Phone Companies Must Now Block Carriers That Didn't Meet FCC Robocall Deadline (arstechnica.com) 49
In a new milestone for the US government's anti-robocall efforts, phone companies are now prohibited from accepting calls from providers that did not comply with a Federal Communications Commission deadline that passed this week. From a report: "Beginning today, if a voice service provider's certification and other required information does not appear in the FCC's Robocall Mitigation Database, intermediate providers and voice service providers will be prohibited from directly accepting that provider's traffic," the FCC said yesterday. Specifically, phone companies must block traffic from other "voice service providers that have neither certified to implementation of STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication standards nor filed a detailed robocall mitigation plan with the FCC." As we've written, the STIR (Secure Telephone Identity Revisited) and SHAKEN (Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using toKENs) protocols verify the accuracy of Caller ID by using digital certificates based on public-key cryptography.
STIR/SHAKEN is now widely deployed on IP networks because large phone companies were required to implement it by June 30 this year, but it isn't a cure-all. Because of technology limitations, there was no requirement to implement STIR/SHAKEN on older TDM-based networks used with copper landlines, for instance. The FCC has said that "providers using older forms of network technology [must] either upgrade their networks to IP or actively work to develop a caller ID authentication solution that is operational on non-IP networks." The FCC also gave carriers with 100,000 or fewer customers until June 30, 2023, to comply with the STIR/SHAKEN requirement, though the commission is seeking comment on a plan to make that deadline June 30, 2022, instead because "evidence demonstrates that a subset of small voice service providers appear to be originating a high number of calls relative to their subscriber base and are also generating a high and increasing share of illegal robocalls compared to larger providers."
STIR/SHAKEN is now widely deployed on IP networks because large phone companies were required to implement it by June 30 this year, but it isn't a cure-all. Because of technology limitations, there was no requirement to implement STIR/SHAKEN on older TDM-based networks used with copper landlines, for instance. The FCC has said that "providers using older forms of network technology [must] either upgrade their networks to IP or actively work to develop a caller ID authentication solution that is operational on non-IP networks." The FCC also gave carriers with 100,000 or fewer customers until June 30, 2023, to comply with the STIR/SHAKEN requirement, though the commission is seeking comment on a plan to make that deadline June 30, 2022, instead because "evidence demonstrates that a subset of small voice service providers appear to be originating a high number of calls relative to their subscriber base and are also generating a high and increasing share of illegal robocalls compared to larger providers."
WHAC-A-MOLE! (Score:3)
You know what's going to happen... these small companies will become pure cesspools before they're put out of business. Better to disconnect the laggards now so their customers flee.
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"Are they friendly moles?" https://lutheranliar.com/eenie... [lutheranliar.com]
I guess it's an interesting FP, but typically unclear (and probably rushed) and your reasoning seems flawed. If they use a whitelist approach, then a company must comply or its attempted calls will be rejected. Period.
Having said that, I note that the article does not mention whitelists (or blacklists (or even lists)). The main concern I noticed in the article was with complicated exceptions and loopholes. Is that somehow related to your use of the
Re:WHAC-A-MOLE! (Score:4, Insightful)
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“Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by eactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for commiting thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. . . . Has it ever occcured to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”
This quote is why English language pedants are really the heralds of fascism.
The English language is malleable, fault tolerant and constantly changing. More over, a sentence derives a lot of its meaning from contexts. You can use completely the wrong sausage and everyone still understands it. Words are constantly being added to the language, the OED adds half a dozen or so each year but ultimately the arbiter of language is usage, so words enter the public consciousness simply by becoming used rather tha
Re: WHAC-A-MOLE! (Score:2)
"You know what's going to happen... these small companies will become pure cesspools before they're put out of business. Better to disconnect the laggards now so their customers flee."
I see it now: Shittybuttel sells their (legit) customers' info to every shady outfit they can find, engages in mass credit card fraud, goes on a spam call spree reminicent of the "AOL riots" of old, and finally rips out all of the copper wiring from the building they are leasing for extra moneys to flee the country wit
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Read the article... small telcos get until next year to rid them selves of the losers, while big ones lose them today.
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Read the article... small telcos get until next year to rid them selves of the losers, while big ones lose them today.
Read even just the summery and you'd know they currently have til June 30 2023. The FCC is still seeking comment on the plan to make that 2022.
