From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Oct 12 19:11:25 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9CNBOA17192; Tue, 12 Oct 2004 19:11:25 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 19:11:25 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410122311.i9CNBOA17192@massis.lcs.mit.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: massis.lcs.mit.edu: ptownson set sender to editor@telecom-digest.org using -f To: ptownson Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V23 #485 TELECOM Digest Tue, 12 Oct 2004 19:10:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 485 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Law Hits Home (Lisa Minter) U.S. Funds Chat-Room Surveillance Study (Lisa Minter) FTC Versus Some Spyware, etc. Including Sanford Wallace (Danny Burstein) Re: 911 Address Display Delays Police Response (Lisa Hancock) Re: 911 Address Display Delays Police Response (SELLCOM Tech support) Re: Why There's no DNS or Comparable Distributed Naming (Thor L Simon) Re: Why There's no DNS or Comparable Distributed Naming (Phil Anderton) Re: Net Giants Adopt Anti-Spam System (Scott Dorsey) Re: Monthly Bill Fatigue (Marcus Didius Falco) Re: Monthly Bill Fatigue (NYC) Re: REN Boosters From England? (Paul Coxwell) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter Subject: Law Hits Home Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 12:37:52 EDT by Anush Yegyazarian A recent court decision on a 5-year-old case highlights the failure of our laws to protect the privacy of personal e-mail. Everyone (or almost everyone) knows that the e-mail you send and receive at work, using your employer's computers and network, isn't really private: The company and your boss have the right to both monitor and read what you're sending and receiving. But if you're like me, you probably thought that the Internet service provider you use at home -- and by extension those who work there -- doesn't have the same right. We're wrong: They do. At least that's what a recent court ruling says. Apparently, a strict reading of the laws that supposedly protect our private communications -- principally 1968's Wiretap Act (Chapter 119 of Title 18) and one of the subsequent amendments to it, 1986's Electronic Communications Privacy Act -- in effect denies e-mail the kind of privacy protection from law enforcement agents that other forms of personal communication have. What's more, the laws give ISPs pretty much the same right to read and monitor your e-mail that you have. In Transit Versus Stored About a month ago, in United States v. Bradford C. Councilman the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that an ISP wasn't covered by the Wiretap Act if it chose to snoop into its users' e-mail because the e-mail messages were stored on its servers. Councilman worked for a company called Interloc, a rare-book listing service that also provided Internet access (the company was subsequently bought by Alibris). He ordered a modification to the company's e-mail-handling program so that he could identify e-mail sent to its users from certain domains, such as Amazon.com, that were his competitors. He then read those e-mail messages in order to get a competitive advantage. However, according to the Wiretap Act, an ISP is not allowed to intercept your e-mail and read it or otherwise use its contents. So the federal government prosecuted. Councilman argued that he didn't intercept anything, as the e-mail messages were no longer in transit: They were stored in the RAM or the hard drive of his company's computers. Both the district and appellate courts in Massachusetts agreed. Why should the location matter? Well, it matters because the law treats stored e-mail messages differently from ones in transit. I kid you not. Stored e-mail messages fall under the guidelines set out in 1968's Stored Communications Act (Title 18, Chapter 121). Its restrictions on both ISPs and law enforcement agents are less stringent than the rules governing communications under the Wiretap Act. And while wiretap laws don't allow ISPs to read your e-mail, the Stored Communications Act does. Like so many other legal decisions, it all comes down to language and definitions -- in this case the definitions of transit, transmission, and interception. For the wiretap rules to apply, your e-mail has to be intercepted, which means it has to be in transit. If I were asked, I'd say an e-mail is in transit as long as it hasn't actually been downloaded to my inbox: It hasn't reached me, so it's still traveling. It's like a package: Those new CDs I've ordered from Amazon.com are still in transit until they're in my hands, although technically they may be stored at the local UPS depot awaiting rescheduled delivery because I wasn't home the first time. However, the laws are worded -- and have been interpreted by the courts -- to define transit as a very limited state for electronic communications. Transit is only that tiny portion of time it takes an e-mail message to pulse through telecom pipes between periods when it's stored on the servers that route e-mail traffic from sender to receiver. Storage is quite broadly defined in these laws. It includes all kinds of momentary storage, such as on a server or in a PC's RAM, or even its cache. So e-mail is considered to be "in storage" nearly all of the time. Welcome to the wacky world of law. Consistent Protection in the Works Although the decision in United States v. Councilman gives ISPs the right to snoop into users' e-mail practically anytime they want to -- and significantly eases access