I work with phone systems. It's usually determined by how long they hear a continuous sound at the start of a call. If it's relatively short (and it can be adjusted by settings), it assumes it's a live voice (like someone saying "Hello?" is usually pretty short). If it's continuous for a certain period of time, it assumes it's a voicemail.
For our speech applications we have different behaviors depending on which call disposition is detected (that's the term for this, also determines things like invalid phone numbers).
Sometimes when testing speech applications I'll pick up and scratch the receiver continuously or speak without taking a pause until the voicemail disposition is triggered so I can test a voicemail message without having to check voicemail.
We make these calls on behalf of health insurance companies for health reminders and surveys, so our calls are more legitimate than most, but we do use an autodialer to reduce the load on our live agents.
Question you might know the answer to: I've noticed it's a pretty common practice to get appointment reminders with caller ID from the doctor's office. I like that feature. I'd imagine there are plenty of other legitimate use cases for caller ID spoofing as well. Do you have any idea how that's going to work with STIR/SHAKEN?
I'd guess it's going to be some kind of oauth for your phone number, where you own it and can grant spoofing access to other entities?
Google seems to be supporting it: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/1119583115056/2018-11-19%20Goog... (via https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication)
If you call the missed call back, you realize the person picking up didnt make the call.
Wheeler was born on April 5, 1946 in Redlands, California. He attended Ohio State University.[7] From 1969 to 1976, Wheeler led the trade group Grocery Manufacturers of America.[8] He then went on to work at the National Cable & Telecommunications Association from 1976 to 1984, becoming president of the trade group in 1979. For a year until its closure, Wheeler was president of NABU Network, before spending a number of years creating or running several different technology startups. In 1992, he became the CEO of the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association, a post he held until 2004.
Since then, I only get such calls from companies that got my details in exchange for some freebie. I tell them I'm not interested, and would they please stop calling me, and they do.
The only calls I got recently were in English with a heavy Indian accent, "Ilse Smid" or another stereotypically Dutch name, claiming to be from Microsoft Windows, and that my computer had alerted them that it had a virus... These scam calls all came from nonexistent Dutch phone numbers.
The funniest one is when my fixed line provider (let's call it P) calls me on my mobile phone (which is another provider) and ask me if I'm one oh their (P) customer :-) (the explanation is that the mobile/fixed businesses are separated to avoid monopoly and, since they can't share customer data ('cos of data protection rules), they have to ask them again :-))
Telco has not been a free market, ever.
Competition is only a solution for problems where the telcos' interest and the consumers' interest align. And that's very rare.
Someday we'll have A.I. to screen calls for us, and hopefully it can also screen this highly-upvoted-but-worthless tripe from message boards for us.
If you pay upvotes and karma, you get unsubstantiated politicised arguments. The feedback mechanism rewards those comments.
Otherwise, every hyperbole will have to be considered as irrefutable truth.
Or, is the 'who comes up with wittiest hyperbole' is the type of 'thought exchange' framework you would like to engage in?
That kinda/sorta was the mandate, until we put a telecom shill in charge.
"An independent U.S. government agency overseen by Congress, the commission is the United States' primary authority for communications law, regulation and technological innovation."
Source: https://www.fcc.gov/about-fcc/what-we-do
You can have arguments until forever about what they should or shouldn't do, but their raison d'être is to set policy according to these overarching objectives.
Oh, and just to be clear, the lack of an Oxford comma in that quote is inexcusable :)
In 2005, the FCC decided that ISPs should be regulated by them. From 2005 - 2012, Congress failed to pass new bills granting the FCC this authority. It was denied by congress. In 2015, the FCC decided that they didn't congress to grant that authority.
So yeah, the FCC website claiming they have an authority is not an impartial source. Two years later, the FCC reverted back to the Title I classification.
So for 2 years, the FCC claimed a power that they were not authorized to claim.
If Congress wants the FCC to have this power they can easily pass a bill granting them that authority, they have repeatedly failed to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...
It's inexplicable that the same party that claims the act establishing the FCC is more limited than the wording states while the federal arbitration act is continuously expanded to cover cases that neither the authors nor previous courts ever tolerated.
https://www.rpc.senate.gov/policy-papers/why-title-ii-is-not...
The GOP lays out an obviously slanted view about why they are opposed to the "utility-style" regulation that Title II entails.
However, this assumes that the market is functional when it's been clear since the '96 Telecom Act that it has been anything but. The idea that the FCC can't claim this authority without Congress acting first is FUBAR.
From pricing (generally higher for lower speed) to barriers to entry (the upfront cost for infrastructure is enormous), time has shown that carriers and ISPs will refuse to behave unless they are forced to.
Legislation is needed, but Republican arguments that a light touch will "preserve innovation" or some other nonsense doesn't work. 1993 was a long time ago and almost anyone who cares about this issue will tell you that Internet access is a utility (essential service, widely available, for reasonable cost) but the incumbent providers don't act like one.
