Bill to crack down on robocalls passes Senate
theverge.com
theverge.com
[1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
Okay, so that's a kind of a long bill, so I can't verify but you make it sound a bit like the carriers will be fined. They historically directly pass-through all compliance costs to customers, so ultimately customers pay to receive the robocalls?
Good, maybe they'll fix the problem by offering data only plans at lower rates than data + phone + sms. All I need is data.
To be fully cynical would be to predict that in five years Congress will be calling the wireless providers to testify as to why prices are increasing at such a high rate.
Why didn't they do that already?
2. There was supposedly a confusion around whether they were allowed to block anything. That's gone now.
> 2. There was supposedly a confusion around whether they were allowed to block anything. That's gone now.
Under the current system, it seems 100% of spam gets through that could so easily be filtered. At an old small business I worked at, we received ~10 calls per day from an identical caller ID number robocaller and ~20 calls per day from a robocaller always using a slightly different very long string of characters. Due to the nature of the company, the main line had to be manned by a human being, so even just the time to look at the caller ID, ignore the caller, and then re-focus back on task was at least 15 minutes of lost productivity every day, yet this is about the easiest type of spammy activity to filter. No need to cooperate with anyone but your customers.
The second could be interpreted as: regulations caused the proliferation of robocalling, as we can see in the unregulated email space that far more spam is sent yet far less ever makes it through the filters. What problems will the new regulations cause?
I don't think this is possible in the telecom space without some sort of complete rethinking of spectrum licensing.
Which I pointed out a month ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21494828
48 billion calls, $208 in assessed fines, $6,790 collected.
Like if the fines hit $400 million, a group that could only deliver a 10% increase in collections might still be worth doing.
The fines attributable to a single entity another.
The collectability on those fines, the third.
By scoping responsibility to include the call recipient's telco, you'd address all three of these.
That telco could, of course, adjust its risk-management practices (who it interops with, what the conditions of those interops are, caller identity / reputation) to minimise such risks.
Which would of course be the whole fucking point.
I get several of them a day. So I think I'll keep my old number.
So I think there's a possible solution: Pick a new mobile number with an area code for a place you don't know anyone and have no reason to receive calls from.... then block/ignore all calls originating from it.
Most websites asked for an address only. Some asked for a little more information, but to my surprise, it worked. I haven't received that ream of coupons in years, and in the off-chance that something new appears (usually something credit related), I've been able to opt-out just fine.
At first I balked but then I realized somebody would probably enter every single person’s name and address in the country if they didn’t have some kind of cost associated with it.
Still stinks to pay someone not to harass you. But I guess that’s been common throughout history.
After that unsubscribe, I've had to reach out to USPS several times when they still deliver the coupons to me and those coupons have someone else's address on them. I'm unsubscribed but USPS doesn't care and delivers anyway.
There is also a USPS service called Every Door Delivery Mail (EDDM) where USPS guarantees delivery to every address in a certain area. There is no way to opt out of EDDM.
What happens is that the DMA maintains an opt-out list which the mailers are supposed to check. Then they add your address to a cover sheet called a facing slip which they pass to the local USPS when they hand off the ads. The USPS is then supposed to give those addresses to the mail carrier and the mail carrier is supposed to check it when delivering the ads.
In reality, since EDDM is intended for blanket coverage of local ads, practically no local advertisers bother or are even aware of the opt-out list, and even if they did the mail carrier will probably ignore the list, so signing up has little effect.
The best way to "opt out" is to be a dick to your mail carrier. Put a sign on your mailbox that says "NO EDDM: unaddressed mail will be refused" and then follow through on your threat by forcing your carrier to take back all EDDM ads the next day. My mail carrier quickly realized that there was no point delivering EDDM ads to my house.
Entirely nonsense that there's costs and whatnot associated with it. I am sure it's a PII goldmine for some script kiddie who gets lucky.