to private e-mail for law enforcement agents -- it's something of a red herring, says Kevin Bankston, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The real problem, he says, is that the Stored Communications Act and the Wiretap Act treat e-mail so differently, when they should protect it in the same way. Voice mail, for example, is explicitly protected under wiretap laws even when it's stored. At least some congressional representatives think this discrepancy should be resolved, and a new bill (H.R. 4956) proposed in late July should help do just that. The E-Mail Privacy Act of 2004 would basically place e-mail, even while it's stored, under the interception rules for wiretaps, and would also help prevent ISPs from accessing users' e-mail messages beyond what's needed for the service to function. Not All Monitoring Is Bad There are certain kinds of e-mail scanning and filtering I want my ISP to perform. It can -- and should -- go to town on spam, and I'm grateful for any virus or worm scanning that goes on before my local protection kicks in. In my mind, that's part of the service I'm paying for. ISPs are allowed to perform functions like this because such actions are considered part of their normal course of business, or serve to protect their business or equipment. H.R. 4956 would have no effect on that. In case you're wondering, Google's controversial Gmail wouldn't be affected under the new bill either. Users know exactly what they're getting into when they sign up, so they have given consent to Gmail's computerized snooping. ISPs already enjoy a certain privileged position in the eyes of the law: They're exempt from responsibility and liability for what their users say in the e-mail the service handles. That privilege exists for good reason: They need that freedom to operate the service and consequently allow you and me to exercise our free speech on this medium. But the unrestricted right to scan, read, or copy the e-mail they process -- without user knowledge or consent -- serves no comparable good. It's time to close that loophole. Anush Yegyazarian is a PC World senior editor. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance PC World. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: U.S. Funds Chat-Room Surveillance Study Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 12:45:39 EDT By MICHAEL HILL, Associated Press Writer TROY, N.Y. - Amid the torrent of jabber in Internet chat rooms; flirting by QTpie and BoogieBoy, arguments about politics and horror flicks; are terrorists plotting their next move? The government certainly isn't discounting the possibility. It's taking the idea seriously enough to fund a yearlong study on chat room surveillance under an anti-terrorism program. A Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute computer science professor hopes to develop mathematical models that can uncover structure within the scattershot traffic of online public forums. Chat rooms are the highly popular and freewheeling areas on the Internet where people with self-created nicknames discuss just about anything: teachers, Kafka, cute boys, politics, love, root canal. They are also places where malicious hackers have been known to trade software tools, stolen passwords and credit card numbers. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that 28 million Americans have visited Internet chat rooms. Trying to monitor the sea of traffic on all the chat channels would be like assigning a police officer to listen in on every conversation on the sidewalk; virtually impossible. Instead of rummaging through megabytes of messages, RPI professor Bulent Yener will use mathematical models in search of patterns in the chatter. Downloading data from selected chat rooms, Yener will track the times that messages were sent, creating a statistical profile of the traffic. If, for instance, RatBoi and bowler1 consistently send messages within seconds of each other in a crowded chat room, you could infer that they were speaking to one another amid the "noise" of the chat room. "For us, the challenge is to be able to determine, without reading the messages, who is talking to whom," Yener said. In search of "hidden communities," Yener also wants to check messages for certain keywords that could reveal something about what's being discussed in groups. The $157,673 grant comes from the National Science Foundation. The NSF's Leland Jameson said the foundation judged the proposal strictly on its broader scientific merit, leaving it to the intelligence community to determine its national security value. Neither the CIA nor the FBI sites would comment on the grant, with a CIA spokeswoman citing the confidentiality of sources and methods. Security officials know al-Qaida and other terrorist groups use the Internet for everything from propaganda to offering tips on kidnapping. But it's not clear if terrorists rely much on chat rooms for planning and coordination. Michael Vatis, founding director of the National Infrastructure Protection Center and now a consultant, said he had heard of terrorists using chat rooms, which he said offer some security as long as code phrases are used. Other cybersecurity experts doubted chat rooms' usefulness to terrorists given the other current options, from Web mail to hiding messages on designated Web pages that can only be seen by those who know where to look. "In a world in which you can embed your message in a pixel on a picture on a home page about tea cozies, I don't know whether if you're any better if you think chat would be any particular magnet," Jonathan