FTC Awards $50k In Prizes To Cut Off Exasperating Robocalls 216
coondoggie writes "The Federal Trade Commission today said it picked two winners out of nearly 800 entries for its $50,000 Robocall Challenge which dared technologists to come up with an innovative way of blocking the mostly illegal but abundant calls. According to the FTC, Serdar Danis and Aaron Foss will each receive $25,000 for their proposals, which both use software to intercept and filter out illegal prerecorded calls using technology to 'blacklist' robocaller phone numbers and 'whitelist' numbers associated with acceptable incoming calls." Can't wait until Symantec, Kaspersky, etc. sell competing anti-spammer packages for phones.
Worthless... (Score:5, Informative)
Worthless. 99% of all illegal robocalls currently spoof their CallerID. I get robocalls that appear to be coming from my neighbors (robocallers frequently spoof a number that is in the same areacode and prefix as the number they are calling). When I subpoena phone records, the calls actually came from across the country from some podunk reseller in California. All that will happen is that robocallers will start spoofing the whitelisted phone numbers.
You need 1) some indication that the callerID has been falsified (i.e. does not match the exchange of the originating ANI) and 2) have carriers impose restrictions on their clients ability to spoof CallerID, such as requiring them to register the numbers they want to spoof in advance, and prove they have a right to use those numbers in outbound calls (such as a call center making calls for a client, where they legitimately need to put the client's inbound 800 number in the outgoing callerID).
anti-spam for phones (Score:5, Informative)
Can't wait until Symantec, Kaspersky, etc. sell competing anti-spammer packages for phones.
My google voice number discards spam calls all the time. Including political calls.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/235637/google_voice_spam_filter_blocks_unwanted_calls.html [pcworld.com]
Best thing ever.
Re:Robocallers that hang up on you... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, he does, but you don't. Certain types of robocalls are illegal if they use a prerecorded message, but legal if a person is doing the talking. Like the other guy said, they call a lot of numbers at the same time, but since there are not that many people available when calls are answered, some of the calls just get terminated when answered.