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cr1895

What does “accessible to all” mean in this context?

Why do I in Europe get almost zero spam calls or text while in the US it seems like a plague?

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Accessible to all meaning the rules for being part of the public switched telephone network:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_switched_telephone_netw...

Again, I am not sure and very well may be wrong, but I think I recall reading or maybe just assuming that the FCC or maybe a global agreement bars individual network operators from not accepting calls from others within the network.

I imagine this gets very hairy due to international jurisdictions and things like caller ID spoofing.

See section on Legal Considerations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing

An interesting conversation that came up in my research about this topic for why a telco might be barred from blocking against certain numbers:

https://www.techdirt.com/2007/03/16/can-a-telco-block-phone-...

I have no idea why European numbers might not get spam calls with the same frequency as American. Maybe the spammers are looking for English speaking people, or Americans are richer or easier to scam?

Depends on the country. I think it comes down to availability of cheap labour for call-based vectors.

French numbers can get tons of spam calls, because there’s no shortage of impoverished French speakers in the world.

UK here, we get tons of scam robocalls to the point where I leave my phone on airplane mode with Wi-Fi enabled like 95% of the time.

You mean you haven’t been in an accident that wasn’t your fault?

US has a larger market with a single language, and our regulators demanded calls to mobile phones to be on an equal footing for callers. You never needed to pay more to call a cell phone than a land line from the same rate center; the cell phone user has to pay any additional cost to carry the call over the air. Additionally, inter-carrier rates are regulated and set to approximate costs, which is now pretty much zero. This makes bulk calling and texting inexepensive (less than a penny per message or minute). In (most of?) Europe, callers have to pay for the privilege or calling a cell phone, and the numbers are in different ranges, and it's not cheap, 10 cents or more per minute or message at bulk rates; even though the underlying cost is probably similar to the US, near zero.

EU may be stricter about enforcing, but I've also experienced it's very person-dependent.

People who need to answer unknown callers for business reasons (small business owners, sales, etc.) get put on lists of "known active numbers" and may get multiple spam calls a day. Folks like me who can just ignore any unknown number & respond only if they leave a real voicemail, get FAR fewer (maybe 1 a month on avg). We tend to complain less about the issue (even if it is annoying & I still treat all unknown calls as spam by default).

Also, if you own a google device, they're very good at IDing spam callers. I recently switched from Google to Samsung and get far more.

In the US, one of the loopholes in rules requiring STIR/SHAKEN and other protections was that smaller carriers, usually serving rural or under served markets, were exempt. This became a profit center for them as they became one of the only means for these spam calls, which originated in overseas call centers, to connect to US callers.

Thus the smaller carriers were incentivized by profit to connect the calls.

Now that STIR/SHAKEN is supposedly a thing, is there a way in Android that I can block calls that go through those carriers?

Unfortunately it's carrier to carrier and not data we're privy to. Carriers get paid arbitrage fees for carrying or connecting calls, so they really have no incentive to stop these calls other than legal liability.

Then they really dropped the ball on SHAKEN/STIR. At a minimum they should pass the customer all the hops so we can block shit we don't want (international calls, VOIP calls, known spammers, known bad companies etc.) on our end.

Telecommunications is interesting in that everything strives to be backwards compatible and will accommodate the lowest common denominator to connect a call. It's very much like Microsoft Windows, in that backward compatibility is both a strength and a common source of problems. Government mandates don't usually go beyond borders, so carriers have to accommodate international operators.

And any new features or technologies often introduce or expose problems.

When Caller ID was introduced, there was a huge backlash around privacy. Callers were upset about having the number they were calling from being exposed. If a doctor called a patient it could expose his direct or home number instead of the office number. In the age of phone books, a phone number could be associated with an address. The ACLU sued to block Caller ID until it was possible to disabled it.

Because large call centers operated hundreds of numbers and wanted a way for them to all appear as the same business entity. Carriers later implemented ways for these customers to spoof Caller ID so that the carrier wasn't responsible for maintaining it. Carriers connecting calls had to trust the originating carrier's caller ID info as well.

All these requirements allowed for a bad actor to spoof Caller ID and for it to just be trusted.

Carriers use to have star codes you would use for certain features like disabling Caller ID, disabling Call Waiting, and, famously, calling back a number that called you. These are similar to the AT codes you can issue to the modem in your cellphone via the dialer. Kids today will never appreciate REM's Star 69.

When digital cellphones arrived, they presented some odd challenges too like the fact that call information was transmitted digitally to the carrier and not via analog tones. Because number presses on your cellphone didn't equate to analog tones over the line, cellphone users couldn't interact with IVR menu systems (e.g., "Press 1 for English...").

Character limits in SMS messages come from the fact that they occupied the null space in beacon messages transmitted between cell towers and phones. Before MMS was a thing you couldn't send longer messages or if your phone broke them up into chunks, they might be delivered out of order or not at all.

When you target Americans, you can use a single language to hit 239 million people with their native/first language. You can't do that in Europe.

In Canada and while I do get some it’s fairly rare. Maybe 1 a month.

I get 4-5 a week on Bell, my SO gets 1-2 a day on Rogers.

Have you signed up for the national do not call list?

Yes, of course I have. But the “CRA”, Duct Cleaners, and the women who speaks only Chinese all ignore that list.

I really wonder what the difference is between numbers, I’m on telus and I don’t think they make any attempt to block them? And I’ve had my number for 20 years, with both bell and Rogers in the past. and made no effort to keep it secret. Thou I occasionally answer the calls when I’m bored and waste them time.

Anecdotes do not constitute data. My family in Canada gets tons of robocalls and spam calls, to the point that nobody answers unrecognized numbers unless they're expecting a call...

Things seem to be improving: I’m getting fewer and fewer “neighbourhood” calls.

I suspect the vector is moving away from VoIP systems and more toward buying masses of prepaid plans and stuffing them into various contraptions that hold hundreds of sims to blast out messages/calls.

https://m.aliexpress.com/item/1005004095035108.html

Have they signed up for the national do not call list or renewed it? as it expires iirc. My friends in the same boat often never signed up like I did.

Because you have a functioning government.

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