Daley Ponderings

We've gotten two calls in the last couple days from people claiming that we called them, and quite irate about it.  What they didn't realize is that you can't really trust the caller-id values displayed on your phone - they are trivially forgeable by anyone, and I think relatively hard to trace even for phone companies and police, etc.

It is actually worse than the From: address in emails, which lots of people also think you can trust, and which is even easier to forge, though at least it is more traceable from which IP address the email came from.

Unfortunately for me, someone is making the calls, and we're getting blamed for it.  And the people don't really believe me when I say we didn't make the calls (we currently don't make outgoing calls ever using that caller id (note that I can change my caller id to whatever I want it to be), so it is actually impossible for me to pick up the phone and call them with that caller id).

When I search the internet, I see a number of articles published a couple years ago, but apparently, the general public is still under the impression that the caller-id values actually mean anything.

One person said it well when he said that caller-id wasn't ever meant to be secure, it was intended as a convenience, it is the general public who is using the value incorrectly, and so it isn't a technical problem to be solved, but a social problem.

Tell that to the lady who screamed at me late the other night...