Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
Why such a long period in between calls? It should be 90 seconds.
I live in CO now, so anytime I see my old VA area code calling my cell phone that isn't in my address book, I at least don't get tricked... but it's annoying getting one or two of those a day and you're in the middle of something and ring ring some spoofed number again. Seems to be happening everywhere! >:(
Nothing better than using a PAC to do the robocalls.
Make sure you get his five burner cells we're not supposed to know about. And all his kids.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That is actually funny, lucky for those idiots he is not calling their home phone.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Lol. Getting the message across using humor and millions as your witness :)
That linked article has a video that is not available in the UK - and other places I imagine. Here is one that works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... . It is cropped to pass youtube's flagging, so not the best (post if there's a better one), but if you want to see what the post is about it will serve...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
My bad, it is an old episode. Who would have thought, you can't trust people on the internet! :D
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Of course it has a business purpose... to get press coverage, publicize his show on HBO, and get more viewers.
What better way is there to get the rules fixed than using their inadequacies to annoy the hell out of those responsible for making them?
... would it really hurt to give some kind of warning to that effect?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Is this happening to anyone else? About two weeks ago we started getting regular robocalls at 6 AM local. (Usually they've waited until 8:30 AM local time.) And then, late last week we got one robocall at 5:15 AM. (I'm on call, so I *have* to answer the phone.) And this is to a cell phone! (We haven't had a land line for a couple years.) This is going beyond annoying, to the point where I'm going to start calling FCC commissioners myself.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I know it's annoying, but it's quite likely that the person who linked to it did not know it was region locked. I know that in many cases I would have no way of knowing and no reliable way to test if it was.
Most cellphone companies charge extra if you want caller name ID.
Also Verizon for example doesn't support it on all devices that use VoLTE so for example all of their customers using their wireless home phone replacement will lose access to caller name ID at the end of the year unless they do something to fix it.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
They DO have a legitimate purpose. The people being called are public officials. They are the natural recipients of petitions for the redress of grievances WRT communications in the United States. No law may abridge that right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Video unavailable
This video is not available.
Basically ingress filtering. If you are accepting an inbound call from a subscriber, any calling party ANI you pass should match DIDs for which you are the owner.
They know what numbers belong to what carriers so that they can terminate calls to them correctly. I mean, we have number portability and that doesn't work without a database that says which carrier each number belongs to.
If you do this you can go a long way towards killing off robocalling and other scam calls with forged numbers.
I'm sure the more legitimate call center business will get upset, many of them forge ANI for legitimate reasons but this can be pretty easily handled either administratively (by some form or signature from the number's owner) or on the back end with communication between the owner and their provider (so that the owner physically routes outbound calls).
Ordinary business phone systems shouldn't be affected, they're already associated with the DIDs they send out as ANI as well as any base numbers assigned to their phone circuits.
They have been, but those calls have exploded in volume in the last 2 or 3 years.
That is true, but I know for a fact I installed my robo-call blocking apps way before Trump was elected.
It is ALSO true it was enough of a problem when Obama was president, the FCC should have been doing something at that point.
Doesn't mean they shouldn't do something about it now as well.
One fun new trick I've just started seeing in the last few months - calls from *international* numbers where the number ends up looking like a local number - so a call from Greece for example has a country code of "+30". You get a call from 304-298-8442 (not a real number), and if you are not looking closely for the leading "+" in callerID, you don't realize it's international number instead of a number from West Virginia (for example).
Let that soak in fo ra bit - calls are so cheap that even if you start doing something about U.S. numbers. spammers may just move to international lines.
What I would love to see is a discussion of - what CAN the FCC actually do to stop this? What would work? Or does the solution need to come from somewhere else, like congress? Maybe a few spammers wake up to a Seal Team 6 visit, or inside a CIA black site? I'm open to ideas here.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They're political robocalls, and as such they do not need a business purpose.
John Oliver does a lot of these little sort of revenge stunts. It gets a bit tiresome after a while, and I don't think it really helps.
I really hate Robocalls, and have gotten them for 10+ years now. That's over 3 different administrations, and now 5 different FCC directors. If ending robocalls was so easy, it would have been done by now.
I'm not a fan of Pai, but I have a hard time blaming him exclusive for this.
