From editor@telecom-digest.org Sun Jun 5 23:34:57 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 85C1114CAB; Sun, 5 Jun 2005 23:34:57 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #251 Message-Id: <20050606033457.85C1114CAB@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 23:34:57 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.8 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT, PORN_4 autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Sun, 5 Jun 2005 23:35:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 251 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Corporations Entering World of Blogs (Monty Solomon) Wrong Time in Vonage Caller ID (Chris Farrar) SEX.COM Owner Responds to Charges (Gary Kremen) Vonage Virtual Numbers (Chris Farrar) New Anonymous Free Surfing Site: anonycat.com (Tom Cervenka) Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (Steve Sobol) Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (Steven Lichter) Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? (Steve Sobol) Re: Porting an 800 Number (Fred Atkinson) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Lisa Hancock) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Fred Atkinson) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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, 5 Jun 2005 21:08:59 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Corporations Entering World of Blogs By NICOLE ZIEGLER DIZON Associated Press Writer When General Motors Corp. wanted to stop speculation this spring that it might eliminate its Pontiac and Buick brands, Vice Chairman Bob Lutz took his case directly to dealers and customers who were up in arms about the possibility. He wrote about it on the company's blog. "The media coverage on the auto industry of late has done much to paint an ugly portrait of General Motors," began Lutz's entry on GM's FastLane Blog, which the company launched in January. The March 30 entry went on to say that widely reported remarks he made to analysts the week before had been "taken out of context" and that the automaker would not shed the brands. A growing number of companies are stepping softly into the blogosphere, following a path blazed by Microsoft Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc. and others in the technology field. The Internet journal format, they find, lets businesses expand their reach, generate product buzz and encourage consumer loyalty _ while bypassing traditional media. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49647343 ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 17:48:43 -0400 From: Chris Farrar Subject: Wrong Time Shown in Vonage Caller ID I have a Vonage (Canada) VoIP number and I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing this problem. I'm using an Aastra 392 (aka a Nortel Vista 392 screen phone) 2 line phone. Line one is on Bell Canada in the 905-282-XXXX exchange. Line 2 is Vonage Canada through the Linksys PSP2 adapter in the 416-628-XXXX exchange. The problem is that the phone with reset the display clock to conform with the last Caller ID information available. Bell Canada is sending the correct time (Eastern Daylight Time) on inbound calls, but Vonage is sending Eastern Standard Time. So whenever I receive a call on Vonage, my screen phone resets itself to EST, when we are currently in EDT, and the clock is then 1 hour slow until the next call comes in on Bell Canada to put it back into EDT. Theoretically this problem will disappear when we go back to EST in the fall, but is there a way to get Vonage to update their clock before then? Chris ------------------------------ From: gary.kremen@gmail.com Subject: SEX.COM Owner Responds to Charges Date: 5 Jun 2005 14:59:09 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to John Smith writing about the article posted here on Gary Kremens ( http://sex.com ) : >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I wonder if 'Mandy Howard' of Parents >> United is any relation to 'Nancy Howard' who submitted this article? >> I would also like to point out that in this somewhat offensive article >> (to me, at least), neither of the Misses Howard's is entitled to use >> absolute terms like 'predator' or 'should be incarcerated for life', >> certainly without _an adjudication in a court_. My first reaction was >> to pitch the article out unused, but with the possibility there is >> some smidgen of truth herein, i.e. Kremen _was_ arrested on the >> allegations named, and his known legal problems with the 'sex.com' >> domain, etc I decided to use the article. ....PAT] > No reputable psychotherapist would blur the distinction between gays > and pedophiles, much less try to make an outright connection. This is > just hate-group propaganda, piggybacking on what might otherwise be an > actual news story. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Thanks for saying that ... out of > curiosity, I went to look at the http://sex.com site last night for > the first time in my life, to see what apparently makes it such a > famous and popular site, and to find out what would make it worth > fighting over, as Kremen did with that fellow who apparently tried > to cybersquat on it (remember the fellow who snatched the name, got > sued, and the registrar wound up getting sued also, and the lawyer > who was going to get a piece of the action as his fee in the case?) > I _thought_ I was going to see something really amazing, etc. Well, > all I wound up seeing was a sort of poorly designed web site with a > jillion links to other sites on it, all of which wanted your credit > card number, etc. Over all, it was sort of boring, with slow > responding links, etc. (Of course my computer is not the fastest, > and to be charitable, maybe the links were so slow loading because > of the millions of web users trying to get in and supply their credit > card numbers, etc, but I don't think so. Of course, I did not feel > very well last either, but it is hard for me to imagine some lawyer > agreeing to settle for _fifteen percent_ of the action on that site > in exchange for his fee, then suing the client to get that little dab > of (what appeared to me to be) nothing special. I understand the > registrar who got sued in that thing settled for $150 thousand. Damn! > Is _any_ web site worth that kind of money? How and why? Would > someone like to hijack http://telecom-digest.org from me? I'd be > glad to let you do it, if there was any possibility I could 'settle > out of court -- or in court, for that matter -- for $150 thousand from > the transgressor. Geeze ... PAT] Gary Kremens says: 1) Completely fake news article 2) See http://www.sex.com/corporate/lawsuits/ 3) Settlement with Versign is confidential -- see http://downloads.sex.com/corporate/lawsuits/pdf/9th_Circuit_Appeal_Ruling.pdf [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: In (1) above, I presume Ms. Howard took an _existing_ true report of sex.com legal problems as dealt with in great length in the various files reached by looking at the URL mentioned in (2) and (3) and embellished it with the central points of her "news item", i.e. a pedophile situation and heroin use. Gary Kremens does not say if he knows who Ms. Howard is, or what her possible motivation was in further smearing his name around. I cannot imagine she just made the whole thing up out of whole cloth ... he must have some knowledge of _who_ she is and _why_ she chose to submit the report. But I am not going to dwell on it unless Mr. Kremens wishes to elaborate further. I will say those things are always _nasty_ allegations to make about anyone, given the general dislike of many in society for those things. I did go through (2) and (3) above in some detail, and it appears to me this is not something recently started, but rather, it has been going on for about ten years, or since the production of a letter to the registrar from Mr. Cohen in 1995 which Mr. Kamens says is fraudulent. Warning: some of the legal documents shown in (2) above are very long, complex and boring, and there are a couple of audio files -- over an hour long -- of lawyers in court arguing before a judge on things such as 'who owns which site' and how registrars do their duties, etc. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 18:36:37 -0400 From: Chris Farrar Subject: Vonage Virtual Numbers This is hard to work out, as I don't have a Hargray Telecom ( http://www.hargray.com the local landline provider,) phonebook to reference as to local calling area. Does anyone know wheich of the following communities that Vonage has numbers available in that are a local call to Hilton Head Island, SC (area code 843, exchange 842)? Charleston, SC disto Island, SC Folly Beach, SC Hollywood, SC Mount Pleasant, SC Sullivans Island, SC Summerville, SC Yemassee, SC From looking at a map of SC, Edisto Island may be close, but I can't tell for sure. Chris ------------------------------ From: tom.cervenka@gmail.com Subject: New Anonymous Surfing Site (Free): anonycat.com Date: 4 Jun 2005 23:01:01 -0700 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This is being reprinted in case you missed it in an earlier issue of the Digest over the weekend. PAT] There is a new (free) web-based proxy for anonymous surfing at http://anonycat.com It's much better than the other web proxies, like anonymizer.com, and it doesn't require registration. -Tom ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Date: Sun, 05 Jun 2005 14:18:13 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Chris Farrar wrote: >> Godaddy is a reputable registrar. I have three domains registered >> with them. The don't sell spam address lists or function as a >> spamhaus. >> What led you to jump to this particular conclusion? > Over the last several days Spamcop has blocked a considerable number > of emails to me, which all generated reports to Godaddy as the site > orginating them. Well, there are two issues with GoDaddy. First, they register a ton of domains, some of which are registered by/for spammers. Second, they do offer mailing list services. I can resell those services as a WildWestDomains/GoDaddy reseller, but I refuse (I only do TrafficBlazer, domains and SSL certificates). In fact, when I have time over the next couple weeks, I'm going to email GD president Bob Parsons requesting that he drop the email service. It's just way too easy to abuse. But the question is ... are you seeing emails coming from GoDaddy customers using their mailing list product? Or are you just seeing lots of spam from GoDaddy-registered domains? Both are bad. I'd argue that the former is a lot worse. JustThe.net - Apple Valley, CA - http://JustThe.net/ - 888.480.4NET (4638) Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED "The wisdom of a fool won't set you free" --New Order, "Bizarre Love Triangle" ------------------------------ From: Steven Lichter Reply-To: Die@spammers.com Organization: I Kill Spammers, Inc. (c) 2005 A Rot in Hell Co. Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Date: Sun, 05 Jun 2005 23:06:16 GMT Chris Farrar wrote: >> Godaddy is a reputable registrar. I have three domains registered >> with them. The don't sell spam address lists or function as a >> spamhaus. >> What led you to jump to this particular conclusion? > Over the last several days Spamcop has blocked a considerable number > of emails to me, which all generated reports to Godaddy as the site > orginating them. > Other major spammers to my inbox seem to be kornet.com, hanaro.com, > comcast.net All I know is that almost all the spam that got to my junk mail box came from sites on their servers; if they are a reputable registrar then they are not inforcing their rules. I have sent copies and complaints to them, nothing happens. As my take says, goes for them also. The only good spammer is a dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? (c) 2005 I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot in Hell Co. ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? Date: Sun, 05 Jun 2005 14:19:24 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Joseph wrote: > messaging to your phone. They cannot and will not remove phone to > phone text messaging from your account. That's interesting. Both Verizon and Sprint have disabled SMS completely when I requested it. Why can't T-Mobile? JustThe.net - Apple Valley, CA - http://JustThe.net/ - 888.480.4NET (4638) Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED "The wisdom of a fool won't set you free" --New Order, "Bizarre Love Triangle" ------------------------------ From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Re: Porting an 800 Number Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 17:33:20 -0400 > Even if Vonage would let you transfer tollfree numbers, I wouldn't do > it, Vonage's monthly fee for the included minutes is more then I'm > spending now. It's not Vonage that I'm transfering it to. It's yet another VOIP provider. I saw their rates and it is not bad. The long distance carrier that I am now using has a higher rate than this new company offers. Fred ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: 5 Jun 2005 18:00:14 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Dean M. wrote: > Forgive my ignorance, but if this whole exercise on the part of public > schools is simply aimed at reducing their liablility exposure, how do > the private schools others mentioned get around that issue? Private schools are afraid of lawsuits, too, obviously. They protect themselves by: 1) Strict standards of behavior that are enforced. If a kid screws around too much in a private school, they're out. Further, private schools limit who is admitted in the first place. There's normally a smaller staff/student ratio at private schools and students are monitored more closely. I've done some work at private schools and I wouldn't want to be a student there despite the prestige. 2) Contractual limited liability: Unlike a public school which is governed by law, private schools can and do have contracts with students limiting the schools' liability. (Public schools do that for some optional activities, like school sports). > It would be like cutting school sports entirely because some students > may get hurt playing. Or does that happen too? It does at times, although the law has granted some immunity to schools and coaches if a kid gets injured. Liability law is a tricky thing. It is often set by the courts by granting a lawsuit over something. However, legislators may limit liability in certain situations and they do on occassion. Often these issues become very contentious (ie limiting malpractice awards, for example). They generally protect sports coaches because no one would host a sport if they'd get sued every time a kid got injured. ------------------------------ From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Reply-To: fatkinson@mishmash.com Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 01:01:58 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net On Sat, 04 Jun 2005 00:39:11 -0400, Barry Margolin wrote: > Who do they need to use school equipment to pursue these hobbies? You > do school work on school equipment, you go home and work on your > hobbies. I think you meant 'why' rather than 'who'. Well, a number of kids do research for their papers. Writing about radio and other things aren't out of the realm of reason. I wrote several papers and did a presentation or two about radio when I was in junior and senior high. I learned a lot about electronics when I was in high school from reading books in the school library. And I went on to get an electronics degree, a commercial radiotelephone operator's license, and a great deal more later. I ask you what is the difference between reading about it on the Internet and reading about it in a library? Would you advocate removing books like that from the library simply because *you* think that they don't 'need' to read them? And it's a damned sight better thing for a kid to be doing with his or her time than getting involved with the wrong crowd or worse. This is not personal, but you need to severely rethink your position. Sorry to come down on you this hard, but limiting student access to information simply because we think they don't 'need' access to it is a pretty short sighted opinion for an educator to take. Regards, Fred ------------------------------ 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) RSS Syndication of TELECOM Digest: http://telecom-digest.org/rss.html For syndication examples see http://www.feedroll.com/syndicate.php?id=308 and also http://feeds.feedburner.com/telecom ************************************************************************* * 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 V24 #251 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Jun 6 17:27:11 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id A96D414FA0; Mon, 6 Jun 2005 17:27:10 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #252 Message-Id: <20050606212710.A96D414FA0@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 17:27:10 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.7 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Mon, 6 Jun 2005 17:27:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 252 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Microsoft, AT&T in Internet Communications Pact (Lisa Minter) Yahoo Ditches Fees on US Web Auctions (Lisa Minter) Covad, Earthlink Trial Phone and Internet Service (Lisa Minter) Re: Wrong Time Shown in Vonage Caller ID (Robert Bonomi) Re: Wrong Time Shown in Vonage Caller ID (Tim@Backhome.org) Re: Wrong Time Shown in Vonage Caller ID (Henry Cabot Henhouse III Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (Steven Lichter) Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? (Joseph) Re: Known Spam Sites (John Smith) Re: Vonage Virtual Numbers (John R. Levine) Re: Porting an 800 Number (Justin Time) Re: From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell (Nathan Strom) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Scott Dorsey) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Lisa Minter) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (John Smith) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Robert Bonomi) Re: Sex.com Problems Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Microsoft, AT&T in Internet Communications Pact Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 14:26:07 -0500 Software maker Microsoft Corp. on Monday said it signed an agreement with telecommunications company AT&T Corp. to develop Internet-based services to businesses. Terms of the deal were not announced. The companies said the alliance leverages the AT&T's global Internet Protocol network, which can be accessed from 149 countries, and Microsoft's "Connected Services Framework," a software system that enables the rapid delivery of converged communications services across multiple networks and devices. Using Connected Services Framework, AT&T will be able to more easily create and deploy network-based IP services and applications. The two companies said they will develop communications services during the next five years that will focus on messaging, collaboration, media and business applications. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Yahoo Ditches Fees on U.S. Web Auctions Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 14:27:18 -0500 SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Internet media company Yahoo Inc. will quit charging fees for auctions on its U.S. site in an effort to encourage more people to sell their wares, the company said on Sunday. Rob Solomon, general manager and vice president of Yahoo Shopping, denied the move was a defensive response to top online auctioneer eBay Inc.'s announcement on Wednesday it had agreed to buy shopping.com a provider of online comparison shopping and consumer reviews, for $620 million. "It's taken us six months for us to work on this. The timing of this (and eBay's acquisition announcement) is purely coincidental," he said. Yahoo has no plans to end the fees it charges users on its other auction sites, including the one for Japan, the company's top auction site. The company also runs auction sites in Canada, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Yahoo said it will generate revenue from its U.S. auctions by continuing to have paid search listings by its Yahoo Search Marketing division. Paid search ads are triggered by keywords related to their product or brand. Previously, Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo has charged users of its U.S. auction site 5 cents to 75 cents to post an item, depending on the starting price of the item. If an item sells, the user then has had to pay a 2 percent final value fee that can vary depending on the closing price of the item sold. More expensive items carried additional fees that could total up to 1.5 percent of the final price of the item in addition to the 2 percent fee. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Covad, Earthlink Trial Phone and Internet Service Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 14:28:27 -0500 Covad Communications Group and Earthlink Inc. said on Monday they would test a service offering telephone lines and high-speed Internet access to residential customers, aimed at competing with dominant phone and cable companies. Earthlink, one of the larger U.S. Internet service providers, has seen its base of dial-up subscribers steadily erode due to competition from high-speed service. Earthlink's shares fell sharply last week after SBC Communications Inc., said it would offer broadband Internet access for $14.95 per month. Covad and Earthlink said the trial would begin in October in Dallas, San Francisco, Seattle and San Jose, California. Pricing was not announced. The service will use a technology known as a line-powered system. Covad will lease the copper wires running between customers' homes and the local telephone network, hooking those loops into Covad's own network. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Wrong Time Shown in Vonage Caller ID Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 11:03:42 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , Chris Farrar wrote: > I have a Vonage (Canada) VoIP number and I'm wondering if anyone else > is experiencing this problem. > I'm using an Aastra 392 (aka a Nortel Vista 392 screen phone) 2 line > phone. Line one is on Bell Canada in the 905-282-XXXX exchange. Line > 2 is Vonage Canada through the Linksys PSP2 adapter in the 416-628-XXXX > exchange. > The problem is that the phone with reset the display clock to conform > with the last Caller ID information available. Bell Canada is sending > the correct time (Eastern Daylight Time) on inbound calls, but Vonage > is sending Eastern Standard Time. So whenever I receive a call on > Vonage, my screen phone resets itself to EST, when we are currently in > EDT, and the clock is then 1 hour slow until the next call comes in on > Bell Canada to put it back into EDT. > Theoretically this problem will disappear when we go back to EST in > the fall, but is there a way to get Vonage to update their clock > before then? Have you considered *ASKING*VONAGE* ?? Or is that too simple and obvious an approach? As an extreme solution, you could put in an Asterisk PBX, and let it 'rw-write' the caller-id timestamp. ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: Wrong Time Shown in Vonage Caller ID Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 06:01:45 -0700 Organization: Cox Communications Chris Farrar wrote: > I have a Vonage (Canada) VoIP number and I'm wondering if anyone else > is experiencing this problem. > I'm using an Aastra 392 (aka a Nortel Vista 392 screen phone) 2 line > phone. Line one is on Bell Canada in the 905-282-XXXX exchange. Line > 2 is Vonage Canada through the Linksys PSP2 adapter in the 416-628-XXXX > exchange. > The problem is that the phone with reset the display clock to conform > with the last Caller ID information available. Bell Canada is sending > the correct time (Eastern Daylight Time) on inbound calls, but Vonage > is sending Eastern Standard Time. So whenever I receive a call on > Vonage, my screen phone resets itself to EST, when we are currently in > EDT, and the clock is then 1 hour slow until the next call comes in on > Bell Canada to put it back into EDT. > Theoretically this problem will disappear when we go back to EST in > the fall, but is there a way to get Vonage to update their clock > before then? > Chris Vonage doesn't have that problem here in California and my primary number is in DC. Perhaps it has something to do with your phone? ------------------------------ From: Henry Cabot Henhouse III Subject: Re: Wrong Time Shown in Vonage Caller ID Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 21:48:46 -0700 I have a 323 number with Vonage and my outbound caller ID shows as something completely different when calling an 800 number. Maybe they're growing so fast they don't have the time to make it all work right. Chris Farrar wrote in message news:telecom24.251.2@telecom-digest.org: > I have a Vonage (Canada) VoIP number and I'm wondering if anyone else > is experiencing this problem. > I'm using an Aastra 392 (aka a Nortel Vista 392 screen phone) 2 line > phone. Line one is on Bell Canada in the 905-282-XXXX exchange. Line > 2 is Vonage Canada through the Linksys PSP2 adapter in the 416-628-XXXX > exchange. > The problem is that the phone with reset the display clock to conform > with the last Caller ID information available. Bell Canada is sending > the correct time (Eastern Daylight Time) on inbound calls, but Vonage > is sending Eastern Standard Time. So whenever I receive a call on > Vonage, my screen phone resets itself to EST, when we are currently in > EDT, and the clock is then 1 hour slow until the next call comes in on > Bell Canada to put it back into EDT. > Theoretically this problem will disappear when we go back to EST in > the fall, but is there a way to get Vonage to update their clock > before then? > Chris ------------------------------ From: Steven Lichter Reply-To: Die@spammers.com Organization: I Kill Spammers, Inc. (c) 2005 A Rot in Hell Co. Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 03:33:18 GMT Steve Sobol wrote: > Chris Farrar wrote: >>> Godaddy is a reputable registrar. I have three domains registered >>> with them. The don't sell spam address lists or function as a >>> spamhaus. >>> What led you to jump to this particular conclusion? >> Over the last several days Spamcop has blocked a considerable number >> of emails to me, which all generated reports to Godaddy as the site >> orginating them. > Well, there are two issues with GoDaddy. First, they register a ton of > domains, some of which are registered by/for spammers. > Second, they do offer mailing list services. I can resell those > services as a WildWestDomains/GoDaddy reseller, but I refuse (I only > do TrafficBlazer, domains and SSL certificates). In fact, when I have > time over the next couple weeks, I'm going to email GD president Bob > Parsons requesting that he drop the email service. It's just way too > easy to abuse. > But the question is ... are you seeing emails coming from GoDaddy > customers using their mailing list product? Or are you just seeing > lots of spam from GoDaddy-registered domains? Both are bad. I'd argue > that the former is a lot worse. > JustThe.net - Apple Valley, CA - http://JustThe.net/ - 888.480.4NET (4638) > Steven J. Sobol, Geek In Charge / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED > "The wisdom of a fool won't set you free" > --New Order, "Bizarre Love Triangle" I have seen both, more from the mailing though. The only good spammer is a dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? (c) 2005 I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot in Hell Co. ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 05:51:05 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Sun, 05 Jun 2005 14:19:24 -0700, Steve Sobol wrote: > Joseph wrote: >> messaging to your phone. They cannot and will not remove phone to >> phone text messaging from your account. > That's interesting. Both Verizon and Sprint have disabled SMS > completely when I requested it. Why can't T-Mobile? Maybe it has to do with the way GSM works. You didn't mention AT&T Wireless or Cingular. SMS is part of the GSM spec. I don't know if that's the case with CDMA. The question of disabling SMS (text messaging) has come up before in other T-Mobile related forums and the answer has always been no on phone originated SMS but is available to turn off email SMS. ------------------------------ From: John Smith Subject: Re: Known Spam Sites Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 04:29:05 GMT Steven Lichter wrote: > What led me to that was 40 uce's that I got over a 3 day period all > came from sites that listed Godaddy. Plus most of the web sits that > were linked from these spams were also theirs. They're maybe > reputable, but they are not policing the Use Policy. Well, just because they registered the domain doesn't give them any obligation to monitor how it's used, nor could they even if they wanted to. Their only obligation is to point the domain name to a domain name server. Unless the sites were being HOSTED by GoDaddy, what do you expect them to do? It's the hosting company on whose servers the spammers are operating that has the power to stop them. ------------------------------ From: johnl@iecc.com (John R. Levine) Subject: Re: Vonage Virtual Numbers Date: 6 Jun 2005 01:20:08 -0400 Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > reference as to local calling area. Does anyone know wheich of the > following communities that Vonage has numbers available in that are a > local call to Hilton Head Island, SC (area code 843, exchange 842)? None of them, I would say. The informative local calling guide at http://members.dandy.net/~czg says that the normal Hilton Head local calling area is just Hilton Head. Hargray Tel's web site at http://web.hargray.com/tel_localplus.html says that for $10/mo you can get local service plus which lets you call Bluffton, Sun City, Daufuskie and Hardeeville. (Or for $25/mo you get unlimited nation wide LD.) If you want a Hilton Head VoIP number, I notes that Hargray themselves offer VoIP service, presumably with their own local numbers. Maybe they'd sell it to you. R's, John ------------------------------ From: Justin Time Subject: Re: Porting an 800 Number Date: 6 Jun 2005 08:21:18 -0700 But VoIP carriers aren't phone companies so they don't have to point or port anything they don't want to. You can't take the fact they refuse to point an existing number to your PUC because they are an unregulated "information service" and not a phone company. Rodgers Platt ------------------------------ From: nstrom@ananzi.co.za (Nathan Strom) Subject: Re: From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell System Date: 6 Jun 2005 08:49:10 -0700 TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to Steve Sobol : > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: In much of the midwest area now, Amoco > does business as 'The Standard Oil Division of Amoco Oil Company'. PAT] All the Amoco stations near me in CT have re-branded in the past couple years to BP. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I try not to think much about Chicago in recent years, but I think my brother told me that Amoco stations around Chicago are no longer 'Standard Oil Division of Amoco' but now are a sort of green color with the BP signs on them. I really do not know for sure. PAT] ------------------------------ From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: 6 Jun 2005 09:34:28 -0400 Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000) Fred Atkinson wrote: > Sadly, they do these things without looking at how it adversely > affects faculty and staff and what it may deprive the kids of. On the > latter, ham radio is a very educational hobby and they shouldn't be > denying the kids access to information about it. Yes, I think that restricting web access at school and some workplaces is probably a very good thing. What is bad is that it is usually done by people who don't know very much about the web or about the blocking technology, and it is often done by management folks who refuse to take responsibility for their own actions. There are other work environments where blocking any traffic is a very bad thing. I work at a government facility where pornographic sites are blocked. To my mind, it would be much more effective just to fire people who spend their workday looking at porn on the internet; in this case network blocking results in employees being retained who would be better off gone. --scott "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: 6 Jun 2005 06:58:28 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Fred Atkinson wrote: > I ask you what is the difference between reading about it on the > Internet and reading about it in a library? Would you advocate > removing books like that from the library simply because *you* think > that they don't 'need' to read them? And it's a damned sight better > thing for a kid to be doing with his or her time than getting involved > with the wrong crowd or worse. You must remember that the contents of libraries have always been "censored", though perhaps the better word is "selected". For younger readers, books are selected appropriate to their reading skill as well as their age. Most 12 year olds would not know what to do with ancient literature written in the original Greek or Latin, and such books would be inappropriate for them. A second consideration is book quality. There are lots and lots of books out there on any given subject, including "vanity" books published by the authors themselves. Quality varies dramatically. Libraries attempt (not always successfully) to use generally respected and quality works. Lastly, some common sense is applied. Should a children's or school library really contain books on bomb-making or other extremely intense subjects? As to the Internet: There is a great deal of mis-information out there, some of it even dangerous. Anybody can set up a site and put anything they want on it; that by no means makes it authoritative or appropriate. Even legitimate organizations screw up on their Internet sites by failing to keep the information timely and accurate. > Sorry to come down on you this hard, but limiting student access to > information simply because we think they don't 'need' access to it > is a pretty short sighted opinion for an educator to take. As mentioned, student "access" is already quite limited in many ways. ------------------------------ From: John Smith Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 03:47:27 GMT Anony Mouse wrote: > My father went down to the school and told the principal and the vice > principals that he'd swear out a warrant for the arrest of those > students if they laid another hand on me. All they did was warn the > students that my father would have them arrested if they touched me > again. They told both of us that they wouldn't take any action > against those boys because they were afraid of the Civil Liberties > Union (they actually told us that the ACLU would intervene if they > even took those boys off the bus route). Well, that's rubbish of course, and it's reprehensible that school officials would try to blame their own nonfeasance on the ACLU. Or did the principle think that there is a "right to beat people up" in the Bill of Rights? If that happened today, the parent would sue not only the boys, but the school system itself, for having such bone-headed administrators. And win. And even with the strong tenure laws in my state, those idiots would be out looking for work. