I'm not going to mince words here: I can't stand telemarketers. I don't care whether they are charities, political organisations or just run-of-the-mill salespeople, I simply have neither the time, interest nor will to waste my own neurons talking to them. It particularly infuriates me that technology - auto-diallers and voice-over-IP - combined with minimum wage staff, has made it so easy for telemarketers to misuse my time, while making a fortune from it. Even being on a do-not-call list hasn't fixed the problem completely; there's so many exemptions that I still find I get unsolicited calls far too often.
Of course, technology can be fought with more technology, and fortunately those of us who move in the free-software sphere have been graced with the marvelous gift of
Asterisk, which presents many opportunities to waste the time of these people, as they try to waste ours. The equipment needed to run this is all fairly basic, by today's standards: I have a Snom-300 IP phone on my desk, a Linksys SPA-3000 adaptor to connect my PSTN line into my household ethernet (and can also drive a standard PSTN phone) and finally an old-whitebox PC as my Asterisk server.
So if you're being driven insane by students reading from canned scripts wanting your money, here's five ways to use Asterisk to get rid of them and maybe even slow them down in the process...