Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by bongodongobob | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

bongodongobob

Who is "they" and how do they know which calls aren't legitimate?

View on HN

Yes. Completely redesigning how phones work is exactly what we need. This problem is only going to get worse.

consumers have an easier solution: they just don't answer the phone unless it's a someone they know.

This isn't a solution. I need to accept legitimate calls from numbers who've never called me before all the time.

Don't accept them until they start talking.

IDK, my iPhone will show me the live transcription of the callers message without me answering it. And then if I want to speak to them, I can answer the call in the middle of the message being left and talk to them.

Sounds cool, but this concept isn't at all new. Anyone who used answering machines did exactly this. You would listen to the message being left in real-time and pick up if you actually wanted to talk to them.

If people can't be bothered to leave a message, then that's their problem.

> Don't accept them until they start talking.

Not professional, not an option for some calls.

> If people can't be bothered to leave a message, then that's their problem.

It's actually my problem if I miss an important call. A message is great, sure, but I still missed the call.

My phone shows a live transcription of the message being left.

If I see that it's an important call, then I can pick up and answer right there mid-voicemail.

That's what I was referring to. They start talking when they leave the voicemail.

This is how we did it for a long time with home answering machines too. Except instead of reading a live transcription, you listened to their live recording, and could interrupt it and answer if you wanted to talk to them. It's not a new idea.

That relies on people leaving a message, which not everybody does.

And not everybody has a phone that'll do this live message transcribing.

And no, everybody who decides to not leave a message isn't "not worth your time" or something.

Then look up the missed number and call them back if you think it might be legitimate?

> Not professional, not an option for some calls.

Callers can't (well, shouldn't) expect to be able to reach you immediately by calling you. There's a lot of valid reasons to not answer your phone. You might be driving, you might be in the bathroom, you might be getting lunch in a noisy place, you might be in the middle of a different important conversation, etc.

At which point the caller needs to realize that the "professional" thing to do is leave a message if they want to be called back. (Or try calling again later.) Because there's enough junk calls that expecting people to call back every missed call that didn't leave a message is just unreasonable.

>If people can't be bothered to leave a message, then that's their problem.

That's easy to say when you're not looking for a new job. Or don't run a business.

Or something like utility compam6, law enforcement, HOA somebody calling.

It's not a solution for you, but you're one of a shrinking group. Phone calls as a way to communicate with unknown people are on the way out, no one under 40 uses that method except under extreme duress.

> no one under 40 uses that method except under extreme duress

You live in a tiny bubble if you honestly believe that.

OK you're right. It's not an age thing, no one answers unknown calls now.

"Eight-in-ten Americans say they don’t generally answer their cellphone when an unknown number calls" https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/12/14/most-amer...

And that study is from 3 years ago, it's surely a higher percentage now than it was then.

20%, guess I am right

I don’t know why this is the hill you’ve chosen to die on

You stated it's not a solution. It clearly is if it works for more than 80% of people.

It’s not a solution if it doesn’t work for 1/5 users of a system used by millions.

I've been on-call for decades and 24x7 caregiver and it's not an issue, even in emergencies:

1. For non-emergencies, just use social media or email, which have better anti-spam filtration.

2. For most true emergencies, "hang up and call 911" just like every doctor's office recording says.

3. For urgent non-emergencies, either accept the consequences of waiting until your can reach the person via option #1 above, or get creative. Contact friends of the person and ask if they can get ahold of them... or someone IRL near them to get their real-world attention.

4. Consider what happens if you lose or break your phone. Responsible people let a reasonable group of people know how to reach them, and the rest contact a member of that group.

25 year odl here, I prefer phone calls as my primary method of communication, and often place calls as my first method of contact with previously-uncontacted entities. Please check your assumptions :)

VOIP is decades old by now anyway. I’m perfectly capable of calling across the globe with various technologies that don’t need rotary phone technology

Well, that's a multi trillion dollar project that would involve every country in the world. Will never happen.

International calls are still expensive than national or state calls (the regular cellular ones, not the whatspap viber imo or internet ones).

cryptographic signatures are going to have to start becoming necessary for all kinds of things, like even your average JPG image, otherwise nobody can tell what is "fake" or not, court evidence will start to become useless.

You'd have to completely redo the way telephony works. There is no way to enforce numbers or caller IDs.

perhaps, but the alternative is that whatever doesn't support it, just cannot be admissable as evidence anymore.

STIR/SHAKEN is already required for VOIP providers and intermediate carriers. The FCC is working it's way through the system to implement this, there is in fact a way but it takes a while.

> STIR/SHAKEN is already required for VOIP providers

I'm not convinced that STIR/SHAKEN even works properly. Recently, I migrated a DID from one VOIP provider to another. I set the outbound caller ID on the new provider, and it was showing up Verified with a checkmark to mobile devices before I had even submitted the port request to the old provider.

Depending on your new provider, they might just see that they have a contract with you and sign the call on your behalf with B level attestation - indicating that they "know" the end user, but not that they have the right to use the number.

As long as they managed to attach the identity header to the sip invite correctly, and are not considered to be a shady actor - downstream providers such as carriers probably have no reason to label it as spam. Spam labeling is typically done via analytics, outsourced to third parties like First Orion.

Attest levels are not in themselves proper tools for spam detection. The real meat of stir shaken is the origid in the identity JWT claim which is an opaque identifier that can be traced back to a particular user/customer/network equipment.

STIR/SHAKEN being sold as the one and only solution for spam calls was a mistake as it is only one iteration in the right direction. You have a handful of RFCs and ATIS specs that the FCC told operators to implement in a phased approach, and ultimately some gaps were uncovered in practice that reduced its effectiveness.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com