AT&T, Apple, Google To Work On 'Robocall' Crackdown (reuters.com) 113
Last month the FCC had pressed major U.S. phone companies to take immediate steps to develop technology that blocks unwanted automated calls available to consumers at no charge. It had demanded the concerned companies to come up with a "concrete, actionable" plan within 30 days. Well, the companies have complied. On Friday, 30 major technology companies announced they are joining the U.S. government to crack down on automated, pre-recorded telephone calls that regulators have labeled as "scourge." Reuters adds: AT&T, Alphabet, Apple, Verizon Communications and Comcast are among the members of the "Robocall Strike Force," which will work with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The strike force will report to the commission by Oct. 19 on "concrete plans to accelerate the development and adoption of new tools and solutions," said AT&T Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson, who is chairing the group. The group hopes to put in place Caller ID verification standards that would help block calls from spoofed phone numbers and to consider a "Do Not Originate" list that would block spoofers from impersonating specific phone numbers from governments, banks or others.
Fuck It (Score:5, Insightful)
I just don't answer my phone when it does that noisy thing. It happens about once a month. It's never good news anyway, and if it's important I get a followup text or email anyway.
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I set mine to whitelist only for a while. It would send anyone that wasn't in my contacts list to a "number is disconnected" message. It seemed to be working great, but then I noticed everywhere I went would need to verify my current contact information because my number would be marked as invalid.
Back to dumping all non-contacts to voicemail and deleting all messages without reading. Definitely going to bite me when someone has to borrow a phone to get a hold of me for something important.
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I don't know why they don't just outlaw this.
According to some TFA I read recently that I can't be bothered to go find, there are only a handful of companies responsible for most robocalls. Stamping the nonsense out wouldn't cost anyone anything. They employ few people and probably generate very little economic activity anyway. It's just a way of cheaply carpet-bombing people with unwanted advertising.
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I don't know why they don't just outlaw this.
If you are on the DNC list it is already outlawed. "Just one more law" won't fix this problem any more than it will fix the problem of criminals using guns, or secretaries of state using personal email servers for classified email.
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I use white-list only. If a phone number isn't in my contact list it goes straight to voicemail. There are lots of apps that you can use that will provide this service. Yeah, occasionally I miss a call from a new number that I wanted to take, but I can always call them back if they leave a message.
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SIT Tones (Score:2)
Put this sequence of tones [devpost.com] at the start of your voicemail.
The automatic dialing hardware will mark your number as out of service in their database.
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No it won't, unless they're using seriously old equipment. Nobody does call-progress detection over the voice channel anymore because it's more expensive than reading the out-of-band signalling.
Is this so hard (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, they will only prevent spoofing from "important" numbers? That's open to all kinds of abuse. How many people know their bank's number? This plan will make the problem even worse and eventually they will ask for federal funds to "manage" the problem.
Is it difficult to come up with a better plan? Actually yes. Yes when you don't care about helping people. This can be ended quite easily, blacklist numbers that receive a large ratio of complaints to calls. Make it possible to rate received calls. Also, prevent spoofing from all numbers, not just specific ones. Wow this plan didn't take me 30 days to come up with, it took me 30 seconds.
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"Requires users to spend extra time after making a call, and could be confusing."
No. There may be a temporary "rate this call" pop up after you hang up when it's a number that doesn't normally call you. This happens when you use other services like skype .. it isn't a problem. It can be ignored, you aren't forced to rate the call. They can make it even more subtle if that turns out to be annoying (users who want to rate a call can go into their history and rate it there -- statistics can account for the fac
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No. There may be a temporary "rate this call" pop up after you hang up when it's a number that doesn't normally call you. This happens when you use other services like skype .. it isn't a problem. It can be ignored, you aren't forced to rate the call. They can make it even more subtle if that turns out to be annoying (users who want to rate a call can go into their history and rate it there -- statistics can account for the fact that only angry users will bother).
ALL of which is extra steps for users and extra time.
