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Ultimate Caller ID Screeners?
omasse asks: "I'm sick of telemarketing. Really sick. And since I'm in Canada, the new U.S. telemarketing law won't change a thing for me. The only easy solution is a technological one, and it ought to be fully transparent: No phone in my house should ring at all if it's an undesired call, and friends and family should not have to enter a 5-digit code to make them ring. To my knowledge, the only gadget that could do this is a sharp filter based on caller ID that I plug in my main phone drop. But Digitone's Caller
ID Screener has been announced some time ago, there are no guarantees they'll meet their fall 2003 deadline, and I would prefer having a few products to chose from. There's been a discussion here once on a
DIY home PBX system but that's way, way overkill for me. Could anyone tell me what are the ultimate Caller ID Screeners?"
Asterisk can solve that for you. I am playing with it now. It can do different things based on the received CID and even do things like play the "disconnected line" tone sequence before passing the call to you if the CID is unknown.
Just a word of advise: Don't use Quicknet's cards -- the cards work fine but the asterisk developers seem to have something against them, almost forcing you to use Digium's FXO/FXS cards instead. The PhoneJack/LineJacks will work fine for a little while and then you'll get weird problems like oddball rings, CID not being passed through, DTMF not being passed through, all kinds of little issues that you'll have to restart asterisk or reload the modules to fix. The standard answer on #asterisk is "Use Digium cards instead." Right.
A lot of cell phones have include/exclude facilities built-in. A lot of people are eschewing their landlines altogether for their mobile equivalents.
a world in progress...
...you could call up Information and harass them f or the 1-800 number for the Direct Marketing Association, or whatever they call themselves up here, and then get your name put on a do-not-call list.
I did this going on eight years ago, and I've received fewer than a dozen telemarketing calls since. My postal junkmail also was reduced.
There is a registry, it can just be a bitch to find out how to get on it. Shouldn't stop you from succeeding, though!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
If you want to know WHO is calling, and be in a position to decide whether to pick up a call on the basis of the person calling, a telephone answering machine is the only option available. Record a message like "Hi, this is X, speak after the tone and if I'm in I'll pick up", and listen when the phone rings.
It is the technological answer. Unfortunately, as it has no LCD screen and doesn't require subscription to an amazing service that beeps FSK tones in between rings, it's also the most crude looking, and thus the easiest to overlook. Unlike CLI, it works, it's 100% foolproof, there is never a false positive or false negative. You're not at the mercy of the networks interconnecting, or the policies of the person whose phone is being used to call you. And, FWIW, you protect the privacy of both you and the caller calling you.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
http://www.the-cma.org/consumer/donotcall/dnc_serv ice.cfm
Certainly not legally binding, nor as extensive as the US Do-Not-Call list. I think this is what an earlier poster was referring to (though I could be wrong).
Alternately, just fake your death!
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
The problem with blocking calls from strange numbers is that the times you really need the call to get through are often also the times you are calling from a strange number (e.g. a kind stranger's cell phone, since yours is somewhere under the rubble).
-- MarkusQ
"Restrictions apply to all telemarketers, although they may differ depending on whether they use a fax or a telephone. As a minimum, telemarketers must maintain "Do not call/fax lists" and provide customers with a fax or telephone number where a responsible person can be reached. Specific rules are included at the end of this document."
This is the best part:
"What are the consequences if telemarketers don't follow the rules? Telephone companies can notify these telemarketers that telephone service to the lines used in connection with placing calls (telephone or fax) may be suspended or disconnected within two business days."
um... phone company may cut off their most lucrative paying customers... sure... I'm sure their quivering in their boots now... Not only do you have to chase the buggers, then you have to pester the phone company, and then they just change the company name and keep going. Not even a fine.
Canadians are so ... wimpy^H^H^H^H^H understanding and sympathetic.
...a call screener which would let me route calls I know to be telemarketers into a pre-recorded message where I would talk nonstop for about 10 minutes attempting to sell them some product or service of my own.
I don't know precisely how you would implement the system, but your ideal solution should involve ANI, not CallerID. Unlike CallerID, ANI works 100% of the time and there are no blocked numbers. To get ANI services, you need to have an ISDN line or something to that effect.
