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TELECOM Digest Tue, 24 May 2005 19:40:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 231 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson FTC Asks For Help Against Spam Zombies (Lisa Minter) Apple Intends to Support Podcasts (Lisa Minter) Robot Soldiers (Lisa Minter) JDS Buys Acterna (Telecom dailyLead from USTA) Re: Corporate Identify -- Verizon vs. "Bell Telephone" (Lisa Hancock) Re: Packet8 DTMF Tones Sound "Clipped" (Dave Garland) Re: Very Early Modems (Scott Dorsey) Re: Common Sense Moves Could Protect Privacy (Lisa Hancock) Re: Looking for a Model 15 or 19 (Jim Haynes) Re: Looking for a Model 15 or 19 (moody1951) Re: Last Laugh! Your House at P.O. Box 4621 (Lisa Hancock) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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 <lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com> Subject: FTC Asks For Help Against Spam Zombies Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 16:17:44 -0500 By Andy Sullivan Home computer users who unwittingly send out spam e-mail should be disconnected from the Internet until their machines are fixed, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said on Tuesday. The FTC said it would ask 3,000 Internet providers around the globe to make sure that their customers' computers haven't been hijacked by spammers who want to cover their tracks and pass bandwidth costs on to others. Online viruses like "SoBig" turn infected computers into spam-spewing "zombies" that send out millions of unwanted messages without the owner's knowledge. Zombie networks are responsible for 50 percent to 80 percent of all spam, according to various estimates. Because many home users lack the technical smarts to fight the problem on their own, the FTC hopes their Internet providers will help, although they are not required to do so. Internet providers should identify computers on their networks that are sending out large amounts of e-mail and quarantine them if they are found to be zombies, the FTC said. They should also help customers clean their machines and tell them how to keep them safe in the first place, the FTC said. The FTC said Internet providers should route all customer e-mail through their own servers, which could upset more than technically proficient users who run their own e-mail servers. The FTC also said it plans to identify specific zombie computers and notify their Internet providers. Law enforcers in 25 other countries, from Bulgaria to Peru, are also participating in the campaign, the FTC said. Absent from the list of cooperating countries was China, where experts say rapid growth and a relative lack of technical sophistication have led to a large number of zombie computers. Most U.S. Internet providers already have taken the steps outlined in the FTC's letter but they must take care not to squelch legitimate mail in the process, said Dave McClure, president of the U.S. Internet Industry Association. "It's sometimes very difficult to tell the difference between spam coming across your network and your local charitable organization sending out its monthly newsletter," said McClure, who added that U.S. law prevents Internet providers from reading customer e-mail. The FTC's campaign follows on earlier efforts to shut down "open relays" and other poorly configured computers that have been exploited by spammers. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This would be great, if it happened. But as you know, there are so many netters who would quarrel about _anything_ done to actually eliminate (not just filter out) spam. To their way of thinking, any effort to block access to the internet (oops, there I go again, mentioning that non-existent thing!) by these zombies is to be condemmed, since 'no one on the net wants to see any changes' that may possibly impose on anyone else, and there is no agreement on what is considered offensive and malicious, etc, yada, yada, adnauseum etc. If you cannot be man enough to protect your own computer while the cesspool fills up, swarms around you and overflows, then, they would tell you, 'maybe you would be better off just not doing any networking.' How selfish they are in feeling that way! PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter <lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com> Subject: Steve Jobs Says Apple Will Support Podcasts Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 16:20:30 -0500 Apple Computer Inc. (Nasdaq:AAPL - news) will support and organize podcasts in the next version of its iTunes and iPod software, the company said on Monday. Podcasts, which are sound files and audio content such as radio shows, have surged in popularity and do not require an iPod to listen to them on the go. Any digital MP3 player will work. "With the next version of iTunes, due within 60 days, there will now be an easy way for everyone to find and subscribe to" podcasts, the company said in a statement. Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder and chief executive demonstrated on Sunday evening how Apple's podcasting organization and downloading process would work at a Wall Street Journal technology conference, said Tim Bajarin, an analyst at market research firm Creative Strategy. "From the demo, we saw you could put podcasts under categories," Bajarin said. "It makes it much easier to have, access, organize and sync podcasts to an iPod." The updated digital music jukebox software, which Bajarin said Jobs said was version 4.9, "organizes the podcasts within the iTunes store." Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter <lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com> Subject: Robot Soldiers Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 16:31:47 -0500 from the May 19, 2005 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0519/p14s02-stct.html When 'I Robot' becomes 'We Robot' By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor It sounds like classic sci-fi: Robots, linked by a common network, roam the land. When one unit discovers something, they all know it instantly. They use artificial intelligence to carry out their mission. Soon, such marching orders will be real, carried out by robot groups known as "swarms" or "hives." For example: . Last month, South Korea's Defense Ministry announced that it was planning to spend up to $1.9 billion to deploy robots along its border with North Korea. The robots would be used mainly for surveillance, although some could be armed. The effort might allow South Korea to remove some of its troops from along the 150-mile-long demilitarized zone (DMZ), one of the most heavily guarded borders in the world, a defense ministry representative told the Associated Press. . iRobot, a Burlington, Mass., company that makes military robots along with its popular domestic robot, the Roomba vacuum cleaner, operates perhaps the largest robot swarm in the world. About 100 experimental units operate as a team and have taught at least one important lesson: Real-life robots need to be reminded to recharge themselves. That's led to just such a feature on the Roomba, which now returns to its charging base when its battery fades. . The United States Army is developing a Future Combat System (FCS) that includes a close network of troops and ground and aerial unmanned robots. The robots would communicate with one another and coordinate their activities based on the mission assigned to them. "We're very interested" in hive or "swarm" technology, said Dennis Muilenburg, FCS program manager at Boeing, which is being paid $21 billion by the Army to oversee hundreds of contractors working on the FCS program. The FCS family of ground and aerial robots now under development would include a 25-pound "flying fan" that could be carried in a soldier's backpack, Mr. Muilenburg explained at a robotics conference in Cambridge, Mass., last week. When launched, it would survey the battlefield by hovering overhead or perching on a rooftop. A combat unit of the near future, he said, might consist of 3,000 soldiers, 900 vehicles, and "hundreds of robots" -- some of them armed -- all closely networked. The US military will deploy networked robots "within five years," predicts Helen Greiner, cofounder and chairman of iRobot. Frontline Robotics, in Ottawa, is working with a South Korean firm, DoDAAM Systems Ltd., in a bid to supply robots for the DMZ defense project. The Canadian company plans to offer a line of security robots that possess a significant level of individual autonomy and "hive" intelligence, says Richard Lepack, president and chief executive officer of Frontline, which merged last week with White Box Robotics in Pittsburgh. In a test last month, two of the company's robots were able to decide for themselves which should enter a narrow passageway first. That's something that may be easy for people, he says, but has been hard for robots to master. Frontline makes a robotic vehicle that looks like a small Jeep and others that could be cousins of R2D2, one of the robots in the "Star Wars" movies. A proprietary Robot Control System on each unit employs mathematical formulas, or algorithms, that give it some basic movements such as following the leader, avoiding obstacles, or wandering in an area. The robots also can work as teams, with each having a leader. The teams talk among themselves, and the leaders talk with one another. If a leader is disabled, another robot automatically takes over. "What one robot sees is shared among all the other team members in real time," Mr. Lepack says. So what Robot A senses is immediately known to Robots B, C, D, and so on. Birds and bees, part II Robotmakers find inspiration for their programs in nature: the behavior of bee, ant, and wasp colonies, as well as of flocks of birds and schools of fish. Ants, for example, communicate by leaving pheromone trails that other ants can follow to food. Ants also work as teams to distribute their workload, such as finding the most efficient paths for foraging or deciding who will haul bits of leaves back to the nest, without needing any directions from a leader. In simulations on a computer at Frontline, teams of up to 200,000 robots were shown to be able to coordinate their activities smoothly. But computer simulations can only do so much, says Ms. Greiner of iRobot. Software can't account for the unexpected, she says. "Whatever you don't put in [to the simulation] will come back and bite you." 'True swarms' The development of "true swarms," thousands or tens of thousands of mobile robots working together, is many years off and "depends on some things that haven't been invented yet," Greiner says, including miniaturization of components and better power sources and sensors. Military deployment of networked robots will come first, she says. For example, "searching for mines is inherently a parallel task," since you don't want "to put all your eggs in one basket" if a single robot gets blown up. Swarms will be an effective tool for reconnaissance, too. In the foreseeable future, a soldier might take a handful of tiny robots out of his pocket and send them into a building to check it out, she says. And in an imaginable future, swarms might do much of the routine housework, Greiner says. They'd understand that the dusting robots should come out before the vacuuming robots, which should do their job before the mopping robots. The lawn-mowing robots would scurry around before the raking robots cleaned up. Copyright 2005 The Christian Science Monitor. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. *** 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, the Christian Science Publishing Society. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 12:29:16 EDT From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA <usta@dailylead.com> Subject: JDS Buys Acterna Telecom dailyLead from USTA May 24, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=21825&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * JDS buys Acterna BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Report: WLAN shipments jump in Q1 * MSOs see gold in commercial services * GPON piques RBOCs' interest * Vodafone reports earnings USTA SPOTLIGHT * Announcing USTA's New Webinar Series: Marketing Strategies for ILECs EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * BitTorrent creator launches search engine * A primer for podcasts REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * Former Qwest executive settles with SEC Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=21825&l=2017006 Legal and Privacy information at http://www.dailylead.com/about/privacy_legal.jsp SmartBrief, Inc. 1100 H ST NW, Suite 1000 Washington, DC 20005 ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Corporate Identify -- Verizon vs. "Bell Telephone" Date: 24 May 2005 09:54:45 -0700 Al Gillis wrote: > I don't know this for > sure, but I'm guessing changing the name of a big company might be > really expensive but using another name for the business might be as > easy as filing a form with a state's corporation commission. That is true. But in the case of Verizon, I'm reasonably sure they did indeed legally change their name (IIRC, the newspapers said it was voted on a the Annual Meeting of the stockholders); and that included changing the local units' names. > This same syndrome afflicts many railroads; One road buys another, > paints new logos all over everything but retains the old name on > deeds to properties, operating authorities and the like. Railroads often don't directly own all the tracks and routes. Some are on long term leases where the owner gets rent check every year. Others are wholly owned but under a separate name. (AT&T had a "195 Corporation" which just dealt with its HQ bldg). In the case of Verizon and prior Bell names, I suspect the other poster who said it was for trademark protection was correct. I notice black Verizon pay phones have the Bell logo on the side. One other possibility of printing a legacy name on ads is to distinguish the Bell side from the GTE side. I suspect former GTE customers will use legacy GTE services and plans for quite some time to come. (Any former GTE customers now on Verizon want to comment on this issue?) The holder of the Pennsylvania Railroad trademark apparently let it lapse. Some smart private guy quickly snapped it up, then demanded royalties from all the model makers and publishers who use the PRR logo. It got kind of messy and I don't know the details, but the original holder (a corporate descendent) got the rights back. Other railroads are a little more careful with their logos. They don't usually charge modelers for their use, but they don't let them lapse either. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The same thing happened with the internet-history.org URL. It accidentally got away and the person who cybersquats on it now are demanding big ransom for its return. He'll have to wait a bit longer before I give him anything. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Dave Garland <dave.garland@wizinfo.com> Subject: Re: Packet8 DTMF Tones Sound "Clipped" Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 11:39:22 -0500 Organization: Wizard Information It was a dark and stormy night when Clark W. Griswold, Jr. <spamtrap100@comcast.net> wrote: > I seem to recall that the old Bell System spec for tone duration was > 20ms, or 1/5th of a second. That would be 1/50 of a second. Maybe it was 200ms? ------------------------------ From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: Very Early Modems Date: 24 May 2005 11:47:58 -0400 Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000) Brad Houser <bradDOThouser@intel.com> wrote: > Here is a picture of a 1958 AT&T modem (not sure if this is the first > commercial modem, the Bell 103. If so it was 300 baud): > http://www.att.com/history/milestone_1958.html No, the Bell 103 is a little plastic box only a little bit larger than a Hayes external modem. This appears to be a photograph of an encrypted data system using a carrier key tape. --scott "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Common Sense Moves Could Protect Privacy Date: 24 May 2005 08:52:23 -0700 Monty Solomon wrote: > Wachovia Corp., and Bank of America Corp. say they have notified > more th an 100,000 customers that their accounts and personal > information may be at risk after former bank employees allegedly > sold account numbers and balances to a man who then sold them to > data collection agencies. Nine people have been arrested in New > Jersey in the case. At one time bank employees were held to be pillars of the community. They were treated as professionals and acted as professionals. It was rare to have one go bad. Even big city banks tended to be community oriented operations. Most employees intermixed in person with the customers they served. Further, banks had elaborate systems of accounting and auditing