Zittrain, an Internet scholar at Harvard Law School. Since they are focusing on public chat rooms, authorities are not violating constitutional rights to privacy when they keep an eye on the traffic, experts said. Law enforcement agents have trolled chat rooms for years in search of pedophiles, sometimes adopting profiles making it look like they are young teens. But the idea of the government reviewing massive amounts of public communications still raises some concerns. Mark Rasch, a former head of the Justice Department computer crimes unit, said such a system would bring the country one step closer to the Pentagon's much-maligned Terrorism Information Awareness program. Research on that massive data-mining project was halted after an uproar over its impact on privacy. "It's the ability to gather and analyze massive amounts of data that creates the privacy problem," Rasch said, "even though no individual bit of data is particularly private." On the Net: Yener: http://www.cs.rpi.edu/yener/ NSF: http://www.nsf.gov/ Berkman Center: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/ Pew Project: http://www.pewinternet.org/ Electronic Privacy Information Center: http://www.epic.org/ *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Associated Press. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Danny Burstein Subject: FTC Versus some spyware, etc. Including Sanford Wallace Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 18:02:06 -0400 Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC "The FTC has asked a U.S. District Court to shut down a spyware operation that hijacks computers, secretly changes their settings, barrages them with pop-up ads, and installs adware and other software programs that spy on consumers' Web surfing. The spyware may cause computers to malfunction, slow down, or even crash. The FTC alleges the spyware operation violates federal law and will ask the court to bar the practices permanently and order the defendants to give up their ill-gotten gains. [ snip ] "Earlier this year, the FTC received a complaint from the Center for Democracy and Technology concerning pop-up ads for Spy Wiper and Spy Deleter. In response to this complaint and other information, the Commission commenced an investigation of Seismic Entertainment Productions, Inc., Smartbot.Net, and Sanford Wallace... rest at: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2004/10/spyware.htm Sigh. While it's nice to see the FTC doing something, I'd sure like to see something a bit more in the way of, say, criminal fraud charges ... _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: 911 Address Display Delays Police Response Date: 12 Oct 2004 10:12:02 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Maybe what will happen, if Rhode Island > goes through with this plan, the end result will be to force the E-911 > proponents to change *their* way of doing things. Why is it that E-911 > (and by extension, conventional telephony) is so great and VOIP is > such a bad deal? For one thing, conventional phones are here now, the vast majority of people have them, and will continue to have them. VOIP is something new and slowly spreading. Thus, it makes sense for the emergency network -- which is in place _now_ -- to focus on conventional telephones. A recent Newsweek article on VOIP indicated a number of weaknesses with VOIP. A key one is the speed of the line between your PC-phone and your ISP/VOIP server, the server switching speed itself, and the speed of the Internet. If there is a delay in any of these things, conversation will be a problem. We all know there are intermittent delays when on the Internet. Sometimes it just takes an extra moment or two for something normally fast to come up. Newsweek noted that some cable-modem lines are fast now because they're new and traffic isn't loaded on them yet. However, as business picks up and the bandwidth fills up, VOIP won't work as well. > How did we get along for the first seventy years of > the 20th century before there was any such thing as 911? We can ask that question for just about anything. I look at the great buildings and bridges, all built without the benefits of fax, computers, email, CAD, etc., yet still magnificantly done. Somehow people enjoyed listening to music (classical or rock) on vinyl LPs on tube amplified stereos before fancy chips and CD players. > Is 911 that great of a deal? One would have to look up a Bell Labs Record magzine to see what the advantages were for a universal number. When I was a kid I had no idea of police numbers -- we were taught to dial operator and that's what we did. I presume the idea is to have a national universal number and certain special features. IIRC, even the original 911 came with special features that a normal terminating phone line would not have. When I visited a city fire dispatch center, they had plain Call Directors, but nothing special with the line buttons; they could not seize a line or trace a call. Remember, this was in electro-mech days, pre ESS and Caller ID type systems. Another issue is that social conditions have decayed so that citizens request police assistance much more than in the past. A small town whose population and crime rate was steady over the years none the less saw a considerable jump in police calls in the 1970s, esp for minor complaints. I remember quite vividly how life changed for us roughly around 1968 -- we once left our doors unlocked and got along well with everyone. Everyone on the block felt it was their duty to be considerate. There was an expression at one time "what will the