I've never had an early Rabo-Call that I know of, but I have had a handful come at 9-10pm at night... that's new.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If only he had some sort of position of power involving communications. He could do something about robocalls.
Howabout doing your freakin' jobs and passing legislation to outlaw robocalls... oh, except of course during your campaigns. We wouldn't want to miss those /s.
I live in CO now
Ahh, then any moment you too can start getting the spam calls from Greece ( +303-XXX-XXXX )
If you see a + at the start, do not answer the call.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The reason they report incorrect caller ID is because the exchange that the call is coming from is falsely reporting it.
The only way I can imagine to correct this would be to perform an end-to-end reverse lookup on the phone number that is claiming to be the one calling you and ask the exchange that is directly connected to that particular number if that number is making a call to your number, right now via a handshake protocol not entirely unlike starting a tcp connection.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Oh he said he’s against them but he’s also on record as being opposed to rules that former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler put in place to fight them. Also his current solution is to “urge” the telecoms to do something about them. Perhaps if Pai was head of the FCC he could do more but he simply doesn’t have that kind of power.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Funny you skipped over the big, obvious one: by burdening the FCC with robocalls they'll likely be inclined to push rules against robocalls which will burden Last Week Tonight less with robocalls. It's also as if this were some sort of government petition against grievances about the business expense of dealing with all these robocalls.
If I had time, I would write an app that would let me add a number to a list to target for return robocalls. The way it would work is that I get the call telling me that there is nothing wrong with my credit, and I hit a button. From the next week, I return the call every half hour or so, and kindly inform them that there is nothing wrong with their credit either (aren't I helpful).
This sound innocuous, until you consider that they are bothering enough people who have the free app to have someone calling in every second. The amount of slashdotting will be directly proportional to the number of people they've irritated. And since I'm not using the phone anyway, it is no skin off my nose. Hopefully, with enough calls, their phone system will be rendered useless.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
It is not that hard.
The phone company know who they're billing when they complete a circuit. They know who every caller on their network is and what numbers they are assigned. The TELCO should be responsible for assigning the id to the circuit. Not the subscriber.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Here's an idea for starters: For each incoming call that has misrepresented caller ID information, you get $10 off of that month's phone bill.
"But the phone companies can't do that due to $TECHNICALITY"
This is 2019, and they can't keep track of 20 bytes of information? Give me a break. They always seem to know who to bill for a call. With this financial incentive in place, they'd figure it out right quick.
We already have laws in the books prohibiting telemarketing calls to cell phones and numbers on the do not call list. My cell phone number is on the do not call registry, and I still get telemarketing calls to it. Adding more regulations blocking telemarketing calls are unlikely to help, when they're currently ignoring the laws that are already in the books. So while Oliver's tactic may tickle the humorous irony meter, it won't actually solve anything.
The problem is there's no reliable way to figure out who is actually calling you. I get a telemarketing call, and I have no way to file a complaint or lawsuit against the caller - because I have no way to accurately identify the caller. If you want to fix this problem, that's what you need to fix. Pass a law forcing the phone companies to provide a way to accurately trace who is calling you the moment you receive the call. It'll be an uphill road because the telecom companies will fight tooth and nail against it (they make a good chunk of their revenue from telemarketers). And even if we win it'll result in prices going up (lower utilization of the network does not decrease the flat cost to install and maintain the network, so the telecom companies will have to charge more per call to offset the loss of telemarketer revenue). But it'll be worth it not to miss an emergency call from my credit card about "unusual" activity on my account, because I didn't recognize the number and assumed it was a telemarketer, and didn't answer.
If they want to annoy the controllers of the FCC shouldn't they be robocalling Verizon CEO's?
What are "voicemails"?
please explain what the FCC can do?
The FCC should ban number spoofing, unless the company doing it has full legal control over both the calling number and the spoofed number.
Any spoofed call should be required to have a live human available to handle callbacks on the spoofed number, and that human should be required to provide the full name and legal domestic address of the entity that made the call.
There are legitimate reasons for spoofing. There is no legitimate reason for anonymous spoofing without accountability.
I love the way my phone company (CenturyLink) gets to charge me $10 per month per line for caller ID... and yet is apparently under no obligation that the strings that show up on my caller ID display bear any relationship to reality. If that isn't a scam in and of itself, I don't know what is.
