Slashdot Mirror
How One Small Company Blocked 15.1 Million Robocalls Last Year
TechCurmudgeon sends this excerpt from an article at Wired:
Aaron Foss won a $25,000 cash prize from the Federal Trade Commission for figuring out how eliminate all those annoying robocalls that dial into your phone from a world of sleazy marketers. ... Using a little telephone hackery, Foss found a way of blocking spammers while still allowing the emergency alert service and other legitimate entities to call in bulk. Basically, he re-routed all calls through a service that would check them against a whitelist of legitimate operations and a blacklist of spammers, and this little trick was so effective, he soon parlayed it into a modest business. Last year, his service, called Nomorobo, blocked 15.1 million robocalls.
Some regular guy got $25,000 from the government with one weird trick!
I sure hope his hack is free/open-source.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Any reason not to just do this on your phone? e.g: my phone doesn't ring unless the caller is in the address book / contact list.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
...because that's what I just thought.
Newsflash! Government pays entrepreneur USD 25 k for coming up with a technological solution for a legislative problem!
So, yet one more party that gets to peek at all your phone traffic?
Sure, filtering robocalls is useful, but I do have questions about the way it is implemented.
Wait until they answer. Pretend you are from a competing company. Tell them you have everything they sell. Tell them you are a Franciscan and have taken an oath of poverty. Try to sell them something. Say yo want to buy it until right at the end when they want credit card information then say "I'll have to ask my doctor, here at the psychiatric hospital they take away all your personal belongings".
Why do you need to route calls through a seperate business just to do some basic black/whitelisting? That's a basic feature of anything that can forward or route calls anyway.
bickerdyke
Very humurous (--- now medical students studying bones will find this page in their searches)
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
What's actually going on is that phone companies love robocalls because they make money on them and the FCC doesn't give a damn and/or is too "pro-business" to do anything for consumers.
Just stop lying and pretending that this is a hard problem. It's bad enough that this crap goes on in the first place. Pretending that nothing can be done is adding insult to injury. STFU and admit that it happens on purpose and nothing will change because you like the status quo. Stop lying to us!
Why is Snark Required?
And free cable too!
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Why not 20 digit number where wrong numbers all answer and charge the caller? That would fix telemarketing forever.
In the UK we can set preferences with the telephone preference service . But another is to set up a premium rate line and rake in the money - although it might be polite to set up another regular number for family and friends.
Root cause of the problem seems to be, some large corporations with large phone banks want to spoof their number. They don't care if that ability is misused by shady operators peddling junk. They are totally wrong, it is better to pay a few cents more per call to get an account with the privilege to spoof the originating number. If they reduce the number of junk calls, their potential customers might actually answer their calls. Right now the junk call menace is so high most people are refusing answer any unknown number.
Just charge 1 cent per call to spoof the originating number, the junk call volume will go down by orders of magnitude.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
The FCC does give a damn and is currently seeking comments http://www.fcc.gov/document/cgb-seeks-comment-call-blocking-letter-attorneys-general on telcos blocking robo calls.
The telcos tried blaming it on their status as common carriers ... so the FTC jumped in http://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/advocacy_documents/ftc-staff-comment-federal-communications-commission-public-notice-da-14-1700-regarding-issues/150127fcccomment.pdf with their legal opinion that common carriers are allowed to block robo calls.
This plague is 100% on the telcos wanting the money and 0% on government.
In fact, if you read the original filings from the telecoms, they specifically claim that it is the network neutrality obligations which come with common carrier status that tie their hands from blocking robo calls. They don't miss a trick in the fight for the Internet.
What ever happen to the raspberry pi banana phone guy? http://lifehacker.com/5981063/block-telemarketers-and-robocalls-for-good-with-the-raspberry-pi-powered-banana-phone
I was looking forward to seeing that. I even bought the parts for it but haven't had time to build my own.
A blacklist call app that downloads daily a new blacklist number list. If a marketing call get's through, I can manually blacklist and it reports back, if 10 or more of this same number comes in from users, it's added to the global blacklist.
It would decimate the scumbag telemarketing industry within a year.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Something being banned or made illegal does not prevent it from happening. It just prevdnts it from happening legally. See speeding for reference.
So I just don't answer the home phone any more unless I recognize the number.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Simply require the carriers include incoming ANI info for all calls on the customers bill. They can change the CLID as much as they want but changing their ANI is quite a bit more complicated.
https://www.fsf.org/associate/support_freedom
not only that, but banning things is not what makes a civilized society. Freedom does, and yes, that includes the freedom to be a dick
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
In USA, your 2) will be a fraud attempt.
The service actually does some fairly cool stuff since he has lots of customers. He can see if one caller is hitting several of his users in multiple areas and if so, automatically blacklist it for all the rest unless it's explicitly whitelisted. Of course users can also report bad numbers that get through so everyone else gets the benefit of the shared blacklist, and report any legitimate calls that get blocked so they can be whitelisted. Sure, a spammer could TRY to sign up for the service and whitelist his own numbers, but it wouldn't work for long since: A. The whitelist doesn't just apply automatically, I think he (or someone working on his behalf) actually reviews whitelist submissions manually, and B. Very soon another customer would just report the scammer and get him blacklisted again, and Nomorobo would then know the false whitelist submitter must just be a scammer trying to game the system, and they've now got his numbers and some kind of contact info and the originating IP of the false complaints, etc.
He could also heavily weight international termination and/or origin from certain services known to be easy for scammers to hide behind as potential spam, but I don't know if he does or not. That could get more tricky.
The Achilles heel is that (at least in theory) a scammer could literally change their number for every single call, or at least every batch of calls, and potentially get through to at least few Nomorobo users each time. Thus far that doesn't seem to be happening but is a potential weakness in the system regardless.
Barring the involvement of all the telcos and/or legislation and enforcement funding (most likely it would take all three) to force ALL calls to be identifiable, block any that aren't, and go after the offenders mercilessly, this is about the best it gets. I think we're long past the point where making anonymous phone calls serves any purpose whatsoever. Government entities could find the caller regardless if they really care to so it doesn't protect whistle-blowers, and I'd have a hard time believing that there are any legitimate privacy concerns. Basically, if you don't want the person receiving a call to know you're the one calling them, don't call them, and get over it.
I don't suppose the list is available?
Well, if robocalls aren't a "zone of lawlessness" I don't know what is...
I have looked at the Nomorobo website to see how it works, but what is not clear is what happens with all the call history? I understand that the "bad" calls get logged to improve the ability to block calls but the Nomorobo "Privacy Policy" is silent about what happens to all the data logged for the call attempts etc. Seems to me that this solution is another "Free" service to fix a problem that should not exist to begin with, and oh, by the way now there is yet another point of data collection on calls. Maybe no call "content", but the details of how many calls and from whom are now collected. And of course it's "Free" (wink).
Your caller gets a message "dial 75 (random number) if you are not a robot, and you will be connected." It would get rid of most of them.