FaceTime Users Bombarded With Group Call Spam (arstechnica.com) 49
FaceTime users are getting bombarded with group calls from numbers they've never seen before, often as many as 20 times in short succession during late hours of the night. From a report: Griefers behind the pranks call as many as 31 numbers at a time. When a person receiving one of the calls hangs up, a different number will immediately call back. FaceTime doesn't have the ability to accept only FaceTime calls coming from people in the user's address book. It also requires that all numbers in a group call must be manually blocked for the call to be stopped. "I got my first facetime spam starting 4 days ago," one user reported to an Apple support forum earlier this month. "It has been non-stop, over 300 numbers blocked so far. My 3 year old daughter has been accidentally answering them and going on video without a t-shirt on." The high volume of callbacks appears to be the result of other people receiving the call dialing everyone back when the initial call fails shortly after answering. As more and more people receive follow-on calls, they too begin making callbacks. Apple provides surprisingly few ways for users to stop the nuisance calls. As noted earlier, users can block numbers, but this requires manually blocking each individual person on the group call. That's not an effective solution for people receiving dozens of group calls, often to a different group of people in a short period of time, often in the wee hours.
Well color me surprised (Score:1)
Innurnet VoIP increasingly replacing telcos aren't regulated as regular telcos - who themselves couldn't prevent telemarketers and other nuisance actors from ruining everybody's life even if they wanted to anyway.
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The only thing surprising to me about this is that this particular SPAM tactic is only now being used aggressively and in high volumes. Almost like they were waiting for something...
Fundamental problem with telephony (Score:3, Interesting)
Without running your own PBX, there's really no good universal mechanism for handling phone spam. The idea that someone can invade my life by simply knowing 10 digits (3 of which are dictated by my geography) that I have no easy way to change is crazy. Phone numbers aren't compatible with modern technology in any useful way.
Which is why no one can contact me by phone without some pre-existing relationship. If it's not in my address book, it's a giant nope.
Re:Fundamental problem with telephony (Score:4, Interesting)
How do you propose to be reliably reachable if you don't have some fixed number, handle, nickname or address that legitimate correspondant may use to contact you?
The solution is stricter laws on nuisance calls - be it over landlines, cellphones, internet or whatever - complete with jail time for execs of companies engaging in that sort of activity. It still hasn't happened for landlines or cellphones though, so don't hold your breath.
Re:Fundamental problem with telephony (Score:5, Informative)
Problem is, the people doing it, and the people HELPING them do it, are making money and using some of that money to rent congressmen to insure they can continue to do it.
it's not the people that are doing it
it's not the people that are helping them do it
it's not even the LAWS that are allowing it
it's the congresscritters that are being bribed not to fix the laws. That's the only place where this problem can be fixed.
Of course when the people receiving the bribes have written the laws so that bribing them is LEGAL, that makes the problem very difficult to solve. It all comes down to money being the best source of motivation. And that will always create problems that are difficult to fix.
Re: Fundamental problem with telephony (Score:2)
I can be reliably reached via registered mail. There is no other way for strangers to reliably reach me.
This is basically equivalent to the 90s idea of charging senders a penny to receive an email. Just make it expensive to contact you and no one will bother you.
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I can be reliably reached via registered mail. There is no other way for strangers to reliably reach me.
This is basically equivalent to the 90s idea of charging senders a penny to receive an email. Just make it expensive to contact you and no one will bother you.
Given carte blanche to re-design communication one could envision a world with an arbitrary (but small...pennies) cost per incoming email/call charged to the sender. If you replied, you're then charged. If you have a conversation, it nets out to effectively zero over time and any minor 'who replied last' represents pocket change ... UNLESS you're a spammer. Sending out 100 million emails that no one wants or replies to costs real money. Sending out a few thousand emails to people who signed up (or white
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How do you propose to be reliably reachable if you don't have some fixed number, handle, nickname or address that legitimate correspondant may use to contact you?
There's absolutely nothing necessary about the point of contact you give out being fixed.
Look at how the payments industry is handling this. Instead of old fashioned credit cards, which rely on trusting merchants to not misuse a credit card number to run unauthorized charges, modern systems like chip-and-PIN, Apple Pay, and the like instead rely on approaches such as generating single-use tokens that are only good for a single transaction with a single merchant for a specifically authorized amount. If the m
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How do you propose to be reliably reachable if you don't have some fixed number, handle, nickname or address that legitimate correspondant may use to contact you?
What makes you believe that situation is ever good for the recipient? There are very few categorical reasons for brand new correspondence to initiate, and almost all of them are a net negative for the recipient.