Some Charities do not respect the list and send me all manner of things. (Gloves was the most egregious from a charity I haven't given too.)
For better or worse it's almost 2020, not 1820. Let's start acting like it.
The private sector may be more efficient than the government, but that's because of bureaucracy imposed by the politicians themselves.
Tell me, how long does it take UPS or FedEx to ship a package across the US? At least 5 business days for the cheapest. USPS gets it there in 3.
Here's some more facts you may not know (that show why the USPS is good):
* The USPS, unlike UPS and FedEx, have a legal mandate to attempt to deliver every letter and parcel if it's in the US.
* Your mail sent through USPS is protected from searches without a warrant by law. You can't say the same about UPS and FedEx.
* I can send a small letter through USPS for $.55. How much does a private courier charge?
[0]: https://twitter.com/markiplier/status/1193015864364126208
Fedex and UPS are common carriers and also cannot refuse a package without good grounds.
USPS can also refuse a package on good grounds, for example if you try to mail prohibited substances.
When some people don't get their UPS/FedEx/etc, if you call up to complain, the answer is "Oh yeah, we don't service your address. Have a nice day."
Functioning governments really really need a way to physically deliver items to a person in a way that cannot be replaced by private carriers or email systems. This isn't about you getting your Amazon packages or your power bill. This is about the operational stability of basic government services.
There are places in the US where UPS and FedEx do not deliver, and people live there -- people who the US government is legally required to correspond with. They cannot fulfill those obligations without the USPS.
>When some people don't get their UPS/FedEx/etc, if you call up to complain, the answer is "Oh yeah, we don't service your address. Have a nice day."
And if you call USPS, they're just going to jump straight to "it's lost. have a nice day." I don't see how that is better.
Anyway, USPS absolutely does not deliver to every address. This is a myth that won't die for some reason.
>Functioning governments really really need a way to physically deliver items to a person in a way that cannot be replaced by private carriers or email systems.
Can you source this claim? What does my government need to mail me that can't be done by email?
>This isn't about you getting your Amazon packages or your power bill.
I don't use Amazon or get my power bill by snail mail. Not sure why you're bringing these up. They're irrelevant.
>This is about the operational stability of basic government services.
We might need a reliable parcel deliverer (ie, something other that USPS).
>There are places in the US where UPS and FedEx do not deliver, and people live there
And there are places where USPS doesn't deliver. At my house, on a regular basis for example, they don't deliver important parcels.
Also many communities around the country and outside of the country. Email fixes basically all of this.
>-- people who the US government is legally required to correspond with.
Who they should be able to correspond with by email in most cases. In other cases they could contract with a more reliable carrier or have a pared down service for those remote area.
In still more cases, the USPS doesn't service certain areas at all.
>They cannot fulfill those obligations without the USPS.
Nor can they fulfill them solely with USPS. We need to acknowledge that email is a faster, safer and more reliable source of communicating with most people. Its almost 2020.
Yes, the reasons that the USPS is important are mainly legal reasons. Your personal frustrations with what I presume is commercial mail is not one of those reasons. You have alternatives for your commercial needs, and you are free to use them.
The USPS exists because the government has needs that commercial carriers simply cannot fulfill; here's the first 3 examples I could think of:
1. A guarantee of service via direct control. The federal government directly controls the USPS board. Commercial services have no obligation to fulfill any of the government's needs, and could even be legally obligated by their fiduciary duty to deny those needs, even if they wanted to do otherwise. The needs of the government are not always profitable, often they're not.
2. Proper chain of custody. Email simply doesn't address this, and is notoriously awful at it. Commercial delivery services do this better than email, but do so voluntarily, and to their own liking (see #1). On the other hand, some USPS services like Registered Mail can be used for some types of classified documents.
3. Longstanding (and strong) legal precedent regarding its use. Mail has a ton of privilege over electronic communications. It also has privilege over commercial deliveries.
