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Comment by OptionOfT | Hacker News Reader

This was the case in Belgium a couple of years ago.

Everybody had to go to a store and have their ID read by the system, and if they didn't, the phone number would be shut down.

Unsure how that worked for MVNOs though.

Now I live in the USA and am well-familiar with the spam calls. I wonder if this new rule will reduce/prevent them. I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled. Someone from India should not be allowed to call me with a caller ID from Mayo Clinic.

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> I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled.

This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones and the proposed changes won't do anything to change that.

~5 years ago there was a big push (in the USA) to try and solve it with STIR/SHAKEN but I've not been involved or paid attention since then, so don't know if anything came of it. It's a legitimately hard problem to solve though. Lots of engineering and backwards compatibility technical problems, but also political, logistical and commercial issues are abound. You've also got some turtle issues too; it's attestation all the way down.

> This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones

That is not correct. There a phone farms operating purely on burner phones / disposable sims. Even for legit use cases, this path is often way easier/cheaper than go through official channels.

Use cases range from carrier-NAT proxies at < $1 per GB to text message spam.

But... what does your comment have to do with burner phones?

A burner phone is a phone number whose owner is not officially registered somewhere as the owner.

A spoofed phone number is a false declaration that you're calling from number XXXXXXXXXX when in fact you're calling from YYYYYYYYYY.

You might notice that there is absolutely no relationship between these two ideas. You can be registered and lie about your phone number. You can be unregistered and not lie about your phone number.

There are phone farms that exclusively use burner phones and do not need to spoof caller ID.

Let's recall the claim here:

>>> I think in general the ability to spoof numbers should be banned / controlled. Someone from India should not be allowed to call me with a caller ID from Mayo Clinic.

>> This has absolutely nothing to do with burner phones and the proposed changes won't do anything to change that.

> That is not correct. There a phone farms operating purely on burner phones

This is total nonsense. A phone farm that doesn't spoof caller ID isn't presenting false caller ID.

Wait, you’re right, I think I misread your comment somehow or got it mixed with another comment.

Sorry about that.

Wish I could recall the podcast I listened to a few years ago that was telling the history of robo-dialers and caller ID spoofing. The general gist was that AT&T was making money off it from 1-900 operators so they weren't eager to self-regulate. So even though ending spam calling is a bipartisan issue, feet were dragged on the implementation.
If anyone's eager to do podcast archaeology, IIRC one of the angles was investigating dead government agency phone numbers, and some lady entrepreneur in the 80s. Might have been Reply All, but the market regulation angle makes me think Planet Money.

of course, politicians exempt themselves from the spam call category. Political speech is the most important speech!

https://archive.org/details/3f25eeb8affc11e6892a43edc8087050

~~I _think_ this is the one.~~

God I miss this podcast.

Edit: this IS the one.

Are you familiar with the Search Engine podcast?

I am. I couldn't get into it. I'll give it another shot. Maybe I didn't try long enough.

Probably not the issue isn't knowing who owns a number it's that the actual number for the call is just a data field that's not validated or required to be correct. Spam calls would be a lot less annoying if they had to come from real numbers that could be blocked instead of being able to spoof as many numbers as they want.

Spam calls are a different issue (spam is usually VOIP). Spammers also often use spoofed numbers since STIR/SHAKEN is somehow still not properly implemented.

All carrier interconnects use VoIP protocols since forever anyway. So this is pretty much a distinction without a difference. STIR/SHAKEN affects both

This is unrelated to spam calls. Business will register thousands of phone numbers for "surveys" and will continue spamming with AI calls.

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