
America is losing the battle against robocalls - RachelF
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/05/23/america-is-losing-the-battle-against-robocalls
======
cameldrv
We need people to post a bond to make a call. Maybe $1. You can't call without
posting the bond. If, within 10 minutes of the end of the call, I send a text
to my phone company that I didn't like the call, the bond goes to charity. You
could even set something like this up as a smart contract on ethereum.

~~~
jawns
Similar ideas were once floated to stop email spam problems.

But it's untenable.

First, think of the impact it would have on lower-income people.

Second, think of how people might "game" the system. Anytime anyone is unhappy
with a caller for any reason, they can falsely report the caller for spam.

Third, think of what position this puts phone companies in. They then have to
be the arbiter of whether every reported call is actually spam. They'd
probably have to set up an appeals process. It would be a nightmare,
logistically.

Fourth, who would get to decide which charity the bond goes to? That decision
alone is a hornet's nest.

~~~
voidmain
I've always wished for this in every communication medium.

Charging someone for calling you would also block them permanently, so almost
no one is going to do this to their friends just to mess with them. There
should be no appeal: if someone wants to charge every caller, that's totally
fine. People will stop calling them pretty fast. Likewise I would let the
callee choose the charity, or even keep the money. All that matters is that if
you are calling someone who wants your calls you won't be charged, and if you
aren't, you should be. If you aren't sure, you pay your money and take your
chances that you are in fact imposing on someone else.

I can't see how this would hurt anyone of any socio economic level other than
spammers. If you are calling someone who doesn't want your calls, you are a
spammer.

------
jawns
Here's the solution that works for me:

Numbers that aren't already in my contacts list or outgoing calls list get
sent straight to voicemail. I use Google Voice, so when people leave legit
messages, I get a transcription and don't have to waste time listening to the
messages themselves.

I get about 10-12 spam calls a day but this system works well.

~~~
wilkystyle
Is this a feature built into Android? I also have a Google Voice number, but
can't send calls that come to my cell phone number straight to voicemail
(iOS).

~~~
mceachen
Both iOS and Android have a "do not disturb" mode where, when enabled, only
phone numbers in your contact book will ring your phone. I just leave it on
all the time.

[https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204321](https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT204321)

[https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/6111295](https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/6111295)
(see "Option 3: Priority notifications only", and pick Contacts Only.)

------
overcast
'Lenny' shattered the previous record of 8:37 in our office today. Had a
spammer on the phone for 13:47 trying to send him one of four white papers. As
you can imagine, he was very indecisive.

~~~
bognition
gah, if only I had enough spare time to troll spammers for a quarter of an
hour

~~~
NickBusey
I'm pretty sure they're referring to Lenny the telemarketer bot.
[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lenny+telemarke...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=lenny+telemarketer+bot)

~~~
atonse
This is amazing hahahahaha. I love it.

Although I still feel bad for the telemarketer operator. I don't think anyone
chooses that kind of job. I'd rather just not answer the phone.

~~~
krageon
Their job is actively harmful, because they exist to prey on the class of
people that can't see through their bullshit. I agree that they are the low-
level operators (and therefore perhaps not worth the effort to punish), but I
do think it is high time we start viewing predatory sales as exactly what it
is: predatory.

~~~
atonse
I am simply saying that many of the people that work as telemarketers are in
that job because it was the only job available.

Would you take that job? No. Would I? No. But if it were the only job
available, you bet your ass I will take it and put up with the humiliation of
90% of angry callers to support my family.

Yes, I agree that it's a scummy tactic, but I still make a distinction between
their customer (the company paying them to do the job) and the actual
operator.

~~~
loco5niner
> ... I still make a distinction between their customer (the company paying
> them to do the job) and the actual operator.

Nope. Lying to someone because 'my superior told me to' is still lying.

> Yes, I agree that it's a scummy tactic

So, how low are you willing to go on the "scummy tactic" scale?

