John Oliver Fights Robocalls By Robocalling Ajit Pai and the FCC (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comedian John Oliver is taking aim at the Federal Communications Commission again, this time demanding action on robocalls while unleashing his own wave of robocalls against FCC commissioners. In a 17-minute segment yesterday on HBO's Last Week Tonight, Oliver described the scourge of robocalls and blamed Pai for not doing more to stop them. Oliver ended the segment by announcing that he and his staff are sending robocalls every 90 minutes to all five FCC commissioners. "Hi FCC, this is John from customer service," Oliver's recorded voice says on the call. "Congratulations, you've just won a chance to lower robocalls in America today... robocalls are incredibly annoying, and the person who can stop them is you! Talk to you again in 90 minutes -- here's some bagpipe music."

When it came to robocalling the FCC, Oliver didn't need viewers' help. "This time, unlike our past encounters [with the FCC], I don't need to ask hordes of real people to bombard [the FCC] with messages, because with the miracle of robocalling, I can now do it all by myself," Oliver said. "It turns out robocalling is so easy, it only took our tech guy literally 15 minutes to work out how to do it," Oliver also said. He noted that "phone calls are now so cheap and the technology so widely available that just about everyone has the ability to place a massive number of calls." Under U.S. law, political robocalls to landline telephones are allowed without prior consent from the recipient. Such calls to cell phones require the called party's prior express consent, but Oliver presumably directed his robocalls to the commissioners' office phones. Oliver told the FCC commissioners: "if you want to tell us that you don't consent to be robocalled, that's absolutely no problem. Just write a certified letter to the address we buried somewhere within the first chapter of Moby Dick that's currently scrolling up the screen... find the address, write us a letter, and we'll stop the calls immediately."

Comments

Re:Embrace the healing power of AND

[damn_registrars]

Maybe a few spammers wake up to a Seal Team 6 visit, or inside a CIA black site?

That would be a pointless waste of energy. Even if you executed every spammer who robocalled you today, there would still be thousands more waiting to call you starting tomorrow - none of whom would give the slightest shit about the dead ones. In other words: Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( XXX) vigilante

approach to fighting (robocalls) spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(X ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(*) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
(X ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business


Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(X ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for (the phone system) email
(X ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X ) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X ) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X ) Outlook


and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(X ) Blacklists suck
(X ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough


Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (X ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. (X ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.

In other words, you're trying to take the emotions attached