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Comment by prenoob | Hacker News Reader

Writing from rome, italy.

These bureaucrats only pretend to work. The number of privacy violations in italy is staggering, i have to take 10 calls a day from power companies because they have access to all the phone number of anybody who has a gas or energy contract.

I had to change phone numbers. Meanwhile they are going against a service that as far as i know does not even require your name to serve you.

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I am also writing from Italy. In the last few months I have received so many spam calls from UK numbers that I have been forced to ban the whole of Britain from my phone. Good job Data Protection authority.

Report from Germany: Haven't received a spam call in years.

Also from Germany: I have. Please don't assume something does not happen because it doesn't happen to you.

He didn't assume that, though, just reported his situation.

From Poland: I have two numbers - one I use for various services, and it's constantly bombarded with spam (multiple calls a day), one I only use to contact family members, sometimes some small companies like when ordering firewood - got two phonecalls from an unknown number within a couple days (and I didn't care to answer), and that's it for almost a year now.

Sweden here.

I do the same thing. One phone number is just unusable and I don't answer any calls anymore, mostly UK callers recruiting, or other random spam.

The other, which I don't give to almost anyone except close friends/family, gets no spam. Not sure where my first phone number ended up to become spam target, but I remember I got a call once, when that was really uncommon, which an offer to change insurance companies... I was pissed off with my previous company so I actually did it, and it actually worked well, it was not malicious... but since then I think I was added to a list of "spam-friendly idiot" or something.

Report from Canada: I might receive something like three spam calls in the past year.

I don't know why my spam dropped so significantly when I moved up to Canada but it was quite dramatic compared to the US. There are periodic waves but I tend to miss out of them - I suspect because Canada works hard to prevent dumb auto-dialers from working.

It used to be much, much worse here. The CRTC has done some work to address that, it seems like it helped. [0]

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/crtc-telecom-call-authentif...

Another data point from Canada. I've given up answering my phone or checking my voicemail after 10+ calls a week.

I feel the STIR/SHAKEN changes have made a difference with spam calls for me in the US.

I don't know, my wife gets spam calls almost daily, but i almost never get spam calls. on the otherhand I almost never actually give anyone my real phone number and just give everyone my Google Voice number instead. Google seems pretty good at detecting and filtering them out. the only people with my real phone number are family members, my employer, and a few friends from high-school that had it from before i signed up for google voice in the 2000s.

Google Voice indeed seems to be much better at spam call detection than anybody else. Most of them don’t even make it to the "spam" folder in the app for me; they must be rejected at some lower level due to very high confidence.

Lucky you, if you have a Vancouver number you'll definitely get calls from the "Chinese immigration department" which wants to get you deported unless you immediately wire $1000. How do I know that if they speak in Mandarin you say? I have great imagination B-)

I live in Vancouver and spam calls significantly dropped for me too. It's only a few calls a week now.

Report from Italy: i receive at least 3-4 spam calls and messages a week

Report from Norway.

I used to get perhaps 3-4 calls a week from the same Indian sounding scammers (a man and a woman). They call from UK numbers. However, since I got the pixel, it has a setting to block spam calls, I have not gotten any :)

I also have a Pixel! Maybe that is the reason. Anyway.. I used to get many spam calls but the government put up heavy fines for advertisement via phone, since then these disappeared.

I'm in the UK and I don't remember when I got a spam call last time.

Hi Helmut! Greetings from Austria.

> Haven't received a spam call in years.

Ditto.

And from Iceland, not a peep in years.

You never got a call from a mobile network provider? Incredible.

Yes, I've opted out to receiving calls from my provider and they are not allowed to call me.

Unfortunately it’s getting more common there too. I‘ve received a few spoofed caller ID calls by now informing me of my "identity theft case with Interpol".

It‘s not nearly the same extent as in the US, though.

The UK has left the EU. They appear to not be abiding by EU privacy laws as a result.

Italian phone number had to get there somehow, probably sold by X, an Italian company?

Probably phone numbers follow some numbering scheme etc. so it is relatively easy to spam everyone with automated dialing and handing the numbers that prove out to the scammer. Thus while it is possible sold by X, it is just as possible randomly pulled from limited pool of possible numbers.

Back in the good old days my mom worked for a short time for a marketing company making cold calls. Back when long distance phone rates were expensive the company would set up people locally and then just call every possible local number (eg. 678-XXXX). People with an unlisted number would get mad and ask where she found their number.

