once and a person with a French accent answered pretending to be from the CRA. I just said if they called my number again I was going to report them to the rcmp and then hung up. It stopped for a few months after that. I'm assuming if it was actually Canada revenue, they would have called back. All I was getting were the Cantonese ones. The CRA ones only started again recently.
From the website: How to avoid this scam: Don't answer or return any calls from numbers you don't recognize. If the FCC is recommending we don't pick up our phones, isn't something really wrong with the system?
> How to avoid this scam: Don't answer or return any calls from numbers you don't recognize. Unfortunately, this isn't great for a number of reasons: 1) The last two times I got a series of missed calls every two hours from somebody who didn't leave a voicemail, it was my credit card company (a different company each time) calling to ask me about a number of suspicious charges on the other side of the country that I…
This is a huge part of why this system doesn't work. Perhaps 95% of the calls I get from unknown numbers either produce informative voicemails or are scams. But the ones that don't are often the most important calls I get, from sources like credit card companies and doctors. Depressingly often, the numbers they're using aren't even listed online to look up later.
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On spam filtering: the public telephone network transmits almost zero data on a call - the only header is the originating number, which can be un-traceably spoofed at the originator. There is no embedded message data (that would be the call itself). So there’s literally no valid data to filter spam on, unless the spam caller is chivalrous enough to use their legit caller ID. I would also bet that there are regulation…
There’s at least one piece of data on every call that the network operator has—-the identity of the prior network hop. In the early days of fighting email spam, that was enough. Every network operator was responsible for receiving spam complaints and responding appropriately. Network providers that couldn’t or wouldn’t prevent spammers from using their networks were blacklisted and other networks would refuse to rout…
Distrusting one of them and the calls that come from them is something of a non-sequitur since you chose them and intentionally became one of their customers and pay them to receive those calls.
TL;DR This isn't like email or IP traffic where you're interacting with other IPs in a purely untrusted network model. Merely analyzing the previous hop doesn't tell us anything valuable.
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> In other countries, mobile phones have their own "mobile phones" area code which is non-geographic and applies to all mobile phones. Here in Brazil it's slightly different. The area codes are the same for fixed and cell phones, but if the first digit of the local part of the phone number is in the 7-9 range, it's a cell phone (if it's in the 2-6 range, it's a fixed phone; 1 is reserved for special services like eme…
It's interesting that they've managed to merge the numbering systems in that way! Who pays the extra cost for a call to a mobile phone, the caller or the receiver? I've yet to visit any South/Central American countries, they seem to have inherited a lot of North American phone operator customs (like 850/1900 radio bands and CDMA). In the European country I used to live in, they even had different mobile area codes pe…
The caller. You don't pay to receive normal calls unless you're roaming (since the caller can't know you're roaming, it wouldn't be fair to make the caller pay the roaming charges).
> they seem to have inherited a lot of North American phone operator customs (like 850/1900 radio bands and CDMA).
The radio bands make sense, since the whole American continent is a single ITU region. As for CDMA, here on Brazil initially it was only Vivo on CDMA and the rest on GSM, but then Vivo also switched to GSM some time ago.
> They would have deals where calling someone on the same operator was free.
We also have these deals here. And also here, number portability muddled things: while before for instance 95xx to 99xx was Vivo and 90xx to 94xx was Claro, nowadays you can't be sure (and that's before they added an extra "9" digit before all cell phone numbers, making them 9 digits instead of 8).