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Your Phone Number Is Going To Get a Reputation Score
Jah-Wren Ryel writes "Yes, there's yet another company out there with an inscrutable system making decisions about you that will affect the kinds of services you're offered. Based out of L.A.'s 'Silicon Beach,' Telesign helps companies verify that a mobile number belongs to a user (sending those oh-so-familiar 'verify that you received this code' texts) and takes care of the mobile part of two-factor authenticating or password changes. Among their over 300 clients are nine of the ten largest websites. Now Telesign wants to leverage the data — and billions of phone numbers — it deals with daily to provide a new service: a PhoneID Score, a reputation-based score for every number in the world that looks at the metadata Telesign has on those numbers to weed out the burner phones from the high-quality ones."
Will it work the other way too? To weed out the tele-sales numbers from the people who's calls you do want to receive?
...to weed out the burner phones from the high-quality ones.
What do you want to bet those "high quality" numbers quickly become a target for telemarketers to plunder? :p
So additionally to mailinator.com we will need a phoninator.com if this catches on.
A couple of hundred numbers where you'd add your own random Number, then read the SMS and delete it immediately.
...to weed out the burner phones from the high-quality ones.
What do you want to bet those "high quality" numbers quickly become a target for telemarketers to plunder? :p
I came to say this. How is this not obvious? Or is that the actual reasoning behind the list?
I think that this should be done in a fashion similar to how Google Chrome checks if addresses are malware. When your phone rings, md5 the phone number and send it off to be checked against a blacklist of known telemarketers. If it's not on the list and the call is marketing, then add it. Maybe I'll make an app for that.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
... when do my reputation scores start getting reputation scores?
while phone number is unique at any given moment, it doesnt necessarily mean it stays with same person. Most providers sell the used numbers some time after they got inactive. Good luck to the new buyer of 1000 ranked number :)
When I moved to the US, I bought a T-Mobile SIM. A month later, I started receiving robo calls from a debt collector. After about 10 of those calls I finally gave in and called them back on their 800 number and they gave me the name of some guy they were looking for. Probably the previous owner of the number...
I have avoided making a whitelist so far, on the theory that every now and then someone (maybe even a friend! :-) ) might call me from a different number, and I'd hate to block legit calls, but if the mere fact that I've had the same number for 20 years and occasionally call retailers from said number means I'm highly rated & thus a robocall target, it'll be time to block 'em all. :-) )
(wow, that was a Faulknerian sentence
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Everything you do has an online score that has a given value to someone. Your slashdot account (and similar accounts) has an online score from any number of companies that monitor such websites for third parties. They look for for your influential posters, political views, shills accounts, who you look for and so on. You would then be valued according to your usefulness to the organization. These companies range from managing online reputations for companies to countries (ever notice certain stories get a lot of hits from Venezuela etc). Certainly facebook, twitter and similar accounts have companies that watch your reputation and score it as well.
If it's Amazon and you are a reviewer of products and nobody finds your reviews useful than your value is low. If your reviews are well thought of and highly considered you will start to get packages from companies hoping to a review. After a while you could become a professional reviewer without ever paying for packages.
Even things like credit scores aren't standardized anymore and haven't been for years. You could be a perfectly acceptable risk to buy a house, and get turned down for a credit card. You will have a different credit score from each agency based on what type of vendor is requesting your score and for what purpose. You will have one number for employment, another for renting, another for getting a car loan and so on.
The last I checked there are about 1500 different types of credit scores alone (do you know your behavior score?) and they change all the time. Your scores change all the time based on what you buy, where you buy it and when you buy it. Welcome to the world of big data. Don't fear big government, it's big business that you need to worry about.
My phone # is 867-5309, it already has a reputation you insensitive clod!