As for the ability of email to reach everyone -- I think your views might be biased a bit by your experiences. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/22/some-americ...
For a middle ground, I would like USPS to offer a service where they scan and send you the docs and you agree to some terms. They already scan the addresses and show you the informed mail digest. I don't care if they open it and scan it. It's all junk anyway.
If the official channel was email and I said "let's switch to snail mail" you would all rightfully call me an idiot. You/we are all wedded to a really bad paradigm.
There's nothing stopping the government from letting you opt into an official email box.
If the government controlled the entire email system, like they do the USPS, it wouldn’t be email as you know it today.
But as email stands today, it relies on the voluntary cooperation of third-parties who operate on a best-effort basis. It has no governance.
That’s a show stopper, not only for the US government, but for most governments around the world. I’m not aware of any country that has found it reasonable to do as you’re suggesting. Even Estonia, which has online elections, still finds it prudent to have a national mail service.
The free market has nothing to do with this.
As are mail boxes unless you own house outright or have a mom and pop landlord (which is really not much better).
>The private sector may be more efficient than the government, but that's because of bureaucracy imposed by the politicians themselves.
Wait what? No it's the opposite. There are ridiculous laws that attempt to protect the USPS monopoly. For example, only they can deliver to your mailbox.
Only USPS is allowed to deliver letters. USPS does not pay state or federal taxes, etc. There is all kinda of bureaucracy in place to protect USPS and still the private carriers are better.
>Tell me, how long does it take UPS or FedEx to ship a package across the US? At least 5 business days for the cheapest. USPS gets it there in 3.
Yes it's easy to be cheaper when you don't pay any taxes. Except they're not actually cheaper except for most packages between 2 and 5 pounds.
>* The USPS, unlike UPS and FedEx, have a legal mandate to attempt to deliver every letter and parcel if it's in the US.
And yet they fail stunningly at delivering things.
>* Your mail sent through USPS is protected from searches without a warrant by law. You can't say the same about UPS and FedEx.
I agree it's absurd that the law grants these special powers to USPS. All carriers' customers should get this protection.
>* I can send a small letter through USPS for $.55. How much does a private courier charge?
Wait what? It's illegal for anyone else to deliver letters. You're making my case for me.
Anyway, we need to stop sending letters. It's almost 2020.
What? How? No one is legally allowed to open a mailbox that isn’t theirs. If someone is opening your mailbox that isn’t a postman, report it; it’s a federal crime.
If you are worried about Google kicking you off of the platform you should be terrified about what your landlord can to.
Many people are housing insecure, disabled, homeless, etc. You're basically removing all of these people from the system.
The mailbox isn’t yours.
Tell that to FedEx[0].
https://parcelindustry.com/article-4888-The-Mailbox-Monopoly...
This is the problem with using personal anecdotes. They're not applicable to the wider world.
God I hate spam.
Even today, not everyone has an email address. And those that do, they’re at the whims of the corporation. In my original comment, I mentioned google banning people’s entire accounts because they did what the streamer wanted. Would you like your email account to be inaccessible when you decide to protest that corporation?
"I personally use and like a service" is a different statement than "it's in our national interest to continue gifting that service $10b per year in subsidies and benefits".
The other is a policy position that apparently a lot of people want to discuss.
We need to update laws for the fact that we now live in 2020 and not 1820.
I understand that for most healthy, housed, able-bodied, privileged people, mail is a decent way to get in touch with people. For the rest of us email/web is safer, faster, more secure, less burdensome, easier to verify, better for the environment, easier to store, etc.
There are also DMAchoice and CatalogChoice to take you off, but I'm never quite sure if it's working because I still get plenty.
There is also the fun prank one guy did where he would mail back a bunch of pennies to anyone who send him an unsolicited pre-paid envelope. The postage is calculated by weight, so it's just a nice little middle finger.
Enforce collection of the fines in the first place would be a good start.
