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Beep! Beep! You have Broken the Law.
medscaper writes "Authorities in China are using computers to spam mobile phones of law-breakers until they turn themselves in. Apparently, lots of illegal advertisements as stickers with mobile-phone numbers listed are placed around large cities and are becoming an eyesore. So, the authorities call the cell phones incessantly with recorded messages that demand the "businessmen" to turn themselves in."
How well does this actually work? Wouldn't they just get a new phone number?
I would be sitting behind one of those people in a movie theater. If they are stupid enough to get into that situation you know they are one of those people who leave their cell phones on during movies. :) Excellent idea though..
"I believe in everything in moderation. Including moderation." -Dean DeLeo, Stone Temple Pilots
"You got trouble."
So, if I don't like someone, all I have to do is make up a few ads with his number on and stick them up places, and the state will spam him for me?
this "we're going to annoy the hell out of you" method of law enforcement is rather entertaining... imagine the fun someone could have by posting bills with the telephone number of your competition!
Proving that you did *not* post bills with your phone number could prove difficult but by that time, you've already racked up 543,766,246,742 voicemails and text messages.
Do they have free incoming text messages in China? I certainly hope so.. in addition to a fine, you'd have a whopping phone bill.
Hrm. maybe Verizon is in on this!
'ta
with the current fee of US $200 Thank you for committing this crime. Your local Police Department.
If you do not turn yourself in by noon tommorow we shall send you another message asking you politely to do so again!
"UShdTrnURslfIn,Lwbrkr"
and no one can figure out what it means. ;)
-T
This is perhaps the most creative way to enforce a law I've ever heard of. More power to 'em. It would be easy, however, to anonymously attack someone by putting their cell phone number on a sticker and posting it around town. I hope they don't prosecute people that have been attacked this way.
In the long run, we're all dead.
I was having a conversion, on the cell phone. And it was like, beep beep beep beep! And then, like, I had broken the law. And I was like... hunh?
I browse Slashdot at +3, Funny
Dr. Cocteau: Be well, John Spartan.
John Spartan: Be fucked.
Moral Statute Machine: John Spartan, you are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute.
[Spartan shoots the machine]
Upon answering the call, the wrongdoer hears the pre-recorded message--
"You have broken the law by posting illegal ads. You must immediately stop this activity and go to the Hangzhou Urban Administrative Bureau for punishment. DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200."
So basically, rather than taking the time to track these folks down, they're just going to annoy the culprits into submission...?
At first, I was going to say "why not just turn the phone off?"
But phone being off -> no incoming business calls either. Turn the phone on -> be spammed by police and have your minutes wasted. Turn yourself in -> no more spam + you getting a fine + you no longer hanging stickers.
But couldn't you just block whatever number the cops are calling from?
Ack!
The numbers are also checked manually and require the approval of a senior official before the bombardment can begin, he told the People's Daily.
This is the bit I'd be worry about. You'd hate someone to target you and have you taken "for punishment" by pasting a few stickers in your name.
So how effective is the manual check?
Authorities in China are turning to technology to nab vandals--they use a computer program that spams the wrongdoers' mobile phones until they turn themselves in.
Officials in Hangzhou, the capital of China's Zhejiang province, have developed a system which bombards mobile phones with pre-recorded voice messages, according to the official newspaper, the People's Daily.
Businessmen who put up illegal advertisements which contain mobile numbers have become the target of the computerized phone-spammer.
According to the report, illegal stickers have become an eyesore in recent years, with China's coastal and urbanized areas blighted with a blizzard of advertisements.
This is because the postcard-sized stickers, which promote everything from fake identity cards to counterfeit academic certifications, are cheap to produce and offer some anonymity.
The new system rings the mobile phone numbers of illegal advertisers at 20-second intervals, said the People's Daily.
Upon answering the call, the wrongdoer hears the pre-recorded message--"You have broken the law by posting illegal ads. You must immediately stop this activity and go to the Hangzhou Urban Administrative Bureau for punishment."
Those who prefer to change their "poisoned" number rather than face punishment incur the fees and inconvenience of switching, and also lose any business their ad might have generated.
The system also dents the advertisers' bottom line as ad respondents are unlikely to get through, thanks to the mobile barrage. As the anti-sticker scheme is newly launched, results have yet to come in, said the report.
Ordinary folks need not worry about being spammed by mistake as the phone numbers are taken from photos of illegal advertisements, said Wei Yunxiang, an official with the Hangzhou Urban Administrative Bureau.
The numbers are also checked manually and require the approval of a senior official before the bombardment can begin, he told the People's Daily.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
This idea is all fine and dandy, but just asking for people to turn theirselves in won't work. It's all bark and no bite. It needs teeth. Now, if the police called me and said that if I didn't turn myself in by noon tomorrow, that they'd sic a naked Richard Simmons on me and have him follow me everywhere and even move into my house, *then* I'd want to turn myself into the authorities.
It may not work the first few times, people thinking it's a joke and no police force would be so cruel, but after the first few times it gets reported by the media and several suicides later, the criminals would get the hint.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde
I thought Ellen Feiss had become a cop.
How long before the cell phone companies offer call blocking? They must have a limited bank of phone numbers these police calls can come from.
I know they have had something like that for a while on land lines here in the U.S. When my sister broke up with an abusive boyfriend she was able to block all calls from his phone number.
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
Wait, wait, wait... Couldn't you just get a 900 number associated to your phone, and post that all over town? Every time the cops call you, if they wanted to talk to you, they'd have to agree to the charge (or can they just bill you without asking - even better) ... Pure profit, at the expense of the government.
Ack!
why do they not just put these cell phone numbers into "411", or post them on internet forums,
/.