------
wilkystyle
A simple solution for me would be if my phone allowed me to send all calls
that are not in my contacts list to voicemail directly, without ringing the
phone at all. Seems like very easy functionality to implement, and yet it's
just not possible at all (at least not on iOS).

~~~
elahd
This is doable on iOS.

Settings > Do Not Disturb with the following settings:

\- Do Not Disturb: On

\- Scheduled: Off

\- Silence: Always

\- Allow Calls From: All Contacts

You'd lose the ability to use Do Not Disturb to silence your phone, say,
overnight, but this would do what you're describing.

Personally, I've opted in to T-Mobile's spam block feature. I don't get any
robocalls.

~~~
wilkystyle
Yes, but this also silences your notifications...

~~~
elahd
True. This can by bypassed one contact at a time by editing the contact's text
tone. The text tone edit screen has an "Emergency Contact" switch that
overrides DND for that contact. AFAIK there's no way to turn on app
notifications.

This setup definitely isn't ideal. Just want to share the approach for people
who find the tradeoffs acceptable.

~~~
wilkystyle
FWIW, I tried your exact configuration (but added "Repeat Calls: No") and it's
been really useful. I think it's actually worth the trade-off for me. Thanks
for sharing! :)

------
corysama
There’s something I clearly don’t understand that hopefully someone can
explain: If some customer of a phone company is making tens of thousands of
ID-altered calls every day, shouldn’t that be glaringly obvious to said phone
company that the customer is abusing their system?

~~~
bcheung
Unfortunately once you're on the network there isn't much security to prevent
spoofing. It's pretty easy to get access as well. I had a personal VoIP
gateway and was able to just set the caller ID to whatever I wanted.

It's so bad that you can get into someone else's voicemail just by calling a
number and spoofing the caller id to be that same number. No security
whatsoever. It's pathetic.

I think the old telephone network is beyond saving and we just need to abandon
it and move to VoIP services that provide better controls.

~~~
fapjacks
Everything already is VOIP. You haven't been able to use a modem on a phone
line in fifteen years. The problem is these behemoth telecommunication
companies. There's no reason at all for the phone system not to be exactly
like using any sane video messenger software of the last twenty years, _except
for_ those big ass phone companies that will do anything to keep from becoming
"dumb pipes" of this kind of telephony.

~~~
rascul
> You haven't been able to use a modem on a phone line in fifteen years.

I was using a dialup modem in 2013. There are also a bunch of dialup ISPs that
still exist today and provide service over phone lines to people with dialup
modems. Maybe what you say is true in some areas but it certainly is false as
a blanket statement.

~~~
Rjevski
I believe you can use a modem over G711... I know for sure you can send faxes
over it (I’ve done it) despite it being VoIP.

~~~
fapjacks
Yes, faxing is done with T.38, and faxing is actually more reliable than using
a modem. I spent some years running a fax system over VOIP and trying to get
it to work. It's doable (as in some _special cases_ of using a modem over VOIP
lines) but it's absolutely not doable in _most_ other contexts on VOIP for
various reasons including signal compression and packet loss, and the parent
is dreaming if they think they can hook their 14.4 modem up and dump that
signal onto a "telephone" line to (for example) a BBS in another timezone and
have it work. The key here is non-local, not the copper lines the parent
commenter is still using to dial up a local ISP. This is obviously a _special
case_ of the telephone company local to their area maintaining the copper
lines for whatever purposes, keeping the copper from their house to a local
ISP gateway. But Comcast and Verizon have been actively ripping copper lines
out wherever they buy up local phone companies that still have them. I have
asked the phone companies for an actual copper landline in every major city
I've lived in over the last ten years and couldn't get one, specifically
trying to make my life easier running this system I mentioned earlier. The
special edge case exception is actually having a copper line to your local
ISP. It's definitely not the rule. Don't believe me? Take a few minutes to
call up the phone companies in cities around the country and ask for a copper
phone line. Almost all of them won't have copper. And I'm telling you from
years of experience that using a modem across a non-copper VOIP line is flaky
in exceptionally good circumstances and impossible in most cases.

~~~
Rjevski
In my case I was faxing over plain G711 through a SIP to analog phone jack
converter. Not saying it’s a good idea or reliable, but it worked in my case.

