From editor@telecom-digest.org Sun Mar 7 19:34:31 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p2/8.11.3) id i280YUi20795; Sun, 7 Mar 2004 19:34:31 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2004 19:34:31 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200403080034.i280YUi20795@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 #108 TELECOM Digest Sun, 7 Mar 2004 19:35:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 108 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson The Price of Email is Constant Vigilance (Rob Slade) Spam Going Out Under My Name (TELECOM Digest Editor) Compensation For Telephones Sold Programmed to Call my Phone (MLM List) Should I Use 66-block (John) Re: Verizon Wireless/Verizon Airfone Offer 10 Cents-Minute (Novosielski) Re: Verizon Wireless/Verizon Airfone Offer 10 Cents-Minute (Steve Sobol) Re: Vonage with Modem and Fax (John Levine) Re: Need to Block Outgoing Calls to Specific Numbers (name withheld) Re: Quest to Offer "Naked DSL" (David S. Roland) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Rob Slade Organization: Vancouver Institute for Research into User Date: Sat, 6 Mar 2004 16:37:19 -0800 Subject: The Price of Email is Constant Vigilance Peter Wilson's article on spam and viruses (on Saturday, March 6, 2004) lists a number of antispam measures that are currently being promoted. He also retails Bill Gates' confident prediction that spam will be a thing of the past by 2006. Remember that prophecy, because Bill Gates is going to be proven wrong. An examination of the measures listed in the article demonstrates why. SPF (sender-permitted format) is currently garnering the greatest interest. The description of SPF as a kind of caller-ID is not quite correct. All email carries caller-ID in the form of the information about who the message is from, and information about the Internet Protocol (IP) address that originated the message. SPF is actually an attempt to contact the site that is supposed to have originated the message, and verify that these two pieces of information match, or, at least, are likely. Spammers, when creating spoofed addresses, don't bother to make sure that they do. Or, at least, they haven't up until now. Microsoft's own version seems to be either an attempt to compete or an attempt to derail SPF: SPF is primarily promoted by AOL, and the two companies have never played particularly well together. Microsoft's plan is derided by the SPF camp for being proprietary. It is true that SPF uses features and functions that make more effective use of the email protocols that are currently in use on the Internet. The configuration of factors is not universal, though, and some of the activities will require new programming for everyone who participates in SPF. Which may mean that the Internet might become split into the camp of those who use SPF, and those who don't. I have seen this in action already. I have a number of accounts. (And, of course, get tons of spam.) One is through Vancouver CommunityNet, which does not have very much in the way of spam detection or prevention. Because of the volume of spam this account receives (particularly during the Sobig flood last summer), I forwarded the account to a service that does spam and virus filtering. One of the functions that the service uses is similar to the SPF protocol. A great deal of the spam that was being forwarded was unverifiable, and so the service simply refused to accept it. This meant that a volume of email built up on Vancouver CommunityNet, to the point that it affected the mail system as a whole. (Vancouver CommunityNet, despite being informed of all the details, and my own actions to rectify the situation, has handled the whole matter in a very sloppy manner.) SPF has promise, and it may be possible (unlike the Microsoft proposal) to provide workarounds for a variety of systems, platforms, and applications. However, there are a number of issues that still have to resolved, such as email aliases, third-party services, and applications such as mailing lists, which operate in a wide variety of forms. The difficulties are not insurmountable, but an enormous amount of work still has to be done. Microsoft's micropayments strategy is apparently the most recent one, but has been raised many times over the history of the nets. (One of the popular programs providing Usenet news, a type of topical discussion, used to remind anyone who attempted to post a message that it would possibly cost thousands of dollars to send this to everyone: did they really want to do that?) Unfortunately, the issue of mailing lists comes up almost immediately. Even if we assume one cent per message, if I send a message to a popular list such as the RISKS-FORUM Digest, with a possible hundred thousand subscribers, am I charged a thousand dollars for that message? Is the list moderator charged? In the case of RISKS, it is also redistributed by a number of sub-mailing lists: do those costs get charged to the accounts of the local administrators? The list moderator? Me? (The obvious second question is: who *gets* the money? The Internet Engineering Task Force? Some bloated bureaucracy parcelling out the cash to the various national telecom carriers? Charity? Microsoft? The recipient? Hmmm. Maybe I should rethink my objection to the micropayment system. At one point I was getting 8,000 [yes, eight thousand] copies of spam from one system in China. Per hour. Same message.) And, of course, in order to provide for such a micropayment system, everybody is going to have to use a Microsoft mailer. With a Microsoft payment system. And a Microsoft account. This sounds like an attempt to resurrect the (justly derided and roundly condemned) Passport and Palladium systems. The challenge-response system is already being used by a number of outfits providing spam filtering and other services. It is a nuisance. It can create a great deal of annoyance in a number of situations, not least being mailing lists. It also doesn't work. The most common challenge response systems present a graphical image of a word. This word is supposed to be entered in a field on a web page in order to create permission for the message to go through. People can read the word easily, but machines have difficulty with this type of task, so this makes it impossible for spammers to automate the sending of email: they have to read and respond to every challenge. That's the theory. In fact, spammers have already been found to be "automating" the process -- using Internet web surfers. A number of web pages have been set up promising access to pornography. In order to access the files, you have to respond to a challenge. The challenges are, of course, those that are being presented on the antispam filtering sites. Those challenges are simply extracted, presented to the surfers wanting access to pornographic images, solved by the user, and the solution fed back to the antispam site. The same problems apply to computational puzzles: they are simply another form of challenge-response. In fact, most of these antispam technologies fail in the face of the problem of spam nets set up by viruses. Spam sent from infected machines could simply use the name of the owner, thus verifying the identity. Spam sent from infected machines could use the micropayment "wallet" on the infected machine, thus creating not only problems of clean-up for the owner, but also a real cost. Infected machines could be used to crack computational puzzles, or the owner could be presented with challenges to respond to, in a variety of ways. Spam has passed the stage of being a nuisance. Email is a means of communication that is starting to rival the phone, and spam is seriously degrading the effectiveness and utility of email. Antispam measures are badly needed, but we cannot accept any proposed solution uncritically. Dividing the Internet into isolated camps of incompatible (and rival) antispam technologies takes us back to the early days of online systems, when lots of people had email, but nobody could talk to each other. There is no easy fix, and there is no easy answer. Administrators have to ensure that they are not providing open relays that can be used for spam. Email filtering services are checking for inappropriate inbound email, but must also check what is going out. ISPs (Internet Service Providers) must be more vigilant in regard to the use being made of the net to which they provide access. Computer users at all levels have to check for malicious software, unpatched vulnerabilities, open ports and services, and what is going out of their systems as well as what is coming in. Everybody needs to become more aware of what is going on, and keep up with the changes in threats around us all. And anyone who tells you it is not going to be painful is selling something. ====================== (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer) rslade@vcn.bc.ca slade@victoria.tc.ca rslade@sun.soci.niu.edu If you like laws and sausage, you should never watch either being made. - Otto von Bismarck http://victoria.tc.ca/techrev or http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~rslade ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2004 18:00:44 EST From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Spam Going Out Under My Name I had pretty much (foolishly) assumed my name (Patrick A. Townson) and Editor, both e-residing @telecom-digest.org was immune from being used in outgoing spam and virii attacks. I found out yesterday and today that was *not* the case, when I began receiving here at telecom a ton of spam sent here from 'Patrick_A_Townson@telecom-digest.org' and/or 'ptownson@telecom-digest.org' addressed to the same name and/or Editor. I am sure many of you have recieved the same baloney in your own email. Some virii likewise is being sent around the net claiming to be from 'editor@telecom-digest.org' I guess one way of getting someone out of business you dislike is by sending a load of trash under their name, and hope that most readers do not take the trouble to investigate it. I suppose I should get a signature encryption, slap an 'iron clad' (as that goes) copyright on all my work, including this Digest, etc, but I just do not have the energy to go to all that work. I do have a good idea where much of the trash is coming from originally, but proving it of course, is another thing entirely. Those of you who have been annoyed by the same trash bearing my name please be assured it is NOT coming from me, even as clever as the forger seems to be. The spam has dealt with everything from work at home schemes through other get rich on the net plans and penis enlargement plans. I do hope the two people (primarily) who raised the