America is losing the battle against robocalls
economist.com
economist.com
But it's untenable.
First, think of the impact it would have on lower-income people.
Second, think of how people might "game" the system. Anytime anyone is unhappy with a caller for any reason, they can falsely report the caller for spam.
Third, think of what position this puts phone companies in. They then have to be the arbiter of whether every reported call is actually spam. They'd probably have to set up an appeals process. It would be a nightmare, logistically.
Fourth, who would get to decide which charity the bond goes to? That decision alone is a hornet's nest.
Charging someone for calling you would also block them permanently, so almost no one is going to do this to their friends just to mess with them. There should be no appeal: if someone wants to charge every caller, that's totally fine. People will stop calling them pretty fast. Likewise I would let the callee choose the charity, or even keep the money. All that matters is that if you are calling someone who wants your calls you won't be charged, and if you aren't, you should be. If you aren't sure, you pay your money and take your chances that you are in fact imposing on someone else.
I can't see how this would hurt anyone of any socio economic level other than spammers. If you are calling someone who doesn't want your calls, you are a spammer.
Numbers that aren't already in my contacts list or outgoing calls list get sent straight to voicemail. I use Google Voice, so when people leave legit messages, I get a transcription and don't have to waste time listening to the messages themselves.
I get about 10-12 spam calls a day but this system works well.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204321
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/6111295 (see "Option 3: Priority notifications only", and pick Contacts Only.)
They do text transcription for voicemails; I'd be pretty surprised if they didn't have text transcripts of all calls that went through google voice as well.
I have similar concerns about google fiber, although I don't have the evidence to back any of it up.
Although I still feel bad for the telemarketer operator. I don't think anyone chooses that kind of job. I'd rather just not answer the phone.
Would you take that job? No. Would I? No. But if it were the only job available, you bet your ass I will take it and put up with the humiliation of 90% of angry callers to support my family.
Yes, I agree that it's a scummy tactic, but I still make a distinction between their customer (the company paying them to do the job) and the actual operator.
Nope. Lying to someone because 'my superior told me to' is still lying.
> Yes, I agree that it's a scummy tactic
So, how low are you willing to go on the "scummy tactic" scale?
Check out Hoax Hotel and Kitboga on YouTube if you want to learn about the unseemly underbelly of telemarketing. Also, talk to your grand parents and parents about these scams.
Settings > Do Not Disturb with the following settings:
- Do Not Disturb: On
- Scheduled: Off
- Silence: Always
- Allow Calls From: All Contacts
You'd lose the ability to use Do Not Disturb to silence your phone, say, overnight, but this would do what you're describing.
Personally, I've opted in to T-Mobile's spam block feature. I don't get any robocalls.
This setup definitely isn't ideal. Just want to share the approach for people who find the tradeoffs acceptable.
Settings - Sound - Do not disturb
To activate, once the ringer is set to silent, hold down the volume down button.
And frankly, someone is buying this shit. Else they wouldn't call. I mean if 1 sale is made for every 5,000 calls they've made their money. Same with scammers. Who the hell is going to fall for a robocall from the IRS? A call that's barely in English, and comes from a local number? Obviously, somebody does.
Old folks.
To stop this, the phone company should charge 10 cents to place a call. That would destroy the economics of spamming.
The same goes for email. Charge a penny to the originator to receive an email.
It's just ridiculous that every shared mailbox (like an apartment) has a giant recycle bin next to it full of mailers.
I feel like more of that blame lies with the government as a whole than the post office in particular. They have to get innovative when they don't take Federal dollars, get dollars taken from them, have to fund retirement of their employees out further than other agencies, and can't close offices. It surprises me that it stays afloat despite active hindrance from the government at large.
It's so bad that you can get into someone else's voicemail just by calling a number and spoofing the caller id to be that same number. No security whatsoever. It's pathetic.
I think the old telephone network is beyond saving and we just need to abandon it and move to VoIP services that provide better controls.
I was using a dialup modem in 2013. There are also a bunch of dialup ISPs that still exist today and provide service over phone lines to people with dialup modems. Maybe what you say is true in some areas but it certainly is false as a blanket statement.
So the parent post could’ve very well thought he had used his modem on a real copper line while in fact it was VoIP, just the compression was light enough that it still worked fine like in my case.
They get revenue from inbound calls received from other carriers. It’s peanuts per-call but when you add up all the spam calls together in a year it’s still a hefty bag of cash.
There's no highly-evident replacement, but I suspect that what does supplant it 1. will emerge from a socioeconomic elite (as telephony, email, and mobile did, or letter-writing in an earlier era), 2. will have very cheap unwanted-contact rejection, from a cognitive-load standpoint (by the time my phone's rung or a voicemail's been left, it's too late), and 3. will probably intrinsically include multimedia -- text, likely image & video.
I'd like to see robust crypto in authentication, identity, integrity, and encryption of both data and metadata. Multople independeent peersistent, though at least partially repudiable, identities would be very nice-to-have. I have at best modest hopes.
Both elements may be undermined by an ease-of-use dynamic, though that's short-term gain for long-term cost.
In the near term, expect to see a proliferation of conflicting standards and systems.
Everybody has different musical tastes and particularly about what one shares via a VM message, and I'm curious about what you selected. If you don't mind sharing, what segment did you cherry-pick?