neighbors think?" meaning people really cared about good relations and proper behavior. Newcomers to the neighborhood would let their dogs bark, throw very noisy and wild parties, break into people's houses, steal from stores, etc. Around this time national crime began its steep rise from which it never recovered. In New York City, where IIRC 911 began, street crime really took off. The social advocates offer various excuses for the decline including outright denial, but it is fact that life changed downhill. As a result, police depts call far more calls and had to expand, and 911 was part of that. ------------------------------ From: SELLCOM Tech support Subject: Re: 911 Address Display Delays Police Response Organization: www.sellcom.com Reply-To: support@sellcom.com Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 21:59:08 GMT One evening I was sitting in my dining room eating food. A policeman came to our door and I just said invite him in and he was invited in. We were all curious as to why he was there and he explained ... He said there had been a 911 call from this address and then no one there but background noise so they dispatched. It took a short while to figure out that a cordless phone on my belt had been pushed upon its redial button and the previous call (we mostly take incoming on that phone) had been to 911 about something a while back (we do the community watch thing). The policeman was very nice and then went away. I went ahead and finished dinner and went on about my business. Ya gotta sometimes stop and think and appreciate what these guys do for us. This guy I don't know and I don't think have ever met comes to my house fully prepared to risk his life on our behalf if necessary. We take so much for granted ... Steve at SELLCOM http://www.sellcom.com Discount multihandset cordless phones by Siemens, AT&T, Panasonic, Motorola Vtech 5.8Ghz; TMC ET4000 4line Epic phone, OnHoldPlus, Beamer, Watchguard! Brick wall "non MOV" surge protection. Uniden 2line 5.8GHz cordless If you sit at a desk www.ergochair.biz you owe it to yourself. ------------------------------ From: tls@panix.com (Thor Lancelot Simon) Subject: Re: Why There's no DNS or Comparable Distributed Naming Service Date: 12 Oct 2004 15:24:03 -0400 Organization: PANIX -- Public Access Networks Corp. Reply-To: tls@rek.tjls.com In article , William Warren wrote: > On 11 Oct 2004 02:19:00 -0700, Ariel Burbaickij > wrote: >>>> Could someone explain to me why there is no such service as DNS/whois >>>> towards it in SS7 network? After all, we have exactly same concerns >>>> here (distributed and independent administration of different subsets >>>> of address space, mapping must be often provided between pointcodes >>>> (numerical address) and its current owner), so why it was decided not >>>> to do it this way but instead some arcane lists are distributed by ITU >>>> exclusively? > [large snip] > I don't think it's needed in the way the Internet uses the term: DNS > is essential for the internet because the number of separate nodes has > grown too large for any one node to handle, so there has to be a > lookup mechanism to spread the workload, and that's DNS. > Central Offices don't need a dns-like service because: >A. STPs already perform an equivalent function: there > are few enough exchanges that each one can keep a > basic routing table in memory and pass off any > unknown npa/nxx codes to an STP for resolution. The > STP routes the original SS7 traffic on behalf of the > CO, unlike a DNS which returns a routable (IP) address > to the requesting node. This is not really correct. I think you're conflating the functions of an STP and a tandem or gateway switch (which is an SSP, in the usual terminology, but which is not an EO ("End Office"); people often assume the terms are equivalent but they are not. An STP routes signalling messages -- only. The confusion arises because STPs do, in fact, include a somewhat DNS-like address lookup facility, Global Title Translation ("GTT"). It is correct to think of GTT as the analogue to DNS in the SS7 protocl suite. What GTT does is take a name for a service (a token that is of a type *other than* 'SS7 network address and subsystem number') and return a network address (which may be an alias for many hosts in the network, just as a DNS query may return multiple addresses or a single anycast address; SS7 had anycast long before IP did). There is no particular reason one could not implement GTT with DNS as a backend. (In fact, I designed a product that did this and have some related claims in one of my patents). In practice, GTT data is usually fully resident in each STP, downloaded there periodically by various centralized provisioning systems. But GTT is only used for end-to-end services; more precisely, it is only generally used for TCAP "queries" (which can also be thought about as remote procedure call over SS7). LNP is one such service, which is one reason people sometimes confuse GTT, which translates from data that is of one type (e.g. telephone number, trigger type, and some digits) to another (a destination point code and subsystem number) as DNS does, with LNP, which just uses remote procedure call to translate from one telephone number to another (approximately. I am well aware that it does not work quite this way!) ISUP call signaling does *not* use GTT. Instead, switches have static call-routing tables with, usually, a digit-at-a-time resolution starting at the left hand side of the called number. Just like in IP networks, there is sometimes a "default route" -- if there is not, the calling party