Back when ISDN was the cream of the crop, I used to have a dual-line ISDN connection with a WebRamp router. The router would report the ANI information for incoming calls on its status page. Neat stuff.
All you really want is to program your phone to ring silently the
first N rings, and _then_ start ringing on the N+1th ring. The
right value of N will effectively prevent telemarketers from ever
reaching you, period, but anyone who knows you can be told, "Just
let it ring about eight times", which is what anyone with a real
and urgent need to reach you will do anyway.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Despite FFFish comment about do not call lists, many organizations such as religious groups can still call you. Dont rely on do not call lists. Also, people are tallking about new laws that may make it so that there is noo longer any such thing as a do not call list.
They're called "secretaries."
A few years ago I had a whole answering machine system running on my Linux box using this voice modem package and a heavily modified version of the included script. I rewrote the script in perl and modified to, among other things, answer unknown or private calls after the first ring. It was hacked together, but not half bad in the end.
Then about 3 years ago I switched to FreeBSD and never quite got the voice modem control program working. I gave up and got privacy manager from the phone company, which does a fairly good job. Besides, the voice modem was ISA, in a machine that was getting pretty old. I probably still have all that stuff on some backup CD somewhere, but who knows exactly where...
Say hello to zMac.
I use the features of voice-over-IP provider VoicePulse to accomplish what you are talking about. I know that you can't get VoicePulse in Canada, but maybe there are other VoIP providers there that I don't know about, who offer similar features. You sign up with them, and they send you a preconfigured Cisco ATA-186 to hook up to your broadband connection. You plug a telephone into the Cisco ATA to use it.
You can then set up anonymous call blocking so that callers without caller ID don't get through. You can optionally set it up to allow anonymous callers if they enter their phone number after prompted, which then gets sent to your caller ID as ??1234567890?? to indicate that the call was originally anonymous.
They also have "Telemarketer Block", which I assume is the same kind of thing the Telezapper does. I should probably turn it on, but I thought it might be annoying to callers.
You can also use their Do Not Disturb feature in combination with their Filter feature to send most callers immediately to voice mail, but allow your family to ring through. You do this by activating the Do Not Disturb feature, and then setting a filter for each family member's telephone number with the filter action set to "Always Ring" (the filter overrides the Do Not Disturb).
The filters are cool, you can set them up for individual callers with actions of "Always Forward", "Always Ring", "Always Voicemail", "Always Busy", or for the truly annoying, "Not In Service", which plays a "not in service" message. One final option they don't list in their promo materials, but appears on the Filter setup page when I am logged in to my account, is "Rejection Hotline". It supposedly plays a "humorous message provided by the Rejection Hotline." I haven't tried this option yet, so I don't know how lame it is, but I can guess...
is a simple caller-ID display unit similar to the many cheap (~$AU15) models available, but which the user can program to associate the caller's name with the number. Does anybody know of a gadget like this? I haven't seen one on the market here in Australia. I don't imagine such a thing would be hard to produce...
I got an AT&T answering machine that can play different messages for different CID matches. The important feature is support for unique messages for blocked/unknown CID data - telemarketers always block this.
... if this is a telemarketer, please put us on your do not call list, otherwise please leave a message." A friendlier message goes on the unblocked caller ID calls.
So, you setup a message like "Hi... [pause to let the auto-transfer gidgit connect you to a drone]
This has reduced my calls to fewer than 1 per week. I think taking advantage of laws instead of technical quirks is the better strategy, more immune from arms races.
Of course, I'm assuming Canada at least has per-company DNC list legislation.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I was about to mention this as well. considering the number of Telemarketers that refer me to this when I ask them to remove me, it seems like a reasonably well-respected list in Canada. Might just be something to do with our politeness and whatnot.
as well, if you repeatedly get calls from marketters that you've requested not to call you (either by talking to them, or by getting on the list), you can report them to your local telephone company, and let them know about it.
mah na mah na.
I have been working for the last 6 months on something I call Choicelist that aims to be a solution for spam through any electronic communications medium. once the system is in place, it will be easy for a company to make an internet enabled caller id box that can check to see if a number is a personal number or not.
