Hacker News

points by opengrass 1 day ago | 0 comments

Cancer. You won't talk to a human being anymore, and everyone will block numbers not in contacts.

The FCC and Verizon / ATT / T-Mobile allowed the phone system to be ruined in this country by continuing to route calls for spammers and scammers for decades. It's handfuls of people and organized crime causing the vast majority of the problems. Instead of actually investigating this stuff and shutting it down systemically and throwing these people in prison, they let it get so bad that we're just deciding as a society that we'd rather not have real-time voice communications because the few companies that run them haven't been good stewards of the technology.

[–] pvab3 1 day ago

isn't there some application for hardware attestation for calling? Like if I get an iMessage text I know its a real person with an iphone, but no similar system has been applied for phone calls. It can't be that hard for carriers to provide some kind of indication whether a number is an actual phone or not.

[–] ranger_danger 1 day ago

There are massive armies of cheap Chinese phone bot farms... I don't think getting spam from a physical phone is any indication there is a real person in the mix.

[–] ranger_danger 20 hours ago

> everyone will block numbers not in contacts.

Already been doing that for a solid 20+ years now, ever since PocketPC/Windows Mobile first introduced the feature. But OpenAI getting SIP support is not some great new existential threat... we've had similar APIs for years with services like Twilio.

[–] gib444 1 day ago

> and everyone will block numbers not in contacts.

I've had this configured for a while now due to my number being leaked all over the place and getting 4-8 spam calls a day :/