The fact that the call shows an origin number from UK does not mean that it actually comes from UK; source numbers can be spoofed in various ways, especially if it's not spam calls from legitimate companies but actual scam calls.

Unlikely. UK GDPR is pretty much identical to EU GDPR.

AIUI it's presently exactly identical.

However there is a proposal for some changes - it doesn't make any sense for me (make it less onerous yet also somehow maintain compatibility with EU GDPR?) but I don't have time for the actual legalese frankly and the press release was devoid of detail in favour of annoying quips, and completely confusing.

I honestly think politics would be better off without television and radio (again). If the only way lay people heard of stuff was through slower news (if at all) then surely they'd speak normally (not in pithy soundbites) and have better debates.

The UK abides by UK privacy laws, which are in many ways similar to the EU versions.

https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

The ICO, lol... about as useful as Ofgem.

But does it cover also EU citizens or only UK ones? AFAIK EU with GDPR doesn't care that much about data privacy in ie Zimbabwe

In the US, I used to receive multiple spam calls a day. A few years ago, I turned on the iOS setting that sends all phone numbers not in my contacts straight to voicemail and haven't looked back.

It's occasionally inconvenient—maybe once or twice a year I deal with a company that needs to call me. But if it's a call from a real person, I can always listen to the voicemail and call them back. Most spam calls either don't leave voicemail, or leave 1 second message that I can bulk delete every few months.

100%. I use this great strategy as well, but on Android. I just don't pick up any calls that's not in my contacts list. Works out great.

Google Assistant answers all my calls from unknown numbers and asks them to state what they're calling about. It transcribes the text in real time for me, and if I don't answer it saves that conversation for me to review later. Perfect.

> I turned on the iOS setting that sends all phone numbers not in my contacts straight to voicemail and haven't looked back.

And the real-life version of this: you're not morally required to open the front door (or even acknowledge) if you don't knock the person ringing your doorbell. You can actually just... ignore them.

"> I turned on the iOS setting that sends all phone numbers not in my contacts straight to voicemail and haven't looked back.

And the real-life version of this: you're not morally required to open the front door (or even acknowledge) if you don't knock the person ringing your doorbell. You can actually just... ignore them."

I do both and keep my phone on do not disturb with a few bypasses (starred contacts). Neither technology nor people should be able to demand my attention and unilaterally dictate the terms.

Yeah it is a shame that it is has come to this but I do the same.

Imagine my shock when I found out that in the year 2023 there's still only so much room in my voicemail box and I wasn't receiving new voicemails because I never deleted any...

Had no idea this setting existed despite being an iPhone user for years. Thank you!

Settings->General->Phone->Silence Unknown Callers

On my version it’s here

Settings->Phone->Silence Unknown Callers

For Android, it's directly in the Phone App. Then, the 3 dots menu top right > Settings > Blocked Numbers > Block calls from unidentified callers

I work part time at a pizzeria. If you do this try to remember when you order food for delivery. It has become a problem with our drivers. The customer doesn’t answer the phone and our drivers spend 10 minutes trying to contact the customer (delaying the next customers order). Eventually, our drivers give up and the customer (now angry) calls back an hour later demanding their food.

I suppose they could communicate through the app which was used to order the food and/or using whatsapp.

Who orders pizza through an overpriced app?

Some people still order by calling a regular phone number, and I don‘t think forcing more centralization in the industry is a good solution.

The industry stakeholders and FCC should get together and fix caller ID authentication; the rest will follow from there.

Allowing inbounds call from numbers with a recent outbound call sounds like a low-hanging fruit heuristic.

My pizzeria does not use an App. We have an online ordering webpage, or you can order through a traditional phone call.

If I silence calls from unknown numbers I would get most deliveries since the couriers often ask for help finding the house or just won't bother coming unless they verify somebody is at home

Report from Sweden, I'm receiving multiple spam calls per week from UK. WTF is up with this?

Answer them, but don't speak. They will soon tire of you wasting their time. And you will be flagged as 'a 'timewaster'.

Profit! But not for them.

Report from the UK. I'm a British prince. I have a business proposition for you. It could be financially very lucrative.

Having left the EU, we are finding it hard to make ends meet. If you send me £50k,I will be able to release £100m frozen in evil EU banks. I will give you 50%.

Chat GPT warms me that this is likely a scam.

The offer being presented sounds too good to be true and the request for money upfront is a common red flag for scams.

The British prince guy was a fraud. I'll be honest with you, I'm a bum but God be my witnesses, if you send me $100k, I'll unfreeze for you $50,000 in a Swiss Bank (not Credit Suisse).

