WASHINGTON (AP) — There may one day soon be another way to fight those annoying prerecorded phone pitches known as robocalls.
The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday announced winners for its national contest to develop a blocking technology for illegal sales calls.
The winners are Aaron Foss, a freelance software developer based in Long Island, N.Y., and Serdar Danis, a computer engineer who did not wish to disclose his hometown. Each winner will receive $25,000.
The different technologies developed by Foss and Danis involve software that could analyze and filter calls to screen out those being placed from a computer or from someone who has been identified as an unwanted caller.
The judges also selected two Google computer engineers as the winners of a separate category, which did not include a cash prize, for organizations that employ 10 or more people. Daniel Klein and Dean Jackson, from the Pittsburgh office of Google, were cited for their technology which helps identify caller-ID spoofing. ID spoofing masks the original number of the call so that when a person tries to call back the robocaller, they get a disconnected number or something other than the source of the original call.