There is no appeal. If you don't like a call for any reason, you can dial * SPAM, and the caller is charged 25 cents. Since the report must be immediate, VOIP providers only need to require a deposit for two minutes of calling volume, and they can throttle their customers to make sure that the reserve is always present. Callers don't need to be verified or have good credit, they just need to have 25 cents.
However, the financial layer needs to be set up before the call is initiated, not after.
Otherwise, it's ripe for abuse.
Also, making end-users perform extra actions is just BLEH!
Since you have to object to a call within a short period of time, you could get an immediate text message that someone had flagged your call and just not call that person again.
If you were making legitimate high volume calls, you'd get a certain number of people doing this to you, and then you'd just flag it and not call them again or maybe stop doing business with them. Either it's a sign that they don't want you calling them, so you should probably stop.
Collection agencies and such would get a lot of flagged calls, but collection agencies are supposed to stop calling if you ask them to, so this is just an automated way of making that request.
The real cause of all of these robocalls is that calling has gotten so cheap. It used to cost well over $1/minute to call from say, India to the U.S. Even within the U.S., in the 80s and early 90s, it would usually cost about 25 cents a minute to make a domestic long distance call. In many places, including where I grew up, a local call to your next door neighbor cost 5 cents. If the risk of being charged 25 cents for a call is a barrier to making a call, you probably shouldn't be making it.
(Think about it.)
Telcos peer with one another and trust each other's traffic implicitly, all they need to do is stop trusting implicitly and ask for verification for things like caller id.
A Telco may not know where a call originates but they know what Telco it's coming from and can pass responsibility for fines back to that Telco.
Since no Telco wants to be saddled with fines, they'll quickly pass it off and it will eventually reveal the origination.
Similar with Amazon allowing seller selling fakes and counterfeits.
So holding them responsible is a wake up call for them where doing nothing from their side is no longer an option.
Telecoms absolutely have powers and know-hows to detect and deter abusive practices.
Edit: I think one interim solution could be a dcma-style process whereby carriers prove to the fcc that they maintain an auditable takedown process that can be initiated by the consumer and that the carrier is applying reasonable technological solutions to minimize / detect en masse robocalls.
Twilio has a market cap of ~$20B, which is largely fueled by them enabling robocallers to text/call people.
And that's still before name collisions. You can get a valid call from Bill Gates at Microsoft. Just not the one you think.
I already keep my cell phone on silent unless I'm expecting a call, and my voicemail is disabled. It would just be nice to not have to be notified about other calls when I do need to be reachable by phone.
- call from a person in Canada, legally using a valid US caller id
- call from a US mobile roaming in Canada
- call originating in the US, routed via Canadian telco back to the US
- call from a US mobile in the US, using a VoIP service in Canada, legally using the same mobile's US caller id
(None of these are doing anything illegal, and are valid scenarios)
That's in general what the bill provides. What else were you expecting to be enforced?
The problem isn't overseas robocalls originating in the US - it's robocalls originating from outside the FCC's jurisdiction.
See https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/151...
This makes it irrelevant where the call originates. If the call is received on a US-allocated number, it's covered.
In practice, this means AT&T outsources the blocking service to a 3rd party company. In order to use that service you have to surrender your contact list to that 3rd party so they can determine if someone you know is calling and understanding their EULA will make your head spin. This is what I have on my company issued phone.
Personal data is the oil of the 21st century.
Amazon has also done an abysmal job at facilitating between the deveopers (us) and the carriers. They will just shut down your production system without warning and yet their API will still return 200s as tho everything is fine, while silently sending your SMS to the bit bucket. Then when you open a support case it will take a while unless you pay for support, support that you only need because they are returning lies from the API and you have no way of finding out what is wrong without a support agent looking at the system. Yeah I'm still pretty pissed. I will pay more for Twilio until something drastic changes.
Good! I send all calls not in my contact list to voicemail, and then rarely check the voicemails. Businesses need to find a better way to reach me than autodialing.
