president or secretary of a recognised organisation

What constitutes a “recognized organization”? That sounds rather open to interpretation…

There are actually tools that can unmask spoofed calls and show the true number that a call originates from. I’ve never used them personally, but I worked in computer telephony years ago so I have an understanding of how these tools work.

Caller ID was created so that a company like a bank that might have 100 or more telephone lines could program them so they always show up as “1-555-ACME-BANK” if they wanted to. So it’s trivial to set Caller ID to whatever you want.

But there’s another identification baked into calls that goes way back to the days when long distance calls were expensive and charged by the minute. The telephone companies needed to ensure the calling number was passed along from one phone carrier to another for billing purposes, and since it involved collecting money you can be sure it was accurate and unchangeable. This is called Automatic Number Identification (ANI).

Typically ANI is only passed between phone companies, or over high capacity phone circuits like T-1 lines, so it’s not sent to the person receiving the call. But there’s a feature available to most mobile phone plans that, combined with ANI, can provide for a way to do just that.

Depending on your mobile provider there’s likely a way to forward calls you explicitly ignore to another number. This only happens when you click to ignore/disconnect the call, and not let it time out and go to voicemail. When you sign up with one of these unmasking services then you set up your phone to forward these calls to their service. Then, if you get a spoofed call or even one where the caller id says unknown or unavailable, you click to ignore it. The call gets rerouted to the unmasking service, which has access to the ANI data. It reads the ANI number, replaces the Caller ID data with the ANI, then immediately routes the call back to you again. This time it will show you the number the call originated from and would be billed to.

Tesla Model Y owner here (never again, either). I hate the touchscreen, and also hate the way they’ve shoehorned functionality into the button/scroller controls on the steering wheel to try to address complaints.

When I first got the MY, the only way to control things like the wipers was through menus in the touchscreen. A software update introduced the ability to control them from the steering wheel controls, but even that “solution” sucks. You have to press & hold the control down while simultaneously scrolling it with your thumb. And most times you can’t scroll it from all the way off to all the way on in a single motion, so you press, scroll as much as you can, release & press again then scroll the rest of the way. A real PITA.

Lots of houses/apartments in places like Boston, etc. have old, drafty windows that landlords don’t bother to improve. Lots of hardware stores here sell kits containing double-sided tape and sheets of a special type of plastic. You surround the window with tape, place the plastic over it, then use a hot hair dryer to shrink the plastic until it’s snug. You can hardly see the plastic if you do it right, and it does a great job of dealing with drafts.

Eh… My brother has two sons. No need for me to add more.

Exactly. I know somebody who died when a deer came through the windshield…

Wary why? I work remotely in IT and manage a ton of Linux systems with it. Because my company has a large number of remote employees they limit us to Windows or Macs only, and have pretty robust MDM, security, etc. installed on them. Since MacOS is built on top of a unix kernel it’s much more intuitive to manage other unix & linux systems with it.

Personally I haven’t used Windows really since before Windows 10 came out, and as the family tech support department I managed to switch my wife, parents, brother, and mother in-law all to Mac’s years ago as well.

I’m in New England and have had a Tesla for 3 years now. Two years ago we drove it down to South Carolina & back. No issues at all thanks to their supercharger network.

When I was a junior dev back in the 90’s one of my primary tasks was to tackle customer bug reports. Basically grunt work. I doubt AI tools could do that kind of task very well, unless the bug was something like a buffer overflow. I would think it would be terrible when it involves business logic flow.

Even escaping to a Zuckerberg-style bunker sounds depressing as fuck to me. I don’t care how fancy it is, it’s still a gilded cage with limited resources…

I’m roughly half his age and I’m hoping to finally see our first female president. I can only imagine how thrilled he’d be to see it happen.

I doubt it would help. My employer uses Akamai as a CDN & security provider for our websites. Their bot analysis tools regularly flag distributed bot activity that can come from a handful or a few thousand IPs. They do a range of browser fingerprinting, TLS fingerprinting, etc. to uniquely identify traffic across ranges of IP’s. I’m sure Google/Youtube has the ability to do this as well.

Any given client would need to regularly randomize the order of headers in requests, randomly include/exclude optional headers, and also randomize TLS negotiation to try to circumvent all the fingerprinting these big corporations perform.

Haitch

Back in the 90’s I worked for a guy whose first name is “H”.

The problem is computer vision has a LONG way to go before it’s truly on par with human eyesight. Musk loves to crow how cameras are sufficient since we use our eyes to drive.

The thing is, eyes have special neural circuits that detect motion. They essentially filter out unnecessary information and send just the motion details to the brain. This prevents the brain from being overloaded with every detail the eye constantly sees.

And being overloaded with everything is exactly what computer vision currently does. It’s just a stream of images that the computer must analyze completely. So it’s working exactly opposite to how the eye & brain works.

And then they save you time by giving you a ballot with all the Republican candidates already checked.

Same. I’m one and done with my Model Y.

Ugh. I didn’t realize that & haven’t checked out their site in ages…

I just searched for their app in the Apple App Store and it looks like there are at least a few competitors out there now, so if you’re interested in something like this then I’d suggest shopping around to see what alternatives are available.

ANI and CallerID serve two very different purposes. Suppose you managed the telephones for something like an insurance company, where you have lots of customers calling in, but also have lots of employees calling out. You want the Caller ID on your customers phones to show the main # for your company whenever you call them, so it would show something like 1-212-555-1000.

Because the company has a lot of employees, it has 100 individual phone lines, so 100 agents can be on calls at the same time. The phone company actually allocates 100 numbers in that case, and those numbers could be very different than the above -1000 number. So the numbers 1-212-555-7000 through 1-212-555-7099 all belong to the company. Each time an employee makes a call their telephone system finds any one of those numbers between -7000 and -7099 that isnt in use and uses it. The call is billed to that specific number, and the bills for all 100 lines are combined & billed to the company at the end of the month.

If the company couldn’t configure its phones to display 1-212-555-1000 as the Caller ID then customers would see random numbers in the range of -7000 to -7099 any time the company called them.

I’ve never personally used it, but https://www.trapcall.com is a service that can reportedly unmask spoofed/blocked numbers and provide you with the actual number a person is calling from.

I did computer telephony work many years ago and have a general understanding of how this works. Caller ID is trivial to spoof, but there’s an underlying protocol called Automatic Number Identification (ANI) that was historically used for long distance billing when those calls were billed by the minute. Since it involves billing it can’t be spoofed by the caller, and the telephone companies are careful to ensure it’s accurate. What Trapcall apparently does is replace the spoofed Caller ID with the ANI.