switch itself will play you an error message. The output of these routing tables is a destination point code (an SS7 address) and a trunk group number. The ISUP messages will go via an STP (usually, in the absence of F-links) and may make several network hops but the actual voice path *must* be direct. This is a key point. STPs do not "route" voice; and they don't do translation on ISUP messages because the calling switch essentially can't require it -- it _has to_ know who the next hop in the voice path is, because it has to know which of its trunk groups is hooked up to it! (Things can work a little differently in the presence of internetwork gateways, but that is a very special case). Calls may hop across many switches, end-office to tandem to tandem to IXC gateway to IXC gateway to tandem to end-office, but at every hop the next neighbor is known -- has to be, or you couldn't hook up the voice path right. Again, LNP complicates things (the "translate this number to another number" RPC can be invoked *anywhere* in the call path) but it is still not right to think that normal call signalling involves anything like DNS, nor, really, that that would be very useful for that purpose, at least not in my opinion. Thor Lancelot Simon tls@rek.tjls.com But as he knew no bad language, he had called him all the names of common objects that he could think of, and had screamed: "You lamp! You towel! You plate!" and so on. --Sigmund Freud ------------------------------ From: Phil Anderton Subject: Re: Why There's no DNS or Comparable Distributed Naming Service Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 21:46:11 +0200 Organization: Peoples' Front of Judaea Ariel Burbaickij wrote: > I know that Internet didn't have DNS from the very beginning -- it > made fairly decent progress till today, though, if you noticed ;-). I > am not talking abount DNS on phones (actually it does exist in the > form of ENUM and related project and naming scheme for e164 set also > exists for sure). I am talking about DNS for pointcodes, i.e. for > switches (phone switches just to avoid any misunderstanding). There > is no dns-like efforts for this and for reasons unknown to me, ITU > standards that normally tend to foreseen each and everything scenarion > and are so heavily packaged with required features do not even mention > this possibility. Well there is the concept of global titles -- these are usually E.164 or E.214 addresses -- and the SCCP does of course provide the option "route on global title", where you don't need to know the point code of the destination switch. Remember too, that point codes only have a meaning within their own MTP network -- the only way that switches in different networks can communicate is via global title routing. How else could GSM international roaming work? But what you seems to be looking for Ariel, is a reverse lookup function -- given a point code, how do I identify the switch? There's no standard answer to that one -- you need to ask the operator of the network in question. Phil Tschaikowsky. Was he the tortured soul who poured out his immortal longings into dignified passages of stately music, or was he just an old poof who wrote tunes? ------------------------------ From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: Net Giants Adopt Anti-Spam System Date: 12 Oct 2004 15:35:03 -0400 Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000) In article , Lisa Minter wrote: > Some of the net's biggest players such as AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo are > stepping up efforts to combat spam. > http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/technology/3706828.stm SPL sure doesn't sound like an effort to combat spam to me. If anything, it's one of those things that will get adopted by spammers and ignored by people sending legitimate mail. scott "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 12:59:43 -0400 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Re: Monthly Bill Fatigue > From: Amin > Subject: Re: Monthly Bill Fatigue > Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com > Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 03:39:02 GMT > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I am not certain what Amin is trying > to say. Perhaps a reader can interpret the message. PAT] > I had been a country. Almost every business puts the telephone set > in the front of the store. Everyone is able to make free local call > everywhere. Why do they charge a lot only the local pay phone in the > US? I have been in Egypt. There are very few public telephones in Egypt, probably because there is very little coinage. Many small businesses do allow the general public to use their telephones. However, the Egyptian telephone company charges for usage beyond a small minimum. In some other developing countries (India and Bangladesh come to mind) people in villages will obtain a cell phone (mobile; portable), and use this as an informal pay telephone, for the other villagers to make and receive calls. In the US, Canada, and most other developed countries, either the telephone company provides public telephones (at some cost to the company) and charges for their use, or makes telephone available (at some cost to the telephone company) for a charge, so people (businesses) can install their own telephones. Businesses can only allow the general public to use their telephones for free in places where there is no charge for local usage. This might be the case in some countries, though I am not aware of any. In most countries the telephone company charges businesses