[telecom] Robocalls on the upswing: FTC on the hunt for Rachel and company

The cynic in me has to wonder how long Rachel would last if those calls were threatening the lives/safety of high-level politicians.

The answer that burbles up is "less than a week... maybe a lot less...".

I have been ranting about challenge-response periodically for a couple of years now.

"Captcha" for phones, so-to-speak.

Does anybody else think that's where phone service is headed globally?

I'm thinking that a standard part of phone service (like the ubiquitous answering-machine functionality) will be a means to implement challenge-response.

A couple of examples where the phone doesn't even ring until the challenge has been met:

- A message that says "Press 1 for Joe, press 2 for Sam, press 3 for Sue...... where the right number to press is buried somewhere in there and pressing anything else disconnects the call.

- A message that says something like "Please the number of fingers on a human hand" and anything but 5 disconnects.

These could be implemented so that frequent callers can just press the right number as soon as the challenger picks up so they are minimally inconvenienced.

I'm still looking for reasons whey the world isn't headed in this direction...

??

I doubt it. The same thing has been tried with e-mail, and most senders, even legitimate ones, will blacklist the address from which the challenge comes rather than give the response, especially if it requires going to a web site.

But in my view, there are much better strategies for filtering out unwanted calls which can only be done if the calls go through the recipient's computer

-- and for that reason alone, VOIP will largely replace wired phones within a few years.

Indeed, I'd already have ditched my POTS, except that the only phone company which has wired my housing complex is AT&T, and they won't sell broadband without a POTS phone line (an illegal "tying" practice that I wish regulators would compel them to stop, already).

You bet. Millions of phone records shared with government yearly, and that's not even counting the NSA's monitoring of the 'net. Dammit, if we're going to have ubiquitous surveillance and detention without trial, why can't we at least reap a few benefits from it?

Hey, there's an idea! Maybe anybody who receives a call from Rachel should respond with a bunch of words that might trigger NSA

It's not going to happen. Most phone services allow call-block now. And on my phone I use Blacklist for Android - MetroPCS wants to charge me a buck a month for phone block. A $2 app does it forever and I don't need to pay MetroPCS for the privilege.

Per T:

But don't Call-Block services depend on a blacklist? If so, who maintains the blacklist?

What data does the Android app work from? Does it just block anything where the calling number is not in your phonebook?

No, you can tell the Blacklist application what numbers to block. I quite like it as when you want to add it'll go into the phone call log and let you choose a number.

Per T:

Are you in the USA? My experience with robo calls to my cell phone is that they keep changing the numbers that they spoof. e.g. You never know where Heather-Of-Cardholder-Services is going to call from next.

I recently added the Special Information Tones to the beginning of the "answering machine" message on my cell phone.

I don't expect it to help any for the illegal offshore dialers, but presidential elections are looming and I'm hoping that the legal political campaign dialers may have at some concern about costs and react to the tones by removing the number from whatever list they're working out of.

Back in the nineties I had a 28.8kb ISA faxmodem which came with telephony software (I think it was Sierra somethingorother). It was intended for business use, but I quickly adapted it to my POTS service, and used it to screen incoming calls before they were sent to the actual phone.

Of course this only worked when the computer was on, but since most all of the automated dialers at the time called out in the afternoon and evening, it worked well enough.

Jon