Secondly, I don't see why the AWS returning 200s while silently discarding our stuff is the right way to handle this. If you want to block our numbers (which I aboslutely think you should be able to do) the API should return something that tells us that instead of pretending like everything is fine.
As a consumer, I disagree. When I send a message to spam, it doesn't let the spammer know they should switch the e-mail address they're sending from. If I block a phone number, that's not something for the dialer to know.
AWS was sending our messages into the bit bucket and returning 200s. Our customers not only wanted the messages, but were complaining to support that messages were not getting through.
We also use a robocall for the devops team when the site goes down. We can't afford to hire a human to do it, and that would be stupid anyway. That's a pretty useful feature that would suck to lose.
#1 - Calls from the real estate broker who wouldn't take no for an answer: number is disconnected.
#2 - Calls from Anonymous / Private numbers: number is disconnected.
#3 - Calls with "high" spam probability: number is disconnected.
#4 - Ring my VOIP gateway when I'm inclined to take calls. (Currently toggled manually).
#5 - Everyone else: Voicemail.
I had previously scripted downloading my contacts and adding a routing rule that let people in my contacts ring through but disabled that rule. Just need to update my script for google's oauth changes.
Callcentric also offers a interactive voice recording (IVR) options for things like press 1 to talk to a person or even press a randomly generated digit to talk to a person. I haven't bothered with using an IVR since this system works for me.
You can reproduce this system yourself using Asterisk or other open source PBX software if you don't want to pay callcentric for a phone number. At home I use a Gigaset voip gateway and DECT handset [1]. The nice thing about doing it that way is 1) the handset doesn't need to speak tcp/ip and so is light, cheap and the battery lasts for days, 2) if I need a second handset it's trivial to add one.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014A781GS/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
I realize the stereotype is HN readers have no use for the PSTN any more and wonder why people ever answer the phone, but I find it convenient for some things and it lets me stay in touch with older relatives who are less inclined to text / e-mail / insta / whatever-du-jour vs use voice.
Sending everything to voicemail and periodically skimming the transcripts seems safer.
Spoiler Alert: Don't read below if you don't want the podcast episode ruined.
You're not the one being scammed it's the telco.
From the episode:
JAMES: The way that the toll-free industry works is that it's a reverse payment system, right? So you have a toll free number, I call you, I don’t pay. Right? The--the remote end pays.
PJ: So-- so that I knew. But what I didn’t know is that when a company has a toll free number and they pay the phone company a dollar or whatever, the phone company takes that dollar, and shares it with every other phone company that helped make the connection.
[MUSIC]
PJ: So like I’m making this up but if I call Jodie right now, I’ll place the call and it’ll go to like an AT & T tower near me, and then a Verizon Tower in Manhattan, and then over to a Sprint tower to New Jersey, to Jodie.
JAMES: So there’s 1, 2, 3 hops down the chain. Each one of those, you know, for a 1 dollar phone call, is getting maybe ten cents, right? Carrier 2 is getting ten cents. Carrier 3 is getting ten cents.
PJ: So, it’s actually even less money than that. But, there’s so many of these calls happening every single day, that even though the phone companies might just be dividing fractions of penny each time, those fractions of pennies add up to like millions of dollars.
ALEX: Right.
PJ: And so what happened a few years ago apparently, is some brilliant person was like, "Huh, I would love to take some of that money." And what they did was go to some shady telecom company somewhere, like Crazy Eddie’s Phone Service and they were like, "Listen, I am going to place a ton of 1-800 calls though you, and when you get paid for them, share that money with me."
JAMES: So, the more phone calls I can make, and the longer that those phone calls stay up, the more money that I make. PJ: OK, so how does that get us to spooky phone calls from nowhere JAMES: Aha! So, let’s think about that, right? PJ: OK. JAMES: I send out a bunch of phone calls that are just silent, right? It takes you what, a second, two seconds. “Hello hello, damn it.” Hang up the phone, you’re done, you're gone. So how do you keep people on the phone, right? You appeal to their curiosity. PJ: Right.
