What did virtual machines ever do to you?

You do more than I do

You have your vm set up?

I listen to the first couple of seconds of voicemails but 99% of the time I'm deleting at second 2 or 3.

I did get a needed call the other day, our cat had gotten its collar off and a neighbor took it to a shelter. Fortunately he was microchipped and we got a call very quickly and got him, he only had to spend about an hour at the shelter. He was still very stressed out. The neighbor was kind of a dick, there are a lot of cats without collars in our area and most of them are just outside cats that get fed outside.

Our cat used to be one of those, but the owner died and we took it, and he's 13 and doesn't want to wear a collar so he figures out how to break that mother fucker off all the time. If he didn't have a breakaway collar, he would probably choke himself to death.

Yeah but my company thinks that's still the best way to announce everything so I miss stuff all the time lol

jtrek for prez

This is technically how it already works except for the government gets the $10 instead of us

There's no enforcement on this though.

Im not sure i want the phone company to make the decision.

It should be more along the lines of all phone companies must take a deposit to open an account. Foreign and voip calls must be linked to a deposit for the phone company to be allowed to connect those calls. A call gets reported as spam, the $ come out of the deposit, if the deposit gets used up, theyre banned from calling until they reup their deposit.

I used to not get any as well. Then for a new job I had to sign up with an American company, and since I didn't have a company phone yet, I used my private number.

Since then it's been multiple calls/messages per day, but over the years it's died down. I fucking hate it so much.

Ironically that was the cause of the first worst scam calls. The govt had a do not call list that you could put your number on which then became THE phone book for scam calls instead of stopping them. If you've ever signed up for anything or paid for anything online and had to give your phone number, it went into a list that was sold on. With auto dialers, they just go through every permeation of possible numbers. I don't get many calls on my cell because I keep that number private and use my already compromised land line for everything.

Some mobile networks have spam protection that's enabled automatically.

You could also have a "clean" number, especially if you don't use your phone number anywhere online, haven't answered a spam call before, and nobody used it before you (or the previous user was a long time ago).

Spam callers can't robodial literally every number, so they rely on lists of phone numbers that are known to be good/active, for example if they've answered a spam call before, if the number has been in a data leak, etc.

I get them because I was jobless for six months. Now that a lot of job sites sell your data and some jobs are straight up fake to collect data, it is so hard to stay off a list.

What's Merrell?

since STIR/SHAKEN rolled out, the scam and robocalls here have really dropped off. only a few per week now.. even to the phone numbers that are published (intentionally) online.

of the ones that get through, nearly all of them are coming through new voip points-of-presence popping-up in small towns all over our very rural part of the country.

The main reason I ended up with another Pixel phone was for the spam filtering. A couple calls a day go straight to the automated answering service (where I can see the speach-to-text response of the caller on the screen) or get blocked completely. Text messages typically come through, but they're less annoying, and I can add them to a spam list.

Don't sign up for things that need a phone number