controls. Unfortunately, today many accounting controls are gone. The people who loaded up an ATM every day kept whatever cash was left over because no one bothered to audit it, for example. Also, banks today are huge anonymous empires. Many employees work in "boiler rooms", under pressure to sell profitable new banking products like stocks and insurance yet meet a tough quota of customers served per day. The computer watches every transaction and break. These modern employees, often dealing with disgruntled customers over the phone, have little incentive to be loyal. Thus, there is greater temptation, esp when the theft is of non-cash items. (Most of us would not pry open a vending machine to steal a candy bar, but if the vending machine malfunctioned and served it for free, nobody would pay for it. The man who services the machines where I work found that out the hard way.) Cash and money can be audited and controlled. Secret information like personal records can be lifted easily. I don't think much of these 'boiler room' customer service operations. As a customer, I find them maddeningly frustrating to deal with. ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Looking for a Model 15 or 19 Reply-To: jhaynes@alumni.uark.edu Organization: University of Arkansas Alumni From: haynes@alumni.uark.edu (Jim Haynes) Date: Tue, 24 May 2005 19:46:24 GMT In article <telecom24.229.7@telecom-digest.org>, <moody1951@aol.com> wrote: > Looking for a Model 15 or 19 in good cosmetic condition and operating > order. You need to get on the mailing list greenkeys on qth.net. Archives are searchable on www.qth.net. Also try ebay, being aware that asking prices are often unrealistic. jhhaynes at earthlink dot net ------------------------------ From: Reggie <moody1951@aol.com> Subject: Re: Looking for a Model 15 or 19 Date: 24 May 2005 13:14:01 -0700 Yes, the old black boxes. Had some years ago. Donated them to a museum. Wished I had one for display and operation with a HAL 6000 interface. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Your House at P.O. Box 4621 Date: 24 May 2005 13:52:32 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com TELECOM Digest Editor, commenting on the spam from Customer Service wrote: > ... that is the age and quality of the mailing lists these spammers > often times use. Not only spammers. My father died many years. I occassionally today get junk mail addressed to him -- at my present address. He never lived there and at the time he died I was still living at home with him. The databanks do a mix 'n match in hopes of making a connection. The City of Phila Parking Authority got into hot water recently for mailing dunning notices for unpaid parking tickets 15 years old. The recipients were people who never were in Phila nor owned the car. The collection agency did a match search on names nationally. Obviously a lot of errors came up. This made the newspapers and didn't help the poor reputation of the Parking Authority. Sure, one could fight the dunning letter but at considerable cost in time and money. I know one victim is just sending in a check. This kind of database matching is scary. Can anybody out there defend this sort of thing? [public replies please] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Lisa, I am wondering if City of Phila Parking Authority are as full of snot as the people who run the various 'Authorities' (we used to call them 'Atocities' in Chicago; i.e. the Chicago Transit Atrocity, the Chicago Housing Atrocity, etc.)? I do know the people who handle the parking meters in Chicago (when they are not busy ripping them off for the handful of loot inside then they are hassling the people whose license numbers they purportedly copied down [oftentimes incorrectly] to pay fines, etc) can be down- right vicious in their ignorance. Letters from City of Chicago will show up in the mail hundreds of miles away to people who have never been in Chicago in their lives, telling them to pay a one hundred dollar fine for a parking meter violation. The people insist they have never been in Chicago, no one had permission to drive their car in Chicago, and they do not know how they came to be associated with a parking ticket from Chicago. The parking people sass at them, warning them 'if you force us to take this to court the present $100 fine will triple and if you do not show up in court on X day at X hour, your car will be listed on a national registry to get impounded.' 'Just make it easy on yourself [read as lazy us] and send in your check and don't get any smart ideas about stopping payment on the check.' Lisa, those people are truly vicious. What about where you live? PAT] ------------------------------ 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. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 50 Independence, KS 67301 Phone: 620-402-0134 Fax 1: 775-255-9970 Fax 2: 530-309-7234 Fax 3: 208-692-5145 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe: telecom-subscribe@telecom-digest.org Unsubscribe:telecom-unsubscribe@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the oldest e-zine/mailing list on the internet in any category! 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The program has state-of-the-art lab facilities on the Stillwater and Tulsa campus offering hands-on learning to enhance the program curriculum. Classes are available in Stillwater, Tulsa, or through distance learning. Please contact Jay Boyington for additional information at 405-744-9000, mstm-osu@okstate.edu, or visit the MSTM web site at http://www.mstm.okstate.edu ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V24 #231 ****************************** | |