The UK now replaces Nigeria. Bravo! It's come a long way.

Brexit has to be good for something.

For fuck's sake Harry.

Ohhhhh, reverse UNO cards are tight!

Report from Greece. Our local privacy watchdog last year fined Clearview with €20Μ. Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether Clearview operates in Greece. They certainly have no office here. I seriously doubt the fine will ever be collected.

Report from Vietnam: I received scam calls pretty often before. It Vietnam trash SIMs were fairly common, and it bothered people so much that the goverment has to force every mobile company to "standardize" their consumer's data (i.e. fixing the incorrect data in trash SIMs). I have not received any scam calls since doing it.

What do you mean by "trash SIMs"?

Basically SIMs owned by previous owners that are brimmed with scam messages and calls. They are much cheaper than new legitimate SIMs so many people choose them. Sometimes people buy trash SIMs that has "good" or "lucky" numbers (something like 999 999 9999)

What pisses me off is that some legitimate websites like project goutenberg are all blocked by my Internet provider in Italy and I have to go through a VPN to access them. Same for scribd, vdoc, libgen and so on.

Do yourself a favour and install AdGuardHome/PiHole in your LAN so that you don't have to connect to a VPN each time, that way DNS is going to work and return a valid response back to every single device that you own in the network.

No dice if you're a Vodafone customer, they run DPI so that they block specific IPs (or even specific domains if the IP is shared).

This is why we need everyone to use ECH (encrypted client hello) [1] [2] and large CDNs to share IPs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Encrypt...

[2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/handshake-encryption-endgame-an-...

Isn't there a docker image one can spin up cheaply and not connect to dubious vpn provisers?

PiHole is local. You can docker it but you have some.. issues depending on configuration. AdGuard is a pihole like SaaS (that seems pretty good, it's the sort of thing I'd get for my mom).

Would this work? I assumed that ISP blocking would still block even when I use a Pihole.

In most of my cases, they're just blocking the DNS.

Not that I don't recommend something like that for other benefits, but GP could probably just switch their router or devices to use some non-ISP DNS - 1.1.1.1, 9.9.9.9, 8.8.8.8, whatever. It's not blocking specific DNS requests that will fix their immediate problem, it's not blocking them (by not using ISP's resolver).

I have two Plusnet Hub Ones at home being used as wireless access points. Both are flashed with OpenWrt and one has AdBlock installed; that one is the house's primary DNS server, with OpenDNS upstream.

Coupled with uBlock origin on all laptops and PCs, the online world is very ad-free.

If I bypass the blocking I am dismayed by how much ad crap there is out there.

why is Gutenberg blocked?

There was an accusation of copyright violation a few years ago, nowadays it's visible.

Not for me :(

Alleged copyright infringement: https://torrentfreak.com/project-gutenberg-public-domain-lib...

Just change the dns.

I'm too low-IQ to understand what this means.

Probably the same as suggested here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35385075#35386855

Old comment, it was from when we all expected they would have just blocked it at ISP dns level at some point, since openai itself is blocking access from the country, yes, you need a "vpn" now. You IQ is ok.

The Italian gov might be crowded with subpar intelligence, but OpenAI didn’t do a great job at reassuring people either in terms of how they handle data, how they trained models, what they share with plugins, privacy and security blah blah

OpenAI is a fairly new company, and if it tells you how it trained models what stops you from making one yourself?

Well, they don’t

About a quarter of a billion dollars to rent a state of the art GPU cluster, that's what.

GPT can help creating legal documents, in a very easy and quick way, by everyone, a small child or a plumber. Lawyers in general try to stifle competition in order for their salaries to go sky high. So what's the profession of a lawmaker, most of the time?

Would a small child or plumber know when GPT generates something that’s legally incorrect?

Same risk when using actual lawyer

You have recourse against a lawyer that messes up a contract, lies, or misrepresents you.

You also have their reputation to guide you and their professional organisation theoretically enforces minimum standards.

You have no such recourse against chatGPT.

But not the same need.

With a real lawyer almost all the time what they tell me will be legally correct, so if I don't know how to recognize when something is not legally correct that will almost never hurt me.

From what I've seen of people's posts of ChatGPT output it is much more likely to provide incorrect legal advice, and so using it without having a way to recognize incorrect legal advice is much more likely to hurt me.

So when GPT fails we can disbar it permanently?

I can’t let you disbar me, Dave.

No it clearly isn't.

You can't sue OpenAI for giving you really bad advice because they're not a law firm.

