AT&T CEO interrupted by a robocall during a live interview | Hacker News Reader

AT&T CEO interrupted by a robocall during a live interview

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This honestly feels staged. I have never seen anyone in any interview receive a call and pull out their phone to see who was calling. So in this ONE case, someone was calling and he had to take out his phone? I imagine CEOs are getting called constantly, even when they are in interviews. How come they never pull out the phone for other calls? Do they just use airplane mode? If so, then why wasn’t it enabled for this interview?

Just like most of what AT&T does, this is a lie. To what end I’m not sure. To show everyone their incompetence in dealing with the problem? To try to put pressure on the FCC to make some rules (that AT&T will fight against because it hates regulation)? Or maybe they’re just trying to poke fun at the problem.

Edit: OK, so this was on CSPAN, not an actual TV interview. It does seem more natural than something that is clearly staged, so now I have my doubts.

My guess is this is leading up to a PR campaign where the industry will make a big deal about how seriously they are tackling the 'newly discovered' issue as an attempt to undercut a push for actual governmental oversight and regulation.

I mean, if they fix the problem, why would you be upset the government wasn't involved? If the problem persists, we can always have the conversation again. Barring anything else, government solutions tend to be inflexible (which is a feature, but should be much more selectively used).

Because the moment people aren't focused on the issue, it will return.

I doubt it. It may mutate, but regulation has never stopped that sort of thing. If anything, it gains legitimacy by finding a loophole (technical compliance), and it's unlikely anyone will build the political capital to amend the law. And even if they did, it will just mutate yet again.

Look at net neutrality, the official corporate statement is of course they support and free and open internet. However "According to lobbying disclosures filed with the U.S. Senate and reviewed by Sludge, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and their largest trade groups, the Internet and Television Association (NCTA) and CTIA, have spent $190.3 million on lobbying the FCC and other government bodies, much of it to reverse net neutrality, since the 2015 rules were passed."

Source: https://readsludge.com/2018/06/11/today-net-neutrality-offic...

And the net result of that is what? Why would any business want to have regulations passed dictating what they can do? You can support a free, open internet and still not want regulations dictating your behavior. They aren't mutually exclusive.

ATT own FCC; they're not scared of "oversight and regulation" because their lawyers write all of that stuff. ISTM this is more likely to be starting a campaign against NN or even the sort of interconnection we see from VOIP providers or other services like Twilio.

"Can you imagine?! Our CEO got a call that appeared to be from his golf buddy, so he interrupted some interview. Only, and here's the amazing part, it wasn't actually from his golf buddy! It turns out that some evil hackers have subverted the strong security of SS7 to place calls that appear to be from phone numbers assigned to other parties! We can fix this if we get a $1 payment from the VOIP provider every time we terminate a VOIP call."

Or the wireless and traditional wireline players will make a case to the FCC that the bad actors are the VoIP-over-public-Internet providers and such providers alone require special oversight and regulation.

> So in this ONE case, someone was calling and he had to take out his phone?

Watch the 19 second video. He didn't take out his phone, it was a notification on his smartwatch.

All of my comment equally applies to people wearing Apple Watches on air. I have never seen anyone receive a call on one, or look at one and take some action. It’s still staged.

I doubt it is staged. I'm not popular and I get 25 to 30 of these per day. All my calls are permanently forwarded to google voice. I check Google Voice every few days for important things.

I've made peace with the notion that if a family member dies I will find out a few days later, but I refuse to get calls from these people that honestly should have their eyes plucked out.

And what would be the benefit to ATT to stage this?

this seems a little extreme

Plucking their eyes out or forwarding all your calls to GVoice?

Not OP, but I'm just not willing to sell out my privacy just to deal with robocalls.

The eye-plucking, though, that I'm totally okay with.

GVoice

Coincidentally, I recently had a family member involved in a terrible accident and I was the first person called by the police officer (an unknown number) because I appeared first in my family member's phone (and I subsequently had to relay the news). As such, I don't care about robocalls because you really never know. Even if the probability is low, I'd rather be bothered in those situations. I just stopped caring about something that ultimately doesn't matter in the big picture.

Back to the point, I think it was staged, but more to illustrate the CEO also is getting robocalled. If he sat up there and just said it, who wouldn't roll their eyes and say "yeah sure". Without being in the right place, recording at the right time, there is literally no way to convey "I'm having this problem too", even then, there'd be skeptics.

I hope your family member is recovering, but if the police officer had not reached you from the officer’s phone, would they have tried calling you from your family member’s phone? Was your number in your family member’s phone tagged with an “ICE” (“In Case of Emergency”) or some local equivalent, so emergency service-folk know who to call, and could you green-list calls from their number?