Uh, No. There are no extra steps for users. The pop up -- which can be ignored/disabled and only appears when a new phone number appears -- happens AFTER the phone call and you don't need to click ignore it will go away automatically. How many new phone numbers call you on a cell phone anyway? It rarely happens for me, if seeing a popup after a call like that makes you upset maybe you should get therapy? But like I said if seeing a pop up after a phone call is too stressful for you then don't enable that feature. Millions of people would enable it, I mean millions of people signed up for Do-not-call lists .. and that involved a number of steps.
No. Collection agencies, most of which are unscrupulous anyway, could apply for and get themselves a special exemption.
But the scammers can't get this same exception? The exception can't be overridden with enough complaints? The exception can't be technically implemented by companies that don't have a legitimate exception? And cars will run on fair farts in the future too, right?
Uh, the method to handle this should be obvious. The exemption will be pricey enough to handle the fact that approval and subsequent follow up investigation can be handled by the organization setup to maintain this. And yes you would have an external organization handling these approvals and database. You do realize that phone and technologies companies already have setup industry organizations to deal with things (lobbying, LTE, interoperability etc. come to mind) -- so being able to contribute and cooperate through an organization is not new or difficult.
How would you SWAT someone's phone line through this? You can't even block someone's number unless you and a bunch of phone numbers you received a call from it?
You really don't have any idea on the technical requirements of what you want, do you? Who holds the database? Does each company hold it's own? How do companies compare databases? How does someone with a LANDLINE report? How do you handle reporting for VoIP lines? You can't just assume everyone has a cell phone, or that they have a smartphone and data plan. You have to have someway to get reports from non-data enabled lines. How do you deal with foreign numbers, or numbers routed through call forwarding?
You don't have anything approaching a workable solution.
It should be obvious that the database is managed by an organization that each of the phone companies subscribe to. They ALREADY do it for tons of other things, why not this? Heck we can have npac.com (Number Portability Administration Center) take this on, I mean that organization is currently getting paid millions of dollars to host a database of phone numbers. Or the organization handling Do not call lists currently.
As for how do they report, that too should be obvious too. Any problem you are pointing o
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ALL of which is extra steps for users and extra time.
Uh, No. There are no extra steps for users.
I think this is the correct quoting for a posting what appears to have the same person saying two different things.
In any case, YES, extra steps.
1) Answer phone. Oops, that ones one extra step for me already, since I don't answer 99% of the time now.
2) Wait for popup. Another extra step (but impossible for my phone, so not an extra step for me).
3) Select option on popup. Another extra step.
The pop up -- which can be ignored/disabled and only appears when a new phone number appears -- happens AFTER the phone call and you don't need to click ignore it will go away automatically.
Wow. Your system doesn't create any extra steps for people who don't use your system, so you claim that your syste
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No. There may be a temporary "rate this call" pop up after you hang up when it's a number that doesn't normally call you.
I would certainly be more annoyed if things started popping up on my phone. It would be magic, since it has no display.
You also refer to "hanging up", and since I don't waste time answering in the first place, your solution is useless to me.
In fact, it's a godsend to telespammers since it requires people to answer the spam phone calls before they can "rate" it, thus providing confirmation of the validity of the number and making the spammer's number list more valuable when they sell it to the next spammer
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No. There may be a temporary "rate this call" pop up after you hang up when it's a number that doesn't normally call you.
I would certainly be more annoyed if things started popping up on my phone. It would be magic, since it has no display.
You also refer to "hanging up", and since I don't waste time answering in the first place, your solution is useless to me.
In fact, it's a godsend to telespammers since it requires people to answer the spam phone calls before they can "rate" it, thus providing confirmation of the validity of the number and making the spammer's number list more valuable when they sell it to the next spammer.
Uh, if people don't answer telespammers then the robocalling issue wouldn't exist in the first place. Fact is that most people need to answer their phone. How do I know it's not a legitimate call from my bank or somebody who needs my help calling me from a different number than usual? The thing is with my system most spammers will be shutdown quickly. And btw, a list of numbers without useful information about the person being called is useless. I mean, if you dial a random phone number 90% of the time it's
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Uh, if people don't answer telespammers then the robocalling issue wouldn't exist in the first place.
