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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.
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.
The problem with the way the international telecommunications systems are set up is that no, you dont know where the call originates from, just that a network next to yours is handing it to you - its essentially one massive Tor network where the upstream routing information passed around cannot be trusted. You bill the person than handed it to you, they bill the person that handed it to them and so on.
This is why Indian call centres can buy blocks of a million phone numbers, hit UK targets all week and not be penalised for it.
BT cant solve this on their own, because that would require them to be able to force other telecoms companies to solve their own problems with the setup or simply reject 99% of all international calls made.
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.
Because you have a grave misunderstanding that Caller ID and call routing and billing codes have anything to do with each other, and have unrealistic expectations out of Caller ID.
Take the example at my work place. We have over 200 phone extensions, but we only have 60 DIDs from the phone company and thus 60 phone numbers.
For those 60 extensions our system reports the DID in the Caller ID field, so you know the outside phone number to call if you want to reach that extension.
But what do you suggest for the other 140 phones?
I argue the incorrect "spoofed" value of our main/reception phone number being sent as Caller ID is hugely more useful than whatever nonsense you are promoting. At least with that data you know it is our company calling, and have a number to call back to at least potentially be transferred to the internal only phone extension you can not possible dial directly from the outside.
Making the Caller ID value "correct" would mean you couldn't dial it (it's a 4 digit number after all), and it wouldn't tell you who is calling you. Completely worthless.
It can't be made a DID since the phone has none.
It shouldn't be left blank or you would still be bitching about it.
So what exactly would you suggest as a value that isn't "spoofing" but is also your definition of "correct"?