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VoIP to Fuel Plague of 'Dialing for Dollars'/Spam
Ant writes "Broadband Reports says Internet News is exploring how telemarketers world-wide are realizing they can dodge long-distance costs (and U.S. "Do Not Call" restraints) by voice spamming VoIP users. Different from SPIT (spam over internet telephony) because it's not automated, an analyst in the article predicts homes and businesses could see some 150 calls a day from overseas call centers."
What happens if the cost of each almost-continuous call is incremental?
Say the first 10 VOIP calls are free, and if you make the 11th call within 5 minutes of the 10th call, you pay 1 cent, and if you make your 12th call within 5 minutes of your 11th call, you pay 2 cents, then 4 cents, 8 cents and so on.
Private callers shouldn't have to pay anything due to the engaging nature of personal calls.
Businesses will have to register to get exemption from the charges, thus easily identifiable.
Like spam filters, this won't stop spammers from spamming, but hopefully it's enough to make it less profitable.
We didn't see email spams coming, but we should definitely do something on VOIP when we have the opportunity.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
So how long until someone hunts down those IPs and offers up a list for call blocking of them? Also, how long until someone writes a program that will DDoS of some form or another those same call centers or something similar that will harass the call centers?
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And with VoIP it would be quite easy to enable an easy to update whitelist for inbound calls. People could use something like the various spam blocking sites (i.e. Spamhaus) that would put and end to that crap.
/dev/null.
/dev/null. I would sort of expect these options to be built into the software and easily enabled by end users as that would make the most sense.
There are so many possibilities for controlling this crap that I don't even want to go into it. Personally? I would use my addressbook (LDAP?) as the whitelist. Anyone else would get a message to find another way to contact me to be added to the whitelist, to enter the passcode to get through, or they be routed to
Anyone showing up as "UNKNOWN", "UNAVAILABLE", or originating numbers coming from outside the country would automatically be re-routed to
Yeah, it could cause you to lose some callers. How many times do people call you that you don't know and that you actually want to hear from? I'll take the 1 caller a year that doesn't know the passcode and can't find another way to contact me.
YMMV.
Actually we did. The infamous Green Card Lawyers carpet-bombing Usenet told everybody paying attention that we stop it now, or it will only get worse.
Problem with politicians is that they don't react to a problem until after it has grown out of control. And they don't listen to the people who do see it coming.
That's why to this day, CB radio skips clear around the world. They didn't listen to the experts about assigning frequencies. Even now, with spam a problem for everyone, there is little in the way of effective law against it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Why on earth would I (or anyone) use this? The entire point of email is communicating with people. If I got an "email 2.0" address, but nobody who needs to email me has one, what would be the point in me having it? And if it got popular enough that the people I want to communicate with all had it, wouldn't the spammers just get it, too?
Now, I could maybe understanding coming up with something like this for intra-company communications or something, where a specific list of people would get the new format of email and they could all talk to each other but nobody from the outside could email in. But they'd still need traditional email for any communications outside the company. And what company could do any business these days without emailing (or receiving email from) anyone outside?
I just can't see any way at all that something like that would work.
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> There exist many methods for anti-spam
> authentication. Why hasn't someone implemented
> one of them in an "Email 2.0" style service with
> the single feature being "not compatible with
> existing email, including spam"? After the first
> service opened up for business, there would be
> more. And more. Until Spam was gone for good.
because that wouldn't work either.
idiot windows users would tell their mail software to remember their authentication password, and spammer viruses would be rewritten to look for those passwords and use them. within a very short time, the new "secure" authenticated mail protocol would be compromised by spammers.
as long as people are using insecure garbage like MS Windows & IE & Outlook on the net, there will be millions of spam zombies.
Maybe this works for you, but in my life things don't always go as planned. If my girlfriend is in an emergency situation (and it has happened), she contacts me by phone. Because it is an emergency, it may be from a phone number I do not recognize. She will likely not have access to email or IM before calling me. So a random call comes in from a random number... and guess what? I have to answer it because I care about her and it might be her. Until other less-obtrusive technologies like IM are ubiquitous and can be used in emergencies, this cannot change for me.
VOIP spam is a really scary and almost unavoidable future. To combat it, I only give out my cell phone to people I know. I always give businesses my home or work number. But if it starts to be a problem, I bet a lot of the profiling techniques already used for filtering email will start happening on phone networks. And thankfully, I have never heard of a VOIP open relay, so we'll have a better chance at stopping the problem at its source.
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Actually, the phone company would want to encourage it. Phone companies hate VoIP and would love to see it die.
However, I can't see this becoming a problem. VoIP traffic is very easy to block. If you get a telemarketer, block them. It's not like they can change their internet provider every other day, and VoIP traffic, being two-way, is rather difficult to proxy through a hijacked machine (unlike email). And it's rather difficult to move a call center to another country.
"Russia, China, India... Who'd have thought these would be new sources of spam?!"
Make sure you add to your list America's own 2nd/3rd world state, Florida.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
You're missing the point here. The cell phone companies want you to use your phone. You don't have unlimited cell phone service. The more minutes you use, the more you pay. This is to their advantage, because where else are you going to go?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I've developed an extension to an existing bot for a Russian "enterprise" allowing to perform exactly this.
Like anyone else, I hate my job some days. But man, if I did stuff like that for a living, I'd hate my life. What a loser.
It is based on what we think the fairness is. I don't think most people here would fault the MPAA for going that to someone who is copying DVDs and selling them on a street corner for $5/each.
Fight Spammers!