[GRLUG] $50K Prize if You Find Way to Block Robocalls

Tim Schmidt timschmidt at gmail.com
Wed Nov 7 10:34:35 EST 2012


It might be easier to implement an economic solution - make robocalls
too expensive to be worthwhile.  Just spitballing, but something like
legislating that phone companies must charge each account $1.00 per
outgoing call, to be refunded at the end of the month for accounts
which have made fewer than, say, 1000 calls?

Maybe that's ridiculous.  IDK

On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 10:29 AM, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 10:26 AM, Tim Schmidt <timschmidt at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Nov 7, 2012 at 10:15 AM, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> As the intermediary, you check the incoming call for a "spamminess"
>>> factor. If it feels spammy, you put it through an audio captcha or
>>> other challenge/response verification step.
>>
>> Audio captchas will be cracked the same way regular ones have been.
>> There's huge incentive, and automation already built into the process.
>>
>> The only way it would really work is to do per-line spamminess, and
>> block the whole line if it crosses a threshold, until a human gets in
>> contact with the company to rectify it.
>>
>> Unfortunately, that's a pretty heavy hammer to occasionally drop on
>> regular folk.
>
> That's why I mentioned challenge/response; that's a bit harder to
> crack. (And there are other things you could do, such as allowing a
> passphrase bypass.)
>
> There's also call holding; "$snippet has called, and would like to
> speak to you. Would you like to accept this call?"
>
> That kind of service has been in use for decades. Automate it, and you
> can configure schedules, degrees of access, etc. And accumulate denied
> calls for spam/ham classification.
>
> --
> :wq
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