(Save for maybe Google/WebPass, Sonic, and any number of municipal broadband initiatives)
What do you think about the 'Free Press' group asking FCC to sensor Trump's corona virus updates?
Does FCC have authority to do that?
https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/02/far-left-media-group-as...
The second and more common is to simply ask for their company name, their name and employee number, and their boss’s name. By the time I get to the third question they hang up and often don’t call back again. In my state you can sue for unwanted cell phone calls and the max you can get is something like $1200/call, which I am happy to inform them of. No clue how to actually do this but if someone automates the process of filing a suit, I will split the profits :)
Source: I've sent demand letters to vehicle extended-warranty robocallers using DoNotPay
I've never gotten enough information to file a complaint
The time I told the robocall bot that this was very worrying because I was on my way to a driving test was actually true though. :D
I spent a full weekend texting back and forth with the scammer.
Although I never went as far as your lorry of circus animals, I did give _many_ hints to him that he was being played with.
Now, the more interesting part is that I was particularly fed with scammers and wanted to see if I could out scam one, which I did.
On the Monday after that weekend, I managed to get my scammers to provide me with his bank account username and password.
Once I got this information, I checked that they were correct credentials and stopped all and every contact. I also did nothing with it as I didn't want to myself be on the wrong side of the law, nor did I want to mess too much with a scammer and get myself in trouble.
I don't see how people can sit there and watch this live with him trying but normally the clipped/edited videos are pretty funny how much he can waste their time
A website they pointed me to had a multidomain SSL certificate gave me a list of other scammy domains, and one that appeared to sell robocalling software. On that site I found a phone number to call to get started. I called the number and somebody immediately answered! I pretended to be an interested customer for a while, and he claimed to be the author of the software. I wasted his time for about 10 minutes asking questions about how it worked, and where i could get lists, etc. Then told him I wanted him to add a patch to prevent my number from being called again, and that I'd be calling him again if i got anymore calls.
It was very fun!
Basically, he walks through the history of the phone system and how it never really considered bad actors, and then what they are working on now and what it'll take to deploy it.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/district-court-orders-injunct...
I do the same thing. I moved and my old number is forwarded through google voice. Everytime i get a call from my old area code I know it is a neighbor spam call as no one calls me from that area code anymore.
It's gotten so bad i let my calls go to voicemail now.
The times it has failed me is, actually, right now. I put in a call to have a delivery, maybe the last four digits are 4700- I've plugged that number in. But the guy calling me back calls on 4709 and gets VM. So I have to remember to turn this off if I'm expecting a delivery.
I've encountered robots in the last 6 months that have started with "Hello?" when I didn't say anthing. It tripped up my Turing Test at first, but eventually hit an ALICEBot-like moment that crashed the whole thing down.
Robocalls shove someone else's voice into your ear, without offering you an ear in return. They signal a synchronous communication, and then reneg on that promise with a spammed asynchronous message.
"Political speech" is the same as every other kind of speech. There should be no exemptions for policy just because someone running for office is involved. They have the same duty of courtesy as everyone else, and we have the same right to block our ears from their spam messages as businesses and scams.
No idea if it worked, but it was the least I could do to halt progress in the wrong direction.
I know nearly nothing about telco software but after working at enough big places I suspect one likely answer is "because it's monstrously complex for both technical and human reasons, moreso than it might seem at first".
This is a naive assumption. I've come across robocallers that do exactly this. It is sort of trivial, if you think about it.
It should be relatively easy to identify the bad actors here and I don't mean the spammers, I mean the telcos that make this possible, deliberately so, by essentially "laundering" spam calls.
My response to picking up a number is to answer the call and say nothing. Auto-dial systems will route the call to a person when they get a "live" response. I don't know the criteria but I'm pretty sure it's them detecting noise on the call (which could be voicemail).
A human calling will wonder what is happening and fill the silence by saying something. A machine will not.
I hang up within 6 seconds of this in the hopes that it affects some metric somewhere of this being a low-quality or spam call. I don't know if it does. I think I read somewhere once that it did. I could be wrong.
If a real human is on the other end and does say nothing in this window, they'll generally just call right back. You get the exact same number again then this time I'll answer it.
It is nice to filter contacts vs non-contacts but there are too many things on non-contacts. Businesses you deal with, primarily.
In the email world where obviously spam is a huge problem zombie relays that allow this (which I believe is the primary source?) can get blacklisted. Why don't telcos who do this also get blacklisted? Or at least identified? This isn't AT&T or Verizon. It's the little telcos that connect to them.
But is this all too little too late? I think we've discovered over the last 20 years that we're all pretty much over open networks. It's all opt-in now with the likes of Whatsapp, FB Messenger and so forth.
Oh and while we're at it, can we get rid of this stupid exemption to robocalling restrictions for political campaigning? It's defended as "political free speech". To me, this is nonsensical. Free speech doesn't mean that I should be forced to listen to it.
EDIT: Found an example [1] of the bad actors I'm talking about.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/31/21117477/justice-departme...