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Discussion (47 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
For a community of builders, like this, any barrier to entry will be problem, however we'll intend.
I'm assuming there's a technical and/or willpower reason or some counterfactual like VOIP depends on it.
Even just flagging it would help. Or, rejecting numbers they can know lie inside their own routing architecture, or asserts within their own number plan where the CLID does not match.
Morally it's like BCP38 in the customer facing internet systems: reject customer input they don't pay you to assert.
The historic reason was, just like the Internet, the international phone network was built on gentlemen agreements by engineers who largely trusted each other.
A big national telco is unlikely to attack its peers, so there was little need for safety measures. As smaller telcos came in to the mix via deregulation, that understanding changed - but it was hard to retroactively fit controls.
The more modern reason is outsourced call centres. You want outbound calls from your Philippines based staff to show as if they were calling from a local number. When large and reputable entities were doing this it was fine. Just like showing a different reply-to address on an email.
If you were designing a modern network, it wouldn't be like this. But international telephony is over a hundred years old and has a huge amount of legacy technology and legal agreements.
The company that has offshored it's support to the Philippines might want that, but I doubt any consumers want that. That shouldn't have happened, but regulation comes (20+ years?) after harmful business profit decisions have been made and implemented.
But, thank you for the explanation. I have heard similar explanations before, and it has always sounded to me like a situation where the telcos are able to offer a service for a profit for the customers to hide the origin of their offshore call centres (that mostly nobody wants to speak to anyway).
I think I just ranted twice, sorry. Thank you!
Phone is set to only notify me for numbers for known contacts - does mean that I occasionally miss calls from other people, but I can live with that.
Spam calls happen but I'm not interested in social credit ratings for callers.
This is a valid use case, but I’m a bit surprised that the mechanism isn’t better controlled. Surely a better design would be for an actual local entity to forward the call, possibly with an optimization to allow the voice data to bypass the local entity once the call is connected.
But it is slow to roll out.
The second part is the hard part and requires coordination
It wouldn’t be expensive or especially hard to do but there is no payoff for the network. Remember they make money off scam calls too
Since as long as I can remember these organisations have been optimised for profit, not for GAF and that’s why they’re being savaged by regulation and OTT competitors now
There has been no market forces compelling them to do this and until recently when it got really bad, no political or regulatory forces
tl;dr na bro
Call centres were getting outsourced before e.g. Skype was a twinkle in the eyes of Priit Kasesalu and Jaan Tallinn.
I personally don't? Why would I want that.
The companies might want to hide that info but I don't think that's a legitimate use case.
A bigger problem is Russia or Saudi Arabia using the SS7 signalling network to track their dissidents in the US because those legacy telco protocols have basically no authentication whatsoever, and won't blink if a Saudi Telco sends Verizon a MAP message saying "what is the cell location of Jamal Khashoggi's phone?"
Actually, there are several legitimate use cases:
• Call divert: Local number calls a number abroad and that one is diverted back a another local number. It's probably rare, but it's a totally legit use case.
• 2G/3G roaming: I'm not an expert on this one, but as far as I understood it, roaming calls placed on 2G/3G networks are initiated in the visiting country, and use the local number of the caller.
• Getting better rates using VoIP. Whether this is legit or not might be subject to discussion, however I was using a foreign VoIP provider (because they had better rates for local calls than any local providers, for my low call volume) sending out my own local number (had to be validated by them by callback, although that's their own security measure, not the network's one). Now in several EU countries and Switzerland this doesn't work any more, as calls bearing national IDs coming from abroad must be displayed as anonymous. And it's quite annoying that there isn't a way to "authentify" those numbers so the owner can use them as they wish.
Traditionally they have a bias towards "working"/delivering traffic. It's easier to issue a refund than answer a urgent support request.
I can also imagine the biggest customers have all sorts of multi-vendor failover plans that may be affected.
That's what's mandated by ARCEP (the French regulator) since the beginning of this year, and now all faked numbers are marked as “hidden caller”, and indeed it helps a lot.
I haven't yet been able to find the full register (if it's even public) but I thought this is an interesting approach.
Personally, I'd prefer them to be blocked. If it's important and legitimate, they'll register.
https://www.trai.gov.in/advice-to-senders
https://www.donotcall.gov.au
Personally I think the whole system of replacing the point of origin with a name needs to be overhauled. Allowing a name as well is fine, but the practice of delivering messages that can't be replied to is pretty poor.
Rather than have to futz around with a different number or website to go to, I should be able to just reply "STOP" if (for example) Dominos keep spamming me with Pizza offers I don't want.