More generally, what chances of a call being an emergency contact versus a spamming robo-call are people willing to accept? If I had a hemophiliac child, or an at-risk geriatric parent, I would be far more willing to accept all calls. Since I do not, I use a robo-call blocking service (Nomorobo, but any of several would do, if/until Stir/Shaken works.)

Unfortunately the phone's screen was shattered during the accident (made inoperable); I am unsure how I was the one contacted, though I doubt I was their ICE. I assume it was a simple "My first name starts with an A and we shared an uncommon last name". To that degree I don't really care, I'm happy we were contacted immediately.

With the scenario experienced, as I said, I don't really care about robocalls. There's that old saying about "If it won't matter in 5 years, don't spend more than 5 minutes getting angry about it". With that in mind, I just sort of filter out the annoyance. Yes, robocalls are annoying, but again, I prefer it over rhacker's alternative of finding out about important things later.

There were posts on here months ago about how Facebook had a pretty aggressive notification process for users that started leaving the service. I'd stopped posting on there shortly after the accident because my posts became more about my family's status - if felt cheap/dirty/not-right to then post about a meme or something silly. The notifications annoyed me, so I disabled social network notifications and generally "stopped caring" about these types of minor annoyances overall.

My point is that I agree that robocalls are annoying and, sure, I hope someone gets fed up enough to attempt to fix them, but in the grand scheme of my life and happiness, eh. If it happens, it happens, if it doesn't, it doesn't.

I just have my phone permanently on silent / no-vibrate. And I check it when I feel like it (e.g. when checking HN or other news, between meetings, etc.). And I redirect unanswered calls to google voice to get the transcription of voicemail as a text.

If you’re not required to be on call for reason or the other, I can only recommend this approach. No wasted time with robo calls and also puts some humility into your hot shot boss that thinks it’s ok to try to call you about whatever at 1045pm. ;)

If I happen to get a robocall when I'm not doing anything - say waiting on CI to finish - then I'll talk to them and make my way as high up the food chain as possible then tell them to take me off of their robocall list.

If enough people waste their time, then it should become a less profitable strategy.

Does it seem that this strategy is affecting the number of robocalls you receive? Does it appear to increase or decrease?

I am wondering if robocallers rate phone numbers based on their interactions and possibly share that data...

I've not noticed a change. I actually don't think my strategy would make a difference on an individual scale. But if widely deployed, I think it could.

What does being popular have to do with robocalls? It’s more likely they target people who pick up often. In that case, don’t answer the phone unless you know the number

Staged to what benefit?

Here's then Republican Presidential candidate Jeb Bush getting confused by a phone call on his watch[0]. Here's Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi getting a notification on her watch during the State of the Union Address a couple of years ago[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4in1AUemxqM&frags=pl%2Cwn [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/why-was-nancy-pelo...

And Hillary Clinton getting a call from "the grandkids" during an event meant to appeal to moms. Totally not staged.

https://www.indy100.com/article/hilary-clinton-facetime-call...

Not everything is a conspiracy.

Still two options:

1. The CEO was being inattentive and discourteous to the interviewer and the entire live audience, by not silencing or ignoring incoming call notifications from every source prior to taking the stage.

2. The call notification was intentionally staged to occur during the interview.

Either way, it does not reflect well upon AT&T, in my opinion. A live interview is a performance, of sorts, and the pre-performance preparations were either incompetently negligent, or cynically manipulative.

> OK, so this was on CSPAN, not an actual TV interview

CSPAN is actual TV.

It’s actual _reality_ TV. We’ve been trained very well not to know the difference any more.

The difference is that every second of ‘reality TV’ seems very fake.

>I have never seen anyone in any interview receive a call

That's nice, but so what?

For comparison, actual famous people have been interrupted by telephone calls during the taped (before an audience) panel news/comedy show "Have I Got News For You?" all the time. Real people. Real telephone calls. It happens because a certain type of person when you say "Make sure your phone is off" does not in fact make sure their phone is off, why should they, it's fine, right? And then it rings. Embarrassing.

I assume in most cases they just edit it out of the show but if the reaction is especially amusing or they refer back to it in later parts of the show it's easier to leave it in. Because it's a show with actual famous people rather than "real" people there's not really an option to e.g. take their phone away. Who would agree to that if they're famous? "Are you claiming I'm too stupid to turn it off?" Oops.

And no, what happens isn't that people like CEOs are constantly in phone calls. They have someone in the middle, a Personal Assistant, paid to take those calls without wasting their time on frivolities. "Hello, Mr Person's office? No I'm afraid he's busy right now, what did you want to talk to him about?". He may or may not be busy, it's just easier to always say that.

Every person they give their number to is another person who might waste their time, so most people get the PA's number.

I have never seen X happen.

I doesn't happen very often -- but it does happen.

