Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mschuster91 2513 days ago
> I would argue that the legality of this doesn't matter; there's a huge technical problem in that there's no authenticity guarantees at all when it comes to caller ID and the entire feature is badly designed and has always been open to abuse.

There is, at least for foreign calls: assuming US provider A gets an incoming call from the country B's operator C, then A has to verify if the phone number supplied by C is in the country phone number range of country B. If there's a mis-match, deny the connection.
1 comments
viraptor 2512 days ago
It's not that easy. You can get a call from X with a prefix from B and it's just how routing sometimes works. In the same way an internet connection from Germany to the UK may actually arrive from an interconnect in Amsterdam. But it doesn't matter. What matters is the responsibility of each party to point out who sent the call to them.

(And that's not even mentioning the issue of how you'd map providers to prefixes. It's somewhere between non-trivial and impossible in practice.)

link
TheSoftwareGuy 2512 days ago
It should really be more like how the internet works with IP addresses.

Its easy to send an IP packet with a source address that is whatever you want, but if you do that the receiver is going to reply to someone else and you won't be able to establish two way communication.

link
musicale 2512 days ago
Ideally the ISP does basic ingress policing and doesn't accept packets from source addresses outside its range.

Yes, I know most ISPs don't do this. But they could if they wanted to.

link