Whether managing director of AT&T Work a Robocall during a live interview or nobody is immune to this plague

The robotic calling problem only gets worse and worse last year, the Federal Communications Commission told telecoms managers to start doing something about the problem, which report in January 2019 had estimated to have exploded into a tune of 26.3 billion robotic rooms located in the US annual. And not even those in charge of the nation's wireless companies are apparently immune. At an economic club event in Washington DC on Wednesday, AT & T CEO Randall Stephenson was turned up, or apparently, in front of dozens of audiences.

Dallas Morning News reported that Stephenson was there for some to bemoan DC bureaucrats who knocked out AT & T's an ultrafusion with $ 85 billion with Time Warner (which, to be fair, there is some suspicion was more the result of Donald Trump's feud with Time Warner's CNN subsidiary.

In the clip below, posted by C-SPAN, Stephenson paused to look at his Apple Watch and tell the audience: "I also get a robo call … It's literally a robo call."

AT & T and rival Comcast have just announced a partnership (backed by other industry players such as Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint) intended to test new call authentication technology using of cryptographic protocols named SHAKEN (Signature Based Management of Asserted Information using toKENs) and STIR sec Whatever Phone Identification Revised).

According to an AT & T statement, the system should make it harder for robococks to spoof telephone numbers – a practice where the caller speaks a telephone network to display a fake or deceived number on the receiver. A similar system expands in limited use on T-Mobile earlier this year, while Sprint will conduct its own testing in the second half of 2019. Senators John Thune and Ed Markey have also introduced the TRACED Act service "implementing an appropriate and effective call authentication framework in the internet protocol networks of voice service providers. "

Given the eerie timing, it is worth wondering if this was a kind of publicity configuration. On the other hand, it is a little embarrassing, as Stephenson leads one of the companies that leaves this issue out of control. Anecdotal I can tell you that it is not a good time to get one of these things, and have received them in the shower, on the subway, in the middle of other conversations, during movies, and just when I start to fall asleep.

[The Verge]