On Sun, 1 Jan 2023, John C Klensin wrote:
It's *always* been possible to lie about who you are when
making a phone call, but for the first century or so nobody
cared. Whhat changed?
Not quite, universally, always because, in the period prior to
dialed/ automatically switched calls, the operators who were
necessary to connect/ switch calls were often serving a
relatively small area and collection of subscribers and, from
discussions I've had about the period, authentication by voice
recognition worked at least moderately well.
When my mother was in college in Massachusetts in the 1940s, she'd
call her parents in her small hometown in Vermont. The local operator,
hearing her voice, would say "it's your mother's bridge night, shall I
ring her at Mrs Smith's?"
That was a level of service that we can only dream of now, but it
doesn't scale very well. I doubt that operators in Boston or New York
recognized the callers. Also remember that you don't have to fool the
operator to fool the person you're calling.
And, paralleling the above, not just "unlimited numbers of
messages for free", but the ability to send those messages
without the senders accurately identifying themselves and
creating the possibility of being held accountable if, in fact,
societies and legal systems consider spam to be seriously bad.
You need both. People who know a lot more about the phone system
than I do tell me that it is very hard to fake the number on SMS,
so spammers just buy a lot of numbers from sleazy carriers and
cycle through them.
R's,
John