Monstar L
That must have been a comment from a NSA employee. It was 2 paragraphs before it was redacted.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
There is a code you used to be able to play as the call was being answered. This code either signified the call was incorrect or something along the lines of an automated computer answering instead of a human. I forget the name of the device but my brother installed one and all the telemarketing calls think it's a bust call and disconnect the call. I asked him why he kept getting crank calls and he explained how it worked and why when I answered his phone, no one was on the other end but this was years ago (2000 or so).
I forget the name of the device he had but it would likely be quicker to just code something that did that and have it ask the person for a name or to push a number to have the call completed. If it got replied to, it wouldn't be most telemarketers. On the other hand, I never sign up for crap and don't have too many telemarketing calls. When I do, I demand they "take me off their list and any lists they have me associated with". They have to do so else face a fine each time they contact you after the request (document when this happens and with who they claim to be representing along with a number to report it). Most areas will give you a portion of the fines if it goes that far too (you may have to sue the company itself but its easily done). Even if your area doesn't allow the fines, telling them to take you off the list does two things, it first severs any existing permission like previous business and so on that could be used to get around do not call lists, and second, it establishes that you certainly will not purchase anything or donate anything to them and by removing you from the list or placing your number in their internal do not call list, it will be doing them a favor in conserving resources for more productive calls. So at minimum, that should get you out of some of the calls. On average, I get less then 2 telemarketing calls every month. Sometimes I go several months without any. And when the pissed off telemarketing drone start cussing you out, make a record of that and report it to the FCC or whatever regulating authority your area has.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_information_tones
Still works, I use the 'service disconnected' SIT code as the opening to my voicemail message. Pretty much stops spam after the first call. The SIT codes are very timing and tone sensitive, so you need a good recording and to be able to upload a file for your voicemail message rather than trying to record it with the phone mic.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Is this another way for them to pay absolutely no attention to the Do Not Call List? My number is on the DNC list, and yet I get about 6 calls a day from telemarketers. I get maybe three calls a week from people who have any legitimate reason to be calling me.
The fines are not stiff enough for violaters of DNC. Further, the telemarketers use caller ID spoofing to not present a legitimate callback number so that you can determine who they are in order to prosecute. The only way to actually catch them is to buy one of their products and find out where the money goes, and who wants to do that? Even when that happens they are probably being paid by another company to sell their wares, so you still wouldn't find the telemarketing company, although you should be able to find out from the company that apparently hired them.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Where is the absolute outrage about the harvesting of meta-data which was aimed at the NSA?
Here's a company doing it for profit, willing to sell access to the highest bidder (or just for a flat rate), whereas when the NSA does it for national security reasons, it's like they kill a puppy every time they save to disc. If you're really worried about undue influence of political structures, this is far more damning and easier to access/leverage than a top secret database.
You all should be lighting the torches and sharpening the pitchforks, not bitching about telemarketer strategies.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
On the landline side, I don't recall which SIP gateway I bought last. They're nifty little devices you plug into your landline and into your ethernet switch, and when a call comes in they convert the call to a VOIP call and initiate a session with a SIP server. The gateway I bought had a web-based config page and was pretty easy to set up. You could probably set up asterisk on a Raspberry PI or something that doesn't suck too much power. You just need a little space you can write to for a voice mail box. You can do some nifty tricks with a setup like that -- you could install sipdroid or some other sip client app on your cell phone and have the asterisk server try to ring that. If you're not within range of your wlan, you could have it fail over to your voicemail box immediately. I played around with having it dial back out via a VOIP account if the call was from someone on a whitelist, effectively transferring the call to my cell phone. I had some issues with call quality doing that, though -- I'm pretty sure I didn't have echo cancellation set up correctly somewhere in the loop.
You can also have asterisk do least-cost routing. I'd have it dial 800 and local numbers over the landline, try to find data address via enum with e164.org for other numbers and as a last resort dial long distance numbers using a voip account. Technically you don't need a landline in that mix, but at the time my bandwidth was severely limited and the landline was usually a cleaner connection.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?