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 10:46:21 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , wrote: > Robert Bonomi wrote: >> Yuppers. First Amendment means that, as a government agency, you >> cannot monitor/filter/block/etc what students _say_ in outgoing >> email. (It's even a seriously sticky situation in government agencies >> with their employees.) > Sorry, but I know too many government agencies that have strict rules > on what their employees may say using any government equipment, and > AFAIK these rules are perfectly legal and upheld. Generally, true, *today*. There is a _long_ history of attempts at such rules that have been held partially or wholly void, necessitating re-writes. Government-as-employer is a _very_ complex legal situation. There is a difficult balancing act between exercise of 'rights' _as_employer_ and infringing on the 'civil rights' of the employee. There are very few 'employer rights' that a governmental entity cannot exercise, *BUT*, in many cases, they must be _very_careful_ in regard to how they go about exercising those rights, and what advance notifications are given. What you 'know' simply establishes that a path through the swamp has been successfully charted. The swamp is still there. > Employees have been terminated over violations and their unions were > unable to do anything. Shop stewards have been fired and union > activists convicted of trespassing for exceeding the boundaries of > these rules. Says a lot about the intelligence/wisdom (or lack thereof) of shop stewards and union activists, doesn't it? > A government agency may secretly monitor employees' phone calls and > computer use without any warning or notice. > I assure you the unions would've fought this stuff if they could've. > Further, agencies have rules regarding public statements, such as that > external questions have to be forwarded to the designated public > affairs officer. > Just because something is publicly funded does not change every rule > or policy. > I think what you folks are confusing is the right of students and > goverment employees to freely speak outside of school or work. That > is protected speech. But inside the building, especially on > government owned facilities -- computers, phones, bulletin boards*, > etc., you do not have that protection. The bodies of law regarding what is allowable 'in school', and 'at work' are _significantly_ different. The body of law regarding what is allowable/acceptable in a government work-place is significantly different that what is allowable/ acceptable in a private employer's workplace. >> On the other hand, you _can_ ban individuals from using the equipment >> _at_all_, if you have a rational reason for doing so. > Equipment may be assigned or not assigned to individuals as the > administration sees fit in school or in industry. >> Silly as it seems on the face of it, restricting them from 'saying >> anything' it not the First Amendment problem that restricting them >> from 'saying *specific* things' is. > Sorry, but rules do exist prohibiting "specific things" in government > and in schools. > My local library requires a signature observing their rules on using > their public computers. Would you care to itemize the 'saying specific things' forbidden by those rules? > Just because someone is publicly funded does not mean the individual > using it has unlimited rights over it. When you drive a car on a > public road or visit a public park you must obey the law on usage. Apparently, you missed -- or didn't think it significant -- the word "saying" in the phrase 'saying *specific* things'. Use of public roads, or public parks, has *nothing* to do with 1st Amend rights. That aside, Because something _is_ publicly funded, and made available to the public, 'at large', *does* mean that there are restrictions and limitations that the government can exercise over what 'the public' can do on/with that 'something'. > There is no such thing as unlimited free speech. Try screaming a > tirade at your neighbor and you'll get a summons for disorderly > conduct. There are many examples. Which has nothing to do with 'free speech', in point of fact. The summons is for _how_ you did things, not _what_ you said. Regulating/restricting the _content_ of speech has very high barriers to overcome. Regulating/restricting the _form_ of speech faces far, _far_ lower barriers. > Indeed, lately many people have objected toward the expression of > religion in public schools and some courts have upheld restrictions on > that. For example, a school choir was forbidden by the courts to sing > black spiritual gospel songs even as an all-volunteer after school > activity. > As Pat said, administrative convenience is important or schools and > government would grind to a halt mired in bureaucracy. Yes, different > states and municipalities do vary, but this is the way it is. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: It is also important to remember the > difference between someone who is _governed by the government_ versus > someone who is _employed by the government_ (except as the government > employee happens to coincidentally also be a citizen). Things like > the First Amendment theoretically serve as protection for those who > are being governed. While it is grossly inconvenient for most of us > to choose some other governor, on the other hand we have no automatic > right to _employment_ by the government. Because of the inconvenience > or impossibility for us to change governors, we therefore get the > protection of things like the Bill of Right, which do not have to be > given to a 'mere' employee, of the government or otherwise. And > administrative convenience is given much weight in the courts. The > goverment says 'it is more convenient for us to have person X do our > speaking for us, and for persons Y and Z to keep quiet.' And the > courts have occassionally ruled that this is _not_ a violation of > persons Y and Z 'free speech rights'. Certainly any person being > governed can speak _about_ the government, but they cannot speak _for_ > the government nor mislead any reasonable person to think that is > what they are doing. PAT] Pat, you may want to re-think your position. I'm in _complete_ agreement with your comments. :) [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This is to Lisa Hancock regards the school choir denied the right to sing their songs even as an after school volunteer activity. The same thing happened several years ago in Chicago, compliments of the boneheads at the ACLU. So the kids at the school got even, with help from their choirmaster and the parents. Their after school activity withdrew _any and all_ affiliation with the public schools. They made it plain in their concert programs that they were _NOT_ affiliated in any way with the Chicago Public Schools. They further noted in their concert programs that their choirmaster and musicians were employed _by the choir_, and not by the Chicago Public Schools. "Although most members of our choir are in fact students in the Chicago Public Schools, and occassionally it is convenient for the choir to rent an auditorium facility from the Chicago Public Schools to give performances, we have absolutely no connection with the Chicago Public Schools." They gave programs of choral music by Bach, Handel and Mozart. _Tough stuff_ and always excellently done. Of course, much of it made reference to God or (in the case of some of Handel's oratorios), passages of scripture. Stuff that almost caused me to faint, it was that well done. And when asked why they were not affiliated with one of the schools, the choirmaster would always say afterward, _now_ do you see why we have no affiliation with the Chicago Public Schools? We would not be allowed to do what we want to do. We do not sing and play for the lowest common denominator, which is what would be expected of us, and all we would be allowed. A couple of the school system's principals, who were still a bit sensitive to when the choir and their choirmaster had 'pulled out of school' responded by saying, "Well, you don't have to be so snotty about it!" ... but the choirmaster's response was that just because the schools would only allow very bland and generic 'jingle bells' songs at Christmas did not mean _they_ had to, or intended to settle for that. PAT] ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Re: SEX.COM Owner Arrested for Child Molestation; Heroin Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 14:40:59 -0400 nancyhoward2@gmail.com wrote: > Dr. Adrian Copeland, a psychiatrist who works with sexual offenders > at the Peters Institute in Philadelphia, said that, from his > experience, pedophiles tend to be homosexual Really? On what planet is that? I just plain find that hard to believe. Does not jibe with what I have seen at all. In fact every molestor I have had the misfortune to meet seemed to prefer women (that is if they had to have an adult as a partner) > and "40% to 45%" of child molesters have had "significant > homosexual experiences." LOL. I'd bet non-molester stats for males are quite similar. It's just easier to get men to admit to it when you are a police officer interrogating them. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Look Sean, I've already written off Nancy Howard as a troublemaker; let's just forget about her. 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 V24 #252 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Jun 6 21:22:31 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 4DD7114DA1; Mon, 6 Jun 2005 21:22:31 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #253 Message-Id: <20050607012231.4DD7114DA1@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 21:22:31 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.7 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Mon, 6 Jun 2005 21:23:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 253 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson United Airlines Cleared for Wi-Fi Onboard (Monty Solomon) The Front Lines - June 6, 2005 (Jonathan Marashlian) I-Mate PDA2k For Sale (Joseph Adams) United to Announce Approval of Wi-Fi Service (Telecom dailyLead USTA) Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (Steve Sobol) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Thomas A. Horsley) Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? (Steve Sobol) Re: From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell (Lisa Hancock) Re: From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell (Steve Sobol) Re: From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell (Robert Bonomi) Re: Known Spam Sites (Steve Sobol) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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, 6 Jun 2005 18:07:16 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: United Airlines Cleared for Wi-Fi Onboard NEW YORK (AP) -- United Airlines, the world's second-largest carrier, received regulatory approval Monday to install wireless Internet access to its fleet in a partnership with Verizon Communications Inc. The Federal Aviation Administration gave approval to United-parent UAL Corp. to install the cabin equipment necessary to provide wireless Internet connection to passengers and crew members on U.S. domestic flights. United becomes the first domestic airline to get FAA approval that allows passengers to surf the Internet while riding through the sky. United Airlines and Verizon, which already provides airfone capabilities for the carrier, said it must still get approval from the Federal Communications Commission before the new service can officially launch. Both companies expect to have a date within the coming months, following an FCC spectrum auction where service rights and ranges of frequencies will be awarded to one or more onboard Internet access providers. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49673074 ------------------------------ From: Jonathan Marashlian Subject: The Front Lines - June 6, 2005 Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 15:54:21 -0400 Organization: The Helein Law Group http://www.thefrontlines-hlg.com/ The FRONT LINES http://www.thlglaw.com/ Advancing The Cause of Competition in the Telecommunications Industry FCC RELEASES ORDER REQUIRING INTERCONNECTED VOIP PROVIDERS TO OFFER E911 SERVICE WITHIN 120 DAYS; PROPOSES FURTHER RULEMAKING TO INVESTIGATE E911 REQUIREMENTS FOR "PORTABLE" VOIP On June 3, 2005, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released the text of its May 19th decision requiring "interconnected" Voice over IP providers to offer customers E911/911 emergency calling services within 120 days of the effective date of its Order. The strict deadline will mean that VoIP providers offering services that satisfy the FCC's definition of an "interconnected VoIP services" must begin offering E911/911 to customers who utilize interconnected VoIP services at fixed locations sometime around October of this year. The E911 rules apply to those VoIP services that can be used to receive telephone calls that originate on the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and can be used to terminate calls to the PSTN -- such services being labeled by the FCC as "interconnected VoIP services." The FCC elaborates on its definition, as follows: "If a VoIP service subscriber is able to receive calls from other VoIP service users and from telephones connected to the PSTN, and is able to place calls to other VoIP service user and to telephones connected to the PSTN, a customer reasonably could expect to be able to dial 911 using that service to access appropriate emergency services. Thus, [the FCC] believes that a service that enables a customer to do everything (or nearly everything) the customer could do using an analog telephone, and more, can at least reasonably be expected and required to route 911 calls to the appropriate destination. . [t]hus, an interconnected VoIP service is one we define for purposes of the present Order as bearing the following characteris- tics: (1) the service enables real-time, two-way voice communications; (2) the service requires a broadband connection from the user's location; (3) the service requires IP-compatible CPE; and (4) the service offering permits users generally to receive calls that originate on the PSTN and to terminate calls to the PSTN." The Rules require that, within 120 days of the Order's effective date, all entities satisfying the definition of an interconnected VoIP service provider must transmit all 911 calls, as well as a call back number and the caller's "Registered Location" for each call, to the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP), designated statewide default answering point, or appropriate local emergency authority that serves the caller's Registered Location and that has been designated for telecommunications carriers under section 64.3001 of the FCC's Rules. These calls must be routed through the use of ANI and, if necessary, pseudo-ANI, via the dedicated Wireline E911 Network, and the Registered Location must be available from or through the ALI Database. The FCC recognizes that its 120 day implementation deadline is "aggressive." However, the FCC concluded that the threat to public safety exceeded any burdens on interconnected VoIP providers. The FCC offered the following advice: "Interconnected VoIP providers may satisfy [FCC Rules] by interconnecting [with the PSAP or appropriate emergency services contact point] indirectly through a third party such as a competitive LEC. or through any other solution that allows a provider to offer E911 services [as required by the FCC's Rules]. Although the FCC notes that an increasing number of incumbent LECs have announced their intentions to make E911/911 access available to VoIP providers on commercial terms, the Rules adopted by the FCC neither mandate nor direct incumbent LECs to provide access pursuant any defined regulations. The FCC does imply, however, that ILECs that refuse to offer E911/911 services on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis could be subject to formal complaints and/or enforcement proceedings under Sections 201/202 of the Telecom Act. The Rules adopted by the FCC will, for the most part, rely on customers to self-report his or her location to the service provider. The FCC noted, however, that in the future it intends to adopt an advanced E911 solution that must include a method for determining a user's location without assistance from the user. In part to achieve this goal, the FCC released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking seeking comments on E911/911 rules for "portable" VoIP services. Comments are due 45 days after publication of the FCC's notice in the Federal Register and Replies are due 75 days after publication. If you have any questions or concerns regarding how the FCC Order affects your business, you should contact your existing regulatory attorney, if you have one. You may also contact our firm for a consultation: (703) 714-1313, e-mail: jsm@thlglaw.com . The Front Lines is a free publication of The Helein Law Group, LLLP, providing clients and interested parties with valuable information, news, and updates regarding regulatory and legal developments primarily impacting companies engaged in the competitive telecommunications industry. The Front Lines does not purport to offer legal advice nor does it establish a lawyer-client relationship with the reader. If you have questions about a particular article, general concerns, or wish to seek legal counsel regarding a specific regulatory or legal matter affecting your company, please contact our firm at 703-714-1313 or visit our website: http://www.thlglaw.com/ www.THLGlaw.com The Helein Law Group, LLLP 8180 Greensboro Drive, Suite 700 McLean, Virginia 22102 THLG Affiliations: http://www.voicelog.com/ http://www.voicelog.com/ ------------------------------ From: Joseph Adams Subject: I-Mate PDA2k For Sale Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 00:45:01 +0700 Hello, I am interested in the phone model pasted above and would like to know if its still available and what the firm price is. Get back to me as soon as possbile to know the next possible step to take. Regards, Joseph Adams ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 13:06:19 EDT From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: United to announce approval of Wi-Fi service Telecom dailyLead from USTA June 6, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=3D22122&l=3D2017006 NEWS OF THE DAY * United to announce approval of Wi-Fi service BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * AT&T, Microsoft to deliver communications services * Siemens mulls future of mobile phone unit * Apple to use Intel chips * Sprint readies for paradigm shift USTA SPOTLIGHT * SUPERCOMM AE Takes Center Stage This Week in Chicago HOT TOPICS * SBC trims price for DSL service * Sony offers video calling * SBC to move ahead with video plans * CIOs offer tips on VoIP implementation * Alcatel goes GPON, plans wireless networking rollout EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Covad, EarthLink to offer Internet phone service REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * Qwest sues Utah's UTOPIA Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22122&l=3D2017006 Legal and Privacy information at http://www.dailylead.com/about/privacy SmartBrief, Inc. 1100 H ST NW, Suite 1000 Washington, DC 20005 ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 14:41:23 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Steven Lichter wrote: > I have seen both, more from the mailing though. Thanks for the feedback. I wish GoDaddy didn't sell bulk email services at all. :-/ Time to go rattle some cages. JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites From: tom.horsley@att.net (Thomas A. Horsley) Organization: AT&T Worldnet Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 23:55:41 GMT > For younger readers, books are selected appropriate to their reading > skill as well as their age. Most 12 year olds would not know what to > do with ancient literature written in the original Greek or Latin, and > such books would be inappropriate for them. Good theory, but my experience doesn't seem to jibe with it: I was in Grady Elementary school in Tampa many long decades ago. The school went through 6th grade, no higher grades around. I was also in 6th grade, highest grade taught at the school. I tried to check out a Sherlock Holmes book from the library, and the librarian wouldn't let me because it was "too hard" for a 6th grader (not true, by the way). What was it doing in the library if 6th graders shouldn't be reading it? More important, why would a librarian object to a kid attempting a little brain stretching even if it was too hard? Thus began my lifelong love affair with bookstores and shunning of libraries (perhaps the real story behind the librarian's actions involved some kind of guerilla marketing campaign by bookstores to turn kids off of libraries while they are young and impressionable :-). -- >>==>> The *Best* political site >>==+ email: Tom.Horsley@worldnet.att.net icbm: Delray Beach, FL | Free Software and Politics <<==+ ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 14:42:37 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Joseph wrote: > Maybe it has to do with the way GSM works. You didn't mention AT&T > Wireless or Cingular. Only because I refuse to use Cingular and have never used AT&T Wireless -- I only have experience with CDMA carriers. But you may be correct. > SMS is part of the GSM spec. I don't know if > that's the case with CDMA. The question of disabling SMS (text > messaging) has come up before in other T-Mobile related forums and the > answer has always been no on phone originated SMS but is available to > turn off email SMS. mmm ... maybe someone over in the GSM newsgroup knows. JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell System Date: 6 Jun 2005 14:12:42 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com TELECOM Digest Editor wrote: > Mark Cuccia prepared an interesting history of Standard Oil and some > In 1882, the New Jersey branch of Standard Oil was