So the parent post could’ve very well thought he had used his modem on a real
copper line while in fact it was VoIP, just the compression was light enough
that it still worked fine like in my case.

~~~
rascul
No clue if I had a copper line. I didn't mean to dispute that it was or wasn't
VOIP or copper, my point was only that I was using a dialup modem five years
ago, in direct contradiction to the statement that they haven't worked for 15
years. This was in Chambersburg, PA through Centurylink.

------
dredmorbius
This will be the death of general telephony.

There's no highly-evident replacement, but I suspect that what does supplant
it 1. will emerge from a socioeconomic elite (as telephony, email, and mobile
did, or letter-writing in an earlier era), 2. will have _very_ cheap unwanted-
contact rejection, from a cognitive-load standpoint (by the time my phone's
rung or a voicemail's been left, it's too late), and 3. will probably
intrinsically include multimedia -- text, likely image & video.

I'd like to see robust crypto in authentication, identity, integrity, and
encryption of both data and metadata. Multople independeent peersistent,
though at least partially repudiable, identities would be very nice-to-have. I
have at best modest hopes.

Both elements may be undermined by an ease-of-use dynamic, though that's
short-term gain for long-term cost.

In the near term, expect to see a proliferation of conflicting standards and
systems.

------
StephenConnell
I was getting 1-5 three second voicemails a day. Robots being detected and
sent to voicemail, then detecting and hanging up on my voicemail. I added 30
seconds of music to the end of my "please text or email me" message the
voicemails have all stopped.

~~~
drdeadringer
> I added 30 seconds of music to the end of my "please text or email me"
> message the voicemails have all stopped.

Everybody has different musical tastes and particularly about what one shares
via a VM message, and I'm curious about what you selected. If you don't mind
sharing, what segment did you cherry-pick?

~~~
StephenConnell
Instrumental portion of a Lindsey Stirling song.

------
hedora
Fine the telcos per call that gets through, and ramp the fine up in a
predictable way, so that it becomes an existential threat after a few years.

This would immediately put an end to caller id spoofing.

~~~
bcheung
It would be hard to fine them since they did nothing to encourage this
behavior, nor do they have very much control in preventing it.

~~~
toasterlovin
Yeah, but of all the actors in the system, they’re the ones in a position to
do something. It’s like making banks responsible for fraudulent credit card
purchases.

------
naringas
my smartphone already blocks some numbers (but I block every one of them),
so... shared block lists? just like in adblocking software

~~~
ryan-c
Block lists don't work when they can just spoof arbitrary numbers.

------
Florin_Andrei
For me it started this year. Once every few days I get a spam call, sometimes
in languages I don't understand (chinese, etc). It's always during business
hours.

I'm pretty sure my phone is in some do not call database, but that doesn't
seem to help much recently.

Our phones need a "this is spam" button, and that data needs to go to the
telecom, and they need to do something with it.

~~~
dorfsmay
But isn't the incoming number easy to spoof?

~~~
Florin_Andrei
It is. But I'd imagine the telecom has lower level information about that
connection.

~~~
jonathankoren
You can sometimes enroll in spam detection from your cell phone provider. For
some, but not all, calls T-Mobile will tag the call "Scam Likely". The call
still goes through. It's not much at all really, because I already don't
answer calls from numbers I don't recognize. Still it might be useful for some
marks^H^H^H^H^H folks.

------
nopassrecover
I appreciate the US has 10x the population, but Australia’s Do Not Call
Register ([https://www.donotcall.gov.au](https://www.donotcall.gov.au)) has
been fairly effective at reducing these calls (with a domestic origin at
least).

It works as a central government register with a threat and imposition of
large penalties for companies who disregard it.

~~~
haimez
It's international scammers that are the problem, not internal corporations.
An internal registry hurts more than it helps because it provides a list of
callable numbers, and chasing down scammers is way, way, way too expensive to
enforce by any practical measure. Australia doesn't have this problem for the
same reason OSX didn't have viruses in the early naughts. Not a big enough
target.

------
awat
The powers that be are not properly incentivized to battle against robocalls
and in many cases are simply looking the other way.

------
dgudkov
Letting anybody in the world call you any time without any restrictions is
absurd.

