At some point, our phone habits changed. It used to be that if the phone rang, you answered it. With the advent of caller ID, you’d only pick up if it was someone you recognized. And now, with spoofing and robocalls, it can seem like a gamble to pick up the phone, period. In 2023, robocall blocking service Youmail estimates there were more than 55 billion robocalls in the United States. How did robocalls proliferate so much that now they seem to be dominating phone networks? And can any of this be undone? IEEE Spectrum spoke with David Frankel of ZipDX, who’s been fighting robocalls for over a decade, to find out.

David Frankel is the founder of ZipDX, a company that provides audioconferencing solutions. He also created the Rraptor automated robocall surveillance system.

How did you get involved in trying to stop robocalls?

David Frankel: Twelve years ago, I was working in telecommunications and a friend of mine called me about a contest that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was starting. They were seeking the public’s help to find solutions to the robocall problem. I spent time and energy putting together a contest entry. I didn’t win, but I became so engrossed in the problem, and like a dog with a bone, I just haven’t let go of it.

How can we successfully combat robocalls?

Frankel: Well, I don’t know the answer, because I don’t feel like we’ve succeeded yet. I’ve been very involved in something called traceback—in fact, it was my FTC contest entry. It’s a semiautomated process where, in fact, with the cooperation of individual phone companies, you go from telco A to B to C to D, until you ultimately get somebody that sent that call. And then you can find the customer who paid them to put this call on the network.

I’ve got a second tool—a robocall surveillance network. We’ve got tens of thousands of telephone numbers that just wait for robocalls. We can correlate that with other data and reveal where these calls are coming from. Ideally, we stop them at the source. It’s a sort of sewage that’s being pumped into the telephone network. We want to go upstream to find the source of the sewage and deal with it there.

Can more regulation help?

Frankel: Well, regulations are really, really tough for a couple of reasons. One is, it’s a bureaucratic, slow-moving process. It’s also a cat-and-mouse game, because, as quick as you start talking about new regulations, people start talking about how to circumvent them.

There’s also this notion of regulatory capture. At the Federal Communications Committee, the loudest voices come from the telecommunications operators. There’s an imbalance in the control that the consumer ultimately has over who gets to invade their telephone versus these other interests.

Is the robocall situation getting better or worse?

Frankel: It’s been fairly steady state. I’m just disappointed that it’s not substantially reduced from where it’s been. We made progress on explicit fraud calls, but we still have too many of these lead-generation calls. We need to get this whacked down by 80 percent. I always think that we’re on the cusp of doing that, that this year is going to be the year. There are people attacking this from a number of different angles. Everybody says there’s no silver bullet, and I believe that, but I hope that we’re about to crest the hill.

Is this a fight that’s ultimately winnable?

Frankel: I think we’ll be able to take back our phone network. I’d love to retire, having something to show for our efforts. I don’t think we’ll get it to zero. But I think that we’ll be able to push the genie a long way back into the bottle. The measure of success is that we all won’t be scared to answer our phone. It’ll be a surprise that it’s a robocall—instead of the expectation that it’s a robocall.

This article appears in the May 2024 issue as “5 Questions for David Frankel.”

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, Ernie Smith’s newsletter, which hunts for the end of the long tail.

If you ask the average person what the company 3M does, odds are if they have a few gray hairs hanging out on their scalp, they might say that the company makes floppy disks. Now, this was once true, but if you look on 3M’s own website, you will see no mention of this legacy—it’s a firm that sells abrasive materials, adhesive tapes, filters, films, personal protective equipment, and medical equipment. (Younger people, if they recognize 3M, it’s probably because of Post-it notes, or more recently its N95 masks.)

Floppies have had a surprisingly long life—in January 2024, Japan announced it will no longer require floppy-disk copies of government submissions. But 3M got out of the data-storage business about 28 years ago, when it transferred its floppy disk manufacturing to a spin-off called Imation. Imation is still around, under the name Glassbridge Enterprises, but with a much smaller profile.

3M’s spin-off, Imation, continued producing floppy disks after 3M itself left the business. IEEE Spectrum

Even with that said, those gray-hairs will frequently claim that of the many makers of floppies out there, 3M made the best ones. Given that, I was curious to figure out exactly why 3M became the most memorable brand in data storage during the formative days of computing, and why it abandoned the product.