started. A trust > was formed as Standard Oil began to buy out or took control of other > smaller "independent" oil companies. A reorganization of the trust in > 1889 made Standard Oil of New Jersey the holding or parent company of > the entire Standard Oil organization. Misc observations ... As I understand it, the massive Rockefeller Standard Oil fortune was made on mostly kerosene, which was sold for lighting. I think they even threw gasoline away since there was so little use for it. Natural gas, of great value today, was thrown away for years. I don't think in those days there was much demand for heating oil as coal was cheaper and used in most applications. There's a great book, based on a PBS special "The Prize" which is an excellent history of the oil industry until around 1980. I understand today, based on the roads newsgroup, that it's very hard to tell what gasoline you are buying. Apparently there are many layers of owners between getting the oil from the ground, transporting it, refining it, and delivering it to your local gas station. People say all gasoline is the same. All I know is my car will knock from certain gas stations but not on others (on regular gas). I can't help but suspect certain stations use cheaper grades of gas than others. I don't know if there's any audit of gasoline quality. Govt agents check pump volumes very carefully, but do they check octane and purity? I don't know understand why one gas station will be boarded up but a new built a block or two away. Many service stations had only a pay telephone as their service. I believe that was called "semi-public" coin service and the property owner had to pay up if the coin box failed to meet a minimum amount. Sometimes those pay phones had non-dial extensions in a back room; if so the pay phone would have a flip sign over the coin slot warning to listen first. I last saw such an installation about 3 years ago, I don't know if it is offered today. There are fewer gas stations with service bays these days, many have either nothing at all or a convenience store instead. These places also had those LOUD outdoor ringers. Of course today you can buy gas self service sticking your debit card in the slot without any human intervention. Obviously there's a data link a little fancier than a payphone. Some brands have a keychain device for even faster purchases. Some gas stations have a satellite dish on the roof, again, fancier than the payphone. In WW II the govt naturally wanted to simplify shipping goods to the front as much as possible. But there were two types of gasoline required: Leaded gas was needed for motor vehicles, but unleaded was needed for heaters and field cooking stoves (lead would clog the stove.) Apparently gasoline was used as a heating fuel way back when but not anymore. I know of one gas station that still has phone booths and they have the Verizon name on them. Will have to get a picture. Most gas station public phones are pedestal mounted and COCOTS. In some cities, coal was used for school building heater much later than normal (oil had taken over). I believe pressure from the coal miners forced the city to stick with coal. I wonder if they still use coal or since converted. My parents somehow converted their home from coal to oil during WW II (I would've thought it'd be rationed and not permitted). My mother said coal heat was miserable and oil was a huge blessing. When the 1970s energy crises came and some people thought about coal to save money, my mother thought they were crazy. ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell System Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 14:46:49 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Nathan Strom wrote: > All the Amoco stations near me in CT have re-branded in the past > couple years to BP. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I try not to think much about Chicago > in recent years, but I think my brother told me that Amoco stations > around Chicago are no longer 'Standard Oil Division of Amoco' but now > are a sort of green color with the BP signs on them. I really do not > know for sure. PAT] I was in the northwest suburbs of Chicago for a few days at the end of '03 and the few former Amoco stations I saw had been rebranded. I'd heard that they'd retain the Amoco branding, but considering that they moved their US operations from Cleveland to Chicago when they bought Amoco**, I'd have been surprised if they *didn't* rebrand the Amoco stations. --SJS **This would be the second time they moved their US headquarters, having moved from Atlanta to Cleveland when they bought Sohio. JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell System Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 22:28:05 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , Nathan Strom wrote: > TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to Steve Sobol > : >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: In much of the midwest area now, Amoco >> does business as 'The Standard Oil Division of Amoco Oil Company'. PAT] > All the Amoco stations near me in CT have re-branded in the past couple > years to BP. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I try not to think much about Chicago > in recent years, but I think my brother told me that Amoco stations > around Chicago are no longer 'Standard Oil Division of Amoco' but now > are a sort of green color with the BP signs on them. I really do not > know for sure. PAT] The AMOCO label has been gone from the Chicago area for several years. They're all BP now. ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Known Spam Sites Date: Mon, 06 Jun 2005 14:43:30 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com John Smith wrote: > Unless the sites were being HOSTED by GoDaddy, what do you expect them > to do? It's the hosting company on whose servers the spammers are > operating that has the power to stop them. Godaddy's policy on domain name regs is to nuke registrations of domains that spam. JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ 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) RSS Syndication of TELECOM Digest: http://telecom-digest.org/rss.html For syndication examples see http://www.feedroll.com/syndicate.php?id=308 and also http://feeds.feedburner.com/telecom ************************************************************************* * 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 V24 #253 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Jun 7 15:06:47 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 1656314F26; Tue, 7 Jun 2005 15:06:47 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #254 Message-Id: <20050607190647.1656314F26@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 15:06:47 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.7 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Tue, 7 Jun 2005 15:05:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 254 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Seattle Tops List of Wireless Web Communities (Lisa Minter) Bellsouth to Launch Wireless Broadband Service (Lisa Minter) China to Close Unregistered Web Sites (Lisa Minter) BenQ Gets Control of Siemens' Mobile Phone Unit (Telecom dailyLead USTA) QuickTime 7 for Windows Public Preview (Monty Solomon) Coal, was: From our Archives: History of Standard Oil/Bell (D Burstein) Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info) Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (Gary Novosielski) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Gary Novosielski) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Lisa Hancock) Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? (John R. Levine) Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? (pieterek@spamcop.net) Re: Wrong Time Shown in Vonage Caller ID (DevilsPGD) Re: From our Archives: History of Standard Oil/Bell (Justin Time) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Seattle Tops List of Wireless Web Communities Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 12:11:12 -0500 Maybe it's the rain that encouraged Seattle's residents to stay indoors, sipping their lattes and surfing the Web wirelessly, that made the northwest city this year's most 'unwired' city, according to a survey released on Tuesday. The study, sponsored by Intel Corp., showed that Seattle had more places for its residents to connect to the Internet via wireless, or Wi-Fi, hot spots than any other U.S. city. Coffee-sipping laptop users are a common sight in Seattle, Washington, the birthplace of Starbucks Corp. that also has software giant Microsoft Corp. in the nearby suburb of Redmond. Second on the list was San Francisco's metropolitan area, followed by Austin, Texas. Fourth was another northwestern city, Portland, Oregon, and fifth was Toledo, Ohio. The survey for 2005's "Most Unwired Cities" was based on the number of access points at commercial, public, airport, and other locations among the top 100 metropolitan areas in the United States. Following is a complete list of the top ten unwired places in the United States: 1. Seattle, Washington 2. San Francisco-San Jose-Oakland, California 3. Austin, Texas 4. Portland, Oregon-Vancouver, Washington 5. Toledo, Ohio 6. Atlanta, Georgia 7. Denver, Colorado 8. Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina 9. Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota 10. Orange County, California Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Bellsouth to Launch Wireless Broadband Service Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 12:12:25 -0500 BellSouth Corp., the No. 3 U.S. local telephone company, said on Tuesday it would launch a wireless high-speed Internet service for residential customers based on an early version of the WiMax technology backed by Intel Corp. BellSouth and other telecommunications companies have been testing WiMax as a cheaper alternative for connecting hard-to-reach customers or replacing more expensive wired data links. BellSouth said it would offer the service starting in August in Athens, Georgia, and would expand to several cities in Florida later this year. The company did not release details on prices or data speeds for the service. Intel, the world's largest chip maker, is pushing WiMax as a way to spread cheap yet ubiquitous wireless broadband access, as well as a future driver of chips and notebook computer sales. With Intel's muscle behind the WiMax push, some 240 companies have joined the industry group developing standards and equipment. Certified WiMax equipment has yet to go on sale, but several companies sell "pre-WiMax" gear based on early versions of the standards. BellSouth said its service would use equipment from privately-owned Navini Networks. