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Comment by paul7986 | Hacker News Reader

The option to silence unknown numbers in iOS13 has killed their annoyance for me. Soon though they'll flood voicemail boxes making just as annoying to figure out u missed something important or not. If that happens then captcha for voicemail needs to be a built in option. Though for now they arent a bother.

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> Soon though they'll flood voicemail boxes making just as annoying to figure out u missed something important or not.

Consider yourself lucky if that hasn't already been happening to you...

I have a landline for business reasons, and that thing gets a dozen robocalls a day. The telco's voicemail apparently has trouble understanding that two seconds of static followed by a hangup is not worth saving.

The cell spam is relentless. I even get three calls a week (always from new, different numbers) to my iPhone that leave messages in Mandarin. I don't speak Mandarin. I've never done business anywhere that would warrant that.

I needed a VM spam filter years ago.

Your cell number is from an area likely to have a lot (i.e. 5%, maybe) of Chinese folks (especially visitors rather than permanent immigrants), it's a scam aimed at them and you're just among the collateral annoyed. It is easy/cheap/etc. enough for the robocallers to just hit all the numbers in your area in hopes of a few bites from those who speak Mandarin and fall for the equivalent of the IRS scam in Mandarin.

You can install an anti-spam filter on your landline by connecting a modem on the landline. A modem allows you to control the phone-line programmatically: if the number is unwanted, just let your program to hang it up. Software like NCID (http://ncid.sourceforge.net/) provides a solution for interpreting the Caller-ID of the incoming calls.

Even better, because the modem only rejects incoming calls, it won't interfere with your phone. You can continue using it as usual.

All can be done on a Raspberry Pi.

https://murphy101blog.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/raspberry-pi-...

Of course, a graph where vertices are phone numbers and edges are "likely has in contact book" is probably fairly straightforwards, if not cheap, to buy...

They already seem to have caught on. Most of my robo calls leave voicemails now.

iOS13 is still in public beta, right? I'm looking forward to the GA of that release, which I guess is slated for Fall.

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