This would immediately put an end to caller id spoofing.
Already exists :)
I'm pretty sure my phone is in some do not call database, but that doesn't seem to help much recently.
Our phones need a "this is spam" button, and that data needs to go to the telecom, and they need to do something with it.
It works as a central government register with a threat and imposition of large penalties for companies who disregard it.
It should be possible to enforce a mode that requires the caller to send you a request for permission to call first (like contact request in Skype). And unless you explicitly granted such permission all calls from that number should be automatically rejected.
I don't know why we have such crappy cell phone audio quality and such an outdated convention. Why not have an opt-in protocol similar to a friend request on social networks before you can call someone?
From what I've read, the issue lies in the amount of money telco is making from all these calls and, if their income would drop to zero from them, robocalls would stop immediately.
In the last 6 months, it's gotten apocalyptic. Mostly from calls from from the first 6 digits of my current phone number, and most of them calling to extend my car warranty.
8-15 calls each day.
I've tried ignoring them, I've answered them, I've spoken to the calling humans (English speakers, the minute you ask for a manager or to be removed, they hang-up... often, the next call comes within 10 minutes, same people, robodialing engaged).
I called AT&T to see what options I had to minimize teh pain. Can I turn off calling entirely? No. Can I have ringing go straight through to voicemail? No, but I can make it happen after 5 seconds.
I've installed robonomo, AT&T's anti-spam calling app, Hiya, TrueCaller, etc.
They don't work well enough.
I'm on an iPhone 7. I like the 8, but not enough to upgrade. I don't like FaceID, and I don't like the notch, and I have an iPad Pro, and so I leave my iPhone on silent all the time, automatically deny any incoming calls that I notice, and have a voicemail greeting that says I don't check voicemail nor accept calls on this line.
It's that bad and annoying. I do have a Google Voice number that I give out, and which gets almost no spam calls for now. I changed that setting to announce that it's a Google Voice number, so I take the occasional business call.
But if the new iPhones continue to be engineered around FaceID, and if FaceID isn't better (and work with sunglasses and goggles and helmets) and if the notch persists, when this contract is up, I'm pretty sure I'll nix the iPhone contract and live with Google Voice on my desktop, and the iPad for mobile texting/connecting.
Dial (star)#67# (or call 611 if it doesn't show up there) to see what number your voicemail center is. Then dial (star)21(star)1(that number)#. That will automatically forward all calls, at the network level, to your voicemail.
To cancel this, dial #21#.
Are these documented somewhere? The response screen is pretty clear on what's going on here, lots of interesting things.
I've been getting them as well in California. My workplace even sent out an email regarding these since they've been happening more frequently.
I've never been as tempted to becoming a murderer.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1mEm2Fy08 Google Duplex Demo from Google IO 2018 - YouTube
Is launched.
They already have the TTS aspect out in beta. It uses something called WaveNet.
Here this might help.
https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio...
and
"Introducing Cloud Text-to-Speech powered by DeepMind WaveNet technology"
https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/03/introducing-Clo...
Testing will start on the rest later this summer.
https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natur...
On the link some more examples of calls. Pretty cool stuff. Really just shows how far ahead Google is in the AI space at every layer of the stack.
The TTS at scale required the TPUs. Doing 16k cycles through a DNN in real-time is a really intensive compute task but then to offer at a competitive price to using the old way needs custom silicon.
Ah I was not the only one finding it suspicious, Thank you for your links, pretty interesting research quite far away from a real product though.
This Weekend was the bay area makerfaire, where the Google stand was in front of the one of Nintendo, they were showing the exact same tech, but the Google one was really underwhelming, it was actually interesting to compare it.
I don't trust Google, ok let's wait for a product I guess.
https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/wavenet
That is the part that freaked out people as you can not tell the difference between humans and computers any longer.
Google is using a DNN at 16k cycles a second in real-time. Suspect that was only possible to do at scale and at a reasonable cost with the TPUs.
They are competing with a much less compute intensive approach. But Wavenet gets a much better result.
The other aspects of Duplex will enter testing later this summer. So not long to wait.
"Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real-World Tasks Over the Phone"
https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natur...
This is the type of thing that contributed me buying the Google Home. Google is just so far ahead of everyone else in AI. Really every layer of the stack.
How can this not be taken care of with gmail style spam rules?
It’s not trivial - gmail identifies spam by bayesian filtering coupled with the amount of duplicate spam sent to numerous different addresses.
Identifying spam/robocalls requires being able to parse arbitrary spoken word. People keep thinking its a matter of blocking a number, but the reality is that the security of phone networks is laughably broken with respect to number and identity spoofing. It essentially renders the id useless for identifying spam
Landline is mostly a lost cause. I still keep one for various reasons but I mostly ignore it for inbound calls. If things get much worse I may just shut off all the ringers.
realistically, wouldn't that logic extend to all the internet, we should all pay for traffic, to and from servers?
i think "phones" are a dying tech, and proper legal constraints and controls on the tech we pay for would be easier.
i don't see why i can't pre-approve callers, or limit inbound calls to my Favorites/VIP list. Treating phones like "telephones" is one of the problems, treating phones like tech would make solutions easier to implement.