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: China to Close Unregistered Web Sites Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 12:14:10 -0500 China is to close unregistered China-based domestic Web sites and blogs, a media watchdog said, as the government tightens its grip on the Internet. Popular domestic Web portals are already pressured not to publish sensitive news and voluntarily patrol chatrooms and other areas of their sites for "politically incorrect" or "unapproved" statements and delete them. Beijing announced in March that every China-based Web site now had to register and provide complete information on its organizers by June 30 or face being declared illegal, the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders group said in a statement seen on Tuesday. "The plan is all the more worrying as the government has also revealed that it has a new system for monitoring sites in real time and spotting those that fail to comply," Reporters Without Borders said. "This decision will enable those in power to control online news and information much more effectively." Around three-quarters of domestic Web sites had complied with the registration orders, Reporters Without Borders quoted official Chinese figures as saying. A report released by the OpenNet Initiative in April called China the world's leading censor of the Internet and said the government employed thousands of officials and private citizens to monitor and control online content. But for all of Beijing's efforts to rein in the medium, pockets of free speech have appeared in Internet chatrooms and blogs. "The authorities also hope to push the most outspoken online sites to migrate abroad, where they will become inaccessible to those inside China because of the Chinese filtering systems," Reporters Without Borders said. Beijing regularly blocks access to some foreign Web pages, including sites run by Chinese dissidents living in exile abroad. China is the world's second-largest Internet market, with about 100 million users and the number is growing. It is also the world's largest jailer of cyber dissidents, having detained more than 60 people for expressing their views online, according to a Reporters Without Borders report from last June. Copyright 2005 Christian Science Monitor. See http://csmonitor.com daily for news. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. *** 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, Christian Science Publishing Society. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Although this will not happen anytime soon, I think we can expect to see the United States begin to clamp down on 'unapproved' and 'unregistered' web sites in the future. It is just a matter of time until the government gets a belly-full of the spam/scam/porn-ridden internet and decides to crack down hard. I mean, the s/s/p ridden internet is not an exception to the rule; it _is_ the rule and has been for a few years now. Watch and see ... at some point the little porky pig character will step out on the stage and say 'thats it, folks'. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 12:59:23 EDT From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: BenQ Gets Control of Siemens' Mobile Phone Unit Telecom dailyLead from USTA June 7, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22153&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * BenQ gets control of Siemens' mobile phone unit BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Qwest eyes XO, source says * Adelphia, ML Media sell cable venture in Puerto Rico * Analysis: AOL's content strategy * News from SUPERCOMM USTA SPOTLIGHT * SUPERCOMM® Exhibits Open Today in Chicago EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Seattle claims "unwired" top spot REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * FCC makes E911 order official Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22153&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 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 23:20:46 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: QuickTime 7 for Windows Public Preview QuickTime 7 for Windows Public Preview http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/preview/ Welcome to QuickTime 7, the latest version of the world's most advanced digital media technology. Download the public preview to get a first look at the exciting new features in QuickTime 7 for Windows. http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/preview/ ------------------------------ From: Danny Burstein Subject: Coal, was From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 01:19:47 UTC Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC In hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com writes: > In some cities, coal was used for school building heater much later > than normal (oil had taken over). I believe pressure from the coal > miners forced the city to stick with coal. I wonder if they still use > coal or since converted. A hefty number of NYC public schools used coal until about five years ago, so you'll probably still see lots of references to them. Actually, for a school, with a fairly large and high pressure boiler system, and with professionally licensed/trained operators [a], coal is not too bad an idea. Provided, of course, that you're using modern equipment. [a] for the most part, high prssure boiler operators in NYC are pretty competent. Yes, there's the periodic news clip about the usual kickbacks and licensing games common in any gov't agency, but most of the folk involved take this stuff seriously. The problem in NYC was that these were _ancient_ boiler systems. Some had _manual_ stokers (aka "firemen") who shoveled the coal in. And there was not even a hint of combustion control or pollution reduction. (And these firemen, unlike the ones on diesel trains, were actually working hard for their money...). As part of the deal in selling the public on an environmental bond issue, the city and state promised to replace all the coal boilers with either natural gas or oil. And, amazingly enough, they did it pretty close to schedule. Last time I looked some of them still had "temporary" trailer-mounted boilers on the sidewalk, but those were the exception. Personally I think we'd have been better off upgrading the coal systems and, for that matter, placing baseload electrical generators in the schools as well, but no one asked me. NYC's local oil distribution was pretty maxed out a few years ago, and that modest demand increase by the schools had a pretty large impact on fuel prices. And, if you want to see what General Electric is thinking about coal, check out their very, err, unique advert. I've put a QuickTime version of it up at: http://www.panix.com/~dannyb/video/16-tons-cdr.mov _____________________________________________________ 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: I'd personally like to see more wide- spread research/development/use of solar power, especially for things like heating our homes in the winter. Oops, I forgot to include the mantra from the petroleum industry on this: "Solar power is not practical nor efficient." PAT] ------------------------------ From: NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Date: 6 Jun 2005 18:11:29 -0700 Steve Sobol wrote: > Steven Lichter wrote: >> I have seen both, more from the mailing though. > Thanks for the feedback. I wish GoDaddy didn't sell bulk email > services at all. :-/ Time to go rattle some cages. > Nalick, "Breathe" Go to GoDaddy.com on Wednesday evening, they set up a chat room to go along with their streaming radio show. You can even call up an 800 number to get on "air" I think. ------------------------------ From: Gary Novosielski Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 03:27:55 GMT Steve Sobol wrote: > But the question is ... are you seeing emails coming from GoDaddy > customers using their mailing list product? Or are you just seeing > lots of spam from GoDaddy-registered domains? Both are bad. I'd argue > that the former is a lot worse. Since GoDaddy is a fast-growing registrar, it's likely that a lot of mail, even mail with forged From: addresses, may come from a GoDaddy -registered domain. But registrars can't be expected to filter prospective registrants to remove potential, or even actual, spammers. All a registrar does is point a domain name to a name server. It has no part in transmitting the message, nor any idea what's in it. It's the Internet service provider or web hosting company that should field complaints and terminate the service of spammers. Since GoDaddy also does hosting, it's possible they might be on the hook for this, but I had the impression that the original complaint was that some domain in the e-mail headers was had been registered through GoDaddy, as confirmed by a whois search. If that's all it is, then it's not really a fair gripe. But I've re-read the messages and still can't tell for sure exactly how GoDaddy is accused of being involved. Come to think of it, I can't recall ever before seeing a complaint that tried to take a domain name registrar to task for the actions of the owners of the domains. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I would like to ask you just one question: _Why_ can't a registrar be expected to screen potential or actual spammers? If registrars started doing that, they'd be heros in the eyes of most netters. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Gary Novosielski Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 03:29:34 GMT Fred Atkinson wrote: > Sorry to come down on you this hard, but limiting student access to > information simply because we think they don't 'need' access to it is > a pretty short sighted opinion for an educator to take. You're presuming that it's educators who are in favor of blocking technology, but I think that's jumping to an unsupported conclusion. Educators and, to an even greater extent, librarians are mostly opposed to arbitrary blocking software and other automated solutions to this "problem". But the religious fundamentalists now in control of the federal government have forced local schools to install blocking software, ignoring all the facts and figures (and plain old first-hand experience) that show it's useless, just so they can say they're "protecting the children". Sometimes, local school boards will get pressure to "do something" from parent groups who have been panicked by some sensationalized story in the press about child molesters and porno pushers on the Net. Blocking access lets them say they've acted to solve the "problem", which is a whole lot easier than educating parents on the real dangers and the remedies that really work. As a result, students who try to do a report on breast cancer will usually be unable to access any information on the subject because "breast" is on the list of evil keywords. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: 7 Jun 2005 09:07:12 -0700 Robert Bonomi wrote: >> Sorry, but I know too many government agencies that have strict rules >> on what their employees may say using any government equipment, and >> AFAIK these rules are perfectly legal and upheld. > Generally, true, *today*. There is a _long_ history of attempts at > such rules that have been held partially or wholly void, necessitating > re-writes. Until around 1975 government employees were under many restrictions. There was a law, the Hatch Act, that prohibited politicking by government employees. That made sense in the idea it was to avoid government employees serving as patronage or beholden to elected officials for their jobs. Until that time Federal employees had to sign off that they weren't Communists. They didn't even want to see bumper stickers on cars in employee parking lots. They wanted the appearance of strict neutrality. The laws today are different. There certainly does remain some restrictions within the workplace. > Government-as-employer is a _very_ complex legal situation. There is a > difficult balancing act between exercise of 'rights' _as_employer_ and > infringing on the 'civil rights' of the employee. ALL employers face many regulations. That is one of the motivations for established companies to dump long-time employees and go to outsourcing or contract workers. > The body of law regarding what is allowable/acceptable in a government > work-place is significantly different that what is allowable/ > acceptable in a private employer's workplace. There is substantial variety among government employers and private employers. But I am not aware of "significant" differences between public and private as to day-to-day workplace activity. (There may be differences in hiring and firing procedures on account of civil service, but some unionized private companies aren't very different in that regard. >> Sorry, but rules do exist prohibiting "specific things" in government >> and in schools. > Would you care to itemize the 'saying specific things' forbidden by > those rules? Among other things: 1) No pornography. 