[plug] [OT| growing VOIP -> POTS spam problem

[Craig Ringer]

On Wed, 2005-06-01 at 12:57 +0800, Shayne O'Neill wrote:
> > If you should be abusing the "living daylight" out of anyone it should
> > be the people that run the cold-calling sweat shop instead of giving
> > these people real jobs.
> 
> I concur. However, I must confess having recently been woken up at about
> 2am by *PRERECORDED* off-shore phone advertisement with a return number
> that was one of those 50c per minute timed call things I found myself 
> *deeply* wishing I HAD someone to abuse.
> 

This is the price we're going to have to pay for VoIP I fear. Look at
what happened with SMS with providers that have free SMS gateways - SMS
spam galore. VoIP->POTS gateways can't really be run free here thanks to
local call charges (for which I'm more and more thankful every day) but
they're evidently cheap enough to be attractive.

I got a great call recently - it was silent for 30s, then informed me
that "we are sorry, this call was only intended to be recieved by an
answering machine" and hung up. Commence one purple frothing fit of
rage.

Anyway, I think that's it for my participation in this.... PLUG's
getting pretty noisy with paintball and VoIP spam ;-) . Think I might be
in on the paintball come to think of it (if paintball is what it ends up
being) - and as another vim addict^wsupporter.

--
Craig Ringer