I don't answer 99% of them and the robocalling issue still exists. I don't care what other people do, your proposed solution doesn't help me because it requires answering all of them. And somehow getting a "popup" that cannot physically happen.
The thing is with my system most spammers will be shutdown quickly.
Hardly. None of the laws against it have shut it down, so expecting them to all use legitimate, law abiding phone providers is overly optimistic. That's what you'd need to have if you expect a "call rating popup" to have any effect. It's the same failure of legal lim
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Follow the law? These parasites do NOT follow the law. I had one debt collector robocall my house every day for six months before I even knew who it was calling me. Then I spent another six months trying to convince them that the person they were looking for was not at my number. They had a SIMILAR name as my 13-year-old son. I finally had to threaten them with reporting
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This can be ended quite easily, blacklist numbers that receive a large ratio of complaints to calls. Make it possible to rate received calls.
Requires users to spend extra time after making a call, and could be confusing. It could also get legitimate numbers (collection agencies following the law) blacklisted wrongly because people don't like them, or allow people to now SWAT phone numbers of people which could be a serious safety concern given how many households rely on only a single cellular line.
Extra time? I already blacklist numbers that spam me now the new versions of Android make it easy, so no extra there. They simply need to share (with opt-in user permission, of course) our personal lists of blacklisted numbers. They'd pretty easily sort themselves out into very high blacklisted numbers and everything else. When the phone companies start running out of phone numbers that aren't blacklisted, they'll agitate regulators for a real solution.
And as for collection agencies, let people blacklist them. It may be legal for them to call, but it's also legal for me to ignore them and for me to freely share their numbers with the public so everyone else can do the same. If they want someone's money, use the courts instead of harassing people.
But what I really want is punishment. Let regulators work their way down the list of highly blacklisted numbers and fine companies into oblivion when once they collect evidence of illegal abuse.
The collection agencies can skate on the punishment front since they're legal, but we still get to blacklist them so they don't bother us.
Re:Is this so hard (Score:4, Interesting)
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or- some tele-interface, simlar to how you interface voicemail currently.
Not that hard really.
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No, here's how you stop it:
Follow the money. Set up some investigators with fake identities. When they get an illegal robocall, they play along, using the fake identity (credit card, SSN, whatever) until they have enough information to uncover who the scammers are. Then you shut them down and throw them into jail. Maybe they don't have a US presence that you can go after, but you investigate who sold them their connectivity into the phone system, who provides their merchant accounts, who sold them their
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The problem is VoIP. It is not a traditional phone system. There are hundreds of VoIP "carriers" who will eventually terminate a call in a traditional carrier's network (your cell or land line carrier).
So, if, say AT&T, sees a high volume of short duration calls originating from carrier X... sure, they can shut down that carrier, but what if that carrier had legit customers as well? Not only that, carrier X is paying AT&T per minute rates for calls terminating on AT&T's network.
yes, carrier X co
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"but what if that carrier had legit customers as well"
Fuck em. Honestly every time a VOiP provider is supplying a bulk connection for telemarketers there are almost NO "legit customers".
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You may be 100% correct.
Still... where there is money to be made, there will be shady actors. It would become a game of whack-a-mole. We all know how that story ends.
Something needs to be done to improve the integrity of VoIP services. Not really sure what that looks like exactly, but a good start might be to implement a system like SPF for callerid.
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This can be ended quite easily, blacklist numbers that receive a large ratio of complaints to calls.
First, numbers are trivially spoofed so that may not help. Second, that requires a certain percentage of users to still receive (and spam-flag) those calls. No thanks.
Wow this plan didn't take me 30 days to come up with, it took me 30 seconds.
Like most such plans forged in a moment...
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I don't think I read the same thing you read.
The text I read that they will implement "Caller ID verification standards that would help block calls from spoofed phone numbers" AND also they're going to prevent spoofing of "important" numbers.
This isn't ONLY preventing important numbers. That is in addition to the new standards to prevent spoofs in general and yes we need these.