How 3M Became a Key Innovator in the Production of Magnetic Data Storage

Now, to be clear, 3M did not invent magnetic storage—that was done by Austro-German engineer Fritz Pfleumer, in 1928. He created audio tape, a recording medium that started as broad strips of paper coated with iron-powder granules, and eventually moved to less-fragile cellulose acetate with help from what would become another big name in floppy disks, BASF. At first, the innovation didn’t spread outside of Germany because of World War II.

Nor was 3M the first company to popularize magnetic media— that was Ampex, which commercialized the tape recorder in the late 1940s. That was the point when magnetic tape turned into a major innovation in the world of music—one that, famously, Bing Crosby got to first because he gave financial support to Ampex. Incidentally, Ampex’s later spinoff, Memorex, represented Silicon Valley’s first true startup.

“Of all the businesses 3M has shed over its 100 years, the two seminal decisions that people point to as most significant involved the sale of 3M’s Duplicating Products business to Harris Corporation in Atlanta, Georgia, and the spin-off of 3M’s data-storage and imaging-systems businesses in 1996 creating a new company called Imation in Oakdale, Minnesota...”

Before World War II, one company did attempt to manufacture a tape recorder in the U.S. based on Pfluemer’s magnetic-tape invention. That firm, the Brush Development Co., had developed a device called the Soundmirror, produced by a Hungarian inventor named Semi J. Begun, who was likely something of a competitor to Pfleumer: Also a German, he had moved to the United States and developed a steel-based magnetic tape. The invention was used by the U.S. military during the war, and the company revisited the idea immediately after. But, it needed someone to manufacture magnetic tape for it to use.

As author David Morton noted in his 2006 book Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology, 3M was one of the best-suited companies on the market to help Brush out. That’s because the groundbreaking work that the company had done to develop pressure-sensitive adhesive tape was an essential element of making magnetic tape effective.

3M’s adhesive-tape technology transferred readily to magnetic tape. 3M

Strangely enough, Richard Gurley Drew, the inventor of much of 3M’s tape technology, was a musician—he played banjo in a local orchestra—when he took a job with the company. He probably didn’t realize he was inventing a key element of 20th-century recording technology when he observed that auto body shops needed a way to “mask off” areas of vehicles that were being whittled down with sandpaper, but his observation would prove useful to the invention of masking tape.

In the mid-1950s, 3M advertised its Scotch audio reel-to-reel tape.Audio Magazine/Internet Archive/Scotch

As Smithsonian Magazine notes, the formulation he developed, combining cabinetmaker’s glue with glycerin, proved to be just the right level of easy-to-remove adhesive that it became an out-and-out phenomenon. You might know his invention, developed in 1925, as Scotch Tape.

In 1930, he followed it up with another invention that was even more amazing—tape made from cellophane, which by its nature was totally transparent. Another 3M employee developed the tape dispenser, and the two inventions reshaped offices the world over.

So, when Brush looked to others to produce its recording medium, 3M was well positioned to help out due to magnetic tape’s similarity with its Scotch Tape. Brush eventually moved to other manufacturers, like Dupont. But the experience led 3M to continue developing metal-oxide tape technology, leading to the creation of the Scotch 111 reel-to-reel tape, which was one of the most popular types used in recording studios throughout the 1950s, according to the Museum of Magnetic Sound Recording.

I admittedly have long had a fascination with these reel-to-reel tapes. A number of years ago, back when I lived in Milwaukee, I found a couple of blank reel-to-reel tapes created by 3M using the Scotch name. I bought them from a junk store, and maybe paid $2 for them. They managed to follow me through three states and five cities, and now sit on my intentionally organized pile of junk. Based on my analysis of the container and the logotype it uses, they date to the mid-1960s or earlier. (No, I have not tried to record on them.)

I’ve owned this blank Scotch 150 reel-to-reel tape for nearly 20 years. It is 50 to 60 years old. Ernie Smith

For years, 3M’s reel-to-reels had one of the strongest reputations in the music industry; they were built to be of superhigh quality. But you might be wondering, how did 3M make the leap from reel-to-reel tape to floppies? It feels like just as strange a leap as a masking tape company developing reel-to-reel audio tape.

But, again, it happened.

How 3M’s Tapes Went From Music to Data

3M didn’t develop the floppy disk drive, either. IBM did, and Shugart Associates further improved it by making it small enough for regular users.

