afo

Born on March 09, 2018•82 Karma

on June 14, 2019

•on: Magnesium and major depression (2011)

Agreed. I float 2-4x/month and can confirm that I sleep way better and generally have an increase in mood. I'd highly recommend it.

afo•

on Oct 29, 2018

•on: How to Find a Million-Dollar, One-Person Business ...

Reminds me of the “How I made $290,000 Selling Books” joke -

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/6ofdt6/how_i_made_29...

afo•

on Oct 3, 2018

•on: Bill to ban bots impersonating people for telemark...

How would you treat calls where it's a sound board controlled by a human? Human or bot?

If there's a way to get around the system, these guys will figure it out.

afo•

on Oct 1, 2018

•on: Voice Phishing Scams Are Getting More Clever

A better analogy that I use (especially with nontechnical folks) is the return address on an envelope.

You can, technically, write anything in it and there’s no way to guarantee it’s authentic.

gerdesj•

on Oct 1, 2018

In email the From: address rarely delivers the mail. From: and To: are the ones that you see in your mail client and correspond to the addresses on the letter within.

For example here are some headers from some spam I received:

  From: "Jeremy Adamson" <jeremyadamson@illusion24.com>
  Reply-To: "Jeremy Adamson" <jeremyadamsonr@yahoo.com>

From: is what I see in my client and Reply-To: is where a reply would go to.

This one is much better, note how I'm BCCd and To: is complete bollocks:

  Reply-To: dr.ahmed.faruk@outlook.com
  From: Dr Faruk Ahmed <dr.faruk.ahmed1@gmail.com>
  Subject: MANAGER AUDIT AND ACCOUNT DEPT
  To: undisclosed-recipients:;
  BCC: <gerdesj@blueloop.net>
  Return-Path: dr.faruk.ahmed1@gmail.com

Given that Reply-To and Return-Path are in different domains, where would a reply go to?

JamesBarney•

on Oct 1, 2018

What about an out of band verification by the carriers?

Basically a large registry. When I call someone I tell t-mobile who I'm calling, and they register it. Then on the receiving end Verizon checks with T-mobile or a central registry, and says yep James's number is calling this number. Then it marks it as a verified call.

gerdesj•

on Oct 1, 2018

Bear in mind that it is not in a carrier's (financial) interest to drop a call. Carriers are not required to verify CLID either.

There are lots of good things that telephony could be required to do but they are not and they wont.

Splines•

on Oct 2, 2018

iOS/Android could do something like this. You register your number with Apple/Google and link your account with them. When you call someone you set a field on your account that you're calling someone. When the person who you're dialing gets rung, their dialer can look up Apple/Google and see if that number was indeed calling them, and add a "verified" checkmark to the call.

This leads down a privacy/metadata rabbit hole, but there are probably ways to make this a lot better. In any case, the phone OS can do some out-of-band signaling and just avoid dealing with the carriers altogether.

Although if you're doing all that then why not just make a call using voip...

afo•

on Oct 1, 2018

•on: Voice Phishing Scams Are Getting More Clever

We (Nomorobo) have a bunch of recordings of this type of scam. They're scary.

https://nomorobo.com/lookup/844-386-9815

chasingthewind•

on Oct 1, 2018

Love your service! I've been using it for a few years now I think and it's really helped. Thanks!

afo•

on Oct 1, 2018

Thanks! I really appreciate the support. These voice spam calls have gotten out of control.

afo•

on Sept 8, 2018

•on: Show HN: Clipboard Plus, free and open-source clip...

PureText does exactly that. Been using it for years and swear by it.

https://stevemiller.net/puretext/

afo•

on Aug 29, 2018

•on: Google, but for colors

Looks similar to https://picular.co/hate

afo•

on June 30, 2018

•on: Phez: Loosing $29,014 Creating the Bitcoin-Rewardi...

Especially since it loses the extra “O”. At least that’s how I remember the correct spelling.

afo•

on June 14, 2018

•on: Bay Area man must pay $136,000 in tech-support sca...

Even with all these high profile settlements, it's still not stopping the problem.

Just today, we (Nomorobo) see 25 different numbers pushing Windows tech support scams. It's like that every. single. day.

This is an emergency call from Windows Microsoft. Your Windows license key have been expired all services are suspended on your computer. To renew call our toll free 1-877-231-6134.

https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/844-805-7111

https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/855-328-4888

https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/844-517-8655

https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/844-904-1444

https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/972-441-0548

...

https://www.nomorobo.com/lookup/855-895-6786

(edit: formatting)

forapurpose•

on June 14, 2018

I hadn't heard of your service and just looked at it. If you're willing, a few questions I didn't see answered on the website:

From what I can tell, every incoming call rings simultaneously on the user's phone and Nomorobo's systems. If Nomorobo detects a blacklisted number, you pickup the call, play a 'you've been blocked' message, and hangup. Is that basically correct?

So Nomorobo ends up with a log of all my incoming calls. What happens with that data? Nomorobo is free for landlines (which I think means VOIP lines); is data collection the tradeoff?

Also, can I submit a whitelist, to prevent important numbers from being blocked? And is that list confidential?

Finally, do you work with old-fashioned POTS landlines? I'm interested in Nomorobo for an elderly couple who still have POTS.

afo•

on June 15, 2018

Happy to talk about the landline product. Just for clarification, the mobile product works completely differently.

1. Yes, pretty much. Here's a more in-depth answer to what happens when the call is answered - http://www.6083716666.com/

2. Yes, we do get a log of the incoming calls. We use that to analyze the high frequency calling patterns across millions of phone lines and build the blacklist. The more people that contribute, the better the algorithm gets.

3. We globally manage the whitelist and good robocalls (school closings, pharmacies, doctors offices, etc)

4. We don't work with POTS lines yet. The older technologies are tougher to protect than the modern ones.

forapurpose•

on June 16, 2018

2. Is the data used for anything else? Who has access to it? How long is it retained? Is it anonymized?

afo•

on May 11, 2018

•on: FCC fines robocaller record $120M

I found that strange, too. Apple made it seem like it was China only but it's not.

Those features of CallKit are what we (Nomorobo) use to stop the robocalls.