this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2024
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The call, an apparent imitation or digital manipulation of the president's voice, says, "Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again."

A prominent New Hampshire Democrat plans to file a complaint with the state attorney general over an apparent robocall that appears to encourage supporters of President Joe Biden not to vote in Tuesday’s presidential primary.

The voice in the message is familiar — even presidential — as it’s an apparent imitation or digital manipulation of Biden’s voice.

“What a bunch of malarkey,” the voice message begins, echoing a favorite term Biden has uttered before.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Why is it so hard for phone companies to stop this? They explicitly allow unverified numbers to just call whoever on their networks. Is there really no way to stop number spoofing?

[–] highenergyphysics 27 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The same reason 5-6 model years of Hyundais are worth $0 now

It would be a minuscule cost to the company and they’re not legally required to implement it

Except due to the FCCs complete regulatory capture, the telecoms have now completely ruined voice calls as a form of communication to the extent that nobody even picks up calls on their personal lines anymore.

Remember when you could answer the phone and reasonably expect it would be relevant to your life?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Indeed. I screen every call now and check the voicemails.

The same reason 5-6 model years of Hyundais are worth $0 now

What is this referencing?

[–] PM_Your_Nudes_Please 21 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Hyundai and Kia cut costs by excluding industry standard engine immobilizers in their vehicles.

Most cars have a chip in the key, which is read by the car when you insert it into the keyhole, to verify the key is legit. Even if you cut a new copy of the key, the engine won’t start without that chip. That’s an engine immobilizer. It also prevents people from just brute-forcing the keyway into turning, with something like a screwdriver. Because again, no chip means the car won’t start.

Hyundai and Kia decided to forego these, as a cost cutting measure. And now those Hyundais and Kia’s are virtually worthless (and nearly impossible to insure,) because car thieves know how easy they are to steal. In the past few years, as the methods have gotten posted on places like YouTube and TikTok, anyone with a screwdriver can go steal a Hyundai or Kia. And theft rates have skyrocketed, to the point that some insurance companies are outright refusing to issue policies for them because they know it’ll eventually be stolen.

As for why it was referenced here, my guess is that they were making a parallel about how the technology to prevent spoofed phone numbers already exists. But the companies have decided not to implement them, as a cost-cutting (and anti-competition) measure.

Currently, some phone carriers already offer caller verification. But that only works for internal numbers. For instance, an AT&T caller dialing another AT&T phone. But the companies have refused to cooperate, and allow competitors to access their internal verification systems. So for instance, if an AT&T customer calls a T-Mobile customer, both AT&T and T-Mobile can verify internal calls. But neither company wants to play nice with the other, so they refuse to verify each others’ numbers. So when a spammer spoofs a number, any kind of verification would only be effective if the spammer has the same carrier as the target.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Wooow. Holy shit. Those car makers really fucked up. Those class action suits should have mandates to replace the cars or install immobilizers.

[–] Raiderkev 4 points 10 months ago

I think that they did. My brother in law had an affected model, and I know he brought it in to get one installed. Not sure if he went out of pocket, but pretty sure it was covered.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I'm dubious that's all it is; for example, My '03 S10 has a purely mechanical key. In fact, if you have a GM vehicle with that little "chip" in the root of the blade...note that it's in a symmetrical key, so it could go in either way, and it's only got two pins. Because it's just a resistor. The car's security system is pretty much just an ohmmeter.

[–] atp2112 10 points 10 months ago

The fact that Hyundai and Kia chose not to include an industry standard anti-theft system, leading to them being piss easy to steal

[–] platypus_plumba 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I have my phone set to block all unknown number calls. I was getting around 40 calls per day.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I was getting around 40 calls per day.

How much porn did you watch? Lol

[–] platypus_plumba 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

All the porn. But jokes aside, how caa watching porn make callers target you?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's not about porn specifically, but at one point you gave your phone number to a company. Could have been for anything, usually it's for "verification" or 2fa on a new account on any number of types of service. Then that company turned around and sold your phone number to a data broker - or, worse, was hacked and the hacker then sold their ill gotten gains to said data broker. Who then sold that number to a different company, who then sold that number to a different company...

This is why knowing where your data gets around to is important. If your phone number can (and most assuredly does) get passed around town like a cheap hooker, imagine what kinds of transactions are being performed on, say, email addresses. Or social security numbers. Or passwords, or security question answers. Trusting the wrong data into the wrong hands, once, will mean that data is now permanently a matter of public record. Oh, Equifax leaked your phone number? Now every single illegal data broker in the entire world has a copy of that information in their database, there are 3800 additional copies in various hackers' personal data stores, and new copies are being sold to new people every day. Whoops, now Netflix leaked your email address, hackers already have your name and phone number to link to it from Equifax, oh no, that's a complete data profile. Someone can now just buy your data profile to either target you with ads or target you with scams, or worse. Oh no, you got got by one of the targeted scams and accidentally gave your SSN to a bad actor - well, hope you're already on the way to the courthouse because your identity is now unusable. Whoever you were previously is now dead. You've just made appearances in Pripyat, Brazil, Bangladesh and 13 locations in China in the last 8 minutes and made credit card purchases at each location, your 401k is now smoke and your bank accounts are throwing the emergency halt lever. You'll be lucky to recover anything at all after legally changing your name and SSN, which is a real bitch to do, and will only get more difficult over time as Republicans grow increasingly terrified of the existence of trans folks.

Anyway, yeah, moral of this story is, this is why some people are so vocal and up in arms about data privacy issues and laws, be careful who you give your data to because it can and will be used against you to great effect by multiple prongs of malicious actors, change your passwords frequently and for the love of god don't give out your SSN unless it's absolutely required and you know for a fact it's going directly to a governmental agency.

[–] platypus_plumba 1 points 10 months ago

I usually don't go around giving my number, except to major services like Google, for MFA. I recently removed that though, I have hardware tokens... But I guess it's too late now.

And yeha, the last place I'd put my phone number would be a porn site, so that was my surprise. I thought maybe these sites had malware that tried to gather data from insecure cookies or something, but it would be pretty weird for a service like Google to add a phone number in a insecure cookie or local storage

[–] chiliedogg 1 points 10 months ago

Blocking spoofing isn't as simple as you might think. A LOT of legitimate phone traffic uses spoofing for VOIP calling.

In fact, back in 2005 the Madison River Telephone company (CenturyLink) tried blocking outgoing Vonage calls citing the CID spoofing, and the FCC stepped in and required that they allow it. It was the first real Net Neutrality ruling.