Hacker News Reader

Comment by inigyou | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that it's a network. The hard part of networking isn't the technology - it's the other people. And short of a government regulation or a monopoly, they'll never all agree.

STIR/SHAKEN has an exception for calls passing through TDM trunks, which don't support it. This created a small industry for passing spam calls through TDM trunks. Such calls can trivially have their caller ID spoofed.

View on HN

> short of a government regulation or a monopoly,

Phone companies used to be monopolies, in Europe they were owned by the government as a public service. But when they become profitable politicians betrayed their citizens and sold them. Nowadays, phone companies are a source of scams, spam and everything wrong with big corporations. And all that profits are now private instead of helping to fund the country.

On this topic, phone lines are so ubiquitous that it is irresponsible for representative governments to continue to let private companies mess around with them. Doubly irresponsible to go from public to private after the increase in popularity.

That was in the 2000s. Phone lines are an anomaly now but cellphones are not. The phone number is more like an ICQ number than an identifier of a physical connection, but is still regulated like the latter.

You don’t get to tell these people you pay they can’t double-dip as telco shareholders!

Do you have more information on this?

Why are those non-STIR/SHAKEN TDM trunks serving as transit trunks (non-terminating), rather than terminal-only trunks? Seems a pretty obvious hole to close.