> without ever pointing the finger back at them, or at the telecom industry, or the NSA

Time and place. Zuck's job there was to defend facebook from retaliation, not piss off Congress with whatboutism.

Congressional hearings are show trials, not courts of justice.

>Congressional hearings are show trials, not courts of justice.

Exactly, given the fact that most of the senators were donated to by FB prior, and the fact that they all had met days before the "hearing" and had conversations about FB etc, I am pretty sure it was bunch of congressional dinosaurs attempting to be sycophants in the private pre-meetings/dinners...

Its a farce. And given that FB tracks even physical people without their permission, or consent - FB is a social cancer just waiting to metastasize.

I've recently had a bunch of calls and it seems like the callers are spoofing other people's numbers. I came to this conclusion when I didn't answer and called back. It was just a regular person who didn't know anything about it. A few days later, someone called me thinking I was robo calling them.

Yeah this is called 'neighborhood' spoofing - they do it to get numbers similar to yours (sometimes they'll even appear as a known contact).

I use an app called nomorobo ($2/month) that's basically a blacklist that gets continually updated to block these calls prior to ringing my phone. The way they deal with the neighborhood spoofing is having local access to your contacts so they don't accidentally block any real numbers (though those that happen to be an exact match will go through).

My spam calls went from one to two a day to zero.

Interesting, but honestly 2$/month seems very high unless you get a lot of these calls.

2$/month is not “very high” unless you’re living in the third world.

I don’t mind paying it either since I can report numbers that get through to their blacklist. I feel like I’m fighting back.

It's high when you're basically paying because of a fatal flaw in the telecom system.

I’d prefer just an iOS whitelist (which seems like a much easier solution to this problem) - but this doesn’t exist.

The do not disturb work around mutes all notifications which makes it useless for me.

Yes. I called a number back one time when I saw that it had a Facetime option. I figured it must be a real person. Somebody answered my video call and they weren't very happy with me.

I've been using a free alternative to Nomorobo called Hiya that's been working really well, for what it's worth.

I think Hiya uploads your contact list to the cloud - I'd rather pay the $2/month rather than rely on an unknown business strategy.

Agreed, but how do you know for certain they don't surreptitiously upload your contacts after you have granted permission?

Sounds like you are on iOS?

They've been spoofing numbers for quite some time. It only stands to reason that randomly generated spoofed numbers will be numbers belonging to other owners of phones. They think they're being clever about it: use the same area code and exchange numbers as the target, and randomly generate the final digits, hoping you'll think you know the caller and will answer.

I actually use this to screen calls because my exchange and area code are from T-mobile in Pierce County WA circa 2003 and I've long since moved away from that area.

The strategy falls flat when calling a cell phone, but seems to make a lot of sense when targeting landlines. A call from "someone around town" seems worthwhile to pickup.

Add in the fact that people with landlines are more likely to be older people whose priors expect a human to be calling, and the only real question is why don't the spammers catalog and then exclusively target landline prefixes with this method.

It seems like ILECs could start offering a service based on ingress filtering source addrs based on numbers they know haven't been ported out, but Ma Bell is the antithesis of innovation.

I get robocalls "from Quincy, Mass" on my iPhone which has a Quincy number. I haven't lived there in 7 years and have no genuine interaction with anyone there.

It's been years since I looked at any of the telephony standards but... why is phone number spoofing still a thing?

Your telco knows what phone number you pay for. Can't they just not connect calls that claim to be coming from not-that-number?

This works fine for calls from your landline or cellphone. It doesn't work as well go businesses which may legitimately split incoming and outgoing service, so the outgoing carrier really has no way to know what source numbers are legitimate. There's also a pretty big business in traffic resale, and none of those guys have any idea.

What would be more useful is accessible path information, so I can complain to my carrier about a call, and they can find out where it came from and throw people or companies off the network.

"so the outgoing carrier really has no way to know what source numbers are legitimate."

It shouldn't be difficult to get a single number that is legitimate and limit the caller id to that number. Any telecom carrier whose customer is requesting a wide variety of phone numbers ought to know that something sketchy is going on.

Let's say I'm a not entirely small company, with employees with phones on their desks who call customers and have direct numbers to be called. When they call out, the caller id should be their desk number so the people they're calling know it's them and answer the phone.

But the carrier that handles inbound calling charges an arm and a leg for outbound, so I'd like to use another carrier for outbound; I don't want to change my inbound carrier.

In that case there should still be some similarity among the numbers (area code, exchange, etc), and it wouldn't be difficult to tell the outgoing provider that you're going to be using a particular block of numbers. At a minimum, the outgoing calls shouldn't have numbers from different area codes every day.

I feel like I've read the exact same HN comment, comparing Facebook to the NSA, five times in the past couple days. Here it's barely tangentially related to the topic at hand. Is there some sort of mini PR push going on to mitigate FB's recent reputational damage?

Please don't post comments insinuating astroturfing or shillage unless you have some more substantive reason for it—in which case you should email us at [email protected] so we can investigate. All this is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

It's natural for things to seem this way, but that's because there's enough data on HN to produce seeming patterns of all kinds. Overwhelmingly, it's just users being users. Unfortunately the internet habit of leaping to "shill!" or "PR!" as an explanation for $annoying_view does more damage, because it's more widespread. That's why we ask people to inhibit the reflex.

I've posted a ton about this if anyone wants more background: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

You're right, on reflection this was unnecessarily silly/snarky of me to post here. Thanks for the course correction.

Hrm...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=facebook%20nsa&sort=byDate&pre...

"Hey guys, remember how Facebook had to go in front of congress? Zuck did a crappy job there!" is not exactly a great, confidence instilling PR push.

I second this. I too noticed a bunch of suspiciously pro-Zukerberg top comments on frontpage articles that are even remotely related to FB.

It baffles me, the outrage over Facebook data collection and sale. Isn’t it obvious that is their business model, and why they are worth $0.5 T?

They want to know everything about everyone. Always have.

Their business model is data collection and advertising, not sale of collected data.

The thing is, it appears that data was accessible. Perhaps they didn't sell it, as such. Perhaps companies paid to put a game or quiz on Facebook and they were given info on the users who used the game or quiz.

Or maybe Facebook put the games/apps up for free and just gave the data away?

I dunno, but "We aren't in the business of selling your data. We just gave it away." isn't a great message.

Businesses set their own model and can change it whenever they want.

Tesla can start selling killbots, guess what, that probably isn't going to happen

Ok...?

The point is that companies like Tesla can change their business model at anytime and start selling something new, like they did when they started selling battery packs in addition to cars.

I think the outrage is that everyone thought it would just be used for mundane product advertising and were pretty okay with that.

People weren't expecting targeted political propaganda and other sketchy things.

>https://www.twitch.tv/kitboga

This is one of the best things I've ever seen.

That is very entertaining. Thank you for the link.

There's also https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/, though that one only answers calls, doesn't make them.