- Marketing - ie want to sell you something (you probably didn't already want)
- Recruiters - ie want to sell you a new job position (you probably didn't already want)
- Bills - ie pay us owed monies
- Government related workflow toil - most likely leads toward "pay us owed monies"
- Personal corresponde
Misuse of tech of abundance by scarcity-minded (Score:2)
Spam -- whether phone or email -- is related to the idea in my sig about the misuse of technologies of abundance by people still thinking in terms of scarcity. Without cheap communications and cheap automation, spam would not be possible on a significant scale that disrupts people's lives and makes potentially-abundance-producing communication tools like email or the phone increasingly harder to use. But with cheap communications and cheap automation, it is fairly straightforward technicality to produce pl
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Re:Fundamental problem with telephony (Score:4, Interesting)
For those who are more interested in avoiding spam calls, there is a nearly 100% effective solution I implemented years ago...
(1) get a new number from a place you don't know anyone in like a faraway state with potentially a single area code
(2) install some app on your phone to block all numbers from that area code since 99.9% of the bogus calls are spoofed to the same area code as your own phone number
problem solved - I get maybe 1 bogus call/text a month at most since doing this
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Also fwiw, I use numbershield on iOS + also have a google voice number which, impressively, seems to have pretty good filtering from google so I get very few bogus calls via that route without any special filtering
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Fishing for a lawsuit (Score:2, Informative)
"My 3 year old daughter has been accidentally answering them and going on video without a t-shirt on"
Yeah, it sucks...but working that into the conversation was such an obnoxiously calculated move. Nobody cares about your shirtless toddler.
That's also implying the kid has a habit of "accidentally" answering calls...doubtful, but if so, maybe solve that problem.
No, I'm not defending the spammers...Just move on with your life.
Re: 101 Uses For A Dead SJW (Score:2)
Here's a whole catalog of items you can make. They're from the Ed Gein Signature Collection:
https://onedio.co/content/24-u... [onedio.co]
Each one of these worthy of a bullet point.
Apple botched messages and facetime (Score:3)
The amount of unblockable iMessages spam I get makes me think that Apple just doesn't care and is incapable of making a system that makes their users lives better rather than worse.
Add to that the way they botched do-not-disturb/"focus", and something tells me they need a big shakeup.
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I’ve gotten plenty of sms spam texts but never one over iMessage.
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That used to be the case for me as well... until maybe two months ago. Now almost all are iMessage.
How can you develop something like this? (Score:3)
-It is like everyone has to reinvent the wheel and winds up getting it's users run over in the process.
Last year news? (Score:5, Informative)
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Kiddie porn, jail somebody! (Score:1)
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Couldn't one say the same about a super-model?
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My point is that you seem to be saying that "porn" is defined by whether or not somebody gets aroused, not the content itself.
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Cherubs!
If only (Score:3)
there was some way to turn off Facetime. You know, like you can turn off a lightbulb by flipping a switch. Something simple.
Are developers capable of creating something so simple? From what we see every day the answer appears to be no. Complexity and obfuscation are the words of the day.
Does iMessage work... (Score:2)
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I've never had trouble with either SMS or MMS in iMessage.
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The question isn't about if iMessage work with iMessage. Of course it does. The question is about whether iMessage is compatible with regular SMS outside of iMessage.
Yes, which is why I said I've never had trouble with either SMS or MMS in iMessage.
Do you think people with Apple devices only communicate with other Apple device owners? My brother uses an Android phone, and we communicate all the time - one-to-one and as part of larger groups (which is where MMS comes in). It's never been problematic.
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I've had an iPhone since 2013 and in that time iMessage has always been capable of sending/receiving using the cellular Short Message Service (SMS) instead of iMessage protocols when corresponding with non-iPhone users. iMessage is a superset of SMS/MMS plus Apple-specific, fully encrypted messaging between iMessage endpoints.
SMS communications are shown in green, while iMessage-protocol communications are shown in blue. This visual identification of the endpoint type led to Google crying foul because te
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Silence Unknown Callers (Score:2)
Does that setting not work in Facetime?
Give them what they "want" (Score:2)
Clearly these calls come from people desperate for scheisse videos. Take the phone to the toilet and give them what they "want" and it will stop.
"Griefers"??? (Score:2)
Facetime? More like... (Score:2)
There's always this option (Score:3)
The.
Phone.
Off.
A proper night's sleep is far more valuable than some stupid message in the wee hours.
A couple of spammers need to die (Score:2)
Just to send a message. If they don't get it, we should send more messages.