From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Oct 20 13:07:45 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9KH7jL18398; Wed, 20 Oct 2004 13:07:45 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 13:07:45 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410201707.i9KH7jL18398@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 #501 TELECOM Digest Wed, 20 Oct 2004 13:08:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 501 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Microsoft to Debut 'Istanbul' Application (Monty Solomon) AT&T Wireless 3rd Quarter Net Income of $0.04 Per Share (Monty Solomon) Motorola Reports Third-Quarter 2004 Financial Results (Monty Solomon) Hacker Hits California University Computer (Monty Solomon) Hacker Hits Berkeley Computer; More Details (Lisa Minter) InterCall Canada Audio Conferencing? (Geoffrey Welsh) "Technical" Cable/Wire (Cyril) Find Some Books to Swap on www.myswapmeet.com (myswapmeet) Kennedy, Johnson, Goldwater (Anthony Bellanga) 'K' vs. 'W' Radio and TV Call Signs (Anthony Bellanga) Re: AMTRAK (was Re: Last, Sad Laugh! Nice Place to Work) (David Clayton) Re: Verizon Taking Lesson From Hooterville Telephone Company (Ed Clarke) Re: REN Boosters From England? (Paul Coxwell) Last Laugh! Red Faces at Orange as Customer Gets Blue Photos (L Minter) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 09:08:32 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Microsoft to Debut 'Istanbul' Application By MARK JEWELL AP Business Writer BOSTON (AP) -- Microsoft Corp. introduced on Tuesday a desktop computer application that aims to seamlessly integrate e-mail, instant messaging, video conferencing, traditional phone service and Internet-based calling. Microsoft plans to debut the product, code-named "Istanbul," sometime in the first half of 2005. It will compete with efforts from rivals including IBM Corp. and smaller players such as Convoq Inc. to link together various channels of communications and promote their most effective use. The products employ "presence" technology, which tells users whether co-workers are online and their degree of availability _ whether they can take a phone call or prefer to be e-mailed or to instead join a Web conference, for example. The idea is to enhance the "buddy list" concept of instant messaging so workers can choose how to best communicate in a given moment, bringing an end to games of phone tag in a world of packed schedules. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44392180 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 09:15:53 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: AT&T Wireless Reports Third Quarter Net Income of $0.04 Per Share REDMOND, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 19, 2004-- Delivers $1.1 Billion in OIBDA; Operating Free Cash Flow and Net Customer Additions Increase From Second Quarter AT&T Wireless (NYSE:AWE) today said Earnings Per Share (EPS) for the quarter was $0.04, an increase from $0.02 per share in the second quarter, and $0.02 below last year's third quarter EPS of $0.06. The year-over-year decline in EPS was due primarily to lower operating income. Third quarter services revenue declined 1.5 percent from the second quarter to $3.813 billion. Services revenue declined $260 million, or 6.4 percent, from the year-ago quarter. Services revenue was positively impacted by higher data revenue and an increase in revenues from regulatory program fees. Led by strong customer demand for messaging services, mMode and business data solutions, revenue from wireless data services increased 145 percent over the prior year period. More than offsetting these increases were lower monthly recurring charges received from the company's postpaid subscriber base and higher promotional incentives to support customer retention efforts during the quarter. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44377666 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 09:17:31 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Motorola Reports Third-Quarter 2004 Financial Results Motorola Reports Third-Quarter 2004 Financial Results - Oct 19, 2004 04:00 PM (PR Newswire) - Third-quarter 2004 sales of $8.624 billion, up 26 percent compared to third-quarter 2003 sales of $6.829 billion. - Third-quarter 2004 GAAP earnings of $479 million, or $.20 per share, up 313 percent compared to third-quarter 2003 GAAP earnings of $116 million, or $.05 per share. - Third-quarter 2004 GAAP results include: (1) income of $195 million, or $.05 per share, from the sale of investments, (2) net expense of $81 million, or $.02 per share, related to the retirement of $1.7 billion of long-term debt, (3) expense of $67 million, or $.03 per share, related to the impairment of goodwill, (4) expense of $55 million, or $.01 per share, for previously-announced severance charges, (5) a tax benefit of $39 million, or $.02 per share, resulting from the reversal of tax reserves due to the settlement of certain tax audit items, and (6) expense of $19 million, or $.01 per share, for Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. (FSL) separation costs. As previously reported in Motorola's third-quarter 2003 earnings release, third-quarter 2003 GAAP earnings included net special-item charges of $27 million, or $.01 per share, as detailed in that release. - Third-quarter 2004 positive operating cash flow of $1.3 billion, which enabled the company to complete the quarter with net cash of $4.4 billion, compared to net debt of $41 million at the end of 2003.(1) SCHAUMBURG, Ill., Oct. 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Motorola, Inc. (NYSE:MOT) today reported sales of $8.624 billion in the third quarter of 2004. This is a 26 percent increase from sales of $6.829 billion in the third quarter of 2003. Motorola also reported net earnings of $479 million, or $.20 per share, in the third quarter of 2004, presented in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), an increase of 313 percent compared to third- quarter 2003 GAAP earnings of $116 million, or $.05 per share. Third-quarter 2004 GAAP earnings include: (1) income of $195 million, or $.05 per share, from the sale of investments, (2) net expense of $81 million, or $.02 per share, related to the retirement of $1.7 billion of long-term debt and cancellation of associated interest rate swaps, (3) expense of $67 million, or $.03 per share, related to the impairment of goodwill, (4) expense of $55 million, or $.01 per share, for previously-announced severance charges, (5) a tax benefit of $39 million, or $.02 per share, resulting from the reversal of tax reserves due to the settlement of certain tax audit items, and (6) expense of $19 million, or $.01 per share, related to FSL separation costs. Motorola reported GAAP net earnings of $116 million, or $.05 per share, in the third quarter of 2003. As previously reported in Motorola's third-quarter 2003 earnings release, third-quarter 2003 earnings included net special-item charges of $27 million, or $.01 per share, as detailed in that earnings release. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44375553 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 09:30:53 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Hacker Hits California University Computer By REUTERS Filed at 9:02 p.m. ET SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A computer hacker accessed names and Social Security numbers of about 1.4 million Californians after breaking into a University of California, Berkeley, computer system in perhaps the worst attack of its kind ever suffered by the school, officials said on Tuesday. http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-crime-hacking.html?ex=1256011200&en=d6c672d337c23540&ei=5090 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Read further on this in the next article in this issue. Lisa Minter brings more details on the hacker attack on Berkeley. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Hacker Hits Berkeley California University Computer Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 10:47:44 EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A computer hacker accessed names and Social Security numbers of about 1.4 million Californians after breaking into a University of California, Berkeley, computer system in perhaps the worst attack of its kind ever suffered by the school, officials said on Tuesday. "The investigation is continuing but we have no idea if the (personal) information has been compromised," said Carlos Ramos, assistant secretary at the California Health and Human Services Agency. He said state agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were investigating but the hacker had not been found. The names accessed by the hacker were being used by a UC Berkeley researcher who had collected data on elderly people and individuals who provide in-home care to seniors to study the impact of wages on in-home care, Ramos said. The data, which included home addresses, telephone numbers and dates of birth, was being used at the state's authorization but without the consent of the individuals whose information was being used in the study. Ramos said the state is authorized to share with researchers the personal information of individuals who participate in state programs administered by the state social services department. George Strait, a university spokesman, confirmed the school's computer system had been penetrated in what he believed was the most significant hacking job the university had experienced. The university detected its computer system had been broken into at the end of August, but did not notify the state until Sept. 27 after the school had done its own investigation with the FBI, Strait said. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Reuters News Service.. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Geoffrey Welsh Subject: InterCall Canada Audio Conferencing? Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 12:04:32 -0400 I'm shopping our telecom services around, but none of the telcos can match the audio conferencing rates offered by InterCall Canada. (http://www.intercall.ca/) We do enough conferencing that it would be worth severing that service from our otherwise bundled services, but I'm a bit reluctant to roll out new numbers and accounts with an unfamiliar company. They seem to have operations in a few countries, and they are owned by the West Corporation, whom I've heard of but don't really know. Any expeiences/comments? Thanks, Geoffrey Welsh If anything worth doing is worth doing right, then surely anything not worth doing right is not worth doing at all. ------------------------------ From: cyril.dary@cote-azur.cci.fr (Cyril) Subject: Seeking Technical Advice on Cable/Wire Date: 20 Oct 2004 02:38:23 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com I'm looking for experts/companies/laboratories who are working on cables and wires. Caracteristics : low voltage/modulated impedance Objective : creating or buying (!) a cable/wire able to process simultaneous sources/data/information merging lan standards and wireless technologies. Applications : not only computers but telecommunications, domotics Any other informations are welcome (patents, associations, etc.) ------------------------------ From: everything.myswapmeet@gmail.com (myswapmeet) Subject: Find Some Books to Swap on www.myswapmeet.com Date: 20 Oct 2004 07:54:42 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Guys, instead of buying expensive books why don't you swap it with some one ... Check it out -- it has some listing for CCIE -- VoIP and networking under San Francisco Bay Area. www.myswapmeet.com ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2004 23:51:20 -0600 From: Anthony Bellanga Subject: Kennedy, Johnson, Goldwater Reply-To: anthonybellanga@withheld on request PAT, to prevent $pam, please do NOT display my email address, neither in the "from" line, nor in the "reply to" line. Pat, in the thread on the Sinclair owned TV stations, you added (in part): > Barry Goldwater (who ran against Kennedy as I recall) ... and > Remember how Goldwater was thought to be such a war hawk > when he was running, and all the smears against him by > the Democrats? And his Democratic opponent, John Kennedy, Kennedy was assassinated on Friday 22 November 1963. Then Vice-President Johnson became President. As incumbent, he was the "favorite" for Democratic nomination at their Summer 1964 convention in Atlantic City. Even back in 1963, Goldwater WAS indeed the "expected" or "favorite" for the Republican nomination, and he was nominated at their Summer 1964 convention in San Francisco. But Goldwater actually challenged President Johnson in 1964. Kennedy had already been dead for close to a year by then. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 00:00:10 -0600 From: Anthony Bellanga Subject: 'K' vs. 'W' Radio and TV Call Signs Reply-To: anthonybellanga@withheld at request I'm re-sending this. I never got your auto "ack", and this hasn't appeared yet. I originally sent it about 24 hours ago, early on Tuesday morning. PAT, to prevent $pam, please do NOT display my email address, neither in the "from" line, nor in the "reply to" line. John Mayson wrote: > You're thinking of KDKA (Pittsburgh PA) > Originally coastal stations on the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico got > "W" callsigns and Pacific stations got "K". When we started > assigning callsigns to broadcast stations some Texas stations like > WFAA and WOAI ended up with W's. Pittsburgh's KDKW [sic] and > Philly's KYW were allowed to keep their pre-existing callsigns. > The government quickly redrew the line along the Mississippi because > the more populous east was eating up too many "W" callsigns. > I only know of one exception to the Mississippi rule. The FCC > allowed a Waco, TX TV station (and possibly radio) to adopt WACO. There are many other "central plains" states (west of the Mississippi River) with 'W' calll-signs for *old* radio stations dating back to the *early* 1920s era, along with subsequent TV counterparts associated with those *old* radio stations. The original boundary between 'W' and 'K' was roughly the Rocky Mountains. Other states (west of the Mississippi, east of the Rockies) in addition to Texas, with 'W' call-signs for such *old* radio stations (and subsequent TV stations associated with those radio stations) include Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Louisiana and Minnesota both "straddle" the Mississippi River. Offhand, I don't know why Arkansas doesn't have any 'W' radio stations today -- maybe they did at one time, but the few old stations changed their call-signs, of course to 'K' stations ??? The following website gives an excellent history of the rules and such for the 'W' and 'K' usage, including why there are some 'K' stations which happen to be *EAST* of the Mississippi (such as KDKA Pittsburgh). It seems that those few 'K' radio (and TV) stations *east* of the Mississippi River are in the midwest and northeast. http://earlyradiohistory.us/kwtrivia.htm Anthony Bellanga ------------------------------ From: David Clayton Subject: Re: AMTRAK (was Re: Last, Sad Laugh! A Nice Place to Work!) Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 18:44:32 +1000 hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) contributed the following: >> Streetcars, while quaint, have limitations. > Yes, they do. But in certain situations they are superior. They held > more people and accelerated faster than a bus did, providing faster > and more comfortable service. However, in street service they get > blocked behind stuck cars. The older models (pre 1930) were noisy and > rough riding, but the 1930 and onward, especially the PCC* cars were > very nice. > *PCC was an industry top-down new design of a streetcar with high > comfort and performance and efficiency in mind. Anyone lucky enough > to ride the Newark (NJ) City Subway before new cars got to see how > smooth and quiet they were. The design was copied in Europe and > thousands of cars were built there. And if you want to have a look at the one city in Australia that fought off the "fashion" to get rid of their "Streetcars" (we actually call 'em Trams), and is currently extending lines and upgrading its fleet, go to: http://www.doi.vic.gov.au/DOI/Internet/transport.nsf/AllDocs/C7E281CCFFC65BFC4A256AE6000FE6BF?OpenDocument And their also is a PCC car in a tram museum here (somewhere ...) Regards, David Clayton, e-mail: dcstar@XYZ.myrealbox.com Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. (Remove the "XYZ." to reply) Dilbert's words of wisdom #18: Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience. ------------------------------ From: Ed Clarke Subject: Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telephone Company Date: 20 Oct 2004 11:54:45 GMT Organization: Ciliophora Associates, Inc. Reply-To: clarke@cilia.org In article , HorneTD wrote: > Just be aware that voice over cable requires electric power at both > ends of the circuit and several places in between. In the event of a > power outage your phone service dies. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: A suggestion has been made here in this > Digest a few times that to eliminate the problem of a lack of power > due to a storm, or fallen wires or whatever, use a UPS for the VOIP > phone adapter and your modem. This will allow you to make emergency > calls during the power outage. PAT] It's the line amplifiers in between that are the problem. There's a backup generator at the headend but the fiber nodes require power when you go from fiber back to coaxial cable and any amplifiers also need power (comes in on the coax). In other words, if your cable service goes out, so does your phone. On the other hand, Cablevision has been more reliable in the past few years than Verizon. I have an intermitant problem with the fiber-to-copper node that services my local area. EVERYBODY's phone goes out for half an hour or so. Cellphones remain working. Try reporting that to Verizon. Normally I wouldn't care very much, but it also takes down my T1 (lots of errors, then loss of sync, then all the leds on the smartjack go out). My voice telephone(s) also lose dialtone. It also takes out all my neighbors (as verified by a cellphone). ------------------------------ From: Paul Coxwell Subject: Re: REN Boosters From England? Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 14:41:33 +0100 John McHarry wrote in message news:telecom23.486.14@telecom-digest.org: > Points well taken, but I don't think FCC approval is required for a > ringing booster. I comment because it reminds me of being in the UK > some years ago when modems required some sort of approval. Everybody I > knew just built adaptors for US modems. When Brits came to visit us, > we had a couple people who could cobble them the other way. You had to > flip a couple wires around, much like wiring a 10 base T > connector. When I visited the BT labs at Martlesham Heath, the first > thing they did was present me with a prewired adaptor in a little > plastic package. The rule was kind of a dead letter, even with them. Sorry for the late reply -- I missed your response first time around. I just mentioned the approvals for sake of completeness, although I have no idea whether the U.S. rules may have changed in recent years. Technically, here in the U.K. any equipment connected to the PSTN is still supposed to have appropriate approval, but as you say, it's not something that is or ever has been strictly enforced. I was using unapproved U.S. and home-brew modems on the lines 20+ years ago and still have quite a number of old WE 500/2500 sets around the house, which strictly speaking shouldn't be connected (but you didn't hear that from me! ). The UK vs. US connections has been something of an ongoing problem ever since RJ11 type jacks started appearing on telephone equipment aimed at the British market. These days, almost all modems sold here do put the line on the center pair, then the RJ11-to-UK cord is simply a 2-wire to connect to the *outer* pair on the British jack. But many other pieces of telephone equipment need the third wire for the bell/ringer, and use an RJ11 modular connection on the phone itself but with a flat 4-wire cord connecting to the British plug, thereby putting the tip and ring on what would normally be the second pair of the RJ11. Naturally people start having problems when they swap cords around and end up trying to use the wrong type of interconnect. Paul. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Last Laugh! Red Faces at Orange as Customer Gets Blue Photos Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 10:53:15 EDT [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Try not to smirk as you read this report. PAT] LONDON (Reuters) - Mobile phone firm Orange says its picture messaging service can "make someone feel really special." But when one customer called the company helpline she received some pictures that made her feel outraged instead. What she expected was a photo from a customer service representative to make sure her camera phone was working. What she got was a series of close-ups his genitals. "This ex-employee sent some indecent photographs of himself. He was dismissed within a week," an Orange spokeswoman said on Wednesday. "We've looked into the matter, collated the information and handed it over to the police." Worldwide camera phone sales are rising fast and expected to total 150 million this year. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #501 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Oct 20 15:12:22 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9KJCLd20063; Wed, 20 Oct 2004 15:12:22 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 15:12:22 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410201912.i9KJCLd20063@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 #502 TELECOM Digest Wed, 20 Oct 2004 15:12:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 502 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Old Stock Quotation Things? (Jim Haynes) Can't Detect Modem With SBC Yahoo DSL (Olga Sayenko) Restaurant Designates No-Cell-Phone Area (Lisa Minter) Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer (Jack Decker) Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer (GlowingBlue) Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer (John Cummings) Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer (Justin Time) Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer (Rich Greenberg) Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer (John Hines) Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer (Robert Weller) Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer (Bruce Bergman) Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer (Paul Coxwell) Re: Lee's ABC of the Telephone (Justin Time) Re: Radio Questions (Ben Schilling) Last Laugh! Red Faces at Orange Was Not Funny at All! (Fred Atkinson) Last Laugh! Love-Making Couple Sparks Police Emergency (Lisa Minter) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Old Stock Quotation Things? Reply-To: jhaynes@alumni.uark.edu Organization: University of Arkansas Alumni From: haynes@alumni.uark.edu (Jim Haynes) Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 16:37:29 GMT I've been going through some patents from the 1930s. Some of them are for systems to run a stock ticker tape through a projector. I can understand that, as the forerunner of the Trans-Lux 'flipping ball' displays used in brokers' offices. Some others use rotating number wheels to display the high, low, open, and closing prices of a single stock. A bank of these could display data for several stocks; but still a very limited number chosen from the market as a whole. What was the application, or audience, for this kind of display? They are obviously a lot more costly than the projection scheme, both in the hardware and in the operation. I presume an operator had to pick the selected stock trades from the ticker tape and send the data to the display board. jhhaynes at earthlink dot net ------------------------------ From: sayenko@yahoo.com (Olga Sayenko) Subject: Can't Detect Modem with SBC Yahoo DSL Date: 20 Oct 2004 10:11:26 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hi, I just signed up for SBC Yahoo DSL. I got the modem and some filters from them and tried to install the software. The installation fails when the software tries to detect the modem and can't. I called support, but that's pretty much useless. So my questions are: 1) Why would the software have trouble detecting the modem? 2) When you sign up for DSL is it necessary for a technician to have physical access to your line? I registered for a specific date, but there was no information regarding someone actually coming to my house. 3) Can you configure the connection without installing all that software on your machine (god knows what they got in there!) Thanks, Olga [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When I got SBC DSL a few years ago there was no installer visit. It is a fully automatic process. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Restaurant Designates No-Cell-Phone Area Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 11:02:53 EDT BENTONVILLE, Ark. - Diners at The Vineyard can distance themselves from the din of cell phone chatter. The restaurant has designated a "No-Cell-Phone" area, after customers who complained about listening to conversations from adjacent tables asked for the ban. "We had a therapist in from New York in who was giving marriage counseling on the phone for 30 minutes and there were two other tables in the dining area and both complained," server Brittany Peacock said. The seating preference changes with the time of day. "At dinner there are people who don't want cell phones," Peacock said. "At lunch people come in and expect to take a call in the middle of the day and they want cell phones." If someone receives a call while in the cell-free area, they are asked to go outside or into the other area. "It's an interruption. It's loud. Normally you speak louder on a cell phone and it interrupts the peaceful atmosphere of a restaurant," customer Bo Landry said. "I think you need an option if you have emergencies a lot of people have kids at home with a baby sitter, but also think it's a nice to go to an area where it won't interrupt your meal." *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 02:41:23 -0400 From: Jack Decker Subject: Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer Pat, please conceal my e-mail. My guess is that the Intermatic is an AC transformer only, with no rectification or filtering. That's perfectly okay for incandescent lamps, which generally don't care if they get AC or DC. So, it would depend on what you want to use it for. If, for example, you want to power automotive-type incandescent lamps (up to 1 Amp total current) it should work fine. If you want to power anything that requires filtered DC, though, you'd have to add a rectifier and filtering circuit. The rectification is easy, you just use a bridge rectifier circuit rated at 1 Amp or greater, but the required level of filtering would depend on what you want to power, and that gets a bit more complicated. On the other hand, the Radio Shack unit can probably handle all your needs. The exception to that is inductive loads (anything with a coil of wire involved), which at very least will draw far more current with DC than with AC. For example, if you try to run an old fashioned doorbell on 12 volts AC it will probably work fine, but put it on 12 volts DC and it will probably ring much louder and the coils will get much warmer, perhaps dangerously so. So, don't substitute DC for AC on any sort of inductive load, which would include anything that has another transformer in it, or a relay or some other device with a coil of wire (the coiled filament of a light bulb doesn't count, there's not enough inductance there to matter). But for a purely resistive load (such as lamp bulbs) that would otherwise run on AC, substituting a DC power supply of the same voltage should not cause a problem. ------------------------------ From: GlowingBlueMist Subject: Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 01:11:27 -0500 TELECOM Digest Editor wrote in message news:telecom23.500.2@telecom-digest.org: > Here is a question for the group regards 'low voltage' electrical > current. I have two transformers: > One is Radio Shack, 'clean' DC output, 13.8 Volts at 3 Amps. Its > like a little box, a 'powerhouse' kind of thing. It has a 'reset' > button on the back in case the output goes out due to overload or > a short. $39 at Radio Shack. I had been using it to run a small > portable TV set and a scanner radio, such as would be plugged into > a car cigarette lighter and run from a car battery. Pat, The above unit supplies a 12 volt DC output, the same kind of output as your car battery. It contains a transformer to lower the 110 volts to 12 volts but also includes electronic circuitry to convert the voltage to DC. It can be used to power electronic equipment that requires a 12 Volt DC source. This can also be used to power lights, just like the lights are powered in your car. The only provision is that you do not try and power more lights than the unit can support, when that happens the circuit breaker "reset" button on your box will trip. > The other transformer is an Intermatic, model is 'Malibu 88-T' and > it does output of 12 Volts and 1 Amp. It has a clock built in which > allows it to be automatically turned on/off as desired. Its purpose > is to service outside lights along a sidewalk for example. Using > 12 or 14 gauge wire, a series of little lights strung over a distance > of 50 feet will light up. Total wattage allowed is 88 Watts between > all the bulbs, which are 5-10 watts each. It is available from Ace > Hardware here in Indy also for $39. Pat, the above power unit is a 12 volt AC according to the Frequently Asked Questions section of their support web page as shown below. a.. Why do low voltage lighting systems require a transformer? You must have a transformer to reduce the 120-volt AC home current to a safe 12 volts AC. Do not attempt to hook up a line of 12-volt lamps directly to an ordinary home outlet without using a 12-volt transformer. If you were to hook up the TV or Scanner to this type of power unit it will most likely destroy them, unless they are designed to accept an AC/DC input of either type. You would have to check the specs on your scanner and TV to see if they would accept an AC input. > Are these two power supplies interchangeable (ignoring the fact that > the Intermatic has a built in clock since I have other timers I can > use)? I would not suggest hooking any electronics made for use in the USA to a 12 Volt AC power supply unless first confirming the equipment was designed to work using AC voltages. Lights can be powered using AC or DC as the bulbs could care less what type voltage they get fed. Using the lights on the DC power supply should work just fine as long as you do not exceed the capacity of the power unit. From what you describe the DC unit will trip the built in circuit breaker if you exceed the limits, protecting the power unit in the process. > How do you calculate volts/amps to watts? Formulas are something I never could memorize, anyone else know the answer? > I am not going to have $78 to spare this month (barely can spare $39 > for one of them), so am curious to know what I can get away with or > not get away with. If I had to choose myself, I would get the 12 volt DC system and make sure to keep it dry. Verify the light strings have nothing but lights, no motorized devices or timers and you should be OK. > PAT [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The light string is just fifty feet of 12 or 16 gauge wire. The Radio Shack transformer/power supply is in a walk-in shed behind my house (which has electricity from my house.) The Intermatic transformer/timer unit is there also. The shed is enclosed, so nothing in there gets wet. The fifty feet of wire is mostly protected also (but *not* entirely I am sad to report) in the breezeway which is part of my back yard, and it feeds the lighting there, six lanterns and two 'floodlights' which go in the ground around the sidewalk area. The built in clock in the Intermatic Malibu 88-T turns those lights on and off. The floodlights are the most wattage of the bunch, little halogen things surrounded by tin-foil which put out ten watts each. The six lanterns, staked in the ground, put out maybe five watts each, also with reflectors built into the shells which hold the 'flashlight-like' bulbs. Intermatic built the transformer to go with the lanterns, etc. The transformer has quit responding at all (except the clock part still runs okay) and I suspect there may be a dead short in the wiring somewhere. PAT] ------------------------------ From: John A.Cummings Organization: ARRL, CWA, and IEEE Subject: Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 8:11:54 -0400 TELECOM Digest Editor wrote: > Here is a question for the group regards 'low voltage' electrical > current. I have two transformers: > One is Radio Shack, 'clean' DC output, 13.8 Volts at 3 Amps. Its > like a little box, a 'powerhouse' kind of thing. It has a 'reset' > button on the back in case the output goes out due to overload or > a short. $39 at Radio Shack. I had been using it to run a small > portable TV set and a scanner radio, such as would be plugged into > a car cigarette lighter and run from a car battery. > The other transformer is an Intermatic, model is 'Malibu 88-T' and > it does output of 12 Volts and 1 Amp. It has a clock built in which > allows it to be automatically turned on/off as desired. Its purpose > is to service outside lights along a sidewalk for example. Using > 12 or 14 gauge wire, a series of little lights strung over a distance > of 50 feet will light up. Total wattage allowed is 88 Watts between > all the bulbs, which are 5-10 watts each. It is available from Ace > Hardware here in Indy also for $39. > Are these two power supplies interchangeable (ignoring the fact that > the Intermatic has a built in clock since I have other timers I can > use)? > How do you calculate volts/amps to watts? > I am not going to have $78 to spare this month (barely can spare $39 > for one of them), so am curious to know what I can get away with or > not get away with. > PAT I would suspect that the lighting transformer is indeed, ONLY a transformer. Light bulbs don't care about AC/DC. Electronics won't like that AC. Watts = Volts * Amps Volts = Watts / Amps Amps = Watts / Volts I hope that gets you started, Pat. Please munge or withhold my email address. John A. Cummings Member of the ARRL, CWA, and the IEEE. reply-to: jcummings@withheld on request [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I made one mistake in my earlier report. The Intermatic is 110-120 Volts AC with 1 Amp. Output is 12 Volts, but the tag has been defaced at that point so I cannot tell you more about the output. But elsewhere I see a note in the instructions which warns *do not exceed the 88 Watts output of the various bulbs on the string.* There is no push button tripper on it to reset the circuit as there is on the Radio Shack unit. PAT] ------------------------------ From: a_user2000@yahoo.com (Justin Time) Subject: Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer Date: 20 Oct 2004 06:06:00 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com TELECOM Digest Editor wrote in message news:: > Here is a question for the group regards 'low voltage' electrical > current. I have two transformers: > One is Radio Shack, 'clean' DC output, 13.8 Volts at 3 Amps. Its > like a little box, a 'powerhouse' kind of thing. It has a 'reset' > button on the back in case the output goes out due to overload or > a short. $39 at Radio Shack. I had been using it to run a small > portable TV set and a scanner radio, such as would be plugged into > a car cigarette lighter and run from a car battery. > The other transformer is an Intermatic, model is 'Malibu 88-T' and > it does output of 12 Volts and 1 Amp. It has a clock built in which > allows it to be automatically turned on/off as desired. Its purpose > is to service outside lights along a sidewalk for example. Using > 12 or 14 gauge wire, a series of little lights strung over a distance > of 50 feet will light up. Total wattage allowed is 88 Watts between > all the bulbs, which are 5-10 watts each. It is available from Ace > Hardware here in Indy also for $39. > Are these two power supplies interchangeable (ignoring the fact that > the Intermatic has a built in clock since I have other timers I can > use)? > How do you calculate volts/amps to watts? > I am not going to have $78 to spare this month (barely can spare $39 > for one of them), so am curious to know what I can get away with or > not get away with. > PAT Pat, One of the old Ohm's Law formulae was P=IE or Power (watts) equals I (current) times E (voltage)so, 3*13.8=41.4. This doesn't work out in the Intermatic case, as you say the power is 88 watts with the supply rated at 12v and 1A. In this instance you need to do the more exact conversion of P=I2R or Power equals the square of the current times the resistance. One of the transformers may be reporting the input power rather than the output power. This sounds like the situation for the Intermatic. 120W of input at 120VAC is 1A, and with the losses due to conversion to DC could easily scale down to the 88W on output. That would mean the transformer/power supply actually pumps out close to 7A at 12VDC (84W). Because they both are DC supplies, polarity becomes an issue, especially for the TV and scanner. Rodgers Platt ------------------------------ From: richgr@panix.com (Rich Greenberg) Subject: Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer Date: 20 Oct 2004 12:42:43 -0400 Organization: Organized? Me? In article , TELECOM Digest Editor wrote: > One is Radio Shack, 'clean' DC output, 13.8 Volts at 3 Amps. Its > like a little box, a 'powerhouse' kind of thing. It has a 'reset' > button on the back in case the output goes out due to overload or > a short. $39 at Radio Shack. I had been using it to run a small > portable TV set and a scanner radio, such as would be plugged into > a car cigarette lighter and run from a car battery. This is putting out DC, about 40 watts worth. > The other transformer is an Intermatic, model is 'Malibu 88-T' and > it does output of 12 Volts and 1 Amp. It has a clock built in which > allows it to be automatically turned on/off as desired. Its purpose > is to service outside lights along a sidewalk for example. Using > 12 or 14 gauge wire, a series of little lights strung over a distance > of 50 feet will light up. Total wattage allowed is 88 Watts between > all the bulbs, which are 5-10 watts each. It is available from Ace > Hardware here in Indy also for $39. This is putting out AC, not DC. Must be more than one amp because 88 watts at 12 volts is about 8 amps which would match the number of bulbs. > Are these two power supplies interchangeable (ignoring the fact that > the Intermatic has a built in clock since I have other timers I can > use)? No, one is DC and the other is AC. > How do you calculate volts/amps to watts? Disreguarding inductive effects which for DC and AC lighting is negligible watts = volts times amps. W=V*A V=W/A A=W/V > I am not going to have $78 to spare this month (barely can spare $39 > for one of them), so am curious to know what I can get away with or > not get away with. Depends on what you want to do with them. Rich Greenberg Marietta, GA, USA richgr atsign panix.com + 1 770 321 6507 Eastern time zone. I speak for myself & my dogs only. VM'er since CP-67 Canines:Val, Red & Shasta (RIP),Red, husky Owner:Chinook-L Atlanta Siberian Husky Rescue. www.panix.com/~richgr/Asst Owner:Sibernet-L [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What I want to do is (a) replace the Intermatic which runs the lights around the sidewalk and (b) replace the Radio Shack unit which variously has been used for a CB Radio, the scanner, and a small portable television set, all of which were intended for use in a mobile setting at one point. So many of my *nice* toys have been stolen or otherwise rendered useless over the years, and I am reduced to 'mix and match' transformer parts, etc. I have a boxful of plug in the wall transfomers here which I do not know what they are for. Thank goodness the manufacturers usually idiot-proof those things (different size barrels on the plugs, etc) so I cannot just go around trying them at random. PAT] ------------------------------ From: John Hines Subject: Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 11:45:45 -0500 Organization: www.jhines.org Reply-To: john@jhines.org TELECOM Digest Editor wrote: > How do you calculate volts/amps to watts? Volts * Amps = Watts TELECOM Digest Editor wrote: > Are these two power supplies interchangeable (ignoring the fact that > the Intermatic has a built in clock since I have other timers I can > use)? The Intermatic is most likely AC output since that works better for lights. AC, in changing polarity 60 times a second, goes through zero, which is "off". Incandescent bulbs, and our eyes don't react fast enough for this to be noticeable, but it extends bulb life. ------------------------------ From: Robert Weller Subject: Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 08:21:12 -0700 Hi Pat, What is your application? That is, what is it that you are trying to power? The Radio Shack unit supplies a nominal 12-volts DC, while the Intermatic supplies a nominal 12-volts AC, _probably_. You cannot, in general, substitute an AC power supply for a DC one, or vice-versa, unless your load is very simple -- like a light bulb. Bob Weller ------------------------------ From: Bruce L. Bergman Subject: Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 15:41:31 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net If you want to post this, please mung the E-mail address. On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 17:05:30 EDT, TELECOM Digest Editor wrote: > Are these two power supplies interchangeable (ignoring the fact that > the Intermatic has a built in clock since I have other timers I can > use)? No, they are not interchangeable. The Malibu Lights transformer is raw 12V AC with no rectifier or filtering at all -- which works better for the application of those outside lights, as AC will go farther without as much voltage drop problems. Some outside lighting circuits go several hundred feet and the light would visibly dim more at the far end when running on DC. You can NOT use the Malibu transformer as-is for the TV or scanner, if they didn't go "BOOM!" right away the 60-Hz hum would be horrendous. Now if you want to build a filter section for the Malibu transformer with a bridge rectifier, filter capacitors and a choke, you could get a decent unregulated DC supply that would work ... Add a TO-3 regulator chip and a big heatsink (and the proper ancillary parts) and you could build a simple regulator section for it. The Radio Shack 12V DC supply is rectified and filtered heavily to remove as much 60 Hz hum as possible, for running electronic gear. You could use one to run the outside lights (if you get one that is large enough for the load) but it's a waste. Spend the money on the regulated DC supply. If you ask around the Electricians in your area, you can get a used small Malibu transformer for free or cheap when someone installs a larger system. > How do you calculate volts/amps to watts? Volts times amps equals watts. 13.8V * 3A = 41.4W Google on "Ohm's Law" and you should get a gazillion answers. ;-) Bruce L. Bergman, Woodland Hills (Los Angeles) CA - Desktop Electrician for Westend Electric - CA726700 5737 Kanan Rd. #359, Agoura CA 91301 (818) 889-9545 Spamtrapped address: Remove the python and the invalid, and use a net. ------------------------------ From: Paul Coxwell Subject: Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 14:12:27 +0100 TELECOM Digest Editor wrote in message news:telecom23.500.2@telecom-digest.org: > Here is a question for the group regards 'low voltage' electrical > current. I have two transformers: > Are these two power supplies interchangeable (ignoring the fact that > the Intermatic has a built in clock since I have other timers I can > use)? > How do you calculate volts/amps to watts? Pat, First of all, the specifications you quote on that second unit don't tally with the intended use. On a DC circuit (or non-inductive AC circuit, such as simple filament lights) the wattage is equal to the product of voltage and current. 12V x 1A = 12 watts maximum. The specified maximum load of 88W would equate to 88 / 12 = 7.33 amps, so something's not quite right there. Many of the small power packs intended for pathway lighting output AC rather than DC and are unregulated, but you can run regular filament lamps on DC anyway, so no problem there. Your 3A supply would only run up to about 40W of lights though. Another point to consider is some of those cheap supplies intended for scanner/CB/etc. use are rather liberally rated, and although they'll output 3A on demand, they tend to get rather hot when called upon to deliver that full load over an extended period. Paul ------------------------------ From: a_user2000@yahoo.com (Justin Time) Subject: Re: Lee's ABC of the Telephone Date: 20 Oct 2004 06:10:12 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Jason wrote in message news:: > Many thanks Jim! > I picked up more than a few volumes from that site today. I'll > probably be grabbing an edition of the "Principles of Electricity > Applied To Telephone and Telegraph Work" as well. > -Jason Now you know why some of us old and grey haired types have forgotten more than some of the "newbies" have learned in school. They just didn't think it was important to go back to how things worked, just assume they would and go from there. ------------------------------ From: Ben Schilling Subject: Re: Radio Questions Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 11:25:50 -0500 Robert Bonomi wrote: > You havn't looked very hard. > Some more that I dug up: > WJON St. Cloud, Minnesota > WWJO St. Cloud, Minnesota > WYRQ Little Falls, Minnesota Both St. Cloud and Little Falls Minnesota are on the Mississippi River. I think Little Falls is actually on the East bank of the river. ------------------------------ From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Last Laugh! Red Faces at Orange Not Funny at All! Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 13:11:05 -0400 *Try* not to laugh? I don't think it is at all funny. Fred ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Last Laugh! Love-Making Couple Sparks Police Emergency Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 10:56:23 EDT [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: No, this is not a report of a police sting operation, where police tricked someone into doing a sex act then proceeded to bring a gazillion officers and police cars to the scene to arrest the hapless person, nor is it a report about some nosy neighbor getting into something then ratting on someone else to save themselves. Instead, it was purely an accident. PAT] LONDON (Reuters) - British police sprang into operation after receiving an emergency '999' phone alert from a woman in apparently in some distress -- only to discover it had accidentally been made by a couple having sex. Officers at Durham in northern England became alarmed when the call came through to their headquarters in the middle of the night and all they could hear was what sounded like a woman crying with a man's voice in the background. Police traced the number and rushed to the scene, where they found the embarrassed and disheveled couple who explained they were "messing around." "It happened while they were having sex. The woman had depressed with her foot the '9' button on the phone which happened to be on the floor," a Durham police spokesman told Reuters Wednesday. "It certainly put a smile on the faces on the police side -- we were just very relieved it wasn't a violent situation and that the couple were clearly getting on very well together." *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ 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. 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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 #502 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Oct 20 19:04:52 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9KN4oN22190; Wed, 20 Oct 2004 19:04:52 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 19:04:52 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410202304.i9KN4oN22190@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 #503 TELECOM Digest Wed, 20 Oct 2004 19:05:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 503 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Phone Company (R Greenberg) Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Phone Company (SELLCOM Tech) Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Phone Company (J Kelly) Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Phone Company (Lisa Hancock) Sinclair: From Bad to Worse (Lisa Minter) Re: Sinclair's Disgrace (Dave Garland) Re: Sinclair's Disgrace (AES/newspost) Re: Sinclair's Disgrace (SELLCOM Tech Support) Re: Can't Detect Modem with SBC Yahoo DSL (Clarence Dold) Re: Can't Detect Modem with SBC Yahoo DSL (T. Sean Weintz) Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace Power Transformer (Gordon Hlavenka) Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace Power Transformer (Ken Abrams) Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace Power Transformer (Ted Klugman) Re: Computer Users Face New Scourge (Geoffrey Welsh) 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: richgr@panix.com (Rich Greenberg) Subject: Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telephone Company Date: 20 Oct 2004 14:46:28 -0400 Organization: Organized? Me? In article , Ed Clarke wrote: > It's the line amplifiers in between that are the problem. There's a > backup generator at the headend but the fiber nodes require power when > you go from fiber back to coaxial cable and any amplifiers also need > power (comes in on the coax). Depends on the cable company's preparations. In my neighborhood, the local cable co has at least 2 boxes with gas meters connected to them. I haven't looked inside but my guess is a natural gas powered generator set. Rich Greenberg Marietta, GA, USA richgr atsign panix.com + 1 770 321 6507 Eastern time zone. I speak for myself & my dogs only. VM'er since CP-67 Canines:Val, Red & Shasta (RIP),Red, husky Owner:Chinook-L Atlanta Siberian Husky Rescue www.panix.com/~richgr/ Asst Owner:Sibernet-L ------------------------------ From: SELLCOM Tech support Subject: Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telephone Company Organization: www.sellcom.com Reply-To: support@sellcom.com Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 17:47:14 GMT Ed Clarke posted on that vast internet thingie: > In other words, if your cable service goes out, so does your phone. > On the other hand, Cablevision has been more reliable in the past few > years than Verizon. I hate Verizon as much (or more) as anyone else, but in all fairness when we had the last big ice storm and ran on generator for about 7 days our "backup" Time Warner cable internet went down and stayed down. Our Verizon DSL stayed up the whole time. Steve at SELLCOM http://www.sellcom.com Discount multihandset cordless phones by Siemens, AT&T, Panasonic, Vtech 5.8Ghz; TMC ET4000 4line Epic phone, OnHoldPlus, Beamer, Watchguard! Brick wall "non MOV" surge protection. Ramsplitter firewood splitters If you sit at a desk www.ergochair.biz you owe it to yourself. ------------------------------ From: J Kelly Subject: Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telephone Company Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 14:55:50 -0500 Organization: http://newsguy.com Reply-To: jkelly@newsguy.com On Wed, 20 Oct 2004 01:15:57 GMT, HorneTD wrote: > Tony Pelliccio wrote: >> I recently moved three blocks east of my former location and contacted >> Verizon to move the line. >> I was assured that at 8:30AM on the 15th service at the old address >> would cut and the new address would be active at 10:30AM. >> Service at the old location cut at 11:30PM on Friday but the new >> location wasn't up yet. I've been going around and around with Verizon >> for days about this. They say the switch is telling them service is >> fine and to find my network interface and they'll take it from there. >> What I found was I'm pair #14 on a 50 pair breakout box with screw >> posts and nuts to hold the wiring down. I had to ANAC about 30 lines >> before I found mine. >> Thing is, I know I'm going to have to wire my jacks as whoever did the >> wiring before was a hack. But I had this faint image of having to >> climb a telephone pole to make a call that harkens back to Green Acres >> and the Hooterville Telephone Company. >> Needless to say -- the CATV line is in the house and the HSI is >> getting installed Thursday so I just might port my service to Vonage >> and be done with the stodgy phone company once and for all. > Just be aware that voice over cable requires electric power at both > ends of the circuit and several places in between. In the event of a > power outage your phone service dies. > Tom H > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: A suggestion has been made here in this > Digest a few times that to eliminate the problem of a lack of power > due to a storm, or fallen wires or whatever, use a UPS for the VOIP > phone adapter and your modem. This will allow you to make emergency > calls during the power outage. PAT] Where my brother lives if the power goes out across town, or even in a town 30 miles away (where the headend is), his cable tv and internet die. Hard to believe that Mediacom has no UPS's or generators for the headend or any of the line amps. I think they bought some cable co's that were pretty messed up though. In time I suppose they will clean them up. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Jeff nor Lisa) Subject: Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telephone Company Date: 20 Oct 2004 14:09:08 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com HorneTD wrote: > Just be aware that voice over cable requires electric power at both > ends of the circuit and several places in between. In the event of a > power outage your phone service dies. True. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: A suggestion has been made here in this > Digest a few times that to eliminate the problem of a lack of power > due to a storm, or fallen wires or whatever, use a UPS for the VOIP > phone adapter and your modem. This will allow you to make emergency > calls during the power outage. PAT] Our cable system requires line amplifiers and if commercial power fails to the neighborhood the cable goes out, too, and takes a little longer to be restored; apparently they have to reset stuff from their base. In our neighborhood at least, cable telephone would not be as reliable. Per the original post, it sounds like it's a fuzzy situation because there was no standard interface block, just a master junction box serving multiple homes. My apt is served the same way. When I got a new line installed, I had the installer come inside and tell me what cable pair (there were many in the outlets) was the live one, and Verizon did not expect me to pay for his time to do so because of the situation. They didn't want me routing around their outside building box. The poster also mentioned the property was poorly wired, perhaps there was a short or confusion as a result of that. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 11:18:05 -0400 From: Lisa Minter Subject: Sinclair: From Bad to Worse The effects of Sinclair Broadcasting's cynically partisan decision to make its stations air an anti-Kerry movie continue to ripple through the industry. While Sinclair (whose owners are major Bush contributors) still plans to air the film, the reaction remains negative, and Sinclair's behavior isn't helping. On Monday, Sinclair fired the head of its Washington bureau for having the temerity to criticize the airing of one-sided propaganda (ironic, considering Sinclair is claiming a First Amendment right to air the film). Jon Lieberman had correctly pointed out that running the film brought the network's credibility into question, telling the Baltimore Sun: "[It's] biased political propaganda, with clear intentions to sway this election. For me, it's not about right or left -- it's about what's right or wrong in news coverage this close to an election." It didn't take long for Sinclair to send its top DC reporter packing, issuing a statement that labeled him a "disgruntled employee": "Everyone is entitled to their personal opinion, including Jon Lieberman. We are disappointed that Jon's political views caused him to speak to the press about company business." So Leiberman's entitled to his opinion, he'll just be fired for expressing it. Also on Monday, one of the veterans who appears in the film filed a libel lawsuit against its producer (who, it should be noted, is a former Tom Ridge aide). Kenneth Campbell, a former Marine and now a university professor, said the producer used deceptive editing to delete key context from his comments. Lawyers for Campbell sent letters to Sinclair and to a movie theater planning to air the film; the theater canceled the screening. Like Lieberman, Campbell is not connected to the Kerry campaign, just someone angered by Sinclair's decision. In addition, the broadcast network's stock has continued to drop with investors concerned about a loss of ad revenue. No doubt in response to this backlash, the nationwide In Demand pay-per-view network has decided not to offer a Nov. 1 showing of Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" (Moore is now reportedly considering legal action). Obviously, there's a big difference between an opt-in, pay-per-view offering and the preemption of primetime network coverage on free TV, but if In Demand is worried about violating the fairness doctrine, Sinclair is well beyond the pale. Like the candidate it supports, Sinclair Broadcasting is sticking to its guns, even if it means going alone. - Jeff Fleischer Read the MoJo Blog online for more: http://www.motherjones.com/news/blog/index.html @2004 The Foundation for National Progress *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, The Foundation for National Progress and Mother Jones Magazine. . For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Dave Garland Subject: Re: Sinclair's Disgrace Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 01:41:55 -0500 Organization: Wizard Information It was a dark and stormy night when hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) wrote: > It's his personal stations, so he is not "demanding" anything, but > merely showing what he feels like showing, as any station owner may > do. A TV station owner is free to show F/911 if it so chooses. To pick a nit, they are not *his* personal stations. They belong to a publicly traded corporation, Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. (a legal entity that in theory exists for the public good). He happens to control the majority of stock. ------------------------------ From: AES/newspost Subject: Re: Sinclair's Disgrace Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 08:20:24 -0700 In article , TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock): > us continually everytime they got a chance, was a (gasp!) Roman > Catholic, and if *he* got elected, before long, the (gasp!) Pope would > be running America, 'since all Catholics have to obey the Pope.' Given some of the public statements made by senior members of the U.S. Roman Catholic hierarchy in the current campaign, one might not entirely dismiss this, as being representative of their objective anyway. ------------------------------ From: SELLCOM Tech support Subject: Re: Sinclair's Disgrace Organization: www.sellcom.com Reply-To: support@sellcom.com Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 17:44:30 GMT The media has been so biased towards the communist, anti-American, socialist party of traitors etc., I hardly think the truth about a traitor will "disgrace" Sinclair. The disgrace belongs to anyone who would even think of voting for some traitorous lying trash like Kerry. Kerry should still be in jail for betraying his country. Like there is not enough info from www.scaryjohnkerry.com www.notfondakerry.com and www.swiftvets.com etc It is astounding to me that people can be so clueless when "See BS" gets caught red handed interfering in the election and "ABC" have shown their extreme corruption and prejudice towards the socialists/communists that now control the Democratic party. Steve at SELLCOM The opinions expressed here are not necessarily the opinions of anyone anywhere unless they are also correct regarding these matters. Information published here is without warranty express or implied or any of that stuff. http://www.sellcom.com Discount multihandset cordless phones by Siemens, AT&T, Panasonic, Vtech 5.8Ghz; TMC ET4000 4line Epic phone, OnHoldPlus, Beamer, Watchguard! Brick wall "non MOV" surge protection. Ramsplitter firewood splitters If you sit at a desk www.ergochair.biz you owe it to yourself. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Ooops! About time to close out this thread I suppose. PAT] ------------------------------ From: dold@XReXXCanXt.usenet.us.com Subject: Re: Can't Detect Modem with SBC Yahoo DSL Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 20:02:24 UTC Organization: a2i network Olga Sayenko wrote: > I just signed up for SBC Yahoo DSL. I got the modem and some filters > from them and tried to install the software. The installation fails > when the software tries to detect the modem and can't. I called > support, but that's pretty much useless. So my questions are: > 1) Why would the software have trouble detecting the modem? Drivers are required for USB-connected modems. If you are connecting via ethernet, you don't need their software at all. If you have a router, it is pretty simple. If you have no router, Windows XP New Connection Wizard will make the connection. http://www.dslreports.com/faq/5448 SBC Yahoo: What software is included? Do I have to install it? http://makeashorterlink.com/?W25F12399 describes exactly how to set up a Linksys Router with SBC DSL and no software. Clarence A Dold - Hidden Valley (Lake County) CA USA 38.8-122.5 ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Re: Can't Detect Modem with SBC Yahoo DSL Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 16:03:03 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Olga Sayenko wrote: > Hi, > I just signed up for SBC Yahoo DSL. I got the modem and some filters > from them and tried to install the software. The installation fails > when the software tries to detect the modem and can't. I called > support, but that's pretty much useless. So my questions are: > 1) Why would the software have trouble detecting the modem? How are you connected to the modem? Via ethernet or via USB? It makes a difference as to the answer. > 2) When you sign up for DSL is it necessary for a technician to have > physical access to your line? I registered for a specific date, but > there was no information regarding someone actually coming to my > house. No. Tech should not actually need to come to your house. > 3) Can you configure the connection without installing all that > software on your machine (god knows what they got in there!) Yes. In fact don't load anything from SBC. Google for "raspppoe" -- works much better than the software SBC supplies. You do need some sort of PPPoE client to connect. That can be done using the SBC supplied software (last I checked, they used "enternet" by, made by Efficient Networks -- but that has been discontinued. Don't know what they send out nowadays), you can download "raspppoe" and use that, or if you have windows XP, I think that has built in PPPoE support now. There are other PPPoE software solutions available as well. Enternet is no longer sold by Efficiant Networks and has been replaced by a product called "Tango Access". Another popular one is made by Finepoint Networks, Called WINPOET. Lastly, (and IMO the best option) is to buy a firewall/router with built in PPPoE support. My favorite is the sonicwall series of firewalls, but most folks consider them to pricey for home use. Linksys, dlink, and Netgear all make less expensive boxes that support PPPoE. -Sean ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 12:26:01 -0500 From: Gordon S. Hlavenka Reply-To: nospam@crashelex.com Organization: Crash Electronics Subject: Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer TELECOM Digest Editor wrote: > One is Radio Shack, 'clean' DC output, 13.8 Volts at 3 Amps. I > had been using it to run a small portable TV set and a scanner radio > The other transformer is an Intermatic, model is 'Malibu 88-T' and > it does output of 12 Volts and 1 Amp. It has a clock built in which > allows it to be automatically turned on/off as desired. Its purpose > is to service outside lights along a sidewalk for example. > Are these two power supplies interchangeable (ignoring the fact that > the Intermatic has a built in clock since I have other timers I can > use)? You could definitely use the RS box to run the outside lights, no problem. It's overkill compared to the Intermatic, but it will work just fine. You _might_ be able to use the Intermatic with electronic devices, but that's somewhat dicier. The current output is lower, but if the TV or scanner draws less than one amp the Intermatic will be able to support it. BUT: The Intermatic output is not "filtered"; if your TV/scanner does not filter its power input (most don't) then you will have so much 60Hz hum you won't be able to use the device. It's also possible the hum could damage the TV or scanner. You can add an external filter to the Intermatic supply. Wrap a few dozen turns of 14ga wire around a big bolt and connect one end of the wire to one of the output terminals on the timer. Then get a biggish capacitor (say, 10,000uF at 16vdc or better) and connect it from the other end of the bolt to the other output terminal. Connect your TV/scanner across the output side of the coil and the Intermatic terminal connected to the capacitor. Intermatic ---- Bolt/wire ----+-------O CAP Intermatic -------------------+-------O Make sure you obey the polarity markings on the capacitor. If the Intermatic doesn't have polarity markings on its output, check it with a meter. (You'll need to know for hooking it up to the TV/scanner anyway ...) > How do you calculate volts/amps to watts? Are you sitting down? Volts times amps equals watts. :-) Gordon S. Hlavenka http://www.crashelectronics.com "If we imagined he could _find_ the car, we could pretend it might be fixed." - Calvin [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My brain just had another movement, so I must inquire: The RS box has a push button on the back of it to reset the circuit if it blows out. *Whose* circuit is it protecting, the house current to the RS box or the RS box to the external devices? On the same idea: the Intermatic box does *not* have such a push-to- reset switch on it. Since the Intermatic box does *not* have such a button on it, would it be a prudent idea to devise some protection of my own for the new one I have to buy? For example, an automobile fuse holder with a little glass fuse wired on one side of the output line? I think -- not certain -- the sidewalk lights have a short on the line somewhere resulting from a very heavy rain we had a few days ago. I would like to protect my $39 investment when I get the new one and if having a fuse in the output line would help do that, then I will. What size/strength fuse is recommended? ------------------------------ From: Ken Abrams Subject: Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 19:21:59 GMT > of 50 feet will light up. Total wattage allowed is 88 Watts between > all the bulbs, which are 5-10 watts each. It is available from Ace > Hardware here in Indy also for $39. Well, I guess we aren't in Kansas anymore, Dorothy. Indy ??? You DO get around, don't you? ;-) > How do you calculate volts/amps to watts? Watts = volts times amps (P = IxE) and Amps = watts divided by volts (I = P/E) So, to run your 88 watt string of lights, you would need about 8 amps at 12 volts (with a little to spare) Neither of your proposed supplies comes close. Ramblings: A 110V string of Xmas lights would likely turn out to be MUCH cheaper. If you are stuck using 12V bulbs, a 10A (automotive) battery charger would likely be cheaper than a "real" power supply. The light bulbs shouldn't care that the output is "dirty" (unfiltered). Good luck! [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Just FYI, "Indy" is a nickname for Independence, Kansas; its what people around here frequently call the town. So, we are still in Kansas, Dorothy. Frankly, I cannot imagine ever going anywhere else to live; the people here are just too Libertarian and laid-back, all 8800 of them. And starting today, October 20, for the next ten days through the end of the month, it is the Neewollah festival. Much drinking and carousing going on. Originally started 73 years ago as a single day event on Halloween to keep kids out of mischief (and Neewollah *is* the word 'Halloween' spelled backward) it has grown to be a ten day Octoberfest event each year, not only for our community but sort of the 'Mardi Gras of southeastern Kansas' with people visiting from all over; theatre and music, a large parade through the downtown area a week from Saturday, etc. A town with only *one phone exchange* (620-331) for everyone where people give their phone number by saying the last four digits only can't be all that bad a place to live. Regards me being 'stuck with 12 volt bulbs' the Intermatic 88-T power supply came with it, and I got it for five dollars (the whole set of lights, wire, etc) mind you, at the Church of the Epiphany rummage sale in July. It worked just fine until the very heavy rain a few days ago. But I like your idea of a 12 volt-DC battery charger as a cheap alternative. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 21:12:37 GMT From: Ted Klugman Subject: Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer Organization: Optimum Online On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 17:05:30 EDT, TELECOM Digest Editor wrote: > One is Radio Shack, 'clean' DC output, 13.8 Volts at 3 Amps. Its > like a little box, a 'powerhouse' kind of thing. It has a 'reset' > button on the back in case the output goes out due to overload or > a short. $39 at Radio Shack. I had been using it to run a small > portable TV set and a scanner radio, such as would be plugged into > a car cigarette lighter and run from a car battery. > The other transformer is an Intermatic, model is 'Malibu 88-T' and > it does output of 12 Volts and 1 Amp. It has a clock built in which > allows it to be automatically turned on/off as desired. Its purpose > is to service outside lights along a sidewalk for example. Using > 12 or 14 gauge wire, a series of little lights strung over a distance > of 50 feet will light up. Total wattage allowed is 88 Watts between > all the bulbs, which are 5-10 watts each. It is available from Ace > Hardware here in Indy also for $39. The Rat Shack power supply is DC. The Intermatic power supply is AC. By themselves, they are not interchangeable. You *could* wire up some diodes and a capacitor with the Intermatic power supply and you'd get DC out of it. To convert volts & amps to watts: watts = volts * amps (P=VI) You didn't specify what your power requirements are, so I can't say what can and can not be done with these power supplies. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My mission is to 'let there be light' at least on *my sidewalk* through my backyard. My neighbor across the street has the same setup around his backyard swimming pool; he got his from the evil Walmart Superplace here in town. I got my set from the Episcopal Church rummage sale at a considerable savings last July. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Geoffrey Welsh Subject: Re: Computer Users Face New Scourge Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 14:00:16 -0400 Phil McKerracher wrote: > Well, not really. Most likely, he hasn't been patching his computer > with security updates, given those symptoms. He hasn't found and used > the readily-available free tool for removing this particular worm. Two computers I've looked at recently had something wedged into Windows Explorer as a Browser Help Object causing the default page to be reset and causing ads to pop up at various times. AVG didn't detect it, McAfee didn't detect it, and Symantec/Norton didn't detect it. Ad-Aware didn't remove it, nor did Spybot Search & Destroy. Manual removal didn't work, as it was running in Explorer and reinstated itself as soon as I removed it. I'm guessing that my next move is to use some kind of offline registry editor and/or delete the related files without booting Windows. Reinstalling Windows Maybe these folk would not have gotten these infections if they were up to date on patches, but removing them isn't trivial. Geoffrey Welsh If anything worth doing is worth doing right, then surely anything not worth doing right is not worth doing at all. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I use a tool called 'Hijack' available on the net to get those critters out of my computers. Its a free download and well worth it. 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #503 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Oct 21 17:11:15 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9LLBEJ02969; Thu, 21 Oct 2004 17:11:15 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 17:11:15 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410212111.i9LLBEJ02969@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 #504 TELECOM Digest Thu, 21 Oct 2004 17:11:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 504 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson SBC Communications Reports Strong Third-Quarter Results, (Monty Solomon) AT&T Announces Third-Quarter 2004 Earnings (Monty Solomon) Online Intrusion Risks Large Identity Cache (Monty Solomon) XM Satellite Radio Confirms Deal With MLB (Monty Solomon) Multi-link SR3 and Caller ID? (Richard Coutts) Who Carries TV Signals and Long Distance - Today? (Lisa Hancock) Yet Another Telco Tax Proposed (Danny Burstein) Re: Old Stock Quotation Things? (Reed) Re: Old Stock Quotation Things? (Lisa Hancock) Re: Privacy Eroding, Bit by Byte (Wesrock@aol.com) Re: Vonage Upgrades Local Unlimited Calling Plan to Premium (Dave Close) Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer (Bruce Bergman) Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer (Juan A. Monico) Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer (palee@riteaid) 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 09:26:41 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: SBC Communications Reports Strong Third-Quarter Results, Accelerates DSL Gains, Delivers Second Consecutive Quarter of Revenue Growth SAN ANTONIO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 21, 2004--SBC Communications Inc. (NYSE:SBC): -- Reported third-quarter earnings of $0.63 per diluted share, $0.38 per diluted share from continuing operations -- Wireline revenues up 1.7 percent, consumer wireline revenues up 2.8 percent -- Average monthly revenues per consumer retail line up 9.2 percent, driven by success in bundling -- 402,000 DSL lines added in the quarter, up 28 percent from gain in second quarter, to 4.7 million -- Strong long distance growth, with 1.3 million lines added in the quarter to reach 19.8 million in service -- Continued progress in large-business market, with more than 450 contracts of $1 million or more signed this year -- 16.5 percent operating income margin, above the range provided in company's full-year outlook SBC Communications Inc. (NYSE:SBC) today reported strong third-quarter results driven by the continued success of its bundling strategy and by solid momentum in key growth products such as DSL and long distance. SBC reported third-quarter 2004 earnings of $2.1 billion, or $0.63 per diluted share, and earnings from continuing operations of $1.2 billion, or $0.38 per diluted share. Reported revenues from continuing operations grew 1.4 percent, and revenues including proportionate results from Cingular Wireless grew 2.1 percent. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44423705 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 09:27:27 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: AT&T Announces Third-Quarter 2004 Earnings BEDMINSTER, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 21, 2004--AT&T (NYSE:T) -- Consolidated revenue of $7.6 billion -- Third-quarter loss per diluted share of $8.95 -- Adjusted earnings per diluted share of $0.75 - reflects lower depreciation due to asset impairment AT&T (NYSE:T) today reported a net loss of $7.1 billion, or $8.95 per diluted share, for the third quarter of 2004. The company's current-quarter net loss includes non-cash asset impairment charges, as well as net restructuring and other charges. This compares to net income of $418 million, or earnings per diluted share of $0.53, in the third quarter of 2003, which also included net restructuring and other charges. Excluding the asset impairment and net restructuring and other charges and their associated tax benefits, adjusted net income for the quarter was $593 million, or adjusted earnings per diluted share of $0.75. This includes an after-tax benefit from lower depreciation of $331 million, or $0.42 per diluted share, due to the asset impairment charges. A reconciliation of reported earnings per diluted share to adjusted earnings per diluted share is provided in the appendices on page 11 of this document. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44422389 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 09:32:15 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Online Intrusion Risks Large Identity Cache http://news.com.com/2100-1029-5420149.html By Robert Lemos An August intrusion into a social researcher's computer may mean that more than a million Californians need to call the credit bureaus. On Tuesday, the California Department of Social Services warned the providers and recipients of the state's In Home Support Services (IHSS) that their names, addresses, telephone numbers, Social Security numbers and dates of birth may be circulating the Internet. IHSS allows individuals to get paid for providing in-home care to senior citizens. The warning comes after an unknown attacker slipped in through a security hole in a social researcher's unsecured computer at the University of California, Berkeley, on Aug. 1, perhaps making off with 1.4 million database records containing personal information. The researcher noticed the trespass on Aug. 30 and the university notified the state in mid-September. The California government's recommendations for potential victims of the data theft underscore how little people can do to curb the illegal use of their information. While putting credit accounts on fraud alert may make it harder to co-opt financial accounts, forget trying to change a Social Security number, the Department of Social Services stated. "There are drawbacks to doing so, since it may result in losing your credit history, your academic records and professional degrees," the department said in a statement. "The absence of any credit history under a new SSN would make it difficult to get credit, continue college, rent an apartment, open a bank account, get health insurance... In most cases, getting a new SSN would not be a good idea." http://news.com.com/2100-1029-5420149.html ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 19:52:37 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: XM Satellite Radio Confirms Deal With MLB By ELLEN SIMON AP Business Writer NEW YORK (AP) -- XM Satellite Radio announced an 11-year, $650 million deal with Major League Baseball on Wednesday, the latest move in a costly race with rival Sirius Satellite Radio, which earlier this month signed a five-year, $500 million deal with shock jock Howard Stern. Both companies, which have lost a combined $2.5 billion in the last 12 years, are making investments in big-name radio personalities and big-league sports in the hope that they can quickly boost the number of paying customers before the bills for those services come due. And in the tussle between the two companies, XM has the early lead. It now has 2.5 million subscribers who pay $9.95 a month for 130 channels of music and talk radio via satellite receivers. That compares to 700,000 subscribers paying Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. $12.95 a month for 120 channels. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44413528 ------------------------------ From: rcoutts@comcast.net (Richard Coutts) Subject: Multi-link SR3 and Caller ID? Date: 21 Oct 2004 09:39:05 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com I've been using a Command Communications ASAP DR401 for routing three distinctive ring lines -- one for my home number, one for my business number, and one for my fax. It has worked great, but it filters out the Caller ID (I can put a Caller ID device in series before the DR401, but I really need at after the DR401, at each phone). So, I'm now looking for a device that doesn't filter out the Caller ID. I'm looking at Multi-Link's SR3, but I can't find any information online about how it handles Caller ID -- does it also filter out the Caller ID info? Also, what is Multi-Link's web page? I haven't been able to find it. Thanks, Rich ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Who Carries TV Signals and Long Distance -- Today? Date: 21 Oct 2004 11:36:19 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Years ago, the Bell System carried network broadcast transmissions from first radio and then television. After WW II one of the functions of the new coaxial cable and microwave systems was capacity to carry TV signals. With satellites and competing companies that own their own fibre networks, does AT&T still carry broadcast transmissions today? If not, when did the transition start? Was this a blow to AT&T revenues? Likewise, who actually carries long distance telephone calls? I use Verizon, do they own their wholly own long distance network capability of reaching any US central office? What medium is typically used -- ground coax, microwave tower, satellite, fibre. Or do all the other carriers simply contract in bulk with the established AT&T, Sprint, and MCI? With satellites, is there a problem with transmission lag time? In 1970 AT&T descriptions, long distance routing had a triangle design. That is, most calls were sent to a toll center for subsequent routing. However, local exchanges had their own links to some nearby exchanges. For example, New York City to Newark NJ is "long distance" since it crosses states and LATA boundaries, but is physically so close calls be carried over plain copper interoffice trunks. Are such close LD calls still sent that way? It would seem strange to bounce 10 mile call off of a satellite. [public replies, please] ------------------------------ From: Danny Burstein Subject: Yet Another Telco Tax proposed Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 19:23:39 -0400 Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC In the continuing tradition of government that try to offload taxes onto third parties (that way they're not "raising taxes", you see ...) California has a very real problem with medical costs. The hospitals and other medical providers provide services, but don't take in anywhere near as much money as they claim to be expending. Hospital and medical finances are such a huge mess they put Enron to shame. Normally this isn't a telecom issue but ... The telco point: The usual folk have pushed forward a fee on telco services to cover the shortfall. Quoting from a VOA clip: "A voter initiative that Doctor Higgins calls a "Band-Aid" could provide a short-term fix, and he supports the measure. Appearing on the November 2nd ballot as Proposition 67, it would raise 500 million dollars a year by adding a three-percent surcharge to the cost for telephone calls made in California. To which the curmodgeons retort: "It's the wrong solution for a real problem. This is a phone tax. This is a tax on a service that has absolutely nothing to do with emergency medical care whatsoever. http://ibb7.ibb.gov/newswire/2df1f60f.html _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] ------------------------------ From: Reed Subject: Re: Old Stock Quotation Things? Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 02:58:34 GMT Jim Haynes wrote: > I've been going through some patents from the 1930s. Some of them are > for systems to run a stock ticker tape through a projector. I can > understand that, as the forerunner of the Trans-Lux 'flipping ball' > displays used in brokers' offices. Some others use rotating number > wheels to display the high, low, open, and closing prices of a single > stock. A bank of these could display data for several stocks; but > still a very limited number chosen from the market as a whole. What > was the application, or audience, for this kind of display? They are > obviously a lot more costly than the projection scheme, both in the > hardware and in the operation. I presume an operator had to pick the > selected stock trades from the ticker tape and send the data to the > display board. > jhhaynes at earthlink dot net One such device was the "Quoteboard" by Ultronic Systems Corp. I worked on these from 1969-1973 in the Chicago financial district. They were installed mostly in commodity brokers, with some in stock brokers offices. They were an electro-mechanical monster ! IIRC one nest of modules would display 5 ticker symbols, and multiple nests could be driven from 1 logic controller. Data was fed to the board at 1200b/s on a dedicated receive-only Bell 202 modem circuit, that originated from the Ultronics data center near Philadelphia. They combined all the raw market tickers into a special data stream just for these boards. The modules had alphanumeric dials that could be set by office personnel to select the ticker symbol they wanted to display. The logic would decode the dials, then control stepper motors to move a fabric loop, that had numbers printed on them, to display the latest quote. Ultronic also had 2 ticker tape display systems, similar to the T-L Jet. They were all electronic, the older one used large NIXIE tubes (Lectrascan), the newer used a matrix of neon bulbs (Ultrascan). If you haven't already, see http://www.classicstockticker.com/ He has pictures of various machines. --reed ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: Old Stock Quotation Things? Date: 20 Oct 2004 20:20:41 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com haynes@alumni.uark.edu (Jim Haynes) wrote: > I've been going through some patents from the 1930s. ... What > was the application, or audience, for this kind of display? I can't comment on the specifics, but some general observations: First, keep in mind that many inventions that get patented are never put into commercial production for a variety of reasons (too expensive to make, too hard to make, no market, no investors, etc.). The item you found may be one of those. Stock brokers used to have a public area (maybe still do) where investors would sit and watch a projection of the ticker. They often had a news Teletype as well. This is obviously one application. Other financial institutions may need such devices for a large group of people to see the stock ticker. There are other applications in which a large group of people would need up-to-date information. One such place is the race track, where both bettors and tellers need to see changing odds. Another place might be a railroad reservation office where clerks need to see space availability on various trains. ------------------------------ From: Wesrock@aol.com Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 20:38:02 EDT Subject: Re: Privacy Eroding, Bit by Byte In a message dated 19 Oct 2004 19:41:00 -0700 hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) writes: >> ... And I think that up until the 1950's or so, most >> everyone felt that way. Then along came the pushers of credit cards, >> and somehow we got to a point where it was just considered normal to >> live beyond our means, while paying the credit card companies usurious >> interest rates. > Actually, installment buying has been around since the 1920s and > widely used by consumers to buy new electric appliances that were > coming out in those days. Department stores had charge codes and if > you spread out your payments, your interest rates were high. Sears, Roebuck had a massive credit card operation which generated more profit in many years than its retail operations. It goes back many generations. Sears sold it to Citibank earlier this year. Department store cards were prolific. Aluminum plates (a little smaller than today's plastic credit cards) called "Charg-A-Plates" were used by department stores in many cities, notched to show which of the participating stores you had accounts at. If you opened an account at another store, they would punch another notch on the plate on the spot. Multi-store credit cards became popular in the 1950s. In Dallas, the Highland Park State Bank Charge Plan was one of the first in the country, and pitched small businesses with the proposition that they bank could handle the credit for them cheaper than they could do it themselves while giving them a wider range of prospective customers. At the same time an affiliated bank started a similar plan in Oak Cliff. Texas Bank & Trust Company (a downtown bank) started the competing "Texas Bank and Trust Company 'Charge-It' Plan. I was later told (shortly before it was bought out by some mega-chain) that the Preston State Bank MasterCard was more prestigious than an American Express gold card. Since I'd had one slmost since its inception (as the Highland Park State Bank) I never had given it a thought. (The Highland Park [later Preston) State Bank plan and its affiliate in Oak Cliff joined MasterCard; Texas Bank and Trust Company jointed BankAmericard [now Visa].) Wes Leatherock wesrock@aol.com wleathus@yahoo.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Some of the stores also tried to 'cut corners' on their charge account expenses by issuing *their own store charge accounts' automatically to people who had planned to pay for their purchase with a Visa/MC card. The store's assumption was 'if the person has been approved by Visa/MC and their credit checking system, then we do not have to waste time and money checking their credit; Visa/MC already did that part (at their own expense!) for us.' The store clerks were trained when someone came to the cash register and proffered a Visa/MC card in payment, the store clerk was to say, "Wouldn't you like one of our credit cards instead?" and if the person agreed, the clerk would fill out an 'instant application' on the spot, have the customer sign it, call the office and get a credit limit established and a new account number assigned, usually all in two or three minutes. The purchase would then be placed on the *new, store account* rather than the Visa/MC card originally offered in payment. It was a gamble that usually worked pretty well for the stores until Visa/MC started *doing it themselves* by setting up new Visa/MC accounts with miniscule limits lower (in the event of a credit write off) than what it cost Visa/MC to set up the account to begin with. Capitol Financing and Aquistions (known by many folks as the 'What do you have in your wallet' CAP ONE people) are famous for it. Anyone -- *literally anyone* -- can apply for and recieve a Cap One Visa credit card with something like a $50 or $100 credit limit on it. Any number of places now issue 'secured' Visa/MC cards; the credit limits on which are 'secured' by an account in the bank offering the card. Why bother to go to the trouble of an expensive (and often times inaccurate) credit bureau report when the bank has its hands on your security deposit/'savings account' anyway. Cap One's attitude is if we lose fifty or a hundred dollars to find out the guy is a deadbeat, we would have spent considerably more with a traditional approval process. Pay your bill promptly, Cap One (and the other Visa/MC operators doing this) will raise your limit up, inch by inch. You call them, and ask if you can have a hundred dollars more on your limit, as long as they have your phone number and you have been paying on time, they'll raise your limit by one hundred dollars. So the department stores with their own charge account systems which had been worshipping the almighty Visa/MC soon found out that having a Visa/MC (or two, or three, or six) in your wallet meant nothing in many cases. Then of course also came debit cards, in which your 'credit limit' is the amount you have in the bank at any given time, and those were being passed off to store clerks as 'credit cards'. So the person who presented a 'secured' Visa/MC or a 'ultra low limit' Visa/MC or a 'debit card' Visa/MC knowing damn good and well it would never get approved at the authorization center **if the clerk had called it in, or swiped it**, knew that the clerk _would not call it in_ and would instead offer them a new charge account from the store instead. So the stores, in their effort to be 'penny-wise' (intercepting Visa/MC purchases by offering an instant approval on a new store account) were in fact 'pound-foolish' when several months later the new account had aged-out to worthless and write-off time. PAT] ------------------------------ From: dave@compata.com (Dave Close) Subject: Re: Vonage Upgrades Local Unlimited Calling Plan to Premium Date: 20 Oct 2004 20:55:57 -0700 Organization: Compata, Costa Mesa, California I wrote: > But this dialing plan makes Vonage essentially identical to Sprint > PCS. Dial as 7, 10, or 11 digits, as you like. But dialing 7 can be > chancy since it isn't clear if they assume your home NPA or the one > where you currently are located. (Of course, a cell phone doesn't need > a time-out to determine number length.) John McHarry (and others) comment: > I don't see how they could impute anything other than your home > NPA. Your current IP address doesn't tell them much about where you > are. But I was referring to Sprint PCS. They may have a rule about 7-digit numbers, but it isn't well known, so I consider them chancy since I don't know which cell tower is handling my call. I agree that Vonage and other VoIP carriers don't have the ambiguity. Dave Close, Compata, Costa Mesa CA "Politics is the business of getting dave@compata.com, +1 714 434 7359 power and privilege without dhclose@alumni.caltech.edu possessing merit." - P. J. O'Rourke ------------------------------ From: Bruce L. Bergman Subject: Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 06:40:47 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net Pat: "Withhold E-Mail Address" - just tell them that I'm on Earth and Linked to it with a Net. (That should be obscure enough to fool the harvester bots.) ;-) > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My mission is to 'let there be light' > at least on *my sidewalk* through my backyard. My neighbor across > the street has the same setup around his backyard swimming pool; he > got his from the evil Walmart Superplace here in town. I got my set > from the Episcopal Church rummage sale at a considerable savings > last July. PAT] Okay, then it's time to do a bit of diagnosis of the Malibu Lights system to see where the problem is, and get them back on. (And I'm sure that the readers that ever get stuck troubleshooting a complex lighting system will find this /very/ interesting ...) You'll need a DC voltmeter and/or a 12-volt test light. You can get a test light with a pin probe, a 12V lamp in the handle, and a ground lead with clip at any decent auto parts store for a buck or two. Disconnect the 12V output wires from the Malibu transformer, plug it in, turn on the timer, and see if there is power at the output lugs. The 88W Malibu brand transformer is not fused where you can repair it, there's a self resetting (up to a point) circuit breaker but it's hiding somewhere inside the potting compound. The transformer is dropped into the bottom half of the plastic case, and then polyester resin and sand filler is poured in to encase it into a big block and waterproof it, with only the wire leads sticking out. After the resin cures, they wire the timer and put the top on, box it and ship it. If the output is dead with no load, the transformer is trash -- they aren't kidding with the "No User Serviceable Parts Inside" sticker. If you have 12 volts when the output leads from the transformer are lifted, and it disappears when you touch the output leads to the lugs for a second (with a nice little spark as you make and break the connection) there's a short somewhere. First, check the very end of the main 12-gauge SPT2 low voltage cord, to see if the wires got shorted there. (The wires need to be split about an inch back, and then taped separately.) Check any tap splices or straight splices on the main lead, if the insulation job is bad the two leads can touch there. Then pull up the wire as it goes through the planters and flower beds and look for shovel hits on the wire, that's a popular way to short and kill the system. (I think the wire magnetically attracts any nearby shovels, but YMMV.) If all else fails, it's inside one of the light fixtures. Wires burned and shorted together, lamp socket prongs bent to where they're touching ... Hooking up a series load lamp with the transformer output can visibly show when you've found the problem. You will need a high wattage 12-volt lamp like a headlight or a fog light assembly - in the 50 to 100 watt range. (Not much larger than the power source can supply, or you will overload the transformer.) One series lamp lead to the transformer, the other one spliced to the light wiring. With the short still on the system, the series lamp will be full brightness and the landscape lights will all be out. Then start disconnecting the light fixtures from the main lead one at a time. When you clear the short the remaining good landscape lights will start glowing dimly and the series lamp will dim noticeably -- Stop Right There. Whatever you moved was the bad connection. ;-) --<< Bruce >>-- ------------------------------ From: Juan A. Monico Subject: Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 11:01:54 -0700 On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 17:05:30 EDT, in comp.dcom.telecom you wrote: > Here is a question for the group regards 'low voltage' electrical > current. I have two transformers: > One is Radio Shack, 'clean' DC output, 13.8 Volts at 3 Amps. Its > like a little box, a 'powerhouse' kind of thing. It has a 'reset' > button on the back in case the output goes out due to overload or > a short. $39 at Radio Shack. I had been using it to run a small > portable TV set and a scanner radio, such as would be plugged into > a car cigarette lighter and run from a car battery. > The other transformer is an Intermatic, model is 'Malibu 88-T' and > it does output of 12 Volts and 1 Amp. It has a clock built in which > allows it to be automatically turned on/off as desired. Its purpose > is to service outside lights along a sidewalk for example. Using=20 > 12 or 14 gauge wire, a series of little lights strung over a distance > of 50 feet will light up. Total wattage allowed is 88 Watts between > all the bulbs, which are 5-10 watts each. It is available from Ace > Hardware here in Indy also for $39. >> Are these two power supplies interchangeable (ignoring the fact that >> the Intermatic has a built in clock since I have other timers I can >> use)? >> How do you calculate volts/amps to watts? >> I am not going to have $78 to spare this month (barely can spare $39 >> for one of them), so am curious to know what I can get away with or >> not get away with. >> PAT Hi Pat. Please feel free to call me if you need more information. Volts X Amps = Watts This equation requires that the quantities be either all DC or all AC. Unfortunately you probably need two different units. The light transformer is just that, a transformer only. Ordinary light bulbs will work on AC or DC. Normally these units provide AC only. The numbers you quote for the light transformer don't compute. For 88 watts it would have to provide at least (88watts/12volts) 7.4 amps. At 1 amps it could only supply 12 watts and with 10 watt light bulbs it would run out of capacity at 1bulb. Even with 5 watt bulbs it could only handle 2 bulbs. Their web page http://www.absolutehome.com/web/catalog/product_detail.aspx?pid=16071 clearly rates the unit at 88 Watts so the 1amp figure you quote is probably wrong. So for this application you need a 12 volt AC transformer with at least 7.4 amps capacity. Even though this is a simple device it will be difficult to find a cheaper one off the shelf. One can be constructed but will require some sort of enclosure for safety, Now for your TV supply. Most equipment rated for 13.8 volts DC will also work on 12 volts DC since while the actual voltage from a fully charged automobile battery is 13.8 volts DC it can and often does drop to less than 12 volts if the charger isn't running. All Electronics (www.allelectronics.com) have a suitable unit: Cat # PS-1242 12Volt DC 3.5 Amp Power Supply $18.00 you may have to change the plug because of type, size or polarity. This unit has automatic overvoltage and current protection so you won't need the reset button. They are a reliable Mail Order supplier of surplus equipment based in California. I (and many other Ham Radio Operators) use them frequently. Their shipping charges are reasonable and their service is usually quick. I hope this helps. Juan A. Monico 15020 Ripple Rock Road Campbell River, BC CANADA V9H 1N9 Tel: 250-830-1088 ICBM: 50 09 36"N 125 22 19"W Radio: VA7MXA, N6MXA GridSq: CO70hd Internet: juan@monico.org Politicians, like diapers, have to be changed frequently, and for the very same reason. ------------------------------ From: palee@riteaid.com Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 12:17:25 -0400 Subject: Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer In TELECOM Digest V23 #500, TELECOM Digest Editor wrote (in part): > I have two transformers: One is Radio Shack, 'clean' DC output, 13.8 > Volts at 3 Amps. > The other transformer is an Intermatic, model is 'Malibu 88-T' and > it does output of 12 Volts and 1 Amp. ... Are these two power > supplies interchangeable...? The Radio Shack power supply is DC [direct current] at 13.8 V (the output of a "12-volt" automotive charging system). The Intermatic Malibu light power pack is simply an AC transformer with a timer on the primary (line voltage) side. I think the "1 Amp" rating you saw was the line side draw (120 VAC 1 A). > How do you calculate volts/amps to watts? For DC, it's pretty simple for simple loads on a linear power supply, which is almost certainly what the RS unit is: watts = volts x amps. AC calculations are trickier -- that's likely why Intermatic gives their power consumption figures in watts (the 88-T is rated at 88 watts). For a rough calculation, though, you start with 120 VAC at 1 amp (120 volt-= amps) supplying a 10:1 power transformer (120:12 volts) with a typical transformer power factor of about 0.75 (0.733 in this case): 120 V x 1 A = 120 VA x 0.7333 PF 88 watts (output) When you calculate how many Malibu lights the 88-T will handle, power factor is practically 1.0, since lamp filaments are almost pure resistive load. I'm not going to further flaunt how long it's been since I've done any real AC calculations ... Paul A Lee Sr Telecom Engineer Rite Aid Corporation HL-IS-COM (Telecomm) V: +1 717 730-8355 30 Hunter Lane, Camp Hill, PA 17011-2410 F: +1 717 975-3789 P.O. Box 3165, Harrisburg, PA 17105-3165 W: +1 717 805-6208 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My problem is *something* caused a short on the line which caused the Malibu 88-T to get fried. That something was probably the all-day drizzle/rain we had the other day in the one spot where the cord strung to the various lights was not properly protected. I will endeavor to find/correct that problem, but, wouldn't it be good to put an external fuse in the line to prevent that from happening in the future? I am thinking of one of the little glass fuses and fuse holders you can wire in series with the line. I *assume* (correct me as needed) such a fuse in the line would stop any short from reaching the Intermatic power supply. I would rather, next time, blow one of the little five in a box for two dollars fuses rather than be in bed asleep when the short develops (if in fact I get it cured) and the Intermatic silently fries away all night until I wake up, or worse, have my backyard shed burn down (unlikely, I know). What are your thoughts? What *size* fuse should I use of the little glass ones that fit in a holder from RS? Not to small to not allow the little lights to work correctly, but not too big so it won't do a prompt job of stopping any shorts. Ideas? 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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Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #504 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Oct 21 19:15:11 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9LNFBR04221; Thu, 21 Oct 2004 19:15:11 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 19:15:11 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410212315.i9LNFBR04221@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 #505 TELECOM Digest Thu, 21 Oct 2004 19:15:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 505 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson They Can Hear You Now (Lisa Minter) Callsigns and Horse Teeth (jmayson@nyx.net) 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (Neal McLain) Re: AMTRAK (was Re: Last, Sad Laugh! Nice Place to Work) (John R.Covert) Re: AMTRAK (was Re: Last, Sad Laugh! Nice Place to Work) (Mark Crispin) Re: Sinclair: From Bad to Worse (Thomas A. Horsley) Re: Sinclair's Disgrace (Lisa Hancock) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter Subject: They Can Hear You Now Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 11:06:08 EDT IQUITOS, Peru - A few miles downriver from this city in the western Amazon jungle, Andres Alvarado hops off a boat and walks up a muddy path to a hollowed-out log resting on a wooden stand. He beats the log with a stick, sending a series of low-pitched tones into the rain forest. "This is what they call the 'telephone of the jungle,' " says Alvarado, a tricycle taxi-driver and tourist guide. Moments later, as children of the Bora Indian tribe come bounding down the path to answer the "telephone," Alvarado's belt begins beeping: It's his cellphone. Iquitos and nearby riverside hamlets are among the more remote outposts in South America's expanding mobile phone system, part of a global network that is beginning to penetrate even the poorest and most undeveloped corners of the world. For millions of people living in countries where getting a fixed phone line remains a bureaucratic impossibility, the cellphone revolution has allowed them to leapfrog from archaic forms of communication straight into the digital era and that is changing the fabric of their daily lives. In East Africa, the mobile phone has brought a first, tantalizing taste of modernity to people who live on less than $10 a day. In China, the world's biggest market for cellphones, they are embraced by rich and poor alike, a tiny pocket computer with which to surf the Internet, play video games or even do banking. Here in Iquitos, where speedboats and lumbering old fishing craft ply the brown, wide waters of the Amazon, fishermen grab the wheels of their vessels with one hand and their cellphones with the other to check the price their catch will fetch at markets downriver. Alvarado uses his mobile phone to round up clients for his tricycle taxi. And earlier this year, it beeped with the most important call of his life. "My mother-in-law called me from the delivery room," Alvarado recalled. His wife had gone into labor with their first child, and he raced to the hospital on his tricycle. "We all thought we were going to have a girl, but it turned out to be a boy." He flashed the news from the hospital to his sister in Lima via his cellphone, the kind of call that might seem routine in the United States but which still carries for him an aura of science fiction. For Alvarado, a bright-eyed 23-year-old who has rarely traveled beyond the river cities and hamlets of the Amazon, the change brought about by the cellphone has been profound and rapid. A few years back, when Alvarado's grandfather died in a town several days' journey upriver, his family in Iquitos learned the news by telegram. A mourning relative walked several hours to the telegraph office, dictated the sad news to a telegraph operator, who sent it to another office, where the message was typed up and delivered by hand to the Alvarado household. "By the time we found out, they had already buried him," Alvarado said. The number of cellphones in Latin America has tripled since 1999, and one in five people now owns one. In Peru, as in many other countries in the region, there are more cellphones than fixed phone lines. Today, the world's fastest-growing cellphone markets are in places like Iquitos in rural South America and in sub-Saharan Africa, despite widespread poverty. "My cellphone gives me an 'address' just like any other businessman," said Baruwani Mbabazi, a money-changer who is part of a brisk trade in U.S. dollars in Kigali, the Rwandan capital. His $20 purchase of a used cellphone has liberated him from having to stand on the street waiting for customers. "I can't imagine my business without it," Mbabazi said. Rwanda's cellphone boom has followed a pattern typical of many developing countries. It now has more than five times as many cellphones (134,000) as fixed telephone lines (23,000), according to the International Telecommunications Union. As in Rwanda, people elsewhere across Africa are coming to appreciate and rely upon the magic of the cellphone; communicating with a distant friend while under a baobab tree in Mali, for example, or on the Kenyan savanna. In Senegal, farmers use them in their annual, age-old battle against plagues of locusts, calling each other and the authorities to keep track of the progress of insect "hopper bands." In Somalia, men in loincloths flash their cellphones as they guide camels to port. Masai warriors in Tanzania pull phones from their red *shuka* robes to call gem brokers when they find glimmering purple-blue tanzanite, a rare gemstone found only in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro. But mostly, Africans use their phones for the same purpose as people everywhere -- conversation. "We're a nation of talkers," said Kayode Sukoya, a Lagos taxi driver known by the nickname "Guv'nor." He links the cellphone's popularityto the ancient storytelling customs of Yoruba culture. The cellphone is spreading, thanks to "prepaid" service plans, which can lower the cost to a few dollars a month. In Lima, Peru's capital, vendors sell prepaid phone time the same way they sell peanuts: by standing between lines of cars waiting for the light to turn green. You hand over the equivalent of a few dollars and get a coded card, which you use to "charge up" your phone with time credit. In Peru, these consumers far outnumber "postpaid" users, who get a bill for their calls each month. "To get a postpaid cellphone, you need to have a consistent source of income, and since the economy here is mostly informal, people don't have that," said Juan Edgar Chavez, southern Peru sales director for Telefonica Moviles Peru, the largest cellphone company in the country. As in the United States and Europe, cellphones link people in the developing world in ways no one imagined possible just a few years ago. In South America, the cellphone has become a tool of rebellion, and a *de rigueur* accessory for crime bosses who, in certain corners of the region, act as a kind of parallel government. In Brazil, drug kingpin Luiz Fernando da Costa was widely believed to have used a cellphone from his prison cell to control his minions in the *favelas,* or slums, of Rio de Janeiro, leading authorities to install jamming devices outside the city's largest penitentiaries. The cellphone is the communication instrument of choice for leaders of the secessionist Aymara Indian movement in the highlands of Bolivia, where it comes in handy when trying to coordinate strikes and highway blockades. In China, which has more than 300 million users, the cellphone has come to symbolize the national search for prosperity and self- expression. On the streets of Beijing, along with on-the-go businessmen, farmers chatter on cellphones as they drive their vegetables to market in mule-drawn carriages. Xiao Zhao, a 15-year-old purveyor of false documents, uses his phone to keep one step ahead of the law. "You can't glue yourself to a fixed telephone and still do the business," he said. "Once the police get your regular phone number, they'd be able to find out where you're living and have you arrested." One enterprising Chinese author has written a novel meant to be read in 70-word chapters transmitted by mobile phone text message. "Outside the Fortress Besieged" tells the story of an extramarital affair in 60 chapters totaling about 4,000 words, according to China's state-run press. The text-message explosion in China has not escaped the attention of the authorities, who this summer announced a plan to employ new technology to improve surveillance of mobile phone messages. Officials said the campaign was aimed at cleaning up "pornographic, obscene and fraudulent" phone messages. Some say the new scrutiny is aimed at squelching political dissent. Chinese police sometimes use text messages as an anti-crime tool: When they find a cellphone that is being used for illicit purposes, they use a computer to call the phone and flood it with phony text messages, running up such a high bill for the owner that the phone becomes unusable. Xiao, the phony-document seller, said this has happened to him. "I've changed numbers twice since last year," he said. Providing the good, reliable service the market demands is not easy in developing countries such as Peru, where engineers face a series of technical challenges presented by untamed jungles and rickety electrical grids. Each base station requires electricity. "In rural areas, the electricity fluctuates," said David Holgado, Telefonica's chief technical officer. "It's supposed to be 220 volts, but sometimes I get 160 or 250." Often, only battery power keeps the cellular station and all the people using it to make calls online. A donkey is required for the technician with the unenviable task of performing routine maintenance on the antenna that sits atop a 13,100-foot peak above the city of Pasco, one of the highest in the world. "There is a lot of equipment to carry, and of course there is no road or any other way to get up there," Holgado said. Telefonica covers Peru with 400 base stations, the circular towers now a ubiquitous feature of the urban landscape in the U.S. On flat terrain, each tower transmits a signal with an 18-mile radius. But in Peru's mountainous topography, the signals are shadowed out or echo in unpredictable ways. One recent evening, two Telefonica technicians sat inside a nondescript office in the Lima headquarters monitoring the nationwide cell system on a video wall displaying charts and graphs that pulsated as if the network were a living organism. "What we look for are the symptoms of trouble," Holgado said. "Because you see the symptoms before you see the problem itself. Right now, everything is operating normally." One small square showed the base station at the jungle port of Puerto Maldonado, on the Madre de Dios River near the Bolivian border. Puerto Maldonado is so remote that the usual fiber-optic or microwave connections linking base stations to the home network in Lima are unavailable. So all the calls from the jungle outpost where Spanish conquistadors once searched in vain for the mythical El Dorado are routed through space. In some villages, people climb to their roofs to get a good signal, Holgado said. In others, they raise 60-foot-high antennas and rig their phones to them. In villages without electrical power, people charge up their phones with car batteries. "You see all the ingenuity we Peruvians are famous for," said Carlos Zamora Guanillo, a Telefonica engineer. The fishermen of Iquitos know all about ingenuity. Sometimes you have to be quick on your feet to sell your Amazon catfish, or *zungaro* at the right place. Having a cellphone can help you get a good price at the big markets in faraway Leticia in Colombia, on the border with Peru and Brazil. Juan Flores, who was elected president of the Artisan Union of Fishermen of Iquitos in part because he owns a mobile phone, talks about the phone signal in the same tone he might use to describe shifting currents and hazardous sandbars. "When you get to the fork of the Ucayali or the Maraon, it doesn't work," he said, naming a couple of Amazon tributaries. "But in Tamshiyacu, the signal is pretty good. By the time you get to Yurimaguas and to Pucallpa, the signal is nice and strong." The fishermen follow the signal upriver and down, in long, flat boats with thatched roofs that look a lot like floating cigars. The other day, one of the ships of the Iquitos fleet, the El Veloz Quinto (Speedy the Fifth), hit a sandbar and began to sink. The captain couldn't raise the local river patrol on his radio. Luckily, he had a cellphone. He called their office and read them the riot act: "What's wrong with you guys, aren't you listening to the radio? Get out here quick, or I'm going to lose all my ice." They saved the ship. But the ice was lost. ------------------------------- Times staff writers John M. Glionna and Yin Lijin in Beijing, Davan Maharaj in Nairobi, Kenya, and Jube Shiver Jr. in Washington contributed to this report. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Los Angeles Times. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: jmayson@nyx.net Reply-To: jmayson@nyx.net Subject: Callsigns and Horse Teeth Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 02:44:07 GMT Organization: Road Runner High Speed Online http://www.rr.com Whenever I get into these discussions on the Internet, I always think of that old adage about Greek philosophers. They would argue for hours, even days, over things like how many teeth a horse has and no one would bother to go look in a horse's mouth. I looked up callsign history. I was mostly right. According to this page: http://earlyradiohistory.us/recap.htm there were three owner requests for exceptions to the E/W rule: WACO, WDGQ, and WMT. There are other W callsigns west of the Mississippi and these exist for a number of reasons including: pre-existing callsigns, portable stations that moved from east to west, stations that changed their community of license across the divide, and government error (KTGG in Michigan because the FCC thought "MI" stood for "Missouri"). Now to give this more of telecom flavor ... I used to work at a major long-distance company, the one with a logo similar to a large object in the Star Wars movies. A clerk was sending circuit orders to the small independent local telecos in our region and addressed an envelope to Mississippi with an "MI". I told her that was Michigan and she said no, Michigan would be "MN". I said "MN" was Minnesota which she claimed to be "MA". I start to point out that was Massachusetts, but saw it coming ... Mass. would've been "MS" which is Mississippi and around we go again. I figured the USPS went by the ZIP Code anyway, so the order probably got there. John Mayson Austin, Texas, USA [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Actually, no matter how many teeth you saw in the mouth of some particular horse, there can always be exceptions. For example, how many toes does a cat have on its paws? Some people would say 'five', which is normally the correct answer. But some cats have *six* toes on one (or all four) feet. The vernacular name for such cats is 'polydex' and my first cat 'Nicholas' (the one who was so warm and loving, not the later Nicholas who was always hateful with humans) was that way. Nicholas had six toes on each of his two front paws, five toes on each of his back paws. I guess it is some genetic thing going back a million years or so. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 02:37:38 -0500 From: Neal McLain Subject: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns Anthony Bellanga wrote: > Louisiana and Minnesota both "straddle" the Mississippi River. In my experience (mostly in cable TV), the Mississippi-River rule can be more accurately stated as follows: "K" = west of the Mississippi River plus the entire state of Minnesota. "W" = east of the Mississippi River plus Louisiana parishes located in the Baton Rouge and New Orleans DMAs. But even with this version of the rule there are numerous exceptions, especially in the case of low-power television stations (LPTV, Class A, translators, and boosters). Here's my list of television-station exceptions: - "K" callsigns in the "W" half: K07WE Baton Rouge LA K10NG New Orleans LA K14IE New Orleans LA K55EX New Orleans LA K58GB Baton Rouge LA K59DG New Orleans LA K65FP Baton Rouge LA KDKA-TV KDKA-DT Pittsburgh PA KFOL-CA Houma LA KWBJ-LP Morgan City LA KYW-TV KYW-DT Philadelphia PA KZUP-CA Baton Rouge LA - "W" callsigns in the "K" half: W61AF Grand Marais MN W62DB Minneapolis MN WBWX-CA Minneapolis MN WCCO-TV WCCO-DT Minneapolis MN WCMN-LP Saint Cloud MN WDAF-TV WDAF-DT Kansas City MO WDAY-TV WDAY-DT Fargo ND WDAZ-TV WDAZ-DT Devils Lake ND WDIO-TV WDIO-DT Duluth MN WDSE WDSE-DT Duluth MN WFAA-TV WFAA-DT Dallas TX WFTC WFTC-DT Minneapolis MN WIBW-TV WIBW-DT Topeka KS WHO-TV WHO-DT Des Moines IA WIRT WIRT-DT Hibbing MN WOAI-TV WOAI-DT San Antonio TX WOI-TV WOI-DT Des Moines IA WOWT WOWT-DT Omaha NE Source: TvRadioWorld . There are even more exceptions in the case of radio. Robert Bonomi mentioned several of them in TD V23:500, but there are many others (far too many for me to attempt to list here). For anyone really interested, the place to start is: . Bonomi's list included: > WOI (AM, FM, and TV ... ), Ames, Iowa WOI(AM) and WOI-FM are licensed to Iowa State University. WOI-TV is a commercial station (ABC affiliate) serving the Des Moines/Ames/ Marshalltown DMA; it's still licensed to Ames, but it claims "Des Moines" in its publicity. ISU does not operate a TV station (most public television stations in Iowa are operated by Iowa Public Television, a state agency independent of the state universities). > WWL Waterloo, Iowa. Intrestingly, KWWL is in the same town. WWL(AM) and WWL-TV are now located in New Orleans, LA. > WSUI Iowa City, Iowa Also the home of KSUI. *SAME* owner, > even. :) WSUI(AM) and KSUI(FM) are licensed to the University of Iowa (formerly, State University of Iowa; hence, "SUI"). UI does not operate a TV station (same reason ISU doesn't). > WOW Omaha, Nebraska AM only; sister TV is WOWT. > WMT Cedar Rapids, Iowa WMT(AM) and WMT-FM only; sister TV is KGAN(TV), formerly WMT-TV. > WOC Davenport, Iowa AM only; sister FM is WLLR(FM); sister TV is KWQC(TV). > WRR Dallas, Texas FM only (PAT: classical music, streamed online!) > WBAP Ft. Worth, Texas AM only. > WCAL Northfield, Minnesota FM only. Sold to Minnesota Public Radio on 8-10-04; formerly owned by St. Olaf College. > WJOD Asbury, Iowa FM only (Dubuque market). > WJON St. Cloud, Minnesota AM only; sister FM is WWJO(FM). > WNAX Yankton, South Dakota AM only. > WOWT Omaha, Nebraska TV only; sister AM is WOW. > WTAW College Station, Texas AM only. > WWLS Moore, Oklahoma WWLS(AM) and WWLS-FM only. > WWJO St. Cloud, Minnesota FM only; sister AM is WJON. > WYRQ Little Falls, Minnesota AM only. > and, some hair-splitting (Metro area crosses the river, > transmitter_could_ be on the Illinois side of the Missippi): > WIL St. Louis, Missouri FM only. Transmitter is located in Missouri. > WRTH St. Louis, Missouri The FCC has no record of this callsign. > WLTE Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota FM only. Transmitter is located in Minnesota, on the east side of the Mississippi River. That's still on the "K" side of the line according to the version of the rule I stated above. > WMCN St. Paul, Minnesota FM only. Transmitter is located in Minnesota, on the east side of the Mississippi River. > WBJI Blackduck, Minnesota FM only. Blackduck is in Beltrami County (page 72-B2 in DeLorme). > WIRN Buhl, Minnesota FM only; Minnesota Public Radio affiliate. Buhl is in St. Louis County, near Hibbing (page 75-D6 in DeLorme). > WACO Waco, Texas. FM only. R. T. Wurth wrote: > There were some W-s, WEW and WIL, licensed to serve St. Louis, > west of the Mississippi, and thus signing as WEW, St. Louis, and > WIL, St. Louis (technically broadcast radio/tv call signs had to > include the community of license as well as the call letters). > These would appear to be breaking the Mississippi rule. I can > think of a few possible reasons that might make them technically > non-exceptions. It is possible that they transmitted from > across the river in Illinois, and that the rule referred to > transmitter site, not to community of licensure, or it may have > been that they were originally licensed to E. St. Louis, IL, and > then petitioned to move their license to St. Louis. Does anyone > know the real explanation? Were these stations exceptions, too, > or were they special cases? They're both exceptions. Callsigns are attached to the community of license without regard to the location of the transmitter. WEW(AM) is licensed to St. Louis, but the transmitter is located in Washington Park, Illinois. FCC record at: . WIL-FM is licensed to St. Louis, and the transmitter is located in Missouri. FCC record (scroll down below WILL-FM) at: Neal McLain [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Is there a 'WIL' (one /L/) in St. Louis? The reason I ask is because there is a 'WILL' (two /L/) at the University of Illinois in Champaign, 580 KC on AM band.) PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 15:38:45 EDT From: "John R. Covert" Subject: Re: AMTRAK (was Re: Last, Sad Laugh! A Nice Place to Work!) Mark Crispin wrote: > You'll see streetcars in Germany and Austria, as part of an > aboveground S-Bahn network which is invariably slower and less > preferred to the underground U-Bahn. The S-Bahn quickly becomes > rapid transit once in suburbia. Mark, let's get the terminology correct. In Germany, "S-Bahn" is short for "Stadtbahn" (City Railroad) and is almost invariably run by "Deutsche Bahn" (the national railroad) using full-size electric rail vehicles in a system fully integrated with the intercity rail network. It's the equivalent of "commuter rail" in the United States, although in some cities (Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, and Hamburg in particular) it is quite well developed and provides a significant amount of very high speed service within the city limits. It is not "streetcar" in any sense of the word. The U-Bahn (Untergrundbahn) is usually completely separate, and typically operated by a local city transit agency, quite often the same agency which runs the busses and streetcars. There will often be a transit union of several companies across nearby communities to provide a single fare structure (often including the Deutsche Bahn's S-Bahn services in the area). Streetcars and S-Bahn have nothing to do with each other. In fact, it's much more likely that streetcars and U-Bahn will be integrated, as is the case in cities other than Berlin and Hamburg, where there was previously no heavy-rail U-Bahn, and tunnels were built for certain portions of the streetcar system. Two examples come to mind immediately: Bonn and Stuttgart, where the light-rail streetcars go into tunnels with these streetcar stations marked "U". However, the major S-Bahn stations in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart (and most other cities) are the same stations at which you would catch a long-distance train to anywhere in Europe. The S-Bahn also serves many local stations, most of which you would pass through (without stopping) when travelling on high-speed intercity trains. Regards, /john ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 13:33:46 PDT From: Mark Crispin Subject: Re: AMTRAK (was Re: Last, Sad Laugh! A Nice Place to Work!) On Thu, 21 Oct 2004, John R. Covert wrote: > Mark, let's get the terminology correct. In Germany, "S-Bahn" is > short for "Stadtbahn" (City Railroad) Schnellbahn. I checked my dictionary to verify my memory on this point. If Stadtbahn is used today that is a new usage. > It's the equivalent of "commuter rail" in the United > States, although in some cities (Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, and > Hamburg in particular) it is quite well developed I suppose you know that the Berlin S-Bahn is more or less totally reconstructed since the fall of the wall. Prior to that time, the U-Bahn was run by West Berlin authorities and the S-Bahn by East Berlin authorities. Most U-Bahn lines served the west, although one line had a stop in the east (Friedrichstrasse IIRC) and there was another line that was east-only. The S-Bahn was entirely streetcars in West Berlin, and generally avoided. Berlin's S-Bahn could have been how S-Bahn came to be interpreted as "Stadtbahn" since it very definitely was not schnell in Berlin!!! In Munich, the S-Bahn is a high-speed line from the suburbs into downtown, but only one or two stops in town (e.g. at Hauptbahnhof); everywhere else in town you take the U-Bahn or walk. I don't recall streetcars in Munich, but there definitely were streetcars in the Vienna ring which were part of the S-Bahn system. Those streetcars were definitely not schnell; I could walk faster than they would transport you. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you; I think that maybe you aren't aware of some of the history. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum. ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Sinclair: From Bad to Worse From: tom.horsley@att.net (Thomas A. Horsley) Organization: AT&T Worldnet Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 20:57:48 GMT > On Monday, Sinclair fired the head of its Washington bureau for having > the temerity to criticize the airing of one-sided propaganda (ironic, > considering Sinclair is claiming a First Amendment right to air the > film). I don't like Sinclair, but I'm afraid I can't find any irony here. Sinclair owns the stations -- he can put anything he wants on and hire or fire anyone he wants to. There is nothing in the First Amendment that guarantees there will be no consequences for speaking up -- it just guarantees the gummint can't do anything to stop you. "The truth will set you free" (and if you don't believe it, tell your boss the truth someday :-). >>==>> The *Best* political site >>==+ email: Tom.Horsley@worldnet.att.net icbm: Delray Beach, FL | Free Software and Politics <<==+ ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: Sinclair's Disgrace Date: 20 Oct 2004 20:05:45 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: You may be interested in a show to > be aired on October 27 at (I think) 10 PM eastern/9 central on > TV Land, called "Politics and Prime Time". Thanks for the flag, that show should be very informative. I just hope they show the historical commercials in their _entirety_, rather than quick brief snippets. > TV Land has been doing promotions for it for several weeks now, > including the infamous one of Barry Goldwater (who ran against > Kennedy as I recall) I think you mean Johnson. It's tough to say what kind of president Goldwater would've made. But Johnson was a HUGE disappointment. Vietnam, instead of going away, became a huge mess. The Civil Rights era became a huge mess though much of that was not Johnson's fault. > The other good one TV Land has shown almost daily of late is Bush > the First telling us "what America needs is a family structure like > the Walton's, not Homer Simpson." I know it sounds corny, but I agree with that statement. I've seen too many "Homer Simpson"-like families who had plenty of opportunity but screwed it up through their own irresponsibilities. I've got enough gray now to have seen lousy long term behavior patterns that end badly. > Smears and innuendo are nothing new at election time, are they, Lisa? Heck, no! I've already mentioned Nixon's early campaigns. At the same time, Truman was quite nasty in his 1948 campaign against Dewey. We like Truman (who was an excellent president) and cheer his big upset win, but he got pretty shrill in his campaign. Cover-ups aren't new either. It appears FDR's 1944 campaign was a huge coverup to hide FDR's failing health from the public; he had a very serious heart condition by that point. (In fairness, FDR himself appears to have been in denial and didn't follow doctor's orders. Even back then they wanted him to quit smoking.) ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #505 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Oct 22 01:12:51 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9M5CpA07127; Fri, 22 Oct 2004 01:12:51 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 01:12:51 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410220512.i9M5CpA07127@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 #506 TELECOM Digest Fri, 22 Oct 2004 01:13:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 506 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: Who Carries TV Signals and Long Distance Today? (Anthony Bellanga) Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (Mark Roberts) Re: 'K' v. 'W' television station callsigns (Neal McLain) Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (Garrett Wollman) Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (Dave Close) Re: Callsigns and Horse Teeth (jtaylor) Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Phone (Marcus Didius Falco) Re: Old Stock Quotation Things? (AES/newspost) Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer (Jeff Spidle) Protect Passenger Privacy - Help Ground "Secure Flight" (Monty Solomon) EPIC Alert 11.20 (Monty Solomon) Bell System Competition: Private Telephone Networks (Lisa Hancock) Partners Wanted (Marcel Riley) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 17:11:06 -0600 From: Anthony Bellanga Subject: Re: Who Carries TV Signals and Long Distance Today? Reply-To: anthonybellanga@withheld at request PAT, in order to deter $pam, please do NOT display my email address, neither in the "from" line, nor in the "reply to" line. Lisa Hancock wrote: > Years ago, the Bell System carried network broadcast transmissions > from first radio and then television. After WW II one of the > functions of the new coaxial cable and microwave systems was capacity > to carry TV signals. > With satellites and competing companies that own their own fibre > networks, does AT&T still carry broadcast transmissions today? If > not, when did the transition start? Was this a blow to AT&T > revenues? Today, MOST all "long haul" and/or point-to-multi-point (network) radio and TV is distributed by satellite. But remember that AT&T also owns or is part-owner of several satellites as well. "Short haul" (within the same city) distribution, such as "remotes" seem to be handled half-and-half by the local telco (sometimes even on a "dial-up" 3-Khz bandwidth basis! but also on a permanent or temporary "leased line" basis too) as well as by private microwave equipment owned by the TV or radio station, under FCC license for such microwave too. If a local radio or TV station is doing "remotes" on their own from distant locations (Hurricanes, Iraq, etc), they would more than likely use satellite equipment. The first use of satellites for radio/TV pick-ups or distribution first began in the 1960s when such satellites were new, novel services, mostly for special events, such as Olympics, Coronations, Space Shots, etc. In the mid-1970s, the major radio networks (CBS, NBC, Mutual, ABC, and even APRadio, UPI Audio, and even the less important radio services) began to use RCA and Western Union domestic satellites for remote pickups of sporting events outside of the usual program centers of New York or Washington, as well as for sending "time-zone-delayed" feeds to Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco (and the major radio networks usually owned stations in all of the above mentioned major cities as well), when the program was picked up in Chicago, L.A., or Frisco, it then was distributed by Bell System landlines throughout the Central, Mountain and Pacific time zones, sometimes with different programming in different time-zones, delayed one, two or three hours. When full landline distribution was in effect for both network radio and network TV, Chicago would usually be the first point in the Central Time Zone on a program fed out of New York or Washington DC. And depending on how the network chose to have AT&T wire-up their network, either Hollywood or San Francisco would be the first point in the Mountain Time Zone for a program fed from the East or Midwest. Chicago, and likewise Hollywood or Frisco, would tape, transcribe (on wax disc), or "kinescope" the TV or radio program as fed from the east, for playback one, two, or three hours later, throughout the remainder of the network. But with the use of RCA Satcom or WU Westar satellites, all program delaying could be controlled directly out of New York or Washington DC. In the later 1970s, Mutual (which was radio only), NPR, APRadio, and UPI Audio, and some other "minor" radio and TV networks (and I think PBS-TV as well) decided to begin converting over to 100% satellite distribution. In the "long run", use of RCA or Western Union with satellites would be "cheaper" than using long haul AT&T lines. Of course, there still might be the use of the local Bell or "independent" telco on the distant local end, especially if the radio or TV station couldn't place their dish in the same location as their studios. Local telco loops would be needed to "backhaul" the program from where the dish were located, back to the studio. Also in the later 1970s, emerging national-in-scope Cable-TV services such as HBO, CSPAN, CBN, CNN, etc. chose to distribute via satellite directly to local cable franchise operation centers rather than use Bell System facilities. I also don't know if Bell had enough landline VIDEO capacity using the technology of the time for all of the new emerging cable services, on a NATIONAL basis. Afterall, AT&T had mostly been doing the distribution for ONLY three or four major national TV networks for some 25+ years by the late 1970s -- CBS-TV, NBC-TV, ABC-TV, NET/PBS, and the original (early 1950s) DuMont Network which I understand was re-worked (as far as AT&T circuits were concerned) into the "ad-hoc" Hughes Television Network of the 1960s/70s. The three radio networks which also had associated TV networks -- CBS Radio, NBC Radio, ABC Radio, continued to use satellites only for backhaul of sports and specials which didn't originate in New York or Washington DC, and also for "trunking" Central and Pacific programming to Chicago and Hollywood or Frisco into the 1980s. And while CBS-TV, NBC-TV, and ABC-TV also were using RCA and Western Union satellites for the same purposes into the early 1980s, it wasn't until 1982 or 1983 when the "big three" for *BOTH* their radio and television networks, decided to migrate over 100% to satellite. On the RADIO side, CBS, NBC, ABC all chose to go to a "proprietary" *DIGITAL* system, all integrated so that an affiliate which was going to carry programming and services from multiple providers could have a single full-service set of equipment. CBS Radio, NBC Radio, ABC Radio, and a one-time RKO Radio Network, all chose to use "DAT" (Digital Audio Terminal) Technology from Scientific Atlanta and distribution from RCA Americom's SATCOM. (Mutual, PBS, NPR, APRadio and UPI Audio all went with Western Union Westar in the late 1970s/early 1980s). I don't know if CBS-TV and ABC-TV went with RCA, WU or someone else, but in addition to CBS Radio and ABC Radio along with NBC Radio going with RCA, so did NBC-TV. Afterall, RCA owned the National Broadcasting Company. Later in the 1980s, when General Electric purchased RCA and NBC, the communication satellite division was renamed GE American Communications. Today, the players, movers-and-shakers, etc. have changed a bit in name or owners, as media and technical entities have merged and consolidated, but there's no turning back from the use of satellite for long-haul national/network radio and TV. Also, note that the remaining radio and TV networks, the "Big three", made their announcement to migrate to 100% satellite around 1982 or 1983, for full use by 1984 and 1985. Remember what else happened 20 years ago, on 1/1/84 -- this was the official beginning of divestiture, the break-up of the Bell System, where AT&T had to spin-off all its BOCs. The "big-three" knew that RCA Satcom was relatively stable, but were probably worried about what the new world of post-divestiture would bring! > Likewise, who actually carries long distance telephone calls? I use > Verizon, do they own their wholly own long distance network > capability of reaching any US central office? What medium is > typically used -- ground coax, microwave tower, satellite, fibre. > Or do all the other carriers simply contract in bulk with the > established AT&T, Sprint, and MCI? The "big three" of interexchange are AT&T, MCI, Sprint. But there are many others out there with regional or national full networks, including Qwest (the Long Distance side though), Global Crossing, Vartech, and others. I think that Verizon as well has established somewhat of a long distance network as well. Of course, ALL of the common carriers do buy and route traffic over each other depending on the circumstances. > With satellites, is there a problem with transmission lag time? YES! In the 1970s, when AT&T (Bell) announced and even began to utilize, Comstar (owned jointly by AT&T and GTE) satellites for long-haul toll traffic trunking, there was major concern by many large business customers. Two way voice telephone conversation with such a delay/lag for the uplink and downlink to a small radio device some 23,000 miles over the equator was indeed a concern, especially if a corporate customer was conducting a teleconference! But it was a MAJOR worry for two-way data transmission. Radio/TV network broadcasting is different in that a program usually originates from one point (or maybe a small number of locations) and is sent to "everyone" across the country. But a two-way telephone (or data) or full participating mulit-party teleconference needs to be as "realtime" as possible! AT&T did establish means for "forced" landline distribution of switched "telephone" connections, to "avoid" satellites, for large business customers. There were special routing codes to be used if the call were really a data call, or a conference, etc. Also, for telephone calls originating or terminating outside of the mainland US or Canada, AT&T had to introduce special routing instructions so that no domestic satellite circuit would be involved, since the connection to the overseas location (including the Caribbean, Alaska, Hawaii, and even "far-northern Arctic" Canada) might involve an international satellite hop! Since one satellite "hop" involves awkward delays, imagine what two or even three satellite hops would be like! There are going to be times when more than one satellite hop, sometimes even as many as three, are going to be unavoidable, but those are quite RARE. But where possible, AT&T's policy was to keep the number of satellite hops when introduced into a 2-way switched telephone call, to ONE and ONLY one. > In 1970 AT&T descriptions, long distance routing had a triangle > design. That is, most calls were sent to a toll center for > subsequent routing. However, local exchanges had their own links to > some nearby exchanges. For example, New York City to Newark NJ is > "long distance" since it crosses states and LATA boundaries, but is > physically so close calls be carried over plain copper interoffice > trunks. Are such close LD calls still sent that way? It would seem > strange to bounce 10 mile call off of a satellite. Because of the complaints about satellite hops on most domestic (and even many international calls), and also because of the falling prices and proliferation of land-based and undersea fiber optic, as well as digital microwave, about the only times you might encounter a satellite hop within the North American network on a switched 2-way (voice) telephone call is if one of the parties is in a remote Arctic location, such as in remote parts of Alaska, or way up in northern Canada outside of the landline network. There *ARE* landlines in Alaska and also northern Canada's territories (Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut), but the more remote parts of the Arctic parts of North America only interface with "down south" by satellite. Some Pacific Ocean and Caribbean points of the North American network might also still regularly use satellite to connect with each other or the mainland, but telephone calls within a particular location will still be landline, whether copper, fiber, microwave, etc. Anthony Bellanga ------------------------------ From: markrobt@comcast.net (Mark Roberts) Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 01:19:16 -0000 Organization: 1.94 meters Neal McLain had written: > Anthony Bellanga wrote: >> Louisiana and Minnesota both "straddle" the Mississippi River. > In my experience (mostly in cable TV), the Mississippi-River rule can be > more accurately stated as follows: > "K" = west of the Mississippi River plus the entire state of > Minnesota. > "W" = east of the Mississippi River plus Louisiana parishes > located in the Baton Rouge and New Orleans DMAs. > But even with this version of the rule there are numerous exceptions, > especially in the case of low-power television stations (LPTV, Class > A, translators, and boosters). The rules also seemed to weaken, especially after WWWK(FM) Granite City, Illinois won the right in 1982 to assume the KWK-FM calls after its St. Louis AM simulcast partner. Back in the 1950s, when WTAD(AM) Quincy, Illinois put a TV station on the air, it was licensed to Hannibal, Missouri, and thus went under the calls KHQA-TV. Those are still the calls of channel 7, whose studio and transmitter are now on the Illinois side of the river. The best explanation of the K/W split, and the most throughly-researched, is Thomas H. White's "United States Callsign Policies", at . I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the topic. > Bonomi's list included: >> WOI (AM, FM, and TV ... ), Ames, Iowa > WOI(AM) and WOI-FM are licensed to Iowa State University. WOI-TV is a > commercial station (ABC affiliate) serving the Des Moines/Ames/ > Marshalltown DMA; it's still licensed to Ames, but it claims "Des > Moines" in its publicity. ISU does not operate a TV station (most > public television stations in Iowa are operated by Iowa Public > Television, a state agency independent of the state universities). >> WWL Waterloo, Iowa. Intrestingly, KWWL is in the same town. > WWL(AM) and WWL-TV are now located in New Orleans, LA. >> WSUI Iowa City, Iowa Also the home of KSUI. *SAME* owner, >> even. :) > WSUI(AM) and KSUI(FM) are licensed to the University of Iowa > (formerly, State University of Iowa; hence, "SUI"). UI does not > operate a TV station (same reason ISU doesn't). For clarification, U of I *never* owned a TV station (other than for experimental purposes) while ISU *did* own WOI-TV, originally putting it on the air on channel 4 in 1950 and then moving it post-freeze to channel 5 in 1953. ISU sold WOI sometime in the 1980s, ostensibly because it no longer fit the "extension" mission of a land-grant institution. > WIL St. Louis, Missouri > FM only. Transmitter is located in Missouri. >> WRTH St. Louis, Missouri > The FCC has no record of this callsign. Well, it's there, on 1430 kHz. Do a search for all the stations on 1430 in Missouri and you should get back records for three stations, including WRTH. I left WIL intact in the quoted portion above because WRTH and WIL are, in fact, related. Years ago when I was stuck in Kansas City, I put together some pages regarding the histories of some pioneer stations. I haven't been maintaining them too closely the past couple of years but I have kept them accessible at . Pertinent to this discussion are the histories of: WDAF (KCSP), WHB, KCKN (descendant of WLBF), WIBW, WREN, WOQ (defunct), WOS (defunct), KWK (possessor of multiple K and W calls), and WIL. Frank Absher's stlradio.com has more history and a much richer trove of treasurers than I ever managed to put together. Frank also writes a monthly column on radio history for the St. Louis Journalism Review. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Is there a 'WIL' (one /L/) in > St. Louis? The reason I ask is because there is a 'WILL' (two /L/) > at the University of Illinois in Champaign, 580 KC on AM band.) PAT] Yes. WIL-FM is still in St. Louis. It switched to the parent AM station's country format in 1973, and its success eventually eclipsed the AM station's (much as what happened to the west with KCKN-AM/FM, FM now KFKF, in Kansas City). In part, that was because the St. Louis metropolitan area grew to the west, into areas where WIL(AM)'s directional signal was rather weak. Mark Roberts|"Entire media networks, such as Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting, Oakland, Cal| prop up Bush in a way that would make their fellow propagandists NO HTML MAIL| in North Korea and Cuba proud." -- Markos Moulitsas, Guardian Unlimited, 2004-10-12 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 20:53:30 -0500 From: Neal McLain Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' television station callsigns In response to a post by Robert Bonomi , I wrote: > The FCC has no record of this [WRTH St. Louis, Missouri] callsign. Oops, my mistake. WRTH(AM), St. Louis MO, is licensed to Bonneville Broadcasting of Salt Lake City. FCC database record: . In response to a post by R. T. Wurth ), I wrote: > WIL-FM is licensed to St. Louis, and the transmitter is located in > Missouri. FCC record (scroll down below WILL-FM) at: > Whereupon PAT asked: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Is there a 'WIL' (one /L/) in > St. Louis? The reason I ask is because there is a 'WILL' > (two /L/) at the University of Illinois in Champaign, 580 KC > on AM band.) PAT] Yes. WIL-FM, St. Louis MO, is also licensed to Bonneville Broadcasting of Salt Lake City. FCC database record: . But there is no WIL(AM) -- what used to be WIL(AM) is now the aforementioned WRTH(AM). The "-FM" suffix normally indicates an FM station co-licensed with an AM station; however, if an AM station changes its callsign, a co-licensed FM station retains the "-FM" suffix. WILL(AM), Urbana IL, is licensed to the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. FCC database record: . WILL-FM, Urbana IL, is also licensed to the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. FCC database record: . Neal McLain ------------------------------ From: wollman@lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman) Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 02:06:16 UTC Organization: MIT Laboratory for Computer Science In article , Neal McLain wrote: > WOI(AM) and WOI-FM are licensed to Iowa State University. WOI-TV is a > commercial station (ABC affiliate) serving the Des Moines/Ames/ > Marshalltown DMA [...]. ISU does not operate a TV station However, ISU *did* operate a TV station, namely WOI-TV. It was sold to a private owner within the last couple of decades. > WWL(AM) and WWL-TV are now located in New Orleans, LA. Formerly owned by Loyola University. >> WOW Omaha, Nebraska > AM only; sister TV is WOWT. AM is now KOMJ. >> WRR Dallas, Texas > FM only (PAT: classical music, streamed online!) Started out on the AM facility that's now KTCK, if I remember correctly. >> WBAP Ft. Worth, Texas > AM only. Amon Carter's TV station was channel 5, now NBC-owned KXAS. The radio stations are owned by Disney/ABC. >> WNAX Yankton, South Dakota > AM only. WNAX's sister FM has been WNAX-FM several times in the past (as recently as 2001 when I was there). >> and, some hair-splitting (Metro area crosses the river, >> transmitter_could_ be on the Illinois side of the Missippi): >> WIL St. Louis, Missouri > FM only. Transmitter is located in Missouri. >> WRTH St. Louis, Missouri > The FCC has no record of this callsign. I had no trouble finding it in the FCC database. In any case, WRTH *is* the station that was WIL. St. Louis also has the unusual case of KWK, Granite City, Ill. >> WACO Waco, Texas. > FM only. Formerly on AM (as with all of these examples outside of Minnesota and Louisiana). > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Is there a 'WIL' (one /L/) in > St. Louis? The reason I ask is because there is a 'WILL' (two /L/) > at the University of Illinois in Champaign, 580 KC on AM band.) PAT] Yes and no. There is no longer a "WIL" in St. Louis; that station is now WRTH. There is still a "WIL-FM", but according to the FCC's rules as written, there can never be a "WIL" again. However, the Commission accepted a frankly ridiculous argument from the owners of KKHJ (930 Los Angeles) to get its old callsign (KHJ) back. (KHJ's historic FM sister is most recently KRTH, ironically enough.) Garrett A. Wollman | As the Constitution endures, persons in every wollman@lcs.mit.edu | generation can invoke its principles in their own Opinions not those of| search for greater freedom. MIT, LCS, CRS, or NSA| - A. Kennedy, Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. ___ (2003) ------------------------------ From: dave@compata.com (Dave Close) Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns Date: 21 Oct 2004 20:31:07 -0700 Organization: Compata, Costa Mesa, California Neal McLain writes: >> WOC Davenport, Iowa > AM only; sister FM is WLLR(FM); sister TV is KWQC(TV). The TV station was once WOC-TV. WOC is alleged to represent "World of Chiropractic" and was originally owned by Palmer College of Chiropratic. Dave Close, Compata, Costa Mesa CA "Politics is the business of getting dave@compata.com, +1 714 434 7359 power and privilege without dhclose@alumni.caltech.edu possessing merit." - P. J. O'Rourke ------------------------------ From: jtaylor Subject: Re: Callsigns and Horse Teeth Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 21:06:26 -0300 Organization: MCI Canada News Reader Service TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to in message news:telecom23.505.2@telecom-digest.org: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Actually, no matter how many teeth you > saw in the mouth of some particular horse, there can always be > exceptions. For example, how many toes does a cat have on its paws? > Some people would say 'five', which is normally the correct > answer. But some cats have *six* toes on one (or all four) feet. The > vernacular name for such cats is 'polydex' and my first cat 'Nicholas' > (the one who was so warm and loving, not the later Nicholas who was > always hateful with humans) was that way. Nicholas had six toes on > each of his two front paws, five toes on each of his back paws. I > guess it is some genetic thing going back a million years or so. PAT] Polydactyl cats are particularly common (not just if you count them by their toes) around Boston and Halifax; must have been some good mousers in the first lot of ships to come over. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: With Nicholas it appeared to anyone who saw him that he had his 'shoes on the wrong feet'. If I held him on my lap and crossed his legs, then it appeared normal. Nicholas was *too* domesticated, *too* mild mannered. He would have not known what to do with a mouse if he had seen one, he was so well fed. Now one of my present two cats, the older one, a DLH (Domestic Long Hair) is very friendly and peaceful, but *she* knows what to do. Although she is also well fed she chases after the birds and insects in my back yard, but only rarely kills the birds if she gets hungry. Only once have I found any evidence of it: I found *half* of a sparrow in the back yard the other day and I feel certain she did it. I think she waited until it was at the bubbly fountain back there they drink from and bathe in, then she pounced. I don't mind if she gets the mice which come around now and then, and the insects (both flying or crawling) are for her, but she loves to play with them, bat them around, etc, but is never hungry enough to eat them. But she learned her lesson last summer from a wasp she tried to bat around which stung her. When I heard her squall then come limping back with her paw swollen I rushed her over to the animal hospital. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 21:36:02 -0400 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telephone Company >From: J Kelly >Subject: Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telephone Company >Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 14:55:50 -0500 >Organization: http://newsguy.com >Reply-To: jkelly@newsguy.com > Where my brother lives if the power goes out across town, or even in a > town 30 miles away (where the headend is), his cable tv and internet > die. Hard to believe that Mediacom has no UPS's or generators for the > headend or any of the line amps. I think they bought some cable co's > that were pretty messed up though. In time I suppose they will clean > them up. There isn't much you can do if the utility dies. However, you can keep your house running indefinitely using something called an "inverter". This converts DC into "modified sine wave" AC. If you connect an inverter to the battery of your car with the engine running, you can power your computer, telephones, or other small utilities until you run out of gas -- which would probably take several days idling if you start with a full tank. An inverter is rated by peak and sustained power. One that will provide about 1200 Watts sustained will be rated for about 2400 Watts peak. You can probably find one for under $140 on the internet. This is enough power to start and run your refrigerator or, possibly, the fan on your furnace. Maybe even your well pump. The power is clean enough to run your computer, phones, or other electronics. If you have more than one car, then you can have more than one inverter. The alternator on a car can produce about 400 to 600 Watts, but the battery can supply the rest of the load. Thus, you can run your refrigerator, even though it draws about 900 Watts, because it does not run continuously -- your alternator recharges your battery. ------------------------------ From: AES/newspost Subject: Re: Old Stock Quotation Things? Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 16:10:11 -0700 In article , hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) wrote: > haynes@alumni.uark.edu (Jim Haynes) wrote: >> I've been going through some patents from the 1930s. ... What >> was the application, or audience, for this kind of display? Surely brings to mind the big noisy rotating "card flip-over" mechanical displays that used to display arriving and departing flights in major airports -- maybe still do in some cases. ------------------------------ From: Jeff Spidle Subject: Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 20:49:20 -0500 Pat, a 10 Amp fuse should be sufficient. 10 Amps * 12 Volts = 120 Watts. If you only have 88 watts of lights it leaves you with some headroom for small surges and inrush current when you turn on the lights. 10A fuses are common and inexpensive. Jeff, KC9EII wrote in message news:telecom23.504.14@ telecom-digest.org: > In TELECOM Digest V23 #500, TELECOM Digest Editor > wrote (in part): >> I have two transformers: One is Radio Shack, 'clean' DC output, 13.8 >> Volts at 3 Amps. >> The other transformer is an Intermatic, model is 'Malibu 88-T' and >> it does output of 12 Volts and 1 Amp. ... Are these two power >> supplies interchangeable...? > The Radio Shack power supply is DC [direct current] at 13.8 V (the > output of a "12-volt" automotive charging system). > > The Intermatic Malibu light power pack is simply an AC transformer > with a timer on the primary (line voltage) side. I think the "1 Amp" > rating you saw was the line side draw (120 VAC 1 A). >> How do you calculate volts/amps to watts? > For DC, it's pretty simple for simple loads on a linear power supply, > which is almost certainly what the RS unit is: watts = volts x > amps. > AC calculations are trickier -- that's likely why Intermatic gives > their power consumption figures in watts (the 88-T is rated at 88 > watts). > For a rough calculation, though, you start with 120 VAC at 1 amp (120 > volt-= amps) supplying a 10:1 power transformer (120:12 volts) with a > typical transformer power factor of about 0.75 (0.733 in this case): > 120 V x 1 A = 120 VA x 0.7333 PF 88 watts (output) > When you calculate how many Malibu lights the 88-T will handle, power > factor is practically 1.0, since lamp filaments are almost pure > resistive load. > I'm not going to further flaunt how long it's been since I've done any > real AC calculations ... > Paul A Lee Sr Telecom Engineer > Rite Aid Corporation HL-IS-COM (Telecomm) V: +1 717 730-8355 > 30 Hunter Lane, Camp Hill, PA 17011-2410 F: +1 717 975-3789 > P.O. Box 3165, Harrisburg, PA 17105-3165 W: +1 717 805-6208 > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My problem is *something* caused a > short on the line which caused the Malibu 88-T to get fried. That > something was probably the all-day drizzle/rain we had the other day > in the one spot where the cord strung to the various lights was not > properly protected. I will endeavor to find/correct that problem, but, > wouldn't it be good to put an external fuse in the line to prevent > that from happening in the future? I am thinking of one of the little > glass fuses and fuse holders you can wire in series with the line. > I *assume* (correct me as needed) such a fuse in the line would stop > any short from reaching the Intermatic power supply. I would rather, > next time, blow one of the little five in a box for two dollars fuses > rather than be in bed asleep when the short develops (if in fact I > get it cured) and the Intermatic silently fries away all night until > I wake up, or worse, have my backyard shed burn down (unlikely, I > know). What are your thoughts? What *size* fuse should I use of the > little glass ones that fit in a holder from RS? Not to small to not > allow the little lights to work correctly, but not too big so it won't > do a prompt job of stopping any shorts. Ideas? PAT] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That is what someone else said to me tonight on the phone. A 10 Amp fuse, wired in series on the output side of the line should protect future Intermatic transformers in the event of a short. It should hold up for the light string but pop quickly in the event of a short. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 22:13:19 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Protect Passenger Privacy - Help Ground "Secure Flight" EFFector Vol. 17, No. 39 October 21, 2004 donna@eff.org A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ISSN 1062-9424 In the 310th Issue of EFFector: * Protect Passenger Privacy - Help Ground "Secure Flight" * California Poll Workers Told to Withhold Information from Voters * Diebold Coughs Up Cash in Copyright Case * EFF to Trusted Computing Group: Preserve Meaningful Control for Computer Owners * EFF Seeks Dynamic, Motivated Membership Coordinator * MiniLinks (15): Indymedia Protests Seizure of Servers * Administrivia http://www.eff.org/effector/17/39.php ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 22:13:28 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: EPIC Alert 11.20 ======================================================================= E P I C A l e r t ======================================================================= Volume 11.20 October 21, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Published by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) Washington, D.C. http://www.epic.org/alert/EPIC_Alert_11.20.html ====================================================================== Table of Contents ====================================================================== [1] FBI Backs Down in EPIC Lawsuit for Release of Secure Flight Info [2] Award Winners Question Science Funding for Mass Surveillance [3] Ethics Committee Reprimands Congressman For Misleading Agency [4] Federal Agency Approves RFID Implant for Health Care Use [5] Foreign Government Seizes Indymedia Servers in UK [6] News in Brief [7] EPIC Bookstore: The Identity Theft Protection Guide [8] Upcoming Conferences and Events http://www.epic.org/alert/EPIC_Alert_11.20.html ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Bell System Competition: Private Telephone Networks Date: 21 Oct 2004 21:16:47 -0700 It is often said that the old Bell System was a strict monopoly on telephone service. That wasn't 100% true. Many large organizations had their own internal telephone systems that were not Bell supplied -- those companies chose to lease/buy their systems from someone else rather than Bell. AFAIK, those systems were internal only and could not connect to the outside Bell network, but their internal network could be quite large. In an old Bell Telephone employees magazine, they had an article about that. They had a picture of a businessman with two phones on his desk and the story described how that arrangement was costing the Bell System lost business. They wanted employees upon seeing that to encourage the customer to go 100% Bell. I wonder what the actual cost differentials were between self- ownership and self-maintenance (which included capitalization) vs. leasing from Bell. I also wonder how much effort and thought Bell gave to that competition -- did they ever consider lowering their rates or selling equipment for such large installations? In small offices, there was competition between privately purchased intercoms between boss and staff vs. key systems with intercom lines. In old movies the Boss always had an intercom box on his desk in which he buzzed in staff, but I've never seen that. Most big key systems I've seen had dial intercoms or push button signal buzzers. I presume large organizations had their own because it was cheaper to own and maintain their system than lease it from Bell, and having outside connectivity wasn't important. Indeed, sometimes companies did NOT want outside connections for internal phones to avoid employees wasting time on the phone on personal calls. In such facilities, offices that had contact with the public would have double phones, but most locations would have only an internal phone. Private networks were easy to spot since, esp in later years, the private phone would be an AE 40 with a numeric-only dial with the silvery bands compared to a Bell 500 set. The installations I'm aware of tended to phase out in the 1980s because the equipment/wiring got old and tougher to maintain. I suspect Bell Centrex rates for multiple locations became more attractive at the same time. I also know some large installations, such as large hospitals, that were 100% Bell. At least one Bell employee (sometimes more) was assigned to the property full time to handle repairs and changes. Despite the advantage of outside connectivity, some phones were restricted and not allowed outside connections. Indeed, it was quite common on many Bell PBX systems to restrict stations to making internal calls only, and receiving calls were screened by the operator based on company policy. Pay phones were liberally provided for employees to make their personal calls. (I remember office buildings having a few pay phones on every floor plus a big bank in the lobby, factories had pay phone near restrooms; that's no more). Some large network examples: City transportation company: A large dial system connecting all subway-el stations, offices, shops, and key street locations. City govt: A large dial system connecting police and fire stations and streetside call boxes and other affiliates (ie hospitals). For example, a hospital emerg room had a city PAX phone. Schools: Internally connecting classrooms with the school offices. Large factory plants: connecting various shops and offices. Railroads: These were very large networks, connecting stations, headquarters, shops, offices and wayside stations. These was particularly important since otherwise toll charges would be incurred. Railroads had their own signal depts, so they could easily maintain a phone system. Wayside phones were often local battery (crank), and many remained in service through the 1980s. Railroads also had internal Teletype networks. Additional observations/comments welcome. [public replies, please] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When I was growing up, the Standard Oil Company refinery in Whiting, Indiana had an independent network like that, called 'Stanotel'. Stanotel went everywhere in the USA that Standard Oil went and the thing I thought was odd was that although it was fully automatic (a PAX type thing, using the Automatic Electric type phones you mentioned), when one dialed a '9' to get an outside line in Whiting, because Whiting was still a manual exchange (it would not be dialable as 219-659 for several more years), after you dialed '9' for an outside line, you then had to sit there and wait for the Whiting operator and pass her the number you wanted to call. Then after Whiting cut to dial, as 219-659 soon thereafter Stanotel was changed over to Illinois Bell centrex as 219-484, while retaining all the features of the old Stanotel network. PAT] ------------------------------ From: marcel_riley@yahoo.com (Marcel Riley) Subject: Partners Wanted Date: 21 Oct 2004 21:29:35 -0700 I am exploring starting a business to offer services to companies to install/repair/etc. their business Nortel systems. I am looking for partners who knows how to service Norstar and MEridian PBXs. Also, I would like to ask people who are engaged in this type of work to offer their perspective: Pros, cons, etc. Let me know if you are interested. Marcel Riley ------------------------------ 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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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 #506 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Oct 22 18:08:53 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9MM8qE15292; Fri, 22 Oct 2004 18:08:53 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 18:08:53 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410222208.i9MM8qE15292@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 #507 TELECOM Digest Fri, 22 Oct 2004 18:09:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 507 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Boston's Big Rebound Makes a Winner of Fox, Too (Monty Solomon) Statewide Medical Records Planned (Monty Solomon) San Francisco Sets Goal of Free Citywide WiFi (Lisa Minter) 11-Sept Police Widow Gets Domain-Cyberburned (Danny Burstein) What Happened to Channel 1? (Andrea) Re: Who Carries TV Signals and Long Distance -- Today? (Wesrock@aol.com) Re: Who Carries TV Signals and Long Distance -- Today? (Jim Haynes) Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer (Bit Twister) Re: Callsigns and Horse Teeth (Tony Pelliccio) Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Phone Company (T. Pelliccio) Re: AMTRAK (was Re: Last, Sad Laugh! Nice Place to Work!) (T. Pelliccio) Re: AMTRAK (was Re: Last, Sad Laugh! Nice Place to Work!) (John Covert) Re: 'K' v. 