Robo callers we all hate them! Most of us have gotten those annoying phone calls at the most inconvenient of times. In the beginning it was hard for people to root out these calls. They would have to keep track of the caller ID’s being used and learn to ignore them. Then came the block in the iPhone with other apps such as TrueCaller. The spammers were Read more Why the FCC’s large fine on Robo Callers is worthless
How to get back and annoy IRS and other scammers
We have all received calls from the IRS scammers and the like annoying us to no end and trying to scam us out of our hard earned money. Till now there two ways to get back at them.
- Keep them on the phone thinking they have a fish and waste their time.
- Do a LRN lookup on the number, report it and check back to see if the line was taking down.
Both options are gratifying to an extent however the first one only ties up one scammer and the second takes time, some times lots of time. Now there is a better way, we can jam up their lines and annoy them. The added bonus here above the other options is that no one can call them back and get suckered in. All you need is some basic Asterisk skills and a carrier that is willing to take your calls.
This is done in 5 easy steps.
The importance of locking down your boxes
I was prompted to write this article because of a customers system that was being used as part of a DDOS attack. In this case a clients system was part of a DNS reflection attack (https://deepthought.isc.org/article/AA-00897/0/What-is-a-DNS-Amplification-Attack.html). The client had a cluster of servers setup with bind installed with the configuration which accepts and responds to all requests that it gets. The boxes were hosted on AWS. As soon as AWS contacted our client they came to us and it was fairly easy to show where their engineer messed up. Port 53 should have only allowed established traffic.
The fault game
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I sort of had it with the service providers. It seems that everyone here loves playing the blame game. If you call the cable company its the ISP’s issue. If you call the ISP then its the cable companies issue. A little while back a customer called up the phone company and stated that their internet was not working. The phone company said that it was an issue with their ISP. After speaking to the customer about which lights were lit up on the modem it turned out that the mode was not plugged in. How dumb is the telco ? They are so fast to blame the ISP where the modem was unplugged.
Which service provider do you hate the most ?
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Jimmy Justice is the man
It is pretty much well known that police and other government officials do not always respect the law. If they park in a bus zone who will ticket then ? For this reason many park illegally, make illegal maneuvers etc. The game is now changing. There is a man out there who calls himself Jimmy Justice. He walks around Brooklyn and filming government workers violating all sorts of traffic laws. From illegal U-Turns to parking a bus lane so they can get their coffee. Don’t get me wrong I have the highest respect for New York’s finest however they should if not more than the average citizen should know better. They write the tickets. What kind of message are they showing ? Click here for some of his clips that are on YouTube . Rock on Jimmy and keep doing the great work that you are doung.
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Goverments – Stick to what you are good at
XM and Sirius are in the process of a merger. John Kerry said that he would like to see the new units have atleast 50 channels of HD radio (which isn’t even really HD it’s just digital). Does he realize he is asking that a company open them selves up and invite the competition right in ? It’s like saying that Honda must use advertise Toyota ? Would Honda go for that ? Of course not so why should XM and Sirius have to do it ? This makes me wonder if some one is paying him off or is helping him out in some way for this. Johnny boy – stick to what your good at (which is raising taxes and making our lives out). You are not a salesman. Stop making it harder for people to earn money !!!!!
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Rant: We are people not crab
I can’t understand how ISP’s are getting away with offering us the same features as they did yesterday and charge us more. My current ISP worked great for VOIP and recently started getting real bad. I called them up and explained my issue’s and they told me I would need the “gamers package” which was optimized for gamers who need a fast steady connection. A month ago it was working fine and now I must pay for “good internet”. I don’t get it. Treating your customers like S*** and expecting them to more to keep up the same level over service does not work out there. What did I do ? I simply switched ISP’s. So far things are working well. It’s a matter of time before my new ISP starts creating issues and I will be forced to move on or pay a premium price for the same lever of service I was receiving a short while earlier. Oh well it seems they are treating us like crab. They boil us down slowly so we don’t see it coming until it’s too late.
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Some customers are just not worth it
There is a golden rule in life that I go by “You get what you pay for”. I have potential clients that come to me and want to know why my rates are cheaper than the “other guy”. They want my quality service and the next guys rates. It just does not work. Some one came to us recently. He complained about our rates. When we asked him why he was moving over to us he responded “well my current carrier is down some times for hours”. PEOPLE YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR !!!! If you want quality service you are going to pay for it. Teliax for instance charges 2 cents a minute to the US. Some consider this a bit high, however they have great customer service. If there is an issue generally they are great at solving it.
I had a client who wanted to host his Asterisk server from his home off his cable line to save money. I explained him that it was not worth it and that a server in a data center would be worth his while. He went with hosting it in his home. Two months later I get a call at 1:00 AM from him begging me to switch him over to a server in a Data center. He was on a conference call and the quality was horrible. He lost a deal worth all over $30,000. Was it worth it for him to go cheap on the $200.00 a month hosting ?
Remember – Y.G.W.Y.P.F (You Get What You Pay For).
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Rant: Tech Support is NOT your personal slave !!!!
I HATE IT when a customer that spends with you $20.00 a month expects you to everything for them. I recently had a client call me and complain about a very serious issue that was affecting a lot of his clients. He demanded that I get it fixed right away. Now I work on giving the best customer service possible but I am limited. If I were to do that for every client I would get no where. Also I will add that what the customer wanted was more of a feature than a severe bug. Just because a system does no preform to the exact liking of a customer does not mean that it is a bug. I recently had a friend relate to me how he had a client whom he set up Asterisk for and put the box up (a very good one I may add) in a data center. The client called him and stated that system was down and demanded that he fix it at once. He explained that he was on vacation and will look at it when he had time. There was no support contract between the two of them and the system was working fine for many months. The customer assumed that if he paid $200.00 for co-location then he was entitled to all the support in the world. In the end the issue was that the customer did not pay his ITSP and his account closed off. This brings me to another issue when your system is down it does NOT mean that mine is. I have another client that calls me from time to time saying “your lines are down”. As always I run a check and most of the time it is his internet that is having issues. I grab a trace, email it to him and show him that it is an issue at his end. Why do people always blame the next one. Check it out on your end and see if there is an issue. I have more to rant about but this will do for now.
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Rant: “Asterisk/VOIP Professionals”
This has been brewing in me for a while. You have people running around claiming to be VOIP and Asterisk experts when all they know how to do is work a GUI. If I know how to use Windows XP does that make me an expert ? I have nothing against people using GUI’s how ever since they just use a GUI they never learn what goes on behind it, which I will admit some times you don’t need but in the case of Asterisk you need to know the “guts” of Asterisk to trouble shoot issues. Take TrixBox for example. It is a great tool that generates lines and lines of code. If there is an issue they don’t know how to figure it out by looking at the code (since they are experts…. in the GUI only and don’t know how to write any code for Asterisk). They then get charged by the creators of TrixBox roughly $200.00 an hour to solve the issue. It also gives a bad name or us “other” VOIP installers. They put in a system that they are unable to maintain. They instantly turn off customers to the goodness that is VOIP.
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