It's nice to see that I am not the only sick puppy out there.
At 69 years old, I still don't have much trouble with
getting in touch with my inner 12-year-old when it comes to
intrusive marketing which is so prevalent these days.
I found our old dial-up modem in a box of odds and ends 2
years ago and wondered if it could read callerID tones sent after
the first ring. It can so I started on a perl program that
initializes the modem for callerID and then compares the strings
received with a pair of files, one of which is called scum and
contains callerID name packets of folks we don't want to talk to.
The other is called good and looks for names of friends or anyone
else we like hearing from. It is actually scanned first and
causes the program to abort.
If anyone's name matches a name in scum, or the caller's
ID appears to be blocked or, in one case, matches a whole
exchange, (first 3 digits after the area code), I call a
subroutine that makes the modem answer for half a second then
drops the call.
We were bombarded with garbage calls all day long until
the US presidential election and it was so satisfying to hear the
program kill the call by answering just as the second ring began.
I also installed subroutines that looked for the word
"SPAM?" just before the name or "ROBO?" also just before the
name.
We now get very few unwanted calls but occasionally,
we'll get a call from lala-land from someone we don't know who
lets the phone ring until the answering machine picks up and then
fails to leave a message and I tell my wife, "I'll go put them on
the juke box." especially if it looks like the name of a business
with which we have no relationship.
Our phone is very quiet these days except for legitimate
calls.
Martin McCormick