... and, generally they just suck.
Here's the best one:
Tell me how I can make a robo caller so I can join in reindeer games and call those motherfuckers, too.
Thanks.
[John, from the IRS department of arrest yo ass]
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Sure, but what do you do if they falsely report it?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
[nt]
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Don't you dare bring up a first amendment right that cannot be squashed by claiming that it constitutes "harassment" of a public official to contact them on their office phone. Next you'll be telling me that these calls are expressly authorized by the FCC's own consumer guidance, and I simply refuse to believe it. It's criminal -- some goober on Slashdot can construct a business purpose for it so it must be. I look forward to all paid lobbyists being charged with crimes for placing such calls using similar logic.
Yeah, I'm sure John Oliver will really regret consulting with HBO's legal team instead of Random Cranky Slashdotter #8723423
"... find the address, write us a letter, and we'll stop the calls immediately."
It should have been "Within the next two to three weeks" to be more authentic.
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
I get 4-5 a day. Disgusting.
Corporatism != Free Market
The FCC should ban number spoofing, unless the company doing it has full legal control over both the calling number and the spoofed number.
Sounds great (and I don't mean that sarcastically), is that better accomplished through the FCC or Congress? Not sure myself. I am sure we need some kind of action.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The reason they report incorrect caller ID is because the exchange that the call is coming from is falsely reporting it.
The only way I can imagine to correct this would be to perform an end-to-end reverse lookup on the phone number that is claiming to be the one calling you and ask the exchange that is directly connected to that particular number if that number is making a call to your number, right now via a handshake protocol not entirely unlike starting a tcp connection.
Actually there is a much easier way to do this. Our VOIP provider for our customers has implemented it. You can't spoof their calls. They require the sent from number to match the actual number if not the call will not complete. We had trouble when they did this with a hospital and a bank who were sending out the incorrect number string with their forwarded calls. Its possible but the companies have to care and for the most part all they care about is selling phone service and not what the people that are purchasing it are doing.
The FCC should ban number spoofing
And the means of achieving this imperative? I mean, we gotta start at the beginning, right? What is the first step required to remove industry control of the FCC, and all our other government bureaucracies and elected offices?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Here's an idea for starters: For each incoming call that has misrepresented caller ID information, you get $10 off of that month's phone bill.
And if this results in a negative phone bill, your phone company has to pay YOU - thousands and thousands of dollars every month, if necessary.
Watch the robocall problem vanish overnight.
Congress should set broad guidelines and leave the technical details up to the regulatory agencies.
So this should be done by the FCC.
Have some links.
And the means of achieving this imperative?
Allow consumers to directly sue the telcos for spoofed calls in small claims court, with a minimum penalty of $500 per call.
I'm actually working with phone switches for a living. There are so many legitimate reasons to change the caller ID, that I really doubt you can come up with a working definition for "misrepresentation".
A hint: Just because the line a call goes out has a phone number assigned to it, it does not mean that the number of that line should ever be used in a call. It could be that this line is just the overflow line for the main line, and thus the number of the main line should be used. There is no warranty that a callback on that technical line number even works, as all calls should be directed to the main line's number. And with the somewhat screwed up U.S. phone number plan (each and every number has to have 10 digits, with 3 of them have to be the area code), you often need a lot of magic to even get a working caller ID. There are many local phone switches with more connected lines to it than the number plan for the trunk line allows. So you have to overbook the numbers your provider gave you.
They KNOW who they paid, they HAVE to. They paid 'em. So even if you claim that a situation arises where the number is falsely reported, they still know who they billed, so what frigging difference is it? The one being "falsely" used was getting paid for the robocall, and they will be "falsely" reimbursing the calls made that they profited from.
Saw these guys on Shark Tank the other day: https://jollyrogertelephone.co...
With a little voice recognition we could turn this into a killer app.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
As usual, a bunch of excuses.
The ID misrepresented if the person making the call is not entitled to use the number displayed. It's as simple as that.
You people have known about this problem for decades, but have done jack squat about it so far. But I'm sure at $10 bucks a pop, smart people like you would figure out a solution in no time. After all, protocol handshakes, whitelists and the like aren't exactly rocket science anymore.
