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Comment by cik | Hacker News Reader

I'm on your side of the fence - but with very aggressive whitelisting. You're in my phone book or not. I block 100% of calls that aren't in my phonebook, if they don't originate with my voip provider.

All of my incoming calls go to my VOIP provider, which in turn routes to my cellphone if someone has my 'extension'. Anyone who doesn't, has their message go to voicemail, which is transcribed to email (and the audio file attached). Prior to transcription audio plays telling the caller to enter a specific code, to leave a voicemail. Turns out this eliminates 100% of fake foreigners, and locals. They can't be arsed.

I ignore SMS. I receive nothing of value other than registered numbers (as in, a registration with the state) so I actively block them and add on an as needed basis.

My spam has reduced to zero.

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I remember reading one guy who said he implemented a pre-screen before a call rang through. He said his first design was simple a voice message that said "Press 1 to continue" which he planned to ratchet up in complexity until spam calls stopped. He never ended up improving it because the "Press 1" message got the job done.

My grandmother's phone company offers something similar (a simple "press 1 if you are not a telemarketer prompt), and it also eliminated the majority of spam calls, which is not what I expected.

I'd like to do this in theory, but practically I find it not worth it. Consider a case where your partner or your kid lose their phone, are stranded, and borrow a phone from someone. They won't reach you.

They'd know to send a text or email.

Ask to borrow a stranger's phone to get in touch with someone.

Watch their terror as you open their text or email app and get snippets of their private communications.

I'm not sure about your plan, tbh.

I really like the feature on many Android phones where you can turn on Do Not Disturb and phone calls automatically go to voicemail UNLESS they are a "VIP" contact (which you set) OR if someone calls back twice in a row relatively quickly. I wish they had more granular controls like this - I use it currently at night when sleeping (so for example my boss or my family can still contact me at 4am if there's a real emergency) but it would be nice if I could do something similar during the daytime but a bit less restrictive.

SMS should be renamed to 2FA since that's the last remaining use for me, and only until the laggards upgrade to support Authenticator apps (I'm looking at you TD Canada Trust and PC Financial).

SMS is like email for me, these days: only used for transactional messages that I'm expecting, and spam. Both are almost exclusively ways for computers to send me messages.

I just realized that if this STIR/SHAKEN thing (or something similar) was implemented for SMS it could potentially make using SMS for 2FA much more secure - there could be a relatively secure way to verify automatically that the sender of the 2FA code is legit and that the code is only being sent to the proper device.

This works until you need to recieve a large number of calls from people you don't know, say during a house purchase.

No, it literally doesn't. I've done exactly this - 3 times, in two different countries. It's no different than saying "here's the number at my desk in work".

Agreed, it isn't a great solution at all. I've been dealing with winding up my dad's estate recently and in the last couple of months I've taken more calls than I have in the last 10 years, all legitimate too.

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