Just a guess because a lot of others I get just start babbling away as soon as I hit answer. I guess those detect the pick up and don't rely on an actual voice answering.
Instead of waiting, you can also send control sounds to make the robocall believe the call has ended.
If you ever do get around to trying it please post back to HN! Promise I'll do the same...
https://robocall.devpost.com/forum_topics/1748-small-asteris...
https://www.wrbishop.com/telecom/end-robocaller-solicitation...
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=172926
http://nerdvittles.com/?p=15412To
Good luck !
Though most of spam calls are either scams or just barely that
I still have to delete these robocalls' voicemails which is annoying but less then having them ring my phone especially while I'm using it. Interrupted by a spammer it was the worst!And even if we can, would we get any of the money?
PS: I read this book and 9 years ago they might have worked: https://www.amazon.com/How-Sue-Telemarketer-Stephen-Ostrow/d...
Sad, though. So much wasted money just to make us mad.
However, now I get a bunch of robocalls in voicemail, and iOS doesn't transcribe them properly because they're usually in Mandarin.
> NO ADDITIONAL COST TO CONSUMERS OR SMALL BUSINESS CUSTOMERS.—The Commission shall prohibit providers of voice service from adding any additional line item charges to consumer or small business customer subscribers for the effective call authentication technology required under paragraph (1).
It doesn't mean they'll be blocked at no cost, but the authentication system for all parties needs to be free and the enforcement for scams is on the provider. Effectively - you wouldn't pay anything extra once this is implemented.
I hope it will, though. It would be nice to be able to answer my phone again.
My phone company shipped a phone app in the app-stores that you're supposed to use in replacement of the default phone app. It comes equipped with collaborative filtering to weed out robocalls: when one rings your phone, the phone app displays it as such as well as the number of people who have reported it.
I used to have one robocall a day, but not anymore. It looks like this simple technology has made robocallers give up.
I also think that common carriers can still ban such activity.
The common carrier statute says carriers may not "unreasonably discriminate* against customers.
I have to imagine most sane individuals would consider cutting off customers engaged in obviously illegal activity as, in fact, reasonable.
Just like USPS can turn over packages containing drugs to the Feds.
Just think about what you’re suggesting for more than a second. Do you want your base contract to only allow you to send and receive calls within the service providers network? Do you want to have people trying to call you get caught up in an endless web of spam filters? Do want to have to pay extra for the ability to receive calls from over seas? How do you think developing economies would fare if they could essentially never make a phone call to the US again?
Because all that and worse would be an inevitable outcome of the rules you’re suggesting.
The phone system is an open and distributed system, just like email is. It’s everything HN should love. But then you get comments like this which at the first sign of a system showing its natural distributed-system-related short comings, are all of a sudden asking for centralised walled gardens.
There is a massive difference between discriminating based on who the customers are, and discriminating based on "all customers doing this one specifically completely illegal thing".
E.g. My number is ABC-DEF-1234, I'll get calls from ABC-DEF-7899.
It enforces the carriers to implement the authention/blocking/reporting system. It also talks about misclassification and fail-safes too. FCC should create rules:
> establishing a safe harbor for a provider of voice service from liability for unintended or inadvertent blocking of calls or for the unintended or inadvertent misidentification of the level of trust for individual calls based, in whole or in part, on information provided by the call authentication frameworks under subsection
With a list of exceptions for legit stuff like setting a company's inwats number as CID even if the call comes from a branch, etc. I'm sure there's a finite universe of such cases.
The calls don't bother me so much as the spoofing does. I can do my own filtering if I have accurate info to work from. It's the havens allowing bad info into the network that we need to aggressively exclude.
When the collection starts, let me know.