If this problem were really so hard to resolve, it would be an issue in every country. But it's not. The volume of robocalls in European countries is orders of magnitudes lower than in the US. I get maybe one every couple of months. That suggests to me the issue is much more one of political will and regulatory teeth than it is about technical challenge.
Part of the $TECHNICALITY is that it would cost some of the carriers a lot of money to block them. Not spent on the effort, but lost revenue from the robocallers (who DO pay for network use, even if it's a pittance per call).
As long as that perverse incentive is in place, don't expect a lot of action from phone companies to block phone spam.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Just because you made an excuse, or cited a "reason," doesn't mean what you did was also true, or honest.
You deserve to sit in prison with all the other people making this happen; one minute in prison for every minute of people's time you wasted, and a $1 fine for every $1 you cost people in airtime. I don't mean total, I mean every person who made this happen should each be held to account for the entire cost. As a deterrent.
I don't think it is the network use that is driving the profit, but that they sell the ability to fake the caller ID numbers. They're entirely complicit, not just bystanders who refuse to do anything because of some passive benefit.
There are definitely perverse incentives.
What has often been proposed in the past is to force them to limit the caller ID choice to only other numbers on the same account. That would solve the whole thing, and they'd still be able to offer the legit part of the service. They refuse, because legit users are a small user base compared to scammers and liars.
It isn't enough to say they have to control all the numbers, that leaves a barn-door-sized hole where they promise to their telco that they really control the numbers.
Better is to restrict it numbers on the same account at the same telco. That way the telco has the info they need, and there are no excuses.
If they want to pool numbers beyond that, this is 2019, they can just set up an office PBX and bridge the pools themselves. For companies with a legit use case this is not a big deal to do.
It can only reasonably be achieved by Congress, because details.
If the FCC does it directly, it takes a lot longer, is more expensive to make happen, and then sits in purgatory while a bunch of lawsuits wind through the Courts. And then the telcos use all that time to search for ways around the rule. As long as it never really takes effect, people don't get used to the change, so it is under threat of reversal.
Whereas if Congress does it, by telling the FCC exactly what to implement, it goes into effect right away, and it most likely stays in effect while companies try to challenge it in court.
This is because making rules is Congress' job, under the Constitution. The FCC can make regulations, where they've been authorized to by Congress, but there is a bunch of extra restrictions on that, because the Courts have to make sure that they didn't go past what Congress said. So for the FCC to make the rules, they have to basically say that Congress already made rules that let them do it; when Congress does it, the Constitution already says they can do it; there isn't another party that they have to continually show they obeyed while doing it.
Major changes to regulations should always go through Congress, if they can. Especially changes that are likely to be fought over in the Courts.
Sure there is.
TV stations you have to pay for
A) are mostly not regulated by the FCC
B) are excepted from most of the rules about captions
It is the free over-the-air broadcast stations that are required to follow those sorts of rules. The authority of the FCC to regulate them comes from the fact that broadcast bandwidth is a limited public resource.
I'd say the FCC. It requires a shift in technologies, to handle bundling the phone numbers of a customer and forcing Caller-ID to only use that list. I'm afraid the technologies were deliberately designed _not_ to support restriction of spoofing Caller-ID's.
Who do I trust to have a better handle on it, John Oliver and the lawyers at HBO, or random anonymous internet guy?
And I don't even doubt you're a lawyer. It is just that your swollen head won't make your opinion as important as the opinions of the lawyers who are involved. They put a lot of work in to make his show even possible.
You may not know this, but the guy on the screen talking in the first person is just an actor. He didn't actually do any of this himself, other than reading it to you. And maybe writing some of the jokes. Maybe.
Again, what is your procedure for changing the law?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Why obsess about Ajit Pai or whomever when the problem can easily be solved by using an app with better authentication - like Facebook Messenger or Skype or Duo or whatever? You get to control who calls you and confirm their identity much more reliably. We are holding on to technologies like paper mail and numeric phone numbers that have long be superseded with better solutions that need no government to regulate them.
