Well, back around 2003 there were some people who felt that they were being terribly oppressed because they had to change phone numbers if they changed telephone service providers. The whinging and grizzling of these poor beleaguered martyrs rose up and offended heaven, eventually becoming so plaintive and forlorn that it caused congress to look up from where they were busily bending over their pages.
Congress went to the phone companies and said “we just completely rolled over and disregarded our constitutional responsibilities so an unelected, illegitimate President could launch an illegal war and secretly make deals with brown energy companies to keep the price of Texas oil high and extend the operating licenses of nuclear power plants that are well past their design lifetime. People are getting upset, so upset that they are willing to let teh gays get married, it’s clearly an apocalypse. We need a diversion!”
The phone companies, already busy with their illegal and unconstitutional wiretapping schemes that would later by retroactively pardoned by congress, replied that this would break caller ID, permanently, so they didn’t want to do it until some genius came up with a way to preserve caller ID and ANI.
Congress swelled up like a big paternal toad and said “Oh, c’mon, guys we can’t be bothered with your “science” and “technology” nonsense right now! Don’t you know were no longer a part of the reality based community? Appearance is reality, and we need the appearance of doing something for America, and we need it RIGHT NOW!”
The telcos, complaining so bitterly that millions of dollars were soiled with their greasy tears and had to be flushed down the toilet, complied, and the American People Rejoiced. And elected the Tea Party.
It has to be a human that speak decent English, which excludes most of the world´s poorest. Sufficiently good robocallers is a worse problem. Perhaps we will get roboanswerers, only forwarding calls that seem relevant, just as we have mail filters? Imagine having to answer something like a capcthka to be able to get through the machine and reach a friend?
It wouldn’t be much more annoying than growing up in a time of landlines, phone tag, and no cell phones.
That said, I probably won’t bother if it comes to that. This old guy has embraced texting over calling when it comes to contacting friends and loved ones.
Although I did see a slight uptick in out-of-the-blue text spamming recently that seems to have dropped off after I blocked the numbers. I hope that’s not going to become a thing too. If it does, I might get more drastic and only have my phone turned on during certain hours of the day.
There’s a reason i have my phone on silent. However it does make it awkward on the rare times i lose my phone in the apartment, i can’t call it to track it down.
I seem to remember a device that you could put on your landline. It would answer and say “Please enter the number 254.” The caller would have a certain amount of time to do that. If a live person typed in the number, the real landline would then ring. If not, it would hang up. This would block the robocallers. Of course someone who didn’t want or was too surprised to type the number would also be blocked.
It could be I’m remembering this wrong, but would it work?
It also seems to me that this could be programmed into a cell phone too.
“The average American household receives 848 pieces of junk mail per household, equal to 1.5 trees every year—more than 100 million trees for all U.S. households combined.”
I believe that when you answer the phone, your number gets flagged as a “live human being”/“quality business lead!” and sold onwards as part of a premium spam contact list. Spammers don’t just spam, they sell lists to other spammers too.
My mother gets scam calls all the time (in her case, bc landline and retiree), and is super paranoid about the (possibly fictional) “Can you hear me?”/“Yes” scam technique. She also gets the IRS scam pitch a lot, as does my bf’s elderly Korean mother; luckily, her English is not so good so she called her son immediately to ask him wtf that was about.
Or, something like, “You know, you’re making money scamming people out of their life savings. Are you sure you want to get reincarnated as an earthworm for the next thousand years?”
I set up my Asterisk box with a CAPTCHA (unknown numbers have to key in a digit to ring my phone, while people I know ring through), but I’m still so sick of the scammers that I finally, long overdue, ported out my landline to a much cheaper VoIP service. As it turns out, they offer a similar service, and rank calls by spam probability. You can set up a CAPTCHA for calls that rank as medium or high spam probability while letting other calls ring through.
It’s a damn shame it’s necessary to go to such trouble, though.
One of my Chinese colleagues tells me that it’s a scam where they claim to be the Chinese embassy and say that there is a package that you are supposed to pick up.
My cell is a south bronx area code and I’m still getting them.
