* * * * *
Stirring and shaking may be boring, but the future this brings will effect
you in the future
> This all works fine for the purposes of the telephone system. I mean, at
> least for a long time, it did. But have you noticed what's up with email
> lately? It seems that, given an open communications system, people will
> inevitably develop something called a "cryptocurrency" and badly want to
> make sure that you get in on something called an "ICO (Initial Coin
> Offering)." The general term for this phenomenon is "spam," and the fact
> that it is only one letter away from "scam" is meaningful as the line
> between mere unsolicited advertising and outright crime is often razor
> thin.
>
> In the email system, this problem has been elegantly solved by a system of
> ad-hoc, inconsistent, often-wrong heuristic classifiers glued to a
> trainwreck of different cryptographic attestation and policy metadata
> schemes that still haven't solved the problem. It is, perhaps, no surprise
> that the phone system is taking a generally similar approach.
>
“2023-08-07 STIRred AND SHAKEN [1]”
The whole STIR (Secure Telephony Identity Revisited)/SHAKEN (Signature-based
Handling of Asserted information using toKENs) thing first crossed my path a
few years ago at The Enterprise. At the time, I wasn't sure what the
difficulty was in stopping spam/robo calls and that the Oligarchic Cell Phone
Companies were complicit with said calls because it made them money. The
actual story, covered in the above article, is much more complicated and
nuanced than my own cynical take on it (worth reading, even if it's a bit
long). By the time I left The Enterprise [2], we were starting to support it
with our offering (which was “Caller Name ID”—that is, given a phone number,
map that back to a name), along with a process that was attempting to
classify the originating side of the call as legit or not if the call wasn't
attested (that was being done at another department within The Enterprise).
If you use a certain Oligarchic Cell Phone Company, and see the name
“Potential SPAM” as the caller name, you were using code I worked on.
[1]
https://computer.rip/2023-08-07-STIRred-AND-SHAKEN.html
[2]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2022/10/05.1
Email author at
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