biggest stink about the Porn Worm thing and claimed it (porn) was the 'direction the Digest was going' won't wind up getting this other stuff and get hysterical about it also. Patrick Townson ------------------------------ From: MLM Moderator Subject: Compensation For Telephones Sold Programmed to Call my Telephone Date: Sun, 07 Mar 2004 15:14:09 -0500 Approved for misc.legal.moderated Bernie Cosell moderator: misc.legal.moderated From: ConsultingServices2004@yahoo.com (Consultant) Subject: Compensation for telephones sold programmed to call my mobile telephone. Date: 5 Mar 2004 18:46:54 -0800 What do you think of this? A USA Telecom company sold phones that were programmed wrong so they call my mobile phone instead of voicemail. The problem is the number that was programmed in was only valid for one place in the USA. When that phone is used in my state, people call my business mobile phone (instead of their voicemail). I have had HUNDREDS of these calls to my mobile phone. It took me some time to get one of the callers from these seemingly random numbers to let me know they were trying to reach voicemail. I put enough pieces of information together that I called the telecom company and spent several hours getting to the right person who would understand what I was saying. I had to ask callers who called me for more information before I diagnosed exactly what was happening. Today someone from the company called and said they would like to compensate me. The people I've dealt with at the company have been nice. I don't want to be unfair in dealing with them, but I'm wondering what should reasonably request as remuneration. Is what they did illegal? Would the FCC consider this any sort of violation? Could this be considered harrassing calls (even though the telecom company didn't actually place the calls, simply provided the incorrectly programmed equipment)? What do YOU think? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: After dealing with this situation first hand on one occassion (but thank God, in the early 1970's when there was still a legitimate phone company [Illinois Bell] with reasonably intelligent people working for it who had genuine concerns about service) in the Chicago-Beverly ESS cutover when I spend a day getting bombed with calls for Sears, Roebuck, and seeing a few anecdotal cases where a bank (First National of Chicago) misprogrammed their auto-dial Fax machine and other cases, it is very hard for me to approach this without some bias. On the one hand, I would say take them to Small Claims Court (telcos [and banks] absolutely despise that place, and the people who resort to using those places) but you can get very good satisfaction from it. What they did to you is not illegal, unless being a stupid person is against the law (I sometimes think it should be) and any court would resent being asked to function as your collection agency. You would definitly need to document exactly how much inconvenience you suffered. You might be able to sue for negligence on the telco's part, in not properly supervising the employee who programmed the phone. But if telco is being nice about it, and has ended the problem, then I would think a new cellphone for free, and a few hundred dollars would suffice. Are *they* asking you to name the amount? Have they hinted at any amount they think is fair? PAT] ------------------------------ From: johnfofawn@hotmail.com (John) Subject: Should I Use 66-Block? Date: 7 Mar 2004 11:20:18 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com I only have one POTS phone line. I just re-wired my basement and I used CAT5 wire in running all my POTS lines. I now have 8 POTS jacks in the basement that I need to connect to the phone system. I bought a 66-block (Leviton 4066-M50) at Home Depot and I assumed (incorrectly) that I could put the red, green, yellow, and black on each column and then wire the extensions (TIA 568A) to each of the rows. I now understand a 66-block doesn't work this way. Is there something better I can do other than twisting 8 wires together for each of the 4 colors? I looked at a Leviton catalog and I understand how patch panels work, but it's just too expensive. Advice? Thanks, John ------------------------------ From: Gary Novosielski Subject: Re: Verizon Wireless and Verizon Airfone Offer 10 Cents-a-Minute Date: Sat, 06 Mar 2004 03:02:57 GMT Joseph wrote: > You *still* can't use your mobile phone *in* flight. Correct. > It's assumed that you will make arrangements for the transfer of > your calls and account setup whether the "a la carte" 69 cent plan > or the frequent traveler $10/month plan from your mobile phone to > Airphone before the flight leaves. This is about Airphone and not > about Verizon Wireless in flight. As long as you have an assigned AirFone/VZW PIN number, you don't need to do anything with the mobile handset before the flight leaves. Once you're onboard the plane, before or after takeoff, you can program the seatback AirFone handset with your special PIN number. At that point your wireless number will begin to forward to the AirFone at your seat, using the "roaming" rate you've signed up for. When you land, you turn your mobile phone back on. The forwarding is cancelled as soon as the network sees your mobile handset checking back into the net. ------------------------------ From: Steven J Sobol Subject: Re: Verizon