From editor@telecom-digest.org Sat Feb 14 14:17:36 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p2/8.11.3) id i1EJHax01514; Sat, 14 Feb 2004 14:17:36 -0500 (EST) Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 14:17:36 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200402141917.i1EJHax01514@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 #72 TELECOM Digest Sat, 14 Feb 2004 14:17:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 72 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson F.C.C. Begins Rewriting Rules on Delivery of the Internet (M Solomon) How Broadcasters Want to Silence Satellite Radio (Monty Solomon) These Phone Calls Aren't Phone Calls (Monty Solomon) The Plot to Stop the Internet Telephone Revolution (Monty Solomon) Lost Liberties / Outlawing Dissent (Monty Solomon) Lost Liberties / A Thousand J. Edgar Hoovers (Monty Solomon) Acxiom is Watching You (Monty Solomon) Qwest vs. Other Companies (Dave Garland) Re: Building a Voice-Driven Application (Chris Kantarjiev) Re: NetZero Commercials on Television (ellis@no.spam) Re: Blame General Electric for BlackOut says FirstEnergy (Steven Sobol) Re: The Virus Underground (Dave Garland) Re: Telephone Service Surcharges (Michael Chance) 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: Monty Solomon Subject: F.C.C. Begins Rewriting Rules on Delivery of the Internet Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 03:34:19 -0500 By STEPHEN LABATON WASHINGTON, Feb. 12 - The Federal Communications Commission began writing new rules today that officials and industry experts said would profoundly alter both the way the Internet is delivered and used in homes and businesses. In one set of proceedings, the commission began writing regulations to enable computer users to gain access to the Internet through electric power lines. Consumers will be able to plug their modems directly into the wall sockets just as they do with any garden variety appliance. Officials said the new rules, which are to be completed in the coming months, would enable utilities to offer an alternative to the cable and phone companies and provide an enormous possible benefit to rural communities that are served by the power grid but not by broadband providers. In a second set of proceedings, commissioners began considering what rules ought to apply to companies offering Internet space and software to enable computer users to send and receive telephone calls. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/12/technology/12CND-NET.html ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 15:33:59 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: How Broadcasters Want to Silence Satellite Radio All Politics is Local: How Broadcasters Want to Silence Satellite Radio by Radley Balko Most of the torrent of opposition to the FCC's modest proposal to loosen media ownership restrictions last year stemmed from fears that they'd lead to information flow and entertainment programming falling into the hands of just a few behemoth media conglomerates. In a recent issue of Reason magazine, Ben Compaine rather thoroughly elucidated why those fears are unfounded. Still, if it's diversity media consumers want, they should be thrilled with the onset and recent success of satellite radio. The industry's two players -- XM and Sirius -- offer a wide range of programming, hundreds of channels between them that brush up against every conceivable musical niche, as well as news, talk, sports, comedy, children's programming, and even radio installments of cable programming from providers such as E! and VH1. At just $10 or so a month, satellite radio for many has been a welcome alternative to the rather dry, Top Forty-driven monotony of FM radio. Of course, any time a new competitor comes along with a new business model offering consumers new choices, the old guard gets its dander up, and inevitably turns to the federal government to protect its turf, and preserve market share. In this case, the old guard is one of the oldest, the National Association of Broadcasters. NAB is a dinosaur of the lobbying industry, both in its size and its age. And NAB isn't at all happy that radio listeners would rather pay for subscription radio than continue to endure the pap broadcast by its members. http://www.cato.org/tech/tk/040120-tk.html ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 16:22:45 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: These Phone Calls Aren't Phone Calls By Alex Salkever The FCC's Feb. 12 ruling that computer-to-computer calls are exempt from telecom regs is the first blow in a new battle for the Bells. If a phone call is sent digitally over the Internet, is it still a phone call? Or is it a voice e-mail? That question has loomed over the telecom sector for more than a year, as the industry awaited a ruling from the Federal Communications Commission. At issue: new technologies that allow cheap, easy phone calls over existing broadband Net connections. On Feb. 12, the FCC replied with an initial answer that should make the Baby Bells very nervous -- a voice call delivered digitally over the public Internet is the same as an e-mail, as far as the regulators are concerned. The decision came at the behest of Jeff Pulver, the founder of FreeWorldDialup, who had petitioned the FCC for a ruling that would allow him to run his free-of-charge voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) network without facing standard regulations that cover old-school telecoms. Pulver's case was special: His network allows only users who dial directly from one Net connection to another, bypassing completely the public phone networks. More controversial are calls that originate on the Internet and then move through public phone networks. That's the service now being offered by Vonage, Net2Phone, AT&T ( T), and numerous cable companies. That's a real threat to the Bells' services, since it allows customers to connect to anyone who has a phone. