An End To Phone Pranking (axios.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: A researcher at Carnegie Mellon University has developed an intelligent system that is helping the U.S. Coast Guard to distinguish and weed out prank mayday calls that cost it up to millions of dollars a year when it flies or motors out on pointless rescue missions, per Govtech.com. The program, created by Carnegie Mellon's Rita Singh, creates a barcode of a person's voice, deciphering whether the caller really is on a boat or actually in a house somewhere. It can unmask repeat pranksters since it can pick up telltale markers and match them up.

Comments

Phone pranking?

[msauve]

I'm guessing the article is confused.

If it's an emergency phone call to the Coast Guard, they could just use the GPS support like E911 so they get a location from the cell phone. Surely, that's the only type of phone being used on a boat these days.

I think what this is really about is people calling in on VHF (marine) radio, not a phone.

Re:Bizarre

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I am a tax payer and I am not an avid boater. I have no reason to save you at all costs. Only as long as rescue costs are reasonable, it will be funded. If the cost becomes too much, we would yank the entire rescue service. We, the taxpayers, might impose additional restrictions like demanding people provide gps coordinates etc. After the rescue, we would insist on an accident review, and if we find the boater has taken unnecessary risk, or had not followed procedure, a stiff fine might be levied. If necessary the entire cost of rescue should be charged to the user.

So it is in your own interest, people so research like this, and make the research reliable and make pranking a pointless exercise.

At some point we would insist on boating to be taxed so that boater rescue is self funding.