I feel like this for most sensational news stories that I hear on news. Too much agenda in every news pisses me off. I wish there was a way to filter out such agenda.

I didn't do this but it has crossed my mind... The fastest way to end robocalls forever:

Sign up every damn congressional seat's phone number to ever scammy health insurance, hotel timeshare and PC help desk website's contact me form.

Do you have a list of their personal cell phone numbers?

Unfortunately no.

Well, then I guess it’s not “the fastest way to end robocalls forever“, is it?

Would you accept "second fastest way to end robocalls forever... maybe..."? ;)

We briefly had Lindsay Graham's?

I assume you're aware, but it's known that companies give white-glove treatment to all congresspeople and their family and their friends.

From robocalls to health insurance to the credit reporting agencies to comcast, these folks encounter none of the problems regular folks hit.

Do you have any examples?

Not true: https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/11/25/congress-mak...

> "The problems have frustrated Markey as they have worsened over the years. He’s been known to pick up spam calls to his office, just to see what he can find out about who placed them."

The majority of these robocalls companies are fly by night operations engaging in illegal sales tactics. They aren't going out of their way to avoid members of congress.

Even if they wanted to, it's not like there is a list of personal phone numbers of important people to avoid calling.

>From robocalls to health insurance to the credit reporting agencies to comcast, these folks encounter none of the problems regular folks hit.

Sure some companies go out of their way to cater to them, and most of them (ab)use their position to make some problems go away. But most of the time people don't even know who they are. There are 435 members of the House of Representatives, and sizeable fraction changes every 2 years.

The majority of them aren't individually important enough to warrant that kind of extreme deference from every company.

I think John Oliver did something like this with the FCC representatives, robocalling them every few minutes[1].

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/robocall-john-oliver-last-week-toni...

I've been getting spam emails from MidwayUSA, a online gun retailer, despite that I never visited their website, or anything related to guns, and their unsubscribe process is completely non-functional. I was forwarding their emails to the FTC spam address, but eventually took the liberty to create a midway account for them and subscribing to their "eblast lists" (their own words). So far it hasn't accomplished anything.

Regarding caller ID spoofing part of these robocalls... I would think the telco knows the number of each connected phone line, why can't they overwrite whatever number the caller supplies?

Historically, spoofing came from people with Primary Rate Interfaces (PRI, aka calling over T1), where you got to set the outgoing caller id because you might be running inbound calling separate from outbound calling, and you were presumed to know what you're doing.

In the last 20 years, give or take, the spoofing comes from VoIP carriers that are interconnected to the traditional telcos where you're receiving the calls. Your carrier has no idea which customer of the other carrier is making the call, only what the other carrier told them. The other carrier may also be passing through calls from another carrier -- there's a lot of traffic mixing going on.

A "phone line" is kind of an outdated concept. Even traditional call centers had many numbers carried as digital data over something like a T1 line, and nowadays how do you connect a "line" to a call center running VoIP over a business-grade cable modem connection? The "line" is just metadata, like caller ID.

They don't know. the phone system was designed on a trust the caller to not lie system...

What if a call is originating from AT&T and going to a Verizon number, AT&T could mark the number as "tots legit" and then Verizon would be unable to tell if AT&T was lying or not, in fact if one company started clamping down then another company might start openly acting as a haven for these sorts of calls and making a lot more money by being the only option to look legit... Finally, if these calls are originating overseas you might have to go through the chinese government to actually try and force a bad acting telco to start cracking down, that sort of pressure would take the US government - while tech companies have some pull overseas a lot of the local service companies (including probably AT&T) have nothing to pressure the chinese government with.

They could pass you the originator information and refuse to complete calls from networks that don't give them that information. But they won't because that's less money for them

Ideally there would be a ANI number, which should be the originating number. Which is used to know who to bill as the call goes from telco to telco. Most phones don't use this, it isn't required and can also be spoofed. Then there is the CSID which is what shows up on your caller ID and that can be set to whatever we want. What we really need is to force ANI because that is transmitted before the first ring and the CSID is after the second ring. But hardly anyone wants to have a ANI set, especially the spammers.

Link to the video: https://mobile.twitter.com/cspan/status/1108422307008184326

I use google voice to screen my calls, if there was a way on iOS to disable calls not via Google Voice on my phone that would probably solve the robo call problem for me.

Context on the recent media coverage of robocalls:

"I Get a Robocall While Making a Video About Robocalls" by Vlogbrothers: https://youtu.be/mNIgh3JMDcQ

"Robocalls" by Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: https://youtu.be/FO0iG_P0P6M

HA HA HA HA

PR stunt

True or not, the comment is rather unsubstantiated with just two words.

Most of the comments are unsubstantiated. So what? The sentiment is succinct. It's a useful contribution insofar that one may upvote, rather than adding to the noise.

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