I accused my wife of giving me one just so she could call and bug me wherever I was at any time... I never had to use it to call for help for me but several times to report traffic hazards or blotto drivers.

Funny thing how we have the same wife. She gives us a cell phone but we never use it. I don't even remember my phone number because I never have to use it.

 

Consider that there is no legitimate reason to spoof a caller ID. If somebody wants to block it, that is fine, but faking it has no decent application.

There is at least one good reason to spoof caller ID. A physician calling from his office would like the caller ID to be the main office number and not his phone.

A physician calling from home because he's on-call is usually an expected call.

Large corporations with their own exchange might always use ANI (Automatic Number Identification) instead.

That's used for billing and is always correct. 800/900 number holders are always provided with the non-spoofable ANI's.

 

I will keep getting calls because after the tones I will still have my voice and my message. The computer calling will not know the difference, it does not understand speech. But the tones will convince it that the number is not in service.

Oh yeah? What about HAL 9000? HAL 9000 could even read lips and that was 1968.

Ron

 

There is at least one good reason to spoof caller ID. A physician calling from his office would like the caller ID to be the main office number and not his phone.

Wife gets calls from University Hospital network and they show as UNIV HOSP which is fine with us. Even our primary care doctor shows the same unless he calls from his personal cell which just shows as CELL PH OH. Anyway, we take those, even CELL PH OH.

Ron

 

Oh yeah? What about HAL 9000? HAL 9000 could even read lips and that was 1968.

Ron

I REALLY do not want to talk with a computer, ESPECIALLY one that believes that it is smarter than me.

And a physician calling from home is welcome to use the ID blocking function that has been available from day one. In the past 3 years I have received perhaps 2 phone calls with the ID blocked. that is totally different from having the ID spoofed.

 

I had a reason to spoof caller ID once. I forget the reason. We don't have caller ID at home. The cordless phones are caller ID capable. The other problem is when the caller ID shows the gateway phone number number for the VoIP call. Cell phone caller ID is just numbers unless you program the ID.

The spoofing I see is if your cell is (abc) 999-defg, the the spoofed number is often the same exchange. Then suppose a realtor gets your cell number as the spoofed ID and then that person calls you.

A friend has a system that you have to dial 4-digits to ring the phone, otherwise it just goes to voicemail. You have to know about the 4 digits

 

Back in the mid-1960's a fellow teen-age electronics and radio enthusiast moved to the other side of the state. The small cost of calling "long distance" was a real inhibition. My friend and I realized that when calling each other but before picking up our phone were AC coupled so we added amplifiers to inject out voices into the telephone lines and then we merely paced our speech so that we did not talk over the ring signal being fed into the line by the phone company.

The good old days when challenges were simpler.

 

The .7z file extension is for a program called 7zip which is free open source and I use for the compression of files and works like winzip which isn't free to use.

If you have a recent version of Windows (7 or above), zipping files is built into the file system. Right clicking on a file or folder displays a series of operations. One of which is compression. That creates a zip file. No additional utility is needed. There is also a selection to extract files from a zip file.

 

I REALLY do not want to talk with a computer

I dunno... Amazon's Alexa and Google's Nest Hub do a pretty darn good job at our house. They can even do some pretty advanced math (I got bored one day). Our grandkids in P'burgh video call my wife at least once a day on the Nest. Not something I would have initially gone out and bought but the son-in-law was working with Amazon and then Google (now with FaceBook) and bought the first ones for us. Now I'm a believer. Never cared for Siri that much though... At one point I wanted to kill Siri when my cell phone had screen dialing problems and every time I asked Siri to "call Pat" (my wife) Siri responded with "calling Matt" our son's nutso friend who I really didn't want to talk to.

 

Regulatory enforcement of Robo Calls comes under the aegis of the FCC (US Federal Communications Commission). Which, if I interpret this article correctly, can fine the individuals involved but has no legal enforcement or punitive abilities other than issuing the fine notice. If not paid, they have no ability to enforce collection and turn the case over to the DOJ (US Department of Justice) for the courts to attempt collection or prosecution. In other words, the FCC is all bark and no teeth to bite...
Montana man fined $9.9 million by the FCC for making thousands of racist and threatening robocalls (msn.com)

 

Regulatory enforcement of Robo Calls comes under the aegis of the FCC (US Federal Communications Commission). Which, if I interpret this article correctly, can fine the individuals involved but has no legal enforcement or punitive abilities other than issuing the fine notice. If not paid, they have no ability to enforce collection and turn the case over to the DOJ (US Department of Justice) for the courts to attempt collection or prosecution. In other words, the FCC is all bark and no teeth to bite...
Montana man fined $9.9 million by the FCC for making thousands of racist and threatening robocalls (msn.com)

I would favor a much harsher treatment of the robocall scammers. In addition to fines, perhaps a year's banishment from any use of any telecom anything, for any purpose. And for the second offense, perhaps, in addition, time in the slammer, AND "de-militarization" of all their telecom and computer hardware.
I have been fortunate to have not received any of those hate calls, it appears. Only scammers of every kind.