Good. (Score:3)
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I'm against the death penalty for all crimes. Except one. Executives of robocall companies need to be tortured to death.
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I'm against the death penalty for all crimes. Except one. Executives of robocall companies need to be tortured to death.
Slowly... Very slowly tortured to death.
I'm a little disappointed with the acronyms (Score:2)
They should be SHAKE and STIR or SHAKEN and STIRRED. The mixed verb tenses has a real fingernails-on-a-chalkboard vibe.
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No, two different acronyms being different doesn't do that.
It's just you. Don't go control-freak on letters and symbols. You won't get your way.
8 Simple Rules for NOT Dialing My Number (Score:5, Insightful)
1. If you're selling something, don't call me. Period. If I want something, I'll call you.
2. If you're a politician or a pollster, don't call me. Period. I don't care if you're protected by the Do Not Call List. That legislation was damaged goods when it passed into law.
3. If I don't recognize your number you're going to voice mail. Get over it and leave a message.
4. If Caller ID is blocked, missing, or obviously spoofed you're going to voice mail. Get over that, too, and leave a message.
5. Every carrier should have the ability and facility in this day and age to "Back Bill" any call, anywhere. If a "boiler room," or even my own mother, calls me I should be able to dial "*BACB" (or something similar) and charge them some nominal amount for the call to the device that I'm paying the bill for if I don't want them contacting me. This single feature alone could kill boiler rooms as we know them using distributed financial pressure.
6. Spoofing Caller ID information should be considered Wire Fraud and, therefore, illegal.
7. I'm paying for my air time on my cellular phone even when you call me, that makes it trespassing if I don't want you there and I should be able to prosecute you if you become a nuisance.
8. Unsolicited Text Messages are no different from Unsolicited Voice Calls and therefore no exception to the above rules.
9. Bonus Rule: Wireless carriers should enact voluntary number blocking/filtering systems with no arbitrary limits (like, say, MORE than 5 numbers, Verizon Wireless) with Opt-IN policies (NOT Opt-OUT) for scam services like Premium Text Messages.
The PSTN is a cesspool of spammers, scammers, frauds, imposters, and cheats looking to con you and I out of our hard-earned money. Federal regulation and the common carriers are just as much the culprits as the bogus callers for letting it get this way. The only way it changes is if we can apply a reputation system to it (voluntary or involuntary) to favor our personal contacts and distance ourselves from the garbage calls and texts. Curb your natural human curiosity and don't answer calls from numbers you don't recognize. If they don't leave voice mail then it probably wasn't that important, was it? Keep your contacts list current. There may be instances where you may be expecting a call from an unknown number. Mentally compartmentalize that call and be prepared to hang up if it isn't who you think it might be. Someone needs to write a mobile app that blocks your smartphone from ringing and sends the call to voicemail if they're not in your contacts list. Don't give away any personal info if you don't recognized the caller. Use a secure messaging platform in place of voice calls or text messages where you can because the PSTN really does suck that much. Finally, go ask the common carriers how much they've made selling robocall enabling equipment over the last two decades. You won't like that number but they're incentive is profit, not your well-being.
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It seems to me this is a great deal of effort to solve an issue we didn't create in the first place.
I'm sure the phone carrier knows where the call originates from, so they can bill them for the amount of calls they make.
The phone companies should be (but wont, because of money) shutting these scumbags down, not making us jump through hoops to minimize (not eliminate, that can't be done) the problems.
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Exactly. Its almost like the criminals work for the billing department at AT&T.
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Makes sense, the rest of them are criminals too. In particular ATT is a criminal conspiracy which has deliberately defrauded Americans out of literally billions of dollars handed to them by our government to improve infrastructure, which did not happen.
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The biggest single mistake was letting people spoof their Caller ID. I can understand why it seemed like a good idea, but it was a terrible one. Make Caller ID unspoofable, and the vast majority of the abuse disappears, especially now that people can crowdsource their lists of bad phone numbers.
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I'd guess that spoofing calling party info was probably an unintentional feature.
I'd wager when the signaling protocol was created, nobody thought much about spoofing. It was data that would be inserted/generated by the phone switch originating the call, and probably entirely within the telco's network.
