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Comment by drewcrawford | Hacker News Reader

While this is an amazing and thought-provoking article, I can't help but feel it missed the obvious answer to the question it presented.

Phones should be programmed to accept or reject calls by the owner, because it is a really dumb idea to be able to wake people up knowing only their phone number. Notably, this is already the case: cellphones have mute/vibrate switches, and if you have a smart phone you probably have various "do not disturb" modes that do more advanced routing.

As a followup and to actually resolve the question for the call placer, phones could broadcast their availability status and this status could be queryable by phone number.

Stardates have their own problems but I'm not convinced those problems are harder than the problems we have with timezones now. We've built up a terrible amount of infrastructure around timezone handling, we should not be scared off when stardates require unique infrastructure projects.

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In general, the software revolution has made me think back on how much many traditional devices around my house suck.

I pay a lot for phone service and the actual quality of the service they provide to me is terrible. They actually allow illegal phone spammers onto their network. I get phone-calls from robots about free trips, on a service that costs me more than my NetFlix account that I get a lot more enjoyment from.

I get Gmail for free and it filters that crap out.

And don't get me started on the piss-poor UIs of the traditional TV industry. Holy crap.

It's fairly difficult to stop robo dialers. I used to handle about a billion calls a day for providers. Robo calls had to go on separate connections and had other limits and higher prices than regulal ("conversational") calling.

But many customers would slip in lots of dialer anyways. You can tell after the fact, by looking in aggregate. But on a per call basis, nope.

Now, we tried blocking repeated caller numbers. Spammers would just switch to using random numbers. For many reasons (some good) it is simply not tractable to know if s number is s valid source for a call. It's vastly more complicated than say IP spoofing.

The most effective solution is to have an answering service/program that screens calls and allows known callers without further hassle.

Your provider could offer a service to block "known" bad numbers, but a lot of business use the same number for many things. I'd be surprised if some consumer services don't offer such services. Though, there may be some regulations that require them to attempt to complete the call.

Also note that some dialer, like political calls, are expressly allowed and don't have to follow do not call.

The best recourse you have after the fact is to make an FCC complaint and persue it. I've seen tons of complaints that go nowhere because no end user pushes the issue. For really illegal dialer, there's gonna be several intermediaries, say, 5+ isn't surprising. Each one has to escalate to the next. Without a fire under their ass, most providers will close the complaint with effectively "can't repro, dunno".

In the UK there rules about spam calls too, however most of the calls my parents get are international numbers. I told them just to ignore them, but they got upwards of 5 calls a day so it was pretty annoying.

I setup a PBX so that I could block any repeat callers, but that didn't really work because each call is from another random number. There were also a few automated calls so I set it up to play an automated message of 30 seconds saying to press a code to speak to someone, if the number is withheld or international. That ended up blocking pretty much all the calls. I guess the dialers interpret it as a voicemail greeting and move on.

I've since found out there are plenty of SIP providers who if you ask them nicely will let you send any callerid without proving ownership - even for international calls. When it costs them around half a US cent per minute (probably less in bulk) it's not surprising there are so many spam calls.

Providers have to take calls without ownership. It's simply not feasible otherwise. Sometimes, I'd be handling calls going from one landline neighbor to another. There's just too many intermediaries.

Now, for small, low volume deals, like say, Twilio, yeah you could force an ownership test. But it would have no impact on the real offenders.

Another good technique to reduce the number of robo calls is to have your PBX answer immediately, and play a fraction of a second of the "number unobtainable" tone, which is enough for many greedy "robo's" to give up and move on where as a human will barely notice.

I grew up in Ireland. Very few robo calls. Why? It's illegal.

The solution is not a technical solution, but a legal one.

Sure. It's mostly illegal in the US,too. But the FCC simply doesn't pursue the matter enough. Even in illegal things, like guys that setup a line pretending to be the IRS, the worst that happens is someone cuts some little account off.

It could be different. And as a carrier, I've begged other carriers to push. Have their end user escalate. Get LE involved and get them to go all the way till they find the originator of calls and nail em. But out of the few hundred "complaints" I've seen, only one or two even pretended to care, and none ever really followed up.