-John Fenley
Sounds like there's a need for a community around this gizmo, where people can trade their scripts, etc.
Here are the links that you want:
Telephone - http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/
Fax - http://www.fpsonline.org.uk/
Post - http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/
Email - http://www.dmaconsumers.org/emps.html
The first three are pretty effective, but as to how effective a national email preference service can be combatting an international problem... Well we all know the answer to that one.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
The problem with a simple phone answering machine is that it still allows an unwanted caller to wake you up in the middle of the night, or harrass you by calling every ten minutes throughout the day, etc.
Telemarketers don't normally do that, but many people would still like a system that can block unwanted calls without allowing the caller to bother them by even ringing the phone.
They may already have the service you want. Qwest (formerly U.S. West) has it - can't remember the name, but here's what it does.
:)
You get the service, and anyone calling you gets a message saying press '1' to proceed as long as you're not a solicitor, etc.
The message only plays if the caller is calling during legally-approved telemarketing hours.
The message will not play for people you've programmed into the system to bypass it - so put your friends and family members phone numbers into the system, and they'll never get the message. And if they do, all they have to do is press 1 right away, anyway.
Very nice, very simple, about $7 per month if I remember correctly.
So, check with your phone company - they may already have the solution you're seeking (assuming we're not talking about a cellphone company - I haven't seen this solution from them, yet).
The secondary defense is Caller ID, of course. That way you can avoid those calls from Mom when you're just not in the goddamned mood to put up with nonsense.
Check out The Network CallerID Project, NCID. I've been using it for about a year, and it's very effective. You can use a simple user program to call festival (which I do), and voice announce the name of the caller (or not announce some callers, like telemarketers). If you turn the ringers on your phone off, you'll never be bothered again. The network capability lets my (802.11b connected) laptop display the information too, wherever I am in the house. Great software!
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
The way to solve this is to replace the ringer in the phone with lights, like they do in on-air booths at radio stations. I can't imagine it'd work with cordless phones, but my cordless lets you shut off the ringer on the handset, so it might work.
I've tried many methods of screening telemarketing calls, but the tried and true method is prevention. Why screen if they don't call? You thought it was myth. They thought it was legend. I present to you the Blotto Box...
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Please explain these rights of which you speak. I don't believe anybody has a right to use my phone (which I own) or my phone service (which I pay the phone company for) as the vehicle for their freedom of speech when I don't want them to. They have the right to publish a newletter and offer it to me, put up a web site, stand on a soapbox and yell, to broadcast radio signals, to tell their friends to tell their friends to tell their friends to tell my friends to tell me... but not the right to ring my phone or my doorbell or dump crap in my mailbox (physical or electronic) if I don't want them to.
When my wife was expecting we had a problem with my mother-in-law (who had azhimers) and other morons who would call late at night. My phone company offered a 'ring master' service that adds up to 3 phone numbers to the same line that ring with a different cadance. I got a second number on this service that was not listed or published and bought a distintive ring decoder to separate the numbers out to separate (internal) phone lines. I then broke the connection from the phone line to the rest of the house at a single point so I could prevent ANY of the phones from ringing. An X10 operated relay then switched the lines around controlled by a timer. The result was that during the day the main number would ring anywhere in the house, and the second number went to a dedicated phone. After hours the second number was connected to the house phones and the main number dumped into an answering machine ONLY! If I needed to call home after hours I used the second number (which ONLY my wife and I knew.) If we were BOTH home and the phone rang we KNEW it was a junk call and would pick up and hang up without listening. Since the number was unlisted though we only got wrong numbers on it.
Check out YAC. It allows you to take your 56k voice modem and get the caller ID. You can even brodcast it to "listeners" on your network. It can even be incorporated into your TIVO. http://www.sunflowerhead.com/software/yac/
My number used to be a fax number. I continue to get fax calls -- if I hook up a fax to the line, they are all junk faxes.
I've tried to ask them to remove me -- and when I asked one of the junk faxers where they got my number, they said the phone company sold it to them.
Now if only there was a simple way to only ring the phone if it was not a fax call