Robocalls Can Now Get Blocked By Your Carrier By Default (cnet.com) 150
The FCC voted unanimously today to allow carriers to block robocalls by default, setting the stage for the major carriers to take action against the surge of unwanted automated calls that basically everyone hates. From a report: The agency also voted to move forward on a proposed rule that would require carriers to adopt the SHAKEN / STIR caller ID authentication system if they don't do it themselves by year-end. Ajit Pai, a Republican, has called robocalls the "scourge of civilization," while Geoffrey Starks, a Democrat, said that the unwanted calls have "changed the fabric of our culture." The vote comes just two weeks after FCC Chairman Ajit Pai proposed the blocking rule, which he said was designed to give carriers "certainty" about whether automatic blocking was allowed or not. Carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile have offered robocall-blocking services for a while, but they were opt-in. In an op-ed published on USA Today, Pai said, "I hate robocalls as much as you do." He added, "If Americans can agree on anything these days, it's that they're fed up with robocalls. The scam calls. The calls from foreign countries at 2 a.m. The deceptive caller ID 'spoofing,' which happens when a caller falsifies caller ID information to make it look as if they're calling from your area code."
But will they? (Score:5, Insightful)
The money says... no.
Re:But will they? (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course. They'll simply offer an "enhanced enterprise package" for businesses so they can become a "trusted" entity and have free rein to spam the masses. And AT&T makes an extra buck to boot. And the government will be happy with the extra tax revenue as well.
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Of course. They'll simply offer an "enhanced enterprise package" for businesses so they can become a "trusted" entity and have free rein to spam the masses. And AT&T makes an extra buck to boot. And the government will be happy with the extra tax revenue as well.
What makes you think they won't just include it for free because it will become the expectation by consumers? That seems much more plausible than your scenario.
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I honestly don't think they'll even let non-iPhone users access to the feature. I guarantee they won't blanket block them all automatically. Chances are likely you'll have to block them individually one-by-one as the calls come in, and that "blocking" feature won't actually prevent the call, probably just silence the ringer.
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"We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company."
(Also, fuck NBC for eradicating all traces of the sketch from the internet. I guess now that they are owned by a telecom company this became awkward for them.)
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"We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company."
(Also, fuck NBC for eradicating all traces of the sketch from the internet. I guess now that they are owned by a telecom company this became awkward for them.)
I am unfamiliar with the bit (SNL?) you're referring to, but it likely referred to phone companies while they operated as monopolies. Wireless carriers actually do compete on features to some degree, none of them wants to be the one that charges for a service that is standard with the competition.
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Because Ajit Pai received no money.
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Confirmed. I'm still getting them on AT&T as of today. I've previously contacted them about this before today, and they informed me that their network no longer has any call-blocking features whatsoever, and that it is a client-side-only feature I can now only gain by buying a recent model iPhone (data plan required obv.) which I could then use to add individual numbers one-by-one to a block list.
I didn't even bother asking how many numbers the list would hold maximum. They probably budgeted space on
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Well that's a bunch of bullshit and they know it. The numbers are spoofed to be from local area codes or exchanges.
"Here spend money and buy this new phone. It still won't help stop the robocalls though."
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NPR is running an interesting series on the vulnerability of even seemingly self-sufficient
senescent people to financial scams... part of it is once they get tricked it flips a psychological
switch somehow where they don't want to admit hey got scammed so they double down and
keep sending money. (Kinda like populist politics these days.)
Aside from all the damage the actual scamming does by further impoverishing our elderly
and less intellectually gifted and thereby putting financial stress on the family membe
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And we only accept payments in Amazon gift cards.
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You're being sued for back taxes.
Yes, the US government conducts business this way.
I get the Canadian equivalent of this. Doesn't address my by name. Only in English rather than the required bilingual with French. Also threatening me with a Grand Jury - which Canada doesn't use.
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Better yet, why don't all the phone companies get their collective heads out of their asses and redesign the system such that caller ID spoofing cannot be done. Oh wait...if they did that, they wouldn't be able to sell phone service to the spoofing companies. Never mind...
Ajit Pai (Score:1, Funny)
Ajit Pai, a Republican, has called robocalls the "scourge of civilization"
Ajit Pai has no sense of irony.
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Lots of tolerance and love for gays on the marxist left.
Enjoy Trump's second term you mentally deranged ass wart.
Right. And you think that douchebag is actually a good representative of "the left?" I doubt he's either left wing or right wing, or even if any of that matters. He's paid to post to stir up shit. That's all this is. Stirring shit up, because Some People really want shit stirred up.
