--On Sunday, January 1, 2023 21:57 -0500 John R Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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?" Exactly. > That was a level of service that we can only dream of now, but > it doesn't scale very well. Agreed. But let me encourage a small thought experiment. My guess is that, with a little speech pattern analysis and maybe some recording of calling and called number pairs, one could build some databases and an AI-ish system today that would manage a decent approximation to your mother's experience. >From a technological standpoint, the scaling properties would probably not be much worse than other things we see routinely these days. However, there would be at least two important non-technical issues. One is that doing such a thing at scale would require a fairly impressive business model and I'm guessing there isn't one, partially because of the second issue. That other issue would involve the battle for who would get to be first in line to scream "horrible, evil, unacceptable privacy violation" at the very idea of a system/ database/ robot operator knowing enough to know that it was someone's bridge night, where they would be playing bridge, etc. On the other hand, maybe that isn't a good example because, if someone's mother today wanted to go out and play bridge but still be contact-able, they could either take a mobile phone with them (the likely solution) or, sticking to the PSTN, set up temporary call forwarding. Neither causes significant privacy problems and neither involves technology that is not routine today. Both of those approaches require phone-number-per-person rather than phone[-number-per-household which presumably would have been the case in the 40s, but that is not a big deal today, even for non-mobile phones. The problem, on the other hand, would take a selective step toward what PHB is asking for, which is that, on bridge night, one might want calls forwarded from only a pre-identified list of calling parties with the rest going to voice mail. Again, well within the technology given, e.g., selective ring options, but maybe not worth the trouble. > I doubt that operators in Boston > or New York recognized the callers. Probably not, but connected to a bit of research I've never done. If operators were per-exchange rather than for "Boston" or "New York", recognition of at least some callers might have been plausible. And remember that the treatment your mother got might or might not generalize to everyone in that Vermont town and whomever might be calling them, even if they were calling fairly regularly. > Also remember that you > don't have to fool the operator to fool the person you're > calling. Of course. >> 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. And that, of course, is another thing that is different. At least in the US (and probably even more in some other places) we've made it far easier for someone to go into the sleazy carrier business than it was in the days when phone service offerings were either a regulated monopoly or a government enterprise. While there are advantages of the present system as well, that one brings us close to the Pogo Principle when we start complaining about the current state of things. best, john
