From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Apr 6 17:20:46 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p2/8.11.3) id i36LKkW18806; Tue, 6 Apr 2004 17:20:46 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2004 17:20:46 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200404062120.i36LKkW18806@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 #165 TELECOM Digest Tue, 6 Apr 2004 17:20:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 165 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Jeff Pulver's Comments on the Sununu VoIP Bill (VOIP News) Centigram Series 6 Voicemail (Tim Howell) Re: Book on How the Internet/WWW Works? (John Levine) Re: Excel Communications (J Kelly) Re: Regulators Weigh Whether New Services Fall Within Realm (M Sullivan) For the Person Asking About Setting Up an Internet Cafe (Tony P.) Problems With VOIP Dropping Words (Jack Decker) Re: Walmart Mix Up Balancing Credit Cards Causes Major Hassle (Zwanzig) Re: Walmart Mix Up Balancing Credit Cards Causes Major Hassle (Tony P.) Re: Walmart Mix Up Balancing Credit Cards Causes Major Hassle (Thomas) Re: Walmart Mix Up Balancing Credit Cards Causes Major Hassle (Dold) Re: Walmart Mix Up Balancing Credit Cards Causes Major Hassle (Leighton) Re: Walmart Mixup Balancing Credit Cards Causes Hassle (Wesrock) Re: Cell Phones Exceed Land Lines in Maine (John R. Levine) Re: Apparent Hidden Advertisements in the Telecom Digest (C Cryderman) 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: VOIP News Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2004 13:20:45 -0400 Subject: [VoIP News] Jeff Pulver's comments on the Sununu VoIP Bill Reply-To: VoIPnews@yahoogroups.com Jeff Pulver expressed his opinion on the Sununu VoIP Bill on his blog, which can be found at: http://192.246.69.231/jeff/personal/index.html] Here is what he wrote: My take on the Sununu VoIP Bill I like it! :-) Overall the VoIP Bill is what I expected to see, a nice show of support and place holder setting forth a strong statement to allow VoIP to grow relatively free of excessive regulation, particularly unaffected by a host of onerous state regulations. I think it is pretty good to have this as the first proposed piece of legislation on the topic, but I don't really expect any immediate action from Congress beyond a few hearings and press statement this year or early next year. Than again, as I've learned, "Nothing is Impossible!" This bill (and the Pickering version in the House), will be very important to help people frame the regulatory debate. I look forward to additional meetings on Capitol Hill and taking part in future hearings on this subject. Posted by jeff at 06:16 PM How to Distribute VoIP Throughout a Home: http://michigantelephone.mi.org/distribute.html If you live in Michigan, subscribe to the MI-Telecom group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/MI-Telecom/ ------------------------------ From: tim@fefcful.org (Tim Howell) Subject: Centigram Series 6 Voicemail Date: 6 Apr 2004 10:41:21 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Can anyone post instructions on how to change the length of a DTMF digit and the length of the gap between DTMF digits on a Centigram Series 6 voicemail server? Thanks! --TWH ------------------------------ Date: 6 Apr 2004 05:40:43 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: Book on How the Internet/WWW Works? Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > So, can anyone recommend a book or other reference for the technically > savvy but general reader on this? (Not a "how too use it" book; not a > detailed reference on the IP or other protocols; just a "how it all > works" description.) If you can find a copy of my "Internet Secrets", 2nd edition, there's a couple of chapters on just those topics. Regards, John Levine johnl@iecc.com Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies" Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly. ------------------------------ From: J Kelly Subject: Re: Excel Communications Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2004 08:12:28 -0500 Organization: http://newsguy.com Reply-To: jkelly@newsguy.com On 4 Apr 2004 05:46:32 -0000, John Levine wrote: >> If your with any other telecom service provider you're still paying at >> or near the same as Excel price, ... > Uh, no. Excel's Nickel Nation costs $5 per month and 5 cents per > minute with an outrageous five minute (25 cent) minimum per call. > Other plans have even higher per minute rates. 