3M manufactured a signature 5.25-inch floppy disk. IEEE Spectrum

But 3M, much as with mechanical tape, was well positioned to improve on it, leveraging its skills with mechanical media in the budding computing industry. In a way, 3M came to media manufacturing from the opposite direction than its disk-selling competitor Memorex did. Memorex started with computers and gradually came to develop and improve tape-based technology, which eventually evolved into floppy disks. On the other hand, 3M started with the raw materials and the manufacturing processes, and combined those into computing’s greatest commodity item, the floppy disk.

3M got into the floppy disk market around the fall of 1973. It was not the only manufacturer of disks out there—some names from this era include Verbatim, Control Data, Dysan, and BASF. Most of these companies started with computing technology—for example, Dysan worked closely with Shugart Associates on the 5.25-inch floppy. But 3M wasn’t alone in starting with the raw materials. BASF, a German chemical manufacturer, has a somewhat similar corporate history and logo design to fellow thick-Helvetica enthusiast 3M. (Though 3M obviously never associated with the Nazis during World War II, so there’s that.)

3M branched out beyond standard floppy disks with a variety of magnetic-tape storage media.ComputerWorld/Google Books/3M

3M didn’t rest on its laurels with the floppy disk either, and tried to push the technology further, most notably with Floptical disk technology, which Jim Adkisson, who helped create the 5.25-inch floppy at Shugart Associates, developed in the 1980s. A partnership of 3M, Maxell, and Iomega created the Floptical disk, which could hold 20 megabytes of data on something that looked a lot like a 3.5-inch floppy. Unfortunately the floptical disk flopped, losing out to products like Iomega’s iconic Zip drives.

3M also worked in more specialized media, developing high-capacity optical disks that fit into standard floppy and optical disk mechanisms, as well as high-end tape drives intended for the server room rather than your cassette player.

In many ways, 3M was out front on one of the most important elements of computing and was making huge profits from it. But by the end of 1995, those days were done. What changed?

3M advertised its floppy disk as more reliable than the competition in no uncertain terms.

What Led 3M to Kick a Multibillion-Dollar Business to the Curb

By 1995, 3M’s magnetic-media arm had evolved into a US $2.3 billion business, according to Time, which made it a significant chunk of 3M’s overall offering.

But at that time, high technology— especially consumer technology—was starting to look like a bad bet for legacy companies. This was around the same period that AT&T, still smarting from misadventures like the EO Personal Communicator, spun off Bell Labs as Lucent Technologies.

3M’s story, in its own words, suggests a similar crisis of culture. In A Century of Innovation, a book published by the company in 2002, around the time of its 100-year anniversary, the company compared the creation of the spin-off, which it called “the most wrenching decision in its history,” to that of its determination eight years earlier to sell its Duplicating Products Division, which sold copying machines:

Of all the businesses 3M has shed over its 100 years, the two seminal decisions that people point to as most significant involved the sale of 3M’s Duplicating Products business to Harris Corporation in Atlanta, Georgia, and the spin-off of 3M’s data-storage and imaging-systems businesses in 1996 creating a new company called Imation in Oakdale, Minnesota, near 3M headquarters. The two decisions have several elements in common—both involved businesses that 3M created and, in fact, ranked number one in the marketplace for decades. They were “homegrown” businesses—largely created within 3M and commercialized and built with the energy of many internal sponsors and champions. The businesses were risky because the products were based on pioneering technologies. They not only changed the basis of competition; they also created all new, global industries. The businesses were highly profitable for decades, and they represented a significant share of the company’s total annual revenues. They also produced many of 3M’s next generation of leaders.

So what happened? Essentially, despite the company’s success working in industrial and professional settings, doing things for consumers like producing videotapes, floppy disks, and cassettes meant moving out of its comfort zone. These products, initially developed for businesses, grew so popular that they suddenly needed to be available at every big-box store and drugstore alike, and, Post-its aside, retail was not a fit for the kind of company 3M was.

But more significantly, other companies were simply better at undercutting, and per the corporate biography, that required some tough decisions to be made:

While it sold its products for little or no profit, its competition sold their products for even less. Even though the consumer business had huge growth potential, 3M had little experience with a low-cost, low-profit-margin model.

The markings were clear—exit this business, even though 3M invented it. To stay in the “dog fight” meant 3M had to invest enormous amounts of money in order to remain the low-cost producer, with no assurance that profit margins ever would improve. “Exiting it was the right decision,” [former senior vice president Al] Huber said.

Seeing what came after, it’s hard to disagree. While floppies were still a significant medium in the mid-1990s, it was obvious that they would not be enough capacity for the next generation of data hoarders. It would only be a couple of years before Apple would put the first dagger in the heart of the floppy disk with the iMac, breaking with tradition by releasing a personal computer in 1998 with no built-in floppy disk drive.