The US could kill illegal robo dialing, at least a lot if it, just by getting serious and slapping fines down.

It's so dumb, that even the FCC put out a prize for the best anti robo dialer tech someone could come up with. It defies explanation.

Yes there are 2 kinds of illegal: de jure and de facto. You need it to be illegal both way.

We do have a very strong law, the TCPA, that prohibits robocalls to cell phones without prior consent, with a private right of action and a $500-$1,500 _per violation_ (per call at least) penalty. It won't do you much good against scammers, but against actual businesses with assets that could be seized if necessary, it's awesome.

(I personally sued a debt collector in small claims court for wrong number robocalls to my cell phone, and settled for the entire amount I was asking, $500 per call.)

A network that allows anonymous agents to spoof their address is absurdly broken. yes, there are legitimate technical reasons for that problem to exist, but they've had like a hundred years to figure out how to fix them.

> phones could broadcast their availability status and this status could be queryable by phone number

There was a standard for this in the 00's called "Wireless Village" that got so far it was usually integrated into the phone books of dumbphones by Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson, but it never got any uptake.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Village

Agreed. Phones are silly; either use a system that provide a status such as "available" or "away", or use a system that by convention is answered by the recipient at their convenience (which for some crazy reason doesn't normally include telephones, though it easily can with current technology). If you need to schedule a meeting in advance, suggest a time that shows up as "free" on their calendar.

I'm often up at 2AM, in which case I'll hopefully still be sleeping at 9AM. Sometimes I have 6AM meetings, in which case I'll (hopefully) be asleep early the previous day. I also travel to conferences halfway around the world. My local timezone is not a good way to guess when to call me.

I just want two call buttons. One for "call, but don't disturb if person's busy" and one for "call with a high priority, we have an emergency".

And an option to punch someone in the face over the phone if they had used the second button when they should've used the first.

Or an even simpler solution you can implement today: text your uncle "hey, is now a good time to call?"

Both of you guys missed the point.

The problem that people are trying to solve by abolishing time zones is the annoying need to deal with time differences when scheduling meetings. The "I need to consult a table to schedule meetings" problem.

But we've just moved the problem under another shell. Now, in order to schedule meetings, I have to know what the universal "04:00" means for all participants. This is just the flip side of the same coin.

The real fundamental problem is that people like to work "during the day" and sleep "during the night". Either we solve that problem with time zones tables, or we solve it with "what is the solar time of day" tables. The author of this article is arguing, and I agree, that trading one for the other doesn't improve the situation ("is not simpler"), has a lot of human transition costs, and that the new problem may not ACTUALLY be an improvement over the old problem.

The problem that people are trying to solve by abolishing time zones is the annoying need to deal with time differences when scheduling meetings.

No, abolishing time zones and DST would also remove huge swathes of code in all of today's operating systems, numerous costly bugs, and make time unambiguous without qualifiers like time zone or location. There are lots of reasons to do it.

As others have pointed out, the real fundamental problem is best solved by people indicating their status somehow now and in the future, because not everyone in a country works 9-5, not everyone is available all of that time for phone calls, and why should everyone work to the same schedule anyway?

If you want to schedule calls, use a calendar, if you want to make a call right now, use an availability indicator.

"No, abolishing time zones and DST would also remove huge swathes of code in all of today's operating systems, numerous costly bugs, and make time unambiguous without qualifiers like time zone or location."

Because we can be certain that, going forward, we will never need to talk about a time before we made the change.

> But we've just moved the problem under another shell. Now, in order to schedule meetings, I have to know what the universal "04:00" means for all participants. This is just the flip side of the same coin.

The failure cases are much better though. Say you screw this up, and you schedule the meeting at what you think is "09:00 Bangalore" but it's actually "07:00 Bangalore".

With timezones: You tell the guy in Bangalore to dial in at 09:00, he says fine, then he misses the meeting.

Without timezones: You tell the guy in Bangalore to dial in at 04:00, he either sucks it up or says "umm I'm still having my breakfast then" and you reschedule.

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