'W' Televison Call Signs (Linc Madison) Re: Yet Another Telco Tax Proposed (Tony Pelliccio) Re: Bell System Competition: Private Telephone Networks (Jim Haynes) Re: Illinois Death Row is Empty Today (Carl Moore) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 13:24:59 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Boston's Big Rebound Makes a Winner of Fox, Too By RICHARD SANDOMIR It was the game that wasn't supposed to be televised because it wasn't supposed to happen. But you have to think that Fox was pleased and astonished that the Boston Red Sox had done the impossible in postseason: they had forced a seventh game after losing the first three of the American League Championship Series to the Yankees. Then the Red Sox took it one step further last night, beating the Yankees, 10-3. For Fox, it's too bad that Yankees-Red Sox league championship series aren't best-of-nine affairs. A ninth game might approach Super Bowl ratings levels. Game 6 produced a 15.6 Nielsen rating, or 25.1 million viewers, which made it the highest-rated nondecisive league championship series game in 13 years, Fox said, in spin that would gladden a break dancer. Even more fortunate for Fox is the type of television rabidity in the Boston market: 70 percent of those tuned to televisions in the center of Red Sox Nation were watching Game 6 (compared with 44 percent among New Yorkers). The last time the Red Sox were in the World Series -- 18 years ago against the Mets -- they generated a 28.6 rating, the best performance since 1981. Fox might now produce a new reality show: "My Big Fat Obnoxious Idiots." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/21/sports/baseball/21tv.html ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 01:34:51 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Statewide Medical Records Planned Blue Cross to give $50m to boost electronic project By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Massachusetts plans to spend about $50 million to electronically link doctors, hospitals, and other healthcare providers in three Massachusetts communities, allowing them to share and access patients' medical records. Blue Cross and more than 25 other insurers, hospitals, doctors and medical industry groups have formed a nonprofit organization with the goal of building a statewide electronic medical record system. Blue Cross, which has earned record profits in recent years, said it will donate $50 million to test the project next year in three cities or towns. Doctors who study medical errors and quality of care believe electronic medical records will substantially improve healthcare. Done right, they allow doctors spread out in various offices and hospitals to call up a patient's complete medical history, allergies, test results and prescriptions -- even though many different physicians have treated and tested the patient. These systems also can send doctors alerts to follow up on negative test results with further testing and warn them when they prescribe a drug to which a patient is allergic. Right now, most doctors keep patients' records on paper in filing cabinets. Many don't have access to records when their patients received treatment from another doctor. Even hospitals and doctors groups that have sophisticated electronic medical records can look up only their own records but generally can't see their patients' test results and treatment from other hospitals and doctors. http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2004/10/21/statewide_medical_records_planned/ ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: San Francisco Sets Goal of Free Citywide WiFi Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 10:40:45 EDT SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom set a goal on Thursday of providing free wireless Internet activity in his city that sees itself as a vanguard of the Internet revolution. "We will not stop until every San Franciscan has access to free wireless Internet service," he said in his annual state of the city address. "These technologies will connect our residents to the skills and the jobs of the new economy." "No San Franciscan should be without a computer and a broadband connection." He said the city had already made free WiFi service available at Union Square, a central shopping and tourist hub, and would add access to several other sections of the city including Civic Center around City Hall. The stadium where the San Francisco Giants baseball team plays also offers WiFi, a wireless technology that allows a computer with a special modem to connect to the Internet. Other cities have started setting up large areas of WiFi coverage, including San Jose in Silicon Valley and parts of Long Beach, California. Copyright 2004 Reuters Limited. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Danny Burstein Subject: 11-Sept Police Widow Gets Domain-Cyberburned Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 02:59:28 -0400 Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC "The widow of a hero NYPD Emergency Service detective killed on 9/11 created a Web site as a loving tribute to her husband -- only to have it snapped up by a heartless Internet company that forced her to fork over $800 to buy it back, The Post has learned. "Kathy Vigiano's gut-wrenching ordeal began in January when she discovered that her husband Joseph's memorial Web site -- which she filled with personal photos and an emotional letter from one of their sons -- had been replaced by ads for penile-enlargement tools, sexual-performance drugs and Viagra... http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/30859.htm _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The very same people did that to our internet-history.org site as well. If you type in http://internet-history.org you get the very same preposterous ads. And of course, the guy wants to sell that one also. I **thought** there were laws against that sort of cybersquatting, but I guess that only pertains for large commercial web sites. Any damn fool would know that 'internet history' was discussed there on the site which was the property of the Internet Historical Society, which is *my* name, and it was a running site for three or four years. Yet, that moron simply walked away with it, got the org registrar to give it to him I guess. I had asked John Levine to take it away from the person and give it back to me. John won't do it. I thought he was one of the registrars for .org ... so I know how this poor lady feels now as well. But I can tell you *I* am not going to pay his blackmail ransom demand. If I had any money I would just sue the damn registrar who took it from me and gave it to him (I understand he is in some country in Europe. The lady should not have paid anything either, just immediatly filed suit against the registrar she had used when she first set up the site and done it that way. Of course, I have no money to pay any lawyers to help me, so that leaves me and internet-history.org high and dry. Maybe some attorney doing pro-bono work will be able to get our site back. If people would quit paying good money to these charlatans who steal the names that netizens use for their web sites, then they would go out of business. PAT] ------------------------------ From: andrea8090@gmail.com (Andrea) Subject: What Happened to Channel 1? Date: 22 Oct 2004 09:47:13 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Does anyone know the real reason American TVs don't utilize channel 1? I've read many conflicting theories. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have always heard that Channel 1 was occupying frequencies used in the VHF-low area (30-50 mc band) and that *originally* (1940's) some of that spectrum was going to be taken away from the users of VHF-low band radio and given to television, but many people protested it, so rather than re-align the television channels to move Channel 1 a bit further up, the FCC simply abandoned it for television use. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Wesrock@aol.com Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 16:32:15 EDT Subject: Who Carries TV Signals and Long Distance -- Today? In a message dated 21 Oct 2004 11:36:19 -0700, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) writes: > In 1970 AT&T descriptions, long distance routing had a triangle > design. That is, most calls were sent to a toll center for subsequent > routing. However, local exchanges had their own links to some nearby > exchanges. For example, New York City to Newark NJ is "long distance" > since it crosses states and LATA boundaries, but is physically so > close calls be carried over plain copper interoffice trunks. Are such > close LD calls still sent that way? It would seem strange to bounce > 10 mile call off of a satellite. It is not inherently true that a call that crosses state boundaries and LATA boundaries is long distance. (And a call of 10 miles even then was usually carried on a carrier system, as copper for thousands of trunks was prohibitively expensive.) Many local exchanges and calling areas cross state lines and LATA boundaries. A notable example is the Kansas City, Mo.-Kan. metropolitan exchange. Other well known ones include Texarkana, Ark.-Tex. (that's the post office name, too ... the post office sits astride the state line); Fort Smith, Ark. (a lot of it is in Oklahoma); Texhoma, Okla.-Tex. (the elementary school is in one state, the high school in the other); and one with which Pat is no doubt well familiar, Coffeyville, Kan.-South Coffeyville, Okla. Wes Leatherock wesrock@aol.com ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Who Carries TV Signals and Long Distance Today? Reply-To: jhaynes@alumni.uark.edu Organization: University of Arkansas Alumni From: haynes@alumni.uark.edu (Jim Haynes) Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 16:45:31 GMT A related question: Western Union built a transcontinental microwave network, but I guess they never succeeded in capturing any TV business. So they had more bandwidth than needed for the telegraph business. Perhaps they couldn't get the TV business because their microwave system didn't go to enough places. Had they been so inclined, I guess they could have done what MCI did and use their microwave capacity to compete with AT&T for private line service on the heavily traveled routes. MCI had to go through protracted legal battles to get AT&T to connect their customers to their offices. Perhaps W.U. didn't have the stomach or funds to take on that kind of fight. Or perhaps W.U. sided with AT&T, they both being members of the "club" of common carriers and intending to keep MCI or anyone else from joining the club. Comments, anyone? jhhaynes at earthlink dot net ------------------------------ From: Bit Twister Subject: Re: Help Me Identify/Repair/Replace a Power Transformer Organization: home user Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 14:04:20 GMT On Thu, 21 Oct 2004 20:49:20 -0500, Jeff Spidle wrote: > Pat, a 10 Amp fuse should be sufficient. 10 Amps * 12 Volts = 120 > Watts. If you only have 88 watts of lights it leaves you with some > headroom for small surges and inrush current when you turn on the > lights. 10A fuses are common and inexpensive. And getting a slow blow fuse will help that pesky startup surge. ------------------------------ From: kd1s@yahoo.com (Tony Pelliccio) Subject: Re: Callsigns and Horse Teeth Date: 22 Oct 2004 07:58:33 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com jtaylor wrote in message news:: > TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to in message > news:telecom23.505.2@telecom-digest.org: >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Actually, no matter how many teeth you >> saw in the mouth of some particular horse, there can always be >> exceptions. For example, how many toes does a cat have on its paws? >> Some people would say 'five', which is normally the correct >> answer. But some cats have *six* toes on one (or all four) feet. The >> vernacular name for such cats is 'polydex' and my first cat 'Nicholas' >> (the one who was so warm and loving, not the later Nicholas who was >> always hateful with humans) was that way. Nicholas had six toes on >> each of his two front paws, five toes on each of his back paws. I >> guess it is some genetic thing going back a million years or so. PAT] > Polydactyl cats are particularly common (not just if you count them by > their toes) around Boston and Halifax; must have been some good > mousers in the first lot of ships to come over. Throughout New England actually. I've got a very heavy polydactyl who knows he should pounce on a mouse but then plays around until he kills it and then doesn't know what to do with it. In his case he weighs in at close to 30 lbs. so it is a little bit hard to pounce when you are that large. Thing is, he's a big cat. There is also a strong link between the Maine Coon and polydactylism, and anyone who knows cats knows that Maine Coons are HUGE cats. As to mousing ability, the champion at my home is a 6.5lb dsh female. She likes to catch them, gut them and then hide them so she can trot them out later. ------------------------------ From: kd1s@yahoo.com (Tony Pelliccio) Subject: Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telephone Company Date: 22 Oct 2004 08:00:17 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Marcus Didius Falco wrote in message news:: >> From: J Kelly >> Subject: Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telephone Company >> Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 14:55:50 -0500 >> Organization: http://newsguy.com >> Reply-To: jkelly@newsguy.com >> Where my brother lives if the power goes out across town, or even in a >> town 30 miles away (where the headend is), his cable tv and internet >> die. Hard to believe that Mediacom has no UPS's or generators for the >> headend or any of the line amps. I think they bought some cable co's >> that were pretty messed up though. In time I suppose they will clean >> them up. > There isn't much you can do if the utility dies. However, you can keep > your house running indefinitely using something called an "inverter". > This converts DC into "modified sine wave" AC. If you connect an > inverter to the battery of your car with the engine running, you can > power your computer, telephones, or other small utilities until you > run out of gas -- which would probably take several days idling if you > start with a full tank. > An inverter is rated by peak and sustained power. One that will > provide about 1200 Watts sustained will be rated for about 2400 Watts > peak. You can probably find one for under $140 on the internet. This > is enough power to start and run your refrigerator or, possibly, the > fan on your furnace. Maybe even your well pump. > The power is clean enough to run your computer, phones, or other > electronics. > If you have more than one car, then you can have more than one > inverter. The alternator on a car can produce about 400 to 600 Watts, > but the battery can supply the rest of the load. Thus, you can run > your refrigerator, even though it draws about 900 Watts, because it > does not run continuously -- your alternator recharges your battery. Some inverters are better than others. If the wave is too square many pieces of electronic gear will complain. So stay away from cheap inverters. A UPS and a generator are the best way to go. ------------------------------ From: kd1s@yahoo.com (Tony Pelliccio) Subject: Re: AMTRAK (was Re: Last, Sad Laugh! A Nice Place to Work!) Date: 22 Oct 2004 08:48:54 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com joel@exc.com (Dr. Joel M. Hoffman) wrote in message news:: >> doable, if a bit of a long day. It strikes me that one of our biggest >> voluntary economic disadvantages is our failure to maintain and >> improve a strong rail infrastructure. > I'm sure you can find the full story on-line without much trouble. > The short version is that the U.S.'s lack of a strong rail > infrastructure is, in fact, by design. Detroit auto manufacturers and > the truck-driver unions combined to dismantle the rail network that > existed in this country and to pour money into building motorways > instead of railways. The result is that we have great highways in the > U.S. and not nearly as much rail as we used to (and terrible train > service on what's left). Don't forget the oil industry. Imagine what would happen to demand had we a good rail infrastructure. Right now we're paying a heavy price for those great highways. Rhode Island has some of the worst roads, bridges and highways in the country and Masschusetts isn't far behind. What amazes me is that we still buy into the arguments put forth by auto manufacturers, oil companies etc. A recent study indicated that Rhode Island needs to widen I-95 in the southern part of the state and all of I-295. At the same time, there are plans to build sidings for rail stations in Warwick, RI in the immediate future, and then Wickford and Westerley in the longer term. It would make much more sense to drop commuter rail in. The MBTA has actually committed to running their commuter lines as far as Warwick. That would make TF Green airport an intermodal airport as the train station is < 1500 feet from the main entrance. The point of my statement is that widening the highways in those areas won't help. If they're going to wide anything they should do it in the metro ring where traffic always backs up. The other point is that we should make use of commuter rail, yes it's more expensive up front but over the long term it might put off having to expand highways. If we were to tax gasoline to the point where it would be adequate to maintain the roads we'd have riots on our hands. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 16:28:22 -0400 (EDT) From: John R. Covert Subject: Re: AMTRAK (was Re: Last, Sad Laugh! A Nice Place to Work!) Mark Crispin wrote: > Prior to [the fall of the wall], the U-Bahn was run by West Berlin > authorities and the S-Bahn by East Berlin authorities. Actually, the S-Bahn was run by East German authorities, specifically by the Deutsche Reichsbahn, which ran the long-distance trains in East Germany. The Deutsche Bundesbahn and Reichsbahn have now merged to form the Deutsche Bahn, which now runs the Berlin S-Bahn. Up until the wall was built, the U-Bahn was a single network in both the east and the west. After the wall was built, the four U-Bahn lines which crossed between East and West were modified. Two of them were split and did not cross the wall, one of them (U8) passed through six locked and patrolled stations (including the major station at Alexanderplatz) without stopping, and one of them (U6) passed through four of five stations without stopping, and made a stop in a hermetically sealed portion of the Friedrichstr station, where it was possible to transfer to three S-Bahn lines serving the west. > The S-Bahn was entirely streetcars in West Berlin, and generally avoided. Not one bit of the S-Bahn in Berlin is or was ever streetcars. All of it operated directly on rails of the Deutsche Reichsbahn (now Deutsche Bahn) completely within the right-of-way and through the same stations as the long-distance trains (although the long distance trains would not stop at all of the stations). By the mid-80s, the avoidance of what was left of the West Berlin portion of the S-Bahn had pretty much ended, with the incorporation of the S-Bahn into the same fare system as the rest of the West Berlin transit system. (I've visited Berlin on over a dozen separate occasions between 1965 and 2001 and am VERY familiar with the transit systems there and their history.) > In Munich, the S-Bahn is a high-speed line from the suburbs into > downtown, but only one or two stops in town No, the S-Bahn stops at all of the following in-town stations: Westkreuz, Pasing, Laim, Donnersbergerbruecke, Hackerbruecke, Hauptbahnhof, Karlsplatz (Stachus), Marienplatz, Isartor, Rosenheimer Platz, Ostbahnhof, Leuchtenbergring, Untersbergstr, Giesing, Heimeranplatz, Harras, and several other stations. In Munich, the Deutsche Bundesbahn intercity rail system did not provide quite the coverage of the inner city that is the case in Berlin and Hamburg, and the S-Bahn was not fully developed until a major east-west tunnel under the center of the city was built to connect Hauptbahnhof (a terminus like GCT rather than a through station like Penn) with Ostbahnhof. A similar tunnel was built in Frankfurt to extend the S-Bahn from Hauptbahnhof under the city center. > there definitely were streetcars in the Vienna ring which were > part of the S-Bahn system Vienna does have streetcars, but they have nothing to do with the S-Bahn other than the fact that since 1984 there has been a fare union among the commuter rail, bus, streetcar, and U-Bahn systems. As in Germany, the S-Bahn is operated by the national long-distance rail system (the OeBB). There is a picture of some of the Vienna S-Bahn trains at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baureihe_4020 -- and you can see that they are operating as full-size rail cars out of big train stations. /john ------------------------------ Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 14:55:43 -0700 From: Linc Madison Organization: California resident; nospam; no unsolicited e-mail allowed I grew up in Dallas, Texas, with WRR-FM and WRR-AM (now KAAM-AM), WBAP-AM and WBAP-TV (now KXAS-TV), WFAA-AM and WFAA-TV, and, down in San Antonio, WOAI-AM and -TV. I then moved near Philadelphia and watched KYW-TV. What I find rather more interesting are situations where stations sharing the same callsign are in completely different metropolitan areas. For example, KCBS-TV is in Los Angeles, but KCBS-AM is in San Francisco. Linc Madison * San Francisco, California * lincmad@suespammers.org * primary e-mail: Telecom at LincMad dot com All U.S. and California anti-spam laws apply, incl. CA BPC 17538.45(c) This text constitutes actual notice as required in BPC 17538.45(f)(3). DO NOT SEND UNSOLICITED E-MAIL TO THIS ADDRESS. You have been warned. ------------------------------ From: kd1s@yahoo.com (Tony Pelliccio) Subject: Re: Yet Another Telco Tax Proposed Date: 22 Oct 2004 09:07:09 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Danny Burstein wrote in message news:: > In the continuing tradition of government that try to offload taxes > onto third parties (that way they're not "raising taxes", you see ...) > California has a very real problem with medical costs. The hospitals > and other medical providers provide services, but don't take in > anywhere near as much money as they claim to be expending. > Hospital and medical finances are such a huge mess they put Enron to > shame. Normally this isn't a telecom issue but ... > The telco point: The usual folk have pushed forward a fee on telco > services to cover the shortfall. Quoting from a VOA clip: > "A voter initiative that Doctor Higgins calls a "Band-Aid" could > provide a short-term fix, and he supports the measure. Appearing > on the November 2nd ballot as Proposition 67, it would raise 500 > million dollars a year by adding a three-percent surcharge to the > cost for telephone calls made in California. > To which the curmodgeons retort: > > "It's the wrong solution for a real problem. This is a phone tax. > This is a tax on a service that has absolutely nothing to do with > emergency medical care whatsoever. It does have some relation. People use the telephone to call the emergency services which then deliver them to the hospital. But I think too many other taxes have been loaded onto phone bills in recent years. In essence it is nickle and diming us to death. Now my medical system rant. There are several reasons why medical services have gotten so expensive and they have to do with supply and demand. Many more people seek medical attention now than they did years ago, but infrastructure improves glacially and so cannot keep up. The other part of my rant is insurance and billing companies. They just add two more layers of fees to medical services, one cut for the insurer and another for the billing company. Dismantle that mess and we might see costs come down. ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Bell System Competition: Private Telephone Networks Reply-To: jhaynes@alumni.uark.edu Organization: University of Arkansas Alumni From: haynes@alumni.uark.edu (Jim Haynes) Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 16:59:21 GMT Blurring the picture even further, there were big companies that had their own telephone systems, but using lines leased from Bell and connecting with the Bell public system. When I worked for G.E. circa 1967 there was such a system -- I don't remember now what the name of it was -- where we could dial a certain prefix and then dial most other G.E. locations without going through the public switched network. Big companies also had their own teletypewriter networks, usually with lines, equipment and maintenance furnished by Bell or W.U. on a lease basis. The airlines had these, and in addition the ability to exchange messages with other airlines. That was a big thing in the days of regulated air transportation when a trip from here to there often required flying on two or more airlines. I remember too that big department stores had their own internal telephone systems with equipment from independent telephone suppliers. Only a few employees were considered to need phones for both the internal and external phone networks. jhhaynes at earthlink dot net ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 13:08:18 EDT From: Carl Moore Subject: Re: Illinois Death Row is Empty Today This remark by you was in Jan. 2003: > Police around Chicago area are today gunning for the governor, to say > the least. They hate him. Police do not like DNA testing either, > except when the results go the way they want. And occasionally I hear of remarks "just the truth/facts" (remember "just the facts" from the fictitious Sgt. Joe Friday, played by Jack Webb in the "Dragnet" TV series?). Sigh. (I have watched many forensics programs.) [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: There is a new governor in Illinois in the past year. And where did I read it the other day, the Boston Globe perhaps? ... it seems some state passed a new law allowing prisoners to petition to get a DNA test which could possibly prove their innocence, but the prosecutor had to okay the test before the prisoners could receive it or benefit from it. Since prosecutors are usually just rubber stamps for police, you know the likelyhood of a prosecutor agreeing to such a test is very slight unless it was a case where the heat was on so badly. In Chicago, police get in trouble now and then, (arson, drug sales and use, assault, rape, etc) but the *only time* anything is ever done about it is when the case becomes *so* public and the public gets *so* stirred up about it and the newspapers get so up in arms about it, that the prosecutor has to act. So it does not surprise me that they play games with DNA testing if they can. I don't know anything about reading/interpreting those tests, do you? A recent case (Wes Leatherock knows about it as do most folks in Oklahoma) had a forensics technician (Joyce someone) confess to deliberatly screwing up the results of various scientific tests performed as part of police investigations. Any number of guys went to prison, what the hell, one or two may have been executed. Joyce said the police told her how they wanted the tests to turn out, and who was she, she whimpered, to not follow orders from the brave, courageous police officers who told her what to do. She was just following orders. I don't know what ever became of her. The Tulsa World Newspaper raised so much hell about it they had to sacrifice her, I know that much. Wes, how did that ever turn out? I know a lot of the guys in prison who had been victimized by her 'tests' wanted to be retested or set free. PAT] ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #507 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sat Oct 23 00:05:48 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9N45mH18563; Sat, 23 Oct 2004 00:05:48 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 00:05:48 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410230405.i9N45mH18563@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 #508 TELECOM Digest Sat, 23 Oct 2004 00:06:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 508 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: Bell System Competition: Private Telephone Networks (Wesrock@aol) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (Phil Stripling) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (Michael Muderick) Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Phone (Marcus Didius Falco) Re: K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (Wesrock@aol.com) Re: Who Carries TV Signals and Long Distance -- Today? (John Levine) Home Phones Face Uncertain Future (Lisa Minter) Re: 11-Sept Police Widow Gets Domain-Cyberburned (Gene S. Berkowitz) 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: Wesrock@aol.com Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 20:58:09 EDT Subject: Re: Bell System Competition: Private Telephone Networks In a message dated 21 Oct 2004 21:16:47 -0700, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) writes: > It is often said that the old Bell System was a strict monopoly on > telephone service. That wasn't 100% true. Many large organizations > had their own internal telephone systems that were not Bell supplied -- > those companies chose to lease/buy their systems from someone else > rather than Bell. AFAIK, those systems were internal only and could > not connect to the outside Bell network, but their internal network > could be quite large. One company with plants on the Gulf Coast figured it could save a great deal of money by a private PBX, but chose to use Bell service because of the Bell System's ability to restore service after a hurricane. These adjacent plants were served by a 5-digit PBX and the company maintained its own radar installations from the Sabine River to Brownsville. This radar network was more extensive than the Weather Bureau's at the time and the telco often consulted with the company as to what it's radar showed when a hurricane was in the offing. > In an old Bell Telephone employees magazine, they had an article about > that. They had a picture of a businessman with two phones on his desk > and the story described how that arrangement was costing the Bell > System lost business. They wanted employees upon seeing that to > encourage the customer to go 100% Bell. > I wonder what the actual cost differentials were between self- > ownership and self-maintenance (which included capitalization) > vs. leasing from Bell. I also wonder how much effort and thought Bell > gave to that competition -- did they ever consider lowering their > rates or selling equipment for such large installations? The Bell companies were heavily regulated and required to serve all comers at uniform rates. There were anti-trust restrictions on the sale of Western Electric equipment to other than telephone companies/ > Private networks were easy to spot since, esp in later years, the > private phone would be an AE 40 with a numeric-only dial with the > silvery bands compared to a Bell 500 set. This was not universally true, in fact may not have been common at all in later years, since independent manufactures, including A.E., made phones similar or identical to W.E. phone. What you describe was true, however, in many older Montgomery Ward retail stores, complete with two telephones at counters, one the A.E. set you describe, the other a Bell phone, not necessarily a 500 set. Newer stores had all Bell phones without the duplication. > Railroads: These were very large networks, connecting stations, > headquarters, shops, offices and wayside stations. These was > particularly important since otherwise toll charges would be incurred. > Railroads had their own signal depts, so they could easily maintain a > phone system. Wayside phones were often local battery (crank), and > many remained in service through the 1980s. Railroads also had > internal Teletype networks. Railroads and pipeline companies were "right-of-way" companies and could interconnect with Bell pretty much without restriction, including such cases as using their own lines to extend to what otherwise would have been FCO locations. Their PBXs usually had incoming and outgoing Bell trunks that could dial and be dialed and connected with the internal communications system, even for intercity communications. Wes Leatherock wesrock@aol.com ------------------------------ From: Phil Stripling Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? Date: 22 Oct 2004 16:11:30 -0700 Organization: Legal Assistance on the Web andrea8090@gmail.com (Andrea) writes: > Does anyone know the real reason American TVs don't utilize channel 1? > I've read many conflicting theories. See: http://members.aol.com/jeff560/tvch1.html http://www.discovery.com/area/skinnyon/skinnyon971031/skinnyon.html http://anarc.org/wtfda/channel1.htm http://www.tech-notes.tv/History&Trivia/Channel%20One/Channel_1.htm Google is your friend. :-> Philip Stripling | email to the replyto address is presumed Legal Assistance on the Web | spam and read later. email to philip@ http://www.PhilipStripling.com/ | my domain is read daily. ------------------------------ From: Michael Muderick Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 20:32:46 -0400 Channel 1 did appear on some early tv's. I have an RCA TK-630 Eyewitness television that has Channel 1. I think it was given back to government. mm ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 18:44:11 -0400 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telephone Company kd1s@yahoo.com (Tony Pelliccio) wrote about Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telephone Company on 22 Oct 2004 08:00:17 -0700 > Marcus Didius Falco wrote in message > news:: >>> From: J Kelly >>> Subject: Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telephone Company >>> Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 14:55:50 -0500 >>> Organization: http://newsguy.com >>> Reply-To: jkelly@newsguy.com >>> Where my brother lives if the power goes out across town, or even in a >>> town 30 miles away (where the headend is), his cable tv and internet >>> die. Hard to believe that Mediacom has no UPS's or generators for the >>> headend or any of the line amps. I think they bought some cable co's >>> that were pretty messed up though. In time I suppose they will clean >>> them up. >> There isn't much you can do if the utility dies. However, you can keep >> your house running indefinitely using something called an "inverter". >> This converts DC into "modified sine wave" AC. If you connect an >> inverter to the battery of your car with the engine running, you can >> power your computer, telephones, or other small utilities until you >> run out of gas -- which would probably take several days idling if you >> start with a full tank. >> An inverter is rated by peak and sustained power. One that will >> provide about 1200 Watts sustained will be rated for about 2400 Watts >> peak. You can probably find one for under $140 on the internet. This >> is enough power to start and run your refrigerator or, possibly, the >> fan on your furnace. Maybe even your well pump. >> The power is clean enough to run your computer, phones, or other >> electronics. >> If you have more than one car, then you can have more than one >> inverter. The alternator on a car can produce about 400 to 600 Watts, >> but the battery can supply the rest of the load. Thus, you can run >> your refrigerator, even though it draws about 900 Watts, because it >> does not run continuously -- your alternator recharges your battery. > Some inverters are better than others. If the wave is too square many > pieces of electronic gear will complain. > So stay away from cheap inverters. A UPS and a generator are the best > way to go. An inverter costs $100 to $150 and sits in a drawer until you need it. A generator costs $1000 to $5000 and requires regular maintenance if it's going to start when needed. Even if you have to try several inverters to get one that will work your critical equipment (much of which will NOT be electronic -- the real urgent stuff for most people are the refrigerator in summer and the furnace in winter), you're way ahead of the game financially. This is especially true if you expect long blackouts only a few times per decade. (For most people a blackout of a few hours is not a problem.) A UPS is always a good idea. However, most of them have only enough reserve capacity to allow an orderly shutdown (that is, about a half hour or less, and don't try to run your laser printer). ------------------------------ From: Wesrock@aol.com Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 21:59:51 EDT Subject: Re: K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns In a message dated Fri, 22 Oct 2004 14:55:43 -0700, Linc Madison writes: > I grew up in Dallas, Texas, with WRR-FM and WRR-AM (now KAAM-AM), > WBAP-AM and WBAP-TV (now KXAS-TV), WFAA-AM and WFAA-TV, and, down in > San Antonio, WOAI-AM and -TV. Remember when stations had locally produced children's shows? My son watched the "Waste Basket Animal Players" on WBAP-TV (note the initial letters of the program's name). Then we moved to Austin, where there was one TV station -- KTBC-TV, I believe it was, licensed to The L.B.J. Company. Wes Leatherock wesrock@aol.com ------------------------------ Date: 23 Oct 2004 02:17:59 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: Who Carries TV Signals and Long Distance -- Today? Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA >> For example, New York City to Newark NJ is "long distance" >> since it crosses states and LATA boundaries, but is physically so >> close calls be carried over plain copper interoffice trunks. Are such >> close LD calls still sent that way? It would seem strange to bounce >> 10 mile call off of a satellite. > It is not inherently true that a call that crosses state > boundaries and LATA boundaries is long distance. That's true. LATA boundaries only matter for calls that were already long distance. Local calling areas cross state and LATA boundaries all over the country, and in a few areas (as often noted here in the past) even international boundaries. With respect to the specific case of calls between New York and Newark, that's always been a toll call, but NY Tel and NJ Bell got a special waiver at the time of the Bell breakup that let them continue to carry toll traffic between NYC and the adjacent part of NJ. Once equal access came in, callers could use 10NYT or 10NJB to select them as the carrier for those calls. There was a similar waiver between Philadelphia and nearby southern NJ, slightly more confusing since Phila to Camden was a local call, but Phila to slightly more distant towns like Cherry Hill was toll. Now that all of the Bells have long distance authority, the waivers are irrelevant. I don't think anyone used satellite for much domestic traffic other than SBS which didn't last very long. Satellites are great for broadcast but lousy for point to point unless one of the points is the top of a mountain or otherwise inaccessible. NY to NJ was doubtless carrier and now fiber, most likely run through some of the rail tunnels underneath the Hudson. Regards, John Levine johnl@iecc.com Primary Perpetrator of The Internet for Dummies, Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor "I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 02:35:00 +0000 Nokia in the UK seems to feel landline phones will be gone entirely in the next few years, at least in many countries, replaced by cellular phones. Check out this link: The fixed line phone in the home could soon disappear, a study by mobile firm Nokia shows. < http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/technology/3762844.stm > ------------------------------ From: Gene S. Berkowitz Subject: Re: 11-Sept Police Widow Gets Domain-Cyberburned Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 22:49:11 -0400 In article , dannyb@panix.com says: > "The widow of a hero NYPD Emergency Service detective killed on 9/11 > created a Web site as a loving tribute to her husband -- only to have > it snapped up by a heartless Internet company that forced her to fork > over $800 to buy it back, The Post has learned. > "Kathy Vigiano's gut-wrenching ordeal began in January when she > discovered that her husband Joseph's memorial Web site -- which she > filled with personal photos and an emotional letter from one of their > sons -- had been replaced by ads for penile-enlargement tools, > sexual-performance drugs and Viagra... > http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/30859.htm > _____________________________________________________ > Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key > dannyb@panix.com > [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The very same people did that to our > internet-history.org site as well. If you type in > http://internet-history.org you get the very same preposterous ads. > And of course, the guy wants to sell that one also. I **thought** > there were laws against that sort of cybersquatting, but I guess > that only pertains for large commercial web sites. Any damn fool > would know that 'internet history' was discussed there on the site > which was the property of the Internet Historical Society, which is > *my* name, and it was a running site for three or four years. Yet, > that moron simply walked away with it, got the org registrar to give > it to him I guess. > I had asked John Levine to take it away from the person and give it > back to me. John won't do it. I thought he was one of the registrars > for .org ... so I know how this poor lady feels now as well. But I can > tell you *I* am not going to pay his blackmail ransom demand. If I had > any money I would just sue the damn registrar who took it from me and > gave it to him (I understand he is in some country in Europe. The lady > should not have paid anything either, just immediatly filed suit > against the registrar she had used when she first set up the site and > done it that way. Of course, I have no money to pay any lawyers to > help me, so that leaves me and internet-history.org high and dry. Maybe > some attorney doing pro-bono work will be able to get our site back. > If people would quit paying good money to these charlatans who steal > the names that netizens use for their web sites, then they would go > out of business. PAT] What am I missing here? Where is it actually stated that "buying" a domain name grants you rights to it in perpetuity? It's very obvious from the agreements made with the registrars that you are _renting_ the domain. ICANN insists that no domain can be registered for more than ten years at a time; that certainly seems to preclude automatically owning the right to a domain for life. Of course, by simply renewing it before the term expires, the rights remain with you. On the day your "lease" expires, if you haven't renewed, that name returns to the pool, or is possibly auctioned off by the registrar. How is this any different from a telephone number? If you stop paying the bill, the telco shuts off service, and eventually gives (sells) the number to someone else. Should I sue Verizon to get the phone number of my childhood home? Gene [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What you are overlooking is that the lady did not come close to having her domain name for ten years. She had it at best for two or three years, it was an active domain name then it up and disappeared when the registrar chose to give it or sell it to the penis enlargement man. What you are overlooking is that very few netizens care much either way about what ICANN says or thinks should be done. ICANN *only* represents big business interests anyway, not the small, average person with a web site. If you don't think that is the case, then since Microsoft has had their domain name 'microsoft.com' well over ten years, petition the registrars or ICANN to force Microsoft to give it up and give others a chance at it. Or maybe now that Yahoo has had their domain names for that same length of time, they can be forced out. Oh, and you don't hear ICANN complaining that the joker who registered 'whitehouse.com' most likely did it knowing full well that people looking for information on the White House will unwittingly type '.com' instead of '.gov' ICANN represents big business only, **not** people like Mrs. Viagino. The government wants business to control the net; they use ICANN as their tool. What you are overlooking regards phone numbers is that if a phone number is listed in a directory and is in active service for no matter how many years, as your childhood phone number might well have been if your parents or yourself had chosen to continue living there and were still referring to that number as your own then one day Verizon chooses to disconnect it or route it to someone else without so much as a single notice to you then you *would* have a very actionable suit against Verizon. Finally, what you are overlooking is that if the registrar had any care about people's sensibilities, even if Mrs. Viagino *had* misunderstood the terms of registration (I do not think she was even told it had to be renewed, etc) then the registrar might have told the lady something like 'this is a final notice, the site is being removed from you; gather up your files, pictures, etc and find some other place to park them.' Then maybe after two or three weeks shut it down. Or was the penis-enlargement man in such a rush he could not spare a week or two for a man killed in the line of duty, leaving a wife and family behind? Oh, I know it would not matter to ICANN, but you would think there might have been some courtesy given. 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. 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #508 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sat Oct 23 23:18:00 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9O3I0F28639; Sat, 23 Oct 2004 23:18:00 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 23:18:00 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410240318.i9O3I0F28639@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 #509 TELECOM Digest Sat, 23 Oct 2004 23:18:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 509 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Verizon Betting on A Bundle (Marcus Didius Falco) Dialogic D/41ESC - Nuance - Answering (Sven Westenberg) Book Of Interest:"Transmission Systems for Communications" (NoSpamForMe) Free Speech and Corporations (Lisa Hancock) IP Telephony (Ducz Beatrix) Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future (Rick Merrill) Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future (AES/newspost) Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telephone Company (AES) Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telephone Company (SELLCOM) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 02:03:44 -0400 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Verizon Betting on A Bundle http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53151-2004Oct21.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53151-2004Oct21?language=3Dprinter Firm to Spend Billions on Fiber Optics By Yuki Noguchi Washington Post Staff Writer Verizon Communications Inc., the nation's largest telephone company, announced yesterday it is digging up streets and stringing wire in six states, including Washington's Maryland and Virginia suburbs, to build a new fiber-optic network that will deliver high-speed Internet service and cable-style television to homes and businesses. It is part of a $2.8 billion gamble for the giant provider of local phone service, which is trying to compete head-to-head against cable companies. Verizon says it can offer Internet speeds up to 10 times as fast as most residential services and that it will introduce a package of television programming next year. In the Washington area, Verizon said it plans to start offering the new Internet service in late November in Falls Church, parts of Arlington, Herndon and Leesburg. It said it will start selling the new network in parts of Montgomery County early next year, when the service will be available to about 200,000 businesses and households in the region. The company is also laying new fiber in parts of Delaware, New York and Pennsylvania, but a spokesman said it hasn't made plans to enter the District because it is still working on network technology that will allow it to lay fiber-optic cable in urban areas. Nationally, 1 million homes and businesses will be able to buy Internet service on the new network by the end of the year and 3 million by the end of next year, the company said. To accomplish this, Verizon must rebuild a century-old network of copper lines that run into almost every home in the area. It's a costly investment that some analysts said could prove foolhardy if it can't win customers quickly. "We've looked at it really closely, and we don't see how it adds up," said Scott C. Cleland, chief executive of Precursor Group, a research firm in Washington. The company will sink billions of dollars into streets in and around residential neighborhoods, but it's unclear whether customers will be waiting to sign up for the service, he said. Prices for phone and high-speed Internet service keep falling, whittling away at the profit potential. And Verizon's plan to offer television service faces entrenched competition, Cleland said. "Can we honestly believe they're going to be better video providers than cable and [satellite] providers?" But regional phone companies like New York-based Verizon are in a heated battle against the cable industry. Each company is fighting tooth and nail to entice customers to buy bundled services from one provider -- phone, television, and Internet, for instance. Such a package currently costs about $120 monthly. The phone and cable industries have made forays into each other's businesses in recent years. Cable companies such as Comcast Corp. and Cox Communications Inc. have spent $85 billion since 1996 to upgrade their networks to carry Internet traffic and phone service. Phone giants, including Verizon and SBC Communications Inc., partnered with EchoStar Communications Corp.'s Dish Network and DirecTV Group Inc. to offer satellite television bundled with their services. Verizon described its fiber-to-the-home project as the dawn of better Internet connections and competitive television choices. "This is one of the most significant turning points in telecom," said Paul Lacouture, president of Verizon Network Services Group. "This will pave the way for long-awaited convergence between voice, video and Internet." For now, the new network will carry telephone and high-speed Internet, for between $35 and $45 a month, depending on the speed. Verizon said it is negotiating with companies including Viacom Inc. so it can start selling video programming, high-definition television, and video-on-demand service starting next year. The service will be "competitive" with cable, officials said, but they declined to discuss how much it would cost. Cox, which has 260,000 customers in the region, is ahead of Verizon in offering advanced technology, said Alex Horwitz, a Cox spokesman. It completed a $500 million regional upgrade, allowing it to offer high-speed Internet, telephone service and high-definition television, he said. "We believe we are already ahead of the game." "It's a tough market to break into because we already are an extremely competitive market," said Brian Dietz, a spokesman for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, which represents the cable companies. Many Washington area residents already have four options, including Comcast, Cox, Starpower Communications LLC and two satellite-TV providers, he said. Analysts question Verizon's ability to earn back its investment in the new network. "I think it's going to be difficult for them to make their money back," said Timothy Horan, an analyst for CIBC World Markets Corp., because they will have to beat cable's prices. "I haven't seen a model that makes it work." To deploy the service, Verizon must string hair-thin glass fibers. About 60 percent of the fiber can be strung along telephone poles, but the remainder requires digging up streets to bury it. The task is such a huge undertaking that the company said it will hire 3,000 to 5,000 new employees nationally by the end of next year. Verizon currently employs more than 207,000 people. Sales of high-speed Internet in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Dallas, and Tampa, where Verizon started offering service earlier this year, are "better than expected," said Robert Ingalls, president of Verizon's Retail Markets Division, but he declined to release details. 2004 The Washington Post Company *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Washington Post. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Sven Westenberg Subject: Dialogic D/41ESC - Nuance - Answering Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 09:23:24 +0200 Organization: RZ-Online Hallo, I have an Intel Dialogic D/41ESC board (analog, ISA) in a Win2000SP4 machine. I installed System Release 5.1.1 and Feature Pack 1. All Tests with the test- an sample-programs are successful. I use the board with Nuance 8.5. The test-programm act.exe tells me, that the incoming call is recognized and answered, but on the phone i cannot hear, that the call was answered. The ring tone is still there. Find the whole log beneath. I think, the cables and the PBX settings should be OK. The problem should be somewhere in the Nunace configuration. Unfortunately, i neither know, where to start searching nor to change the right parameter. Any hints appeciated! Thanks in advance. Sven act.exe log: VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.589,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,APMGR: AudioProviderManager::get,20,Creating a new Mgr. D_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.629,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderManager::AudioProvide rManager,42,[CH-]:[DEV-]: Built Mar 25 2004 20:44:15. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioConfig::AudioConfig,50, APCFG: AudioConfig::NumDigitalLines = 0 INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioConfig::AudioConfig,50, APCFG: AudioConfig::NumAnalogLines = 4 INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioConfig::AudioConfig,52, APCFG: AudioConfig::NumVoiceResources = 4 INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioConfig::AudioConfig,60, APCFG: AudioConfig::NumDigitalVoiceResources = 0 INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioConfig::AudioConfig,58, APCFG: AudioConfig::NumAnalogVoiceResources = 4 INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioConfig::AudioConfig,50, APCFG: AudioConfig::BusEncoding = Mulaw INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioConfig::AudioConfig,45, APCFG: AudioConfig::BusType = SCSA INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioConfig::AudioConfig,51, APCFG: AudioConfig::NetworkType = Analog INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioConfig::AudioConfig,43, APCFG: AudioConfig::DeviceFamily = DM3 INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioConfig::AudioConfig,57, APCFG: AudioConfig::FirstAnalogBoard = dxxxB1 INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioConfig::AudioConfig,64, APCFG: AudioConfig::FirstAnalogResourceBoard = dxxxB1 INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioConfig::AudioConfig,63, APCFG: AudioConfig::NumPlaybackSamplesNeeded = 16384 VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderManager::add_device,2 5,[CH001]:[DEV-]: Entered. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderManager::add_device,3 3,[CH001]:[DEV-]: max_lines = 4. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderManager::add_device,3 3,[CH001]:[DEV-]: telephony = 1. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderManager::add_device,3 5,[CH001]:[DEV-]: device = "3". INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderManager::add_device,3 2,[CH001]:[DEV-]: lines = . INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderManager::add_device,3 3,[CH001]:[DEV-]: line_number = 3. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderManager::add_device,3 3,[CH001]:[DEV-]: DIDNumber = 0. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderManager::add_device,3 3,[CH001]:[DEV-]: dynamic = 0. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderManager::add_device,3 3,[CH001]:[DEV-]: dynamic_vr = 0. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderManager::add_device,3 3,[CH001]:[DEV-]: global_call = 0. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderManager::add_device,3 3,[CH001]:[DEV-]: isdn = 0. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderManager::add_device,3 9,[CH001]:[DEV-]: network = Analog. D_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderManager::add_device,3 9,[CH001]:[DEV-]: Constructing device 3. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderDevice::AudioProvider Device,61,[CH-]:[DEV003]: Success loading Telephony Provider nuanceR4. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonyDialogic::Init,34,[CH-]:[ DEV003]: Network = analog. D_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonyDialogic::Init,41,[CH-]:[ DEV003]: trying to lock line-a-3. VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,ResourceLock::Apply,70,ResourceLoc kFile returned OK, lockfile=C:\WINNT\nuance_resource_locks VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,ResourceLock::Apply,21,Reading the lockfile VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,ResourceLock::Apply,88,lock:audio: _dialogic_line-a-3 PID=-1 (NO_PROCESS=-1), process no longer exists, lock it INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonyDialogic::Init,33,[CH-]:[ DEV003]: locked line-a-3. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.909,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonySR::Init,47,[CH-]:[DEV003 ]: Initialized TelephonyProvider. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.939,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonySR::SetOnHook,33,[CH-]:[D EV003]: Setting on-hook. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.939,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,Telephony::HookStateCallback,34,[C H-]:[DEV003]: Callback skipped. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.939,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonySR::SetState,69,[CH-]:[DE V003]: CallState changed: BLOCKED --> INTER_CALL_DELAY. D_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.959,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderDevice::AudioProvider Device,73,[CH-]:[DEV003]: Initialization of Telephony Provider returned NUANCE_OK. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.959,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicCSP::SoundDialogicVR, 44,[CH-]:[DEV003]: Can share CSP resource? No. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.959,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicCSP::SoundDialogicVR, 54,[CH-]:[DEV003]: Allocate sound device at run-time? No ERROR,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.959,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicCSP::SoundDialogicVR, 69,[CH-]:[DEV003]: CSP not supported for this analog device [dxxxB1C3]. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.959,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::SoundDialogicVR,7 6,[CH-]:[DEV003]: Play channel will share telephony device, dxxxB1C3, id = 3. VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.959,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,ResourceLock::Apply,70,ResourceLoc kFile returned OK, lockfile=C:\WINNT\nuance_resource_locks VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.959,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,ResourceLock::Apply,21,Reading the lockfile VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.969,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,ResourceLock::Apply,85,lock:audio: _dialogic_dsp-3 PID=-1 (NO_PROCESS=-1), process no longer exists, lock it INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.969,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::SoundDialogicVR,4 4,[CH-]:[DEV003]: Using play device dxxxB1C3. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.969,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::SoundDialogicVR,4 6,[CH-]:[DEV003]: Using record device dxxxB1C4. D_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.969,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::OpenPlayDevice,65 ,[CH-]:[DEV003]: dx_getxmitslot: on device dxxxB1C3, returned OK. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.969,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::OpenPlayDevice,41 ,[CH-]:[DEV003]: Playback on time slot 2. D_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.979,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::OpenPlayDevice,61 ,[CH-]:[DEV003]: dx_getsvmt: on device dxxxB1C3, returned OK. D_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.979,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::OpenPlayDevice,61 ,[CH-]:[DEV003]: dx_setsvmt: on device dxxxB1C3, returned OK. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.989,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderDevice::AudioProvider Device,78,[CH-]:[DEV003]: Success loading and initializing the Sound Provider nuanceVR. VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.989,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::Listen,79,[CH-]:[ DEV003]: Not recording, state=RECORD_IDLE, change time slot connections VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.989,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::Listen,51,[CH-]:[ DEV003]: Current rx=-1 ec=-1, New rx=6 ec=2 D_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.989,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::Listen,72,[CH-]:[ DEV003]: Changing timeslot connections of Record channel (dev=3) VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.989,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::Listen,45,[CH-]:[ DEV003]: dx_listen, channel=3, slot=6 D_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.989,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::Listen,60,[CH-]:[ DEV003]: dx_listen: on device dxxxB1C4, returned OK. VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.989,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::Listen,50,[CH-]:[ DEV003]: dx_listenecrex, channel=3, slot=2 WARN,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.989,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::Listen,112,[CH-]: [DEV003]: dx_listenecrex: on device dxxxB1C4, returned -1, err = 0x00000070, Invalid local timeslot type. VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.989,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderManager::add_device,3 6,[CH001]:[DEV-]: Returned NUANCE_OK. STATUS,0,2004/10/23 08:53:54.989,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderInfoDialogic::Init,62 ,[CH001-ALN003]:[DEV-]: Initialization completed successfully. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:53:55.089,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonySR::SetState,68,[CH001]:[ DEV003]: CallState changed: INTER_CALL_DELAY --> IDLE. VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:04.603,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonyDialogic::EventExists,50, [CH001]:[DEV003]: sr_waitevt(0) returned an event INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:04.603,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonySR::ProcessPhoneEvents,51 ,[CH001]:[DEV003]: sr-event: 1, 134, 0x0088FCE0, 4. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:04.603,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonySR::ProcessEvent,51,[CH00 1]:[DEV003]: sr event 0x00000086 on device 1. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:04.603,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonySR::ProcessEvent,33,[CH00 1]:[DEV003]: Caught a ring. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:04.603,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonySR::ProcessEvent,41,[CH00 1]:[DEV003]: unable to get call id. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:04.603,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonySR::SetState,65,[CH001]:[ DEV003]: CallState changed: IDLE --> INCOMING_CALL. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:04.603,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonySR::SetOffHook,36,[CH001] :[DEV003]: Setting off-hook. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:04.653,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,Telephony::HookStateCallback,35,[C H001]:[DEV003]: Callback called. VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:04.653,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::HookState,39,[CH0 01]:[DEV003]: record/play DISABLED VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:04.653,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::Listen,91,[CH001] :[DEV003]: Time slot connections unchanged, rx_slot=6, ec_slot=2. No need to redo. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:04.653,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::HookState,42,[CH0 01]:[DEV003]: state now CALL_OFFHOOK. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:04.653,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,Telephony::IncomingCallCallback,35 ,[CH001]:[DEV003]: Callback called. VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:04.653,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonyDialogic::EventExists,50, [CH001]:[DEV003]: sr_waitevt(0) returned an event INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:04.653,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonySR::ProcessPhoneEvents,51 ,[CH001]:[DEV003]: sr-event: 2, 134, 0x0088FCE0, 4. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:04.653,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::ProcessAudioEvent s,51,[CH001]:[DEV003]: sr-event: 2, 134, 0x0088fce0, 4. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:04.653,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::ProcessPlayEvent, 29,[CH001]:[DEV003]: CST event. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:04.653,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::ProcessPlayEvent, 47,[CH001]:[DEV003]: Ring detected event ignored. LOG,INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:09.110,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonySR::AnswerCall,27,[CH001] :[DEV003]: Entered. LOG,INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:09.110,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,Telephony::HookStateCallback,35,[C H001]:[DEV003]: Callback called. LOG,VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:09.110,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::HookState,38,[CH0 01]:[DEV003]: record/play ENABLED LOG,INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:09.110,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonySR::SetState,77,[CH001]:[ DEV003]: CallState changed: INCOMING_CALL --> CALL_IN_PROGRESS. LOG,VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:14.447,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderInfoDialogic::Hangup, 60,[CH001-ALN003]:[DEV-]: call no longer active at this point. LOG,VD_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:14.447,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,AudioProviderInfoDialogic::Hangup, 36,[CH001-ALN003]:[DEV-]: Hanging up . LOG,WARN,0,2004/10/23 08:54:14.447,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonySR::HangUp,44,[CH001]:[DE V003]: Invalid side specified: . D_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:14.447,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::~SoundDialogicVR, 59,[CH-]:[DEV003]: dx_close: on device dxxxB1C4, returned OK. D_INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:14.447,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,SoundDialogicVR::~SoundDialogicVR, 59,[CH-]:[DEV003]: dx_close: on device dxxxB1C3, returned OK. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:14.447,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonySR::HangUp,26,[CH-]:[DEV0 03]: Entering. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:14.447,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonySR::SetOnHook,33,[CH-]:[D EV003]: Setting on-hook. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:14.447,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,Telephony::HookStateCallback,34,[C H-]:[DEV003]: Callback skipped. INFO,0,2004/10/23 08:54:14.487,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,TelephonySR::SetState,78,[CH-]:[DE V003]: CallState changed: CALL_IN_PROGRESS --> INTER_CALL_DELAY. STATUS,0,2004/10/23 08:54:14.487,HOST1,ACT,464,AUDIO.DIALOGIC,APMGR: AudioProviderManager::get,20,DELETED THE MANAGER ------------------------------ From: NoSpamForMe Subject: Book of Interest: "Transmission Systems for Communications" Organization: AT&T Worldnet Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 02:56:55 GMT http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=378&item=2496871334&rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Free Speech and Corporations Date: 22 Oct 2004 20:47:01 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Lisa Minter wrote > On Monday, Sinclair fired the head of its Washington bureau for having > the temerity to criticize the airing of one-sided propaganda (ironic, > considering Sinclair is claiming a First Amendment right to air the > film). Jon Lieberman had correctly pointed out that running the film > brought the network's credibility into question ... As another poster correctly pointed out, it is Sinclair's network and he is free to do as he wants (he controls the majority stock) regarding showing the film. The same poster was also correct in saying Sinclair has the right to fire anyone he wants. "Free speech" protects us from the government, but not our bosses. The right of free speech is very important. But it is not unlimited. Nor does the exercise of free speech provide a license to violate other laws, such as trespassing, harassment, riot, etc. Sometimes protesters who violate such laws are shocked when they are actually prosecuted for the crime they have committed rather than just let go later, and feel their "free speech" rights are thus being violated. It's not their free speech, it's their criminal behavior that's being prosecuted. Protesters forget that other people have rights, too, and their cause does not trumpet over the interests of other people, no matter how important they think it is. Free speech is not mob rule, nor compelling someone else to pay or provide your platform to speak from. Another poster stated corporations exist for the good of the public. I don't know where that came from. (Perhaps the existence of a corporation allows business to be conducted which is good for the public since buyers and sellers are brought together). But private corporations exist for the stockholders. A smart corporation will strive for good employee, customer, and public relations since they usually lead to better business operations. However, corporations are under no obligation to "be nice" (beyond what is required by law). Frankly, it bothered me that some people asserted it was somehow "wrong" for Sinclair to show his propaganda, just as some asserted it was somehow "wrong" for Mirimax to decline to distribute Moore's propaganda; that these corporations had some sort of public obligation to do otherwise. ------------------------------ Reply-To: From: Ducz Beatrix Subject: IP Telephony Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 06:38:03 +0200 Organization: Korum Hungary Kft. Dear Mr. Townson! Your website was offered to me by some friends at ECN (electrical-contractor.net) when I started to ask for some help about IP telephony. Could you please help me how could I contact a company that has international server chain and rents it for use? I'm not looking for VoIP companies, only the system that they use. I know some andI asked them to allow us to use the server network, but they didn't allow, and since there are more networks like this, maybe you know one. Thank you for your kind help, your site is very interesting! :) Ducz Beatrix ------------------------------ From: Rick Merrill Subject: Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future Organization: Comcast Online Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 10:41:46 GMT Lisa Minter wrote: > Nokia in the UK seems to feel landline phones will be gone entirely > in the next few years, at least in many countries, replaced by > cellular phones. Check out this link: > The fixed line phone in the home could soon disappear, a study by > mobile firm Nokia shows. > < http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/technology/3762844.stm > As unbelievable as it seems to us today, land lines in the USA ten (10) years from now (2004) will probably down 60% yet total phones will have increased by 30%. How? Cell phones obviously, but also VoIP is poised to expand very rapidly. Why? Widespread availability of broad band and virtually NO REGULATION (as compared to land line phones) ==> Half the Cost of today's "land line phones" for home and business. - RM "I fought the lawn, and the lawn won." ------------------------------ From: AES/newspost Subject: Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 08:20:48 -0700 In article , Lisa Minter wrote: > Nokia in the UK seems to feel landline phones will be gone entirely > in the next few years, at least in many countries, replaced by > cellular phones. Check out this link: > < http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/technology/3762844.stm > > The fixed line phone in the home could soon disappear, a study by > mobile firm Nokia shows. Even if this happens -- and it doesn't seem to be an unreasonable prediction -- the portion of the existing landline infrastructure running from local telco offices into homes and commercial buildings would continue to exist for a long time, and would only slowly decay even if no longer regularly maintained. Continuing to maintain this infrastructure at a low level, while also adding comparable minimum-level hardwired infrastructure into new construction (perhaps as a minor side effort while adding cable, or basic electrical service, or fiber, or whatever) could also be comparatively inexpensive, even in quite low density areas. I put up a long post earlier expressing some thoughts and ideas about how a minimal hardwired infrastructure of this sort, with no residual connections to longline networks or services, could be re-purposed to provide useful services and purposes other than telco -- e.g., emergency services of multiple types. I'll refrain from repeating these ideas here; but it still seems to me that thinking about creative ways of using these potentially disappearing fixed lines could be a useful as well as interesting exercise. ------------------------------ From: AES/newspost Subject: Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telephone Company Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 09:03:00 -0700 In article , Marcus Didius Falco wrote: >>> There isn't much you can do if the utility dies. However, you can keep >>> your house running indefinitely using something called an "inverter". My wife some time back came up with an idea so ingenious -- in my spousal opinion, anyway -- that I can't refrain from passing it on. Honda makes gasoline-powered emergency generators. Honda also makes gasoline-powered power lawnmowers. You can see where this is going: Large numbers of us suburbanites own, maintain, and regularly use our power lawnmowers. So, why have to also purchase, store, maintain, and periodically test a gasoline-powered generator for very infrequent emergency use, including possibly never? Why not have instead a Honda lawnmover designed so a small auxiliary Honda-supplied generator can be bolted on top (or on the bottom) of it? If any of you want to follow up on this commercially, send me a note, and I'll give you the address for the royalties to my wife. ------------------------------ From: SELLCOM Tech support Subject: Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telephone Company Organization: www.sellcom.com Reply-To: support@sellcom.com Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 16:57:06 GMT Marcus Didius Falco posted on that vast internet thingie: > A UPS is always a good idea. However, most of them have only enough > reserve capacity to allow an orderly shutdown (that is, about a half > hour or less, and don't try to run your laser printer). We have a generator here but I also have a Minuteman MCP2000E "True Online" UPS system for our main computers. I also have it connected to a bank of batteries that can keep us up and going for about 7 hours. It is also very well behaved when running on generator power. I could add more batteries to get more time but they are not cheap. I have the Minuteman plugged into a BrickWall surge protector to protect it. Steve at SELLCOM www.surgeprotect.com http://www.sellcom.com Discount multihandset cordless phones by Siemens, AT&T, Panasonic, Vtech 5.8Ghz; TMC ET4000 4line Epic phone, OnHoldPlus, Beamer, Watchguard! Brick wall "non MOV" surge protection. Ramsplitter firewood splitters If you sit at a desk www.ergochair.biz you owe it to yourself. ------------------------------ 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. 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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 #509 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sun Oct 24 01:03:16 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9O53GR29843; Sun, 24 Oct 2004 01:03:16 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 01:03:16 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410240503.i9O53GR29843@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 #510 TELECOM Digest Sun, 24 Oct 2004 01:03:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 510 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Qwest to Pay $250 Million in Fraud Probe (Marcus Didius Falco) Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (Steve Sobol) Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (Robert Bonomi) Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (Dave Close) Re: Who Carries TV Signals and Long Distance -- Today? (Neal McLain) Re: Bell System Competition: Private Telephone Networks (jdj) Re: Bell System Competition: Private Telephone Networks (Julian Thomas) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (Robert Bonomi) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (Herb Stein) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (Fred Atkinson, WB4AEJ) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (DevilsPGD) Re: Callsigns and Horse Teeth (Fritz Whittington) Re: Yet Another Telco Tax Proposed (Gene S. Berkowitz) AT&T Reports $7 Billion Loss (Marcus Didius Falco) Re: Sinclair: From Bad to Worse (Gene S. Berkowitz) Last Laugh! Re: Boston's Big Rebound Makes a Winner of Fox (HorneTD) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 02:22:50 -0400 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Qwest to Pay $250 Million in Fraud Probe http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53148-2004Oct21.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53148-2004Oct21?language=3Dprinter By Carrie Johnson Washington Post Staff Writer Qwest Communications International Inc. yesterday agreed to pay $250 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that the company fraudulently booked $3.8 billion in revenue over nearly three years, repeatedly turning to accounting tricks that employees compared to a heroin "addiction." Qwest employees carried out an extensive fraud, under orders from senior managers who made "outrageously optimistic" assertions that the Denver company would post double-digit profit gains at a time when demand sharply lagged, regulators alleged. The SEC is continuing to investigate the role of individuals in the scheme. In one common tactic, employees reported revenue from one-time sales of fiber-optic capacity as recurring revenue, referring to such transactions as "one hit wonders." They also swapped assets with other companies but treated Qwest's side of the swaps as if they were sales, producing immediate revenue, the SEC said. Qwest also allegedly understated $231 million in expenses from June 1999 to March 2002. Employees employed the strategies so often that some began to refer to them as Qwest's "heroin," the SEC said. The nation's fourth-largest long-distance telephone service provider did not admit or deny wrongdoing as part of the settlement. "Qwest senior management created a corrupt corporate culture in which meeting Wall Street expectations was paramount," said Randall J. Fons, director of the SEC's Denver regional office. "Senior management projected unrealistic revenue growth and would not tolerate missing the numbers." Qwest's current chief executive, Richard C. Notebaert, said in a prepared statement: "We are pleased to conclude this matter, which will now allow us to focus even more of our effort to provide exceptional value and service to customers." Qwest, whose stock price plunged from a high of $55 to less than $2 a share after the fraud surfaced in August 2002, said it would cover the settlement in two separate payments. It will send the agency $125 million soon, and the rest by December 2005. The money eventually will be given to Qwest shareholders, regulators said. Qwest stock closed yesterday at $3.44 a share, up 12 cents. The company also agreed to hire a compliance official to ensure that managers never again stretch or ignore accounting rules to meet earnings targets and trigger executive bonuses, as was also alleged by the SEC. Regulators said that Qwest misled investors about its business partnerships and improper relationships with suppliers, who were sometimes pressured by unidentified Qwest officials to award them shares in the supplier before initial public offerings during the Internet boom. Qwest also failed to disclose to shareholders a $7.6 million aircraft sale between the company and the Anschutz Co., owned by Philip F. Anschutz, Qwest's founder and co-chairman of its board of directors. The May 2001 deal brought tax benefits and savings to Qwest, regulators said. "Disinterested" Qwest board members approved the transaction, according to the SEC order. The order did not question the propriety of the transaction itself, only that it was not disclosed as it should have been in the company's annual report or its proxy statement. SEC enforcement chief Stephen M. Cutler said yesterday in a prepared statement that the investigation of individuals at Qwest who participated in the fraud is "active and ongoing." Federal prosecutors in Denver said they are continuing to investigate the company and former executives. Former Qwest chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, who is referred to by title in yesterday's SEC complaint, recently received notice that the agency planned to file related civil charges against him. Nacchio joined the company in January 1997 and departed under pressure in June 2002. "Mr. Nacchio never did anything improper or illegal -- nor instructed anyone else to do anything improper or illegal -- during his tenure as the CEO of Qwest," William Anderson, a spokesman for Nacchio, said in a prepared statement yesterday. Anderson added that many of the activities mentioned in the SEC order were reviewed and approved by lawyers, accountants and Qwest's board. The SEC and Justice Department prosecutors already have sued several former Qwest managers. Two have pleaded guilty to criminal offenses; two others were acquitted after a seven-week trial this year. Copyright 2004 The Washington Post Company *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance Washington Post. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 13:07:05 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Linc Madison wrote: > I grew up in Dallas, Texas, with WRR-FM and WRR-AM (now KAAM-AM), > WBAP-AM and WBAP-TV (now KXAS-TV), WFAA-AM and WFAA-TV, and, down in > San Antonio, WOAI-AM and -TV. I then moved near Philadelphia and > watched KYW-TV. > What I find rather more interesting are situations where stations > sharing the same callsign are in completely different metropolitan > areas. For example, KCBS-TV is in Los Angeles, but KCBS-AM is in San > Francisco. WONE-AM Dayton, Ohio WONE-FM Akron, Ohio This one is pretty easily explained, though. Both were owned by Summit Broadcasting at one time (Not sure where they were located but I assume it's near Akron, since Akron's in Summit County) AM was sold to Clear Channel. The FM ended up in the hands of another local broadcaster, Rubber City Radio. Both still use the same calls. JustThe.net Internet & New Media Services, http://JustThe.net/ Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / 888.480.4NET (4638) / sjsobol@JustThe.net PGP Key available from your friendly local key server (0xE3AE35ED) Apple Valley, California Nothing scares me anymore. I have three kids. ------------------------------ Organization: Robert Bonomi Consulting Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 01:18:22 +0000 In article , Neal McLain wrote: > Anthony Bellanga wrote: >> Louisiana and Minnesota both "straddle" the Mississippi River. > In my experience (mostly in cable TV), the Mississippi-River rule can be > more accurately stated as follows: > "K" = west of the Mississippi River plus the entire state of > Minnesota. _that_ "rule" adds at least half-a-dozen 'out-of-place' 'W' stations to the list. Including places such as Duluth, MN. :) >"W" = east of the Mississippi River plus Louisiana parishes > located in the Baton Rouge and New Orleans DMAs. [[.. munch ..]] > Bonomi's list included: >> WOI (AM, FM, and TV ... ), Ames, Iowa > WOI(AM) and WOI-FM are licensed to Iowa State University. WOI-TV is a > commercial station (ABC affiliate) serving the Des Moines/Ames/ > Marshalltown DMA; it's still licensed to Ames, but it claims "Des > Moines" in its publicity. ISU does not operate a TV station (most > public television stations in Iowa are operated by Iowa Public > Television, a state agency independent of the state universities). Your knowledge of history is woefully lacking. WOI TV _was_ owned and operated by Iowa State University (known as "Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts" until 1959), *was*an*ABC-affiliate*station*, until relatively recently. (i.e. 10 years ago -- ISU sold the station to ABC's parent company in March 1994; it was perceived as a 'valuable asset' that could be sold, at a time when the Regents, and the State as a whole, were in dire financial straits. People in education were _extremely_ opposed to the sale idea, and went to court over it; the issue eventually ended up before the _U.S._ Supreme Court.) See: for some of the station history, and the contention surrounding the selling of the station. WOI-TV was in operation _long_ before 'Iowa Public Television' came into existence. In point of fact, WOI-TV was the _first_ TV station in the state broadcasting on a regular schedule. They became an ABC affiliate fairly early. Yes, a public-university-owned =commercial= broadcast station is _unusual_. As a network affiliate of a commercial network (the *only* kind of 'network' TV in those days :), it was _very_ unusual, possibly even =unique=. >> WWL Waterloo, Iowa. Intrestingly, KWWL is in the same town. > WWL(AM) and WWL-TV are now located in New Orleans, LA. Looks like memory has played me false on this one. Further checking shows it has always belonged to Loyola University, in New Orleans. (I'm going to have to do some more digging on this -- I'm _sure_ that WWL was in the Cedar Rapids/Waterloo metro area in the 50's-70's. "I may be wrong, but I'm not uncertain" applies :) The university-owned and operated TV station in New Orleans was a CBS network affiliate, as of 1959. So, WOI-TV was not the only university-owned network TV affiliate -- but I don't know of any other that was owned/operated by a _public_ institution. >> WSUI Iowa City, Iowa Also the home of KSUI. *SAME* owner, >> even. :) > WSUI(AM) and KSUI(FM) are licensed to the University of Iowa > (formerly, State University of Iowa; hence, "SUI"). UI does not > operate a TV station (same reason ISU doesn't). Bzzzzt! Thank you for playing. See above. Iowa State owned and operated a commercial (_not_ 'public' television) station for more than 40 years. Among other things it provided 'hands on' training, in a "real, working station environment" for students in the television programs (both in journalism and engineering) at Iowa State. The University of Iowa, on the other hand, never had a program in television, and thus never found a 'need' for their own television station. :) >> WOW Omaha, Nebraska > AM only; sister TV is WOWT. Again, knowledge of history is lacking. see: WOW _did_ operate AM and FM stations, for years, WOWT is a call-sign change, from the original WOW-TV. >> WMT Cedar Rapids, Iowa > WMT(AM) and WMT-FM only; sister TV is KGAN(TV), formerly WMT-TV. A call-sign change for the TV station. >> WOC Davenport, Iowa > AM only; sister FM is WLLR(FM); sister TV is KWQC(TV). >> WRR Dallas, Texas > FM only (PAT: classical music, streamed online!) I believe there was an AM station with that call-sign, originally. Has since undergone a name-change. [[.. munch ..]] >> and, some hair-splitting (Metro area crosses the river, >> transmitter_could_ be on the Illinois side of the Missippi): >> WIL St. Louis, Missouri > FM only. Transmitter is located in Missouri. >> WRTH St. Louis, Missouri > The FCC has no record of this callsign. *THAT* is a surprise! Considering ... My cribsheet says "1430 AM, St. Louis". And, according to : WRTH1430 Business Office (314) 983 -6000 11647 Olive Boulevard Saint Louis, MO 63141 >> WLTE Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota > FM only. Transmitter is located in Minnesota, on the east side of the > Mississippi River. That's still on the "K" side of the line according to > the version of the rule I stated above. If you're going to put all of MN in the 'K' district, there are at least another half-a-dozen 'W' call-signs worthy of being listed. As far east as Duluth. >> WMCN St. Paul, Minnesota > FM only. Transmitter is located in Minnesota, on the east side of the > Mississippi River. >> WBJI Blackduck, Minnesota > FM only. Blackduck is in Beltrami County (page 72-B2 in DeLorme). >> WIRN Buhl, Minnesota > FM only; Minnesota Public Radio affiliate. Buhl is in St. Louis County, > near Hibbing (page 75-D6 in DeLorme). >> WACO Waco, Texas. > FM only. > WEW(AM) is licensed to St. Louis, but the transmitter is located in > Washington Park, Illinois. FCC record at: > . > WIL-FM is licensed to St. Louis, and the transmitter is located in > Missouri. FCC record (scroll down below WILL-FM) at: > > Neal McLain > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Is there a 'WIL' (one /L/) in > St. Louis? The reason I ask is because there is a 'WILL' (two /L/) > at the University of Illinois in Champaign, 580 KC on AM band.) PAT] Yes. WIL (one 'L') has been in St. Louis for a *long* time; W-ILL (two 'L') is a comparative newcomer. And, as Ogden Nash says, I've never heard of a three-'L' spelling. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When you discuss WLTE or other 'W' stations in Minnesota, maybe the reason for the 'W' there is because the Mississipi River only begins part way into Minnesota; a bit south of St. Paul (or actually Bay City, WI) where the water is just a small stream and becomes known as the 'Mississippi River'. Most of Minnesota has nothing to do with the river. PAT] ------------------------------ From: dave@compata.com (Dave Close) Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns Date: 22 Oct 2004 20:10:32 -0700 Organization: Compata, Costa Mesa, California Linc Madison writes: > What I find rather more interesting are situations where stations > sharing the same callsign are in completely different metropolitan > areas. For example, KCBS-TV is in Los Angeles, but KCBS-AM is in San > Francisco. That's because, until fairly recently, KCBS-TV was KNXT. The network evidently decided branding was more important than history. Dave Close, Compata, Costa Mesa CA "Politics is the business of getting dave@compata.com, +1 714 434 7359 power and privilege without dhclose@alumni.caltech.edu possessing merit." - P. J. O'Rourke ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 20:28:48 -0500 From: Neal McLain Subject: Re: Who Carries TV Signals and Long Distance -- Today? Lisa Hancock wrote: > With satellites and competing companies that own their > own fibre networks, does AT&T still carry broadcast > transmissions today? If not, when did the transition > start? Anthony Bellanga responded: > Also in the later 1970s, emerging national-in-scope Cable-TV > services such as HBO, CSPAN, CBN, CNN, etc. chose to distribute via > satellite directly to local cable franchise operation centers rather > than use Bell System facilities. I also don't know if Bell had > enough landline VIDEO capacity using the technology of the time for > all of the new emerging cable services, on a NATIONAL basis. The "new emerging cable services" didn't emerge until satellite distribution made them economically feasible. Before satellites came along, cable television systems relied almost exclusively on broadcast stations for their programming. Given enough money, the cable industry could have built a microwave network with sufficient capacity to distribute non-broadcast cable-only programming nationally. But the industry never considered it: the cost would have been astronomical. By the early 70s, the industry had been around for 25 years, and there were far more cable headends (by some two orders of magnitude) than broadcast stations in the country. A ground-based microwave network for cable TV would have had to reach many more end-points than the network AT&T was operating for the broadcast networks. Headends in remote places like mountaintops or barrier islands might never have been reached. The first nationally-distributed satellite-delivered non-broadcast programming service was Time Inc's HBO, launched in December 1975 on Satcom 3R. Prior to its satellite launch, Time had been using non-AT&T microwave to distribute HBO to its own cable systems in the northeast. Time wanted to extend HBO's coverage nationwide, and satellite was the only economically-feasible way to do it. Once HBO broke the ice, other non-broadcast services soon followed. By 1979, programming was available from Turner Communications Group (WTCG, now TBS Superstation), Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), Southern Satellite Systems (Satellite Programming Network, or SPN), USA Network, C-SPAN (sharing transponder time with USA), ESPN, and Nickelodeon. A year later, Turner launched CNN, the first in a string of non-broadcast services that now includes Cartoon Network, CNNSI, CNNFN, Headline News, TCM, and TNT. Of course, not all of these new services survived. CBN became ABC Family; SPN morphed into CNBC. Others flashed across the horizon and disappeared: Reuters "Newsview"; TEC (The Entertainment Channel); HTN (Home Theater Network); MSN (Modern Satellite Network); Cinemerica. But the basic financial model worked: operating a non-broadcast satellite-delivered programming service proved to be a viable business. These services now make up the bulk of the programming offered by cable television systems on their basic and extended-basic tiers. Lisa continued: > With satellites, is there a problem with transmission lag > time? Anthony continued: > Radio/TV network broadcasting is different [from telephone > conversations] in that a program usually originates from one > point (or maybe a small number of locations) and is sent to > "everyone" across the country... Programming production studios sometimes have a trio of video monitors sitting side-by-side: - The first displays the program signal directly from the studio. - The second displays the downlink from the programmer's own uplink, after a delay of about 0.24 seconds (one round trip to/from a geostationary satellite). - The third displays the downlink from the DirecTV or Dish Network, after a delay of about 0.48 seconds (two round trips). It's fascinating to watch the same image signal jump from monitor to monitor. But a home viewer would never be aware of it. But two-way phone conversations make the round-trip delay obvious. I often notice this on CNN when the studio anchor asks a question of a field reporter who is using a videophone. After the anchor finishes the question, we watch the reporter just standing there (trying not to look too stupid) for a half second before answering. Neal McLain [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I've noticed the television set in my parlor runs about two seconds later than the televison set in my bedroom. That is to say, the bedroom set displays an image and audio, then the same audio/video appears a couple seconds later on the other set. I wondered about that, then I remembered that the television in the parlor is fed from the cable through the DVR; the television in the bedroom is cable through converter box straight to the television. It must be because the DVR first puts the signal onto the hard drive (which is where it gets to to feed the television set. PAT] ------------------------------ From: jdj Subject: Re: Bell System Competition: Private Telephone Networks Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 22:39:45 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 20:58:09 -0400, Wesroc wrote: > In a message dated 21 Oct 2004 21:16:47 -0700, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com > (Lisa Hancock) writes: >> Railroads: These were very large networks, connecting stations, >> headquarters, shops, offices and wayside stations. These was >> particularly important since otherwise toll charges would be incurred. >> Railroads had their own signal depts, so they could easily maintain a >> phone system. Wayside phones were often local battery (crank), and >> many remained in service through the 1980s. Railroads also had >> internal Teletype networks. > Railroads and pipeline companies were "right-of-way" companies and > could interconnect with Bell pretty much without restriction, > including such cases as using their own lines to extend to what > otherwise would have been FCO locations. Their PBXs usually had > incoming and outgoing Bell trunks that could dial and be dialed and > connected with the internal communications system, even for intercity > communications. Southern Pacific's SPRINT and Microwave Communications, Inc. (later MCI) were pretty well known. Most of what I heard on the SPRR telephone channels were patches to/from moving trains but occasionally there were strange signals including dtmf prior to an actual phone call. The call progress signals were often very different from Bell stuff. ------------------------------ From: Julian Thomas Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 21:37:01 -0400 Subject: Re: Bell System Competition: Private Telephone Networks (as usual, please obscure my email - thanks). In <1098564678.198.7892.m12@yahoogroups.com>, on 10/23/04 at 08:51 PM, telecom-news@yahoogroups.com typed: > Blurring the picture even further, there were big companies that had > their own telephone systems, but using lines leased from Bell and > connecting with the Bell public system. When I worked for G.E. circa > 1967 there was such a system -- I don't remember now what the name of it > was -- where we could dial a certain prefix and then dial most other G.E. > locations without going through the public switched network. In 1962, IBM had a moderately extensive tie line system, with special access codes between different sites even within Poughkeepsie, and to many other nearby locations (such as Endicott). ISTR many of these codes began with '1'. Later this was recreated as a 'dial 8 [from most locations; one location stubbornly used 8 for local access and something else, 7? for tie line access]' and then a 7 digit number within the IBM internal network. I believe that later some of the traffic was moved to the PSTN, and later yet, the dial 8 system was replaced by smarter PBX/CENTREX systems that would route an external 1+10 digit number optimally including on a tie line if it still existed. Julian Thomas: jt at jt-mj dot net http://jt-mj.net In the beautiful Finger Lakes Wine Country of New York State! Boardmember of POSSI.org - Phoenix OS/2 Society, Inc http://www.possi.org If you want it done right, forget Microsoft. ------------------------------ Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? Organization: Robert Bonomi Consulting From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 01:38:06 +0000 In article , Andrea wrote: > Does anyone know the real reason American TVs don't utilize channel 1? > I've read many conflicting theories. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have always heard that Channel 1 was > occupying frequencies used in the VHF-low area (30-50 mc band) and > that *originally* (1940's) some of that spectrum was going to be taken > away from the users of VHF-low band radio and given to television, but > many people protested it, so rather than re-align the television > channels to move Channel 1 a bit further up, the FCC simply abandoned > it for television use. PAT] _Which_ 'channel 1' ?? In point of fact, there were several different channel 1 allocations at various times in history. See: for a good description of that all went on. ------------------------------ From: Herb Stein Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 19:47:11 -0500 6 meter amateur 50-54 mhz. Andrea wrote in message news:telecom23.507.5@telecom-digest.org: > Does anyone know the real reason American TVs don't utilize channel 1? > I've read many conflicting theories. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have always heard that Channel 1 was > occupying frequencies used in the VHF-low area (30-50 mc band) and > that *originally* (1940's) some of that spectrum was going to be taken > away from the users of VHF-low band radio and given to television, but > many people protested it, so rather than re-align the television > channels to move Channel 1 a bit further up, the FCC simply abandoned > it for television use. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Fred Atkinson, WB4AEJ Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 23:58:41 -0400 As I recall, most of Channel 1 was reallocated to the amateur radio service (six meters) as six meters is fifty to fifty-four Mhz. Can someone tell me if I am wrong? Fred, WB4AEJ http://www.wb4aej.com/hamdomain ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 22:06:43 -0600 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Michael Muderick wrote: > Channel 1 did appear on some early tv's. I have an RCA TK-630 > Eyewitness television that has Channel 1. I think it was given back > to government. mm Interestingly enough, channel 1 is making somewhat of a comeback since in a digital environment any channel can be used without regards to what frequency the channel uses. Shaw cable is (or was, I don't have my TV connected to my DCT right now) using channel 1 as a digital channel for themselves. Analog cable still starts at 2 though. Next on FOX, all new REALITY SHOW promises to be a hit: "STOP A BULLET WITH YOUR HEAD" ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 19:46:47 -0500 From: Fritz Whittington Subject: Re: Callsigns and Horse Teeth On or about 2004-10-22 09:58, Tony Pelliccio whipped out a trusty #2 pencil and scribbled: > jtaylor wrote in message > news:: >> TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to in message >> news:telecom23.505.2@telecom-digest.org: >>> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Actually, no matter how many teeth you >>> saw in the mouth of some particular horse, there can always be >>> exceptions. For example, how many toes does a cat have on its paws? >>> Some people would say 'five', which is normally the correct >>> answer. But some cats have *six* toes on one (or all four) feet. The >>> vernacular name for such cats is 'polydex' and my first cat 'Nicholas' >>> (the one who was so warm and loving, not the later Nicholas who was >>> always hateful with humans) was that way. Nicholas had six toes on >>> each of his two front paws, five toes on each of his back paws. I >>> guess it is some genetic thing going back a million years or so. PAT] >> Polydactyl cats are particularly common (not just if you count them by >> their toes) around Boston and Halifax; must have been some good >> mousers in the first lot of ships to come over. > Throughout New England actually. I've got a very heavy polydactyl who > knows he should pounce on a mouse but then plays around until he kills > it and then doesn't know what to do with it. > In his case he weighs in at close to 30 lbs. so it is a little bit hard > to pounce when you are that large. Thing is, he's a big cat. Let me guess. You call him "Garfield", right? Well, you should! Fritz Whittington It is better to live in a free society, and risk death by a terrorist attack, than to live in a "safe" police state. ------------------------------ From: Gene S. Berkowitz Subject: Re: Yet Another Telco Tax Proposed Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 23:21:43 -0400 In article , kd1s@yahoo.com says: > Danny Burstein wrote in message > news:: >> In the continuing tradition of government that try to offload taxes >> onto third parties (that way they're not "raising taxes", you see ...) >> California has a very real problem with medical costs. The hospitals >> and other medical providers provide services, but don't take in >> anywhere near as much money as they claim to be expending. >> Hospital and medical finances are such a huge mess they put Enron to >> shame. Normally this isn't a telecom issue but ... >> The telco point: The usual folk have pushed forward a fee on telco >> services to cover the shortfall. Quoting from a VOA clip: >> "A voter initiative that Doctor Higgins calls a "Band-Aid" could >> provide a short-term fix, and he supports the measure. Appearing >> on the November 2nd ballot as Proposition 67, it would raise 500 >> million dollars a year by adding a three-percent surcharge to the >> cost for telephone calls made in California. >> To which the curmodgeons retort: >> "It's the wrong solution for a real problem. This is a phone tax. >> This is a tax on a service that has absolutely nothing to do with >> emergency medical care whatsoever. > It does have some relation. People use the telephone to call the > emergency services which then deliver them to the hospital. > But I think too many other taxes have been loaded onto phone bills in > recent years. In essence it is nickle and diming us to death. > Now my medical system rant. There are several reasons why medical > services have gotten so expensive and they have to do with supply and > demand. Many more people seek medical attention now than they did > years ago, but infrastructure improves glacially and so cannot keep > up. No, that's not it. It has nothing to do with the number of people; more paying customers would mean more money. It has much more to do with the services now delivered (and expected): 30 years ago, if you had congestive heart failure, you died of it. Today, it is routine that a heart bypass operation be performed, at an average cost of $23,000, or a a minimum, an angioplasty, at around $5,000. 50 years ago, severely premature infants died. Today, many, if not most, survive after months of hospital care at an average cost of about $30,000. 40 years ago, if you were injured, the x-ray was the only diagnostic procedure besides "tell me where it hurts". Today, tennis elbow is diagnosed in an MRI, which costs around $2 million to buy, and is considered as essential in a modern U.S. hospital as bedpans. --Gene [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When I had my two heart attacks back in the middle 1990's, I lived in the Chicago area and thought the bills from Northshore Medical Center were pretty awful. There were angioplasties each time and other treatment as well. But when I got here to Kansas and had a brain aneurysm (which is more or less a stroke but not entirely), when I got out of Stormont-Vail Medical Center in Topeka and the associated Kansas Rehabiitation Hospital (yes, the nearest brain surgeon was a 125 mile ambulance ride going down I-70) I got a bill for *three hundred thousand dollars*. Ever had a hospital or doctor bill with a bottom line of $300,000.00 ? Not bad, I guess for someone who is comotose for over two months and in emergency rehabilitation for another month after that. Add about another $35,000 for a year's stay in a nursing home. How can anyone afford to get sick these days? PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 02:04:09 -0400 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: AT&T Reports $7 Billion Loss http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53075-2004Oct21.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53075-2004Oct21?language=3Dprinter Retreat From Traditional Phone Service Causes Drop By Bruce Meyerson NEW YORK, Oct. 21 -- AT&T Corp. reported a third-quarter loss of $7.12 billion Thursday because of huge charges resulting from the company's retreat from traditional telephone services, which included at least 7,500 more job cuts and a write-down in the value of the company's long-distance network. The loss amounted to $8.95 per share for the period ended Sept. 30. The results, which topped more pessimistic analyst forecasts, reflect write-down and severance costs of $12.47 billion, as well as a resulting $4.38 billion tax benefit and after-tax savings of $331 million on depreciation thanks to the write-down. In the corresponding quarter last year, AT&T earned $418 million, or 53 cents a share. Third-quarter revenue totaled $7.6 billion, down 11.7 percent from $8.65 billion a year earlier, but the decline was less than many analysts had projected. Shares of AT&T rose 22 cents, or 1.4 percent, to close at $15.80 on the New York Stock Exchange. Business services revenue fell 10.4 percent, to $5.65 billion, as voice and data services suffered from ongoing price battles and competition from cell phones. Consumer revenue fell 15.2 percent, to $1.98 billion, driven by a sharp drop-off in new customers following AT&T's decision to stop marketing local and long-distance service. Long-distance price wars and the loss of business to wireless and Internet-based calling also reduced revenue. AT&T, still the nation's largest long-distance company with 26 million customers, said two weeks ago that it would reduce the book value of its assets by about $11.4 billion now that its network is expected to generate far less revenue from consumer voice traffic. The decision to cut spending on customer acquisitions followed a federal court decision that will make it more expensive for AT&T to sell local service by leasing residential lines from the four regional phone companies -- which at the same time are luring away AT&T's long-distance customers. When it announced the write-down, AT&T also said it was expanding this year's job cuts to more than 20 percent of the workforce, or at least 12,500 jobs. The company had previously projected a downsizing of 8 percent of the workforce, or about 4,900 positions. More than 9,000 of the affected employees have either already left the company or been notified they were being laid off. To cover severance benefits and other costs related to those cuts, AT&T said it would record a charge of about $1 billion with the third-quarter results. Copyright 2004 The Washington Post Company *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance Washington Post. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Poor AT&T ... how long do you think it will be until we report here that they went bankrupt completely, or maybe are totally gone, like Western Union? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Gene S. Berkowitz Subject: Re: Sinclair: From Bad to Worse Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 23:00:42 -0400 In article , tom.horsley@att.net says: >> On Monday, Sinclair fired the head of its Washington bureau for having >> the temerity to criticize the airing of one-sided propaganda (ironic, >> considering Sinclair is claiming a First Amendment right to air the >> film). > I don't like Sinclair, but I'm afraid I can't find any irony here. > Sinclair owns the stations -- he can put anything he wants on and hire > or fire anyone he wants to. There is nothing in the First Amendment > that guarantees there will be no consequences for speaking up -- it > just guarantees the gummint can't do anything to stop you. Well, the Smiths, who control the majority of the stock (Sinclair was the founder's middle name) may own the stations (and that is questionable also; they have "operating agreements" with other stations in markets where they already own one, in order to avoid the (eroding) limits on media ownership); however they DO NOT OWN the spectrum allocations they broadcast in. That is supposedly held in trust for its true owners, the American Public, and broadcasters are granted a LICENSE to use the airwaves that belong to US, in order to serve the public interest. The U.S. Government has auctioned portions of the spectrum for use by mobile phone and PCS services; they have yet to hold such an auction for the TV spectrum. --Gene ------------------------------ From: HorneTD Subject: Last Laugh! Re: Boston's Big Rebound Makes a Winner of Fox, Too Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 02:31:06 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net Monty Solomon wrote: > By RICHARD SANDOMIR > It was the game that wasn't supposed to be televised because it wasn't > supposed to happen. But you have to think that Fox was pleased and > astonished that the Boston Red Sox had done the impossible in > postseason: they had forced a seventh game after losing the first > three of the American League Championship Series to the Yankees. > Then the Red Sox took it one step further last night, beating the > Yankees, 10-3. > For Fox, it's too bad that Yankees-Red Sox league championship series > aren't best-of-nine affairs. A ninth game might approach Super Bowl > ratings levels. > Game 6 produced a 15.6 Nielsen rating, or 25.1 million viewers, which > made it the highest-rated nondecisive league championship series game > in 13 years, Fox said, in spin that would gladden a break dancer. > Even more fortunate for Fox is the type of television rabidity in the > Boston market: 70 percent of those tuned to televisions in the center > of Red Sox Nation were watching Game 6 (compared with 44 percent among > New Yorkers). > The last time the Red Sox were in the World Series -- 18 years ago > against the Mets -- they generated a 28.6 rating, the best performance > since 1981. Fox might now produce a new reality show: "My Big Fat > Obnoxious Idiots." > http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/21/sports/baseball/21tv.html What do you call twenty seven men watching the World Series on television? Answer: The New York Yankees. Tom H ------------------------------ 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. 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #510 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sun Oct 24 04:46:50 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9O8knS02723; Sun, 24 Oct 2004 04:46:50 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 04:46:50 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410240846.i9O8knS02723@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 #511 TELECOM Digest Sun, 24 Oct 2004 04:46:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 511 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: 11-Sept Police Widow Gets Domain-Cyberburned (Gene S. Berkowitz) Re: 11-Sept Police Widow Gets Domain-Cyberburned (Rick Merrill) Re: 11-Sept Police Widow Gets Domain-Cyberburned (John Levine) Cybersquatter Update (TELECOM Digest Editor) Making Geurilla War for Cybersquatters (TELECOM Digest Editor) Re: Who Carries TV Signals and Long Distance -- Today? (Neal McLain) 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: Gene S. Berkowitz Subject: Re: 11-Sept Police Widow Gets Domain-Cyberburned Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 01:25:24 -0400 In article , first.last@comcast.net says: > In article , dannyb@panix.com > says: >> "The widow of a hero NYPD Emergency Service detective killed on 9/11 >> created a Web site as a loving tribute to her husband -- only to have >> it snapped up by a heartless Internet company that forced her to fork >> over $800 to buy it back, The Post has learned. >> "Kathy Vigiano's gut-wrenching ordeal began in January when she >> discovered that her husband Joseph's memorial Web site -- which she >> filled with personal photos and an emotional letter from one of their >> sons -- had been replaced by ads for penile-enlargement tools, >> sexual-performance drugs and Viagra... >> http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/30859.htm >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The very same people did that to our >> internet-history.org site as well. If you type in >> http://internet-history.org you get the very same preposterous ads. >> And of course, the guy wants to sell that one also. I **thought** >> there were laws against that sort of cybersquatting, but I guess >> that only pertains for large commercial web sites. Any damn fool >> would know that 'internet history' was discussed there on the site >> which was the property of the Internet Historical Society, which is >> *my* name, and it was a running site for three or four years. Yet, >> that moron simply walked away with it, got the org registrar to give >> it to him I guess. >> I had asked John Levine to take it away from the person and give it >> back to me. John won't do it. I thought he was one of the registrars >> for .org ... so I know how this poor lady feels now as well. But I can >> tell you *I* am not going to pay his blackmail ransom demand. If I had >> any money I would just sue the damn registrar who took it from me and >> gave it to him (I understand he is in some country in Europe. The lady >> should not have paid anything either, just immediatly filed suit >> against the registrar she had used when she first set up the site and >> done it that way. Of course, I have no money to pay any lawyers to >> help me, so that leaves me and internet-history.org high and dry. Maybe >> some attorney doing pro-bono work will be able to get our site back. >> If people would quit paying good money to these charlatans who steal >> the names that netizens use for their web sites, then they would go >> out of business. PAT] > What am I missing here? Where is it actually stated that > "buying" a domain name grants you rights to it in perpetuity? > It's very obvious from the agreements made with the registrars > that you are _renting_ the domain. ICANN insists that no > domain can be registered for more than ten years at a time; that > certainly seems to preclude automatically owning the right to a domain > for life. Of course, by simply renewing it before the term expires, > the rights remain with you. > On the day your "lease" expires, if you haven't renewed, that name > returns to the pool, or is possibly auctioned off by the registrar. > How is this any different from a telephone number? If you stop paying > the bill, the telco shuts off service, and eventually gives (sells) the > number to someone else. Should I sue Verizon to get the phone number > of my childhood home? > Gene > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What you are overlooking is that the > lady did not come close to having her domain name for ten years. She > had it at best for two or three years, it was an active domain name > then it up and disappeared when the registrar chose to give it or > sell it to the penis enlargement man. NO. According to the NY Post Article: "They immediately realized they inadvertently allowed the registration for their site ' www.vigiano.com' to elapse [sic] and that each believed the other had renewed it." It wasn't taken, stolen, hijacked, or dematerialized. IT EXPIRED. > What you are overlooking is that very few netizens care much either > way about what ICANN says or thinks should be done. Fine. Then let them actually READ the registration agreements they agree to, and be bound by the terms of that contract. > ICANN *only* represents big business interests anyway, not the > small, average person with a web site. If you don't think that is > the case, then since Microsoft has had their domain name > 'microsoft.com' well over ten years, petition the registrars or > ICANN to force Microsoft to give it up and give others a chance at > it. > Or maybe now that Yahoo has had their domain names for that same > length of time, they can be forced out. No, you completely misunderstand. As recommended, Microsoft, Yahoo, or YOU can register a domain for ten years. If, within 9 years and 364 days you RENEW the domain, it's yours for another ten years. If, instead, at 9 years + 365 days, you decide to go skiing instead of renewing your registration, it returns to the free pool, where ANYONE, including the original registrar, can have a shot at it. The exception being where a name is a recognized trademark, such as "Microsoft" or "IBM". > Oh, and you don't hear ICANN complaining that the joker who > registered 'whitehouse.com' most likely did it knowing full well > that people looking for information on the White House will > unwittingly type '.com' instead of '.gov' ICANN represents big > business only, **not** people like Mrs. Viagino. The government > wants business to control the net; they use ICANN as their tool. > What you are overlooking regards phone numbers is that if a phone > number is listed in a directory and is in active service for no matter > how many years, as your childhood phone number might well have been if > your parents or yourself had chosen to continue living there and were > still referring to that number as your own then one day Verizon > chooses to disconnect it or route it to someone else without so much > as a single notice to you then you *would* have a very actionable > suit against Verizon. And if I "choose" not to pay the bill, Verizon has the right to disconnect my service, unless I dispute the bill. As we are moving into a new paradigm where phones are mobile, and the number has no relation whatsoever to a physical location (other than next to my ear), it's an even more specious argument to claim it as "yours" if you fail to pay for it. > Finally, what you are overlooking is that if the registrar had any > care about people's sensibilities, even if Mrs. Viagino *had* > misunderstood the terms of registration (I do not think she was even > told it had to be renewed, etc) then the registrar might have told > the lady something like 'this is a final notice, the site is being > removed from you; gather up your files, pictures, etc and find some > other place to park them.' There is a very clear distinction that must be made between a domain, which is simply a NAME in a lookup table, and a HOST, where the actual files are stored. You can be pretty sure that the files were still on the hosting server, and could be accessed via the IP address originally assigned, unless that bill wasn't paid either. If people are confused about the difference between a Registrar, who offers domain registration, and a Host, who rents file server space, then maybe they should do a little more research before proffering their credit card number. > Then maybe after two or three weeks shut > it down. Or was the penis-enlargement man in such a rush he could not > spare a week or two for a man killed in the line of duty, leaving a > wife and family behind? Oh, I know it would not matter to ICANN, but > you would think there might have been some courtesy given. PAT] The Post article does not mention the time elapsed from when the registration expired to when the speculator bought it. The real irony in all this: Domain Name: VIGIANO.COM Created on: 25-Jan-04 Expires on: 25-Jan-06 ... they only renewed it for two more years... --Gene ------------------------------ From: Rick Merrill Subject: Re: 11-Sept Police Widow Gets Domain-Cyberburned Organization: Comcast Online Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 10:34:58 GMT > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What you are overlooking is that the > lady did not come close to having her domain name for ten years. She > had it at best for two or three years, it was an active domain name > then it up and disappeared when the registrar chose to give it or > sell it to the penis enlargement man. There is NO evidence that it was an "active domain" name: in-use yes, but apparently not having a paid-up registration. The real problem is that ICAN does not have any 'grace period' that keeps a name that has expired. It could have been the fault of the domain registration service that failed to get the registration paid/registered in time. It is this zero tolerance policy that is taken advantage of by domain squatters/robbers. - RM ------------------------------ Date: 23 Oct 2004 13:01:28 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: 11-Sept Police Widow Gets Domain-Cyberburned Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > I had asked John Levine to take it away from the person and give it > back to me. John won't do it. I thought he was one of the registrars > for .org ... You thought wrong. Unless you have a clear case of trademark infringement, which you don't, the only way to get a domain from someone else is to buy it from them. Yes, this is a pain, but it also means that someone else who purports to be the Internet Pioneers can't take your internet-pioneers.org domain away from you. R's, John [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: If I had no case of trademark infringment on the Internet Historical Society and internet-history then what makes internet-pioneers any better? Both -history and -pioneers pointed to the same site at xuxa.iecc.com where the files are stored. The cybersquatter purpoted to be the internet historian and got that; why couldn't he purport to be the internet pioneer? PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 22:17:55 EDT From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Cybersquatter Update By doing 'whois -h whois.publicinterestregistry.net internet-history.org' I found some interesting details on the cybersquatter who ripped off the name being used as a repository for Internet History Society and put his penis enlargement ads there instead: Domain ID:D104959718-LROR Domain Name:INTERNET-HISTORY.ORG Created On:03-Oct-2004 22:43:28 UTC Expiration Date:03-Oct-2005 22:43:28 UTC Sponsoring Registrar:OnlineNIC Inc. (R64-LROR) Status:TRANSFER PROHIBITED Registrant ID:ONLC-1349494-4 Registrant Name:Admin Registrant Organization:BEALO GROUP S.A. Registrant Street1:BP 138 Registrant Street2:BP 138 Registrant Street3: Registrant City:Geneve Registrant State/Province: Registrant Postal Code:1218 Registrant Country:CH Registrant Phone:+41.227347210 Registrant Phone Ext.:1111 Registrant FAX:+41.227347210 Registrant FAX Ext.: Registrant Email:www@promotechnology.com Admin ID:ONLC-1349494-1 Admin Name:Admin Admin Organization:BEALO GROUP S.A. Admin Street1:BP 138 Admin Street2:BP 138 Admin Street3: Admin City:Geneve Admin State/Province:- Admin Postal Code:1218 Admin Country:CH Admin Phone:+41.227347210 Admin Phone Ext.:1111 Admin FAX:+41.227347210 Admin FAX Ext.: Admin Email:www@promotechnology.com Tech ID:ONLC-1349494-2 Tech Name:Admin Tech Organization:BEALO GROUP S.A. Tech Street1:BP 138 Tech Street2:BP 138 Tech Street3: Tech City:Geneve Tech State/Province:- Tech Postal Code:1218 Tech Country:CH Tech Phone:+41.227347210 Tech Phone Ext.:1111 Tech FAX:+41.227347210 Tech FAX Ext.: Tech Email:www@promotechnology.com Name Server:NS1.FWHDNS.COM Name Server:NS2.FWHDNS.COM Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: Name Server: I am attempting to find an attorney who will handle a probono case for the Internet Historical Society who will attempt to retrieve the name back. Obviously it is hard to sue someone in Switzerland when you are in the USA, but maybe Bealo Group S.A. has a representative or agent here in the USA. If anyone wants to followup on this, please do with a phone call to Geneva, Switzerland to +41.227347.210 Ext 1111 and ask them why they cybersquat on legitimate web sites. Or if you prefer to write to them, send a letter to Bealo Group, S.A. Post Office Box 138, Geneva 1218 Switzerland. Mark your letter to the attention of the person in charge of cybersquatting and penis enlargement ads. Maybe they will answer email sent to them at http://www.promotechnology.com but I sort of doubt it. By looking at their website http://www.promotechnology.com I see it is just a porn outfit anyway. Maybe *they* have a USA representative. I can tell you this much: Bealo Group S.A. and promotechnolgy need to get a good suing, which I may just give them. But that *is* expensive and perhaps futile. Perhaps there are other ways to accomplish the same thing, using geurilla (or do you say 'gorilla' warfare. Read on in the next message to see what I mean. PAT ------------------------------ Date: 23 Oct 2004 22:18:01 -0400 From: Patrick Townson Subject: Geurilla Warfare and Cybersquatters Thank God there are some registrars who do not submit to the tyranny of outfits like ICANN. One for example is UNONIC where you get the 'us.tf' and 'net.tf' names. Go to http://www.unonic.com and register all you want at no charge. They are all set to re-direct to wherever you want. Someone pointed out to me in private email: > "I wouldn't make any long term plans about a us.tf domain. All the > two-letter domains are assigned to countries and country-like hunks of > territory, like .ca for Canada and .jp for Japan and .to for Tonga. > The.tf domain is assigned to "French Southern Territories" which are a > bunch of uninhabited islands in the Indian Ocean. A while ago the > French government contracted with the English company Adamsnames to > run it as a vanity domain, but now I see at www.adamsnames.tf that the > French want it back, and I expect that sooner or later the us.tf > registration, which was made in 1999 by some guy in Greece, will > expire and since he is nowhere near those islands, they won't let him > renew it. See http://www.taaf.fr/ to find out where .tf really is." I noted that in fact "French Southern Territories" is in the Indian Ocean but getting down in the direction of Antarctica as www.taaf.fr explains. Those people don't give a hoot about what ICANN wants or does not want. None of the 'two letter domains', i.e. .ca or .jp care either way. ICANN claims to own it all, but no one pays any attention. I continued in the private email correspondence asking, > I wonder what the good people at ICANN would do if someone went to > us.tf and took out web sites like Microsoft,Coca Cola, General > Motors, White House, etc, then pointed them all to the most > scurrilous sex web sites there are. He replied: > "That would be fun. Most likely it would get Mr. us.tf > shut down since he and the .tf registrar are in Europe so the big mean > companies all have local lawyers there." I asked: > And why do the registrars have to go along with whatever ICANN has > to say? And why do you feel .com or .org is safe for the long term > but ca jp and those are not? He responded: > "Actual registrations in .ca and .jp are fine so long as you meet the > rules (actual presence in Canada and Japan, in those two cases). But > when you use phoo.us.tf, you're actually using a subdomain of us.tf > and it appears that the random registrations like us.tf are allowed. > "ICANN claims that they are in charge of all the domains, but the > two-letter domains have so far been ignoring them. The three and more > letter domains (ever hear of .coop or .museum or my fave .aero?) are > all in bed with ICANN." ----------------------- Yes, I have heard of those also. But let us now consider and contem- plate a perfectly dreadful, perfectly evil scenario: it is so dreadful and awful and evil and even illegal in some jurisdictions, that I certainly cannot recommend it. It goes like this: first, make a list of your 'favorite' large companies; Microsoft, SBC, AT&T and McDonalds come to mind. Next, you go to UNONIC (United Names Organization) at http://www.unonic.com . It is an automated process where you are asked to sign up for a domain name. You get a drop down menu of all the available sub-domains available, such as '.us'. '.net', etcetera, all of which end in the domain '.tf' You sign up your favorite large companies one by one. You are then asked to identify the administrator of the domain. Now this must be your own name and address, and an email address. **DO NOT** REPEAT **NOT** put down something fictious like 'Bealo Group SA' with an address in Switzerland or an email address such as @www.promotechnology.com. Use your own name/email. Pick an easy to remember password, because when you sign up other companies with their own 'web sites' also, if you use the same name of administrator and same email address, you will be told 'already have that one; provide the password and this new one will take control of your domain group. ' Naturally, for additional companies you sign up, you will want to use your correct name on them as well. Don't get in the habit of just putting down 'Bealo Group SA' and some address in Switzerland. Now as you sign up each of your favorite companies you will be asked where to redirect calls to that URL. Re-direct the calls to wherever they should go; some nice web site which reflect the proper spirit. Don't just redirect to some crude, rude, or lewd or pornographic website. Remember, it is a fully automated process; no one is going to be spying or checking up on you. And be sure to cloak the true URL you send callers to. By 'cloaking' it, your new title goes on the page, and your alias URL name appears on the caller's browser window. Basically what happens is a new window opens where you take zero 'frames' and the picture which was there gets a hundred percent of the 'frames' when you 'cloak' it or hide the re-direction. So now you have a 'web site' all set up in the form brandname.us.tf or companyname.net.tf ... and callers to that URL go to the nice web site they should be at. Ah, but the best fun is yet to come. Now your new web site has to be promoted; customers need to know where to find you. For this, you spam *massively*. Every domain in the world you can think of. Every name you can think of; maybe use a brute force dictionary appoach. But try hard to skip past those spam filters: A nice, clean unassuming short letter such as Subject: Our change of email address brandname.com now receives its email at brandname.us.tf or companyname.com now receives email at companyname.net.tf. Check out our improved, easy to use web site at www.brandname.us.tf **Make certain** this change of email address letter *at the very least* gets to the key executives at brandname or companyname. Even if you prefer not to spam the whole world, at least get it to those important officials in that company or agency, such as their lawyer, their president, their VP, etc. You know they are going to want to check out their 'new email address' or 'new web home' which is why the cloaking is very important. I mean, you are much too modest to have them wind up looking at a page on _your computer_ if that is where the pages are at you wanted them to see. Maybe you could use a throwaway account. Now someone at brandname is going to want to meet you personally, to discuss what you have done, and some one or more lawyers or investigators will want to counsel you about your work and this is where _accurate_ information regards the name of the administrator in the files of unonic.com is so important. They are not going to go chasing off to some uninhabited island in the southern Indian Ocean around Antarctica when they could do 'whois' and find out the details as they prepare their lawsuits against that person. If you had filled in the registration purporting to be Bealo Group SA that would be wrong. Bealo Group is known to be cybersquatters and hosts of numerous sex sites, so when brandname or companyname lawyers get to that point and see Bealo Group as the contacts, it is going to be a bit awkward to say the least for Bealo Group to explain it all. *YES* we are cybersquatters, *YES* we do operate sex sites as per http://promotechnology.com, and *YES* we try to trick guys into measuring their penises and buying our worthless pills and potions for which we have no medical license to sell or treat anyone, but *NO* we did not confiscate the brand names Microsoft, or Coke, or McDonalds or SBC and try to trick the public into coming to those redirected sites which have our name as the administrators. So now I trust you can understand why it is so important, so critical when going to a fully automated, no questions asked, no fees charged registrar like http://unonic.com to only select brandnames over which you have control and to make sure you enter the name of the site administrator correctly and to make sure you do the redirection correctly. Do not put down Bealo Group in Geneva,CH at the phone number +41.227347.210, because you might cause them to get sued by angry brandnames and companynames. PAT ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 22:51:19 -0500 From: Neal McLain Subject: Re: Who Carries TV Signals and Long Distance -- Today? Lisa Hancock wrote: > With satellites and competing companies that own their > own fibre networks, does AT&T still carry broadcast > transmissions today? If not, when did the transition > start? Anthony Bellanga responded: > Also in the later 1970s, emerging national-in-scope > Cable-TV services such as HBO, CSPAN, CBN, CNN, etc. > chose to distribute via satellite directly to local > cable franchise operation centers rather than use Bell > System facilities. I also don't know if Bell had enough > landline VIDEO capacity using the technology of the > time for all of the new emerging cable services, on > a NATIONAL basis. The "new emerging cable services" didn't emerge until satellite distribution made them economically feasible. Before satellites came along, cable television systems relied almost exclusively on broadcast stations for their programming. Given enough money, the cable industry could have built a microwave network with sufficient capacity to distribute non-broadcast cable-only programming nationally. But the industry never considered it: the cost would have been astronomical. By the early 70s, the industry had been around for 25 years, and there were far more cable headends than broadcast stations in the country. A ground-based microwave network for cable TV would have had to reach many more end-points than the network AT&T was operating for the broadcast networks. Headends in remote places like mountaintops or barrier islands might never have been reached. The first nationally-distributed satellite-delivered non-broadcast programming service was Time Inc's HBO, launched in December 1975 on Satcom 3R. Prior to its satellite launch, Time had been using non-AT&T microwave to distribute HBO to its own cable systems in the northeast. Time wanted to extend HBO's coverage nationwide, and satellite was the only economically-feasible way to do it. Once HBO broke the ice, other non-broadcast services soon followed. By 1979, programming was available from Turner Communications Group (WTCG, now TBS Superstation), Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), Southern Satellite Systems (Satellite Programming Network, or SPN), USA Network, C-SPAN (sharing transponder time with USA), ESPN, and Nickelodeon. A year later, Turner launched CNN, the first in a string of non-broadcast services that now includes Cartoon Network, CNNSI, CNNFN, Headline News, TCM, and TNT. Of course, not all of these new services survived. CBN became ABC Family; SPN morphed into CNBC. Others flashed across the horizon and disappeared: Reuters "Newsview"; FNN (Financial News Network); TEC (The Entertainment Channel); HTN (Home Theater Network); MSN (Modern Satellite Network); Cinemerica. But the basic financial model worked: operating a non-broadcast satellite-delivered programming service proved to be a viable business. These services now make up the bulk of the programming offered by cable television systems on their basic and extended-basic tiers. Lisa continued: > With satellites, is there a problem with transmission > lag time? Anthony continued: > Radio/TV network broadcasting is different [from > telephone conversations] in that a program usually > originates from one point (or maybe a small number of > locations) and is sent to "everyone" across the > country... Programming production studios sometimes have a trio of video monitors sitting side-by-side: - The first displays the program signal directly from the studio. - The second displays the downlink from the programmer's own uplink, after a delay of about 0.24 seconds (one round trip to/from a geostationary satellite). - The third displays the downlink from the DirecTV or Dish Network, after a delay of about 0.48 seconds (two round trips). It's fascinating to watch the same image signal jump from monitor to monitor. But a home viewer would never be aware of it. But two-way phone conversations make the round-trip delay obvious. I often notice this on CNN when the studio anchor asks a question of a field reporter who is using a videophone. After the anchor finishes the question, we watch the reporter just standing there (trying not to look stupid) for a half second before answering. Neal McLain ------------------------------ 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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Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #511 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sun Oct 24 17:28:39 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9OLSdX08381; Sun, 24 Oct 2004 17:28:39 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 17:28:39 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410242128.i9OLSdX08381@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 #512 TELECOM Digest Sun, 24 Oct 2004 17:29:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 512 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Identities Stolen in Seconds (Monty Solomon) I Love Bees Game a Surprise Hit (Monty Solomon) City-Wide Wi-Fi Link Considered for Newton, MA (Monty Solomon) FTC Gets Court Order Against Spammer Wallace, et al (Danny Burstein) Verizon Hooked on Cable (Scott) SLIC Tutorial (behzad) Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telco (Gary Novosielski) Re: Yet Another Telco Tax Proposed (Gene S. Berkowitz) Re: Sinclair: From Bad to Worse (Linc Madison) Re: Free Speech and Corporations (John Smith) Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (Wesrock@aol.com) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 03:51:42 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Identities Stolen in Seconds By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN PAUSING in the foyer of a comfortable suburban home two days before Halloween in 2002, Kevin Barrows, a special agent with the F.B.I., could not bring himself to open the front door. He and a team of agents had just spent several hours searching every room in the house, in New Rochelle, N.Y., but they were leaving empty-handed. Months of investigating had led Mr. Barrows to believe that someone was orchestrating a huge fraud from the house, yet he had not found a single scrap of evidence. Still, something bothered him about the furniture in one of the bedrooms. It seemed oddly oversized. So he headed back upstairs for a second look, and his attention focused on an expansive canopy over the bed. When he pushed at the draping, he found that it was weighed down with files. They contained reams of confidential financial information about hundreds of individuals whose identities had been pilfered in an intricate scheme that illicitly netted more than $50 million. Two years later, the New Rochelle home has emerged as a linchpin in what federal law enforcement authorities describe as the biggest case of identity theft ever uncovered in the United States. The scheme was essentially masterminded by just two people: Linus Baptiste, who lived in the house and had contacts with a sprawling ring of Nigerian street criminals, and Philip A. Cummings, his former brother-in-law, who worked as a help-desk clerk at a Long Island software company. At least 30,000 people nationwide were victimized, according to law enforcement authorities and court documents. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/business/yourmoney/24theft.html ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 03:00:10 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: I Love Bees Game a Surprise Hit By Daniel Terdiman Following Wednesday's third presidential debate, an out-of-place poster with a large cartoon image of a grinning bee appeared on the wall of a room packed with spinmeisters brandishing Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards signs. Most people who saw it on CNN that night probably didn't even notice it, but fans of a game called I Love Bees knew it was a shout out to them from a team of the game's players at Arizona State University, the site of that evening's debate. I Love Bees is the latest and perhaps most ambitious of the growing genre known as alternate-reality games. In it, widely dispersed players coordinate to find and answer thousands of ringing pay phones all across the United States and provide correct answers to recorded questions. When all the answers have been supplied, the latest episode in an internet-based War of the Worlds -esque radio serial is unlocked and made available to its rabid fans. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65365,00.html ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 16:59:43 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Citywide Wi-Fi Link Considered / Internet Virtually Everywhere NEWTON Citywide wi-fi link considered Internet access would be virtually everywhere By Matt Viser, Globe Correspondent | October 24, 2004 Several Newton officials are looking into blanketing the city's 18.5 square miles with wireless Internet transmitters, which would make the city one of several places in the nation -- and the only one in Massachusetts -- to offer the service on such a wide scale. The plan, which an aldermanic committee began discussing last week, would involve mounting routers on telephone poles throughout the city. Anyone within 100 yards of one of the routers would be able to access the Internet using a password. The city would charge about $10 per month to use the service, which could begin to be available in as soon as six months. Installing the routers throughout the city would cost between $370,000 and $740,000, according to initial estimates. http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/10/24/citywide_wi_fi_link_considered/ [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Here in Independence, authorities have considered the same thing, but the scale is quite different. Our town is only two miles long by two miles wide approximatly, with between 8000-9000 residents, but I do not think it has ever gotten beyond the talking stage as of yet. Independence High School and the college have both pushed for it, but no one wants to supply the money needed. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Danny Burstein Subject: FTC Gets Court Order Against Spammer Wallace, et al Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 06:36:10 -0400 Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC "CONCORD, N.H. - A federal judge has ordered a man known as the "Spam King" to disable so-called spyware programs that infiltrate people's computers, track their Internet use and flood them with pop-up advertising. "U.S. District Judge Joseph DiClerico issued a temporary restraining order Thursday against Stanford Wallace and his companies, SmartBot.net Inc. of Richboro, Pa., and Seismic Entertainment Productions Inc. of Rochester. SmartBot's principal place of business is Barrington. rest at: http://www.portervillerecorder.com/articles/2004/10/23/ap/hitech/d85tku5g0.prt danny " yes, the court order was thursday. dunno why it didn't show up in the news until now " burstein _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] ------------------------------ From: Scott Subject: Verizon Hooked on Cable Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 09:46:15 -0400 Newsday Company plans to use fiber-optic lines to better compete with Cablevision in offering TV and Net services BY HARRY BERKOWITZ STAFF WRITER In a new competitive threat to Cablevision's cable-television and Internet services, Verizon Communications yesterday announced it will string fiber-optic connections directly to homes and businesses in parts of Nassau, Westchester and Rockland counties. The connections will replace copper-wire links and allow Verizon to offer cable TV and faster Internet access. The company said it expects to start marketing cable services next year, including high-definition TV and video-on-demand, and is already negotiating with Viacom and other programmers for content. "I expect that next year we'll not only be in the video business, but we will be a significant competitor to those that provide cable TV services today," said Paul Lacouture, president of the Verizon network services group. Verizon added parts of six states, including New York, to the previously announced three where it had said it is rolling out the connections. The company said it will hook up these areas, totaling 3 million homes and businesses, by the end of 2005 and more in following years. "In suburban New York City, Verizon vs. Cablevision is likely to be a major battleground, testing whether Verizon is able to put together a cable-like video package that is competitively and economically viable," Merrill Lynch analyst Jessica Reif Cohen said. Cablevision Systems Corp. has 3 million cable customers in the New York City metro area, including the three counties that Verizon is targeting. "We compete vigorously and successfully with the phone company today and expect to in the future," said Cablevision spokesman Jim Maiella. Regional telephone companies have tried to add video services in the past but largely gave up in the face of heavy expenses and difficulties attracting customers. This time, the new technology that makes video possible is needed anyway to improve phone and Internet service, Lacouture said. Verizon is spending $800 million on the overhaul this year alone. It is targeting affluent suburban areas, where overhead lines, rather than more expensive underground ones, will be replaced and where customers are more likely to bite. Verizon did not say how much it would charge for video service. It will charge $34.95 or more per month for Internet access that will reach download speeds of up to 5 megabits per second, more than triple the old speeds it has offered, and $44.95 or more per month for speeds reaching 15 megabits per second. In a year, it will have the capability to offer speeds of up to 100 megabits. Cablevision charges $44.95 for its Optimum Online service, which has 1.2 million customers and speeds up to 10 megabits per second. Cablevision also has started competing with Verizon by offering Internet-based phone service called Optimum Voice, which had signed up 115,000 customers as of June 30. ------------------------------ From: bsheikho@yahoo.com (behzad) Subject: SLIC Tutorial Wanted Date: 24 Oct 2004 11:42:36 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hello all, I'll appreciate if anybody address me a tutorial about SLIC "subcriber line interface circuit". I need to know about important spec and architecture. Thanks, B.SH ------------------------------ From: Gary Novosielski Subject: Re: Verizon Taking Lessons From Hooterville Telephone Company Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 15:38:17 GMT AES/newspost wrote: > Why not have instead a Honda lawnmover designed so a small auxiliary > Honda-supplied generator can be bolted on top (or on the bottom) of it? Well, the idea isn't brand new, but that shouldn't be surprising. Back in the seventies, or maybe even sixties, the Toro company came out with a line of yard equipment centered around a one-cylinder four-cycle gasoline engine attached to a handle, with a v-belt pulley on the side, and a mounting plate on the bottom that could be clamped into any of several different bases. The handle had controls for the throttle and a "clutch" that spread the pulley apart, allowing the v-belt to slip. I know there was at least one variety of lawnmower base, a snowblower base, and I think some sort of cultivator device as well. I'm not sure if they ever had a generator, but it would have been a simple matter. It was never a big hit, probably because like so many jacks-of-all-trades, it was the master of none. By today's standards, it was also a pretty unsafe design. ------------------------------ From: Gene S. Berkowitz Subject: Re: Yet Another Telco Tax Proposed Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 03:10:35 -0400 In article , first.last@comcast.net says: > In article , kd1s@yahoo.com says: >> Danny Burstein wrote in message >> news:: >>> In the continuing tradition of government that try to offload taxes >>> onto third parties (that way they're not "raising taxes", you see ...) >>> California has a very real problem with medical costs. The hospitals >>> and other medical providers provide services, but don't take in >>> anywhere near as much money as they claim to be expending. >>> Hospital and medical finances are such a huge mess they put Enron to >>> shame. Normally this isn't a telecom issue but ... >>> The telco point: The usual folk have pushed forward a fee on telco >>> services to cover the shortfall. Quoting from a VOA clip: >>> "A voter initiative that Doctor Higgins calls a "Band-Aid" could >>> provide a short-term fix, and he supports the measure. Appearing >>> on the November 2nd ballot as Proposition 67, it would raise 500 >>> million dollars a year by adding a three-percent surcharge to the >>> cost for telephone calls made in California. >>> To which the curmodgeons retort: >>> "It's the wrong solution for a real problem. This is a phone tax. >>> This is a tax on a service that has absolutely nothing to do with >>> emergency medical care whatsoever. >> It does have some relation. People use the telephone to call the >> emergency services which then deliver them to the hospital. >> But I think too many other taxes have been loaded onto phone bills in >> recent years. In essence it is nickle and diming us to death. >> Now my medical system rant. There are several reasons why medical >> services have gotten so expensive and they have to do with supply and >> demand. Many more people seek medical attention now than they did >> years ago, but infrastructure improves glacially and so cannot keep >> up. > No, that's not it. It has nothing to do with the number of people; more > paying customers would mean more money. > It has much more to do with the services now delivered (and expected): > 30 years ago, if you had congestive heart failure, you died of it. > Today, it is routine that a heart bypass operation be performed, at an > average cost of $23,000, or a a minimum, an angioplasty, at around > $5,000. > 50 years ago, severely premature infants died. Today, many, if not > most, survive after months of hospital care at an average cost of > about $30,000. > 40 years ago, if you were injured, the x-ray was the only diagnostic > procedure besides "tell me where it hurts". Today, tennis elbow is > diagnosed in an MRI, which costs around $2 million to buy, and is > considered as essential in a modern U.S. hospital as bedpans. > --Gene > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When I had my two heart attacks back > in the middle 1990's, I lived in the Chicago area and thought the > bills from Northshore Medical Center were pretty awful. There were > angioplasties each time and other treatment as well. But when I got > here to Kansas and had a brain aneurysm (which is more or less a > stroke but not entirely), when I got out of Stormont-Vail Medical > Center in Topeka and the associated Kansas Rehabiitation Hospital > (yes, the nearest brain surgeon was a 125 mile ambulance ride going > down I-70) I got a bill for *three hundred thousand dollars*. Ever > had a hospital or doctor bill with a bottom line of $300,000.00 ? > Not bad, I guess for someone who is comotose for over two months and > in emergency rehabilitation for another month after that. Add about > another $35,000 for a year's stay in a nursing home. How can anyone > afford to get sick these days? PAT] Money well spent, I'd say. How much were you out of pocket? --Gene [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: In total, about five thousand dollars. PAT] ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Sinclair: From Bad to Worse Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 23:30:00 -0700 From: Linc Madison Reply-To: lincmad@suespammers.org Organization: California resident; nospam; no unsolicited e-mail allowed In article , Gene S. Berkowitz wrote: > Well, the Smiths, who control the majority of the stock may own the > stations (and that is questionable also; they have "operating > agreements" with other stations ... to avoid the (eroding) limits on > media ownership); Furthermore, owning majority control of the corporation that owns the stations is a very different thing from owning the stations outright. The stations are owned by a publicly traded corporation. That brings into play the "fiduciary duty" of the management to refrain from conduct that diminishes the value of the stock, even if management owns the majority of the stock. > however they DO NOT OWN the spectrum allocations they broadcast in. Very true. However, the "public interest" part of the license is being watered down about as quickly as the limits on ownership. The bottom line is that the stockholders who object to the actions taken by the Smiths have a strong legal case against them. They placed their own personal political beliefs ahead of their fiduciary duty to their stockholders. Linc Madison * San Francisco, California * lincmad@suespammers.org * primary e-mail: Telecom at LincMad dot com All U.S. and California anti-spam laws apply, incl. CA BPC 17538.45(c) This text constitutes actual notice as required in BPC 17538.45(f)(3). DO NOT SEND UNSOLICITED E-MAIL TO THIS ADDRESS. You have been warned. ------------------------------ From: John Smith Subject: Re: Free Speech and Corporations Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 16:48:50 GMT Lisa Hancock wrote: > As another poster correctly pointed out, it is Sinclair's network and > he is free to do as he wants (he controls the majority stock) > regarding showing the film. ... > The right of free speech is very important. But it is not unlimited. And Sinclair should be taught that fact. > Free speech is not mob rule, nor compelling someone else to pay or > provide your platform to speak from. You're quite right, but you're arguing against yourself. By allowing Sinclair to use the public "airwaves" without restriction (which are not his, but are in fact public property, a finite resource licensed to him by the people for use in the public good) I am being compelled to provide him a platform to speak from. Who do I see about that? > Another poster stated corporations exist for the good of the public. > I don't know where that came from. It's clear you don't. I chalk it up to a private education. So let's enlighten you. Where that came from was the fact that corporations exist by state charter, and these charters are issued under the proviso that the corporation shall operate in the public good, in exchange for liability protection. If corporations accept this protection, they must abide by the terms of the offer. They are no longer "free". If it's freedom they want, they can do it on their own without this, the oldest form of state welfare. You can be excused for not knowing, of course, because it is so rare for a state, on learning that a corporation has not lived up to its charter, to do anything about it. In fact though, a state could revoke the charter of a corporation for cause -- an act that has been referred to as the "corporate death penalty" -- if it found that the corporation was acting against the public good. Now you know. Lisa Hancock further wrote: > Frankly, it bothered me that some people asserted it was somehow > "wrong" for Sinclair to show his propaganda.... Oh, and P.S.: People can "assert: things, but they can also do a lot more than that. Sinclair has since announced that it will not be airing the show, and will instead present a different one-hour news show entitled "A POW Story: Politics, Pressure, and the Media" which will include some clips from "Stolen Honor" but not the entire film. The company denies that grassroots protests, including those of stockholders and advertisers, which have caused it financial damage running into nine figures since their original announcement, had anything to do with the change. In fact they are now claiming that they never had any intention of airing the whole of "Stolen Honor" from the git-go. Yeah, right. ------------------------------ From: Wesrock@aol.com Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 10:02:27 EDT Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns In a message dated Sun, 24 Oct 2004 01:18:22 +0000, bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) writes: >> WWL(AM) and WWL-TV are now located in New Orleans, LA. > Looks like memory has played me false on this one. Further checking > shows it has always belonged to Loyola University, in New Orleans. > (I'm going to have to do some more digging on this -- I'm _sure_ that > WWL was in the Cedar Rapids/Waterloo metro area in the 50's-70's. "I > may be wrong, but I'm not uncertain" applies :) The university-owned > and operated TV station in New Orleans was a CBS network affiliate, as > of 1959. So, WOI-TV was not the only university-owned network TV > affiliate -- but I don't know of any other that was owned/operated by > a _public_ institution. In the late 1930s and 1940s, when I was growing up as a DX fan, WWL (AM, of course) came booming in at night as loud as a local station with the ID "WWL, Loyola University of the South, New Orleans." It was definitely a commercial station owned by a university. Wes Leatherock wesrock@aol.com wleathus@yahoo.com ------------------------------ 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #512 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Oct 25 17:15:56 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9PLFtN19142; Mon, 25 Oct 2004 17:15:56 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 17:15:56 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410252115.i9PLFtN19142@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 #513 TELECOM Digest Mon, 25 Oct 2004 17:15:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 513 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Telecom Update (Canada) #454, October 25, 2004 (Angus TeleManagement) CLIP and Call Forwarding (Bart) Testing MMS (ruchit garg) Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (Mark Roberts) Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (Neal McLain) Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (J. Kelly) Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future (Mark Roberts) Re: Old Stock Quotation Things? (Mark Roberts) Take the Trouble to Block WiFi Poachers (Monty Solomon) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 10:25:51 -0400 From: Angus TeleManagement Subject: Telecom Update (Canada) #454, October 25, 2004 ************************************************************ TELECOM UPDATE ************************************************************ published weekly by Angus TeleManagement Group http://www.angustel.ca Number 454: October 25, 2004 Publication of Telecom Update is made possible by generous financial support from: ** ALLSTREAM: www.allstream.com ** AVAYA: www.avaya.ca/en/ ** BELL CANADA: www.bell.ca ** CISCO SYSTEMS CANADA: www.cisco.com/ca/ ** ERICSSON: www.ericsson.ca ** MITEL NETWORKS: www.mitel.com/ ** SPRINT CANADA: www.sprint.ca ** UTC CANADA: www.canada.utc.org/ ************************************************************ IN THIS ISSUE: ** Rogers Matches Bell $5 LD Offer ** Bell Wins Olympics Sponsorship ** Rogers Offers BlackBerry 7290 ** Utility Telcos to Merge ** C-Com Boosts Satellite Internet Speeds ** Mitec Consolidates R&D ** Qwest Pays $250 Million Fraud Penalty ** Telecom Management Awards Announced ** Telus Wants No-Contract Centrex ** FCI Adds 8-Mbps Internet ** Judge Orders Infolink CEO to Resign ** Bell Appoints New Head of Operations ** Primus Manager Joins Vonage ** New Minacs Call Centre in Pickering ** CANARIE Holds Applications Workshop ** Profits Grow at Cogeco, Shaw ** A User Voice in Telecom Policy ============================================================ ROGERS MATCHES BELL $5 LD OFFER: Rogers Communications has become a long distance reseller, offering 100 minutes of North American LD for 5 cents a minute, and the next 900 minutes for free. This effectively matches Bell Canada's recently announced $5 for 1,000 minutes plan. (See Telecom Update #438) ** Rogers $5 LD is available only to customers who sign two- year contracts on a "Better Choice Bundle" for two of Internet, premium cable, or postpaid wireless service. BELL WINS OLYMPICS SPONSORSHIP: Bell Canada has been named the premier sponsor of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic games and of the Canadian Olympic Team for Olympic events through 2012. Bell's bid included $60 million in telecom infrastructure and $90 million in cash, beating out a Telus proposal that included $50 million in cash. ** Telus said it was disappointed but noted that it would be contributing to the Olympic team effort through ongoing amateur sports sponsorships. ROGERS OFFERS BLACKBERRY 7290: Rogers Wireless and Research In Motion have launched the BlackBerry 7290 in Canada. The device includes a quad-band phone, Bluetooth support, a brighter colour screen, and increased memory, as well as the standard BlackBerry e-mail features. Price: $599.99, less a $150 mail-in rebate. ** Rogers also says it will begin selling RIM's consumer- focused 7100 model in Canada "in the coming weeks." Pricing has not been announced. ** Last week RIM publicly demonstrated a BlackBerry that incorporates Wi-Fi connectivity, scheduled for release in 2005. UTILITY TELCOS TO MERGE: FibreWired, the telecom division of Hamilton Hydro, and Fibre Tech Telecom, a joint venture of three Waterloo region utilities, are merging. Their combined networks include more than 1,100 km of fibre. C-COM BOOSTS SATELLITE INTERNET SPEEDS: Ottawa based C-Com Satellite Systems says its new satellite-based mobile Internet services, developed in conjunction with RAMTelecom, will be able to deliver upload speeds of up to 1.15 Mbps and download speeds of up to 60 Mbps. MITEC CONSOLIDATES R&D: Wireless component maker Mitec Telecom is closing R&D centres in New Jersey and the UK, moving the work to Montreal and China. Overall R&D employment is unchanged. QWEST PAYS $250 MILLION FRAUD PENALTY: U.S. telco Qwest Communications has agreed to pay a US$250 million penalty to settle a complaint by the Securities and Exchange Commission that it engaged in accounting fraud involving more than $4 billion in misstated revenue and expenses. TELECOM MANAGEMENT AWARDS ANNOUNCED: Last week's Telemanagement Live conference featured the Management & Industry Commitment awards, in recognition of "great end-user achievements demonstrated through outstanding technology deployments and enhanced management practices." The 2004 winners are: ** Cost Recovery Project of the Year: Glen Ryan, Johnson Insurance ** Most Innovative Project of the Year: Oleg Khaev, De Beers Canada ** IP Project of the Year: Dave Dobbin, Telecom Ottawa ** Wireless Project of the Year: Chris Taylor, Metro Toronto Convention Centre ** Telecom Manager of the Year: Rick Adams, City of Coquitlam TELUS WANTS NO-CONTRACT CENTREX: If a tariff notice filed by Telus last week is approved, Provincial Centrex Service in Alberta will be available on a non-contract basis for all customers, not just those with 99 or fewer lines. ** Telus also wants to introduce Automatic Contract Renewal for Provincial Centrex Service customers in Alberta and B.C. www.crtc.gc.ca/8740/eng/2004/t42/tn539.doc FCI ADDS 8-Mbps INTERNET: FCI Broadband has begun offering 8 Mbps Internet access service to its residential customers in the Greater Toronto Area. A bundle including that and local telephone service is $54/month. JUDGE ORDERS INFOLINK CEO TO RESIGN: An Ontario court has ordered the CEO of Infolink Technologies to resign, following allegations that he misused $250,000 in company funds for personal benefit. Cesar Correia, who owns about one-third of Infolink's shares, denies the charges, but has agreed to repay $100,000. ** Infolink recently won a controversial CRTC ruling that allows it to send advertising to consumers' voicemail boxes without ringing their phones. (See Telecom Update #452) BELL APPOINTS NEW HEAD OF OPERATIONS: Bell Canada has named EVP Patrick Pichette as President, Operations, replacing David Southwell, who is retiring. PRIMUS MANAGER JOINS VONAGE: Joe Parent, who until recently was with Primus Telecommunications Canada, has joined Vonage Canada as Vice-President, Marketing & Business Development. NEW MINACS CALL CENTRE IN PICKERING: Call centre outsourcer Minacs Worldwide has leased a 54,000 square foot building in Pickering, Ontario, to expand its services to "a Canadian telecommunications client." The company says it will install 400 workstations in the building and hire 200 new employees over the next three months. CANARIE HOLDS APPLICATIONS WORKSHOP: CANARIE is holding a free workshop in Toronto November 4-5 to demonstrate new network applications developed in federally funded programs. For information on "Showing Results, Sharing Knowledge," go to www.canarie.ca/conferences/fall_series/index.html. PROFITS GROW AT COGECO, SHAW: During the quarter ended August 31: ** Cogeco Cable's net income was $6.5 million, three times higher than in the same period a year ago. Sales were $133 million, a 5.2% increase. Cogeco lost 2,493 basic service customers and gained 5,190 Internet customers during the quarter. ** Shaw Communications had net income of $28.9 million, compared to $4.4 million a year earlier. Service revenue grew 5.9% to $532 million. Basic cable subscribers increased by 5,830, and Internet customers by 23,488. A USER VOICE IN TELECOM POLICY: This month's Telemanagement features an exclusive interview with Ian Russell, chair of the Coalition for Competitive Telecommunications Pricing, explaining how and why business customers are again playing an important role in CRTC proceedings and government telecom policy. ** Also in this issue: John Riddell on Open Source alternatives for IP-PBXs and IP-Centrex; how to get corporate wireless bills under control; and Lis Angus's comprehensive report on the issues in the VoIP regulation debate. ** For a one-year subscription, including unlimited access to Telemanagement's extensive online content, visit www.angustel.ca/teleman/tm-sub-online.html or phone 800- 263-4415 ext 500. ============================================================ HOW TO SUBMIT ITEMS FOR TELECOM UPDATE E-MAIL: editors@angustel.ca FAX: 905-686-2655 MAIL: TELECOM UPDATE Angus TeleManagement Group 8 Old Kingston Road Ajax, Ontario Canada L1T 2Z7 =========================================================== HOW TO SUBSCRIBE (OR UNSUBSCRIBE) TELECOM UPDATE is provided in electronic form only. There are two formats available: 1. The fully-formatted edition is posted on the World Wide Web on the first business day of the week at www.angustel.ca 2. The e-mail edition is distributed free of charge. To subscribe, send an e-mail message to: join-telecom_update@nova.sparklist.com To stop receiving the e-mail edition, send an e-mail message to: leave-telecom_update@nova.sparklist.com Sending e-mail to these addresses will automatically add or remove the sender's e-mail address from the list. Leave subject line and message area blank. We do not give Telecom Update subscribers' e-mail addresses to any third party. For more information, see www.angustel.ca/update/privacy.html. =========================================================== COPYRIGHT AND CONDITIONS OF USE: All contents copyright 2004 Angus TeleManagement Group Inc. All rights reserved. For further information, including permission to reprint or reproduce, please e-mail rosita@angustel.ca or phone 905-686-5050 ext 500. The information and data included has been obtained from sources which we believe to be reliable, but Angus TeleManagement makes no warranties or representations whatsoever regarding accuracy, completeness, or adequacy. Opinions expressed are based on interpretation of available information, and are subject to change. If expert advice on the subject matter is required, the services of a competent professional should be obtained. ------------------------------ From: bart_deboeck@hotmail.com (Bart) Subject: CLIP and Call Forwarding Date: 25 Oct 2004 07:18:02 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Given the following setup : Party A calls Party B, and Party B forwards this call to Party C. Is it possible for party C to see the CLIP of party A and party B ? According to my operator, C should see the CLIP of party A. I wonder whether party C can also see the CLIP of party B. If it is not possible to pass the CLIP information during forwarding, does there exist any other setup which allows party C to see the CLIP of party A and B ? Thanks, Bart ------------------------------ From: ruchitgarg@yahoo.com (ruchit garg) Subject: Testing MMS Date: 25 Oct 2004 06:50:58 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hi, I want send a MMS and SMS from my PC to my cell phone. Is there any free/evalutaion APIs available to test run the applications? Ruchit ------------------------------ From: markrobt@comcast.net (Mark Roberts) Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 04:06:02 -0000 Organization: 1.94 meters Robert Bonomi had written: > Yes, a public-university-owned =commercial= broadcast station is > _unusual_. As a network affiliate of a commercial network (the *only* > kind of 'network' TV in those days :), it was _very_ unusual, possibly > even =unique=. It's not unique. KOMU-TV was and is still owned by the University of Missouri, and is the NBC affiliate for Columbia and Jefferson City. From 1953 until 1956, it was the only station in the area and carried all three networks. From 1956 until 1971, it was also the secondary ABC affiliate for the market. Its newsroom is staffed by School of Journalism instructors and students, who report and produce the station's newscasts. It had a jam-packed schedule, with the late afternoon "downtime" from the network being filled with ABC programming. Likewise, the "Tonight Show" was joined in progress at 11 pm for many, many years in order to fit an ABC program in at 10:30 pm. It also had the dubious distinction of being the last NBC affiliate to go full-color, in 1973. (Network programs and films were in color from the early 1960s but KOMU's studio cameras were monochrome until 1973.) The station originally proposed a 50% commercial and 50% noncommercial schedule to the FCC. The FCC said, "either one or the other". The University felt it could not financially support a non-commercial station and chose the commercial option. > Looks like memory has played me false on this one. Further checking > shows it has always belonged to Loyola University, in New Orleans. > (I'm going to have to do some more digging on this -- I'm _sure_ that > WWL was in the Cedar Rapids/Waterloo metro area in the 50's-70's. "I > may be wrong, but I'm not uncertain" applies :) It was always KWWL. There was a big fight between KXEL and a local entrepreneur over the channel 7 allocation. The entrepreneur won. Jeff Stein's history of Iowa broadcasting has the complete play-by-play. Mark Roberts | "You'll know gas prices are hurting when you see headlines Oakland, Cal.