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Comment by HidyBush | Hacker News Reader

We are drowning in spam because the spammers use automatic systems while we don't or can't. When I receive a call from a number outside my contacts that has never called me before I want a dialog to pop up after I close the call that asks me if I want to block the caller or whitelist him. This way if I receive a spam call I can immediately hang up and block it without navigating through some baroque UI and manually blacklist it. I still have found no landline phone that offers a similar functionality and I'm stuck with manually blocking numbers from a horrible webUI

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Blocking spam calls is not very helpful because the numbers are inevitably spoofed and can be spoofed differently for the next call with near zero effort on behalf of the spammer. The problem is the phone system has inherent poor design that causes all sorts of issues and the major players aren't really interested in fixing it but at best are willing to apply mediocre patches.

We had a lady calling our company (the hallway phone specifically) for a week demanding answers/threatening lawsuits about why we keep trying to sell her pills. We make commercial and government electronics. She refused to understand that the phone number on her screen is not the number calling her.

You're telling me that a connection-oriented system with a volume a billionth of the internet can't keep logs of who initiates a connection for 5 minutes? Oh, yeah.

It does keep a log… of caller IDs. The problem isn’t the volume of data, it is that the system isn’t setup to authenticate callers so you can’t tie a spam call to any persistent identity to block

>It does keep a log… of caller IDs. The problem isn’t the volume of data, it is that the system isn’t setup to authenticate callers so you can’t tie a spam call to any persistent identity to block

Except the system is set up to authenticate callers[0] and that's been in place (at least in the US) for almost a year.

That it hasn't been as effective as it should be is another issue, but the technology exists and is (or should be) in place as specified by the law.

[0] https://www.fcc.gov/call-authentication

SMTP isn't authenticated either, and is by many measures way looser than the telephone system (which was built around managing physical wires for almost a century), and yet spam filtering has gotten pretty good?

The CNAM field in phone systems is a lot like the “from” field in an SMTP message, and the “source ip” in a IP packet. The sender can just set it to whatever they want.

Yeah, this is the most aggravating part of it. I've had people call me and ask why I called them (I didn't my number was spoofed). I tell them I didn't call, and invariably they don't believe me. Side note, I do not recommend trying to explain spoofing to random strangers. It doesn't help

> When I receive a call from a number outside my contacts that has never called me before I want a dialog to pop up after I close the call that asks me if I want to block the caller or whitelist him

Is this not standard on phones? Terminating a call on my Galaxy s10 shows me options to block number add to contacts, and redial. I know Samsung's UI has remained a couple years upstream of stock Android (and many yrs upstream of IOS) for the entirety of the smartphone era, but I thought this wouldve been a big standard feature.

Blocking doesn't help much when they're forging the phone number. I've even gotten spam calls with MY number as the caller ID!

The telecoms know who's PAYING for these calls to be connected and SMSes to be delivered - they should be required to surface that information.

we also need a better way to report spam, anti spam should be builtin by operators

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