800 service is > $3.50/mo and 19 cpm. And don't forget the bogus $1.30/mo "carrier > cost recovery" charge which Excel keeps. LOL! I pay $.05 with NO monthly fee, no minimum, and it is capped at $20. Use more than 400 minutes and the rest are free. I'm quite happy with it. The provider is the same as my local service. Qwest. Never had a problem with their LD service. Their local service had some nightmares for awhile, but they fixed it and compensated me nicely for their screw up. ------------------------------ From: Michael D. Sullivan Subject: Re: Regulators Weigh Whether New Services Fall Within Their Realm Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2004 04:49:19 GMT In article , TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to an article in VOIP News: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Those public servants never give up, do > they? They'll be damned if they can't have VOIP service to screw up > the way they have screwed up landline telco over the years. Anyway, I > thought a couple days ago I read here that (a) the FCC had decided > that VOIP was not going to be subject to those regulations and/or (b) > the federal government was pre-empting all the state and local > agencies and going to take it over exclusively for themselves. PAT] The FCC has not decided what to do about phone-to-phone VOIP yet. It has held that pulver.com's non-interconnected Free World Dialup isn't a telecommunications service, but it has begun a rulemaking about what to make of this new thing that is threatening to break out of the mold of the 1934 Act. Legislation is being introduced (most recently by Sununu of NH -- I wonder who wrote it for him? My guess is the carrier with the TouchTone(TM) code 288 that wants to convert all of its service to VoIP and exempt it from access charges) that would specifically exempt all VoIP service from telecommunications regulation at the state and federal level, but a bill is about as good as a warm bucket of s*it. Michael D. Sullivan Bethesda, MD, USA Delete nospam from my address and it won't work. ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: For the Person Asking About Setting up an Internet Cafe Organization: ATCC Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2004 05:22:14 GMT Read! This is very interesting even if it did happen in Ireland. John Allman allmanj at houseofireland.com Mon Apr 5 09:33:39 IST 2004 Some of you who were on #linux on Friday will know part or most of this story already as I witnessed some of it (while drinking a truly delicious hot chocolate). For those of you who don't, the following is a report written up by a friend of mine on his succussful (or at least, it's looking good) attempt to stop and catch a 419 scammer. I feel it's worth the read. John From: Steffen Higel To: John Allman , [This is long, and is quite heavy on the technical discussion. Skip the bits you don't understand. It gets interesting.] I work for a busy Dublin Internet cafe, doing some sysadmining and general computer maintenance. On Sunday the 28th of March, I got a rather distressing email from a sysadmin in a large U.S. University. Spamcop had blacklisted our server's external IP address. Abuse mail for the server in question gets sent to my college account (bad practice, I know, but it's a part time job). My college uses Spamcop as a blacklist source. You can probably tell what happened... Anyway, said email included the full headers of an email which was natted by our server pretending to be from the widow of Mr. Jonas Savimbi, offering the recipient a share of an unspecified large sum of money. The usual panicked thoughts kick in... "Have I fiddled with something which has left us as an open relay?", "Has our server been cracked?", "Have I been sleep-spamming again?". A more reasoned examination of the headers showed that the mail had originated from one of the IP addresses that we assign dynamically to people who bring laptops into the cafe. This is something of a nightmare for cafe operators, we can hardly block outbound smtp but then again it isn't possible for us to manually check every single mail either. Maybe rate limiting is a valid technical solution. Or a contraption which hits the user on the head for every mail they send. So if they send 1 an hour, it's a mild nuisance. But if they send 100 a minute, it'll probably kill them. A peek through the logs revealed: Mar 26 15:04:16 server dhcpd-2.2.x: DHCPDISCOVER from 00:40:f4:5d:aa:f7 via eth1 Mar 26 15:04:17 server dhcpd-2.2.x: DHCPOFFER on 192.168.1.70 to 00:40:f4:5d:aa:f7 via eth1 Mar 26 15:04:17 server dhcpd-2.2.x: DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.1.70 from 00:40:f4:5d:aa:f7 via eth1 Mar 26 15:04:17 server dhcpd-2.2.x: DHCPACK on 192.168.1.70 to 00:40:f4:5d:aa:f7 via eth1 Mar 26 15:04:20 server dhcpd-2.2.x: DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.1.70 from 00:40:f4:5d:aa:f7 via eth1 Mar 26 15:04:20 server dhcpd-2.2.x: DHCPACK on 192.168.1.70 to 