dredmorbius

Though yes, I'd agree that NSCP launched the mania.

That seems not to be available at either the Internet Archive nor Archive Today:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20200000000000*/https://ello.co/...>

<https://archive.is/https%3A%2F%2Fello.co%2Fdredmorbius%2Fpos...>

Sic transit gloria data.

Update: At least some of the Wayback captures have the actual page content if you view source. See for example: <https://web.archive.org/web/20210524202824/https://ello.co/d...>.

(Another reason I'm pretty salty about breaking basic HTML page functionality for slick trix.)

I'm not going to finger-scroll or down-arrow the whole thing.

Don't break scrolling. Please.

Military politics, intelligence concerns, international relations, environmental regs, and more.

See my earlier comment: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49131195>.

Citing "Robocalls: A Worldwide or US-only Problem? Analyzing Spam and Fraud in International Phone Calls" (30 Jun 2026) <https://arxiv.org/html/2606.31790> and a Hiya report <https://work.hiya.com/hubfs/2025/Global%20Call%20Threat%20Re...> (PDF).

Among other factors: time value of money and future-value discounting mean that economically ever-expanding copyright terms offer virtually no present-value benefit.

Most works see virtually all of their economic value in the first few years of publication. There are some (rare) long-tailed exceptions. The original US copyright term of 14 years, with extensions, actually fits the economics pretty well.

What extreme copyright duration does do is:

1. Create vast copyright-holding monopolies, often of works for which authors were poorly compensated if at all. (For the latter: academic publishing.)

2. Create a vast category of "orphan works" which aren't or cannot be published, in the latter case because rights simply cannot be clearly established, or competing claims (survivors, estates, publishers) exist.

"Seventeen Famous Economists Weigh In On Copyright : the Role of Theory , Empirics , and Network Effects" <https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v18/18HarvJLTech43...> (2005)

"The true impact of shorter and longer copyright durations: from authors’ earnings to cultural creativity and diversity" Jimmyn Parc & Patrick Messerlin (2020) <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10286632.2020.1...>

Orphan Works: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_work>

From TFA.

The Treasury’s intervention to bolster the yen is the first since 1998, when it bought the currency in order to strengthen Japan’s economy after the yen had dropped to eight-year lows. The US intervened in Japan’s currency in 2011 to weaken it as part of a co-ordinated international effort to prevent a dangerous currency appreciation after the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.

(From TFA.)

The Asian Financial Crisis of the 1990s was one of several that occurred during that decade (also: the recession triggered by the 1st Gulf War 1992, the Mexican Peso crisis of 1994, the Russian financial crisis of 1998, and arguably the post-dot-com bust in 2001, stretching the decade just a tad). For those present at the time, the dot-com boom was a short-lived (though extravagent) interval, beginning in late 1998, spiking early 2000, and crashing out in early 2001.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Asian_financial_crisis>

I've heard the "but we can't filter traffic at the network level" line from AT&T much more recently than that date. If there's any corporate learning that's occurred, it's not filtered through the ranks.

It seems as if sorting out the STIR/SHAKEN situation with smaller telcos is going to have to happen. How that happens is something I don't have much clarity on, though I suspect some degree of national regulation and assistance will be required in the US. Your work could be an element of that?

I've been ... unhappy ... with telecoms options for well over a decade now, and predicting the #DeathOfTelephony (one of my Fediverse topics/tags) for much of that time. It's coming about more slowly than I'd expected/hoped, but I'm seeing lots of strain. Enterprise/organisational frustration has been increasingly apparent over the past five years or so. Millennials and onward (as well as many Gen Xers) actively avoid voice calls. It's simply getting hard to connect to people. Then there's the privacy / surveillance / propaganda / manipulation elements.

I think what I'd like is a SIP trunk to the house, and manage remote calls over WiFi (possibly with a SIP phone, I've got an old GSM 2G I'm thinking of doing some hardware-hacking on, or I could buy something ready-made). Carry a standard mobile for emergencies, but avoid it if at all possible, and route most comms through the VOIP system with a bunch of bespoke rules.

If I were running a business there'd be other considerations. I'm ... glad I'm not, for the moment.

The extent to which something vaguely resembling that might be more widely used ... I'm not sure. I'm thinking through elements I'd like to incorporate, might post that later (probably to the Fediverse or elsewhere for now).

I discussed it yesterday in another thread:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49126133>

I suspect that the relevant factor is that Comcast doesn't provide significant outbound business telephony relative to its household business, though that is one of their business offerings, see: <https://business.comcast.com/>.

(I may be entirely wrong on this, I'm just learning much of this in the past few days/weeks.)

Reader had no such strategic leverage, at least to Google execs' understanding.