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Obligatory Critique*:
Their plan proposes a
(X) technical (X) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting [telephone] spam. Their idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to their particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and
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I'm confident the same merry fuckers that fixed email spam can fix phone spam.
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"There are many legitimate reasons to spoof the number.
Simply example: call center. "
Only allow call enters to spoof to a number that they can prove they control. In your scenario, it does them no good to spoof a random phone number. Also, it does no good for the company supplying the cheap outbound lines to do business with a customer that they cannot contact.
That's a load of bullshit from AT&T (Score:4, Interesting)
They've been working with us to expand our robocalling since it is so profitable for them. We just added two new PRI lines and budgeted over six figures more per month for long distance calling with them. They love robocallers and are working hard to sell them services.
Recaptcha for Audio (Score:3)
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That just means that a robocall will have a 1 in 12 chance of getting the correct answer. So, worst case, they need to re-dial the call 12 times... no problem.
In order for this to work, you would have to make the response complex. Math wouldn't work, because speech to text systems would make arithmetic trivial for the robocaller. So the question would have to require a alphabetic answer of more than 2 characters to be effective. Even then... with machine learning.. who know how trivial this would be to bypa
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I HATE questions like this. All those captchas, as well as text book questions back in my school days, you have to pretend to be an idiot in order to guess the answer they want (which is often different from the "right" or "correct" answer).
What color is dead grass? Yellow seems a reasonable choice to me. I've seen lots of yellow spots in otherwise green lawns everybody calls "dead patches". Green might be the correct answer in many
Exemptions.... (Score:1)
Spoofing should work by whitelist (Score:5, Interesting)
The group hopes to put in place Caller ID verification standards that would help block calls from spoofed phone numbers and to consider a "Do Not Originate" list that would block spoofers from impersonating specific phone numbers from governments, banks or others.
This is totally the wrong approach. It is why, for example, antivirus products tend to not work all that well. Instead, the phone company should not be able to legally allow phone number spoofing unless and until the entity that wants to spoof proves to the phone company that they or another legal entity they control is the legal owner of the number which will be displayed. I'm sure it will still be abused because people are sort of relentless in their desire to game the system, but it would be orders of magnitude better than what we have now.
Re:Spoofing should work by whitelist (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Spoofing should work by whitelist (Score:4, Insightful)
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How does ANI work for billing purposes then?
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Poorly. Verizon used to give us pseudo-ANIs so they could bill for calls coming out of our telephony switches. They were "pseudo" in that there was no actual subscriber line that matched that ANI. Except there often was. Some poor SOB would end up with a bill for all our call traffic that used that pseudo-ANI that month, refuse to pay, then Verizon would kill the ANI and our switch would basically fall over dead since it couldn't send traffic out anymore. The best part is that we were providing carrier
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100% bs. they know where they are coming from.
When a VoIP call is made to a landline or cellphone number, the call travels for a portion of the time over the PSTN. The amount of time the call spends on the PSTN usually determines the price of the call (apart from the base charges for any VoIP to VoIP call).
At the point where it enters the PSTN, a process called address translation takes place. It means that the IP address is translated to the identifying phone number of the called party to complete the call
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That other regional operator can tell when the caller ID data is spoofed. They just need to stop allowing those calls to go through.
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So have it work similar to DKIM or SPF with SMTP, just with POTS instead.
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Simplest solution: Personal Whitelists (Score:1)
Of course political calls wont be "scourge." (Score:1)
"...joining the U.S. government". That's a hoot..
Most of these bulk calls this time of year of from my local Congress-critter. Making sure I know to vote for his/her team. Politicians have a way of putting blinders on when it comes to there own bulls**t.
No, can't have those political calls blocked - them's important.
BTW, where is Centurylink in all this? (Score:2)
Or any of the other ILEC and CLEC telecoms for that matter...
IMO, they know their cash cows are about to get shot, so they don't want to be near them when it does.
Looks like a good start... (Score:3)
...The group hopes to put in place Caller ID verification standards that would help block calls from spoofed phone numbers and to consider a "Do Not Originate" list that would block spoofers from impersonating specific phone numbers from governments, banks or others....
I'm happy that the original focus is more on the source than the destination.
