Congressional Dinosaurs outlaw Spoofing

From this article in Arts Technica:

Today the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation has passed S. 704, a bill that would make it a crime to spoof caller ID. Dubbed the "Truth in Caller ID Act of 2007," the bill would outlaw causing "any caller identification service to transmit misleading or inaccurate caller identification information" via "any telecommunications service or IP-enabled voice service." Law enforcement is exempted from the rule.

This will, of course be of no help to us in frazzled pharma-hell. First of all, I've noticed that probably less than a third of pharmacies calling me use a bogus number. Most of the numbers can be called back, which thankfully for me, gives me legitimate targets to harass.

And secondly, these guys are overseas. There's no doubt about it. Even if they were in the country, they obviously don't want to be bothered by the Do Not Call list - so why would this law change anything?

Congress needs to get its head out of you know where regarding consumer privacy. Probably the best thing they've done in the last ten years is LNP - local number portability. Remember how the carriers screamed and hollered about its cost? Well, Congress mandated it - and I would argue that everyone, even the carriers, won.

What we need is a law mandating cell phone carriers to give us the ability to block numbers, kind of like Outlook allows you to "add person to blocked list". Until carriers do this, and it seems they aren't in a big rush - everyone is a potential victim of these pharmacy rats.

Finally, I was enjoying a nice night at the Harborlights Pavilion here in Boston before the Wilco show... and guess who called - a pharmacy. Their number was (866) 838-0738. I tried calling them back but had no luck, even though they are listed in the whocalled.us database.

The Gloves Are Coming OFF!

As many of you may have noticed, this blog has been silent for a while. The calls died down for me, life got busy, and fighting overseas pharmacy telemarketers dropped on my priority list.

I do check the statistics, and despite my lack of posting, many people are finding the blog. I want to remind everyone of the good work being done over at http://whocalled.us in creating what I think is the most useful log of incoming call numbers out there. (Note: I am in no way affiliated with them and am not sure of what they think of my efforts).

BUT, it is time to ratchet things up again. My previous idea of creating an army of auto-dial zombies, using VMWare (which creates numerous virtual machines within a machine) is now officially resurrected. All I need to do is assemble the various operating systems, and I can have ten autodial machines dialing them non-stop.

On the news front, there doesn't seem to be much action. Cell phone carriers still ignore us, so for now, the battle is back on. I will be posting with more frequency in the coming days.

For now, check out this experiment. You can't hear it well, but in the future I'm going to try to get the choicest moments from my calls and post the audio. I was conferencing them all together and annoying the crap out of them.