It wasn't until much later and the development of consumer caller ID that anyone cared about spoofing this info because nobody saw it except maybe telecom network engineers. So that's probably when PBX vend
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Everyone calling me should pay me 25 cents per call, if it rings, even if I don't pick up. Every call I make, I will pay 25 cents. For normal people incoming and outgoing calls will balance out. Any imbalance is a small and is worth having a simple phone that works.
Right now I am paying 20$ a month for a landline to keep the number I got back in 1994, and have not received a single good call on plain old telephone.
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Yeah, I hardly answer it anymore--it's mostly spammers and scammers calling, these days. I let them wait for my (tape!) answering machine, then I call whoever back. 'Nuts...
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I'd be happy to talk to a robocaller for a $10 fee plus $5 per minute.
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Your #5 is the one to do. I've seen someone mention it before. Mandate the process by law (it can't be that hard to achieve technically!). Then, the small fee that gets billed back to the caller will be split between the person who was called and the phone company; that should keep the phone company interested in playing fair.
This is the federal bill I want:
After any call or text you receive and dislike, be it a scammer, a sales scheme, a robo-call, your EX, etc, just type *38 (*FU) to have $1.00 US debited from their phone account or added to their bill and receive a $1 credit to your phone account, indexed to inflation. If the originating phone company is not able to 100% verify where the call or text came from, then a $1 US is debited from the phone company for their failure and credited to your account. Any positive account
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No matter what happens, phone companies win as both sides pay for the call.
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1. If you're selling something, don't call me. Period. If I want something, I'll call you.
2. If you're a politician or a pollster, don't call me. Period. I don't care if you're protected by the Do Not Call List. That legislation was damaged goods when it passed into law.
3. If I don't recognize your number you're going to voice mail. Get over it and leave a message.
4. If Caller ID is blocked, missing, or obviously spoofed you're going to voice mail. Get over that, too, and leave a message.
5. Every carrier should have the ability and facility in this day and age to "Back Bill" any call, anywhere. If a "boiler room," or even my own mother, calls me I should be able to dial "*BACB" (or something similar) and charge them some nominal amount for the call to the device that I'm paying the bill for if I don't want them contacting me. This single feature alone could kill boiler rooms as we know them using distributed financial pressure.
6. Spoofing Caller ID information should be considered Wire Fraud and, therefore, illegal.
7. I'm paying for my air time on my cellular phone even when you call me, that makes it trespassing if I don't want you there and I should be able to prosecute you if you become a nuisance.
8. Unsolicited Text Messages are no different from Unsolicited Voice Calls and therefore no exception to the above rules.
9. Bonus Rule: Wireless carriers should enact voluntary number blocking/filtering systems with no arbitrary limits (like, say, MORE than 5 numbers, Verizon Wireless) with Opt-IN policies (NOT Opt-OUT) for scam services like Premium Text Messages.
The PSTN is a cesspool of spammers, scammers, frauds, imposters, and cheats looking to con you and I out of our hard-earned money. Federal regulation and the common carriers are just as much the culprits as the bogus callers for letting it get this way. The only way it changes is if we can apply a reputation system to it (voluntary or involuntary) to favor our personal contacts and distance ourselves from the garbage calls and texts. Curb your natural human curiosity and don't answer calls from numbers you don't recognize. If they don't leave voice mail then it probably wasn't that important, was it? Keep your contacts list current. There may be instances where you may be expecting a call from an unknown number. Mentally compartmentalize that call and be prepared to hang up if it isn't who you think it might be. Someone needs to write a mobile app that blocks your smartphone from ringing and sends the call to voicemail if they're not in your contacts list. Don't give away any personal info if you don't recognized the caller. Use a secure messaging platform in place of voice calls or text messages where you can because the PSTN really does suck that much. Finally, go ask the common carriers how much they've made selling robocall enabling equipment over the last two decades. You won't like that number but they're incentive is profit, not your well-being.
Spoofing CLID is how you know that the person calling you from $vendor that you opened a ticket with is actually calling you. They should always be able to rewrite CLID on outbound calls with their 800 support number. The problem is Joe Scammer simply picking random numbers out of their ass to write into their CLID and their carrier NOT BLOCKING their calls for using a CLID that they don't own/use/represent..
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> Spoofing Caller ID information should be considered Wire Fraud and, therefore, illegal.