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/feb2004/tc20040213_1268_tc024.htm ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 15:12:18 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: The Plot to Stop the Internet Telephone Revolution by Adam Thierer and Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. Much has been written over the past few months about the revolutionary potential of Internet telephony, or voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) service. VoIP would let consumers make phone calls through an Internet connection, largely bypassing traditional circuit-switched wireline telephone networks. In time, some think it might come to completely replace older phone networks. In just a few short years, VoIP has gone from wishful thinking to marketplace reality as numerous companies now plan to deploy such services. This has also led many industry watchers to speak of VoIP as a veritable deregulatory deus ex machina that potentially offers a sudden and unexpected way to escape from the past century's regulatory morass. http://www.cato.org/tech/tk/040209-tk.html ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 03:27:17 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Lost Liberties / Outlawing dissent Spying on peace meetings, cracking down on protesters, keeping secret files on innocent people -- how Bush's war on terror has become a war on freedom. By Michelle Goldberg Feb. 11, 2004 | The undercover cop introduced herself to the activists from the Colorado Coalition Against the War in Iraq as Chris Hoffman, but her real name was Chris Hurley. Last March, she arrived at a nonviolence training session in Denver, along with another undercover officer, Brad Wanchisen, whom she introduced as her boyfriend. The session, held at the Escuela Tlatelolco, a Denver private school, was organized to prepare activists for a sit-in at the Buckley Air National Guard Base the next day, March 15. Hurley said she wanted to participate. She said she was willing to get arrested for the cause of peace. In fact, she did get arrested. She was just never charged. The activists she protested with wouldn't find out why for months. Chris Hurley was just one of many cops all over the country who went undercover to spy on antiwar protesters last year. Nonviolent antiwar groups in Fresno, Calif., Grand Rapids, Mich., and Albuquerque, N.M., have all been infiltrated or surveilled by undercover police officers. Shortly after the Buckley protest, the Boulder group was infiltrated a second time, by another pair of police posing as an activist couple. Meanwhile, protesters arrested at antiwar demonstrations in New York last spring were extensively questioned about their political associations, and their answers were entered into databases. And last week, a federal prosecutor in Des Moines, Iowa, obtained a subpoena demanding that Drake University turn over records from an antiwar conference called "Stop the Occupation! Bring the Iowa Guard Home!" that the school's chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a civil libertarian legal group, hosted on Nov. 15 of last year, the day before a protest at the Iowa National Guard headquarters. Among the information the government sought was the names of the leaders of the Drake University Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, its records dating back to January of 2002, and the names of everyone who attended the "Stop the Occupation!" conference. Four antiwar activists also received subpoenas in the investigation. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/02/11/cointelpro/ [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That's really nothing new. Back in the sixties and seventies, Chicago Police had an active 'red squad' whose job it was (besides gassing and beating up war protestors and others) was to spy and infiltrate churches and other peaceable gatherings of citizens. I wonder why Salon thinks this is somehow a new story. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 03:29:21 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Lost Liberties / A thousand J. Edgar Hoovers Lost Liberties A thousand J. Edgar Hoovers State and local police are taking it upon themselves to investigate antiwar activists -- and in the computer age, the threat to our civil liberties is even greater than it was in Hoover's day. Editor's note: This is the second of a two-part series. Read Part 1. By Michelle Goldberg Feb. 12, 2004 | Political spying has many costs. One is that it poisons communities, putting dissidents in the social position of criminals, co-conspirators or untrustworthy elements. Jennifer Albright, a 30-year-old lawyer in Albuquerque, N.M., believes such spying cost her her job with the Bernalillo County district attorney's office. On Tuesday, March 25, two days after marching in a permitted demonstration against the war, Albright, then an assistant district attorney, was called into her boss's office and put on leave. The reason? Local police said she had identified undercover agents in the crowd at the protest, which she denies. Three days later, Albright was fired. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/02/12/dissent_two/ [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Again, this is supposed to be something new? Of course computers have made the job of police (spying, gassing, and general brutality) much easier. J. Edgar Hoover would be so proud of how far his people have been able to get, spy-wise, in this age of computers. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 03:31:44 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Acxiom is Watching You Whenever you book a flight, this data-mining colossus will be turning over its files to John Ashcroft. Why did Wesley Clark lobby for what could become the biggest snooping operation of all time? By Farhad Manjoo Feb. 10, 2004 | On Saturday, Jan. 5, 2002, a 15-year-old boy named Charles Bishop stole a single-engine Cessna airplane from the St. Petersburg International Airport in Florida and crashed it into an office building in Tampa. The boy, who was probably mentally disturbed, died; no one else was hurt. Still, in the tense months after the 9/11 attacks, Charles Bishop's flight was one of the dozens of small, strange events that set the public imagination reeling over the horrors surrounding airplanes, and cable news shows went into overdrive to cover it. The next day on CNN, Wesley Clark, the retired Army general who was at the time the network's military analyst, was asked about "the situation in Tampa.... The fact that a teenager was able to steal this plane and crash it into a building -- what does that say about the general state of aviation security?" "We've been worried about general aviation security for some time," Clark said. "The aircraft need to be secured, the airfields need to be secured, and obviously we're going to also have to go through and do a better job of screening who could fly aircraft, who the private pilots are, who owns these aircraft. So it's going to be another major effort." That answer -- that pilots ought to face more-rigorous screening -- seemed logical enough; but according to some critics, Wesley Clark might have had an ulterior motive in calling for more background checks in aviation. What Clark, who is now campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, did not tell the CNN audience was that, months before the interview, he had been hired as a board member and lobbyist for Acxiom, an Arkansas company that manages data collected by large businesses on millions of Americans. Weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the company developed a computerized system that would perform instant identity checks on airline passengers. http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/02/10/acxiom/ ------------------------------ From: Dave Garland Subject: Qwest vs. Other Companies Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 10:28:00 -0600 Organization: Wizard Information The following post is from another group, but may be of interest to TELECOM Digest readers. It's a response from an ISP tech guy to griping about telco service in a Qwest area. Since I don't have permission to repost, I've sanitized it a tad to anonymize the author. ------------------------------ As much as people gripe about Qwest, there are far far worse telco's out there in the world. Since we deal with just about all of them (either on a daily basis, because they are a given ILEC of an area served [by us], which are Qwest, Frontier & Sprint), or have dealt with them in the past. The ones that spring to mind right away that are much much worse to deal with than Qwest are #3 Sprint #2 McLeod USA #1 MCI At MCI, it feels like you talk to a brick wall, and it sure seems like its company policy to just ignore you, keep on billing you for services after you've cancelled (well past the 6-month mark is an *average*), and have CSR's that couldn't tell you what a phone is, even though they are talking to you on one. The Sprint CSR's usually don't even know if they offer a service or not, and there's no supervisors to check with to see. I think for a while there, they started cold calling up random potential customers, and offering the weirdest things like DSL service for somebody in downtown [city], even though they only service a few areas around [far-out suburbs]. They'd even get some people to sign up, only to call back in a couple months to explain that they really couldn't offer service there. I'd put Frontier and some of the CLEC's in the area in the upper edge above Qwest in terms of ease to deal with. Sure, there's some bad reps at Qwest, and their internal communication is pretty lacking sometimes, but there's also some pretty good reps in there too. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 12:08:41 PST From: Chris Kantarjiev Subject: Re: Building a Voice-Driven Application I think that before you dive into architecting and owning a lot of hardware, you should consider building at least a prototype of your application in Voice XML and doing a trial hosting with a voice ASP such as Voxeo. They already own all the hardware and maintain a phone network. When I was working with them, they made their system available for free to developers, and had very good (and responsive) technical support. Check them out - www.voxeo.com. (Just a happy past customer.) chris ------------------------------ From: ellis@no.spam Subject: Re: NetZero Commercials on Television Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 20:31:40 -0000 Organization: S.P.C.A.A. In article , Danny Burstein wrote: > a) it'll downgrade images on a web page, making > them much smaller (bytewise) and moving them > across faster. So that 250k jpg you're downloading > from NASA's Mars collection will be replaced by > a, perhaps, 50k one. Faster d/l, but lossy. Is there a way for a web author to tell them not to do that? I really don't like the idea of Netzero messing with my images. http://www.spinics.net/photo/ ------------------------------ From: Steven J Sobol Subject: Re: Blame General Electric for BlackOut says FirstEnergy Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 