.
What I would also like to see is something along the lines of... tracking the robocalls back to their origination networks and creating a blacklist of the resulting bad actor networks.
Some entity is allowing these calls into the public telephone network.
The entryways to our public phone networks obviously need to be more secure than they currently appear to be.
It is not that difficult, really (Score:1)
why doesn't the FCC just go after rachel? (Score:2)
Why doesn't the FCC just go after Rachel? It cannot be that difficult to track down who's behind it (hint: they advertise on craigslist in Orlando) and sue them into oblivion. I cannot fathom why this hasn't happened yet.
Would something as simple as this work? (Score:1)
If you get one of these calls, just have a system where you dial a * code (e.g. *66) and it gets flagged. More than 100 (or larger number), per day flagged from your billing info and the callers line is blocked at the source and you have to explain why it should ever be re-enabled. This would include the business and bank/payment method so these caller
Really simple. (Score:2)
Stop accepting any calls routed from unknown phone companies. It will stop 99% of them that are simply a freaking PC that is making VOIP calls via a scumbag VOIP service provider that will let them send whatever CID information they want.
Call coming into AT&T from a unknown and untrusted call routing? Refuse it.
Don't forget the exceptions (Score:2)
Didn't FTC Do This in 2013? (Score:1)
I guess I misunderstood TFA. Didn't FTC hold a $50,000 challenge in 2013 and award a prize? [ftc.gov]
I immediately attempted to set this up at my house but of course ATT didn't implement the third party ring feature which is the central requirement. Funny thing...
Oh well. We have an answering machine, anyone who calls is welcome to use it. All the phones have their ringers off. We get about 20 calls a day, and about 2 messages a week. I wonder who all the other calls are from?
robo politicians (Score:1)
In Aus we were getting regular robo calls at election time,
disregarding the do not call register which is a government body,
Australian Media and Communications Authority (the ACMA)
https://www.donotcall.gov.au/ [donotcall.gov.au]
Free speech (Score:2)
I've read that robocalls cannot be made explicitly illegal because they are protected as free speech, like junk mail.
But that's a bad comparison. Here are some details that might have been overlooked.
1. Fee speech is protected in public spaces and forums like newspapers, etc. and the government operated postal service (you don't get junk mail from UPS or Fedex). My phone is not a public space. A better analogy than a mailbox would be to treat my phone like the front door to my house. It is the front door t
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What we need is not a disingenuous technological solution from a phone company with a conflicted interest. Simply make it illegal to make pre-recorded phone calls that are not pre-approved by the recipient. Make it illegal to obfuscate the caller-ID system and make text-based caller ID mandatory for anything commercial.
Another "just one more law" solution to something that is already illegal and is a social issue created by a technical problem.
Think about it. BOING! Congress acts. (Or Obama makes it an Executive Order, bypassing Congress.) It is now illegal to call RonTheHurler for any reason that RonTheHurler doesn't approve of. Now tell me how this is enforced. You don't have any caller id information to turn over to the feds. Your phone company fed you the invalid caller id info that they passed on to you. They maybe
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You know what, I completely forgot about the Do Not Call registry. Thanks for reminding me. I'm registered now and I'll be sure to report any stray calls after the grace period ends.
Regarding trespass, it could be argued that a sidewalk from the street to my door, which most houses have, is an implied invitation. Especially if the primary means of getting in and out of the house by the owner is through the garage. But you are right, a simple "no trespassing" sign should be sufficient. How would a "no tresp
Nomorobo? (Score:1)
I use it for free on my residential numbers.
There is a charge for non-residential phones.
Stops 98%of all robocalls, even the ones with spoofed IDs.
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For those who don't know how the service works, it relies on your phone provider supporting "simultaneous ring" which is having your incoming calls ring not only your phone but also another phone that you specify. The service detects where the call is coming from and if it believes it is spam, it w
Make ANI free, and compare with Caller ID (Score:2)
ANI is expensive for a regular residential line. If it was made free, people would know the real number calling them. Give phones the option that if caller ID doesn't match ANI, the call goes to voicemail.