It should be possible to enforce a mode that requires the caller to send you a
request for permission to call first (like contact request in Skype). And
unless you explicitly granted such permission all calls from that number
should be automatically rejected.

~~~
orev
You’re talking about a system that’s over 100 years old and has been in the
hands of monopoly companies for most of that time. Ajit Pai has said
(surprisingly astutely) that you can solve this problem by requiring some kind
of authentication for calls. Even getting that in place seems like an
impossible task (though for some reason he doesn’t see how someone in his
position could force that to happen). What your talking about is more
difficult than that.

------
bcheung
Even ignoring unknown numbers got too distracting. My phone never comes out of
Do not Disturb mode unless I'm expecting an important call.

I don't know why we have such crappy cell phone audio quality and such an
outdated convention. Why not have an opt-in protocol similar to a friend
request on social networks before you can call someone?

~~~
pishpash
That's exactly it though: PTSN will be dead soon. You barely need it except to
talk to the older generation.

~~~
orev
Right. Oh, and businesses use it too. Just as soon as we get rid of those,
everything will be fine.

------
WalterBright
I try to sell them a compiler.

------
sureaboutthis
I wonder if I sent out 3.4 billion robo-emails how quickly the law would come
knocking on my door.

From what I've read, the issue lies in the amount of money telco is making
from all these calls and, if their income would drop to zero from them,
robocalls would stop immediately.

------
olivermarks
America has never been a position to be 'winning' the battle against
robocalls. I'm in California and currently typically get well over 10 calls a
day, many with Chinese language voicemail messages. Hard to see how there is
any way to stop this...

~~~
jvagner
The laws changed a while ago, I hadn't gotten a single spam call in 10+ years
of cell phone ownership.

In the last 6 months, it's gotten apocalyptic. Mostly from calls from from the
first 6 digits of my current phone number, and most of them calling to extend
my car warranty.

8-15 calls each day.

I've tried ignoring them, I've answered them, I've spoken to the calling
humans (English speakers, the minute you ask for a manager or to be removed,
they hang-up... often, the next call comes within 10 minutes, same people,
robodialing engaged).

I called AT&T to see what options I had to minimize teh pain. Can I turn off
calling entirely? No. Can I have ringing go straight through to voicemail? No,
but I can make it happen after 5 seconds.

I've installed robonomo, AT&T's anti-spam calling app, Hiya, TrueCaller, etc.

They don't work well enough.

I'm on an iPhone 7. I like the 8, but not enough to upgrade. I don't like
FaceID, and I don't like the notch, and I have an iPad Pro, and so I leave my
iPhone on silent all the time, automatically deny any incoming calls that I
notice, and have a voicemail greeting that says I don't check voicemail nor
accept calls on this line.

It's that bad and annoying. I do have a Google Voice number that I give out,
and which gets almost no spam calls for now. I changed that setting to
announce that it's a Google Voice number, so I take the occasional business
call.

But if the new iPhones continue to be engineered around FaceID, and if FaceID
isn't better (and work with sunglasses and goggles and helmets) and if the
notch persists, when this contract is up, I'm pretty sure I'll nix the iPhone
contract and live with Google Voice on my desktop, and the iPad for mobile
texting/connecting.

~~~
gergles
You actually _can_ turn off cellular network calling altogether, if you are
willing to do that.

Dial (star)#67# (or call 611 if it doesn't show up there) to see what number
your voicemail center is. Then dial (star)21(star)1(that number)#. That will
automatically forward all calls, at the network level, to your voicemail.

To cancel this, dial #21#.

~~~
jvagner
Thanks for that, very cool. Giving it a shot.

Are these documented somewhere? The response screen is pretty clear on what's
going on here, lots of interesting things.

------
jacksmith21006
Wait until

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1mEm2Fy08](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bd1mEm2Fy08)
Google Duplex Demo from Google IO 2018 - YouTube

Is launched.

~~~
philca
How many business answer the phone by saying "How can I help you?", are they
lying? Are they not even close to have a system like that?

~~~
jacksmith21006
Google shared they removed personal information from the calls like the names
of the locations.

They already have the TTS aspect out in beta. It uses something called
WaveNet.

Here this might help.

[https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-
audio...](https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/)

and

"Introducing Cloud Text-to-Speech powered by DeepMind WaveNet technology"

[https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/03/introducing-
Clo...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/03/introducing-Cloud-Text-
to-Speech-powered-by-Deepmind-WaveNet-technology.html)

Testing will start on the rest later this summer.