Imation carried on a floppy-disk ad campaign through the late 1990s.

That was a harbinger of what was to come. Within a decade of the decision, floppy drives, compact cassettes, and videotapes—the three key elements of 3M’s move into consumer-driven magnetic media—had fallen by the wayside. Imation, still active today, is owned by O-Jin Corp., a Korean technology company that basically bought it for its trademarked name.

Five Unusual Types of Products 3M Developed Over the Years

Bondo: While not developed under 3M’s roof, the Bondo brand of automotive body filler, essentially a putty designed to fill in holes and cover visual imperfections, has been owned by 3M since at least 2007. Much like Post-its and Scotch Tape, it has become a generic term for the product line it serves.

Petrifilm: You know petri dishes, the containers used to allow bacteria to grow in a lab? Yep, 3M came up with a better version of them, in the form of Petrifilm, an easy-to-deploy platelike product developed by the company’s food-safety department in 1984. The technology has become hugely important in testing for potential food-safety concerns.

Tartan track: You know how Astroturf is commonly used in sports stadiums as a replacement for grass? Tartan track is sort of the track-and-field version of Astroturf , originally designed for horse tracks. One strange element of the Tartan track story is the fact that the original formulation used mercury, making it much more dangerous than it needed to be. (This kind of problem would later be a theme for 3M, a major chemical manufacturer.)

The typodont: This weirdly named device, associated with dentistry, is essentially a plastic model of the mouth and teeth, intended to make it easier to explain what is happening in a person’s mouth. While 3M didn’t invent the typodont, which has existed since the late 19th century, it is one of the 60,000 products the company makes.

Wind-vortex generators: In 2016, 3M developed a technology to help wind turbines generate airflow more optimally to ensure they work better, in partnership with Smartblade. It’s essentially a piece of carefully placed, high-quality plastic that, when placed correctly, increases energy production on turbines by 2 to 3 percent—a boost that adds up.

Much like its one-time competitor Memorex, Imation is a technology ghost kitchen. Its former corporate parent 3M, meanwhile, has a market cap of $51.33 billion at the time of this writing.

3M’s Magnetic Legacy

In a lot of ways, I think 3M’s persisting deep association with computing, despite the fact that the company left the field decades ago, comes down to the fact that it had a very recognizable logo design during its computer heyday.

My first experience with 3M was seeing its bright red logo on floppy disks used in classrooms with Apple IIe computers in the late 1980s and early ’90s. 3M was instantly recognizable among those responsible for creating the disks we needed to load up Number Munchers and Commander Keen, and as a result, its name is forever imprinted into the brains of retro-tech nerds the world over. It is a memory that gives me warm feelings.

But 3M, for a number of reasons, is not a company that carries a lot of goodwill with younger generations. For example, the company is closely associated with the manufacturing of a variety of chemicals, including PFOS (Perfluorooctane sulfonate), a key ingredient in Scotchguard and other water-resistant materials. It’s one of many PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl) substances that are believed to be harmful to humans.

The floppy disks that I and other elder millennials associate with a company that was essential to our youthful computing experience are long gone, shuttled away as a non-core business for a giant corporation that is best described as an amalgamation of non-core businesses loosely held together by a logo and backing in chemistry and raw materials.

Even if you are, for the most part, on the same page with someone, you’re bound to disagree with them about something sooner or later. If this doesn’t happen often—or you’re navigating the situation for the first time—it can be stressful: After all, no one wants to jeopardize a functional relationship.

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Once upon a time, as part of Un-Carrier 9.0, then T-Mobile CEO John Legere stated that “The Un-contract is our promise to individuals, families and businesses of all sizes, that − while your price may go down − it won’t go up”.

It seems those days are long gone, as a leaked series of documents has confirmed the company plans to force customers on slightly older plans onto the newer Go5G equivalents unless you opt out.

As first shared on Reddit and separately confirmed by us here at The Mobile Report, T-Mobile plans to automatically migrate customers on older plans to a newer Go5G equivalent plan.

Affected plans appear to be the following:

• Magenta
• One
• Magenta 55+
• Simple Choice / Select Choice
• Simple Choice Business

The rate plan that customers are moved to will vary depending on which plan they are coming from. Simple Choice and Select Choice may be moved to either of two options, possibly dependent on how many lines are on the account.