A T1 trunk has 30 lines. Those lines are not physical numbers, just possible phone connections. Normally, the T1 lines are assigned round robin to the calls (you can also assign them linearly, meaning always use the lowest free line number). So whenever station 43 calls, and the last call was assigned to line 14 on the T1, the call of station 43 will now go out on line 15. And an incoming call to station 198 will then get line 16. It simply makes no sense to associate 30 fixed numbers to it, as there is no 1:1 relation to a physical station. A T1 has a single number. If I have 30 calls going through a T1, which numbers shall I assign to them?
As the phone switch the T1 is hooked up to has maybe 500 stations, how shall I distribute 30 numbers to them? And the phone switch has several T1s connected to it, because the company has several locations, how shall I assign the respective T1 number to them?
It gets even worse if the company has locations in several countries. It makes sense to have a call going to the U.S. leave the switch on a T1 in the U.S., because the call rates might be better, and the callback to that number will be cheaper if the called number gets back to an U.S. number. So I have to assign an U.S. number to a station which might be physically located in Ireland. Or, if you prefer the "real ID", I have to assign an Irish caller ID to a call leaving an U.S. located T1 connection.
The whole "no misrepresented caller ID" comes from the technically wrong idea that a line is fixed to a station, and thus the line somehow represents the station, which never was the case, not even in the times of manually connected calls on large switch boards 100 years ago.
Let me present you a phone switch system I helped building a few years ago. It is the phone switch of an organization with locations in several counties. In each county, you have a local gateway connected to sometimes one, sometimes several S1 lines (depends on the number of calls usually going on there). Each S1 can operate 30 simultaneous calls, and each S1 has its own phone number. In each location, the organization has a local phone number, and you can dial through to individual stations via their 4 digit extension. All local phone switches are interconnected within that organization, thus internal calls never leave the system.
So far, so good.
If an S1 fails for what reason ever or all 30 connections are used, the location would be unreachable. Thus each S1 has at least one overflow destination, meaning another S1 (with another number associated to it). If you call the failed S1, your call will be automatically routed to another S1, completely transparent to you, and you will still reach the 4 digit extension you dialed, as the organization has a flat numbering plan, meaning each 4 digit extension exists only once within that organization, independent of their actual physical location. Thus the phone switch the other S1 is connected to (in whatever county or area code it is located) will automatically route your call to the extension intended by you without you even noticing that the physical call was routed via another county with another area code on a different S1 with another trunk number. You will not see that the original S1 has failed or was completely full. For you, your call has worked the way you intended it to work when you dialed that number.
Still o.k. with you?
And now, you have to simulate the same behavior for outgoing calls. The S1 you call out should assign to you the right area code and the right trunk code of your station, independently of the S1 the call is actually leaving the organization. Thus you have to overwrite the S1 trunk code, insert the right area code and the right trunk code additionally to your extension number, so people you call can get back to you via the number of the location you are actually working from. How do you do that without "misrepresenting caller IDs"?
Why not just make it illegal to even store your phone number without your permission, like it is in the EU?
GDPR means that companies have to get opt-in permission to store your phone number and use it to call you.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This sounds like a very similar problem to what firewalls have solved in IP space decades ago. There may be a gazillion of legitimate reasons why a company calling from anywhere wants a specific number to show up, but generally allowing display of arbitrary numbers is not the solution to this. Like with IP firewalls, the preferred mode of operations would be explicit whitelisting of legitimate uses.
Yes, this could rack up some extra cost to carriers, but it would turn our land line phones into useful devices for communication again.
This is no problem in my not-us country. I don't get robocalls.
I nearly never get robocalls in Germany, none of my friends watching LWT does.
I guess we're using a completely different phone network or technology in Europe.
That must be why universal healthcare works here, too, and cant work in the US :-)
Your racism is glaringly obvious here. Ajit Pai is the "bad guy" in this scenario and the "good guy" is John Oliver...
In Australia there is a Do Not Call list to which it is easy to submit your phones numbers. Telemarketers can be fined up to AUS$2.2 million in court for each day on which infringements occurred. I can't remember ever receiving an unsolicited call in the last 10 years. It's not that hard if there is a will for it.
Here's an idea for starters: For each incoming call that has misrepresented caller ID information, you get $10 off of that month's phone bill.
Why don't you just do what the rest of the world has done and make a law stating that any phone company allowing a spoofed phone number will be charged $10,000 per incident. You'll find that spoofing rates drop to almost 0 after that.