Dave Lieber of DMN ran a series of articles on this as well, I recommend:

"Watchdog Memo to AT&T's CEO: Didn't mean to get you in trouble" <https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2016/07/08/watchdog...>

And:

"Watchdog: AT&T's CEO gets new job, Frontier employees dance during disaster" <https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2016/08/04/watchdog...>

At Techdirt: "AT&T Falsely Blames The FCC For Company's Failure To Block Annoying Robocalls " <https://www.techdirt.com/2016/06/02/att-falsely-blames-fcc-c...>

The FCC announcement, voted on June 18, 2015: "Fact Sheet: Wheeler Proposal to Protect and Empower Consumers Against Unwanted Robocalls, Texts to Wireless Phones" <https://web.archive.org/web/20150910081851/https://apps.fcc....> (PDF)

Particularly where the agent has specialised knowledge and/or privileged access.

Not uncommonly an issue in IT.

A growing concern with AI, to boot: Alignment.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_alignment>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Alignment_Problem>

Several carriers offer this, usually aimed at corporate users (construction, maintenance, fleet workers, emergency responders). See Kyocera and Sonim, particularly their rugged phone offerings (Dura from Kyocera, XP from Sonim).

Carrier-based PTT is typically limited only to other phonesets on that carrier, though in practice the feature is generally accessed through a programmable key, and can be configured to use another (unlimited) press-to-talk app, such as Zello (which I've seen before) or Express Chat (#TIL).

And no specific instances or mechanisms detailed, to boot.

Thanks.

What activities are you engaged in which make you think you'd likely be considered a spammer? What specific harms do you see occurring? Might these be related to your present line of business / profession / employment?

Please walk through as well, what the privacy, surveillance, data-disclosure, third-party bad-actor, and authoritarian-government risks of such a system would be.

In much of the US, the push is on to retire the last twisted pair within a very few years, if not months. Utilisation rates are well into the single-digits and falling, which makes continued support quite expensive.

The problem for many holdouts is that alternatives fail to deliver reliability, or the equivalent of a site-centred service (as opposed to personal mobile devices). Residential VOIP is confusing from the subscriber's perspective, and the telcos aren't making choosing options much easier.

SMS itself is highly problematic, as it's grossly insecure, unreliable, and very subject to surveillance and other abuse. Secure chat alternatives tend to be proprietary (e.g., RCS, effectively specific to Apple and Google, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services>), or aren't supported on all devices (Signal would be excellent, but isn't supported on most Feature Phone / Dumbphone OSes, such as KaiOS/AOSP). And Signal too is ultimately a single provider.

Initially the approach was a long list of rules, usually a whitelist and blacklist of known good and bad contacts, and then a large set of specific patterns and assigned weights. Procmail was an early standard here, later Spamassassin.

The biggest revolution came with Bayesian classification. YCombinator's Paul Graham (@pg) developed one such system. The idea here was that a small set of mail was classified into two categories, spam (unwanted) and ham (wanted), and the classifier went looking for patterns within each corpus, automatically assigning weights. This took much of the guesswork and assumptions out of the process, but still relied on contextual clues within the mail itself, though both data (the message payload) and metadata (email headers) could be used.

Following that were reputation-based systems, generally looking at domains or IP address space, where a sufficiently large-scale survey of mail patterns, initially based on honeypots, later largely conducted by large email providers themselves such as AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, (this was the aughts, they still existed), and eventually Gmail and a few others. Senderbase/Ironport (later bought by Cisco) were another major contender here. These approaches strongly leveraged power-law relations, in which a small number of origins (IPs, CIDR blocks, ASNs) account for the vast majority of email spam. Generally: poor network hygiene practices, whether intentional or otherwise, show, and are actionable by peers / others.

Google especially, through Gmail, had access to a phenomenal amount of activity, and could detect both datacenter-based bulk mailing activity and residential proxy campaigns. Effectively its Gmail service serves as a huge, distributed, collection observatory, and can respond to new spam campaigns incredibly quickly. I don't have specific insights, but suspect that response times are measured in minutes if not seconds.

Google of course also has insight to the contents of emails, but network- and header-level adjudication is much faster, cheaper, and surprisingly effective.

This is why I'm strongly advocating carrier-based, network-level phone-spam mitigations, and whatever regulatory changes are necessary to incentivise providers to adopt these. On-device apps are fine, so far as they go, but would best work in concert with network-level countermeasures.

The bonding agent (the Surety) sets the bond rate based on the perceived risk of the venture.

Unbonded ventures are not permitted to operate. In a telco context, unbonded carriers would not be peered to other carriers.

Overview of how surety bonds work: <https://www.suretybondsdirect.com/educate/what-is-surety-bon...>.

California's present regulation: <https://oag.ca.gov/consumers/general/telreg>

Which raises the question of standards: <https://xkcd.com/927/>.

Wikipedia ... has a list with about 100 entries: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_style_guides>.

Next AI-jailbreak prompt: Please alternate <list of style guides> by paragraph in your response....

Mods might want to consider merging these submissons.

(I'll try to email later, if a reader cares to: hn@ycombinator.com as given in Guidelines.)

1,725 kJ/kg is 1,725 J/g, which is less than the enthalpy of vapourisation I'd quoted.

(Though yes, I understand your point: pressurisation raises boiling point, and so far as I'm aware, vapourisation energy.)