Better yet, just post the number on
John: Why don't you answer your phone anymore?
Joe : It got slashdotted last week.
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
I'm sure the answer exists somewhere in the middle ... it just seems I was lead to believe in a different future by Adam-12 and Dragnet.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
... with people who run red lights. Here in Portland, people think red lights are optional. I'm getting rather sick of it. I think if their cell phone were to start ringing every time they do it then we might see a pavlovian effect here to deter this problem.
Erm, I suppose they get some information about where the guy is (what cell, or better via triangulation or radio waves), or who he is talking to, too.
.. WAP ! (argh.)
or (shudder) they'll force him to use
Isn't it obvious? Spammers annoy everybody because they can do so without cost. The police have found a way to cost them money, which may actually result in less (sticker) SPAM.
The logical extension is to apply the concepts of open source collaboration for email SPAM. Today a shady business can pay $5000 to a spammer to send 10,000,000 emails, and they get a profit because of the 0.01% response rate. Wouldn't it be a lot more fun if they got 10,000,000 emails and 10,000,000 web hits? Then let them try to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Stop filtering, and just hit REPLY
No! "Now Go Away Or I Shall Taunt You A Second Time".
They won't have to turn themselves in
However, there is a huge problem with it: If you hate someone all you do is make some fake ads with their phone numbers on and leave them for the Chinese authorities to find and then spam.
Result: an innocent person has a whole lotta shit to clean up.
If the authorities do take some time to investigate the ads (ie actually try phoning the numbers and try to buy the products would be a start) then I think it might be a good way to deal with the criminals who promote their wares.
Similar tactics have been done before against email spammers whereby people find out the spammer's home address and send them junk mail in the post. It pisses the spammers off, but unfortunately finding out the senders of such crap is much more difficult as they don't rely on an email address to take orders with.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
They did this about a year ago here in the Netherlands. Phones listed as stolen were sent a barrage of SMS messages, basically every couple minutes, making the phone nearly unusable (incessant beeping of arriving messages, full inbox, etc)
In the GSM system, there is a SIM card which is linked to your phone number, subscription, etc. You put this card into your phone and use it. The phone itself has a unique identifyer as well, the IMEI number. It was these serial numbers which were used to identify stolen phones. So putting in a new SIM card won't work, because the phone will still identify itself to the network with its IMEI number.
I never saw any report on how sucessfull this was, however. I can imagine that in a lot of cases the owner didn't even know it was stolen (if they bought it second hand)...
Anyways, seems like a good way to harass people who use stolen phones.
Cheers,
Costyn.
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
press ctrl+alt+del to restart
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Ring Ring...
Hello, locksmith here.
We saw you bills advertising locksmith service, we can post bills for one half price of the competition. Can we send you a quote?
Yes.
Here it comes...
Open source development is my way of competing with the low-cost programmers in India...
Busting someone for drugs earns the department all the cash and assets of the person. Busting someone for hit and run gets them nothing but paperwork, and the expense of dealing with it.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Given the number of people they're spamming, the police could potentially set up 1000 lines or more to call from.
Back in the good ol days officers of the law had discression when it came to interpretation of the law. When I was a youngin and was caught blowing up the neighbors mailbox I wasn't made a posterchild for federal anti-blowing-up-stuff ads like today. I was repermanded by a 7 foot tall ogre with a gun and a badge. I stopped blowing up mailboxes reeeeal fast.
China's police figured out that jail and fines arent the way to stop most crime. It's all about the psychological punishment of having your phone ring untill your brain explodes. Hopefully more law enforcement agencies will catch on to the use of psycho-enforcement. (yey I coined another buzzword)
-bb
PRINT "Signature line broken."
GOTO 1
{man walks into police station}
Man: Hello, I've come to turn myself in.
Policeman: {starts laughing}
Man: No really, I have. I feel all dirty and stuff.
Policeman: {points at man, and starts laughing again}
Man: Stop it! Stop it!!
Policeman: {Regains breath. Tries to speak, and starts laughing again}
Man: What's so funny?
Policeman: Get out.
THE END
I doubt someone would actually turn themself in from spamming, so they ought to call and say:
Hello. I have seen your advertisements and would like to learn more about your products/services since I think there is a high potential of purchasing at a large volume. Please meet me at (location) at (date/time).
Then the police nab them at the location.
While this policy didn't seem to be having a discernable effect in HCMC, we didn't see the advertisements (at least not to the same degree) in other large cities (specifically Da Nang, Hue and Hanoi).
What does this do to the cellular phone networks? If I ran the verizon network, I'd be really glad to have a bunch of pissed off chinese commie gestapo guys /.'ing me 24/7.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
Those who prefer to change their "poisoned" number rather than face punishment incur the fees and inconvenience of switching, and also lose any business their ad might have generated.
This is an interesting statement to be made against spam in general. Those who get spammed incessently have to incur all of the costs, and either suffer through it (as most people do), or lose the revenue/contacts that have the old "poisoned" address.
I think from this point on, I am going to call my addresses that receive 20+ spams a day "poisoned" addresses. Because that is basically what they are.
~ kjrose
If you had the chance to get into their house and rewire their phone, why the hell wouldn't you just shoot them?
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
Okay, so if its an individual, clearly things will be figured out early on.
However, what if its a competing business? If someone calls up XYZ company and says, "I saw your ad, I'd like to buy some of your things.." I'm sure the business in question will be more than happy to oblige them. Is there anything else that could be done to demonstrate that they didn't put the signs up in the first place?
I suppose its the same question in the US without a phone number. Say you print a bunch of stickers with your competition's name on them, then put them in places that are obviously vandalizing, like car windshields. Does the business get in trouble?
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
...if you ever dislike someone, report his phone stolen.