00:40:f4:5d:aa:f7 via eth1 Bingo. I had something to work with. The network card is one based on a Cameo 32bit chipset. Matches up quite nicely with these: Return-Path: Received: from 192.168.1.70 (server.XXXXXX [XXXXXXX.29]) byXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX) with SMTP id i2QFrgi0002755 for ; Fri, 26 Mar 2004 10:53:44 -0500 (EST) Reply-To: "michelle savimbi" From: "michelle savimbi" To: Subject: urgent response Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 15:53:26 +0000 Organization: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0034_01C221EC.6C64F7B0" X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000ams X-MimeOLE: Produced by Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165 I asked around, and a man, described as being black (or is the word African-American these days?), roughly 30, with an accent which seemed half London and half African had been in the cafe with a laptop and had a number of visitors call into his booth and had been there at the given time. I hate spam more than I hate crackers. I hate spam more than I hate virus writers. I wanted to catch this guy in the act and I wanted to see him hauled off in a paddywagon. We contacted the police, who unfortunately didn't seem willing to do anything about it unless we caught someone in the act of doing something illegal. The daily staff in the cafe were instructed to let me know if said individual turned up again, though honestly, who could be that stupid? My hopes weren't high. Evidently, a 419er is that stupid. The very next Friday (2nd of April 2004) he turned up again. I was on the bus at the time, just about to go in for another day of world altering research. I ran down as fast as I could and was told that he was on the second floor and hadn't plugged in yet because he wanted one particular booth which is somewhat secluded and was willing to wait. I sat myself down at a computer in another room, started tailing the daemon.log and waited for the telltale entries. I took a quick flick through the tcpdump manpage, just to make sure I didn't screw up. 20 minutes later, it started to happen. He plugged in, and his Windows XP laptop started to blabber away. WindowsUpdate, Netbios, passport logins. Nothing much happened for a while. The odd DNS request here, the occasional search: GET /search.php?Keywords=male%20erection&p (I'm not messing!) on 64.21.81.131, which seems to belong to some direct marketing whorehouse. He logged into this as well: 66.180.174.12, which seems to be some sort of mail harvesting database. The login is done over SSL, so I can't find out more. If any militant anti-spam vigilantes want to get a good look at how these people organize themselves, that's probably a good place to start. Then, he spent a bit of time on http://www.emailspidereasy.com. Don't you just love the fake google-textads? He logged into mail.com next, using the email address kendoda at accountant.com. Whatever hash they use for passwords was aaka7zxkcNo. Then, he logged into his yahoo mail account. This was probably to check the account that in which he receives those mails. It looks like the rest happened over SSL. Then it started. The screen started showing an awful lot of smtp traffic heading out onto the net. I knew that I had to let it go, even if it meant another 48 hours of being blacklisted. If it meant he could be convicted of committing a crime, then I figured it was worth the price. I hope those who received the mail also feel that way. (sorry :-/) Before I phoned my contact in the Gardai, I had to make sure that he was actually sending out his vile wares. I scped the partial dumpfile onto my laptop, and opened it up in ethereal. Guess what? 220 serverXXXXXXXXXX ESMTP Postfix HELO 192.168.1.70 250 serverXXXXXXXXXX MAIL FROM: 250 Ok RCPT TO: 250 Ok DATA 354 End data with . Reply-To: "michelle savimbi" Subject: Trouble With VOIP Sometimes Dropping Words Pat, please conceal my e-mail address as usual. At 03:38 PM 4/5/2004 -0400, editor@telecom-digest.org wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have discovered one thing about my > Vonage service which is a problem. Even though it usually does okay, I > get the dropped words problem whenever I am trying to run too many > jobs at once here. Left alone on the cable, Vonage seems to do very > well. But usually I am running my weather station > http://weatherforecast.n3.net or http://weatherforecast.us.tf and my > computer room live camera http://patricktownson.us.tf most of the > time. Both of these services take .jpg images and transfer them to my > California web site using FTP (under their alias 'n3.net' and 'us.tf' > names) every fifteen seconds or so. Often times also I am using a > secure form of telnet or