15:23:57 -0600 Daeron wrote: > Poulsen reported that FirstEnergy engineers had bridged the nuclear > plant's control network with FirstEnergy's corporate network -- a > practice that is increasingly common among utility companies, > according to industry and security experts." I used to live about ten miles from the Perry nuke plant in North Perry Village, the other Ohio nuclear plant owned by FirstEnergy. I no longer live there, but my family still lives in the Cleveland area, within easy driving distance of Perry. Ironically, when I moved on June 29th of last year, I was *in* Akron. My brother-in-law and mother-in-law flew into town to help us move and were staying in Akron because it was cheaper to fly into Akron than into Cleveland. I was within a couple minutes walking distance of FirstEnergy. Perhaps I should have gone over to their headquarters and kicked a couple CxO's in the head. What is wrong with these people? > "The root cause of the outage was linked to .. trees .. FirstEnergy > says .. its role in the outage is overstated in the interim report" Uh-huh. > Retrospective ass covering is all. I guess General Electric can't > afford as much protection on Capitol Hill as MICROS~1. Get those > cheque books out guys. It's election year!!! Yeah ... well ... does the bug even exist, or is FirstEnergy lying? Before we blame GE or even Microslop, I'd love to see an audit of FirstEnergy's network. Not gonna happen, of course, but it would be interesting reading. 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 ------------------------------ From: Dave Garland Subject: Re: The Virus Underground Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 15:02:17 -0600 Organization: Wizard Information It was a dark and stormy night when Barry Margolin wrote: > How does that address the point that Geoffrey was making, which is > that AV software won't recognize a virus that it hasn't specifically > been taught about? Some AV software does. It watches or scans for "virus-like" characteristics. F-Prot is one such, but I think not the only. Some AV software also can store state info about files (checksums, whatever) and warn if it changes. Of course, if the software has been taught about the virus (updates are usually available within a day or so) identification is more positive. Most software firewalls will raise a flag if a program tries to access the 'net without permission, or if a program that has permission has been modified since permission was given. I use Kerio, but ZA and I think the others are similar. That *should* stop an email worm that has its own SMTP engine. > Unfortunately, this type of monitoring doesn't really work in the case > of things like email worms. As applications have become more complex > and integrated, it's common for many different applications to access > the address book and/or send out mail, so these alerts would be much > more common from normal activities. Any software that goes through my Windows Address Book is going to come up pretty dry, as I don't use it. And don't use MS mail programs, either. > And there are also many more unsophisticated users, who wouldn't really > know how to respond to the alerts. That is indeed a problem. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When I woke up this morning and stopped in the computer room on my way to my first cup of coffee and cigarette for the day, there was the Windows 98 sitting there patiently waiting for me with a message from Zone Alarm stating that 'program X wants to access internet. Will you permit this? From sometime around 4 AM. It was some kind of spyware thing trying to 'call home'. Of course I went in and bashed the whole thing on the spot. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Michael Chance Subject: Re: Telephone Service Surcharges Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 12:44:16 GMT In article , jared.NospaM@netspace.net.au says: > Federal Excise Tax 3% > Tax mandated by the federal government imposed on all > telecommunication services. Isn't this the original telephone tax, which was enacted as a "luxury tax" in about 1898 to help finance the Spanish-American War? And wasn't there an effort a couple of years ago to phase out this tax? Michael Chance [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I thought the 'telephone luxury tax' started about 1917 during the First War as a way to provide for the soldiers. They won't be getting rid of it anytime soon, however. Even though our president lied about the need to be in Iraq, (WMD and all that malarkey) and he then declared officially that the hostilities ended back in May of last year, we still have had any number of young guys getting killed on a daily basis, and about five thousand new guys shipped out for Iraq from North Carolina last week. Didn't someone around here shake his finger at you and pronounce from his deseased brain that by the time we finally get out of Iraq it would make VietNam look like a summer church camp for little kids? If readers could have only been around Chicago during the week of August, 1968 when the Democrats had their riotous (not an exageration!) convention in Chicago and the police followed up with a riot of their own and went totally out of control with their gas and their clubs. Cell phones had not yet been invented, and you could walk around for blocks downtown looking for a single payphone to use which had not been vandalized beyond any use at all. **Iraq is shaping up the same way** I am sad to say. 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: 620-330-6774 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 second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #72 *****************************