| about plunging sales of sport utility vehicles." NO HTML MAIL | -- Floyd Norris, New York Times, October 23, 2004 ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2004 20:36:25 -0500 From: Neal McLain Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns Robert Bonomi wrote (in his list of K/W exceptions): > WRTH St. Louis, Missouri I wrote: > The FCC has no record of this callsign. Robert responded: > *THAT* is a surprise! Considering ... > My cribsheet says "1430 AM, St. Louis". I was surprised too when I discovered my own stupid mistake (see TD V23:506). Robert continued: > _that_ "rule" adds at least half-a-dozen 'out-of-place' > 'W' stations to the list. Including places such as > Duluth, MN. :) > If you're going to put all of MN in the 'K' district, > there are at least another half-a-dozen 'W' call-signs > worthy of being listed. As far east as Duluth. My original list of television stations (as published in TD V23:505) identifies nine such exceptions, including three in (or near) Duluth. If there are more than these nine, please let me know their callsigns and I'll add them to the list. W61AF Grand Marais MN W62DB Minneapolis MN WBWX-CA Minneapolis MN WCCO-TV WCCO-DT Minneapolis MN WCMN-LP Saint Cloud MN WDIO-TV WDIO-DT Duluth MN WDSE WDSE-DT Duluth MN WFTC WFTC-DT Minneapolis MN WIRT WIRT-DT Hibbing MN In any case, I'm sure you'll agree that there would be far more exceptions if the river itself were the dividing line. Furthermore, if the river were the line, where would we put Bemidji -- east or west? Pat wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When you discuss WLTE or other > 'W' stations in Minnesota, maybe the reason for the 'W' there > is because the Mississippi River only begins part way into > Minnesota; a bit south of St. Paul (or actually Bay City, WI) > where the water is just a small stream and becomes known as the > 'Mississippi River'. Most of Minnesota has nothing to do with > the river. PAT] As a named river, the Mississippi River originates at Lake Itasca in Clearwater County, Minnesota. From there, it flows north, past Bemidji, makes a u-turn, then heads south. It becomes the Minnesota-Wisconsin state line near Hastings. Neal McLain ------------------------------ From: J Kelly Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 12:56:58 -0500 On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 01:18:22 +0000, bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) wrote: > WOI-TV was in operation _long_ before 'Iowa Public Television' came > into existence. In point of fact, WOI-TV was the _first_ TV station > in the state broadcasting on a regular schedule. WOI was in fact on way before Iowa Public Television. IPTV began in 1969 when the State Educational Radio and Television Facility Board purchased KDPS-TV (Des Moines Public Schools) Channel 11 in Des Moines and changed the callsign to KDIN-TV. The network was known as Iowa Educational Broadcasting Network (IEBN). Seven other stations followed over the next 8 years, and one more was added in 2003 when they acquired channel 36 in Davenport. In 1976 the name was changed to Iowa Public Broadcasting Network, and was changed to Iowa Public Television in 1982. >>> WMT Cedar Rapids, Iowa >> WMT(AM) and WMT-FM only; sister TV is KGAN(TV), formerly WMT-TV. Yes, at one time sister stations, WMT AM is now owned by Clear Channel, and Sinclair Broadcast Group owns KGAN-TV. I'm not sure if they really consider themselves sisters anmore, I believe WMT AM uses KWWL-TV's weather guys on the air. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When you discuss WLTE or other 'W' > stations in Minnesota, maybe the reason for the 'W' there is because > the Mississipi River only begins part way into Minnesota; a bit south > of St. Paul (or actually Bay City, WI) where the water is just a small > stream and becomes known as the 'Mississippi River'. Most of Minnesota > has nothing to do with the river. PAT] Wrong. The Mississippi starts near Bemidji, Minnesota at Itasca State Park. I once stood in the headwaters where it begins as a small stream. See: http://www.visitbemidji.com/itasca_state_park.html ------------------------------ From: markrobt@comcast.net (Mark Roberts) Subject: Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 02:39:05 -0000 Organization: 1.94 meters Rick Merrill had written: > Lisa Minter wrote: >> Nokia in the UK seems to feel landline phones will be gone entirely >> in the next few years, at least in many countries, replaced by >> cellular phones. Check out this link: >> The fixed line phone in the home could soon disappear, a study by >> mobile firm Nokia shows. >> < http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/technology/3762844.stm > > As unbelievable as it seems to us today, land lines in the USA ten (10) > years from now (2004) will probably down 60% yet total phones will have > increased by 30%. How? Cell phones obviously, but also VoIP is poised to > expand very rapidly. Why? Widespread availability of broad band and > virtually NO REGULATION (as compared to land line phones) ==> Half the > Cost of today's "land line phones" for home and business. - RM Not just VOIP, though it certainly is poised to become a player. (Five cents a minute to Europe on Vonage is hard to beat, even with Vonage's sometimes-inflexible policies. But I now see that Packet8 offers *two* cents a minute to some countries in Europe!) Anyhow, the PSTN still offers two things that aren't true for cell phones: ubiquity and reliability. While cell phones may *seem* to be nearly ubiquitous, there are a *lot* of areas with poor coverage. Where I live in Oakland, California, only two carriers manage to put in a signal -- and those only sporadically. And that's not the only spot in the Bay Area with poor cellphone coverage. Likewise, VOIP relies upon "somebody else" to provide data transport. If that "somebody else" is a two-way cable connection, you'll lose it during power outages. While Comcast is pretty good about rolling a truck to our area whenever our power goes out which, thanks to the poor maintenance practices of PG&E is distressingly common during winter storms, you still can't do anything without power to the cable modem. Similar considerations apply to DSL, though a UPS might keep you going for a little longer. All of these considerations mean that we are keeping our two landlines. We have them on measured-rate service and have no custom-calling features, but in a pinch, we're sure they'll be there -- something that can't be said for cell phones or VOIP. Mark Roberts | "You'll know gas prices are hurting when you see headlines Oakland, Cal.| about plunging sales of sport utility vehicles." NO HTML MAIL | -- Floyd Norris, New York Times, October 23, 2004 ------------------------------ From: markrobt@comcast.net (Mark Roberts) Subject: Re: Old Stock Quotation Things? Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 03:54:33 -0000 Organization: 1.94 meters AES/newspost had written: > Surely brings to mind the big noisy rotating "card flip-over" > mechanical displays that used to display arriving and departing > flights in major airports -- maybe still do in some cases. They are still in use at railway-station platforms on the Dutch national railways. I don't believe these were "Solari boards" which functioned on a similar principle and were often used on TV game shows to keep score. Mark Roberts | "You'll know gas prices are hurting when you see headlines Oakland, Cal.| about plunging sales of sport utility vehicles." NO HTML MAIL | -- Floyd Norris, New York Times, October 23, 2004 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 15:49:43 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Take the Trouble to Block WiFi Poachers By Hiawatha Bray If you have wireless Internet access at home, your next-door neighbor could have it as well, without paying for it. He can just use yours. No problem if he's just shopping on Amazon.com or e-mailing Grandma. But what if he's sending spam messages or downloading kiddie porn? It happens, and that should surprise nobody. WiFi wireless networking systems can provide Internet service up to 300 feet away, with signals that can punch through brick walls. So anybody within range can get a taste of your bandwidth, and use it for any purpose, noble or malignant. It's up to them. Actually it's up to you. With a little effort, you can seal off your WiFi router from unwelcome guests. If you leave it unprotected, it could become a hangout for a variety of digital sleazebags. http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/10/25/take_the_trouble_to_block_wifi_poachers/ [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have some comments and questions about this: On my Wi-fi card (Netgear MA-521, 32-bit cardbus) I was lucky for a while to get twenty feet away, in other words, my computer area and into the next room. But I could barely get outside my house, and certainly not into my parlor or my bedroom. A cheap piece of cardboard and tinfoil (serving as a reflector to push the signal around helped with that.) Now I can get my parlor/bedroom areas, my back porch/back yard and *most* of my front yard. I have noticed that when I get out to the sidewalk on the street in front of my house, when my signal is still there but mostly unuseable, on the 'site survey' tab on the MA-521 diagnostics, I see listed not only my base unit, but also the base unit of the guy directly across the street from me. I can move my mouse onto either of these locations (mine or his), click for connection and connect with either one. I assume this is how 'hackers' (i.e. spammers, kiddie-porn downloaders) work, am I correct? When I have clicked on his base-station (and like mine, he gets maybe a couple hundred feet, out into the street and onto the sidewalk on *my side* then his gives out also) I get a message on my screen saying 'to connect with this channel please enter the proper encryption.' I use 128-bit encryption, which I guess is what he uses also. Right or wrong? I have no idea what *he* uses for encryption and I surely have not told anyone what I use. I am not going to sit out on the sidewalk in front of my house, which the one place I can contact his station and try to hack out his encryption password, etc. I would not have the patience for it. But unlike him, I guess, I also told my base station 'do not broadcast your own name'. Tell me if I am correct: when I get to the one point on the sidewalk where I can pick him up, my 'site survey' not only lists me, but also lists him. I assume -- tell me if right or wrong -- if some other person with a WiFi card (other than *myself*) came to the same spot they would see his station -- 2WIRE895 -- waiting for someone to provide the proper encryption, but they would NOT see me. Right or wrong? I see myself listed, because it is me, but having it set to 'not broadcast your own name' keeps others from seeing me. Right or wrong? Now what else should I do, or can I do within reason, to stay protected? The house next door to me, across the alley to the west is vacant. But let's say tomorrow it got rented to 'hackers', spammers and kiddie- pornography downloaders; yes, unlikely, but still ... unlike the house across the street where distance separates us, the house across the alley from me *is* within radio range; a warm, comfortable, off-the-street, out of your car hiding place. Is there anything I can do other than 'do not broadcast your name' and 128-bit encryption for protection? Or is it a needless worry? 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #513 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Oct 26 14:24:46 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9QIOkO28800; Tue, 26 Oct 2004 14:24:46 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 14:24:46 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410261824.i9QIOkO28800@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 #514 TELECOM Digest Tue, 26 Oct 2004 14:25:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 514 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Cracking the Wireless Security Code (Monty Solomon) Re: Take the Trouble to Block WiFi Poachers (Gene S. Berkowitz) Re: Take the Trouble to Block WiFi Poachers (Gary Breuckman) Re: Take the Trouble to Block WiFi Poachers (Clarence Dold) Re: Take the Trouble to Block WiFi Poachers (jtaylor) Re: Citywide Wi-Fi Link Considered/Internet Everywhere (Tony Pelliccio) Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (Wesrock@aol.com) Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (Robert Bonomi) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (Neal McLain) Baseball Broadcast Station? (jtaylor) The State of VoIP (Lisa Minter) More About Poly D. Creatures (Paul A Lee) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 01:08:56 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Cracking the Wireless Security Code By Joel Snyder and Rodney Thayer Is it possible to deploy a secure wireless LAN with technology available today? That question preys on the minds of IT executives who are tempted to deploy enterprise WLANs, but are hesitant because of security concerns. So we assembled 23 wireless products from 17 vendors and ran them through a battery of tests aimed at getting the answer. Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is very weak in many products, and we don't recommend using it other than in very specialized cases. WEP's successor, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) has flaws but provides solid security when combined with 802.1X authentication and deployed carefully. Ultimately, 802.11i, the standard that replaces WEP and WPA, will provide all the tools needed to protect WLANs. To their credit, vendors are aggressively shipping products at all prices that support enterprise-class security features. Two-thirds of the products tested support 802.1X, and vendors are moving rapidly to comply with 802.11i standards. http://www.nwfusion.com/reviews/2004/1004wirelessmain.html ------------------------------ From: Gene S. Berkowitz Subject: Re: Take the Trouble to Block WiFi Poachers Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 21:54:58 -0400 In article , monty@roscom.com says: > By Hiawatha Bray > If you have wireless Internet access at home, your next-door neighbor > could have it as well, without paying for it. He can just use yours. > No problem if he's just shopping on Amazon.com or e-mailing Grandma. > But what if he's sending spam messages or downloading kiddie porn? > It happens, and that should surprise nobody. WiFi wireless networking > systems can provide Internet service up to 300 feet away, with signals > that can punch through brick walls. So anybody within range can get a > taste of your bandwidth, and use it for any purpose, noble or > malignant. It's up to them. > Actually it's up to you. With a little effort, you can seal off your > WiFi router from unwelcome guests. If you leave it unprotected, it > could become a hangout for a variety of digital sleazebags. > http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/10/25/take_the_trouble_to_block_wifi_poachers/ > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have some comments and questions > about this: On my Wi-fi card (Netgear MA-521, 32-bit cardbus) I was > lucky for a while to get twenty feet away, in other words, my > computer area and into the next room. But I could barely get outside > my house, and certainly not into my parlor or my bedroom. A cheap > piece of cardboard and tinfoil (serving as a reflector to push the > signal around helped with that.) Now I can get my parlor/bedroom > areas, my back porch/back yard and *most* of my front yard. I have > noticed that when I get out to the sidewalk on the street in front > of my house, when my signal is still there but mostly unuseable, on > the 'site survey' tab on the MA-521 diagnostics, I see listed not > only my base unit, but also the base unit of the guy directly across > the street from me. I can move my mouse onto either of these locations > (mine or his), click for connection and connect with either one. > I assume this is how 'hackers' (i.e. spammers, kiddie-porn downloaders) > work, am I correct? When I have clicked on his base-station (and like > mine, he gets maybe a couple hundred feet, out into the street and > onto the sidewalk on *my side* then his gives out also) I get a > message on my screen saying 'to connect with this channel please enter > the proper encryption.' I use 128-bit encryption, which I guess is > what he uses also. Right or wrong? I have no idea what *he* uses for > encryption and I surely have not told anyone what I use. I am not > going to sit out on the sidewalk in front of my house, which the one > place I can contact his station and try to hack out his encryption > password, etc. I would not have the patience for it. But unlike him, > I guess, I also told my base station 'do not broadcast your own name'. > Tell me if I am correct: when I get to the one point on the sidewalk > where I can pick him up, my 'site survey' not only lists me, but also > lists him. I assume -- tell me if right or wrong -- if some other > person with a WiFi card (other than *myself*) came to the same spot > they would see his station -- 2WIRE895 -- waiting for someone to > provide the proper encryption, but they would NOT see me. Right or > wrong? I see myself listed, because it is me, but having it set to > 'not broadcast your own name' keeps others from seeing me. Right or wrong? > Now what else should I do, or can I do within reason, to stay protected? > The house next door to me, across the alley to the west is vacant. But > let's say tomorrow it got rented to 'hackers', spammers and kiddie- > pornography downloaders; yes, unlikely, but still ... unlike the house > across the street where distance separates us, the house across the alley > from me *is* within radio range; a warm, comfortable, off-the-street, > out of your car hiding place. Is there anything I can do other > than 'do not broadcast your name' and 128-bit encryption for protection? > Or is it a needless worry? PAT] Yes. If supported by your wireless access point or router, enable MAC authentication. Then, connections will only be accepted from wireless adapters (such as your Netgear card) that you specify to the router by their MAC address, which is printed directly on the card, usually near the FCC label. Of course, the MAC address can be spoofed, so this one isn't perfect either. You can disable DHCP, and use a static address. Why let your router hand out addresses to anything that asks? The SSID (2WIRE895) may not be regularly broadcast, but it can still be found in sniffed packets. By disabling SSID broadcast, you are hiding from casual users, but a more determined individual may be lured by the presence of the signal; finding no SSID, he migt just start sniffing, wondering what you're hiding. Encryption (either 40- or 128-bit) is simply used to prevent eavesdropping. The appropriate key is required (26 hex digits for a 128-bit key). Unfortunately, the WEP encryption used with 802.11b (11 mb/s) wireless has a flaw that permits the key to be derived simply be collecting enough packets (passive receive). If the usage is low, this might takes weeks. If the traffic is high enough, like at a corporation or university, it might take less than an hour. I change keys every few weeks. --Gene [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I found that my NetGear does allow for what it calls 'access control' which means for it to answer only to *my card*, *my MAC address*, so I turned that on also. I think however, there is a limit to the return on my investment in making things secure. Reason is, if anyone was parking in the alley next to my house, I would hear them soon, and in my usual snoopy way (like all my neighbors) peer out the window to see who was there. Sometimes I go most of a day without having *any car at all* drive down Poplar Street, let alone drive in our alley way and sit there for a period of time. If anyone moved in the vacant house next door to the west, I would find out about it same day, just as I did when the folks moved in on the other side of the street and down one house to the east. And I am *not* interested in improving my signal to the point I could walk even four or five blocks away and pick it up. Blame that perhaps on my brain aneurysm, but I get so tired of walking around the area, so far, particularly carrying a laptop; I really don't see anyone around the immediate (four or five block area) who would appear to me to even know what computers are about, let alone have a radio- transmission from one. I think WiFi is only practical if you have a laptop anyway, is that correct? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Gary Breuckman Subject: Re: Take the Trouble to Block WiFi Poachers Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 23:26:04 -0500 Organization: Puma's Lair - catbox.com > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: > if some other person with a WiFi card (other than *myself*) came > to the same spot they would see his station -- 2WIRE895 -- waiting > for someone to provide the proper encryption, but they would NOT see > me. Right or wrong? I see myself listed, because it is me, but > having it set to 'not broadcast your own name' keeps others from > seeing me. Right or wrong? That's right, but if you have encryption turned on it really doesn't matter. Not broadcasting your SYSID can allow you to hide without using encryption, some places use that so they can tell folks they WANT to use the network the SYSID, but not others. Using encryption is the way to go. You might want to pick a different channel, if someone is nearby on the same channel. That might improve your range. Gary Breuckman [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So if I use 128-bit encryption and no SYSID then I get twice as good a chance as not, don't I, and using 'access control' so base only responds to *my* MAC address. PAT] ------------------------------ From: dold@XReXXTakeX.usenet.us.com Subject: Re: Take the Trouble to Block WiFi Poachers Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 22:54:14 UTC Organization: a2i network TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to Monty Solomon: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have some comments and questions > about this: On my Wi-fi card (Netgear MA-521, 32-bit cardbus) I was > lucky for a while to get twenty feet away, in other words, my > computer area and into the next room. But I could barely get outside > my house, and certainly not into my parlor or my bedroom. A cheap > piece of cardboard and tinfoil (serving as a reflector to push the > signal around helped with that.) Now I can get my parlor/bedroom I don't think that is atypical. "punch" "brick wall" and "802.11" don't belong in the same sentence. Is the tinfoil an EZ-10 from http://www.freeantennas.com ? > I assume this is how 'hackers' (i.e. spammers, kiddie-porn downloaders) > work, am I correct? When I have clicked on his base-station (and like The hacker or poacher would probably have a program called Netstumbler running, a gps connected to a laptop for automatically marking locations of signals, and a better antenna than the one you have. > message on my screen saying 'to connect with this channel please > enter the proper encryption.' I use 128-bit encryption, which I > guess is WEP comes in 64 and 128 bit varieties. For typical residential use, you have done the right thing, and so has your neighbor. > place I can contact his station and try to hack out his encryption Other than guesswork, there are software packages that can crack the WEP code, but they require a hefty amount of data to flow across the link, using, in part, a known portion of the encoded packet that keeps repeating to help crack the rest. You probably don't send that much data in a short enough period of time to keep anyone parked out in front long enough to crack your WEP code. There are too many unsecured residences, and valuable businesses, to bother cracking yours. > password, etc. I would not have the patience for it. But unlike him, > I guess, I also told my base station 'do not broadcast your own > name'. That has almost no effect in your case ... It would prevent some scanners from finding you, but if they found him and sat there, they would find you soon enough. Pretty much all blocking your SSID does is make it harder for you to connect using Windows XP, which really likes to see the SSID. > Now what else should I do, or can I do within reason, to stay protected? For a residence, I think you've done all you need to do. You might cahnge your WEP code every once in a while. Clarence A Dold - Hidden Valley (Lake County) CA USA 38.8-122.5 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Yes, it is an EZ-10 from freeantennas.com and it may be my imagination, but I *think* it is making things better, and things do seem to be better, *I think*, so I guess that is what counts. And, I just recently turned on 'access control', a condition in the Net Gear where the base only responds to my MAC address. If someone wants to park in my driveway (off the alley) or park in front of my house -- and hope in both cases I did not see them and wonder about them -- or rent the vacant house next door and move in without my seeing them or any computers and then discover my unannounced signal and work out the encryption then (based on that information) figure out a way to forge my MAC address and then proceed to 'borrow' my resources, then God Bless them. They are a better man than I -- which wouldn't be very hard, considering my partial paralysis, my inability to put things together in my head for more than a few seconds at a time, etc. PAT] ------------------------------ From: jtaylor Subject: Re: Take the Trouble to Block WiFi Poachers Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 22:10:49 -0300 Organization: MCI Canada News Reader Service TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to Monty Solomon by writing in news:telecom23.513.9@telecom-digest.org: > Now what else should I do, or can I do within reason, to stay protected? > The house next door to me, across the alley to the west is vacant. But > let's say tomorrow it got rented to 'hackers', spammers and kiddie- > pornography downloaders; yes, unlikely, but still ... unlike the house > across the street where distance separates us, the house across the alley > from me *is* within radio range; a warm, comfortable, off-the-street, > out of your car hiding place. Is there anything I can do other > than 'do not broadcast your name' and 128-bit encryption for protection? > Or is it a needless worry? PAT] If your access point came with a firewall then set it up so that it'll only allow access from the card you use in your laptop. You will need the number assigned to the card called a MAC or "physical address". Although this can also be spoofed, it takes a much smarter variety of intruder to sucessfully do this to you, and like burglary, you don't need to be able to keep the burglars out, you just need to make it easier for them to go burgle someone else. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I just a couple days ago turned on 'access control', as the Net Gear refers to it. I do not know if 'access control' has anything to do with the firewall or not, or just what the base station is willing to accept/act on. Same difference, I guess. If the base station is not willing to ask the WAN for some files to start with, then the files won't be sent. PAT] ------------------------------ From: kd1s@yahoo.com (Tony Pelliccio) Subject: Re: Citywide Wi-Fi Link Considered / Internet Virtually Everywhere Date: 25 Oct 2004 14:46:50 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com This would be a sweet thing to have here in Providence. The city is only about 20 square miles and has plenty of places to put WiFi nodes. The interesting part of this is that as a condition of its franchise agreement in the state I believe Cox has agreed to wire all state and municipal agencies for the bubble. So could the municipal use their Cox IP feed to dole out to citizens for a small fee, or even for free? It would be interesting to see how this would pan out. Tony Monty Solomon wrote in message news:: > NEWTON > Citywide wi-fi link considered > Internet access would be virtually everywhere > By Matt Viser, Globe Correspondent | October 24, 2004 > Several Newton officials are looking into blanketing the city's 18.5 > square miles with wireless Internet transmitters, which would make the > city one of several places in the nation -- and the only one in > Massachusetts -- to offer the service on such a wide scale. > The plan, which an aldermanic committee began discussing last week, > would involve mounting routers on telephone poles throughout the > city. Anyone within 100 yards of one of the routers would be able to > access the Internet using a password. The city would charge about $10 > per month to use the service, which could begin to be available in as > soon as six months. > Installing the routers throughout the city would cost between $370,000 > and $740,000, according to initial estimates. > http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/10/24/citywide_wi_fi_link_considered/ > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Here in Independence, authorities have > considered the same thing, but the scale is quite different. Our town > is only two miles long by two miles wide approximatly, with between > 8000-9000 residents, but I do not think it has ever gotten beyond the > talking stage as of yet. Independence High School and the college have > both pushed for it, but no one wants to supply the money needed. PAT] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My next question on this thread pertaining to proposed 'city wide' WiFi setups is this: Suppose San Francisco, or Newton, MA or Independence, KS or any of the more enlightened communities installs such a thing. What then prevents 'hackers' or spammers or kiddie porn downloaders (to name just three species of no-goods) from doing their thing and charging it all to the city authorities who installed it to begin with. I would suppose there would have to be 'passcodes' based on the MAC addresses of the citizens would there not? The WiFi base would have to be told to only respond to the MAC addresses in its files and somehow keep track of who did what which brings up a lot of privacy concerns. Then you talk about people sniffing at things: there sure would be a lot of sniffing around for MAC addresses to spoof wouldn't there? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Wesrock@aol.com Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 20:05:45 EDT Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns In a message dated Mon, 25 Oct 2004 04:06:02 -0000, markrobt@comcast.net Mark Roberts) writes: > It's not unique. KOMU-TV was and is still owned by the University of > Missouri, and is the NBC affiliate for Columbia and Jefferson City. > From 1953 until 1956, it was the only station in the area and carried > all three networks. From 1956 until 1971, it was also the secondary > ABC affiliate for the market. > Its newsroom is staffed by School of Journalism instructors and > students, who report and produce the station's newscasts. > It had a jam-packed schedule, with the late afternoon "downtime" from > the network being filled with ABC programming. Likewise, the "Tonight > Show" was joined in progress at 11 pm for many, many years in order to > fit an ABC program in at 10:30 pm. > It also had the dubious distinction of being the last NBC affiliate The University of Missouri also publishes a commercial daily newspaper in competition with a locally-owned one, with not only its newsroom but its advertising department staffed by School of Journalism instructors and students. Certainly real world training for both news editors and reporters and also advertising salesmen and saleswomen. The privately-owned newspaper feels strongly it is unfair competition. Wes Leatherock wesrock@aol.com wleathus@yahoo.com ------------------------------ Organization: Robert Bonomi Consulting Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 06:10:20 +0000 In article , J Kelly wrote: > On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 01:18:22 +0000, bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com > (Robert Bonomi) wrote: >> WOI-TV was in operation _long_ before 'Iowa Public Television' came >> into existence. In point of fact, WOI-TV was the _first_ TV station >> in the state broadcasting on a regular schedule. > WOI was in fact on way before Iowa Public Television. IPTV began in > 1969 when the State Educational Radio and Television Facility Board > purchased KDPS-TV (Des Moines Public Schools) Channel 11 in Des Moines > and changed the callsign to KDIN-TV. The network was known as Iowa > Educational Broadcasting Network (IEBN). Seven other stations > followed over the next 8 years, and one more was added in 2003 when > they acquired channel 36 in Davenport. In 1976 the name was changed > to Iowa Public Broadcasting Network, and was changed to Iowa Public > Television in 1982. The first expansion was the addition of Channel 12 (KIIN TV), in Iowa City. By circa 1975, there were KDIN, KIIN, and at least 7 UHF 'repeater' stations across the state. With a decent directional antenna, virtually every place in the state was within reception range of one of the transmitters. The 'repeater' stations were very high-tech (for their day), *automated*, systems. A high-gain channel-11 antenna pointed towards Des Moines, coupled to a carrier-operated-relay, that triggered the transmitter into operation. If KDIN was on the air, the repeater stations came up, and rebroadcast the signal; when KDIN shut down for the night, the repeaters turned themselves off, too. Well, *MOST* of the time. Late one night, in the fall of 1973 (74?), I was DX hunting with my little B&W, *rabbit-ears*only* TV, in my apartment on the outskirts of downtown Des Moines. Here is this *snowy* picture on channel 11 -- old gangster movie. Took quite a while for a call-sign to come by WQXI. Just for grins, I _called_ the station, to let them know they had a viewer "way out in Iowa". This got to be a _very_ strange phone converation. The station _chief_engineer_ was working the night shift that night, and actually answered the phone, =himself=. He got *real* upset, and asked me _exactly_ what I'm seeing, what kind of a monstrosity I'm using for an antenna, *exactly* where I am, etc., etc. The more detail I provided in answer to the questions, the _more_upset_ he was getting. Finally, we get through the panic, and he explains -- several weeks previously, 'skip' conditions had been 'just right', and their signal had been hitting Iowa with enough signal strength to *trigger* some of the IEBN repeaters. Most notably the one in northwest Iowa, from who's 'viewpoint', Atlanta was nearly in a straight line with Des Moines. This led to an incredible stack of paperwork, to mollify the FCC. Here was 'retransmission'/'rebroadcasting' of a commercial TV station, *without* the permission/consent of the originating station. Here was _commercial_ content on an 'educational TV' repeater channel. etc., etc., ad nauseum. Oh yeah, those remote 'repeater' stations were automated enough that they did _not_ have an 'engineer on duty' at the transmitter site. The 'local' engineer had remote monitoring gear at his house, or wherever. Note: this was *monitoring* capability, _only_. He did *not* have anything like a 'kill switch' for the transmitter -- could *not* shut it down, except from on-site brute-force controls, if the master station (or what the hardware *thought* was the master station :) was 'on the air'. As a result of _that_ 'design stupidity', the "problem" recurred _again_ the next night. And several following nights. Which made the paperwork swamp *MUCH* worse. Now it wasn't a _single_ 'inadvertent' error, but a repeated pattern of "illegal" behavior. He had just finished up (i.e., a day or two previously) _his_ stack of paper- work related to the problem, *believing*it*to*be*finally*resolved*, and was relaxing as things got back to normal -- and this phone call comes in from IOWA, where somebody is seeing his station, *AGAIN*(!!) In that light, the 'upset' was quite understandable -- and he _did_ relax considerably when it was established that I _was_ watching on channel *11* -- not on some repeater output frequency. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 20:47:38 -0500 From: Neal McLain Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? DevilsPGD wrote: > Shaw cable is (or was, I don't have my TV connected to my DCT > right now) using channel 1 as a digital channel for themselves. > Analog cable still starts at 2 though. Some analog cable systems start (or used to start) at Cable Channel 1. Three analog frequency plans are approved by the FCC for use by the cable TV industry: IRC Incrementally-related carriers HRC Harmonically-related carriers STD Standard The IRC and HRC plans include Cable Channel 1. Details at . IRC and HRC are rarely used today; however, many so-called "cable ready" television sets still include some means to receive them: either an obscure little switch or an option in the setup menu. Neal McLain ------------------------------ From: jtaylor Subject: Baseball Broadcast Station? Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 09:26:16 -0300 Organization: MCI Canada News Reader Service Yeah, it's probably not absolutely telecom related (they don't have the reporters on the 'phone to the station at hockey games anymore, either), but my neighbour has a good SW radio and wants to hear the Red Sox win. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, I suggested 1080 Hartford, but are there any better options? (I also asked a few days ago on rec.radio.shortwave, alt.sports.baseball, and alt.sports.baseball.bos-redsox; no response anywhere. With the s/n ratio and wide-range knowledge of this group I figger it's much more likely an answer will pop up.) ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 02:43:55 -0400 Subject: The State of VoIP http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2004/10/22/voip_1.html The State of VoIP by Andy Oram I often go out seeking fertile intersections of technological innovation, new businesses, and policy debates. This month, I found just such an intersection at the Fall 2004 Conference and Expo of the Voice on the Net (VON) Coalition. It bubbled over with a rich, interactive mix of implementers, vendors, service providers, customers, standards committee members, regulators, public interest representatives, and press. Organizer Jeff Pulver predicted over 5000 people -- twice the number who came last year -- to pass through the show. The presence of more than 200 vendors on the exhibit floor showed that a lot of people expect VoIP to generate a lot of money. More on that later. You may think you know Voice Over IP. It's the technology that lets you phone Cairo from San Francisco as casually as you send an email. And it lets you bypass those nasty charges that the FCC levies on behalf of rapacious local phone companies. But wait! The FCC and the local phone companies love VoIP! FCC chair Michael Powell came up to Boston for the Tuesday morning session of the VON conference, saying such things as, "You are bringing about a revolution, like the American revolution, bringing power to the people....We need to create a new constitution regulating VoIP that reflects that revolution. If we do, we will be rewarded as our forefathers were ... VOIP has ignited a fire under a stalled industry." And the day before, a spokesperson from Verizon gleefully called VoIP a disruptive technology (not a trait that one would expect to endear VoIP to an established incumbent) and touted it as a selling point for DSL. So what's going on? To get some perspective on what VoIP means to different people, we have to look at some of the technical challenges, then at its business prospects, and finally at regulatory issues. Full story at: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2004/10/22/voip_1.html ------------------------------ From: Paul A Lee Subject: More About Poly-D Creatures Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 17:34:31 -0400 Organization: Rite Aid Corporation In TELECOM Digest V23 #505, our esteemed Editor wrote (in part): > ...how many toes does a cat have on its paws? Some people > would say 'five', which is normally the correct answer. But > some cats have *six* toes on one (or all four) feet. The > vernacular name for such cats is 'polydex'... > I guess it is some genetic thing going back a million years > or so. "Polydactyly" [polly DAK tih lee] is the name of the condition; animals affected by it are described as "polydactyl" or "polydactylous". It occurs in cats, humans, and other critters. One or two extra fingers or finger-like growths of cartilage beyond the "pinkie" finger is the more common form. An extra thumb is rarer, and an extra middle, index, or ring finger (usually a cartilaginous projection from a finger) is the rarest form. Polydactyl people and cats were thought to be witches in medieval Europe, and as such, were frequently put to death. Count Rugen, the villain in "The Princess Bride" who was played by Christopher Guest, was polydactyl. I have known at least three polydactyl people, all of whom had their polydactyl fingers surgically removed in infancy. The only one with extra toes kept them; his parents were told that removing them could make it more difficult to walk, because of the way the toes had formed. He wore something like a 'EEEE' shoe width. One of these acquaintances, a mild-mannered fellow I went to high school with, was later shot and killed during the last of his dozen or so bank robberies in the Denver area. He had been nicknamed "the gentleman robber" (as I recall) for his conduct during his crimes. Not gentlemanly enough to keep him from getting shot, it seems. (The examples above are not meant to imply any predilection toward antisocial behavior by polydactyl people.) Lots of good Google hits on "polydactyl" -- too many and too much variety to try to include here. Can't think of a telecom tie-in, I'm afraid. Call this "Friday trivia" ... Paul A Lee Sr Telecom Engineer Rite Aid Corporation HL-IS-COM (Telecomm) V: +1 717 730-8355 30 Hunter Lane, Camp Hill, PA 17011-2410 F: +1 717 975-3789 P.O. Box 3165, Harrisburg, PA 17105-3165 W: +1 717 805-6208 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Except today is Tuesday, not Friday, but that's okay. Little Nicholas (the first one who was always so loving and friendly to humans) was polydactyl as I mentioned before. But he *never* went outside, I think he was afraid of being outside. 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #514 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Oct 26 20:00:38 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9R00cW02018; Tue, 26 Oct 2004 20:00:38 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 20:00:38 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410270000.i9R00cW02018@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 #515 TELECOM Digest Tue, 26 Oct 2004 20:01:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 515 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Vonage(R) Launches Virtual Phone Numbers From London (Lisa Minter) InfiniCall Adds Brazil to Its Unlimited VoIP Calling Plan (Lisa Minter) Re: Infinicall Adds Brazil to Unlimited VOIP Calling (Angela Epstein) Verizon California Terminates ISDN, FX, Other Services (Jeff Sutter) DT003 Help Needed (Jabriol) Re: Old Stock Quotation Things? (Lisa Hancock) Re: Baseball Broadcast Station? (dold@XReXXBaseb.usenet.us.com) Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (J Kelly) Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (Mark Roberts) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 12:28:30 -0400 Subject: Vonage(R) Launches Virtual Phone Numbers from London http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/10-26-2004/0002310515&STORY&EDATE= Vonage(R) Launches Virtual Phone Numbers from London Vonage Customers within the United States and Canada Can Now Have a London Number EDISON, N.J., Oct. 26 /PRNewswire/ -- Vonage, the leading provider of broadband phone service, today announced the availability of virtual numbers with London city codes. Vonage's current and future customers can now select London-based virtual numbers for $4.99 USD/$7.99 CAD per month. Virtual Phone Numbers are inexpensive secondary numbers that ring to the primary Vonage line. London-based virtual numbers make it less expensive for friends, relatives and business professionals residing and working in the United Kingdom's leading cultural and business sector to make calls to the U.S. and Canada. The people they are calling now have numbers local to their calling area. "For several months, Vonage's customers have been requesting the ability to have London telephone numbers to communicate with family members, friends and business associates," said Jeffrey A. Citron, chairman & CEO of Vonage. "Vonage has responded quickly to our customers' demands that we make keeping in contact with friends and loved ones abroad easier and more convenient by offering a local number as a point of contact, no matter where you are in the world." Full story at: http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/10-26-2004/0002310515&STORY&EDATE= ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 14:28:09 -0400 Subject: InfiniCall Adds Brazil to Its Unlimited VoIP Calling Plan Jack Decker notes: I think this is the first I've heard of this company -- they do not seem to have the sort of web portal that most consumer VoIP companies have nowadays, but this appears to be the lowest monthly rate I've seen yet for this kind of calling area. If they really deliver unlimited calling to all the mentioned countries for $15 per month that could be quite a bargain, but the very little information given on their web site doesn't really inspire me with confidence (How is their service utilized? Do they have local numbers for incoming calls, and if so, where? What sort of adapter do they use, if any? Their site is very short on information of that type!). Please use all normal caution in dealing with an unknown company, but if you do decide to try them, please post a review. http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/10-25-2004/0002309136&STORY&EDATE= InfiniCall Adds Brazil to Its Unlimited VoIP Calling Plan LOS ANGELES, Oct. 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- InfiniCall Corporation (OTC Bulletin Board: INFL) is pleased to announce that it will add the country of Brazil to its unlimited calling plan for all InfiniCall VoIP subscribers, effective November 8, 2004. InfiniCall provides its customers with unlimited monthly calls within the continental United States, Canada, most of Europe, selected countries in Asia and two Latin America countries: Argentina and now Brazil for a flat monthly fee of just $15. InfiniCall Chairman, Gary Rasmussen commented that "with the addition of Brazil to the InfiniCall unlimited dialing plan, we now are able to offer coverage to six of South America's ten most populous cities." About InfiniCall Corporation InfiniCall is a rapidly emerging company in the fast growing VoIP industry. The company provides its customers with access to extremely low cost, long-distance calling via the Internet, using only a standard telephone handset or their personal computer. Contact: http://www.infinicall.net James Trodden (323) 653-6010 Web Site: http://www.infinicall.net ------------------------------ From: Angela Epstein Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 17:20:50 -0400 Subject: Re: InfiniCall Adds Brazil to Its Unlimited VoIP Calling Plan BroadVoice provides unlimited calls within USA and Canada as well as 22 countries for $19.95 a month. For $24.95 one can get 35 countries. Some of those countries are in Asia, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. These prices include basic and advanced features for free (24). You can't beat that! Angela M-Epstein www.broadvoice.com VoIP number: 860 523 5476 cell number: 917 509 ------------------------------ From: lurkeroo@yahoo.com (Jeff Sutter) Subject: Verizon California Terminates ISDN, FX, Other Services Date: 26 Oct 2004 13:05:51 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com In my Verizon bill, there was a tiny insert, advising me that a number of services would be "grandfathered", including some I've never heard of, nor have the people at the Verizon (GTE) office. They include (abbreviated list -- several custom calling bundles omitted) Digital ISDN Single Line Service Verizon Dial Datalink Service Foreign Exchange Service - Primary Service Residence and "InContact". GTE always made it extremely difficult to obtain residential or business FX or ISDN services, and their billing of said services was often fraught with gross errors (some in the customer's favor). It is unfortunate that their obfuscation and pricing policies will now result in justifying the end of useful technologies. ------------------------------ From: jabriol1@excite.com (Jabriol) Subject: DT003 Questions Date: 26 Oct 2004 10:12:30 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com All, I have this data module, I suspect it works with my NEAX 2400. I am using a PA-4DTLA board in the system and can run a data module set up for RS232. However, when I set up the DT-003 data module (V.35) the line on the board becomes busy and it will not pass data. Is there any help you can offer? Thank in Advance. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: Old Stock Quotation Things? Date: 26 Oct 2004 11:22:56 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com markrobt@comcast.net (Mark Roberts) wrote > They are still in use at railway-station platforms on the Dutch > national railways. > I don't believe these were "Solari boards" which functioned on a > similar principle and were often used on TV game shows to keep score. "Solari" makes train station announcement boards that are in use in many U.S. train stations. Early models used flip over panels where one panel contained a city name, another panel type of service (ie LOCAL, EXPRESS), etc. Later models use tiny panels of single letters so that various messages could be spelled out without physically changing the board. Many of these boards are still in use. Newer boards use illuminated displays which dispense with moving parts. It was reported that in one station which got a new board, they had to add a clicking sound that the prior mechanical panel made so people would look up and check the board for changes. I have found some illuminated panels harder to read than the mechanical ones. Sometimes the letters are too thick and at a distance "bleed" together; and there is also insufficient sharpness or blackness of the background. I don't know if Solari makes the illumninated panels. It was kind of neat watching the displays change on the mechanical flipover panels. These boards are much bigger than TV screens are with larger letters and more information, but there is usually only one master panel per station, with connected TV monitors at other places in the station. There are also minature panels at track gates. One psgr railroad carrier inherited manual pull down metal signs. The gate usher would use a window pole and the sign was hinged. These were replaced by TV monitors which didn't show as much information and were inaccurate. There are other stations with badly working TV monitors. That annoys the heck out of me because TV monitor departure signage is very old technology and the implementers or operators are just plain incompetent. If they can't run their computers, go back to the hinged signs. ------------------------------ From: dold@XReXXBaseb.usenet.us.com Subject: Re: Baseball Broadcast Station? Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 20:03:53 UTC Organization: a2i network jtaylor wrote: > Yeah, it's probably not absolutely telecom related (they don't have > the reporters on the 'phone to the station at hockey games anymore, > either), but my neighbour has a good SW radio and wants to hear the > Red Sox win. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, I suggested 1080 > Hartford, but are there any better options? http://espnradio.espn.go.com/espnradio/affiliatebyshow?show=M BANGOR, ME WZON-AM 620 BANGOR ROCKLAND, ME WRKD-AM 1450 PORTLAND AUBURN http://myafn.dodmedia.osd.mil/radio/shortwave/ Armed Forces Radio Network. Keflavik, Iceland Upper Sideband 13,855 KHz and 7,590 KHz http://myafn.dodmedia.osd.mil/radio/sports/schedule.asp Clarence A Dold - Hidden Valley (Lake County) CA USA 38.8-122.5 ------------------------------ From: J Kelly Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 16:46:56 -0500 Organization: http://newsguy.com Reply-To: jkelly@newsguy.com On Tue, 26 Oct 2004 06:10:20 +0000, bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) wrote: > n article , J Kelly > wrote: >> On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 01:18:22 +0000, bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com >> (Robert Bonomi) wrote: >>> WOI-TV was in operation _long_ before 'Iowa Public Television' came >>> into existence. In point of fact, WOI-TV was the _first_ TV station >>> in the state broadcasting on a regular schedule. >> WOI was in fact on way before Iowa Public Television. IPTV began in >> 1969 when the State Educational Radio and Television Facility Board >> purchased KDPS-TV (Des Moines Public Schools) Channel 11 in Des Moines >> and changed the callsign to KDIN-TV. The network was known as Iowa >> Educational Broadcasting Network (IEBN). Seven other stations >> followed over the next 8 years, and one more was added in 2003 when >> they acquired channel 36 in Davenport. In 1976 the name was changed >> to Iowa Public Broadcasting Network, and was changed to Iowa Public >> Television in 1982. > The first expansion was the addition of Channel 12 (KIIN TV), in Iowa > City. > By circa 1975, there were KDIN, KIIN, and at least 7 UHF 'repeater' > stations across the state. With a decent directional antenna, > virtually every place in the state was within reception range of one > of the transmitters. > The 'repeater' stations were very high-tech (for their day), > *automated*, systems. A high-gain channel-11 antenna pointed towards > Des Moines, coupled to a carrier-operated-relay, that triggered the > transmitter into operation. If KDIN was on the air, the repeater > stations came up, and rebroadcast the signal; when KDIN shut down for > the night, the repeaters turned themselves off, too. > Well, *MOST* of the time. Late one night, in the fall of 1973 (74?), > I was DX hunting with my little B&W, *rabbit-ears*only* TV, in my > apartment on the outskirts of downtown Des Moines. Here is this > *snowy* picture on channel 11 -- old gangster movie. Took quite a > while for a call-sign to come by WQXI. Just for grins, I _called_ the > station, to let them know they had a viewer "way out in Iowa". This > got to be a _very_ strange phone converation. The station > _chief_engineer_ was working the night shift that night, and actually > answered the phone, =himself=. He got *real* upset, and asked me > _exactly_ what I'm seeing, what kind of a monstrosity I'm using for an > antenna, *exactly* where I am, etc., etc. The more detail I provided > in answer to the questions, the _more_upset_ he was getting. > Finally, we get through the panic, and he explains -- several weeks > previously, 'skip' conditions had been 'just right', and their signal > had been hitting Iowa with enough signal strength to *trigger* some of > the IEBN repeaters. Most notably the one in northwest Iowa, from > who's 'viewpoint', Atlanta was nearly in a straight line with Des > Moines. > This led to an incredible stack of paperwork, to mollify the FCC. > Here was 'retransmission'/'rebroadcasting' of a commercial TV station, > *without* the permission/consent of the originating station. Here was > _commercial_ content on an 'educational TV' repeater channel. etc., > etc., ad nauseum. Oh yeah, those remote 'repeater' stations were > automated enough that they did _not_ have an 'engineer on duty' at the > transmitter site. The 'local' engineer had remote monitoring gear at > his house, or wherever. Note: this was *monitoring* capability, > _only_. He did *not* have anything like a 'kill switch' for the > transmitter -- could *not* shut it down, except from on-site > brute-force controls, if the master station (or what the hardware > *thought* was the master station :) was 'on the air'. > As a result of _that_ 'design stupidity', the "problem" recurred > _again_ the next night. And several following nights. Which made the > paperwork swamp *MUCH* worse. Now it wasn't a _single_ 'inadvertent' > error, but a repeated pattern of "illegal" behavior. > He had just finished up (i.e., a day or two previously) _his_ stack of > paper- work related to the problem, > *believing*it*to*be*finally*resolved*, and was relaxing as things got > back to normal -- and this phone call comes in from IOWA, where > somebody is seeing his station, *AGAIN*(!!) In that light, the > 'upset' was quite understandable -- and he _did_ relax considerably > when it was established that I _was_ watching on channel *11* -- not > on some repeater output frequency. The "repeater sites" (and they were NOT repeaters but full tv transmitters) were in fact manned whenever they were on the air. An engineer turned them on and off at the start and end of the day. At no time was there ever any carrier operated relays that turned on the stations. They were turned on manually from the transmitter site itself by a station engineer. I've talked to engineers that have been working at IPTV since the KDPS days and nobody remembers anything about the above story. If there was a whole mess of FCC paperwork generated over it, someone there would remember it. ------------------------------ From: markrobt@comcast.net (Mark Roberts) Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 22:31:31 -0000 Organization: 1.94 meters Wesrock@aol.com had written: > markrobt@comcast.net (Mark Roberts) writes: >> It's not unique. KOMU-TV was and is still owned by the University of >> Missouri, and is the NBC affiliate for Columbia and Jefferson City. >> From 1953 until 1956, it was the only station in the area and carried >> all three networks. From 1956 until 1971, it was also the secondary >> ABC affiliate for the market. >> Its newsroom is staffed by School of Journalism instructors and >> students, who report and produce the station's newscasts. > The University of Missouri also publishes a commercial daily newspaper > in competition with a locally-owned one, with not only its newsroom > but its advertising department staffed by School of Journalism > instructors and students. > Certainly real world training for both news editors and reporters and > also advertising salesmen and saleswomen. > The privately-owned newspaper feels strongly it is unfair competition. As last I recall, the Missourian's (J-school) circulation was about 25% of the privately-owned Tribune's, even though the Missourian is the morning paper and the Tribune the afternoon paper (plus Saturday and Sunday mornings). The family that owns the Tribune has quietly complained about the situation but does not seem to have suffered terribly. In fact, it benefits from being able to hire recent grads at newbie wage rates. All the sales staff for KOMU-TV are full-time employees of the station. Mark Roberts | "You'll know gas prices are hurting when you see headlines Oakland, Cal.| about plunging sales of sport utility vehicles." NO HTML MAIL | -- Floyd Norris, New York Times, October 23, 2004 ------------------------------ 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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Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #515 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Oct 27 15:59:42 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9RJxfS12144; Wed, 27 Oct 2004 15:59:42 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 15:59:42 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410271959.i9RJxfS12144@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 #516 TELECOM Digest Wed, 27 Oct 2004 15:59:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 516 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson HP Chief Science Officer Squires Joins ISOC Board (Internet Society) Norvergence Article "Customers Left Holding the Bag" (Lisa Hancock) Advice Needed on SMS Servers (Andrew Pasetti) Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future (Dave Close) Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future (Isaiah Beard) Re: Verizon California Terminates ISDN, FX Services (Tim@Backhome.org) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (Doug Krause) Re: Take the Trouble to Block WiFi Poachers (David Quinton) Utilities Take Pass on Offering Broadband (Monty Solomon) Delphi XM MyFi (Monty Solomon) FCC OKs Cingular, AT&T Wireless Merger (Monty Solomon) The Internet of Things (Monty Solomon) Verizon Plunges Into Cable Wars With New Technology (Monty Solomon) Sony Ericsson Quad Band EDGE (Monty Solomon) Re: Cybersquatter Update (Melvin Klassen) 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: Internet Society Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 11:10:31 +0200 Subject: HP Chief Science Officer Stephen Squires Joins ISOC Board Reston, VA - October 27th, 2004 - Dr. Stephen L. Squires, Vice President and Chief Science Officer for Hewlett-Packard Company, has been appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society. The Internet Society (ISOC), a not-for-profit membership organisation founded in 1991, provides leadership in Internet related standards, education, and policy. With offices in Washington, DC, and Geneva, Switzerland, its mission is to ensure the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of people throughout the world. ISOC is also the organisational home of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) -- the principal body dedicated to the development of new Internet standard specifications. Dr. Squires said that he took the Board post because "I believe in the potential of the Internet Society to build on the excellent work it has done in order to continue to be recognised as a critical Internet resource serving all who use the Internet or who aspire to use it." "Dr. Squires brings a wealth of valuable Internet experience to the Internet Society, and we are delighted to have him on our Board of Trustees," said Fred Baker, Chairman of the Internet Society's Board of Trustees. As Vice President and Chief Science Officer for Hewlett-Packard Company, Dr. Squires is responsible for providing leadership in establishing overall strategic scientific and technical directions, including architectural development of the 21st century Internet. Prior to joining HP in November 2000, Squires was the special assistant for Information Technology to the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). At DARPA he was responsible for advancing the frontier of progressively larger sectors of information technology. He developed plans for, managed, and directed the scalable systems parts of the DARPA Strategic Computing Program, the Federal High Performance Computing and Communications Program and its extension to the National Information Infrastructure. Dr. Squires earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University. "His career has seen him play a major role in managing programs that have helped enable the modern Internet. We look forward to his counsel as a member of the Board of Trustees," said Lynn St. Amour, President and CEO of the Internet Society. FOR FURTHER DETAILS Internet Society: http://www.isoc.org Peter Godwin Communications Manager E-mail: godwin@isoc.org Internet Society 4, rue des Falaises 1205 Geneva Switzerland ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Norvergence Article "Customers Left Holding the Bag" Date: 27 Oct 2004 09:24:21 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com The Newark Star Ledger reported on 10/27/04 about how many small businesses were stuck with leases they must pay for worthless service and equipment. This was their feature article on the Business Page. See: http://www.nj.com/business/ledger/index.ssf?/base/business-0/109885514466130.xml Big financing companies have filed suits against hundreds of small business that stopped making payments on their NorVergence [sic] leases. A NJ lawyer, Michael Green of Milltown, has filed a class action lawsuit against the financing companies accusing them of violating consumer protection laws. He says small business customers were misled and that the financing companies should have done due dilligence -- had they done so they would've discovered the leases were fraudulent. The leasing companies disagree. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I certainly hope and expect Mr. Green will prevail. There is **no way** the financing companies could not have known about this fraud; they are now trying to unjustly enrich themselves at the expense of the poor business people involved. There is another firm of attornies working on this matter as well, basically claiming the same thing. If the finance companies did not thoroughly investigate the paper they were being asked to handle, that is their fault. There are laws against unjust enrichment (where someone takes advantage of the stupidity or ignorance of another party) as well as against the more serious acts of fraud. I can't help but feel most of the banks and finance companies knew full well what was happening and assumed they would be able to pull it off; I doubt any of them (the finance companies) expected the little customers would revolt as they have done. "Just pay your bills, what the computer says you owe, since as you must know, computers don't make mistakes." Although the one group of attornies has suggested the business people bring their bills up to date during the interim while they try to recover for them, the latest group of attornies (Green, et al) has not commented that I know of. I still suggest that debtors *freeze all accounts payable to Norvergence** unless/until their attorney instructs them to the contrary. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Andrew Pasetti Subject: Advice Needed on SMS Servers Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 09:50:17 -0400 Hi Patrick - Perhaps you can offer me some advice on a telecom issue. We're about to roll out the latest version of Easy411, which includes call completion and sms messaging of the listing information. We don't have the resources to purchase an sms server of our own, so for the time being we were simply going to email the listing information to users who choose to enable this option. Rather than have the user select their carrier when enabling sms messaging, we were hoping to find a web site or web service that will list a user's carrier given their cell phone number. Do you know if such a site exists? Or perhaps there's a better method of handling this that you can suggest. Your advice will be greatly appreciated. Thank you, Andrew Pasetti Easy411 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Off hand, my mind draws a blank on this but perhaps other readers will have suggestions for you. In the meantime this reminds me I have not mentioned Easy411 recently. East411 is the directory assistance resource I recommend for readers of the Digest. It only costs 65 cents for one or two inquiries from a real time live operator directory assistance bureau, or about half of what your telco charges you. The best deal other than Easy411 that I know of is Vonage, which gets 99 cents per call to the bureau they use, but Easy411 does not require any special equipment and can even be used with Vonage as desired. You just dial an 800 number where you enroll your phone number (up to five phone numbers you may use) and you get billed the 65 cents on your credit card at intervals. You can even set it up as a speed dial if you wish. Remember, this is *real time* DA, records updated daily, not just a web site thing like switchboard.com where records are updated whenever. Best of all, from my perspective, Easy411 pays *me* a few cents for each call you make to their bureau on my referrals, so I am proud to be their paid spokesperson. Check it out at http://easy411.com/telecomdigest . Thanks, and if you have any ideas on SMS servers, let them know also. PAT] ------------------------------ From: dave@compata.com (Dave Close) Subject: Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future Date: 26 Oct 2004 17:05:28 -0700 Organization: Compata, Costa Mesa, California markrobt@comcast.net (Mark Roberts) writes: > All of these considerations mean that we are keeping our two > landlines. We have them on measured-rate service and have no > custom-calling features, but in a pinch, we're sure they'll be there -- something that can't be said for cell phones or VOIP. If the original article proves correct, you may find that land-line phone service will become much less ubiquitous, and much more costly. I been looking for a local retailer selling an add-in PCI card with a parallel port. A few years ago, these were easy to find and cost about $10. Now nobody seems to have any except ones which require a Windows driver (a "winpar"?), and they want $30 and up. USB has taken over. It would not surprise me to see a similar outcome for land-line telephony. For now, a land-line phone is a good stand-by. And the only way to make a data modem call reliably. But for how much longer? Tried to buy a (new) 5.25-inch floppy drive recently? Dave Close, Compata, Costa Mesa CA "Politics is the business of getting dave@compata.com, +1 714 434 7359 power and privilege without dhclose@alumni.caltech.edu possessing merit." - P. J. O'Rourke ------------------------------ From: Isaiah Beard Subject: Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 11:51:05 -0400 Lisa Minter wrote: > Nokia in the UK seems to feel landline phones will be gone entirely > in the next few years, at least in many countries, replaced by > cellular phones. Yes, and there were quite a few dot-com-boom companies in the 90's saying that by now the desktop PC would be extinct. Guess who, in fact, became extinct by now? Go figure. The landline phone's peak has come and gone, but it won't be gone. Anyone who has complained about the sound quality of a cell phone connection (nearly all of us, I would think) can attest to this. E-mail fudged to thwart spammers. Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply. ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: Verizon California Terminates ISDN, FX, Other Services Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 02:52:37 -0700 Organization: Cox Communications What useful purpose does ISDN serve these days? Also, with VOIP who needs FX these days? Jeff Sutter wrote: > In my Verizon bill, there was a tiny insert, advising me that a number > of services would be "grandfathered", including some I've never heard > of, nor have the people at the Verizon (GTE) office. > They include (abbreviated list -- several custom calling bundles > omitted) > Digital ISDN Single Line Service > Verizon Dial Datalink Service > Foreign Exchange Service - Primary Service Residence > and "InContact". > GTE always made it extremely difficult to obtain residential or > business FX or ISDN services, and their billing of said services was > often fraught with gross errors (some in the customer's favor). It is > unfortunate that their obfuscation and pricing policies will now > result in justifying the end of useful technologies. ------------------------------ From: dkrause@ratcage.com (Doug Krause) Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? Date: 26 Oct 2004 22:26:37 -0500 In article , DevilsPGD wrote: > Shaw cable is (or was, I don't have my TV connected to my DCT right > now) using channel 1 as a digital channel for themselves. Analog > cable still starts at 2 though. Comcast in Western Massachusetts uses channel 1 for On Demand. About 10 or 15 years ago my grandmother's cable in Arlington, Texas had Channels 1, 0, and 00. ------------------------------ From: David Quinton Subject: Re: Take the Trouble to Block WiFi Poachers Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 08:53:58 +0100 On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 15:49:43 -0400, TELECOM Digest Editor asked about disabling SSID on WiFi in response to a message from Monty Solomon. Consensus, on alt.internet.wireless newsgroup would seem to be: "Forget about disabling SSID. it provides no additional security and just screws things up. Disabling SSID is also contrary to 802.11." FREE phonecalls with other TalkTalk customers: Locate your Mobile phone: ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 21:39:58 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Utilities Take Pass on Offering Broadband Most firms skeptical of providing service over power lines By Peter J. Howe, Globe Staff The nation's top telecommunications regulators are convinced that electric-power lines are finally ready to become a revolutionary new way for Americans to get high-speed Internet access, unleashing competition for cable and phone giants. But the utility companies that would actually deploy the services remain overwhelmingly skeptical. Of the nearly 160 investor-owned utilities in the United States, dozens have tried out 'broadband over power line' systems. Only one -- Cinergy Corp. in Cincinnati -- has moved ahead with a significant commercial rollout, so far attracting barely 1,500 subscribers. Dozens of utilities that ran trials of the service in the last three years took a pass on making a business venture of it. Locally, Western Massachusetts Electric Co. is starting up a 25-home trial in Agawam of a hybrid system that carries Net traffic on medium-voltage lines and uses wireless gear for the last-mile connection to homes. But the state's two dominant electric utilities are both steering clear. http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/10/25/utilities_take_pass_on_offering_broadband/ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 22:11:17 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Delphi XM MyFi The World's First XM Portable The Delphi XM MyFi is the world's first XM2go receiver - a personal XM satellite radio. The MyFi includes everything you need to enjoy XM anywhere -- in the home, in the car, and on the go. Memory Mode MyFi can store up to 5 hours of fresh new XM content. Record while you listen or schedule MyFi to record your favorite XM shows -- even when the unit is not in use. http://www.xmradio.com/myfi/index.jsp ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2004 23:49:49 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: FCC OKs Cingular, AT&T Wireless Merger By BRUCE MEYERSON AP Business Writer NEW YORK (AP) -- Now that the purchase of AT&T Wireless is complete, Cingular Wireless' new status as the nation's biggest cell phone provider may prove fleeting if the merged company doesn't move quickly. The $41 billion deal, finalized Tuesday with Federal Communications Commission clearance, pairs two companies whose customer service rankings and operating performance are among the weakest in the industy. As Cingular's management takes on the sizable distraction of merging two large corporations, it may prove especially difficult to attack those issues with any speed. One top concern has been the pace at which subscribers have been switching to rivals, especially at AT&T Wireless Services Inc., though Cingular's performance in this area has been unimpressive as well. Those defections have been fueled in large part by a successful marketing campaign at Verizon Wireless, which has built a strong perception as the company with the country's most expansive cell phone network. The new Cingular hopes the added network coverage and capacity from AT&T Wireless will help counter that perception almost from the start. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44523186 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 00:43:58 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: The Internet of Things Start-ups jump into next big thing: tiny networked chips By Robert Weisman, Globe Staff At a renovated textile warehouse near Boston's Fort Point Channel, where 50 employees of Ember Corp. are moving this month from cramped quarters next door, young engineers are busy lining the walls with 600 wireless sensor nodes -- each containing a low-powered radio frequency microchip mounted on a printed circuit board. Technologists at Ember and a batch of other start-ups on both coasts believe such 'mesh networks' with their 'radios' -- tiny chips just seven millimeters long and seven millimeters wide -- will be the next big thing in the high-tech world, wirelessly ferrying data between hundreds of sensors throughout homes, factories, and office buildings. ... http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/10/25/the_internet_of_things/ Ethernet Creator Evangelizes on New Networking Revolution By Robert Weisman, Globe Staff WALTHAM -- Bob Metcalfe -- inventor, entrepreneur, pundit, and venture capitalist -- is just back from Europe and jet-lagged. Padding about the immaculate offices of Polaris Venture Partners, his current base of operation, Metcalfe enters a conference room in a white business shirt and sandals and begins expounding on his latest technology crusade: a 'system on a chip,' which will form the backbone of the coming wireless sensor networking revolution. http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2004/10/25/ethernet_creator_evangelizes_on_new_networking_revolution/ ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 01:49:18 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Verizon Plunges Into Cable Wars With New Technology By Peter J. Howe, Globe Staff Verizon Communications Inc. said yesterday it will extend a powerful new fiber-optic network capable of delivering cable television to 1 million US homes and businesses by year's end, including more than 100,000 in suburban Boston. The new network, versions of which Verizon already has deployed in test markets in California, Florida, and Texas, is expected to ratchet up the competition between cable and phone companies, as Verizon uses the massively upgraded network to sell ultrafast Internet access and packages of interactive television programming. Verizon said it will launch services starting this winter in Essex and Middlesex counties north and west of Boston. It declined to identify the cities and towns it will target first, although Lexington, Newburyport, Newton, Reading, and Topsfield are considered by telecommunications executives familiar with Verizon's plan to be likely prospects. Verizon is building similar networks in eight other states this year. Besides enabling the nation's biggest phone company to offer cable television, including potentially high-definition programming delivered on demand, the network would allow Verizon to vault past Comcast Corp. and RCN Corp. with Internet access at speeds that are six to 10 times faster than today's cable and Verizon broadband offerings. While a new entrant into the cable TV market may cause more consumer excitement, broadband data could be an equally lucrative business for Verizon. http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/10/22/verizon_plunges_into_cable_wars_with_new_technology/ ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 15:41:46 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Sony Ericsson Quad-band EDGE / WiFi Combo PC Card Sony Ericsson introduces new Quad-band EDGE / WiFi Combo PC Card - Essential Travelling Tool Provides Convenient Wireless Access 25 October 2004 San Francisco at CTIA Wireless IT -- Sony Ericsson today announced a new quad-band PC Card that provides convenient wireless Internet access for laptop and notebook users wherever they need to be online. Bridging the cellular and WiFi worlds, the GC89 PC Card combines global EDGE coverage with the popular WiFi technology in a single card which is compatible with both Windows and Macintosh computers. The new GC89 card further strengthens Sony's Ericsson's leadership position in EDGE PC Cards gained from the highly successful launches of the GC82, GC83 and GC85 PC cards. The GC89 card delivers connectivity through EDGE, GPRS, CSD, SMS over the GSM 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 bands world-wide. And, for those areas covered by wireless local networks: homes, offices, and hotspot locations such as airport lounges, coffee shops and hotels, the GC89 provides 802.11b and g connectivity with speed potential in excess of 50 Megabits per second. http://www.sonyericsson.com/spg.jsp?cc=global&lc=en&ver=4001&template=pc1_1_1&zone=pc&lm=pc1&prid=2432 ------------------------------ From: Klassen@UVic.CA (Melvin Klassen) Subject: Re: Cybersquatter Update Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 18:06:20 UTC Organization: University of Victoria On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 22:17:55, TELECOM Digest Editor wrote: > By doing 'whois -h whois.publicinterestregistry.net > internet-history.org' I found some interesting details on the > cybersquatter who ripped off the name being used as a repository for > Internet History Society and put his penis enlargement ads there instead: I wonder how much the cyber-squatter pays for the bandwidth that is used by visitors to his web-site? I wonder what he's charged if a tool like 'wget' ("get-an-entire-web-site") is used to get every web-page and image from the site? I wonder what happens when 'wget' is used inside a DO-loop, and the entire web-site is repeatedly fetched, and copied to /dev/null ? I wonder what happens when every reader of c.d.t runs the same DO-loop at 12:00 GMT on the 1st day of the month, i.e., shortly after the "cut-off" date/time for the previous month. Will his Internet provider bill him for the usage? If the web-site has a "monthly-quota", will the web-site become inaccessible for the remaining days in the month, when the quota is exceeded? I wonder. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Don't have ugly thoughts like that; ugly thinking is *my* domain. I suspect that the persons running the stolen web site (internet-history.org) and the persons running the *real* web site (www.promotechnology.com) are one and the same otherwise known as 'Bealo Group, SA'. In case you have not checked it out, the bogus history site run by the cybersquatter is sort of constructed 'on the fly' with some javascript which looks at what you asked for (in this case the URL internet-history) and slaps that phrase at the top of his otherwise page on penis enlargment ads. I have tried it with a few other inoperative URLs in .org and they get the same web page nonsense fed in those cases also, with the bogus URL slapped on the top with a message saying 'you want to buy this page?' I had thought that a few months ago one of the registrars had tried that same stunt, redirecting unused URLs to some sort of 'helpful page' offering suggestions for where you might find what you wanted instead. I had thought when that happened and became obvious there were several people on the net who put much pressure on that registrar to make them quit doing it. Or maybe I am mistaken; I usually am these days. Now this is just an ugly thought of my own, but suppose -- just suppose -- the Public Interest Registry people had cut some sort of deal with the Bealo Group SA in Switzerland: We will fork over to you all the .org names where the owner unwittingly did not pay our ransom to keep the page alive. You fill the page with offensive ads, and when the real owner comes back and gets on his knees, begging and pleading for his page to be released back to him and offering to pay some outrageous sum of money, you give him (real owner) back the page and split the profits with us at PIR. Considering how quickly the cybersquatter moved in and took over internet-history.org (the day it was taken back by PIR for whatever reason) I feel there *must have been some collusion between the registrar PIR and the Bealo Group, SA.* How else would the cyber- squatter have know to act on it that quickly? So if the cybersquatter collects several hundred dollars in ransom money on a site, and he splits (or even gives some percentage of the money to PIR) that's a better deal for PIR than simply trying to make do with the pitiful little 'registration fees' ICANN otherwise authorizes them to rip off from netizens. That, along with the fact that no registrar who supposedly acts in the public interest (such as the traditional meaning of the .org domain) -- unless he was totally insane and lacked any due diligence -- would have given away an internet history site to the penis enlargement company. I think it might be a good case for an attorney who likes doing pro-bono things on behalf of the net. But by all means, anyone who feels like trying w-get as per the earlier instructions in this message go right ahead, and don't forget when you sign up your favorite companies in the us.tf or the net.tf domains to be sure to not put down Bealo Group SA and www.promotechnolgy.com as the administrative contacts when asked to list a contact name. Just as a reminder also, the contact phone number you should avoid using is +41.227347.210 at Post Office Box 138 in Geneva Switzerland. 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #516 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Oct 28 00:22:03 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9S4M3S16019; Thu, 28 Oct 2004 00:22:03 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 00:22:03 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410280422.i9S4M3S16019@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 #517 TELECOM Digest Thu, 28 Oct 2004 00:22:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 517 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Comcast Reports Third Quarter 2004 Results (Monty Solomon) Google AdSense Not Working All That Well (TELECOM Digest Editor) VOIP and Telnet (rshlain@hotmail.com) Re: Inexepensive Remote Forwarding by Auto Attendant Over Vonage (Fred) Re: Cybersquatter Update (Ed Clarke) Re: Cybersquatter Update (Miikka Kiprusoff) Owner of Stolen 'sex.com' Can Sue VeriSign - Court (TELECOM Archives) Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future (Joseph) Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future (Charlie3) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 16:30:20 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Comcast Reports Third Quarter 2004 Results Cable Revenue Increased 10.6% to $4.844 Billion Delivers Record New Product Growth Led by High-Speed Internet Subscriber Additions of 549,100 Digital Cable Subscribers Increased 341,000 to 8.4 Million Cable Operating Cash Flow Increased 14.6% to $1.858 Billion Consolidated Operating Income Increased 39.0% to $686 Million PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 27 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Comcast Corporation (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) today reported results for the quarter ended September 30, 2004. Comcast will discuss third quarter results on a conference call and webcast today at 8:30 AM Eastern Time. A live broadcast of the conference call will be available on the investor relations website at http://www.cmcsa.com and http://www.cmcsk.com . - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44527793 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 20:53:59 EDT From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Google AdSense Not Working All That Well If you recall, a couple months ago I was approached by Google to begin putting their ads on the Digest web site. I've tried it, but it really did not impress me a lot, and the results do not seem to be very effective. I am going to try it for another month and if there is no improvement, I will probably just remove the. Some readers don't like it all that much anyway. Google is not doing a very good job of counting my hits (many discrepancies between my own hit counters and theirs) and they (Google) claims only a 1.5 percent rate of page view to click through. And those are the people who are complaining about click fraud being so bad for them! Most everyone I talk to says the ratio of page hits to click ought to be around 3 percent, or maybe 4 percent. PAT ------------------------------ From: rshlain@hotmail.com Subject: VOIP and Telnet Date: 27 Oct 2004 13:04:43 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com It is possible to have VOIP and be able to connect to machines that have modems and use telnet? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: If I understand it correctly, VOIP -- or at least Vonage -- can do everything a telephone can do. PAT] ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Inexepnsive Remote Forwarding by Auto Attendant Over Vonage From: Fred Organization: VixFone Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 17:21:27 -0500 visniranjan@hotmail.com (Vish) wrote in news:telecom23.494.4@telecom- digest.org: > I want to buy an inexpensive auto attendant that will announce the > name of our company and based on callers need (1 for John, 2 for > Peter, 3 for David) transfer the call to a remote number (home, cell > etc.) It can easily be done by someone who knows how to set up an Asterisk switch -- so it could run on a pc unattended; it runs under Linux, which is pretty robust. The other option is to find a service that does what you need. Fred VixFone.com We specialize in wholesale VoIP to ISPs, auto-attendants, foreign exchange and switch services for business. ------------------------------ From: Ed Clarke Subject: Re: Cybersquatter Update Date: 27 Oct 2004 22:45:48 GMT Organization: Ciliophora Associates, Inc. Reply-To: clarke@cilia.org In article , TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to Melvin Klassen: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Don't have ugly thoughts like that; > ugly thinking is *my* domain. I suspect that the persons running > the stolen web site (internet-history.org) and the persons running > the *real* web site (www.promotechnology.com) are one and the same > otherwise known as 'Bealo Group, SA'. In case you have not checked > it out, the bogus history site run by the cybersquatter is sort of > constructed 'on the fly' with some javascript which looks at what > you asked for (in this case the URL internet-history) and slaps that > phrase at the top of his otherwise page on penis enlargment ads. I > have tried it with a few other inoperative URLs in .org and they > get the same web page nonsense fed in those cases also, with the > bogus URL slapped on the top with a message saying 'you want to > buy this page?' > I had thought that a few months ago one of the registrars had tried > that same stunt, redirecting unused URLs to some sort of 'helpful > page' offering suggestions for where you might find what you wanted > instead. I had thought when that happened and became obvious there > were several people on the net who put much pressure on that registrar > to make them quit doing it. Or maybe I am mistaken; I usually am > these days. That would be "Network Solutions" -- they run the .com and .net registry. Any unused or misspelled domain would end up at their website. Since this was a blatent violation of the social contract ( even though it was perfectly legal ), the organization that writes and maintains the most used DNS software ( ISC - Internet Systems Consortium, software is BIND 8.x or 9.x currently, http://www.isc.org ) came out with an immediate patch to make their name grabbing inoperative. Here are the commands to add to the configuration file of a current version of bind: zone "COM" { type delegation-only; }; zone "NET" { type delegation-only; }; This disables their evil wildcard power grab. If you go look at the Network Solutions homepage, you'll find that they give you a great break on renewing a domain -- $19.99 per year -- if you renew for five years. The fact that this is more than twice what others charge (http://www.godaddy.com for example at $8.95) ... And they are also associated with VeriSign who will give you a great deal on an SSL certificate at $895 per year ( or you could go to GeoTrust and get the equivalent for $229 with renewals at $179 ). [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So, if this 'social contract' implies that non-working/unoccupied URLs are to go to at best a very generic 'not in service' screen, then a web site on which a fee had not been paid -- therefore being unoccupied or non-working should go there as well. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 15:42:39 -0600 From: Miikka Kiprusoff Subject: Re: Cybersquatter Update Reply-To: miikka@calgaryweb.net -----Original Message----- > From: Klassen@UVic.CA (Melvin Klassen) > Subject: Re: Cybersquatter Update > Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 18:06:20 UTC > Organization: University of Victoria Original text snipped, leaving Patrick's reply: > I had thought that a few months ago one of the registrars had tried > that same stunt, redirecting unused URLs to some sort of 'helpful > page' offering suggestions for where you might find what you wanted > instead. I had thought when that happened and became obvious there > were several people on the net who put much pressure on that registrar > to make them quit doing it. Or maybe I am mistaken; I usually am > these days. Not at all the same thing, though I see how you might have thought so. The registry operator you're talking about is Verisign, who operates the top level .com and .net domains. Their little scheme worked like this: if somebody typed in a domain name that did NOT resolve -- that was not registered by anybody -- the old practice was for DNS to return a no such domain error message. After they implemented the scheme, it returned a VALID result -- pointing to Verisign's servers. So if you mistyped "microsoft.com" as "microsofft.com", you got Verisign's website. That was deemed to be unfair competition, and rightly so. What has happened in your case is that the registry operator, in this case PIR, threw your domain name back into the pool of available names due to non-payment. Once this happened, a whole 'nother company, Bealo whatevertheheck, PAID TO REGISTER the domain name. They forked out the cash and registered it, as is their right -- as was your right when YOU first registered it (do you recall being asked to prove YOUR right to the name when you first registered it? Why should they have been asked to prove such?) They then arranged to have this domain name point to their (pornographic) servers. Shady and slimy, yes. Illegal and against the rules, no -- unless you've got a trademark in the name or otherwise can prove superior interest in the name -- hard to do without that trademark. > Now this is just an ugly thought of my own, but suppose -- just > suppose -- the Public Interest Registry people had cut some sort of > deal with the Bealo Group SA in Switzerland: We will fork over to > you all the .org names where the owner unwittingly did not pay our > ransom to keep the page alive. You fill the page with offensive ads, > and when the real owner comes back and gets on his knees, begging > and pleading for his page to be released back to him and offering to > pay some outrageous sum of money, you give him (real owner) back the > page and split the profits with us at PIR. > Considering how quickly the cybersquatter moved in and took over > internet-history.org (the day it was taken back by PIR for whatever > reason) I feel there *must have been some collusion between the > registrar PIR and the Bealo Group, SA.* How else would the cyber- > squatter have know to act on it that quickly? Sir, you should have been a writer for the X-Files -- with your bent towards conspiracy theories, the show might still be on the air. There's a much, much simpler explanation for this, Mr. Townson. It's called "WHOIS". You're a long time 'netter, so I won't explain what WHOIS is. But I will remind you that, among other information, WHOIS will tell when the domain is set to expire. For a sleazy operator, that's all the information he needs. He just watches all domains and sees which ones are coming up for renewal. Those that don't renew, he grabs. Most of them, he's probably wasting his money. But a few people do want their domain names back -- and that's when you're asked to pay through the nose. After all, somebody's got to pay for all those domain names he snapped up that nobody actually wants back. :-) > So if the cybersquatter collects several hundred dollars in ransom > money on a site, and he splits (or even gives some percentage of the > money to PIR) that's a better deal for PIR than simply trying to > make do with the pitiful little 'registration fees' ICANN otherwise > authorizes them to rip off from netizens. You're getting perilously close to libel here. Prove that PIR has done this, or retract it. > That, along with the fact that no registrar who > supposedly acts in the public interest (such as the traditional > meaning of the .org domain) -- unless he was totally insane and > lacked any due diligence -- would have given away an internet history > site to the penis enlargement company. I think it might be a good > case for an attorney who likes doing pro-bono things on behalf of > the net. I don't know how many times you need to be told this before it sinks into your diseased brain. PIR "gave" the domain to nobody. They offered you the EXCLUSIVE right to renew the domain name at any time prior to expiration. Your failure to renew it ended your contract with them. At that point, they were free -- and, indeed, *REQUIRED* by their charter -- to sell the name to the first person who asked for it and who was prepared to pay the standard fee. That's what Bealo did. > But by all means, anyone who feels like trying w-get as per the > earlier instructions in this message go right ahead, and don't forget > when you sign up your favorite companies in the us.tf or the net.tf > domains to be sure to not put down Bealo Group SA and > www.promotechnolgy.com as the administrative contacts when asked to > list a contact name. Just as a reminder also, the contact phone number > you should avoid using is +41.227347.210 at Post Office Box 138 in > Geneva Switzerland. PAT] Now this ... I say go for it. :-) These people are slimy sharks, out to boot the screws to people such as yourself and that 9/11 widow and they don't care who they piss off to do it. So by all means, let's give them a taste of their own medicine. But let's just make sure we're putting the blame in the right place. PIR is, as near as I can tell, *ENTIRELY* without blame here. The blame goes 80% to Bealo and 20% to you for not renewing on time. ------------------------------ From: Patrick Townson Subject: Owner of Stolen 'sex.com' Can Sue VeriSign - Court Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 20:12:01 -0500 This message originally appeared here in this Digest a little over a year ago. I thought it was worth repeating now in view of the readers who claim my lawsuit should be against Bealo, SA (regardless of how inconvenient that may be) instead of the easier to reach Public Interest Registry. PAT] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Monty Solomon" Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Sent: Friday, July 25, 2003 10:04 PM Subject: Owner of Stolen 'sex.com' Can Sue VeriSign - Court > By Elinor Mills Abreu > SAN FRANCISCO, July 25 (Reuters) - The owner of "sex.com," > once considered one of the Internet's hottest addresses, can > seek payment from the company that improperly transferred the > domain to a "con man" who later fled to Mexico when ordered to > pay $65 million, a court ruled on Friday. > The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that > "computer-geek-turned-entrepreneur" Gary Kremen can hold VeriSign > Inc.'s (NASDAQ:VRSN) Network Solutions unit liable for handing the > sex.com Web address over to a "con man." > The decision has widespread implications for companies that register > domains, which until now have not been held responsible when Web sites > are switched from their rightful owners, a lawyer for the plaintiff > said. > - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=35007290 Here is the way I see it: 1) Bealo Group SA are con artists and shysters. 2) I cannot force them to do anything if they are in Switzerland, just as Kremen could do nothing with the defendant having fled to Mexico. 3) In the above case, we see that registrars *can* be held accountable for errors they make. Now you are probably asking 'what errors did Public Interest Registry make?' 1) what makes .ORG different than .COM is the nature of the web site. 2) .ORG was always traditionally defined as for use by non-profit organizations, public service places, etc. ICANN did not just toss .ORG into the same pot as .COM for good reasons; they are to serve different categories of web sites. 3) I will suggest *it is possible* that PIR deliberatly and wilfully chose to accept a porn site into the .ORG domain. I certainly do not think their 'charter' as per ICANN rules allows that. I would like to see the PIR charter, issued to them by ICANN or whoever. I would like to see where in that charter it states that PIR is free to (and as Mr. Kiprusoff states elsewhere in this issue) *must* accept all applicants for web addresses **regardless of the nature of their activities.** We are not speaking about _two_ history web sites squabbling over the same address and which one is the better of the two or 'more entitled' to the address or who got to the registrar first, etc. I would not impose on PIR to sort that out, nor be responsible. But when you have an established web site which meets the criteria in (2) above for placement in .ORG and a web site comes along _the very same day_ which has no place in .ORG to start with -- by traditional net definitions, etc -- who pounces the instant a domain becomes available for whatever reason and PIR makes no effort to clarify the matter at all -- I will suggest is very negligent, if their own charter is the guidepost -- then it becomes an actionable matter. Thank you, Mr. Kiprusoff for mentioning the PIR charter and its obligations and responsibilities. Let's get it out here and look at it, shall we? Either the charter for PIR *does* say those things, and ICANN (which probably choreographed it) is guilty of trying to rewrite years of internet traditions or it does not say those things and PIR is the party fixing to get sued. And if it *does* say those things in reference to the .ORG domain -- note I did **not** say the .COM domain, where anything goes, it seems -- that seems rather careless since Bealo SA could have as easily moved in on an .EDU domain where someone was late paying the bill, unless you are now going to suggest that ICANN wrote up this one very special charter for .ORG which makes it equivilent to .COM in its activities. Oh, and lest I forget, thanks also for your compliment on my writing skills where X-Files was concerned. Anyway, let's go over that charter. You want to fetch it and go first, or should I? PAT ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 18:31:16 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 11:51:05 -0400, Isaiah Beard wrote: > The landline phone's peak has come and gone, but it won't be gone. > Anyone who has complained about the sound quality of a cell phone > connection (nearly all of us, I would think) can attest to this. Over 90% of the time my cell phone voice quality is every bit as good as wireline phone service. On 26 Oct 2004 17:05:28 -0700, dave@compata.com (Dave Close) wrote: > If the original article proves correct, you may find that land-line > phone service will become much less ubiquitous, and much more costly. Not only for home service, but look at pay phones. Pay phones not only are becoming scarce (my local super market just remodeled and they decided that they were not going to install pay phones since they were just being used to make drug sales.) Not only that but since pay phones are getting less traffic the phone companies decided that the solution to that was to increase the rate for local calls by 50% rather than try to find a way to make them viable. Another local mall when they did a remodel also removed all pay phones. The neighborhood near the mall also petitioned the tenant who had the phones in front to remove them. They are more valuable to drug dealers than they are to the man on the street. ------------------------------ From: charlie@cdsdetroit.com (charlie3) Subject: Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future Date: 27 Oct 2004 15:11:50 -0700 I ported my home phone to Vonage last spring and haven't looked back. It happens that cell phone coverage is excellent where I am so I use the cell phone as the backup phone. I have Vonage set to simultaneously ring the cell phone and ring the cell phone when the network is out. With these features, Vonage plus cell phone are reliable enough for my purposes. Charlie ------------------------------ 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #517 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Oct 28 14:57:21 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9SIvKa23827; Thu, 28 Oct 2004 14:57:21 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 14:57:21 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410281857.i9SIvKa23827@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 #518 TELECOM Digest Thu, 28 Oct 2004 14:55:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 518 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Cable Companies See Surge in Net Business (Monty Solomon) Effector 17.40 EFF, VVF at E-Voting Ground Zero November 2 (M Solomon) Re: FCC Okays Cingular, AT*T Merger (kansasman) Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence (Matt) Voice Over Internet Revolution Will Be Big but Quiet (Lisa Minter) Is There a PBX Like This? Urgent!!! (Vish) Linux Asterisk Embedded PBX, Help!! (Vish) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (Neal McLain) Re: VOIP and Telnet (Rick Merrill) Re: VOIP and Telnet (kansasman) Re: Inexepnsive Remote Forwarding by Auto Attendant (Vish) Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future (kansasman) Re: Yet Another Telco Tax Proposed (David) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 01:20:28 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Cable Companies See Surge in Net Business By MICHAEL RUBINKAM Associated Press Writer PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- The cable industry's foray into high-speed Internet service continues to pay off, with Comcast Corp. and Cox Communications Inc. both reporting hundreds of thousands of new broadband subscribers _ and double-digit revenue increases. The gains buoyed investors, who sent the shares higher despite profits that fell short of expectations. Comcast, the nation's biggest cable television company, said Wednesday it added a record number of new high-speed Internet subscribers in the third quarter, helping boost revenue by 12.1 percent. The company now has 6.5 million broadband subscribers. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44550770 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 13:01:15 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: EFFector 17.40: EFF, VVF at E-voting Ground Zero, Nov. 2 EFFector Vol. 17, No. 40 October 27, 2004 donna@eff.org A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ISSN 1062-9424 In the 311th Issue of EFFector: * EFF and Verified Voting at E-voting Ground Zero, November 2 * Look Before You Vote - Proof Your Ballot! * EFF Launches "Paper or Plastic 2004" Campaign * Sixth Circuit Court Protects the Right to Reverse Engineer * EFF Challenges Secret Court Order: Motion Demands Information About the Seizure of Indymedia's Servers * MiniLinks (15): John Kerry - DMCA Reformer? * Administrivia http://www.eff.org/effector/17/40.php ------------------------------ From: dog4dogg@yahoo.com (kansasman) Subject: Re: FCC OKs Cingular, AT&T Wireless Merger Date: 28 Oct 2004 09:48:22 -0700 Monty Solomon wrote in message news:: > By BRUCE MEYERSON AP Business Writer > NEW YORK (AP) -- Now that the purchase of AT&T Wireless is complete, > Cingular Wireless' new status as the nation's biggest cell phone > provider may prove fleeting if the merged company doesn't move > quickly. > The $41 billion deal, finalized Tuesday with Federal Communications > Commission clearance, pairs two companies whose customer service > rankings and operating performance are among the weakest in the > industy. > As Cingular's management takes on the sizable distraction of merging > two large corporations, it may prove especially difficult to attack > those issues with any speed. > One top concern has been the pace at which subscribers have been > switching to rivals, especially at AT&T Wireless Services Inc., > though Cingular's performance in this area has been unimpressive as > well. > Those defections have been fueled in large part by a successful > marketing campaign at Verizon Wireless, which has built a strong > perception as the company with the country's most expansive cell phone > network. > The new Cingular hopes the added network coverage and capacity from > AT&T Wireless will help counter that perception almost from the start. > - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44523186 Great to know. I have been wondering when this merger would take place ... this bit of information is interesting to note too: "One top concern has been the pace at which subscribers have been switching to rivals, especially at AT&T Wireless Services Inc., though Cingular's performance in this area has been unimpressive as well." ------------------------------ From: Matt Subject: Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 09:14:34 -0400 Organization: http://extra.newsguy.com Hi, Got a weird problem that I'm looking for a possible resolution to. There is a fairly large farm with about a mile of electric fence around the cattle area, with a pulsing electric fence. Apparently this is a heavy duty pulser and is able to power 100 miles of fence. Now ... about 500 feet - 1000 feet from the field where the electric fence is a youth camp. On the camp is the office telephones, caretaker, and a program director. The phone line for the caretaker and ONE of the two office lines experience a continual hum as well as a click, click, click, click, click, every time the electric fence fires off. The program director does not experience any known issue on his line, and the other line in the office is fine. I find this very odd, since both of the office lines come in (presumably) on the same cable? Any thoughts? Verizon is kinda stumped on this issue, so I'm trying to see if I can figure anything out to help them out. Does this sound like a grounding issue? If so is it at the demarc box? Or on a line some place? Why only one phone line and not the other? As another side note, the electric fence runs about 500 - 600 feet beside the road, which is also where the telephone/electric poles run (same side of the road). ~ Matt ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 23:16:52 -0400 Subject: Voice Over Internet Revolution Will Be Big but Quiet http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pulver26oct26,0,3831005.story?coll=la-home-business Q&A Voice Over Internet Revolution Will Be Big but Quiet, Prominent Booster Says By James S. Granelli, Times Staff Writer Telecommunications is a witches' brew of acronyms like TDM, FTTH, ISDN, PSTN, POTS and CDMA. Another one is quickly catching on 'VOIP', for voice over Internet protocol, a technology that breaks up a voice call into data packets and sends it, like e-mail, along a high-speed connection. Jeff Pulver has been promoting VOIP for more than a decade, longer than most of the companies offering VOIP service have existed. Through his frequent Voice on the Net conferences, he has brought together VOIP engineers, entrepreneurs, analysts, consultants, venture capitalists, vendors, providers and, most important, regulators. Full story at: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pulver26oct26,0,3831005.story?coll=la-home-business ------------------------------ From: visniranjan@hotmail.com (Vish) Subject: Is There a PBX Like This? Urgent!!! Date: 28 Oct 2004 07:49:19 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hi folks, I have two incoming lines that need to be transferred to one of several remote numbers depending on extension or names directory (for a virtual office). Is there a SOHO PBX with the following specs? 1. Can be configured locally like a hub or switch is configured ie. by launching a browser. For my Belkin ethernet hub I enter 192.168.2.1 on my browser and it helps me configure my hub. Any PBX that can be configured similarly? 2. Can be configured remotely (via VPN) over the internet 3. PBX should not need a dedicated PC ie. should work independent of a PC (except for inital configuration). Thanks in anticipation, Vish ------------------------------ From: visniranjan@hotmail.com (Vish) Subject: Linux Asterisk embedded PBX, HELP!! Date: 28 Oct 2004 07:58:42 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hi again folks, Is there a PBX which is Linux/Asterisk based that can work independent of a PC? A PBX with embedded Linux OS and Asterisk that can be configured locally initialy with a PC, (later works independent of the PC). The device must also be subsequently configurable remotely via the internet (VPN if required). Maybe I am just dreaming but am new to this. Any help appreciated. Thanks, Vish ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 23:09:57 -0500 From: Neal McLain Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? DevilsPGD wrote: > Shaw cable is (or was, I don't have my TV connected to my > DCT right now) using channel 1 as a digital channel for > themselves. Analog cable still starts at 2 though. Whereupon Doug Krause wrote: > Comcast in Western Massachusetts uses channel 1 for On Demand. "On Demand" is distributed digitally; as DevilsPGD noted, channel 1 can be used for digital services. However, digital "channel" numbers are arbitrary labels for specific data streams; they bear no relationship to any actual RF channel. Based on the "channel" number, a digital converter refers to an internal lookup table. Based on the information obtained from the table, the converter determines if the signal is authorized; if so, it tunes to the correct RF carrier, demodulates it, demuxes it, decodes the desired signal, and outputs video and audio. Most converters include a modulator to provide an NTSC output, typically switchable to Channel 3 or 4. Most converters also display the digital "channel" number; some display additional information such as time and date and/or program metadata. Lookup tables can be downloaded from the cable TV company headend to accommodate changes in authorized service levels or to totally de-authorize a non-pay subscriber. > About 10 or 15 years ago my grandmother's cable in Arlington, > Texas had Channels 1, 0, and 00. Settop converters of that vintage were analog. Analog cable TV channel numbers were not standardized until 1992, when the FCC adopted EIA Interim Standard IS-132 [47 CFR 76.605(a)(ii)]. See . Long before 1992, most analog cable-TV channel numbers had been fairly well standardized by common industry practice. Two numbering systems were in common use: Letter designations: A, B, C, etc. Channel A = 120-126 MHz. Number designations: 14,15,16, etc. Channel 14 = 120-126 MHz. But three channel numbers had remained unstandardized, so various converter manufactures invented their own numbering schemes: FREQUENCY EIA LETTER OTHER CHANNEL NUMBERS BAND CHANNEL CHANNEL SOMETIMES USED BY (MHz) NUMBER NUMBER CONVERTER MANUFACTURERS NOTES --------- ------- ------- ------------------------ ----- 72-78 1 A-8, 0, 1 1,2 108-114 98 A-2, 0, 1, 00, 01, 54, 57, 60 1,3 114-120 99 A-1, 0, 1, 00, 01, 55, 58, 61 1,3 Note 1: "A-8" is read "A minus 8," meaning eight channels below channel A. Similarly, "A-1" is one channel below channel A, etc. Note 2: The IRC and HRC frequency plans expand the 72-76 MHz band to 6 MHz, enough to carry one NTSC television channel, designated by EIA as Channel 1. See . Note 3: The 108-120 MHz is used in the airspace for VOR (VHF Omnidirectional Range). To avoid a possible conflict, this band was skipped when the original lettered-channel assignments were made (sometime around 1960). As technology improved (and FCC rules changed), this band became usable for two TV channels, which somehow got named A-2 and A-1. For obvious reasons, converter manufacturers didn't want to use such klunky channel numbers, so they invented their own numbers. The EIA standard finally put an end to this nonsense by naming them 98 and 99. Your grandmother's Channels 1, 0, and 00 were probably some combination of what are now EIA Channels 1, 98, and 99. But, given the free-for-all channel assignment schemes floating around back then, about all we can say for certain is that Channel 1 was *not* the same as the long-defunct broadcast Channel 1. Neal McLain [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Something I do not understand about our Cable One system is this: (Basic) channels are numbered 2 though 62 with no channel 0 or 1 and no channel 4, sixty channels total . There is a channel 3 on our cable which happens to be Fox out of Tulsa. Our converter boxes come with arrangements to use a switch on the back to set the converter to do its output on channel 3 or 4, depending. My thinking was since there is a channel 3, put the converter box output to channel 4 which is otherwise vacant. But no, Cable One says use the '3' side of the converter switch *even though they also put stuff on channel 3. In fact, if you put the converter box on 4 and also set the television set to '4', we only get a snowy, grainy picture. But go 3 and 3 as they suggest, the picture is fine whether you are watching the cable channel 3 or something else. I wonder why they would use 3 for the converter box output to the television even when they themselves are using channel 3? Their full spectrum of 'channels' runs from channel 2 through channel 938 if you have their full package (2 through 62, basic), (101 through 1xx, then 200 through 2xx, etc. up through 901 through 938 which are the music channels, in total about 400 channels total, with lots of vacancies in the middle.) But they do not use zero, or one, or four for some reason. Also, when manually tuning a cable channel where nothing is located, the cable does not allow the remote to be stopped on a vacant spot (even if requested) but automatically goes to the next highest actual channel, with one exception, channel 70, just above the basic group of channels. The coverter will stop on 70 if you request it to, and you get a continuous black screen, almost like a television station is there but with carrier but no other output. Ignoring the cable converter and manually tuning the television to channel 70 I usually just get snow and hiss, but sometimes I get a 'ghost image' of some cable channel instead. Can anyone explain any of this? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Rick Merrill Subject: Re: VOIP and Telnet Organization: Comcast Online Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 14:16:41 GMT rshlain@hotmail.com wrote: > It is possible to have VOIP and be able to connect to machines that > have modems and use telnet? Yes, of course: it is a telephone. But WHY would you want to because VoIP requires that you already have broadband or equivalent. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Maybe he wants to run a BBS which accepts calls over a modem line and he wants to know an a VOIP or Vonage phone be the call-in line for his BBS so that callers can use *thier* modems to call *his* modem and use the BBS? PAT] ------------------------------ From: dog4dogg@yahoo.com (kansasman) Subject: Re: VOIP and Telnet Date: 28 Oct 2004 09:45:56 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com rshlain@hotmail.com wrote in message news:: > It is possible to have VOIP and be able to connect to machines that > have modems and use telnet? > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: If I understand it correctly, VOIP -- > or at least Vonage -- can do everything a telephone can do. PAT] In my experience, in order to have VoIP, you need to have DSL or Digital Cable with Broadband. I hope this is helpful! I was curious about this too -- and I found this site to be helpful in answering some of my basic questions: http://www.inclusive.com/trng/voip/facets.htm Good Luck! [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Maybe also the man has not only broad band and a fast local area network like myself (and most of you) but he also has (built in by default) 'Dial Up Networking' and he now and then uses that instead of the broadband, (as I do when I wish to call some small BBS type thing.) He wonders if *his modem* will work with his Vonage phone on his broadband line. PAT] ------------------------------ From: visniranjan@hotmail.com (Vish) Subject: Re: Inexepnsive Remote Forwarding by Auto Attendant Date: 28 Oct 2004 07:24:12 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Thanks, Fred, for your reply. Do I have to have a PC to run Asterisk? is there any other free standing device short of a PC running Linux that I can use? Thanks, Vish Fred wrote in message news:: > visniranjan@hotmail.com (Vish) wrote in news:telecom23.494.4@telecom- > digest.org: >> I want to buy an inexpensive auto attendant that will announce the >> name of our company and based on callers need (1 for John, 2 for >> Peter, 3 for David) transfer the call to a remote number (home, cell >> etc.) > It can easily be done by someone who knows how to set up an Asterisk > switch -- so it could run on a pc unattended; it runs under Linux, > which is pretty robust. > The other option is to find a service that does what you need. > Fred > VixFone.com We specialize in wholesale VoIP to ISPs, auto-attendants, > foreign exchange and switch services for business. ------------------------------ From: dog4dogg@yahoo.com (kansasman) Subject: Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future Date: 28 Oct 2004 09:29:36 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com charlie@cdsdetroit.com (charlie3) wrote in message news:: > I ported my home phone to Vonage last spring and haven't looked back. > It happens that cell phone coverage is excellent where I am so I use > the cell phone as the backup phone. I have Vonage set to > simultaneously ring the cell phone and ring the cell phone when the > network is out. With these features, Vonage plus cell phone are > reliable enough for my purposes. > Charlie Good to hear you are happy with VoIP. I have heard mixed reviews about Vonage, depending on the area. Are you east coast or west coast? I have also heard mixed reviews about their customer service. Thanks for the feedback. I am interested in finding out more. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Maybe I am sort of a special customer of theirs, but I rarely have any hassles with their service. Occassionally their customer service sucks, but not often. But you know something? Even Bell, back in the days when it had only a couple hundred thousand customers (a hundred years ago?) gave excellent customer service. The extent to which a company begins getting very bad in its customer service is directly related to its size, and its customer base. Watch and see if Vonage, in forty or fifty years, hasn't gotten just as outrageous as the telcos are now. In the case of Vonage, regardless of your location, customer service is all given from an east coast office in New Jersey. Finding the proper ratio of customer base to quality service at a price that does not cause the company to lose its shirt in the process is a very complex thing. You want to have enough reps to take calls and stay active but not so few the customer waits on hold forever and gets wrong answers from a stressed out representative, and not so many reps that they can sit around wasting their time and your money. It gets very delicate. I may be a little bit prejudiced here: This past week, UPS rang my doorbell and handed me a package from Vonage -- which I had not ordered -- and in it was a t-shirt and a cap, each with the Vonage emblem, and a handwritten note saying 'a gift from us to you with our thanks for being one of our top referrers.' I called VONAGE-HELP on the phone then and there to say 'thanks' and promptly got put on hold for ten minutes before a rep answered who had no idea what I was talking about! PAT] ------------------------------ From: David Reply-To: FlyLikeAnEagle@United.Com Subject: Re: Yet Another Telco Tax Proposed Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 02:48:20 GMT > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When I had my two heart attacks back > in the middle 1990's, I lived in the Chicago area and thought the > bills from Northshore Medical Center were pretty awful. There were > angioplasties each time and other treatment as well. But when I got > here to Kansas and had a brain aneurysm (which is more or less a > stroke but not entirely), when I got out of Stormont-Vail Medical > Center in Topeka and the associated Kansas Rehabiitation Hospital > (yes, the nearest brain surgeon was a 125 mile ambulance ride going > down I-70) I got a bill for *three hundred thousand dollars*. Ever > had a hospital or doctor bill with a bottom line of $300,000.00 ? > Not bad, I guess for someone who is comotose for over two months and > in emergency rehabilitation for another month after that. Add about > another $35,000 for a year's stay in a nursing home. How can anyone > afford to get sick these days? PAT] FWIW, you are still with us and able to share and participate. Surely that time is worth a good deal of the sum even if you didn't have to pay it all yourself. David [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: As I slowly pulled myself back together in the Kansas Rehabilition Hospital (for starters) and in the nursing home over the year following that, there were a few times I wondered why I was still around. As I began to acclimate myself to being at home finally, a disabled older person who has to have almost daily attention, those thoughts of 'why am I still around' occur now and then. Two years ago, I filed my tax return with the state of Kansas and claimed my (refund) due to 'Homestead Tax Exemption'. Kansas does not require old people to pay tax on their real property (my house and land) or any food sales tax (a standard amount is refunded for that if you are old and disabled.) You pay it as called for, then file for a refund of it all together each January and get it back as a refund check a few months later. Would you believe they tripped me up when the state auditor's office sent me a warrant due for ambulance service from the City of Junction City, KS for ambulance service the night of my aneurysm and that l-o-n-g (over a hundred miles) ride down I-70 from Junction City to Topeka where a brain surgeon was located. The auditor's office was merely a middle-man, collecting on outstanding warrants from various municipal governments. I told the JC people that Kansas SRS had paid the rest of the 300,000.00 bill and they should have paid Junction City for the ambulance service as well. The state auditor 'graciously' offset the warrant with my Homestead tax refund, but eventually the folks in Junction City backed down and okayed the release of the funds and I guess submitted their ambulance bill to Kansas SRS instead. Junction City has a 'relationship' with Fort Riley, where I was actually living and working to supply them with ambulance as needed and medical service from the Junction City Community Hospital. Between the Fort Riley army medics and the JC hospital, neither of them could come up with a brain surgeon (most small towns cannot), so it was off to Topeka with me in the back of the wagon, two Army MP's and a watchful nurse from the hospital looking after me. I joked on the way, asking the nurse if they were going to 'pronounce me' before they got to Topeka; she looked sort of aghast at that and said she hoped they would not have to. Naturally they all -- US Army, City of Junction City ambulance and the hospital nurse wanted to get paid for their efforts. The Army and the hospital all submitted their bills to Kansas SRS in a 'timely way' and got their money. For some reason, City of Junction City did not get their paper work in until almost two years later when I submitted the Homestead Tax refund form on my mother's house in Independence, then they decided they wanted their money also, when SRS said the bills left (at that point) had not been submitted in a 'timely fashion'. It finally all got resolved. 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #518 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Oct 29 21:54:55 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9U1stA08304; Fri, 29 Oct 2004 21:54:55 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 21:54:55 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410300154.i9U1stA08304@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 #519 TELECOM Digest Fri, 29 Oct 2004 21:55:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 519 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (Lisa Minter) Re: Linux Asterisk embedded PBX, HELP!! (T. Sean Weintz) Re: Linux Asterisk embedded PBX, HELP!! (Jay Hennigan) Re: Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence (Gordon S. Hlavenka) Re: Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence (ranck@vt.edu) Re: Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence (Tony P.) Re: Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence (Carl Zwanzig) Re: Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence (Gary Breuckman) Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future (Lisa Hancock) Re: Yet Another Telco Tax Proposed (Lisa Hancock) Re: Is There a PBX Like This? Urgent!!! (T. Sean Weintz) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (Neal McLain) Re: Owner of Stolen 'sex.com' Can Sue VeriSign - Court (Gary Breuckman) Verizon Communications Third-Quarter Revenues Increase 6.7% (M Solomon) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter Subject: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:45:30 -0500 WASHINGTON (AFP) - Electronic banking in the United States took another step forward as a new law took effect allowing digitized images of checks to become their legal equivalent. The new law, aimed at easing the burden of transferring billions of paper checks between banks, has drawn praise from the banking industry as a more efficient way of moving money, but is being criticized by some consumer advocates. The Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act, or Check 21, was pushed by the industry and regulators in the wake of the disruption to banking following the September 11, 2001 attacks. Under the law, any bank in the check-processing chain can convert the original check into a digital image known as a substitute check and throw away the original. Banks are required to accept the digitized images as the "legal equivalent of the original check for all purposes." For consumers, the change may mean an end to the "float" time of several days for a check to travel between banks and clear. "The guy who is trying to cut corners and get an extra few days of float? That's history," said Mark Simmons of Commerce National Bank in Fullerton, California. "They're going to be in for a big surprise." "Banks will save money on processing checks, but banks are not required to share these savings with consumers," says a guide to the new law from Consumers Union. Consumers are unlikely to get their cancelled checks back, although some banks had already stopped this practice. Some say consumers may take an additional hit because Check 21 does not require banks to shorten the holds they put on deposits. And because the law allows banks to create checks with customer information on them, some fear Check 21 will foster fraud, increase mistakes and violate consumer privacy. But Nessa Feddis of the American Bankers Association says making the system more efficient will have benefits for consumers. "Check 21 will help to eliminate the need to use special, dedicated planes and trucks to transport checks around the country," Feddis said. "In addition, natural disasters (hurricanes, and earthquakes) as well as terrorist threats can have a detrimental impact on the timely transportation of paper across the country. Electronic processing can help mitigate some of these issues and provide a more stable banking infrastructure. Merchants may also gain efficiencies in their banking practices. The efficiencies, which will be gained over the long term rather than immediately, will reduce banks overhead costs, and those savings will help consumers." *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Yahoo News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Re: Linux Asterisk embedded PBX, HELP!! Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 15:39:29 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Vish wrote: > Hi again folks, > Is there a PBX which is Linux/Asterisk based that can work independent > of a PC? A PBX with embedded Linux OS and Asterisk that can be > configured locally initialy with a PC, (later works independent of the > PC). The device must also be subsequently configurable remotely via > the internet (VPN if required). Maybe I am just dreaming but am new to > this. Any help appreciated. > Thanks, > Vish Um, yeah. You are just dreaming. Consider this -- would not a low end PC generally be cheaper than an embedded system anyway? Making it into an embedded system would make it more expensive, since the embedded system would have all the componenets of a PC anyway (it would essentially be a PC in a special case). ------------------------------ From: Jay Hennigan Organization: Disgruntled Postal Workers Against Gun Control Subject: Re: Linux Asterisk embedded PBX, HELP!! Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 22:58:00 -0700 On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 07:58:42 -0700, Vish wrote: > Hi again folks, > Is there a PBX which is Linux/Asterisk based that can work independent > of a PC? A PBX with embedded Linux OS and Asterisk that can be > configured locally initialy with a PC, (later works independent of the > PC). The device must also be subsequently configurable remotely via > the internet (VPN if required). Maybe I am just dreaming but am new to > this. Any help appreciated. Well, yes. But it's really a PC under the hood. PBXs have essentially been computers since the crossbar days. There are a number of single-board dedicated x86 boxes that can run asterisk without the "look and feel" of a PC. You can boot from a solid-state "disk" and have no hard drive, you don't need a monitor, keyboard or mouse, etc. Some even run on -48VDC, just like your grandfather's PBX. But, if you want the features and reliability, a server-class rack mount "PC" is your best choice. You'll want a large amount of storage for voice mail, standard PCI slots for the Digium boards, etc. And you can configure it locally with a PC (connected via console) or remotely via ssh or telnet, or even with a real green-screen VT-100. If you wanted to, you could probably run asterisk on a Tivo, a Cisco 2500, or any of a number of other esoteric non-PC platforms. It's open source and there are a number of cross-compilers available. With a little effort, most any platform with a C compiler can likely handle the basic engine. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 14:54:58 -0500 From: Gordon S. Hlavenka Reply-To: nospam@crashelex.com Organization: Crash Electronics Subject: Re: Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence Matt wrote: > Now ... about 500 feet - 1000 feet from the field where the > electric fence is a youth camp. On the camp is the office telephones, > caretaker, and a program director. > The phone line for the caretaker and ONE of the two office > lines experience a continual hum as well as a click, click, click, > click, click, every time the electric fence fires off. Hum in particular, and also noise to some extent, are symptoms of an unbalanced pair. > The program director does not experience any known issue on his > line, and the other line in the office is fine. I find this very > odd, since both of the office lines come in (presumably) on the same > cable? These are three separate phone lines, each with their own phone number, right? Not extensions from a single number? Check the lines where they enter the building; hopefully there's a NID there. You can disconnect an RJ-11 type plug inside the NID and connect a phone directly to the line there. If there's still hum and clicking, then it is absolutely Telco's problem. If the hum and clicks disappear when tested at the NID then the problem is with your inside wiring, which Telco will happily repair for you at a substantial fee ... (If you're talking about one phone number with several extensions, of which some are clean and some are noisy -- then it's definitely a problem with your phones or inside wiring. Possibly both.) If there's not a NID it shouldn't be too difficult to have Telco put one in for you. The fact that one line is OK shows that it is possible to provide service to your location without interference. So all your lines should be clean. Yes, they all come in on one cable but that cable is probably not continuous back to the CO. It's likely opened up at one or more pints to tap off pairs for other subscribers. Any of these points provides an opportunity for corrosion or foreign material to affect one or more (but not necessarily all) pairs and cause an unbalanced condition. > Any thoughts? Verizon is kinda stumped on this issue, so I'm trying > to see if I can figure anything out to help them out. This shouldn't be a stumper at all. It can be labor-intensive to track down where the pair is going out of balance, so maybe they're just dragging their feet hoping you'll give up and accept the service you've got. A telephone pair is two wires twisted together. The wires are as near to identical electrically as they can be made. So, if one lead has a 600V pulse induced in it by a nearby electric fence, the other will have an identical 600V pulse induced in it. Since the wires' electrical characteristics are identical, these pulses propagate at identical speeds and arrive at your telephone simultaneously. But since one lead attaches to one side of the phone's circuits and the other lead attaches to the other side, the two pulses cancel each other perfectly and you hear nothing. Only the audio placed onto the pair at the CO should be heard. The hybrid in your telephone is in essence an analog computer; it calculates the difference of the voltages on the two wires and outputs that difference as audio. The CO places different signals on each wire (representing audio) but noise sources place the SAME signal on each wire. Telephone pairs generally carry a LOT of noise -- but since they carry the IDENTICAL noise on both wires, it all cancels perfectly at the ends and nobody hears any of it. Even the twist plays a role; if the wires were parallel they would electromagnetically couple slightly different audio signals from adjacent pairs in the cable. Twisting the pairs ensures that each wire picks up an identical signal. (If your house is wired with old Red-Green-Black-Yellow "cloverleaf" cable and you use the B-Y pair for a second line, you will probably notice crosstalk. This happens because the cloverleaf cable is not twisted-pair and so it acts like a coupling transformer. It can cause crosstalk even if you don't have anything connected to the far end of the cloverleaf cable.) When the electrical characteristics of one wire are changed, the pair becomes unbalanced. This can happen because a spiderweb is built in a junction box, and provides a high-resistance leakage path to ground, or to other pairs (which leads to crosstalk). It can happen because rain leaks into a splice and the resulting corrosion inserts a few dozen ohms of DC resistance into one side of the circuit. It can happen when a mouse chews up insulation on a bunch of wires and randomly alters their capacitance. In an unbalanced condition, signals do NOT propagate identically down the two wires. They may propagate at different speeds, and/or they may have different frequency response curves. When noise signals reach your telephone instrument, the difference between them (which would be zero on a perfectly balanced line) becomes audible. Power lines produce a 60Hz hum, electric fencers produce regular clicks, other types of problems cause hissing and popping. Gordon S. Hlavenka http://www.crashelectronics.com "If we imagined he could _find_ the car, we could pretend it might be fixed." - Calvin {TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I had telephone service once where the line went bad, and telco decided it was necessary to swap the pairs. Trouble was, they had a hard time finding *any* spare pairs in the cable, but about a half-dozen pairs which were out of order. So what telco wound up doing (I found out later) was to take *one* good wire from one pair and a second good wire from another pair, in effect making one good pair out of four wires (two of which were out of order.) When I started listening to my phone calls later on, it just did not seem right, it sounded sort of out of balance somehow. I then complained about that also, and a few days later they came out and were working in the hole in the street changing things around again, and that time it sounded better. Is that some sort of problem, when you 'mix and match' wires from different pairs to get a good pair? PAT] ------------------------------ From: ranck@vt.edu Subject: Re: Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 20:16:58 +0000 (UTC) Organization: Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA Matt wrote: > The phone line for the caretaker and ONE of the two office > lines experience a continual hum as well as a click, click, click, > click, click, every time the electric fence fires off. The program > director does not experience any known issue on his line, and the > other line in the office is fine. I find this very odd, since both of > the office lines come in (presumably) on the same cable? > Any thoughts? Verizon is kinda stumped on this issue, so I'm > trying to see if I can figure anything out to help them out. Does > this sound like a grounding issue? If so is it at the demarc box? Or > on a line some place? Why only one phone line and not the other? Many years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I looked after some 4-wire leased circuits that we used for data communications. Occasionally, usually after a thunderstorm, one of those lines would get noisy. I would call what was then a Bell company and report noise on circuit number blah. The trouble ticker writer would ask for the phone number, which I didn't have because it was a leased 4 wire, not a real phone line, but they'd take down the circuit number and almost exactly 20 minutes later I would get a call from a technician asking me how I knew there was noise on that cicuit. I learned that if I told them the truth, that I had put an oscilloscope on there and could see it, they would get upset. After some further conversation they'd go and check it out. After the techs got to know me, they would tell me more and the noise usually turned out to be caused by what they called "bad carbons." These are some sort of grounded protective devices that apparently get leaky some times. I am willing to bet that is what the problem is for you. Now, good luck getting anyone to understand the old Bell System term "bad carbons." I assume these are sort of surge suppressors of some sort, but what the modern phone company might call them is anybody's guess. Bill Ranck Blacksburg, Va. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The most unusual thing I ever saw which was sort of like that was when I worked for a place which used wire contacts on their doors and windows for a security alarm company. One night when it was time to go home, I could not get the alarm to 'set' and had to call the alarm company to get them to come over and fix it. The trouble when this happened was usually around the elevator doors which would slide open and closed. For continuity in the wire, there was a wire grill like thing which had to be put across the elevator door opening when you were leaving the premises for the night. The repairman came out (he had a buttset with him with clamps on the ends of the wires) and he stood there at the elevator where the grill went across the doors, clamped on his buttset and *talked* through the wires to the office where he worked, where someone else was making adjustments as they talked. Now that I think about it, I guess there is no reason you could not carry on a conversation over the wires of an alarm system. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence Organization: ATCC Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:18:25 -0400 In article , spammers@are.bad.com says: > Hi, > Got a weird problem that I'm looking for a possible resolution > to. There is a fairly large farm with about a mile of electric fence > around the cattle area, with a pulsing electric fence. Apparently > this is a heavy duty pulser and is able to power 100 miles of fence. > Now ... about 500 feet - 1000 feet from the field where the > electric fence is a youth camp. On the camp is the office telephones, > caretaker, and a program director. > The phone line for the caretaker and ONE of the two office > lines experience a continual hum as well as a click, click, click, > click, click, every time the electric fence fires off. The program > director does not experience any known issue on his line, and the > other line in the office is fine. I find this very odd, since both of > the office lines come in (presumably) on the same cable? > Any thoughts? Verizon is kinda stumped on this issue, so I'm > trying to see if I can figure anything out to help them out. Does > this sound like a grounding issue? If so is it at the demarc box? Or > on a line some place? Why only one phone line and not the other? > As another side note, the electric fence runs about 500 - 600 > feet beside the road, which is also where the telephone/electric poles > run (same side of the road). Grounding is probably an issue here. An 8' copper spike driven into the ground and then bonded to every phone instrument would probably do the trick. ------------------------------ From: zbang@radix.net (Carl Zwanzig) Subject: Re: Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 01:46:56 -0000 Organization: RadixNet Internet Services Matt wrote: > The phone line for the caretaker and ONE of the two office > lines experience a continual hum as well as a click, click, click, > click, click, every time the electric fence fires off. The program > director does not experience any known issue on his line, and the > other line in the office is fine. I find this very odd, since both of > the office lines come in (presumably) on the same cable? Sounds like there's a ground on the line, somewhere down the line from the premises. That would account for the hum and for picking up the fence clicking. > Any thoughts? Verizon is kinda stumped on this issue, so I'm > trying to see if I can figure anything out to help them out. Does > this sound like a grounding issue? If so is it at the demarc box? Or > on a line some place? Why only one phone line and not the other? Not too surprised ... A decent tech should be able to find it with a 'kicker' in short order. Of course, so should a test board. z! ------------------------------ From: Gary Breuckman Subject: Re: Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 22:18:36 -0500 Organization: Puma's Lair - catbox.com In article , "Matt" wrote: > Hi, > Got a weird problem that I'm looking for a possible resolution > to. There is a fairly large farm with about a mile of electric fence > The phone line for the caretaker and ONE of the two office > lines experience a continual hum as well as a click, click, click, > click, click, every time the electric fence fires off. The program > director does not experience any known issue on his line, and the other > line in the office is fine. I find this very odd, since both of the > office lines come in (presumably) on the same cable? Perhaps the one phone line is unbalanced, or has leakage to ground. The telco should have equipment to check this. Also trying different telephones may make a difference, especially if the one with the problem is one of those el-cheapo electronic ones. -- Gary Breuckman ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Jeff nor Lisa) Subject: Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future Date: 29 Oct 2004 08:34:01 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Joseph wrote >> The landline phone's peak has come and gone, but it won't be gone. >> Anyone who has complained about the sound quality of a cell phone >> connection (nearly all of us, I would think) can attest to this. > Over 90% of the time my cell phone voice quality is every bit as good > as wireline phone service. Why should someone tolerate 90% when they can have 100%? Cell phones still have a way to go to catch up to wireline reliability and quality. People joke about making crackling noises, but conversations still break up in mid call, and calls don't go through. Cell phones depend on radio waves. Obviously in the 100 years that we've had radio the technology has improved tremendously. However, radio waves still remain sensitive to interference and blockages. Are today's cell phones sensitive to bad sunspot activity? What happens when lightning hits a cellphone tower -- does it continue functioning without any call interruption? Can modern tiny cellphones work well in isolated rural areas far from the interstate -- do the towers have that wide a coverage? Cellphones also require the battery be kept charged. Presumably that's easier now and we don't have to worry about partial charges ("memory") or overchaging. But do batteries wear out from heavy use and frequent charge/discharge cycling? I don't think landline phones are going away. For years the landline was primarily used for voice with data hitch-hiking along. Now with things like DSL I forsee that data will be the primary and voice hitched along on top of a data line, with the same or even more features and reliability for voice. > Not only for home service, but look at pay phones. Pay phones not > only are becoming scarce (my local super market just remodeled and > they decided that they were not going to install pay phones since they > were just being used to make drug sales.) This is true, my local library pulled its payphone and many patrons still ask to use one. But payphones are a different market than home or office wireline phones. Cell phones definitely took a lot of business away from payphones, however, there remains more payphone business than expected. Not everyone carries their cellphone with them at all times, not everyone even has a cellphone, and sometimes cellphones aren't working (ie dead battery). I think we'll see fewer payphones, especially where there was once a battery of them, but they'll still be around. A brand new train line put payphones on every platform (though partly to serve as a 911 service in case of psgr emergency). [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I had a weird experience today with my cell phone, which normally works pretty well. This is Neewollah week here, and downtown was totally jammed, with cars and pedestrians as to be expected. I was over at the Arco Building to pay my monthly phone bill at Prairie Stream and for some reason looked at my cell phone (from Cingular Wireless) which had changed from saying 'Cingular' at top of the LED screen and instead said 'Roam'. I tried to make a call (we can do seven digits on local cell phone calls) but the phone responded 'must have area code and number'. Okay, so I tried 620 plus the number I wanted, and this time it sat there and after a minute or so started beeping. I looked at the LED and it said 'will try to redial in five seconds.' It did that several times. So I dialed 611 to get the Cingular Business Office and repair. Instead, the phone told me 'you have reached Alltel'. The lady who answered had no idea what was going on, and "are you sure your phone is not on the Alltel network?" Of that I am positive it was not changed. I cycled the power, and it came back up as Cingular. When I then called 611 a second time, Cingular answered me. She asked me where I was at and I told her right here in town as always, I never get away these days. She asked 'where is that' and I told her in Independence. She tapped on her keyboard, came back and said, "Aren't you having some kind of Mardis Gras thing there this week?" I said we were, and she said "that explains why our towers in the area are so jammed up. We were full so you were handed off to the Alltel tower which is in Liberty, KS at the Cell One large facility there. Look at your meter and see what the signal strength is ... " I looked, it was slightly above zilch, zero; usually I get a full, heavy signal since Cingular installed their new tower in the Presbyterian Church steeple over on Fourth Street. "There," she said, "now you see what happened? Everyone in town must all be using their cell phone at the same time." I said I hoped I did not get roaming charges added to my bill from the Alltel people. She said I would not get charged anything extra, and she was sorry for any confusion by having to add the area code to my local dialing, etc. PAT] ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Jeff nor Lisa) Subject: Re: Yet Another Telco Tax proposed Date: 29 Oct 2004 11:46:43 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Danny Burstein wrote: > In the continuing tradition of government that try to offload taxes > onto third parties (that way they're not "raising taxes", you see ...) > California has a very real problem with medical costs. The hospitals > and other medical providers provide services, but don't take in > anywhere near as much money as they claim to be expending. > The telco point: The usual folk have pushed forward a fee on telco > services to cover the shortfall. Quoting from a VOA clip: There are two issues at work here: 1) One is the ever increasing demand for government services. All of us are guilty of that even though we all blame someone else. I heard one local curmogeon gripe about taxes. Yet he is a member of several community organizations that get taxpayer-paid grants for their advocacy work (a specific park improvement). So it's ok for his specific park to get grants, but not for anything else. It never occured to anyone that perhaps his advocacy group is doing too good a job and that their specific park is _over_ funded at the expense of other parks or govt services. We want better roads and transit but we don't want to raise our gasoline taxes to pay for them. We want less crime, but don't want to raise our taxes to pay for an expanded criminal justice system. 2) Medical expenses: Medical costs are going through the roof, as they have been for years. This is a very difficult and complex subject and not fixable by pointing fingers at one simple thing. From a telecom point of view, I am extremely frustrated at the gross inefficiency of today's payment processing for health care. A simple visit to the doctor generates considerable paperwork, much of it wrong! For the life of me I don't understand why claims are not (1) standardized for all health insurers so they are uniform processing even if coverage varies and (2) why claims can't be entered and validated on-line. For some reason I don't understand, many of my doctor's claims are rejected. He has to submit them a second time. I get mailed copies of all the paperwork. The same thing happens to my mother who uses different doctors covered by a different insurer, so it's not just me. Obviously there are clerks processing all this junk in both the doctor's office and insurance carrier and all this costs money. ABC News reported that administrative costs make up a big part of the cost of health care. Now I don't know a stent from styrofoam so I can't comment about the direct costs of the actual medical care. But I do know there is no excuse for this massive inefficient paperwork bureaucracy. Sure they use computers, but the systems are ridiculous. One simple office visit generates a voucher of FOUR 8x11 images! Also, I don't understand what "managed" mean in "managed health care". When HMOs first came out, they were supposed to save us money by encouraging cheap checkups to catch expensive disease early on (ie it's suppposedly cheaper to treat someone with high chloresterol than after they've had a real heart attack.) But obviously that hasn't worked out. Also, I don't understand why the traditional Blue Cross/Blue Shield became extremely expensive. Since those subscribers pay big deductibles (ie 20% of the fee) there would be an incentive to not get care unless necessary, yet that hasn't worked out either. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I notice that several dentists, eye- doctors and podiatrists here in town (many services that are *not* covered by Medicare but *are* covered by Kansas Medicaid have put up signs in their waiting rooms saying 'we no longer accept public aid cards.' The reason, I am told is just what you said: paperwork submitted time and again, always sent back with something wrong, then when they *do* decide to pay the doctor, he gets the money in maybe three or four months. :( PAT] ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Re: Is There a PBX Like This? Urgent!!! Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 15:40:52 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Vish wrote: > Hi folks, > I have two incoming lines that need to be transferred to one of > several remote numbers depending on extension or names directory (for > a virtual office). Is there a SOHO PBX with the following specs? > 1. Can be configured locally like a hub or switch is configured ie. by > launching a browser. For my Belkin ethernet hub I enter 192.168.2.1 on > my browser and it helps me configure my hub. Any PBX that can be > configured similarly? Not that I have ever seen. Not browser based. At least not a shoho system. > 2. Can be configured remotely (via VPN) over the internet That's a given. If it works from a browser it will work over VPN. > 3. PBX should not need a dedicated PC ie. should work independent of a > PC (except for inital configuration). > Thanks in anticipation, > Vish ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 16:30:23 -0500 From: Neal McLain Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? PAT wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Something I do not understand > about our Cable One system is this: (Basic) channels are > numbered 2 though 62 with no channel 0 or 1 and no channel 4, > sixty channels total. There's no 0 or 1 because Cable One's basic service uses the STD ("standard") channel-numbering plan, and this plan doesn't include 0 or 1. See the "Standard Carrier Frequency" column at . Cable One probably doesn't use cable channel 4 because of possible direct pickup from K04EJ, a 310-watt station in Coffeyville owned by Coffeyville Community College. A strong off-air signal could get directly into the internal wiring of a poorly-shielded television set that had been connected directly to the cable (without a converter), and cause interference to any signal carried on cable channel 4. This would be the case even if Cable One carried K04EJ *on* cable channel 4. Even though signals move pretty fast through a cable network, there's still a delay of a few microseconds. If an off-air signal and a cable signal both arrive at the TV set, one signal will appear as a ghost in the other. At 310 watts, K04EJ isn't a very strong station, but Independence is only about 13 miles away, so you could still be receiving a fairly strong signal. > here is a channel 3 on our cable which happens to be Fox out > of Tulsa. Our converter boxes come with arrangements to use a > switch on the back to set the converter to do its output on > channel 3 or 4, depending. My thinking was since there is a > channel 3, put the converter box output to channel 4 which is > otherwise vacant. But no, Cable One says use the '3' side of > the converter switch *even though they also put stuff on > channel 3. Assuming the converter is properly designed, there's no reason the output channel can't be the same as one of the input channels. Cable One doesn't use channel 4 as the converter-output channel for the same reason they don't use it as a cable channel: potential interference from K04EJ. > In fact, if you put the converter box on 4 and also > set the television set to '4', we only get a snowy, grainy > picture. Disconnect the converter, hook the TV set up to an antenna, and see what you get. My guess: you'll see K04EJ. > Their full spectrum of 'channels' runs from channel 2 through > channel 938 if you have their full package (2 through 62, > basic), (101 through 1xx, then 200 through 2xx, etc. up > through 901 through 938 which are the music channels, in total > about 400 channels total, with lots of vacancies in the > middle.) But they do not use zero, or one, or four for some > reason. See explanation above. > Also, when manually tuning a cable channel where nothing is > located, the cable does not allow the remote to be stopped on a > vacant spot (even if requested) but automatically goes to the > next highest actual channel, with one exception, channel 70, > just above the basic group of channels. The coverter will stop > on 70 if you request it to, and you get a continuous black > screen, almost like a television station is there but with > carrier but no other output. Ignoring the cable converter and > manually tuning the television to channel 70 I usually just get > snow and hiss, but sometimes I get a 'ghost image' of some > cable channel instead. Can anyone explain any of this? PAT] See "The Mysterious Cable Channel 70" at . Neal McLain [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I read your tinyurl page and it was quite interesting. I also tried your suggestion about an antenna on the television and over the air signals from Channel 4. I did *not* get anything different than what I got before (some hiss and snow with a very faint image.) However, if what you suggest is true about inter- ference from Coffeyville CC, then why isn't that also true of the guy who does the low power repeater of Trinity Broacasting on (I think) channel 22 or 23 here in Indy? Cable One does not block out that channel on account of him; in fact I think Trinity is on our cable 22. I seem to remember channel 4 from *years* ago when as a young kid I lived and visited in Coffeyville. It seems to me it was a 24 hour per day transmission of some weather station. The cameras always looking at the weather dials, and background music. That would have been 1954-55. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Gary Breuckman Subject: Re: Owner of Stolen 'sex.com' Can Sue VeriSign - Court Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 22:24:36 -0500 Organization: Puma's Lair - catbox.com In article , "Patrick Townson" wrote: > 1) what makes .ORG different than .COM is the nature of the web site. > 2) .ORG was always traditionally defined as for use by non-profit > organizations, public service places, etc. ICANN did not just toss > .ORG into the same pot as .COM for good reasons; they are to serve > different categories of web sites. As you said, that difference is 'traditional' and not really enforced these days -- anyone can apply for the com/org/net TLDs without regard for what they want to do with them. 'edu' is the only one that's really restriced anymore. Same with us/biz/info and most of the country code TLDs. Anyone with the money to do so can register any domain that's free. There may be trademark issues, but that gets resolved in court, the registrars don't care. -- Gary Breuckman [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think the registrars would begin to care if they got sued more often, as in the sex.com case. And I feel Public Interest Registry *should* get sued, to make an example of them just as Verisign got sued for the way they gave away the sex.com thing without any care in the world (at least at first, until *they* got sued.) But now I am waiting for the millionaire soccer player Mikka Krupisoff (or his namesake who corresponded with us a couple days ago using the 'garynuman' mail server in Calgary, Alberta) to get back to me with the 'charter' for PIR which he insisted *requires* them to serve one and all pornographers and penis enlarger companies equally, along with any hapless history archivists who happen to be waiting in line. Personally, I think that is a large slice of bologna; charter, indeed. Either the ICANN people deliberatly tossed internet traditions out the window (which would not surprise me) with a new type of charter for the registrars *or* PIR deliberatly abused the charter and the purpose of the Public Internet Registry. So which is it, Mikka, or garynuman or whoever? *Someone* has to get sued! My question is, who? And I am not interested in chasing off to the Swiss Alps looking for anyone. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 16:35:07 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Verizon Communications Third-Quarter Revenues Increase 6.7% Verizon Communications Third-Quarter Revenues Increase 6.7%, to a Record $18.2 Billion; Wireless Revenues Up 23% - Oct 28, 2004 06:25 AM (PR Newswire) Quarterly Earnings of $1.8 Billion; Continued Strong Growth in Broadband and Wireless Services; Continued Solid Cash Flows and Margins THIRD-QUARTER HIGHLIGHTS * Total Company: Earnings of 64 cents in diluted earnings per share, or 65 cents per share before one special item (non-GAAP); 6.7 percent, or $1.1 billion, growth in operating revenues; $5.6 billion in cash flows from operating activities, a $0.3 billion increase; $1.3 billion free cash flow (non-GAAP, cash from operating activities less capital expenditures and dividends); 19.8 percent consolidated operating income margin (operating income divided by operating revenues) * Wireless: 1.7 million net customer additions, an industry record for the second consecutive quarter; 42.1 million total customers; 23.0 percent growth in total revenues; company-record average revenue per customer; 22.5 percent operating income margin; churn (customer turnover) of 1.5 percent per month * Wireline: 11.5 percent growth in total data revenues; 8.7 percent growth in long-distance revenues; 309,000 net additions of broadband DSL (digital subscriber lines); 3.3 million total DSL lines; broadband, data, long-distance and Enterprise (large business) services contribute to Domestic Telecom's second sequential quarter of revenue growth Notes: Growth percentages cited above compare third-quarter 2004 with third-quarter 2003. See the schedules accompanying this news release and http://www.verizon.com/investor for reconciliations to generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) for the non-GAAP financial measures included in this announcement. Discontinued operations in the quarterly periods presented include the operations of Verizon Information Services Canada, following a third-quarter 2004 agreement to sell this business. NEW YORK, Oct. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Showing continued strong revenue growth, Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ) today reported third-quarter 2004 earnings of $1.8 billion -- 64 cents per diluted share, or 65 cents per share before one special item. Quarterly consolidated operating revenues topped $18 billion for the first time in the company's history -- increasing 6.7 percent to $18.2 billion, compared with $17.1 billion in the third quarter 2003. Also for the first time, Verizon Wireless contributed more than 40 percent of Verizon's total revenues. The nation's leading wireless company grew revenues 23.0 percent to $7.3 billion, compared with $5.9 billion in the third quarter 2003. This marks Verizon Wireless' ninth consecutive quarter of double-digit, year-over-year revenue increases, and the third consecutive quarter that increases totaled more than $1 billion compared with the previous year's quarter. Overall, Verizon's growth businesses -- wireless, long-distance, broadband, data and Enterprise services -- accounted for 55 percent of third-quarter 2004 revenues. This compares with 49 percent of third-quarter 2003 revenues. Over the past year, revenues from these businesses have grown by 20.8 percent. Domestic Telecom operating revenues were $9.6 billion in the third quarter 2004, a 2.1 percent decrease compared with the third quarter 2003 and a slight increase compared with the second quarter 2004. The segment's third-quarter results included an 8.7 percent increase in revenues from all long-distance services, which were $1.1 billion compared with $1.0 billion in the third quarter 2003, and an 11.5 percent increase in total data revenues, which were $2.0 billion compared with $1.8 billion in the third quarter 2003. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44563915 ------------------------------ 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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Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #519 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sat Oct 30 21:08:50 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id i9V18o219001; Sat, 30 Oct 2004 21:08:50 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 21:08:50 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200410310108.i9V18o219001@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 #520 TELECOM Digest Sat, 30 Oct 2004 21:08:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 520 Inside This Issue: Don't Forget to Set Clocks Back Now! XM vs. IPod - XM's New Portable Satellite Radio (Monty Solomon) New Treo 650 Is Better Than Ever; Rivals Offer Alternatives (M Solomon) Re: Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence (Eric Tappert) Re: Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence (David Clayton) Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (Rick Merrill) Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (AES/newspost) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (Neal McLain) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (Stanley Cline) Re: Verizon California Terminates ISDN, FX Other Services (Isaiah Beard) Re: Advice Needed on SMS Servers (John Levine) Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future (w_tom) Re: Yet Another Telco Tax Proposed (Clark W. Griswold, Jr.) Re: VOIP and Telnet (Hank Karl) Re: Cybersquatter Update (Hank Karl) Re: Owner of Stolen 'sex.com' Can Sue VeriSign - Court (Steve Sobol) New Telecom Web Site on the Way (Patrick Townson) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 22:28:23 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: XM vs. IPod - XM's New Portable Satellite Radio Will XM's new portable satellite radio make the iPod obsolete? By Paul Boutin Listen to this story on NPR's Day to Day. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4128832 Apple Computer and XM Radio both unveiled hot, next-generation portable music players this morning. Apple's upgraded iPod Photo has 60 gigs of storage capacity, a color screen, and new software that lets you bloat it with photos as well as music. (Cost: $499 for the 40-gig model, $599 for the 60-gig version.) XM's new MyFi player is, in short, the first satellite radio Walkman. It can tune into 130-plus channels of digital radio and even store five hours of programming for you to play back at your leisure. (Cost: $349.99, plus $9.99 per month for an XM subscription.) My instant take on today's game of whiz-bang one-upmanship is that both companies lost. It's now five hours after Apple's U2-bedecked press conference, and I still haven't stopped yawning. This new iPod Photo is the same iPod we're already sick of hearing about. The 2-inch color screen isn't the start of any digital revolution-all it does is turn your iPod into a camera phone that can't take pictures or make phone calls. http://slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2108707 ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 01:05:56 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: New Treo 650 Is Better Than Ever, But Rivals Offer Alternatives New Treo 650 Is Better Than Ever, But Rivals Offer Some Alternatives By WALTER S. MOSSBERG PalmOne's Treo smart phone has been the best combination of phone, PDA and e-mail device on the market. It had a few key flaws, though, so the company has now released a new, improved model, the Treo 650, to be sold by Sprint starting next month. But the rest of the industry is catching on to the idea of making a phone that, like the Treo, actually has a full keyboard for banging out e-mails. So the competition will be tougher for the new Treo than it was for its predecessor. Over the last week, I've been testing the new Treo 650, and comparing it with two other PDA phones that have now morphed into models with keyboards. One is the Microsoft-based Pocket PC phone. The other is the Sony Ericsson P910 smart phone, based on the Symbian operating system. I concentrated on the new keyboards in these two competitors because that's their main new feature. I have already reviewed another major Treo competitor, the new BlackBerry 7100t, sold by T-Mobile. My verdict: The Treo is better than ever, but the two newest keyboard phones, like the new BlackBerry, will give some new options to mobile e-mail users who prefer different designs and different software. http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20041028.html ------------------------------ From: Eric Tappert Subject: Re: Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 02:38:20 GMT Organization: AT&T Worldnet On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 20:16:58 UTC, ranck@vt.edu wrote: > Matt wrote: >> The phone line for the caretaker and ONE of the two office >> lines experience a continual hum as well as a click, click, click, >> click, click, every time the electric fence fires off. The program >> director does not experience any known issue on his line, and the >> other line in the office is fine. I find this very odd, since both of >> the office lines come in (presumably) on the same cable? >> Any thoughts? Verizon is kinda stumped on this issue, so I'm >> trying to see if I can figure anything out to help them out. Does >> this sound like a grounding issue? If so is it at the demarc box? Or >> on a line some place? Why only one phone line and not the other? > Many years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I looked after some > 4-wire leased circuits that we used for data communications. > Occasionally, usually after a thunderstorm, one of those lines would > get noisy. I would call what was then a Bell company and report noise > on circuit number blah. The trouble ticker writer would ask for the > phone number, which I didn't have because it was a leased 4 wire, not > a real phone line, but they'd take down the circuit number and almost > exactly 20 minutes later I would get a call from a technician asking > me how I knew there was noise on that cicuit. I learned that if I > told them the truth, that I had put an oscilloscope on there and could > see it, they would get upset. After some further conversation they'd > go and check it out. After the techs got to know me, they would tell > me more and the noise usually turned out to be caused by what they > called "bad carbons." These are some sort of grounded protective > devices that apparently get leaky some times. I am willing to bet > that is what the problem is for you. Now, good luck getting anyone to > understand the old Bell System term "bad carbons." I assume these are > sort of surge suppressors of some sort, but what the modern phone > company might call them is anybody's guess. > Bill Ranck > Blacksburg, Va. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The most unusual thing I ever saw which > was sort of like that was when I worked for a place which used wire > contacts on their doors and windows for a security alarm company. One > night when it was time to go home, I could not get the alarm to 'set' > and had to call the alarm company to get them to come over and fix it. > The trouble when this happened was usually around the elevator doors > which would slide open and closed. For continuity in the wire, there > was a wire grill like thing which had to be put across the elevator > door opening when you were leaving the premises for the night. The > repairman came out (he had a buttset with him with clamps on the ends > of the wires) and he stood there at the elevator where the grill went > across the doors, clamped on his buttset and *talked* through the > wires to the office where he worked, where someone else was making > adjustments as they talked. Now that I think about it, I guess there > is no reason you could not carry on a conversation over the wires of > an alarm system. PAT] OK, you're in luck, I know the origin of the term "bad carbons". A carbon protector is a "spark gap" like device that uses carbon electrodes (acually small blocks of carbon) separated by 3 mils of air for an insulator. This air gap breaks down somewhere between 500 volts and 1000 volts. One carbon block of the pair is tied to local ground, the other to either tip or ring. The entire protector has two pairs of blocks (one pair for tip, one for ring). The idea is that if a surge (lightning induced, typically, but also power company switching operations on joint use pole lines can also introduce a surge) exceeds the breakdown voltage of the 3 mil air gap between the blocks, an arc forms and a low impedance path to ground protects the premises equipment. These protectors are used at customer premises entrances, CO entrances (actually on the MDF), and at aerial to underground junctions (to protect the underground cable). The NEC requires them on premises where the circuit runs between buildings (no flames, please, I know there are exceptions to that general rule). The "problem" is that when an arc forms it sometimes "pits" the carbon blocks and results in some carbon granules floating around the air gap. This can cause a resistance (often highly variable or intermittent) to the grounded block, unbalancing the line (typically only one of the pairs of blocks has the problem). Thus the term "bad carbons". Modern protectors use gas discharge tubes instead of carbon blocks separated by air. The sealed discharge tube effectively eliminates the loss of balance due to particles of the electrodes shorting the gap. Unfortunately, the old carbon blocks are only replaced when they go bad or a modern NID is installed, so there are still lots of them out there. They are usually referred to as "station protectors" or "primary protectors" (to differentiate them from the SCRs and diodes used to protect the circuit cards. Those are called "secondary protectors".) Hope this helps. Eric Tappert ------------------------------ From: David Clayton Subject: Re: Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 18:38:36 +1000 Matt contributed the following: > Hi, > Got a weird problem that I'm looking for a possible resolution > to. There is a fairly large farm with about a mile of electric fence > around the cattle area, with a pulsing electric fence. Apparently > this is a heavy duty pulser and is able to power 100 miles of fence. > The phone line for the caretaker and ONE of the two office > lines experience a continual hum as well as a click, click, click, > click, click, every time the electric fence fires off. The program > director does not experience any known issue on his line, and the > other line in the office is fine. I find this very odd, since both of > the office lines come in (presumably) on the same cable? Since one line is ok, it is possible the faulty line is actually on a "split pair" where (for some portion of the run) it is connected using different legs of 2 pairs in a cable, rather than both legs of one pair. It will still have connectivity and work, but if there is any junk about, you'll hear it (as you have described). Regards, David Clayton, e-mail: dcstar@XYZ.myrealbox.com Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. (Remove the "XYZ." to reply) Dilbert's words of wisdom #18: Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience. ------------------------------ From: Rick Merrill Subject: Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Organization: Comcast Online Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 18:45:42 GMT Lisa Minter wrote: > WASHINGTON (AFP) - Electronic banking in the United States took > another step forward as a new law took effect allowing digitized > images of checks to become their legal equivalent. > The new law, aimed at easing the burden of transferring billions of > paper checks between banks, has drawn praise from the banking industry > as a more efficient way of moving money, but is being criticized by > some consumer advocates. > The Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act, or Check 21, was pushed > by the industry and regulators in the wake of the disruption to > banking following the September 11, 2001 attacks. > Under the law, any bank in the check-processing chain can convert the > original check into a digital image known as a substitute check and > throw away the original. Banks are required to accept the digitized > images as the "legal equivalent of the original check for all > purposes." IF these images were accessed it would give criminals access to an image of the customer's signature. Said criminal could then use a laser printer with 640 dpi resolution to print checks that would be indistinguishable from the photo check after a 240 dpi Scan!? ------------------------------ From: AES/newspost Subject: Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 14:22:00 -0700 In article , Lisa Minter wrote: > Consumers are unlikely to get their cancelled checks back, although > some banks had already stopped this practice. Not sure what the practice is in other places, but at my Credit Union you can view a scanned image of any of your cleared checks online (only after logging in to your personal account, of course). Seems to work pretty well in practice, and meets my occasional need to verify a check written earlier. Can only trust that the connection is secure, of course, although a hacker attack would probably be directed at other aspects of an account, e.g. online funds transfers. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 16:03:00 -0500 From: Neal McLain Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? Pat wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I read your tinyurl page > and it was quite interesting. I also tried your > suggestion about an antenna on the television and over > the air signals from Channel 4. I did *not* get anything > different than what I got before (some hiss and snow with > a very faint image.) You *did* tune the television set to channel 4, didn't you? Also, what sort of antenna were you using? Assuming you used a decent antenna and tuned the TV to channel 4, but still couldn't get a picture, I would have to conclude that either W04EJ was not on the air at the time, or that its signal is too weak at your home. Given that W04EJ only puts out 310 watts, that might be possible. Whose signal was that "very faint image" anyway? > However, if what you suggest is true about interference from > Coffeyville CC, then why isn't that also true of the guy who does > the low power repeater of Trinity Broadcasting on (I think) channel > 22 or 23 here in Indy? Cable One does not block out that channel on > account of him; in fact I think Trinity is on our cable 22. Because cable channels (above channel 13) operate at different frequencies than broadcast channels. Three examples: CHANNEL BROADCAST CABLE NUMBER FREQUENCY FREQUENCY ------- ----------- ----------- 4 66- 72 MHz 66- 72 MHz 22 518-524 MHz 168-174 MHz 23 524-530 MHz 216-222 MHz Note that broadcast channel 4 and cable channel 4 are the same, but 22 and 23 are not. For a comparative list of all broadcast-vs.-cable channels, and the history behind it, see: http://www.sbe24.org/archive/c24sep97.asp#seventeen > I seem to remember channel 4 from *years* ago when as a young kid I > lived and visited in Coffeyville. It seems to me it was a 24 hour > per day transmission of some weather station. The cameras always > looking at the weather dials, and background music. That would have > been 1954-55. PAT] Perhaps you might contact the college and see if they publish a program guide. I searched the college's website, but couldn't find anything about their TV station. Neal McLain [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Good idea. If I think of it I will call them on Monday. Yes, I turned the television set to channel 4 on over the air, but for an antenna, I cheated. I did not want to take the TV set I had available at the time out to the backyard where there is an antenna (very high) so I used a small, at ground level, but electrically amplified antenna. I really am just not in a position to climb up a ladder onto the back porch roof area. If one of the young guys around the area had been here, I would have asked him to do it, but everyone seems to have been away celebrating (or avoiding) Neewollah week events. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Stanley Cline Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 13:17:53 -0400 Organization: Roamer1 Communications Reply-To: sc1-news@roamer1.org On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 16:30:23 -0500, PAT wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I read your tinyurl page and it was > quite interesting. I also tried your suggestion about an antenna on > the television and over the air signals from Channel 4. I did *not* > get anything different than what I got before (some hiss and snow with > a very faint image.) However, if what you suggest is true about inter- > ference from Coffeyville CC, then why isn't that also true of the guy > who does the low power repeater of Trinity Broacasting on (I think) > channel 22 or 23 here in Indy? Cable One does not block out that > channel on account of him; in fact I think Trinity is on our cable 22. "Cable" 22 and "UHF" 22 aren't at the same frequency at all. UHF 22 is approximately where cable 73 is (at around 470 MHz), while cable 22 is down around 170 MHz, near the bands used for VHF business radio, pagers, etc. The only overlap between broadcast TV stations and cable TV channels are in the 2-13 range, where VHF stations and cable stations directly overlap, and in the very high cable channels (cable 65 and above), where UHF stations and cable stations overlap with 2 MHz of separation between them (i.e., the visual and aural carriers of cable 65+ are 2 MHz below those of UHF 14+, with standard and HRC cable frequency plans anyway.) As for the channel 4 issue, my guess as to why Cable One isn't using it now is that they used to use it for a premium channel such as HBO using negative traps (which remove the signal of a given channel or group of adjacent channels), and they moved HBO to another analog channel or to digital and left channel 4 idle because reusing it for something else would require visiting the homes of all current customers who don't have HBO to remove traps. Comcast in the area where my parents live (northwest Georgia a few miles south of Chattanooga, TN) doesn't use channels 2 or 14 for the very same reason ... to reuse them would require going around to thousands of homes and removing "HBO" and "Showtime" traps. Stanley Cline -- sc1 at roamer1 dot org -- http://www.roamer1.org/ "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. There might be a law against it by that time." -/usr/games/fortune ------------------------------ From: Isaiah Beard Subject: Re: Verizon California Terminates ISDN, FX, Other Services Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 13:22:52 -0400 Tim@Backhome.org wrote: > What useful purpose does ISDN serve these days? It's VERY useful, actually. Where I work, we have a number of Tandberg 6000's and Polycom FX devices scattered on a number of sites, and quite a few of them are hooked up to both Gigabit ethernet and 3 bonded ISDN PRIs each. Videoconferencing is VERY big, even bigger now that businesses are trying to cut their travel expenses. While videoconferencing over IP is fine inter-office and usually works well within the continental US, there have been plenty of instances where connections to developing countries (South Africa, Guyana, parts of Russia) and even some parts of Europe (Belgium, the UK, Ireland) where the backbone connection over IP is unacceptably bad for even 384kbps full motion video with voice. However many of these sites can be very easily and reliably reached by dialing in to their ISDN lines. Lousy connections suddenly become very crisp 384kbps video and audio. In fact as recently as last week, the US Department of Commerce was leasing our equipment and services to connect to their contacts in certain countries which I probably shouldn't name. Good luck trying to get to those places by IP. Even domestically, ISDN has helped helped greatly. On 9/11 and for days afterwards while flights were grounded, ISDN saved our hides. A number of emergency meetings had to happen, and the 'net was horribly congested. But ISDN? I thanked my lucky stars for circuit-switched connections that day, and I know a lot of other businesses did too. Although New York was a total loss for a while, all other sites were still able to communicate. ISDN made my department look like heroes and miracle workers then. I also know for a fact that even very modern, cutting-edge companies like XM radio continue to use ISDN lines. Their remote New York studios are connected to the headquarters in Washington via bonded ISDNs. They consider their services too critical to risk putting on a T1 and hoping the internet backbone will hold up. A direct dial ISDN connection was the only acceptable solution. E-mail fudged to thwart spammers. Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So you are suggesting that ISDN makes a very good backup system in the case of emergencies? PAT] ------------------------------ Date: 30 Oct 2004 21:34:56 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: Advice Needed on SMS Servers Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > Rather than have the user select their carrier when enabling sms > messaging, we were hoping to find a web site or web service that will > list a user's carrier given their cell phone number. Do you know if > such a site exists? Or perhaps there's a better method of handling > this that you can suggest. Unless you have access to the number portability database, you can't tell. It's easy enough to go to nanpa.com and find out what carrier each prefix is assigned to, but now that people can move from carrier to carrier and keep the phone number, the prefix info is only a guess. If you really can't afford your own SMS gateway, you might take a look at clickatell.com or zimepl.net which offer SMS gateway service priced per message via their servers. By the way, if I SMS a name and partial address or zip code to shortcode 46645 on any US network, Google will look up the phone number and SMS it back for free. Is that similar to what you plan? John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 330 5711 johnl@iecc.com, Mayor, http://johnlevine.com, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 08:44:18 -0400 From: w_tom Subject: Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future Bubble memory was suppose to replace disk drives. Mainframes were being obsoleted by mini computers. Mini computers were obsoleted by PCs. The CRT would make the office paperless. In each case, the predictions were made assuming a static world. Common mistake when predictions are based upon business school concepts rather than first learning the details. One must first appreciate the dynamics -- which means extensive experience and underlying knowledge of details and the long term potential of new technology. Long and complex sentences that say those predictions assumed too much fiction -- and therefore fail to see the entire future. One need only see why AT&T is almost nothing more than a paper company to appreciate why such fictional predictions are not viable. What do land lines provide? Security. Predictable service. Almost unlimited bandwidth. Three major weaknesses in cell phones. The weakness with dedicated service is the lack of mobility. No problem. Move the existing technology towards its three strengths. Virtually every building in these towns are being rewired with direct fiber optic cables -- from CO to every building. That means VoIP, massive data transfers, security, the reliability not provided, yet, by cell phones, and a host of other yet to be discovered features. Third generation cell phone technology has finally made standard (POTS) phones obsolete. The baby Bells are not dominated by myopic MBA managers whose education literally destroys both innovation and what little remains of AT&T. AT&T management has a static perspective because they view from anti-innovative B-school concepts. If AT&T still ran the baby Bells, then Nokia's predictions would have merit. But baby Bells (about 10 years too late) suddenly realized that they too will go the way of the anti-innovation AT&T. Baby Bells are finally, after more than 50 years, rewiring their entire network. Cell phones will always be chasing land line communication just as the PC chases the mini computer (ie Sun) which in turn chases the main frame (IBM). Cell phones have limits such as radio frequencies which means cell phone towers may eventually be replaced by WiFi type technology -- to keep chasing the land line companies. But don't expect mobiles to replace land line just as IBM found new purpose in their core businesses (once IBM replaced their MBAs with computer guys, then IBM rediscovered innovation meaning that a main frame is no longer a dinosaur). Devil is always in the details which means the manager must have 'dirt under his fingernails'. Without a long detailed list of advantages and disadvantages for each technology combined with a list of future markets and innovations, then one can only make predictions like business school graduates and that BBC article. These latter people routinely stifle innovation because they don't have education from where innovation happens. Spread sheets and marketing mentalities are important peripheral parts of business; but only with a short term perspective. To see the future of land lines with a long term perspective, one must apply knowledge and experience of the technology. 3G cell phones will take future business from land line companies as the second generation (now considered unreliable) cell phones are replaced. And land line companies must discover, invent, and expand into new markets -- which also means innovation. Any land line company that intends to be alive in 10 years will have replaced or duplicated their entire network in fiber -- and learned new products based upon the new demands of that technology. Standard technologies potentially on the chopping block: faxes, portable phones, conventional dial up phones, international shortwave broadcasting, and maybe even conventional letters. Remember what happens to companies who don't innovate. Any Baby Bell that uses the bean counter concepts of cost controls is doomed just like Western Union and AT&T. AT&T and Western Union both were dead center in a wonderful future -- and instead failed to innovate their core business. Nokia's article assumes the Baby Bells are also anti-innovative. It even fails to see the massive move to fiber. Nokia also has a serious problem. Cell phone technology, once complex, has now become so simple that others can also build phones. Standard cell phone chip sets are doing to Nokia what happened to IBM's PC business. Ironic. Innovation threatens Nokia for same reasons that Nokia feels their product will replace the Baby Bells. Lisa Minter wrote: > Nokia in the UK seems to feel landline phones will be gone entirely > in the next few years, at least in many countries, replaced by > cellular phones. Check out this link: > The fixed line phone in the home could soon disappear, a study by > mobile firm Nokia shows. > < http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/technology/3762844.stm > ------------------------------ From: Clark W. Griswold, Jr. Subject: Re: Yet Another Telco Tax proposed Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 22:25:43 -0600 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) wrote: > 1) One is the ever increasing demand for government services. All > of us are guilty of that even though we all blame someone else. At the federal level and at most local levels, the "ever increasing demand" is primarily social transfer taxes, not roads or other classic government responsibilities. The single largest component of my local tax bill is the county hospital. Don't tell me we do not have government mandated universal healthcare in the US. I pay thousands every year to cover the uninsured. ------------------------------ From: Hank Karl Subject: Re: VOIP and Telnet Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 13:49:32 -0400 Organization: NETPLEX Internet Services - http://www.ntplx.net/ On 27 Oct 2004 13:04:43 -0700, rshlain@hotmail.com wrote: > It is possible to have VOIP and be able to connect to machines that > have modems and use telnet? I'm not sure what effect telnet will have. You will generally need to get four UDP sessions connected plus a session for the signaling to have a VoIP conversation. Another factor is the modem speed and codec used. You will probably have to use G.729A or G.723.1 or some other low bitrate codec. So you can use VoIP over a modem and it can sound OK (I've done this using Windows Messenger to a colleague in England who only had a "56K" dial up line, and he sounded ok (It wasn't toll-quality, but I knew who was talking and what he said). Codecs use more bandwidth on the Internet than their nominal rate implies. For example, G.729A (8KHz) generally uses 20 bytes of data per sampling interval, the RTP header is 12 bytes, and the UDP/IP header is 28 bytes. If you use G.723.1 at 5.3 KHz, you will have a smaller data packet, but you don't reduce the rest of the payload. If you put two or more data packets in a UDP/IP message, you get better link utilization, but the delay (end-to-end and roundtrip) suffer. If your system can use header compression, things will go a lot better. If you're interested in more details on bandwidth, see http://www.telchemy.com/references/bw_efficiency.html If you'd like to hear what low-bitrate codecs sound like, check out http://www.nine-9s.com/prod_speech_codec_comparisons.htm There are audio files that have been compressed and decompressed for codecs ranging from 1.2K to G.799A (8K) On 28 Oct 2004 09:45:56 -0700, dog4dogg@yahoo.com (kansasman) wrote: > rshlain@hotmail.com wrote in message > news:: >> It is possible to have VOIP and be able to connect to machines that >> have modems and use telnet? >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: If I understand it correctly, VOIP -- >> or at least Vonage -- can do everything a telephone can do. PAT] > In my experience, in order to have VoIP, you need to have DSL or > Digital Cable with Broadband. I hope this is helpful! > I was curious about this too -- and I found this site to be helpful in > answering some of my basic questions: > http://www.inclusive.com/trng/voip/facets.htm Or you could try www.testyourvoip.com and see if it works. > Good Luck! > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Maybe also the man has not only broad > band and a fast local area network like myself (and most of you) but > he also has (built in by default) 'Dial Up Networking' and he now and > then uses that instead of the broadband, (as I do when I wish to call > some small BBS type thing.) He wonders if *his modem* will work with > his Vonage phone on his broadband line. PAT] On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 14:16:41 GMT, Rick Merrill wrote: > rshlain@hotmail.com wrote: >> It is possible to have VOIP and be able to connect to machines that >> have modems and use telnet? > Yes, of course: it is a telephone. But WHY would you want to because > VoIP requires that you already have broadband or equivalent. Broadband isn't available everywhere yet. Some people are stuck with analog modems. ------------------------------ From: Hank Karl Subject: Re: Cybersquatter Update Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 13:53:25 -0400 Organization: NETPLEX Internet Services - http://www.ntplx.net/ On 27 Oct 2004 22:45:48 GMT, Ed Clarke wrote: > If you go look at the Network Solutions homepage, you'll find that > they give you a great break on renewing a domain -- $19.99 per year -- > if you renew for five years. The fact that this is more than twice > what others charge (http://www.godaddy.com for example at $8.95) ... > And they are also associated with VeriSign who will give you a great > deal on an SSL certificate at $895 per year ( or you could go to > GeoTrust and get the equivalent for $229 with renewals at $179 ). Godaddy also has an "auto-renew" feature so that you don't inadvertently lose your domain name. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So, if this 'social contract' implies > that non-working/unoccupied URLs are to go to at best a very generic > 'not in service' screen, then a web site on which a fee had not been > paid -- therefore being unoccupied or non-working should go there as > well. PAT] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So the Public Interest Registry *could* do the same thing if they felt like it; either 'renew' or put a short hold on a URL pending a final notice to the owner. Of course that might put a crimp in things for the penis enlargement company and the pornographers. I am still waiting to hear from Mr. Mikka K. who came to us through the garynuman mail server in Calgary, Alberta who has insisted that PIR *had* to do it the way they did, shoving internet history out of the way, and rolling out the red carpet for Bealo, SA. Imagine, the same day PIR bumped me out, they moved Bealo SA right in. I sure hope I did not cause them any inconvenience. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Owner of Stolen 'sex.com' Can Sue VeriSign - Court Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 10:15:42 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Gary Breuckman wrote: > As you said, that difference is 'traditional' and not really enforced > these days -- anyone can apply for the com/org/net TLDs without regard > for what they want to do with them. 'edu' is the only one that's > really restriced anymore. Same with us/biz/info and most of the > country code TLDs. And even EDU isn't enforced completely. It's supposed to be for four-year institutions ONLY, yet you have Cuyahoga Community College in my hometown -- tri-c.edu -- and Victor Valley College and Barstow College in this area -- vvc.edu and barstow.edu. All three are two-year community colleges. JustThe.net Internet & New Media Services, http://JustThe.net/ Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / 888.480.4NET (4638) / sjsobol@JustThe.net PGP Key available from your friendly local key server (0xE3AE35ED) Apple Valley, California Nothing scares me anymore. I have three kids. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Do you know who the .EDU registrar is? I suppose I could try 'whois .edu' and try to see how it resolves. Reason I ask is maybe someone will decide to start a sex education course on the internet and ICANN, out of their deep respect for that kind of website (after all, there are so many sex sites on the net now) will suggest putting them in .edu . PAT] ------------------------------ From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: New Telecom Web Site on the Way Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 21:00:00 EDT I am very pleased to announce that a totally new, totally remodeled telecom-digest.org web site is going to be opening in the next few days. All the links have been checked and verified, a better, and I hope easier format is being installed, but with all the back issues over the past twenty-three years still intact, and the other special reports, etc. We (my associates and myself) had hoped for a November 1 opening; it may be a little later or it may be a little earlier. Look for it to possibly be in place on Monday. No spy cookies, no splash screens you cannot exit from, none of the javascript stuff I had on the old pages. Watch for its arrival maybe Monday or Tuesday and let me know what you think. To our USA readers: Don't forget to set your clocks *back one hour* sometime Saturday night or Sunday if you live in most parts of the USA. 'Fall behind' .... Patrick Townson, Editor/Publisher TELECOM Digest ------------------------------ 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #520 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sun Oct 31 19:54:50 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA10snR29622; Sun, 31 Oct 2004 19:54:50 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 19:54:50 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411010054.iA10snR29622@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 #521 TELECOM Digest Sun, 31 Oct 2004 19:55:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 521 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Smart Web to Usher in Host of New Services-Gartner (Lisa Minter) China Closes 1,600 Internet Cafes in Crackdown (Lisa Minter) Companies Scramble to Deal With Spyware (Lisa Minter) Users Often Invite Spyware Trouble (Monty Solomon) Sneaky Spyware Becomes Internet Scourge (Monty Solomon) VPN Over Vonage Router (Mike Kraley) Delphi, XM Unveil Handheld Satellite (Marcus Didius Falco) Re: Cybersquatter Update (Gary Breukman) Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (DevilsPGD) Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (Steve Sobol) Re: Yet Another Telco Tax Proposed (Tony P.) Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future (John Levine) Last Laugh! A Halloween Weekend Car Trip (Patrick Townson) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter Subject: Smart Web to Usher in Host of New Services-Gartner Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 17:22:31 -0600 Smart Web to Usher in Host of New Services-Gartner http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=3Dstory&u=3D/nm/20041031/wr_nm/tech _trends_gartner_dc AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A smarter Internet and a host of cheap, Web-enabled mobile devices will allow users to access a whole range of services on the move, research group Gartner Dataquest said on Sunday, ahead of its ITXpo symposium. At the annual gathering in Cannes, France next week, Gartner analyst Alexander Linden will identify several of the long-term technology trends and innovations whose seeds were sown in the days of the tech bubble. A smarter Internet will allow consumers to collaborate to pay for services costing just a few cents, making a whole range of new offerings viable. "We can start selling products we could not sell before. iTunes (Apple's online music store where songs cost $0.99 apiece) is just the start," Linden said. Navigation systems which now offer only a rudimentary selection of road services such as fuel stations and tourist sights are just a beginning. Mobile users will one day be shown the way to the nearest doctor on weekend duty. Parents will be able to contact the nearest child minder to take over at a moment's notice. Consumers will be able to select and rate a wide range of services such as restaurants or shops. "It will influence competition. Companies will have to compete more on quality and location than brand," Linden said. Some Web sites already offer a glimpse of the future by having customers describe and rate restaurants they visit, in a real life version of what Google and Amazon.com do by tracking clicks and customer purchases. Consumers and businesses should expect this kind of Internet intelligence to come to the real world. There is also a new opportunity for investors. On the new Internet, they will not need expensive investment software to find and compare data from company financial reports. The building blocks for a more intelligent Internet are standardized data from a plethora of sources which can be recognized and connected. For now, we are in a technology cycle in which all kinds of information network are built and tied together for ubiquitous access to the Internet, Gartner says. It expects the distinction between fixed and mobile Internet to slowly disappear. The first signs of this can be seen in some Web sites which recognize how a consumer accesses a site, either by PC or cellphone. They adjust the size and content of the page accordingly and automatically. The next cycle of connectivity, where all systems understand each other, has barely started, while the following cycle -- in which this intelligence is embedded in every device -- is still a dream. "We always say we live in the information age. But in fact we live in an information wanna-be situation," Linden said. "It will take a century or more to get to ubiquitous intelligence." *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: China Closes 1,600 Internet Cafes in Crackdown Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 17:23:20 -0600 http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=3Dstory&u=3D/nm/20041031/wr_nm/chin= a_internet_crackdown_dc=20 BEIJING (Reuters) - China shut 1,600 Internet cafes between February and August and imposed $12.1 million worth of fines for allowing children to play violent or adult-only games and other violations, state media said. Of 1.8 million Internet bars inspected, 18,000 were ordered "to stop operation for rectification," Xinhua news agency quoted Zhang Xinjian, deputy director of the Culture Ministry's market department, as saying. "Porn, gambling, violence and similar problems have adversely affected the healthy development of the Internet in China," Zhang was quoted as saying. The crackdown comes amid a nationwide push to limit violence and pornography on the Internet that has seen the government shut down hundreds of Web sites it deemed unsavory. China has some 87 million Internet users, over 50 percent of whom are under 24 and approximately 18 percent are minors. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Companies Scramble to Deal With Spyware Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 17:23:02 -0600 By ALLISON LINN, AP Business Writer SEATTLE - The people who call Dell Inc.'s customer service line often have no idea why their computers are running so slow. The ones who call America Online Inc. can't necessarily explain why Internet connections keep dropping. And those who file error reports with Microsoft Corp. don't always know why their computers inexplicably crash. Sometimes, the company that gets the complaint is rightly to blame. But with alarming frequency, officials at these and other technology companies say they are tracing customer problems back to one culprit: spyware. In the past year, spyware problems have become especially pernicious, leaving companies scrambling to respond to customers who don't necessarily realize they have spyware. Companies are concerned about the cost of dealing with such calls. But perhaps more worrisome, they fear customers will wrongly blame them. Spyware generally refers to programs that land on computers without their owners' knowledge. They can deliver hordes of pop-up ads, redirect people to unfamiliar search engines or, in rare cases, steal personal information. Users most often get them by downloading free games or file-sharing software -- and consenting to language buried deep within a licensing agreement. And because they consented, "in some ways it ties our hands because we can't legally interfere," said Mike George, head of Dell's U.S. consumer business. Russ Cooper, senior scientist with TruSecure Corp., said a longstanding fear of legal repercussions is likely one reason companies have only recently begun to address the problem. But now that spyware has become epidemic, he believes Microsoft and other companies ought to do much more to educate the public -- such as by running public-awareness commercials akin to the old Smokey Bear slogan "Only you can prevent forest fires." The industry's incentive is simple survival, Cooper said. "It's almost ridiculous," said Bill Bane, 33, a derivatives trader in New York. "You buy a computer. It's new, bright and shiny and looks great and three months down the road, it's infested with spyware." Though he recognizes he's partly to blame for his surfing habits, he believes his service provider and manufacturer share responsibility. "Either the Internet providers figure out a way to clean up the Net or people are just going to pull the plug at home," Bane said. "It ain't worth it." Microsoft officials blame unwanted software for up to one-third of application crashes on Windows XP computers. AOL estimates that just three such programs together cause some 300,000 Internet disconnections per day. Forrester Research analyst Jonathan Penn said a spyware-related support call can cost $15 to $45, and companies may lose business. "Security is a component of loyalty," Penn said. "People, they want all these various services, but they expect security to come with it." Some companies have begun offering spyware-detection tools -- Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news)'s is free, while AOL and EarthLink Inc. limit key features to paid subscribers. Anti-spyware software that Hewlett-Packard Co. began shipping with new computers in June comes with a 30-day free trial; it's about $20 a year after that. Dell will have similar software by the holidays. Most tools leave it to users to decide what to do with any programs found. EarthLink's tool -- and AOL's by default -- will quarantine spyware without removing it completely. EarthLink spokesman Jerry Grasso said some users may decide that having spyware is worth the nuisance in exchange for the free program that came with it. Microsoft's Service Pack 2 security upgrade for Windows XP warns users of spyware and other unexpected programs before they are loaded. And the company plans spyware-specific tools to give users more control, said Paul Bryan, a director in the security, business and technology unit. He said it was too soon to say when they would be available. Advertisers are responding, too. After using the criticized delivery methods for nearly two years, Verizon Communications Inc. suspended those campaigns in July. "We realize it was being raised as a consumer issue," spokesman John Bonomo said. "We wanted to make sure we were keeping with the trust they place in us." *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Associated Press and Christian Science Monitor.. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 16:28:51 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Users Often Invite Spyware Trouble By ANICK JESDANUN AP Internet Writer NEW YORK (AP) -- Tagalong software, generally known as spyware, is an especially tricky security threat because user carelessness is nearly always to blame. All Dennis McGrath wanted was to belong. Just about everyone else in his chat room began displaying new kinds of smiley faces with their messages. So he downloaded a free program to get some, too. Little did McGrath know he would also get a pesky toolbar that keeps reappearing no matter how he tries to disable it. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44636966 ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 16:28:51 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Sneaky Spyware Becomes Internet Scourge By ANICK JESDANUN AP Internet Writer NEW YORK (AP) -- Spyware, an amorphous class of software that mostly gets onto computers without their users' knowledge, has become epidemic in the past year as people spend more time online and spyware developers get more aggressive. The resource-hungry programs often render machines unusable. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44636941 ------------------------------ From: Mike Kraley Subject: VPN Over Vonage Router Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 21:50:13 -0400 I have a Linksys RT31P2 router for my Vonage VOIP connection. Everything else works fine, but I cannot establish a vanilla Microsoft VPN connection thru it. Topology is my computer to Linksys to cable modem thru internet to VPN server. I could easily establish a connection with my previous router (DLINK DI-624) where the Linksys is now. Now, however, I get hung at the "verifying username and password" prompt. Googling this says the likely culprit is that PPTP passthru is not enabled in the router; however, this router gives such an option in its menus and it is enabled. Any suggestions would be appreciated. ....Mike ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 00:46:41 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Delphi, XM Unveil Handheld Satellite A nice photo on the original main page. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A610-2004Oct26.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A610-2004Oct26?language=3Dprinter http://www.washingtonpost.com/ Delphi, XM Unveil Handheld Satellite Radio Receiver By Annys Shin Washington Post Staff Writer XM Satellite Radio and radio manufacturer Delphi yesterday introduced the Delphi XM MyFi, a portable, handheld satellite radio receiver the companies hope will lure more consumers to a medium currently limited to car and home units. Along with giving its subscribers the convenience of a traditional transistor radio, the MyFi also offers a five-hour recording capacity to let listeners download favorite programs and songs. The MyFi is the latest entry in the highly competitive battle over digital music, a fight that pits XM against its immediate competitor, Sirius Satellite Radio, but more broadly against on-line music sources like Napster, and the makers of small, highly portable MP3 and other devices. It was unveiled at a New York nightclub on the same day that Apple Computer used rock superstars U2 to promote the release of a higher capacity iPod, and less than a month after Sirius announced it had signed popular radio personality Howard Stern to a five-year contract. Since it launched its service three years ago, XM has reached its 2.5 million subscribers through factory-installed receivers in automobiles, detachable units for other cars, and Delphi boomboxes. Over the past several weeks, it also announced a deal to pipe music into Starbucks stores, and to offer programming online for paid subscribers. But XM's service, along with that of Sirius, has lacked the portability of devices such as the iPod and MP3 players. Now, with the MyFi, subscribers can receive XM's more than 130 channels of talk, news, sports, and commercial-free music, on a device about the same size as a handheld organizer. Unlike Delphi's plug-and-play satellite radio receivers, the MyFi doesn't require an antenna and can be used with headphones. The device also comes with a docking station for recharging and accessories to hook it up to car stereos and home audio equipment. MyFi will be available in stores and through on-line retailers in December -- too late for the post-Thanksgiving shopping rush, but still in time for the holiday gift-buying season. The suggested retail price of $349.99 makes it a high-end item, said analysts. And consumers still have to pay $9.99 per month for programming. But XM officials and analysts said the product is likely to appeal to those who prefer to have disc jockeys serve up music instead of having to burn their own CDs or download music to MP3 players. Such "user-intensive" devices require consumers "to work too hard to get the freshest entertainment product," said Francisco Ordonez, president of Delphi Product and Service Solutions. Ordonez and XM Satellite Radio chief executive Hugh Panero unveiled the MyFi at the Chelsea nightclub in Manhattan before an audience of about 50 reporters and Delphi and XM staff, as they nibbled on potato-goat-cheese-and-wasabe dumplings and shrimp on skewers. In his remarks, Panero called the MyFi "the next big step" in the evolution of XM Satellite Radio. Ordonez called the MyFi "a change not just in the satellite radio category, but in consumer electronics," and likened its debut to the introduction of the transistor radio and the portable CD player. At the end of his remarks, Panero quipped, "We've gone Hollywood," and on cue, several "lifestyle" models -- a young male in a red hooded sweatshirt, a young woman in a pink track suit and a man in a business suit, among others -- descended a set of stairs, listening to the new radios. XM officials would not disclose how much they spent to develop MyFi or how much they intend to spend on marketing it. They did, however, preview a new television spot featuring singer Elton John hawking the MyFi and his new song, "Answer in the Sky." The roll out of MyFi caps a busy month for XM, which earlier this month debuted the "Bob Edwards Show," and shock jocks Opie and Anthony. On Oct. 20, the company also announced it had signed an 11-year, $650 million broadcasting and marketing deal with Major League Baseball. Shares of XM closed yesterday at $32.54, down slightly from $32.74. Even before the MyFi debut, XM Satellite Radio was on target to reach its goal of 3.1 million subscribers by year's end, said Janco Partners analyst April Horace. "Will [the new device] continue to drive subscription growth? Yes," Horace said. "Has XM expanded the marketplace once again? Yes." In a research note released yesterday, Legg Mason's Sean Butson wrote, "Although we are disappointed that the device will not be available until after Thanksgiving, we do believe it will be a game-changer and provide XM with a differentiated weapon in its retail arsenal." Copyright 2004 The Washington Post Company *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Washington Post Company. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Gary Breuckman Subject: Re: Cybersquatter Update Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 18:13:47 -0600 Reply-To: gary@breuckman.com On 27 Oct 2004 22:45:48 GMT, Ed Clarke wrote: > Godaddy also has an "auto-renew" feature so that you don't > inadvertently lose your domain name. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So the Public Interest Registry *could* > do the same thing if they felt like it; either 'renew' or put a short > hold on a URL pending a final notice to the owner. The registrar that I use, dotregistrar.com, does this. They put expiring domains on a 30-day hold. If you want them back, it does cost more than just the renewal would, but you can get them back, at least for a while. They also will auto-renew domains, if you wish that, and they send renewal reminders by email starting about 30 days prior to expiration. -- Gary Breuckman [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That seems fair enough, and one does not mind a small extra charge for that courtesy service, but PIR (the Public Interest Registry, an ICANN thing) would probably tell you it is more profitable to let the porn sites have it and share with them whatever ransom can be extracted from the guy who lost the site. PAT] ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 12:43:57 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Rick Merrill wrote: > IF these images were accessed it would give criminals access to an > image of the customer's signature. Said criminal could then use a > laser printer with 640 dpi resolution to print checks that would be > indistinguishable from the photo check after a 240 dpi Scan!? I'm curious, is there a requirement that the bank which accepted the cheque store it for any period of time? Hey, it's the female man. -- Bart Simpson ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 20:26:11 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com AES/newspost wrote: > In article , Lisa Minter > wrote: >> Consumers are unlikely to get their cancelled checks back, although >> some banks had already stopped this practice. > Not sure what the practice is in other places, but at my Credit Union > you can view a scanned image of any of your cleared checks online > (only after logging in to your personal account, of course). At my bank, too (Bank of America). They only keep images online for (I think) two months, though. JustThe.net Internet & New Media Services, http://JustThe.net/ Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / 888.480.4NET (4638) / sjsobol@JustThe.net PGP Key available from your friendly local key server (0xE3AE35ED) Apple Valley, California Nothing scares me anymore. I have three kids. ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Yet Another Telco Tax proposed Organization: ATCC Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 23:02:52 -0400 In article , spamtrap100@ comcast.net says: > hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) wrote: >> 1) One is the ever increasing demand for government services. All >> of us are guilty of that even though we all blame someone else. > At the federal level and at most local levels, the "ever increasing > demand" is primarily social transfer taxes, not roads or other classic > government responsibilities. > The single largest component of my local tax bill is the county > hospital. Don't tell me we do not have government mandated universal > healthcare in the US. I pay thousands every year to cover the > uninsured. Close to 75% of local taxes here go to the schools. ------------------------------ Date: 31 Oct 2004 03:12:08 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > What do land lines provide? Security. Predictable service. Almost > unlimited bandwidth. ... Virtually every building in these towns > are being rewired with direct fiber optic cables -- from CO to every > building. That means VoIP, massive data transfers, security, the > reliability not provided, yet, by cell phones, and a host of other > yet to be discovered features. Fiber has bandwidth, but unlike copper, it can't power the phones. An important parts of the reliability of POTS is that the phones are powered from the phone line, so you don't depend on the power company or batteries. John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 330 5711 johnl@iecc.com, Mayor, http://johnlevine.com, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail ------------------------------ From: Patrick Townson Subject: Last Laugh! Our Weekend Auto Trip Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 17:14:16 -0600 Over this Halloweeen holiday weekend, I took a ride with some friends through the countryside, and made a little movie for you to see. I thought you might like to see it, and just in time for Halloween and last night's blood red full moon eclipse. Be sure and have your speakers turned up when you play the movie, you don't want to miss any of it. Watch it and about halfway through, as the car emerges from the clump of trees, look and you will see something interesting, Be sure to have your sound turned up, since the people are speaking sort of quietly. Here is the link to the movie: Just click it and it should open up. It's about 4M so it's not huge, but might take a few seconds on a really slow dial up connection. When it starts, watch it and listen very closely. http://63.78.183.81/temp/j/Classic_Auto_1.mpeg Oh, and happy Halloween to all of you. I assume you *did* get your clocks set back an hour sometime last night or today. 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #521 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Nov 1 14:21:39 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA1JLc208983; Mon, 1 Nov 2004 14:21:39 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 14:21:39 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411011921.iA1JLc208983@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 #522 TELECOM Digest Mon, 1 Nov 2004 14:22:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 522 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Telecom Update (Canada) #455, November 1, 2004 (Angus TeleManagement) Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal (Lisa Hancock) Poland Builds Europe's Largest Optical Research (Marcus Didius Falco) Great-Grandma Bell: Is Once Great Telco About Dead (Marcus Didius Falco) Re: Channel 1? (Julian Thomas) SBC Continues Trying to Get me Back (TELECOM Digest Editor) Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (DevilsPGD) Re: VPN Over Vonage Router (Rick Merrill) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 10:22:07 -0500 From: Angus TeleManagement Subject: Telecom Update (Canada) #455, November 1, 2004 ************************************************************ TELECOM UPDATE ************************************************************ published weekly by Angus TeleManagement Group http://www.angustel.ca Number 455: November 1, 2004 Publication of Telecom Update is made possible by generous financial support from: ** ALLSTREAM: www.allstream.com ** AVAYA: www.avaya.ca/en/ ** BELL CANADA: www.bell.ca ** CISCO SYSTEMS CANADA: www.cisco.com/ca/ ** ERICSSON: www.ericsson.ca ** MITEL NETWORKS: www.mitel.com/ ** SPRINT CANADA: www.sprint.ca ** UTC CANADA: www.canada.utc.org/ ************************************************************ IN THIS ISSUE: ** Carriers Show Improved Results Telus Reverses Wireline Decline Rogers Wireless Profit Soars Microcell Revenues Up 20% Call-Net Cuts Its Losses Videotron Sales, Operating Profit Rise Aliant Blames Strike for Profit Slump ** Primus Launches Cellular Service ** Cellcos Face Class-Action Suit ** Nortel Misses Another Deadline ** Avaya Profits Rise ** Bell Third-Party VoIP Tariff Approved ** Bell-Quebecor Dispute Returned to CRTC ** Inukshuk Calls for Proposals in Yukon ** Bell-NorthernTel Fibre Swap Agreement Nixed ** Sprint Expands Local Phone Coverage ** Emergis Replaces CEO ** Bell, Aliant to Create SMB Innovation Centre ** Reinventing Telecom in 2005 ============================================================ CARRIERS SHOW IMPROVED RESULTS: The following results are for the quarter ended September 30: ** Telus Reverses Wireline Decline: Led by an 8% increase in data revenue, Telus wireline sales edged up by 1% compared to a year ago, reversing a two-year decline. Overall revenue increased 7.8%; net income rose 37%. Telus Mobility added a net 136,200 subscribers and reduced monthly churn to 1.34%. ** Rogers Wireless Profit Soars: Rogers Wireless reports a profit of $108 million, a 154% increase over the same period a year ago. Revenue rose 22.5% to $721 million, of which $36 million was data. Net subscriber additions were 97,500, down 15% from a year ago. ** Microcell Revenues Up 20%: Microcell revenues of $175 million were 20% higher than a year ago; net income was $2.9 million. Net subscriber additions of 75,773 rose 84%; per-subscriber revenue rose 11%. Churn increased to 2.8%, which the cellco attributed to competitor retaliation for City Fido. ** Call-Net Cuts Its Losses: Call-Net Enterprises neared breakeven with a quarterly loss of $1.6 million, compared to a $30 million loss a year ago. Consumer sales rose 8% and business sales rose 1%. A decline in carrier sales resulted in a marginal drop in total revenue, to $204 million. ** Videotron Sales, Operating Profit Rise: Videotron Telecom had sales of $21.5 million (up 18%) and an operating profit of $4.2 million (up from $2.4 million). Videotron, Quebecor's cable subsidiary, increased its sales 9.4% from a year ago to $221 million, and its operating profit by 37% to $90 million. ** Aliant Blames Strike for Profit Slump: Aliant was the exception to the positive trend. Sales dropped 3.3% compared with a year ago (to $497 million); net income declined 27% (to $37 million). Aliant blamed the five- month strike of its unionized employees, which it says cost the company $55 million. PRIMUS LAUNCHES CELLULAR SERVICE: Primus Canada has begun offering cellular telephone service using the Microcell network. Initial plans range from $20/month for 250 anytime local minutes to $40 a month for 550 anytime local minutes. CELLCOS FACE CLASS-ACTION SUIT: Last week's quarterly reports from Rogers and Microcell revealed that they and the other wireless carriers face a possible class action suit accusing them of "deceit, misrepresentation, and false advertising" when they levied so-called system access fees on customers. The action, filed by a Saskatchewan lawyer in August, has not yet been certified as a class action. NORTEL MISSES ANOTHER DEADLINE: Nortel Networks, which had promised to file its financial results in October, now says that its statements for 2003 and the first half of 2004, and revised statements for 2001 and 2002, will be completed in mid-November. AVAYA PROFITS RISE: Avaya's net income for the third quarter was US$100 million, up 82% from a year ago and 64% from the previous quarter. Revenues increased 10.8% to $1.08 billion. BELL THIRD-PARTY VoIP TARIFF APPROVED: The CRTC has given interim approval to Bell's Internet Voice Access Service, which provides call origination and termination functionality to and from the public switched telephone network to Voice over Internet Service Providers (VISPs). The CRTC ordered Bell to offer the service only to telecom carriers. www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/ENG/Orders/2004/o2004-353.htm BELL-QUEBECOR DISPUTE RETURNED TO CRTC: The Federal Court of Appeal has referred a fees dispute between Quebecor-owned Videotron and Bell Globemedia-owned RDS (see Telecom Update #361) back to the CRTC, saying the Commission's original order in RDS's favor may have been based on "misleading, if not false, evidence" filed by RDS. http://decisions.fca-caf.gc.ca/fca/2004/2004fca299.shtml INUKSHUK CALLS FOR PROPOSALS IN YUKON: Inukshuk Internet says it will provide up to $63,000 to fund content and connectivity projects in the Yukon, and has invited proposals. This is the latest in a series of regional calls for project proposals. www.inukshuk.ca/anglais/fonds.html BELL-NORTHERNTEL FIBRE SWAP AGREEMENT NIXED: The CRTC has refused to ratify a five-year old fibre swapping agreement between Bell Canada and NorthernTel, which "through an administrative oversight" was not filed with the Commission until early 2004. The CRTC says the carriers must charge each other tariffed rates for the fibre, and orders NorthernTel to file an interexchange dark fibre tariff in order to do so. www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/ENG/Orders/2004/o2004-356.htm SPRINT EXPANDS LOCAL PHONE COVERAGE: Sprint Canada has begun offering local residential and business phone service in three more Ontario cities: Barrie, Markham, and Richmond Hill. EMERGIS REPLACES CEO: Former BCE subsidiary BCE Emergis has named Francois Cote as its new CEO, replacing Tony Gaffney, who will "pursue other interests." Gaffney headed Emergis for only 17 months: he was previously President of Bell Nexxia. BELL, ALIANT TO CREATE SMB INNOVATION CENTRE: Bell Canada and Aliant plan to open a "Small-Medium Business Innovation Centre" in Saint John, N.B., in the first quarter of 2005. The Centre will develop IP applications for the SMB market. REINVENTING TELECOM IN 2005: The coming issue of Telemanagement, available to subscribers next week, will feature two in-depth looks at the trends that will shape business telecommunications in the coming year: ** "Reinventing Telecom Management, Again," by Ian Angus and Henry Dortmans, examines the rapidly evolving role of networking in business, and offers practical guidelines for managers who must plan and implement change. ** "IP Telephony Today: Changing Everything (Almost)," by Business Communications Review publisher Fred Knight, predicts that IP telephony will reach the tipping point in 2005, and explains how that will affect the industry and business customers. Don't miss these important Telemanagement feature reports! Call 1-800-263-4415 ext 500 or subscribe online now (www.angustel.ca/teleman/tm-sub-online.html). ============================================================ HOW TO SUBMIT ITEMS FOR TELECOM UPDATE E-MAIL: editors@angustel.ca FAX: 905-686-2655 MAIL: TELECOM UPDATE Angus TeleManagement Group 8 Old Kingston Road Ajax, Ontario Canada L1T 2Z7 =========================================================== HOW TO SUBSCRIBE (OR UNSUBSCRIBE) TELECOM UPDATE is provided in electronic form only. There are two formats available: 1. The fully-formatted edition is posted on the World Wide Web on the first business day of the week at www.angustel.ca 2. The e-mail edition is distributed free of charge. To subscribe, send an e-mail message to: join-telecom_update@nova.sparklist.com To stop receiving the e-mail edition, send an e-mail message to: leave-telecom_update@nova.sparklist.com Sending e-mail to these addresses will automatically add or remove the sender's e-mail address from the list. Leave subject line and message area blank. We do not give Telecom Update subscribers' e-mail addresses to any third party. For more information, see www.angustel.ca/update/privacy.html. =========================================================== COPYRIGHT AND CONDITIONS OF USE: All contents copyright 2004 Angus TeleManagement Group Inc. All rights reserved. For further information, including permission to reprint or reproduce, please e-mail rosita@angustel.ca or phone 905-686-5050 ext 500. The information and data included has been obtained from sources which we believe to be reliable, but Angus TeleManagement makes no warranties or representations whatsoever regarding accuracy, completeness, or adequacy. Opinions expressed are based on interpretation of available information, and are subject to change. If expert advice on the subject matter is required, the services of a competent professional should be obtained. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal Date: 31 Oct 2004 19:43:19 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com In this election season, I have been BOMBARDED with pre-recorded phone calls pitching various candidates, flooding my answering machine. I know election phone calls are legal. However, I think pre-recorded phone calls, of any kind, should be illegal. The constant ringing of the phone this year was terribly annoying. If it had been last year, it would've been devastating. Last year at this time I was caring for a seriously ill person and was ill myself. I was in frequent touch with doctors, phamarcies, nurses, and families. I had to keep the phone open and answer all calls. To a healthy person, the constant ringing was terribly annoying. I would've gone out of my mind last year. When you're in bad pain, a ringing telephone is not a pleasant thing. BTW, I also received several live calls urging a deceased member of family to go vote, even though that person was removed from the election rolls quite some time ago. [In hindsight I wish I requested they come and assist that person to the polls.] When I go to the polls Tuesday, I will talk to the politicians (the people who stand outside and give out leaflets). I will ask them for their home phone numbers, but I have a funny feeling they, for some strange reason, won't give them to me. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 21:21:37 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Poland Builds Europe's Largest Optical Research Network For more information on this item please visit the CANARIE CA*net 4 Optical Internet program web site at http://www.canarie.ca/canet4/library/list.html [Excerpts from Lightwave article - BSA] http://lw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=ARTCL&ARTICLE_I D=214117&VERSION_NUM=3 Once restricted by the bandwidth limitations of 622-Mbit/sec ATM leased-line connections, Polish researchers today rely on the largest scientific network ever deployed by a European country: PIONIER, the Polish Optical Internet. When the final five of 21 academic MANs are interconnected-scheduled to occur by the end of this year-PIONIER will have reached 5,500 km of optical fiber, delivering 10 Gbits/sec of networking power. PIONIER supports transmission speeds up to 10 Gbits/sec across 2,600 km of optical fiber, making it the largest scientific network ever deployed by a European country. "PIONIER is not just a network; it's a complete development program," contends Artur Binczewski, manager of the network department of Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC), which serves as PIONIER research and development center for new-generation networks, grids, and portals. "The long-term purpose was to facilitate the ongoing development of the information society in Poland, and PIONIER has provided us with the robust, flexible network architecture necessary to enable this vision." As part of the GANT vision of a multigigabit pan-European network, PIONIER is being linked with neighboring national research and education networks (NRENs). Connections into the Czech Republic, Germany, and Slovakia will bring Poland into an e-region, and through the Porta Optica project the network will be expanded to Poland's eastern neighbors. Even in this nascent stage in the network's overall development, Polish science has benefited from PIONIER's capabilities. In interferometry, astronomers link data gathered by multiple radio telescopes to create space images of tremendous expanse and resolution. A very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) radio telescope can generate more than 1 Gbit/sec of traffic during a single session. Before deployment of the PIONIER network, VLBI radio-telescope data had to be stored on magnetic tape and shipped to central correlators abroad to give Polish astronomers usable images. Using PIONIER's 10-Gbit/sec capacity, VLBI radio-telescope data can be carried across the network, cutting cycle times and costs for agencies. While it was being determined what equipment would light PIONIER, PSNC was acquiring rights of way along public roads, railway tracks, and power distribution lines and installing optical fiber across Poland. "We knew national deployment would be the big step," explains Maciej Stroinski, technical director at PSNC, "but what we wanted to achieve, we've achieved." Bill St. Arnaud Senior Director Network Projects CANARIE bill.st.arnaud@canarie.ca +1 613 944-5603 John F. McMullen http://www.westnet.com/~observer ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 21:18:26 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Great-Grandma Bell: Is the Once Great Telco on Last Legs? Graph of AT&T's stock price, 1985 -2004, in the original http://economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=3D3337000 http://economist.com/printedition/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3D3337000 Is the once great telecoms company on its last legs? CHURCHES have altars, royalty has thrones, and AT&T has its network. For over 125 years, this was the source of the telecoms company's power and its most prized asset. Yet as telecoms capacity has become a commodity, the value of owning a network has diminished dramatically. It has forced AT&T to search for new areas of growth, but its prospects are not promising. Last week, the company's latest earnings figures included an $11.4 billion write-down of its assets, forced by a fall in prices due to competition and technologies such as voice over internet protocol (VOIP). The troubles which AT&T faces are severe. The company earns roughly half its revenue by charging for long-distance calls, but these earnings are tumbling at around 20% a year and will never recover. Long-distance calls using VOIP are essentially free. The company is therefore between a rock and a hard place: it must migrate to the more efficient technology without cannibalising its existing revenue, at a time when there is a plethora of competitors. This dilemma has been predicted by telecoms pundits for a decade, but AT&T never developed a suitable strategy to cope. Its plan now is to slow its decline in income and cut debt by continuing to slash its workforce. It hopes that a better balance sheet will help as it hunts for new business, focusing on large corporate accounts, which make up about 60% of its revenue. It is also betting on managing business customers' own networks to boost revenues. The company drew back from marketing to residential customers this summer after a regulatory decision increased the prices it would have to pay to access the lines of America's local telecoms operators the Baby Bells that were spun out of AT&T 20 years ago. AT&T's desire is to sell VOIP over broadband, and it has struck a number of marketing deals with cable companies, which own a line into people's homes. It is a sad outcome for a company which, in the 1990s, acquired cable companies for this very purpose, but was forced to dispose of them a few years later when the cost of upgrading the lines and its heavy debt got in the way. AT&T's foundering fortunes come amid difficulties in the telecoms industry as a whole. America's second- and third-largest long-distance companies, MCI and Sprint, are also suffering from the glut of telecoms capacity and the fast erosion of revenue from selling voice-minutes. Newer rivals, like Level 3 and Global Crossing, are ailing too. Analysts predict a consolidation of today's ten-or-so long-haul networks to around four. The industry needs to restructure, says Tim Horan, an analyst at CIBC, an investment bank. AT&T has a future; we just don't know in what form. Can AT&T weather the storm? Touting the quality of its network may attract large companies which need time and help in switching their existing computing applications on to an internet platform. Moreover, the company plans to enter the attractive wireless market for business customers in six months as a virtual operator by buying capacity on Sprint's mobile network. This follows the sale of AT&T Wireless to Cingular, which was approved (with conditions) by regulators this week. AT&T has not had much success in adapting to new technologies and to competition since it was broken up 20 years ago. All the old-model telcos are on their way out, says David Isenberg, a telecoms expert who accurately predicted the fall in value of AT&T's network in the 1990s when he worked for the company's famed Bell Labs (though his warnings went unheeded and he resigned). AT&T , he adds, will show them the way. Copyright 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, the Economist Group. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Julian Thomas Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 22:00:25 -0500 Subject: Re: Channel 1? > About 10 or 15 years ago my grandmother's cable in Arlington, Texas had > Channels 1, 0, and 00. Was that cable or a roulette wheel? Julian Thomas: http://jt-mj.net In the beautiful Finger Lakes Wine Country of New York State! -- -- There are very few personal problems that cannot be solved by a suitable application of high explosives. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 13:41:10 EST From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: SBC Continues Trying to Get me Back About a year ago, when I ditched SBC totally to go with Cable One for my high speed internet service, and Prairie Stream Communications for my reasonably priced, accurate and honest telephone service, the folks at Southwestern Bell (SBC) started trying to get me back to them. They reduced the prices just a wee bit, put together a new package and offered it along with freebies including a VISA gift card and other things. That correspondence from them has gone on more or less weekly since I dropped them. Each week, the offer gets slightly better. Now, as of October 30 (their latest mailing) the price for a full package is *$12.95* per month for five months then an additional seven months at $19.95. In addition to the usual assortment of goodies, they now offered a free 30 minute prepaid phone card from some telco in Mexico (TelMex I think) "if you would just call and give us ten minutes of your time listening to us on the phone. We are certain you will agree we are the best phone company anywhere, and we do want you back as a customer. After you hear us out, we know you will want to return back where you belong. In any event you will get a free 30 minute prepaid phone card." So I thought today I would listen to what they had to say, with my timer keeping track of the number of minutes. In the letter they sent I was told to dial 1-866-331-8585 (or in Espanol 1-800-418-9612). I called, no voice mail jail, no holding queue. A man answers very politely and asks for my name, address and phone number which I give him. He said 'just a minute while I pull up your records'. He then leaves the line *for slightly over 8 minutes* leaving me on hold. When he eventually came back on the line at about 9 minutes, 30 seconds, hw said he was sorry but the computers were down, so he could not discuss it right now. I told him that was fine, I had given him the ten minutes they had requested couldI now please get my thirty minute prepaid calling card? He assured me I would get the calling card 'in a few days in the mail'. We will see ... I surely hope he does not try to slam my phone line. PAT ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 22:01:14 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Steve Sobol wrote: >> Not sure what the practice is in other places, but at my Credit Union >> you can view a scanned image of any of your cleared checks online >> (only after logging in to your personal account, of course). > At my bank, too (Bank of America). They only keep images online for (I > think) two months, though. My bank has offered this for a few months now, but they charge per view. On the other hand, they still return the physical cheques. Personally, I wish they'd go the other way around, even if it's only available for a couple months (I can keep my own archives -- I archive everything.) ------------------------------ From: Rick Merrill Subject: Re: VPN Over Vonage Router Organization: Comcast Online Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 14:35:26 GMT Mike Kraley wrote: > I have a Linksys RT31P2 router for my Vonage VOIP > connection. Everything else works fine, but I cannot establish a > vanilla Microsoft VPN connection thru it. Topology is my computer to > Linksys to cable modem thru internet to VPN server. I could easily > establish a connection with my previous router (DLINK DI-624) where > the Linksys is now. > Now, however, I get hung at the "verifying username and password" > prompt. Googling this says the likely culprit is that PPTP passthru > is not enabled in the router; however, this router gives such an > option in its menus and it is enabled. > Any suggestions would be appreciated. > ....Mike Do you mean that the RT31P2 is your TA (telephone adapter)? Why did you change from the Dlink? Have you power cycled all components? ------------------------------ 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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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 #522 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Nov 1 15:40:50 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA1KeoV09966; Mon, 1 Nov 2004 15:40:50 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 15:40:50 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411012040.iA1KeoV09966@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 #523 TELECOM Digest Mon, 1 Nov 2004 15:39:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 523 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson When Phones Go Bad (Marcus Didius Falco) How to Make The Right Call On Cell Plans (Marcus Didius Falco) Printer Forensics | Band Aid | How to Beat (Marcus Didius Falco) Semiconductors | The End of Moore's Law? (Marcus Didius Falco) Another Black Eye For VoIP2 (Lisa Minter) Asterisk Recommended Hardware? (Joel) Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (Joseph) Re: Last Laugh! Our Weekend Auto Trip (Tim@Backhome.org) Re: Last Laugh! Our Weekend Auto Trip (Kenneth P. Stox) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 22:44:31 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: When Phones Go Bad http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64538-2004Oct26.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64538-2004Oct26?language=3Dprinter Fancier Gadgets Mean More Acute Problems By Yuki Noguchi Washington Post Staff Writer Robert Burger recently paid $460 for a new Motorola cell phone with a wireless earpiece. It didn't work. "I can't get it to recognize the earpiece," said Burger, an administrator in a Washington law firm who says he spends thousands of minutes on his cell phone every month. "And the battery isn't holding a good charge." This year, 98.9 million cell phones will be distributed to customers in North America, according to research firm Instat/MDR. About 20 to 25 percent of them will run into problems within the first year, costing money and time for consumers like Burger, estimates Neil Strother, an Instat analyst. In a world of balky gadgets, cell phones occupy an uncertain middle ground between the costly, indispensable items we fix when they break (computers if they're recent models) and those we throw away to buy replacements (VHS players, answering machines). Many of today's cell phones come loaded with cameras, e-mail, schedulers, Web browsers, Bluetooth wireless capability, speakerphones, digital music players and video players. And all of those features mean there's more to go wrong. The average life cycle of a phone is down, to 19.4 months this year from 25 months three years ago, thanks not only to phones that fail but also to customers who change providers or upgrade to the latest models, according to the Yankee Group, a research firm in Boston. This year, replacement-phone sales are expected to reach 103 million -- costing consumers $4.8 billion -- or nearly double the 56.4 million sold three years ago, according to the research firm. Replacing a broken or lost cell phone can be a pricey proposition because most carriers won't provide their advertised discount s of $100 or more unless customers commit to extending their contracts for a year or two. Customers who are early into a contract may not qualify for a discount at all. Dionne Hamilton, a legal secretary in Silver Spring, is fed up with her LG 3100 phone, which she said is one of four in her family that drops calls or loses service altogether. She brought it in for a software upgrade three months ago, but it's acting up again, she said. "It's not under warranty," which means she would have to pay between $100 and $200 to replace it with a similar new phone. "But I don't want to." For most cell phone users, replacing a phone that's gone bad comes with an added cost in time and aggravation: pecking away at the keys of the new phone to reconstruct a mobile address book of often-used names and numbers. Verizon Wireless recently started offering a service to back up cellular address books for just such an emergency -- at a cost of $1.99 a month. Some advanced "smart phones," which sell for $400 to $600, can download schedules and address books directly from a computer. Warranties on new phones typically last for a year but don't cover loss or physical damage. Carriers often offer insurance policies, at a cost of about $4 a month plus a deductible, but only about 10 percent of cell phone users buy such plans, according to J.D. Power and Associates. The cost of fixing phones isn't just a nuisance for consumers; it's also a hassle for carriers, which typically spend hundreds of hours testing phones for durability in labs and field tests before releasing them to the public. "As products got more complicated and expensive, we find it harder to educate the technicians and to get them the right tools to repair those devices," said Michael Cost, executive director of supply-chain management for Cingular, which became the nation's largest cellular carrier when it completed its merger with AT&T Wireless last week. In 2002, the average store carried eight to 10 models of phones. Now, with all the added features, a store carries between 25 and 30 models, Cost said. Late last year, Cingular pulled technicians out of its 1,700 stores around the country and switched to an "exchange-by-mail" program. The company mails the customer a replacement phone that's been refurbished. The customer mails the broken one to Cingular, which repairs it and gives it to another customer needing an exchange. That approach saves time for customers and a "significant" amount of money for the company, which can fix the phones at a centralized site, Cost said. Rival Verizon Wireless, which has no mail-exchange program, is hiring more in-store technicians because customers like having technicians available, spokesman John Johnson said. Feature-packed smart phones, billed as pocket-size personal computers, are especially vulnerable to software bugs. "As mobile phones become PC-like, they also suffer some of the same problems," said Gene Wang, chairman and chief executive of Bitfone Corp., a company that has designed a way to send software fixes over the air to a cell phone. Despite all the new gadgetry, most cell phone breakage results from human error. "I've seen a few flip phones break in half," said Howard Rosenberg, manager of a Simply Wireless store on Capitol Hill, who keeps some replacement parts in stock but generally refers customers to their carriers or third-party repair centers that specialize in fixing gadgets. The antenna on an old model, the Motorola v60, broke frequently but was among the cheaper repairs, costing customers $35 if the device wasn't covered by a warranty, Rosenberg said. Often, liquid crystal screens go dead, or phones are dropped in water, like the customer's phone that shorted out after falling into the Potomac River. "Flushing it in the toilet -- I've heard that many times," Rosenberg said. And, he added, "they go after it." Not all complaints about broken phones turn out to be valid. Carriers say a quarter to a third of customers coming in with problems simply don't know how to use the phone or its features. Dwain Gourdine, store manager of the Verizon Wireless store on G Street in downtown Washington, said 30 to 40 customers come in on an average day complaining of a problem that's the result of incorrect usage. Some are trying to make calls in basements or other areas where there is no coverage; others can't figure out the phone. "They're not just phones anymore. They've got so many products and tools built into them, so [users] need lots of education." Many customers hate giving up their buggy or broken phones, even for a day. "You're more reliant on technology, and when it goes down, you're dead," said Burger, the law firm administrator, who finally got his phone fixed by spending a lunch hour waiting for a technician's help at a Verizon Wireless store. Asked what he would do without his phone, Burger widened his eyes and said: "Cry." =A9 2004 The Washington Post Company *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance Washington Post Company. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 22:45:15 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: How to Make The Right Call On Cell Plans http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64549-2004Oct26.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64549-2004Oct26?language=3Dprinter By Rob Pegoraro The Washington Post Wireless phone service is one of the great bargains of the modern age. When The Post began its annual comparison of cellular calling plans in 1998, $40 bought a lousy 100 minutes of talk time a month. Now that same bill will provide 600 peak minutes, plus unlimited night and weekend minutes -- about 24,000 in all, if you must know. No other telecom service has seen this sort of ballooning value -- not Internet access, not landline phones and certainly not cable or satellite TV. But most other telecom markets don't benefit from the intense competition of the wireless industry, with five strong, nationwide carriers (down from six since Cingular's purchase of AT&T Wireless) out to eat each other's lunch. But wireless phone service can't be purchased on price alone -- first, you need to decide which carrier to go with, since not all offer the same service. It helps to start with the right questions. How much time do you spend in rural areas? Any wireless carrier should be able to give you a sturdy signal in the mall or at a downtown intersection -- digital coverage has become almost ubiquitous in most metropolitan areas. But what about 30 miles out of town? What about a vacation house four hours' drive away? This is why the first thing you should look at on a carrier's Web site is its coverage map. While these generally can't tell you about the annoying dead zones that only last half a mile on the highway, they should indicate where a carrier just doesn't have service at all. How important is it that the phone work at all times? There's no common standard for wireless service, save the oldest technology of them all -- analog cellular. Analog is what gave cell phones a bad name: It kills a phone's battery life, sounds lousy and will run up massive roaming charges. But as the lowest common denominator, it may be available where digital service is not. Only Sprint PCS and Verizon still offer phones that are analog-capable -- although some of their latest models are digital-only. Do you ride Metro often? Verizon continues to be the only carrier to offer service in the underground portions of Metro. Sprint says its phones can roam on Verizon's signal, but other firms' customers are shut out -- their phones don't support analog and use a different digital technology than the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) standard that Sprint and Verizon share. Do you want to use your phone overseas? Since Cingular and T-Mobile rely on the Global System for Mobile (GSM) standard widely deployed in Europe and Asia, their customers can use their phones overseas. But if you're not planning to make calls back home, it will be far cheaper to buy prepaid wireless service overseas. Which carrier do your friends and family use? Many Cingular and Verizon plans include unlimited calling to other phones on the same network. Sprint sells that option for $5 a month, and Nextel's Direct Connect Walkie-Talkie service, thanks to the unlimited usage the carrier generally allows, offers a rough equivalent. In any of those cases, you can opt for a cheaper plan if the people you'll talk to most often will use the same network as you. Do you want the gadget-iest phone available? If you want a cell phone that doubles as a handheld organizer, that decision may dictate your choice of carrier. The two most aggressive marketers of smartphones are Sprint and T-Mobile, which have been first to sell such popular models as the Treo 600 (Sprint will be the first carrier to offner PalmOne's new Treo 650), the Sidekick and Sidekick II, and the new BlackBerry 7100t. Cingular is a little further behind, followed by Verizon. Nextel is dead last; it waited until a few weeks ago to offer its first camera phone, a good two years after the competition. Do you plan to use your phone to go online? Wireless Web access is no longer a joke, thanks to improvements in data technology and cellphone screens. The fastest connections around are the "1X RTT" services offered by Sprint and Verizon, which top out at almost three times the speed of a landline modem. Cingular and T-Mobile's "EDGE" and "GPRS" offerings are a tad slower. How much do you plan on calling? Offers of unlimited or might-as-well-be-unlimited night and weekend minutes mean you only need think about calls between 6 or 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekdays. If in doubt, get a cheaper plan; you can always switch to a plan with more minutes, although that may require extending your contract. Cingular and Sprint have come up with two smart twists on standard pricing. Cingular lets you carry over unused minutes into the next month, while Sprint's customers can be automatically bumped to a higher calling plan if they exceed their included minutes. In one area, however, the competitive juices of the wireless market aren't flowing properly: Under-$30 plans, once a commonplace offering by carriers, have all but died out. If you need a phone only on rare occasions, look into prepaid service. This is the equivalent of getting a calling card for your long-distance use: You buy an allotment of minutes and don't have to pay again until either the minutes are gone or a certain time has elapsed, often 90 days. The major carriers, save Sprint, sell prepaid service, as do such third-party firms as TracFone and Virgin Mobile (which itself resells Sprint service). What if you realize you made the wrong call? Whether you wait out your contract or eat the early-termination fee, you can still leave and take your number with you, thanks to the "wireless number portability" policy enacted by the Federal Communications Commission last year. That's one of the best moves the government has done for customers lately, giving them yet another way to keep these competitors honest. Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com. Copyright 2004 The Washington Post Company *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Washington Post Company. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 21:28:21 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Economist.com | Printer Forensics | Band Aid | How to Beat http://economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=3D3329120 http://economist.com/printedition/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3D3329120 Printer forensics Band aid From The Economist print edition How to beat digital forgers Corbis A paper trail NO DOCUMENT is safe any more. Counterfeiting, once the domain of skilled crooks who used expensive engraving and printing equipment, has gone mainstream since the price of desktop-publishing systems has dropped. Virtually any kind of paper can be forged, including cheques, banknotes, stock and bond certificates, passports and security cards. For currency alone, millions of dollars in counterfeit banknotes make their way into circulation each year, and 40% of the counterfeits seized this year were digitally produced, compared with 1% a decade ago. In ancient times, counterfeiting was a hanging offence. In Dante's Inferno, forgers were placed in one of the lowest circles of hell. Today, desktop counterfeiters have little reason to worry about prison, at any rate, because the systems they use are ubiquitous and there is no means of tracing forged documents to the machine that produced them. This, however, may soon change thanks to technology developed by George Chiu, Jan Allebach and Edward Delp, three anti-counterfeiting engineers based at Purdue University in Indiana. The results of their research will be unveiled formally on November 5th at the International Conference on Digital Printing Technologies in Salt Lake City. Though the approaches of the three researchers differ slightly, all are based on detecting imperfections in the print quality of documents. Old-school forensic scientists were at least so the movies would have you believe able to trace documents to particular typewriters based on quirks of the individual keys. The researchers from Purdue employ a similar approach, exploiting the fact that the rotating drums and mirrors inside a printer are imperfect pieces of engineering which leave unique patterns of banding in their products. Although these patterns are invisible to the naked eye, they can be detected and analysed by computer programs, and it is these that the three researchers have spent the past year devising. So far, they cannot trace individual printers, but they can tell pretty reliably which make and model of printer was used to create a document. That, however, is only the beginning. While it remains to be seen whether it will be possible to trace a counterfeit document back to its guilty creator on the basis of manufacturing imperfections, Dr Chiu is now working out ways to make those imperfections deliberate. He wants to modify the printing process so that unique, invisible signatures can be incorporated into each machine produced. That would make any document traceable. Ironically, it was after years of collaborating with printing companies to reduce banding and thus increase the quality of prints, that he came up with the idea of introducing artificial bandings that could encode identification information, such as a printer's serial number and the date of printing, into a document. Many factors can affect banding patterns. These include the intensity, timing and width of the pulses of laser light that control the printing process, and the efficiency of the motor controls that steer the laser beam, turn the drum and move the mirrors. All of these could be exploited to produce unique signatures, but Dr Chiu found that the one which works best without compromising print quality is to fiddle with the intensity of the laser. Using a computer model of the human visual system, he has designed a method of banding that is invisible to the eye while remaining all too visible to an expert with the right machine. The current techniques used to secure documents are either digital (and therefore easy to fake with desktop publishing systems) or too costly for widespread applications (paper watermarks, fibres and special inks). Using the banding patterns of printers to secure documents would be both cheap to implement and hard, if not impossible, for those without specialist knowledge and hardware to evade. Not surprisingly, the American Secret Service is monitoring the progress of this research very closely, and is providing guidelines to help the researchers to travel in what the service thinks is the right direction. Which is fine for catching criminals. But how the legitimate users of printers will react to Big Brother being able to track any document back to its source remains to be seen. Copyright 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance the Economist Group. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 23:43:28 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Semiconductors | The end of Moore's law? | http://economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=3D3321802 http://economist.com/printedition/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3D3321802 Semiconductors What Intel's latest stumble means for the chip industry's rule of thumb. I'm so sorry, says Barrett IT IS not often that the chief executive of one of the world's biggest companies gets down on one knee and begs for forgiveness. Yet that is what Craig Barrett of Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, did this week at an industry conference in Florida. He was only joking, of course. But his apology for Intel's decision to cancel the next version of its flagship Pentium 4 chip highlights the latest in a series of stumbles by the company, which has once again been forced to follow the lead of its much smaller but increasingly feisty competitor, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). At issue is the best approach to making faster chips. For years, Intel has steadily increased the clock speed of its processors, the fastest of which now run at 3.4GHz, or 3.4 billion ticks per second. But it has now fallen victim to the law of diminishing returns. Although boosting the clock speed increases performance, it also increases the power consumption of the chip and the need for cooling. (Some of the very high-speed PCs used by serious gamers are even water-cooled.) So, rather than concentrating on clock speed, Intel has decided to boost the performance of future chips in other ways, such as increasing the amount of on-board cache memory and, in the coming years, switching its chips to a multi-core design. This means putting multiple cores in effect, complete processors into a single chip. These cores can run more slowly, consume less power and generate less heat, while collectively providing more processing power than a single core. Multi-core is a way to achieve additional performance without turning up clock rates, says Dean McCarron, an industry analyst at Mercury Research. This idea is not new: IBM, Sun and Hewlett-Packard already sell high-end computers powered by their own multi-core chips. But it is only recently that PC software has been able to exploit multiple processors. Intel's decision to de-emphasise clock speeds is just the latest example of how the company has reluctantly ended up following where AMD has previously= led. (Earlier this year, AMD forced Intel to make a U-turn in its=20 64-bit-chip strategy.) AMD has long argued that there is more to=20 performance than clock speed, and gives its chips model numbers giving some= idea of their power. Its new Athlon 64 4000+ chip, for example, announced=20 this week, runs at 2.4GHz, but its name implies rough equivalence with a w4GHz Intel chip. Intel is now adopting similar model numbers. Having abandoned its obsession with raw speed, Intel is embracing the multi-core approach with great enthusiasm. Paul Otellini, Intel's number two, who is expected to take over from Mr Barrett next May, said last month that he expects 40% of desktop chips sold, and 80% of server chips, to be multi-core by the end of 2006. The switch to multi-core is, he says, a sea change in computing and a key inflection point for the industry . What does all this mean for Moore's law, the rule of thumb coined by Gordon Moore, Intel's co-founder, which states that the amount of computing power available at a given price doubles every 18 months? For most people, Moore's law manifests itself as a steady increase in clock speed from one year to the next. The cancellation of the 4GHz version of the Pentium is Intel's clearest admission yet that clock speed is no longer the best gauge of processor performance: henceforth, it will increasingly take a back seat to other metrics. But the law itself, the death of which has been announced many times, will live on. Mr Barrett insisted this week that it would continue to apply for at least another 10-15 years. That is because multi-core designs mean chips' performance can continue to increase even if the formerly much-trumpeted clock speed does not. Copyright 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Economist Newspapers. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 14:05:12 -0500 Subject: Another Black Eye For VoIP2 Jack Decker comment: Anyone who is even thinking about doing business with VoIP2 really should first read the numerous comments about them in the BroadbandReports.com VoIP forum. http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/56260 Read Your Fine Print Marketing Lingo in the modern age. One user in our VoIP forum claims they were slammed with a five-hundred dollar cancellation fee by upstart provider VoIP2 after taking their "Money Back Guarantee" a little too literally. Their terms of service stipulate if you cancel in writing within the allotted time frame you'll get your money back, sans "the charges for completed calls at $0.03 per minute for United States calls related to an Unlimited plan and the actual billed charge for International calls" (of which we're guessing he made a few). This is 2004: unlimited means limited and "Money Back Guarantees" mean "Some of your money back, maybe." Full article plus reader comments at http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/56260 Another related thread at: http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,11640174~mode=flat ------------------------------ From: Joel Subject: Asterisk Recommended Hardware? Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 19:21:08 GMT I'm looking in to implementing Asterisk in our small office to achieve the following goals: * Provide extensions/voicemail and SIP speakerphones for all employees * Make sure all employees can transfer calls to each other * Provide 'remote' extensions so employees can use softphones when they are off-site (using IAX2 and DIAX) * Utilize existing Siemens 2400 base station/speakerphone with wireless handsets (using ATA) Is this type of thing a pretty standard setup for Asterisk? I'm a little worried because of all the vendors providing SIP phones and ATAs that I've never heard of. Are there some 'standard', trusted brands that, if I go with them, everything should just work? The Asterisk wiki didn't seem to answer these questions -- it seems like every phone will require its own workarounds. Thanks, -- Joel ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 10:42:33 -0800 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Sun, 31 Oct 2004 12:43:57 -0700, DevilsPGD wrote: > Rick Merrill wrote: >> IF these images were accessed it would give criminals access to an >> image of the customer's signature. Said criminal could then use a >> laser printer with 640 dpi resolution to print checks that would be >> indistinguishable from the photo check after a 240 dpi Scan!? > I'm curious, is there a requirement that the bank which accepted the > cheque store it for any period of time? I don't believe with the new check 21 law that they can destroy checks as soon as they're processed. I believe however that they have to store images of the processed checks. Whether your bank will also give you copies of those images probably differs from bank to bank. ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Our Weekend Auto Trip Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 07:02:43 -0800 Organization: Cox Communications Patrick Townson wrote: > Over this Halloweeen holiday weekend, I took a ride with some friends > through the countryside, and made a little movie for you to see. Great camera work. You must have a huge film crew. Really nice hills, too. What part of Kansas is that? > I thought you might like to see it, and just in time for Halloween and > last night's blood red full moon eclipse. Be sure and have your > speakers turned up when you play the movie, you don't want to miss > any of it. > Watch it and about halfway through, as the car emerges from the clump > of trees, look and you will see something interesting, Be sure to have > your sound turned up, since the people are speaking sort of quietly. > Here is the link to the movie: Just click it and it should open up. > It's about 4M so it's not huge, but might take a few seconds on a > really slow dial up connection. When it starts, watch it and listen > very closely. > http://63.78.183.81/temp/j/Classic_Auto_1.mpeg > Oh, and happy Halloween to all of you. I assume you *did* get your > clocks set back an hour sometime last night or today. > PAT [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Me thinks maybe you missed the point of the exercise. It was Halloween, after all. I don't honestly know where the .mpeg clip came from; it was e-mailed to me a couple days earlier as a joke by Lisa Minter. She identified it as 'a new guy who I met when I was traveling to my grandparent's house last week.' Identify it however you like, but be sure to tell the prospective viewer to have their sound up loud and be watching closely when the car comes out of the bushes. Can anyone read the language on that notice on the screen at the very end? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Kenneth P. Stox Organization: Imaginary Landscape, LLC. Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Our Weekend Auto Trip Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 01:06:45 GMT Patrick Townson wrote: > Over this Halloweeen holiday weekend, I took a ride with some friends > through the countryside, and made a little movie for you to see. > I thought you might like to see it, and just in time for Halloween and > last night's blood red full moon eclipse. Be sure and have your > speakers turned up when you play the movie, you don't want to miss > any of it. > Watch it and about halfway through, as the car emerges from the clump > of trees, look and you will see something interesting, Be sure to have > your sound turned up, since the people are speaking sort of quietly. Wiseguy! I see you haven't lost your sense of humor. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Thanks ... give it out wherever you like: justify it however you wish, i.e. 'weekend auto trip', or 'I meet a new friend' or better still, 'a new friend meets me for the first time. Not being prepared for it, later I said to Lisa, "if you were trying to cause me to have another heart attack, you did a damn good job." Maybe you could justify it as 'my reaction after I finished reading the ICANN charter for registrars.' (But find some excuse for the bucolic scenery and the car on the road.) 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #523 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Nov 1 17:15:20 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA1MFKK11014; Mon, 1 Nov 2004 17:15:20 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 17:15:20 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411012215.iA1MFKK11014@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 #524 TELECOM Digest Mon, 1 Nov 2004 17:15:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 524 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson VoIP Provider Presses FCC to Block Broadband Discrimination (L Minter) Re: Verizon California Terminates ISDN, FX, Other Services (Justin Time) Re: Verizon California Terminates ISDN, FX, Other Services (I. Beard) Re: When Phones Go Bad (Danny Burstein) Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal (John Hines) Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal (Eric Tappert) Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal (Mark Crispin) Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (Isaiah Beard) Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future (Lisa Hancock) Management and Inovation (Lisa Hancock) Last Laugh! SPAM!! Pick the President (Group Lotto) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 14:43:05 -0500 Subject: VoIP Provider Presses FCC to Block Broadband Discrimination http://www.cabledatacomnews.com/nov04/nov04-8.html VoIP Provider Presses FCC to Block Broadband Discrimination Nuvio Filing Threatens to Re-ignite Cable Open Access Battles of Late 1990 By Alan Breznick, editor, Cable Datacom News In a case that may have major implications for both cable operators and phone companies, a little-known voice-over-IP (VoIP) provider is urging the FCC to keep broadband providers from tampering with independent IP telephony services riding on the same fat pipes. Nuvio Corp., a commercial, private-label VoIP provider based in the Kansas City suburbs, wants the FCC to prohibit MSOs, Baby Bells and other broadband providers from blocking or degrading access to other VoIP services. In a letter and corresponding white paper filed with the Commission in mid-September, the firm proposes that the agency use its Title I authority under the 1996 Telecommunications Act to ban "discriminatory practices by vertically integrated broadband/VoIP providers" offering rival services. "If these vertically integrated firms are free to discriminate against unaffiliated VoIP providers, they will almost certainly garner the major share of the VoIP market, and in doing so drive smaller unaffiliated VoIP providers out of the market," the company argues. "If left unchecked, such discrimination would seriously endanger the vibrant competition that currently exists in the market for VoIP services and ultimately harm consumers." Full story at: http://www.cabledatacomnews.com/nov04/nov04-8.html ------------------------------ From: a_user2000@yahoo.com (Justin Time) Subject: Re: Verizon California Terminates ISDN, FX, Other Services Date: 1 Nov 2004 11:45:35 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Isaiah Beard wrote in message news:: > Tim@Backhome.org wrote: >> What useful purpose does ISDN serve these days? > It's VERY useful, actually. Where I work, we have a number of > Tandberg 6000's and Polycom FX devices scattered on a number of sites, > and quite a few of them are hooked up to both Gigabit ethernet and 3 > bonded ISDN PRIs each. Videoconferencing is VERY big, even bigger now > that businesses are trying to cut their travel expenses. Oh, I'm sure you meant BRI rather than PRI. > <> > E-mail fudged to thwart spammers. > Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So you are suggesting that ISDN makes > a very good backup system in the case of emergencies? PAT] In this country ISDN has almost always been targeted toward the commercial user. The reason companies like XM and other broadcasting companies use ISDN or at a minimum a 56K digital line for voice backup is no static or loss of bandwidth because of distance. Comparing the voice quality and bandwidth on ISDN and analog would be similar to comparing an FM radio signal with an AM. Both have their advantages, but the FM signal always will have better bandwidth and carry more information than an analog AM signal. That's the reason music stations have all but abandoned the AM airwaves -- music just sounds better on FM. If the music sounds better because of the increased bandwidth, wouldn't it have the same affects on voice? Rodgers Platt ------------------------------ From: Isaiah Beard Subject: Re: Verizon California Terminates ISDN, FX, Other Services Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 15:29:01 -0500 TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to Isaiah Beard: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So you are suggesting that ISDN makes > a very good backup system in the case of emergencies? PAT] I'm saying that it's far more reliable than a commodity internet connection can be for point to point communication, emergency or not. E-mail fudged to thwart spammers. Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply. ------------------------------ From: danny burstein Subject: Re: When Phones Go Bad Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 20:54:07 UTC Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC In Marcus Didius Falco writes: [ snip ] > For most cell phone users, replacing a phone that's gone bad comes > with an added cost in time and aggravation: pecking away at the keys > of the new phone to reconstruct a mobile address book of often-used > names and numbers. Hence one of the beauties of the SIMcard method used on GSM (and a handful of other) phones. All the info can be stored in the thumbnail sized chip, and all you need to do is move it from the old phone to the new one. (It's pretty rare, though not impossible, for the SIMcard to fail). _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] ------------------------------ From: John Hines Subject: Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 13:44:22 -0600 Organization: www.jhines.org Reply-To: john@jhines.org hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) wrote: > In this election season, I have been BOMBARDED with pre-recorded phone > calls pitching various candidates, flooding my answering machine. The only worse than being in a state that is out of play, and ignored, would be being in a swing state, with non-stop politicing. This election wore out its welcome along time ago. That is why I'm trying to revive the "Pat Paulsen for President" campaign of '68. So far, everyone has got a smile out of it, which is something that can not be said about the current election. ------------------------------ From: Eric Tappert Subject: Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 19:52:56 GMT Organization: AT&T Worldnet On 31 Oct 2004 19:43:19 -0800, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) wrote: > In this election season, I have been BOMBARDED with pre-recorded phone > calls pitching various candidates, flooding my answering machine. > I know election phone calls are legal. > However, I think pre-recorded phone calls, of any kind, should be > illegal. > The constant ringing of the phone this year was terribly annoying. > If it had been last year, it would've been devastating. Last year at > this time I was caring for a seriously ill person and was ill myself. > I was in frequent touch with doctors, phamarcies, nurses, and > families. I had to keep the phone open and answer all calls. > To a healthy person, the constant ringing was terribly annoying. I > would've gone out of my mind last year. > When you're in bad pain, a ringing telephone is not a pleasant thing. > BTW, I also received several live calls urging a deceased member of > family to go vote, even though that person was removed from the > election rolls quite some time ago. [In hindsight I wish I requested > they come and assist that person to the polls.] > When I go to the polls Tuesday, I will talk to the politicians (the > people who stand outside and give out leaflets). I will ask them for > their home phone numbers, but I have a funny feeling they, for some > strange reason, won't give them to me. Amen to that, Lisa. I happen to live in a "battleground" state and have averaged over 6 calls per day for the last two weeks. Very annoying. Telemarketers were never this bad ... Eric Tappert I hear the lawyers are going to argue that tombstones really can vote this year! :-) [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: One real, actual problem has been with the advance voting allowed in so many states. Florida is a good example. A gazillion old people live in Florida and quite a few of them have already voted. How the question is you voted last week, then you die yesterday or today (as many folks have already done; died, I mean.) Do you count the votes or not? Everywhere has a law saying dead people are disqualified from voting (except in Chicago). Most states have a law which says if a person dies before election day, their vote is not to be counted. Are they going to cross check the morgue records with the election records? That is a serious question under debate in Florida where there are such a huge number of senior citizens in residence and where there are many deaths each day. Someone has suggested if this election is very close, it may come down to the 537 or so people in Florida who died between the time voting started a couple weeks ago and the official close of the polls tomorrow. Here is another example: two guys are in the Army, both registered to vote out of Fort Campbell, KY/TN (which straddles two state lines.) One lives in a barracks on the Kentucky side of the line; the other in a barracks on the Tennessee side. Both were sent to Iraq (what else is new?) both submitted absentee ballots in the past few days. Both were killed in action a few days ago when the military transport bus was blown up. According to the law in Kentucky, that guy's vote *is* counted. According to the law in Tennessee, the other guy's vote is *not* counted (deceased prior to the official election day). So the one soldier's vote is counted, the other one's is not. Is that fair? Indeed, the people who have voted in advance of November 2 but who then died (for whatever reason *before* November 2) will probably give the 'army' of ten thousand lawyers we have heard about for awhile now busy-work for a long time. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Mark Crispin Subject: Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 11:56:17 -0800 Organization: University of Washington My home phone was delightfully free of all such calls throughout this horrendously toxic election season. I dumped No Solicitation, Security Screen, and the other overpriced services that do little to stop the telesleaze, and replaced it with a much cheaper service that does work: Do Not Disturb. Do Not Disturb allows you to set a schedule of hours when it will block incoming calls. It's possible to set the schedule to be 24 hours/day. Callers who know the 4-digit override passcode that you set (and can change at any time) can break through the block and then the call will ring through. There are two additional options in Do Not Disturb. If you enable emergency breakthrough, the caller can press "*" and then record his name. Your phone will then ring, and you'll be given that name and asked whether or not you want to take the call. The other option, which I recommend *against* due to prerecords, happens if you have voice mail. The caller can press "#" or wait long enough and the call will be transfered to voice mail (where the prerecord can dump its advertisement on your voice mail). I suggest just cancelling voice mail and use an answering machine. This works well for me, because an analysis of my incoming calls (as recorded on Caller ID) showed that almost all of the legitimate calls came from the same handful of callers. They all have my passcode, and they all continue to call me. The one bug with Do Not Disturb is that emergency breakthrough calls shows up as 000-000-0000 on the caller ID instead of the caller's number. So, if such call comes in when you're not around, you know that you got such a call but no record of where it was from. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum. ------------------------------ From: Isaiah Beard Subject: Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 15:26:23 -0500 DevilsPGD wrote: > Rick Merrill wrote: >> IF these images were accessed it would give criminals access to an >> image of the customer's signature. Said criminal could then use a >> laser printer with 640 dpi resolution to print checks that would be >> indistinguishable from the photo check after a 240 dpi Scan!? > I'm curious, is there a requirement that the bank which accepted the > cheque store it for any period of time? Quite the reverse actually. If they send the check along electronically, then the original is destroyed. E-mail fudged to thwart spammers. Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future Date: 1 Nov 2004 12:54:46 -0800 w_tom wrote > Common mistake when predictions are based upon business school > concepts rather than first learning the details. While some of what you say is true, I must disagree with other parts. Business school concepts definitely have their place. > Third generation cell phone technology has finally made standard > (POTS) phones obsolete. "Technology" is not _instant_. Just because a new technology is perfected does not mean other technologies are "obsolete". A lot of technocrats are so enamoured with new stuff they fail to understand the big picture. First, it takes time to implement new technology. For example, a great many people out there do not have cell phones nor wish to have one. Others have them but use them only for emergencies and have $15/month plans. Many people get something new only when their existing machine wears out; not everyone is enamored with the "latest and greatest". Secondly, new technologies must mature. Things are improving, but many cell phone users get cutoff in mid conversation. When compact discs were first introduced, their sound and operation needed tweaking to get widespread acceptance so serious listeners would replace their vinyl. Third, new technologies have a new cost that not all consumers are willing -- nor should -- have to pay. A consumer perfectly happy with POTS service should not have to pay the $40/month for cell phone service. An occassional $15/month emergency-only cell phone user likewise shouldn't be forced to upgrade. The computer manufacturers finally learned that people weren't so ready to upgrade their PCs so often. Fourth, the implementation and marketing of technology is critical. Dilbert might make fun of the marketing types, but they are necessary. The genius of Edison was not in the light bulb, but rather a whole power generation and distribution network to make the light bulbs work and earn money from them. > The baby Bells are not dominated by myopic MBA managers whose > education literally destroys both innovation and what little remains > of AT&T. AT&T management has a static perspective because they view > from anti-innovative B-school concepts. If AT&T still ran the baby > Bells, then Nokia's predictions would have merit. But baby Bells > (about 10 years too late) suddenly realized that they too will go > the way of the anti-innovation AT&T. Baby Bells are finally, after > more than 50 years, rewiring their entire network. Being an "MBA manager" is neither good nor bad in itself. Sure, one could point to plenty of very successful businessmen who had an 8th grade education, just as one could point to 3-pack-a-day smokers who lived to be 105. But most business people make good use of skills taught in business school. I don't agree on AT&T being "static" at all. Their management tried quite a few different avenues, they just didn't work out, it was not for lack of trying. Guessing wrong does not make a company "myopic", hindsight is always 20/20, foresight is not. Over history, many 'wrong' business predictions were perfectly reasonable and logical at the time they were made. When a businessman takes a longshot and wins, people call him "shrewd". If his longshot loses, people call him other less complimentary things. We read about the success stories with great fanfare, but not about the many more losers. Baby Bells most certainly did NOT wait "50 years" to rewire their networks. A lot of people believe -- wrongly -- that the phone network at the time of divesture was all ancient. True, some of it was, but a very great deal of it was state of the art for its day. Bell Atlantic was 100% ESS after divesture, and shortly later was 100% digital, just to give an example. Trunks between offices were advanced high capacity. > But don't expect mobiles to replace land line just as IBM found new > purpose in their core businesses (once IBM replaced their MBAs with > computer guys, then IBM rediscovered innovation meaning that a main > frame is no longer a dinosaur). While agree mobiles won't replace totally land lines, there are a couple of errors here. What I expect is that mobile were supplement land lines. A suburban family with teenagers that might have had two or even three voice lines in the house may get by with a single line, and use cell phones for the rest. As to IBM, IBM did not go back to its "core business", nor did it replace its MBAs with computer guys. Actually, IBM has reduced its core business -- manufacturing and selling computers -- and wisely supplemented it with consulting and service bureau work which was once a small subsidiary. The "computer guys" didn't make this transition, but rather an outsider, the former head of Nabisco (Gerstner sp?). I don't know if he had an MBA or not, but I think he did. > Devil is always in the details which means the manager must have 'dirt > under his fingernails'. That is true. > Without a long detailed list of advantages and disadvantages for > each technology combined with a list of future markets and > innovations, then one can only make predictions like business school > graduates and that BBC article. Not true. Predicting the future, whether it be the tomorrow's weather or markets for new technologies, is always a gamble. There are always variables that are a guess, plus variables no one expects. > These latter people routinely stifle innovation because they don't > have education from where innovation happens. Spread sheets and > marketing mentalities are important peripheral parts of business; > but only with a short term perspective. Without a "marketing mentality", innovation is worthless. Without a good cost/pricing strategy, products cannot be manufacturered nor services provided. Having technology without a way to get it in the hands of customers is worthless. The Watson father/son didn't know squat about any technology, but they knew marketing. The ENIAC-Univac people were experts in technology, but didn't know squat about marketing. It didn't take long for IBM, using its marketing skills, to quickly surpass ENIAC-UNIVAC's way superior tech skills. > To see the future of land lines with a long term perspective, one > must apply knowledge and experience of the technology. Yes and no. In the late 1970s, the "knowledge and experience" of computers was using punch cards as an input medium. Note that when more modern gear (ie key-to-disk, on-line terminals, PC-DOS) replaced the punch card, they kept the principles -- 80 column screen, auto numeric shift, 'drum card' field setup, etc. That's what the technies were used to. But the techies were wrong! It turned out that the future belonged to something entirely new -- the GUI screens and Windows that had no connection to the punch card style whatsoever. > Any land line company that intends to be alive in 10 years will have > replaced or duplicated their entire network in fiber -- and learned > new products based upon the new demands of that technology. Who knows if fibre will be dominant in ten years? Keep in mind there's an excess today of fibre capacity; that means some companies that built fibre networks are losing money from lack of use. Don't ask me why, but Picturephone service never caught on, while cell phones cameras and text messaging are very popular with kids. (Punching in text on a tiny phone keypad seems ludicrous, but they love it.) > Standard technologies potentially on the chopping block: faxes, > portable phones, conventional dial up phones, international shortwave > broadcasting, and maybe even conventional letters. It takes an awful lot for a technology to become truly discontinued. What usually happens is that an older technology remains in use, but yields market share to newer technologies. They still make typewriters for example, but most such work is done on computers now. Further, older technologies may offer a backup. (Yes, there are some exceptions). > Any Baby Bell that uses the > bean counter concepts of cost controls is doomed just like Western > Union and AT&T. "Beans" are basic to a business. If you don't count your beans, you will go out of business. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Management and Innovation Date: 1 Nov 2004 13:33:20 -0800 [I created a separate subject and post to discuss a different issue] w_tom wrote > Remember what happens to companies who don't innovate. Any Baby > Bell that uses the bean counter concepts of cost controls is doomed > just like Western Union and AT&T. AT&T and Western Union both were > dead center in a wonderful future -- and instead failed to innovate > their core business. As mentioned in my other post, hindsight is 20/20 and it's easy to criticize past managements for "failing to innovate". But the issue is not so simple, and people must realize that. Western Union's core business -- record message transmission -- became obsolete with the advent of cheap long distance service in the 1960s. In the 1950s and earlier, long distance telephone calls were extremely expensive and telegrams were cheaper. But once LD rates dropped, a phone call cost the same and was both faster and more efficient (two way conversation). With money transfers, the widespread advent of everyday people having credit cards eliminated much of that need. So, Western Union's "core businesses" were obsolete (and this was even before cheap faxes). WU was further hampered by adverse regulatory actions which favored AT&T at WU's expense and by a tough labor situation. WU was blocked from going into potentially profitable businesses. There was nothing WU for "innovate" when the core business itself was obsolete. The only choice WU had was to go into entirely new lines of business. [This is only a brief summary of WU's issues.] Over the years, there have been some companies that have done just that -- doing things today that are a far cry from their past. There is today a big convenience store chain that was once an iron maker, for example. I don't call that "innovation". The truth is that in many cases, management most certainly wanted to innovate and had the correct direction in mind. However, legal, regulatory, labor, or other external constraints blocked them from doing what they wanted. Western Union had severe regulatory restraints. Actually, the Baby Bells were blocked by regulation from doing some things they're doing today. Let's look at Sears and Montgomery Ward. At the end of WW II, Sears invested in suburban expansion, Montgomery Ward expected a recession. Historically, M/W was correct because recessions occured after wars and the Great Depression preceeded WW II. But M/W turned out to be wrong and Sears correct. Let's look at the Penn Central: Many people blame its management for the bankruptcy, feeling if there was more "innovation" the company would have survived. But the truth is that the Penn Central did try to improve things and innovate but that wasn't enough to save it. It faced drastically changed business conditions in its service territory. But government regulation and labor laws blocked management from meeting those challenges. Subsequently, the laws were changed but it was too late for the PC. BTW, the PC was criticized for going away from its "core business", but its other investments were what carried it. Let's look at domestic steel, which died in the 1980s and mgmt is blamed. But in the 1970s, steel got him with a simultaneous triple whammy: 1) Drastic increases in pollution control laws that were extremely expensive to comply, 2) drastic increases in the cost of energy, and 3) drastic reduction in demand as a result of foreign competition of both raw steel and finished goods (like cars) and cheaper substitute materials. It should be noted that until this triple whammy hit, demand for domestic steel had been very strong and growing since WW II. The result was way too much high-cost capacity for low demand, and many steel companies went bankrupt. Thousands of steel workers lost their jobs. There was certainly some things steel management could have done differently, but that would've only made things slightly better and wouldn't have changed the big picture. Now this is not to say management is always blameless. There are many examples of where management simply blew it (why some supermarket chains flourish while others languish). Sometimes management clings to a past or charges headstrong to a future that no one else sees or agrees with. Sometimes innovation -- the way an outsider sees it -- isn't as easy as it looks. ------------------------------ From: Group Lotto Reply-To: gl@domain670.com Subject: Last Laugh! SPAM!! Pick the President Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 15:30:36 EST Which President would you put on the face of a $1,000,000 bill? Bush? Clinton? Reagan? Go Here: http://t1.domain670.com/track.php/FCE06B7C99/fast/2?email=telecom-request%40massis.lcs.mit.edu Until then, if you win $1,000,000 cash, we hope you'll settle for smaller bills. Play GroupLotto now and, you get to play for FREE. Enter now. Get 10 FREE chances to WIN over $1,500,000 CASH. http://t1.domain670.com/track.php/FCE06B7C99/fast/2?email=telecom-request%40massis.lcs.mit.edu [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Somehow in preparing this message for inclusion in the Digest I accidentally trucated the other 63,000 bytes of HTML code which were included in it. Sorry to disappoint you. I did send a note to Resident President, White House and gave them my permission to put my face on the new three dollar bill, which has been proposed in an effort to balance our National Budget. They could put my picture on it then include as a free gift in every box of cereal sold, or maybe in boxes of the Monopoly game. We should get our National Budget crisis solved that way sometime in the 29th century. 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. 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #524 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Nov 2 01:57:46 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA26vkm15326; Tue, 2 Nov 2004 01:57:46 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 01:57:46 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411020657.iA26vkm15326@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 #525 TELECOM Digest Tue, 2 Nov 2004 01:58:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 525 Inside This Issue: Be Sure to Go Vote Today! Universal Home API Forum (Monty Solomon) Nokia 9500 Communicator Receives Wi-Fi Certification (Monty Solomon) Free For the Listening -- and Legal (Monty Solomon) Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal (Thomas A. Horsley) Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal (J Kelly) Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal (Steve Sobol) Re: Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence (Gordon S. Hlavenka) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (Neal McLain) Re: Last Laugh! Our Weekend Auto Trip (Fritz Whittington) Re: VOIP and Telnet (Andy Janssen) Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (DevilsPGD) Re: When Phones Go Bad (David Clayton) Web Site Renovation Complete! (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 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 00:11:22 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Universal Home API Forum Leading Companies Establish The Universal Home API Forum to Create Standards for the Converging Consumer Electronics Industry PORTLAND, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 1, 2004-- Universal Home Application Programming Interface Dramatically Reduces Time and Expense of Software Application Development for the Connected Home A group of leading consumer electronics (CE) and semiconductor companies including Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (LSE (GDR):SSNHY) (KSE:005930), Royal Philips Electronics (NYSE:PHG) (AEX:PHI), HP (NYSE:HPQ) (NASDAQ:HPQ), the Digital TV Industry Alliance of China (DTVIA) and ACCESS Co., Ltd., today announced the formation of the Universal Home Application Programmer Interface (UHAPI) Forum. The UHAPI Forum will standardize hardware-independent application programming interfaces (APIs) for analog and digital televisions, set top boxes, DVD players and recorders, personal video recorders (PVRs), home servers and other consumer audio/video (A/V) devices. The Forum invites other organizations to contribute to the UHAPI specification process and implement the UHAPI specification in their respective consumer A/V products. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44671414 http://www.uhapi.org/ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 00:19:59 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Nokia 9500 Communicator Receives Wi-Fi Certification NEW YORK, November 1 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Nokia today announced the Nokia 9500 Communicator has been granted the IEEE 802-11b and WPA (Wireless Protected Access) certifications by the Wi-Fi Alliance. The Nokia 9500 Communicator is the first mobile device operating in both cellular and wireless LAN networks to receive this qualification. The Wi-Fi certification verifies that the product meets the compatibility and interoperability requirements under the standards identified by the Wi-Fi Alliance, a global organization that works to promote wireless LAN standards across all market segments. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44649368 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 00:28:00 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Free for the Listening -- and Legal By Hiawatha Bray The Internet remains as tuneful as ever, record-company lawsuits notwithstanding. Any kind of music you fancy is free for the listening, and you don't even have to steal it. With thousands of legitimate music streams online, a good broadband connection is all you need. Of course, we humans can only listen to one channel at a time. Our computers aren't so limited. With the right software, you can tune in to two, five, or a dozen Internet audio streams, record them all, then listen at leisure. It's not altogether good news for the recording industry, already busy trying to stamp out the music file-swappers. But there's not much they can do about it. It's perfectly legal to record a TV show for personal use, or to tape a favorite AM radio talk show. The same principle applies to Internet audio streams. As long as you don't pass out copies to others, you're on the right side of the law. So all you need is software that will capture the incoming music and save it to your hard drive. You can download a number of these programs, ranging from the primitive to the polished. http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/11/01/free_for_the_listening____and_legal/ ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal From: tom.horsley@att.net (Thomas A. Horsley) Organization: AT&T Worldnet Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 22:15:06 GMT Yep, I think I'm getting repetitive stress syndrome deleteing messages on my answering machine this weekend -- fortunately it will all stop tomorrow :-) >>==>> The *Best* political site >>==+ email: Tom.Horsley@worldnet.att.net icbm: Delray Beach, FL | Free Software and Politics <<==+ ------------------------------ From: J Kelly Subject: Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 18:06:12 -0600 Organization: http://newsguy.com Reply-To: jkelly@newsguy.com On 31 Oct 2004 19:43:19 -0800, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) wrote: > In this election season, I have been BOMBARDED with pre-recorded phone > calls pitching various candidates, flooding my answering machine. > I know election phone calls are legal. > However, I think pre-recorded phone calls, of any kind, should be > illegal. > The constant ringing of the phone this year was terribly annoying. > If it had been last year, it would've been devastating. Last year at > this time I was caring for a seriously ill person and was ill myself. > I was in frequent touch with doctors, phamarcies, nurses, and > families. I had to keep the phone open and answer all calls. > To a healthy person, the constant ringing was terribly annoying. I > would've gone out of my mind last year. > When you're in bad pain, a ringing telephone is not a pleasant thing. > BTW, I also received several live calls urging a deceased member of > family to go vote, even though that person was removed from the > election rolls quite some time ago. [In hindsight I wish I requested > they come and assist that person to the polls.] > When I go to the polls Tuesday, I will talk to the politicians (the > people who stand outside and give out leaflets). I will ask them for > their home phone numbers, but I have a funny feeling they, for some > strange reason, won't give them to me. I wish they would send valid Caller ID also. I get a LOT of calls from "Dir Asst Iowa" at 515-555-4143. Almost all of them are the Governors office begging me to please vote for Democrats. Also had at least 20 calls from 000-000-0000 and 10 or so from 111-111-1111. One guy did send valid CID, and it was his home phone number. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The poor devil; probably just a hapless volunteer working for some candidate he likes; but refreshing to see, wasn't it? Makes you feel like voting for his candidate. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 17:24:09 -0800 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Lisa Hancock wrote: > In this election season, I have been BOMBARDED with pre-recorded phone > calls pitching various candidates, flooding my answering machine. > I know election phone calls are legal. > However, I think pre-recorded phone calls, of any kind, should be > illegal. Me too. Apple Valley, California town council incumbent Tim Jasper got a call from me on Friday telling him I had decided not to vote for him due to a prerecord. He got my message and called back and said "I can't reach everyone -- it is necessary for me to make those calls." Bullshit. The prerecord contained the exact same content his radio ad had. Hm. Oh, that's right, the radio ad only reached a couple people! What was I thinking?! Bite me, Tim Jasper. You had already used several more acceptable channels to broadcast your message. Telemarketing calls are bad enough, but if you don't have enough respect for me to call me yourself, don't talk to me at all. JustThe.net Internet & New Media Services, http://JustThe.net/ Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / 888.480.4NET (4638) / sjsobol@JustThe.net PGP Key available from your friendly local key server (0xE3AE35ED) Apple Valley, California Nothing scares me anymore. I have three kids. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 22:44:45 -0600 From: Gordon S. Hlavenka Reply-To: nospam@crashelex.com Organization: Crash Electronics Subject: Re: Clicking in Phone Line From Electric Fence > {TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I had telephone service once where the > line went bad, and telco decided it was necessary to swap the pairs. > Trouble was, they had a hard time finding *any* spare pairs in the > cable, but about a half-dozen pairs which were out of order. So what > telco wound up doing (I found out later) was to take *one* good wire > from one pair and a second good wire from another pair I'm astonished that they would do this. What you've described is called a "split pair" and is a huge no-no! Since the two wires being used are not twisted _together_ in the bundle, they are not exposed to exactly the same noise environment and thus the pair is not balanced. Of course, a DC resistance check will claim that the line is fine, but it's not. It's no wonder they had to come out a second time and fix it for real. Gordon S. Hlavenka http://www.crashelectronics.com "If we imagined he could _find_ the car, we could pretend it might be fixed." - Calvin ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 17:45:25 -0600 From: Neal McLain Reply-To: nmclain@annsgarden.com Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? Stanley Cline wrote: > As for the channel 4 issue, my guess as to why Cable One isn't using > it now is that they used to use it for a premium channel such as HBO > using negative traps (which remove the signal of a given channel or > group of adjacent channels), and they moved HBO to another analog > channel or to digital and left channel 4 idle because reusing it for > something else would require visiting the homes of all current > customers who don't have HBO to remove traps ... Good point. I've known this to happen in other cable systems as well. However, I still think that in the specific case at hand, the Coffeyville TV station was probably the primary reason for not using cable channel 4. Given that channel 4 is subject to interference from a television station (even a weak one like W04EJ), it seems unlikely that the cable company would have used that channel for an important service like HBO or Showtime. Neal McLain ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 19:22:36 -0600 From: Fritz Whittington Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Our Weekend Auto Trip TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response on or about 2004-11-01 09:02 to Tim@Backhome.org by whipping out a trusty #2 pencil: > Patrick Townson wrote: >> Over this Halloweeen holiday weekend, I took a ride with some friends >> through the countryside, and made a little movie for you to see. > Great camera work. You must have a huge film crew. > Really nice hills, too. What part of Kansas is that? > > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Me thinks maybe you missed the point > of the exercise. It was Halloween, after all. I don't honestly know > where the .mpeg clip came from; it was e-mailed to me a couple days > earlier as a joke by Lisa Minter. She identified it as 'a new guy > who I met when I was traveling to my grandparent's house last week.' > Identify it however you like, but be sure to tell the prospective > viewer to have their sound up loud and be watching closely when the > car comes out of the bushes. Can anyone read the language on that > notice on the screen at the very end? PAT] First screen: So wake yourself up like never before! Last screen: Coffee in convenient cans. Fritz Whittington "You need only two tools. WD-40 and duct tape. If it doesn't move and it should, use WD-40. If it moves and shouldn't, use the tape ..." [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Thank you for that translation, Fritz. What language was it in? PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 00:23:51 GMT From: andy janssen Subject: Re: VOIP and Telnet Organization: Shaw Residential Internet rshlain@hotmail.com wrote: > It is possible to have VOIP and be able to connect to machines that > have modems and use telnet? > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: If I understand it correctly, VOIP -- > or at least Vonage -- can do everything a telephone can do. PAT] I can't answer this, but I think I understand the question better ... Can you use a standard Telco modem over VoIP? What kind of speeds could you expect? 56k? SLower due to the inherant digital -> analog -> digital -> analog -> digital conversions? computer -> tel modem -> VoIP -> tel modem -> computer >> Hey! >> NEWS dosn't belong in email! ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 17:51:10 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Isaiah Beard wrote: >>> IF these images were accessed it would give criminals access to an >>> image of the customer's signature. Said criminal could then use a >>> laser printer with 640 dpi resolution to print checks that would be >>> indistinguishable from the photo check after a 240 dpi Scan!? >> I'm curious, is there a requirement that the bank which accepted the >> cheque store it for any period of time? > Quite the reverse actually. If they send the check along > electronically, then the original is destroyed. Interesting -- So if I say I wrote a different dollar value on the cheque, and the electronic copy isn't sufficient to provide proof one way or the other, does the transfer of funds get reversed? Nothing is fool-proof to a sufficiently talented fool. ------------------------------ From: David Clayton Subject: Re: When Phones Go Bad Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 15:21:31 +1100 Danny Burstein contributed the following: > In Marcus Didius Falco writes: > [ snip ] >> For most cell phone users, replacing a phone that's gone bad comes >> with an added cost in time and aggravation: pecking away at the keys >> of the new phone to reconstruct a mobile address book of often-used >> names and numbers. > Hence one of the beauties of the SIMcard method used on GSM (and a > handful of other) phones. All the info can be stored in the thumbnail > sized chip, and all you need to do is move it from the old phone to > the new one. And even better, you frequently "back up" your SIM card data to a PC, so in the event of losing the phone (with the SIM card in it), you can restore all of your valuable contact info into the replacement SIM card. Regards, David Clayton, e-mail: dcstar@XYZ.myrealbox.com Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. (Remove the "XYZ." to reply) Dilbert's words of wisdom #18: Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 01:28:47 EST From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Web Site Renovation Complete! I am very pleased to announce that the http://telecom-digest.org website has been completely rebuilt and is now on line for your reference. All the old files were kept around, of course, all 23 years of the back issues of the Digest, etc, but there is a shiny new face on it all, and I hope it is much easier to sort through and use. Please check it out and report any typographical errors, etc, I really hope you will enjoy it, and searching for articles in back issues, etc should now be a lot easier also. And this being the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November (that is an important distinction; voting can occur anytime between November 2 and November 8, but *never* on November 1) please go to your polling places when you wake up sometime Tuesday and vote for the Demopublicans or the Republicrats of your choice. As Mayor Daley would say, 'vote early, and often'! I would personally suggest you try out the Libertarian candidate for president, Mr. Badnarik; he is the only *real* alternative to the present system, but do as you wish, just go do it. And check out the rejuvinated telecom web site, http://telecom-digest.org and let me know how you like it. PAT ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #525 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Nov 2 18:46:58 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA2NkwX23367; Tue, 2 Nov 2004 18:46:58 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 18:46:58 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411022346.iA2NkwX23367@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 #526 TELECOM Digest Tue, 2 Nov 2004 18:45:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 526 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future (w_tom) Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future (John McHarry) Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future (kansasman) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (DevilsPGD) Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (Isaiah Beard) Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (Rick Merrill) Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal (BobGoudreau@nc.rr.com) Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal (J Kelly) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 00:57:56 -0500 From: w_tom Subject: Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future Lisa unfortunately describes short term solutions as if they were long term. Long before any business school spread sheet can measure innovation, the innovation is no longer innovative. List of companies destroyed by short term thinking -- ie management concentrating on marketing -- is long. Old style business schools taught that innovation was something that fell from the clouds or was a result of capital investment. Reality. Innovation requires capital. Too much capital can even destroy innovation. Capital never created innovation. Again innovation requires capital BUT capital does not create innovation. How long does it take to develop an innovative product? Four to ten years. Any b-school graduate should have been able to answer that without hesitation. The profits that Ford Motor finally created in 1990s had almost nothing to do with the work (or marketing) in 1990. Those 1990 profits were directly traceable to work done in 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, and 1986. Four to ten years to produce an innovative product -- even longer for the resulting profits to appear on bean counter spread sheets. Business school graduates in marketing and accounting are necessary. They are peripheral (support) functions - about 20 or 30% of the work. Unfortunately, such people are trained to think only they are source of success. The work they do today can appear on a spread sheet this year or next. That is misleading. Same thinking that nearly destroyed IBM, HP, Apple Computer, and is destroying AT&T, GM, and Kodak, and Xerox. Business school people make good employees in peripheral company operations -- accounting and marketing. But the profit comes from long term thinking -- things done 4 and many more years previous. Real profits come from innovation that business school graduates have a long history of undermining. If the CFO becomes CEO, then historically, innovation is stifled. Demonstrated repeatedly and consistently. In the meantime, cell phone technology did not happen instantly as implied. Its been ongoing since the 1960s. Each generation has been slowly picking at the land line business. Finally, a cell phone technology has emerged that does obsolete POTS landlines -- 3G cell phones. This latest cell phone finally does everything POTS phones do -- and more. No place did I say technology is instant. Furthermore your facts are too much based on yesterday's (static) prices rather than on the true cost of the service now and in the future. Again a classic business school mistake to see things in terms of spread sheets -- that report things 4 to 10 years previous rather than on current costs that will appear as prices in the years future. You cannot use costs as demonstrated to see the future. Because cell phones costs $40 per month means they will costs as much in four years? Furthermore, the typically land line now costs about $50 per month with minimal long distance usage, taxes, long distance access charges, etc. POTS line costs will not decrease. Cell phone costs will. Your business school analysis should have made that obvious. 3G phones have finally made POTS phones obsolete. Your first point -- if people only replace things when they wear out, then we all would still be using 486s. Classic error taught by some B-schools in the 1970s. Indeed, this machine is a 486-66 and it works just fine. So why did so many replace their 486s with Pentium 233s, then with Pentium II and Pentium III 500s, then with Gigahertz Pentiums? The 486s did not wear out. In industries that are more innovative, then products are replaced because they become too obsolete. In technologies with no innovation, then people do not dispose of equipment until it wears out. This is why bean counters loved to make cars that failed after 3 years -- most every 1970 MBA designed American car. In companies dominated by business school graduates -- IBM corporate that stifled their PC division -- then the company is doomed to be a loser. IBM PC business was founded by hiding the operation from IBM MBA types (Don Estridge). Once the PC business became so profitable, then those MBA types (Cannavino) conspired to control that business. Therefore drove IBM Boca Raton into the ground using business school concepts that stifled innovation. This example is repeated constantly in dying businesses. AT&T being another classic death. But to see the death, one must use product oriented thinking -- decades -- rather than business school thinking -- four year and less perspectives. Again, to respond to your 'second': somehow you think cell phones are instant technology. The cell phone has been in development since the 1960s. Those with 'dirt under fingernails' knew this. To your 'fourth': marketing is a necessary part of the business -- a peripheral part that must not dominate innovation. When marketing types became the top manager -- Young of HP, Akers and Cannavino at IBM, Spindler and Sculley at Apple, Roger Smith at GM, Henry Ford at Ford Motor, etc -- then innovation dies and the company sees the effect a decades+ later in spread sheets. Cancer created when marketing becomes more than a peripheral business function. In another example, you don't understand what Gerstner did to save IBM. IBM was foundering when he brought with him his business experts. For years, IBM did nothing. But in Jan (forgot the year) in the Wall Street Journal were the backgrounds of five people who were promoted from the ranks to be 'above' those earlier friends. Look at those five backgrounds. At least four were slam dunk examples of people who come from where the work gets done. Therefore IBM stopped calling the mainframe a dinosaur. Instead they rebuilt the entire business around the mainframe -- including support operations you have cited. Innovation was finally permitted. Therefore the mainframe began taking business from super computers. With redundant processing, the mainframe also cut into the mini-computer server business. Product oriented managers refocused on the main frame and its so many peripheral businesses. Gerstner's original MBA subordinates were replaced by those with product oriented backgrounds. That was the turn around at IBM after floundering in the first years that Gerstner arrived. I am trying to keep this short. But to understand what I have posted, one cannot take the simplistic analysis from b-school graduates. Even the Wall Street Journal summary that touches on this IBM story was multiple full pages inside. To see how product oriented thinking turned about IBM, one must be able to, for example, describe in technical detail fundamental differences between the pre-Gerstner IBM 390 and its innovative (rather than cost controlled) replacement. The devil is in that detail which is why those with technical degrees make far better managers than those with b-school education. B-school graduates routinely stifle innovation with spread sheet analysis. Two types of managers exist. Product oriented and finance oriented. Finance oriented actually think they can create innovation by throwing capital at it. If your b-school education is still teaching this, then your school still promotes an American version of communism. The B-school graduate is the key decision maker. Under communism, your roof does not leak until the top manager says so. In product oriented systems, the manager says a roof leaks when the occupant says it is leaking. In communism, everyone works for the boss. In product oriented companies, the boss works for employees. Fundamental difference between well managed verses communist companies. In the movie Apollo 13, who is the hero? Bean counters will often say the astronauts or flight director Gene Krantz. Reality: every hero has no name. This is how America works when it is productive. The management simply provides attitude and knowledge -- the strategic objective -- and the little people effectively solve problem after problem. The little people are empowered to be decision makers -- not top management. Worse, when b-school training says the manager is the problem solver, then we have communism -- centralized bureaucracy - only the trained manager can solve problems. This causes stifled innovation. Classic example of bean counter management. Every engineer said don't launch the Challenger. They could not find a single engineer to say launch. And so bean counters made a 'management decision' by not listening to engineers. Bean counter types explicitly demanded that "a management decision" be made -- because they could not think product oriented. That should have been 3rd degree murder. But too many are now brainwashed in business school concepts as to say it was an accident. It is an accident if the decision maker first had sufficient background to understand the concepts. But those who killed Challenger astronauts did so because using business school concepts (which also meet the definition of junk science reasoning) rather than good technical facts to make a decision. Those not qualified to make decisions rejected the advise of everyone who was qualified. That should be called manslaughter. They only did as they were taught in the business schools. Therefore seven died and we forgive them? Being MBA trained is power to know how the enemy thinks. Japanese call it "Made Being in America". Yes, some business school graduates do work as product oriented thinkers -- and therefore promote innovation. They use their MBA background to help drive off the anti-innovators. They fully appreciate Clayton Christensen's "Innovators Dilemma". One need only look at steel manufacturing companies (saved by an anti-innovation US president) to see the only reason for steel's continued demise. Too many business school graduates and therefore nobody could innovate. The anti-American steel companies USX (US Steel) and Bethlehem Steel still did not use electric arc furnaces some 40 years after the innovation was used by innovative (foreign) steel companies. Companies who used 'men of steel' rather than bean counters for managers. Please show me where the bean counters could justify electric arc furnaces? Instead, bean counters used MBA cost control mentality -- economy of scale. They made more obsolete blast furnaces -- just bigger. Patriotic foreign manufacturers provided US with steel because innovators innovate rather than cost control. You think AT&T was not static? They attempted how many different solutions justified by MBA concepts? They had no idea of how to put VoIP on cable. They bought cable companies based upon spread sheet analysis only to discover, after the fact, that entire cable company infrastructure was built with the wrong cable -- using cost controls to install wrong cable. For a third time, the entire cable network had to be replaced again. Any product oriented thinker could see that. But AT&T management is anti-innovative -- which means anti-American. AT&T managers did not even sufficient technical knowledge to even read the label on cable entering their own homes. AT&T did not have the capital to replace the entire network. So AT&T sold off those cable companies at a major loss. Was it a $500 million loss? You call that trying a new business? I call it classic MBA school management techniques where "a good manager can manage ANY business" ... into the ground. It gets more damning as we think more product oriented. AT&T did not comprehend packet switching concepts. Too complex. AT&T understood circuit switch technology. So they were going to provide phone service on cable using circuit switched technology! If your jaw did not drop, then your technical background is woefully insufficient. Obviously a more expensive technology with no future. But on MBA b-school educated spread sheets, circuit switched was a less 'risk adverse' technology. Classic b-school mentality which is why every new AT&T venture was flawed from the beginning. AT&T MBA trained managers never entered a new business venture with product facts. Therefore everyone failed. One need only read David Isenberger (www.isen.com), chief scientist in AT&T Bell Labs, to see how anti-innovative AT&T was even 10 and 20 years ago. Why? Robert Allen (AT&T president) was a fast tracker and Harvard Business School trained. Innovation at AT&T could not happen. Change cannot be measured on spread sheets until long after change has happened. AT&T has long been the classic example of static -- selling off businesses to remain solvent rather than innovate. AT&T is a dead company that survives only on finance games. AT&T is classic of what bean counters do to companies. The Economist said it best. No company in the history of free market economics has ever destroyed more shareholder value faster than what AT&T did to NCR. AT&T is dying because MBAs stifled innovation at AT&T for at least 25 years. The examples would be longer than this post. Only bean counter mentalities could not see this because many stifled innovations are instead blamed on straw men such as unions, unfair laws, unfair competition, under funded pension funds, etc. Why did AT&T long distance network crash across the country for one whole day? Why did they shut down NYC long distance and NYC airports on two different occasions? (Concorde had to make an emergency landing on a runway 500 feet too short because of but another AT&T network failure directly traceable to bean counter costs controls). Why did Robert Allen go before the press at 4 PM -- before failure reasons were even known - to blame unions? He was using classic business school reasoning. Blame everyone but top management. An enemy of business schools is management education that comes from product. W. E. Deming is an enemy of business schools. How did Ford Motor show profits in 1990? They eliminated the anti-innovation (therefore anti-American) bean counter Henry Ford. (Actually we the public did that by not buying American; instead buying on free market concepts such as Toyota and BMW.) Therefore Ford began scrapping their every anti America cars. First car designed by 'car-guys' in Ford since the 1965 Mustang? 1987 Ford Taurus. First car since 1965 designed by people who come from where the work gets done. Bean counters were demoted to jobs they do best - support the innovators. Cost controls were replaced with innovation - which is why new Fords on and after Taurus cost less to build. By replacing cost controls with innovation (Quality is Job One), Ford went from new bankruptcy to record profits in something under 20 years. Quality is Job One -- means W. E. Deming management principles replaced business school myths. People with 'dirt under their fingernails' replaced cost controlling bean counters. Cost controls make short term cost reductions and long term major cost increases. (Same principle proven by Iacocca in Chrysler.) Business school graduates only see those cost reductions many years after the fact -- long after innovation has reduced those costs. I come from where the work gets done. Have seen business school graduates stifle innovation routinely - and deny they were doing so. Why? They had short term perspectives (spread sheets) and could not see innovation, because innovation takes upwards of a decade. And then more years for such innovations to appear on spread sheets. Where companies are in trouble, then use a Deming concept to see why. 85% of all problems are directly traceable to top management. When management says there is plenty of blame to go around, then management is 100% responsible for the failures. In AT&T and other anti-innovative companies, top management routinely blamed anyone but management. Look at the background of that management. They are trained as MBAs or lawyers -- have no experience in the core business. No wonder innovation could not happen (Same reason why First Energy almost made a Three Mile Island event in Toledo, electric shocked people in swimming pools in Ocean County NJ, failed to provide electricity to Jersey shore boardwalk concessions on multiple, consecutive weekends including 4 July, and created the entire NE blackout.) They believed a b-school mantra -- a good manager can manage any business -- which means innovation is then stifled. It is not a 'longshot' when the man has 'dirt under his fingernails'. He has the experience and technical knowledge to know. B-school graduates who could not see same instead call that a 'longshot'. 'Longshot' without much hope in success is virtually everything AT&T tried -- because AT&T management is b-school trained. Their cable purchases at excessive price, reasons for nation wide and multiple NYC long distance blackouts, destroying the management concepts that once made the Bell Labs so successful, or what they did to Unix are but classic examples of anti-innovation thinking. But then AT&T management -- business school trainees -- will deny this. They instead blamed others. Classic bean counter thinking. Myopic thinking not to see fiber as the future for landline companies. In fact, if land line companies do not hurry (because they are 10 years late), their future will be radically diminished by the lesser technologies such as cable companies. If you don't think so, then please put up facts that demonstrate otherwise. Show us how business school thinking can see the future of technology - see the future by using spread sheet analysis. The future of landline companies is clear if one has 'dirt under the fingernails'. Please show us -- using specific product examples and b-school concepts -- where another technology would save the baby Bells. An outright challenge to bean counters. Show us another technology that could save the baby Bells from going down like AT&T. Lisa Hancock wrote: > w_tom wrote: >> Common mistake when predictions are based upon business school >> concepts rather than first learning the details. > While some of what you say is true, I must disagree with other > parts. Business school concepts definitely have their place. >> Third generation cell phone technology has finally made standard >> (POTS) phones obsolete. > "Technology" is not _instant_. Just because a new technology is > perfected does not mean other technologies are "obsolete". A lot of > technocrats are so enamoured with new stuff they fail to understand > the big picture. > First, it takes time to implement new technology. For example, a > great many people out there do not have cell phones nor wish to have > one. Others have them but use them only for emergencies and have > $15/month plans. Many people get something new only when their > existing machine wears out; not everyone is enamored with the "latest > and greatest". > Secondly, new technologies must mature. Things are improving, but > many cell phone users get cutoff in mid conversation. When compact > discs were first introduced, their sound and operation needed tweaking > to get widespread acceptance so serious listeners would replace their > vinyl. > Third, new technologies have a new cost that not all consumers are > willing -- nor should -- have to pay. A consumer perfectly happy with > POTS service should not have to pay the $40/month for cell phone > service. An occassional $15/month emergency-only cell phone user > likewise shouldn't be forced to upgrade. The computer manufacturers > finally learned that people weren't so ready to upgrade their PCs so > often. > Fourth, the implementation and marketing of technology is critical. > Dilbert might make fun of the marketing types, but they are necessary. > The genius of Edison was not in the light bulb, but rather a whole > power generation and distribution network to make the light bulbs work > and earn money from them. >> The baby Bells are not dominated by myopic MBA managers whose >> education literally destroys both innovation and what little remains >> of AT&T. AT&T management has a static perspective because they view >> from anti-innovative B-school concepts. If AT&T still ran the baby >> Bells, then Nokia's predictions would have merit. But baby Bells >> (about 10 years too late) suddenly realized that they too will go >> the way of the anti-innovation AT&T. Baby Bells are finally, after >> more than 50 years, rewiring their entire network. > Being an "MBA manager" is neither good nor bad in itself. Sure, one > could point to plenty of very successful businessmen who had an 8th > grade education, just as one could point to 3-pack-a-day smokers who > lived to be 105. But most business people make good use of skills > taught in business school. > I don't agree on AT&T being "static" at all. Their management tried > quite a few different avenues, they just didn't work out, it was not > for lack of trying. Guessing wrong does not make a company "myopic", > hindsight is always 20/20, foresight is not. Over history, many > 'wrong' business predictions were perfectly reasonable and logical at > the time they were made. > When a businessman takes a longshot and wins, people call him > "shrewd". If his longshot loses, people call him other less > complimentary things. We read about the success stories with great > fanfare, but not about the many more losers. > Baby Bells most certainly did NOT wait "50 years" to rewire their > networks. A lot of people believe -- wrongly -- that the phone > network at the time of divesture was all ancient. True, some of it > was, but a very great deal of it was state of the art for its day. > Bell Atlantic was 100% ESS after divesture, and shortly later was 100% > digital, just to give an example. Trunks between offices were > advanced high capacity. >> But don't expect mobiles to replace land line just as IBM found new >> purpose in their core businesses (once IBM replaced their MBAs with >> computer guys, then IBM rediscovered innovation meaning that a main >> frame is no longer a dinosaur). > While agree mobiles won't replace totally land lines, there are a > couple of errors here. What I expect is that mobile were supplement > land lines. A suburban family with teenagers that might have had two > or even three voice lines in the house may get by with a single line, > and use cell phones for the rest. > As to IBM, IBM did not go back to its "core business", nor did it > replace its MBAs with computer guys. Actually, IBM has reduced its > core business -- manufacturing and selling computers -- and wisely > supplemented it with consulting and service bureau work which was once > a small subsidiary. The "computer guys" didn't make this transition, > but rather an outsider, the former head of Nabisco (Gerstner sp?). I > don't know if he had an MBA or not, but I think he did. >> Devil is always in the details which means the manager must have 'dirt >> under his fingernails'. > That is true. >> Without a long detailed list of advantages and disadvantages for >> each technology combined with a list of future markets and >> innovations, then one can only make predictions like business school >> graduates and that BBC article. > Not true. Predicting the future, whether it be the tomorrow's weather > or markets for new technologies, is always a gamble. There are always > variables that are a guess, plus variables no one expects. >> These latter people routinely stifle innovation because they don't >> have education from where innovation happens. Spread sheets and >> marketing mentalities are important peripheral parts of business; >> but only with a short term perspective. > Without a "marketing mentality", innovation is worthless. Without > a good cost/pricing strategy, products cannot be manufacturered nor > services provided. Having technology without a way to get it in the > hands of customers is worthless. The Watson father/son didn't know > squat about any technology, but they knew marketing. The ENIAC-Univac > people were experts in technology, but didn't know squat about > marketing. It didn't take long for IBM, using its marketing skills, > to quickly surpass ENIAC-UNIVAC's way superior tech skills. >> To see the future of land lines with a long term perspective, one >> must apply knowledge and experience of the technology. > Yes and no. In the late 1970s, the "knowledge and experience" of > computers was using punch cards as an input medium. Note that when > more modern gear (ie key-to-disk, on-line terminals, PC-DOS) replaced > the punch card, they kept the principles -- 80 column screen, auto > numeric shift, 'drum card' field setup, etc. That's what the technies > were used to. > But the techies were wrong! It turned out that the future belonged to > something entirely new -- the GUI screens and Windows that had no > connection to the punch card style whatsoever. >> Any land line company that intends to be alive in 10 years will have >> replaced or duplicated their entire network in fiber -- and learned >> new products based upon the new demands of that technology. > Who knows if fibre will be dominant in ten years? > Keep in mind there's an excess today of fibre capacity; that means > some companies that built fibre networks are losing money from lack of > use. > Don't ask me why, but Picturephone service never caught on, while cell > phones cameras and text messaging are very popular with kids. > (Punching in text on a tiny phone keypad seems ludicrous, but they > love it.) >> Standard technologies potentially on the chopping block: faxes, >> portable phones, conventional dial up phones, international shortwave >> broadcasting, and maybe even conventional letters. > It takes an awful lot for a technology to become truly discontinued. > What usually happens is that an older technology remains in use, but > yields market share to newer technologies. They still make > typewriters for example, but most such work is done on computers now. > Further, older technologies may offer a backup. (Yes, there are some > exceptions). >> Any Baby Bell that uses the bean counter concepts of cost controls >> is doomed just like Western Union and AT&T. > "Beans" are basic to a business. If you don't count your beans, you > will go out of business. ------------------------------ From: John McHarry Subject: Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 22:41:53 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net Lisa Hancock wrote: OK, up to here: > Fourth, the implementation and marketing of technology is critical. > Dilbert might make fun of the marketing types, but they are necessary. > The genius of Edison was not in the light bulb, but rather a whole > power generation and distribution network to make the light bulbs work > and earn money from them. I think the generation and distribution network was where he blew it. He championed relatively low voltage DC over Tesla's AC system, which won out. Of course, the Swan/Edison incandescent light doesn't much care. ------------------------------ From: dog4dogg@yahoo.com (kansasman) Subject: Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future Date: 1 Nov 2004 14:23:27 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com John Levine wrote in message news:: >> What do land lines provide? Security. Predictable service. Almost >> unlimited bandwidth. ... Virtually every building in these towns >> are being rewired with direct fiber optic cables -- from CO to every >> building. That means VoIP, massive data transfers, security, the >> reliability not provided, yet, by cell phones, and a host of other >> yet to be discovered features. > Fiber has bandwidth, but unlike copper, it can't power the phones. An > important parts of the reliability of POTS is that the phones are > powered from the phone line, so you don't depend on the power company > or batteries. > John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 330 5711 > johnl@iecc.com, Mayor, http://johnlevine.com, > Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail That is very true, but in my house, we only keep one POTS phone (no batteries, local service) near the bed, and then rely on SunRocket VoIP the rest of the time. We are saving so much more money by not paying for regional and national phone plans, and we do not have to wait until 5 or 7p.m. when the rates go down. We also do not have to wait until 8p.m. when our cell calls are free. It just means more flexibility and organization. I love that my VoIP calls and e-mail all come to one centralized place. ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 01:21:19 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com In message Neal McLain wrote: >> As for the channel 4 issue, my guess as to why Cable One isn't using >> it now is that they used to use it for a premium channel such as HBO >> using negative traps (which remove the signal of a given channel or >> group of adjacent channels), and they moved HBO to another analog >> channel or to digital and left channel 4 idle because reusing it for >> something else would require visiting the homes of all current >> customers who don't have HBO to remove traps ... > Good point. I've known this to happen in other cable systems as well. > However, I still think that in the specific case at hand, the > Coffeyville TV station was probably the primary reason for not using > cable channel 4. Given that channel 4 is subject to interference from > a television station (even a weak one like W04EJ), it seems unlikely > that the cable company would have used that channel for an important > service like HBO or Showtime. Could it be that there wasn't a conflict at that time? Channel 4 isn't used for anything important here, just text news last time I checked, but the picture is clear and sharp. HAM AND EGGS: A day's work for a chicken; A lifetime commitment for a pig ------------------------------ From: Isaiah Beard Subject: Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 10:57:16 -0500 DevilsPGD wrote: >> Quite the reverse actually. If they send the check along >> electronically, then the original is destroyed. > Interesting -- So if I say I wrote a different dollar value on the > cheque, and the electronic copy isn't sufficient to provide proof one > way or the other, does the transfer of funds get reversed? Not sure I understand. The digital copy is going to be an electronic check image (similar in nature to what you get in online banking tools today). Basically a scanned black and white copy of the check you wrote. Do you mean what would happen if the check image wasn't of sufficient quality to be readable? I do know that the new law offers provisions where a bank must credit funds while a dispute and investigation are pending. And I would guess that if the image isn't usable or clear enough to figure out what happened, they would treat the situation as if a physical check had somehow been mutilated beyond recognition in transit (does anyone know how banks handle such a situation? I can imagine it has to have happened at somepoint). > Nothing is fool-proof to a sufficiently talented fool. I agree. It's going to be interesting. I have a check card and occasionally use electronic bill payment, but I used to prefer sending a check out in the mail to pay bills. Not because of float, but because I liked the idea that a physical, tangible paper copy of my payment was available, as well as a physical endorsement acknowledging receipt of payment on the same piece of paper, in case there was ever any dispute. Now, there's no guarantee of even that. So I guess I'll be using my Visa check card for bill payments for a while, since it claims zero liability in disputes. At least that'll be the case for a few months, until any bugs with the new check clearing system is ironed out. E-mail fudged to thwart spammers. Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply. ------------------------------ From: Rick Merrill Subject: Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Organization: Comcast Online Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 17:50:29 GMT DevilsPGD wrote: > Isaiah Beard wrote: >>>> IF these images were accessed it would give criminals access to an >>>> image of the customer's signature. Said criminal could then use a >>>> laser printer with 640 dpi resolution to print checks that would be >>>> indistinguishable from the photo check after a 240 dpi Scan!? >>> I'm curious, is there a requirement that the bank which accepted the >>> cheque store it for any period of time? >> Quite the reverse actually. If they send the check along >> electronically, then the original is destroyed. > Interesting -- So if I say I wrote a different dollar value on the > cheque, and the electronic copy isn't sufficient to provide proof one > way or the other, does the transfer of funds get reversed? Hopefully you have your record (or write once) copy. The thing is, would you notice if the check was changed from 10 to 100$? Many people do not check that closely. - RM ------------------------------ From: BobGoudreau@withheld on request Subject: Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 11:14:50 -0500 [Please remove my email address. Steve Sobol wrote: > Lisa Hancock wrote: >> I know election phone calls are legal. >> However, I think pre-recorded phone calls, of any kind, should be >> illegal. > Me too. Not me. I actually find the prerecorded announcement calls that we choose to receive weekly from my kids' schools to be useful. I hope that you didn't literally mean "pre-recorded phone calls, of any kind", since there are plenty of cases where people actually WANT to receive such calls and make arrangements to do so. Perhaps you actually meant "UNSOLICITED pre-recorded phone calls, of any kind". Even then (and leaving aside the constitutional issues of political speech raised by campaign calls) it's not completely black and white, since I can envision various emergency scenarios (storm evacuation, water contamination, armed-and-dangerous suspect at large, etc) where public safety might be aided via mass robo-calls to the affected areas. Bob Goudreau Cary, NC ------------------------------ From: J Kelly Subject: Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 13:28:08 -0600 Organization: http://newsguy.com Reply-To: jkelly@newsguy.com On Mon, 01 Nov 2004 18:06:12 -0600, J Kelly wrote: > On 31 Oct 2004 19:43:19 -0800, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) > wrote: >> In this election season, I have been BOMBARDED with pre-recorded phone >> calls pitching various candidates, flooding my answering machine. >> I know election phone calls are legal. >> However, I think pre-recorded phone calls, of any kind, should be >> illegal. >> The constant ringing of the phone this year was terribly annoying. >> If it had been last year, it would've been devastating. Last year at >> this time I was caring for a seriously ill person and was ill myself. >> I was in frequent touch with doctors, phamarcies, nurses, and >> families. I had to keep the phone open and answer all calls. >> To a healthy person, the constant ringing was terribly annoying. I >> would've gone out of my mind last year. >> When you're in bad pain, a ringing telephone is not a pleasant thing. >> BTW, I also received several live calls urging a deceased member of >> family to go vote, even though that person was removed from the >> election rolls quite some time ago. [In hindsight I wish I requested >> they come and assist that person to the polls.] >> When I go to the polls Tuesday, I will talk to the politicians (the >> people who stand outside and give out leaflets). I will ask them for >> their home phone numbers, but I have a funny feeling they, for some >> strange reason, won't give them to me. > I wish they would send valid Caller ID also. I get a LOT of calls > from "Dir Asst Iowa" at 515-555-4143. Almost all of them are the > Governors office begging me to please vote for Democrats. Also had at > least 20 calls from 000-000-0000 and 10 or so from 111-111-1111. > One guy did send valid CID, and it was his home phone number. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The poor devil; probably just a hapless > volunteer working for some candidate he likes; but refreshing to see, > wasn't it? Makes you feel like voting for his candidate. PAT] Pat, it was the CANDIDATES home number. I called to bitch at them to stop calling me and I get the families answering machine at home! I hung up figuring if he has the balls to put in his actual home number, than I'll let him call and tele-spam me. I did actually vote for him even though he is in the 'wrong' party. ------------------------------ 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #526 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Nov 2 19:37:41 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA30bfu24192; Tue, 2 Nov 2004 19:37:41 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 19:37:41 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411030037.iA30bfu24192@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 #527 TELECOM Digest Tue, 2 Nov 2004 19:38:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 527 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson FCC: Forum Will Examine Impact of VoIP, New Services (Lisa Minter) Vonage: Recipe For Success? (Lisa Minter) Can an NEC IPK 192 Report DID to CallAnalyst? (Dave Rupp) Any News on the Feds v. Norvergence? (Satchel Paige) Re: Pre-recorded Phone Should be Illegal (John Mayson) Re: How to Make The Right Call On Cell Plans (CharlesH) Re: Semiconductors | The End of Moore's Law? (w_tom) The Global Way (No-Charge E-book Edition for Students) (The Global Way) The Remodeled Archives Web Site (Jeffrey Mattox) Re: Last Laugh! Our Weekend Auto Trip (The Wondrous One) Re: Last Laugh! Our Weekend Auto Trip (Fritz Whittington) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 13:08:45 -0500 Subject: FCC: Forum Will Examine Impact of VoIP, New Services on Numbering http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-253829A1.pdf NEWS MEDIA CONTACT: Mark Wigfield, 202-418-0253 Email: mark.wigfield@fcc.gov FCC's WIRELINE COMPETITION BUREAU HOSTS NUMBERING SYMPOSIUM Forum Will Examine Impact of VoIP, New Services on Numbering System Washington, D.C. the impact of emerging technologies on the nation's telephone numbering system will be explored in a symposium to be hosted on Thursday, Nov. 4 by the FCC's Wireline Competition Bureau. In the face of increased demand for numbers for cell phones, fax machines and new local competitors, the FCC since 2000 has implemented policies designed to extend the life of the numbering system. By working with state commissions and the telecommunications industry, the FCC substantially increased the estimated life of the system, known as the North American Numbering Plan. But emerging new technologies such as Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, raise new demand for numbers and new challenges. Among those challenges are 'portable' VoIP services that use the same number no matter where the customer is located geographically. The symposium is entitled 'The Future of Numbering: Will New Technologies, Innovations and Services Affect Number Administration and Optimization.; Questions for the panels can be e-mailed in advance or during the symposium to FutureOfNumbering@fcc.gov. When: Thursday, Nov. 4, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Where: FCC Headquarters, 445 12th St. SW, Commission Meeting Room. Moderators: Robert Atkinson, Chairman of the North American Numbering Council (NANC), and Sanford Williams, FCC, designated federal officer to the NANC. Panels: Status of the North American Numbering Plan (NANP), with John Manning, NANP administrator and Amy Putnam, Pooling Administrator. Is there a likelihood of exhausting numbers under the NANP in the foreseeable future? John Manning and Amy Putnam. New number sources and substitutes for NANP numbers, with Scott Marcus, FCC Office of Strategic Planning. New technologies/services that may require numbering resources, with Mike Altschul, Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association; Penn Pfautz, AT&T; Hank Hultquist, SBC, and Todd Daubert, VON Coalition. Numbering resource optimization, with Adam Newman, Telcordia; Ken Havens, ATIS Industry Numbering Committee; Elliott Smith, Commissioner, Iowa Utilities Board; Helen Mickiewicz, California Public Utilities Commission, and David Bench, Nortel Networks. -FCC- News about the Federal Communications Commission can also be found on the Commission's web site, www.fcc.gov. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 13:33:28 -0500 Subject: Vonage: Recipe For Success? Jack Decker's Note: Although this article deals with Vonage specifically, it talks about future trends and the possible future direction of VoIP regulation, things that would be applicable to all VoIP providers. I tend to avoid sending out "puff pieces", that is, articles that are thinly-disguised promotions from a company's product that don't say anything we haven't heard before, but this article raises some interesting issues that I suspect are of interest to everyone that has an interest in VoIP. I would simply note that although Vonage may be the best-known VoIP company, it may not offer the best value for all customers. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/02/vonage_voip/ Vonage: Recipe For Success? By Faultline Published Tuesday 2nd November 2004 11:05 GMT Analysis say 'Vonage' to anyone in the communications industry and they say: "Oh the VoIP people." Ask if they'll make it, and you may get responses like, "well the RBOCs hate them and they have hundreds of lookalike competitors." The salvation of Vonage is that when you ask anyone to name one of these 20 or 30 start ups that have copied the Vonage model, they usually hesitate, stammer and go to look them up. Perhaps being first into a revolutionary market, even if you don't have much in the way of breakthrough technology, may well be enough. But the headline numbers say everything about the company that virtually invented paid consumer VoIP services across America. In 2002, the year it launched, it acquired just 7,500 customers. A year later it had 85,000. Now it boasts 300,000 accounts, each paying roughly $30 a month, which makes its run rate for revenue around $108m for a rolling 12 month period. With 600 staff that only gives them a revenue per employee of 180,000, pretty low for a technology company, but it is partly explained because it is currently ramping revenues. It is also ramping staff and said this week it will add 600 more employees between now and Q1 2005. Full story at: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/02/vonage_voip/ ------------------------------ From: a0157202@yahoo.com (Dave Rupp) Subject: Can an NEC IPK 192 Report DID to CallAnalyst? Date: 2 Nov 2004 08:01:02 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com We have an NEC Electra Elite IPK 192 with some card, sorry I don't know more, which connects via a serial cable to a PC running CallAnalyst, http://www.triviumsys.com. We got the card + s/w so we could do DID reporting, but now our phone provider tells us the NEC doesn't report the "called number". Does anyone have a URL or information on whether or not this key system can provide this? Even if I need a different card(or 2) in the NEC I'm open. TIA, Dave ------------------------------ From: dor@writeme.com (Satchel Paige) Subject: Any News on the Feds v. Norvergence? Date: 2 Nov 2004 09:49:20 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com I am just trying to find out any information on what the Federal government or state governments are doing about Norvergence, the Salzano brothers and other Norvergence officers. Although my opinion is that the leasing companies were working along with Norvergence, at this point I just want to know about criminal investigations and proceedings into Norvergence's officers. Anyone with information please inform. ------------------------------ From: John Mayson Subject: Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 00:19:50 GMT Organization: Road Runner High Speed Online http://www.rr.com > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: One real, actual problem has been with > the advance voting allowed in so many states. Florida is a good > example. A gazillion old people live in Florida and quite a few of > them have already voted. How the question is you voted last week, then > you die yesterday or today (as many folks have already done; died, I > mean.) Do you count the votes or not? Everywhere has a law saying In Texas the law is clear. Your vote counts. It's no different than if you dropped dead immediately after voting on Election Day. Once you've cast your ballot, it's cast. John Mayson Austin, Texas, USA ------------------------------ From: hoch@exemplary.invalid (CharlesH) Subject: Re: How to Make The Right Call On Cell Plans Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 20:17:59 GMT In article , Marcus Didius Falco wrote: > Analog is what gave cell phones a bad name: It kills a phone's > battery life, sounds lousy and will run up massive roaming charges. Someone else suckered into the analog = roaming model spread by SprintPCS. SprintPCS is itself all-digital. Until recently, they disabled digital roaming on cellular systems, such as Verizon Wireless, forcing the phone to use the cellular provider's analog service, even if that provider had compatible digital service. So on SprintPCS, if you were digital, you were on SprintPCS; if you were analog, you were roaming (and paying for it). But in reality, analog has NO CONNECTION to roaming charges. It all depends on the roaming agreements between your provider and the provider you are roaming on, and the specifics of your rate plan, not the modulation scheme. As a Verizon Wireless customer, there are quite a few analog roaming providers included in my rate plan, and quite a few digital providers who are not. Similarly if you lose the digital coverage on a cellular provider and fall back to their analog system; if your call was included when you were using digital, it still will be if you fall back to that provider's analog service. And concerning sound quality, you wouldn't believe the number of people on the cellular Usenet groups who complain about the artificial sound of digital service and sing the praises of the natural-sounding analog service. And if the signal gets weak, analog gets static, and digital has drop-outs; why is one better than the other in this respect? There are a lot of good reasons to use digital, but roaming costs and sound quality are not among them. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 01:22:09 -0500 From: w_tom Subject: Re: Semiconductors | The end of Moore's law? | Intel has a serious problem. Notice the backgrounds of Noyce, Moore, and Grove. Compare that to Barrett's background. Same lesson is provided by Hewlett Packard. Dave Packard literally had to return to HP to rescue the company from John Young's management. Again, notice Young's background. Apple Computer was originally created by computer guys. When Apple was on the verge of a demise, well, what were the backgrounds of Sculley and Spindler who took them there -- and how did the entire Apple board of directors (BoDs) change? For that matter, what were the words shouted by stockholders at the BoDs before those BoDs would change their mind -- and fire Spindler. These are damning facts. To find failure, start with the background of top management. Trend is not limited to the computer industry. First Energy of Ohio singlehandedly created the 14 Aug 2003 NorthEast blackout -- a fact that virtually no one seems to know. Again the background of Anthony Alexander, his entire corporate staff, and everyone in the First Energy BoD. Again, management with no background nor knowledge of the core business nor of any related industry. This is simply part of the answer to where Intel is going. There exists a serious technical problem inside Intel in which the management is aggravating. The Economist magazine articles did provide a warning for layman but not enough information to understand why. Serious problems exist for Intel. But to understand why, one must first have 'dirt under the fingernails' and not a stockbroker's bean counter perspective. Why did IBM literally flirt with bankruptcy only to come back decades later so strong? If one can answer that question, then one is ready to see where Intel may or may not be going. Why are Xerox and AT&T all but bankrupt. To understand why, one must literally start the story in the 1970s. Again, the lessons of these stories might be applicable to Intel. Intel has a problem - and it is not AMD. Marcus Didius Falco wrote: > http://economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=3D3321802 > http://economist.com/printedition/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3D3321802 > Semiconductors > What Intel's latest stumble means for the chip industry's rule of thumb. > I'm so sorry, says Barrett > IT IS not often that the chief executive of one of the world's > biggest companies gets down on one knee and begs for forgiveness. > Yet that is what > Craig Barrett of Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, did this week > at an industry conference in Florida. He was only joking, of > course. But his apology for Intel's decision to cancel the next > version of its flagship Pentium 4 chip highlights the latest in a > series of stumbles by the company, which has once again been forced > to follow the lead of its much smaller but increasingly feisty > competitor, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). > At issue is the best approach to making faster chips. For years, Intel > has steadily increased the clock speed of its processors, the fastest > of which now run at 3.4GHz, or 3.4 billion ticks per second. But it > has now fallen victim to the law of diminishing returns. Although > boosting the clock speed increases performance, it also increases the > power consumption of the chip and the need for cooling. (Some of the > very high-speed PCs used by serious gamers are even water-cooled.) > So, rather than concentrating on clock speed, Intel has decided to > boost the performance of future chips in other ways, such as > increasing the amount of on-board cache memory and, in the coming > years, switching its chips to a multi-core design. This means putting > multiple cores in effect, complete processors into a single > chip. These cores can run more slowly, consume less power and > generate less heat, while collectively providing more processing > power than a single core. Multi-core is a way to achieve additional > performance without turning up clock rates, says Dean McCarron, an > industry analyst at Mercury Research. This idea is not new: IBM, > Sun and Hewlett-Packard already sell high-end computers powered by > their own multi-core chips. But it is only recently that PC software > has been able to exploit multiple processors. > Intel's decision to de-emphasise clock speeds is just the latest > example of how the company has reluctantly ended up following where > AMD has previously= led. (Earlier this year, AMD forced Intel to make > a U-turn in its=20 64-bit-chip strategy.) AMD has long argued that > there is more to=20 performance than clock speed, and gives its chips > model numbers giving some= idea of their power. Its new Athlon 64 > 4000+ chip, for example, announced=20 this week, runs at 2.4GHz, but > its name implies rough equivalence with a w4GHz Intel chip. Intel is > now adopting similar model numbers. > Having abandoned its obsession with raw speed, Intel is embracing the > multi-core approach with great enthusiasm. Paul Otellini, Intel's > number two, who is expected to take over from Mr Barrett next May, > said last month that he expects 40% of desktop chips sold, and 80% of > server chips, to be multi-core by the end of 2006. The switch to > multi-core is, he says, a sea change in computing and a key inflection > point for the industry . > What does all this mean for Moore's law, the rule of thumb coined by > Gordon Moore, Intel's co-founder, which states that the amount of > computing power available at a given price doubles every 18 months? > For most people, Moore's law manifests itself as a steady increase in > clock speed from one year to the next. The cancellation of the 4GHz > version of the Pentium is Intel's clearest admission yet that clock > speed is no longer the best gauge of processor performance: > henceforth, it will increasingly take a back seat to other > metrics. But the law itself, the death of which has been announced > many times, will live on. Mr Barrett insisted this week that it would > continue to apply for at least another 10-15 years. That is because > multi-core designs mean chips' performance can continue to increase > even if the formerly much-trumpeted clock speed does not. ------------------------------ Reply-To: info@theglobalway.net From: The Global Way e-book Subject: The Global Way (No-Charge E-book Edition for Students) Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 03:42:01 -0800 Organization: Global Way Development Center An on-line preview of the complete book "The Global Way" is being offered at no charge to university and college students prior to its hardbound first edition release in the Spring of 2005. Here's why: The total number of readers who log on to the book site will help the publisher determine the initial quantity of books to print. You may read "The Global Way" either on-line or print it out from the following site**: http://www.theglobalway.net/The%20Global%20Way%20Internet%209.28.04.pdf You may read more about the evolution of "The Global Way" and its author on the following site**: http://www.theglobalway.net/ Feedback? Reply to this email and be sure to enter "Global" in the subject line. Many thanks. Have a good read! **copy-paste the site address in your browser's ADDRESS BAR ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 01:04:42 -0600 From: Jeffrey Mattox Subject: The Remodeled Telecom Web Site Pat: I'm glad I'm able to help. I hope the front page will be more useful now and visitors will say longer. We'll see -- the Google ads will help keep score. PAT then asked: > Do you want any mention at all of your work in the next issue of the > Digest? Name okay; but no email address. Jeff [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I wish to publicly say 'thanks' to Jeff Mattox for his work on the *new* Telecom Digest & Archives web site. I am sorry the net in general is so miserable these days that Jeff does not want his address published here; who can blame him in view of the amount of trash the spammers and others send around. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 10:26:27 -0600 From: The Wondrous One Reply-To: The Wondrous One Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Our Weekend Auto Trip The video clip is from an ad campaign in that started in Germany but now there are US-English versions. http://www.k-fee.com/de/index_center.html http://www.k-fee.com/en/index_center.html In my opionion, the wording of the English-language versions has been altered from the original German, probably for cultural and marketing reasons. My personal bent on the translation of the clip posted is: So wach (so awake) warst (were) du (you) noch nie (not ever) :==: You've never been so awake. Kafee in hohen Dosen :==: Coffee in tall cans. {TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Thanks for that further explanation, and I hope it helped make a nicer Halloween for you also. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 15:05:41 -0600 From: Fritz Whittington Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Our Weekend Auto Trip On or about 2004-11-01 19:22, Fritz Whittington whipped out a trusty #2 pencil and scribbled: > TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response on or about 2004-11-01 09:02 > to Tim@Backhome.org by whipping out a trusty #2 pencil: >> Patrick Townson wrote: >>> Over this Halloweeen holiday weekend, I took a ride with some friends >>> through the countryside, and made a little movie for you to see. >> Great camera work. You must have a huge film crew. >> Really nice hills, too. What part of Kansas is that? >> >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Me thinks maybe you missed the point >> of the exercise. It was Halloween, after all. I don't honestly know >> where the .mpeg clip came from; it was e-mailed to me a couple days >> earlier as a joke by Lisa Minter. She identified it as 'a new guy >> who I met when I was traveling to my grandparent's house last week.' >> Identify it however you like, but be sure to tell the prospective >> viewer to have their sound up loud and be watching closely when the >> car comes out of the bushes. Can anyone read the language on that >> notice on the screen at the very end? PAT] > First screen: So wake yourself up like never before! > Last screen: Coffee in convenient cans. > Fritz Whittington > "You need only two tools. WD-40 and duct tape. If it doesn't move and > it should, use WD-40. If it moves and shouldn't, use the tape ..." > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Thank you for that translation, Fritz. > What language was it in? PAT] Sorry. Obvious to me, it's German. Fritz Whittington Let each man exercise the art he knows. (Aristophanes, Wasps, 422 B.C.) ------------------------------ 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #527 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Nov 3 11:28:47 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA3GSlP02856; Wed, 3 Nov 2004 11:28:47 -0500 (EST) Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2004 11:28:47 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411031628.iA3GSlP02856@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 #528 TELECOM Digest Wed, 3 Nov 2004 11:29:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 528 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Lever Voting Machines - What's Wrong? (Lisa Hancock) ENUM LLC - What's it All About? (George Bush) Cut-Through Connection (Ariel Burbaickij) Playing out DTMF Tone in a Dialogic Channel (Ruchit Garg) Vonage No Longer Shipping Linksys PAP2 (Dave) Nextel and Verizon Settle Legal Disputes (Monty Solomon) Re: Can a NEC IPK 192 Report DID to CallAnalyst (Justin Time) Re: How to Make the Right Call on Cell Plans (Lisa Hancock) Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (DevilsPGD) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (Neal McLain) Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal (Steve Sobol) Re: Web Site Renovation Complete! (Charles 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: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Lever Voting Machines - What's Wrong? Date: 2 Nov 2004 19:47:13 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com My county uses "lever" voting machines, which are wholly mechanical. You simply push a lever for each desired candidate and when you open the curtain (a big lever) the votes are recorded on counters. The machines contain interlockings so you can only vote for the prescribed number of candidates for an office. That's usually one, but some offices you vote for three of five candidates (ie town councils). I understand some newer machines have no such protection and such overvotes ended up wasting a ballot. Another advtg is that you enter the machine with an open curtain, pull a master lever to close it and open the machine to accept your votes, then pull the master again to record your final votes and open the curtain. The curtains are large and fully enclosed -- it appears that modern electronic machines have very tiny curtains or just a small divider, limiting voter privacy. Yet I understand these machines are very old and not made anymore. Other counties went to punch cards and we know about their problems. Many counties are going electronic but sometimes those machines fail. Is there a reason mechanical machines are so out of favor? Sure, they would require maintenance and setup and there is a cost to that, but that is only twice a year. If the machines were in production, costs would be lower. A modern generation would probably have newer mechanical engineering and lighter better wearing gears. Does anyone know anything about the "Shoup" or "Jamestown" voting machine companies? They made the machines. (Some models even had electric curtains, where you flipped a switch and a motor closed the curtain.) [public replies please} [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: In Chicago, many years ago we had those mechanical things, where one large lever closed and opened the curtains and you could not vote without that lever to close the curtains and the vote(s) was cast when the lever opened the curtains. There were a few 'medium size' levers inside on the panel (for 'straight ticket' voting) and many smaller levers for individual candidate voting. And when you approached the polling place (as close as they could get *without* blocking the door and at least 100 feet away [to avoid any charges of 'electioneering'] which is illegal) someone would try to shove a piece of paper in your hand advising you to 'pull lever X' (or whichever lever was assigned) to vote a 'straight Democratic ticket'. 'Straight' meant that you wanted to cast a ballot exclusively for all the Democratic candidates. I assume the medium size lever at the start of each row had the effect of mechanically pulling all the smaller levers which were behind it on that row. It was **so refreshing** to go vote yesterday and not have a dozen or more politicians standing in front of the door trying to stuff papers in your hand as you were trying to walk in. The only thing is, here in Independence, we vote on large sheets of paper using a special type of soft lead pencil where we have to totally fill in an oval circle next to the candidate's name and political affilitation. The other thing was where we used to go to vote in our ward/precinct at the SEK senior citizen place down the street from my house, yesterday they have *five* precincts all voting in one place in five separate areas of a large basement room in Memorial Hall downtown. I saw my 'ladies (the judges and clerk of election) for my precinct' over at one table in one area and went over to them, as signs everywhere told people where to find their precinct. Apparerently the government got after the city and told them all polling places had to be more handi- capped accessible, so they had to move out of SEK Senior Citizens. At first we got a letter in the mail from the county clerk saying our new polling place was in the basement of the County Detention Center (the 'jailhouse'), which is theoretically more accessible (no stairs, entirely at ground level) but further for *me* to have to walk. Then Charlotte Scott (county clerk) sent a second letter a few days later saying 'due to scheduling conflicts we have to move you again, this time to Memorial Hall, in the basement.' Not even in our precinct, (nor anywhere close to it) she said they would have put us in the hall at Epiphany Church (which is very close to me) 'except we already have a precinct voting in there, no room for a second precinct.' We have four wards in Independence, two precincts each ward, and five of the eight precincts in total had to go to Memorial Hall basement to vote, all the way downtown. But having the paper ballots which are optically scanned (assuming you correctly filled in the oval with your special lead pencil which the judge gave you) seemed like a good way. We went into little wooden stalls with curtains on the front of them which we pulled open or closed by hand, (I have always thought they were sort of flimsy; I joked once with the judge and told her a strong wind would blow them over) and our ballots went in metal containers which covered up the places where we had put marks. When we exited our little stalls, with the paper in the metal container we handed them back to one of the judges who slipped it into the voting box *in the metal container*. The paper fell out into the box then the metal holding container was taken back for someone else to use. When the judge put your ballot in the larger container there, then she picked a little sticker from a sheet of same saying "I voted today in Independence, have you voted yet?" with a little flag printed on it, and stuck it on your shirt or wherever. It was *so refreshing* not to be bombarded with phone calls and/or people in front of the election places stuffing literature at you, nor were there any police officers hanging around to maintain order, as you used to see in Chicago all the time years ago, but like Chicago, the saloons had to stay closed all day, and were allowed to open at 7 PM, after the voting had concluded. I stopped downtown on my way back home for a sandwhich (and I had hoped, a beer) but the server said 'no alcholic drinks of any kind allowed under law today until after election is finished, but I can get you a coke if you want', and the bar in the center of the room was totally abandoned. PAT] ------------------------------ From: macj201@netscape.net (george bush) Subject: ENUM LLC - What's It All About ? Date: 3 Nov 2004 01:15:24 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Well, I don't get it. What's the idea behind Godaddy linking up with all these carriers to for enum llc ? I thought enum was all about transposing the digits in a phone number, inserting full stops and forming a domain name (and vice versa) by following an algorithm. So what's the point of forming a body who apparently will go to tender to find someone to provide some form of 'directory' ? Surely, once enum is agreed, it's simply a question of a simple, real time translation ? Is this just a vehicle to help someone mop up all the revenues from the millions and millions of domain name registrations ? ------------------------------ From: ariel.burbaickij@gmail.com (Ariel Burbaickij) Subject: Cut-Through Connection Date: 3 Nov 2004 03:52:48 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hello dear newsgroup participants, Could someone explain to me what does the term "cut-through connection" mean? Are there several meanings? With Best Regards, Ariel Burbaickij ------------------------------ From: ruchitgarg@yahoo.com (Ruchit Garg) Subject: Playing Out DTMF Tone in a Dialogic Channel Date: 3 Nov 2004 04:20:01 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hi all, I want to play DTMF tone to a phone line opened by my dialogic card. How can I achieve this? Regards, ruchit ------------------------------ From: davidf@popmail.com (Dave) Subject: Vonage no Longer Shipping Linksys PAP2 Date: 2 Nov 2004 16:56:40 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Anyone else heard Vonage is no longer shipping the PAP2 due to "an excessive amount of problems and returns"? That's the exact information I got from a great tech support rep at Vonage who tried getting a PAP2 sent to me after I was default shipped the Linksys RT31PT. He called the warehouse and was told they have PAP2 on hand but they are not permitted to ship them due to all the problems. One thing the rep told me is buzzing on calls when using the PAP2. I use my Vonage as a fax line, so I made a regular "voice" call and sure enough, as soon as I dialed my first digit I hear a hum/buzz. The PAP2 was great because it was so small. Easy to throw in a bag to travel. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2004 08:57:02 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Nextel and Verizon Settle Legal Disputes By BRUCE MEYERSON AP Business Writer NEW YORK (AP) -- Nextel Communications Inc. and Verizon Wireless unexpectedly resolved a heated dispute Tuesday over a federal proposal to clear up interference between cell phones and emergency response radios by moving Nextel's signals to a more valuable band of spectrum. In exchange for Verizon dropping its opposition to the spectrum proposal, Nextel is withdrawing its claim of trademark rights for the phrase "Push To Talk" and the word "push" to describe the popular walkie-talkie service which Nextel introduced to cell phones and which Verizon and other rivals now offer. The agreement announced Tuesday ends a very public argument in which each company nastily accused the other of putting business interests ahead of public safety concerns _ often invoking memories of Sept. 11 and the need for reliable emergency communications as an issue being exploited or ignored by the other side. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44706756 ------------------------------ From: a_user2000@yahoo.com (Justin Time) Subject: Re: Can an NEC IPK 192 Report DID to CallAnalyst? Date: 3 Nov 2004 06:36:31 -0800 a0157202@yahoo.com (Dave Rupp) wrote in message news:: > We have an NEC Electra Elite IPK 192 with some card, sorry I don't > know more, which connects via a serial cable to a PC running > CallAnalyst, http://www.triviumsys.com. We got the card + s/w so we > could do DID reporting, but now our phone provider tells us the NEC > doesn't report the "called number". Does anyone have a URL or > information on whether or not this key system can provide this? Even > if I need a different card(or 2) in the NEC I'm open. > TIA, > Dave If by phone provider you are referring to your dealer, then what they are telling you is probably correct. If you want additional opinions, I would suggest you join the NEAX User Group. Their website is: http://www.neaxug.org and they provide a wide variety of services to their members -- including resolving technical issues. Rodgers Platt ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: How to Make The Right Call On Cell Plans Date: 3 Nov 2004 07:12:26 -0800 Marcus Didius Falco wrote > The Washington Post > No other telecom service has seen this sort of ballooning value -- not > Internet access, not landline phones and certainly not cable or > satellite TV. But most other telecom markets don't benefit from the > intense competition of the wireless industry, with five strong, > nationwide carriers (down from six since Cingular's purchase of AT&T > Wireless) out to eat each other's lunch. I am far from an expert, but I disagree with some things in this article. In the short run, cell phone rates have dropped dramatically. But in the longer run, long distance telephone rates and telephone set costs have dropped dramatically, too. I don't credit competition but rather technology. Prior to divesture, AT&T's long distance rates were dramatically falling (esp when compared in constant dollars) because of improved technologies in switching and transport. For cellular, technology of high capacity within the radio bandwidth made it cheap. The first big jump was the cellular concept itself, then was digital to further split up the spectrum. Modern electronics allowed powerful but tiny and light phones. The high capacity allowed high volume which spread the unit cost of building towers among many subscribers. > This is why the first thing you should look at on a carrier's Web site > is its coverage map. While these generally can't tell you about the > annoying dead zones that only last half a mile on the highway, they > should indicate where a carrier just doesn't have service at all. I would love to see a _detailed_ coverage map for any cell phone carrier, but I never could find one. The maps in the stores are generally of a very wide area, impossible to identify the boundaries with any precision. One major carrier uses various shades of green which are hard for the viewer to separate. Digital phones require more towers than analog. Cell phone companies originally advertised digital as being superior quality, but it is actually superior for them, not for us users. > How important is it that the phone work at all times? There's no > common standard for wireless service, save the oldest technology of > them all -- analog cellular. Analog is what gave cell phones a bad > name: It kills a phone's battery life, sounds lousy and will run up > massive roaming charges. But as the lowest common denominator, it may > be available where digital service is not. Analog phones had bigger batteries. The older analog phones -- either in a bag or in a car, had much more powerful transmitters. AFAIK, the cell carriers will continue your service if you're already on with such an old phone, but will not give you analog service as a new customer with an old phone. My own analog phone sounds no different than digital phones. The issue of "roaming" is strictly marketing and has nothing to do with technology. When I got my cell phone service, the roaming charges and roaming territory was a function of my service plan. Cheap plans = low roaming, expensive plans = high roaming. The newspapers report many people get surprised by high roaming charges they didn't except today; many plans still have some sort of roaming charge. > Which carrier do your friends and family use? Many Cingular and > Verizon plans include unlimited calling to other phones on the same > network. Sprint sells that option for $5 a month, and Nextel's Direct > Connect Walkie-Talkie service, thanks to the unlimited usage the > carrier generally allows, offers a rough equivalent. In any of those > cases, you can opt for a cheaper plan if the people you'll talk to > most often will use the same network as you. Being on a single carrier can save a lot of money. My Verizon plan pre-dates that, but my carrier still didn't charge me when I made some peak-period calls to another cell phone of my carrier. I see contractors using the walkie-talkie feature often. > Cingular and Sprint have come up with two smart twists on standard > pricing. Cingular lets you carry over unused minutes into the next > month, while Sprint's customers can be automatically bumped to a > higher calling plan if they exceed their included minutes. My Verizon plan pre-dates rollover, but they did that for me anyway automatically one month when I went over on my minutes. > In one area, however, the competitive juices of the wireless market > aren't flowing properly: Under-$30 plans, once a commonplace offering > by carriers, have all but died out. If you need a phone only on rare > occasions, look into prepaid service. As we see, "competition" isn't always working as we expect. My old plan is $19.95 a month with 200 off-peak minutes. Great for my use since I would only make daytime calls in an emergency. To get a similar plan today I'd have to pay $40/month plus pay for a phone. There are a few $15/month plans but they are very limited, truly for emergency use only. While I bought my cellphone for emergency use, I have found it quite useful on weekends and obviously much cheaper and more convenient than payphones. I'm not sure the "pre-paid" phones are such a good idea because some have expiration dates on the time whether you use it or not. Plus you have to constantly recharge the time or you lose your number. Whatever plan you do, you are on your own. Get everything in writing! The cell phone sales people are interested in making commission, not the best plan/phone for you. Too often they say a phone/plan has features that it does not have or that something is free when it is a cost. Also, most aren't very well trained and would not know the answer to a specific question about coverage or technology. My experiences at stores of the major carriers has been most unsatisfactory. ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 18:01:17 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com In message Isaiah Beard wrote: > I agree. It's going to be interesting. I have a check card and > occasionally use electronic bill payment, but I used to prefer sending a > check out in the mail to pay bills. Not because of float, but because I > liked the idea that a physical, tangible paper copy of my payment was > available, as well as a physical endorsement acknowledging receipt of > payment on the same piece of paper, in case there was ever any dispute. I use Visa for the opposite reason -- Lack of paper means I can reverse any charge at a whim, and it's up to the merchant to produce a signed paper or they'll eat the charges. Makes life easier when somebody messes up something somewhere along the line. In message Rick Merrill wrote: > DevilsPGD wrote: >> Isaiah Beard wrote: >>>>> IF these images were accessed it would give criminals access to an >>>>> image of the customer's signature. Said criminal could then use a >>>>> laser printer with 640 dpi resolution to print checks that would be >>>>> indistinguishable from the photo check after a 240 dpi Scan!? >>>> I'm curious, is there a requirement that the bank which accepted the >>>> cheque store it for any period of time? >>> Quite the reverse actually. If they send the check along >>> electronically, then the original is destroyed. >> Interesting -- So if I say I wrote a different dollar value on the >> cheque, and the electronic copy isn't sufficient to provide proof one >> way or the other, does the transfer of funds get reversed? > Hopefully you have your record (or write once) copy. The thing is, > would you notice if the check was changed from 10 to 100$? Many people > do not check that closely. - RM That's my point -- without the physical paper available it's likely difficult (if not impossible) to prove that the cheque was modified. ==================== Who is General Failure and why is he reading my disk? ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 21:01:58 -0600 From: Neal McLain Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? I wrote [TD V23 #525]: > However, I still think that in the specific case at hand the > Coffeyville TV station was probably the primary reason for not > using cable channel 4 [in Independence, Kansas]. Given that > channel 4 is subject to interference from a television station > (even a weak one like W04EJ), it seems unlikely that the cable > company would have used that channel for an important service > like HBO or Showtime. Whereupon DevilsPGD wrote [TD V23 #526]: > Could it be that there wasn't a conflict at that time? According to PAT, channel 4 was in use in Coffeyville as far back as 1954-55 [TD V23 #519]: > I seem to remember channel 4 from *years* ago when as a young > kid I lived and visited in Coffeyville. It seems to me it was > a 24 hour per day transmission of some weather station. The > cameras always looking at the weather dials, and background > music. That would have been 1954-55. PAT] DevilsPGD continued: > Channel 4 isn't used for anything important here, just text > news last time I checked, but the picture is clear and sharp. Is there a local broadcast station on Channel 4 where you are? If so, that would be consistent with the cable company's use of cable channel 4 for a relatively unimportant service like "text news." It's certainly possible for a cable company to use a cable channel that conflicts with a local off-air station; indeed, that's the ideal situation. But the fact remains that in some situations, off-air interference *does occur*. For that reason, a cable company isn't likely to use it for an important service like HBO or Showtime. The two most common sources of off-the-air interference into a cable channel are: A LEAK IN THE CABLE NETWORK. Theoretically, cable TV systems are fully-shielded, closed networks. Nevertheless, breaks in the shield ("leaks") are inevitable. Searching out and fixing leaks is the cable company's responsibility, strongly enforced by the FCC. See: Leakage sources: http://www.sbe24.org/archive/c24aug98.asp#six Leakage control: http://www.sbe24.org/archive/c24sep98.asp#six FCC enforcement: http://www.sbe24.org/archive/c24oct98.asp#six FCC enforcement: http://www.sbe24.org/archive/c24nov98.asp#six DIRECT PICKUP (DPU) IN THE TELEVISION RECEIVER. Back in the 1950s and 1960, cable companies usually didn't provide converters; the incoming cable was connected directly to the TV set. TV sets in those days were generally poorly shielded (300-ohm twinlead was often used to connect the setback terminals to the tuner). This situation resulted in DPU: direct pickup of the off-air signal by the internal circuitry of the TV set. The introduction of converters solved the DPU problem (assuming that the converter itself was properly shielded). Of course, the converter output had to be on a channel that wasn't subject to DPU. To accommodate this situation, converters were fitted with dual-channel modulators, so that a vacant local channel could be selected. Most converters could be switched between channel 3 or 4; Pioneer converters used channel 2 or 3. So if your cable company's channel 4 is "clear and sharp," that's great: it means your cable company is doing a good job with leakage control. But I still wouldn't use it for HBO. Neal McLain [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But this area did not have cable TV (nor, for the most part) any over the air TV in 1954-55. Coffeyville had that *one* station (channel 4) over the air in that time period, Independence had nothing. Even today, Coffeyville and Independence can receive at best *two* over the air television signals, one from Joplin, MO/Pittsburg, KS (90 miles straight east), and one from Tulsa, OK (85 miles almost straight south), and possibly a third one from Wichita, KS (110 miles northwest). Those are our three 'major' cities. Coffeyville of course still gets channel 4 with its weather dials, etc. Your choices here are (a)cable (b) *very high* antenna most likely amplified or (c) nothing at all. On over the air signals, the two out of the three possible depends on how your antenna is turned. Turned sort of east and south for Joplin and Tulsa, or sort of east and south for good Tulsa and crappy Wichita. When cable moved into rural southeast Kansas in the 1970's, we had Time-Warner's prede- cessor. Then Coffeyville about 1990 got Cox Cable. In 2002, Time-Warner traded their territory here to Cable One in exchange for some larger area which they wanted (and Cable One) had. Our cable also serves the little towns of Neodesha, Kansas and Cherryvale, KS which are near here. Cox Cable has Coffeyville and all the southern part of the county. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2004 19:38:59 -0800 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Bob Goudreau said: >>> However, I think pre-recorded phone calls, of any kind, should be >>> illegal. >> Me too. > Not me. I actually find the prerecorded announcement calls that we > choose to receive weekly from my kids' schools to be useful. OK, let me clarify. I meant any kind of pre-recorded TELEMARKETING calls. Political tele-spam is included in that category. > Perhaps you actually meant "UNSOLICITED pre-recorded phone calls, > of any kind". Even then (and leaving aside the constitutional issues of > political speech raised by campaign calls) I've said this about email spam, and I'll reiterate it here. Freedom of speech does not trump my personal rights as the owner of the phones that are being dialed, the person who is billed for the phone lines, etc. > and white, since I can envision various emergency scenarios (storm > evacuation, water contamination, armed-and-dangerous suspect at large, > etc) where public safety might be aided via mass robo-calls to the > affected areas. My clarification should exclude those types of calls. It's rather like the difference between your Internet provider sending mass unsolicited emails regarding system outages or sending mass unsolicited emails telling you how wonderful their great new service is, and you really ought to try their three-month free trial. (a) is ok, (b) is not. JustThe.net Internet & New Media Services, http://JustThe.net/ Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / 888.480.4NET (4638) / sjsobol@JustThe.net PGP Key available from your friendly local key server (0xE3AE35ED) Apple Valley, California Nothing scares me anymore. I have three kids. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The trouble here, Steve, is that like telephones, email requires *two* parties to make it work, unlike other utility services. How you use your electric, or water, or gas has no affect on me at all. How you use your *telephone* or *email* does have an effect on me. With no one to communicate with, my telephone and email are useless. Not so with my other utility services. I quite agree that telemarketing phone calls are a scourge, but like email, what you think is a useful communication, I think is spam. So where do we start your rights and end my rights? PAT] ------------------------------ Subject: Web Site Renovation Complete! Date: Tue, 2 Nov 2004 16:32:04 -0500 From: Charles Cryderman Our Esteemed Moderator wrote: > And this being the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November > that is an important distinction; voting can occur anytime between > November 2 and November 8, but *never* on November 1) please go to > your polling places when you wake up sometime Tuesday and vote for > the Demopublicans or the Republicrats of your choice. As Mayor Daley > would say, 'vote early, and often'! I would personally suggest you > try out the Libertarian candidate for president, Mr. Badnarik; he is > the only *real* alternative to the present system, but do as you > wish, just go do it. As you have told us before Pat, that you have voted for democrats most your life but now are going to vote your conscience. I too followed suit this AM and I wrote in John McCain and Colin Powell. Now as we both know our choices won't change the end results but I do feel much better following my conscience then choosing the lesser of two very big evils. Chip Cryderman [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I certainly do not expect any Libertarians to get elected anytime soon. The United States government isn't set up to allow anything but a centrist candidate to get into office. Either one that leans a little bit left or one that leans a little bit right. Those are our only two allowed choices. When I went to vote yesterday, I stroked the paper ballot with every Libertarian candidate who was on the ballot. Were there -- Goddess forbid! -- even a slight chance of a Libertarian candidate getting elected and that person did get elected, I suspect the Secret Service would arrange to have the person assassinated his first day in office, if not before. There is no room for any changes in our system of government, except one, and they have taken care of that with their bizzare interpretations of the Second Amendment. And in case you have not yet checked out our newly resdesigned web page please check it out today at http://telecom-digest.org and if you have Jeff Mattox's email address, write him and tell him thanks for the work he did on it. 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #528 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Nov 4 02:29:07 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA47T7t10428; Thu, 4 Nov 2004 02:29:07 -0500 (EST) Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 02:29:07 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411040729.iA47T7t10428@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 #529 TELECOM Digest Thu, 4 Nov 2004 02:29:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 529 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson FCC to Decide VoIP Fate Next Week (Lisa Minter) VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election Turnout (Lisa Minter) Qualcomm's Field Of Streams (Eric Friedebach) Nokia, Good Technology Ink Smartphone Deal (Eric Friedebach) Specs Finding Tool (Steve Hanov) Prepaid Questions [was Re: How to Make Call On Cell Plans] (Tom Horsley) Avaya S8100/G600 and MIBs for SNMP (Scott M. Foster) Microsoft TV Foundation Edition 1.7 (J.T. Srinivas) Does Anyone Make Portable Keyboard for Blackberry 7230 (Unknown) Re: Cut-Through Connection (Paul A Lee) Re: Semiconductors | The End of Moore's law? (Carl Zwanzig) Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal (Lisa Hancock) Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal (jared) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (Neal McLain) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (Mark Roberts) Re: How to Make The Right Call On Cell Plans (John Levine) Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future (kansasman) Re: Lever Voting Machines - What's Wrong? (John Hines) Re: Lever Voting Machines - What's Wrong? (Robert Bonomi) Last Laugh! was Re: Lever Voting Machines - What's Wrong? (Dave VanHorn) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 19:34:27 -0500 Subject: FCC to Decide VoIP Fate Next Week http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3430691 By Roy Mark The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced Tuesday it would rule Nov. 9 on whether Internet telephony is an interstate service and exempt from state and local regulation and tariffs. The decision is considered critical to the future development of the emerging Voice over IP industry, which hopes to avoid negotiating rates with 50 separate state governments. In particular, the FCC will be ruling on a request by independent Internet telephony provider Vonage that would classify the business as an interstate information service, which is no different from applications, such as e-mail. Such a ruling would put VoIP beyond the taxing and regulatory reach of the states. "The [Vonage] petition gives the commission an appropriate opportunity to immediately declare that VoIP services, whether traversing the public Internet or privately managed IP networks, are interstate in nature and subject to the commission's exclusive jurisdiction," 61 members of Congress stated in an October letter to FCC Chairman Michael Powell. Full story at: http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3430691 ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 00:01:54 -0500 Subject: VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election Turnout http://voxilla.com/voxstory114-nested-order0-threshold0.html VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election Turnout By PHILLIP BRITT for VOXILLA.COM VoIP may have played a role in choosing the next president of the United States. Ravi Sakaria, chief executive officer of VoicePulse, said his company was seeing five times the normal call volume, with all of the spike due to calls from political volunteers in the battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. Many political pundits have been saying the candidate that carries two of these states will win the election. Seeing the spike in traffic, Sakaria did a quick check of caller IDs and found that most of the calls from the Democratic party, though there were some VoIP calls from Republican volunteers as well. Full story at: http://voxilla.com/voxstory114-nested-order0-threshold0.html [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have a question about the election. On AP News Wednesday afternoon, Senator Kerry said in order to save the country the kind of debacle which occurred in 2000 when Mr. Bush was eventually declared the winner, he was going to concede the election to Bush, which he did. But later in the day Wednesday officials said they were still going to closely audit all the votes from Ohio. Now just suppose the Ohio audit showed the Kerry *had* won that state (although he and others said it was quite unlikely). But let's say it turned out he did win *that state's electoral votes*. In that case he might have won the election; but he has already conceded to Bush. What would happen in that case? Has a 'winner' of a presidential election ever conceded it to someone else? Just curious. PAT] ------------------------------ From: friedebach@yahoo.com (Eric Friedebach) Subject: Qualcomm's Field Of Streams Date: 3 Nov 2004 12:55:12 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com David M. Ewalt, 11.02.04, Forbes.com NEW YORK - If you build it, they will come ... or so Qualcomm hopes. The wireless chip and technology vendor is betting that if it constructs a nationwide network to stream television over cell phones, cellular carriers will sign on and consumers will clamor for the service. But it remains to be seen whether anyone really wants a TV in his pocket. On Monday, Qualcomm said it would begin building a nationwide wireless network specifically designed to deliver high-quality audio and video programming to mobile phones. The endeavor is expected to cost about $800 million over the next four or five years, and begin commercial service in 2006. Eventually, Qualcomm says it intends to spin off the company. http://www.forbes.com/2004/11/02/cx_de_1102qcom.html Eric Friedebach /3D Monkeys From Monroeville/ ------------------------------ From: friedebach@yahoo.com (Eric Friedebach) Subject: Nokia, Good Technology Ink Smartphone Deal Date: 3 Nov 2004 12:59:45 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Lisa DiCarlo, 11.02.04, Forbes.com NEW YORK - Nokia is developing a smartphone that will incorporate Good Technology's GoodLink wireless e-mail service, a deal that should broaden Good's penetration and boost its market share against leader Research in Motion. The people at privately held Good say that Nokia decided to use its service partly as a defensive play against RIM, which is increasingly getting into the handset business. Nokia also sells RIM's BlackBerry wireless e-mail service with its phones, as well as its own service. "RIM is aggressively targeting the market for smartphones," says Sue Forbes, Good's vice president of marketing, noting that hardware revenue at RIM has been increasing. "We do think Nokia is waking up to the reality of the marketplace, that it's growing and RIM is going after the market. Enterprise customers need a flexible, standard approach." http://www.forbes.com/2004/11/02/cx_ld_1102nokia.html Eric Friedebach /3D Monkeys From Monroeville/ ------------------------------ From: smhanov@hotmail.com (Steve Hanov) Subject: Specs Finding Tool Date: 3 Nov 2004 15:34:52 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com As a software engineer in the telecoms industry, I often have the problem of finding information in the 30,000+ pages of specifications stored on my computer. So one day I sat down and coded an application to solve that problem, and I'd like to share it with you. Before I had this tool it would take me close to a minute of clicking to find a specification, even if I knew where it was. This is a major pain when document 'A' refers to document 'B' to 'C' and then back to another annex in 'A'. Now I just type 4.18 and the relevant etsi standard pops up in acrobat reader. This tool is for Windows 95/98/XP/2000. It builds a list of all of the programs and documents on your computer, and when you hit a hotkey, you can type in part of the name and it will give you a listing of everything matching that name. It even works with media files. Give it a try: http://www.hanovsolutions.com/hj/ (Note that the license is shareware) Steve Hanov ------------------------------ Subject: Prepaid Questions [was Re: How to Make Right Call On Cell Plans] From: tom.horsley@att.net (Thomas A. Horsley) Organization: AT&T Worldnet Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 23:17:34 GMT > I'm not sure the "pre-paid" phones are such a good idea because > some have expiration dates on the time whether you use it or not. > Plus you have to constantly recharge the time or you lose your number. I've been thinking about getting rid of my wired phone and going with pre-paid only because I make about 3 minutes of calls a year (only slight exaggeration :-). Even if I have to constantly "charge up" a pre-paid phone I don't use the minutes on, the minimum charge seems ("seems" is the rub) less than my monthly bill for the most basic possible phone service from BellSouth. The main obstacle is my total confusion when I look at the prepaid folks web pages -- I mostly can't understand a word they are saying or figure out what the actual minimum amount I'd have to spend really is (virginmobile.com is the exception -- it almost seems clear). I usually give up when I get past the first page that says prepaid has "NO CONTRACTS, NO PLANS, JUST PAY AS YOU GO!", then I see the next page which lists a huge matrix of "PLANS" for different kinds of prepaid phones (Aargh!). Just as a starting point for comparison, can anyone answer this question: If I never use the phone at all, what is the minimum per-year charge to keep it active for each of the prepaid providers "plans"? (I can start digging up other implications of each plan if I could just order them first by this criteria :-). >>==>> The *Best* political site >>==+ email: Tom.Horsley@worldnet.att.net icbm: Delray Beach, FL | Free Software and Politics <<==+ ------------------------------ From: scott_m_foster@yahoo.com (Scott M. Foster) Subject: Avaya S8100/G600 and MIBs for SNMP Date: 3 Nov 2004 21:59:39 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com The Avaya S8100 can be configured to deliver SNMP traps as well as be polled by an SNMP host. I can't seem to find the MIB for my Network Management system that defines the OIDs for the Avaya S8100. I have been searching all over the Internet and can only find MIBs for the S8300 and S8700. Avaya isn't helping out very much either. Can someone email me the MIB(s) necessary and/or give me some assistance to find the MIBs? Thanks, Scott ------------------------------ From: srinivasjt@esntechnologies.co.in (jtsrinivas) Subject: Microsoft TV Foundation Edition 1.7 Date: 3 Nov 2004 22:18:14 -0800 Hello, I want to download Microsoft TV Foundation Edition 1.7 along with Microsoft TV: Tools Suite. Can any one let me know the details where I can download them? Thanks in advance. ------------------------------ From: Unknown Subject: Portable Keyboard for Blackberry 7230 Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 02:00:00 EST A message came into the Digest late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning asking if anyone knew who makes these portable keyboards for the Blackberry 7230. Unfortunatly, the message got mutiliated in processing. I do not have the name or email address of the sender, just that he was talking about Blackberry 7230's. If the person will resubmit the message I will run it again, and perhaps there will be some answers for you also by the next issue. PAT ------------------------------ From: Paul A Lee Subject: Re: Cut-Through Connection Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2004 12:27:08 -0500 Organization: Rite Aid Corporation In TELECOM Digest V23 #528, ariel.burbaickij@gmail.com (Ariel Burbaickij) wrote (in part): > Could someone explain to me what does the term "cut-through > connection" mean? Are there several meanings? In general, "cut-through" is the action of connecting one circuit to another circuit (subscriber line, tie trunk, tandem trunk, etc.). In electromechanical switches, dial pulses were presented sequentially and acted on the switching equipment sequentially. The speed with which each incremental connection was cut-through affected the path of the subsequent dial pulses. With electronic switching and senderized (rather than individual) presentation of pulses or tones, "cut-through" has come to refer o the point at which a station-to-station or station-to-facility voice path is established, following the sending of pulses or DTMF or MF) tones. For example, when you dial a DID number served by an analog DID trunk, the connection between your phone and the DID trunk is not cut through until after the end office switch has DTMF'd the DID station number to the prem switch. That's why you don't hear the tones (or pulses, if it's an old prem switch) being sent. I have also heard the term "cut-through" used to refer to the opening of a voice path laid out by out-of-band signaling (SS7 or ISDN). Technically inaccurate, but conceptually plausible, so it will probably stick. (I know telco veterans' explanations will differ from mine on several points, but not fundamentally.) Paul A Lee Sr Telecom Engineer Rite Aid Corporation HL-IS-COM (Telecomm) V: +1 717 730-8355 30 Hunter Lane, Camp Hill, PA 17011-2410 F: +1 717 975-3789 P.O. Box 3165, Harrisburg, PA 17105-3165 W: +1 717 805-6208 ------------------------------ From: zbang@radix.net (Carl Zwanzig) Subject: Re: Semiconductors | The End of Moore's Law? Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 21:05:55 -0000 Organization: RadixNet Internet Services Reminds me of a railroad executive in the '50s. When asked what the biggest problem the railroads faced, he said "Too many bankers railroading." The situation hadn't changed, it's difficult, if not impossible to manage what you don't understand. z! ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal Date: 3 Nov 2004 08:06:53 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com BobGoudreau@withheld on request wrote: > I hope that you didn't literally mean "pre-recorded phone calls, of > any kind", since there are plenty of cases where people actually WANT > to receive such calls and make arrangements to do so. > Perhaps you actually meant "UNSOLICITED pre-recorded phone calls, > of any kind". Even then (and leaving aside the constitutional issues of > political speech raised by campaign calls) it's not completely black > and white, since I can envision various emergency scenarios (storm > evacuation, water contamination, armed-and-dangerous suspect at large, > etc) where public safety might be aided via mass robo-calls to the > affected areas. In the case of a public safety emergency -- normally a very rare occurence -- I could see the use of pre-recorded announcements. However, these should not replace traditional sirens or radio announcements. As to other pre-recorded calls, I suppose in your example -- school messages that one has explicitly accepted -- it would be tolerable. But even this is questionable. When this issue came up before, Sears Dept Stores said they use pre-recorded announcements to notify customers of up-coming deliveries. That sounds ok, but there are many problems with that (esp from my experience getting something from Sears). First, sometimes the delivery time is not good and you need to tell a real person that. Second, answering machines could garble a pre-recorded message or skip it altogether -- the calling machine simply has no idea if it's talking to off-hook but dead air. As to constitutional issues, I don't see how that applies at all. If you put a sign up on your front gate advising visitors to KEEP OUT and that you will not tolerate being disturbed, anyone who disregards that sign is subject to arrest for trespassing and harassment. They may leave a note at your gate but may not enter your property, even for political reasons. There is no difference between such a "keep-out" sign and a do-not-call phone list. There is also such a thing as harassment and existing laws that restrict political telephone soliciting. If it was constitutionally protected, than there'd be no restrictions on nursing home and cell phone calls and late hour calls. Free speech does not include harassment. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 22:38:37 -0700 From: jared@nospam.au (jared) Subject: Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal Illegal would be lovely ... consider the following ... The Oregon Republicans called me repeatedly on my cell phone ... including election day. Calling cell phones costs the person called money, did they think about that? ... the number is in a cell phone exchange so they could have checked ... I asked them to stop ... they didn't ... one person could even tell me the next pre-recorded call to expect ... they said they got my number from the elections office ... certainly not under my name as I'm not registered ... maybe someone had my number years ago??? ... the Oregon voter registration form has phone number as optional entry ... no warning that the number will be given to third parties. The stupidest call was about going to polling places ... Oregon voted by 'mail', ballots came in the mail ... one voted by returning the ballot: either postal, taking it to the county offices or dropping off at official pick-up sites. Anyone in Oregon have a similar experience with junk political calls? ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 19:46:14 -0600 From: Neal McLain Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? PAT wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But this area did not have cable > TV (nor, for the most part) any over the air TV in 1954-55. > Coffeyville had that *one* station (channel 4) over the air in > that time period, Independence had nothing ... Pat, did you contact the College to see if they publish a program schedule for W04EJ? And were you able to get your TV set hooked up to a better antenna to try to receive W04EJ? > Coffeyville of course still gets channel 4 with its weather > dials, etc ... Is the College *still* using "weather dials"? It reminds me of a device that cable companies used to use back in the 1950s. It consisted of a monochrome vidicon camera clamped to a vertical shaft that rotated back-and-forth through an angle of about 180 degrees. There were six or seven dials, each about 6 inches in diameter, arranged in a semicircle around the camera; these dials displayed time, temperature, wind direction, wind speed, and I forget what else. Between the dials there were little slots where the cable operator could insert 3x5 cards for announcements or advertisements. It was a pretty primitive device, but in the days before electronic character generators, it was all we had. Besides, it filled a channel -- in those days, cable companies often didn't have enough video programming to fill even the 12 channels on the VHF dial. It's possible that the College could have used such a device back in the 1960s. But they certainly must be using something more up-to-date by now! Neal McLain [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I did not get a chance to call them or ask anything. I will try tomorrow (Thursday). PAT] ------------------------------ From: markrobt@comcast.net (Mark Roberts) Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 05:18:03 -0000 Organization: 1.94 meters Neal McLain had written: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But this area did not have cable TV > (nor, for the most part) any over the air TV in 1954-55. Coffeyville > had that *one* station (channel 4) over the air in that time period, I don't see how that is possible with full-power stations on channel 4 in Oklahoma City and in Kansas City. Low-power, non-translator stations were not authorized until the mid-1980s. Mark Roberts | "You'll know gas prices are hurting when you see headlines Oakland, Cal.| about plunging sales of sport utility vehicles." NO HTML MAIL | -- Floyd Norris, New York Times, October 23, 2004 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I *do not know for sure* they were on channel 4 in the 1950's, or even that it was the same thing. I do know in the 1950's I stayed for a few days with my cousins who (still even today) live in Coffeyville. There was a 24 hour black and white station which continuously showed weather dials and a clock; nothing else. Neil McLain mentioned Coffeyville Junior College having something on Channel 4 *today*. I _assumed_ it was the same thing. Thursday I am going to call them and ask them (1) if they are on the air now, (2) if they have a program guide (3) if they were on the air fifty years ago doing continuous weather, etc. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: 3 Nov 2004 21:36:14 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: How to Make The Right Call On Cell Plans Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > In the short run, cell phone rates have dropped dramatically. But in > the longer run, long distance telephone rates and telephone set costs > have dropped dramatically, too. > I don't credit competition but rather technology. It was at least as much due to the Bell breakup. Before that, long distance was deliberately overpriced to subsidize local service, on the theory that it was an expensive luxury. (Well, it was back in 1920.) Prices would have dropped a lot anyway, but a big chunk of the drop is due to the access charges assessed on LD calls. They used to be on the order of 10 cents/min or more, now in most places they're just a penny or two. > Digital phones require more towers than analog. Cell phone companies > originally advertised digital as being superior quality, but it is > actually superior for them, not for us users. Not really. Digital in the 800 MHz AMPS band has about the same range as analog. But the 1900 MHz band, where everyone uses varieties of of digital does require smaller cells. Also, and more importantly in most places, there's a maximum of 100 analog calls per cell, while digital permits several times that, 3x for TDMA, for example. That means they don't have to subdivide cells as much to add more call capacity. > Analog phones had bigger batteries. The older analog phones -- either > in a bag or in a car, had much more powerful transmitters. Yes, that's true. Bag and car phones could transmit at 3W, digital top out at .75W unless you get an aftermarket signal booster to put in line with the antenna. John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 330 5711 johnl@iecc.com, Mayor, http://johnlevine.com, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail ------------------------------ From: dog4dogg@yahoo.com (kansasman) Subject: Re: Home Phones Face Uncertain Future Date: 3 Nov 2004 11:10:51 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com > You think AT&T was not static? They attempted how many different > solutions justified by MBA concepts? They had no idea of how to put > VoIP on cable. They bought cable companies based upon spread sheet > analysis only to discover, after the fact, that entire cable company > infrastructure was built with the wrong cable -- using cost controls > to install wrong cable. For a third time, the entire cable network > had to be replaced again. Any product oriented thinker could see > that. But AT&T management is anti-innovative -- which means > anti-American. AT&T managers did not even sufficient technical > knowledge to even read the label on cable entering their own homes. > AT&T did not have the capital to replace the entire network. So AT&T > sold off those cable companies at a major loss. Was it a $500 million > loss? You call that trying a new business? I call it classic MBA > school management techniques where "a good manager can manage ANY > business" ... into the ground. > It gets more damning as we think more product oriented. AT&T did not > comprehend packet switching concepts. Too complex. You are right about AT&T. At&T has not changed its ways as a telcom conglomerate; with their VoIP service, customer service is still unresponsive, treating customers like numbers. I do not want that. You do not want that. I am ready for a new company that actually treats their customers like poeple, not like the next problem in line. Next! A friend of mine has been enjoying her SunRocket service, particularly because during the few times she did call customer service, SunRocket was extremely helpful and quick! There is nothing more agravating than waiting on hold only to hear an electronic non-human voice at the other end of the line. Have you looking into SunRocket service (SunRocket.com)? It is available in the DC and Boston areas now, and they are going national at the end of the year. ------------------------------ From: John Hines Subject: Re: Lever Voting Machines - What's Wrong? Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 11:15:51 -0600 Organization: www.jhines.org Reply-To: john@jhines.org > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: In Chicago, many years ago we had those > mechanical things, where one large lever closed and opened the curtains > and you could not vote without that lever to close the curtains and > the vote(s) was cast when the lever opened the curtains. There were a > few 'medium size' levers inside on the panel (for 'straight ticket' > voting) and many smaller levers for individual candidate voting. Illinois got rid of the "straight ticket" option a decade or so ago. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: You can't just go vote straight Democratic any longer (which is what they always preferred to have you do.) I learn something new daily it seems. PAT] ------------------------------ Organization: Robert Bonomi Consulting Subject: Re: Lever Voting Machines - What's Wrong? From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 20:03:55 +0000 In article , Lisa Hancock wrote: > My county uses "lever" voting machines, which are wholly mechanical. > You simply push a lever for each desired candidate and when you open > the curtain (a big lever) the votes are recorded on counters. > The machines contain interlockings so you can only vote for the > prescribed number of candidates for an office. That's usually one, > but some offices you vote for three of five candidates (ie town > councils). I understand some newer machines have no such protection > and such overvotes ended up wasting a ballot. > Another advtg is that you enter the machine with an open curtain, pull > a master lever to close it and open the machine to accept your votes, > then pull the master again to record your final votes and open the > curtain. The curtains are large and fully enclosed -- it appears that > modern electronic machines have very tiny curtains or just a small > divider, limiting voter privacy. > Yet I understand these machines are very old and not made anymore. > Other counties went to punch cards and we know about their problems. > Many counties are going electronic but sometimes those machines fail. > Is there a reason mechanical machines are so out of favor? Sure, they > would require maintenance and setup and there is a cost to that, but > that is only twice a year. If the machines were in production, costs > would be lower. A modern generation would probably have newer > mechanical engineering and lighter better wearing gears. There are several reasons those mechanical machines have fallen out of favor: 1) they are *BIG* and *HEAVY* The cost for storage storage space is non-trivial. Ditto the cost of transport to/from each polling place. 2) They require a _lot_ of labor for set-up. This has to be done _before_ they are transported to the polling places; which means that you have to move them around in that storage space, to work on them. This adds to the space requirements for storage. Also, for a large/complex election, one person can service about *five* machines in an 8 hour shift. For a 'simple' election, productivity is only about 3 times higher. 3) There is a physical limit to the number of candidates/offices that the mechanical-lever voting machine can handle. With 'unified' general elections -- *everything* happens on that 'Tuesday' in November -- in many locales the capacity of the lever machines is simply insufficient. I don't remember what the actual numbers are, but if the lever machine has only 240 'individual vote' levers, and there are a total of 244 candidates running across all the positions being voted on, then, obviously, you =cannot= use the lever machine for that election. Now, for a concrete illustration: the State of Iowa has about 2100 polling places state-wide. You have to have an *absolute*minimum* of 2 machines at every polling place, and precincts in the larger cities typically have 4 or more per location. This works out to at least 6-8 _thousand_ machines, state-wide. 15,000-20,000 sq.ft of storage space needed, in roughly 100 different locations. Plus, call it four *thousand* man-hours for 'programming' the machines, per location. Plus delivery (and retrieval). A 24' straight truck can hold about 36 machines at one time. Which is about what can be delivered in an 8-hour shift, with a two (possibly three) man crew. Call it 200 truck-loads going out, and another 200 truck-loads coming back, Now, lets add up the costs. per election 20,000 sq ft storage @ $6/sq.ft/yr. $120,000* * assumes 1 general election and 1 primary every two years. same as 1/year 'programming' $30/hr, 30 min/machine $120,000 delivery $ 90,000* * 2 men at $25/hr ea, truck at $50/day return to storage $ 90,000 Throw in the costs of printing and inserting the lever 'labels', required repairs, amortization of the purchase price, etc. and you're easily over $500,000 per election. or $250/polling place. Compare that to the costs of using the 'punch-card' ballot machines -- like the (in)famous ones used in Florida, in 2000. voting machine storage (about 2% of the space required for lever machines) $ 2,400 'programming' -zero- delivery (100 _car_ loads, 1 man) $23,000 return to storage $23,000 To be fair, you have to figure in the cost of the punch-card ballots (about 1 cent each). Iowa votes around 1 million ballots,, so that's an extra $10,000.00. Oh my, we're up to a cost of circa $60,000/election. vs $500,000+ using the old lever machines. 'optical scan' ballots -- allowing the use of a cardboard, _throw-away_, privacy screen, can reduce the delivery cost even further. *and* eliminate the 'return to storage' cost, as well as the need for long-term storage. 'overhead' down to circa $15,000. Ballot consumables at around $20,000. And you wonder _why_ they don't use lever machines today ? ------------------------------ From: Dave VanHorn" Subject: Last Laugh! was Re: Lever Voting Machines - What's Wrong? Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2004 12:08:38 -0500 > "I voted today in Independence, have you voted yet?" with a little > flag printed on it, and stuck it on your shirt or wherever. Someone should run around and put them on the tombstones. :) KC6ETE Dave's Engineering Page, www.dvanhorn.org Microcontroller Consultant, specializing in Atmel AVR [TELECOM Digest Editor's note: Very funny, indeed, but here they would be aghast at something like that. The judges of election and clerks here are expected to have a good idea of who each person is who approaches them to vote. On Tuesday when I went to vote, the three ladies at the table were all looking at me as I walked over to them. All three of those ladies live right there in my own neighborhood. I saw one of them a couple days before the election over at Marvin's store, and we said hello, and she reminded me to come over to Memorial Hall to vote; 'not the jailhouse where we had the primary election'. I told her I had gotten the notice in the mail from Charlotte telling us about the change in polling places. Believe me, if it ever came to light here that a person dead and buried had not been removed from the rolls and a vote had been cast in that person's name, the stink would be terrible all over town. 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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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 #529 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Nov 4 14:53:37 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA4JrbH17053; Thu, 4 Nov 2004 14:53:37 -0500 (EST) Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 14:53:37 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411041953.iA4JrbH17053@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 #530 TELECOM Digest Thu, 4 Nov 2004 14:53:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 530 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson About Coffeyville Junior College and Channel 4 (TELECOM Digest Editor) VoIP -- to Regulate or Not to Regulate? (Lisa Minter) Internet Without Landline? (Markus Dehmann) SunRocket -- Press Release About New Service (kansasman) Home Phone Link in India (NewPhoneUser) Re: VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election (Wesrock@aol.com) Re: VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election (Clark W. Griswold,Jr.) Re: VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election (Fred Goldstein) Re: VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election (Rick Merrill) Re: VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election (ranck@vt.edu) Re: Prepaid Questions [was Re: How to Make Right Call] (Clark Griswold) Re: Prepaid Questions [was Re: How to Make Right Call] (Joseph) Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal (Phil Stripling) Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal (palee) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 13:55:27 EST From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: About Coffeyville Junior College and Channel 4 Today, Thursday, I got a chance to speak to folks at CCC and ask them about the television signal on Channel 4. The young lady who answered the phone at 620-251-7700 said to me she had only worked there a short time and knew nothing of it. She put me through to a man who had worked there for about twenty years and he said they had discontinued the 'station' (which was a learning exercise or practice for students *more than ten years ago*. He said "it was only licensed as a low- power station and we had so much interference (which, under the terms of our FCC license we had to accept) from the bigger station in Oklahoma City, and our equipment got old and hard to maintain, so we decided to abandon that part of our program. We have not been on the air in years, but Oklahoma City still comes booming through now like a local now and then." I told him I believed they were still a licensee in FCC records (Neil, am I correct on this? You said you looked it up) and he was surprised to hear that. I asked him about the television station broadcasting in the 1950's doing weather all the time. He said he started working at the college about 1981 and he could not help with that, but he was *certain* it had not been them. He concluded our phone conversation by saying "for about the last ten years or so, our students have worked on the local (Cox Cable) municipal-based 'educational' channel. CCC shares a channel with Field Kindley High School in Coffeyville, cable channel 21. Our students involved in that maintain the studio, the equipment, and direct the programming. The FKHS students in the program take their classes here at CCC." He did agree, Neil, that the 'old station, when it was running, more than a decade ago' was 310 watts. He suggested I should speak to someone at the 'Dalton Defenders Museum' (which doubles as the Coffeyville Historical Society). A phone call to the historical society (a/k/a Dalton Defenders Museum) did not produce much luck. The man there basically confirmed what the guy at CCC had told me, and when I mentioned the 'local' station in the 1950's he said it drew a blank with him. He *did* remember both my father George (who died in 1991) and my Uncle Clarence Lowrance who died about a year go. He seemed to think 'channel 4' was not a local operation but (in those days, 1950's) it was still a relatively new operation in Oklahoma City and it was likely large amounts of time each day were spent 'just staying on the air' broadcasting things like pictures of weather dials, etc. He suggested trying the daily newspaper, the Coffeyville Journal. The Journal was no help at all; the kid who answered the phone said no one around there had been there *that* long, 'even our publisher is a lady in her fifties who has worked here for a long time, ten years or so.' The one guy I know of at the Journal, Jim Tickle in their circulation department is an older guy who doubles as their manager of the e-Journal they used to put out for awhile on the Internet, and he was not in the office today. The kid who answered the phone at the Journal invited me to 'stop by anytime and check the old films. We have most of them, except for a few missing issues in the 1880's when there was a fire.' So Neil, there is your half-answer. I realize not a very good one. I rather suspect the one time I got ghosting images and snow with a very faint picture it must have been the OKC station under good atmospheric conditions. PAT ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 06:51:06 -0500 Subject: VoIP -- to Regulate or Not to Regulate? http://www.mlive.com/businessdirect/stories/index.ssf?/base/test/109955885121870.xml lstevens@bdwbusiness.com Telcos are awaiting Chairman Michael Powell's proposal to the full Federal Communications Commission on regulating voice-over Internet protocol service as early as late November. This is a reversal for Powell, who had taken a hands-off approach to broadband and Internet-based phone technologies. Federal rules could preempt plans by some states -- and Michigan is one of them -- to regulate VoIP technology. Michigan telcos think the explosive national growth of VoIP -- reportedly to over one million subscribers in 2004 compared to 131,000 in 2003 -- probably grabbed Powell's attention. But if the FCC sets rules, they expect those to be minimally intrusive. "It's amazing that a year to two ago, VoIP wasn't a word that entered anyone's vocabulary," said Matthew Resch, Lansing spokesman for Texas-based SBC Communications Inc. [NYSE: SBC]. Federal regulation could head off a patchwork of state regulations, he said. "I think nearly every telco is looking at deploying some sort of VoIP service," said Scott Stevenson, president of the Telecommunications Association of Michigan, a trade group that includes most telcos and telephone service providers operating in the state. It reportedly was a hot topic at the association's October meeting. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Just like telephones in many ways. In the the late 19th century 'telephone' was not a word in most people's vocabulary, but by 1901-1905 nearly everyone had heard of the device and many folks had even used one. PAT] ------------------------------ From: markus.cl@gmx.de (Markus Dehmann) Subject: Internet Without Landline? Date: 4 Nov 2004 07:53:53 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Is it possible to get high-speed internet access without a phone/landline at home (in Maryland/U.S.)? I only have a cell phone, but internet at home would be good, too. I don't need a landline, though because the cell phone is enough. Thanks! [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Yes, it is not only possible, but for many folks more desirable. You get your high speed internet from the cable company there in Maryland and otherwise use your cell phone for voice calls. That's essentially what many folks do, or they have a very inexpensive landline phone from a CLEC as a backup only. PAT] ------------------------------ From: dog4dogg@yahoo.com (kansasman) Subject: SunRocket -- Press Release About New Service Date: 4 Nov 2004 07:53:49 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com This sounds promising, particularly the free international calling: SunRocket Brings Internet Phone Service to Mainstream America The "No Gotcha" Company Sets New Standard for Making It Easy for Consumers to Use Broadband to Enjoy Internet Phone Savings VIENNA, VA, November 1, 2004 - Establishing new benchmarks for value, control and simplicity, SunRocket, the "no gotcha" phone company, today announced the arrival of SunRocket Signature Servicesm, designed to accelerate the adoption of Internet phone service. This new residential primary-line phone service is offered at an all-inclusive price of $24.95 per month, with no activation charges, hidden fees or "gotchas", making it easy and risk-free for mainstream consumers to make the leap to state-of-the-art Internet telephony. Now available in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Boston, SunRocket will be available in cities across America by the end of the year. "We are the first phone company that gives consumers what they want -- an easy-to-try, simple-to-use, feature-rich phone service at a superior value for a fixed monthly fee that eliminates the surprises we call 'gotchas'," said Paul Erickson, chief executive officer of SunRocket. "We recognize the mounting frustration that consumers have with escalating fees, add-on surcharges and taxes that turn an advertised $49.99 price into a $65 monthly phone bill. With SunRocket's Bottom-Line Pricingsm, members get everything they need for one low monthly price which includes taxes." Making it even easier for households to experience the future of Internet-enabled communications, SunRocket does not require contracts, term commitments, activation fees, shipping charges, equipment charges or cancellation fees. All necessary equipment is provided at no additional charge for members who sign up for SunRocket Signature Service. Members receive a free self-install kit containing a plug-and-play gizmo that connects to the customer's high-speed modem and sends phone calls over the home broadband connection. Membership comes complete with a no-risk, 31-day money back guarantee. SunRocket Signature Service includes a myriad of features and benefits such as unlimited domestic phone calling and over a dozen free calling features such as enhanced voicemail, caller ID with name, call waiting, 3-way calling, smart call forwarding. In addition to these built-in features and Bottom-Line Pricing, SunRocket offers members these extra benefits at no additional charge: Choice of phone numbers. SunRocket members get to choose their phone numbers from a pool of available numbers or transfer an existing number from their old phone company. Free International Calls. Every SunRocket Signature Service member receives an allowance for free calls to any international destination, which translates to 100 minutes to any of 13 countries or 30 minutes or more to any of 75 countries. Incremental minutes are priced at SunRocket's low international rates, such as $0.03 per minute to Hong Kong, London, Paris, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Tokyo or Toronto, $0.04 per minute to Mexico City, and $0.05 per minute to Beijing, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Lima, Jakarta, Seoul or Taipei. Free Directory Assistance Calls. Members get two free nationwide 411 calls each month. Free Signature Numbers. Two phone numbers for the price of one. In addition to a regular household phone number, members can choose an extra Signature Number to give to another member of the household, complete with its own distinctive ring, calling features and personal voicemail. Enhanced 911. Unlike most other Internet phone companies, SunRocket provides Enhanced 911 emergency calling, which routes calls directly to emergency operators along with service location address information and automatic phone number identification. Paul Erickson and Joyce Dorris, former MCI Consumer executives who pioneered many of MCI's breakthrough innovations, including 1-800-COLLECT and The Neighborhood, founded the company in early 2004. "SunRocket isn't just about great technology at a great price. Our vision is to build a company that is committed to doing the right thing for consumers, something that big phone companies appear genetically incapable of doing," said Erickson. Nokia Venture Partners, a leading global venture capital firm focused on early-stage technology companies, led SunRocket's initial financing round. According to John Malloy, managing partner of the firm, "Internet-enabled wireless and landline voice services will transform the global telecom industry, producing billion-dollar opportunities for new entrants with the right vision and business model to drive that transformation. Having observed the company's leadership in action and glimpsed the innovations they will introduce, we're convinced that SunRocket will emerge as the leading brand in Internet phone service." "The interest in Internet phone service has been established. Now, someone has to take it mainstream in a friendly, easy, and motivating way, and let consumers escape from the 'gotcha' traps from other providers," said Dorris, SunRocket's chief marketing officer and former head of MCI's consumer unit. "We know what it takes to convince millions of Americans to embrace change in pursuit of better value, and we're excited to begin to establish SunRocket as the premier brand for personal Internet phone service." Consumers can learn more and sign up for service on the web at SunRocket.com or by contacting SunRocket Member Services at 1-800-786-0173. About SunRocket Headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, SunRocket, the "no gotcha" phone company, is bringing new personal Internet phone service to mainstream America with its SunRocket Signature Servicesm. The only company to offer a complete Internet phone service at an all-inclusive, bottom-line monthly price of $24.95 with no hidden charges or "gotchas", SunRocket makes it easy for broadband households to take advantage of the value and enhanced capabilities of state-of-the-art Internet telephony. Nokia Venture Partners is the lead investor in the privately-held corporation. For more information, see the company's web site at SunRocket.com. Contact Julie Rosenthal, JR Communications 202.248.8449 Julie@jrcommunications.com Heather Frick, SunRocket 703.394.4175 Heather.Frick@sunrocket.com ------------------------------ From: desikkan@gmail.com (NewPhoneUser) Subject: Home Phone Link in India Date: 4 Nov 2004 00:59:37 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hi, Can anyone post the various options I have if I want to take a phone connection in Delhi, India. I know there are a lot of players now in the market. Can anyone reply on the options available for Fixed Line, WLL and Wireless. As a home user, I would be interested in having a clear voice communication link and an internet connection for casual web browsing. Of course, it would be great if I get an idea on the cost of each option. Thanks. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Do you still have to wait for months and years to get new landline phone service in India? It used to take just *forever* to get new service established in some of those countries. How is it now? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Wesrock@aol.com Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 09:23:07 EST Subject: Re: VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election Turnout In a message dated 11/4/04 1:33:21 AM Central Standard Time, editor@telecom-digest.org writes: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have a question about the election. > On AP News Wednesday afternoon, Senator Kerry said in order to save the > country the kind of debacle which occurred in 2000 when Mr. Bush was > eventually declared the winner, he was going to concede the election > to Bush, which he did. But later in the day Wednesday officials said > they were still going to closely audit all the votes from Ohio. Now > just suppose the Ohio audit showed the Kerry *had* won that state > (although he and others said it was quite unlikely). But let's say > it turned out he did win *that state's electoral votes*. In that case > he might have won the election; but he has already conceded to Bush. > What would happen in that case? Has a 'winner' of a presidential > election ever conceded it to someone else? Just curious. PAT] "Conceding" has no legal effect. You will recall that in the last presidential election Gore conceded to Bush, then later un-conceded. then challenged the Florida in court. The reports I have heard is that Ohio officials will continue counting absentee ballots and checking provisional ballots (and counting them if they qualify), as of course they should, but that Kerry and his associates determined that challenging them in court or waiting for the count to be completed could not result in gaining enough votes to make him the winner. Wes Leatherock wesrock@aol.com wleathus@yahoo.com ------------------------------ From: Clark W. Griswold, Jr. Subject: Re: VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election Turnout Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 07:46:30 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com TELECOM Digest Editor noted: > In that case he might have won the election; but he has already > conceded to Bush. What would happen in that case? Conceding an election has no legal standing. It's just a way of telling all the campaign volunteers and lawyers to stop any activities. Theoretically, if a candidate was later found to have one before the vote was certified, that candidate would be installed. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 10:46:00 -0500 From: Fred Goldstein Subject: Re: VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election Turnout > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have a question about the election. > On AP News Wednesday afternoon, Senator Kerry said in order to save the > country the kind of debacle which occurred in 2000 when Mr. Bush was > eventually declared the winner, he was going to concede the election > to Bush, which he did. But later in the day Wednesday officials said > they were still going to closely audit all the votes from Ohio. Now > just suppose the Ohio audit showed the Kerry *had* won that state > (although he and others said it was quite unlikely). But let's say > it turned out he did win *that state's electoral votes*. In that case > he might have won the election; but he has already conceded to Bush. > What would happen in that case? Has a 'winner' of a presidential > election ever conceded it to someone else? Just curious. PAT] The concession speech means nothing, legally. If Ohio turns out to go to Kerry, then Kerry wins, and Bush has egg on his face. Unlikely but possible. ------------------------------ From: Rick Merrill Subject: Re: VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election Turnout Organization: Comcast Online Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 13:53:23 GMT Lisa Minter wrote: > http://voxilla.com/voxstory114-nested-order0-threshold0.html > VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election Turnout > By PHILLIP BRITT > for VOXILLA.COM > VoIP may have played a role in choosing the next president of the > United States. > Ravi Sakaria, chief executive officer of VoicePulse, said his company > was seeing five times the normal call volume, with all of the spike > due to calls from political volunteers in the battleground states of > Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. Many political pundits have been > saying the candidate that carries two of these states will win the > election. > Seeing the spike in traffic, Sakaria did a quick check of caller IDs > and found that most of the calls from the Democratic party, though > there were some VoIP calls from Republican volunteers as well. > Full story at: > http://voxilla.com/voxstory114-nested-order0-threshold0.html > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have a question about the election. > On AP News Wednesday afternoon, Senator Kerry said in order to save the > country the kind of debacle which occurred in 2000 when Mr. Bush was > eventually declared the winner, he was going to concede the election > to Bush, which he did. But later in the day Wednesday officials said > they were still going to closely audit all the votes from Ohio. Now > just suppose the Ohio audit showed the Kerry *had* won that state > (although he and others said it was quite unlikely). But let's say > it turned out he did win *that state's electoral votes*. In that case > he might have won the election; but he has already conceded to Bush. > What would happen in that case? Has a 'winner' of a presidential > election ever conceded it to someone else? Just curious. PAT] The concession speech is gracious, but non-binding! The electoral college meets next month and ITS decision IS binding. If hope springs eternal for you, then it aint over until it's over. - RM ------------------------------ From: ranck@vt.edu Subject: Re: VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election Turnout Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 17:30:44 +0000 (UTC) Organization: Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have a question about the election. > On AP News Wednesday afternoon, Senator Kerry said in order to save the > country the kind of debacle which occurred in 2000 when Mr. Bush was > eventually declared the winner, he was going to concede the election > to Bush, which he did. But later in the day Wednesday officials said > they were still going to closely audit all the votes from Ohio. Now > just suppose the Ohio audit showed the Kerry *had* won that state > (although he and others said it was quite unlikely). But let's say > it turned out he did win *that state's electoral votes*. In that case > he might have won the election; but he has already conceded to Bush. > What would happen in that case? Has a 'winner' of a presidential > election ever conceded it to someone else? Just curious. PAT] I don't think it has ever happened, but what Kerry really said, in effect, is that his campaign will not challenge the vote counts anywhere. If, as you suggest, Ohio does its own audit and awards its electors to Kerry, then the Electoral College still does its thing on the appointed day in December and Kerry could in theory still become President. This seems highly unlikely, but there is no mechanism in the Constitution for a candidate to "concede." I suppose he could refuse the appointment, but then the office would go to Edwards, not Bush. At least, I think that's how it would work. Bill Ranck Blacksburg, Va. ------------------------------ From: Clark W. Griswold, Jr. Subject: Re: Prepaid Questions [was Re: Make Right Call On Cell Plans] Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 07:44:10 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com tom.horsley@att.net (Thomas A. Horsley) wrote: > If I never use the phone at all, what is the minimum per-year charge > to keep it active for each of the prepaid providers "plans"? The cheapest I'm aware of is TracFone. You buy one of their annual 150 minute cards for around $100 and it works for a year. That works out to be about $8 a month with about 10 minutes of calls per month as well. No rollover worries. Need more minutes and you can buy one of their recharge cards, but your expiration date stays at the longer of either your annual date or the new card date. ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Prepaid Questions [was Re: How to Make Right Call On Cell] Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 08:06:34 -0800 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Wed, 03 Nov 2004 23:17:34 GMT, tom.horsley@att.net (Thomas A. Horsley) wrote: > The main obstacle is my total confusion when I look at the prepaid > folks web pages -- I mostly can't understand a word they are saying or > figure out what the actual minimum amount I'd have to spend really is > (virginmobile.com is the exception -- it almost seems clear). I'm not really sure what all your confusion is due to. Most tell you what the terms are i.e. you must pay a minimum amount to get service and there are usually some requirements for you to keep the service such as a requirement that you add money at a required interval or that you place a call by a certain period to keep your account active or both. > I usually give up when I get past the first page that says prepaid has > "NO CONTRACTS, NO PLANS, JUST PAY AS YOU GO!", then I see the next > page which lists a huge matrix of "PLANS" for different kinds of > prepaid phones (Aargh!). Different plans for different needs I should think. It's not one size fits all. Some people need it *just* for emergencies and some need it for occasional use while others do not have any choice and need something economical as that's the only service that they qualify for because either their credit is not good enough to get monthly service or they are foreigners with no local credit. > Just as a starting point for comparison, can anyone answer this > question: > If I never use the phone at all, what is the minimum per-year charge > to keep it active for each of the prepaid providers "plans"? I know of at least one plan where you can buy an initial package and your plan will live on indefinitely providing you make a one minute duration call every 60 days. It does require that you make at least a one minute duration call before the end of 60 days. So some effort and recall is required of you. Beyond Wireless provides this service http://www.gobeyondwireless.com/ You can buy service and phones through this company. They are a reseller of AT&T Wireless TDMA service. The disadvantage of this service is that they offer local numbers only in certain areas and may not have an area code/number local to you. They will also activate a compatible phone for free and give you some initial minutes for free. Minimum recharge card is $5. Another prepaid service offered by PhoneShark called "JusTalk" which you can buy a minimum $10 'card' (40 minutes) and it will last you for six months before you must add new minutes to keep the account active. They are an AT&T Wireless TDMA reseller as well. They do not sell phones though. You must provide your own AT&T Wireless TDMA compatible handset. This service ends up costing you ~$1.50/month. Here is a site that does prepaid comparisons: http://markson.net/cell_prepaid_compare.htm ------------------------------ From: Phil Stripling Subject: Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal Date: 04 Nov 2004 10:22:13 -0800 Organization: Legal Assistance on the Web hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) writes: > In the case of a public safety emergency -- normally a very rare > occurence -- I could see the use of pre-recorded announcements. Not in the area I live in. We've had one in the last couple of weeks, and there are several a year. > However, these should not replace traditional sirens or radio > announcements. The calls go out at dark-thirty in the morning. No one has radios on, and apparently, sirens are ineffective with closed windows and such. >SNIP< > If you put a sign up on your front gate advising visitors to KEEP OUT > and that you will not tolerate being disturbed, anyone who disregards > that sign is subject to arrest for trespassing and harassment. They Give that a try. Seriously. Put a sign on your gate and then call the cops when someone comes knocking at your door. Have them arrested. Phil Stripling | email to the replyto address is presumed The Civilized Explorer | spam and read later. email to philip@ http://www.cieux.com/ | my domain is read daily. ------------------------------ Date: 4 Nov 2004 16:25:21 -0000 From: Paul A Lee Subject: Re: Pre-Recorded Phone Should be Illegal In TELECOM Digest V23 #529, jared@nospam.au (jared) wrote (in part): > Oregon Republicans called me repeatedly on my cell phone ... > Calling cell phones costs the person called money, did they > think about that? ... > I asked them to stop ... they didn't ... one person could > even tell me the next pre-recorded call to expect ... they > said they got my number from the elections office ... > The stupidest call was about going to polling places ... > Oregon voted by 'mail', ballots came in the mail ... > Anyone in Oregon have a similar experience with junk political > calls? There were numerous anecdotal reports of nuisance phone calls, recorded messages, cell phones being called, and other activities that amounted to harassment, being committed by misguided loyalists of one party and attributed to the opposing party. The apparent goal was to p*ss off the recipient enough to provoke them to vote for the other party (the one actually supported by those making the bogus calls). There were also some less-than-gracious reactions from get-out-the-vote callers when the person called said s/he would or did vote for the opposing party. A worker for one party abruptly hung up on my wife when she told the caller that she had already voted for the opposition. An acquaintance told me that a campaign worker for the other party let fly some personal epithets when told that my acquaintance had already voted for the opposing candidate. Isn't it wonderful how the democratic process brings out the best in people ...? Paul A Lee Sr Telecom Engineer Rite Aid Corporation HL-IS-COM (Telecomm) V: +1 717 730-8355 30 Hunter Lane, Camp Hill, PA 17011-2410 F: +1 717 975-3789 P.O. Box 3165, Harrisburg, PA 17105-3165 W: +1 717 805-6208 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I remember something like that happening in Chicago years ago. Someone who was basically Republican in their outlook and sympathies and wanted to get others to feel the same way went through the phone book and called up a huge number of people between 3 and 4 AM every night and after getting the head of the household (usually) out of bed and awake would inquire who they were speaking to (leaving the head of the household to fear the worst [ie must be police calling, must have been some horrible accident, or a death, etc]) then proceeded to tell the party, 'be sure vote Democratic at the polls next week, and vote as often as you can get away with it', then they would hang up. The Republican Party is almost non-existent in Chicago; people are either straight- out Democrats or maybe they are 'independent voters'. Those middle of the night phone calls convinced more than one person that the Chicago Democratic Party was every bit as corrupted and rotten as they have been given credit for over the years. 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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Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #530 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Nov 4 16:48:24 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA4LmOe18251; Thu, 4 Nov 2004 16:48:24 -0500 (EST) Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 16:48:24 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411042148.iA4LmOe18251@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 #531 TELECOM Digest Thu, 4 Nov 2004 16:47:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 531 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (Fred Goldstein) Web Calls May Be More Popular Than Thought - Survey (Lisa Minter) Re: Lever Voting Machines - What's Wrong? (Jim Burks) Re: Lever Voting Machines - What's Wrong? (Joe Morris) Re: Lever Voting Machines - What's Wrong? (Shalom Septimus) Re: Last Laugh! was Re: Lever Voting Machines (Lisa Hancock) Re: How to Make the Right Call on Cell Plans (Lisa Hancock) Re: Semiconductors | The End of Moore's Law? (Rick Merrill) Your Experience With Vonage (Hector L. Gonzales) Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (Isaiah Beard) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 15:07:00 -0500 From: Fred Goldstein Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? In V23#259, markrobt@comcast.net (Mark Roberts) noted, >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But this area did not have cable TV >> (nor, for the most part) any over the air TV in 1954-55. Coffeyville >> had that *one* station (channel 4) over the air in that time period, > I don't see how that is possible with full-power stations on > channel 4 in Oklahoma City and in Kansas City. Low-power, > non-translator stations were not authorized until the mid-1980s. Oklahoma City and Kansas City are well out of range of Independence and Coffeyville. TV stations are protected to their Grade B contours. The FCC makes those contours available in the form of a MapInfo database, which anyone with MapInfo can download and see. So I did. There is no Channel 4 showing in the immediate area. From Independence proper, the protected reception channels are: 7 KOAM-TV Pittsburg (that's all) Plus there are construction permits in place for: 50 K54GC Independence Trinity Broadcasting translator (application, not CP) 59 K59HS Independence Tulsa Channel 19 LLC translator 34 KIDP-LP Independence Marcia T. Turner (low power TV) 20 K20HJ Independence Tulsa Channel 19 LLC translator 15 KDOR-TV Bartlesville Trinity Broadcasting digital TV KDOR's Channel 17 contour *just misses* Independence; the DT range seems a tiny bit larger. The Tulsa stations' contours tend to run out just about at Coffeyville. There is however no Channel 4 hitting Coffeyville or anywhere else nearby, for that matter. A few miles northwest of Independence, Moline County is one of those unusual places with *no* off-air TV coverage (Grade B) at all. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I *do not know for sure* they were on > channel 4 in the 1950's, or even that it was the same thing. I do > know in the 1950's I stayed for a few days with my cousins who (still > even today) live in Coffeyville. There was a 24 hour black and white > station which continuously showed weather dials and a clock; nothing > else. Neil McLain mentioned Coffeyville Junior College having something > on Channel 4 *today*. I _assumed_ it was the same thing. Thursday I am > going to call them and ask them (1) if they are on the air now, (2) if > they have a program guide (3) if they were on the air fifty years ago > doing continuous weather, etc. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Web Calls May Be More Popular Than Thought - Survey Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 14:09:47 -0600 http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=3Dstory&u=3D/nm/20041104/wr_nm/tele= coms_internet_voice_dc AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Making cheap telephone calls over the Internet could be much more popular among consumers than previously estimated, leaving incumbent telecom service providers highly vulnerable, a survey revealed on Thursday. Over 50 million western European consumers with a broadband Internet connection at home may use telephony software and special phones by 2008, British research group Analysys found. "The impact on traditional telephony providers' revenues could reach 6.4 billion euros in 2008, representing 13 percent of the residential fixed-line voice market," said analyst Stephen Sale, adding this was a worst case scenario drawn up for operators who want to know how badly they can be hit. Previous estimates forecast that up to five percent of revenues could be eaten away by Internet telephony. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), as Internet telephony is officially known, has become popular among consumers in the last year thanks to free software from providers such as Skype. Two weeks ago, Luxemburg-based Skype said it had reached the milestone of one million simultaneous callers. Calls are usually made from computer to computer, although Skype sells a service where PC users can call normal phones at low per minute charges. Skype and rivals like Popular Telephony are working with hardware manufacturers like Siemens, Cisco and Plantronics to develop VoIP-enabled home phones that plug into broadband modems. This will open the way to call VoIP users -- at the moment this is not possible, because VoIP users have to be online if they want to be reached via the Internet. It is creating a critical mass for rapid adoption, Sale said. Most calls from home phones are made to a handful of friends and relatives, and it is easier to convince a small group to move to Internet telephony, than a large group. Operators are divided over what they should do. The chief executives of Deutsche Telekom and British Telecom, two of Europe's top phone carriers, differed in their views on how to counter the decline of their traditional fixed-line sales. British Telecom's Ben Verwaayen said the telecoms industry has to prepare for next-generation Internet networks. Kai-Uwe Ricke, meanwhile, saw his voice telephony business threatened mainly by mobile phones. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Jim Burks Subject: Re: Lever Voting Machines - What's Wrong? Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 11:48:04 GMT Organization: Road Runner High Speed Online http://www.rr.com TELECOM Digest Editor Noted in response to Lisa Hancock who wrote in message news:telecom23.528.1@telecom-digest.org: > Apparently the government got after the city and told them all > polling places had to be more handicapped accessible, so they had > to move out of SEK Senior Citizens. Another example of the ADA removing the rights (and conveniences) of the many to support a few, not by having them drive downtown, but having everyone. Jim Burks [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I am not so sure I agree with you on this, Jim. In *my particular case* it is true that walking downtown to do whatever from my home is a bit of a hassle. And voting was at Memorial Hall, which is the north side of the downtown area. But our entire town is only 2 miles long by about 2 miles wide and most people if they drive just get in a car and get to wherever in two or three minutes anyway. Truly, at the old voting place at SEK Senior Citizens I could (when I felt sprightly) walk three blocks down the street, vote, and walk three blocks home (although the trip coming back is up a hill, and I was usually sort of tired after that walk. Now when they told me to the jailhouse to vote (in the primary election), that is six blocks away (the southern/eastern edge of the downtown area) so I walked, but called the cab to get back home. When I went to vote last Tuesday, I asked Jeff, the cab driver here, if he would mind waiting for me unless he got another call while I was inside. He did get another call so I walked over to the post office to dump my box and stopped at the Radio Shack *then* called Jeff to come back and pick me up there. But I can't complain *that much*; I ride around town when I go anywhere using a City of Independence Senior Citizens card, and get the ride for $1.50. (Usual cab fare anywhere in town is $3.00, city pays half of the fare for old people and disabled people.) Jeff's boss, the lady who owns the cab company says it sometimes is a bummer getting the city to pay off every month; city in turn blames the dead-beatery on the state of Kansas for not paying *them* on time. So the ADA is a typical beaurocratic thing; they take from you one place and give back in other ways. Argue about it if you want; like all public servants they don't give a damn either way. And the lady who owns the cab company says that *I* am one of the biggest 'coupon' riders they have. She points out that most people using the handicapped or old people coupons use them once or twice per *month* to go to Walmart or the beauty salon, etc. She said "you (meaning me, PAT) use them once or twice a *day*. Like this afternoon, after I get this issue of the Digest out, I will go to Doctor Epp's Animal Hospital with my cat, Callie to get her stitches out (she was 'fixed' a couple weeks ago.) They won't charge me for taking her in her case in the cab, and if Jeff is not busy he will wait there for me to come back home. So I do okay with ADA, but maybe its the southeast rural Kansas attitude working in my favor. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Joe Morris Subject: Re: Lever Voting Machines - What's Wrong? Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 13:32:19 UTC Organization: The MITRE Organization hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) writes: > Is there a reason mechanical machines are so out of favor? Sure, they > would require maintenance and setup and there is a cost to that, but > that is only twice a year. If the machines were in production, costs > would be lower. A modern generation would probably have newer > mechanical engineering and lighter better wearing gears. One reason is voting integrity. I grew up in Louisiana, a state where political corruption is considered to be an art form. I'll admit that the details are a bit fuzzy in my memory, but one news story I recall from the 1950s was a demonstration given to the Legislature of how easy it was for a person to rig a mechanical voting machine *during the voting*. A voting machine was set up as if for an election, and (without curtains) a "voter" went into it, then used a (coat hanger?) to manipulate the linkages behind the level panel. In a real election he would have been behind curtains and his actions not visible to the election officials. Of course, this being Louisiana no reforms came out of the demonstration, and I suspect that lots of legislators were taking notes -- for their political operatives' benefit so that they could rig the machines in their districts. Joe Morris [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: They caught some guy doing something similar in Chicago years ago. He was employed by the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners (thus had a right to be in the warehouse where the machines are/were kept unsupervised) and he loosened a few screws and attached some wires in the back of several machines to rig them that no matter what the person chose to vote, it would get recorded as a straight Democratic vote. It was found out when one of the machines had a crank handle which got stuck and would not turn (after his tampering with it.) Mayor Daley claimed to be (and acted) furious when he found that out, but you know how that goes. Police had quite an investigation into it; found several of the voting machines had been tampered with in that way. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Shalom Septimus Subject: Re: Lever Voting Machines - What's Wrong? Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 15:59:52 -0500 Reply-To: druggist@pobox.com On 2 Nov 2004 19:47:13 -0800, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) wrote: > Another advtg is that you enter the machine with an open curtain, pull > a master lever to close it and open the machine to accept your votes, > then pull the master again to record your final votes and open the > curtain. The curtains are large and fully enclosed -- it appears that > modern electronic machines have very tiny curtains or just a small > divider, limiting voter privacy. I, too, remember voting on those old machines, and I loved them. New York City bought a load of them in 1960, and are using them to this day. Now I live in New Jersey, and the electronic machines we have here just don't have the same feel. Yes, the ultimate result is the same, but pushing the little red button and hearing a "beep" doesn't make you feel like anything of moment had taken place, whereas on those old beasts, when you pulled that huge lever, the resounding "Ka-Chonk!" really gave you a feeling of accomplishment: by $DEITY, you knew you'd voted. But there's been one modification on many of these machines over the past decade: the big lever doesn't close the curtains anymore. When I asked why, they said that too many people didn't realise that it also recorded the vote: as a result, they'd close the curtain, then decide they had to ask the attendant a question and open it again. Oops, you just recorded a blank ballot. Now the curtains stay closed, and you push your way between them, or slide them open and closed by hand. I would guess that the mechanical design of these machines was borrowed from railroad engineering: the interlocks that prevent you for voting for two presidents, or four judges when only three seats were available, are much the same as the interlocks in the switching plant preventing you from lining a switch until the associated signal is clear, or setting up impossible routes, or routes that would have trains in opposite direction on the same track, etc. Those interlockings were entirely mechanical for many years, although it's mostly computerized today on the Class I railroads like Union Pacific. See _Risks Digest_ 9:58 http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/9.58.html for a simple setup, and remember that in yards or along busy main lines they could be much more complicated. Shalom ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: Last Laugh! was Re: Lever Voting Machines - What's Wrong? Date: 4 Nov 2004 12:24:23 -0800 > [TELECOM Digest Editor's note: Believe me, if it ever came to light > here that a person dead and buried had not been removed from the > rolls and a vote had been cast in that person's name, the stink > would be terrible all over town. As mentioned, I received a great many phone calls to go out and vote. This included three on election day specifically requesting a deceased relative to go out and vote. One was a human message and they left a return phone number. I was so annoyed at the flood of calls -- for someone who was not on the voting register (I doubled checked) -- that I wanted to let these solicitors have it. They offered to come down and drive the person to vote. I was tempted to ask them to come down and send them off to the cemetery. (I didn't.) I did call them back and asked if they were sure if the person was registered and qualified to vote. At first the person insisted yes, but then she said she'd check on it. She called me back and explained that their list was based on people who had voted in the past but hadn't voted lately -- it was NOT the official voter rolls. They get the list from sitting at the polls and seeing who voted; they cannot get access to the official list. Her boss just told her there would be people on the list who might be deceased or had moved. With that I let the issue go. I was annoyed that previous solicitors insisted their list was official and accurate. I am still glad the whole thing is over. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: They do that in Chicago, also. The precinct captain (the go-fer in your neighborhood who works for the alderman) has the duty of driving a van around to get all the old people and take them to the polls and show them how to vote, etc. On those phone calls you received, did they ask you to please vote a straight Democratic ticket? In Chicago, the precinct captain would tell the old people "all you have to do is pull lever 6" (or whichever lever did the straight ticket thing). Then you can get back on the bus and we will stop to get your ice cream (or beer or a pack of cigarettes, whatever) on the way back to the nursing home. They've had some hassles in the past few years with a Reublican administration yet a Democratic 'machine' in Chicago. People are divided; they want to support the president, yet they don't want to double cross the local precinct captain either. PAT] ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: How to Make The Right Call On Cell Plans Date: 4 Nov 2004 12:58:01 -0800 John Levine wrote > It was at least as much due to the Bell breakup. Before that, long > distance was deliberately overpriced to subsidize local service, on > the theory that it was an expensive luxury. (Well, it was back in > 1920.) Prices would have dropped a lot anyway, but a big chunk of the > drop is due to the access charges assessed on LD calls. They used to > be on the order of 10 cents/min or more, now in most places they're > just a penny or two. I used a lot of long distance in the late 1970s and I saw the price drops. On some short haul interstate calls at night, the cost could be only 5 cents per minute; less than 10 cent 'access charge' mentioned above. Given the drop in rates, I wonder if that cross- subsidy charge was still in effect. What was in effect was cross subsidy nationally -- a "costly" call (ie over mountains) cost the customer no more than a "cheap" call (ie a direct high capacity microwave channel). Interstate long distance rates were uniform nationwide and varied by mileage. The cost and setup for a given mileage could vary dramatically -- perhaps two wholly different companies (Bell and an Independent) or the same company (one Bell company serving both states). The network was very mixed in those days; some calls were carried by AT&T Long Lines, some by the Bell Company. Many calls could be routed multiple ways depending on traffic, so there was no fixed assignment. Also, I don't think AT&T had its own operators handling domestic calls; rather, all that work was done by the local company. However, that concept was changing. The cheap rates were for dailed direct calls only. Operator handled calls/pay phone cost more. At the time IIRC distant directory assistance was still free, but I suspect without divesture that would've gone away. At the time of divesture, there was considerable equipment used for both local and toll service that it was very hard to split it up for ownership between the Baby Bells and AT&T. They just arbitrarily ran colored tape. (See Mountain Bell history). There were also certain economies of scale lost because of divesture and this drove up costs. After divesture, I do not recall a big drop in costs for a simple user. I think what happened was that higher volume users started to get a break, as did longer distance (ie coast to coast). I recall the rate step schedule was shrinking -- heading toward a single rate/minute for long distance. Also, to get discounts, one had to join a plan which usually had a separate monthly fee. For high volume callers this would pay off, but a low volume caller would lose. Also, carriers constantly changed their plans and discontinuing the old one without notice. Customers who didn't scrutinize their bills carefully (who has time to do that?) would end up paying full retail unknowingly until they got around to calling and making a change. (Banks pull the same crap with Cert Dep interest). So, if you were paying $100/month calling coast-to-coast, you could save serious money. If you were paying $10/month calling 50 miles away you essentially did not. I suspect most residential LD traffic was more shorthaul than long haul. >> Digital phones require more towers than analog. Cell phone companies >> originally advertised digital as being superior quality, but it is >> actually superior for them, not for us users. > Not really. Digital in the 800 MHz AMPS band has about the same range > as analog. ... As I understand it, digital signals are more sensitive to building and geographic obstructions. People who had analog phones that worked fine found that their digital phones failed in the same places. A major newspaper story had a big map of digital dead spots that the carriers were working to resolve by building more towers appropriate to digital transmission and terrain; in my area at least the problems seem to have been fixed (no more negative publicity). This is a similar problem occuring in public safety radios that have upgraded from analog to digital -- the cops and firemen are finding dead spots. There's been a lot of negative publicity that is an ongoing story today, at least in my area in several jurisdictions. (There was even something in the paper today about a frequency shift). ------------------------------ From: Rick Merrill Subject: Re: Semiconductors | The End of Moore's Law? Organization: Comcast Online Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 13:55:32 GMT > The situation hadn't changed, it's difficult, if not impossible to > manage what you don't understand. Are you sure that doesn't make it EASIER to "manage!"