Luckily, customers will (for now) have the opportunity to opt-out of these changes, even if the changes are discovered after they happen.

Customers can contact support upon notification of the pending changes and, after listening to a pitch on why they should migrate anyway, be allowed to opt out of the migration.

If the customer does not notice the pending change, or misses the notification, the plan can still be reverted back, though it’s not clear how long that will be an option.

Care reps are also instructed to offer one-time credits if customers complain and want to opt-out.

We are not raising the price of any of our plans; we are moving you to a newer plan with more benefits at a different cost.

T-Mobile’s doublespeak script for care employees

The documents include talking points and benefit statements care reps are to use to encourage customers to allow the plan changes.

Affected customers will begin receiving notices about the migration on October 17th via email and sms.

Below is a list of expected price changes for customers that go through migration. Some customers could see price increases as high as $120 per month on accounts with 12 lines.

It’s a sad day for many T-Mobile customers. The days of T-Mobile being an honest company that won’t raise your rates behind your back are gone. Sure, you can opt-out, but it’s clear the goal is to have as many people ignore the changes as possible, and increase profits by changing out the legacy plans for new, more expensive ones.

We’ll be keeping an eye on this story and updating you if we learn more.

The post Breaking: T-Mobile Will Force Customers Onto Newer Plans Unless You Opt-Out appeared first on The Mobile Report.

On Monday evening, 20-year-old Savannah De La Torre walked across the graduation stage with her 2-year-old son, River, in hand.

It was an emotional moment for the room filled with students, families, and teachers who knew what it took for De La Torre to make it to that moment.

“I got pregnant around COVID, so I didn’t finish school, and I really wanted to finish school,” De La Torre said.

She was 18 years old when she had her son, River.

Soon after, in 2021, she enrolled at Learn4Life Edgewood, which at the time was a brand new program allowing students to bring their kids to school.

“My son was the first child here, a baby, here at Learn4Life. And the next day, when I came to school, they had a whole playroom for him,” De La Torre said with a smile.

Learn4Life classrooms are housed in a building on the JFK High School campus within Edgewood ISD.

The program is designed for students 14 to 20 years old who are behind in credits, need to graduate, or need to work at their own pace for personal reasons.

The classes have an average of 13 to 14 students.

There are almost 190 students in the program, and about six bring their children to class.

Those parents come to school to do their work and can break away and take care of their kids as needed.

School days are four hours long, with options in the morning, afternoon and evening.

“I was a teenage mother myself. I was 15 when I started, and by the time I was 18, I had three children,” said Learn4Life teacher Maryann Esparza-Padilla.

Esparza-Padilla said she fell through the cracks as a child, and she’s stopping that from happening to these kids.

“Miss Padilla, she helps me put him to sleep while I do my work, and he’ll sleep for like 2 hours, and then he’ll wake up, and we’ll play for a little bit,” De La Torre said.

The support allowed De La Torre to attend class during major life challenges, as recent issues at home led her toward homelessness.

“We were going to be homeless, but somehow God blessed us with the home. And now I feel comfortable being in my home, and I feel safe, and I’m very happy,” she said.

She said Esparza-Padilla would not let her give up during those tough times.

“I consider this my family and my home away from home,” De La Torre said.

That’s why she wanted Esparza-Padilla right by her side Monday when she gave a graduation speech.

“They’re like my babies,” Esparza-Padilla said. “They’re all my children. I still got very emotional when I saw her speech, and I cried because everyone deserves a chance. Everybody deserves a second chance.”

De La Torre is proud that her son watched her work hard, overcome obstacles, and achieve her goals.

She said River has grown and thrived within the Learn4Life program as well.

“He was tough. He just wouldn’t get along with other kids. Now he gets along with other kids. He has a best friend here. Her name’s Avery, and they’re crazy together,” De La Torre said with a laugh.

As River and Avery played in the classroom play area, the two moms told each other how proud they were of one another. They both graduated Monday and will be moving on, so they have already started planning playdates so the kids can remain friends.

“I’m not going to forget about this school, and I will always recommend any student that is struggling like me to come here,” De La Torre said.

De La Torre wants to go to college for business and become an entrepreneur.

“Create generational wealth, take care of my family, and not just my immediate family, my entire family. I want to help the homeless. I want to help people that are sick,” she said.

Learn4Life staff helps the students transition to higher education, even leading them to programs that cover tuition.

For information on the program or to apply, call (210) 898-4078 or visit the Learn4Life website.

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