mwfj's comments

Not going to answer this because

a) I already answered a very similar question of yours in a separate thread

b) you hijacked a subthread that was particularly talking about the politics involved

You are not going to convince me, or anyone else who understand the tech, that this is a fundamentally unsolvable technical problem, I promise. It all boils down to compromises between regulation vs freedom, etc.

So, I do take issue when you say things like:

> There's absolutely nothing we can do to prevent malicious people from abusing it.

Seems like a lot of people here really want VOIP to be anonymous/unregistered. You know, so that the nazis can't get you if they seize power. But they also seem loath to acknowledge this desire, particularly in this context.

Somehow, having a well-recorded connection between identity and phone line didn't lead to "fascism" in your past though.

Okay, I get that complexity, I think.

But then the question shifts to: maybe your country is too large to govern effectively - if you can't make changes like this quickly, something is wrong, I think.

>A policy decision by whom?

By your government?

> Specifically, how do you do this when IP spaces are controlled by various unfriendly countries around the world

You begin a "911-certified program" that requires your local ISPs to register their IP ranges with some central authority. The rest is a bunch of detailed but solvable details.

Your idealism when it comes to making this seem more complicatated that it really is seems misplaced.

Thanks, but I somehow get the feeling that it's more about not wanting outsiders telling them how to solve problems they know they should have solved a long time ago by themselves.

"IPs are just too ephemeral to trust for any form of location data"

That is just policy decision. It would, for example, be possible to declare that no single IP should be used for more than two customers during a single X hour block.

"0 points"

Ah, well, Jingoism is an american word. I guess I just thougt the crowd here could agree that it's retarded to not have a political policy against fake VOIP numbers.

Well, I do agree. I shouldn't take more than a few months to fix this. I don't live in the US, but I get the feeling something is terribly wrong with the way you're handling such a basic thing as a phone call, be it VOIP or not.

That's extraordinarly retarded.

People generally caring about declaring img size attributes died out like 15 years ago. grumble

Declaring image sizes doesn't fit into the distributed model that is that is the rage these days, so I guess people don't care since it's so hard. At least it makes their ms/req numbers look great, nevermind that the experience for the actual users sucks.

I agree; it should be technically trival to implement this. All of my comments along the lines of this are wildly downvoted though; I'm not quite sure why. Maybe privacy cowboys?

Sure, but that only works so far. Even a european-style police force would eventually snap if they had to do 100 break-ins to combat ongoing crime if 99/100 calls were fake.

Both issues need to be addressed.

Edit: Ah, after reading more from that link you provided; the issue is stuck in your dysfunctional government.

I'm so confused right now.

Does the US not have a central agency that allocates phone numbers and operators? Does that agency not have the ability to shutdown operators who don't follow the rules?

Well, then, fix it.

So the solution is to regulate the assignment via phone numbers via VOIP providers. Which I perhaps, naively assumed was already happening. WTF?

I could actually imagine things being better if proof-of-identity was required for a phone number.

I really don't want IP access to run by the same scheme though.

How do these swatters fake phone numbers?

They are optimistic about getting paid next month.

I think the technical wtf should become clear if you look at the entire comment tree starting at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16041209

But yeah, to clarify: What they primarily need is someone who gives a shit about the site being functional, secondarily money to cover operating costs. Before the first need is covered, just blindly giving some loose group money seems like it would have a high potential of going to waste.