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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

I watched the webcast of the Robocall summit, and it was fascinating.

It was clear that most of the telephone industry really hates phone spammers. An AT&T guy was saying that evil robocall outfits often forge the numbers of their existing customers, causing AT&T no end of headaches. Plus they get a ton of complaints from call receivers. I am sure that the major carriers would shut down phone spammers in a heartbeat if it were easy.

Looks like the FTC now has the videos from the summit up on the web:

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/workshops/robocalls/

Anybody seriously interested in the problem should check out the videos. There's a lot of good stuff in there about the technical issues. And there are some interesting technical solutions as well.

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I work at the lone automated calling company that represented the "industry " at FTC Robocall Summit(http://www.call-em-all.com) and we are interested to see what solutions to this problem might come from this.

We definitely would love to have a solution to where we could guarantee that no illegal calls are being made (Recent Blog Post: http://blog.call-em-all.com/3-reasons-we-are-excited-about-f...). We have our own internal checks but something which can be implemented on a higher level would be great for us.

The reality is that with the mix of old tech and new tech (read VOIP), tracking who is really making the call is very hard right now (timely and costly). Scammers knowingly break the law and unfortunately, a list of people saying don't call isn't going to stop them from scamming.

So what amount above zero has the industry spent time and/or money in order to combat this problem, possibly to prevent their industry being killed by the bad companies? Does the legit part of the industry support unspoofable CID or any other technical restriction? Has your company publicly suggested any solutions?

We haven't proposed any solutions at this time, but we feel that a method in which we can utilize certificates or authentication is potentially the way in which is the least disruptive to the current infrastructure.

But the infrastructure is the real problem. So many switches around the country are so old that hops through the network are very difficult to track and make any innovative technology solution hard to implement fully.

I can't imagine how to solve the problem in an acceptable manner. Without something like certificates and encryption, some concept of identity, you're just not going to get anywhere, and I'm about fifteen miles into the "unacceptable" territory with that suggestion ("hey, guys, let's just rewrite the entire infrastructure from the very bottom!"). Your primitives are broken, any system built with them will be broken, and it's going to be more years before people are ready to even think about that.

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