rlogin to work on this Digest at MIT. > Whenever weather or the office cam decide it is time to do a transfer > via FTP I can count on the words on Vonage getting lost. I can set my > watch by it, every fifteen seconds or so. They are on other machines, > (the Windows 98 and Windows 95 computers) but still using the same > NetGear router and cable modem. I wish there was a way that Vonage > could take priority and slow down or automatically stop the other > jobs when it was talking. > I asked Mike Flood, general manager of Cable One here in Independence > about this. His answer was I need a 'bigger pipe', which of course he > said he could sell me. I now have what he termed 'half size' (or some > words like that) with 500 K and he said I should get a 'full size > pipe'. (More money of course). Does that make sense to anyone? I > guess the full size is twice the 500 K. PAT] Pat, if you have 500K upload speed that should be more than adequate, since even G.711 (the highest bandwidth protocol) only uses about 90K. The problem is that your other applications are managing to totally saturate your outgoing bandwidth. First check to see if there's any way to throttle the software itself - some FTP software will let you throttle uploads, but many other kinds of software don't have that feature. Beyond that, you may find some helpful ideas at these pages on BroadbandReports.com: http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/41603 http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/38267 http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,9751570~mode=flat Somewhere in those three pages, or one of the pages linked from them, you should be able to find a way to resolve your problem. Jack ------------------------------ From: zbang@radix.net (Carl Zwanzig) Subject: Re: Walmart Mix Up Balancing Credit Cards Causes Major Hassle Date: Mon, 05 Apr 2004 23:26:34 -0000 Organization: RadixNet Internet Services PAT asked: > or $1.10 total) for the two bogus transactions. What I do not understand > is why an outfit like Walmart, as big as they are, does not process > their own Visa/MC paper, sending it directly to Visa/MC instead of > going through a third party place like First Data Merchants? Isn't > FDMC in this case a sort of 'bottom feeder' a lot like the 'operator > service companies' who intercept what Bell is doing and get their own Because Visa/MC are issued by individual banks, not by a single entity like amex. Visa Int'l and MC are pretty much only licensing organizations, they don't do any processsing. WallyWorld would have to interface to every bank that has issued the cards. This is similar to why banks send foreign checks to the federal reserve or another large bank for clearing, instead of to each issueing bank. (At one time, the fed was contracting large regional banks to process checks for them. Riggs in DC comes to mind.) z! ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Walmart Mix Up Balancing Credit Cards Causes Major Hassle Organization: ATCC Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2004 05:27:45 GMT > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Whatever happened to the small merchant > with a storefront who sells thing occassionally getting a credit card > for payment where the person signs the little slip of paper and the > merchant stores these slips of paper away in the event of a dispute > and the (swiped) card transaction goes to Visa/MC for processing? A > larger store, such as Walmart for example would so something similar > but on a much larger scale. Does *anyone* turn their charges into > Visa/MC directly these days? PAT] It used to be that the money wasn't actually transferred from your card issuer to the merchant until the merchant had submitted the signed charge slip. Now everything moves at near light speed. And so you get triple dips into your account. It's only going to get worse over time. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2004 11:47:13 +0100 From: Graeme Thomas Subject: Re: Walmart Mix Up Balancing Credit Cards Causes Major Hassle [ Pat: please remove my address from this is you send it to the digest. It's OK to leave my name. ] > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Whatever happened to the small merchant > with a storefront who sells thing occassionally getting a credit card > for payment where the person signs the little slip of paper and the > merchant stores these slips of paper away in the event of a dispute > and the (swiped) card transaction goes to Visa/MC for processing? A > larger store, such as Walmart for example would so something similar > but on a much larger scale. Does *anyone* turn their charges into > Visa/MC directly these days? PAT] Visa/MC try hard not