From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Mar 2 03:12:26 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p2/8.11.3) id i228CQd26386; Tue, 2 Mar 2004 03:12:26 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 03:12:26 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200403020812.i228CQd26386@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 #100 TELECOM Digest Tue, 2 Mar 2004 03:11:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 100 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Anti-Spam Solutions and Security (Monty Solomon) Alleged WebTV 911 Hacker Charged With Cyberterrorism (Monty Solomon) Maxtor Champions 6 Stream DVRs (Monty Solomon) Lawsuit Over Fake Sony Critic Survives Challenge (Monty Solomon) Is Password-Lending a Cybercrime? (Monty Solomon) Re: Sharing Passwords (Bit Twister) Re: Nevada Bell (Michael Chance) Re: Missouri Bell (Michael Chance) Re: RI & Providence Plantations; St. Pierre/Miquelon/Newfoundland (Tony) More Re: The GTE Side of Verizon (Mark J. Cuccia) I Found Something You May Like (TELECOM Digest Editor) 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 is 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 00:47:23 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Anti-Spam Solutions and Security by Dr. Neal Krawetz SecurityFocus 1. Overview In a recent survey, 93% of respondents reported dissatisfaction with the large volume of unsolicited email (spam) they receive. [ref 1] The problem has grown to the point where nearly 50% of the world's email is spam [ref 2], yet only a few hundred groups are responsible. [ref 3] Many anti-spam solutions have been proposed and a few have been implemented. Unfortunately, these solutions do not prevent spam as much as they interfere with every-day email communications. The problems posed by spam have grown from simple annoyances to significant security issues. The deluge of spam costs up to an estimated $20 billion each year in lost productivity -- according to the same document, spam within a company can cost between $600 and $1,000 per year for every user.[ref 4] http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1763 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 00:53:01 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Alleged WebTV 911 Hacker Charged With Cyberterrorism By Kevin Poulsen SecurityFocus FBI agents arrested a Louisiana man last week under the cyberterrorism provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act for allegedly tricking a handful of MSN TV users into running a malicious e-mail attachment that reprogrammed their set-top boxes to dial 9-1-1 emergency response. According to prosecutors, David Jeansonne, 43, was targeting 18 specific MSN TV users in an online squabble when he crafted the script in July 2002, and sent it out disguised as a tool to change the colors on MSN TV's user interface. Though the code didn't mass-mail itself to others, some of the recipients were sufficiently fooled that they forwarded it to friends, for a total of 21 victims. Known as WebTV before it was acquired by Microsoft, MSN TV works with television set-top boxes to allow users to surf the Web and send and receive e-mail without using a PC. The boxes connect to the Internet through a local dial-up number. The malicious script changed the dial-up to 9-1-1. If a victim didn't go online again after being infected, the box would summon help anyway when it tried to make an automatic daily call to the network at midnight. http://www.securityfocus.com/news/8136 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That is absolutely DUMB! I have to wonder why David Jeansonne that would hurt anyone but eventually himself. Dumb, dumb, dumb! PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 01:00:36 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Maxtor Champions 6 Stream DVRs http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/35932.html By Faultline Maxtor and Scientific Atlanta last week attracted column inches on their plans for the next generation of DVRs, due for release in about 18 months. But what exactly are they talking about when they boast of 6 stream technology? To date, pegging the price of DVRs and VCRs meant that they could feature a limited number of tuners. A tuner sorts through the signals on a TV network - digital or analogue - and selects the wavelength carrying the required programme. The tuner then unscrambles it and readies it for viewing pleasure. In the past, including two tuners was thought to be an extravagance, and any more than that completely unnecessary. The rationale behind this was that the single-TV consumer would be unlikely to want to record more than two programs at a time, while either watching one of them or watching a third recorded program. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/35932.html ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 22:33:12 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Lawsuit Over Fake Sony Critic Survives Challenge - Mar 1, 2004 09:48 PM (Reuters) By Gina Keating LOS ANGELES, March 1 (Reuters) - The fictitious movie critic David Manning may still end up in court over all the nice things he had to say about "Hollow Man" and "The Animal." A California appeals court on Thursday ruled that a proposed class action filed by filmgoers against Sony Pictures Entertainment could go to trial over the studio's admission that it had created a fake critic to plug its movies. But in a scathing dissent, Justice Reuben Ortega called the lawsuit "a farce" and "the most frivolous case with which I have ever had to deal." Sony's lawyers had asked a Los Angeles trial judge to throw out the lawsuit, which accuses Sony of false advertising and deceptive business practices for creating Manning and then using his laudatory blurbs in ads that ran in U.S. newspapers in 2000 and 2001. But the Los Angeles trial judge rejected Sony's argument that the ads were protected by the state's free speech guarantees. The Second District Court of Appeal upheld the trial judge, saying the case could proceed to trial. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=40729094 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 00:39:10 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Is Password-Lending a Cybercrime? A judge's wrongheaded interpretation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act illustrates the problems of allowing civil enforcement of a criminal law. By Mark Rasch SecurityFocus In a little-observed civil lawsuit involving tracking of magazine subscriptions, a federal court in Manhattan issued a ruling last week that could theoretically result in prosecutors going after people who use another person's password and userid with their permission, but without the permission of the issuer. The case, decided last Monday, arose out of a dispute between two competing companies, Inquiry Management Systems (IMS), and Berkshire Information Systems, both of whom tracked magazine advertisements for their clients. Employees of Berkshire obtained a userid and password from a client of IMS, and used them to access IMS's website and tracking service. This act violated the customer's agreement with IMS. From there, the Berkshire employees either read, or downloaded (or both) certain copyrighted information about the tracking of magazine advertisements, which of course, they used to compete with IMS. Is this an unfair and deceptive trade practice? Sure! Inducing a breach of contract between IMS and its customer? Absolutely! Fraud? Sure, why not. But IMS sued Berkshire for computer crime, and a violation of the DMCA. http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/222 ------------------------------ From: Bit Twister Subject: Re: Sharing Passwords Organization: home user Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 03:48:07 GMT On Tue, 02 Mar 2004 01:36:59 GMT, Bit Twister wrote: > Is password-lending a cybercrime? > By Mark Rasch, SecurityFocus > http://theregister.co.uk/content/55/35942.html > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: You may wish to read the article > referenced above, then reach a decision of your own. My personal > feeling is this: If you willfully provide a password belonging to > yourself to some other person, then YOU should be responsible for > whatever damage is caused as a result. If your password was used > *without* your knowledge or permission then AFTER you have signed > off on an affidavit denying any knowledge or permission given for > its use, you are not responsible. That's my opinion. PAT] I was thinking about a nytimes.com telecomdigest1 account. :( [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, think about it if you wish. There are some substantial differences in the cases. In the original report presented in this issue by Monty Solomon, a fellow had been given a secret password as a condition of his employment. I presume his pass- word enabled him to make some changes on the computer. In my case, I don't honestly know who first created the telecomdigest account on the New York Times, only that it was later reported to me here that the 'group password' for Digest readers was not working correctly, so I made changes as needed to make it work. It was never known as anything other than a 'group password', there was never any secret about it, nor was it a condition of employment, etc. In addition, it was not a password with sufficient ability to make any changes in the records of NYT or do anything other than read news. If NYT wants to sue me as a result, or refer to me as a 'cyberterrorist' they are welcome to do so, but I can't really see it happening. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Michael Chance Subject: Re: Nevada Bell Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 04:53:43 GMT In article , Wesrock@aol.com says: > The largest city in Nevada, Las Vegas, was not and is not served by > Bell. Actually, it is. SBC Telecom (the SBC subsidiary that acts as a CLEC in non-SBC ILEC territory) provides local service to Las Vegas. It's not widely advertised, but if you ask, they'll provide service. Michael Chance ------------------------------ From: Michael Chance Subject: Re: Missouri Bell Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 05:02:24 GMT In article , Wesrock@aol.com says... > As I recall, M & K did not include the eastern part of Missouri > (St.Louis area), but I don't remember the name of the company that > operated there. Here's the history: St. Louis Telephonic Exchange, April 1878-1879 became The Bell Telephone Company of Missouri,1879-1913 [primarily St. Louis area] renamed The Southwestern Telegraph and Telephone Company (of Missouri), 1913-1917 and sister company The Missouri and Kansas Telephone Company,1882-1917 [chiefly Kansas and Western Missouri] merged to form Southwestern Bell Telephone Company (of Missouri),1917-1920 [Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas]. The headquarters building that Missouri Bell built in the 1890s is still standing at the corner of 10th and Olive in downtown St. Louis, and is currently being renovated into loft condos named, appropriately, The Bell Lofts. The Southwestern Bell headquarters building that was built in the early 1920s at 1010 Pine in downtown St. Louis (a fine example of art deco architecture) is still owned by SBC, and is used for a variety of corporate offices, and still houses the Chestnut central office, serving the downtown area. Michael Chance ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: RI & Providence Plantations; St. Pierre/Miquelon, Newfoundland Organization: ATCC Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 04:03:41 GMT In article , msb@vex.net says: > Simple. Rhode Island is an offshore island, also called Aquidneck > Island. Its largest city is Newport. Providence Plantations is a > section of mainland centered around Providence, and forms most of the > state's area. Presumably the island was the important part when the > name began being used and so was named first, but the full name was so > it was already being shortened in speech before Providence became more > important. In essence that's part of the story. Roger Williams landed in what is now Providence. Newport only became prominent because of it's strategic location at the mouth of Narragansett Bay. In fact, sandwiched between Canal Street and North Main Street in Providence is the Roger Williams National Memorial -- built on what was once the site of his home in Providence. But you're correct about the plantations part -- the urban core of Providence was ringed with farmlands up until the 40's. Now it's one huge strip mall. More interesting is that while Newport pretty much bulldozed most of it's historic properties, Providence managed to preserve quite a bit on the east side of the city. That has to do with the efforts of this group: http://www.ppsri.org/ As of this year the settlement of that State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations is 368 years in the past. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 22:28:32 CST From: Mark J Cuccia Subject: More Re the GTE Side of Verizon Steven Sobol wrote (in the thread of upstate-NY, Alltel, Centurytel, etc): > Don't know how much of the Erie PA metro is Alltel. I'd assume that Erie > itself is Verizon, but don't know for sure. Erie PA is indeed Verizon, but not from Bell Atlantic. Erie PA (and surrounding territory) is old GT&E and is actually a "LATA" unto itself! In the old BA states, at the time of the merger between GTE/Contel and BA/NYNEX to form VeriZon, only PA and VA were states with old GTE (some inlcuding old Contel). In addition to the Erie PA and surrounding area being GTE and actually a *LATA* of its own, there are other GTE areas in PA (and VA) which are simply within (legacy) Bell Atlantic LATAs. Erie PA and vicinity is the only GTE area that is also a GTE LATA, that exists in PA (or VA). West Virginia (a legacy BA state) used to have some GTE (which was also associated with GTE bordering in Virginia), but when GTE bought out Contel in the early 1990s, they sold off the West Virginia operations to Citizens' Telephone/Utilities. None of the old NYNEX states had any remaining GTE. There seems to have been some GT&E up there in the later 1950s, 1960s and even 1970s, but it was all sold off, probably well before GTE took over Contel in the early 1990s. Large amounts of old GTE and old Contel was sold to Citizens' and Alltel in the early 1990s when GTE took over Contel, probably to comply with FTC/DOJ "antitrust". mjc ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 23:06:35 EST From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: I Found Something You May Like I have something here you may enjoy. I call it the perpetual porn maker machine. Actually, what it does is goes about the entire net, like a hungry worm, looking for all the porn it can find. It never goes hungry! Its for any flavor of Windows It simply starts out with some well-known sites, traverses them one by one crawling around, and exploring every link it finds therein, and because it has been taught what 'porn looks like' it brings back all it can find, like several thousand jpg files every hour more or less. It takes a while, maybe a couple minutes to get started, but once the results start coming in, they pour in heavily. More porn than anyone can ever deal with. In an experiment, I turned it on one night before going to bed, and had *eighteen thousand* porn images (.jpg) on my computer the next morning. It neatly puts all the results in a file of whatever size, subject to the limits of your hard drive in c:/my thumb gallery. It helps to have a huge hard drive! Be careful, don't let the worm run unsupervised or uncontrolled for very long at a time. And there is no front door or cashier's window to go past. Why should guys have to pay for porn? It just goes in deep and takes it all out and brings it to you. No advertising, no pop ups, no spy-cookies installed on your computer, etc. If you click on the picture of the camera, then you get to see the work that is going on in the background. My suggestion would be if you like that sort of thing is to run it in the background, let little pictures pop up on your screen and periodically clean out the c://my thumbgal gallery file. You can run it all the time, but the storage file gets to be so big and unwieldy, and frankly, boring. You can rename the directory and restart the program; the worm just recreates a new directory with the same name and starts filling it with porn again, by the truckful. I did NOT invent this worm, but the company which did is now long since out of business. One of the options available once it is loaded and running is to 'register' the program; that would give you access to movies, etc but that function does not work; I think the company which invented the porn-worm was too trusting in thinking all the dirty old men around here would be willing to pay for at least that much. I've renamed my version of it 'Porn Worm'. Let me know how you like it. http://porn-worm.us.tf 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. 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #100 ******************************