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Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

Robocalls would be easy enough to fix, and could be fixed by Apple and Google in cooperation. They could release, with every phone, tightly integrated software that allowed me to spawn off my own robot answerer. I might have to spend 20 minutes setting it up (or maybe not, with the latest in AI voice imitation), so that it could reasonably pretend to be me and keep the caller on the phone as long as possible.

If every single iPhone user, for instance, wasted 10-30 minutes of time for robocallers, stringing them along, the economics of the robocalling fall apart. If Android also does the same thing, then even more so. That "industry" would self-destruct within months.

Whether the carriers would allow this though, when they stand to lose so much business, that's another story.

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It's not exactly what you described, but Pixel phones have something similar and it has stopped almost all spam calls for me [1].

[1] https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/9118387?hl=en

> They could release, with every phone, tightly integrated software that allowed me to spawn off my own robot answerer.

Here's a DIY solution: https://www.lennytroll.com/

And a $2/month batteries-included solution: https://jollyrogertelephone.com/

How about just not allowing phone numbers to be spoofed in the first place?

That would mitigate nearly ALL robocalls.

/me leans up against Chesterson's Fence.

I reckon it would be beneficial to discover why such a thing was allowed in the first place, and for what it is commonly used aside from robocalls.

The A in SS7 stands for authentication. It's old enough that it predates any kind of meaningful network security practices. You can amend the standard to add auth (that's what SHAKEN does), but the issue has been that much of the equipment carrying these calls was built back when C was a hot new language and people rode dinosaurs to work. Some telcos based their entire business model on putting off the upgrades and none of the legitimate telcos would cut them from the network, so the FCC (eventually) stepped in.

It took me a little while to get this joke.

I know what it's used for. I just don't care. Corporations can find another way.

It's to allow for trunked calls. If you're calling out from a call center, it allows the caller ID to reflect the public phone # that people can actually call rather than the internal phone # that was used to call out.

It's a legitimate use, but comes with a high potential (and reality) of abuse.

The most common use case for spoofing is trunk-to-trunk call forwarding while preserving the original caller's caller id.

This has been a problem far longer than cell phones or spoofed numbers. I don't want to have to individually block every one of the 8000 numbers some scam telemarketer paid to have allocated. I don't think your plan mitigates any robocalls, it just forces them to (slightly) change tactics.

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