Also in the UK, for example, lawyers can't hide behind a limited liability company, they have to have skin in the game.

i.e. you can sue them personally for negligent advice and in theory they could loose everything they own (barring tools of the trade and bedding).

You can't do that to anyone that works at OpenAI Incorporated just because their language predictor convinced you of something that wasn't true.

Even if they were based in the country you could only sue the corporation.

They wouldn't, but there is a way to figure some stuff out. A person with no experience in the subject, could hire someone else, who has some knowledge and knows how to find his way into the laws, a lot cheaper than a lawyer.

Then this person will generate a legal document, which is eighty to ninety percent already there. The next step is to correct that remaining 10% of the document and you are good to go. Instead of paying 1000$ to a lawyer for legal fees, you paid 50 or a 100 bucks and the quality is the same, if not better. Specialized tools for that purpose are created as well, ai-lawyer or something like that.

Same in Spain. I get calls every day from energy companies pretending to be my own provider and having lots of data on me like my name and contact numbers.

Privacy is so broken here.

The Android phone application --I think it's by Google-- alerts of most suspected spam, or you can mark it afterwards and block. I still receive one call every other week, pick up and keep quiet, waiting for the caller to speak. Most times they hang in a few seconds. They have a finite number of numbers, so in a handful of years, frequency came from a couple a day.

Yesterday I received a call from Bari, my patron saint's city in Italy. It seems they're exporting their spam. Italy has a weird criminal legislation for scams, that's why there are so many fake products in used items applications like Wallapop or Vinted.

The problem is the false positives. I missed an important call from the doctor because it was incorrectly blocked as spam. So I don't use that feature anymore.

Let's not forget that these people, not a long time ago, worked hand-in-hand with the government to promote contact tracing applications at a time where it was clear that they could potentially be used to steal data from their users.

The bureaucrats were sure to add clauses to their privacy laws to grant themselves carte blanche powers during “extraordinary events”

All they needed, then, was to have an event appear “extraordinary” and they could legally compromise the privacy of the entire population.

Sorry if I picked your comment but it seems one of the most upvoted.

What’s the correlation between the alleged privacy violations of OpenAI laid out in the article and the “bureaucrats only pretend to work”?

Honestly asking: if there are indeed privacy violations in OpenAI (we don’t know that yet I think) shouldn’t that authority address them?

Usually this way of thinking is called "benaltrismo".

In English, whataboutism.

I saw you commented something like this in this thread

> These huge companies need to stops behaving like they own the world.

How would you call that?

Maybe "qualunquismo" but not whataboutism.

These phone calls are absolutely a nightmare. My phone filters out at least 2-3 automatically filtered calls a day and yet a few slip through the cracks.

These companies are using the old phone infrastructure that on paper could be traced without problems. Yet nothing, they operate with impunity

In the US, many people I know have been periodically inundated with scam robocalls... in Mandarin! They spoof a number very close to your own which is a dead giveaway in a larger metropolitan area but probably pretty effective in rural areas with fewer local numbers. The novelty wore off after like the 10th "Nĭhǎo..."

The interesting thing is that in Italy in most of these spam phone calls there is actually a human speaking (often but not always with a slight Albanian accent)

Answer the phone every time. But do not listen or do anything. Leave them hanging - they will soon take you off the lists.

Modern Italy is, in many senses, a failed state. Frequent turnover in prime ministers and corruption are just 2 signals.

It might be worth getting a SIM and/or VOIP number from a different country and a different country code.

ChatGPT requires your phone number and your email. Plus they have leaked their subscribers information. I know nothing about Italy but it's not one vs the other

Do you think that the stated motivation for banning chatGPT is just a veil?

It's BigVPN pulling the strings in the background. \s

Thanks. I was wondering whether there were other ideological motives behind the ban other than the official "privacy protection," as Italy is governed by the right. They just banned artificial meat for what seems to be a host of ideological grounds typical of the right.

Interesting logic:

A is not doing good in B B+ is a worse version of B A addressed B+

Then people not encouraging them, but still say A is "pretending to work"...

Are you "pretending to think", or just is another troll?

This is because OpenAI already knows your name and a lot more about you.

They don't need your name, they fingerprint your browser when necessary.

Please tell us more about OpenAI fingerprinting browsers when they currently serve 0 ad

The import word is "currently" and MS is already starting to integrated ads in Bing Chat.

And we all know if ads come into play then tracking follows closely.

It makes sense that they look @ this re: GDPR, if you've ever had to do training on GDPR you'd see it.

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