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John Oliver tackles robocalls by flooding FCC with spam calls:
"The host of HBO's Last Week Tonight has come up with a new way to encourage FCC commissioners to take a harder stance on robocalls: by robocalling them. On his show Sunday evening, Oliver debuted a system ... that robocalls FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and fellow commissioners every 90 minutes.
Can we call it treason? I don't think so, this guy is foreign, from U.K. Time to deport?
John Oliver Fights Robocalls. by Robocalling Ajit Pai and the FCC:
Comedian John Oliver is taking aim at the Federal Communications Commission again, this time demanding action on robocalls while unleashing his own wave of robocalls against FCC commissioners.
In a 17-minute segment yesterday on HBO's Last Week Tonight, Oliver described the scourge of robocalls and blamed Pai for not doing more to stop them. Oliver ended the segment by announcing that he and his staff are sending robocalls every 90 minutes to all five FCC commissioners.
"Hi FCC, this is John from customer service," Oliver's recorded voice says on the call. "Congratulations, you've just won a chance to lower robocalls in America today... robocalls are incredibly annoying, and the person who can stop them is you! Talk to you again in 90 minutes—here's some bagpipe music."
[...] When it came to robocalling the FCC, Oliver didn't need viewers' help. "This time, unlike our past encounters [with the FCC], I don't need to ask hordes of real people to bombard [the FCC] with messages, because with the miracle of robocalling, I can now do it all by myself," Oliver said.
"It turns out robocalling is so easy, it only took our tech guy literally 15 minutes to work out how to do it," Oliver also said. He noted that "phone calls are now so cheap and the technology so widely available that just about everyone has the ability to place a massive number of calls."
It would be a shame to waste all that time between phone calls doing nothing. Maybe John Oliver could be persuaded to add a 100 more people and maybe another 435 people while he's at it?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Appalbarry on Sunday March 17 2019, @12:37AM (3 children)
Still baffled why my Android lets me mark and block spam text messages with on tap, but offers no way to block spam calls.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cykros on Sunday March 17 2019, @05:33AM (1 child)
Well, mine lets me block calls, mark calls as spam, and lets me know when a call is from a suspected (by other people or Google itself) spam caller. But then I've got a Pixel 2. So, either it's only in a newer version of Android than you have (I'm running Android 9 with the March 5, 2019 security patch), or for whatever reason, it's been disabled by your particular phone manufacturer.
Either way, I think my next phone will be a Pixel 3 or 4, because this is functionality I'm not giving up any time soon. Especially considering I've got a recycled number, so the irrelevant calls have always been bad, even before Ajit Pai came along.
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Sunday March 17 2019, @05:53PM
LG G4, Android 6 with no hope of ever updating.
I long ago stopped trying to guess what was an Android problem and what was LG. Though I have to say that Android seems to become less usable with every new flavour.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday March 17 2019, @11:15PM
Figured a hack for this one a long time ago. Make a new contact called "Block List" and set the number of rings to zero or use the nothing ring tone. Go to your call log, click the call that was spam, add it as a contact and pick your new Block List contact.
Newer Android does support real number blocking but it's an additional click. Go into your call log, click the info "I" and then click triple dots. There is the Block Number option.
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