Yep, L5 Needs a Call Blocker

Hardware Librem 5
1

Still in the first week of my new L5 and I got two spam calls on my AWESIM powered new phone number.

Both were for Medicare part A and B.

So what I think happened is that the phone number I got was allotted from a block of previous customers who died off of old age. After all the phone company that owns it can’t use it anymore so what else can they do but sell it to a new customer?

Meanwhile the targeted spam still goes to an old age customer. I suppose this means I’m in line for spam about “Depends”, “Viagra”, “Cialis”, and “Testosterone Therapy” also.

I know Captain Morgan tried installing the phone call blocker, looking at his multitudinous efforts on another thread tells me it isn’t worth the trouble.

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I’d like the option of enabling (from the Settings) a whitelist, based on my contacts. All other incoming calls are blocked from ringing/notifications. Same wish for SMS as well. The spam is intolerable, especially when it’s election time in the US, when you are bombarded with both phone and SMS spam.

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What I DO like on my old 'droid (which is working in parallel), is the ability to click on a recent call and just hit “block”. If it turns out to be real friend they can contact me by other means and have me fix it.

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4

In the meantime, try this.

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Voicemail? I haven’t figured that one out yet. Does the AWESIM provide phone number even HAVE voicemail? Hmmm… it points to T-Mobile, I’ll have to figure that out.

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And don’t forget to register your new number at https://www.donotcall.gov/

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Joy! Thanks!

I even have my login for that written down from a dozen years ago.

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Here’s Canada’s DoNotCall registry, for those who might need it: https://lnnte-dncl.gc.ca/en/Consumer/Register-your-number/

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Unfortunately, many spam calls originate from overseas operations, who don’t care about U.S. or Canadian laws.

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Not too bad mine was of old age and a maga supporter asking me to fund all those Maga efforts.

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The last 3 calls (today) came from my local area code. (Yes they may be spoofed from overseas, but at least I should be able to block them, ad infinitum.)

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But blocking one spoofed number won’t prevent that caller’s other spoofed numbers from getting through.

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13

I really don’t mind. I can do that as they occur. There isn’t more that a few a day. (Although I can foresee a funny drawback, would there be a programmatic limit of 32767 blocked number because the programmer decided to use an 8 bit integer for the field?) Hee hee.

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In some applications (mobile or voip), one would be able to use a wild card to catch more than one at a time, e.g. block “888555****”

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Come to think of it, surely there’s some CLI way to set BM818 rules for certain incoming numbers.

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That would be (signed) 16 bit but now that you are back in the game and since this is an open source phone, you could answer your own question. Right? :wink:

More of a concern for me would be that the implementation starts to suffer performance failure i.e. concern that you could block 40,000 numbers but it will take so long to decide whether or not to block that the call times out / other similar adverse performance-related issues.

So you need to look both at hard limits and effective performance limits.

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Ach, you caught me in any obvious error. Thanks. (I have had 8 bits on the brain lately).

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18

Does that work for you? I signed up a long time ago, but it didn’t to make a difference.

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A binary search of 1,000,000 sorted items is 20 operations/cycles, I don’t think 40k will be a problem as long as the block list is sorted.

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I compiled phosh-antispam for my L5 a while ago, but never got to test it enough before I ran into serious issues with call audio and infinite ringing on the phone. Now when these issues seem mostly or completely resolved, I might try it again.

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