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31 pointsipython20 comments

My dream is that some day I can go into iOS and say "I want anonymous calls and texts from Government Entities, Medical Providers, and Utilities only." Everyone else needs to get into my contacts first. Everything else is moved to a spam folder that I barely ever see. Political parties would, of course, hate this, but it is exactly what needs to happen to restore the usefulness of SMS and phone calls.

That is a neat exception that would be very handy. My phone now permanently lives in 'Do not disturb' mode as it at least filters based on contacts. But it doesn't help with other calls you want. It will still list the call in the missed call log but this is still not ideal.

Doesn't help with SMS though which is still 2-10 messages a day for all kind of junk.

My kids school ever so helpfully calls me from a variety of blocked, unknown and random numbers…

This is actually pretty easy to do with local LLMs: https://justine.lol/matmul/#:~:text=For%20example%2C%20let%2....

It's not a large project, but you would need fine-tuning or a lot of few-shot examples to approach SpamAssassin's efficacy. It would still be slower than SpamAssassin. This is one of those "X but with LLM" ideas :)

As far as I know, Gmail has a neural net which is trained by examples from people reporting spam. That is a more potent approach. If you're going to restrict the output grammar to 'true or false', why even run a giant net? You could achieve the same loss with a much smaller one.

I once had an idea for an app for managing multiple phone numbers.

The idea being you would have a unique phone number or ext for each contact you want to give. Don't know if it's viable or not.

But I think there's need to be a unique key for everyone you give your number too.

This would enable two things.

1. Discard it as soon as it has been compromised.

2. Know who is leaking your information.

I don't really know if it's a viable solution to implement in practice though.

Just like "virtual" credit card numbers.

There are 7,920,000 telephone numbers per area code and 335 area codes. See https://www.puc.texas.gov/industry/maps/areacodes/txareacode... and https://www.twilio.com/docs/glossary/north-american-area-cod.... I don't know much about VOIP and how many of those numbers are allocated. So that over 2.5 billion total #s.

Still I think you'd need extensions or something which probably would not work with texting, etc.

I’ve been doing this with an eSIM and two VoIP lines doing call forwarding.

So I have a line for:

- my personal line for friends and family (primary eSIM)

- utilities/banking (secondary eSIM because these seem to hate voip numbers)

- store programs and shopping

- what I give out to people I don’t consider family or close friends

I initially ignore everything but the personal line.

"You can try to block, encrypt and unsubscribe your way out of it, but you may not succeed."

I'm doing pretty great, thank you very much. Haven't seen an ad in decades, my spam folder is empty and on average, I get one annoying call a year. What bothers me is the declining quality of Google Search results.

Ed Zitron did a reasonable rant about why this is happening.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

When the author describes digital life as it is today in the opening paragraphs, it’s so in contrast to how life was in the 90s or early 00s. My first thought reading that was not about scams, but about how poked and prodded we are from every direction by every digital thing relentlessly every hour of every day.

https://archive.is/jnDWT

I remember back when I lived in the US, I got daily spam calls. I never get spam calls in Europe. I wonder why that is and if that's still the case (lived there between 2014 and 2018)

I used to get sooo many in Australia, but in Austria I only got some during the early covid months.

Yeah, it is pretty bad in Oz now. My wife and I have fun every night playing our missed call messages to see what spam calls we got for the day.

I haven't answered the phone since 2002. Hopefully that answers the question.

The important part of this article to me is where the author writes that for some companies or government agencies, their communication practices do not pass muster. I’m very curious to learn more about that crappy government letterhead that the quoted psychologist Pamela Rutledge mentioned.

I have three mobile numbers...1 for trust people, the second is for business and the last is for authentication and tied to an account that is not tied to my real name. There is too much information collection going on.

Here's a paywall free link to the article. Enjoy! https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/style/scams-identity-thef...

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