Two developers will share the FTC’s $50,000 prize...
Two developers will share the FTC’s $50,000 prize for providing the best solutions to illegal prerecorded calls, the FTC announced Tuesday (http://1.usa.gov/YZnMcm). The commission announced the “Robocall Challenge” in October, and promised that the winner would become “a national hero”…
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(CD Oct 19 p9). Both winning proposals, by Serdar Danis and Aaron Foss, focus on intercepting and filtering out the illegal calls by using technology that blacklists known robocaller phone numbers, while letting through calls from other phone numbers. Both proposals would use a “CAPTCHA” style challenge-response test to stymie unwanted robocalls from reaching the user. The winning entries “have the potential to turn the tide on illegal robocalls, and they show the wisdom of tapping into the genius and technical expertise of the public,” said Charles Harwood, acting director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. The agency also gave a “technology achievement award” to a proposal that would use crowd-sourcing to block callers flagged as a spammer by other users.