Just worked an issue at Job wherein a customer tried to make a call and got busy signal, and when I looked at the trace, I found a completely new SIP error code coming back from the handoff carrier: SIP 608 Rejected
looked into this and learned that this is a brand new response code established by RFC8688 in 2019, and it indicates that my call has been blocked by an automated system. In other words: a fucking Deep Learning Algorithm decided this call was spam. and, of course, given that I know the particulars, I can say for a fact that this was a perfectly legitimate call, so this is a false positive.
and this, of course, is the hell future we already predicted years ago and can expect to experience in increasing quantity for the rest of our lives: because we absolutely and resolutely refuse to do anything to improve the social conditions that cause people to turn to scams as a form of income, and because no business is willing to actually work with any other equitably or hire adequate staff to handle their actual business needs, we can expect every single medium of communication to slowly become completely saturated by scams.
at this point, we expect phone calls to be liars trying to steal money. we expect emails to be spam and viruses. we expect snail mail to be useless fucking credit card offers and misleading internet "upgrade" offers. we have given up on fixing any of this at the source.
we will not punish the corporations who send spam, for obvious reasons, and we can't punish scammers because there are literally hundreds of thousands of them, almost all beyond the reach of our justice system. which is good, because that would just be a new treadmill of misery, pushing more people into prisons even as they get replaced instantly by the next wave of people who have no other options.
so in response to this now unavoidable hurricane of fraud, a storm with no end and no eye, we will increasingly take what appears to be the only way out: feed it all into a computer running code nobody understands, and if the quantity of scam messages decreases, simply close the door and walk away, feeling like we solved the problem
what happens when that unknowable ML clusterfuck decides that saying the word "dollar" three times in one message means you're a scammer? it can't be fixed. even if it could, it's a single chunk of code processing data for 5,000,000 end users. your problem simply isn't worth solving at the risk of making everyone else's problem worse.
and none of that matters, because reaching the people who own and run the systems is impossible. if "google" blocks an email because an ML algo said it was spam, you can't get google to fix it, because even if they care, they don't own the system. it's some middleware, probably serving a hundred other providers. they will not open a ticket on your behalf; they most likely can't.
this is the very definition of "kafkaesque." this is what The Trial was about, in no uncertain terms. you can only speak to functionaries and middlemen; people who are responsible for nothing, who work for an organization but aren't allowed to represent it, because that's too much liability. the organization has too many employees, so below the top few tiers, which are themselves gigantic, they simply can't trust their own people to serve the organizations interests.
and besides, there are simply too many of you. it would not be possible to let you speak to anyone who's In Charge of anything. their time is, by definition, too precious. in order to let you talk to an actual authority, the organization would need to employ so many authorities that they would become too numerous to govern, and thus their trust level would have to be reduced, bringing us back to the same situation.
google, or AT&T, or microsoft cannot afford - in every sense of the term - to let you appeal anything. rules must be hard and fast so they can be applied by machines and explained by untrained and untrustworthy employees.
in this specific context they must be even more rigid, because any option for bypassing the rules will immediately become a target for all scammers. they need to get through, they have nothing to lose, and they have infinite time and infinite manpower. if the option to bypass The System exists, whoever fields those requests will be deluged by feckless attempts to do so fraudulently. once again, they'll have to hire an unreasonable number of people to handle all the requests, and on top of that, eventually the bomber would get through, and someone would accept a bad-faith request.
furthermore.
when it comes to phones, in particular, it is even moreso the case that "nobody" is at fault. you pick up your T-Mobile cellphone and call an AT&T number. you get blocked by a spam filter. who did it? neither of those companies - it was centurylink, or some nothing-company you've never heard of called Sinch. they're an intermediate carrier, who completed the call between the originating and terminating carriers.
you have no business relationship with them. they will not speak to you if you call them; they won't even admit they received the call, because federal law prohibits them. and this doesn't matter, because you can't even see who that company was. even the carriers originating and terminating the call can't see more than one hop in the process.
SIP 608 is supposed to provide a remedy. the carrier who rejects the call can send a business card (literally - there's a header in which they can put a link to a fucking vCard) for their dispute resolution department, which you can't see, but your phone provider can.
so, assuming their support is remotely competent (they aren't, but) you can call your phone company, say you can't reach a given number, and they can find out who blocked it and submit a dispute
except
the RFC says they MAY provide a vCard, if they don't believe that information will be used for further fraud. which is literally impossible to determine automatically, and the whole point of these systems is automation.
the one i worked today did not provide the header. it is unquestionably the case that nobody will, because they don't have to, and there's no incentive. therefore: absolutely nothing has changed, except that now you can see that you've been put into double secret jail that you can never escape.
