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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

If someone from the US wants to sell me a vacuum cleaner sure, but when "Michael" from "Microsoft" is calling me from a call center in India to tell me that my computer has a virus, how many legitimate phone calls can come from India anyway? How about the solution is to allow me to block any call not made from North America/Europe and be done with it.

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.

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I would love to be able to block all calls from Texas. Every day I get 5+ spam calls, starting at 7:30am, almost all from Texas. If I could block all of Texas, then 90%+ of the spam calls I get would go away.

They spoof their location

> how many legitimate phone calls can come from India anyway

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'.

The person you're responding to wants the ability to block callers in India from reaching him. I don't think he wants the ability to block callers in India from reaching you.

Let's try a Gedankenexperiment.

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?

Muggings rarely happen at intercontinental range.

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.

Blocking Indian calls is not racist, just like nullrouting all of China to stop a legion of bruteforcers hammering your servers is not racist. It's a measured response to a real problem, which you are free to not like.

That is, unfortunately, not the way society as a whole sees it. It is fairly common for stores to be attacked as racist when they lock down products that are targeted at a specific minority segment; even when they have clear data indicating those products are stolen more than others. The intent and reason for actions is no longer the deciding factor in whether or not something is racist/biased; the effect is what's focused on.

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.

> Is Albert racist, or is he responding to past trauma as you are suggesting by blocking all Indian calls?

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...

This is a bit hurtful, especially considering that I address this right in my comment:

> 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.

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