? ------------------------------ From: Hector L. Gonzalez Sent: Thu, Nov 04, 2004 9:21:00 GMT Subject: Your Experience With Vonage Mr. Townson, Hello Mr. Townson, I'm interested in the Vonage VOIP service. I saw that you had some problems with erroneous caller ID numbers according to the forum. Question!! Have you had anymore similar experiences such as no caller ID from certain carriers? Has your called party experienced any missing caller ID from your vonage service? Thanks, Hector L. Gonzalez 972.728.2648 Vnet 753-2648 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I've had no serious problems with Vonage. Vonage claims (for caller ID) they 'give out what is given to them by the various telcos'. Bear in mind, I am sort of biased on Vonage: I do not pay for the service; I go with the 'next month free' coupons (and now it is two months free during a promotion). So I guess I get what I pay for. Over all the service is decent. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Isaiah Beard Subject: Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 10:44:25 -0500 DevilsPGD wrote: > I use Visa for the opposite reason -- Lack of paper means I can > reverse any charge at a whim, and it's up to the merchant to produce a > signed paper or they'll eat the charges. True, however, things like auto finance companies, mortgage companies, student loan servicers, and courts where things like parking or traffic tickets are owed have recourse of their own if a payment can't be tracked. :) So, I'd much prefer to have proof of payment in those cases than not. E-mail fudged to thwart spammers. Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That is where when you use a credit card to pay a bill you want to keep track of the authorization number the merchant got when he sold you whatever. That happened to me once with my good friends, Southwestern Bell. They told me they did not get a payment, I said they did. They said "well you have to send us proof or get cut off". I produced the sales authorization number they had been given when they first took my card as payment, and told them "there, you see you got paid. Now straighten it out with VISA who authorized it, and here is a copy of my bill showing where you got the money." They were most perturbed by that remark, but they agreed they had gotten the money; they just did not know what they had done with it or where they applied it, which was not my fault. 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #531 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Nov 5 19:00:20 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA600Je01346; Fri, 5 Nov 2004 19:00:20 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 19:00:20 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411060000.iA600Je01346@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 #532 TELECOM Digest Fri, 5 Nov 2004 19:00:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 532 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson FTC Complaint Regarding Norvergence: A Total Fraud! (Danny Burstein) FTC Sues Norvergence Founders (John R. Levine) Re: Any News on the Feds v. Norvergence? (Lisa Hancock) Nations Use Net to Spy, Plot Attacks Ex-Bush Aide (Lisa Minter) Politicians See E-Voting as a Remote Prospect (Lisa Minter) Re: Prepaid Questions [was Re: How to Make Right Call] (NYC) Re: Prepaid Questions [was Re: How to Make Right Call] (Thomas Horsley) Re: Prepaid Questions [was Re: How to Make Right Call] (Joseph) Re: VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election Turnout (Rick Merrill) Re: VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election Turnout (Robert Bonomi) Re: VoIP -- to Regulate or Not to Regulate? (Rick Merrill) How do I Find Useful Sites About Telecom Billing; Processes? (Sam) 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: Danny Burstein Subject: FTC Complaint Regarding Norvergence: A Total Fraud! Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 11:15:37 -0500 Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC FTC Charges New Jersey Company with Defrauding Consumers Through Sale of its 'Matrix' Telecom Service NorVergence Claimed It Could Provide Dramatic Savings to Small Businesses "The Federal Trade Commission has charged New Jersey-based NorVergence, Inc. with defrauding consumers through misleading claims that it would provide them with years of dramatic savings on their monthly telephone, cellular, and Internet bills. It also falsely promised to provide unlimited long-distance and cellular minutes at no extra cost. [ snip ] "Finally, the Commission's complaint charges NorVergence with providing others with the means to commit deceptive and unfair acts by furnishing third-party finance companies with rental agreements it signed with its customers. By providing the agreements, NorVergence allegedly facilitated the finance companies' ability to file collection suits in areas outside of where the contracts were signed and to demand payment even if the consumers received no services. [ snippety snip, rest at: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2004/11/norvergence.htm ] _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] ------------------------------ Date: 5 Nov 2004 16:19:49 -0500 From: John R Levine Subject: FTC Sues Norvergence Founders FTC Charges New Jersey Company with Defrauding Consumers Through Sale of its 'Matrix' Telecom Service http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2004/11/norvergence.htm The FTC also specifically claims that the leases are fraudulent, which sounds like good news for people still trying to get out of them. Regards, John Levine johnl@iecc.com Primary Perpetrator of The Internet for Dummies Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Mayor "I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: Any News on the Feds v. Norvergence? Date: 5 Nov 2004 11:41:48 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com dor@writeme.com (Satchel Paige) wrote: > I am just trying to find out any information on what the Federal > government or state governments are doing about Norvergence, the > Salzano brothers and other Norvergence officers. The FTC is involved. See article at: http://www.nj.com/newsflash/jersey/index.ssf?/base/business-1/1099612448215700.xml&storylist=jersey [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Not only is the FTC 'involved' as Lisa states it, but the same FTC has declared all the lease arrangements to be part of the fraud. THAT MEANS NO MONEY IS DUE TO ANY BANK OR LEASING COMPANY; FURTHERMORE THE VICTIMS CAN SUE THE BANKS AND FINANCE COMPANIES TO GET BACK MONEY THEY PAID. That is, unless you are still one of the suckers who kept wimpering (here in this Digest and else- where) about how 'people who do not pay on their lease for the next X years will get sued and have their credit ruined.' For all I care, YOU can keep on paying, while everyone else follows the suggestion I made here starting several months ago, advising everyone to **put a freeze on all accounts payable to Norvergence immediatly.** I am certain some finance companies and banks will continue to have the required brass bedsprings to keep on hassling the alleged debtors for payment. No doubt they will continue their story on how they are 'holders in due course' and all that baloney. Anyone who has paid the 'holder in due course' even five cents has paid five cents too much! Explain to the banks, etc that they will have to go back to Norvergence and get the money which was stolen from them, and to consider themselves lucky if you don't sue *them* to get back what they tricked/strong-armed you out of. Let them go see the executives and managers in their own bank/loan company who got the huge bonuses and steak dinners for bringing in that trashy, worthless paper. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Nations Use Net to Spy, Plot Attacks Ex-Bush Aide Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 10:50:14 EST BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) - The world's most advanced military powers are using the Internet to spy on their enemies and prepare digital attacks against rogue targets, a leading cyber security expert said on Friday. "When there's a major cyber incident it's very difficult to prove most of the time who did it," said Richard Clarke, former White House adviser on national security and cyber threats. "There are incidents, I think, where governments are involved, doing either reconnaissance or testing out concepts, probing for weaknesses." Clarke said he suspects Russia and China are the most pervasive users of Internet for intelligence-gathering on suspected enemy states and plotting ways to use the information for military purposes. "Maybe the United States too," he told Reuters at a security conference here. Clarke worked for the last three U.S. presidents as a White House national security advisor. He resigned after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on America and has been a vocal critic of the Bush Administration's anti-terror and Iraq campaigns. His latest comments come as network security experts report a growing sophistication of attacks on business and government Web sites, either knocking them offline for long periods or cracking their defenses to steal trade secrets. GROWING RISKS With more and more of the world's crucial national infrastructure -- from emergency police hotlines to power grids -- connected, at times, to the public Internet, the risk of cyber attacks is growing. In addition, a new crop of elaborate computer programs has been unleashed on the Internet, capable of snooping on security networks for top secret information. Experts agree there is scant evidence so far of state-sponsored efforts to hack into military computer systems or compromise national security networks. But the growing severity of Internet attacks and the rise of malicious spying programs have led many to conclude this is the handiwork of professionals with advanced computing skills, ample funding and a military mindset. Law enforcement officials believe organized crime is behind much of the new so-called "spyware" that emerges on the Internet daily. The programs have proved adept at conning consumers out of money or stealing their banking details and major companies have been hit as well. "Organized hacking is mainly done for economic purposes," said Ira Winkler, a former network security specialist for America's National Security Agency. He added some governments are also interested in using the medium to steal a march on their economic rivals, as the Internet has proved to be one of the best resources for corporate espionage. For that reason, security experts have begun to warn the world's most visible multi-national conglomerates to shore up their networks defenses against cyber snooping -- with mixed results. Clarke said the most industrialized nations of the world remain at risk to some form of cyber attacks against both the corporate sector and their national infrastructure because investment in shoring up these networks has been weak. "I would hope that one of the lessons we learned from 9/11 is that you don't wait for a disaster to occur before we fix the problems we know exist," he said. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Politicians See E-Voting as a Remote Prospect Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 10:54:30 EST BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) - Forget the hi-tech predictions -- it will be years, if ever, before electors can use the Internet to vote, many policymakers believe. The prediction is bad news for technology firms hoping to introduce e-voting to the masses. Worse still, long queues at polling stations, like those seen this week in the United States presidential election, look like being around for a long time. "You will never see absentee voting conducted online -- ever," said Jeannemarie Devolites Davis, a Republican in Virginia's state senate. "As long as there is any question somebody can tamper with the vote it will never happen," she told Reuters at a security conference here. The high turnout in the U.S. election bucked a trend on both sides of the Atlantic toward falling numbers of people bothering to vote over recent years. Voter apathy in Britain, for example, has been especially marked in local contests, prompting the government to launch a number of pilot trials of Internet or text-message voting in minor elections to increase turnout. But despite assurances that this kind of remote voting can be protected against fraud, suspicions persist. The European Union, which has committed vast sums to so-called e-government initiatives to cut through red tape, is not even considering e-voting at the moment. Reinhard Posch, chief information officer for the Austrian government, also thinks old-fashioned paper ballots are here to stay. "It's all about trust and the digital divide," he said. In the United States and throughout Europe, voting procedures are determined by states or local governments. Most often, amending the process requires a change in the law. While more sophisticated touch-screen voting kiosks have come into use lately, they, crucially, need the voter to be present in the booth. So, while millions of TV viewers use the Internet or their mobile phone to evict a member of the "Big Brother" house or a "Pop Idol" hopeful, politicians prefer to stick with the old-fashioned method of queuing at the polls. As Devolites Davis put it: "if the lawmakers don't trust it, it's not going to happen." *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: NOTvalid@surplus4actors.INFO (NYC) Subject: Re: Prepaid Questions [was Re: How to Make Right Call On Cell] Date: 4 Nov 2004 13:28:17 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com tom.horsley@att.net (Thomas A. Horsley) wrote in message news:... > Just as a starting point for comparison, can anyone answer this > question: > If I never use the phone at all, what is the minimum per-year charge > to keep it active for each of the prepaid providers "plans"? (I can > start digging up other implications of each plan if I could just order > them first by this criteria :-). Wife and I are Virgins. Each user has to put in a minimum of $20.00 each 90 days. Since the first 10 calls on any given day are 25 cents each, you could use the twenty bux to make 80 one minute calls. Every time you add 20 bux, it gets added to remainder. To send text messages is always ten cents. To receive text messages is always free. So I can send a msgs to my wife as Email while I am on line and she doesn't pay to receive and I don't pay for an outgoing call. Incredibly low long distance phone rates, As low as USA-Canada 1.9CPM! Works as prepaid phone card. PIN not needed for calls from home or cell phone. Compare the rates on the WWW. No monthly fee or minimum. 20 minutes for FREE! using https://www.onesuite.com/034720367/suitetreat ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Prepaid Questions [was Re: How to Make Right Call On Cell] From: tom.horsley@att.net (Thomas A. Horsley) Organization: AT&T Worldnet Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 23:46:33 GMT > I'm not really sure what all your confusion is due to. Most tell you > what the terms are i.e. you must pay a minimum amount to get service > and there are usually some requirements for you to keep the service > such as a requirement that you add money at a required interval or > that you place a call by a certain period to keep your account active > or both. They tell you some of the terms up front, but actually finding out the minimum time you have to buy to keep the phone active seems to be a real challenge (at least to me), I've had to dive down multiple levels to finally get to the leagalese fine print "terms of service" documents, and then translate that from lawyer to human :-). One big difference I have noticed is that some of the plans expire your minutes if you don't use them, and others keep accumulating unused minutes as long as you keep the phone active (if I went with one of those, I'd probably eventually wind up with several years worth of un-used minutes - maybe they should come up with a program for donating unused minutes to charities :-). >>==>> The *Best* political site >>==+ email: Tom.Horsley@worldnet.att.net icbm: Delray Beach, FL | Free Software and Politics <<==+ ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Prepaid Questions [was Re: How to Make Right Call On Cell] Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 14:55:22 -0800 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Thu, 04 Nov 2004 08:06:34 -0800, Joseph wrote: > Another prepaid service offered by PhoneShark called "JusTalk" which > you can buy a minimum $10 'card' (40 minutes) and it will last you for > six months before you must add new minutes to keep the account active. > They are an AT&T Wireless TDMA reseller as well. They do not sell > phones though. You must provide your own AT&T Wireless TDMA > compatible handset. This service ends up costing you ~$1.50/month. > Sorry about replying to my own post, but I just got a notice today from Phoneshark about the JusTalk service. They have modified the way plans work and rather than having the accounts expire afteer six months and requiring that you add money by that time the accounts now do not expire at the end of six months, but will go on indefinitely though they require that you make at least *twenty* minutes of calls per month. That's no bargain at all considering that per minute cost is around 25 cents per minute. This was a good economical service to have, but I can't recommend them any longer and would instead recommend Beyond Wireless. ------------------------------ From: Rick Merrill Subject: Re: VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election Turnout Organization: Comcast Online Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 21:52:30 GMT ranck@vt.edu wrote: >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have a question about the election. >> On AP News Wednesday afternoon, Senator Kerry said in order to save the >> country the kind of debacle which occurred in 2000 when Mr. Bush was >> eventually declared the winner, he was going to concede the election >> to Bush, which he did. But later in the day Wednesday officials said >> they were still going to closely audit all the votes from Ohio. Now >> just suppose the Ohio audit showed the Kerry *had* won that state >> (although he and others said it was quite unlikely). But let's say >> it turned out he did win *that state's electoral votes*. In that case >> he might have won the election; but he has already conceded to Bush. >> What would happen in that case? Has a 'winner' of a presidential >> election ever conceded it to someone else? Just curious. PAT] > I don't think it has ever happened, but what Kerry really said, > in effect, is that his campaign will not challenge the vote counts > anywhere. If, as you suggest, Ohio does its own audit and awards > its electors to Kerry, then the Electoral College still does its > thing on the appointed day in December and Kerry could in theory > still become President. This seems highly unlikely, but there is > no mechanism in the Constitution for a candidate to "concede." > I suppose he could refuse the appointment, but then the office > would go to Edwards, not Bush. At least, I think that's how it > would work. > Bill Ranck > Blacksburg, Va. Even cooler :-( is what would happen in the event of a TIE in the Electoral College: the vote goes to the Senate (and Bush wins) But the vice president could be Edwards!! [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: It was all rendered moot earlier today when AP Radio News (see http://telecom-digest.org/stuff ) reported that the Iowa returns were now finalized and they had gone to Bush also. PAT] ------------------------------ Organization: Robert Bonomi Consulting Subject: Re: VoIP Plays Big Role in Presidential Election Turnout From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 22:25:05 +0000 In article , > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have a question about the election. > On AP News Wednesday afternoon, Senator Kerry said in order to save the > country the kind of debacle which occurred in 2000 when Mr. Bush was > eventually declared the winner, he was going to concede the election > to Bush, which he did. But later in the day Wednesday officials said > they were still going to closely audit all the votes from Ohio. Now > just suppose the Ohio audit showed the Kerry *had* won that state > (although he and others said it was quite unlikely). But let's say > it turned out he did win *that state's electoral votes*. In that case > he might have won the election; but he has already conceded to Bush. > What would happen in that case? Has a 'winner' of a presidential > election ever conceded it to someone else? Just curious. PAT] I don't know of it ever having happened at the Presidential level, but it has happened at lower-level elections. The 'actual' winner was seated ------------------------------ From: Rick Merrill Subject: Re: VoIP -- to Regulate or Not to Regulate? Organization: Comcast Online Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 21:55:07 GMT > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Just like telephones in many ways. In > the the late 19th century 'telephone' was not a word in most people's > vocabulary, but by 1901-1905 nearly everyone had heard of the device > and many folks had even used one. PAT] When the telephone came out, business men accustomed to the telegraph, said "We want someting IN WRITING!" I have heard someone say they want something WITH A CORD! ------------------------------ From: 9mo9vlp02@sneakemail.com (Sam) Subject: How do I Find Useful Sites About Telecom Billing; Processes? Date: 4 Nov 2004 19:31:14 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com With all my google searches so far I have to wade through a lot of resumes and headhunter postings and vendor sales information. I can't seem to find a lot of useful stuff. The useful stuff I'm looking for are sites that give examples of how various people/companies do billing related business processes. I've been asked to do some work with a billing system & would like to get a feel for how some people/companies approach things. Various things along the whole data pipeline, some examples being rules of thumb for how many billing cycles to have. How many dummy accounts should you have to check billing run accuracies? How many dummy calls per account? At what stage of the billing process do you inject dummy calls: at the switch, at the switch-file loading into the DB, as SQL inserts into the DB? Or should you even have dummy accounts, should you test with real accounts set in a "no-real-bill, no-dummy-effect, dummy mode"? What are some good processes for entering rates, taxes (for those companies that can fix rates themselves and don't buy government approved rates in easily loadable electronic format), for example, should the typing be checked 3 times? 4 times? Thanks in advance. ------------------------------ 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #532 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Nov 5 20:21:11 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA61LB802717; Fri, 5 Nov 2004 20:21:11 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 20:21:11 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411060121.iA61LB802717@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 #533 TELECOM Digest Fri, 5 Nov 2004 20:21:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 533 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Anyone Use Skype on Win98? Seeking Advice (Moderator@yahoogroups.com) Re: What Happened to Channel 1? (Richie Kennedy) Re: Coffeyville Junior College and Channel 4. (Neal McLain) Re: Semiconductors | The End of Moore's Law? (Lisa Hancock) Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (DevilsPGD) Verizon Wireless to Buy NextWave Spectrum (Lisa Minter) Re: Prepaid Question was Re: How to Make Right Call on Cell (Doug Faunt) Re: Last Laugh! was Re: Lever Voting Machines - What's Wrong? (McHarry) 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: Moderator@yahoogroups.com Subject: Anyone Use Skype on Win98? Seeking Advice Date: 5 Nov 2004 13:31:27 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com re: Skype telephony software - Win98 on a Pentium2 http://www.skype.com/ I am the moderator of a language learning group with some 600 participants. I have recommended that group members download Skype for use in language practice among themselves. I myself have only a Pentium 2, 550 MHZ, Compaq Presario 7478 (250 MB memory, 40 Gigabyte hard drive). Before trying to install Skype on my system, I would WELCOME hearing from others about their success or not -- or hearing any informed hearsay -- re: using Skype on a Win 98 system such as mine. I have found an older beta version of Skype: File name: SkypeSetup-beta.exe v 0.98.0.68 (Freeware). I've read that on Win98 systems, the video can sap so much of the system resources that the audio can suffer markedly. Apparently, the current version is: Version: 1.0.0.97. Release date: Oct 26, 2004 File name: SkypeSetup.exe -- for Win2000/XP. Before embarking on this journey, would WELCOME hearing from you ... your suggestions, caveat, questions, etc ... Any recommended alternative telephonie software that may be equal to Skype? Thanks so much in advance. Rob In addition to posting your response here, please also send it directly to me, at: FETModerators(TOBEREMOVEFIRST)@yahoo.com adonisinc@(NO-SPAM)yahoo.com (first remove the spam blockers in parentheses) ================ The Skype propa: Skype is a user friendly P2P software, that allows you to make free Internet telephone calls (VoIP) to any other Skype user, anywhere in the world. The sound quality is as good or even better than regular phones, and requires no additional equipment, besides a normal PC microphone or headset. The Skype interface is similar to popular instant messenger clients and allows you to create a profile, with optional picture, that will be displayed when you call other Skype users or receive incoming call. The program is very easy to use, and works with firewalls and NAT without any additional configuration changes. Basically, all you have to do is download, select a Skype username and you are ready to make or receive calls. Skype in a nutshell. Our software's quick and easy to get started with. Download, register, install, plug in your headset, speakers or USB phone and start calling your friends. The calls have excellent sound quality and are highly secure with end-to-end encryption. You don't even need to configure your firewall or router or any other networking gear. It just, you know, works. Bridging the gap. And it doesn't just work on Windows, like some other software you may know. Skype is also for Mac OS X, Linux and PDAs using Pocket PC, with a native look and feel for each platform. Talking, sending instant messages or even file transfers work between different platforms like a charm. Calling regular phone numbers. If there weren't enough ways for you to contact your friends, we have a little thing called SkypeOut. It let's you make calls to old-fashioned phone numbers all around the world. Landlines, mobile phones ... it works with almost all of them. SkypeOut is not free but it is pretty cheap, actually. You can read more about SkypeOut if you wish. ------------------------------ From: Richie Kennedy Subject: Re: What Happened to Channel 1? Date: Fri, 05 Nov 2004 00:05:13 -0000 Organization: route56.com Fred Goldstein wrote in news:telecom23.531.1@telecom-digest.org: > A few miles northwest of Independence, Moline County is one of those > unusual places with *no* off-air TV coverage (Grade B) at all. There is no "Moline County" in Kansas. I'm assuming you are referring to the town of Moline, in Elk County. Richie Kennedy route56@route56.com www.route56.com "There's always a stage and a beautiful babe to squeeze my lime..." [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I am sorry I did not catch that error when the article was first published. Moline is a tiny little town in a very rural county of Kansas. Here in the eastern half of Kansas (which is where the people live, what there are of us), Elk County is *very* rural, even more so than my own Montgomery County. I think is is about as sparse, population-wise, as Chatauqua County which is next door to our county. I should have corrected Fred's reference when the article first came in. And no, they do not have *any* over the air television signals at all, other than a 'wisp' now and then from either Tulsa or Wichita. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 22:24:07 -0600 From: Neal McLain Subject: Re: Coffeyville Junior College and Channel 4. PAT wrote: > Today, Thursday, I got a chance to speak to folks at CCC and > ask them about the television signal on Channel 4. The young > lady who answered the phone at 620-251-7700 said to me she had > only worked there a short time and knew nothing of it. She put > me through to a man who had worked there for about twenty years > and he said they had discontinued the 'station' (which was a > learning exercise or practice for students *more than ten years > ago*. He said "it was only licensed as a low-power station and > we had so much interference (which, under the terms of our FCC > license we had to accept) from the bigger station in Oklahoma > City, and our equipment got old and hard to maintain, so we > decided to abandon that part of our program. We have not been > on the air in years, but Oklahoma City still comes booming > through now like a local now and then." > I told him I believed they were still a licensee in FCC records > (Neil, am I correct on this? You said you looked it up)... It's still listed in TvRadioWorld at http://tinyurl.com/6k8j5 . Unfortunately, TvRadioWorld isn't up-to-date. The FCC database indicates that the license expired on 12/01/1998. http://tinyurl.com/3kpse > ... and he was surprised to hear that. I asked him about the > television station broadcasting in the 1950's doing weather all > the time. He said he started working at the college about 1981 > and he could not help with that, but he was *certain* it had not > been them ... If I understand this correctly, he was certain that the station had not been broadcasting in the 1950s. But he also stated that the station's equipment was "old and hard to maintain" (leading to the decision to discontinue operations) "more than ten years ago" -- i.e., before 1994. So I wonder when the station was broadcasting? Perhaps during the 60s and 70s? > He did agree, Neil, that the 'old station, when it was running, > more than a decade ago' was 310 watts. He suggested I should > speak to someone at the 'Dalton Defenders Museum' (which doubles > as the Coffeyville Historical Society). > A phone call to the historical society (a/k/a Dalton Defenders > Museum) did not produce much luck.... > So Neil, there is your half-answer. I realize not a very good > one. Well, perhaps it *does* answer the original question that started this thread: why doesn't Cable One use cable channel 4? If the station was operating during the 60s and 70s, when many cable TV systems were being built, this might explain why the original cable company in Independence didn't use cable channel 4. In which case, Cable One could probably start using it now. Still, there may be other reasons why Cable One might not want to use it even now. DTV is going to arrive eventually (by 2009 according to the latest rumor); consequently, Cable One might want avoid activating any more analog channels. Or maybe Stanley Cline's theory about traps [TD V23 #520] is correct after all. < http://tinyurl.com/4oy9k >. > I rather suspect the one time I got ghosting images and snow > with a very faint picture it must have been the OKC station > under good atmospheric conditions. Probably. And BTW, the station was K04EJ, not W04EJ. Given the recent thread about the K/W line, how could I have screwed that up? Neal McLain [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But did you know that back in the days when FCC was actually issuing 'licenses' for Citizen Band radio operation, *all* those licenses began with 'K' regardless of where they were located? What do they have now, for people who bother to tell them about a CB radio? I think it is first and last initials and one's zip code. In other words I would be 'PT67301' I think. PAT] ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: Semiconductors | The End of Moore's Law? Date: 5 Nov 2004 14:11:50 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com zbang@radix.net (Carl Zwanzig) wrote > Reminds me of a railroad executive in the '50s. When asked what the > biggest problem the railroads faced, he said "Too many bankers > railroading." I'm not sure if that's true. Specifically to the railroads of the 1950s: they faced new competition from tax subsidized highways, waterways, and airports and the obligation to pay more taxes on their own properties. Further, they faced strict regulatory and labor laws on improving their own operations. As to 'bankers': All business requires capital. Unless you are personally very rich and have very rich friends, you must get your capital from the finance markets (bank loans, investors of stocks and bonds). If your business is floundering, your investors will get nervous about losing their investment and will naturally wonder if you are doing a good job. Depending on the nature of financing, they may have a legal right to muddle in the business. Stockholders can and do have proxy fights to kick out existing managements. Sometimes that is a good idea, sometimes not. Part of the challenge of running _any_ business is keeping the investors happy. It is not an easy task. Henry Ford (I) did it by being so rich he could buy out the other investors in Ford Motor Co. (although only after some nasty court battles). Most other corporations aren't so lucky. The flip side of that was that Ford had no one balancing him and as he got older, got more eccentric and tough to work with. Ford Motor Co. lost its leadership in the car industry and almost shut down because of the father's stubborness in his later years. His family forced him to give up control, in obviously a very emotional and difficult situation. In the 1950s IBM was poised for dramatic growth. The father, Thomas J. Watson Sr, was most uncomfortable about his son raising additional capital needed to expand the business, but he finally relented. Today it is said that investors are too short term oriented. I don't know the answer to that. I do wonder how the old Bell System would've developed if today's attitudes were in place. In the 1950s, Western Electric equipment was built for the long-haul and cost accordingly. I wonder if the investment community would've been as patient and accepting of the steady but modest return on investment of AT&T stock. ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Date: Thu, 04 Nov 2004 22:12:49 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com In message Isaiah Beard wrote: >> I use Visa for the opposite reason -- Lack of paper means I can >> reverse any charge at a whim, and it's up to the merchant to produce a >> signed paper or they'll eat the charges. > True, however, things like auto finance companies, mortgage companies, > student loan servicers, and courts where things like parking or > traffic tickets are owed have recourse of their own if a payment can't > be tracked. :) So, I'd much prefer to have proof of payment in those > cases than not. I have proof of payment -- A line on the statement showing they processed the payment, and (usually) a matching receipt. I keep any important receipt, although I do toss the day to day stuff. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That is where when you use a credit > card to pay a bill you want to keep track of the authorization number > the merchant got when he sold you whatever. That happened to me once > with my good friends, Southwestern Bell. They told me they did not > get a payment, I said they did. They said "well you have to send us > proof or get cut off". I produced the sales authorization number they > had been given when they first took my card as payment, and told them > "there, you see you got paid. Now straighten it out with VISA who > authorized it, and here is a copy of my bill showing where you got > the money." They were most perturbed by that remark, but they agreed > they had gotten the money; they just did not know what they had done > with it or where they applied it, which was not my fault. PAT] Or, if they can't find it, reverse the charge, sit back and watch how fast they can find the payment. They will, of course, want their money immediately, but they can't penalize you for late payment or anything since they did pay you in the first place. And sometimes I park, in handicapped spaces, While handicapped people, make handicapped faces! -- Denis Leary ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 13:47:30 EST From: Lisa Minter Subject: November 5, 2004 - Verizon Wireless to Buy NextWave spectrum Starting today, and I believe every weekday hereafter I will be getting the daily columns from USTA (United States Telecom Association) which Patrick told me used to be known years ago as USITA (United States Independent Telephone Association). As these arrive, I will be posting them here, both with a URL link and a few text headlines. Lisa Minter ======================== Telecom dailyLead from USTA November 5, 2004 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=17360&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * Verizon Wireless to buy NextWave spectrum BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * NTT plans huge FTTH expansion * Nokia embraces "clamshell" design * Verisign dials up VoIP * Charter Communications reports $3.29 billion loss USTA SPOTLIGHT * New in the Telecom Bookstore: USTA's VoIP & Packet Network Security Guide EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * BPL gets mixed reception in survey REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * Telecom industry awaits FCC's VoIP ruling Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=17360&l=2017006 ------------------------------ From: Doug Faunt N6TQS +1-510-655-8604 Subject: Re: Prepaid Questions [was Re: How to Make Right Call On Cell] Date: 05 Nov 2004 19:29:52 -0500 Organization: at home, in Oakland, California Joseph writes: > Sorry about replying to my own post, but I just got a notice today > from Phoneshark about the JusTalk service. They have modified the way > plans work and rather than having the accounts expire afteer six > months and requiring that you add money by that time the accounts now > do not expire at the end of six months, but will go on indefinitely > though they require that you make at least *twenty* minutes of calls > per month. That's no bargain at all considering that per minute cost > is around 25 cents per minute. This was a good economical service to > have, but I can't recommend them any longer and would instead > recommend Beyond Wireless. This discussion has been most interesting. Unfortunately, no one but Verizon seems to provide prepaid service in 59801, Missoula, Montana, that works for somone who wants to actually spend some time on the 'phone, on long distance. If anyone has any hints for that particular service, we'd appreciate it. 73, doug ------------------------------ From: John McHarry Subject: Re: Last Laugh! was Re: Lever Voting Machines - What's Wrong? Date: Fri, 05 Nov 2004 01:14:15 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net Lisa Hancock wrote: > I did call them back and asked if they were sure if the person was > registered and qualified to vote. At first the person insisted yes, > but then she said she'd check on it. She called me back and explained > that their list was based on people who had voted in the past but > hadn't voted lately -- it was NOT the official voter rolls. They get > the list from sitting at the polls and seeing who voted; they cannot > get access to the official list. Her boss just told her there would > be people on the list who might be deceased or had moved. With that I > let the issue go. I was annoyed that previous solicitors insisted > their list was official and accurate. In NC the list is public, as is the last few elections in which one voted. In my precinct people came by to vote with a printout of their information. The parties also had databases of the stuff that allowed them to mechanize canvassing. If somebody didn't like getting called, that was plugged in, and they would not be again. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: They do that in Chicago, also. The > precinct captain (the go-fer in your neighborhood who works for the > alderman) has the duty of driving a van around to get all the old > people and take them to the polls and show them how to vote, etc. On > those phone calls you received, did they ask you to please vote a > straight Democratic ticket? In Chicago, the precinct captain would > tell the old people "all you have to do is pull lever 6" (or whichever > lever did the straight ticket thing). Then you can get back on the bus > and we will stop to get your ice cream (or beer or a pack of > cigarettes, whatever) on the way back to the nursing home. A few years ago two of us from opposing parties were standing around electioneering in Northern VA. We came up with a scheme to give each person who voted a schwag bag on the way out labeled "I voted" and to shake down the local businesses to set up on the the outgoing side to toss in freebies, coupons, etc. It would help get out the vote, but do we really want voters who are only there for the free crap? My limited experience in downstate Illinois was that both parties would arrange free rides for the faithful. I spent part of the day in '76 driving elderly black ladies to the polls. It was a lot of fun. They all dressed up as for church and were delighted to be squired to the polls by a (then) young white graduate student. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Regards your two final paragraphs, that is *exactly* how it works in Chicago also. The Precinct Captain has the job of renting a bus or limousine, going around to all the nursing homes in his area (there are several dozen such places in Chicago if you count them all; several hundred mostly elderly, mostly black, poor people are housed between them) and taking 'his people' to the polls on election day. Each resident gets a bag of goodies to eat on the way or coming back home, and it is hinted (though never actually stated) that the job of these elderly black voters is to return to office (or put in office) the 'proper' Democratic politicians. The people may be told "there are rumors your (nursing) home is going to be shut down for violations of the housing code, etc." Or better still, "candidate X is going to crack down on" (you name it; drugs, crime, etc) which at best is a campaign promise or at worst, a bald face lie. All the old church ladies know what is expected of them: *pull lever six*, or whatever was assigned to straight ticket voting) and they march off that church bus or whatever dressed in their Sunday finest, at the polling place to go in and do battle with the forces of evil (the wrong political party). When they get back on the church bus to go back to the nursing home their box of goodies is waiting there for them on their seat. That's how the Democratic 'machine' works in Chicago, and Mayor Daley II is proud of it, just as his father, Mayor Daley I was before him. It never occurs to the elderly poor black residents of the nursing homes and housing authority that the ten thousand prisoners in the Cook County Jail are mostly poor younger black guys; the children and grandchildren of the nursing home residents, and that Daley and his minions put them there. 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #533 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sat Nov 6 21:24:41 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA72Ofi14239; Sat, 6 Nov 2004 21:24:41 -0500 (EST) Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 21:24:41 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411070224.iA72Ofi14239@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 #534 TELECOM Digest Sat, 6 Nov 2004 21:24:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 534 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson HELP: Vonage Problem After Installation (Iluv) Microsoft in the Telephony Middle Again (Lisa Minter) Movie Studios to Sue Internet File Traders (Lisa Minter) File-Sharing Network Thrives Beneath the Radar (Lisa Minter) "We're From the Government"; NSA Recs Securing Mac OS X (Danny Burstein) Idaho Settles Modest Court Case Against fax.com (Danny Burstein) Looking For Billing Systems Information (Sam) List of All Handphone From Major Manufacturers (Anonymous Netter) Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (Joseph) Re: Prepaid Questions [was Re: How to Make Right Call] (John Levine) Re: Prepaid Questions [was Re: How to Make Right Call] (Joseph) Re: Coffeyville Junior College and Channel 4 (Tony P.) Last Laugh! Much Excitement Around Here Today (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 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: luvtopost@yahoo.com (Iluv) Subject: Help: Vonage Problem After Installation Date: 6 Nov 2004 09:05:32 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hey guys, I just got the Vonage service. They sent me a box with the Linksys Router. The installation was pretty simple. Now, I have one big problem. I used an RJ-11 to connect from the Linksys Phone Line port to a phone line port on the wall of my bedroom. The other phones in my bedrooms and kitchen (which all have a phone wall jack) will ring only once when I try to dial my new number from my personal cell phone to test the incoming calls as if someone from outside calling to my house. Incoming calls will only ring once and then dead silence. Outgoing doesn't seem to be a problem as I can call my friends. Any ideas on what to do? I've already set it to tone (not pulse) as Vonage mentioned in the brochure. Basically, all I want to do is use my phones throughout the house for incoming and outgoing calls. Please assist. Thanks. PS: I have only one phone number(line). [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Whatever you do, *** get that Vonage adapter box disconnected from the telephone line immediatly ***. NEVER hook a Vonage adapter box into a phone outlet _until all phone lines are disconnected at the demarc or the main terminal where they come into your house_. That will probably fry the Vonage box totally, and if it has not yet, I would be quite surprised. The reason your phone rings one time then goes dead is due to this problem. Stop right now and make sure Vonage and your telephone line do NOT see or come in contact with each other. They obviously are somewhere in your house. Make sure there is _NO_ short on the line. Try it first only between the Vonage adapter box and a phone plugged in there. Having the Vonage phone on touch tone instead of rotary is important, but for a different reason (Vonage does not recognize pulse dialing). Your main thing right now is get that thing disconnected from the wall box until you make sure the wall boxes are all working and *disconnected everywhere* from any Bell lines, eitehr alive or (in theory) 'dead'. Then let us know how it works. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Microsoft in the Telephony Middle Again Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 15:18:06 EST What's the idea behind Microsoft's new Live Communications Server client 'Istanbul' at the recent 'Voice on the Net' show? An IP-based, enterprise software end point that knows which of your friends and colleagues are available at any given time, and on which devices. This upgrade of the Windows Messenger instant messaging client also improves its voice and video delivery and offers APIs to vendors that want to add their endpoints, conferencing bridges, media servers and application servers. It also allows a geographically dispersed work force to all huddle over the same Microsoft Office documents and applications as they speak into microphones or IP phones or as they chat into boxes. This sounds familiar to anyone who's kept up with the IP PBX market. In terms of its goals, Microsoft is offering what all the major PBX vendors have come out with over the past 18 months. All have worked presence and instant messaging into their VOIP (voice-over-IP) and hybrid phone systems, for anyone who wants to buy the extra server. They all let you scale from chat to voice to video. What I haven't seen these vendors do, of course, is imbed the IM interface so that it can be launched from within applications. But this appears, to me, to be a relatively small advantage. Within Avaya, Nortel, Mitel or Alcatel systems, for example, document and app sharing is a matter of a few more clicks. And insofar as their systems are SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), these voice switches should also be able to communicate with the world of Windows XP users, whether using enterprise Windows Messenger or consumer MSN Messenger. The Instanbul and LCS announcements also sound somewhat familiar to anyone with sufficient Windows and telecom memory. Since Harry Newton first coined (or borrowed) the name "computer telephony" and promoted an industry in which standard computers could direct the making and taking of phone calls, Windows has wanted a big piece of that action. Many open-system PBXs were built to run on Windows NT 4. Many still run on Windows 2003. Windows drivers were written for the telephony boards from Dialogic (now part of Intel) and NMS and Brooktrout that performed the actual call singling and media functions in the PC-based PBX platforms. TAPI, Microsoft's Telephony API, provided the middleware between the telephony hardware and the applications. Using TAPI, application developers could let users dial contacts with a click or forward an incoming call to voice mail. The nearest I ever came to death by PowerPoint was a 9-hour marathon session in one room on Microsoft's campus one December day in 1998, where nine successive product managers told me what the latest version of TAPI, the TAPI server, and its integrations with Active Directory and SQL Server would do for telephony. Someone who also worked for Harry once explained to me that the idea behind Windows middleware was to fit all the devices like printers, scanners and modems; to all the applications and just stand in the middle of the money stream with a big net. By planting its IM and presence platform in the middle of an enterprise communications network and offering APIs to others' legacy or IP PBXes, gateways and media servers, as well as its own VOIP clients in "Istanbul," I can see Microsoft continuing in this tradition. In doing so, it will be offering its partners a huge user base in the form of users of its dominant desktop. Several companies have already jumped on this invitation: At VON, Radvision announced that it would integrate its multipoint audio/video conference unit and gatekeeper with LCS. Broadsoft announced its intention to integrate its advanced call-feature server and GUI.com Jasomi networks its PeerPoint session border controller for endpoint-to-endpoint control over encryption, call logging, and firewall transversal. While Microsoft lines up its partners for VOIP, it was equally clear at VON that the IP PBX vendors themselves; who have worked in their own presence; and IM integrations are largely defecting from Windows, or at least giving customers that option. Wendy Bohling, presenting for Avaya at the IP "PBX shoot-out" presentation at VON, listed the reasons behind Avaya's offering Communications Manager in Linux as being the desire to minimize virus threats, freedom from worry about constant patches, and the convenience of one user image. Nortel will offer its Business Communications Manager in Linux, Cisco its Call Manager, and 3Com its NBX. It will be interesting to see if and how Microsoft succeeds in pressing its desktop advantage. Istanbul clients will perform as soft phones within the enterprise, probably even wirelessly on Windows-running handhelds. Add a gateway to the system and they'll call anywhere. But they don't now have the wide range of features of PBX phones. And telecom and IT managers obviously show reluctance to bet the office phone system on Windows. Indeed, Anoop Gupta, announcing Istanbul, said that Microsoft does not make PBXes. So at this point, the question is this: If the IP PBXes have found their own presence/IM solutions, how does LCS earn its keep? Perhaps enterprises get it for secure IM and presence, and use it and its soft-phone capability in parallel with an existing legacy gateway'ed PBX. Perhaps they get it to make use of already purchased XP licenses, to be used as soft extensions at home and abroad. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance Ziff-Davis Publishing. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Movie Studios to Sue Internet File Traders Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 15:43:05 EST LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Taking a cue from the music industry, film studios and the Motion Picture Association of America said on Thursday that they were readying the first lawsuits against people suspected of illegally distributing movies over the Internet. The civil suits will seek to stop trading and damages of up to $30,000 per film, the MPAA said, adding that damages could reach $150,000 if the infringement was deemed willful. Record companies have led the way with such lawsuits, targeting major traders of song files who use Kazaa and other programs to swap songs on the Web. The movie trade group, representing Hollywood's major studios, plans to launch its own legal challenges beginning Nov. 16. Studios have been slow to release DVD-quality films on the Internet because of the twin piracy and technological shortcomings -- it takes hours to download even a film at lower quality levels, while it takes minutes or seconds to download a song. Improving technology is cutting the gap, though. "That distinction is rapidly vanishing, so we are taking these actions to try and prevent this illegal activity from becoming mainstream," the MPAA said in a statement, adding that future technologies could allow movie downloads in as few as six seconds. MPAA President and Chief Executive Dan Glickman said at a news conference that the music industry has had an impact on music piracy with its lawsuits. That campaign has had a mixed reception from consumers and some in the industry, who have urged movie and music makers to develop easy-to-use technology for buying or renting content that would be a viable alternative to illegal downloads. Apple Computer Inc's iTunes is often heralded as an example of legal song buying that works. "The industry should be thinking of new ways to deploy the new technology rather than suing the consumer," said Mediaport Entertainment Inc. Chief Executive Helen Seltzer, which makes kiosks, or automatic teller machines, to buy and download music. "We find that if students are given an easy way to download, they will do it and pay for it happily," she said. An MPAA attorney said studios would launch fewer lawsuits than the record industry, which has pursued more than 5,000 people to date. Studios would also use "John Doe" lawsuits that allow them to pursue file traders without knowing the traders' identities. Chris Ruhland, a former studio lawyer now at Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, forecast the movie makers would win their days in court. "The law is very clear that unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material is illegal," he said. Reuters/VNU *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance Reuters/VNU News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: File-Sharing Network Thrives Beneath the Radar Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 15:43:04 EST LONDON (Reuters) - A file-sharing program called BitTorrent has become a behemoth, devouring more than a third of the Internet's bandwidth, and Hollywood's copyright cops are taking notice. For those who know where to look, there's a wealth of content, both legal -- such as hip-hop from the Beastie Boys and video game promos -- and illicit, including a wide range of TV shows, computer games and movies. Average users are taking advantage of the software's ability to cheaply spread files around the Internet. For example, when comedian Jon Stewart made an incendiary appearance on CNN's political talk show "Crossfire," thousands used BitTorrent to share the much-discussed video segment. Even as lawsuits from music companies have driven people away from peer-to-peer programs like KaZaa, BitTorrent has thus far avoided the ire of groups such as the Motion Picture Association of America. But as BitTorrent's popularity grows, the service could become a target for copyright lawsuits. According to British Web analysis firm CacheLogic, BitTorrent accounts for an astounding 35 percent of all the traffic on the Internet -- more than all other peer-to-peer programs combined -- and dwarfs mainstream traffic like Web pages. "I don't think Hollywood is willing to let it slide, but whether they're able to (stop it) is another matter," Bram Cohen, the programer who created BitTorrent, told Reuters. John Malcolm, director of worldwide anti-piracy operations for the MPAA, said that his group is well aware of the vast amounts of copyrighted material being traded via BitTorrent. "It's a very efficient delivery system for large files, and it's being used and abused by a hell of a lot of people," he told Reuters. "We're studying our options, as we do with all new technologies which are abused by people to engage in theft." FOR GOOD OR EVIL BitTorrent, which is available for free on http://bittorrent.com, can be used to distribute legitimate content and to enable copyright infringement on a massive scale. The key is to understand how the software works. Let's say you want to download a copy of this week's episode of "Desperate Housewives." Rather than downloading the actual digital file that contains the show, instead you would download a small file called a "torrent" onto your computer. When you open that file on your computer, BitTorrent searches for other users that have downloaded the same "torrent." BitTorrent's "file-swarming" software breaks the original digital file into fragments, then those fragments are shared between all of the users that have downloaded the "torrent." Then the software stitches together those fragments into a single file that a users can view on their PC. Sites like Slovenia-based Suprnova ( http://www.suprnova.org ) offer up thousands of different torrents without storing the shows themselves. Suprnova is a treasure trove of movies, television shows, and pirated games and software. Funded by advertising, it is run by a teen-age programer who goes only by the name Sloncek, who did not respond to an e-mailed interview request. Enabling users to share copyrighted material illicitly may put Suprnova and its users on shaky legal ground. "They're doing something flagrantly illegal, but getting away with it because they're offshore," said Cohen. He is not eager to get into a battle about how his creation is used. "To me, it's all bits," he said. But Cohen has warned that BitTorrent is ill-suited to illegal activities, a view echoed by John Malcolm of MPAA. "People who use these systems and think they're anonymous are mistaken," Malcolm said. Asked if he thought sites like Suprnova were illegal, he said: "That's still an issue we're studying, that reasonable minds can disagree on," he said. GOING LEGIT Meanwhile, BitTorrent is rapidly emerging as the preferred means of distributing large amounts of legitimate content such as versions of the free computer operating system Linux, and these benign uses may give it some legal protection. "Almost any software that makes it easy to swap copyrighted files is ripe for a crackdown. BitTorrent's turn at bat will definitely happen," said Harvard University associate law professor Jonathan Zittrain. "At least under U.S. law, it's a bit more difficult to find the makers liable as long as the software is capable of being used for innocent uses, which I think (BitTorrent) surely is." Among the best legitimate sites for movies and music: -- Legal Torrents (http://www.legaltorrents.com/), which includes a wide selection of electronic music. It also has the Wired Magazine Creative Commons CD, which has songs from artists like the Beastie Boys who agreed to release some of their songs under a more permissive copyright that allows free distribution and remixing. -- Torrentocracy (http://torrentocracy.com/torrents/) has videos of the U.S. presidential debates and other political materials. -- File Soup (http://www.filesoup.com) offers open-source software and freeware, music from artists whose labels don't belong to the Recording Industry Association of America trade group, and programs from public television stations like PBS or the BBC. -- Etree (http://bt.etree.org) is for devotees of "trade-friendly" bands like Phish and the Dead, who encourage fans to share live recordings, usually in the form of large files that have been minimally compressed to maintain sound quality. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Danny Burstein Subject: "We're From the Government..."; NSA Recs on Securing Mac OS X Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 20:16:15 -0500 Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC Yes, that NSA: Title: How to Securely Install and Use Apple Computer Inc.'s Mac OS X Version 10.3.x Operating System (Panther) 109 pages; PDF http://www.nsa.gov/snac/os/applemac/osx_client_final_v.1.pdf ------------------------------ From: Danny Burstein Subject: Idaho Settles Modest Court Case Against fax.com Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 21:47:07 -0500 Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC "Fax.com, believed to be the largest volume "fax-spammer" in the United States, has been permanently enjoined from doing business in Idaho," Attorney General Lawrence Wasden announced today. During a news conference in Boise, Wasden said that his office has obtained a consent judgment against the California-based company. "'The Idaho Consumer Protection Act and the Idaho Telephone Solicitations Act prohibit sending unsolicited faxes, Attorney General Lawrence Wasden said. 'The laws are clear and do not contain exceptions. This is not a situation where you have to tell the sender to stop. Anytime you receive an unsolicited ad by fax, the sender has violated the law.' [ snip ] "The agreement also subjects Fax.com to liquidated damages of up to $5,000 for each unsolicited fax it sends into Idaho in the future. [ snippety snip, rest at: http://www2.state.id.us/ag/newsrel/2004/nr_nov052004.htm ] ______________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] ------------------------------ From: 9mo9vlp02@sneakemail.com (Sam) Subject: Looking For Billing Systems Information Date: 5 Nov 2004 17:25:28 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com I thought I posted this but it's not shown up yet. I cannot seem to find good billing systems information. All my searches produce a lot of vendor sites and resumes. How do you all find info on billing? I've been asked to add customizations to our billing system & I'd like to understand billing systems in general. Stuff like: Side by side comparisons of system features - Amdocs, Portal, LHS, etc ... What are recommended practices/ rules of thumb on how many cycles to have? How many dummy accounts should be run to verify bill correctness, or should you not use dummy accounts, preferring to use real accounts in a 'no-print, no-effect, dummy mode". How to inject information for dummy accunts? Into the switch somehow? fake files that look like they come from the switch? direct SQL inserts into the database? For those telecoms that can set prices what are good strategies for double -- triple -- quadruple checking the input? What's the preferred method of integrating fraud detection? At the database level? Integrated at the switch? Thanks in advance. ------------------------------ From: nospamlah-googlenews@yahoo.com (Anonymous Netter) Subject: List of All Handphones From Major Manufacturers Date: 5 Nov 2004 18:11:41 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hi everyone, I am trying to compile a product comparison list for all currently available handphones (cellphones) especially for GSM models. Ideally the list should have the following : a) small colour icon of the phone b) phone model c) summary of key features such as : > frequency bands > support for GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, etc > support MMS, Java, etc Does anyone have such a list that they are willing to share, or do the manufacturers release such a list? The closest I have come across is Nokia website but it lists only a) & b). TIA. ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Date: Fri, 05 Nov 2004 18:59:20 -0800 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Thu, 04 Nov 2004 22:12:49 -0700, DevilsPGD wrote: > And sometimes I park, in handicapped spaces, > While handicapped people, make handicapped faces! Was this supposed to be humourous? I found it quite repulsive that you would deny someone with a handicap a space that was reserved for them. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I didn't think it was very funny either. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: 6 Nov 2004 03:41:27 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: Prepaid Questions [was Re: How to Make Right Call On Cell] Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > This discussion has been most interesting. Unfortunately, no one but > Verizon seems to provide prepaid service in 59801, Missoula, Montana, > that works for somone who wants to actually spend some time on the > 'phone, on long distance. If you use your phone more than a few minutes a month, service with a normal monthly plan is much cheaper. In Missoula, I see that Western Wireless (that's Cellular One) for $30 offers 400 daytime, 3500 night and weekend minutes, or for $40, 1200 daytime, unlimited night/weekend. That's a good price, even compared to plans available in big cities. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Alltel has a 'pre-paid monthly' plan called 'Smart Pay', which is *much cheaper* than their 'pay by the call' prepaid plan. It still has to be paid monthly in advance, on a deposit account type system where your credit balance is debited for the calls you make, but unlike the fifty cents at a time method, the monthy 'Smart Pay' system grabs $30-$35 from your account on the first day of each month, then you get to call day or night at a rate more typical of a regular plan. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Prepaid Questions [was Re: How to Make Right Call On Cell] Date: Fri, 05 Nov 2004 18:56:33 -0800 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Thu, 04 Nov 2004 23:46:33 GMT, tom.horsley@att.net (Thomas A. Horsley) wrote: > One big difference I have noticed is that some of the plans expire > your minutes if you don't use them, and others keep accumulating > unused minutes as long as you keep the phone active (if I went with > one of those, I'd probably eventually wind up with several years worth > of un-used minutes - maybe they should come up with a program for > donating unused minutes to charities :-). If you want a cheap alternative to regular mobile service you'll have to play the game of expiration dates or adding money to accounts. All of the traditional prepaids will roll over any amount you have in your account provided you put more money in prior to any expiration date. I personally don't see where continuing to bank minutes is a bad thing. You'll have those minutes to use if you need them. ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Coffeyville Junior College and Channel 4. Organization: ATCC Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 23:57:04 -0500 In article , TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to nmclain@annsgarden.com: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But did you know that back in the days > when FCC was actually issuing 'licenses' for Citizen Band radio > operation, *all* those licenses began with 'K' regardless of where > they were located? What do they have now, for people who bother to > tell them about a CB radio? I think it is first and last initials > and one's zip code. In other words I would be 'PT67301' I think. PAT] Indeed -- I recall those days. I had KOR-8812. Of course now I'm KD1S having joined the ranks of amateur radio operators. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 19:43:31 EST From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Last Laugh! Much Excitement Around Here Today As I was working on this issue of the Digest earlier Saturday afternoon, all of a sudden I heard a loud popping noise, and all the lights went out (except for the computers and the Vonage phone, which are on battery backup.) I still powered everything down, and looked in my own fuse box, then called up the electric plant (KGE/Westar) to report the lights were out. I heard a siren from a fire truck nearby, and decided to go look and see what was up. The lights were out at nearby houses as well. Outside I could smell the remains of some thick, acrid smoke in the air, about a block away so I walked up that way to see what it was about. It turns out a power transformer had blown out on the corner of Second Street and Walnut, about a block from my house, taking with it a fuse in the line at the next transformer down the street, where a couple of older teenage guys live with the girl friend of one of them. Neither of those guys is terribly bright -- if you will pardon me for saying so -- but they had called the Fire Department because they thought their house was on fire (very loud, popping noise, tons of thick black smoke everywhere); it wasn't -- nothing wrong with their house at all, but I can't say I blame them for being a little bit concerned at first. These kids are obviously used to being blamed for whatever goes wrong in town; by now a police car had come past, the officer was chatting with the two firemen still standing around looking at electric poles in the area, and the KGE guys in their truck with the yellow spinning light on top had just pulled up also. The cop and the firemen all drove away, totally uninterested, leaving the KGE guys there to do what they had to do. The girl friend, who seems to do the talking for these guys told me "I was ironing Chester's (her boy friend) clothes; he has a new job working at Walmart on the midnight shift. I have to get his clothes ready for him to go to work. He had the television set turned on, and his friend Bobby was looking in the refrigerator for something for them to eat. Bobby had just opened the refrigerator when we heard that awful explosion and our house all filled up with black smoke. Do you think we were using too much electricity having my iron plugged in at the same time the television was going and the refrigerator door was open.?" I told her I did not think that caused the problem. "When we called the Fire Department we thought his house was on fire and then when the police car showed up just now we figured Bobby would get blamed for making all the lights go out all over the neighborhood." (Apparently the KGE guys were walking down the alley at this point trying to detirmine if any other transformers/fuses were out.) The two guys and their girl friend are all sitting the front porch all this time, having evacutated when the explosion occurred and the smoke was so thick earlier. I asked Bobby how he was getting along with his new computer and he said "I got an account from Yahoo but I don't know how to use it, can you come by in a day or so and show me what to do to get on line? and put my picture there for girls to see also?" I told him I would. Bobby has been by here a few times to 'check his email' (before getting his own computer and Yahoo account), and invariably he wanted to 'pick up girls' and see their pictures. I told him whatever you guys do, do not send out such 'hot pictures' of yourselves and your girl friend that you cause the circuits to blow out again like you did today! He responded sort of indignantly, "I told you me and Chester had nothing to do with all the lights all over the neighborhood going out this afternoon!" Well, just another day in the life. 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #534 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Nov 8 15:33:28 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA8KXR205929; Mon, 8 Nov 2004 15:33:28 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 15:33:28 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411082033.iA8KXR205929@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 #535 TELECOM Digest Mon, 8 Nov 2004 15:33:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 535 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson File-Sharing Thrives Under Radar (Monty Solomon) Handsome New Phone by Motorola Is Skinny, Sleek -- Expensive (Solomon) Starting Dialgic From Command Line (Ruchit Garg) Case Sends Tough Message on Spam (Lisa Minter) Mitel SX2000 Ring Back (Benm) Portable Keyboard for Blackberry 7230 (SebDech) Does Vonage Service Work Like SBC? (Zylan) Re: HELP: Vonage Problem After Installation (Luv post) Re: Internet Without Landline? (Robert Bonomi) Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (David Clayton) Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (DevilsPGD) Re: List of All Handphones From Major Manufacturers (Steve Sobol) Employment Opportunity: Support Engineer - Telecom-Singapore (jobs) Re: "We're From the Government"; NSA Recs on Securing Mac (Justin Time) Handicapped Parking Spaces was Re: New Electronic Check Law (palee) Hands Off VoIP, Feds Likely to Tell State Regulators (Lisa Minter) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 01:53:23 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: File-Sharing Thrives Under Radar Reuters 10:27 AM Nov. 06, 2004 PT LONDON -- A file-sharing program called BitTorrent has become a behemoth, devouring more than a third of the internet's bandwidth, and Hollywood's copyright cops are taking notice. For those who know where to look, there's a wealth of content, both legal -- such as hip-hop from the Beastie Boys and video game promos -- and illicit, including a wide range of TV shows, computer games and movies. Average users are taking advantage of the software's ability to cheaply spread files around the internet. For example, when comedian Jon Stewart made an incendiary appearance on CNN's political talk show Crossfire, thousands used BitTorrent to share the much-discussed video segment. Even as lawsuits from music companies have driven people away from peer-to-peer programs like KaZaa, BitTorrent has thus far avoided the ire of groups such as the Motion Picture Association of America. But as BitTorrent's popularity grows, the service could become a target for copyright lawsuits. According to British web analysis firm CacheLogic, BitTorrent accounts for an astounding 35 percent of all the traffic on the Internet -- more than all other peer-to-peer programs combined -- and dwarfs mainstream traffic like web pages. http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,65625,00.html ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 02:20:35 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Handsome New Phone by Motorola Is Skinny, Sleek -- and Expensive By WALTER S. MOSSBERG Cellphones have gotten smaller and smaller over the years, and they are crammed with more "features" than most people will ever use. But, in general, their designs have been uninspired. There hasn't been an iconic cellphone to rival such triumphs as the iPod music player, the classic Palm V organizer, or even some of the most beautiful digital cameras. But I've been testing a gorgeous new cellphone that sets a new design standard. It's the thinnest, sleekest flip phone I've ever seen, yet it doesn't compromise on features. And it comes from Motorola, a company that, until recently, seemed lost in the digital woods, unable to compete with the likes of Nokia and Samsung. This bold new phone is called the RAZR V3, although it is known among cellphone devotees as simply the "Razor." It will go on sale from Cingular Wireless on Nov. 15. The Razor is Motorola's best design statement since the company's pioneering StarTAC flip phone, back in 1996, and Motorola has some other interesting new phones on the way. http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20041104.html ------------------------------ From: ruchitgarg@yahoo.com (ruchit garg) Subject: Starting Dialgic From Command Line Date: 7 Nov 2004 23:11:40 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hi all, I wish to start Dialogic board from a command line script ... how can I do that. I have JCT 120 analog board. ruchit garg ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Case Sends Tough Message on Spam Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 11:27:52 EST From a nondescript house in a neighboring state, Jeremy Jaynes and his sister raked in more than $24million with fake Internet offers of penny-stock tickers, non-existent FedEx refunds, cheap drugs and pornography. They did it by flooding millions of gullible Internet users with junk e-mails known as spam. Indeed, Jaynes was ranked among the top 10 spammers in the world. But last week Jaynes' schemes fell victim to what government officials and anti-spam groups hope will become an increasingly effective weapon against Internet fraud: hefty doses of jail time. Using a new state anti-spam law considered the toughest in the United States, a Virginia jury convicted North Carolina residents Jaynes, 30, and Jessica DeGroot of sending untraceable junk e-mails to millions of customers of America Online, which is based in northern Virginia. It was the first conviction under the law, the first in the nation to make it a felony to send large numbers of fraudulent, unsolicited e-mail messages. In a state that is home to some of the nation's largest Internet service providers, the jury's decision was a milestone in another way: It made it likely that Jaynes will serve substantial prison time. The trial judge will not impose sentence until February, but the jury recommended 9 years. DeGroot, 28, who was found to have played only a supporting role, was fined $7,500. A third defendant was acquitted. Jaynes' lawyer is contesting the prosecutions. Although building legal cases against spammers and bringing them to court can be difficult given the global nature of the Internet, state officials and anti-spam advocates hope this case and others in the works will reverberate beyond the mid-Atlantic region -- much the way high-profile legal action put a crimp in the downloading of pirated music from the Internet. "These convictions and the prison sentence for kingpin spammer Jaynes send a resounding message from Virginia to spammers around the world," said Richard Campbell, deputy attorney general for the commonwealth. "If you defraud individuals and encumber ISPs with illegal spam, there are consequences." Combating spam has confounded government and private-sector officials for years. Despite hundreds of lawsuits and many federal and state laws, the e-mails now account for 70 percent of all e-mail traffic, according to some anti-spam organizations; others claim 85 percent is a more realistic amount of the traffic. It's a lucrative business for spammers. Jaynes forged Internet addresses and used confidential e-mail directories stolen from AOL and other Internet providers to peddle his usually phony products. In one month alone he received 10,000 credit card orders for $39.95 each, according to the prosecution. Anti-spam organizations and law-enforcement officials see prosecution as a key element in the fight, along with more consumer education. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Chicago Tribune Company. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: benm@rifton.com (Benm) Subject: Mitel SX2000 Ring Back Date: 8 Nov 2004 07:36:15 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com I have a Mitel SX2000 and on several of my extensions, random ring backs are being set. This is especially affecting one of my extensions (extn: 269) , and that extension most often has a ring back set on a certain other extension (extn: 266). This is occuring even when neither phones have been used for hours. The code for ringback on my system is 3. Has anyone had similar problems before or can anyone suggest a solution? I've tied a different port on a different ONS card. ------------------------------ From: dechamps@caritas.va (SebDech) Subject: Portable Keyboard for Blackberry 7230 Date: 8 Nov 2004 01:02:14 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hello! Has anyone heard about the possibility to have a portable extra keyboard for the Blackberry 7230? There is a company (Flexis) making such keyboards for other Blackberries, but for 7230 I haven't found anything so far. Thank you in advance, Sebastien ------------------------------ From: zcarenow@yahoo.com (Zylan) Subject: Does Vonage Service work Like SBC? Date: 7 Nov 2004 18:02:52 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com I have SBC and I can go to any room in my house that has a phone jack and plug in my phones and it will work. My understanding from what I've read is that Vonage works by having you plug the phone cable into their Vonage device and plug the other end to your phone. Now how will this allow me to talk to someone from a phone in my master bedroom as opposed to another room with a phone jack. Thanks in advance. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The answer is yes and no. YES it will work if it is wired up correctly, but NO, it will not work and may well fry your Vonage adapter if it accidentally comes in contact with the SBC (or for that matter, any telco) lines. Telephones do send various amounts of voltage down the line; frequently it is very benign to human beings who happen to touch the wires, but it and the voltage coming out of/going into a telephone adapter for VOIP do *not* get along. Make positively sure the lines from telco are totally isolated at the demarc (point of entry into your house) from your house wiring before you extend your Vonage adapter around the house through other connector boxes, etc. Read the message in this issue, some email correspondence I have had with another guy who 'just assumed' the wiring in his house was correct and found out the Vonage adapter box did not like it at all. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 21:11:27 PST From: Luv post Subject: Re: HELP: Vonage problem after installation [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Do you recall a message here last week sent by a man who had just recently got Vonage service and had hooked it up so the output from Vonage went to a telephone jack in his house? Then when he went around his house, he expected to be able to use the Vonage, and he *mostly* could. But on his incoming calls there was a hassle: Vonage would ring once, then there would be dead silence. He wondered 'what is wrong with the Vonage box?' I told him nothing was wrong with the Vonage box except you may have fried it by mixing it with your telephone lines, and I strongly urged him to **disconnect it immediatly** until he got the puzzle in his house wires cleared up, and to test the Vonage adapter by plugging a phone into it *alone*, making sure if it did or did not work before complaining to Vonage (he had opened a trouble ticket with them). That is where we left off last week here. He and I had some additional correspondence in email over the weekend, and it follows now. PAT] He then replied: > The Vonage box(Linksys router) is ok. I can call out(outgoing) with no > problem. It is when someone calls me that i get one ring and then > silence. I can also surf the net with no problem thru the Linksys > router. So it must be something else going on. I left an email with > Vonage Tech support, but still awaiting their response. Any other > suggestions? Thanks. I had noted here last week: >> TELECOM Digest Editor wrote:Whatever >> you do, *** get that Vonage adapter box disconnected from the >> telephone line immediatly ***. NEVER hook a Vonage adapter box into a >> phone outlet _until all phone lines are disconnected at the demarc or >> the main terminal where they come into your house_. >> That will probably fry the Vonage box totally, and if it has not >> yet, I would be quite surprised. The reason your phone rings one >> time then goes dead is due to this problem. Stop right now and >> make sure Vonage and your telephone line do NOT see or come in >> contact with each other. They obviously are somewhere in your >> house. Then he responded further in email: Pat, Plugging the phone cord directly from phone set to Vonage box works just fine for incoming and outgoing. Problem has been when i plug a phone cord from my study den wall jack to Vonage box, i can't seem to get incoming calls from any of my other rooms and kitchen wall jacks My entire is pre-wired by my homebuilder with analog wall jacks(numbered 2a, 2b, etc.) throughout the house. Initially, I had plugged the phone cord from my 4a jack(Study den) to the Vonage box directly. It worked fine for incoming and outgoing. Then I thought why not use the phone jacks in my other rooms and kitchen. Doesn't make sense to have to go to the Study Den everytime I get a call. That's why I put phones in the other rooms and one in the kitchen. Thus, other family members can pick up incoming calls depending on where they are in the house. It rings once in those locations for incoming calls. So I think that the wiring in my house is something that I need to look at. Can you point me the right direction in where to look or start? Thanks. Mike I responded: A sure sign of a short somewhere on the line is when the phone rings *ONCE* (or maybe half a ring) then dead silence. *Something* in the Vonage box is making it think there has been an answer when there has not been. That 'something' is a couple of wires somewhere in your home system barely, occassionally touching. Not all the time, just when there is a spark or a wee bit of connectivity. This condition is NOT helping the electronics in your Vonage box at all. If ONE phone, connected directly to the Vonage box works okay for incoming calls, then the trouble is in your house wiring. If it still does not work okay, then there is something wrong with the Vonage box (a) either it was bad when it got there or (more likely) (b) the abuse it has already suffered being directly connected for some period of time directly to the house phone wiring has fried it. First, please try it as I suggested, lets pin down where the trouble lies. PAT [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: He says he finally tried my suggestion, (Vonage TA direct on a short cord to a single phone); lo and behold it all worked just fine. I told him good, at least you did not fry the adapter box electronics. **LEAVE IT THAT WAY UNTIL YOUR HOUSE WIRING GETS ORGANIZED**. And he said he would. But he kept objecting at first: the person who put in his phone lines put in two pairs (a) and (b) and the (telco) phone worked okay, etc. But I explained to him that (as far as I know) Vonage runs their phone on the first pair (in a cable with two pairs) just as telco does. So at the very least, you are going to have to trick Vonage into being happy with the second pair (normally the yellow/black) wires. But you start by going to the demarc and pulling down the pair from the telco central office to start with; *no* live telco service at all. When that's done, then if you wish, plug the Vonage into some outlet somewhere and go about your premises to each phone and see if in fact Vonage is at each of them. If you get Vonage at each location where you had earlier been hearing telco, then much of your trouble is over. At least your (a) pair and (b) pair are correct everywhere. Now you are going to need to get **two line phones** everywhere you want Vonage _and_ telco to both appear. And you still have telco totally disconnected at the demarc, right? Just leave it alone for now. Stay away from that demarc! Now you have your **two line phones** everywhere you want them, and Vonage is happily providing dial tone and ringing on one of the two *line appearances* everywhere. The other line appearance at the phone instrument is dead of course, you disconnected telco at the demarc earlier. And I would not press my luck with more than three appearances of the Vonage line. (We refer to that as 'REM 3' sometimes. That's the amount of voltage the Vonage adapter puts out, to ring up to three bells or electronic chirps at one time. Maybe four ringers if you are still detirmined to fry the adapter box (and then blame it all on Vonage tech support) as you were when we started this project. Now it is time to reconnect the central office. Go to the demarc and listen to the two pairs out there. Probably the red/green wires which is most likely (a). If you hear Vonage on those two wires, put them aside. Take the two wires from the central office and attach them to the idle pair (most likely yellow/black -- (b) of your house wires.) Now go back inside your house and see if both line appearances work at each phone. On the one line appearance should be Vonage; on the other line appearance (or 'pair') should be telco. By the way, when you go to Radio Shack or wherever to get the two line phones, *do not* let the clerk talk you into buying more expensive 'electronic phones' with six or eight wires coming out of them. That's just grief you (and I) don't need, trying to get all that properly wired. I know one person here in town who has his Vonage line show up on line 4 or line 5 of a six-button (five line with hold) type phone. I would not wish that sort of nightmare on anyone who was not a telephony genius which I am not. If you want a more elegant set of instructions than what I can give here, I suggest you look at: How to Distribute VoIP Throughout a Home: http://michigantelephone.mi.org/distribute.html which is Jack Decker's offering on this topic. And to you guys eager to install Vonage or some other kind of VOIP, good luck! Oh! I still offer Vonage e-coupons to people who want to check out this new phone system. You send me a note marked 'not for pub' in the subject line, and request a coupon. You have to get the adapter box through me (Vonage drop ships my orders) and you have to pay for a month of service in advance. Whatever kind of service you sign up for, Vonage then gives you a second month of the same service totally free. PAT] ------------------------------ Organization: Robert Bonomi Consulting Subject: Re: Internet Without Landline? From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Date: Sun, 07 Nov 2004 21:28:07 +0000 In article , Markus Dehmann wrote: > Is it possible to get high-speed internet access without a > phone/landline at home (in Maryland/U.S.)? > I only have a cell phone, but internet at home would be good, too. I > don't need a landline, though because the cell phone is enough. > Thanks! > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Yes, it is not only possible, but > for many folks more desirable. You get your high speed internet from > the cable company there in Maryland and otherwise use your cell phone > for voice calls. That's essentially what many folks do, or they have > a very inexpensive landline phone from a CLEC as a backup only. PAT] If you order _SDSL_ service, it always comes on a separate pair. *ordering* can be an 'interesting time' (in the sense of Chinese _curse_ :), but it can be done. Depending on locale -- and I have _NOT_ researched the specific case of Maryland -- ADSL on it's own pair *may* also be available; where available it is typically $5-10/mo more than 'shared' ADSL (piggy-backed on a POTS line). 'dry pair' ADSL is becoming more common than it was a year or two ago. Visiting the 'dslreports.com' website, and using a next-door neighbor's phone number, _will_ get you a list of providers and service options that are available at your location. When actually ordering, the order usually has to go up the food-chain *several* layers, between the DSL provider and the ILEC. The situation I ran into, the DSL provider's computer system would -not- accept the order _without_ some sort of a 'phone number' for location, while the _phone_company_ (ILEC) computer would not accept the order *with* a phone number (it -knew- there was no phone service at that location). *PEOPLE* had to actually get involved from the DSL provider, in placing _their_ order with the phone company. When the install was actually done, the DSL 'field technician' was _really_ puzzled, cuz his paperwork showed a 'site phone number' of "000-0000". [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What you say is all well and good, but why should someone have to go to all that trouble of arguing and pleading with telco to get them to sell you service when you could just go to your cable company and have them turn it on the same day? And regardless of what you say about SDSL service, Southwestern Bell Telephone (now known as SBC) **will not** sell it to you without taking 'regular' phone service as well. I think it is against their religion or something. They do it only in California where a court ordered them to do so. Forget it elsewhere from SBC. People who want high speed internet up and running in a hurry just go to their cable company. PAT] ------------------------------ From: David Clayton Subject: Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2004 17:02:58 +1100 Joseph contributed the following: > On Thu, 04 Nov 2004 22:12:49 -0700, DevilsPGD > wrote: >> And sometimes I park, in handicapped spaces, >> While handicapped people, make handicapped faces! > Was this supposed to be humourous? I found it quite repulsive that > you would deny someone with a handicap a space that was reserved for > them. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I didn't think it was very funny either. > PAT] It's from a Dennis Leary (sp?) song: "I'm an asshole!" Regards, David Clayton, e-mail: dcstar@XYZ.myrealbox.com Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. (Remove the "XYZ." to reply) Dilbert's words of wisdom #18: Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level then beat you with experience. ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Date: Sat, 06 Nov 2004 20:13:15 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com In message Joseph wrote: >> And sometimes I park, in handicapped spaces, >> While handicapped people, make handicapped faces! > Was this supposed to be humourous? I found it quite repulsive that > you would deny someone with a handicap a space that was reserved for > them. It's a Dennis Leary quote ... Do not taunt zombie badgers ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: List of All Handphones From Major Manufacturers Date: Sat, 06 Nov 2004 20:59:27 -0800 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Anonymous Netter wrote: > Hi everyone, > I am trying to compile a product comparison list for all currently > available handphones (cellphones) especially for GSM models. Try http://www.phonescoop.com/ I don't know how close you'll get to the details you need, but there's a ton of good information on that site. JustThe.net Internet & New Media Services, http://JustThe.net/ Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / 888.480.4NET (4638) / sjsobol@JustThe.net PGP Key available from your friendly local key server (0xE3AE35ED) Apple Valley, California Nothing scares me anymore. I have three kids. ------------------------------ From: jobs@peopleassociates.com Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 16:51:39 +0800 Subject: Employment Opportunity: Support Engineer - Telecom (Singapore) We are an international Information Technology (IT) company, with focus in providing Software Solutions, Software Products/tools, Software Consultancy and Out Sourcing. We are URGENTLY looking for the following resources for our client in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Position : Support Engineer - Telecom Location : Singapore Duration : One year -extendable Start Date : ASAP The experience/background required for support engineer are as follow: 1. Experience with mobile operators an advantage. 2. Knowledge of mobile roaming preferred. 3. Knowledge of Sun Solaris UNIX, Oracle, SS7, C/C++/Java required. 4. Candidate must possess at least a Diploma and preferably a degree in Computer Science/IT/Electronic Engineering. 5. Good communication and customer relation skills 6. Good spoken and written English required. 7. Willing to standby 7x24 required Interested, please send your resume to jobs@peopleassociates.com with your expected salary -- (pls give some figure) and earliest joining time. ------------------------------ From: a_user2000@yahoo.com (Justin Time) Subject: Re: "We're From the Government..."; NSA Recs on Securing Mac OS X Date: 8 Nov 2004 06:57:38 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Danny Burstein wrote in message news:: > Yes, that NSA: > Title: > How to Securely Install and Use Apple Computer Inc.'s Mac OS X > Version 10.3.x Operating System (Panther) > 109 pages; PDF > http://www.nsa.gov/snac/os/applemac/osx_client_final_v.1.pdf But it took them at least 30 more pages to make guesses about that other common proprietary operating system -- the one from Redmond Wa. with the longest running beta test in history. Rodgers Platt ------------------------------ From: palee@riteaid.com Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 10:15:47 EST SUBJECT: Re: Handicapped Spaces [was 'New Electronic Check Law...'] In TELECOM Digest V23 #534, Joseph wrote (in part): > DevilsPGD wrote: >> And sometimes I park, in handicapped spaces, >> While handicapped people, make handicapped faces! > Was this supposed to be humourous? I found it quite > repulsive that you would deny someone with a handicap a space > that was reserved for them. I've always believed that only handicapped people park in handicapped spaces. Some are physically challenged, while the others are emotionally and socially challenged. (And then there are those who believe it's their prerogative to park in a reserved space, simply because they are driving a vehicle with a placard or tag, even when no one with a physical disability is using or riding in the vehicle.) Paul A Lee Sr Telecom Engineer Rite Aid Corporation HL-IS-COM (Telecomm) V: +1 717 730-8355 30 Hunter Lane, Camp Hill, PA 17011-2410 F: +1 717 975-3789 P.O. Box 3165, Harrisburg, PA 17105-3165 W: +1 717 805-6208 ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2004 11:27:27 -0500 Subject: Hands Off VoIP, Feds Likely to Tell State Regulators Reply-To: VoIPnews@yahoogroups.com http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/10126946.htm By John Woolfolk Mercury News Federal authorities Tuesday are poised to declare Internet phone service off-limits to state regulators. Providers call the move critical to the fast-growing industry's development, but consumer advocates fear it will unfairly burden those who place calls the old-fashioned way. New Jersey-based Vonage, a leader in the field of Web-based phoning known as Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP, has asked the Federal Communications Commission to declare it an interstate information service exempt from state regulation. "The decision before the FCC is critical, and very serious," said Bruce P. Mehlman, a director of the Internet Innovation Alliance, a trade group favoring light regulation. "The question for regulators is: Do we treat it like telecommunications, taxing it and regulating it heavily, or like information technology, keeping our hands off and letting market-based innovation benefit everyone?" Internet calling hooks standard phones to an adapter and broadband connection. The adapter converts the voice signal to data packets and sends them over the Internet to a service provider, where they are converted back and sent on the traditional phone network to the recipient. The FCC decision is important for Silicon Valley, home to many VoIP providers and companies involved in the technology, said California Public Utilities Commissioner Susan Kennedy. "It's very important that the FCC establish a uniform national framework in which VoIP can be allowed to thrive," Kennedy said. Consumer advocates say exempting VoIP from state regulation and treating it as an information service more like e-mail lets providers avoid paying for the traditional public switched phone network -- even though they still use it to complete their calls. [Jack Decker Comment: Makes you wonder where some of these so-called "consumer advocates" are getting their funding, doesn't it? If they wanted to take the high road, they could advocate that all these additional taxes and fees be abolished on all forms of communications. But some of these "consumer advocates" are getting paid to advocate on issues related to the PSTN, and if the the PSTN diminishes in importance, so do they. Full story at: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/10126946.htm ------------------------------ 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #535 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Nov 8 18:17:42 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA8NHgA07505; Mon, 8 Nov 2004 18:17:42 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 18:17:42 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411082317.iA8NHgA07505@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 #536 TELECOM Digest Mon, 8 Nov 2004 18:17:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 536 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Keeping Internet Phone Service Simple (dog4dogg) Long Distance Service in California (becky) Need Help From Nortel Design Engineer (Joe Elichaa) Goeltzer Quits Web Directory Service (TELECOM Digest Editor) Re: HELP: Vonage Problem After Installation (Luv post) BT Acquires Infonet (Lisa Minter) Boeing Executive to Address ECC Event (Cliff Ward) Who Sends This Stuff: EVIL FBI SADISTS should be KIDNAPPED (Keith) 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: dog4dogg Date: Mon, 08 Nov 2004 18:08:30 -0000 Subject: Keeping Internet Phone Service Simple washingtonpost.com http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33031-2004Nov7.html By Andrea Caumont Washington Post Staff Writer Two former MCI executives, Joyce Dorris and Paul Erickson, want to bring Internet phone service to mainstream America. "We're in the beginning of a wholesale transformation to have communications run over Internet technology," said Erickson, chief executive of SunRocket, a start-up in Vienna. "If you have broadband, you'd be silly not to put your phone service on the Internet." SunRocket Inc. began providing Voice over Internet Protocol service in the Washington and Baltimore areas in September, and in Boston last month. Dorris and Erickson said company plans to expand nationwide by year-end. "We're passionate about starting with a blank sheet of paper and saying: 'What's the way [a phone company] should work? How can we make it as simple as possible?'," Erickson said. SunRocket charges $24.95 a month for almost all of its phone services, with no added fees. The package includes unlimited domestic calls, features such as voice mail and caller ID, an allowance for international calls, two directory assistance calls and an extra phone number with a distinctive ring and voice mail. A customer needs a phone and a broadband connection that connects to a device SunRocket calls "the gizmo." The company has hundreds of customers already and Dorris and Erickson hope to see that number in the hundreds of thousands by this time next year. At MCI, the two executives were behind some of the marketing tactics that revitalized its long-distance telephone business in the 1990s. Erickson said he invented 1-800-COLLECT, which became more expensive. "You come up with something successful, and then the big- company attitude takes over," he said. "Right now, there's a $4.99 surcharge and calls cost $1.15 per minute. Initially, it was $1.25 per call and 25 cents per minute ... I feel bad because I started it." Dorris said she helped create the Neighborhood Built by MCI, which provided unlimited local and long-distance calls to customers for a fixed rate. "We've built our careers on looking at the market and taking a different approach," Dorris said. But Internet phone service is looking less different as time goes on. Independent operators such as Vonage of New Jersey are already established, and giant phone and cable companies are moving into the field, too. But Dorris and Erickson do not regard the large communications companies as stiff competition. "In new categories, it's independent brands who have the vision of the way it should be that get embraced by consumers because they stand for one thing. Customers want specialists," Dorris said. "As new categories are born, it's typically not the big, old companies that pave the way." Technophobia, however, is probably their biggest challenge in weaning potential customers from copper-wire phones. "Sometimes it takes a friend, neighbor or colleague to say this works, it's great," Erickson said. "It's those people that are going to carry the message." ------------------------------ From: becky210@hotmail.com (becky) Subject: Long Distance Service in California Date: 8 Nov 2004 11:42:44 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com I just disconnected from SBC long distance. What other long distance service is available? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So much is available, we could not begin to list it all. Have you considered VOIP service which is about as inexpensive as you can get these days, depending on your volume of usage, etc. There are *much better* deals out there than SBC for sure. Maybe someone will write you with some suggestions. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Joe Elichaa Subject: Need Help from Nortel Design Engineer Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 15:04:00 -0500 I am looking for a engineer that can help me with some Nortel telephone design questions. If you are familiar with how or know someone who is familiar the Norstar & Meridian phones as far as the code that is sent back and forth between the phones and the KSU/PBX, please contact me. Joe Elichaa Refurb Supplies 866-789-5656 joee@refurbsupplies.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 15:50:50 EST From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Goeltzer Quits Web Directory Service I recently got a note from Lucio Goeltzer in Geneva, Switzerland saying that he was no longer going to operate his web directory of telecom publishers and telecom sites, etc. Mr. Goeltzer was a good friend for several years to TELECOM Digest and other telecom-related web sites. He was employed for many years by the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva, which as I understand it, is a technical agency of the United Nations. Mr. Goeltzer retired from ITU in 1998. He continued to run a web site of his own for several years, one feature of which was his directory (with clickable links) to a huge number of resources on the net dealing with telecom stuff. Now he has decided he cannot maintain it any longer, and it is a loss to the rest of the net. Thank you for the work you did for the net, and for TELECOM Digest for many years, Lucio. PAT ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 10:43:45 PST From: Luv post Subject: Re: HELP: Vonage Problem After Installation [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Here is some new email from the man I told you about in the last issue, trying to wire up his house to use his Vonage system everywhere. PAT] Thanks for coupon info. Right now I am only using Vonage box to one phone like you mentioned to do. I will have to check with the box outside house to see where the phone lines run. > TELECOM Digest Editor wrote: Anytime > YOU make a referral to someone inviting them to try Vonage, you give > their email address to Vonage, who will in turn send out an e-coupon > to that person inviting them to try Vonage. You do not get a stack > of paper coupons to hand out. Just tell Vonage the email address of > some friend of yours and Vonage will get the e-coupon to them. The > person has to click on the link in the email Vonage sends them to > take advantage of the system. If you had signed up through me and > gotten an e-coupon from me, then you would have gotten a couple > months of free service, but it is too late now. Sign up your > friends, using the spot on the Vonage home page to get the coupon > sent out to the person. > When the phone 'rings once then goes silent' the voltage from the > ringing caused a temporary short on the line which usually is not > there but gets there when the ringing voltage is traveling on the > line. > A lot of people do what you are suggesting, wire their entire house up > to have several appearances of the Vonage phone in various rooms, etc. > But, it gets tricky if you do not understand phone wiring. > PAT [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I will refer you once again to Jack Decker, who is the VOIP expert around here. His Michigan Telephone web site has pages devoted just to this topic: How to Distribute VoIP Throughout a Home: http://michigantelephone.mi.org/distribute.html Good luck to you! PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 13:37:01 EST From: Lisa Minter Subject: BT Acquires Infonet Telecom dailyLead from USTA November 8, 2004 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=17389&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * BT acquires Infonet BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Phone companies enter TV business * Cable consortium eyes joint venture for cellular services * SBC may pare work force USTA SPOTLIGHT * Order the Essential Guide to Telecommunications Today! EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Cell-phone screen a growing ad target * Yahoo! knocks on Hollywood's door REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * FCC to rule on VoIP tomorrow Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=17389&l=2017006 ------------------------------ From: Cliff Ward Subject: Boeing Executive to Address ECC Event Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 14:58:58 Reply-To: cward@iec.org The Enterprise Communications Consortium's next conference 'Wireless Technologies in Enterprise Networks' takes place Thursday, Nov. 18 at the University Club in Chicago. Registration is free, including a lunch that will feature an address from Dr. Vaho Rebassoo, chief technology officer for IT services at The Boeing Company. Dr. Rebassoo will be talking about the latest advances in wireless technology and what they mean for the enterprise manager. There will also be morning and afternoon panels on 3G wireless solutions and wireless LANs in Enterprise Networks. For complete details, including free registration for the media, visit http://www.ec-consortium.org/events/november_2004.asp Or contact: Cliff Ward Director of Corporate Communications International Engineering Consortium 312-559-3325 mailto:cward@iec.org ------------------------------ From: keith1377@hotmail.com (keith) Subject: Who Sends This Around? EVIL FBI SADISTS should be KIDNAPPED Date: 7 Nov 2004 01:54:59 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Keith says: > Someone emailed and requested me to post it on Usenet newsgroups. Now I note: There then followed about a hundred K of text from someone just rambling along with various complaints about FBI. I have recieved several copies of this diatribe in recent weeks. Supposedly it is working its way all over the net, mostly in unmoderated news groups. The author noted (a *tiny iota* of the total transmission; most truncated): > Sadistic FBI agents should be tortured the way how FBI sadists and > perverts tortured this poor guy (non-muslim) for three years and > continue to torture him even after he left america tracking him with > implanted transponder chips and other methods. > FBI is an evil organization and those FBI sadists and perverts deserve > to be kidnapped and their eyes gouged, noses and ears chopped off, > forced to eat their own feces and drink their own piss and extra hot > red chilli powder poured into their eyes, make them cry and scream in > pain and continue the torture mercilessly for three yearss to do > justice to this poor guy. FBI sadists and perverts deserve every bit > of torture these animals meted out to this poor chap. > Evil FBI organization deserves 10000 Tim McVeighs and 10000 Osamas who > should have gone after the vertical edgar hoover building instead of > the horizontal pentagon or the fed building in oklahoma city. Half the > worlds evil resides in edgar hoover building in Washington DC. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And every sentence went on like that, most were more outrageous than previous lines. It went on for another 95 K of text or so. I was reluctant to print this much of it, but this is now the third time I have received it. It never is signed, but I get the impression (from reading most of it) that the guy lives up in Michigan, in one of the suburbs of Detroit. And this last time, he gave it to 'Keith' and asked him to mail it around. Anyone else know anything about this guy? 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #536 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Nov 9 15:07:39 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA9K7cH18163; Tue, 9 Nov 2004 15:07:39 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 15:07:39 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411092007.iA9K7cH18163@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 #537 TELECOM Digest Tue, 9 Nov 2004 15:07:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 537 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson FCC Expected to Exempt VoIP From State Rules (Lisa Minter) Pulver.com Encouraged by FCC Acknowledgement on Nomadic VoIP (L. Minter) FCC Insulates Web Phone Service from State Regs (Lisa Minter) FCC Further Deregulates Net Calls (Lisa Minter) $1.40 Monthly VoIP Tax? Two California Towns Ask For Handouts (L Minter) Free VOIP Learning Resources, News, Links Tutorials (TekJockey) Lost Caller ID Switching Local Service - Need Translation (Adam Harbour) SBC Dial-up Internet Modem Speed Only 28.8 Kbps in Westland (N Joltt) Re: Who Sends This Around? EVIL FBI SADISTS (palee@riteaid.com) Re: Who Sends This Around? EVIL FBI SADISTS (Charles Cryderman) Re: "We're From the Government..."; NSA Recs on Securing Mac OS X (jdj) Re: Long Distance Service in California (Clarence Dold) Re: Any News on the Feds v. Norvergence? (Satchel Paige) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 04:30:27 -0500 Subject: FCC Expected to Exempt VoIP From State Rules http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/telecom/2004-11-08-voip-usat_x.htm By Paul Davidson, USA TODAY The Federal Communications Commission is expected to vote today to exempt Internet-based phone companies from state regulation, a step that could help boost the emerging services. But the vote is likely to anger some local officials who say the FCC is usurping local authority. Among other things, the ruling would mean states could not force Vonage and other Internet phone companies to provide 911 service or comply with local consumer fraud laws, FCC officials told USA TODAY. [.....] The agency does plan to impose its own requirements that VoIP services provide 911 and make their networks wiretap-friendly for the FBI. But state officials say they are better equipped to oversee issues such as 911 and consumer fraud. "Our main concern is: What's left for the states here?" says Commissioner Bob Nelson of the Michigan Public Service Commission. State and local officials have flooded FCC commissioners with letters voicing concerns about the proposed ruling. One of their concerns is they could not collect revenue from VoIP providers to subsidize high-cost rural phone service. [Jack Decker comment: Dear Mr. Nelson: Considering the track record of the Michigan Public Service Commission and the way they have allowed the independent phone companies to avoid coming into full compliance with the Michigan Telecommunications Act of 2000, which (if they request a rate increase) requires them to provide local calling to adjacent exchanges (but the MPSC has in effect allowed some of the companies to redefine the meaning of a local call, so that in some cases it is charged like a toll call even though they still call it local, in a fine example of Orwellian "newspeak"), I would say that there should be *nothing* left for the states here. The very last thing I would ever want to see is the Michigan Public Service Commission attempting to regulate VoIP. You and your fellow Commissioners have shown that you cannot be trusted to uphold the law as the Michigan legislature intended, nor to put the interests of telephone customers first. Besides those associated with some of the second- and third-tier incumbent phone companies, which stand to lose their defacto monopolies if VoIP gains traction, about the only people that are going to be upset if the FCC rules as expected are you and some of the other state Commissioners (in Michigan and other states), who in my opinion seem to be more concerned about your own jobs than the public interest. Not to mention that you seem to love being quoted by the press! One reason the courts tend to give a lot of weight to the "commerce clause" of the U.S. Constitution (article I, section 8) is that if the states were free to regulate every industry at will, it would be so costly for any company to do business nationwide that few companies would be able to. In the area of telecommunications regulation, state commissions have in many cases shown that they cannot be trusted to put the overall public interest ahead of the narrow interests of the companies they are supposed to be regulating. The Michigan Public Service Commission may be among the worst in that regard, particularly when they apparently let some of the smaller rural phone companies gouge their customers just about any way they can think of. Mr. Nelson, would it be too much to ask that you get out of the limelight for a while, and start doing a much better job of regulating those companies you're already supposed to be regulating, before you try to broaden your influence to encompass a very competitive industry for which there is NO need for the traditional form of regulation?] Full story at: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/telecom/2004-11-08-voip-usat_x.htm ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 11:15:56 -0500 Subject: Pulver.com Encouraged by FCC Acknowledgement That Nomadic VoIP Reply-To: VoIPnews@yahoogroups.com http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/11-09-2004/0002399032&STORY&EDATE= Pulver.com Encouraged by FCC Acknowledgement That Nomadic VoIP Service Not Subject to State Economic Regulation Vonage Order Was Next Logical Step in FCC's Approach to VoIP MELVILLE, N.Y., Nov. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- The following may be attributed to Jeff Pulver, CEO of pulver.com regarding today's FCC decision asserting preempting state jurisdiction over certain nomadic VoIP services: "In the world's first regulatory statement freeing VoIP communications from legacy telecom regulation, the FCC ruled last February that pulver.com's computer-to-computer Free World Dialup service was an unregulated information service. The pulver Order was a great first step to ensure that pure peer-to- peer VoIP services are not subjected to legacy regulations. The Vonage Order is the next logical step to ensure that VoIP services that look like more traditional telecom services are not subjected to a cumbersome, patchwork of state regulations." "We are encouraged by the FCC's decision preempting states from imposing economic regulations on nomadic VoIP services. Today's decision was essential to allow the IP-based communications industry to develop and flourish free from traditional telecommunications regulation and to ensure that a hodge- podge of archaic telecom regulations do not stifle the nascent IP-based communications industry." "Every sector of the high tech and communications industries, including capital markets, has been watching to see how rules are set for this potentially explosive technology, one that holds tremendous promise not only for communications innovation, but also for the global economy." "Certainly, the Commission should not subject IP-based communications to a set of archaic regulations that were designed and kluged together over the years to patch together a disparate array of technologies and services. The disruptive emergence of IP-based communications essentially compels the Commission, the States and every regulatory authority around the globe to rethink the patchwork of disparate, illogical and irreconcilable regulations." "The Commission must next resolve the lingering intercarrier compensation and universal service proceedings, particularly to ensure that IP-based communications providers are not dragged into existing regulatory schemes that so desperately need to be reformed. The conclusions and rules that will result from these proceedings will greatly affect the future of all IP-based communications, including the speed of deployment, consumer and enterprise adoption and ubiquity of IP-based communications." "Regulators and the IP-based communications industry need to think creatively about how to protect consumers in a new communications environment. pulver.com and many members of the IP-based communications community are committed to achieving the social good through industry-based solutions that do not unnecessarily subject industry to regulatory and other governmental intrusion. To that end, in fact, pulver.com has established the Global IP Alliance, an international organization committed to advancing IP-based communications and resolving the commercial, technical, operational and social issues confronting the world-wide IP communications community." "VoIP is 'disruptive communications' in the most positive sense. IP-based communications allow for 'open' solutions, with no barriers to entry and no relation to geography. IP-based communications are capable of empowering users to control their own communications experience. There, however, is a real danger in regarding VoIP simply as a cheaper way to provide voice service. That is NOT VoIP. It is incumbent upon all us to ensure that it does not get relegated to the world of black rotary phones, but truly the becomes the communications of the future." About Pulver.com Jeff Pulver is the President and CEO of pulver.com, and one of the true pioneers of the Internet telephony/VoIP industry. Mr. Pulver is a globally renowned thought leader, author and entrepreneur. He is the publisher of The Pulver Report and VON magazine, and creator of the industry standard Voice on the Net (VON) conferences. Additionally, Mr. Pulver is the founder of Free World Dialup (FWD), the VON coalition, LibreTel, WHP Wireless, pulverinnovations, Digisip, and is the co-founder of VoIP provider, Vonage. Recently, Mr. Pulver's petition for clarification declaring Free World Dialup as an unregulated information service was granted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This landmark decision by the FCC, now referred to as "the Pulver decision", was the first decision made by the FCC on IP communications, and provides important clarification that computer-to-computer VoIP service is not a telecommunications service. For more information, please visit http://www.pulver.com ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 11:21:33 -0500 Subject: FCC Insulates Web Phone Service from State Regs http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=6760085 FCC Insulates Web Phone Service from State Regs WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday approved a petition to insulate Vonage Holdings Corp.'s Internet-based telephone service from certain state regulations. Full story at: http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=6760085 ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 12:19:26 -0500 Subject: FCC Further Deregulates Net Calls http://news.com.com/FCC+further+deregulates+Net+calls/2100-7352_3-5444883.html By Ben Charny Staff Writer, CNET News.com The nation's top telephone regulators on Tuesday further deregulated Internet phone services. The Federal Communications Commission ruled that states are now barred from imposing telecommunications regulations on Net phone providers, which treat calls no differently than any other application on the Internet. That class of operators includes Vonage Holdings, which asked the FCC for just such a designation in May, plus Verizon Communications, AT&T and dozens of other commercial Internet providers, according to those familiar with the FCC's thinking. "This landmark order recognizes a revolution has occurred," FCC Chairman Michael Powell said at the meeting. The FCC's decision was a general one, was widely anticipated, and answers just one of dozens of questions about how regulators will ultimately treat Internet phone services, typically referred to as voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Much of the nitty-gritty of policymaking is still to come, as the FCC plods away at drafting a set of rules for new services like Vonage's that rely on Internet Protocol, the backbone of the Internet. For instance, Vonage had also asked in its May petition whether it would be considered a telephone or information service, a designation that means the difference between a draconian and very light regulatory environment for the carriers. The commission did not answer that question Tuesday. Full story at: http://news.com.com/FCC+further+deregulates+Net+calls/2100-7352_3-5444883.html ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 10:34:22 -0500 Subject: $1.40 Monthly VoIP Tax? Two California Towns Ask For Handouts http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/56531 While the FCC is expected to rule today that state and local governments can't touch VoIP carriers, two California towns are making last ditch efforts to tax VoIP. The towns of Burbank and El Monte are asking VoIP carriers to collect $1.40 from every subscriber. The states (started by Minnesota) are also gunning for a money grab; even though VoIP providers often don't even have a physical presence in the areas trying to tax them. Article plus reader comments at: http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/56531 ------------------------------ From: tekjockey@yahoo.com (TekJockey) Subject: Free VOIP Learning Resources, News, Links, Tutorials Date: 8 Nov 2004 21:21:39 -0800 ###Learn VOIP (H323, MGCP, SIP), LAN (ethernet, fiber, copper), WAN (T1/ T3) , ROUTING (BGP, OSPF, EIGRP)### http://www.compointsolutions.com ##Great for TECH PROFESSIONALS AND BUSINESS OWNERS WHO NEED TO KNOW MORE## Updated Daily - Tutorials, news, resource links and pdf's on learning voip. Fresh content - updated daily! Vist the links and feed your appetite for knowledge! http://www.compointsolutions.com Stop By, Learn Stuff, Tell a Friend! ... :-) ------------------------------ From: aharbour@yahoo.com (Adam Harbour) Subject: Lost Caller ID Switching Local Service - Need Explanation Date: 8 Nov 2004 17:31:21 -0800 Hi, I switched from Verizon to Ztel local service last year and in the process lost my caller id service. I am the only person in my street that does not have it but ZTel told me that it is not available in my area. Here is the explanation from the ZTel engineer. Can somebody read and understand it and tell me if it is BS or true and what I would have to do to get caller id service back. I really need it for both my business and home use. Thanks, AH ----------------------- "Attempt to add any form of caller id to this ani not available ; spoke to repair/ not in switch, not on service order that migrated them to ztel/ spoke to business office and verified that no form of caller id is available in this switch/ npa nxx/ spoke to customer to try to explain there are only a certain # of cid spots in each switch and per Verizon this is no longer available in this switch/ cannot add cid closing ticket - have called and advised customer. " ------------------------------ From: njoltt@yahoo.com (N Joltt) Subject: SBC Dial-up Internet Modem Speed Only 28.8 Kbps in Westland, MI Date: 9 Nov 2004 05:03:09 -0800 Dial-up speed 28.8 Kbps is the abosulate maximum. Most of times it is just 26.4, sometimes 14.4 or even lower. So if you want to rent an apartment in Westland, Michiagn, just be aware of this fact. SBC would not do anything about it, because the voice bandwidth up to 3K is all they care about. As long as they meet the voice line quality, any more improvement for other purposes (such as dial-up Internet access) is deemed unnecessary. And due to (or because of) that, they're aggressively promoting DSL in my area. What an irony. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think most people prefer cable internet service over DSL. Is SBC saying a service provided by their company, (SBC/Yahoo Internet) is 'unnecessary' ? If you go with cable internet, then you can probably drop SBC entirely if you wish, and go with one of the CLECs in your area. That's what I did over a year ago, it has worked out quite well. PAT] ------------------------------ From: palee@riteaid.com Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 10:51:44 -0500 Subject: Re: Who Sends This Around? Organization: Rite Aid Corporation In TELECOM Digest V23 #536, our Esteemed Editor wrote (in part): > Anyone else know anything about this guy? All you need to know about this guy can be found at http://members.aol.com/intwg/trolls.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TrollDefinition Paul A Lee Sr Telecom Engineer Rite Aid Corporation HL-IS-COM (Telecomm) V: +1 717 730-8355 30 Hunter Lane, Camp Hill, PA 17011-2410 F: +1 717 975-3789 P.O. Box 3165, Harrisburg, PA 17105-3165 W: +1 717 805-6208 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I've a hard time accepting that fellow (at AOL) definition of 'trolling' or even if it is a valid thing. It seems to me that what many people call 'trolling' is nothing more than their explanation of why something they personally disagree with should not appear on the net. I've been called a 'troll' a few times and all I can say is that some of us speak and write the way we do because it is our personality. Some of us (most of us, I would hope!) write and express ourselves from our personal experiences, the fact that sometimes what we have to say offends the virgin ears, eyes and brains of some readers is an unfortunate by-product of that. The fact that some people are offensive in this way should not mean we should always dismiss them as a 'troll' rather than read what they have to say (or not). I am still curious to know if anyone has ever met this person or has some idea of his background, etc, other than just dismissing him as a 'troll'. PAT] ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Who Sends This Around? Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 06:19:31 -0500 From: Charles Cryderman Pat, First off, the way things are going, please remove my return e-mail address. Now on to my remarks. This guy is just plan nuts. I went and did a google on this and found his entire rant. Near the beginning he states: "PERVERTED FBI agents RAPED, TORTURED, SEXUALLY ABUSED ME for THREE YEARS and BEHEADED ME which is 10000 times worse than the SEXUAL ABUSE of prisoners by Lyndie England." Now I am no doctor or an expert on how the mind works but for some reason I have a hard time believing anything this joker had to say. This is because of this one paragraph. How many people do you know that can live to tell about themselves being "beheaded" Not many is my guess. Well to tell the truth, none. Chip Cryderman [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I do agree it is one of the weirder pieces of spam which makes the rounds. But I think somewhere in the first few paragraphs of his rant he also states something about "you people who do not agree with me please go on to the next message." But judging from the sheer size of his missive (100 K of manually typewritten text) and the fact that it has been around the net many times (I suspect; I have recieved it three times I think and it appears to be bombarding Usenet in every newsgroup), I really have to wonder where the guy is coming from. Unlike most spam, which appears to be mass produced and distributed millions of times (usually smaller in size, and with the same phishing expeditions over and over, with the same misspelled words in the same place time and time again), this guy appears to have sat there at least once to type it in, and on various times has updated it with 'latest details' of what the #@$&@ FBI has done to him, including lately, as you point out, the FBI having beheaded him. Very unusual, to say the least. I must wonder what the average, John Q. Non-Netizen *must think* when he occassionally stumbles in here, sees the beheaded trolls hoping around at their keyboards while others try to save us from ourselves by telling us what our reaction should be to the individuals they have defined as trolls and sometimes being a bit trollish in their own responses. I'd say John Q. probably thinks we are all high on drugs. PAT] ------------------------------ From: jdj Subject: Re: "We're From the Government..."; NSA Recs on Securing Mac OS X Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 09:41:38 -0800 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com On Mon, 08 Nov 2004 06:57:38 -0800, Justin Time wrote: > Danny Burstein wrote in message: [snip] >> Yes, that NSA: >> Title: >> How to Securely Install and Use Apple Computer Inc.'s Mac OS X >> Version 10.3.x Operating System (Panther) [snip] > But it took them at least 30 more pages to make guesses about that > other common proprietary operating system -- the one from Redmond Wa. > with the longest running beta test in history. Beta????? I thought it was still in pre-alpha. It's still very unstable. =-= ------------------------------ From: dold@XReXXLongX.usenet.us.com Subject: Re: Long Distance Service in California Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 23:34:59 UTC Organization: a2i network becky wrote: > I just disconnected from SBC long distance. What other long distance > service is available? > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So much is available, we could not > begin to list it all. Have you considered VOIP service which is > about as inexpensive as you can get these days, depending on your > volume of usage, etc. There are *much better* deals out there than > SBC for sure. Maybe someone will write you with some suggestions. > PAT] I wasted my breath arguing with an SBC rep who insisted I was paying a monthly fee for my long distance with another carrier. I pay the bill; I know what I pay ... No, there isn't a $3.00 per month "gee we love having you as a customer" fee. For any international calls, I use 1010987 which is $.03/minute to most of the countries I call. That's actually cheaper than the plan that I have for domestic LD, but I dislike the extra digits. Clarence A Dold - Hidden Valley (Lake County) CA USA 38.8-122.5 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Can't you get that 1010987 put onto a speed dial button if you do not want to default all your LD traffic to them? PAT] ------------------------------ From: dor@writeme.com (Satchel Paige) Subject: Re: Any News on the Feds v. Norvergence? Date: 8 Nov 2004 21:34:47 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com What kind of recourse do I have? I originally reported Norvergence to the FTC in September of 2003. I then posted Norvergence's fraud here to warn everyone about them and to ask everyone to report Norvergence to the FTC as well. Norvergence sued me. And because I could not afford to travel from California to New Jersey, let alone to hire a New Jersey attorney, a default judgement was passed against me. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Good question. 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #537 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Nov 9 15:57:18 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA9KvHn18858; Tue, 9 Nov 2004 15:57:18 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 15:57:18 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411092057.iA9KvHn18858@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 #538 TELECOM Digest Tue, 9 Nov 2004 15:56:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 538 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Worm Breaks Speed Record from Discovery to Life (Lisa Minter) Iranian Internet Journalists Face Trial Next Week (Lisa Minter) Patton Adds Dial-Out PPP, Call-Back, and PPP Uplink Capabilities (Chris) VoIP Squawk (Rick Merrill) Zultys MX250 (Stephen Jones) Nortel Launches Global Ad Campaign (Lisa Minter) Re: Who Sends This Around? EVIL FBI SADISTS (Rick Merrill) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter Subject: Worm Breaks Speed Record From Discovery to Life Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 11:09:12 EST AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A new computer worm emerged on Tuesday which broke the speed record from the announcement of a security vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer to a full-blown virus that spreads in the wild. The vulnerability was discovered and made public by two hackers with aliases "ned" and "SkyLined" on Friday, and only four days later a worm exploiting the weakness was developed and set loose, several virus-trackers reported. Microsoft said the worm is a variant of MyDoom and that it was investigating the threat the worm poses. Some anti-virus companies said the new worm was different from MyDoom because it spreads via weblinks and not e-mail attachments. "People will receive an e-mail saying that their PayPal account has been credited or that they are invited to watch a webcam. When they click on the link, just by viewing a site it executes code and infects the computer," said technical consultant Graham Cluley at Sophos Anti-Virus. Microsoft was expected to issue its monthly batch of security patches later on Tuesday, but the company could not immediately say if a patch for the new worm would be part of it. However, the U.S. software giant said that consumers who had installed Service Pack 2 for Windows XP were at a reduced risk. The weakness in Internet Explorer is known as the IFRAME buffer overflow vulnerability. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Iranian Internet Journalists Face Trial Next Week Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 11:12:31 EST TEHRAN (Reuters) - A group of journalists working with pro-reform online media will go on trial in Iran next week accused of spreading propaganda against the Islamic state, a judiciary official was quoted as saying on Tuesday. At least nine journalists writing on online journals known as weblogs and news-based Internet sites have been detained by the hardline judiciary since September, newspapers and judiciary officials have said. "They will be tried next week in a public court," the Mardomsalari newspaper quoted the head of Tehran's Justice Department, Abbasali Alizadeh, as saying. The Internet has become a refuge for reformist journalists who lost their jobs when the judiciary closed more than 100 pro-reform publications in the past four years. Reformists, including President Mohammad Khatami have denounced the arrests as politically motivated and accused hard-liners of trying to curtail limited press freedoms. The journalists will face charges of "propagating against the regime, acting against national security, disturbing public opinion and offending Allah," the Etemad daily said last week. Nemat Ahmadi, lawyer of some of the detainees, have said they are being held in solitary confinement and have not been allowed to meet their lawyers or families. International human rights groups criticized the lack of freedom of expression in Iran which they say has more journalists in jail than any other country in the Middle East. "We are talking about rank and file activists working on social and cultural issues," said Joe Stork, Washington director of Human Right Watch's Middle East and North Africa Division. "Basic freedoms are being sacrificed as conservative leaders try to purge critics from society," he said. Human Rights Watch urged the European Union to step up pressure on Iran to end what it said was torture and ill-treatment of detainees and restore freedom of expression. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Note the second to last paragraph in the article quoted above: "Basic freedoms are being sacrificed as conservative leaders try to purge critics from society." Does that sound like any other country in the world you know of or are familiar with right now? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Chris Subject: Patton Adds Dial-Out PPP, Call-Back, and PPP Uplink Capabilities Date: 9 Nov 2004 09:33:26 -0800 Patton Adds Dial-Out PPP, Call-Back, and PPP Uplink Capabilities to RAS Product Line New RedRAS(tm) software adds dial-out PPP, call-back, and PPP uplink features that enhance security while reducing equipment and operating costs for ISPs and enterprises. GAITHERSBURG, Maryland - Patton Electronics -- an industry leader in access, connectivity and VoIP -- announces free RedRAS software release 3.5.1 for customers with T1 robbed-bit, T1/PRI or E1/PRI connections. The no-charge upgrade includes dial-out PPP, call-back, and uplink over T1/E1 PPP capabilities for Patton's popular and distinctive 2900 Series and 3120 remote access server product family. The expanded feature set enables new applications for ISPs and enterprises that offer enhanced security combined with reduced equipment and operating costs. Patton RAS owners can download the new software immediately from Patton's web site at upgrades.patton.com. "RAS isn't dead, in fact, it's more popular than ever," said Scott Whittle, Patton's Director of Product Marketing. "That's because dial-up is less expensive and more available than broadband -- and will be for years to come. Plus, dial-up RAS is vital for teleworkers, business travelers, and users in under-developed remote and rural locations. Patton's versatile new RedRAS 3.5.1 upgrade gives ISPs and enterprises fresh ways to leverage this time-tested technology to expand their service offerings, reduce expenses, and grow their business." Mr. Whittle added. New feature/benefits in RedRAS 3.5.1 include dial-out with multi-link support for lower-cost high bandwidth uplinks, call-back for reduced telephony expenses and enhanced security, and Synch PPP uplinks for lower equipment costs. Dial-out PPP Patton's dial-out PPP feature with dial-on-demand allocates bandwidth dynamically so enterprises and ISPs can avoid paying for unused bandwidth on dedicated uplinks. Patton's dial-on-demand boasts a multilink capability that distributes outbound data among multiple modems to create an aggregated high bandwidth pipe. As additional bandwidth is needed, the RAS automatically initiates a dial-up call and establishes a framed IP connection to a remote network. RAS administrators control the feature via configurable operating parameters. Patton's integrated packet filtering prevents unwanted outbound calls from unauthorized users or ping requests, ensuring security while further reducing costs. Dial-on-demand is ideal for such enterprise applications as automated backups to a remote data center. The RAS automatically sets up connections and then transmits the data over multiple modems to the remote center for storage. With dial-on-demand, ISPs can reduce expenses by replacing costly dedicated uplinks with Patton's "E1-on-demand" -- a dynamic pool of dial-out PPP uplinks. Call-Back The call-back feature employs the Call Back Control Protocol (CBCP) to enhance security and reduce telephony costs. CBCP verifies the identity of a remote calling device using RADIUS authentication. If authentication succeeds, the RAS disconnects the user and reestablishes the connection by initiating a new call. For each calling user, RAS administrators can pre-define the call-back digits within RADIUS, or allow the user device to specify the dial-back number. Enterprises can use the call-back feature to reduce telephone expenses incurred by teleworkers and business travelers calling from remote locations. By configuring the RAS to dial the caller back, businesses can take advantage of lower corporate rates for long-distance dialing. Synch PPP Uplink The synch PPP uplink feature permits a dedicated IP connection for uplink using existing T1/E1 WAN ports. User-selectable nx64 DS0s per WAN port allows the RAS to be used as an edge router instead of requiring the added expense of an external router or switch. This is a benefit for ISPs because it makes the RAS more flexible, so you can deploy a RAS to a new location without buying a router or switch, reducing the cost of growing your business. About Patton's Remote Access Servers Patton's chassis-based RAS products support V.92, V.90, K56Flex, V.34+, and ISDN dial-in, scale from 16 to 120 ports, and come in the industry's highest-density 1U chassis. These sleek units come with redundant power supplies and, because they don't use fans for cooling, are very quiet and reliable. They address the dial-up and DSL needs for carrier, ISP, and co-location customers who are deploying IP services. The following models are compatible with the new 3.5.1 software upgrade: * Model 2960 RAS (16, 24, 30, 48, and 60-port models) * Model 2996 RAS (96 and 120-port models) * Model 3120 RAS (96 and 120-port models) Pricing and Availability The 3.5.1 software upgrade is available now to Patton RAS users worldwide. Customers can download the software free of charge from http://upgrades.patton.com. About Patton Patton Electronics Company is a US manufacturer and marketer of data communications products, including VoIP/ToIP gateways & routers, Remote Access (V.92, V.90, K56Flex, V.34+, and ISDN dial-in), Last Mile/Local Loop Access (T1, E1, and xDSL modems, NTUs and CSU/DSUs), Multi-Service Access (voice, intranet, extranet, and Frame Relay access), and Connectivity (interface converters, short range modems, multiplexers, and surge protectors). Patton Electronics Company 7622 Rickenbacker Drive Gaithersburg, MD 20879 USA Tel: (301) 975-1000 Fax: (301) 869-9293 Email: marketing@patton.com http://www.patton.com ------------------------------ From: Rick Merrill Subject: VoIP Squawk Organization: Comcast Online Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 18:49:07 GMT I've been using a VoIP system with in-house wiring for one month now and it works Great, except for one little thing: after asking the ATT CallVantage center to place a call from the "phone book" that its omputer maintains for me, there will be one or two Loud Squawks on the line early in the call. Any ideas what could be causing that? - RM ------------------------------ From: stevejo@hotmail.com (Stephen Jones) Subject: Zultys MX250 Date: 9 Nov 2004 11:19:42 -0800 I am about to embark on investing in a Zultys MX250 -- I'm planning on purchasing 37 ZIP2 IP phones and 10 ZIP4X4 phones -- the phone system will co-exist on my network with a DELL 48 port switch. I am not planning on putting all my call traffic over the Internet until I have a permanent leased line installed however I am VERY concerned about call quality even though we will be going over traditional BT phone lines. Does anyone have any experience of the Zultys telephone system -- i.e. is it any good. The feature set is amazing and the cost is around the same cost of a traditional digital system such as the Ascotel 2065. I would love to receive any feedback, Kind Regards, Steve ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 13:28:42 EST From: Lisa Minter Subject: Nortel Launches Global Ad Campaign Telecom dailyLead from USTA November 9, 2004 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=17418&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * Nortel launches global ad campaign BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * NextWeb adds VoIP to the mix * AOL chief splits company into four units * SBC hires former cable executive to acquire content USTA SPOTLIGHT * Announcing Phone Facts Plus 2005 EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Comcast to roll out Microsoft set-top box in Washington state REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * SEC may take civil action against former Lucent executives Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=17418&l=2017006 ------------------------------ From: Rick Merrill Subject: Re: Who Sends This Around? EVIL FBI SADISTS should be KIDNAPPED Organization: Comcast Online Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 18:50:51 GMT keith wrote: > Keith says: >> Someone emailed and requested me to post it on Usenet newsgroups ... Ask the email recipient to post the "full headers" of the email. - RM [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Do you think that would do any good, or would it just add to the already oversized email? Anyway, I already wrote 'Keith' and asked him about this, but got no answer except for a mail-daemon in return, along with a thousand other mail-daemons that same day. Anyway, any beheaded troll who posts on Usenet newsgroups can't be all that bad of a guy. In the last issue of this Digest palee explained to me why the poster was probably a troll, and Charles Cryderman pointed out he was a beheaded one at that. That's all the evidence I need. 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #538 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Nov 10 01:18:44 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iAA6Ii523744; Wed, 10 Nov 2004 01:18:44 -0500 (EST) Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 01:18:44 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411100618.iAA6Ii523744@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 #539 TELECOM Digest Wed, 10 Nov 2004 01:18:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 539 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Packet8 Service Provider 8x8, Inc. Issues Statement on FCC (Lisa Minter) VoicePulse Optimistic After Positive FCC Ruling (Lisa Minter) Ohio Consumers' Counsel Reacts to FCC's Decision (Lisa Minter) Global Crossing Statement on FCC Action (Lisa Minter) FCC Declares Vonage(R) VoIP Service Is Interstate (Lisa Minter) Panasonic KX-TD 500, Please Help (73553) Establishing Local Access Numbers in US (MK) Beheaded Trolls, etc (TELECOM Digest Editor) Re: Lost Caller ID Switching Local Service - Need Explanation (Dearing) Re: Lost Caller ID Switching Local Service - Need Explanation (I Beard) Re: Long Distance Service in California (Joseph) Re: Any News on the Feds v. Norvergence? (William Van Hefner) I Have VOIP2 and Experience Flawless Service (Frank Reynolds) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 22:23:56 -0500 Subject: Packet8 Service Provider 8x8, Inc. Issues Statement on FCC http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/11-09-2004/0002399969&EDATE= Packet8 Service Provider 8x8, Inc. Issues Statement on FCC VoIP Ruling http://www.8x8.com SANTA CLARA, Calif., Nov. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- 8x8, Inc. (Nasdaq: EGHT), the Packet8 broadband voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and videophone communications service provider, issued the following statement regarding today's Federal Communications Commission decision that VoIP services like Packet8 are interstate in nature, thereby preempting efforts by state and local authorities from regulating such services. Bryan R. Martin, Chairman and CEO of 8x8, Inc., stated: "The FCC made a historic decision today for the future of Internet-based telephony services like Packet8. By declaring that these services are interstate by their very nature, and asserting federal jurisdiction over how such services are regulated, the FCC has taken a decisive step towards ensuring that innovative new IP-based applications, services and choices will be available to all consumers." 8x8 has been lobbying the FCC and other federal officials since September 2003, when it began receiving letters from several state regulatory agencies asserting jurisdiction over the Packet8 voice and video telephony service. Today's decision from the FCC enables VoIP service providers like 8x8 to avoid negotiating rates, rules and services with separate and individual state governments and continue to offer new, competitively-priced Internet phone services to residential and business broadband subscribers. About 8x8, Inc. VoIP (voice over internet protocol) service provider 8x8, Inc. offers internet-based telephony solutions (http://www.packet8.net) for individual residential and business users as well as small to medium sized business organizations. In addition to regular Packet8 VoIP service plans, priced as low as $19.95 per month for unlimited anytime calling to the U.S. and Canada, 8x8 now offers the Packet8 DV 326 VideoPhone, the industry's first stand alone broadband consumer videophone. Packet8 Virtual Office, 8x8's VoIP system for small to medium sized businesses, is a hosted PBX solution comprised of powerful business class features. For additional company information, visit 8x8's web site at http://www.8x8.com. NOTE: 8x8, the 8x8 logo, Packet8, the Packet8 logo and Packet8 Virtual Office are trademarks of 8x8, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. SOURCE 8x8, Inc. Web Site: http://www.8x8.com ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 22:33:25 -0500 Subject: VoicePulse Optimistic After Positive FCC Ruling http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/11-09-2004/0002399768&EDATE= Commission Rules in Favor of Innovation JAMESBURG, N.J., Nov. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- The FCC today ruled in favor of choice, competition and innovation by preempting state regulation of Voice-over-IP phone services provided by companies like VoicePulse. Remaining consistent with the FCC's deregulatory policies, the order lifts the burden of complying with 50 different regulatory bodies which could have stifled the emerging technology. "We're pleased that the FCC recognizes the potential of VoIP and welcome their continued support in bringing services like VoicePulse to the consumer," said Ravi Sakaria, VoicePulse's President & CEO. "The ruling is an important first step towards defining a new framework to support and encourage the growth of the industry while benefiting and protecting the consumer." VoicePulse allows consumers to use their existing cable or DSL Internet connection for phone service. The service includes traditional features such as Caller ID, Call Waiting, Call Forward and Voicemail as well as a host of advanced features such as Distinctive Ring, Call Filters, Telemarketer Block and Anonymous Call Block. Consumers need only a high-speed Internet connection and an ordinary touch-tone telephone to use the service. VoicePulse uses Voice-over-IP technology to deliver broadband phone service. VoicePulse's services include: * Unlimited local, regional and US long distance calling for $24.99 per month * Unlimited local, regional and 200 US long distance minutes for $14.99 per month * Advanced features including Voicemail, Telemarketer Blocking, Do Not Disturb, Anonymous Call Rejection, Distinctive Ring * Voicemail with optional e-mail delivery of messages as sound attachments * Choose your own area code * Low international calling rates * http://www.voicepulse.com/ About VoicePulse VoicePulse is a New Jersey based communications company that uses its VoIP network to deliver advanced features and high-quality phone service to residential and small-business consumers. The company leads the industry in delivering innovative features and excellent customer service. For more information about VoicePulse, please visit http://www.voicepulse.com. VoicePulse is a trademark of VoicePulse Inc. For more information about VoicePulse, please contact: Rima Vaghasiya 732-339-5100 rima@voicepulse.com SOURCE VoicePulse ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 22:29:47 -0500 Subject: Ohio Consumers' Counsel Reacts to FCC's Decision on Jack Decker Comment: As you read this and similar statements by "consumer groups", bear in mind that some of these organizations stand to lose a lot of their influence, and perhaps their entire reason for existence, if wireline telephony goes away. You will know which ones are possibly thinking of their own job security first, and what is best for consumers second, if all they can do is knock today's FCC decision.] http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/11-09-2004/0002399895&EDATE= Ohio Consumers' Counsel Reacts to FCC's Decision on Internet-Based Telephone Services http//www.pickocc.org COLUMBUS, Ohio, Nov. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made a decision that limits the authority of individual states over Internet-based telephone services (called Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP). The Office of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel (OCC) believes that it is important that states have the ability to enact consumer protections and safeguards for this fast-growing technology. The following statement can be attributed to Janine Migden-Ostrander, Consumers' Counsel: "With traditional local telephone competition in jeopardy, the last thing consumers need is for their new choices to lack any safeguards. While there is still uncertainty about how much of a role states will ultimately be able to play, the FCC took away any authority for them to require VoIP companies to provide customers with 9-1-1 emergency services. When it comes to consumer protections and public safety issues, states should be in the driver's seat and need to act." About the Office of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel The Office of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel (OCC), the residential utility advocate, represents the interests of 4.5 million households in proceedings before state and federal regulators and in the courts. The state agency also educates consumers about electric, natural gas, telephone and water issues and resolves complaints from individuals. To receive utility information, brochures, schedule a presentation or file a utility complaint, residential consumers may call 1-877-PICKOCC (1-877-742-5622) toll free in Ohio or visit the OCC website at http//www.pickocc.org . SOURCE Office of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel Web Site: http//www.pickocc.org ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 22:31:43 -0500 Subject: Global Crossing Statement on FCC Action http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/11-09-2004/0002399891&EDATE= http://www.globalcrossing.com FLORHAM PARK, N.J., Nov. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Global Crossing (Nasdaq: GLBC) issued the following statement, which should be attributed to John Legere, CEO, on the Federal Communications Commission's declaratory ruling today. "We are pleased that the FCC is continuing its efforts to regulate VoIP services with a 'light touch.' We believe this approach will foster continued innovation and investment in IP networks and services. "The ever-quickening acceleration of technological change in the telecommunications industry demands a regulatory process that is swift, efficient and final." As the industry evolves towards an IP environment, Global Crossing recommends its REFORM agenda to begin adapting today's regulatory tools to tomorrow's regulatory challenges. Global Crossing's REFORM agenda is comprised of six pillars: * Rationalizing inter-carrier compensation. * Establishing a swift and efficient dispute resolution forum. * Formulating clear and simple rules and regulations. * Overhauling universal service. * Redefining public interest obligations. * Maintaining authority over essential bottleneck facilities The company believes that the few simple rules and safeguards outlined by REFORM will provide for a largely deregulated environment that will benefit both consumers and the telecommunications industry as a whole. ABOUT GLOBAL CROSSING Global Crossing (Nasdaq: GLBC) provides telecommunications solutions over the world's first integrated global IP-based network. Its core network connects more than 300 cities and 30 countries worldwide, and delivers services to more than 500 major cities, 50 countries and 6 continents around the globe. The company's global sales and support model matches the network footprint and, like the network, delivers a consistent customer experience worldwide. Global Crossing IP services are global in scale, linking the world's enterprises, governments and carriers with customers, employees and partners worldwide in a secure environment that is ideally suited for IP-based business applications, allowing e-commerce to thrive. The company offers a full range of managed data and voice products including Global Crossing IP VPN Service, Global Crossing Managed Services and Global Crossing VoIP services, to more than 40 percent of the Fortune 500, as well as 700 carriers, mobile operators and ISPs. Please visit http://www.globalcrossing.com for more information about Global Crossing. CONTACT GLOBAL CROSSING: Press Contact Becky Yeamans + 1 973-937-0155 PR@globalcrossing.com Analysts/Investors Contact Laurinda Pang + 1 800-836-0342 glbc@globalcrossing.com SOURCE Global Crossing Web Site: http://www.globalcrossing.com ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 22:35:13 -0500 Subject: FCC Declares Vonage(R) VoIP Service Is Interstate, Preempts http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/11-09-2004/0002399599&EDATE= FCC Declares Vonage(R) VoIP Service Is Interstate, Preempts States From Regulating VoIP http://www.vonage.com Vonage CEO Jeffrey A. Citron Says Increased Clarity in the Broadband Telephone Marketplace Means Subscribers Will Enjoy More Innovation, Greater Savings WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Today the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) found that Vonage's Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service is "interstate" in nature, meaning that individual states cannot regulate Vonage as it would a traditional telephone company, nor regulate the rates, terms and conditions of Vonage's service. Vonage CEO Jeffrey A. Citron responded to the news. "This forward-thinking decision from the FCC assures that competition from VoIP is here to stay. Now we can focus our resources exclusively on building an even better service- rolling out E-911 for all our subscribers, innovating new features and new devices for VoIP, and expanding aggressively around the globe. Because the FCC has acknowledged the reality of the Internet-which knows no state boundaries and no borders-more people will enjoy the benefits of Internet phone service." "Clarity for the VoIP industry benefits not only the U.S. economy, but will also drive broadband penetration. The value proposition is clear-our customers pay less for the combination of high-speed Internet and Vonage phone service than they do for traditional phone service plus clunky dial-up Internet. It's an upgrade that saves consumers money, simplifies their lives and gives them features they can't get from traditional phone service. The FCC has ensured that more consumers will enjoy the benefits of this upgrade by providing clarity in the marketplace," added Citron. The vote was 3 in favor, with 2 concurring votes, leading to a unanimous declaration that that Vonage's form of IP-to-PSTN communications is an interstate service, asserting their sole jurisdiction over its Internet-based service. The ruling is the third in a series of IP-enabled services petitions, which establish the role of the FCC in the regulation of the changing telecommunications landscape. The order is expected to be issued in two to three weeks. Please visit http://www.fcc.gov for more information about this landmark ruling. About Vonage(R) Vonage is redefining communications by offering consumers and small businesses an affordable alternative to traditional telephone service. The fastest growing telephony company in North America, Vonage is sold directly through http://www.vonage.com and retail partners such as Amazon.com, RadioShack, Best Buy, Circuit City, Staples, Fry's Electronics and Office Depot. With more than 300,000 lines in service, over 5 million calls per week are made using Vonage, the easy-to-use, feature-rich, flat rate phone service. Vonage is headquartered in Edison, New Jersey. For more information about Vonage's products and services, please visit http://www.vonage.com or call 1-VONAGE-HELP. SOURCE Vonage Web Site: http://www.vonage.com ------------------------------ From: 73553 Subject: Panasonic KX-TD 500, Please Help Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 04:11:46 GMT Hi, Does anyone know how to change the ring type for incoming trunk lines on a kx-td500 phone system. My company HATES the default ring and I do not see where to change it. Thanks ------------------------------ From: meshko@gmail.com (MK) Subject: Establishing Local Access Numbers in US Date: 9 Nov 2004 20:41:11 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hi, How do comapnies like ISPs roll out hundreds of local access numbers all over the country? Do they really have local points of presence all over the US? I talked to our phone company but they claim that the only option is to do call forwarding but that sounds very, very expensive. What is the right way of doing this? TIA ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 20:00:36 EST From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Beheaded Trolls, etc In a message in issue 537, palee@riteaid.com on Tue, 9 Nov 2004 10:51:44 -0500 responded to Editor Re: Who Sends This Around? >> In TELECOM Digest V23 #536, our Esteemed Editor wrote (in part): >> Anyone else know anything about this guy? palee responded: > All you need to know about this guy can be found at > http://members.aol.com/intwg/trolls.htm I noted in response to palee: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I've a hard time accepting that fellow > (at AOL) definition of 'trolling' or even if it is a valid thing. It > seems to me that what many people call 'trolling' is nothing more > than their explanation of why something they personally disagree with > should not appear on the net. I've been called a 'troll' a few times > and all I can say is that some of us speak and write the way we do > because it is our personality. Some of us (most of us, I would hope!) > write and express ourselves from our personal experiences, the fact > that sometimes what we have to say offends the virgin ears, eyes and > brains of some readers is an unfortunate by-product of that. The fact > that some people are offensive in this way should not mean we should > always dismiss them as a 'troll' rather than read what they have to > say (or not). I am still curious to know if anyone has ever met this > person or has some idea of his background, etc, other than just > dismissing him as a 'troll'. PAT] and Charles Cryderman responded in the same issue (537): > Pat, > First off, the way things are going, please remove my return > e-mailaddress. > Now on to my remarks. This guy is just plan nuts. I went and did a > google on this and found his entire rant. Near the beginning he > states: > "PERVERTED FBI agents RAPED, TORTURED, SEXUALLY ABUSED ME for THREE > YEARS and BEHEADED ME which is 10000 times worse than the SEXUAL ABUSE > of prisoners by Lyndie England." > Now I am no doctor or an expert on how the mind works but for some > reason I have a hard time believing anything this joker had to > say. This is because of this one paragraph. How many people do you > know that can live to tell about themselves being "beheaded" Not many > is my guess. Well to tell the truth, none. > Chip Cryderman Now my problem today is this: that phrase "and BEHEADED ME" did *not* appear in the original text sent by what palee referred to as the 'troll'. The _original text_ as seen in mid-October and early November versions of the message (and Google has a million copies of it on line in their archives, it would seem) read like this " ...ABUSED ME for THREE YEARS, which is 10000 tunes worse than the ..." The first instance I found of the altered version of the message to include ... and BEHEADED ME ... was November 6, in a message posted to alt.hackers from 'eworly@vanadoo.fr' which altered the original message posted by this user when they were known as 'vicky' on the net and became 'keith'. In an update to the original diatribe posted that day or earlier by 'keith' he explained why he changed his email name from 'vicky' to 'keith'. It was because, he alleged, the FBI had forced one or two ISPs to cancel his email password to 'get even with him'. That copy of the updated (but still same old message) I saw at the end of October did not have the 'beheaded me' comment in it. The first reference I saw to 'beheaded' was in a reply/rebuttal added to the thread in alt. hackers by eworly@vanadoo.fr where it had been clevery edited in to the original sentence by *someone*, and eworly@vanadoo.fr was the first person I could find who used that altered phrase in quoting the message. What you wish to make of the message (he is/is not a troll) (he is/ is not a crazy person) is everyone's own judgement call. But, if you will pardon me, it is just too damn bad when a person goes and sits in the filthy, stinky toilet stall called "Usenet", and not content with what someone else has scribbled on the wall has to cleverly edit it to make it appear ridiculous, as it it were not ridiculous on its own merit, prior to alteration. So if you wish to go read the message again, please ignore that 'and BEHEADED ME' addition, which the original author did *not* include. PAT ------------------------------ From: John P. Dearing Subject: Re: Lost Caller ID Switching Local Service - Need Explanation Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 01:24:11 GMT Adam Harbour wrote: > Hi, > I switched from Verizon to Ztel local service last year and in the > process lost my caller id service. I am the only person in my street > that does not have it but ZTel told me that it is not available in my > area. Here is the explanation from the ZTel engineer. Can somebody > read and understand it and tell me if it is BS or true and what I > would have to do to get caller id service back. I really need it for > both my business and home use. > ----------------------- > "Attempt to add any form of caller id to this ani not available ; > spoke to repair/ not in switch, not on service order that migrated > them to ztel/ spoke to business office and verified that no form of > caller id is available in this switch/ npa nxx/ spoke to customer to > try to explain there are only a certain # of cid spots in each switch > and per Verizon this is no longer available in this switch/ cannot add > cid closing ticket - have called and advised customer. " I'm wondering if Ztel is a "reseller" that is simply just repackaging Verizon dialtone and is then selling that to you at a discount. There are several ways for CLECs to provide service. One is to lease the "loop" from the ILEC (Verizon) and put *their* dialtone from *their* switch and then port your number over to their switch. This is an unbundled loop. Another way for the CLEC (ZTel) to enter into a relationship with the ILEC (Verizon) to unbundle the entire service (VZ switch, services, and loop) and resell that to you. I believe this is called UNE-P (Unbundled Network Element -- Platform). There are things that can and can't be done with UNE-P. It may be that Caller-ID is considered by Verizon to be an advanced feature and isn't offered to the CLEC to be resold. Same thing with Verizon VoiceMail and DSL. You have to be a Verizon customer first to qualify for the "value added" features. Go back to ZTel and ask them precisely *how* your service is being provided. If they can't/won't help you, you can always go back to Verizon. John P. Dearing A+, Network+ To reply: Just drop "YOURPANTS" in my address! 