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You're saying the people pushing laws to stop minority CITIZENS from voting, restricting their poll hours/locations, and effectively trying to impose a poll tax on them, add census questions specifically to undermine them, etc..
That's the same thing as Obama's "dreamer" plan?
Yeah. Your equivocations don't help. They aren't equal. There is wrong on both sides, but they aren't equal.
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As TheRegister pointed out at the time, Pai's unexpected support for call blocking coincided closely with congress finding cross party support for it. Knowing it would be forced on him within 24 hours or so, he immediately 180degreed and tried to grab the glory for something he'd resisted till then!
No, not at all. Rarely confirms caller ID info (Score:2)
No, SHAKEN / STIRRED will normally not be able to confirm or deny the accuracy of the caller ID information.
It will sometimes be able to verify which *company* is making the call. Companies can buy phone numbers from https://www.buydidnumber.com/ [buydidnumber.com] or any other provider and there is no way to know whether or not they have the number that is in the caller ID.
SHAKEN / STIRRED is a SIP-based protocol which can provide the following three levels of attestation in various circumstances, with no ability to ever say
American companies never outsource to India? (Score:3)
You're saying no American company has a call center in India?
That's interesting.
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The call center could might as well use VoIP/SIP using the company's exchange in the US and originate the call from there. There is no need to spoof numbers, and the company could register all numbers used in that exchange and get verified as owners/authorized users.
I agree with the parent, under no circumstances should a call originating from an international caller show a different country code than where it originated from.
It's all SIP. "Originate" is the starting point (Score:2)
> The call center could might as well use VoIP/SIP
SHAKEN / STIR is a sip-based protocol. SIP use is assumed from the outset. There aren't in fact a million copper pairs between India and the US that they're going to use.
> in the US and originate the call from there
oÂrigÂiÂnate /É(TM)ËrijÉ(TM)ËOEnÄt/
verb
create or initiate (something).
If a guy in India initiated the call, the call originated in India.
> There is no need to spoof numbers
What are you talking abou
exclusionary? (Score:2)
so reading between the lines here, the interesting thing is they say block using some form of reasonable analytics.
there's no guarantee carriers will allow /legitimate/ robocalls. there's no regulation of the type of analytics that will be in place or what it is allowed to do or who is allowed to subvert it. there are a huge number of legitimate robocalls that may be impacted by whatever systems a carrier is allowed to implement under this system. will the carriers abuse their control to create a non-neutra
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If they do abuse it then they are bound to get slapped hard in the courts. robocall legislation doesn't supersede common carrier requirements.
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plenty of us feel there are no legit robocalls whatsoever on this Earth. The rest of you can enjoy your "legit robocalls" that are a poor substitute for what modern tech can do
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Your bank calls you to tell you that they have noted a suspicous activity on your credit card. The initial call is always done by robocall... you have to call them back.
I, for one, am grateful that my bank does this.
I will say, however, that there is no legitimate use for robocalls from a number that you would not be able to recognize.
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Your bank calls you to tell you that they have noted a suspicous activity on your credit card. The initial call is always done by robocall...
If your bank feels that it needs to spoof the caller id on that warning call so that it looks like the call from your next door neighbor, then they should be slapped with a fine.
You are not talking about "robocalls" as intended by the context of this rule.
I will say, however, that there is no legitimate use for robocalls from a number that you would not be able to recognize.
Which is it? Is there a legitimate use or not? I would not be able to recognize the phone number my bank would use to call me about a charge issue.
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Why not?
Because I don't know the phone number for the credit card company fraud department, that's why. I never call it, why would I?
Your bank wouldn't be spoofing another number,
Which means that they are not a "robocall" as meant by this new rule. Stop worrying about your bank calling you with bad news. This rule has nothing to do with that.
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Whether this new rule would apply to them or not does not mean that they are not robocalls.
Read all the words, next time. They are not robocalls for the purposes of this rule. Stop getting your knickers in a knot thinking that your bank is going to be prevented from alerting you to charge issues when the phone companies go after robocallers who spoof their numbers.
The definition of a robocall only is that it is an automated call which delivers a recorded message, nothing more or less.
You will find that for the purposes of law the definition is usually somewhat more, or somewhat less, than the colloquial definition of something. If you don't know that, and you deliberately ignore the specific limits on the legal defi
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If you reread my initial comment, I clearly quoted another poster, who said the following:
My point is that there *are* legitimate robocalls... not that I was suggesting that such a legitimate case would necessarily be impacted by the rule
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My bank calls me with a live human and verifies who I am, and I don't call them back
My bank also does SMS alerts and email.
Ditto for my credit cards
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And again, if your bank spoofs their caller ID so it looks like the call comes from a next door neighbor, then they deserve to be slapped with a
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I wasn't suggesting that they shouldn't.
