About two years ago CenturyLink discontinued landline, so I had to get a VOIP connection and plug my phone into it. Admittedly this has advantages over the old way, since I can look online and see if I missed anything meaningful. During those two years, 99% of the incoming calls were obvious spam, at least two per day, showing the standard 14 second spam pattern.
The spam stopped suddenly last month. The entire call history from 3/24 to 4/24 has three calls, one of which was real. Previously a month would have contained 50 calls. What happened? Might be connected with the shutdown of a spam center based in Portland around the same time. Some of the spam calls were listed as Portland, many from fake locations between here and Portland.
The email spammers are still going strong, pumping out as many as 100 fake messages a day, carefully designed to evade the filters. A higher cost per message is the obvious solution, but nobody is willing to impose it.
= = = = =
Few days later, nice example of another observation. The online AI bots confine themselves to fairly old items (at least two years ago) UNLESS they detect that a blogger is talking about bots. They want to know what’s being said about them. This item got two “reads” today while everything around it was reliably zero.
Polistra's Mill 