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706 points ortusdux | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.791s | source
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bsdice ◴[] No.42141280[source]
The scam and spam call problem is really bad in Germany to this day. And has been for 10 years.

A couple years ago I would sit at my desk thinking about a really hard problem in silence. The phone rings. Spam call. Every 30-180 minutes another one. If you now think turn the phone off, well not that easy as CEO of a business when people expect you to be reachable.

It creamed my corn so much that I recorded my own voice samples as a senile "Opa Denny" (german grandpa Denny), modelled after Lenny. Complete with background ducks hanging out on the couch to Opas dismay, later in the call. It works on autopilot without interaction because on Asterisk, and with the largest German SIP provider at least, you can extract the calling peer identity from the SIP header. So I wrote a scoring system based on indicated number, black and whitelist regexs for number and for calling peer, greylist for the geographically surrounding number prefixes, etc. A legit mobile call would show up as number@t-mobile.de for example, while a spam call would say fakenumber@01012.com.

Asterisk would record the call in wideband stereo, normalize the audio, and mail it to me as MP3 attachment. Funny for a while, but these days I just throw all such calls onto the mailbox. Since they need a real person to scam or create a sale, the call is finished right away.

It works great to this day, because I never published it.

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Ocha ◴[] No.42142020[source]
Screen unknown callers to VM. Solved all my problems
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ycombinator_acc ◴[] No.42144888[source]
VM? Virtual machine?
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1. mcntsh ◴[] No.42144949[source]
Wow the HN crowd is younger than I thought.

Voicemail

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2. arrowsmith ◴[] No.42145059[source]
I’m old enough to remember voicemail and I’ve never seen it referred to as “VM”.
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3. Toutouxc ◴[] No.42145256[source]
Dunno about the US, but where I live (Czechia, in Europe), voicemail is simply not a thing. I've never used it in my life and I don't know anyone who's ever used it, young or old.
replies(1): >>42145783 #
4. dizhn ◴[] No.42145783[source]
We have it here for mobile but by default providers set it to "call waiting" instead. One of the reasons people don't use voicemail (other than not knowing it exists) is they charge you money to leave a message. Your plan minutes don't count. They probably charge you to listen to messages too.
5. tim333 ◴[] No.42147982[source]
Not only is voicemail still a thing but just yesterday my iPhone took it upon itself to identify an incoming call as 'suspected spam' and route it to voicemail. I didn't tell it to do that so I guess it's part of some update Apple have pushed. I sometimes wish Apple would ask me first before that kind of thing! Although I probably would have ok'ed that one if they had asked.