Posted by FergusArgyll 3 hours ago
You can still allow people to hide it, but then by default every non-business phone should block calls with hidden numbers.
> SHAKEN system, short for Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using toKENs [...]
> The name was inspired by Ian Fleming's character James Bond, who famously prefers his martinis "shaken, not stirred". STIR having existed already, the creators of SHAKEN "tortured the English language until [they] came up with an acronym."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STIR/SHAKEN
(Unrelatedly, seeing a slash used casually within the URL slug feels so wrong)
So maybe it's bad backronyms that demonstrate the soul. I don't know who's idea it was to allow a computer to generate whimsy, that should be interdicted by a fourth law of robotics.
I always imagined that there are certain shady providers ("grey-market Twilio" sort of idea) that just let you run single outbound call/text requests through a giant pool of numbers shared with other customers of the service. Perhaps specifically a bank of residential numbers plugged into banks of regular cell phones, like a residential IP proxy service provider.
It's very unlikely anybody is placing spam/scam calls with regular cell phones when VoIP numbers are easy and cheap to get, and when VoIP systems are far easier to manage.
Easy fix. It should be opt-in to accept a call that is routed through one of these. I know they allow it so some grandma in rural France that still uses a dial phone on a copper line that hasn't been touched since 1962 can call her son in New York, but for the rest of us who are not in that situation, we can just blacklist all those calls and lose nothing. This would even fix spam for the people who opt-in, because so few people have grandmas in rural France that it's not worth it for the spammers to bother anymore.
Easier (and correct) fix: Telecoms operators should not be permitted to provide transit to a call that's routed through one of these.
> I know they allow it so some grandma in rural France that still uses a dial phone on a copper line that hasn't been touched since 1962...
This doesn't make sense. Even my inexpensive Mikrotik switches can augment packets with the ID of the port that they originated from. I do not believe for even a second that Telecoms Grade switching equipment is unable to do the same. The fact that that grandma can send and receive calls tells you that both that that equipment exists and that it knows what port her phone is connected to.
Mikrotik is a young spring chick compared to the dinosaurs in telecom.
The example should rather have been some telecom carrier in Africa or India. Telco equipment is expensive, the technology is ridiculously complex and getting companies especially in less well-off regions to replace aging stuff and updating it to modern standards is next to impossible. Think about it, the globally connected phone system includes countries where you get 10 GBit/s symmetric fiber in your home and it includes countries where people don't even have running water because they're so poor.
The fact that we in Western countries can have a realtime conversation with someone in the Saharan desert or in an Indian village that requires days worth of travel [1] is nothing short of a miracle.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/5/8/an-election-booth...
Almost every spam call has that I get, is spoofed.
Someone here explained it, once.
I think the spoofed calls use a legacy transport tech that can’t be forced to validate.
Not my job to "verify," in the technical sense.
When a call for an Indian crypto pump comes in as "SMITH, ROBERT", and a local exchange, I call that "spoofed."
Unfortunately there isn’t an easy way to report abuse to the telcos (and regulators).
If the FCC implements this, I expect a lot litigation because of the burden and legal liability this would place on telecom and VOIP companies. There are other less burdensome approaches to preventing spam that the FCC has not tried.
First of all, the decision makers at the FCC profit from directly from spam, Christ.
Secondly, the indirect value of spam to the FCC is that it helps to justify initiatives to ruin the privacy of ordinary people via the constant push for KYC.
Just like "age verification", Flock cameras, license plate scanners, ubiquitous IoT with microphones and cameras, etc. Governments and corporations both profit from shredding every molecule of your privacy.
- Providers that can't afford it implement it - Non-IP networks - Small voice service providers that originate calls via satellite using U.S. NANP - Providers that lack control over the network infrastructure necessary to implement
Nothing is going to change as long as those holes exist.
It would certainly hurt a consumption-based economy, for starters.
If your carrier accepts a spoofed call they're already violating FCC recommendations.
I find that abusive on its own but let’s not forget about the fact that now you have victims of domestic violence being forced to answer hidden numbers in case it’s welfare, or the cops, or their abusive spouse.
I would be willing to bet money that any "better call addressing system" would be a design by committee where this just gets litigated there. And we'd end up with either a system that requires KYC per-call, or has compromises similar to what we're complaining about now.
Considering most of those same telcos are donors and employers of large numbers of people across many constituencies of almost every nation, usually no politician has or is willing to spend political capital to shoot themselves in the foot like that. And no nation with a national telco company runs it well enough to ever even dream of spending money for something like IP addresses, they typically barely keep the lights on.
