I find it astonishing that robocalls are still an issue in 2021, especially those coming from abroad. How can it be that hard to force authentication to use the phone network and permanently block malicious carriers?
Without partitioning world telephone connectivity? Easily.
> and permanently block malicious carriers?
By any reasonable definition involving unwanted traffic, ATT is a malicious carrier. Do you see the problem?
If you have family in India you can just not block the country and that should be good enough for everyone? Of course my solution that I came up in 5 minutes is probably not the one we'd actually want to implement, but this has been an issue for probably half a century at this point, I'd hope this is enough time to find one decent mitigation implementation.
Spoken with the hubris of someone who has never been more than five miles from the town they were born in, and who can't imagine why anyone else would do such a thing.
India isn't Mars, there are over a billion people living in it, most of whom have telephones, many of whom using them to talk to their friends and relatives who live abroad. The Indian diaspora is 18 million people, but I guess we should just write all of them off, their needs and desire to communicate doesn't matter.
You're going to need to come up with a better solution than 'Blackhole the entire country'.
Consider Albert, white, who was mugged twice by black men. Now when strangers turn to him - say to ask the time - he'll tell them the time if they are white but will put his head down and walk away quickly if they are black.
Is Albert racist, or is he responding to past trauma as you are suggesting by blocking all Indian calls?
For someone whose transactions are principally in their own home town and state, denying access to random long-distance numbers would be a feature.
The restriction isn't against calls from those of South Asian Indian heritage, it is against calls made from India.
A critical property of space is that it puts those who are in the same loction near one another, and those who are not, far apart. The fact that telecoms obliterates distance is not an unalloyed good.
As a side note, I am of the opinion that, if the effect causes real problems for the target segment, then focusing on it is reasonable. For example, if loans are harder to get for a minority because they are more likely to default, then (regardless of the intent/reason for making the loans harder) it makes sense to consider this bad and look for a solution. If it's something like a hair care product that is behind lock and key because it's stolen more often, then calling the store racist is a little over the top. I guess, in the end, it's a matter of balancing the interests of society against that of the store (or other party). There's a large gray area there.
I'm not sure why you're phrasing things that way, it's not my proposed solution to the problem.
A similar but more practical solution might be an account setting toggle for allowing or blocking international calls. That's not super practical for people living in a small nation who spend a lot of time on international calls. In a country with tens or hundreds of millions of people, it's more practical. Most people wouldn't have any trouble with having to arrange international calls beforehand. They might very well decide to rely more on Zoom or some other IP solution, which I think would be fine...
> If you have family in India you can just not block the country and that should be good enough for everyone? Of course my solution that I came up in 5 minutes is probably not the one we'd actually want to implement, but this has been an issue for probably half a century at this point, I'd hope this is enough time to find one decent mitigation implementation.
But to rephrase, my point is not about India or any country it's about how a basic linear classifier could probably detect most robocalls because *I* don't get calls from India so it's very unlikely that the call is legitimate.
I certainly don't care if foreign call centers can't call me from domestic numbers. If they want to call me and try to sell me some scam, they can use a number that's local to them.
At the same time that these companies don’t do anything about spam calls, they formed a consortium to push something called A2P-10DLC on services like Twilio, to force smaller businesses to pay more money for the privilege of texting their own customers. They say it’s for protecting the end users from spam, but clearly they don’t really care about that, instead they realized they were not getting a big enough piece of the pie of texting services and want to get more.
Now imagine the phone network, which hasn't seen a major core upgrade since SS7 in the 70s.
It's Hard.
The phone network on the other hand could work with a very simple reputation list. If you carrier fails to act against malicious actor they lose access to everyone else and that's it. Once they have a financial interest that forces them to look into it the problem would solve itself. Just today I've had 2 calls from "the government of Canada" telling me that there was a warrant out to my name.
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/stop-unwanted-robocalls...