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Comment by Mario9382 | Hacker News Reader

I thought this was excessive and impossible, but as I was reading, I realized nowadays everything you say is technically possible. The future gives me the chills.

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The likely outcome is that the phone system becomes massively more locked down. Your phone will only ring if the caller has a number which is backed by a real ID, particularly one from your own country. It will become increasingly difficult to contact someone you don’t have a legitimate connection to.

The banking system will become increasingly fraud resilient with better real time detection of fraud.

Your phone may even have its own AI on your side listening in on the call and sounding the alarm when a number from Nigeria starts using an AI voice pretending to be your son.

You would just get called from an agent (bot) based in your country. There’s no easy way to prevent that. Fraud is massive and it’s becoming cheaper and easier to run at scale.

Then when it gets reported the authorities can just look up the owner of that number and arrest them. Vs overseas based operations that are difficult to follow up on.

The authorities already don’t have much leverage over “domestic” spam call centers that are actually located overseas but somehow always manage to acquire domestic numbers to call from.

A couple of years ago Australia had a big reform of the laws where sms providers / voip companies had to actually verify their users owned the numbers they send from. Anecdotally before then I was getting a scam text message every day, now I haven’t had one in years.

Phone numbers in Australia are also all tied to ID. If there is a will to fix the system, it can be done.

Good now we only need to get 100% of sovereign nations and rogue states to adopt uniform global treaties

China has much stricter control over phone #'s and identities than USA/EU does. It's much more difficult for me to create a placeholder digital identity in China. I wouldn't love that solution, but it exists.

As a result, it's very difficult for me to use a lot of Chinese websites and it's a pretty sizable barrier to hardware development when Chinese citizens can just download the relevant datasheet off some Chinese forum in 5 minutes, but I have to sign NDA's with western companies or figure out how to WeChat a Chinese OEM to send me their datasheets.

I swear it's harder for us to access Chinese sites than it is for them to VPN to outside services. There's one event I was looking at going to in China but the announcements/chat was on QQ which as far as I can tell is just impossible to access.

> The likely outcome is that the phone system becomes massively more locked down.

We've had phone fraud for decades, and the system has dragged its heels forever. I genuinely don't know if even this will be enough to address phone spam.

Ostensibly this is what STIR/SHAKEN was supposed to cover but aiui they basically fucked it up so bad that it will only work for domestic calls in the US.

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