to have any direct dealings with merchants. They may allow it occasionally, but I'm sure they charge a great deal for the privilege. The normal procedure (even for small merchants) is for them to sign up to an acquiring institution -- often their local bank -- for credit card services. As John Levine remarked, often small banks subcontract the work to specialist companies like First Data. The card transaction from the swiped (or, these days, dipped) card is routed first to the acquirer. They then route it to the network (Visa, etc), who ship it to the issuer (the card-holder's bank). There are supposed to be protections in place from having batches of transactions submitted multiple times. It's hard, though, to find out reliably if this is the case. Fortunately it's relatively easy to track down such things once they've happened, and reversing the transactions themselves is easy. Coping with the consequential damage (such as PAT's $1.10 profit) is way harder. Graeme Thomas [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: As of today, Tuesday afternoon, PayPal has not yet seized their $1.10 back from my account. PAT] ------------------------------ From: dold@WalmartXMi.usenet.us.com Subject: Re: Walmart Mix Up Balancing Credit Cards Causes Major Hassle Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2004 13:35:57 UTC Organization: a2i network dold@walmartxmi.usenet.us.com wrote: > It was mentioned on the CBS Hourly News carried on KCBS-AM radio in San > Francisco. It mentioned the dates involved, the only store was WalMart, > and that the corrections had been applied to people's accounts. It made KTVU-Fox TV in Oakland. ------------------------------ From: hudsonl@skypoint.com (Hudson Leighton) Subject: Re: Walmart Mix Up Balancing Credit Cards Causes Major Hassle Date: Tue, 06 Apr 2004 09:17:14 -0500 Organization: MRRP In article , johnl@iecc.com (John R. Levine) wrote: >> What I do not understand is why an outfit like Walmart, as big as >> they are, does not process their own Visa/MC paper, sending it >> directly to Visa/MC instead of going through a third party place like >> First Data Merchants? Isn't FDMC in this case a sort of 'bottom >> feeder' a lot like the 'operator service companies' Because Visa/MC do not process credit cards, they are just marketing companies, the cards are issued by banks ( the meaning of "bank" is a little hazy with credit cards), the merchant then contracts with a "processor" which then bills the various "banks" and then deposits the funds in the merchants bank account. American Express and Discover are done a little differently, but the end result is about the same. -Hudson http://www.skypoint.com/~hudsonl [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I guess from what you are saying, that VISA (formerly known as BankAmericard) is no longer a Bank of America in San Francisco product, as it was back in the 1950's and 60's. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Wesrock@aol.com Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2004 10:35:07 EDT Subject: Re: Walmart Mixup Balancing Credit Cards Causes Hassle editor@telecom-digest.org (Pat Townson) wrote in two separate messages: > ... What I do not understand > is why an outfit like Walmart, as big as they are, does not process > their own Visa/MC paper, sending it directly to Visa/MC instead of > going through a third party place like First Data Merchants? Isn't > FDMC in this case a sort of 'bottom feeder' a lot like the 'operator > service companies' who intercept what Bell is doing and get their own > rake off at more expense to the end user (in this case, Walmart?) I > had thought places like First Data Merchants were mostly intended for > small people. For example, when I first checked into the idea of > using credit cards here in the Digest, First Data said they would > lease me a terminal, accept 'no signature, no swipe, no card > presented' transactions, etc, for some monthly fee. It would have > been ideal for me, but then PayPal came along and said they could do > it better and at no charge to me. Why would Walmart need a company > like that to handle their credit card stuff? PAT] - - - - - > Whatever happened to the small merchant > with a storefront who sells thing occassionally getting a credit card > for payment where the person signs the little slip of paper and the > merchant stores these slips of paper away in the event of a dispute > and the (swiped) card transaction goes to Visa/MC for processing? A > larger store, such as Walmart for example would so something similar > but on a much larger scale. Does *anyone* turn their charges into > Visa/MC directly these days? It was my understanding that there is no "Visa/MC" entity, in the sense you are