for usage (even local usage), and businesses would have to pass on that charge. > Monty Solomon wrote in message > news:telecom23.481.5@telecom-digest.org: >> Service Add-Ons Nibble at Incomes >> By Christopher Stern >> Washington Post Staff Writer >> Satellite radio. Cell phone. High-speed Internet service. Matt Botwin, >> a Washington consultant, has it all -- and the bills that go with his >> growing bundle of technology. >> With each new service, more of Botwin's monthly income is spoken for. >> A generation ago, mortgages, utilities and newspaper subscriptions >> made up a short list of payments due each month. Now Americans pay an >> average of 12 bills a month, including fees for a broad range of >> services such as television programming, home security-system >> monitoring and online gaming Web sites. And each individual bill may >> increase as consumers add incremental improvements such as Internet >> access to their cell phones and premium channels to their satellite >> radio service. >> Botwin figures that he spends at least $250 a month on his >> subscription services. "I'm not happy about it. It's a lot," Botwin >> said. But he also feels that his digital devices and services are >> necessities. The Sirius satellite radio is indispensable for his >> frequent drives to New York and Philadelphia. "It's like any luxury. >> I didn't think I needed a microwave [oven], but I'm sure glad I have >> it now." >> Economists and academics are beginning to grow concerned about >> Americans' willingness to cede a regular chunk of their monthly >> paychecks to new conveniences and services, saying it is taking a >> serious bite out of discretionary spending, a key driver of the >> nation's economy. They also worry that new services are contributing >> to a growing divide between consumers who have the means to secure >> special treatment, such as access to free-rolling highway lanes, while >> others are stuck in bumper-to-bumper standstills. >> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19377-2004Oct9.html ------------------------------ From: NOTvalid@surplus4actors.INFO (NYC) Subject: Re: Monthly Bill Fatigue Date: 11 Oct 2004 22:28:26 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Tony P. wrote in message news:: > In article , monty@roscom.com > says: ... >> Botwin figures that he spends at least $250 a month on his >> subscription services. "I'm not happy about it. It's a lot," Botwin >> said. But he also feels that his digital devices and services are >> necessities. The Sirius satellite radio is indispensable for his >> frequent drives to New York and Philadelphia. "It's like any luxury. >> I didn't think I needed a microwave [oven], but I'm sure glad I have >> it now." ... > Right now I've got cable and phone+DSL, that's it. The cell phone is > office provided and used only for official business. I've been > resistant to Sirius and the like because I honestly don't need it. We now have Virgin mobile and are spending the minimum $7.00 a month. We had been spending $40.00+ monhly on SpCS. That two people, EACH phone. Long phone calls are made from home. You can be frugal. Ray Normandaeu here with new ".INFO" domain I bought for only one dollar form GoDaddy. I also get 100 disposable email addies. ------------------------------ From: Paul Coxwell Subject: Re: REN Boosters From England? Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 12:50:18 +0100 Ted Koppel wrote in message news:telecom23.483.5@telecom-digest.org: > A quick browse through Google shows a number of sources selling REN > Boosters (or REN amplifiers) for about a third of what Viking does, or > around 38 (roughly $60). Granted, these contraptions take line > current of 240 volts, but assuming that could be handled with a > transformer, is the rest of the technology the same? That is, would a > British REN amplifier function on a line in the US? Basic ringing voltage/frequency characteristics are close enough between our two systems, but there are a couple of other things to consider. First, we use our own peculiar telephone jacks rather than RJ11 configuration, so if you're buying a residential-type plug-in booster rather than a hardwired unit, you'd need adapter leads. Second, normal telephone extension wiring here uses a 3-wire system, with the bell feed on a separate wire. (The bell capacitor is actually located inside the main network interface and ringers are then connected between the third wire and the tip lead throughout the house.) I'm not familiar with the circuitry of these boosters. They may just work on a straight tip/ring input and feed their own ringing supply out on tip & ring with a capacitor coupling to the third wire on the output, or they may only output ringing between the 3rd line and tip (i.e. no ringing voltage would appear between across tip & ring). Depending upon the actual configuration you may have problems connecting to a normal 2-wire American system. At the current exchange rate 38 is about $68, plus postage, and you may get hit with import duty as well. Add the cost of a 240-120V transformer or running a dedicated 240V line to the booster, and I would have thought you could obtain a suitable unit within the U.S. at considerably lower cost.and without any connection issues. Oh, and the British units won't have FCC approval, of course! Paul Coxwell Norfolk, England. ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, Yahoo Groups, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occasional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. 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