8-) ------------------------------ From: Isaiah Beard Subject: Re: Lost Caller ID Switching Local Service - Need Explanation Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 16:25:37 -0500 Adam Harbour wrote: > Hi, > I switched from Verizon to Ztel local service last year and in the > process lost my caller id service. I am the only person in my street > that does not have it but ZTel told me that it is not available in my > area. Here is the explanation from the ZTel engineer. Can somebody > read and understand it and tell me if it is BS or true and what I > would have to do to get caller id service back. I really need it for > both my business and home use. [SNIP] > "Attempt to add any form of caller id to this ani not available ; > spoke to repair/ not in switch, not on service order that migrated > them to ztel/ spoke to business office and verified that no form of > caller id is available in this switch/ npa nxx/ spoke to customer to > try to explain there are only a certain # of cid spots in each switch > and per Verizon this is no longer available in this switch/ cannot add > cid closing ticket - have called and advised customer. " Adam, The comments the tech provided are very sketchy and even contradictory. But it would would appears the the tech is trying to claim the that when you switched to Ztel, your number was moved to a different central office swtich (and he is very likely correct) and that switch that your number has been moved to is not fully SS7 compliant, and is not capable of caller ID. In layman's terms, Ztel probably cheaped out and is using bargain-basement, substandard equipment in your area, that can't handle caller ID functions. I find that explanation a little hard to believe, but it is possible. You mention everyone else in your neighborhood has caller ID. Have they too switched to Ztel, or are they still with Verizon? If still with Verizon, then the explanation you've been given is likely. If you DO have neighbors with Ztel and they do have Caller ID, then it's possible this tech doens't know what he's doing. In any case, if CID is important to you, I'd dump Ztel. If you really don't want to be with Verizon, there are plenty of VoIP providers where you can port your number to (Vonage, Packet8, Lingo, and possibly your local cable company) that do in fact provide CID services. You might get better rates, too. E-mail fudged to thwart spammers. Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply. ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Long Distance Service in California Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 13:42:21 -0800 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On 8 Nov 2004 11:42:44 -0800, becky210@hotmail.com (becky) wrote: > I just disconnected from SBC long distance. What other long distance > service is available? > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So much is available, we could not > begin to list it all. Have you considered VOIP service which is > about as inexpensive as you can get these days, depending on your > volume of usage, etc. There are *much better* deals out there than > SBC for sure. Maybe someone will write you with some suggestions. > PAT] For regular LD providers I've always had good luck with http://abtolls.com who compare the different LD providers and actually give you the "real" rate vs. the advertised rates including USF and other fees (such as monthly fees.) You should be able to find at least one or two providers that you can get service from for as low as 3 cents per minute with no monthly fees. Watch out for monthly fees! ------------------------------ Reply-To: From: William Van Hefner Subject: Re: Any News on the Feds v. Norvergence? Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 18:56:36 -0800 Organization: Vantek Communications, Inc. Satchel, There is a press release that the Federal Trade Commission just issued regarding the Norvergence case at http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2004/11/norvergence.htm . A copy of the actual filing of FTC vs. Norvergence is available at http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/0423184/041104norvergecmplt.pdf . I found it rather amazing that at least one company agreed to pay as much as $340,000 for the Norvergence "Black Box". Exactly why a company would sign such a huge deal without at least showing it to their lawyer (who should have suspected fraud from the get-go) is beyond me. The complaint itself mainly seeks injunctive relief, in order to release former Norvergence customers from their "Matrix Box" leases. They have a pretty solid case for that, I believe. Unfortunately, the FTC did NOT seek any temporary injunctive relief, which means that any company that does not make lease payments until the case is settled is still technically liable, and can be sued by the banks holding the leases. Thus, it is quite possible that during the interval period, those who are contractually bound to make payments may very well be sued by these lease holders, lose, and have such lawsuits upheld by freezing a company's assets, taking cash out of their bank accounts, etc. Needless to say, this was a major "oversight" by the FTC. Those who live in a handful of states (Florida, Texas, New Jersey) are in luck though. Each of those state's Attorney Generals have launched suits against the leasing companies, and residents who hold contracts in those states are not required to make lease payments, pending the outcome of their investigation. Other states like New York, Illinois and Colorado have also launched their own investigations, but have not provided their state's consumers with any temporary injunctive relief. The FTC complaint also seeks restitution of legal fees for Norvergence customers, fines, penalties, and barring Norvergence from offering leases again in the future. There is just one problem though. THERE IS NO NORVERGENCE!!! The company was dissolved under Chapter 7 Bankruptcy law. Other than the leasing companies, there is no one left to sue. Norvergence has no one to represent them, because they no longer exist. Period. Any consumer who is hoping to get any type of compensation or restitution in this matter is basically SOL, insofar as the law goes. At best, they may be able to get out of the rest of their lease payments. The law does not provide for restitution from a corporation that no longer exists. The only way such a thing could be done is if a complaining party can prove that the officers and shareholders of the company intentionally set out to defraud them criminally. In that case, consumers could go directly after the corporate officers and shareholders of Norvergence. This is commonly known as "piercing the corporate veil". In this particular action, no entity that I am aware of has targeted the officers or shareholders for personal liability or criminal prosecution though. It is very rare for any entity or government agency to be able to be able to prove criminal intent in cases such as these, so most don't even try. It would probably bust the budget of most states or even the FTC itself to hire enough lawyers to be able to build a winnable case of this kind. Even if they did, the officers and shareholders of Norvergence likely have their money packed away in Swiss bank accounts by now, so any award would likely be meaningless to consumers. The moral of this story is, don't depend on the government to bail you out of a bad business deal, no matter how screwed up it is. Once they have your money, it is likely gone for good. Do your due diligence on matters of such importance. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure in matters such as these. William Van Hefner Editor - http://www.thedigest.com > From: dor@writeme.com (Satchel Paige) > Subject: Re: Any News on the Feds v. Norvergence? > Date: 8 Nov 2004 21:34:47 -0800 > Organization: http://groups.google.com > What kind of recourse do I have? I originally reported Norvergence > to the FTC in September of 2003. I then posted Norvergence's fraud > here to warn everyone about them and to ask everyone to report > Norvergence to the FTC as well. Norvergence sued me. And because I > could not afford to travel from California to New Jersey, let alone to > hire a New Jersey attorney, a default judgement was passed against > me. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Good question. PAT] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Mr. Van Hefner, with no more Norvergence, who is there now to enforce any judgment obtained against Satchel Paige? Or is the judgment entered against him now technically at least the property the Bankruptcy Trustee as one of the 'assets' due the creditors of Norvergence, i.e. miscellaneous recievables due Norvergence. My other question is, consider the poor business people who paid out good money to the finance companies. If, as we suspect, the leases are all overturned by the court, then cannot the victims of the fraud (the business people) turn on the finance companies and banks and sue them for the return of what they *did* pay? In other words, the banks and finance companies get it twice: once from (no more) Norvergence and once from 'debtors' suing them to get back what they paid in on their leases. I really hope the banks and finance companies get the screws turned on them so badly; you know at least some of them had to be in on the scam along with Norvergence. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Frank D. Reynolds Subject: I Have VoIP2 and Experience Flawless Service Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 00:26:31 -0500 I have read the negative comments by some people about the thresholds of VoIP2's "Small World" plan, and I disagree with their comments. I have had VoIP2's service from the companies inception, I have never had a problem with their service or billing. I call various parts of the world on a daily basis, and use a substantial amount of time on the phone. If I have not had a problem, why have others? Remember, there are always two sides to every story. ------------------------------ 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. 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You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #539 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Nov 10 13:34:51 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iAAIYoX01445; Wed, 10 Nov 2004 13:34:51 -0500 (EST) Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 13:34:51 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411101834.iAAIYoX01445@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 #540 TELECOM Digest Wed, 10 Nov 2004 13:34:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 540 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson FCC Takes on Oversight of Internet Phone Services (Lisa Minter) FCC Limits State Oversight Of Internet Phone Calling (Lisa Minter) FCC Rules in Favor of Net Phone Industry (Monty Solomon) EchoStar Grosses $102M in 3Q Earnings (Monty Solomon) Re: "We're From the Government"; NSA Recs on Securing Mac (Justin Time) Re: Global Crossing Statement on FCC Action (Henry Cabot Henhouse III) Re: Establishing Local Access Numbers in US (Scott Dorsey) Re: Establishing Local Access Numbers in US (Stanley Cline) Re: SBC Dial-up Internet Modem Speed 28.8 Kbps (Kay Archer) Re: Any News on the Feds v. Norvergence? (Lisa Hancock) Re: I Have VoIP2 and Experience Flawless Service (Rick Merrill) Ownership of Anti-Spam Measure Queried at Talks (Lisa Minter) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 08:30:20 Subject: FCC Limits State Oversight Of Internet Phone Calling http://www.investors.com/editorial/feature.asp?v=11/10 BY REINHARDT KRAUSE INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY The Federal Communications Commission Tuesday exempted Internet calling services from most state regulation, in a ruling sought by startup Vonage Holdings but also welcomed by big phone and cable TV companies. If the FCC ruling withstands expected court challenges, states will not regulate voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, the way they do traditional dial-tone phone calls. In a filing, Vonage had asked to be shielded from state regulation because VoIP calls are an interstate service. States typically certify phone companies, regulate rates and tax services. While the FCC curtailed the role of states, providers of VoIP services may not avoid some traditional telecom charges and regulations in the long run. That's because the FCC itself and Congress intend to address many key regulatory questions. The issues include whether VoIP service providers must pay fees that subsidize phone services in rural areas or pay "access charges." Those are fees that phone companies collect to connect calls. Despite these lingering questions, some lawmakers hailed the FCC's decision Tuesday. Full story at: http://www.investors.com/editorial/feature.asp?v=11/10 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 01:35:50 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: FCC Rules in Favor of Net Phone Industry By JENNIFER C. KERR Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal regulators gave a boost Tuesday to the fledgling Internet phone industry, removing a regulatory hurdle that threatened to drive up the cost of making calls through cyberspace. The Federal Communications Commission voted 5-0 for a petition by Vonage Holdings Corp. of Edison, N.J., which had asked the agency to declare the company's product an interstate service, giving the FCC regulatory control. The move exempts Vonage and similar providers of Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, from some key state-by-state regulation that the companies say would add cost. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44885446 ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 01:39:14 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: EchoStar Grosses $102M in 3Q Earnings By SANDY SHORE AP Business Writer ENGLEWOOD, Colo. (AP) -- EchoStar Communications Corp. on Tuesday reported its third-quarter earnings nearly tripled as the parent company of Dish Network, the nation's second largest satellite TV service, added about 350,000 new subscribers. The company also said it would pay a one-time dividend of $1 a share, or a total of $455 million, next month. Based in suburban Englewood, EchoStar said its net income was $102 million, or 22 cents per share, for the quarter ended Sept. 30. That was up from $35 million, or 7 cents per share, during the same period in 2003. Analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call expected EchoStar to earn 23 cents per share. Revenue totaled $1.86 billion, a 28 percent increase over $1.45 billion during last year's third quarter. EchoStar said it had approximately 10.5 million subscribers at the end of the quarter, but reported its churn rate, reflecting the number of subscribers who dropped service, rose to 1.77 percent from 1.72 percent in the previous quarter. In addition, EchoStar said its average subscriber acquisition cost was $421 per subscriber, down from $466 in the third quarter of 2003. EchoStar attributed the drop partially to equipment costs. With more subscribers leasing equipment, the company said it can recover those boxes and reuse them when customers drop the service. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=44878006 ------------------------------ From: a_user2000@yahoo.com (Justin Time) Subject: Re: "We're From the Government..."; NSA Recs on Securing Mac OS X Date: 10 Nov 2004 05:32:33 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com jdj wrote in message news:: > On Mon, 08 Nov 2004 06:57:38 -0800, Justin Time wrote: >> Danny Burstein wrote in message: > [snip] >>> Yes, that NSA: >>> Title: >>> How to Securely Install and Use Apple Computer Inc.'s Mac OS X >>> Version 10.3.x Operating System (Panther) > [snip] >> But it took them at least 30 more pages to make guesses about that >> other common proprietary operating system -- the one from Redmond Wa. >> with the longest running beta test in history. > Beta????? > I thought it was still in pre-alpha. It's still very unstable. > =-= Nope. Windows is the longest running Beta test in history. Been going on for over 10 years now and they are still trying to stabilize version 1.0 Rodgers Platt ------------------------------ From: Henry Cabot Henhouse III Subject: Re: Global Crossing Statement on FCC Action Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 06:07:54 -0800 We have Global Crossing internet T1's at 3 of our buildings ... perhaps this is why all 3 have lagged and gone to crap in the past month ... I mean, come on, ping times to yahoo and 4.2.2.2 at 3 am with *no* traffic from us hitting 90 to 300 ms? Lisa Minter wrote in message news:telecom23.539.4@telecom-digest.org: http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/11-09-2004/0002399891&EDATE= > http://www.globalcrossing.com > FLORHAM PARK, N.J., Nov. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Global Crossing > (Nasdaq: GLBC) issued the following statement, which should be > attributed to John Legere, CEO, on the Federal Communications > Commission's declaratory ruling today. > "We are pleased that the FCC is continuing its efforts to regulate > VoIP services with a 'light touch.' We believe this approach will > foster continued innovation and investment in IP networks and > services. > "The ever-quickening acceleration of technological change in the > telecommunications industry demands a regulatory process that is > swift, efficient and final." > As the industry evolves towards an IP environment, Global Crossing > recommends its REFORM agenda to begin adapting today's regulatory > tools to tomorrow's regulatory challenges. Global Crossing's REFORM > agenda is comprised of six pillars: > * Rationalizing inter-carrier compensation. > * Establishing a swift and efficient dispute resolution forum. > * Formulating clear and simple rules and regulations. > * Overhauling universal service. > * Redefining public interest obligations. > * Maintaining authority over essential bottleneck facilities > The company believes that the few simple rules and safeguards outlined > by REFORM will provide for a largely deregulated environment that will > benefit both consumers and the telecommunications industry as a whole. > ABOUT GLOBAL CROSSING > Global Crossing (Nasdaq: GLBC) provides telecommunications solutions > over the world's first integrated global IP-based network. Its core > network connects more than 300 cities and 30 countries worldwide, and > delivers services to more than 500 major cities, 50 countries and 6 > continents around the globe. The company's global sales and support > model matches the network footprint and, like the network, delivers a > consistent customer experience worldwide. > Global Crossing IP services are global in scale, linking the > world's enterprises, governments and carriers with customers, > employees and partners worldwide in a secure environment that is > ideally suited for IP-based business applications, allowing e-commerce > to thrive. The company offers a full range of managed data and voice > products including Global Crossing IP VPN Service, Global Crossing > Managed Services and Global Crossing VoIP services, to more than 40 > percent of the Fortune 500, as well as 700 carriers, mobile operators > and ISPs. Please visit http://www.globalcrossing.com for more > information about Global Crossing. > CONTACT GLOBAL CROSSING: > Press Contact > Becky Yeamans > + 1 973-937-0155 > PR@globalcrossing.com > Analysts/Investors Contact > Laurinda Pang > + 1 800-836-0342 > glbc@globalcrossing.com > SOURCE Global Crossing > Web Site: http://www.globalcrossing.com ------------------------------ From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: Establishing Local Access Numbers in US Date: 10 Nov 2004 09:43:31 -0500 Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000) In article , MK wrote: > Hi, > How do comapnies like ISPs roll out hundreds of local access numbers > all over the country? Do they really have local points of presence all > over the US? I talked to our phone company but they claim that the > only option is to do call forwarding but that sounds very, very > expensive. What is the right way of doing this? Some of them really do have local POPs all over the country. AOL certainly does. Sometimes they will get lines extended out of area in more rural locations, to get a single POP to handle a larger location. When Netcom still existed, they had a closet in the back of our local library where their POP hardware resided. They also had them throughout Europe and it was very nice to be able to go travelling and call into the Netcom shell machines with a local number in London. Most smaller ISPs don't have the infrastructure to support this kind of thing, and so they contract with a POP provider like MegaPOP, that supplies POP service to a lot of different ISPs. --scott "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ From: Stanley Cline Subject: Re: Establishing Local Access Numbers in US Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 12:10:14 -0500 Organization: Roamer1 Communications Reply-To: sc1-news@roamer1.org On 9 Nov 2004 20:41:11 -0800, meshko@gmail.com (MK) wrote: > How do comapnies like ISPs roll out hundreds of local access numbers > all over the country? Do they really have local points of presence all > over the US? I talked to our phone company but they claim that the Few ISPs own their own modems in every market they serve, and many, including some of the biggest ones, own no modems at all; ISPs usually buy access to modems on a wholesale basis from a handful of companies that specialize in that product -- most notably MCI/UUNet and Level 3. These companies generally have a single physical POP per region (three to five states for the larger companies, maybe two to three per state for some of the smaller regional ones, like Pac-West and O1 in California) and either a) backhaul PRIs from various cities and towns to their POP (most common with MCI/UUNet), or b) are a CLEC and order access trunks from their POP to tandems and end offices in the areas where they have numbers. If you're trying to get local numbers in a range of cities, most CLECs offer "superPOP" or "wide area" services that will provide you with numbers in multiple local calling areas that come in on the same PRIs or T1s. If you only need a few numbers (say, for your home or a small office) and expect relatively low call volume, nearly any VoIP provider can provide you numbers, thanks to the fact that the companies that provide numbers and modems to ISPs and numbers to VoIP providers tend to be one and the same. :) There's generally no reason to resort to remote call forwarding unless you're trying to get local numbers in an area served by a small independent ILEC that CLECs can't touch. Stanley Cline -- sc1 at roamer1 dot org -- http://www.roamer1.org/ "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today. There might be a law against it by that time." -/usr/games/fortune ------------------------------ From: Kay Archer Subject: Re: SBC Dial-up Internet Modem Speed Only 28.8 Kbps in Westland, MI Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 01:10:22 -0600 N Joltt wrote in message news:telecom23.537.8@telecom-digest.org: > Dial-up speed 28.8 Kbps is the abosulate maximum. Most of times it is > just 26.4, sometimes 14.4 or even lower. So if you want to rent an > apartment in Westland, Michiagn, just be aware of this fact. SBC would > not do anything about it, because the voice bandwidth up to 3K is all > they care about. As long as they meet the voice line quality, any more > improvement for other purposes (such as dial-up Internet access) is > deemed unnecessary. And due to (or because of) that, they're > aggressively promoting DSL in my area. What an irony. This is going to be true of _any_ telephone service. As long as your faxes (14.4kbps) are not garbled they will not work on your phone lines. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think most people prefer cable internet > service over DSL. Is SBC saying a service provided by their company, > (SBC/Yahoo Internet) is 'unnecessary' ? If you go with cable internet, > then you can probably drop SBC entirely if you wish, and go with one > of the CLECs in your area. That's what I did over a year ago, it has > worked out quite well. PAT] ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: Any News on the Feds v. Norvergence? Date: 10 Nov 2004 07:03:52 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com dor@writeme.com (Satchel Paige) wrote: > What kind of recourse do I have? I originally reported Norvergence to > the FTC in September of 2003. I then posted Norvergence's fraud here > to warn everyone about them and to ask everyone to report Norvergence > to the FTC as well. Norvergence sued me. And because I could not > afford to travel from California to New Jersey, let alone to hire a > New Jersey attorney, a default judgement was passed against me. You probably need a lawyer. Did they attempt to execute the judgment and did you have to pay them money? If so, I don't think you'd be able to get that money back. If they did _not_ execute the judgement you're probably ok, but you would still need to consult a lawyer about it. Possibly you may need to file a counter claim 'for the record' to protect yourself but again a lawyer has to advise you. As an individual, you have the right to file criminal charges against the principals of the corporation. But as others mentioned, this isn't easy. Again, a lawyer would have to advise. William Van Hefner wrote > Norvergence has no one to represent them, because they no longer > exist. Period. Any consumer who is hoping to get any type of > compensation or restitution in this matter is basically SOL, insofar > as the law goes. At best, they may be able to get out of the rest of > their lease payments. Merely filing for bankruptcy does not grant bankruptcy. Has that relief and authorization to liquidate been granted? Normally, the creditors would get their say in court as to dissolution of the assets. > ... The only way such a thing could be done is if a > complaining party can prove that the officers and shareholders of the > company intentionally set out to defraud them criminally. In that > case, consumers could go directly after the corporate officers and > shareholders of Norvergence. This is commonly known as "piercing the > corporate veil". In this particular action, no entity that I am aware > of has targeted the officers or shareholders for personal liability or > criminal prosecution though. It is very rare for any entity or > government agency to be able to be able to prove criminal intent in > cases such as these, so most don't even try. I'm surprised "most don't even try" to go after officers of a corporation with suspicious activities. I agree it wouldn't be an easy task, but not doing so would leave the door open for whitespread white collar fraud: open a business, take everyone's money and hide it, then declare bankruptcy. It seems a reasonable question to ask what happened to all the money the leasing companies paid to N/V for which nothing was returned. It seems reasonable that the officers of the corporation be called in with their financial records -- including salary and capital withdrawals --to explain the cashflow of the business and to answer questions and provide documentation if an expenditure seems questionable. > It would probably bust the budget of most states or even the FTC > itself to hire enough lawyers to be able to build a winnable case of > this kind. It would take some effort, but I don't think a budget busting effort. The prosecution of Enron and Arthur Andersen officers is going slowly, but it is going on and people have been sent to prison. Perhaps a combined effort of the leasing companies and the government might work. > Even if they did, the officers and shareholders of Norvergence > likely have their money packed away in Swiss bank accounts by now, > so any award would likely be meaningless to consumers. Prison terms have a way of opening up such bank accounts. > The moral of this story is, don't depend on the government to bail you > out of a bad business deal, no matter how screwed up it is. Once they > have your money, it is likely gone for good. Do your due diligence on > matters of such importance. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of > cure in matters such as these. True. BTW, in one newspaper report, a leasing company representative claimed they weren't responsible for what the customer bought with the lease money, anymore than if a wall caved in a house that was mortgaged. But that's not quite true. When you buy a house with a mortgage, the mortgage company does go out and perform an appraisal and inspection. Sometimes the mortgage application is rejected because the appraised value is too low or there are significant repairs required. In other words, the mortgage companies won't loan you $200,000 to buy a $100,000 house. ------------------------------ From: Rick Merrill Subject: Re: I Have VoIP2 and Experience Flawless Service Organization: Comcast Online Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 16:33:38 GMT Frank D. Reynolds wrote: > I have read the negative comments by some people about the thresholds > of VoIP2's "Small World" plan, and I disagree with their comments. > I have had VoIP2's service from the companies inception, I have never > had a problem with their service or billing. Do they bill you a month in advance and direct to your credit card? > I call various parts of the world on a daily basis, and use a > substantial amount of time on the phone. If I have not had a problem, > why have others? > Remember, there are always two sides to every story. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Ownership of Anti-Spam Measure Queried at Talks Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 10:07:40 EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Internet companies have begun to change the way e-mail works in order to weed out spam, but experts on Tuesday clashed over whether the underlying technology should be controlled by any one company. At a meeting hosted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, advocates of open-source technology questioned whether a standard patented by Microsoft Corp. should be incorporated into the fabric of the Internet, where free, open-source software has long dominated. Others said they didn't care which standard was adopted as long as it provided a way to highlight legitimate e-mail in a sea of spam, estimated by Microsoft to be 80-85 percent of total email traffic. "We want to make sure our guys have the ability to communicate with their consumers, period," said Louis Mastria, spokesman for the Direct Marketing Association, which represents 5,000 bulk mailers. Senders of unsolicited spam and deceptive "phishing" attacks commonly use fake addresses to slip through content filters. Microsoft officials estimate that 81 percent of all mail coming into its Hotmail system is "spoofed" in this way. Microsoft and companies like Cisco Systems Inc. have developed different methods to verify e-mail to determine that a message from, for example, joe@example.com actually comes from example.com's mail servers. E-mail providers like Time Warner Inc. have begun to test Microsoft's standard, which is invisible to everyday users. Yahoo and Cisco's approaches are more technically demanding and will take longer to implement. Microsoft has sought to combine its proposal with another popular standard developed by entrepreneur Meng Wong, but splits appeared in September when open-source advocates said they were reluctant to use Microsoft-patented technology, even though the dominant software company said it would not charge for its use. David Kaefer of Microsoft said the patent "sets up a legal framework for people to do business with one another, for people to not end up in a situation where they end up in legal disputes." But the Apache software used by most Web servers has flourished without patents, said Daniel Quinlan, vice president of Apache SpamAssassin. Harvard University's Scott Bradner said the legal language put forward by Microsoft clouded what should have been a technical discussion among engineers looking for a reliable standard. "The license was written in lawyer, it wasn't written in human," he said. Microsoft has since revised its standard and won the support of technology companies including Sendmail Inc., whose open-source software is widely used to run e-mail systems. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #540 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Nov 10 23:09:51 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iAB49ps06334; Wed, 10 Nov 2004 23:09:51 -0500 (EST) Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 23:09:51 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411110409.iAB49ps06334@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 #541 TELECOM Digest Wed, 10 Nov 2004 23:07:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 541 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Cyber Crime Tools Could Serve Terrorists - FBI (Lisa Minter) Gmail Users Soon Able to Check E-Mail Via Outlook (Lisa Minter) FCC Puts VoIP Under Federal Jurisdiction (Lisa Minter) Re: "We're From the Government"; NSA Recs on Securing Mac (Kenneth Stox) Re: Does Vonage Service work Like SBC? (Tony P.) Congress Praises FCC VoIP Ruling (Lisa Minter) Special Report: The Phonemasters (Archives Reprint) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter Subject: Gmail Users Soon Able to Check E-Mail Via Outlook Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 21:57:37 EST SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Web search leader Google Inc. said on Wednesday it will soon make it possible for users of its free Gmail service to check their e-mail via Microsoft Outlook or on certain handheld devices such as mobile phones. Google said it is adding POP, or post office protocol, access to Gmail for all users over the next couple of weeks. The move will enable Gmail users to download a copy of their messages through other e-mail programs, such as Outlook and Eudora, and devices that support POP. Using POP access, Gmail users would also be able to view their messages offline. Google said it already provides free automatic forwarding, which enables users to send incoming messages to the e-mail of their choice. "We have no plans to charge for either feature," the company said. Google, which had its much anticipated initial public offering in mid-August, recently has been adding address book and other features to its advertising-supported Gmail service launched this spring. Microsoft Corp.and Yahoo Inc. which compete with Google in Web search, also offer rival free e-mail services. People can access POP mail accounts for free through Yahoo Mail, but forwarding is available only as part of a premium mail service, a company spokeswoman said. Representatives of Microsoft's Hotmail service were not immediately available to comment. Google shares, which briefly topped 200 after debuting at 85, closed at 167.86 on the Nasdaq, off 84 cents, or 0.5 percent. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 14:20:37 EST From: Telecom DailyLead From USTA Subject: FCC Puts VoIP Under Federal Jurisdiction Telecom dailyLead from USTA November 10, 2004 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=17449&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * FCC puts VoIP under federal jurisdiction BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Vodafone launches 3G service in Europe, Japan * Speakeasy plans WiMAX network for downtown Seattle * Verizon extends 3mbps DSL service * Cisco, Cablevision report earnings USTA SPOTLIGHT * Carrier Grade Voice Over IP -- Now at www.telecom-bookstore.com EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Siemens includes Skype VoIP software with Internet adapter * 20th TV goes wireless with "24" spinoff REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * Editorial praises VoIP ruling * Regulations in Brazil lead to cable pirating, companies say EDITOR'S NOTE * SmartBrief will not be published Thursday Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=17449&l=2017006 ------------------------------ From: Kenneth P. Stox Organization: Imaginary Landscape, LLC. Subject: Re: "We're From the Government..."; NSA Recs on Securing Mac OS Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 18:40:38 GMT Justin Time wrote: > Nope. Windows is the longest running Beta test in history. Been > going on for over 10 years now and they are still trying to stabilize > version 1.0 10 years? Try close to 20 now. If memory serves correct, Microsoft announced Windows in late 1984. ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Does Vonage Service work Like SBC? Organization: ATCC Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 17:15:31 -0500 In article , zcarenow@yahoo.com says: > I have SBC and I can go to any room in my house that has a phone jack > and plug in my phones and it will work. My understanding from what > I've read is that Vonage works by having you plug the phone cable into > their Vonage device and plug the other end to your phone. Now how > will this allow me to talk to someone from a phone in my master > bedroom as opposed to another room with a phone jack. Thanks in > advance. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The answer is yes and no. YES it will > work if it is wired up correctly, but NO, it will not work and may > well fry your Vonage adapter if it accidentally comes in contact > with the SBC (or for that matter, any telco) lines. Telephones do > send various amounts of voltage down the line; frequently it is very > benign to human beings who happen to touch the wires, but it and > the voltage coming out of/going into a telephone adapter for VOIP > do *not* get along. Make positively sure the lines from telco are > totally isolated at the demarc (point of entry into your house) from > your house wiring before you extend your Vonage adapter around the > house through other connector boxes, etc. Read the message in this > issue, some email correspondence I have had with another guy who > 'just assumed' the wiring in his house was correct and found out > the Vonage adapter box did not like it at all. PAT] In my case I just threw a splitter on the jack where I plugged the VoIP line into and disconnected the NID by pulling out the RJ11 plug that connects the home wiring to the network. Of course tagging it also helps immensely when some lame brained tech comes out to install the neighbors phone; well you know the drill. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: The Phonemasters (Archives Reprint) Five years ago in the Digest, we had an interesting report which was filed in our security area of the archives. In view of all the phishing expeditions we see these days, I thought this might be worth reviewing once again. It was originally given to us by Tad Cook (tad@ssc.com). PAT Subject: Special Security Report: The Phonemasters Date: Sun, 03 Oct 1999 23:40:00 EDT Sender: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu This TELECOM Digest special report is on the topic of the FBI investigation of 'The Phonemasters', a recent group of hackerphreaks who were investigated, arrested, put on trial and convicted. This will be a permanent addition to the Telecom Archives in the http://telecom-digest.org/archives/security-fraud area. Subject: The Phonemasters Date: Sun, 3 Oct 1999 19:25:36 -0700 (PDT) From: tad@ssc.com (Tad Cook) How an FBI Cybersleuth Busted a Hacker Ring By JOHN SIMONS Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL DALLAS -- In a federal courtroom here, Calvin Cantrell stands silently, broad shoulders slouched. His lawyer reads from a short letter he has written: "My parents taught me good ethics, but I have departed from some of these, lost my way sometimes," the letter states. "I was 25 and living at home. No job, and no future. All I ever really wanted was to work with computers." Mr. Cantrell certainly did work with computers -- both his own, and, surreptitiously, those of some of the largest companies in the world. He was part of a ring of hackers that pleaded guilty here to the most extensive illegal breach of the nation's telecommunications infrastructure in high-tech history. And sitting behind him in court as he was sentenced two weeks ago was the accountant-turned-detective who caught him: Michael Morris. A decade earlier, Mr. Morris, bored with accounting work, left a $96,000 job at Price Waterhouse and enrolled in the FBI academy, at $24,500 a year. Mr. Cantrell's sentencing was the final act in a five-year drama for Mr. Morris, and secured his reputation as the FBI's leading computer gumshoe. The tale of Mr. Morris and Mr. Cantrell is among the first cops-and- robber stories of the New Economy, involving, among other things, the first-ever use of an FBI "data tap." It illustrates how the nation's law-enforcement agencies are scrambling to reinvent their profession in a frantic effort to keep pace with brilliant and restless young hackers. The story also shows that hacking's potential harm is far more ominous than theft of telephone credit-card numbers. Mr. Cantrell was part of an eleven-member group dubbed "The Phonemasters" by the FBI. They were all technically adept twenty-somethings expert at manipulating computers that route telephone calls. The hackers had gained access to telephone networks of companies including AT&T Corp., British Telecommunications Inc., GTE Corp., MCI WorldCom (then MCI Communications Corp.), Southwestern Bell, and Sprint Corp. They broke into credit-reporting databases belonging to Equifax Inc. and TRW Inc. They entered Nexis/Lexis databases and systems of Dun & Bradstreet, court records show. The breadth of their monkey-wrenching was staggering; at various times, they could eavesdrop on phone calls, compromise secure databases, and redirect communications at will. They had access to portions of the national power grid, air-traffic-control systems and had hacked their way into a digital cache of unpublished telephone numbers at the White House. The FBI alleges, in evidence filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, that the Phonemasters had even conspired to break into the FBI's own National Crime Information Center. Unlike less-polished hackers, they often worked in stealth, and avoided bragging about their exploits. Their ultimate goal was not just fun, but profit. Some of the young men, says the FBI, were in the business of selling the credit reports, criminal records, and other data they pilfered from databases. Their customers included private investigators, so-called information brokers and -- by way of middlemen -- the Sicilian Mafia. According to FBI estimates, the gang accounted for about $1.85 million in business losses. "They could have -- temporarily at least -- crippled the national phone network. What scares me the most is that these guys, if they had had a handler, whether criminal or state-sponsored, could have done a lot of damage," says Mr. Morris. "They must have felt like cyber-gods." With the exception of Mr. Cantrell, none of the defendants in the Phonemasters case would comment on the matter. Others are thought to remain at large. This is the story of Mr. Cantrell and two accomplices, largely put together from federal district court records and FBI interviews. Mr. Morris first learned of the group in August 1994, when he got a phone call from a Dallas private investigator, saying Mr. Cantrell had offered to sell him personal data on anyone he wished. He even offered a price list: personal credit reports were $75; state motor-vehicle records, $25; records from the FBI's Crime Information Center, $100. On the menu for $500: the address or phone number of any "celebrity/ important person." Mr. Morris immediately opened an investigation. Only 33 years old at the time, he had taken an annual pay cut to join the FBI just five years earlier. He had been a tax consultant at Price Waterhouse, and despised the work. "I was young and making the big bucks, but every morning I would think 'God, I don't want to go to work.' " Tall, square-jawed and mustachioed, Mr. Morris began working white-collar crimes when he arrived at the Dallas FBI field office. He took on a few hacker cases and realized he liked the challenge. "These guys are not the kind who'll rob the convenience store then stare right into the security camera," he says. "Trying to be the Sherlock Holmes of the Internet is hard when the fingerprints on the window can be so easily erased." Mr. Morris convinced the private investigator to meet with Mr. Cantrell while wearing an audio taping device. After reviewing the tapes, he was certain that he was onto something big. He applied for and received court authority to place a digital number recorder on Mr. Cantrell's phone lines, which would log numbers of all outgoing calls. It showed that Mr. Cantrell frequently dialed corporate telephone numbers for AT&T, GTE, MCI, Southwestern Bell and Sprint. Mr. Cantrell had also placed calls to two unlisted numbers at the White House, which further piqued Mr. Morris's interest. So, late that summer, Mr. Morris took an unprecedented step. He began writing a 40-page letter to the FBI's Washington headquarters, the Department of Justice and the federal district court in Dallas. Recording Mr. Cantrell -- now his central suspect -- while on the phone wasn't sufficient for the job that faced him, he believed. Instead, he needed new federal powers. He asked for Washington's permission to intercept the impulses that traveled along Mr. Cantrell's phone line as he was using his computer and modem. "It's one of the hardest techniques to get approved, partly because it's so intrusive," says Mr. Morris, who spent the next month or so consult- ing with federal authorities. "The public citizen in me appreciates that," he says. Still, the long wait was frustrating. "It took a lot of educating federal attorneys," he says. Once authorities said yes, Mr. Morris faced another obstacle: The equipment he needed didn't exist within the FBI. Federal investigators had experimented with a so-called data-intercept device only once before in a New York hacker case a year earlier. It had failed miserably. Mr. Morris and technicians at the FBI's engineering lab in Quantico, Va., worked together to draft the specifications for the device Mr. Morris wanted. It would need to do the reverse of what a computer's modem does. A modem takes digital data from a computer and translates it to analog signals that can be sent via phone lines. Mr. Morris's device would intercept the analog signals on Mr. Cantrell's phone line and convert those impulses back to digital signals so the FBI's computers could capture and record each of a suspect's keystrokes. While waiting for the FBI to fit him with the proper gear, Mr. Morris contacted several of the telephone companies to alert them that they had been victimized. The reception he got wasn't always warm. "It's kind of sad. Some of the companies, when you told them they'd had an intrusion, would actually argue with you," he said. GTE was an exception. Mr. Morris discovered that Bill Oswald, a GTE corporate investigator, had opened his own Phonemasters probe. Mr. Oswald and Mr. Morris began working together and uncovered another of Mr. Cantrell's schemes: He and some friends had managed to get their hands on some telephone numbers for FBI field offices. They entered the telephone system and forwarded some of those FBI telephones to phone-sex chat lines in Germany, Moldavia and Hong Kong. As a result of the prank, the FBI was billed for about $200,000 in illegal calls. Mr. Morris also learned that on Oct. 11, 1994, Mr. Cantrell hacked GTE's computer telephone "switch" in Monticeto, Calif., created a fake telephone number and forwarded calls for that number to a sex-chat line in Germany. The FBI isn't sure how Mr. Cantrell convinced people to call the number, but court records show that Mr. Cantrell received a payment of $2,200 from someone in Germany in exchange for generating call traffic to the phone-sex service. In early December 1994, Mr. Morris's "analog data intercept device" finally arrived from the FBI's engineering department. It was a $70,000 prototype which Mr. Morris calls "the magic box." On Dec. 20, Mr. Morris and other agents opened up their surveillance in an unheated warehouse with a leaky roof. The location was ideal because it sat between Mr. Cantrell's home and the nearest telephone central office. Mr. Morris and nine other agents took turns overseeing the wiretap and data intercepts. The agents often had to pull a tarp over their workspace to keep rain from damaging the costly equipment. As middle-class families go, the Cantrells seem exemplary. Calvin's father, Roy, was a retired detective who had once been voted "Policeman of the Year" in Grand Prairie, the suburb west of Dallas where they live. His mother, Carol, taught Latin and English at Grand Prairie High School, where Calvin graduated in 1987 with above-average grades. As a student, he was no recluse. He had a small circle of friends who shared his love of martial arts, video games, and spy movies. Mr. Cantrell's longtime friend, Brandon McWhorter, says Calvin was always a fun-loving guy, but there was one thing about which he was very serious. "He would always talk to me about religion," says Mr. McWhorter. "He held very strong religious beliefs." After high school, Mr. Cantrell continued to live at home while taking classes at the University of Texas at Arlington and a local community college. He held a series of odd jobs and hired himself out as a deejay for weddings and corporate parties. Mr. Cantrell balanced, school, work, family and friends even as he began hacking more often. His parents became suspicious, but said nothing. The family had three phones; Calvin stayed on his 15 hours a day. "They'd go in my room and see all the notes and the phone numbers. Even though they couldn't put it together technically, they knew something was up," says Mr. Cantrell. "They were kind of in denial. My parents were pretty soft." Mrs. Cantrell says Calvin had been so well behaved that she never suspected his computer activities were more than fun and games. "I wish I had known what was going on. Unfortunately, my son was smarter than I was." (Calvin's father passed away last year.) At 8:45 on the night of Dec. 21, just four days before Christmas, Mr. Cantrell went online. Using an ill-gotten password, he entered a Sprint Corp. computer, where he raided a database, copying more than 850 calling-card access codes and other files, court records in the case show. The Phonemasters often got passwords and other key inform- ation on companies in a low-tech approach called "Dumpster diving," raiding the trash bins of area phone firms for old technical manuals, phone directories and other company papers. This often allowed Mr. Cantrell to run one of his favorite ruses -- passing himself off as a company insider. "I'd call up and say, 'Hi, I'm Bill Edwards with systems administration.' I'd chat with them for a while, then I'd say 'We're doing some network checkups today. Can you log off of your computer, then tell me every character you're typing as you log back on?' A lot of people fell for that," Mr. Cantrell says. After hacking into the Sprint database that evening, Mr. Cantrell talked to another hacker, Corey Lindsley, over the phone. He'd 'met' Mr. Lindsley, and another hacker, John Bosanac, in 1993 while surfing the murky world of hacker bulletin boards. Mr. Cantrell then sent the copied files to Mr. Lindsley, who was a student at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Mr. Morris's equipment captured everything -- voice and data. It was an FBI first. "We're sitting in this place that looked liked a bomb pit, but the atmosphere was really exciting," says Mr. Morris. "We were ecstatic." As the days passed, the FBI wiretap generated stacks upon stacks of audiotapes and data transcripts. Some was just idle talk among friends, the occasional call to finalize dinner plans, lots of workaday chatter. But the incriminating evidence mounted. "It's great, you know. I really love fraud," joked Mr. Bosanac, a Californian who was musing with Mr. Cantrell about the various technical methods of using other people's cellular telephone accounts to place free calls. "Fraud is a beautiful thing." Family conversations even entered the investigation. On Jan. 7, for instance, Mr. Cantrell called his mother from a friend's house and asked her find an MCI Corp. manual on his shelf. He then asked her to read him a set of directions for accessing MCI's V-NET computer system. Mrs. Cantrell read the material but asked her son whether he was supposed to have the book, citing warnings that stated its contents were restricted to MCI employees. Mr. Cantrell just avoided his mother's question. The FBI data-tap captured every word. Still, the process took its toll on the FBI team, especially coming during the holidays. "It was stressful that the wiretap was going 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I had to write up the legal documents and it's tough making people work through Christmas," Mr. Morris said. On top of that, he had to keep records of his findings, and every ten days he had to reapply to the court to prove that his wiretap was yielding evidence. By late January, the FBI had begun to get a clear profile of Mr. Cantrell and his hacker friends. Mr. Lindsley, it appeared, was the group's acerbic leader, directing much of the hacking activity. Over phone lines, the FBI heard him bragging about how he had given a Pennsylvania police department "the pager treatment" in retaliation for a speeding ticket he received. Mr. Lindsley had caused the police department's telephone number to appear on thousands of pagers across the country. The resulting flood of incoming calls, Mr. Lindsley bragged, would surely crash the department's phone system. They also enjoyed collecting information about film stars, musicians and other famous people. Mr. Cantrell has admitted that he broke into President Clinton's mother's telephone billing records in Arkansas to obtain a list of unpublished White House numbers. The men, says the FBI, even made harassing phone calls to rock star Courtney Love and former child actor Danny Bonaduce using pilfered numbers. They weren't without fear of getting caught. On the evening of Jan. 17, for instance, there was a clicking on the phone line as Messrs. Bosanac, Cantrell, and Lindsley shared a three-way conference call. "What the hell happened?" asked Mr. Bosanac, according to an FBI transcript of the conversation. "That was the FBI tapping in," laughed Mr. Cantrell. "Do you know how ironic that's gonna be when they play those tapes in court?" Mr. Lindsley said. "When they play that tape in court and they got you saying it was the FBI tapping in?" On Jan. 18, the FBI overheard Messrs. Cantrell, Bosanac and Lindsley on another conference call. With the other two men giving directions, Mr. Cantrell dialed his computer into Southwestern Bell's network and copied a database of unlisted phone numbers. The three men then discussed plans to write a computer program that could automatically download access codes and calling-card numbers from various telephone systems. They also talked about the chance that the FBI would one day track them down. "Just remember, nobody f-- rats anybody out," said Mr. Lindsley to the others. "No deals." "Yeah, no deals is right," replied Mr. Bosanac. "No deals. I'm serious. I don't care what your f-- lawyers tell you," said Mr. Lindsley. Mr. Cantrell said nothing. Later that morning, between 5:09 a.m. and 7:36 a.m., Mr. Cantrell entered Sprint's computer system and downloaded about 850 Sprint calling-card codes. He then transferred those codes to a man in Canada. The codes would allow anyone who purchased them to place free international phone calls. Mr. Morris would later learn that a contact in Canada paid Mr. Cantrell $2 apiece for each code, court records show. The Phonemasters most likely did not know -- or care -- where the codes ended up, but the FBI traced them and found some ended up in the hands of a Sicilian Mafia operative in Switzerland. On Jan. 23, while probing a U S West telephone database, Mr. Cantrell, Mr. Bosanac, Mr. Lindsley and others stumbled over a list of telephone lines that were being monitored by law enforcement. On a lark, they decided to call one of the people -- a suspected drug dealer, says Mr. Morris -- and let him know his pager was being traced by the police. On Jan. 27, the group was clearly feeling paranoia about being caught, prompting Mr. Lindsley to tell his accomplices to pull as many Sprint codes as quickly as they could. Mr. Cantrell began to have reservations. "What if I stopped before all of y'all?" Mr. Cantrell asked Mr. Lindsley. "Would you applaud my efforts?" "No," said Mr. Lindsley. "I don't think there's any reason to stop. What are you worried about?" "Uh, I'm not worried about anything. I'm just saying, uhm. There might ... There might come a time here where I don't have time for this." He added a little later: "I, you know, really like it. But, I don't know, I just ... Eventually, I don't see myself doing a lot of illegal things." Mr. Lindsley continued to prod Mr. Cantrell to speed up the download of stolen codes by spending more time online and using two phones. "I'm telling you, you run two lines around the clock," Mr. Lindsley said. "You can't run them around the clock," said Mr. Cantrell. "Why not?" "Oh, come on. I think that's pushing it too hard." "I think you just got a weak stomach there, boy." By late February, things began to get tense. One of Mr. Cantrell's hacker friends informed him that his number had shown up in a database of phone numbers being monitored by the FBI. In all the excitement of burglarizing databases and rerouting phone calls, the Phonemasters had neglected to check their own phone lines for any signs that law enforce- ment might be listening in. Mr. Morris hastily arranged for an FBI raid. On Feb. 22, 1995, agents raided Mr. Cantrell's home, Mr. Lindsley's college dorm room, and burst into Mr. Bosanac's bedroom in San Diego. For Mr. Morris, the climactic raid was only the start of a long battle to bring the hackers to justice. Because of the complicated nature of his evidence gathering, it took him more than two years to compile the most salient portions of the wiretap transcripts and data-tap evidence. "All the documents and tapes from this case could fill a 20-by-20 room," Mr. Morris explains. "And at the time, I was the only computer investigator for all of Texas." In the meantime, as federal prosecutors slowly geared up for a trial, Mr. Cantrell tried to get on with his life. "I spent the first few weeks after the raid being paranoid and wondering what would happen," he says. Occasionally, Mr. Morris and other agents would call him, asking questions about some of the systems he had hacked. By the summer of 1995, at the urging of his mother, Mr. Cantrell started attending church again. He scored the first in a string of professional computing jobs, doing systems-administration work for a company called Lee Datamail in Dallas. He neglected to tell his employers about the FBI case. "It's been mental torture for the last four years, not knowing," says Mr. Cantrell. "Can I go to school, move to another state? That kind of thing messes with your head." Over time, Mr. Cantrell says he had come to seriously regret what he had done and the $9,000 he says he made from selling codes wasn't worth the trouble. "Looking back, it was all crazy. It was an obsession. I wanted to see how much I could conquer and a little power went to my head." Mr. Cantrell notes that he has since tried to make amends, even helping the phone companies plug their security holes and helping the FBI gather more information on some of the group's members who haven't yet been apprehended. The matter finally seemed near conclusion this March when Mr. Morris was able to play "a couple of choice tapes" in separate meetings with Messrs. Cantrell, Bosanac and Lindsley. Afterward, all three agreed to plead guilty to federal charges of one count of theft and possession of unauthorized calling-card numbers and one count of unauthorized access to computer systems. Chief Judge Jerry Buchmeyer ordered a presentencing investigation. During a hearing on the matter, Mr. Lindsley's attorney tried to argue that the FBI had wildly overstated the $1.85 million in losses that her client's hacking had allegedly caused. But in the end, Judge Buchmeyer rejected the argument and sentenced him to 41 months in prison. Mr. Bosanac, in the meantime, has asked that his sentencing hearing be moved to San Diego, where he lives. As for Mr. Cantrell, Judge Buchmeyer lauded his "acceptance of guilt." He could have been sentenced to three years in federal prison; instead he was given two. He reports to federal prison in January of next year. Mr. Morris, meanwhile, has used his data-tap method in several other cases; he also travels around the country and the world advising law-enforcement agencies on how to conduct state-of-the-art investi- gations of hacker crimes. ------------------------------ 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'. 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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 #541 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Nov 11 19:22:03 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iAC0M3E16542; Thu, 11 Nov 2004 19:22:03 -0500 (EST) Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 19:22:03 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411120022.iAC0M3E16542@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 #542 TELECOM Digest Thu, 11 Nov 2004 19:21:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 542 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Advertisers Tune In to New Radio Gauge (Marcus Didius Falco) Book Review: "WarDriving: Drive, Detect, Defend" - Hurley (Rob Slade) Pennsylvania Norvergence Victims Group (Alecia) My Vonage Experience So Far (Tony P.) Re: Internet Without Landline? (Robert Bonomi) Internet Telephony Rings up Business, Regulatory Interest (Lisa Minter) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 23:52:11 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Advertisers Tune In to New Radio Gauge http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60013-2004Oct24.html By Dina ElBoghdady Washington Post Staff Writer The device, the size of a shoe box, is tough to spot unless you make a habit of looking skyward to inspect utility poles while driving. But in 14 locations around the Washington area, the devices are there, sensing which radio stations drivers are listening to by picking up faint electronic signals emitted from car antennas as they drive by. The technology, owned by MobilTrak Inc. of Phoenix, was introduced in this region in May. By year-end, MobilTrak hopes to mount nine more units to monitor the listening habits of more than 1 million drivers and present the results to advertisers eager to better reach the audience in the country's eighth-largest radio market. The monitoring aims to help retailers choose where to advertise by giving them a snapshot of which stations consumers tune into as they drive by their businesses. The most enthusiastic MobilTrak adopters: auto dealers, who generally believe that 80 percent of their business is with people who live or work within 10 miles of a given dealership. "It's all about precision marketing," said C. David Boice, 39, MobilTrak's managing partner. "It's about giving marketers real-time data about what's happening in certain areas at certain times so they don't waste their advertising dollars." The approach is the most recent example of the powerful ways marketers are using technology to track customer behavior in natural settings. The strategy in slightly different form is already well entrenched in supermarkets, which track customers' purchases with loyalty cards. Much to the alarm of privacy advocates, technology is helping marketers identify their ideal customers, such as the frequent buyer of a certain brand of detergent, and fine-tune their selling. In this case, privacy advocates are not too worried because MobilTrak does not collect identifiable data about a car or the person driving it. It cannot see or eavesdrop on the driver. MobilTrak compares its technology to a rubber hose laid across a road to count traffic. Its solar-powered units randomly pick up signals across six lanes of traffic from cars up to 140 feet away in the same way a police officer measures car speeds by pointing a radar detector at traffic and repeatedly resetting it. Still, one privacy expert called the technology "creepy" while another raised concerns about the potential of combining it with other technologies to create more intrusive marketing techniques. "It would be a quick leap to connect that data with other data," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union. "Technology is moving at the speed of light. We've reached a point where there are few technological bars to doing anything." Jim Giddings, general manager of Lustine Toyota Scion Dodge in Woodbridge, sees that as progress. Every month his dealership spends $90,000 on radio advertising. For years, he spent $25,000 on one talk-personality station and another $25,000 on a contemporary music station. Both were recommended by his advertising agency, which consulted ratings from Arbitron Inc.'s research team in Columbia, Md. Arbitron tracks listening habits by asking small, random samples of people in the nation's major broadcast markets to keep daily diaries. It is the arbiter of how much stations can charge for commercials based on the estimated number of listeners and the demographics those stations attract. But when Giddings signed on with MobilTrak two months ago, he found that Arbitron's top two stations didn't even rank in the top 10 for in-car radio listeners driving past his dealership. So he shifted his budget, allotting the most money to a news show and a contemporary music station identified as popular by MobilTrak. "It was a real eye-opener," he said. But is MobilTrak helping him attract more customers? "I don't know yet," he said. "I'll have a better idea 90 days from now maybe." Thom Mocarsky, a spokesman for Arbitron, described MobilTrak as "complementary" to Arbitron's wide variety of services. "MobilTrak tells you what your selection of stations should be but it doesn't tell you how many people you are reaching and what you should pay for it," Mocarsky said. "The station with the biggest audience is not necessarily the best buy for a particular advertiser." A drawback to MobilTrak, Mocarsky said, is that it captures only radio listening in cars, which accounts for 33 percent of all radio listening. Another third of radio listening takes place at work and the rest is done at home. Also, MobilTrak captures only FM stations. But MobilTrak counters that research shows there's no indication that preferences are different at home than in the car. The company also said it plans to introduce technology that picks up AM and satellite station signals next spring. MobilTrak was founded in Alabama in 1998 by Jim Christian, who once owned the software firm TapScan, which interpreted ratings from radio and TV stations. Christian, a former radio deejay, sold TapScan to Arbitron in 1998 and sank $10 million to $15 million of his own money into developing MobilTrak's technology, said Boice, the company's managing partner. The company's early years were devoted to refining the sensors and scaling back their size. (The original was refrigerator-sized and needed electricity.) Along the way, Christian picked up customers. But MobilTrak ramped up its marketing efforts when Boice and his two partners bought it in April 2004, shortly after selling a Virginia software company they owned. The three -- Boice, his father Craig Boice, and Kevin Gallagher -- now own 80 percent of the company while Christian owns the rest, Boice said. Christian was not available for comment. Boice and his partners work in Herndon and 15 people work in Phoenix, where the sensors are built. Three MobilTrak salespeople are based elsewhere in the country. MobilTrak also operates in Seattle, Los Angeles, New Jersey and Charlotte. Within 36 months, Boice hopes to have a presence in 100 markets. One California company, Smart Sign Media, uses MobilTrak's sensors and changes the advertising on digital billboards, depending on which radio station people are listening to as they approach. The price of the MobilTrak service ranges from $500 to $6,000 a month, depending on the client and the number of locations they want to monitor. Home Depot just tested the technology in Phoenix, Boice said. Simon Property Group is about to install it in the parking lot of a California mall, he said. And two of the nation's largest radio station owners -- Clear Channel Communications Inc. and Infinity Broadcasting Corp. -- are trying the service in the Washington area. Radio stations use the data MobilTrak collects to lure advertisers. For example, if MobilTrak shows that Clear Channel stations have a loyal following in the Tysons Corner area, "that's a chance for me to show all the retailers there that we're a good investment," said Bennett Zier, Clear Channel's vice president for the Washington-Baltimore area. Michael Hughes, a senior vice president at Infinity, appreciates that MobilTrak can produce ratings information quickly. For example, the firm provided him with data on listeners of a Washington Redskins game on WJFK (106.7) the day after it was broadcast. Hughes said he knows the data are limited because the information comes from only a few locations around the region. "But media these days is about immediacy," he said. "And to have immediate measurement is very attractive." Copyright 2004 The Washington Post Company *** FAIR USE NOTICE. 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For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Rob Slade Organization: Vancouver Institute for Research into User Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 10:49:14 -0800 Subject: Book Review: "WarDriving: Drive, Detect, Defend", Hurley/Thornton Reply-To: rslade@sprint.ca (Hi, I'm back. What a trip! Did ya miss me? :-) BKWARDRV.RVW 20040823 "WarDriving: Drive, Detect, Defend", Chris Hurley/Frank Thornton/Michael Puchol, 2004, 1-931836-03-5, U$49.95/C$69.95 %A Chris Hurley %A Frank Thornton %A Michael Puchol %C 800 Hingham Street, Rockland, MA 02370 %D 2004 %G 1-931836-03-5 %I Syngress Media, Inc. %O U$49.95/C$69.95 781-681-5151 fax: 781-681-3585 www.syngress.com %O http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931836035/robsladesinterne http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931836035/robsladesinte-21 %O http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/1931836035/robsladesin03-20 %P 495 p. %T "WarDriving: Drive, Detect, Defend" Chapter one is an introduction to the concept, with a discussion of required components, and the relevant characteristics thereof. Installing NetStumbler is described in chapter two, with operating instructions in three (which also repeats some of the earlier advice on component choice). Kismet installation is detailed for Slackware in chapter four, Fedora in five, and the operations are listed in six. Screenshots of using StumbVerter (and Microsoft MapPoint) or DiGLE to produce maps with the data previously obtained are shown in chapter seven. Chapter eight describes, in detail, how to organize your own wardriving contest (including an eight page Perl script for scoring results). Simple means of attacking and connecting to wireless networks are given in chapter nine. Screenshots of dialogue boxes for enabling basic security features on the major wireless routers are listed in chapter ten. Some features providing more advanced security are discussed in chapter eleven. The material provided in the book is clear, and will provide you with enough information to start wardriving and connecting to other networks. The content is fairly rudimentary, though, without the background information of a work like "Wireless Hacks" (cf. BKWLSHCK.RVW), by Rob Flickenger, which would allow the reader to go further in both understanding the technology and defending wireless networks. copyright Robert M. Slade, 2004 BKWARDRV.RVW 20040823 ====================== (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer) rslade@vcn.bc.ca slade@victoria.tc.ca rslade@sun.soci.niu.edu Those damn digital computers! - Vannevar E. Bush http://victoria.tc.ca/techrev or http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~rslade ------------------------------ From: Alecia Subject: Pennsylvania Victims Group Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 14:38:59 -0500 A group is being formed consisting of Pennsylvania Norvergence victims. This also includes companies outside of PA who have PA Leasing Companies. With this group, we could attack our problem with a united front and exchange information. We are considering using this information for the following: Group meeting ? (possibly one in the East and one in the West ? Or maybe one in Central PA ? - please give your feedback). One member has offered his company's teleconferencing services to assist with this. United mailings to government agencies, elected officials, etc. Getting media coverage to put pressure on the PA AG and also to find other victims. Exchanging information and helping each other develop strategies. Please respond to this email OFF BOARD and let me know if you are interested in joining such a group. You must let me know if it is OK to use your name and information to share with others in the group. Also let me know if you are willing to be listed along with us if we contact the media, government agencies, etc. Of course, if at any time you wish to be removed from the group, just let us know. If you are interested, please give me full information -- name, company name, address, telephone number, fax number, email address, leasing company and their state, and anything else you feel is important. You might want to include whether you have been sued, what equipment you received, what your lease amount is, whether you are paying, etc. If you think there is more information we should gather, please let me know. I will be glad to share with you all of my information once I hear from you off-board. Please feel free to contact me by phone as well. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you, Alecia M. Quinn VP, Administration Keystone Foam Corporation PO Box 355 Loyalhanna, PA 15661 (724) 694-8833 (724) 694-8519 fax amquinn3030@comcast.net [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Alecia, before you attempt to re-invent the wheel on this, you may want to check into federal actions in recent days on Norvergence. The Federal Trade Commission has already, not long ago, declared that Norvergence was a total fraud (and a very good one, I might add), and they have declared that the leasing things that companies like yours signed were equally fraudulent documents. Some have suggested that the leasing companies were at best, very casual and careless in agreeing to accept the lease assignments, as 'holders in due course' and at worst, complicit in the fraud. Use our web site http://telecom-digest.org to search for Norvergence in our archives for all you would ever want to know about that bunch of charlatans. As I understand it, essentially no one these days is paying on that lease arrangement, no matter how it was phrased, nor no matter how aggresive the banks and finance companies have gotten, and the more agressive of the 'debtors' (who were defrauded as you apparently have been) have begun looking into ways to force the return of the money they already paid under duress from collectors, etc. Read the last two months or so of this digest at our web site for more details before you try to organize people in Pennsylvania at some expense to yourself, etc. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: My Vonage Experience So Far Organization: ATCC Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 23:18:28 -0500 Got it hooked up yesterday. Sound quality is pretty good for packet. That being said I have one major complaint that has blossomed into two now. The first is that my Trimline, 2702B and Celebrity phones won't work the way they're supposed to. By that I mean they don't ring except for one little ding of the bell. Hooking up my AT&T 1523 to the line gets full electronic ring. Now I read the specs for the Linksys router -- it says it supports 5 REN. A bell is 1 REN by default and it can't drive it? Something is up there. The spawned complaint is hold times for support. Excessive. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I agree sometimes the hold time when calling Vonage is worse that it should be. I can also tell you that as I have heard from others, Vonage is no longer using the Linksys router for their adapter; too many other complaints including yours. I have a Motorola adapter, which seems to do okay and one day in a conversation with a Vonage rep we were talking about the (new for them) Linksys router. I started with Vonage using the Cisco phone adapter, switched over the Motorola since I have other Motorola products here (Surfboard cable 'modem'), and asked the guy if I should try the newest adapter they have, the Linksys. "Nah," he said, "You don't want to mess with it. We've already had various complaints on it, and I think they are going to stop shipping it as well." My suggestion is try your various (cluster of) phones one at a time giving you one REN on the line at a time talking to the Linksys. See if your two offending phones can at least work along with the Linksys by themselves, i.e. adapter to one phone. If they can get that far, then when they are on your internal network and act up again, you may want to think about a possible problem with your own network. Let us know how it works for you. PAT] ------------------------------ Organization: Robert Bonomi Consulting Subject: Re: Internet Without Landline? From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 03:49:43 +0000 In article , Robert Bonomi wrote: > In article , Markus Dehmann > wrote: >> Is it possible to get high-speed internet access without a >> phone/landline at home (in Maryland/U.S.)? >> I only have a cell phone, but internet at home would be good, too. I >> don't need a landline, though because the cell phone is enough. >> Thanks! >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Yes, it is not only possible, but >> for many folks more desirable. You get your high speed internet from >> the cable company there in Maryland and otherwise use your cell phone >> for voice calls. That's essentially what many folks do, or they have >> a very inexpensive landline phone from a CLEC as a backup only. PAT] > If you order _SDSL_ service, it always comes on a separate pair. > *ordering* can be an 'interesting time' (in the sense of Chinese > _curse_ :), but it can be done. > Depending on locale -- and I have _NOT_ researched the specific case > of Maryland -- ADSL on it's own pair *may* also be available; where > available it is typically $5-10/mo more than 'shared' ADSL > (piggy-backed on a POTS line). 'dry pair' ADSL is becoming more > common than it was a year or two ago. > Visiting the 'dslreports.com' website, and using a next-door > neighbor's phone number, _will_ get you a list of providers and > service options that are available at your location. > When actually ordering, the order usually has to go up the food-chain > *several* layers, between the DSL provider and the ILEC. The > situation I ran into, the DSL provider's computer system would -not- > accept the order _without_ some sort of a 'phone number' for location, > while the _phone_company_ (ILEC) computer would not accept the order > *with* a phone number (it -knew- there was no phone service at that > location). *PEOPLE* had to actually get involved from the DSL > provider, in placing _their_ order with the phone company. > When the install was actually done, the DSL 'field technician' was > _really_ puzzled, cuz his paperwork showed a 'site phone number' of > "000-0000". > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What you say is all well and good, but > why should someone have to go to all that trouble of arguing and > pleading with telco to get them to sell you service when you could > just go to your cable company and have them turn it on the same day? > And regardless of what you say about SDSL service, Southwestern Bell > Telephone (now known as SBC) **will not** sell it to you without > taking 'regular' phone service as well. I think it is against their > religion or something. They do it only in California where a court > ordered them to do so. Forget it elsewhere from SBC. People who want > high speed internet up and running in a hurry just go to their cable > company. PAT] Why? Any of a large _number_ of reasons. To name a few: 1) It *isn't* always 'turn it on the same day' with the cable companies. Not even the same *month*. or *YEAR*. Last spring a client of mine moved into different office space in the Chicago Loop (Jackson and Wells). Called the Cable TV company to get *TV* hooked up; they looked up the address, and said "Oops! that building is _NOT_WIRED_ The lead time for getting you service is *two*years*". They got satellite TV instead. 2) In some places the cable company is _not_ an Internet access alternative. Because they *do*not* offer Internet access. 3) Some people need a more _trustworthy_ connection than the Cable companies provide. 'Reliability' is *not* a selling point for cable Internet services. In Chicago, service outages are _frequent_ (like average 3-5 times a week), although of short (30 minutes or less) duration. For 'hobby' use this is fine, but it doesn't cut it when you're trying to use the connection for 'real work'. 4) Some people need higher _uplink_ throughput, and/or more 'predictable' download speeds, even when a lot of their neighbors are "on-line". 5) Trying to _keep_ Internet access running from the cable company, when you *don't* subscribe to the cable _TV_ service, gets even *more* interesting than trying to order DSL w/o a POTS phone line. A friend in Philly got *sued* by the cable company -- for 'stealing' TV service, would you believe? -- because the TV techs found this 'tap' running into his house. They disconnected it, he called in trouble to the ISP operation, when his connection went down; they re-connected, Next time by, the TV tech discovered the 'illegal' tap had been re-installed, and guess what? . "lather, rinse, repeat" applies. The TV side eventually _did_ file a lawsuit, *and* a criminal complaint. It took more than 6 months, and several *thousand* dollars in lawyer fees to get *that* mess straightened out. And, no, the cable company did -not- offer to make good on the out-of-pocket expenses incurred due to *their* failure to communicate between their departments. BTW, SBC, in Illinois, _will_ sell SDSL to someone who does not have 'regular' phone service from SBC. It is true that they do not offer dry-pair ADSL, but only 'shared' service. Furthermore, SBC is _not_ the only alternative for the actual DSL circuit, in *this* area. I have a choice of _THREE_ physical-layer DSL providers, with more than 80 ISPs reselling connectivity through one (or more) of those physical-layer providers. I can get 'dry pair' ADSL from at least one of the non-SBC providers. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: By chance, were you thinking about the Judy Sammel incident in your example above? That poor lady really had a hellish adventure with Comcast. I am going to add her experience as a 'feature story' on our web site http://telecom-digest.org sometime soon. You can read it now, it is in the archives in the 'security- fraud' directory, but it is all in html which makes it hard for anyone to read in straight ASCII text. I dunno why that file never got a straight text version made up to go along with the web site version. Nor have I ever figured out why Judy Sammel did not sue the pants off of Comcast for the hell and humiliation she had to endure. But that's her business, I guess. I guess I also forgot that not everyone lives in Independence, KS where the workers at the local cable company, Cable One, are local residents, where everywhere has long since been wired up and where they are unlikely to make the sort of goof-up that Judy Sammel endured, and where, indeed, when you go in the office downtown and say "I would like to try X" the lady probably already knows your address, sits at the computer, types in a few things and says, "okay, it is turned on now, it should be working when you get back home." and if you do have some problems then her husband, or their kid or the other guy drives over and looks at it a few minutes after you called. I guess I forgot that Chicago has a lot of problems, poor customer service in cable being just a minor one. It reminds me of the day I went to our local Social Security office on Penn Street just north of the downtown area. When I told the ladies there that I had formerly lived in Chicago (which is where I was at when I was approved for Social Security Disability due to the brain aneurysm), their eyes got big, wide like saucers. The office manager said to me, "Well, I have never been in Chicago in my life, but we have had to call the warehouse/service center there, and it takes a long time to get anything done, to even get their attention, and I work for the same bunch as they do." Then a lady said, "Is it true when you have to go into the Social Security office, in Chicago you have to wait an hour before your number is called for you to get 'waited on' then you go stand in a little cubicle while they sass at you? I've never been to Chicago either." I said that was true, she made a clucking noise and pursed her lips. Yeah, I guess I forgot all that when I suggested 'go for cable, get it turned on same day'. Ditto with Prairie Stream telco. Having *local, community residents* to deal with is a much better deal than having to diddle around on the phone or fax for many days/weeks to get a job done. Maybe that is my one major gripe with SBC, or Southwestern Bell. For years, they had a single service rep and cashier over at the combination CO/business office at 6th and Maple. When you went in to see them, the lady would write up the paperwork, take your money or whatever, then as needed call upstairs to the guy in the switch and tell him what you wanted done, and it happened, same day. They also lived right here in the community, just like the Cable One people, the ladies who run our Social Security office, the guys at Prairie Stream and others. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 10:42:55 -0500 Subject: Internet Telephony Rings up Business, Regulatory Interest http://www.mlive.com/businessdirect/stories/index.ssf?/businessdirect/central/stories/20041111telophany.html By Mark Fellows A new Internet-based network linking Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing to campuses in Grand Rapids and Oakland County will allow high-speed connections not just for instruction and administration, but to cut phone bills as well. Cooley last month hooked up with Grand Rapids-based fiber-optic service provider U.S. Signal to upgrade its voice and data system into a virtual private network with speeds up to 45 MB per second. That's a 15-fold speed boost using an Internet protocol, or IP, system. [.....] Yet how -- and whether -- to regulate VoIP is in dispute. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell advocates a hands-off approach and vows to head off state efforts to regulate it. Although the Michigan Public Service Commission is one of many around the country looking into the technology, by November it had not followed up a March call for testimony with any report or action. "We are in limbo land and I fully expect that we're going to stay there for quite a while," telecommunications specialist Rick Coy of the Lansing office of the Clark Hill law firm said. "Not only are the feds saying to states 'Don't do anything,' but there are some serious questions whether states have the authority to do much." Convergence of data, video and voice information technologies into digital packets, Coy said, undermines such efforts. Although telecommunications giants are consolidating such technologies to remain major competitors, he said, "regulation itself is a declining industry." Full story at: http://www.mlive.com/businessdirect/stories/index.ssf?/businessdirect/central/stories/20041111telophany.html ------------------------------ 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #542 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Nov 12 14:44:23 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iACJiNl26257; Fri, 12 Nov 2004 14:44:23 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 14:44:23 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411121944.iACJiNl26257@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 #543 TELECOM Digest Fri, 12 Nov 2004 14:43:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 543 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Samsung to Sell U.S. High-Speed Phone in Early 2005 (Lisa Minter) Microsoft Search Encounters Glitches on First Day (Lisa Minter) Criminals 'Joining Finance Firms' (Lisa Minter) Nokia is Trying to Become Leader in Future Next Generation (SecQrilious) Access Charges For Local 8xx (Patrick Townson via TollFree List) Cable Internet, was Internet Without Landline? (Danny Burstein) Home Phone Link in India (Jackie) Re: Long Distance Service in California (Jackie) Re: My Vonage Experience So Far (Tony P.) Re: Pennsylvania Victims Group (Michael D. Sullivan) Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (Steve Crow) Re: Multi-link SR3 and Caller ID? (David I) Re: "We're From the Government"; NSA Recs on Securing Mac (Justin Time) Enhanced Easy411 Announced (Andrew Pasetti) Telecom DailyLead From USTA (Lisa Minter) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter Subject: Samsung to Sell U.S. High-Speed Phone in Early 2005 Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 10:31:38 -0500 (EST) NEW YORK (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (005930.KS) plans to introduce a mobile telephone with high-speed Internet links in the United States in the first quarter of next year, an executive said on Thursday. Peter Skarzynski, a Samsung vice president for mobile phones, said the phone would be based on EV-DO, a high-speed technology that Verizon Wireless are building into their networks. Verizon Wireless, the No. 2 U.S. mobile provider, has said it would begin to market high-speed services to consumers when its first EV-DO phones go on sale next year but it has not yet revealed a launch date or named its device suppliers. Verizon now uses EV-DO technology in a number of U.S. markets to deliver the Internet to business customers via laptop computers at speeds similar to home broadband links. Samsung's Skarzynski was speaking at a event where Samsung displayed several phones it plans to deliver to U.S. consumers in the coming months. He declined to give specific details about Samsung's first high-speed U.S. phone and did not say which service provider would sell the product. Samsung showed two EV-DO phones with computer features that it expects to launch in the United States around the middle of 2005. Its i730 EV-DO phone has a large screen and a keyboard that users can slide out from inside the phone when they want to type messages or e-mails. The i640 EV-DO phone has a keyboard that can be attached to the phone when the user wants to type. Samsung also unveiled its p735 phone, which has a high resolution camera and music player and will go on sale by year end at the fourth-biggest U.S. provider T-Mobile USA -- owned by Germany's Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE). It expects to sell its RL-A760 phone to Sprint (FON.N) also by year end. This phone has walkie-talkie style capability and voice recognition technology that will let users dial phone numbers by saying the name of the person they want to call. Samsung plans to sell another phone in the first quarter aimed at people who use their phones to play video games. The n330 has a screen that can be made bigger for game playing and can be set to vibrate at key points during a game. It did not reveal prices. Samsung is the world's third largest mobile phone maker but is only about 500,000 phone sales away from taking the No. 2 position from Motorola Inc. according to analysts. It is expected to provide about 20 percent of the roughly 100 million mobile handsets to be sold in the United States this year. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Microsoft Search Encounters Glitches on First Day Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 10:34:48 EST SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp.'s widely anticipated search engine, which launched in test mode on Thursday, encountered some glitches on its first day, the world's largest software maker said. The new search engine, Microsoft's first assault on Google Inc.'s leading position in the market, returned "temporarily unavailable" messages to some users looking for answers to queries at its Web site at beta.search.msn.com. "In the process of making our new MSN Search Beta globally available, we experienced technical difficulties that rendered it unavailable for some consumers for periods of time," Microsoft said in an e-mailed statement. Microsoft said it had expected such problems with MSN Search during its beta, or test mode, while soliciting feedback from users. "We expected to find some problems in the beta, and we anticipate there will be additional times when we limit service availability for maintenance purposes," the company said. Microsoft had been working on its search engine for the last 18 months after deciding to challenge Google's leading position the market. Microsoft's said its new search engine would deliver results from a database index of more than 5 billion indexed Web documents and pages. Google said on Wednesday that it had nearly doubled its index database to 8 billion pages. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Criminals 'Joining Finance Firms' Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 06:47:15 +0000 Members of organised crime are joining financial firms to commit fraud, a new report by the industry watchdog reveals. < http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/business/4005355.stm > ** BBC Daily E-mail ** ------------------------------ From: waeg@latinmail.com (SecQrilious) Subject: Nokia is Trying to Become Leader in Future Next Generation Date: 12 Nov 2004 00:45:05 -0800 Nokia is trying to become a leader in the future next generation wireless communication and computing enterprise market. This new market replaces the current corporate IT infrastructure. Nokia is going to be in the direct competition with Microsoft, Dell,HP and other current corporation. Nokia tries to become the next Microsoft. by Markku J. Saarelainen The Spiked Octapoint Society ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 10:54:42 -0600 From: jobinvestments To: tollfree-l@yahoogroups.com=20 Subject: [tollfree-l] Access charges for local 8xx Can anyone tell me if 8xx calls the originate AND terminate in the same rate center (originates from local phone and routed to local DID) are subject to access charges from the LEC? If so, where do I go to get the rates? Thanks! TOLLFREE-L is a moderated internet mailing list for the discussion of management, marketing, policy, engineering, logistical and regulatory matters related to the business use of toll free service and toll free numbers. Also ENUM and domain name issues. TOLLFREE-L is edited, published and compilation-copyrighted by Judith Oppenheimer, publisher and president of ICB Consultancy. ------------------------------ From: Danny Burstein Subject: Cable Internet, was: Internet Without Landline? Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 00:37:22 UTC Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC In bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) writes: [ lots snipped ] > 4) Some people need higher _uplink_ throughput, and/or more > 'predictable' download speeds, even when a lot of their neighbors > are "on-line". In many (certainly, most certainly, not all) areas, you can, indeed, purchase higher levels of speed and/or quality of service/reliability levels from the local cableco. At a higher price, of course. The big complaints come from people/businesses who sign up for a standard (residential) service level and are shocked, shocked, they don't get everything they wished for. Personally I'm not at all comfortable with many of these distinctions, but the entire high speed (dsl/cable) internet concept is only a few years old. There's going to be a lot more shakeup, both pricing and speedwise, (and in technology) in the near future. _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] ------------------------------ From: Jackie Subject: Home Phone Link in India Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 02:54:28 GMT Hi, Try Talk Is Cheap Inc. at www.talkischeapinc.net. You can get unlimited free Internet phone calls worldwide if you and the other person you're talking to are subscribers of the service. If only one of you is a subscriber then you would pay the low international rates. I live in the USA and my relatives live in Europe and I talk to them for free. I have the service for a few months now and I am very happy with it. Jackie > "NewPhoneUser" wrote in message > news:telecom23.530.5@telecom-digest.org: > Hi, > Can anyone post the various options I have if I want to take a phone > connection in Delhi, India. I know there are a lot of players now in > the market. Can anyone reply on the options available for Fixed Line, > WLL and Wireless. > As a home user, I would be interested in having a clear voice > communication link and an internet connection for casual web browsing. > Of course, it would be great if I get an idea on the cost of each > option. > Thanks. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Do you still have to wait for months > and years to get new landline phone service in India? It used to take > just *forever* to get new service established in some of those > countries. How is it now? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Jackie Subject: Re: Long Distance Service in California Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 06:51:05 GMT Try VoIP provider www.talkischeapinc.net. They have a calling plan for $0.99 (99 cents) a month for service charge, and a flat 2.8 cents a minute for calls anywhere in continental USA & Canada. Jackie > "becky" wrote in message > news:telecom23.536.2@telecom-digest.org: > I just disconnected from SBC long distance. What other long distance > service is available? > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So much is available, we could not > begin to list it all. Have you considered VOIP service which is > about as inexpensive as you can get these days, depending on your > volume of usage, etc. There are *much better* deals out there than > SBC for sure. Maybe someone will write you with some suggestions. > PAT] ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: My Vonage Experience So Far Organization: ATCC Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 22:27:12 -0500 In article , TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to kd1s@nospamplease.cox.reallynospam.net: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I agree sometimes the hold time when > calling Vonage is worse that it should be. I can also tell you that > as I have heard from others, Vonage is no longer using the Linksys > router for their adapter; too many other complaints including yours. > I have a Motorola adapter, which seems to do okay and one day in a > conversation with a Vonage rep we were talking about the (new for > them) Linksys router. I started with Vonage using the Cisco phone > adapter, switched over the Motorola since I have other Motorola > products here (Surfboard cable 'modem'), and asked the guy if I > should try the newest adapter they have, the Linksys. "Nah," he > said, "You don't want to mess with it. We've already had various > complaints on it, and I think they are going to stop shipping it > as well." > My suggestion is try your various (cluster of) phones one at a time > giving you one REN on the line at a time talking to the Linksys. > See if your two offending phones can at least work along with the > Linksys by themselves, i.e. adapter to one phone. If they can get > that far, then when they are on your internal network and act up > again, you may want to think about a possible problem with your > own network. Let us know how it works for you. PAT] Pat, I did try them one at time with nothing else connected to the linksys router. I put the unit on my scope -- it definitely isn't pushing enough current to drive a bell. I'm going to order Mike Sandman's internal electronic ringers and just retrofit my vintage gear with that. I'm also working on a pulse to dtmf converter -- I'll let everyone know when I finish it as then you can use your rotary dial gear with VoIP. What spawned that is I've got a nice 302 and a 1950's Imperial (The gold plated 202 with F type handset and network/bell box.) They work so well a decorative elements in this place. People are actually shocked to learn they're still functional. When WE built these things they were meant to last forever. The 302 is 54 years old and still going strong. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, you really should not have to buy additional equipment from Mike Sandman (although I am sure he will be glad to sell it to you) in order to get what you paid for from Vonage to work correctly. If you can document what you said your scope shows about the Linksys router (maybe with a print out, etc) then I would say ask Vonage to replace it for you. I have heard of 202/302 type phones (which always used the 'side-ringer' wall box to ring the phone) which drew heavy current to operate, but this does sound ridiculous. Let us know how your project works out. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Michael D. Sullivan Subject: Re: Pennsylvania Victims Group Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 04:23:15 GMT > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Alecia, before you attempt to re-invent > the wheel on this, you may want to check into federal actions in > recent days on Norvergence. The Federal Trade Commission has already, > not long ago, declared that Norvergence was a total fraud (and a very > good one, I might add), and they have declared that the leasing things > that companies like yours signed were equally fraudulent documents. > Some have suggested that the leasing companies were at best, very > casual and careless in agreeing to accept the lease assignments, as > 'holders in due course' and at worst, complicit in the fraud. Use our > web site http://telecom-digest.org to search for Norvergence in our > archives for all you would ever want to know about that bunch of > charlatans. As I understand it, essentially no one these days is > paying on that lease arrangement, no matter how it was phrased, nor > no matter how aggresive the banks and finance companies have gotten, > and the more agressive of the 'debtors' (who were defrauded as you > apparently have been) have begun looking into ways to force the > return of the money they already paid under duress from collectors, > etc. Read the last two months or so of this digest at our web site > for more details before you try to organize people in Pennsylvania > at some expense to yourself, etc. PAT] Pat, the FTC hasn't "declared" anything. It has voted to file, and has filed, a civil complaint. This, by itself, has no legal effect; it is just the filing of a lawsuit. Any action against Norvergence or the finance companies will have to come from the judge considering the lawsuit. Michael D. Sullivan Bethesda, MD, USA Delete nospam from my address and it won't work. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Mr. Sullivan, I thought the rulings of a federal agency had the effect of law. Or perhaps, fact that the FTC has filed this lawsuit will influence the judge already hearing the matters at hand. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Steve Crow Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 08:23:49 GMT >>> Louisiana and Minnesota both "straddle" the Mississippi River. >> In my experience (mostly in cable TV), the Mississippi-River rule can be >> more accurately stated as follows: >> "K" = west of the Mississippi River plus the entire state of >> Minnesota. >> "W" = east of the Mississippi River plus Louisiana parishes >> located in the Baton Rouge and New Orleans DMAs. >> But even with this version of the rule there are numerous exceptions, >> especially in the case of low-power television stations (LPTV, Class >> A, translators, and boosters). Do the same rules apply to radio stations as well? I would imagine so, but what about KYW in Pennsylvania? According to: http://www.kyw1060.com/stationinfo/station_history.cfm ... the station has moved several times (Chicago, Cleveland), but appears to have maintained the same call sign even in moves across state lines. Is this common? ------------------------------ From: dai_321@hotmail.com (David I) Subject: Re: Multi-link SR3 and Caller ID? Date: 12 Nov 2004 09:50:49 -0800 My understanding on how these routers work is that it monitors the first incoming ring burst, and then based on the ring pattern, forwards the ringing call to one of the output ports. Since Caller ID information is transferred between the first and second ring, that data may not be getting to your phones that are downstream. I see that some of the Multi-Link products (e.g. The Stick) have a pass-through mode where all lines receive the incoming call for two rings so that the CID is received, and then the unit kicks in and restricts the call to one of the ports. For their SR2/3 products, it says to contact technical service for a by-pass option (http://www.multi-link.net/html/tech_support.htm) I would be curious what the workaround is if you find out. -david i rcoutts@comcast.net (Richard Coutts) wrote in message news:: > I've been using a Command Communications ASAP DR401 for routing three > distinctive ring lines -- one for my home number, one for my business > number, and one for my fax. It has worked great, but it filters out > the Caller ID (I can put a Caller ID device in series before the > DR401, but I really need at after the DR401, at each phone). So, I'm > now looking for a device that doesn't filter out the Caller ID. > I'm looking at Multi-Link's SR3, but I can't find any information > online about how it handles Caller ID -- does it also filter out the > Caller ID info? Also, what is Multi-Link's web page? I haven't been > able to find it. > Thanks, > Rich ------------------------------ From: a_user2000@yahoo.com (Justin Time) Subject: Re: "We're From the Government..."; NSA Recs on Securing Mac OS Date: 12 Nov 2004 05:53:26 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Kenneth P. Stox wrote in message news:: > Justin Time wrote: >> Nope. Windows is the longest running Beta test in history. Been >> going on for over 10 years now and they are still trying to stabilize >> version 1.0 > 10 years? Try close to 20 now. If memory serves correct, Microsoft > announced Windows in late 1984. Yea, I got to thinking about that and remember it was around '85 or '86 when we had what was called "Windows" installed on a PC in our compatibility lab. It really wasn't much more than Borland's Sidekick repackaged if I remember correctly. ------------------------------ From: Patrick Townson Subject: Enhanced Easy411 Invitation Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 10:59:50 -0600 If you are still using your telco's Directory Assistance Bureau at $1.25 or more per call, you may wish to investigate the less expensive *real time* DA service offered by http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest where DA calls are just 65 cents. Andrew Pasetti of their staff sent me some email today with details on improvments they are working on now: ----- Original Message ----- From: Andrew Pasetti To: ptownson@massis.csail.mit.edu Sent: Friday, November 12, 2004 9:16 AM Subject: Enhanced Easy411 Invitation Enhanced Easy411 We at Easy411 want to take a moment to thank you for using our service and for your tolerance in our inability to automatically connect you to the listing you requested. Like the Red Sox finally winning the World Series, call completion has finally arrived. We will now begin offering call completion and other advanced options such as: Enhanced Call Completion Easy411 will allow the user to setup their account for call completion automatically on every call, automatically on no calls, or via a prompt on a call-by-call basis. Last Number Redial Just press *69 while the greeting ("Thank you for using Easy411") is played and Easy411 will either repeat via voice prompt or reconnect you to the last listing requested, for a cost of only 15 cents (plus 3.9 cents per minute). SMS Text Messaging Easy411 will send an SMS text message of the listing requested to your cell phone. Email Messaging Easy411 will send an email of the listing requested to your email address or PDA. Call Warning Easy411 will play a warning message and allow the call to go through when the number of calls per month you have set is reached. Call Limit Easy411 will play a message notifying the caller that they have reached their monthly limit of calls that you have set. The caller will then no longer have access to Easy411's operators. Company/Personal Billing Easy411 will allow users to flag their directory assistance calls as business-related or personal. These calls will then be categorized separately on your monthly statement. To be certain that this technological advance is robust and reliable we would like to offer to you the opportunity to act as a Tester for a week or so to work out any bugs that may be hiding beneath the surface. During this testing period, your calls will be completed at no charge. (Call completion will be offered at 3.9 cents per minute after this testing period.) We've set up a temporary number (866.528.9720) during this trial period. Only calls to this number will have access to the new enhancements before being publicly released. To participate in this test period, simply login to your account and enable the features that you find useful. Then call 866.528.9720 to try out the new features. Of course, your feedback is very important to us. So please send us feedback about these new enhancements. Thank you for using Easy411. The Easy411 Customer Support Team http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So you may be asking how to become an Easy411 subscriber. You login to the above URL to set up an account. At http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest you will supply up to five telephone numbers you normally use for making calls to DA. You also will supply them with a credit card you wish to pay for your inquiries at 65 cents each. Your telephone number supplies them with the ANI needed for billing; your credit card is charged at intervals when the balance becomes feasable to charge you. This is *realtime, live* DA, not the stuff you find on the net which may or may not be up to date. Then, you set a speed dial button on your phone to punch out the 800 number to be called for inquiries. *DO NOT* just dial 411; that defaults to whomever your telco uses as a provider, at telco's price on your next phone bill. It is not that well known, but just like your one-plus dialing on long distance calls where the call defaults to whichever carrier you have chosen, your calls via 411 could be the same way, with '411' aliased to your carrier of choice, but good luck getting telco to go along with your wishes. If someone -- Mike Sandman for example at http://sandman.com -- were to built a '411 interceptor' to sit on your line and re-route your 411 calls, I think that person would have a winning product. But for the meantime, you have to dial the 800 number you are given to use the service. It is much less expensive than any other directory assistance bureau, and no charge to sign up. I am pleased to be the paid spokesperson for Easy411, and I hope you will enjoy using it. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 13:19:08 EST From: Telecom dailyLead From USTA Subject: SBC Plans $4 Billion Upgrade to Sell TV, Voice and Internet Service Telecom dailyLead from USTA http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=17472&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * SBC plans $4 billion upgrade to sell TV, voice and Internet service BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Nortel again delays financial statements * Investment firms consider joint offer for Adelphia * SBC uses blogs to enhance image among Net savvy * AOL to end broadband service in South USTA SPOTLIGHT * Radio Frequency Identification -- Get Your Copy Today! EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Europe's mobile phone companies eye portable music market REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * Iowans get behind municipal FTTH initiative * Qwest to pay $7.8 million fine for Washington state deals * China launches telecom probe Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=17472&l=2017006 http://www.dailylead.com/usta/usta_passiton.jsp ------------------------------ 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #543 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sat Nov 13 17:59:21 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iADMxLv09137; Sat, 13 Nov 2004 17:59:21 -0500 (EST) Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2004 17:59:21 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411132259.iADMxLv09137@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 #544 TELECOM Digest Sat, 13 Nov 2004 17:59:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 544 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Dutch Charge Teenage Govt Web Site Hacker Suspects (Lisa Minter) Chechen Rebel Web Site Reopened (Lisa Minter) Transforming Existing Wireless Intelligence Systems (SecQrilious) Access of Calling Card Dial in Number From Prepaid Cellular (M Tomczyk) Vonage Phone Adapter (Mike Sutter) Update: Vonage Ring Problem (Tony P.) Re: Criminals 'Joining Finance Firms' (jdj) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter Subject: Dutch Charge Teenage Govt Web Site Hacker Suspects Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2004 16:17:20 EST AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Dutch authorities have charged two teenagers with cyber crimes on suspicion of bringing down government Web sites last month by flooding them with traffic, public prosecutor said on Friday. The boys from the southern Dutch town of Breda were arrested earlier this week after a raid on their houses in which computers were confiscated. There could be more arrests, the public prosecution service said. The two are believed to have hacked into other computers to launch a mass visit to government Web sites, which collapsed under the strain. The attacks on the Web Sites coincided with protests against government plans to overhaul the social security system that drew 250,000 people to a weekend demonstration in Amsterdam. Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende and other ministers had to change mobile telephone numbers after a list circulated on the Internet invited protesters to send a barrage of text messages. Cyber criminals in the Netherlands risk up to a year in jail under a new law forbidding the distribution of spam messages which overload networks and cause computers to crash. Copyright 2004 Reuters Limited. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Chechen Rebel Web Site Reopened Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2004 16:25:05 EST HELSINKI (Reuters) - A Web site used by a Chechen warlord to claim responsibility for September's school siege in Russia has reopened, one month after it was closed by the Finnish company that hosted it. Finnish news agency STT reported Saturday that the site, www.kavkavcenter.com, was now hosted on a Swedish server with a backup in Finland. It was last open for a few days in mid-October. STT quoted the Finnish businessman who rented out the server at the time as saying it was now clear that the Web Site was not illegal and that he had therefore decided to help reopen it. It was not immediately clear who had closed the site in Finland. Before opening in Finland it was based on a Lithuanian server until authorities in the Baltic country shut it down in September after pressure from Moscow. The site was used by rebel warlord Shamil Basayev to claim responsibility for the September school siege in Beslan when 330 hostages were killed, about half of them children. Copyright 2004 Reuters Limited. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: waeg@latinmail.com (SecQrilious) Subject: Transforming Existing Wireless Intelligence Systems to 21st Century Date: 13 Nov 2004 00:04:49 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Copyright 2004 Markku J. Saarelainen WIRELESS INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS BEHAVIOR NEWSLETTER November, 2004 by Markku J. Saarelainen Transforming Our Existing Wireless Intelligence Systems to the 21st Century's Wireless Electronic Commerce New developments in wireless information technologies (IT) have become every day facts in our businesses and intelligence systems. We need to be capable of adopting new wireless technologies to process our information and data. Without this adoption, our businesses may lose their competitiveness and they may fall behind main global competition. During the last two decades, improvements in computing technologies have enabled computers to double the number of processed instructions / information every 18 months. At the same time, these wireless computers and computing systems have become available for masses and they have become smaller, while improving their effectiveness. Already today, business people can use their wireless devices and wireless network computers around the globe to access their critical information, communicate with their customers, suppliers, partners and other parties and complete business transactions and purchases. However, these developments are just the beginning of new and breakthrough wireless enterprise developments in many information and communication related wireless technologies. This is why we all have to facilitate the use, utilization and adoption of new and existing wireless information technologies in our organizations, businesses and intelligence systems. Many global companies are currently complying with the ISO 9001 standard or other national or international intelligence requirements. These systems have been implemented in many different ways and wireless information technologies are used to some extent. Applications of wireless ITs are often limited to document and data control, intelligence system documentation, audit results communication, control of intelligence records, statistical techniques, control of nonconforming intelligences and some other intelligence system areas. Very few organizations are using wireless ITs for issuing electronic purchase orders (PO) to subcontractors or establishing legal contracts between the company and its customers. Current applications are mostly helping internal processes to be more efficient and operate in the intelligence and reliable manner with very little "real financial and electronic payment" wireless interfaces to external parties such as subcontractors, suppliers, customer and clients, investors and bankers and other significant parties. However, this is all going to change -- applications of wireless information technologies in intelligence systems will become more sophisticated and advanced (see Distributed Wireless Intelligence Audit Vision, July, 1996). We shall be able to issue electronic purchase orders, submit electronic invoices / payments and establish legally binding contracts between us and our clients and customer. Our customers will issue their purchase orders to us through wireless electronic networks and we will be able to provide wireless electronic and multimedia advise and assistance for our clients wirelessly around the globe. In addition, we will be able to utilize "wireless software intelligent agents" to handle some of our information processing, information retrieval, research and analysis needs and requirements. For example, our software agents will be capable of completing automatic supplier evaluations and reviews. We will also be able to automate some of our intelligence audit practices such as review and evaluation activities of electronic intelligence records with new automated wireless agent processes. Our intelligence systems will include processes for completing purchase order forms and issuing these forms automatically over wireless networks, when our inventory levels become low enough to initiate these automated processes to meet our raw material requirements. To enable all new wireless IT applications operate effectively and reliably, our business environment has be able to support the utilization of new wireless applications and our clients, customers, suppliers and other relevant parties have to be able to connect their internal processes such as purchase order reviews to our processes wirelessly. Electronic interfaces between different parties have to be developed creating additional requirements for interdependent and highly connected wireless information processing systems, methods and processes. Without these changes in our business environment, applications for wireless electronic commerce will be limited to our internal processes without real and financially sound wireless commerce. We have to be able to complete our financial transactions wirelessly in secure, effective and reliable ways to implement and utilize wireless electronic commerce and all its applications fully in our businesses and intelligence systems. What should your company do to plan and implement wireless electronic commerce (EC) in your intelligence systems? You need to establish your "Wireless EC Strategy" (WECS). One good approach is to define and document applicable transition phases for transforming your current intelligence system. You can review your system against desired WECS requirements and then identify development areas (this can be your "Initial Assessment" or "Baseline Assessment"). Some companies may already have started this transition and they may be in early WEC phases including wireless electronic document control, document and report distribution, marketing and advertising activities and other internal or minor external processes, while still heavily relying on non-electronic / non-IT processes. For example, one of your phases could include the development, implementation and maintenance of purchasing systems for completing and issuing electronic purchase orders wirelessly to you suppliers / subcontractors. During this phase, you need to be capable of making required preparations for accepting any wireless electronic POs from your clients and customers. In the beginning, these methods and processes may rely more heavily still on humans, but in future transition phases you can develop and implement wireless software agents to minimize human involvement in purchasing, sales and other processes by improving "organizational / system intelligence" in your intelligence and information systems. Our intelligence systems have transformed in the last 25 years remarkably due to many improvements and developments in IT applications, Internet technologies and wireless capabilities. It is expected that these developments will continue and our intelligence systems will be relying on new wireless applications that help us to improve our intelligence and efficiency having positive impact on customer satisfaction, price, cost efficiency, intelligence and process safety and reliability. We need to help our organizations to accept, adopt and utilize these new wireless technologies effectively and transform our human resources, processes and organizational structures to the 21st century's wireless electronic commerce (21WEC). We can not do this alone, but we need to work with our business partners, clients, governments, suppliers, investors, regulatory agencies, standardization bodies and any other relevant parties to make this happen. Copyright 2004 Markku J. Saarelainen ------------------------------ From: Marek Tomczyk Subject: Access of Calling Card Dial in Number From Prepaid Cellular Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 23:43:32 +0100 Organization: University of Karlsruhe, Germany Hi, I'm posting this for a friend (Juergen). Find his contact address at the bottom of this post. Thanks. Marek =========== Hi Telecom Digest, This October I stayed three weeks in the bay area. I like it a lot, and this time I even had a GSM1900 (Nokia 6100) phone from my German provider T-Mobile with me. The phone worked fine, but I never ever used it to place phone calls home to Germany and I never ever answered any incoming call. Why? Quite simple, the charges for outgoing and esspecially inbound calls are outrageous. Just imagine to pay $1.70 for incoming calls per minute!!! So I have decided now to get an American mobile phone on my next trip to the USA. I like the offer of AT&T Wireless very much as it provides a long validity of one year for balances starting at $100. Domestic calling with the Free2Go service is very reasonable priced, but calling foreign countries is still expensive. So the idea is to use a calling card service for this matter. The AT&T documents say that prepaid calling card service is not possible with Free2Go. Besides this AT&T says in its terms that certain numbers can be blocked if "abuse" to the network happens. Is calling a local dial in number from a mobile phone in America, in particular from a free2Go phone, abusive usage of the network? Do you know if calling of local (regular) dial in number from American, in particular prepaid aka "pay as you go" services is possible? Can such providers block access to those numbers? Unfortunately I could not find definitive information about this issue on the web. Thanks, Juergen-Usenet@web.de ------------------------------ From: Mike Sutter Subject: Vonage Phone Adapter Reply-To: DaGroup@syrcnyrdrs-02.nyroc.rr.com Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 23:30:01 GMT Organization: Road Runner I've been a Vonage customer for well over a year now. I like the service and am generally satisfied with one exception. Often when I take an incoming call there is a two - five second lag between when I pick up and when the call path is established. I've tried letting it ring a few extra times but that doesn't seem to make any difference. The phone adapter I got from Vonage is the Cisco ATA which they no longer seem to ship. Two questions. Does anyone know if the newer phone adapters offer any better performance in this area or any other benefits that I should consider? How much hassle is it to replace a phone adapter on an existing Vonage account? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The Motorola TA (which Vonage was shipping after they discontinued shipping the Cisco) has never had that problem that I am aware of; that's the telephone adapter I have now. Lately they have been shipping Linksys on orders, but they may have stopped that and gone back to Motorola; I do not know. Regards any 'hassles' with swapping out one TA for another, my experience was this: Several months ago when chatting with a customer service person one day (while I still had the Cisco TA) they told me they had 'started using Motorola'; they suggested the QoS or quality of service, fromn a technical standpoint, was better on the Motorola so I requested one. Here is where my experience may differ from yours. I have mounds of credit on their books, due to 'next month free' e-coupons I have redeemed for new users, so the rep said what they would do was put a charge against my credits on hand for the amount of a Motorola TA (in effect, I paid for a new adapter; they will probably take your credit card number for payment.) Two or three days later I had the new Motorola TA, which I installed on my line, taking out and returning the old Cisco adapter, using the RMA number they gave me, marked plainly on the Fed Ex box. When the old Cisco TA got back to them and recorded on my account, they then gave me the full credit for same back on my account (in your case they would probably issue credit back to your credit card [or release the hold on it, however they do it].)But be sure to save the receipt from the Fed Ex driver or whoever. The Motorola TA they sent me to replace the Cisco has certain things burned in the e-PROM of it when they send it to you; an ESN (or electronic serial number) and your telephone number; you cannot change those values as apparently you could with the Cisco. Also, with the Cisco, I could do (on the phone keypad)_ #80# and get an audio playout of many of the values recorded in the TA. Or, I could do #123# and the Cisco would recite to me its 'name' and version number, etc. With the Motorola TA I can't find anything to do on the phone keypad to produce such results, however if you know to do it you can get a *visual display* on your screen. I think on my network here 192.168.100.102 displays the Motorola TA values that are burned into it, including my particular rom version number, ESN and phone number. And where I view my NetGear router on 192.168.0.1 (and change values as desired) the Motorola TA which sits beyond it, and more on the 'net side' of things, looks at the NetGear as 192.168.102.something. If you have the money to spare (while waiting for the new Motorola TA to reach you and the Cisco to get returned to the company) you may want to ask them if they still have any Motorola TA units around you could try. I have not seen the Linksys (and the latest rep I talked to at Vonage told me 'do not even bother; it is a disappointment'). The Motorola TA has one advantage; instead of plugging it into one of the holes on your router -- depending on how many computers/periphe- rals you work with, that hole might be very valuable real-estate -- it bypasses all that and plugs into the line ahead of everything else. With three holes of its own, the modem plugs into one, the telephone into another, 'bypassing' your internal network, then your router and computers and peripherals go out the third hole. Vonage says the Motorola TA 'chokes' data coming and going, providing better phone conversations. I dunno how true that is, or if it is just bulljive from the Vonage people. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Update: Vonage Ring Problem Organization: ATCC Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 22:19:48 -0500 It appears the problem is solved. I looked at Linksys's datasheet for the RT31P2 router and found you could vary the ring voltage and frequency (60 to 90 vrms at 10 to 40Hz). But Vonage locks that on the router. Finally got a former switch tech when I called support who understood what I was telling him in that the router is supposed to support 5REN on the jack on the router. I told him to crank the voltage to 90 vrms and sure enough -- the Trimline, Princess and Celebrity all ring when they're plugged in together. He mentioned 90 vrms stressing the unit. I told him that if the unit was stressed by 90 vrms which is telecom industry standard for ring voltage, and further that the specs for the unit indicate it is capable of, then the problem lay with their choice of router not the settings. So all is functional now. All I have left to do is the dial pulse to DTMF converter so my Imperial and 302 can connect and I'll be all set. Tony [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I assume the tech had to unlock your TA at his end while you were speaking and make that change to 90 vms. And as far as their choice of router goes, I am not hearing very good things about the Linksys device. I do not know what Vonage was hung about with the Motorola TA; it has mostly worked fine for me, although a couple people with super sensitive ears still complain to me that I 'drop out' on occassion when talking to them. I just tell them to put new batteries in their hearing aids. PAT] ------------------------------ From: jdj Subject: Re: Criminals 'Joining Finance Firms' Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2004 23:35:53 -0800 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 06:47:15 +0000, Lisa Minter wrote: > Members of organised crime are joining financial firms to commit > fraud, a new report by the industry watchdog reveals. That's a logical step. The info they get that way is long-lived and they can just snarf it up, store it away for much later use. Crime orgs have been building databases of financial and ID info for quite a long time now. The Russian mafia has been leading in this but the Asian orgs are catching up quick. It may become necessary to start using throwaway or one-time ID's and accounts to keep ahead of them. ------------------------------ 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. 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #544 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sun Nov 14 02:21:43 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iAE7LgH12778; Sun, 14 Nov 2004 02:21:43 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 02:21:43 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411140721.iAE7LgH12778@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 #545 TELECOM Digest Sun, 14 Nov 2004 02:20:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 545 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Use Comcast Cable Modem? Go to Jail! (Judy Sammel; Archives Reprint) Canada Not Trying to Kill Web Drugstores, PM Says (Lisa Minter) Livewire: Web Sites Help Ease Grind of Daily Commute (Lisa Minter) Seoul May Ban North Korea College Web Site (Lisa Minter) Re: Pennsylvania Victims Group (Robert Bonomi) Re: Update: Vonage Ring Problem (Tony P.) Access of Calling Card Dial in Number From Prepaid Cell (Marcus Falco) What Walmart Knows About Customers (Monty Solomon) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 00:11:33 EST From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Use Comcast Cable Modem? Go to Jail! Judy Sammels's Experience The other day here we were discussing the general incompetence of so many folks working in customer service/tech support functions for the cable companies. Someone wrote to say with cable modem (which I happen to have very good experience with) was not always a wonderful way to go. This reminded me of the experience of a lady named Judy Sammel, who wrote an essay which appeared in various sources during 1999-2000 about what happened to her, as a user of Comcast. We put it in the archives here, but have not used it since. You can read it as a feature story in the archives now (since the archives was remodeled a couple weeks ago) but here today is a text based version of her fascinating story; how she was falsely accused of 'fraud and theft of cable service'. If you are considering Comcast for your cable modem/high speed internet service, you will want to read this account. PAT ============================== Chapter 1: In Which I Learn About the Various Divisions of the District Court of the State of Maryland. Thursday, November 19, 1998: It's an ordinary day. I get home from work, picking up the mail as I walk toward my house. I notice that the return address on one of the letters is the District Court of the State of Maryland. As I walk up the front steps, I think, "I just did jury duty last year; they can't be asking me to serve again so soon, can they?" After I settle in at home, I open the letter and read, "You have been summoned to appear as a defendant in a trial...". My first thought is that someone is suing me for something, but then I see at the top of the page 'State of Maryland vs. Sammel, Judith Lynne', and realize that this isn't a person suing me. My second thought is that I've gotten a parking ticket that blew off of my windshield and has gone unpaid, or maybe a speeding ticket from the traffic cameras I've heard about. It's too late to call the Court to see what the case is about, so I have to wait until the next day. The next morning, I call the telephone number that's printed on the letter, and a recording says something like "press 1 for Civil Division, 2 for Traffic Division, 3 for Criminal Division, 4 for information about specific cases," etc. I choose the option for information about specific cases, and the person who answers the phone asks me to read her the case number. After I read it, I hear her say, "Just a minute. Let me transfer you to the Criminal Division." "Whaaaaaaaaat?" I ask, but it's too late. I'm on hold. Someone else picks up the phone, and again I read the case number and ask what the case is about. "Cable fraud, " she replies. Chapter 2: In Which Comcast Cablevision's Administrative Offices in Baltimore are Informed that "At Home" is More Than Just "A Place They'd Rather Be Than At The Office" Unfortunately, I think I know what the problem is. I had signed up for Comcast@home cable modem service last March, but had not signed up for cable TV service. (Last time I checked, this was legal. In fact, it is mentioned specifically as a service in the FAQ list on @home's web site.) But, when they came to install my @home service, they had neglected to install the filter (they call it a video trap) to filter out the video signal; from reaching my home. (I live in a townhouse community, and there is a "pedestal" containing cable connections for several houses -- this is a few houses away from mine.)  The installers had told me that they would return to install the video trap, and that I could enjoy cable TV service until they came back to do so -- they said I should consider it an incentive to sign up for the service. Well, they never came back to install the video trap. Then, in early June, my @home service stopped working. I made several calls to Comcast Cablevision and Comcast@home customer service. Each claimed that it was the responsibility of the other to determine what the problem was, and fix it. During my conversations with Comcast Cablevision and Comcast@home, I told them both that nobody had come back to install the video trap. Finally, Comcast@home agreed to come out and see what the problem was. I told them that they should bring a video trap with them when they came to repair the service. Because of their schedule and my vacation schedule, they didn't come out to repair the service until late June. The repair technician, when he arrived, said that the reason that my @home service stopped working was that someone had disconnected the cable in the cable "pedestal" on my street. He said that it was likely that Comcast Cablevision personnel had done this, not realizing that I had Comcast@home service. When he'd reconnected my service, I asked him about the installation of the video trap. He said he hadn't brought one with him, but would take care of it later. Again, nobody came back to install the device. So, after I receive this letter from the District Court, I figure that Comcast Cablevision has been out to my neighborhood and has seen that I was connected up again (and again not realized that I had Comcast@home cable modem service.) I call the administrative offices of Comcast Cablevision here in Baltimore, and explain the situation. They say that they will have Comcast's attorneys call me to discuss it. I also make the suggestion that they come out and install a video trap on my line so that this won't happen again. They assure me they will send someone out that day to do it. I get home fairly late that evening and find that the video trap hasn't been installed. Since the Comcast administrative offices are closed by this time, I call @home customer service. I call at 10:30 PM and remain on hold until 11:15 PM, at which time a customer service representative takes the call. When I ask about getting a video trap placed on the line, his first response is that Comcast, not @home, should take care of that, and I should call Comcast customer service. I explain to him that, based on my prior experience with Comcast customer service, if I call them, the following situation will likely occur: the Comcast customer service representative will ask for my Comcast account number; I will reply that I have none, since I am only a Comcast@home customer, not a Comcast cable TV customer; the service representative will tell me they can't do anything for me, and I will have to call @home customer service. He then agrees to talk to his supervisor. He returns to the line to tell me that he will place a work order for a video trap to be placed on the line. Chapter 3: In Which I Wait Not-So-Patiently for Comcast's Attorney to Call, and for the Video Trap to be Installed Saturday, November 21, 1998: After I place two calls to their offices, Comcast's attorney who is assigned to my case returns my call to assure me that the criminal charges will be dropped. I mention that the video trap wasn't installed the previous day. Sunday, November 22, 1998: As of Sunday morning, neither Comcast nor @home has arrived to place a video trap on the line. I call Comcast customer service to ask about the status of this, and am initially told that since I am not a Comcast cable TV customer, I have to call @home to resolve any problems. I explain that the situation is related to criminal charges that Comcast has filed against me, and ask the account executive to try to find a way to assist me from her location. She asks for my name and address. I give it to her, and she comes back on the line after a few moments and says that the only name she has listed at that address is that of former occupants of my home (from1989-1992). I explain again that I am not a Comcast cable TV customer, but only a Comcast@home customer, so there would likely not be a record of my name, unless she has records of Comcast@home customers as well as Comcast cable TV customers. She again asks me to hold the line. When she returns, she says that she has checked into the situation with @home, and has found out that the video trap was not placed on the line because the part is out of stock. She says that when parts are shipped, they will send an installer out to put it in. She says that in the meantime, I cannot be held responsible for the signal coming into my home. Tuesday, November 24, 1998: Comcast's attorney leaves a message on my answering machine saying: "I withdrew ... did a request to withdraw those charging documents" . I will soon find out the hard way that the "withdrew ... did a request to withdraw" wording actually means something -- Comcast doesn't have the ability to get criminal charges dropped on their own, even though they're the ones who got the court to file them in the first place. Once the charges are "in the system", Comcast can only *request* that this be done. Chapter 4: In Which A Police Officer Serves Me With A Criminal Summons in Front of an Out-of-Town Houseguest on the Eve of Thanksgiving. Wednesday, November 25, 1998: A uniformed police officer drives up to my house in his police cruiser and delivers the summons to me; it shows 4 counts of cable fraud, with the possibility of 6 months in jail on each count.  I had always wondered why, when someone commits what appears to be a single crime, you hear things about being charged with "10 counts" of something-or-other. In my case, Comcast's visit in June (when they cut off my service) was 2 counts -- one for cable having been fraudulently hooked up, one for fraudulent receipt of service; and a subsequent visit they made in July, during which they saw that service had been reconnected, was again 2 counts. I try to tell the police officer what Comcast's attorney has told me to tell him -- that the charges are being dropped, and that he should call her to verify this -- but he could care less about this -- he just wants a signature on the papers and wants to leave. A friend of mine, who has driven up from Virginia to spend the holiday weekend with me, is sitting nearby in my kitchen watching this sorry event; it's a really humiliating experience. Anyway, by the end of the day, I find that the video trap has finally been installed on the line. Chapter 5: In Which I Come to the Conclusion that Lady Justice is Not Just Blindfolded, But Actually Blind Monday, November 30, 1998: I telephone the State's Attorney's office to see if they have received and processed Comcast's request to withdraw the charges. They tell me that it has been received, and that the State's Attorney's office has disapproved Comcast's request. They tell me that no reason for the disapproval was supplied. I begin to feel like a character in a Kafka novel. I call Comcast's administrative offices in Baltimore and tell them that the State's Attorney has denied the request to withdraw charges. "They can't do that!" the employee that I speak to exclaims. "Well, obviously they can, because ... they have," I reply. Chapter 6: In Which I Determine That an Excellent Way to Pique Someone's Curiosity is to Ask, "Do You Have any Recommendations for a Good Criminal Defense Attorney?" No chapter here, but it's too good of a title to pass up. Actually, I am told by some colleagues who are attorneys that even in a cut-and-dried case like this, I should expect to pay $750 or $1000 for an attorney if I need to mount a defense in court. Chapter 7: In Which I Find Out that the Attorney for Comcast Actually Does Have a Sense of Humor: I speak with the Comcast attorney about my call to State's Attorney's office. She says she was unaware that State's Attorney has denied the request to drop the charges, and that she will write another letter to ensure that the situation is taken care of. She also asks about whether the video trap has been installed and is working correctly. I tell her that everything is blocked except for 2 religious channels, 1 Spanish language channel, and the video portion of E! TV. She says something along the lines of, "I guess the signal of the Lord manages to find its way through somehow." Chapter 8: In Which I Learn That the Cable TV Franchising Authority is Willing to Handle Complaints About Cable TV Issues -- But Only Up To a Point. A friend of mine had suggested that I find out who the Franchising Authority for cable television in Baltimore County is, and that I ask them to assist in the getting the problem resolved. I find out that the Baltimore County Council is the local Franchising Authority. On November 30, I call the County Council's offices and speak to an employee who is assigned to handle cable television issues. I explain the situation; she says she will check into it. On December 1, I speak to her again, and she says she had gotten in touch with the Assistant to the VP at Comcast Cablevision of Baltimore, and he will call her back with information. On December 3, when I speak to her again, she says that the assistant to the VP had assured her that Comcast is working on the problem. She is satisfied with this answer, and encourages me to "call her back to let her know when the problem's been resolved". It's nice to know that the employees of our local elected officials are really concerned about taking such a proactive role in ensuring that the problems of constituents are handled effectively. Chapter 9: Boy, Do I Feel Like A Criminal Thursday, December 3, 1998: One of the other Comcast attorneys calls me to say that the only person at the State's Attorney's office who can take care of the situation is an Assistant State's Attorney who is the Chief of the District Court Division, and that he has been out of the office all week. The attorney gives me the phone number, and tells me I can try to reach him myself. I call the number a few times during the day, and am alternately told that he is out of the office, or that "you're not allowed to call the State's Attorney, you're a defendant!" I leave a message for him, but it is not returned. Also, around this time, I have a bizarre discussion with the Comcast attorney to try to find out why the State's Attorney disapproved the request to withdraw the charges. She explains that procedurally, they cannot withdraw the charges once the trial date has been set, and the summons has been served. She tells me that I should have "avoided being served". I never thought I'd ever get myself into a situation where I had to make a point of avoiding process servers. Anyway, it's true that the trial date had already been set (it was set on the same day Comcast applied for the Statement of Charges, November 17, 1998). But, the summons was not served to me until Wednesday, November 25. The State's Attorney disapproved the request for withdrawal of the charges on Tuesday, November 24, the day before I was served. So, either the State's Attorney's office doesn't know its own procedures, doesn't bother to follow them, or perhaps there's something more nefarious going on; I'm still not sure. Chapter 10: In Which I Get To Speak With Sandra O'Connor's Second-In-Command. Friday, December 4, 1998: No, not *that* Sandra O'Connor. Baltimore County has its own, local, Sandra O'Connor. She's the State's attorney (an elected official) and I've actually voted for her. I speak with her Deputy for Operations. Since he's responsible for the overseeing the District Court Division, he's the one that the Chief of the District Court Division reports to. I explain that Comcast said that the Chief of the District Court Division was the only one who could take care of the situation, but that he's been unavailable for several days.  I ask the Deputy for Operations if he can take care of the situation in his employee's absence. He tells me no -- that I should wait until his employee returns on the following Monday. He tells me that there is nothing in my file to show that Comcast has done anything related to the case since November 24, and that, if Comcast has promised to get the charges dismissed, I should be "on them" to take care of it. Chapter 11: In Which I Get to Sit and Stew About This for Another Weekend Because the Only Person on Earth Who Can Apparently Take Care of this Situation is Either in Training, on Vacation, or Simply Out of the Office, Depending Upon Whom You Talk To. December 5-6, 1998: My demeanor begins to degrade into "don't get mad, get even" mode. I do some research on what the elements of a case of malicious prosecution are. (And, of course, I can do all of my research over the Internet -- at cable modem speeds.) Paraphrasing one article that I read, the elements are: 1. The people that you sue for malicious prosecution have to be the one that got charges filed against you in the first place. 2. The case has to have been decided in your favor, in one way or another. 3. There has to have been a lack of probable cause. 4. There has to have been malice. 5. There have to be damages. Although "malice" in this situation might be hard to prove, one article published on the subject asserts that malice can be implied from a lack of probable cause, and from inadequate investigation and research. "Lack of probable cause" might also be difficult to prove here, but I believe that a good lawyer could argue that the fact that "cables have been connected and Comcast Cablevision was not the one who connected them" is no longer acceptable as probable cause, now that Comcast Cablevision has given @home (or its local affiliate, Comcast Online Communications) the authority to connect them. Chapter 12: Things Finally Start Falling Into Place December 7, 1998: I leave a voice mail message for the General Counsel at Comcast's Corporate Headquarters in Philadelphia telling him I'm unhappy with the way the situation is being handled, and that I'm considering filing a case in civil court for malicious prosecution. I receive a conciliatory call back from him, and also from one of the local Comcast attorneys telling me that the situation is being taken care of promptly. I finally get a call from the Chief of the District Court Division of the State's Attorney's office saying they will "nol pros" the case. It's great; I'm getting to learn some Latin while I'm at it. "Nol pros" is short for "nolle prosequi", which is Latin for "I will not prosecute." I can't believe it's taken over two weeks just to get a verbal agreement from the State's Attorney not to prosecute a case that everyone involved clearly agrees was based on a Comcast error. December 12, 1998: I receive a courtesy copy of a letter from the State's Attorney to the Judge, requesting that the trial date be moved up, and saying that they intend to nol pros. December 22, 1998: I call the District Court, and find out that the Judge has moved the trial date up to January 12, 1999, instead of the original date, which was in March 1999. Chapter 13: In Which I Get an Unsolicited Letter From a Local Criminal Defense Attorney. December 30, 1998: I come home from work to find another interesting letter in my mailbox; this time it's from a local criminal defense attorney. It reads, "Dear Ms. Sammel, When you are charged with a criminal offense, not only can your freedom and liberty be taken away, a criminal record can affect you the rest of your life." The attorney then proceeds to offer his services, and even provides me with a handy little reminder card with my trial date stamped on it. Great. I guess that since the court's records are considered public documents, anyone can come in and get copies of them. I'm afraid to think about what kinds of mailing lists I could end up on as a result of this. Will I start receiving notices asking me if I want to subscribe to *Prison Life* magazine? Chapter 14: In Which I Go to the Trial "Just In Case". Although I've been told by Comcast that I don't need to show up in court on the trial date, I've never received notice from the District Court about this. And, considering that the last paperwork I received from the court said "a warrant for your arrest may be issued" if you don't show up at your trial, I decide it would be best to show up anyway. January 12, 1999: Just when I'm starting to think that Comcast's motto has been morphed  into "Comcast -- Everything You Convict With", the court appearance is pretty uneventful. I show up at 8:30 along with about a dozen other people who are involved in other cases in the same courtroom that morning. According to the list outside the courtroom, it looks like there are a couple of theft cases and a couple of drug cases on the schedule. I'm actually starting to look forward to an interesting morning in court, hearing about all of this stuff, but the State's Attorney calls my case first. I start walking up to the Defendant's table, and hear the State's Attorney say that he's entering a nol pros. I've just reached the table when the judge says, "your case is dismissed, you're free to go," and so I turn back around and leave the courtroom. Chapter 15: In Which The Assembled Readership Gets To Find Out That I Never Got Sent To Jail, But Just Got Threatened With The Possibility Of It Sorry to disappoint those of you who were looking forward to hearing about that part. I gave the "malicious prosecution" scenario a thought, but I'm not really a lawsuit kind of person. Unless I find out that Comcast has been involved in a pattern of cases like these without regard to the consequences, I don't intend to follow up on filing a malicious prosecution lawsuit. Besides, if I want to get my criminal record expunged, it looks like I will need to sign a waiver absolving them of liability for this incident. I am hoping, however, that Comcast will reimburse me for the $30 fee involved in getting my record expunged. Epilogue: Although everyone I dealt with seemed apologetic, and willing to help get this fairly outrageous situation taken care of, I believe that there are still some problems that Comcast and @Home management need to address. For that reason, I decided to write to the Presidents of both companies, and ask them to respond to several issues. ================================ A copy of Ms. Sammel's letter to Comcast officials is on our web site http://telecom-digest.org and more details of this case. It all makes very fascinating reading. So if you are even thinking about signing up with Comcast for cable modem service, it might not hurt to think again after you read this entire report. PAT ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Canada Not Trying to Kill Web Drugstores, PM Says Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2004 16:20:03 EST VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - Prime Minister Paul Martin denied on Friday that Canada was trying to drive Internet pharmacies out of business, despite Ottawa's recent complaints over drug sales to the United States. Martin also denied the warnings were linked to any effort to improve relations with President Bush, who has objected to U.S. states and cities attempting to use Canada as a source of less expensive medicines. "The two are entirely unrelated," Martin told reporters in Vancouver. Federal Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh warned in a speech at Harvard University on Wednesday that Canada cannot act as America's "drugstore." Web pharmacies sell about $600 million in prescription drugs to U.S. customers annually. Dosanjh also complained about prescription countersigning, in which Canadian doctors or third-party pharmacists sign off on prescriptions for U.S. patients they have not seen in person. The law requires a Canadian doctor approve prescriptions, and the Internet pharmacies complained Dosanjh will drive them out of business if he blocks doctors from approving mail-order requests. "Minister Dosanjh's comments were directed at the medical fraternity, and simply said to the medical fraternity these are your own rules," Martin said. Physician groups in several provinces prohibit the practice of countersigning, which can provide doctors with a lucrative source of income. Canadian prescription drug prices are capped at the average shelf price in major industrialized nations, and are usually less than in the United States where the prices are unregulated. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Livewire: Web Sites Help Ease Grind of Daily Commute Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2004 16:23:45 EST SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The Internet not only is transforming the way we shop and search for information, but it also is quietly smoothing the grind of the daily commute. From the San Francisco area's 511.org, which helps connect lone drivers with the riders they need to use commuter lanes and avoid bridge tolls, to Houston's cyberlink to cameras that monitor traffic flow, commuters have a bevy of sites aimed at improving the hours that bookend the 9-to-5 workday. Besides finding out how to carpool as a way to avoid paying the $3 San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge toll, users of 511.org (http://www.511.org) can access trip planners, transit schedules and information for bicyclists. A popular section (http://www.ridenow.org/carpool) lists pickup locations for "casual carpooling" -- an activity known as "slugging" in the Washington metropolitan area. This informal, but well- established system helps riders meet drivers in set locations so they can carpool to work. A variety of sites run by official transportation departments as well as online commentators (http://www.slug-lines.com/Slugging/Etiquette.asp) compile etiquette tips for casual carpoolers. As a general rule, line jumping is frowned upon; passengers should remain silent unless spoken to by the driver; and talk of religion, politics or sex is verboten. In the Washington Beltway, the Washington Area Bikers Association (http://www.waba.org/new/help/cap.php) helps pedaling commuters find their best route. Riders of the area's Metro trains recently tapped into the local transit authority's site (http://www.wmata.com) for alternate routes home when a crash disrupted rush-hour schedules. Commuters who want to free up their hands and eyes while filling travel time with literature or news turn to sites like http://www.audible.com/. Audible Inc., a former dot-com star resurrected with help from the technology behind popular digital music players like Apple's iPod, provides subscribers with downloads of "The DaVinci Code," The Wall Street Journal and other content. The Web also treats commuters to a bird's-eye view of traffic conditions -- thanks to sites connected to cameras installed by transportation departments around the United States. The Greater Houston Transportation and Emergency Management Center provides a real-time traffic map with color-coded trouble spots in addition to up-to-the-minute reports on weather, accidents and incidents, road closures and construction projects. The site http://www.houstontranstar.org is among the most sophisticated of its kind. Elsewhere, Metrocommute.com (http://www.metrocommute.com) provides real-time traffic, transit and weather reports for New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston and Hartford, Connecticut, via the Web, e-mail or text messages to mobile phones. And as with almost everything that happens in life, there are Web logs, or blogs, with cybercommentary devoted to the daily commute. Proponents of the car-free lifestyle tap into the Web log BikeForums (http://www.bikeforums.net) to share views with fellow cyclists. Across the pond, Webmaster Annie Mole operates "Going Underground" (http://london-underground.blogspot.com), a daily blog on the London Underground where posters ponder such mysteries as how seven stops and one change can be faster than two stops and one change. The site also features photos from the Tube -- as the subway system is also known. While the Internet cannot eliminate all the headaches of public transportation, it does provide a way to vent poetically, as shown in this Tube haiku favorite selected by Mole: Damn the Circle line Counting minutes ticking by. Killing life's lost time. I'm offered her seat but reject her kind insult. This journey's aged me. The train is filling, Why does your bag need a seat? I am getting stressed. ("LiveWire" is being discontinued. The last column will appear on Dec. 8.) *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owners, in this instance Annie Mole, Livewire and Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Seoul May Ban North Korea College Web Site Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2004 16:26:36 EST SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea may ban access to a Web site of North Korea's Kim Il-sung University to stop the communist state's ideology from spreading among the South's Internet-savvy young, an official said on Friday. The move comes amid squabbles in South Korea's parliament over scrapping or revising the National Security Law that restricts contacts with the north. The issue has taken on a bitter ideological tone because North Korea has consistently demanded repeal of the act. "We have received an official request from police to ban access to the Web site and referred the case to an ethics committee," Chung Dae-soon, an Information Ministry official in charge of the case, said by telephone. "If the committee concludes it violates the security law, we would ban access soon," he added. The Korean-language Web site (www.ournation-school.com) offers distance learning and replaces 42 years of educational radio broadcasts, the JoongAng Daily newspaper reported. The site features animated pictures but is a far cry from jazzy South Korean sites and lists courses on the country's ideology and leaders. Kim Il-sung, the late North Korean leader, mixed Marxism and ultra-nationalism to form his country's go-it-alone Juche ideology. He founded the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in 1948 and ruled it unchallenged until his death in July 1994. In the first communist dynastic succession, his son Kim Jong-il inherited power from his father, who has been named "Eternal President." "The Web site is unilaterally cramming young netizens with Juche ideology which runs counter to public sentiment," said a police official who declined to be named. "We need to block access to resources of one-sided information or knowledge which ordinary people can obtain easily." Police had asked the government to block 31 North Korean-related Web sites, he added. The South's president, Roh Moo-hyun, wants to scrap or revise the security law, saying it is a relic of the country's 1970s and 1980s military dictatorships. But the conservative opposition argues the law is still needed because North Korea has never renounced its goal of overthrowing the South by force -- as Pyongyang tried to do when it invaded in 1950, sparking the three-year Korean War. South and North Korea are still technically at war since the conflict ended in armed truce without a peace treaty. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Reuters News Service. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ Organization: Robert Bonomi Consulting Subject: Re: Pennsylvania Victims Group From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2004 23:22:19 +0000 In article , the esteemed moderator pontificates: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Mr. Sullivan, I thought the rulings of > a federal agency had the effect of law. You, sir, "don't know what you don't know." Enacted regulations of a Federal agency have the 'force of law', *only* when there is a statute that enumerates the area(s) for which the regulations of that agency have the force of law. The 'usual' case is that the law says that you must obey the regulations established by the agency in carrying out the duties assigned to it by that law, and that violation of those regulations is a violation of _that_ statute. Separately, there are 'administrative rulings', resulting from a 'trial equivalent', before an 'officer' of a federal agency. You're stuck with whatever they said in the ruling, *unless* you choose to appeal the ruling, into the regular court system. Now, the FTC, has _no_ *direct* enforcement powers whatsoever. Their _only_ recourse, where they believe their 'rules' have been violated, is to GO TO COURT, and _ask_ the court to order enforcement, or assess penalties. It is the *court* that makes the final determination whether a violation has _actually_ occurred, as well as what the 'appropriate' remedy is. Currently the 'backlog' in that court is running 15-18 months. > Or perhaps, fact that the FTC has filed this lawsuit will influence > the judge already hearing the matters at hand. PAT] Again, the court system *doesn't*work*that*way*. _Legally_, the filing doesn't mean anything other than the FTC _thinks_ it has a case. This is _not_ "proof" of wrongdoing that can be introduced in any _other_ proceeding. Any attempt to cite the FTC filing would be dismissed out-of-hand as 'hearsay'. Prior to the actual trial/ruling in the FTC suit, the _only_ way for their 'evidence' to influence any other Norvergence-related case would be for the FTC, themselves, to file an 'amicus curiae' (friend of the court) brief with the court hearing that other case -- setting out _their_ evidence of wrong-doing by the Norvergence-associated party. This is, unfortunately, =NOT= at all likely to happen. It would hurt the prosecution of FTC's own case, and they have a policy of -not- intervening in 'private' lawsuits. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well I don't know about you, but if the FTC or FCC or other federal agency accused me of some wrong doing, I would consider it prudent to stop whatever I was doing. I would not be inclined to continue my activities for the 15-18 months or so it would take for the agency to get me into court. Maybe there is a rare case somewhere where a government agency loses a case, but it is quite rare. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Update: Vonage Ring Problem Organization: ATCC Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2004 18:51:56 -0500 In article , kd1s@nospamplease.cox.reallynospam.net says: > It appears the problem is solved. > I looked at Linksys's datasheet for the RT31P2 router and found you > could vary the ring voltage and frequency (60 to 90 vrms at 10 to 40Hz). > But Vonage locks that on the router. > Finally got a former switch tech when I called support who understood > what I was telling him in that the router is supposed to support 5REN on > the jack on the router. > I told him to crank the voltage to 90 vrms and sure enough -- the > Trimline, Princess and Celebrity all ring when they're plugged in > together. > He mentioned 90 vrms stressing the unit. I told him that if the unit > was stressed by 90 vrms which is telecom industry standard for ring > voltage, and further that the specs for the unit indicate it is > capable of, then the problem lay with their choice of router not the > settings. > So all is functional now. All I have left to do is the dial pulse to > DTMF converter so my Imperial and 302 can connect and I'll be all set. > Tony > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I assume the tech had to unlock your > TA at his end while you were speaking and make that change to 90 vms. > And as far as their choice of router goes, I am not hearing very > good things about the Linksys device. I do not know what Vonage was > hung about with the Motorola TA; it has mostly worked fine for me, > although a couple people with super sensitive ears still complain to > me that I 'drop out' on occassion when talking to them. I just tell > them to put new batteries in their hearing aids. PAT] The unit appears to be working well now. I have noted some peculiarities though. I found either dialing 1+NPA+NXX+XXXX completes calls in < 2 seconds while dialing NXX-XXXX takes 5 to 6 seconds -- they're waiting to time out in that case. I also note that in some instances ringback will continue even though supervision has started. Click to Dial works great. I just wish it would save phone numbers but it doesn't appear to be doing so. Overall the receive audio quality is mostly superb (I do notice a slight background noise that reminds me of the old microwave transmissions systems for LD calls.) and outgoing audio reminds most people of a cell phone less the gaps. I can live with that. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: On your Vonage seven digit dialing try adding a carriage return ('#') at the end of your dialing string to speed things up somewhat. In other words, NXX-XXXX# should work a bit faster. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Marcus Didius Falco Sent: Sat, Nov 13 2004 8:26 PM Subject: Re: Access of Calling Card Dial in Number From Prepaid Cellular Marek Tomczyk wrote about Access of Calling Card Dial in Number From Prepaid Cellular on Fri, 12 Nov 2004 23:43:32 +0100: > I'm posting this for a friend (Juergen). Find his contact address at > the bottom of this post. Thanks. > Marek > =========== > Hi Telecom Digest, > This October I stayed three weeks in the bay area. I like it a lot, > and this time I even had a GSM1900 (Nokia 6100) phone from my > German provider T-Mobile with me. > The phone worked fine, but I never ever used it to place phone > calls home to Germany and I never ever answered any incoming call. > Why? Quite simple, the charges for outgoing and esspecially inbound > calls are outrageous. Just imagine to pay $1.70 for incoming calls > per minute!!! > So I have decided now to get an American mobile phone on my next > trip to the USA. > I like the offer of AT&T Wireless very much as it provides a long > validity of one year for balances starting at $100. Domestic calling > with the Free2Go service is very reasonable priced, but calling > foreign countries is still expensive. > So the idea is to use a calling card service for this matter. The > AT&T documents say that prepaid calling card service is not > possible with Free2Go. Besides this AT&T says in its terms that > certain numbers can be blocked if "abuse" to the network happens. > Is calling a local dial in number from a mobile phone in America, in > particular from a free2Go phone, abusive usage of the network? > Do you know if calling of local (regular) dial in number from American, > in particular prepaid aka "pay as you go" services is possible? > Can such providers block access to those numbers? > Unfortunately I could not find definitive information about this issue > on the web. > Thanks, > Juergen-Usenet@web.de I have used my Verizon phone to dial 800 numbers, including the one for my calling card. Since the wireless company recovers its regular per-minute charge for 800 numbers, I fail to see why which 800 number you call should be an issue. Since you last used your phone in the US, AT&T wireless has been taken over by Cingular. Cingular may have different terms. Moreover, T-Mobile also provides GSM service, and sells pre-paid plans. Finally, check the roaming charges on your German SIM. Some companies are much cheaper than others. I know of pre-paid SIMs from Switzerland and Monaco that are usable nearly world wide, and generally charge about $1 per minute when roaming. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 00:36:23 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers' Habits By CONSTANCE L. HAYS HURRICANE FRANCES was on its way, barreling across the Caribbean, threatening a direct hit on Florida's Atlantic coast. Residents made for higher ground, but far away, in Bentonville, Ark., executives at Wal-Mart Stores decided that the situation offered a great opportunity for one of their newest data-driven weapons, something that the company calls predictive technology. A week ahead of the storm's landfall, Linda M. Dillman, Wal-Mart's chief information officer, pressed her staff to come up with forecasts based on what had happened when Hurricane Charley struck several weeks earlier. Backed by the trillions of bytes' worth of shopper history that is stored in Wal-Mart's computer network, she felt that the company could "start predicting what's going to happen, instead of waiting for it to happen," as she put it. The experts mined the data and found that the stores would indeed need certain products -- and not just the usual flashlights. "We didn't know in the past that strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane," Ms. Dillman said in a recent interview. "And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer." Thanks to those insights, trucks filled with toaster pastries and six-packs were soon speeding down Interstate 95 toward Wal-Marts in the path of Frances. Most of the products that were stocked for the storm sold quickly, the company said. Such knowledge, Wal-Mart has learned, is not only power. It is profit, too. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/business/yourmoney/14wal.html?ex=1258088400&en=0605d1fc88b8ab98&ei=5090 ------------------------------ 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. 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #545 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sun Nov 14 16:46:37 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iAELkbA19894; Sun, 14 Nov 2004 16:46:37 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 16:46:37 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411142146.iAELkbA19894@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 #546 TELECOM Digest Sun, 14 Nov 2004 16:45:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 546 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Has TiVo Forsaken Us? (Monty Solomon) Spoofing Caller Party With Custom Equipment (rsn) Re: Update: Vonage Ring Problem (DevilsPGD) Re: Update: Vonage Ring Problem (Tony P.) Re: Cable Internet, was: Internet Without Landline? (w_tom) Re: Chechen Rebel Web Site Reopened (Henry) Re: Access of Calling Card Dial in Number From Prepaid Cell (Wesrock) Re: Movie Studios to Sue Internet File Traders (Bob Smythe) Re: Use Comcast Cable Modem? Go to Jail! Judy Sammels's Story (Tony P.) Re: What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers' Habits (Lisa Hancock) Last Laugh! Pure Spam/Phishing! MY PRESENTATION TO YOU (HENRY CASTLE) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 14:49:02 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Has TiVo Forsaken Us? Excerpt from From: Seth David Schoen Date: November 14, 2004 12:21:08 PM EST Subject: Re: [IP] Has TiVo Forsaken Us? Until about a year ago there was a nice bright-line rule between unencrypted stuff like free-to-air broadcasting and basic-tier cable: open standards and no license required to receive them, therefore no legal restrictions on what you can do with them. (You are still bound by copyright law, but the legal default for unencrypted signals has been that technology is not required to enforce anyone's notion of copyright.) ------------------------------ From: techbaath@yahoo.com (rsn) Subject: Spoofing Caller Party With Custom Equipment Date: 14 Nov 2004 06:15:03 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hello, I am wondering what prevents someone from spoofing the phone number? If we built a modified GSM modem +SIM type capability that took the phone number and MSIDN and any other relevant ids as input would'nt you be able to call/SMS on someone else's id? (Assume for the moment that their phone is switched off and hence there is no conflict on the network). There is probably some defence built into the system, just wanted to know how this works. Thanks, tb ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: Re: Update: Vonage Ring Problem Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 00:52:41 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com In message Tony P. wrote: > I found either dialing 1+NPA+NXX+XXXX completes calls in < 2 seconds > while dialing NXX-XXXX takes 5 to 6 seconds -- they're waiting to time > out in that case. Try dialing NPA+NXX+XXXX and it will connect the call immediately. > Overall the receive audio quality is mostly superb (I do notice a > slight background noise that reminds me of the old microwave > transmissions systems for LD calls.) and outgoing audio reminds most > people of a cell phone less the gaps. I can live with that. Last I heard Vonage is artificially adding background noise. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: On your Vonage seven digit dialing try > adding a carriage return ('#') at the end of your dialing string to > speed things up somewhat. In other words, NXX-XXXX# should work a bit > faster. PAT] That doesn't (and has never) worked here. 1832-Curling is introduced to the U.S., giving Americans a sport combining the surface of hockey with the thrill of watching paint dry. ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Update: Vonage Ring Problem Organization: ATCC Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 12:14:56 -0500 In article , kd1s@nospamplease.cox.reallynospam.net says: > In article , > kd1s@nospamplease.cox.reallynospam.net says: >> It appears the problem is solved. >> I looked at Linksys's datasheet for the RT31P2 router and found you >> could vary the ring voltage and frequency (60 to 90 vrms at 10 to 40Hz). >> But Vonage locks that on the router. >> Finally got a former switch tech when I called support who understood >> what I was telling him in that the router is supposed to support 5REN on >> the jack on the router. >> I told him to crank the voltage to 90 vrms and sure enough -- the >> Trimline, Princess and Celebrity all ring when they're plugged in >> together. >> He mentioned 90 vrms stressing the unit. I told him that if the unit >> was stressed by 90 vrms which is telecom industry standard for ring >> voltage, and further that the specs for the unit indicate it is >> capable of, then the problem lay with their choice of router not the >> settings. >> So all is functional now. All I have left to do is the dial pulse to >> DTMF converter so my Imperial and 302 can connect and I'll be all set. >> Tony >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I assume the tech had to unlock your >> TA at his end while you were speaking and make that change to 90 vms. >> And as far as their choice of router goes, I am not hearing very >> good things about the Linksys device. I do not know what Vonage was >> hung about with the Motorola TA; it has mostly worked fine for me, >> although a couple people with super sensitive ears still complain to >> me that I 'drop out' on occassion when talking to them. I just tell >> them to put new batteries in their hearing aids. PAT] > The unit appears to be working well now. I have noted some peculiarities > though. > I found either dialing 1+NPA+NXX+XXXX completes calls in < 2 seconds > while dialing NXX-XXXX takes 5 to 6 seconds -- they're waiting to time > out in that case. > I also note that in some instances ringback will continue even > though supervision has started. > Click to Dial works great. I just wish it would save phone numbers but > it doesn't appear to be doing so. > Overall the receive audio quality is mostly superb (I do notice a > slight background noise that reminds me of the old microwave > transmissions systems for LD calls.) and outgoing audio reminds most > people of a cell phone less the gaps. I can live with that. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: On your Vonage seven digit dialing try > adding a carriage return ('#') at the end of your dialing string to > speed things up somewhat. In other words, NXX-XXXX# should work a bit > faster. PAT] Ah yes, I should have mentioned that I tried the terminator also. That also gives a < 2 second connection time. It's funny how spoiled you get by the incumbent carrier though. Punch a 7 digit number with no terminator and the call connects immediately. Probably because they've got all sorts of ARS and routing tables set up to handle it. Kind of hard to do on a little Linksys router. I do know how Vonage put its network of sorts together though. They're just using excess capacity on all these IP aware switches throughout the country. For example, mine appears to route through Paetec's switch in Providence. That is probably what upsets the ILEC's the most -- that someone else figured out how to use excess CLEC capacity to their own benefit. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think the difference is the telco says the default condition is seven digits, with eleven now and then providing the first digit is '1', or occassionally three digits of the form N11. Vonage on the other hand says the rule is eleven digits always beginning with '1' and occassional exceptions being seven digits. Note how with telco you can do '0#' (zero pound) and cut through to an operator immediatly. Ever since telco started allowing things like 011+, and 01+ they have to time out the operator as well. Just a straight and solo '0' lets you sit there for six or seven seconds before it times out also as a result. A terminator or carriage return (#) always tells telco (and usually Vonage) 'that is all you are going to get, so act on it'. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 03:20:11 -0500 From: w_tom Subject: Re: Cable Internet, was: Internet Without Landline? Broadband technology has been long available. Any company that does not understand what is required of internet providers is demonstrating why business school principles so often create business failures. For example, DSL was demonstrated first by British Telephone in 1981. Broadband technology is that old. Because local providers (the last mile) were stifling internet growth, then the 1996 Federal Communication Act forced even those 'we fear to pioneer new technology' companies (baby Bells and cable companies) to let others provide that service. Basic principles of broadband have been around so long that only the naive would not understand what services were available and are necessary. Example: broadband service for internet client access is not same as service necessary for server access. The former (clients) use an upload bandwidth much slower than download speeds. The latter (servers) require equal or higher upload data transfer speeds. Anyone with first year (basic) networking knowledge would say, "But of course. This has long been understood." However business school graduates are taught a good manager can manage any business. Its a 56K modem. Therefore it can do 56K in both directions? According to 'business school' mentalities, these details are too messy, technical, and unnecessary. Therefore even this paragraph confuses bosses who are the reason for internet service mistakes. You are right to blame some businesses for making unnecessary internet service mistakes. But that mistake is not due to a new technology. Broadband is over 20 years old. Unfortunately too many think they are decision makers only because they have a business degree - rather than first learn from those who make things actually work. The problem is not that broadband is a new service. The problem is directly traceable to company management that foolishly practice what business schools teach: a good manager can manage any business. Danny Burstein wrote: > In bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com > (Robert Bonomi) writes: > [ lots snipped ] >> 4) Some people need higher _uplink_ throughput, and/or more >> 'predictable' download speeds, even when a lot of their neighbors >> are "on-line". > In many (certainly, most certainly, not all) areas, you can, indeed, > purchase higher levels of speed and/or quality of service/reliability > levels from the local cableco. At a higher price, of course. > The big complaints come from people/businesses who sign up for a > standard (residential) service level and are shocked, shocked, they > don't get everything they wished for. > Personally I'm not at all comfortable with many of these distinctions, > but the entire high speed (dsl/cable) internet concept is only a few > years old. There's going to be a lot more shakeup, both pricing and > speedwise, (and in technology) in the near future. ------------------------------ From: henry999@eircom.net (Henry) Subject: Re: Chechen Rebel Web Site Reopened Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 12:31:15 +0200 Organization: Elisa Internet customer Lisa Minter wrote: > HELSINKI (Reuters) - A Web site used by a Chechen warlord to claim > responsibility for September's school siege in Russia has reopened, > one month after it was closed by the Finnish company that hosted it. > Finnish news agency STT reported Saturday that the site, > www.kavkavcenter.com, was now hosted on a Swedish server with a backup > in Finland. Well, on Sunday at 10.13 gmt I got "The specified server could not be found." Cheers, Henry ------------------------------ From: Wesrock@aol.com Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 09:58:24 EST Subject: Re: Access of Calling Card Dial in Number From Prepaid Cellular Marek Tomczyk wrote about Access of Calling Card Dial in Number From Prepaid Cellular on Fri, 12 Nov 2004 23:43:32 +0100: > I'm posting this for a friend (Juergen). Find his contact address at > the bottom of this post. Thanks. > Marek > =========== [ ... ] > So I have decided now to get an American mobile phone on my next > trip to the USA. > I like the offer of AT&T Wireless very much as it provides a long > validity of one year for balances starting at $100. Domestic calling > with the Free2Go service is very reasonable priced, but calling > foreign countries is still expensive. > So the idea is to use a calling card service for this matter. The > AT&T documents say that prepaid calling card service is not > possible with Free2Go. Besides this AT&T says in its terms that > certain numbers can be blocked if "abuse" to the network happens. > Is calling a local dial in number from a mobile phone in America, in > particular from a free2Go phone, abusive usage of the network? > Do you know if calling of local (regular) dial in number from American, > in particular prepaid aka "pay as you go" services is possible? > Can such providers block access to those numbers? > Unfortunately I could not find definitive information about this issue > on the web. > Thanks, > Juergen-Usenet@web.de Dialing a local number from a cellular phone is probably the most common usage of a wireless phone in the U.S.A. It's not at all clear why is would even be thought to be abusive. Wes Leatherock wesrock@aol.com wleathus@yahoo.com ------------------------------ From: billyzane1@excite.com (Bob Smythe) Subject: Re: Movie Studios to Sue Internet File Traders Date: 14 Nov 2004 07:40:03 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com The thing is, it is illegal to download or upload copyrighted works, the concept of file sharing and actual file sharing is not illegal. I do not condone illegal file sharing, but am just trying to clarify a few things. The MPAA (and RIAA) have not and will not target individual downloaders. There is no real way to get them. They are not a law enforcement agency. They cannot entrap individual users. If you download from them, and they are the rightful owners, then there is no law broken, even if it is widely know that the service being used is to illegally obtain files. Plus having downloaded one file will not be worthwhile anyway in court. They will focus and be able to bust those who share (uploaders) works they do not own. These are the people who are illegally distributing, offering, sharing and causing the industry the most harm, and potentially profiting from this type of activity. Bottom line is if you do not share, then you run little to no risk of being caught. But people need to realize the impact reaches far beyond whether or not they get caught. They are hurting our economy. A great number of jobs and resources goes into creating movies and songs, and you are stealing money out of their pockets and retailers, etc.. For me, I do not like the threat of viruses and poor sound and picture quality. That is why I stay away from such activity. That is the greater threat. The fact that it is also illegal makes it even less appealing. Just buy the damn videos y'all. The industry will benefit by offering an I-Tunes type service for those who want to get movies via downloading for an affordable price. Say -8 bucks for a movie. YOu have to go by the hardware and software to burn it and the dual layered DVD's are like 4 bucks a pop I think. BOB Lisa Minter wrote in message news:: > LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Taking a cue from the music industry, film > studios and the Motion Picture Association of America said on Thursday > that they were readying the first lawsuits against people suspected of > illegally distributing movies over the Internet. > The civil suits will seek to stop trading and damages of up > to $30,000 per film, the MPAA said, adding that damages could > reach $150,000 if the infringement was deemed willful. > Record companies have led the way with such lawsuits, targeting major > traders of song files who use Kazaa and other programs to swap songs > on the Web. The movie trade group, representing Hollywood's major > studios, plans to launch its own legal challenges beginning Nov. 16. > Studios have been slow to release DVD-quality films on the Internet > because of the twin piracy and technological shortcomings -- it takes > hours to download even a film at lower quality levels, while it takes > minutes or seconds to download a song. Improving technology is cutting > the gap, though. > "That distinction is rapidly vanishing, so we are taking these actions > to try and prevent this illegal activity from becoming mainstream," > the MPAA said in a statement, adding that future technologies could > allow movie downloads in as few as six seconds. > MPAA President and Chief Executive Dan Glickman said at a news > conference that the music industry has had an impact on music piracy > with its lawsuits. > That campaign has had a mixed reception from consumers and some in the > industry, who have urged movie and music makers to develop easy-to-use > technology for buying or renting content that would be a viable > alternative to illegal downloads. > Apple Computer Inc's iTunes is often heralded as an example of legal > song buying that works. > "The industry should be thinking of new ways to deploy the new > technology rather than suing the consumer," said Mediaport > Entertainment Inc. Chief Executive Helen Seltzer, which makes kiosks, > or automatic teller machines, to buy and download music. "We find that > if students are given an easy way to download, they will do it and pay > for it happily," she said. > An MPAA attorney said studios would launch fewer lawsuits than the > record industry, which has pursued more than 5,000 people to > date. Studios would also use "John Doe" lawsuits that allow them to > pursue file traders without knowing the traders' identities. > Chris Ruhland, a former studio lawyer now at Orrick Herrington & > Sutcliffe, forecast the movie makers would win their days in > court. "The law is very clear that unauthorized distribution of > copyrighted material is illegal," he said. > Reuters/VNU [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What MPAA and RIAA do not understand (or pretend not to understand) is the purposes for which the net was developed: It was developed for the sharing of ideas and files, at no charge between the participants. What MPAA/RIAA seem to want is the ability to put out their goods all over the public sidewalk, but they do not feel people should be free to to examine same goods at their leisure without paying for them. The net was around for a long time before MPAA/RIAA came around wanting to put their trash out on the public roadway, and they wanted to change the rules the minute they got here from a place of free expression to a place where you have to pay to view their stuff. There are plenty of ways to mark directories (on computers) to keep people out of them who have not paid. But it seems to be more to their advantage to use the net as an advertising media then file suit against people who stop to look (too long, and too extensively) rather than just move along. I do not really have any sympathy for those relative newcomers to the net. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Use Comcast Cable Modem? Go to Jail! Judy Sammels's Experience Organization: ATCC Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 12:48:09 -0500 In article , ptownson@telecom- digest.org says: > The other day here we were discussing the general incompetence of so > many folks working in customer service/tech support functions for the > cable companies. > Someone wrote to say with cable modem (which I happen to have very > good experience with) was not always a wonderful way to go. This > reminded me of the experience of a lady named Judy Sammel, who wrote > an essay which appeared in various sources during 1999-2000 about > what happened to her, as a user of Comcast. We put it in the archives > here, but have not used it since. You can read it as a feature story > in the archives now (since the archives was remodeled a couple weeks > ago) but here today is a text based version of her fascinating story; > how she was falsely accused of 'fraud and theft of cable service'. If > you are considering Comcast for your cable modem/high speed internet > service, you will want to read this account. > PAT > ============================== > Chapter 1: In Which I Learn About the Various Divisions of the District > Court of the State of Maryland. > charges will be dropped. I mention that the video trap wasn't > installed the previous day. This was back when @home was actually excite@home. They had agreements with all the cable companies including Comcast, Cox etc. to allow pure data hookups. The fact that most pedestals for cable service are locked means that somewhere in Comcasts maintenance records they have a record indicating that the service was to be hooked up and a filter installed. She should have proceeded with the civil case and opened the underbelly of incompetence at our cable companies. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well she should have, and I would have. But if you read the entire story on her web site or on our web site http://telecom-digest.org you'll note she says she is 'not inclined to sue people or companies'. I would have made an example of Comcast for sure, if they had been that arrogant and stupid (and don't those two characteristics often times go hand in hand?) with me. But, Ms. Sammel had to do what she felt was best, although as you read her testimony about Comcast you could see where there were times she was really about to do a number on them. The whole story was much larger and longer, and greatly truncated (like a Reader's Digest Condensed Book) to fit the limitations of this text based digest. PAT] ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers' Habits Date: 14 Nov 2004 09:52:42 -0800 Monty Solomon wrote > The experts mined the data and found that the stores would indeed need > certain products -- and not just the usual flashlights. "We didn't know > in the past that strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven > times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane," Ms. Dillman > said in a recent interview. "And the pre-hurricane top-selling item > was beer." WalMart is huge and now many people don't like them. There have been several documentaries on them (PBS' Frontline will have another this week, check your local listings). Critics say Walmart destroys Main Street and American jobs. Yes, it does. But on the other hand, aren't the customers of Walmart benefiting from lower prices? I like patronizing local businesses and try to do so. But when my local hardware store charges $5 for a flashlight and Walmart charges $1.50 for the very same model, I do have to stop and think. I realized my local hardware store was grossly overcharging for many things. (They're out of business now). A few towns still have nice Main Streets, though many places they're pretty awful. But most of these were killed off long before Walmart came around, the more traditional shopping centers and chain stores did them in a long time ago. Some people may be upset that Walmart has such detailed customer buying habits as described above. But it enabled them to serve their customers with things they needed and wanted in an emergency. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: No, their prices are not necessarily lower. Prices are only lower in areas (of the merchandise) they want to push one week. At our downtown grocery store, Marvin's, the selection is always just as good, and the prices are nearly always at least competitive (if not sometimes better) than Walmart. Plus which, I *hate* large crowds in a mall-type setting, and not getting the customer service, carry out to your car arrangements that Marvins and the stores downtown offer. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2004 05:45:22 -0600 Subject: Last Laugh! Purely Spam! MY PRESENTATION TO YOU From: HENRY CASTLE [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Of the 126 times in the past two days I have been selected by some bogus Solicitor in Nigeria somewhere to serve as the executor of some poor deceased devils estate (always numbering in the millions-billions of dollars) I have never once answered them. I am wondering what would happen if I did. I've had many folks say these charlatans would try to pick me clean, getting my bank deposit account numbers, my social security number, etc. And some have suggested they (the charlatans) would send you a bogus draft for several thousand million billion dollars to be deposited in my bank account, which, surprise!, would turn out to be counterfiet after I had endorsed/negotiated it and remitted proceeds back to the Solicitor, etc. Has anyone on the net ever played their game back at them? That is to say, responded saying "I am so sorry to hear of my long lost relative being deceased, how can I help you?" then milked them and toyed with them as long as they kept playing back? I wonder what they would say/do then? Let's say, a few typographical errors in your social security number, your bank and credit card numbers, etc. Or maybe a *l o n g* time before you remitted proceeds back to them less the matter of your fees, of course. Naturally you do not withdraw five cents of the 'money order' or 'bank draft' they use to pay you with until *it* has cleared, in the unlikely event it ever does. I would suggest you give it to your bank and ask *them* to clear it first before they issue any credit to you. Above all, do not sign or endorse it in any way. See if you can get any good, legitimate email or street addresses for these fools before you get them on the run, of course. So -- if there are any Sires or Madams in our audience today who feel like playing along and milking Henry Castle, Solicitor at Law for whatever he may be worth, have at it. Here is his Crock for your examination and purusal. PAT] --------------------------------------- From sb0-07369716fd-nobody@rose-chi.propagation.net Sun Nov 14 03:01:39 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: from xuxa.iecc.com (xuxa.iecc.com [208.31.42.42]) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id D9CC115398 for ; Sun, 14 Nov 2004 03:01:38 -0500 (EST) Received: (qmail 18469 invoked by uid 166); 14 Nov 2004 08:01:37 -0000 Delivered-To: virtual-telecom-editor@telecom-digest.org Received: (qmail 18467 invoked from network); 14 Nov 2004 08:01:37 -0000 Received: from 1-1-13-69.cust.propagation.net (HELO rose-chi.propagation.net) (69.13.1.1) by mail2.iecc.com with SMTP; 14 Nov 2004 08:01:37 -0000 Received: (from nobody@localhost) by rose-chi.propagation.net (8.11.6p2/8.11.6) id iADBjMg29273; Sat, 13 Nov 2004 05:45:22 -0600 Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2004 05:45:22 -0600 Message-Id: <200411131145.iADBjMg29273@rose-chi.propagation.net> To: Subject: MY PRESENTATION TO YOU From: HENRY CASTLE X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Cc: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: RLSP Mailer X-DCC-IECC-Metrics: xuxa.iecc.com 1107; bulk Body=79 Fuz1=many Fuz2=many X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=1.3 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,DATE_IN_PAST_12_24, DEAR_SOMETHING,NIGERIAN_BODY1 autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: * Status: RO Dear Sir/Madam, FOR YOUR ATTENTION I am barrister Henry Castle a solicitor at law. I am the personal attorney to Mr. Mark Webb, a national of your country, who until his death was an employee with Chevron Oil Exploration Company in Nigeria. Here in after shall be referred to as my client. On the 21st of April 1999, my client, his wife and their three Children were involved in a car accident along Sagbama express-road. All occupants of the vehicle unfortunately lost their lives. Since then I have made several enquiries to your embassy to locate any of my clients extended relatives, this has also proved unsuccessful. After these several unsuccessful attempts, I have contacted you to assist in repatriating the money and property left behind by my client before they get confiscated or declared unserviceable by the bank here where the huge deposits were lodged. Particularly, Commercial Bank of Africa where the deceased had an account valued at over $7million dollars has issued me a notice to provide the next of kin or have the account confiscated within 14 official working days. Since I have been unsuccessful in locating their relatives for over 3 years now I seek your consent to present you as the next of kin of the deceased, so that the proceeds of this account valued at over $7million dollars can be officially and promptly paid to you and then you and me can share the money. The ratio of sharing shall be 45% to you and 50% to me, while remaining 5% will take care of incidental expenses which shall be incurred in the cause of this transaction. I have all necessary legal documents that can be used to back up any claim we may to stand make. All I require is your honest cooperation to enable us seeing this deal through. I guarantee that this will be executed under a legitimate arrangement that will protect you from any breach of the law. For confidential reasons contact me via my alternate email address: henrycastle@tiscali.cz Best regards, Henry Castle Esq. ___________________________________________________________________________ Mail sent from WebMail service at ladiesteaparty.com (a PHP-Nuke Powered Site) -Visit us at http://www.ladiesteaparty.com ------------------------------ 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. 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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 #546 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Nov 15 00:47:54 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iAF5lra23623; Mon, 15 Nov 2004 00:47:54 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 00:47:54 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411150547.iAF5lra23623@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 #547 TELECOM Digest Mon, 15 Nov 2004 00:47:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 547 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson The End of Privacy -- It's Not the FBI or CIA (Marcus Didius Falco) Supervision for DID Lines? (Lincoln J. King-Cliby) While I'm Asking Questions: CalNet (Lincoln J. King-Cliby) Re: Update: Vonage Ring Problem (Tony P.) Re: Update: Vonage Ring Problem (Steve Crow) Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns (Neal McLain) Re: What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers' Habits (DevilsPGD) Re: Use Comcast Cable Modem? Go to Jail! Judy Sammel (Rick Merrill) TV Movie: Category 6 - Day of Destruction (TELECOM Digest Editor) Re: Last Laugh! Purely Spam! MY PRESENTATION TO YOU (Rich Greenberg) Re: Last Laugh! Purely Spam! MY PRESENTATION TO YOU (Rick Merrill) Re: Last Laugh! Purely Spam! MY PRESENTATION TO YOU (Henry) Re: Last Laugh! Purely Spam! MY PRESENTATION TO YOU (SELLCOM Tech) Re: Last Laugh! Purely Spam! MY PRESENTATION TO YOU (Ted Klugman) 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. 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Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 17:55:06 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: The End of Privacy -- It's not the FBI or CIA * The Original NYTimes article is below, and then a response: (johnmac -- .. but the customer / citizen may benefit from this ... and is it worth it?) From the New York Times -- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/business/yourmoney/14wal.html?th What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers' Habits By CONSTANCE L. HAYS HURRICANE FRANCES was on its way, barreling across the Caribbean, threatening a direct hit on Florida's Atlantic coast. Residents made for higher ground, but far away, in Bentonville, Ark., executives at Wal-Mart Stores decided that the situation offered a great opportunity for one of their newest data-driven weapons, something that the company calls predictive technology. A week ahead of the storm's landfall, Linda M. Dillman, Wal-Mart's chief information officer, pressed her staff to come up with forecasts based on what had happened when Hurricane Charley struck several weeks earlier. Backed by the trillions of bytes' worth of shopper history that is stored in Wal-Mart's computer network, she felt that the company could "start predicting what's going to happen, instead of waiting for it to happen," as she put it. The experts mined the data and found that the stores would indeed need certain products -- and not just the usual flashlights. "We didn't know in the past that strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane," Ms. Dillman said in a recent interview. "And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer." Thanks to those insights, trucks filled with toaster pastries and six-packs were soon speeding down Interstate 95 toward Wal-Marts in the path of Frances. Most of the products that were stocked for the storm sold quickly, the company said. Such knowledge, Wal-Mart has learned, is not only power. It is profit, too. Plenty of retailers collect data about their stores and their shoppers, and many use the information to try to improve sales. Target Stores, for example, introduced a branded Visa card in 2001 and has used it, along with an arsenal of gadgetry, to gather data ever since. But Wal-Mart amasses more data about the products it sells and its shoppers' buying habits than anyone else, so much so that some privacy advocates worry about potential for abuse. With 3,600 stores in the United States and roughly 100 million customers walking through the doors each week, Wal-Mart has access to information about a broad slice of America - from individual Social Security and driver's license numbers to geographic proclivities for Mallomars, or lipsticks, or jugs of antifreeze. The data are gathered item by item at the checkout aisle, then recorded, mapped and updated by store, by state, by region. By its own count, Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, made by NCR, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts. Information about products, and often about customers, is most often obtained at checkout scanners. Wireless hand-held units, operated by clerks and managers, gather more inventory data. In most cases, such detail is stored for indefinite lengths of time. Sometimes it is divided into categories or mapped across computer models, and it is increasingly being used to answer discount retailing's rabbinical questions, like how many cashiers are needed during certain hours at a particular store. All of the data are precious to Wal-Mart. The information forms the basis of the sales meetings the company holds every Saturday, and it is shot across desktops throughout its headquarters and into the places where it does business around the world. Wal-Mart shares some information with its suppliers -- a company like Kraft, for example, can tap into a private extranet, called Retail Link, to see how well its products are selling. But for the most part, Wal-Mart hoards its information obsessively. It also takes pains to keep the information secret. Some of the systems it uses are custom-built and designed by its own employees, the better to keep competitors off the trail. Companies that sell equipment and software to Wal-Mart are bound by nondisclosure agreements. Three years ago, Wal-Mart summarily announced that it would no longer share its sales data with outside companies, like Information Resources Inc. and ACNielsen, which had paid Wal-Mart for the information and then sold it to other retailers. "When you look at their behavior, you can tell that Wal-Mart considers data to be a top priority," said Christine Overby, a senior analyst for consumer markets at Forrester Research. Over the years, she said, Wal-Mart executives have spent handsomely for their systems, paying $4 billion in 1991 to create Retail Link and signing onto innovations like bar codes and electronic data interchange, a forerunner of the Internet, well ahead of the pack. Wal-Mart is also driving manufacturers to invest in radio frequency identification. By next October, the company will require its biggest suppliers to tag shipments to some of its distribution centers with tiny transmitters that would eventually let Wal-Mart track every item that it sells. With so much data at Wal-Mart's corporate fingertips, what are the risks to consumers? Most have no clue that their habits are monitored to such an extent. There are no signs -- like the ones for Wal-Mart's anti-shoplifting cameras -- advising customers that information is being collected and stored. And there is no giveback: Wal-Mart doesn't use loyalty cards and rarely offers promotions based on past purchases. It is aware, however, that shoppers are concerned about privacy. On its Web site, Wal-Mart posts a privacy policy that states, in part: "We take reasonable steps to protect your personal information. We maintain reasonable physical, technical and procedural measures to limit access to personal information to authorized individuals with appropriate purposes." NOT everyone agrees. "People don't know that Wal-Mart is capturing information about who they are and what they bought, but they are also capable of capturing a huge amount of outside information about them that has nothing to do with their grocery purchases," said Katherine Albright, the founder and director of Caspian, a consumer advocacy group concerned with privacy issues. "They can find out your mortgage amounts, your court dates, your driving record, your creditworthiness." One source of information can be a credit card or a debit card, Ms. Albright said. Wal-Mart shoppers increasingly use the cards to pay for purchases, particularly in the better-heeled neighborhoods where the company has been building stores recently. Some companies specialize in what is known as data enhancement, in which a customer's name and address, or a telephone number, can open the door to additional information. "If Wal-Mart had a customer database and wanted to start e-mailing their customers, we could append their e-mail addresses," said Sarah Stansberry, director of marketing for AccuData America, a company based in Fort Myers, Fla., that specializes in such services but does not use credit card records. With e-mail addresses, AccuData can track names and home addresses, she added. Other information follows: "We can access what they paid for their house, and their mortgage," though not driving records. The company has not done any work for Wal-Mart, she said. Ms. Dillman said that she did not think Wal-Mart had ever tried to squeeze data from credit cards to learn more about customers' buying habits. Indeed, she said, it wouldn't be necessary. "We can do that without the credit card information," she said. "We can look at what's happening in the market, and look at what's happening in other markets that are similar." WAL-MART uses its mountain of data to push for greater efficiency at all levels of its operations, from the front of the store, where products are stocked based on expected demand, to the back, where details about a manufacturer's punctuality, for example, are recorded for future use. The purpose is to protect Wal-Mart from a retailer's twin nightmares: too much inventory, or not enough. "They recognize that technology is a critical tool for them to have an efficient supply chain," said Kathryn Cullen, a principal at Kurt Salmon Associates, a consulting firm, who said that she has not advised Wal-Mart. "They track the purchases and very quickly route that back to their suppliers so they can be replenished. They are very strict with their suppliers, but they give them the data that they need." Armed with sales results from past weeks and months, Wal-Mart meets with each of its suppliers to establish sales goals for the coming year. Suppliers are actively encouraged, so to speak, not to miss those goals. A manufacturer that fails to meet its sales target -- or has data-documented problems with orders, delivery, restocking or returns -- can expect even tougher negotiations in the future from Wal-Mart, which is renowned for its steeliness in such situations. Still, achieving sleeker operations is not the whole story. In many ways, data are used to forecast and drive Wal-Mart's business. "We use it in real estate decisions, understanding what the draw is like and what the customers will be like," Ms. Dillman said, referring to the company's planning for new stores, including the number of shoppers it expects to attract to each. When it comes to Sam's Club, Wal-Mart's membership warehouse chain, "we know who every customer is," she added. So Wal-Mart does a kind of outreach, contacting nearby convenience store owners, for example, to let them know that "the items they buy, they could save money on by buying at Sam's." AT Wal-Mart, problems are referred to as "exceptions," and technology is essential for what Ms. Dillman calls "exception management." Within the company's empire, "we keep watching everything that just happened," she said. "We are pretty near real time. We can tell people that they need to go do something, and we are within hours, depending on the event." The "event" may be a truck's failure to drop off or pick up something, or the delivery of a load of shoes missing their mates. It could be the absence of an important product in a store's backroom, or in the distribution center that serves that store. Or it could be an act of nature like the hurricanes that descended, one after another, on Florida and other parts of the Southeast this year. Eventually, some experts say, Wal-Mart will use its technology to institute what is called scan-based trading, in which manufacturers own each product until it is sold. "Wal-Mart will never take those products onto its books," said Bruce Hudson, a retail analyst at the Meta Group, an information technology consulting firm in Stamford, Conn. "If you think of the impact of shedding $50 billion of inventory, that is huge." The impact will probably be felt by suppliers, he added, but none are likely to complain. "You can see the pattern of Wal-Mart's mandates, and as Wal-Mart grows in power, it is getting more dictatorial," he said. "The suppliers shake their heads and say, 'I don't want to go this way, but they are so big.' Wal-Mart lives in a world of supply and command, instead of a world of supply and demand." Consumers willingly turn over plenty of information. For example, cashing a payroll check at Wal-Mart requires a two-step process, said an assistant manager in a Wal-Mart in Saddle Brook, N.J., who asked to be identified only by her first name, Mary. "First you enter your Social Security number into the system, twice," she said, pointing to the number pad hooked up to a register in the checkout lane. "The cashier can enter it, but some people don't like to share that information." Next a customer must enter his or her driver's license number, the assistant manager said. If payroll checks are cashed regularly at Wal-Mart, there is no need to keep punching in the Social Security number, only the driver's license number: "The system will recognize you the next time." All of that information winds up at the company's office in Bentonville, the assistant manager added. Ms. Dillman said it was "separated out, along with any personal identifiable information," and warehoused in a way that requires special permission to gain access. For check approval -- when a customer writes a personal check to pay for something at a Wal-Mart, for example -- "we don't keep it any longer than we need it for that transaction," she said. "All it's linked to is the checking account number, when we scan your check," she added. "We don't mine that data. We don't use it for anything other than the transaction." Historically, Wal-Mart's focus has been on the products it sells, not to whom it sells them. One of the most difficult pieces of information to harvest is which customer bought what. Such information is expensive, too. "When you are in the everyday-low-price market, you tend not to gather a lot of information about customers directly because you don't spend a lot of time with them gathering name, address, telephone numbers through a loyalty card," said Gene Alvarez, a vice president at the Meta Group. "That is the proper focus, because when you want to get customer-intimate, you have to offer a loyalty program, and there's the cost of that loyalty program." Wal-Mart has discovered the potential of its own Web site in learning more about customers. Ms. Dillman said the site was beginning to allow users to buy a product online and have it delivered to a store near them, an option that Sears, Roebuck and other retailers have had for years. Naturally, some personal information would have to be submitted as part of the transaction. "You can do some association there, what products are of what interest," Mr. Alvarez said. But Wal-Mart executives tend to care more about how products sell as part of a larger basket. "Me knowing what you specifically buy is not necessarily going to help me get the right merchandise into the store," Ms. Dillman said. "Knowing collectively what goes into one shopping cart together tells us a lot more." Analyzing what ends up together in that cart drives Wal-Mart's pricing, other experts said. Shoppers might buy cold medicine along with chicken soup and orange juice during flu season, but not all of those products need to be priced at rock-bottom, said Ms. Overby, the Forrester analyst. "They might say, 'If we get really good at pricing the cold medicine and promoting it and letting people know that, hey, we have that product in stock and also at the best prices,' then they get people into the store," she said. "The other items in the basket might not be the lowest price in town, but the entire basket will be 10 to 20 percent less." STILL, as Wal-Mart recently discovered, there can be such a thing as too much information. Six women brought a sex-discrimination lawsuit against the company in 2001 that was broadened this year to a class of about 1.6 million current and former female employees. Lawyers for the women have said that Wal-Mart has the ability to use its human-resources database to calculate back pay for the plaintiffs as well as to determine whether women were fairly promoted and paid. The judge hearing the case, which is pending in a federal court in San Francisco, has agreed. The database is unusually detail-rich, said Joseph Sellers, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. "They've put into their work force database the information that bears on virtually every facet of compensation," he said. "They have performance reviews, along with seniority, the time spent with the company, which store they worked in. So you can compare people working in the same store, to measure whether men and women are paid differently." If that comes to pass, it will be a rare moment indeed, with Wal-Mart's carefully assembled data being channeled for a purpose Wal-Mart did not desire. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The 'johnmacsgroup' Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, New York Times Company. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml John F. McMullen http://www.westnet.com/~observer ==------------response below-------------- From Cherie Price on the OSINT discussion list -----Original Message----- From: CodeTen7 < > To: discuss-osint@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [discuss-osint] The End of Privacy -- It's not the FBI or CIA -- What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers' Habits Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 09:50:38 -0700 I am NOT a Walmart fan. When they first started opening huge numbers of stores in and around the area in which I live(d), I shopped there because I was suckered into their "everything we sell is made in the U.S.A.". That sure didn't last long. I've read all about their unfair and downright unethical practices used against their employees and have read all the info ciruclated about their overseas "sweat shops". I've further read about their tracking policies of which customers purchase what items. The only thing I can't fault them on is their unique and brilliant (and very expensive) technology of knowing what to stock their shelves with. That is simply 'good business'. So why do I continue to shop there when I dislike 'them' so much? Prices, of course. Though as a regular (and former) Walmart shopper, I could testify under oath that their prices are going up, up, up. A couple of years ago, I sought out and complained to a Walmart manager that they don't put 'shelf prices' on a huge percentage of their items. I was laughingly told that they were working on it (like hell) and I always had in-store price scanners available to me to check the price of an item I might be intersted in. Trust me, by not putting up shelf prices, most people will buy the wanted items anyway thinking "it will be cheaper here" than elsewhere. Wrong, people! 3 weeks ago, while grocery shopping in Walmart, I was on the other side of the store and found a couple of GI Joes that are missing from my grandson's collection. Trust me, it's difficult to find a toy he doesn't own! No shelf price. I take them to a scanner and they scanned at $9.96 each. Though they were basically the same toy, I scanned both of them -- just to make sure. When they were rung up at the checkout register, they rang up at $13.96 each. STOP, I told the cashier and explained why. She called management at my request. We ended up having 3 'managers' at my register and I accused them of unlawful practices. An in-store scanner and the cash register ringing up different amounts in a period of 45 minutes?? I don't think so. They finally ended up generously (gag) "offering" me the toys at $9.96. I told them where they could put them and it wasn't into my shopping bag. A week ago, against my own better judgement, I returned to Walmart. There ARE some things that are cheaper ... snacks for the kids, hair spray etc. Let me back up a minute. When I walk into a store ... ANY store, my brain turns into a very functionable and extrememly accurate caluculator. Whether I buy 12 things or 212 things, when they are rung up, I know to the penny whether the items are being rung up at the right price. In Walmart, you are required to take your purchases from your cart and put them on the conveyor belt. What I do that I've never seen anyone else do, is turn the "customer-view-register" (or whatever it's called) to face me. I then put my items on the counter by touch as my eyes are on the register. When the cart is empty and I have to move a couple of feet forward, I again turn the register to where I can see it. I would suggest everyone do this. OK ... back to shopping a week ago ... I again bought a toy. My 5 yr old was with me and had 'worked and earned' a treat. He wanted a new Star Wars figure (said he'd been wanting this one for 200 years ;-) ) ... It was $4.96 ... on the SHELF. It rang up at the register for $9.96. BULL! Needless to say, since the child was with me, I HAD TO buy the action figure ... but I bought it for $4.96. Sorry this is so lengthy, as well as personal, but I'm trying to warn all Walmart shoppers ... BUYER BEWARE. I, for one, will NOT return to this store. Take a look around you when in Walmart and see how many items are in everyone's shopping carts ... A LOT! Now, think how many people are paying $9.96 for a $4.96 toy and don't even know it happened. Walmart soared to leading the pack in the category of 'discount' stores and I am waiting for the day when their self inflated balloon bursts. BUYER BEWARE. I am bcc'ing this to all of my friends (especially the toy shoppers who have kids/grandkids) as holiday shopping has begun. If you shop at this consumer unfriendly store, watch your back. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have had the same problems when I have been in Walmart here. Shelf price says one thing, check out clerk says another; the clerks are told not to budge on the price; your only alternative is to have them call a manager over to the register all the time they are condescending to you and six or eight customers in line behind you are giving you dirty looks. And unless you can match up the exact product number at the sales sign in the aisle with the product number on the item itself, they'll keep insisting the sales sign pertained to a 'different model' or a 'different size'. PAT] ------------------------------ From: chsvideo@hotmail.com (Lincoln J. King-Cliby) Subject: Supervision For DID Lines? Date: 14 Nov 2004 18:18:29 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hello, A question I've been pondering for a while: When you call a DID number, at what point does the call start to be billed? For example, Cal State University San Marcos (my employer and school) has the entire 760-750-xxxx range -- serving the campus with an EADS Telecom PointSpan switch, served by the telco with a Nortel DMS-100 Large Remote, located on campus (actually in the middle of one of the parking lots). If I were to call campus long-distance, when would the call become billable? At the time ringing starts? At the time someone answers (but how can the telco determine this)? What about misdialed calls to numbers not in service (which there are a large number of and IIRC, ring infinitely)? Now for another example, from my desk phone I tried calling my counterpart at Cal Poly Pomona ... Thanks to old directory information on their website my first attempt was not successful: I got two beeps of the "fast busy" signal followed by (not exact, but close) "You have called a non-working number at California State Polytechnic University Pomona. If you feel that you have reached this recording in error, please consult our website at --- or call the university operator (hours) at ---" Would we be billed for this call? If it were a telco generated recording I would say no ... but since this was a customer-generated (and LONG) recording ...? Just curious and thanks for any answers, Lincoln ------------------------------ From: chsvideo@hotmail.com (Lincoln J. King-Cliby) Subject: While I'm Asking Questions: CalNet Date: 14 Nov 2004 18:30:00 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com While I'm at this: How does CalNet work? The particular system I'm refering to is what appears to be a private telephone network connecting some (but by no means all) California state agencies with its own dialplan. For example, from the Office of Risk and Insurance Management website: Susan Hogg (Office Chief) (916) 376-5271 CALNET: 8-480-5271 Or the Agricultural Labor Relations Board PHONE 916-653-3803 CALNET 8-453-3803 etc., etc., etc., But other agencies -- such as (as far as I can tell) every campus within the California State University system, and the University of California have absolutely no participation in CalNet. So how does it work? I can't imagine the State of California mantaining its own LD switching equipment ... well, actually I can, but I'd rather not. Thanks, Lincoln ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Update: Vonage Ring Problem Organization: ATCC Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 17:15:00 -0500 In article , devilspgd@crazyhat.net says ... > In message Tony P. > wrote: >> I found either dialing 1+NPA+NXX+XXXX completes calls in < 2 seconds >> while dialing NXX-XXXX takes 5 to 6 seconds -- they're waiting to time >> out in that case. > Try dialing NPA+NXX+XXXX and it will connect the call immediately. >> Overall the receive audio quality is mostly superb (I do notice a >> slight background noise that reminds me of the old microwave >> transmissions systems for LD calls.) and outgoing audio reminds most >> people of a cell phone less the gaps. I can live with that. > Last I heard Vonage is artificially adding background noise. So people wouldn't think the connection dropped. Usually you can hear the person breathing on the other end among other background noises. If I just punch a digit I can hear a distinct hiss of sorts on the line. Tried this using a number of phones ranging in year from 1949 to the present. They all did it. ------------------------------ From: Steve Crow Subject: Re: Update: Vonage Ring Problem Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 23:54:15 GMT Tony P. wrote: > Ah yes, I should have mentioned that I tried the terminator also. That > also gives a < 2 second connection time. > It's funny how spoiled you get by the incumbent carrier though. Punch a > 7 digit number with no terminator and the call connects immediately. > Probably because they've got all sorts of ARS and routing tables set > up to handle it. Kind of hard to do on a little Linksys router. Not necessarily. When Sprint (former Centel) replaced the aging TRW-Vidar switch in Montpelier, VA with a shiny new Nortel DMS-100 in late-1999, the DMS was set up to wait for additional digits on anything that was not a local exchange (of which there are a whopping THREE). So unless you're dialing 883-xxxx, 227-xxxx, or 449-xxxx, there's a 4-digit delay at the end while it waits for more digits. Hitting [#] expedites the call. It even does this with 10- or 11-digit dialing (local or long distance), and 3-digit dialing (411, 611, 711, 811, and presumably 911). Irrelevent to the topic at hand, but interesting nonetheless: The old Vidar handled the prefix of "1" as well as the local area code (804) quite strangely. If I wanted to dial a local call, I could not put 804 in front of it; it would roll the call to intercept. If I wanted to dial a long-distance call in the same area code, I did not need the "1". I could dial 1-749-xxxx, or I could do 804-749-xxxx, since it treated the "804" as a "1". I could also do 1-804-749-xxxx, or (and this was fun) 804-804-749-xxxx (the first "804" was treated as a "1"). Also amusing was out-of-area-code long distance: 804-540-829-xxxx would work. Time and temperature, however, was simply 8463. :) The new DMS still won't allow the area code in front of a local exchange. You just can't do fun stuff like this with these newfangled VoIP boxes. Personally, I want my Vidar back. Steve ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 16:16:29 -0600 From: Neal McLain Reply-To: nmclain@annsgarden.com Subject: Re: 'K' v. 'W' Television Station Callsigns Steve Crow wrote: >>> Louisiana and Minnesota both "straddle" the Mississippi >>> River. >> In my experience (mostly in cable TV), the Mississippi- >> River rule can be more accurately stated as follows: >> "K" = west of the Mississippi River plus the entire >> state of Minnesota. >> "W" = east of the Mississippi River plus Louisiana >> parishes located in the Baton Rouge and New Orleans >> DMAs. >> But even with this version of the rule there are >> numerous exceptions, especially in the case of low-power >> television stations (LPTV, Class A, translators, and >> boosters). > Do the same rules apply to radio stations as well? I > would imagine so, but what about KYW in Pennsylvania? > According to: > http://www.kyw1060.com/stationinfo/station_history.cfm > ... the station has moved several times (Chicago, > Cleveland), but appears to have maintained the same call > sign even in moves across state lines. Is this common? Since the second-level (">>") quotes above seem to be taken from my post in TD 23:505, I'll attempt to provide an answer. What I called "the Mississippi-River rule" was intended to apply only to television stations. I didn't intend it to apply to radio. Furthermore, my "rule" is not the official FCC rule; it's just an attempt on my part to define the line in such a way that it minimizes the number of exceptions. It certainly doesn't eliminate all exceptions: as Robert Bonomi pointed out in TD 23:510, my rule creates several (four, by my count) exceptions in Duluth, Grand Marais, and Hibbing, Minnesota. But it eliminates far more exceptions than it creates. Furthermore, it eliminates ambiguity in DMAs (or smaller non-DMA markets) that straddle the river, but don't straddle a state line: Baton Rouge, Bemidji, Minneapolis, New Orleans, St. Cloud. With regard to radio: as Mark Roberts pointed out in TD 23:506, a good source of information about the K/W rule, as it applies to AM broadcast stations (including KYW), is Thomas H. White's "United States Callsign Policies." http://earlyradiohistory.us/kwtrivia.htm A comprehensive state-by-state list of all broadcast stations is available at http://www.tvradioworld.com/region1/usa/usastates.asp . From this site, you can drill down to a list of stations in each individual city. Unfortunately, this list is often out-of-date. To verify the specifics related to any particular station, click on the "F" button in each station's listing; this will link you to the FCC's database for that particular station. Neal McLain ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: Re: What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers' Habits Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 18:26:15 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com In message TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock): > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: No, their prices are not necessarily > lower. Prices are only lower in areas (of the merchandise) they > want to push one week. At our downtown grocery store, Marvin's, the > selection is always just as good, and the prices are nearly always > at least competitive (if not sometimes better) than Walmart. Plus > which, I *hate* large crowds in a mall-type setting, and not getting > the customer service, carry out to your car arrangements that Marvins > and the stores downtown offer. PAT] I don't shop at Walmart's grocery stores ... But I don't believe that Walmart is pushing dry catfood, wet catfood, cat litter, fish tank pumps and other accessories, or dandruff hair care products over the last two years, are they? I'm one of those people that prices things out at different stores. I don't blow an 8 hour day looking to save $0.25 on a $5 product, but when I do buy something, I write down the price. When I go to another store that carries the product, if it's cheaper I write down the new price. Walmart is consistently the cheapest on those products, for example. Why is a person who plays the piano called a pianist, but a person who drives a race car isn't called a racist? ------------------------------ From: Rick Merrill Subject: Re: Use Comcast Cable Modem? Go to Jail! Judy Sammels's Experience Organization: Comcast Online Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 22:47:53 GMT > Unfortunately, I think I know what the problem is. I had signed up for > Comcast@home cable modem service last March, but had not signed up for > cable TV service. (Last time I checked, this was legal. In fact, it is > mentioned specifically as a service in the FAQ list on @home's web > site.) But, when they came to install my @home service, they had > neglected to install the filter (they call it a video trap) to filter > out the video signal; from reaching my home. ... I think there is a misconception about the "video trap" : it does NOT cut out the video, but removes some video reflections so that said reflections will not interfere with the cable modem! The "solution" to your original problem was simply to Not Connect your TV to the cable. - RM ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 23:53:55 EST From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: TV Movie: Category 6 - Day of Destruction Did anyone else watch the first part of this two part movie on CBS Sunday night. (For us, CBS is cable channel 6/7 in Joplin, MO/Tulsa, OK.) The movie purported to be about a major disaster in Chicago, when a major power outage covering several midwestern states takes place on the same day as a major storm (converging on the city from *three* directions all at once). The movie implied the power outage was due to a greedy company they called the 'Lexer Corporation' which was a power supplier to the local electric utility, which they called 'Midwest Edison'. Apparently Lexer had been manipulating things all over the midwest with the various power companies and was the villian responsible for the midwest power outage in several states which was going on. To make matters worse, in the midst of this multi- state power outage, weather conditions made it necessary to evacuate large numbers of citizens to shelters, etc. The unusual weather conditions were due, the movie claimed, to the large number of climate changes known as 'global warming' and 'greenhouse conditions' which this company (Lexer Corporation) was also causing through their mistreatment of the atmosphere. (They, and other companies in the business of manufacturing and using aerosols). When the first part of the movie ended Sunday night, the 'Jarvis Station' of 'Midwest Edison' was running well beyond capacity at the instuctions of the 'Lexer Corporation' people who were desparate to keep the power up and running everywhere, despite the fact that that the federal government was after them to reduce the power output at 'Jarvis' due to the dangers which were being caused. The 'Lexer' and 'Midwest Edison' people have begun to suspect maybe a 'computer hacker' has caused much of this trouble. The movie producers frequently use 'Lexer' and 'Enron' in the same scenes, as if to imply that Lexer's corporate structure and sheer bully pressure on its employees are going to eventually cause an 'Enron-like' collapse of Lexer. All the while we see people trapped in elevators and on subway trains and no one able to get news of any kind on the radio or television unless they happen to have a portable battery operated unit. It was a very frightening movie about what will be the consequences of 'global warming' and what will happen if the very complex computers which run our interlocking power grid go out of order at the same time as a major storm in a large metropolitan area. The second and final part of this movie will air on CBS at 8 PM central time on Wednesday night. If you did not see the Sunday night portion of the movie, you may want to watch the Wednesday night sequel. Patrick Townson ------------------------------ From: richgr@panix.com (Rich Greenberg) Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Purely Spam! MY PRESENTATION TO YOU Date: 14 Nov 2004 19:26:54 -0500 Organization: Organized? Me? In article , HENRY CASTLE wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Of the 126 times in the past two days > I have been selected by some bogus Solicitor in Nigeria somewhere to > serve as the executor of some poor deceased devils estate (always > numbering in the millions-billions of dollars) I have never once > answered them. I am wondering what would happen if I did. I've had > many folks say these charlatans would try to pick me clean, getting > my bank deposit account numbers, my social security number, etc. And > some have suggested they (the charlatans) would send you a bogus > draft for several thousand million billion dollars to be deposited > in my bank account, which, surprise!, would turn out to be > counterfiet after I had endorsed/negotiated it and remitted proceeds > back to the Solicitor, etc. > Has anyone on the net ever played their game back at them? That is to > say, responded saying "I am so sorry to hear of my long lost relative > being deceased, how can I help you?" then milked them and toyed with > them as long as they kept playing back? I wonder what they would > say/do then? Let's say, a few typographical errors in your social > security number, your bank and credit card numbers, etc. Or maybe a > *l o n g* time before you remitted proceeds back to them less the > matter of your fees, of course. Naturally you do not withdraw five > cents of the 'money order' or 'bank draft' they use to pay you with > until *it* has cleared, in the unlikely event it ever does. I would > suggest you give it to your bank and ask *them* to clear it first > before they issue any credit to you. Above all, do not sign or endorse > it in any way. See if you can get any good, legitimate email or > street addresses for these fools before you get them on the run, of > course. So -- if there are any Sires or Madams in our audience today > who feel like playing along and milking Henry Castle, Solicitor at > Law for whatever he may be worth, have at it. Here is his Crock > for your examination and purusal. PAT] There are two flavors of these scams and the "You have won the lottery" scam. One flavor is that you have to send them several hundred dollars of earnest money/processing fee or some such. You send that and you never hear from them again or perhaps they attempt to get an additional fee. The other is that if they can get your bank account and bank routing numbers, they will monitor your account a while and at a peak, they will drain it with an ACH transfer through a Nigerian bank that works with them (for a cut of the action). Best thing to do with them is to ignore them. If you want to do something at all, forward them with complete headers to 419.fcd@usss.treas.gov which I have been doing for a while. Not sure what if any good that does but they have never asked me to desist. Rich Greenberg N6LRT Marietta GA USA richgr atsign panix.com +1 770 321 6507 Eastern time zone. I speak for myself & my dogs only. VM'er since CP-67 Canines:Val, Red & Shasta (RIP),Red, husky Owner:Chinook-L Atlanta Siberian Husky Rescue. www.panix.com/~richgr/ sst Owner:Sibernet-L ------------------------------ From: Rick Merrill Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Purely Spam! MY PRESENTATION TO YOU Organization: Comcast Online Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 00:56:21 GMT HENRY CASTLE wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Of the 126 times in the past two days > I have been selected by some bogus Solicitor in Nigeria somewhere to > serve as the executor of some poor deceased devils estate (always > numbering in the millions-billions of dollars) I have never once > answered them. I am wondering what would happen if I did. I've had > many folks say these charlatans would try to pick me clean, getting > my bank deposit account numbers, my social security number, etc. And > some have suggested they (the charlatans) would send you a bogus > draft for several thousand million billion dollars to be deposited > in my bank account, which, surprise!, would turn out to be > counterfiet after I had endorsed/negotiated it and remitted proceeds > back to the Solicitor, etc. > Has anyone on the net ever played their game back at them? Yes. I've seen some of the back and forth of this effort. It is fruitless and potentially dangerous and is not advised. There are just too many of 'them.' - RM ------------------------------ From: henry999@eircom.net (Henry) Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Purely Spam! Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 06:26:37 +0200 Organization: Elisa Internet customer > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: > Has anyone on the net ever played their game back at them? That is to > say, responded saying "I am so sorry to hear of my long lost relative > being deceased, how can I help you?" then milked them and toyed with > them as long as they kept playing back? I wonder what they would > say/do then? Oh yes, Pat. Check out www.scamorama.com for a barrel of laughs. cheers, Henry ------------------------------ From: SELLCOM Tech support Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Purely Spam! MY PRESENTATION TO YOU Organization: www.sellcom.com Reply-To: support@sellcom.com Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 04:57:39 GMT > Has anyone on the net ever played their game back at them? It is becoming a major sport. Here are some sites I found. www.419eater.com www.ebolamonkeyman.com Now, these websites have some objectionable content but after all they are dealing with criminals. Steve at SELLCOM http://www.sellcom.com Discount multihandset cordless phones by Siemens, AT&T, Panasonic, Vtech 5.8Ghz; TMC ET4000 4line Epic phone, OnHoldPlus, Beamer, Watchguard! Brick wall "non MOV" surge protection. Ramsplitter firewood splitters If you sit at a desk www.ergochair.biz you owe it to yourself. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 05:00:20 +0000 (GMT) From: Ted Klugman Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Purely Spam! MY PRESENTATION TO YOU Organization: Optimum Online On Sat, 13 Nov 2004 05:45:22 -0600, HENRY CASTLE wrote: > Has anyone on the net ever played their game back at them? You bet. There's a website dedicated to it. Lots of laughs. http://www.419eater.com ------------------------------ 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. 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End of TELECOM Digest V23 #547 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Nov 15 15:33:07 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iAFKX6l01744; Mon, 15 Nov 2004 15:33:07 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 15:33:07 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411152033.iAFKX6l01744@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 #548 TELECOM Digest Mon, 15 Nov 2004 15:31:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 548 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Telecom Update (Canada) #457, November 15, 2004 (Angus TeleManagement) VoIP Backers Should Celebrate Bush Win (Lisa Minter) Wired News: American Passports to Get Chipped (Marcus Didius Falco) Trial Shows How Spammers Operate (Monty Solomon) Trial Shows How Spammers Operate (Long Version) (Marcus Didius Falco) Re: Chechen Rebel Web Site Reopened (BobGoudreau@nc.rr.com) Re: TV Movie: Category 6 - Day of Destruction (Paul A Lee) Re: Use Comcast Cable Modem? Go to Jail! Judy Sammel (Clarence Dold) Re: Movie Studios to Sue Internet File Traders (jmeissen@aracnet.com) Re: Last Laugh! Purely Spam! MY PRESENTATION TO YOU (Dan Lanciani) Re: Last Laugh! Purely Spam! MY PRESENTATION TO YOU (Tim@Backhome.org) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 10:41:11 -0500 From: Angus TeleManagement Subject: Telecom Update (Canada) #457, November 15, 2004 ************************************************************ TELECOM UPDATE ************************************************************ published weekly by Angus TeleManagement Group http://www.angustel.ca Number 457: November 15, 2004 Publication of Telecom Update is made possible by generous financial support from: ** ALLSTREAM: www.allstream.com ** AVAYA: www.avaya.ca/en/ ** BELL CANADA: www.bell.ca ** CISCO SYSTEMS CANADA: www.cisco.com/ca/ ** ERICSSON: www.ericsson.ca ** MITEL NETWORKS: www.mitel.com/ ** SPRINT CANADA: www.sprint.ca ** UTC CANADA: www.canada.utc.org/ ************************************************************ IN THIS ISSUE: ** Fast Shake-Up at Microcell ** Rogers Aims to Take Wireless Company Private ** Nortel Finds $3 Billion Problem, Delays Reports Again ** Ottawa Opens Infrastructure Protection Discussion ** Bell Wants Faster Tariff Approvals ** Videotron Cable and Telecom Units to Merge ** Mitel Upgrades Flagship PBX ** FCC Asserts Control of U.S. Internet Calling ** Rogers to Announce PEI Investment ** Roadpost Offers World Blackberry Rental ** Clarification on Bell Staff Reductions ** Cisco Sales Grow 17% ** Everything's Changing in Telephony--Almost ============================================================ FAST SHAKE-UP AT MICROCELL: After winning its takeover bid last week, Rogers Wireless moved quickly to put its own team in charge of Microcell Telecommunications. Rogers CEO Nadir Mohamed and CFO John Gossling have been named to the same positions at Microcell, replacing Andre Tremblay and Jacques Leduc, who have resigned. Other Microcell executives are expected to depart soon. ** Alain Rheaume, who has been President and COO of Microcell Solutions, has been named Executive VP of Rogers Wireless and President of Fido. ** The entire Microcell Board has been replaced by members of Rogers' Board. ROGERS AIMS TO TAKE WIRELESS COMPANY PRIVATE: Rogers Communications wants to buy the 11% equity interest in Rogers Wireless that it doesn't currently own. It is proposing to offer 1.75 shares in Rogers Communications for each outstanding wireless share. NORTEL FINDS $3 BILLION PROBLEM, DELAYS REPORTS AGAIN: Nortel Networks has again delayed releasing financial reports, saying its 1999 and 2000 sales figures were overstated by US$3 billion. Most of that amount will be moved into subsequent years, but $250 million will be "permanently reversed." ** The announcement comes just days after the company launched a new image-building advertising campaign, using the slogan "This is the Way. This is Nortel." OTTAWA OPENS INFRASTRUCTURE PROTECTION DISCUSSION: Communications and Information technology is one of 10 key sectors identified in the federal government's new Position Paper on a National Strategy for Critical Infrastructure Protection. Ottawa wants to "elicit feedback from stakeholder groups" with the goal of adopting a strategy by the fall of 2005. www.ocipep.gc.ca/critical/nciap/positionpap_e.asp BELL WANTS FASTER TARIFF APPROVALS: Bell Canada has asked the CRTC to streamline the process for reviewing and approving the incumbent telcos' retail tariffs. Under Bell's proposal, tariffs would receive interim approval in 10 days or 40 days (depending on the nature of the tariff) unless the Commission deferred or denied them in that time, and would receive final approval in 60 days unless rejected by the Commission. ** Bell says the proposed changes would not "conflict with or modify the Commission's current regulatory framework or price cap rules." www.crtc.gc.ca/PartVII/eng/2004/8657/b2_200412627.htm VIDEOTRON CABLE AND TELECOM UNITS TO MERGE: Quebecor Media announced last week plans to integrate its Videotron Telecom unit into its cable subsidiary, Videotron ltee, in 2005. MITEL UPGRADES FLAGSHIP PBX: Mitel Networks is now shipping Release 5 of its 3300 ICP IP-PBX, featuring enhancements to in-building wireless, hotdesking, messaging, system management, and other capabilities. FCC ASSERTS CONTROL OF U.S. INTERNET CALLING: The Federal Communications Commission has voted unanimously to exempt Vonage's Internet telephony service from regulation by the State of Minnesota, asserting that such services fall under federal jurisdiction. ROGERS TO ANNOUNCE PEI INVESTMENT: This morning, Rogers will announce a donation to support wireless research and development in Prince Edward Island, and measures to improve wireless coverage on the island. ROADPOST OFFERS WORLD BLACKBERRY RENTAL: Toronto-based Roadpost says it is the first Canadian provider of wireless equipment for world travelers to offer BlackBerry rentals. The service delivers data in 55 countries. CLARIFICATION ON BELL STAFF REDUCTIONS: Bell Canada points out that the 5,000 employees who are leaving the company (see Telecom Update #456) have all accepted voluntary departure or voluntary early retirement packages. CISCO SALES GROW 17%: Cisco Systems reports net sales of US$5.97 billion, an increase of 17% over a year ago and 0.8% over the previous quarter. Net income increased 29% to $1.40 billion. R&D of $787 million was 7% higher than a year ago. EVERYTHING'S CHANGING IN TELEPHONY -- ALMOST: The November-December issue of Telemanagement, now available online, provides an exclusive look at the future of business telecommunications by Fred Knight, a world-recognized authority on enterprise telephony and networking. Also in this issue: ** Avaya and Mitel: Two Strategies for IP Success ** Opening Enterprise Wi-Fi Nets to Guests and Customers ** Reinventing Telecom Management, Again These important reports are available to Telemanagement subscribers only! To subscribe today, call 1-800-263-4415 ext 500 or go to www.angustel.ca/teleman/tm-sub-online.html. ============================================================ HOW TO SUBMIT ITEMS FOR TELECOM UPDATE E-MAIL: editors@angustel.ca FAX: 905-686-2655 MAIL: TELECOM UPDATE Angus TeleManagement Group 8 Old Kingston Road Ajax, Ontario Canada L1T 2Z7 =========================================================== HOW TO SUBSCRIBE (OR UNSUBSCRIBE) TELECOM UPDATE is provided in electronic form only. There are two formats available: 1. The fully-formatted edition is posted on the World Wide Web on the first business day of the week at www.angustel.ca 2. The e-mail edition is distributed free of charge. To subscribe, send an e-mail message to: join-telecom_update@nova.sparklist.com To stop receiving the e-mail edition, send an e-mail message to: leave-telecom_update@nova.sparklist.com Sending e-mail to these addresses will automatically add or remove the sender's e-mail address from the list. Leave subject line and message area blank. We do not give Telecom Update subscribers' e-mail addresses to any third party. For more information, see www.angustel.ca/update/privacy.html. =========================================================== COPYRIGHT AND CONDITIONS OF USE: All contents copyright 2004 Angus TeleManagement Group Inc. All rights reserved. For further information, including permission to reprint or reproduce, please e-mail rosita@angustel.ca or phone 905-686-5050 ext 500. The information and data included has been obtained from sources which we believe to be reliable, but Angus TeleManagement makes no warranties or representations whatsoever regarding accuracy, completeness, or adequacy. Opinions expressed are based on interpretation of available information, and are subject to change. If expert advice on the subject matter is required, the services of a competent professional should be obtained. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 12:25:48 -0500 Subject: VoIP Backers Should Celebrate Bush Win http://news.com.com/VoIP+backers+should+celebrate+Bush+win/2010-1071-5450656.html By Declan McCullagh President Bush's second term is likely to yield ballooning deficits, further erosion of civil liberties, and military adventurism that will estrange the United States from the rest of the world. But a decision last week illustrates why Bush's ascendancy is terrific news for Internet telephony companies that would have experienced a tougher time if a Democrat had moved into the White House. The Federal Communications Commission's vote on Tuesday in favor of voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, companies nicely captures the long-running discord between the Democrats' regulatory fetishism and the Republicans' regulatory restraint. Led by FCC Chairman Michael Powell, the Republicans said VoIP must be freed from the clutches of busybody state utility commissioners--an argument also raised by Vonage and Internet companies worried about states regulating prices and levying onerous taxes in the manner of the former Soviet Union. As usual, that approach irked the two Democrats on the five-member commission. Full story at: http://news.com.com/VoIP+backers+should+celebrate+Bush+win/2010-1071-5450656.html ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 12:51:05 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Wired News: American Passports to Get Chipped http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,65412,00.html http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,65412,00.html By Ryan Singel Story location:=20 http://www.wired.com= /news/privacy/0,1848,65412,00.html New U.S. passports will soon be read remotely at borders around the world, thanks to embedded chips that will broadcast on command an individual's name, address and digital photo to a computerized reader. The State Department hopes the addition of the chips, which employ radio frequency identification, or RFID, technology, will make passports more secure and harder to forge, according to spokeswoman Kelly Shannon. "The reason we are doing this is that it simply makes passports more secure," Shannon said. "It's yet another layer beyond the security features we currently use to ensure the bearer is the person who was issued the passport originally." But civil libertarians and some technologists say the chips are actually a boon to identity thieves, stalkers and commercial data collectors, since anyone with the proper reader can download a person's biographical information and photo from several feet away. "Even if they wanted to store this info in a chip, why have a chip that can be read remotely?" asked Barry Steinhardt, who directs the American Civil Liberty Union's Technology and Liberty program. "Why not require the passport be brought in contact with a reader so that the passport holder would know it had been captured? Americans in the know will be wrapping their passports in aluminum foil." Last week, four companies received contracts from the government to deliver prototype chips and readers immediately for evaluation. Diplomats and State Department employees will be issued the new passports as early as January, while other citizens applying for new passports will get the new version starting in the spring. Countries around the world are also in the process of including the tags in their passports, in part due to U.S. government requirements that some nations must add biometric identification in order for their citizens to visit without a visa. Current passports (which are already readable by machines that decipher text on the photo page) will remain valid until they expire, according to a State Department spokeswoman. The RFID passport works like a high-tech version of the children's game "Marco Polo." A reader speaks out the equivalent of "Marco" on a designated frequency. The chip then channels that radio energy and echoes back with an answer. But instead of simply saying "Polo," the 64 Kb chip will say the passport holder's name, address, date and place of birth, and send along a digital photograph. While none of the information on the chip is encrypted, the chip does also broadcast a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitally_Signed digital signature that verifies the chip itself was created by the government. Security experts said the U.S. government decided not to encrypt the data because of the risks involved in sharing the method of decryption with other countries. RFID technology has been around for more than 60 years, but has only recently become cheap enough to be adopted widely. Pass prepay toll systems across the country run on RFIDs, pets and livestock around the world have RFID implants, and businesses such as Wal-Mart plan to use the tags to track their inventory. But Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Lee Tien argues that RFID chips in passports are a "privacy horror" and would be even if the data was encrypted. "If 180 countries have access to the technology for reading this thing, whether or not it is encrypted, from a security standpoint, that is a very leaky system," Tien said. "Strictly from a technology standpoint, any reader system, even with security, that was so widely deployed and accessible to so many people worldwide will be subject to some very interesting compromises." Travel privacy expert Edward Hasbrouck argues that identity thieves are not the only ones with an interest in recording the data remotely. Commercial travel companies, including hotels, will capture the data to create commercial dossiers when people check into hotels or exchange currency in order to up-sell their customers, he argues. While there are no laws in the United States prohibiting anyone from snooping on someone's passport data, Roy Want, an RFID expert who works as a principal engineer for Intel Research, thinks that the possibility of identity theft is overblown. "It is actually quite hard to read RFID at a distance," said Want. A person's keys, bag and body interfere with the radio waves, and the type of RFID chip being used requires readers equipped with very large -- and obvious -- coils to capture the data, according to Want. Still, he concedes that a determined snooper could create a snooping system. "In principle someone could rig up a reader, perhaps in a doorway you are forcing people to go through. You could read some of these tags some of the time," Want said. But Want thinks that overall the chips will help cut down on passport fraud. "The problem with security is there is always a possibility of attack," Want said. "RFIDs are not going to solve the problem of passport forgery, but people who know about printing are not going to learn about RFIDs." Copyright 2004, Lycos,Inc. All Rights Reserved. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Lycos, Inc. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 00:18:07 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Trial Shows How Spammers Operate By MATTHEW BARAKAT AP Business Writer LEESBURG, Va. (AP) -- As one of the world's most prolific spammers, Jeremy Jaynes pumped out at least 10 million e-mails a day with the help of 16 high-speed lines, the kind of Internet capacity a 1,000-employee company would need. Jaynes' business was remarkably lucrative; prosecutors say he grossed up to $750,000 per month. If you have an e-mail account, chances are Jaynes tried to get your attention, pitching software, pornography and work-at-home schemes. The eight-day trial that ended in his conviction this month shed light on the operations of a 30-year-old former purveyor of physical junk mail who worked with minimal assistance out of a nondescript house in Raleigh, N.C. A state jury in Leesburg has recommended a nine-year prison term in the nation's first felony trial of spam purveyors. Sentencing is set for February. During the trial, prosecutors focused on three products that Jaynes hawked: software that promises to clean computers of private information; a service for choosing penny stocks to invest in; and a "FedEx refund processor" that promised $75-an-hour work but did little more than give buyers access to a Web site of delinquent FedEx accounts. Jaynes, going by Gaven Stubberfield and other aliases, had established a niche as a pornography purveyor, said Assistant Attorney General Russell McGuire, who prosecuted the case. But Jaynes was constantly tweaking and rotating products. Relatively few people actually responded to Jaynes' pitches. In a typical month, prosecutors said during the trial, Jaynes might receive 10,000 to 17,000 credit card orders, thus making money on perhaps only one of every 30,000 e-mails he sent out. But he earned $40 a pop, and the undertaking was so vast that Jaynes could still pull in $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead, McGuire said. http://finance.lycos.com/qc/news/story.aspx?story=200411150144_APO_V5198 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 00:38:20 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Trial Shows How Spammers Operate (Lycos full version) http://finance.lycos.com/qc/news/story.aspx?story=3D200411150144_APO_V5198 Trial Shows How Spammers Operate By MATTHEW BARAKAT AP Business Writer LEESBURG, Va. (AP) -- As one of the world's most prolific spammers, Jeremy Jaynes pumped out at least 10 million e-mails a day with the help of 16 high-speed lines, the kind of Internet capacity a 1,000-employee company would need. Jaynes' business was remarkably lucrative; prosecutors say he grossed up to $750,000 per month. If you have an e-mail account, chances are Jaynes tried to get your attention, pitching software, pornography and work-at-home schemes. The eight-day trial that ended in his conviction this month shed light on the operations of a 30-year-old former purveyor of physical junk mail who worked with minimal assistance out of a nondescript house in Raleigh, N.C. A state jury in Leesburg has recommended a nine-year prison term in the nation's first felony trial of spam purveyors. Sentencing is set for February. During the trial, prosecutors focused on three products that Jaynes hawked: software that promises to clean computers of private information; a service for choosing penny stocks to invest in; and a "FedEx refund processor" that promised $75-an-hour work but did little more than give buyers access to a Web site of delinquent FedEx accounts. Jaynes, going by Gaven Stubberfield and other aliases, had established a niche as a pornography purveyor, said Assistant Attorney General Russell McGuire, who prosecuted the case. But Jaynes was constantly tweaking and rotating products. Relatively few people actually responded to Jaynes' pitches. In a typical month, prosecutors said during the trial, Jaynes might receive 10,000 to 17,000 credit card orders, thus making money on perhaps only one of every 30,000 e-mails he sent out. But he earned $40 a pop, and the undertaking was so vast that Jaynes could still pull in $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead, McGuire said. "When you're marketing to the world, there are enough idiots out there" who will be suckered in, McGuire said in an interview. Prosecutors believe Jaynes had a net worth of up to $24 million, and they described one of his homes as a mansion, though the e-mail came from a house described as average. Jaynes got lists of e-mail addresses _ millions of them _ through a stolen database of America Online customers. He also illegally obtained e-mail addresses of users of the online auction site eBay. Prosecutors don't know how he got the lists, though McGuire said the AOL names matched a list of 92 million addresses an AOL software engineer has been charged with stealing. However Jaynes got them, they were particularly valuable because AOL customers and eBay users by their very nature have already shown a willingness to engage in e-commerce. Under Virginia law, like a federal anti-spam measure that took effect months later, sending out commercial pitches, even on a massive scale, is not itself illegal. The e-mail must be unsolicited and contain false information as to its origin or transmission. Jaynes did that in several ways. He provided bogus contact information and company names when registering for Web sites, making it almost impossible for recipients to track him down. He also falsified routing information within message headers and used software to generate phony domain names identifying the e-mail server used to send messages. "He would do that to circumvent the spam filters," said Lisa Hicks-Thomas, section chief for the Virginia attorney general's computer crimes unit. Jaynes honed his techniques a decade ago as a distributor of regular, old-fashioned junk mail hawking a "mortgage refund processor," similar to the FedEx refund processor he pitched in his spam, McGuire said. But the ability to set up shop in cyberspace allowed Jaynes to take his fraud to a whole new level, McGuire said. A videotape prosecutors were barred from showing at trial shows Jaynes sitting amid his array of computer equipment, bragging about sitting at "spam headquarters." It appears, though, that Jaynes was sending out e-mails 24 hours a day, so he could frequently leave those headquarters unstaffed. And it appears he had little assistance. Jaynes' sister, Jessica DeGroot, was convicted of identical charges but given no jail time. A third defendant was acquitted. Prosecutors would not discuss the investigative techniques that led to Jaynes' capture. But John Levine, author of "The Internet for Dummies" and an expert witness for the prosecution in Jaynes' trial, said Jaynes was relatively unsophisticated compared to spammers who use "zombie servers" in foreign countries _ akin to "e-mail laundering" _ to hide the e-mail's true origin. Such zombies are often innocent Internet users whose computers, through a virus or other malicious code, become relays for spam. "I was surprised at how simple his operation was," Levine said. "If he were more clever, it would have been much harder to catch him." Jaynes' defense attorney, David Oblon, never disputed that his client was a bulk e-mail distributor. But he argued that the law was poorly crafted and that prosecutors never proved the e-mail was unsolicited. He also argued before the trial that the law is an unconstitutional infringement of free speech. Jaynes can raise the free-speech issue on appeal, and Oblon said both he and Jaynes are confident the conviction will eventually be overturned. Oblon also took issue with the recommended nine-year sentence, calling it exceptionally harsh. Virginia is investigating similar cases, and McGuire said a lengthy sentence would serve as a deterrent _ not only in Virginia, where prosecutors brought the case given that AOL's headquarters is there. Copyright 2004, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance Lycos, Inc. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: BobGoudreau@withheld at request Subject: Re: Chechen Rebel Web Site Reopened Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 11:33:07 -0500 [As usual, please hide my email address.] Henry wrote: > Lisa Minter wrote: >> HELSINKI (Reuters) - A Web site used by a Chechen warlord to claim >> responsibility for September's school siege in Russia has reopened, >> one month after it was closed by the Finnish company that hosted it. >> Finnish news agency STT reported Saturday that the site, >> kavkavcenter.com, was now hosted on a Swedish server with a backup >> in Finland > Well, on Sunday at 1013 gmt I got > "The specified server could not be found." That's because either Lisa or Reuters made a typo. Having taken some Russian in college, I was immediately suspicious of the link above, since the Russian word for "Caucausus" transliterates to "Kavkaz", not "Kavkav" And indeed, www.kavzazcenter.com comes up fine in my browser. Bob Goudreau Cary, NC [Lisa Minter responds: I am at a total loss at reading/translating Russian. It would be easy to say Reuters made the error, but it might have well been my mistake, and I apologize.] ------------------------------ From: Paul A Lee Subject: Re: TV Movie: Category 6 - Day of Destruction Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 12:07:03 -0500 Organization: Rite Aid Corporation In TELECOM Digest V23 #547, our Esteemed Editor wrote (in part): > Did anyone else watch the first part of this two part movie > on CBS Sunday night[?] > The movie purported to be about a major disaster in > Chicago, when a major power outage covering several > midwestern states takes place on the same day as a major > storm (converging on the city from *three* directions all at > once)... > It was a very frightening movie about what will be the > consequences of 'global warming' and what will happen if the > very complex computers which run our interlocking power grid > go out of order at the same time as a major storm in a large > metropolitan area. I tuned in, just to see what kind of ideas would be offered by a production that apparently offered a "category 6" imaginary extension of the Saffir-Simpson scale (which only goes to 5). After about 20 minutes, I could no longer stand the smell of the hackneyed "evil conspiracy of huge corporations causing or taking advantage of natural disasters to destroy humanity for their own profit" plotline. I wonder what the reaction would be to a TV movie that depicts a conspiracy by entertainment companies to present a surfeit of disinformation about environmental problems, in the guise of "entertainment", with the goal of distracting the public from the _real_ issues? Paul A Lee Sr Telecom Engineer [let's leave the company name out of this one] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well Paul, the entertainment companies do that already. You should know that in the movies, everyone and every idea is fair game for everyone else. These days, truth is very rare. Everyone's agendas have to come first. For interested parties, the second half of this movie 'Category 6: Day of Destruction' will appear on CBS Wednesday night at 8 PM. PAT] ------------------------------ From: dold@XReXXUseXC.usenet.us.com Subject: Re: Use Comcast Cable Modem? Go to Jail! Judy Sammels's Experience Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 17:13:41 UTC Organization: a2i network Rick Merrill wrote: > I think there is a misconception about the "video trap" : it does NOT > cut out the video, but removes some video reflections so that said > reflections will not interfere with the cable modem! The "solution" to > your original problem was simply to Not Connect your TV to the > cable. - RM The video trap installed on my internet-only cable was described as blocking TV channels. It caused problems for my internet connection, and was "allowed" to be removed because the cable run went directly from the drop to my cable modem, and I could not attach a TV anywhere. Clarence A Dold - Hidden Valley (Lake County) CA USA 38.8-122.5 ------------------------------ From: jmeissen@aracnet.com Subject: Re: Movie Studios to Sue Internet File Traders Date: 15 Nov 2004 17:14:41 GMT Organization: http://extra.newsguy.com In article , Bob Smythe wrote: > Just buy the damn videos y'all. The industry will benefit by offering > an I-Tunes type service for those who want to get movies via > downloading for an affordable price. Say -8 bucks for a movie. YOu > have to go by the hardware and software to burn it and the dual > layered DVD's are like 4 bucks a pop I think. Personally, I have never seen a reason to download a movie. It's not worth my time and effort when I know the real product will show up at the used record store in a few months for $10 or less, and not long after that will probably be under $10 at regular retail stores. The video industry is so anxious to squeeze every dollar out of a movie or TV show that everything, regardless of how bad, eventually shows up on DVD. If the movie industry is suffering I doubt it's because downloaders are ripping them off. People probably spend the time and effort because the industry has driven them away from the theatres. I stopped going to theatres when they started making me sit through commercials. I sent a letter to the owner of the local chain complaining about having to sit through 20-30 minutes(!) of commercials (straight from TV) after spending ~$25 in ticket costs plus another ~$20 for popcorn, etc, and was essentially told, "sorry, that's the way it is." Well, sorry, but from now on I'll wait for the video, and spend $2 on rental fees and my kids and I will eat our own popcorn. Music is a somewhat different matter. In a lot of instances the P2P networks are the only source for non pop-culture music. With the consolidation in radio it's become almost impossible to hear anything not specifically molded for success by the Recording Industry (ala Britney Spears, etc.). The actions by the RIAA benefit the RIAA, not the artists. An excellent article on this point was written by Folk artist Janis Ian: http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html John Meissen john@meissen.org Think Logically / Act Intelligently / Question Authority [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: At the Independence Cinema over on 8th and Laurel Streets, you get your choice of any of the five movies currently being shown for about $3 *per movie, and showing* (no fair walking with the crowds between showings between rooms and getting a second show [of something else] for free or hiding out in the restroom until some other film in a different room is ready to start.) They do show about ten minutes worth of advertising (mostly for local merchants) before the movie starts, interspersed with reminders that no smoking is allowed, follow the rules, etc, to give you a chance to eat your five dollar little skimpy bucket of popcorn and your little cup of beverage. Honestly, the popcorn/candy/soda costs more than the movie these days. At least they do honor Visa/MC to get your admssion ticket and refreshments. I generally prefer to use a service on the net called 'Movie Link' where you can download and *rent* the movies you wish (and those people _WILL_ come back on your computer the next day and remove the movie you rented) for about two dollars per movie and you supply your own refreshments. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 02:23:32 EST From: Dan Lanciani Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Purely Spam! MY PRESENTATION TO YOU richgr@panix.com (Rich Greenberg) wrote: > The other is that if they can get your bank account and bank routing > numbers, they will monitor your account a while and at a peak, they > will drain it with an ACH transfer through a Nigerian bank that works > with them (for a cut of the action). I wonder who actually ends up paying in cases like these? Are there any posted accounts that tell whether the bank absorbed the loss? Or whether they were able to pull the money back? These might provide some ammunition to argue with banks that universally refuse to block ACH debits on consumer accounts (as that would be inconvenient for businesses) and claim that they can clean up any fradulent withdrawals after the fact. Dan Lanciani ddl@danlan.*com ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Purely Spam! MY PRESENTATION TO YOU Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 08:34:40 -0800 Organization: Cox Communications > The other is that if they can get your bank account and bank routing > numbers, they will monitor your account a while and at a peak, they > will drain it with an ACH transfer through a Nigerian bank that works > with them (for a cut of the action). Under federal law pertaining to electronic transactions, your bank has no choice but to charge the electronic debit back to the originating bank so long as you notify them on a timely basis that you did not authorize the transfer. If the Nigerian bank won't accept the charge-back they are supposed to be removed from the ACH. If they don't accept the charge-back your bank has to ultimately eat the charge. ------------------------------ 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! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #548 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Nov 15 23:07:19 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iAG47Js05441; Mon, 15 Nov 2004 23:07:19 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 23:07:19 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411160407.iAG47Js05441@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 #549 TELECOM Digest Mon, 15 Nov 2004 23:07:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 549 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Wired News: ID Rule Exists, But Can't Be Seen (Marcus Didius Falco) Wired News: Airlines Ordered to Expose Data (Marcus Didius Falco) Re: Wired News: American Passports to Get Chipped (Steve Sobol) D.C.-Area Telecom Market Shows Some Spark (DailyLead From USTA) Re: Supervision For DID Lines? (John R. Levine) Leaving Email Addresses Hidden (Withheld on request) Re: Use Comcast Cable Modem? Go to Jail! Judy Sammel (Rick Merrill) Vonage Tech Support Dead? (DevilsPGD) Employment Opportunity: C++ Scripting/Unix/Java (jobs) Intermittant Panasonic TV Display Problem (Graham Warren) Microsoft Cracks Down on X-Box Changes (Monty Solomon) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 14:41:33 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Wired News: ID Rule Exists, But Can't Be Seen http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,65154,00.html http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,65154,00.html By Ryan Singel Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,65154,00.html Government lawyers defending the identification requirement at the nation's airports from a lawsuit by privacy activist John Gilmore admitted in a new filing Wednesday that the requirement exists, but argued it cannot be challenged or seen in full because it is a law enforcement technique, not a law. The lawsuit revolves around whether a rule exists that says passengers must show their ID to airline agents before boarding a plane. Gilmore is also trying to get the government to state exactly what the rule, if it exists, says. The government has refused to confirm that the requirement exists or show the exact wording. Justice Department lawyers offered in an earlier filing to show the rule to an appeals court judge in secret without Gilmore's lawyers present. The appeals court denied that motion on Sept. 20. Internet entrepreneur Gilmore first challenged the constitutionality of requiring airlines to ask passengers to show identification in U.S. District Court in San Francisco in July 2002, but the government refused to tell that court whether the rule existed. Gilmore argued that the rule is vague, since no one knows what kind of identification is adequate and the penalties are unknown. He said he opposes Americans being subjected to a secret law. The rule impinges upon the right to travel and leaves people open to unreasonable searches, he added. In Wednesday's filing, the government continued to stonewall about the existence of the identification-or-search requirement. The Transportation Security Administration published notice of the identification portion of the requirement in a little-noticed May 2004 Federal Register http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname_register&d ocid=3Dfr18my04-12>filing about maritime security. That notice, which expanded the reach of secrecy rules for information classified as "sensitive security information," carved out an exception to secrecy for cases when the government needs to publicize a rule to ensure "compliance." "For instance, as part of its security rules, TSA requires airlines to ask passengers for identification at check-in," the filing read. "Although this requirement is part of a security procedure that is sensitive security information, TSA has released this information to the public in order to facilitate the secure and efficient processing of passengers when they arrive at an airport." William Simpich, one of Gilmore's lawyers, questioned the timing and manner of the TSA's filing, calling it embarrassing. "They are trying to hide what they are doing from the American people," Simpich said. The government filed the notice just after Gilmore's original case was dismissed, and Simpich claimed the government hid the notice to avoid future legal challenges since such orders generally have to be challenged within 60 days. Justice Department lawyers also argued that Gilmore cannot challenge the requirement because it is not a law, it is a law enforcement technique. "The identification-or-search requirement is simply a technique used to detect possible violations of the law, such as the prohibition on carrying a weapon or explosive onto the plane," they wrote. "While passengers have a right to know the law (that they cannot bring weapons on board), they have no due process entitlement to advance notice of how the Government might attempt to discover whether the law is being broken." Simpich dismissed that argument as absurd doublespeak. "Drugs are against the law," Simpich said. "So blowing through your house to look for drugs is a law enforcement technique that you can't challenge, either." Gilmore's lawyers have two weeks to file their reply to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which will then set a hearing date. Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller declined to comment on the government's brief, calling it "carefully crafted". Copyright 2004, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Lycos, Inc.. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 14:42:47 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Wired News: Airlines Ordered to Expose Data http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,65699,00.html?tw=3Dwn_tophead_3 http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,65699,00.html By Ryan Singel Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,65699,00.html Homeland security officials accidentally revealed on Friday that the Transportation Security Administration will soon officially order America's airlines to turn over a month of passenger data to test a new passenger screening system. The final rule ordering the airlines to provide data on all June 2004 domestic flights will be issued formally on Monday by the Transportation Security Administration. The airlines must comply by Nov. 23. The TSA announced in late September its intention to order all 72 domestic airlines to turn over the passenger records -- which can include credit card numbers, phone numbers, addresses and health conditions -- in order to stress-test a centralized passenger screening system called "Secure Flight." Currently, passengers are screened by the airlines, which check itineraries against a set of watch lists provided by the government. The TSA hopes to reduce the number of people flagged incorrectly by performing the checks itself using data fed to it by the airlines and a centralized terrorist watch list. Over 500 citizens and organizations commented on the order, most expressing opposition to the planned test and the system itself. Civil liberties advocates strongly opposed the order, citing privacy concerns and the proposed use of commercial credit databases to verify passengers' identification. The airline industry's response, published after the comment period officially ended, was less visible, but was not much more supportive than most of the other comments. The airlines prefaced their criticism by saying they wanted to work with the TSA, but went on to contend that the order would be expensive and would force them to choose between complying with an American anti-terrorism program or rejecting European privacy laws -- which could potentially prevent them from flying there. The airlines' trade and lobbying organization, the Air Transport Association, initially expressed concerns that the order was technically inadequate and its legal status unclear. The airlines also questioned whether the government had clearance from European Union officials to use data about European citizens. "Our concern is understandable: Airlines cannot be subject to the potentially conflicting demands of TSA's Secure Flight test program and European (or other nations') data protection requirements," wrote ATA Deputy General Counsel James L. Casey. "This clarification is indispensable because U.S. airlines are subject to severe civil and criminal penalties in EU member states if we violate the EU data privacy directive." The final order specifies that airlines can exclude flight records that include segments between the European Union and the United States. But that may not be enough to protect the airlines from European enforcement actions since the law also covers any European on a domestic flight, if that person made the reservation from a computer in the EU. The TSA has briefed the European Commission about the exclusion of international flights and the testing of Secure Flight, according to a TSA official. However, the agency has not received written permission to use European data, as it did when it wanted to formally test CAPPS II, an earlier version of the pre-screening system. That version was scrapped after months of intense criticism of the system by privacy advocates and successive revelations that airlines had secretly turned over data to the agency and its contractors to build the system. Those transfers may have violated the Privacy Act and are the subject of two yet-unpublished Department of Homeland Security investigations. The airlines are not the only segment of the travel industry objecting to the Secure Flight test and the program's development. The Business Travel Coalition, an advocacy group for large corporate travel purchasers, takes issue with the lack of notification to passengers. "We agree with several of (the) privacy groups that these passengers had no knowledge nor were given any ability to approve in advance that their data would be used down the road," said BTC chairman Kevin Mitchell. "In fact the expectation would have been the opposite of what is happening." The lack of notification shows the TSA's lack of transparency and inclusiveness, according to Mitchell. The TSA has been open, said spokeswoman Amy Von Walter, who points to the TSA's notice and comment period for the test order, which were not necessary by law. The TSA systematically responded to many criticisms in the document published today, seeking to assure citizens and interest groups that it was listening to their criticisms. "TSA is aware of, and sensitive to, the need to preserve Americans' freedom while pursuing better security," the agency wrote. "In implementing a new security measure that affects these interests, it is necessary to move deliberately and cautiously." But Mitchell said outreach is not enough and that when the TSA decided to brief his group on Secure Flight, it called on a Friday at 2 p.m. to inform him of a meeting at 3 p.m.. "Give me a break," Mitchell said. "That's not process, that's window dressing." Copyright 2004, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Lycos, Inc. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Wired News: American Passports to Get Chipped Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 13:50:59 -0800 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Marcus Didius Falco wrote: > "The reason we are doing this is that it simply makes passports more > secure," Shannon said. "It's yet another layer beyond the security > features we currently use to ensure the bearer is the person who was > issued the passport originally." Moron. Let's store personal information digitally, and not encrypt it! That'll make it MORE secure! > While there are no laws in the United States prohibiting anyone from > snooping on someone's passport data, Roy Want, an RFID expert who > works as a principal engineer for Intel Research, thinks that the > possibility of identity theft is overblown. > "It is actually quite hard to read RFID at a distance," said Want. Sure it is. Didn't a couple major retail chains have trouble with people reading RFID tags this past year? Why should we believe someone who works for Intel, a company that could potentially profit big from a large deployment of RFID? JustThe.net Internet & New Media Services, http://JustThe.net/ Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / 888.480.4NET (4638) / sjsobol@JustThe.net PGP Key available from your friendly local key server (0xE3AE35ED) Apple Valley, California Nothing scares me anymore. I have three kids. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 13:36:01 EST From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: D.C.-Area Telecom Market Shows Some Spark Telecom dailyLead from USTA November 15, 2004 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=17504&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * D.C.-area telecom market shows some spark BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Global Crossing posts Q3 loss * China telecom picks Cisco for next-generation network * Cingular enters new phase USTA SPOTLIGHT * USTA Webinar: Phone Facts & Telecom Trends, The 2005 Roadmap! EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Pentagon to spend billions on Internet network REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * Verizon Wireless, Sprint lower number portability fees Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=17504&l=2017006 Legal and Privacy information at http://www.dailylead.com/about/privacy_legal.jsp SmartBrief, Inc. 1100 H ST NW, Suite 1000 Washington, DC 20005 ------------------------------ From: johnl@iecc.com (John R. Levine) Subject: Re: Supervision For DID Lines? Date: 15 Nov 2004 15:24:57 -0500 Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > A question I've been pondering for a while: When you call a DID > number, at what point does the call start to be billed? If things are set up correctly, when it's answered, the same as any other call. Classic DID switches the roles of the central office and the PBX. The PBX provides battery on the line, the CO seizes the line and outpulses the digits, the PBX provides ring tones and supervision, I presume by revsersing line polarity. If it plays a recording but doesn't supervise, you shouldn't be billed unless you have one of those lame LD companies that bills after a fixed time rather than checking supervision. In practice, this wasn't always set up correctly, and I wouldn't be astonished if some of the recordings supervised, although I would check for a LD company fixed time rule first. These days, the preferred way to provide DID is over ISDN, BRI for low volume or PRI for high volume, with the signalling happening on the ISDN D channel, but the principle is the same. ------------------------------ From: Anonymous Subject: Keeping Email Address Hidden in Digest Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 17:22:41 -0500 Er, could you please prevent my email address from showing up in the issue's Table of Contents too? Thanks, Anonymous [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Dear Anonymous, as long as people ask me **in the first line of text in their actual message* to please delete their email address, I do so. If they further ask me to delete it in the Table of Contents in the Digest ASCII text version (which is the main reason or rationale for my existence here) I will do that also. But you need to *remind me every time* in order for me to get it *every time*. Better still, some users here have 'throw-away' addresses they use in their email headers (from which the Table of Contents gets constructed) and then put their real address (if they wish to use it, with 'at' as a symbol and extraneous other verbiage in the real address included in the message itself. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Rick Merrill Subject: Re: Use Comcast Cable Modem? Go to Jail! Judy Sammel's Experience Organization: Comcast Online Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 22:49:53 GMT dold@XReXXUseXC.usenet.us.com wrote: > Rick Merrill wrote: >> I think there is a misconception about the "video trap" : it does NOT >> cut out the video, but removes some video reflections so that said >> reflections will not interfere with the cable modem! The "solution" to >> your original problem was simply to Not Connect your TV to the >> cable. - RM > The video trap installed on my internet-only cable was described as > blocking TV channels. It caused problems for my internet connection, > and was "allowed" to be removed because the cable run went directly > from the drop to my cable modem, and I could not attach a TV anywhere. > Clarence A Dold - Hidden Valley (Lake County) CA USA 38.8-122.5 There are several video traps installed on the analog signal. For example, there is a narrow band one on-the-pole that blocks HBO. At the house there can be another. All these "filters" go in BEFORE the house connection. BUT NONE of those block ALL analog channels -- the only way to do that is to unplug the TV. However, with cable modem AND cable TV there is a short filter that goes on the TV side and not on the Cable side. Therefore this gadget is in the house. But if your TV is not connected, you don't need it. If you do not have it, they can easily read the reflections and tell that you are using the analog signal. You were misinformed, or only partially informed. - RM ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: Vonage Tech Support Dead? Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 17:56:41 -0700 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Just wondering if anybody has contacted Vonage within the last month or so and gotten a response? I sent two emails (about different issues) on October 25th. I received ticket numbers, but no response since then, and the issues do not appear to be resolved. I sent another ticket (on a third issue) on November 7th, without any response (including an autoresponder) I have attempted to followup by phone, but both the technical support and the billing departments are experiencing higher then expected call volumes, and I should try again later or contact them via the web. I have attempted to contact sales, waited on hold 20-30 minutes, then the call was dropped. Did somebody forget to feed and water the support folks? FWIW, the issues are: 1) Outbound caller-ID is wrong a significant percentage of the time. 2) Unanswered inbound calls tend to ring forever (long after the caller went to voicemail or gave up) -- In one case it was ringing for several days straight while we were out of town. The phones were forwarded to voicemail after "instant". 3) Since the DST switch, one of my ATAs has the wrong time. This has happened before on that ATA and was fixed within an hour of opening a ticket last time. Warning: Dates in Calendar are closer than they appear. ------------------------------ From: jobs@peopleassociates.com Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 02:57:16 -0000 Subject: Employment Opportunity: C/C++/UNIX/Scripting & JAVA/Oracle/Unix We are URGENTLY looking for the following resource for our client (American MNC) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. If interested, please send your latest resume to jobs@peopleassociates.com with your expected salary & joining date. Also mention the ref no in the subject line. === Job Title : Test Engineer (C/C++/UNIX/SCRIPTING) (Ref: PATE02) ------------------------------ From: graham_warren@hotmail.com Subject: Intermittent Display Problem With Panasonic 32" LCD TV Date: 15 Nov 2004 17:39:01 -0800 Hi, I wonder if anyone has heard of or seen this problem before. I have a 3 month old 32" Panasonic LCD TV. This TV works a treat apart from when viewing the odd TV program with allot of close-ups of peoples heads where intermittenly the skin on their faces seems to float of the face or more correctly their face moves but the skin stays in one place. It's a very wierd problem not totally annoying to me although it seems to irritate my girlfriend more so I do get annoyed (if you know what I mean!) I'm pretty sure it's not a TV display problem as in DVD mode via the component video it does not do it at all in fact the picture using a >3 year old DVD movie is perfect as you would want it. THe problem to crop up more often than not with UK sourced programs i.e. crime drama's, BBC World. But it also very occassionaly (but not all the time) happens with some US programs like Law & Order & SVU. It doesn't seem to happen with locally broadcast TV so I'm picking that's it some sort of broadcast in-compatibility but so far have failed to get rid if it via the TV settings. I also thought it might be an amorphic problem i.e. some wierd distortion casued by the TV display 4:3 in 16:9 but I eliminated this by watching TV in native 4:3 mode until the problem cropped up again. BTW this model TV does a great job of displaying 4:3 in 16:9 compared to some LCD TV's that I have seen. My TV model is a Veria TX-32LX1A. (That's the New Zealand Model number.) The equivalent US TV is I think the Viera TC-32LX20. Thanks, Graham Warren ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 21:56:50 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Microsoft Cracks Down on Xbox Changes By ALLISON LINN AP Business Writer SEATTLE (AP) -- In the days before Microsoft Corp. released the hotly anticipated Halo 2 video game for the Xbox game console, some gamers noticed a sudden spike in the number of people being kicked off the company's online game service. That was no coincidence. With Halo 2 expected to entice a new batch of users to the Xbox Live online gaming community, Microsoft says it got tougher with people suspected of making unauthorized modifications to their Xboxes. Gamers who modify Xboxes usually do so either to be able to cheat on games or use pirated copies, although some also have made changes so they can use the Xbox for other functions, from running Linux to playing music. Cameron Ferroni, general manager of the Xbox software platform, says Microsoft is not interested in suing individual users. But the company does want to banish scofflaws from its online service, Xbox Live. It's hard to know how many of Microsoft's 15.5 million Xbox users have modified their game consoles, although the percentage is believed to be small. Microsoft has a unique glimpse into the approximately 1 million Xbox Live users' computers because, by virtue of signing up for the service, users agree to let Microsoft gather certain information from their machines. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=45027307 ------------------------------ 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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Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2004 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE JUST 65 CENTS ONE OR TWO INQUIRIES CHARGED TO YOUR CREDIT CARD! REAL TIME, UP TO DATE! SPONSORED BY TELECOM DIGEST AND EASY411.COM SIGN UP AT http://www.easy411.com/telecomdigest ! ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #549 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Nov 16 13:33:42 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iAGIXgV13795; Tue, 16 Nov 2004 13:33:42 -0500 (EST) Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 13:33:42 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411161833.iAGIXgV13795@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 #550 TELECOM Digest Tue, 16 Nov 2004 13:34:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 550 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Bigstring - Erasable, Recallable, Non-Printable Email (Monty Solomon) Breaking the Ice 2.0 (Monty Solomon) Senate May Ram Copyright Bill (Monty Solomon) Motorola RAZR V3 Now Available at Cingular Wireless (Monty Solomon) DrayTek VoIP Router model, Vigor2900V (Chris Tsai) SBC Communications Announces Launch of Residential VoIP (Lisa Minter) Re: Wired News: American Passports to Get Chipped (Marcus Didius Falco) Re: Trial Shows How Spammers Operate (jdj) Which Adapter For Vonage? (Hemant Shah) Satellite Receiver Calling Out Over VOIP? (Hemant Shah) Re: Access of Calling Card Dial in Number From Prepaid Cellular (Joseph) Re: Chechen Rebel Web Site Reopened (Henry) Re: Last Laugh! Purely Spam! MY PRESENTATION TO YOU (Tim@Backhome.org) Re: Vonage Tech Support Dead? (Sara Garland) Re: Wired News: American Passports to Get Chipped (William Warren) 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 11:40:56 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Bigstring - "Erasable, Recallable, Non-Printable Email" Bigstring keeps the e-mail on their server and sends an HTML link to the recipient. Bigstring - "Erasable, Recallable, Non-Printable Email" http://bigstring.com/ http://bigstring.com/learn_more.php http://bigstring.com/faq/ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 11:58:34 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Breaking the Ice 2.0 Forget the bland name sticker: The interactive nTAG is giving strangers something to talk about as they network at social events By Diane E. Lewis, Globe Staff Schmoozing can be a trial for the shy, reclusive, and socially challenged. Even those who understand the power of networking sometimes quake at the thought of a roomful of strangers. But a Boston company has come up with a solution that helps break the ice at big meetings. All participants need to do is enter some personal information into an electronic file before the meeting or event: place of employment, alma mater, job title, hobbies, or, for sports lovers, the name of the team they rooted for during the World Series. An electronic name tag then helps get conversations going. The brainchild of Boston inventor Rick Borovoy, the product is called nTAG: It measures 4 inches wide and 3 inches high, and hangs around the conventioneer's neck from an adjustable lanyard. Wearing the nTAG is a bit like sporting a tiny, six-ounce TV screen, except the screen beams messages to fellow conventioneers like, "Hi, Jane, I like strawberry ice cream, too." For those who do their networking at cocktail hour, when the lights are dim and the bar is stocked, the nTAG lights up in the dark. It uses infrared sensing, radio frequency identification, a screen, and three control buttons to connect people with mutual interests or needs, including people who might otherwise gravitate toward folks they already know or hover around a buffet table instead of employing the art of schmooze. http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/11/15/breaking_the_ice_20/ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 11:20:51 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Senate May Ram Copyright Bill By Michael Grebb WASHINGTON -- Several lobbying camps from different industries and ideologies are joining forces to fight an overhaul of copyright law, which they say would radically shift in favor of Hollywood and the record companies and which Congress might try to push through during a lame-duck session that begins this week. The Senate might vote on HR2391 , the Intellectual Property Protection Act, a comprehensive bill that opponents charge could make many users of peer-to-peer networks, digital-music players and other products criminally liable for copyright infringement. The bill would also undo centuries of "fair use" -- the principle that gives Americans the right to use small samples of the works of others without having to ask permission or pay. The bill lumps together several pending copyright bills including HR4077, the Piracy Deterrence and Education Act, which would criminally punish a person who "infringes a copyright by ... offering for distribution to the public by electronic means, with reckless disregard of the risk of further infringement." Critics charge the vague language could apply to a person who uses the popular Apple iTunes music-sharing application. The bill would also permit people to use technology to skip objectionable content -- like a gory or sexually explicit scene -- in films, a right that consumers already have. However, under the proposed law, skipping any commercials or promotional announcements would be prohibited. The proposed law also includes language from the Pirate Act (S2237), which would permit the Justice Department to file civil lawsuits against alleged copyright infringers. Also under the proposed law, people who bring a video camera into a movie theater to make a copy of the film for distribution would be imprisoned for three years, fined or both. http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,65704,00.html ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 11:04:30 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Motorola RAZR V3 Now Available Exclusively at Cingular Wireless The Wait is Over: New Motorola RAZR V3 Now Available Exclusively at Cingular Wireless Ultra-thin mobile phone delivers technological excellence with awe-inspiring style LIBERTYVILLE, Ill. and ATLANTA, Nov. 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Today Motorola, Inc. (NYSE:MOT) and Cingular Wireless announce the exclusive availability of the Motorola RAZR V3. Delivering cutting-edge design and advanced technology, the Motorola RAZR V3 brings an elegant new twist on the classic flip phone to Cingular Wireless customers nationwide. Created with aluminum, magnesium nickel-plated copper alloy and chemically-hardened glass, the durable Motorola RAZR V3 captures attention for its beautiful form. Space-saving engineering is leveraged to deliver the latest in mobile technology, including MPEG 4 video playback, Bluetooth(R) wireless technology, digital camera with zoom and an internal quad-band antenna for global communications. Ryan Seacrest, the popular host of "American Idol," helped unveil the Cingular-exclusive Motorola RAZR V3 at a Cingular store in Los Angeles. The Motorola RAZR V3 launch coincides with the availability of the "Cingular Experience" in all Cingular stores. Just three weeks after joining forces to become the biggest wireless carrier in the U.S., Cingular Wireless and AT&T Wireless have -- overnight -- truly become one company by converting more than 1,000 AT&T Wireless company-owned stores into Cingular Wireless stores. Another approximately 10,500 agent locations will be converted in the coming months. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=45040963 ------------------------------ From: cisco8899@yahoo.com.sg (Chris Tsai) Subject: DrayTek VoIP Router Model, Vigor2900V. Date: 15 Nov 2004 21:59:22 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Hi, I found out a interesting new VoIP Router model-Vigor2900V from UK site-www.draytek.co.uk This model has rich features with VPN, Firwall, IP Sec, DES, 3DES, bandwidth management facilities and support FXS ports to make & receive real voice calls. Some friends told me DrayTek Vigor is a reliable router model in whole Euro market. Did you try to use VoIP Router ? pls pick-up Vigor2900V !! ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 11:11:03 -0500 Subject: SBC Communications Announces Launch of Residential VoIP Service http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20041116005259&newsLang=en SBC Communications Announces Launch of Residential VoIP Service; Another Step Forward in the SBC IP Transformation; Full-Scale VoIP Service Rollout Planned for Early 2005 SAN ANTONIO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 16, 2004---SBC Communications Inc. (NYSE:SBC) today announced the launch of a residential Voice over IP (VoIP) service that will significantly expand the SBC IP service portfolio and give DSL customers a powerful new option for communicating with friends and families. The full-scale VoIP service rollout will take place in early 2005. It is preceded by a trial, now under way, in Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago and San Antonio. The service will use IP technology and a DSL Internet connection to deliver not only voice calling but also other enhanced features, such as a Web-based portal and advanced call- management capabilities that make it easier for customers to manage their communications. "When we fully launch our service early next year, consumers will be able to choose between traditional and traditional plus next- generation voice services from SBC companies," said Randall Stephenson, SBC chief operating officer. "Over time, we expect that VoIP will be a preferred voice service because of the features and benefits this technology enables. "Our VoIP services continue to evolve, as we introduce innovative features that take full advantage of the power of IP technology," he said. "Residential VoIP is an important emerging technology, and with our industry-leading base of DSL customers and our ability to integrate wireline and wireless communications services in new ways, we're committed to playing a leading role in this growth market -- just as we have in the business VoIP market." The SBC VoIP service will have a Web portal with features such as "find me" and enhanced "do not disturb," giving customers the ability to specify which numbers can ring through, as well as a click-to-call capability that lets customers call friends and family with a click of a mouse The service will also have popular calling features, such as voice mail, call forwarding, call waiting, caller ID and three-way calling. VoIP technology uses high-speed connections to make voice calls to anyone over the Internet or IP networks rather than over the traditional circuit-switched phone network. Customers must have broadband in order to use VoIP service. "By adding VoIP to our extensive consumer product lineup, we gain more flexibility to create an array of innovative and integrated service bundles," said Stephenson. "With a portfolio that includes wireless, broadband, video, Wi-Fi, VoIP, and traditional local and long distance services, customers can get the complete range of integrated communications and entertainment services from SBC companies." Building on a History of IP Leadership The SBC VoIP service is the latest milestone in the company's emergence as a leader in IP communications and in its strategy to create a host of new features and offerings that will seamlessly integrate communications devices and networks for its customers. In October, SBC companies announced the acceleration of an initiative -- Project Lightspeed -- to build a fiber optic-based network that will use IP technology to deliver digital TV, VoIP and super high- speed broadband services to 18 million customers in two to three years. In September, SBC companies, which have provided IP services for businesses since 1998, won contracts for several large-business VoIP deployments, including a deal to create and manage a VoIP network for 50,000 Ford employees located in 110 different facilities. Also in September, SBC companies launched SBC Unified Communications. This new messaging service uses IP technology to create a single electronic mailbox for multiple types of messages, including e-mail, wireless voice mail, landline voice mail and even faxes. The innovative service works over either a DSL or dial-up Internet connection. Customers access the mailbox from any compatible PC or PDA with Internet access or any touchtone landline or wireless phone. The service uses text-to-speech technology to read e-mail and/or fax headers over the phone. Regulatory Rulings Help Spur Consumer VoIP Offer Recent decisions by the Federal Communications Commission have encouraged companies like SBC companies to invest in bringing the latest IP services to customers more quickly. For example, the FCC recently ruled that VoIP was an interstate service and that it would keep authority over the promising new technology in order to eliminate the possibility of a patchwork of state-by-state regulations. "The FCC is moving to create an environment that promotes investment and innovation in IP services," Stephenson said. "It is important that federal, state and local authorities keep the road clear so that this technology can reach consumers faster. The fact that we are accelerating our investment to bring new technologies to the market more quickly shows how good policies can deliver good results to consumers." SBC Communications Inc. is a Fortune 50 company whose subsidiaries, operating under the SBC brand, provide a full range of voice, data, networking, e-business, directory publishing and advertising, and related services to businesses, consumers and other telecommunications providers. SBC holds a 60 percent ownership interest in Cingular Wireless, which serves more than 46 million wireless customers. SBC companies provide high-speed DSL Internet access lines to more American consumers than any other provider and are among the nation's leading providers of Internet services. SBC companies also now offer satellite TV service. Additional information about SBC and SBC products and services is available at www.sbc.com. Contacts SBC Communications Inc. Sue McCain, 314.982.8664 www.sbc.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 23:53:38 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Re: Wired News: American Passports to Get Chipped Steve Sobol said in Re: Wired News: American Passports to Get Chipped on Mon, 15 Nov 2004 13:50:59 -0800: > Marcus Didius Falco wrote: >> "The reason we are doing this is that it simply makes passports more >> secure," Shannon said. "It's yet another layer beyond the security >> features we currently use to ensure the bearer is the person who was >> issued the passport originally." > Moron. Let's store personal information digitally, and not encrypt it! > That'll make it MORE secure! >> While there are no laws in the United States prohibiting anyone from >> snooping on someone's passport data, Roy Want, an RFID expert who >> works as a principal engineer for Intel Research, thinks that the >> possibility of identity theft is overblown. >> "It is actually quite hard to read RFID at a distance," said Want. > Sure it is. Didn't a couple major retail chains have trouble with > people reading RFID tags this past year? > Why should we believe someone who works for Intel, a company that could > potentially profit big from a large deployment of RFID? I guess if we're concerned, the thing to do will be to make the chip unreadable. I guess putting the passport in the microwave should burn out the chip. I'm sure there will be a lot of such instructions on the internet in a couple of months. :-) ------------------------------ From: jdj Subject: Re: Trial Shows How Spammers Operate Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 19:59:02 -0800 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com There is a stressed out twisted-knickers type on slashdot "suggesting" that spam be responded to, including spam sent to bad addresses, to cost spammers money. It's been suggested before and was instantly squelched without comment, except to accuse the poster of being a troll. Seems that spam service providers charge fees for everything, from using their address database to send spam to charging for each hit on the website they provide to their spamming clientele as well as getting a cut of each sale. It seems to follow that at least some spammers can be bankrupted if every single item from them were to get several responses in return. It's almost like sending back empty business-reply envelopes that come with annoying snailmail ads. There is an added benefit if spam to bad addresses were responded to: the bad addresses are confirmed valid and permanently taint the databases, which get sold around and the fun starts all over again. Should not be too difficult to set up a procmail script for servers to send a few http requests to a spammer's website instead of bouncing mail with bad addresses. It would cost very little, if anything for a mail server to respond to a few spams but the spammer's site wold get a huge number of hits and the spammer would certainly pay for all the the traffic. Instead of using filters to try to make it as if spam does not exist (the Emperor's New Clothes approach) which costs the spammer nothing at all, why not make the spammer pay literally by hitting the website with http requests (the validated parking for shopping approach)? The idea of spending the spammer's money is appealing and seems to be a very tasty bit of revenge, much better than the current crop of spam "solutions". But it has a weakness: It requires a large number of mail servers cooperate in responding to spam instead of bouncing it or dumping it in the bit bucket. ------------------------------ From: Hemant Shah Subject: Which Adapter For Vonage? Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 16:26:06 UTC Organization: Aaja Fasaja & Co. Reply-To: NoJunkMailshah@xnet.com Folks, Is there a difference (as far as phone adapter features are concerned) between Linksys PAP2 and WRT54GP2? I already have Netgear wireless router and would prefer to buy PAP2 if there is no difference in phone adapter features between the two. Circuit City has PAP2 free after rebates. Hemant Shah /"\ ASCII ribbon campaign E-mail: NoJunkMailshah@xnet.com \ / --------------------- X against HTML mail TO REPLY, REMOVE NoJunkMail / \ and postings FROM MY E-MAIL ADDRESS. -----------------[DO NOT SEND UNSOLICITED BULK E-MAIL]------------------ I haven't lost my mind, Above opinions are mine only. it's backed up on tape somewhere. Others can have their own. ------------------------------ From: Hemant Shah Subject: Satellite Receiver Calling Out Over VOIP? Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 16:26:54 UTC Organization: Aaja Fasaja & Co. Reply-To: NoJunkMailshah@xnet.com Folks, I am considering gettting VOIP service at home (probably Vonage), I also have 2 dish network receivers (one is a DVR) at home and they are connected to a land line. Dish network said that I have to have the receivers connected to the phone line, otherwise I have to pay extra per month per receiver (I think it is $5 per month per receiver). Will the satellite receiver be able to dial out over VOIP? Thanks. Hemant Shah /"\ ASCII ribbon campaign E-mail: NoJunkMailshah@xnet.com \ / --------------------- X against HTML mail TO REPLY, REMOVE NoJunkMail / \ and postings FROM MY E-MAIL ADDRESS. -----------------[DO NOT SEND UNSOLICITED BULK E-MAIL]------------------ I haven't lost my mind, Above opinions are mine only. it's backed up on tape somewhere. Others can have their own. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Vonage is supposed to be just like a 'telephone', and able to do anything a 'telephone' can do. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Access of Calling Card Dial in Number From Prepaid Cellular Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 22:00:27 -0800 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Fri, 12 Nov 2004 23:43:32 +0100, Marek Tomczyk wrote: > So I have decided now to get an American mobile phone on my next > trip to the USA. Since you have a phone that's capable of GSM 1900 why not pick up a T-Mobile USA "T-Mobile To Go" SIM card. Full retail price is $50 which includes $30 of calling time, but these cards are often on sale on eBay for much less. Some of them even have extended expiry times of one year's time. > I like the offer of AT&T Wireless very much as it provides a long > validity of one year for balances starting at $100. Domestic calling > with the Free2Go service is very reasonable priced, but calling > foreign countries is still expensive. Unfortunately with the Free2Go service it will be necessary for you to buy a telephone instrument as the Free2Go service is not GSM but is TDMA and requires a TDMA technology handset. > So the idea is to use a calling card service for this matter. The AT&T > documents say that prepaid calling card service is not possible with > Free2Go. Besides this AT&T says in its terms that certain numbers can > be blocked if "abuse" to the network happens. For making international calls from your mobile phone I recommend a service called Gorilla Mobile < http://gorillamobile.com > which provides very reasonable rates for international calls. Calls to foreign mobiles such as in Europe are a good deal more expensive, but that's usually the case with all long distance providers or many of them at least. You must have a major credit card to charge your calls or have a US bank account to debit the charges. > Is calling a local dial in number from a mobile phone in America, in > particular from a free2Go phone, abusive usage of the network? If you mean is there a larger charge to call a US mobile as there is in Europe? The answer is no. Calls made from the mobile phone are the same whether calling regular land line numbers or other mobile phone numbers. However, you should know that in North America you are charged both for incoming calls as well as outgoing calls. Normally you are also charged for calling "free phone" numbers (800/888/877/866 numbers.) > Do you know if calling of local (regular) dial in number from American, > in particular prepaid aka "pay as you go" services is possible? I'm not sure if I understand your question but you can pretty much dial any number either domestically or internationally from your mobile phone whether it's monthly or "pay as you go" or as they call it in North America "prepaid." > Can such providers block access to those numbers? I'm sure it's possible that a provider could block certain numbers if they wished to, but as far as I know no providers do or at least don't intentionally. ------------------------------ From: henry999@eircom.net (Henry) Subject: Re: Chechen Rebel Web Site Reopened Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 11:38:03 +0200 Organization: Elisa Internet customer BobGoudreau@withheld wrote: > ... either Lisa or Reuters made a typo. > And indeed, www.kavzazcenter.com comes up fine in my browser. Thanks, Bob. But ... "kavzaz"??? D**n those typos! But, we know what you mean. :-) Cheers, Henry ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Purely Spam! MY PRESENTATION TO YOU Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 05:40:47 -0800 Organization: Cox Communications Dan Lanciani wrote: > I wonder who actually ends up paying in cases like these? Are there > any posted accounts that tell whether the bank absorbed the loss? Or > whether they were able to pull the money back? These might provide > some ammunition to argue with banks that universally refuse to block > ACH debits on consumer accounts (as that would be inconvenient for > businesses) and claim that they can clean up any fradulent withdrawals > after the fact. The banks love to act like innocent conduits when it comes to any issue about ACH debits. Nonetheless, with any given transaction, if the account holder affirms on a timely basis that it's either fraud or simply not authorized, the bank has no choice but to charge it back. Banks hate the concept of consumers knowing that. ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Vonage Tech Support Dead? From: no_email_address@hotmail.com (Sara Garland) Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 16:59:16 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net DevilsPGD wrote: > Just wondering if anybody has contacted Vonage within the last month or > so and gotten a response? > I sent two emails (about different issues) on October 25th. I received > ticket numbers, but no response since then I sent them a complaint yeterday -- my *69 is stuck, telling me that the last incoming call was six months ago. I got an automated ticket # by email immediately, but no human yet. ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Wired News: American Passports to Get Chipped From: William Warren Organization: Comcast Online Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 16:10:02 GMT On Mon, 15 Nov 2004 13:50:59 -0800, Steve Sobol wrote: > Marcus Didius Falco wrote: >> "The reason we are doing this is that it simply makes passports more >> secure," Shannon said. "It's yet another layer beyond the security >> features we currently use to ensure the bearer is the person who was >> issued the passport originally." > Moron. Let's store personal information digitally, and not encrypt it! > That'll make it MORE secure! Yes, it will. If the passport holder knows that the data is available at every doorway, (s)he will take steps to protect it that (s)he might have neglected if "encryption" persuaded otherwise. >> While there are no laws in the United States prohibiting anyone from >> snooping on someone's passport data, Roy Want, an RFID expert who >> works as a principal engineer for Intel Research, thinks that the >> possibility of identity theft is overblown. >> "It is actually quite hard to read RFID at a distance," said Want. > Sure it is. Didn't a couple major retail chains have trouble with > people reading RFID tags this past year? > Why should we believe someone who works for Intel, a company that could > potentially profit big from a large deployment of RFID? Reading data outside the Immigration Office is what Bruce Schnier artfully describes as an "Externality". Intel doesn't bear the cost of identity theft, privacy invasion, and/or other abuses such as customer-profit-potential-pre-screening (Have a good medical plan? Want the ambulance attendant to know that?). Intel doesn't care about the costs you pay; only its own. Of course, this issue would be better seen outside the "Passport" metaphor that's being used for this trial balloon: everybody "knows" that you "must" have a passport to cross a border, so passports are safe places to put rfid chips. However, if the War On Terror [TM] or the Campaign To Save Our Children [TM] or (pick your buzzword) requires it, RFID chips can be easily and painlessly implanted below the skin in the delivery room. Think of the advantages: you'll never have to prove who you are, ever again, not to the cop at the demonstration, not to the cop at the caucus meeting, not to the cop in your woodpile, not to the cop who's knocking on your front door. William "And then they came for me" Warren (With apologies to the Firesign Theatre) ------------------------------ 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. 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