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BT Announces Free Service To Screen Nuisance Callers (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: British telco BT is launching a free landline service for UK customers which promises to divert millions of unwanted calls. A dedicated team at BT will monitor calls made to UK numbers, across its network of over 10 million domestic landlines, to identify suspicious patterns, which could help to filter out nuisance callers. The flagged numbers will then be directed to a junk voicemail box. The company has estimated that the voicemail 'net' will catch up to 25 million cold calls every week. It explained that to achieve this success rate, it would be deploying enormous amounts of compute power to monitor and analyse large amounts of data in real-time.
30 years too late, could have been done at ANY point, but they are no longer making money from such calls so they promote a service AGAINST them to increase their product value.
Fuck off.
We got rid of landlines because of this shit.
Mobiles all have caller blocking.
Everything past that is your fucking responsibility anyway, to trace these "withheld numbers" and shut them down. But you have ZERO interest in doing so.
Why is it even possible to fake Caller-ID anyway? You are charging a provider to make the call, you know exactly who it's come from. Even if I can't SEE the number, I should be able to block the fucker with one button. And should have always been able to. And you should spot the pattern in who gets blocked and chuck them off your service.
You didn't care when it mattered. Now it doesn't matter. Nobody really "needs" a landline any more. Nobody even needs a mobile number. They certainly no longer need to have one they advertise. You can buy front-numbers that just forward to your phone for a pittance. And that's exactly the problem you introduced and refused to combat. And that's exactly why nobody gets my mobile phone number, or my landline.
And yet, somehow, I still get occasional junk calls. There's only a few sources of such information. My providers and/or the numbering authorities. Who should be combating this shit all the time for me anyway.
The day my phone rings with too much spam, I enable the "reject calls from unknown callers" options on my phone, or people will only get my WhatsApp or Skype and unless you're on my contact list, then fuck you.
What stopped you doing this sort of thing even before CallerID existed? Nothing.
Someone shoot that foghorn captain... I'm tired of getting blasted in the ear by their calls.
The start offering companys that pay a fee the ability to be white listed and let their calls trough anyway.
All private phone conversations will be stored for later use in targeted advertisements and citizen profiles.
-SR
Well that's really big of you, BT, considering it was you that pretty much single-handedly enabled the whole spam/unwanted/nuisance calling industry.
"It explained that to achieve this success rate, it would be deploying enormous amounts of compute power to monitor and analyse large amounts of data in real-time."
How is this different to what the NSA, GCHQ et al were (or are) doing? It's ostensibly for a different purpose, but presumably would have to work on a pretty similar dataset. That is to say: watching who's calling who, in realtime. And do they collect everyone's data for analysis, but only "use" it if you opt-in to the service, or do they only analyse your calling patterns if you opt-in?
let people report a spam call number easily. once you get 15 different people reporting the same number block it system wide. Honestly it will take down the whole spam calling industry within 30 days.
But knowing how telcos work, they will monetize it and sell to spammers a service to have their number forever whitelisted.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Because this is maybe the most stupid, most expensive and most error-prone way to set this up.
You know what's easier, faster and cheaper? Give people the ability to complain. Since you're monitoring already anyway who calls whom and at what time (oops, hope I didn't give away a military secret here...), let people record the time they were called and report this. If enough people complain about some nuisance, block them.
Unless said nuisance is, of course, not just some kid making phony calls but a company peddling shit, then you should give them the option to give you a cut of their profits to stay in business, making the whole shit moot.
As usual.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I wouldn't put it past BT (who collaborate in GCHQ illegal domestic surveillance*) from putting a clause in to permit it and third parties from monitoring the calls. It probably sells access to your telephone calls to GCHQ.
* Parliament never authorized domestic surveillance, a civil servant decided to do it. Him and his crooks are trying now to make it legal with Snoopers Charter.
Postal service announces free service to screen nuisance snailmail. CIA will open all your letters to check them for subversive^Hillegal content
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have been developing a program for several years that blocks junk calls. Its on SourceForge.net. In the Search window, enter: jcblock.
and if I get a call and don't recognize the number, I simply don't answer. If someone really needs to get hold of me, they will send a text message.
At this point it should be clear the only robust solution to spam is getting the public to accept weird new forms of money. You could for example pay $0.50 per call to the person on the other end, and the average person who calls as frequently as they are called would break even.
All they have to do is add a code (*64 or something) that reports the last call as undesired. Then when a very small number of people have reported the last call as undesired anybody who has subscribed to the undesired service doesn't get that calls from that number.
This would then take the paternalistic element out of the equation such as allowing politicians or charities to have a pass. Pretty much anyone who makes calls people don't want would then be cut off. This would include any sales calls that might meet the terms of "legitimate" such as businesses that have a "relationship" that allows them to make cold calls; calls that people actually don't want. Collection agencies would be cut off. Even crazy girlfriends who keep calling people would be cut off. Numbers could potentially be warned that they are about to cross the threshold.
Ideally even whole countries or calling services could be included. So if a single service allowed more than a small set number of their subscribers to be cut off they too would just be cut off. This would force them to screen their clients a bit better.
I don't see any reason any organization should be given a pass. Quite simply if a number of other people think that they should be cut off, I can't be bothered getting a call from them; no matter how legitimate they think their reason for calling me is. If other people didn't want to get a call, neither do I.
A simple example of this would be when I continuously report the hotmail emails from team hotmail as spam. They of course give themselves a pass. I checked with my friends and they were all "Hey, I report those too in the hopes that they would go away." There are all kinds of people who think that they are so very important, things such as charities and politicians, but the reality is that I and most other people want them out of their lives. If you do want to get these calls then you could not subscribe to the service.
arseholes
Suppose 10 people press 1-8-7-6 (say) to report a call as (say) robot or (say) fraudulent tech support and so on. Now the charge rate is doubled. Telco networks are superlative at charging. The more people complain the more the charge goes up. WIN-WIN. Simple.
They could get a hoard of people listening in who would be paid for every sales call, or charity call or pervert call. With enough paid hunters the negative calls could quickly vanish.
If you receive an unwanted cold call, you dial a particular number after it, which isn't processed as a regular call, but flags the number. If the counter goes high enough, things happen.
For decades, the Telcos did nothing about unwanted calls. If anything, they encouraged it because they were able to often charge by the minute. All of this was possible because there was absolutely no competition. You signed up with Ma Bell, or you didn't get phone service. It literally took an act of Congress to force them to let you buy your own phone instead of leasing one of the two models (standard or trimline) offered by the Phone Company.
Nowadays, the old-fashioned Telcos are starting to feel the pressure of competition. People are ditching land lines in droves. They can actually choose a carrier now.
Guess what! Suddenly the Telcos are starting to remember they they have living, breathing, unhappy customers. FINALLY they are starting to innovate. Unfortunately, it's a bit too late.