The purpose of this CXTech Week 12 2023 newsletter is to highlight, with commentary, some of the news stories in CXTech this week. What is CXTech? The C stands for Connectivity, Communications, Collaboration, Conversation, Customer; X for Experience because that’s what matters; and Tech because the focus is enablers.
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Covered this week:
- FCC Adopts Its First Rules Focused on Scam Texting
- Completed. TADSummit Special, 21-23 Mar
- TADHack Open is this weekend + Enterprise Connect 2023
- The cloud backlash has begun. No, we live in a post-cloud world.
- Clubhouse, Agora and Reality
- People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
FCC Adopts Its First Rules Focused on Scam Texting
Last week we saw the FCC adopt some network centric rules on illegal robo-texting. I had the chance to talk with Tim from Commio about this on their monthly industry briefing, see video below.
I’m surprised the FCC not did not take on a broader perspective with this ruling, and look at it from the consumers’ perspective. I use spam protection in Google Messages, and spam texts are not a problem. Like Gmail it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough. Robo-calling is a more significant problem because the experience is different, it interrupts what I’m doing, illegal robo-texting does not.
Back in 2020/2021 I showed a few people who hadn’t enabled SPAM protection in their SMS client, but I think it’s on by default these days. Talking with a few people about the announcement, there is a general consensus it’s not a significant problem in the US for SMS. Though outside of SMS, WhatsApp is definitely seeing a rise in SPAM.
Taking a singularly network centric approach is definitely a more complex way to solve it. The 2 sources of illegal robo-texts are P2P SMS (SIM boxes, applications using a carriers’ SIM) and A2P. Carriers can easily block the P2P stuff, that’s basic network hygiene. Given the billions of messages on their network, they’re likely aware of a new illegal SMS campaign in minutes. Smishing is another issue, a zero trust approach is likely the only option, but it is not cheap; and that’s not included in these rules.
As covered by YouMail at TADSummit, they provide protection services that recognizes the robo-calling / texting templates, see “What Everyone Needs to Know about Protecting the CPaaS Ecosystem from Unlawful Robocalls.” Network-centric solutions are available.
For A2P based illegal robo-texting we have the 5 aggregators with direct carrier connections: Syniverse, Sinch, Kaleyra, Vibes, and Infobip. They should be implementing basic network hygiene, like the carriers. If it’s not these 2 sources, then where are all these illegal robo-SMS coming from?
Unfortunately the whole of the A2P industry is being made to suffer. All A2P providers must monitor all text messages to block those from invalid, unallocated, unused numbers, or numbers not assigned to be text capable (self-identified). The FCC runs the reassigned Numbers DB. But those self-identified as not texting, that’s worrisome. It’s a patchwork quilt of databases.
Additionally there’s the creation of point of contact for rejected messages, additional processes such as including the do not call registry (but it’s not ‘do not text’), and tightening up the campaign opt-in rules. I think this is important, but I’m not sure the FCC can do much there. The document is a bit of a mish-mash, looking at the problem from the network-side, rather than holistically.
Currently we’re in a relatively uncontrolled situation where some companies have clear written policies, including opt-in renewal, etc. While some buy lists of numbers and go for it. The walls are closing in on them, albeit slowly.
The network is never going to be in a position of completely stop this problem. Data hygiene is required across all actors including the end customers. Good marketing practices should go beyond opt-ins, reminding people to add the brand’s numbers / emails to their contact lists.
Even with all these rules the FCC has been poor on fine collection for robo-calling. Given the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars the spammers are making, and the impact on the nation, jail time should be included, not just fines.
The Commio Monthly Briefing reviews this and much more. In the limit its KYC (Know Your Customer) and Compliance. The solution requires all of us to work together in squeezing out the spammers.
Completed. TADSummit Special, 21-23 Mar
Tuesday 21st March. The EU Cyber Resilience act – what does it mean for IP communications?
Here’s the videos, slides and commentary: https://blog.tadsummit.com/2023/03/21/eu-cyber-resilience-act/
Olle Johansson, Experienced consultant in network security and real time communication – PKI, webrtc, SIP , XMPP. Kamailio and Asterisk expert.
