I’m getting the Windows support call 3 times a day now. Occasionally I’ll have a chat with them.
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but the battery in my kindle doesn’t last all that long!
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They are often dumb enough to tell you their own teamviewer quick access code if you walk then into it.
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Socialism!
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I suspect that it’s not too dissimilar from the fact that ‘return path’ and ‘from:’ can freely be entirely different in email without violating the relevant RFCs(common clients won’t necessarily let you author such messages without some prodding; but it works); but with a few extra decades of legacy inertia and uncaring telco hubris.
Also, ‘caller ID’ being(and, shamefully, remaining) a totally separate(and pitifully weak) consumer grade toy unrelated to the ANIs at are used for important stuff, like billing. Definitely that too.
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I’m a contractor and often get calls from employment agencies to discuss new roles. A phone call from an unknown number can often mean a new opportunity.
Or it can be that lady who keeps asking me if i’ve been in an accident 
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I’ve had those. I’m sitting there watching TV and get a call from apparently myself in a parallel universe
I have nothing to say to myself so Goodbye To You
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Shouldn’t they be FIXING THE PROBLEM rather than blaming consumers?
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Remember when phone calls were the main way people stayed in touch with each other? To the point that people were complaining nobody knew how to write a letter anymore?
Regulatory inaction is leading to the complete destruction of this perfectly good mass medium. I haven’t added a new number to my phone book in ages, nor had anybody ask me for mine.
It’s as if today’s decision-makers think that robocalls are a legitimate use of the system, and that the whole purpose of this legacy technology is to facilitate fraudulent advertising by spammers.
More than half of our peers have decided they could live without a landline in the last ten years or so. Maybe soon they’ll decide the whole “telephone” concept is more trouble than it’s worth.
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uhh pretty sure they are going to class action the telephone company
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I can’t help thinking that maybe the fascist overlords want the telephone to go bye-bye. Controlling the flow of information is a cornerstone of authoritarianism. The Soviet Union quite purposely underinvested in the public phone network (but had special networks for the apparatchiks).
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So this means that our phone company knows we are getting calls from suspicious 3rd world phone exchanges well enough to bill us for the calls, but not enough information about suspicious 3rd world phone exchanges to actually tell us we’re getting called from a suspicious place?
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Thr IRS scam, the car warranty scam, Rachel (debt scam), the Microsoft scam, and various real estate scams all leave messages.
Ask me how I know.
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Oh, yeah, I know too. Good point. My language could have been more precise. You are unlikely to miss something important from a legitimate business if you don’t answer and let the call go to voice mail. That does not mean that illegitimate enterprises won’t also leave messages – just that you are unlikely to miss calls from people you care about dealing with. You’ll still need to sort out the wanted from unwanted VMs.
Yeah, I got rid of my landline years ago, when I got a cellphone - I figured, why have two lines for getting robocalls? My mother talks about getting rid of her phone altogether every day she gets more than half-a-dozen robocalls - which is frequently. (Though it’s an empty threat for her, as she still heavily relies on it.) I sometimes think about getting rid of my phone, but there are a tiny number of situations that require it, so it stays.
Every time I get a scam call, it angers me because it doesn’t have to be this way. I used to report every violation of the do-not-call list, but gave up after I realized that the phone numbers were all spoofed and the callers never would give the name of their organization, so it did exactly nothing.
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Use Linux and the Microsoft scams are irrelevant too.
Sure, I can see this, but why don’t they messages?
Of course, you can usually find out if it’s a robo or scam number by searching for the number online. Often they will have already been reported and you can add it to your blocked list (while understanding that they will just call you from another number)
I turned off voicemail because it’s usually enough to have the missed call. It’s also another “inbox” to maintain.
But yes, on reflection i should turn voicemail on.
So this is because
-
Caller ID is not real? OOPS
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People wanted to keep their numbers when they switched phone companies, requiring technocrats to create the infrastructure for spoofing? OOPS
Whatever. We had a system that worked fine fifty years ago, when everyone was ignorant and stupid and lead-poisoned and flying to the moon. There has to be a way to fix all this and it doesn’t have to be by making it more complicated.
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