Re: Slashdot - Call Someone Without Having To Talk To Them [TELECOM]

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| |This is rather interesting, but why do I suspect it's just an |invitation to large volumes of voice spam? | |-- |John Mayson |Austin, Texas, USA | |***** Moderator's Note ***** | |According to the article, this service offers callers a chance to |leave a message on a cellular user's voice mail without risking |actually talking to the person who owns the cellphone. However, before |they can "bypass" the cellular user, callers must listen to an ad |before they're allowed to leave a message: in other words, those who |use the service can be _positive_ that they're wasting their time, |instead of taking the chance that the cell-phone owner _might_ waste |their time. Seems like a self-limiting paradigm.

I looked at this a while ago when it was (maybe?) in beta. It wasn't as interesting as I thought. Near as I can tell they just place two calls to the target number in quick succession. I assume the hope is that the first call will busy out the phone long enough for the second to be forwarded to voice mail. The trick might be to kill the first call quickly enough that the phone doesn't ring.

I have gone to some trouble to disable voice mail on my GSM phone (required some time on the line with T-Mobile customer service) so I can control the conditional forwarding options myself. (With voice mail enabled they are locked to the voice mail server.) In general I do not enable any conditional forwarding so if you try to "Slydial" me my phone rings and you get an all-circuits-busy message as the second call fails. If I enable forward-on-busy to my home answering machine it still doesn't work right because (I assume) my machine either doesn't answer fast enough or doesn't do some voice mail server handshake.

Dan Lanciani ddl@danlan.*com