Wireless and Verizon Airfone Offer 10 Cents-a-Minute Date: Fri, 05 Mar 2004 09:56:45 -0600 Gary Novosielski wrote: > THIS IS NOT THE CASE! You need to "sign up" for EITHER the > subscription or the non-subscription feature. If you do nothing and > place a call from an AirFone handset, you'll be charged the normal > ~$4/min rate. The press release is just a press release. I'm sure whatever literature the company releases will state that ... VZW is pretty good about disclosing everything. JustThe.net Internet & New Media Services, Apple Valley, CA Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / 888.480.4NET (4638) / sjsobol@JustThe.net PGP: C57E 8B25 F994 D6D0 5F6B B961 EA08 9410 E3AE 35ED Domain Names, $9.95/yr, great service: http://DomainNames.JustThe.net/ ------------------------------ Date: 6 Mar 2004 22:30:54 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: Vonage with Modem and Fax Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > Thanks for the info ... but after contacting Vonage via email, they > said they don't have my area yet but should soon. That means they don't have local numbers in your area. They work fine on any broadband connection. For a second line that's used mostly for outgoing calls, the number doesn't much matter. If you have friends or relatives somewhere else, get a number there and they can call you for free. If you tell them where you want a number, they'll let you know when they have numbers there and let you change your number at that time for free. By the way, I see that Vonage just adjusted their international rates downward by quite a lot. Calls to the UK, France, and Hong Kong are 2 cpm, Mexico City is 5 cpm, etc. Regards, John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 330 5711 johnl@iecc.com Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner http://iecc.com/johnl Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 06 Mar 2004 22:26:07 -0600 From: Name Withheld at Users Request Subject: Re: Need to Block Outgoing Calls to Specific Numbers Earlier, I wrote: > [PAT - In the interest of privacy, please delete my .sig and email > address from this post. Thanks.] Do it again, please? > I'm looking for a way to block outgoing calls to three specific phone > numbers. > I'm pretty sure telco can block _incoming_ calls _from_ a certain > number, and this might be an option -- I could offer to pay for this > service on the neighbors' lines. But I'd rather handle it on the > originating end if possible. I plan to call telco tomorrow and see if > they offer an outbound-blocking feature. Lo and behold, they do! There's a service called "Call Control" that allows blocking of specific numbers, even local numbers. So we've ordered that. We also ordered "Call Screening" to block incoming calls from some "charities" who solicit her for cash donations weekly. I'll also be contacting Carl and Mike, in case the Telco solution doesn't work out for some reason ... Thanks, folks. ------------------------------ From: David S. Roland Subject: Re: Quest to Offer "Naked DSL" Date: Sun, 07 Mar 2004 14:39:31 -0700 This may have been dealt ... distance as the crow flies, is not the same as wire length especially, when the provider tries to find an open cable pair. maybe the only way to get a pair to you is by way of a backup cable coming from the other direction. We got a dry copper pair installed which came out initially at 13,000ft. after the sdsl modems came in ... we tested out at 27,000ft. that was 30 days later. Tony P. wrote: > In article , epg1@comcast.net > says: >> McWebber (mcwebber@my-deja.com) wrote: >>> Verizon recently caved and now allows DSL only subscriptions, so I'm >>> sure Qworst looked at that before making the decision. >> Can anyone provide details of DSL-only subscriptions through Verizon >> (in Eastern Massachusetts, if it matters)? I would love to tell >> Comcast where to shove their overpriced service. >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, if you think the telephone >> company is going to give you a better deal *and* stick to their word, >> you might need to review your premises. (in other words, think again.) >> PAT] > Somewhat true -- I was promised 1.5MBps service and got 760KBps but know > what, it's as fast or faster in many cases than Cox own 2MBps service > promise. > just go to http://www.verizon.net and on that page I believe there's a > script that will tell you if you qualify for DSL. > ** WARNING ** The folks at Verizon DSL are a little bit brain dead. I > was told I was 27K feet from the CO when I know that's not the case. > Turns out I'm actually 9K feet from the CO, or 1/3 the distance. > Their records are notoriously bad. So don't accept a no answer without > first calling repair and asking them to run a loop length test. Then > call the Verizon DSL folks and explain that you called repair and they > verified the distance recorded in the Verizon DSL database is wrong. <<--Ask me about the Residential (ISDN based) Information Appliance -->> Roland Projects, Inc. P.O. Box 370745 Denver, Colorado 80237-0745 Telecommunication Application and System Software Office: (303) 340-3090 ------------------------------ 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. 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Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #108 ******************************