How Alice and Bob got telephone/SMS spam on their Moko.

Shawn Rutledge shawn.t.rutledge at gmail.com
Mon Feb 25 23:11:14 CET 2008


On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 2:18 PM, Heikki Sørum <heikkis at matnat.uio.no> wrote:
>  from Matilda in Canned Meat Marketing. Matilda has created an software
>  system that automates calling and displays a unknown caller ID, then
...
>  3rd party ruggedized Moko Case!) he tags the calling ID with "Deceptive
>  Marketing" tag. Unfortunately Matilda in Canned Meat Marketing

Well if it's unknown caller ID then Bob can't do that.  Besides it
might be counter-productive to blacklist big blocks of numbers which
might later belong to somebody else when the telemarketing co. shuts
down.

I would propose sending unknown callers into a menu system:

<recorded message> Your caller ID is blocked or turned off.  If you
are a telemarketer, please be warned that we are registered with the
national Do-Not-Call list and do not wish to receive marketing
messages of any kind.  Otherwise please press 1 to leave a voice
message, or enter your friend code.

Then if some friend who calls from work complains that he always gets
this because the phones at work have blocked caller ID, you give him a
"friend code" which he can enter to authenticate and actually ring
your phone.  Otherwise you don't even know any of this is going on
until you get a voicemail notification, and the "friend codes" are
only needed in the special cases.  Plus you can still blacklist small
quantities of known-bad phone numbers.

This sort of thing can probably be done with Asterisk.

You could even do that with calls which do have caller ID but which
are not on your whitelist.  Or do that only during certain hours (when
you are usually sleeping).  Or make everyone enter a friend code when
you are sleeping.  :-)  I think I would probably do that; as it is, I
keep my cell turned off much more than I should, just in case.  (Hate
being woken up in the morning before my usual time to get up - one
distraction like that can make me tired for a day or two if I don't
get back to sleep.)




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