Sandro Gauci, CEO / Senior Penetration Tester / Chief mischief officer at Enable Security
Wednesday 22nd March. Silent Authentication: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly!
Here’s the video and commentary: https://blog.tadsummit.com/2023/03/22/silent-authentication/.
Eric Nadalin, CTO, co-founder tru.ID, and Gentleman Farmer
Thursday 23rd March. Why many conversational AI providers are ditching commercial platforms and moving to open source — and why you should too!
Here’s the video and commentary: https://blog.tadsummit.com/2023/03/23/conversational-ai-open-source/
Dave Horton, Creator of drachtio.org, the open source framework for SIP Server applications
TADHack Open is this weekend + Enterprise Connect 2023
Just a couple more days and I’ll not be emailing you so often. Well, until TADHack Global on 21-22 October.
Thank you to everyone who has registered to take part in TADHack Open 2023. I’m grateful for everyone who is prepared to give their time to show the power of programmable communications using Radisys through their hacking skills.
Check out the Tips for Competing in TADHack Open.
As many of you are remote this year, start whenever you like, the sooner you start the sooner you’ll be finished! There’s no ready-set-go kick-off, think of this email as that.
If you have any issues using the Radisys resources you can contact them on tads.slack.com or via email tadhack23_support@radisys.com. Mariana Lopez from WebRTC.Ventures is available if you want help with ideation and presentation review.
The big thing to complete now is to create your account on the Engage Digital Portal, please submit a small registration form at https://engagedigital.ai/tadhack. Click the “Sign Up” button. Please get this done before the weekend.
For your hack; think about problems you see in your home, work and community life; and think about how the Radisys resources can help you solve them.
Keep an eye on @TADHack on Twitter, search #TADHack on Linkedin, and join TADS Slack to see the chatter. Good luck and I’m excited to see what you create over this weekend.
I’ll be at Enterprise Connect on Monday and Tuesday, give me a ping if you’d like to meet up.
The cloud backlash has begun. No, we live in a post-cloud world.
TechCrunch had an article on the cloud backlash, I think it’s 5 years late. Back in 2018 Dropbox moved away from AWS as it scaled up its business and saved $75M. Many large SaaS companies have done the same over the passed 5 years.
With a ‘telco hat’ on at TADSummit 2020 we had some great presentations on telco cloud, in particular the panel discussion clearly defined the challenges in public cloud adoption for network software. It’s far beyond a technology issue, as always, there are people and processes to be changed. And back to Dropbox, they do use AWS for analytics today, a workload discussed in the TADSummit 2020 panel session.
Clubhouse, Agora and Reality
Seeking Alpha did a piece on Agora, they’re watching a waiting to see what happens. Agora is trading at about $3, from $40-$50 in 2020, in 2021 they saw a peak of over $100. When they listed I did point out my concerns in CXTech Week 37 2020. They rode the wave of Clubhouse, being an enabling technology. Clubhouse failed for the reasons I mentioned in CXTech Week 5 2021. The comments in that article and some of the people mentioned remind me of what we’re seeing at Twitter today. Moderation must be baked into the platform, not removed. See this article from the BBC, “How Elon Musk’s tweets unleashed a wave of hate“.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Paul Stovall is now Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at LFG Data Services (LCI, Fintellex and G2 Web Services). I’ve known Paul since his time at Synchronoss over 10 years ago.
Niall Roche has added an additional position as Grant-Giving Committee Member and Education Chair at DLT Science Foundation. Niall has supported TADHack London over the years.
Brian Johnson is now Authentication and Verification at Sinch. Which is a return home as he was with mBlox which was bought by Sinch.
Dalan Angelo is now Business Development Lead at Sony. We first met during his time at Subspace.
Denis Dorval is now VP, Sales International (EMEA & Apac) at JumpCloud. We first met during his time at Apigee.
Avik Datta is now Technology Director at Landways. We first met at Vodafone, when I was trying to sell presence APIs to carriers over 2 decades ago!
Glen Schmid is now Sr. Sales Manager at Lanner Electronics Inc.
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