using the term, to send them to. Visa and MC are associations of financial institutuions which interchange their transactions with one another. The transactions go to a processing and interchange agent, of which First Data is the largest. In turn the processing agent relays them to the various banks that issue Visa and MasterCard. (There was a big flap a number of years ago when JCPenney wanted to enter their transactions directly, as though they were a bank.) As far as I know, every Visa or MasterCard is issued by a bank or other financial instittution which is a member of those associations, and the transactions are interchanged between the association members, not through a great "Visa/MC" in the sky. Perhaps others can contradict or expand on this, which is seems to be on-topic as it intimately involves telecommuniciations and its processing. (It seems to me than in the time when all credit card transactions were done on paper, the actual slips were sent between banks, often represented by associations which handle the business for their members.) Wal-Mart and many other merchants now operate in a totally paperless mode, and you sign on a pad which captures the image of your signature electronically. Wes Leatherock wesrock@aol.com wleathus@yahoo.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: At our Walmart Supercenter here, unless they changed procedures lately, (I rarely ever go there, I hate the place) if the plastic is used as a 'debit' card the clerk has you put in your pin on a keypad. If the plastic is used as a 'credit' card the clerk prints out a little receipt and has you sign it. If the plastic just has a bank name on it, they usually assume it is a credit card. PAT] ------------------------------ From: johnl@iecc.com (John R. Levine) Subject: Re: Cell Phones Exceed Land Lines in Maine Date: 6 Apr 2004 15:09:14 -0400 Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > Cell phone subscribers in the state now exceed the number of Verizon > telephone lines running into Maine homes, according to spokesman > Peter Reilly. Verizon is not the only landline telco in Maine. There are plenty of independents. I would be surprised if there were more cell phones than landlines, since in large parts of rural Maine, your cell phone just plain doesn't work. ------------------------------ From: Charles Cryderman Subject: Apparent Hidden Advertisements in the Telecom Digest Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2004 14:11:04 -0400 In TELECOM Digest V23 #163 Phil Earnhardt wrote: > You've told us in the past that the TELECOM Digest follows the funding > model of PBS or NPR stations where they have periodic "pledge breaks". I > would be outraged if these broadcasters started sprinkling hidden > advertisements in their normal programming. I fondly hope that you will > maintain the same integrity with the TELECOM Digest. I don't know about you but this past Saturday morning I was watching "New Yankee Workshop" and right after it was over there were 5 minutes of commercials for things like "Stanley Tools" and "Home Depot". They were no just mentioning them for their support but were full fledged advertisements a good two minutes each. So Pat, take heart, you are not going that far and I see no reason for you not to add your comments after these items. Remember folks, we should be grateful to have someone with as much experience as Pat working this Digest for us. I will never understand the way we Americans treat the elderly. They get old and we throw them away, forgetting all the knowledge they can impart to us young whipper- snappers. Thanks for the job you do Pat. Chip Cryderman [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Thank you for your kind words. I *do* try to be mindful of the 'old Usenet customs' (and some customs I invented on my own) here when it is practical, but things around here have changed **so much** over the past twenty years or so. I still do not like putting in the pitch (or 'pledge' messages) now and then, but I do what I have to do in order to survive. When I first saw the original message from p.a.e. here (first time I read it was when I was editing it) I thought I was going to be accused of implanting spy cookies or pop-up ads or selling the mailing list secretly (all of which I have been approached to do at one time or another). 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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If you donate at least fifty dollars per year we will send you our two-CD set of the entire Telecom Archives; this is every word published in this Digest since our beginning in 1981. 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 End of TELECOM Digest V23 #165 ******************************