That's already an issue with most cell phones. Making this apply to prepaid phones is even worse.
Like that is Carr's FCC in a nutshell - he wants to control speech by controlling the airwaves. That is a raw fact in his behavior. But when the news stations say the thing they want them to say, what happens next other than slightly extending the definitions of public good to the internet and then restricting speech?
What they'll do, what they always do, what you can see them actively doing (albeit on other policy axis) even at the local government level, is simply scrutinize these people for other laws they've broken or rules they've run afoul of and then enforce the shit out of those.
We have a real problem with people in government buying into the idea that it's basically a private company set up for the benefit of one man in particular.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-expands-this-location-focus...
Is there really not a way to submit an express FCC comment that avoids all my personal info being publicly published to the web? Yeesh.
And if you think your name and address are private, then I have some bad news for you.
Publication is probably a bit much as a default and chills speech a bit, but it’s also important that the federal register can remain public with all public comment on the web. These are official comments on the record.
They probably do keep records, but something doesn't have to be perfect in order to be better.
It's unclear to me how I'd be impacted by these new rules, but I don't believe there's any requirement to provide PII to get a VOIP number.
Seems that we can’t both get what we want.
A potential solution is that you get your anonymous phone line but my phone provider simply refuses to let you call me with it.
Of course then we need to extend the same principle to data and to IP traffic originating from your device. If you don’t want to be traceable it seems reasonable that services should have the right to refuse to handle IP traffic you generate.
Would such a half-baked level of network access suit your needs?
Why can't you? They don't want to provide info for a credit check, you want human accountability. All that requires is for them to use a debit card for whatever service (prepaid or postpaid). Law enforcement can trace that if needed. No need for credit checks or really any other information directly in the hands of the telco.
I don't think it's necessary to go this far. The provider could indicate something like "CANNOT VERIFY NUMBER". I imagine most people would block such calls.
I would like anonymous political posts to be untraceable by the government.
I can't even get all of what I want.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/05/26/2026-10...
I think that gets you most of the way to a link that somebody on HN dropped a few days ago:
https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express
It requires the docket-id to complete:
Docket No: 17-59
You can double check that Docket Number here: https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-seeks-comment-enhanced-know...
My guess is that there's some requirement that if it's a working number, it must be able to dial emergency services and that's the loophole that's being exploited. So the FCC's answer is if all numbers must work, push the check directly on the subscriber.
To your point about emergency services—while it's true that any unactivated phone must be allowed to dial 911, that rule only opens a one-way path to emergency dispatch. It doesn't give a device the ability to place outbound calls to everyday citizens. The real loophole isn't a public safety mandate; it's the wholesale VoIP market.
Phone numbers were designed with the idea that they need to be easily memorizable in your head but I don't think that's really needed today.
At any moment I should be able to discard my contact and redistribute it on my own.
The idea that old numbers get recycled is completely ridiculous as well.
The problem is, with a phone number anyone can. Phone numbers need to operate more like a shared secret.
I was getting an oil change the other day and the guy asked me for my phone number...
I said why? Do you need to call me?
He said, no we just need it to put in the system and it won't let me proceed without one.
I said ok well here is a fake number since you don't need to contact me.
He was visibily frustrated with me, yet inputed the fake number and it allowed him to proceed.
My point with sharing this story is it seems like we have forgotten as a society what the purpose of the phone number is. Your supposed share it when you want to be able to communicate that's it.
It's turned into a required chokepoint to do anything.
Sure, not much money to be had by fighting that fight but basically any PAC should have the means to do this and by claiming money is at stake and not people's actual safety you do have a better chance at this not being dismissed because of how your justice system /is/.
One could argue that it's a failure of law enforcement or telcos or regulators to do enough to prevent fraud and maaaaybe bring a class action or something, but that's a massive stretch.
Suggest phone scams are a $26 B per year industry.
Not every unjust, stupid, or evil thing is illegal.
Even when something is illegal, that doesn't mean you have standing to challenge it in court, or that a given court has jurisdiction to do anything about it.
Courts (theoretically) follow rules. They can't just randomly set things aside without some basis in those rules. Lawsuits are not a magic universal remedy.
You could definitely argue that courts don't always follow rules, and that the Trump administration is doing everything it can to make that worse, but the changes they're making aren't going to work in your favor, because those changes are in the nature of "we can do whatever we want, and fuck the courts if they don't like it".
The true american dream.
Our democracy in action.