[https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-
natur...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-
conversation.html)

On the link some more examples of calls. Pretty cool stuff. Really just shows
how far ahead Google is in the AI space at every layer of the stack.

The TTS at scale required the TPUs. Doing 16k cycles through a DNN in real-
time is a really intensive compute task but then to offer at a competitive
price to using the old way needs custom silicon.

~~~
philca
I missed
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17094231](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17094231)

Ah I was not the only one finding it suspicious, Thank you for your links,
pretty interesting research quite far away from a real product though.

This Weekend was the bay area makerfaire, where the Google stand was in front
of the one of Nintendo, they were showing the exact same tech, but the Google
one was really underwhelming, it was actually interesting to compare it.

I don't trust Google, ok let's wait for a product I guess.

~~~
jacksmith21006
The voice part is already in beta and on the Google Home.

[https://cloud.google.com/text-to-
speech/docs/wavenet](https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/wavenet)

That is the part that freaked out people as you can not tell the difference
between humans and computers any longer.

Google is using a DNN at 16k cycles a second in real-time. Suspect that was
only possible to do at scale and at a reasonable cost with the TPUs.

They are competing with a much less compute intensive approach. But Wavenet
gets a much better result.

The other aspects of Duplex will enter testing later this summer. So not long
to wait.

"Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real-World Tasks Over the
Phone"

[https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-
natur...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2018/05/duplex-ai-system-for-natural-
conversation.html)

This is the type of thing that contributed me buying the Google Home. Google
is just so far ahead of everyone else in AI. Really every layer of the stack.

------
Zamicol
Isn't the problem the FCC regulation prohibits carriers from taking serious
action like blocking robocallers?

How can this not be taken care of with gmail style spam rules?

~~~
olliej
The fcc literally had a competition to identify to robocalls.

It’s not trivial - gmail identifies spam by bayesian filtering coupled with
the amount of duplicate spam sent to numerous different addresses.

Identifying spam/robocalls requires being able to parse arbitrary spoken word.
People keep thinking its a matter of blocking a number, but the reality is
that the security of phone networks is laughably broken with respect to number
and identity spoofing. It essentially renders the id useless for identifying
spam

------
ghaff
Fortunately, it's still at a tolerable level on my cell. Though it does force
me to use Do Not Disturb so I don't get awakened when traveling.

Landline is mostly a lost cause. I still keep one for various reasons but I
mostly ignore it for inbound calls. If things get much worse I may just shut
off all the ringers.

------
circa
Yeah it’s getting worse too. I’ve had the same number for about 18 years and I
definitely get about 5-12 calls per day. Usually weekdays and during work
hours. Our business line is awful. Constant calls all day long. About 25%
robocalls

------
millzlane
Should I answer Is a Bazooka in this battle.

[https://www.shouldianswer.com/](https://www.shouldianswer.com/)

------
greggman
rather than complain I'm curious what a solution would be. It seems pretty
clear we need to get rid of the current phone system to fix this.

------
elvirs
the solution is easy: end unlimited calling. make unlimited plans $10/mo
cheaper but start charging 1 cent for every call. legitimate companies and
regular people with normal usage will have no complaints but these charges
will put robocallers out of business real quick

~~~
jvagner
The robocallers aren't calling from cell phones.

~~~
elvirs
doesnt have to be a cellphone. they are connecting to the rest of the
telephone lines somehow and do have get account to do it. Im pretty sure
technicality of implementation is not that hard. Its the enforcement of
something like this that people desperately need is close to impossible with
the dysfunctional shit show called the government we have.

~~~
jvagner
oh, you're suggesting all calls are per-minute, including landlines and VOIP.

realistically, wouldn't that logic extend to all the internet, we should all
pay for traffic, to and from servers?

i think "phones" are a dying tech, and proper legal constraints and controls
on the tech we pay for would be easier.

i don't see why i can't pre-approve callers, or limit inbound calls to my
Favorites/VIP list. Treating phones like "telephones" is one of the problems,
treating phones like tech would make solutions easier to implement.