My point is that there *are* legitimate uses for robocalls. That this rule doesn't seem to apply to them doesn't mean that such things have somehow ceased to be robocalls, only that they are not the types of robocalls covered by this rule.
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My point is that there *are* legitimate uses for robocalls.
A meaningless point since your bank's calls are not robocalls for the purpose of this discussion. Yes, context matters.
And you claimed that they were always robocalls. They aren't. Others besides myself have gotten such calls, and they're real people. The bank doesn't need to make robocalls for this, and thus even were they the target of this rule, too bad. They'll have to change. We'll all cry about it.
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You have apparently failed to notice that my comments in this regard weren't with regards to this rule, but specifically addressing another commenter's remark that there was supposedly absolutely no legitimate use case for robocalls.
It's kinda funny that you seem to think I was somehow trying to dispute the idea behind this rule with this example when in my initial remark, I *explicitly* quoted the person I was actually raising a dispute with.
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The poster to whom I had responded said:
While my remark might be OT from the story, it sure as hell isn't OT with respect to that comment. Perhaps the above poster should be reprimanded for mentioning that he didn't believe in legit robocalls in the first
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but they don't ask fishing questions, verify ID with things you can get online.
"This is about the $391.03 purchase at Red's at 5:30pm. Did you make that purchase?"
Yeah, someone is faking that question. PFffft.
you're all a bunch of scaredy cats.
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Except they don't verify who they are. Just because it is a live human with a north american sounding accent, doesn't mean they are for real. "Please verify your home street address and last 4 digits of your social security number. Thanks sucker, goodbye!"
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"was your purchase in the amount of $403.23 at the Dr. Sam a valid one?"
yeah, real danger if they're fake and know that
NOT
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An email that claims to have noticed suspicious activity on your credit card could be very easily mistaken for a phishing attack....
It could, until you call them back at the published number and they discuss the matter with you.
I'm surprised your bank has agreed to use this as a contact method for you.
It's simple, fast, and can be received anywhere he gets email. Why wouldn't a bank like a system like that? Why wouldn't YOU like a system like that? You think that it's impossible for a robocaller to leave you a fake voicemail claiming there is a problem with your card? Email is no different, so what's your problem?
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Uh, no. Robocalls are *ANY* automated call that has a pre-recorded message. Full stop.
That one associates robocalls with spam is an indication of how the technology happens to be used, not an indication that robocalls are inherently spam. This is not unlike how a few years ago many people equated torrents to piracy, despite the legitimate use cases for torrents. Both are tools, and as usual, the problem is not the tool, but how the tool gets used.
My point is that there *IS* a legitimate use case f
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plenty of us feel there are no legit robocalls whatsoever on this Earth
Robocalls can be used as part of two factor authentication. They can be used by your bank to ask if a suspicious payment was legitimate or not. They can be used to tell you when a delivery will arrive.
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Robocalls can be used as part of two factor authentication.
The other part of the colloquial definition of "robocalls" is that they are made in volume to large numbers of people. 2FA "robocalls" would be useless. Not every machine made call is a "robocall". (You know, as in a robot that does tedious repetitive work so a human doesn't have to. One call is not tedious repetitive work that a human could not make.)
HOW SHAKEN/STIR WORKS (Score:2, Informative)
https://transnexus.com/whitepapers/understanding-stir-shaken/
it's DKIM for phones
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So it's a Policy solution to a Technical problem (Spoofing, inability to identify who is making the calls), nothing like that would work for this situation at all.
Re: There's a better solution. (Score:1)
Similar laws exist in U.S. as well. However, entities outside of U.S. do not care about local laws, and neither do criminals. The number spoofing is trivial to do in Germany. Contrary to public belief there is absolutely nothing to prevent it.
The reason why Germany, like the majority of the world, in not plagued by spammers has to do with language. German is seldom thought in India. Spam callers affect almost exclusively the English speaking world.
Ohh Ohh (Score:3)
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There is a long list of bipartisan initiatives that, while sounding great, did much greater damage than the problem that they were addressing in the first place.
Take Health Care for example. New regulations have stipulated that insurance providers must spend at least 80% of all premiums on reimbursement costs. This was suppose to free up more money for paying services and limit the amount of profit an insurance company can make. However the only thing it did was cause insurance companies to raise rates. The exact opposite it was suppose to do. Why, because a smaller percentage of a much larger amount is still the same amount of money. For example: they use to
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If you think that is true, why wouldn't they have charged $175k in thr beginning and have had $110k in profits?