The problem there is that the network is *designed* to allow passing caller id for a dialed call. This allows you to have a phone extension with a DID number. It allows carriers to offer customers whatever numbers they'd like (numbers that may have been ported over to/from a different carrier). Fix the protocol to fix spoofing, and good luck with that.
STIR/SHAKEN is "not a cure-all" (Score:2)
It's not even that good. Use billing information to get the guy's number. The phone company always knows who to bill. Make them use that info on your caller ID. And we need to demand that whitelisting be available at our end.
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some shell company's name often really not that helpful, especially when they fake a real company's name with tiny variation, like "INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICES" and then pretend to be the IRS or MICROSOFT WIN DIV for fake windows key sales
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If they are making any kind of money off these calls, even it is from your air-time, then they should be charged as accessories to the crime. If the call is a scam or fraud, then the telephone companies from end to end, should also be charged with the crime. That will fix the issue rather quickly. Make the CxO level officers and board members be required to "do the time" if the conviction would include jail time.
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'carriers with 100,000 or fewer customers' (Score:2)
-Gee thanks, - Mr. Loophole.
I've received about 50 calls on (Score:2)
my "expired car warranty" in 5 or so different voices. I don't have a car warranty. I block the number but they use a different number next time.
Who the hell is so damned hell-bent on selling me a car warranty? It's like their life depends on it. Maybe in some 3rd world country the mob threatened a really poor guy to "sell this damned American a car warranty or I kill and eat your family!"
Maybe we should have an option where somebody has to pay a few cents to the answerer to call. A typical telecom plan wou
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From what little I have looked into this, these auto warranty scams serve two purposes:
They are extremely profitable (from those that fall for it) and also serve as a gateway into identity and credit theft.
I have an unlisted work cellphone and the entire call log is full of spoofed numbers leaving VMs on car warranties. It's frustrating.
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Call Warranty ..
I answer the calls, when I get a chance. My car? 1969 Ford Mustang (not really) or a nonsense one 2021 Sterling Arc Core 2x6 SUV (Super Uranium Version). That one gets a "huh?" if they don't hang up.
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A telemarketer counter troll-bot, finally a real use for AI.
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Make Lenny into an app/site that anyone can use when pests call.
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I haven't got a car warranty one in a while. But I keep getting "urgent" calls about my student loan (which I don't have).
They gonna block pliticians calls? Finally? (Score:3, Insightful)
I voted with extreme prejudice against Arnie's candidate. As in, I looked at who had the best chance of beating him and voted for that person.
I live in California if that matters.
A word to the judges. Robocalls are not free speech unless a human both dials the number, and takes the call. Any scenario where a computer dials numbers is a scam. Drop mike. Period. Outlaw that shit.
What's in a name? (Score:4, Interesting)
STIR/SHAKEN ... seriously? I'm sure it's useful, but it feels like more effort than warranted to come up with names that have cute acronyms.
Although I am looking forward to their in-development technology that will prevent 'Frequently Updated Carrier Kludge / Yielding Obsfucated Undesired" calls.
Should be a real game changer.
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The Wikipedia article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] ) says that it's an intentional reference to James Bond and that:
STIR having existed already, the creators of SHAKEN "tortured the English language until [they] came up with an acronym.”
surprise (Score:2)
No one saw this coming!! /s
Almost all my calls are from various small towns.
Small Business Nightmare (Score:2)
My office has copper wire, and we now get so many telemarketer calls that we never received. It's insane. At least 20 per day.
Tortured abbreviation (Score:2)
SHAKEN (Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using toKENs)
Abusing language to get a "catchy" abbreviation or acronym is jackassery of the lowest sort.
More horse pooey (Score:2)
Only affects IP-based system. My AT&T landline has more robocalls than ever. In addition, as for IP-based systems, my google voice line has more robocalls than ever. My Boost mobile cell phone has more robocalls than ever.
There are so many loopholes that you can drive a truck through. BTW, you want an extended warranty on that truck?
Everyone needs a 900 number! (Score:2)
I've argued for around three decades that everyone's number should be allowed to work like a 900 number (pay-per-call). That is, make the caller give permission to be billed an arbitrary, pre-set, but fully disclosed amount to be paid to the recipient, before the recipient's phone even rings. The recipient should also be able to create whitelists of callers who can bypass the charge, and allow the recipients to refund the charge while the call is in-progress.
"Thank you for calling me. To complete this call,