You still get spam calls, but even then they're minimal over here.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
So you've conclusively proven that phone companies can't possibly bill their customers based on usage, since based on this lame architecture, they have no fucking idea about who is calling who.
Either that, or you're just plain wrong.
I too deal with phone switches. And networks.
The spoofing problem exists in both, and the mitigations for networks work for phones as well, if enforced by the carriers.
If BGP between AS' on the internet worked like phone trunks, we would have no fucking internet.
You're representing a problem as intractable because you don't want to either do the work, or be forced to do the work to mitigate the problem.
The thing is, you're being disingenuous, and you know it.
As someone who has handled phone routing, like I do, you know full well there is plenty of room for filtration of outbound CID information with registered DIDs.
We do it with our customers. The large Telcos don't do it with theirs because they're lazy and they don't want to address the problem.
I think the point he's making is that phone numbers are actually just labels on a physical connection, and therefore have no power for identifying the connection used between you and whoever is on the other end. The company is able to bill you when you make calls because they know the physical location of your "station" (i.e. your house), and they've labelled this with your phone number. However, if the "station" resides in a location that the company has no control over, say China, then they have no means of knowing exactly what physical location the connection was made from. The phone number on that connection that you see is passed along from the foreign phone system so it may or may not represent a real physical location on that end, but your phone company would have no way to verify this. Worse yet is IP calling in which voice data is sent via the Internet between hubs, then translated into the local phone company system to actually connect the call. There is no means of knowing where the IP call came from or if the phone number it is labelled with actually means anything. So, if the caller is originating from the same phone company as you, there should be a way for the company to identify if they are a real customer. The problem, as usual, is the fact that everything is connected between competing systems across national and international boundaries that make it impossible to do anything if the other end doesn't cooperate.
To be fair.. I'd go as far as to say 98% of spoofed phonecalls are to (Primary) English speaking countries.
There's little point some 'sales rep' sittin' in a call center in India callin' up some german speaking citizen with a barely-understandable-anyway English script...
But yes - Also those with lax laws about wether you can (or should) be doing it or not.
A bigger version of this problem has already been solved on the Web with TLS. The Telcos could implement a similar solution (which could be much simpler due to the constrained nature of their proprietary systems) if they'd only get off of their asses and do it.
Here's an idea for starters: For each incoming call that has misrepresented caller ID information, you get $10 off of that month's phone bill.
My question on this is how do you determine which phone company is at fault? If the call originated with company ABC but my carrier is DEF, would DEF have had the ability to tell that the information was misrepresented? When multiple carriers are involved who gets the bill?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
When the hell has making something illegal ever gotten rid of it?
After the Chicago Beer Wars, automatic weapons were banned in the United States. There's been only two crimes committed with a legally owned machine gun since 1934. Since the 1990s, ATF gun trace requests for even illegally owned machine guns have been less than 0.1% of all trace requests. Machine guns were banned and automatic weapon crime is basically nonexistent.
If you are connected to a physical switch, such as a Centrix or POTS (Plain Old Telephone Switch), then the phone number comes from the line card. When a line is configured the phone number is assigned at that time
I spent a number of years working on an application that interfaced with Centrix switches. It allowed the users to make changes without having to log onto the switch directly and learn the cryptic commands.
Lets for a moment ignore all flat billing plans or similar constructs.
Then you get billed for using a line for a specified amount of time. Each line has a base rate associated to it, and a billing clock, that ticks while you are using that line. You get then billed for the number of ticks during the call. If you are calling long distance or international, you have to use several lines connected together and get billed for the ticks of each of those lines (which then often have different rates). Between the providers, there are interconnects (mostly running the CCSS7 protocol) which also exchange the billing information. But as you can't know beforehand on which lines your call actually gets routed and what the actual total rate for your call will be, your provider offers you a plan with fixed rates for each type of call, hiding the actual pricing the company has with other companies. If you want to see the real cost incurred by your call, you would have to operate your own CCSS7 switch at home and have an CCSS7 link to your provider instead of a PSTN.
That's why VoIP between providers gets more and more popular, and why numbering schemes like ENUM are used. It just takes time until all the phone switches and exchanges are upgraded or moved to VoIP. I've seen switches running since 30 years, which also have the capabilities of 30 years ago.