Competition, raising rates by 75% would make customers consider other plans that charge less. But I hear you say, what if all insurance companies decided to get together and increase their pocket books? Since health insurance is mandated or face a fine (call it a tax if you want but its still a fine paid to hospitals) there would be massive outrage and investigations into price fixing which would result in fines/breakup/jail time for the insurance companies.
Suppose I make something for $10 and sell it for $100, making $90.
Suddenly sales taxes are invented and now I need to collect $120 to keep my $90 profit.
If I could have charged $120, what makes you think I wouldn't have been doing so all along? Why does that justification not apply to your example?
If you could have charged $120 with no competi
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I have no faith in any of this bullshit. The Do Not Call list was supposed to be the answer. I feel this will have to end in blood and fire. Maybe a few heads on pikes will send the message.
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Maybe a few heads on pikes will send the message.
Without the underlying infrastructure to verify the caller's identity you will never get "heads on pikes". Enabling this rule will help push the infrastructure for that identification. Why object to a natural result of a new level of authentication when the current level cannot give you what you want?
I get robocalls from spoofed numbers. It's not worth my time to report them to the FTC because there is no identification I can provide to allow them to get "heads on pikes". With this new rule my telco can b
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Unfortunately, I work for a company notifying people when their car insurance is about to expire, and now everyone keeps putting my number on a spam filter because they think I'm fake.
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Ooops I meant Car Warranty not insurance. /self own.
I'm sorry you chose to work for a spammer (Score:3)
I used to hate robocalls (Score:1)
Until I found out that Ajit Pai hates them,
Regarding the numbers robocallers use (Score:1)
I was wondering why (Score:2)
The phone companies are the cause of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
But instead, the phone companies only let you see a spoofable caller ID number, meaning the number you see calling you isn't necessarily who is really calling you. Basically the phone companies' scam goes like this:
In an arms race, the only winners are the arms dealers. This is the cycle you need to break if you want to fix this. Force the phone companies to pick whose side they're on. Force them decide who they value more: their regular customers or the spammers. (And just to head off the inevitable comments about how capitalism has failed in this case, capitalism is not a factor here. The phone companies can only do this because they have a government-granted monopoly in each region, preventing customers from switching to a different local phone company. So this failure is 100% the government's fault. If there were actual competition among multiple phone companies, the "good" companies would only allow calls to go through their network from other "good" companies which shared the account ID which was actually making the call. They'd flag calls from "bad" companies which only shared spoofable caller ID (abused to mask the real account), allowing their users to auto-block all flagged calls. Once word got out that you didn't get spam calls if your service was with a "good" company, all regular customers would switch their service from "bad" companies to "good" companies, leaving the spammers on the "bad" companies nobody to spam but each other.)
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I don't think it's so cut-and-dried. I run a service which places phone call notifications on behalf of local institutions. I have to "spoof" Caller ID, because I'm calling via a dialing service on behalf of legitimate institutions. If the Caller ID didn't say the phone number and name of my customer, there would be no point.
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If there's some reason that doesn't work, well, then your service may be a casualty of this war. Sorry, but I and a lot of other Americans are willing to kill your business in order to stop the rest of the system from de
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What you are saying is that you are running a service that is dependent on a broken system. In the case the system was fixed, you would have to find another hack to be able to pretend that you are the organization buying the phone line connection. Your situation does not invalidate the GPs assertion that the phone company is a bad actor for allowing spoofed phone numbers in the first place.
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Email is a broken system, but lots of services run over it, and we're very, very careful about making changes that will break things that people expect to work.
There are many scenarios where the Caller ID of a call needs to be something other than the "actual" caller. I didn't say I was invalidating anybody's assertion, only that there's some baby and bathwater going on here.
AT&T Call Protect (Score:2)
I recently added the AT&T Call Protect app to my phone, and it's blocked a ton of obviously bogus numbers and robocalls.
(Full disclosure: it also initially blocked me from getting to my own voicemail, but after unblocking my number everything seems to be working smoothly.)
It's reduced the bogus/robo calls from about 5 per day to one every few days. When one does get through I can click to report it and automatically add it to the reject list.
It's not perfect but it's definitely helped.
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Don't go thinking AT&T are doing you any favors, they just slapped a logo on some other app that everyone with a clue is using already.
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Don't go thinking AT&T are doing you any favors, they just slapped a logo on some other app that everyone with a clue is using already.
Thanks. Yeah, I kind of figured they'd leased/borrowed/stolen it from someone else, but at the same time it does seems to help considerably.
Would you recommend switching it out for the HIYA app? The AT&T version doesn't seem to have any overt advertising in it as far as I can tell.
"allow" vs "force" (Score:2)
Robocallers?! (Score:1)