2) Illegal pornography will be turned over to the police. 3) No harassment (per sexual harassment standards). 4) No non-work related material (doesn't apply in the library). 5) No release of private or restricted information. 6) Compliance with policy on inter-dept communications (doesn't apply in the library). 7) Compliance with various technical rules to protect system integrity. > That aside, Because something _is_ publicly funded, and made available > to the public, 'at large', *does* mean that there are restrictions and > limitations that the government can exercise over what 'the public' > can do on/with that 'something'. There are restrictions on EVERYTHING in this world. A building has to comply with zoning and fire codes. A private building open to the public (ie a store or restaurant) must comply with further regulations. None the less, within the law, owners of property, BOTH government or private, may enact their own rules of conduct and procedure within their properties. Years ago (before the laws), a governmentn director banned smoking in his dept, for example. Certain attire may be required, for example. Indeed, in some cases government employees have more restrictions than private employees, such as poll workers and cops showing neutrality while on duty during an election. > Which has nothing to do with 'free speech', in point of fact. The > summons is for _how_ you did things, not _what_ you said. It has EVERYTHING to do with what is SAID. If I threaten to kill you, you can have me arrested and convicted for making threats. Other statements can result in conviction for disorderly conduct or harassment. If I libel or slander you, you can sue me for damages. > Regulating/restricting the _content_ of speech has very high barriers > to overcome. > Regulating/restricting the _form_ of speech faces far, _far_ lower > barriers. The barriers are not as high as you think. Further, many argue (I don't quite agree) that regulating the form of speech effectively limits the content of speech. For instance, some demand that free speech be allowed in shopping malls (which are private property) because the malls are the "new Main Street". Courts have been mixed on that. Many advocates argue that standing on a corner handing out leaflets (a very classic form of free speech) has so little impact that they should be allowed stronger forms of speech. >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: It is also important to remember the >> difference between someone who is _governed by the government_ versus >> someone who is _employed by the government_ (except as the government >> employee happens to coincidentally also be a citizen). ... >> administrative convenience is given much weight in the courts. Pat's position is 100% correct and a good view of it. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This is to Lisa Hancock regards the > school choir denied the right to sing their songs even as an after > school volunteer activity. The same thing happened several years ago > in Chicago, compliments of the boneheads at the ACLU. So the kids at > the school got even, with help from their choirmaster and the parents. > Their after school activity withdrew _any and all_ affiliation with > the public schools. They made it plain in their concert programs that > they were _NOT_ affiliated in any way with the Chicago Public Schools. > They further noted in their concert programs that their choirmaster > and musicians were employed _by the choir_, and not by the Chicago > Public Schools. "Although most members of our choir are in fact > students in the Chicago Public Schools, and occassionally it is > convenient for the choir to rent an auditorium facility from the > Chicago Public Schools to give performances, we have absolutely no > connection with the Chicago Public Schools." They gave programs of > choral music by Bach, Handel and Mozart. _Tough stuff_ and always > excellently done. Of course, much of it made reference to God or > (in the case of some of Handel's oratorios), passages of scripture. > Stuff that almost caused me to faint, it was that well done. And > when asked why they were not affiliated with one of the schools, the > choirmaster would always say afterward, _now_ do you see why we have > no affiliation with the Chicago Public Schools? We would not be > allowed to do what we want to do. We do not sing and play for the > lowest common denominator, which is what would be expected of us, > and all we would be allowed. A couple of the school system's > principals, who were still a bit sensitive to when the choir and > their choirmaster had 'pulled out of school' responded by saying, > "Well, you don't have to be so snotty about it!" ... but the > choirmaster's response was that just because the schools would only > allow very bland and generic 'jingle bells' songs at Christmas did > not mean _they_ had to, or intended to settle for that. PAT] I agree -- this shows that sometimes restricting religion is actually restricting free speech and art and culture. A heck of a lot of classic art and music was religious oriented. The Philadelphia schools had an open access policy for after school activities. The choir happened to be school students and led by a school employee (on her own time) but they did African American gospel singing. They claimed it was cultural. They claimed that since no school money was involved and the school had an open policy their choir should be allowed. The courts ruled against it as being religion practiced in schools. I don't think anybody in the school objected, rather it was external ACLU types who brought a lawsuit. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Did the court actually put the choir out of business? It sounds to me like it did. Did the choir try going the 'free association' direction as the one did in Chicago? That is to say, pick up their music and other belongings (and since it was after school hours) simply skip the premises to do their thing? The ACLU would have probably had a hissy fit if they had done that, or tried to do it. And you see, the 'joke', if you want to call it that, flies back squarely into the faces of the ACLU types. I thought almost _everyone_ knew that a _huge_ amount of the world's greatest classical music and its composers, Bach, Mendelssohn, Handel, Mozart, others, based much of their work on religious themes. And other than the Bible -- the first place winner for much classical music -- who comes in second place? None other than William Shakespeare, i.e. 'Romeo and Juliet' and others from Felix Mendelssohn for example. 'tis a real shame the ACLU has to act so puritanical so much of the time. PAT] ------------------------------ From: johnl@iecc.com (John R. Levine) Subject: Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? Date: 6 Jun 2005 23:10:10 -0400 Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > Maybe it has to do with the way GSM works. You didn't mention AT&T > Wireless or Cingular. Cingular has turned off all SMS on my GSM phone other than their own (free) network messages. They said it was the only way to prevent getting postage-due premium SMS spam from sms.ac. I checked, it's really off, SMS sent either from other phones or from email vanishes. R's, John ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 19:58:29 -0500 From: pieterek@spamcop.net Subject: Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? Steve Sobol wrote: >> John Mayson wrote: >> My wife and I switched to T-Mobile this week. With our particular >> plan all incoming text messages are charged at 5 cents per message. I >> receive about a $1 worth of spam per day. I called T-Mobile, but they >> won't even acknowledge my account exists because I'm not the "primary >> account holder" as my wife actually bought the phones. She's been >> sort of busy and hasn't called them herself. I don't know whether or not T-Mobile can/will disable SMS, but I am a TM subscriber. They are pretty strict about security as far as my dealings with them. When you dial customer care from your mobile, you are asked for your number, area code first, and last 4 digits of the primary account holder's SSN. They did not used to ask for that. When you reach a rep, they ask you to verify name and address and usually (but not always) ask you for your account's password. (I am not making this up; I have always had a password on my T-M account as well, which you can also use on their website). > TM should be no different. It's an account security issue; you DO NOT > want just anyone to be able to call in about your account. I'm with Steve; you do not want just anyone to be calling and messing up your accounts! However, I fail to see how you are getting so much SMS spam (spim?). I have only gotten 2 since I have been with VoiceStream, now T-Mobile ... my SIM card is so old, it still says VStream when I turn my phone on. Maybe you should demand a new number -- the person who had the phone number before you may be the party causing your grief ... Good luck, Claire ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: Re: Wrong Time Shown in Vonage Caller ID Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 11:03:27 -0600 Organization: Disorganized In message Chris Farrar wrote: > I have a Vonage (Canada) VoIP number and I'm wondering if anyone else > is experiencing this problem. > I'm using an Aastra 392 (aka a Nortel Vista 392 screen phone) 2 line > phone. Line one is on Bell Canada in the 905-282-XXXX exchange. Line > 2 is Vonage Canada through the Linksys PSP2 adapter in the 416-628-XXXX > exchange. > The problem is that the phone with reset the display clock to conform > with the last Caller ID information available. Bell Canada is sending > the correct time (Eastern Daylight Time) on inbound calls, but Vonage > is sending Eastern Standard Time. So whenever I receive a call on > Vonage, my screen phone resets itself to EST, when we are currently in > EDT, and the clock is then 1 hour slow until the next call comes in on > Bell Canada to put it back into EDT. > Theoretically this problem will disappear when we go back to EST in > the fall, but is there a way to get Vonage to update their clock > before then? First, go to your web interface, change the timezone, reset your ATA, see if it changes your CID. If so, change it back and see if you're good to go. If that doesn't help, email Vonage, wait 4 months, receive a response that says "Yes CID is supported", then reply back and explain the issue again and they'll fix it. ------------------------------ From: Justin Time Subject: Re: From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell System Date: 7 Jun 2005 05:53:24 -0700 The AMOCO label has been gone from the Chicago area for several years. They're all BP now. And every time I see a BP station I think back to Dick Martin and "You bet your bippee!" Rodgers Platt ------------------------------ 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 V24 #254 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Jun 8 03:51:30 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id EF24C15106; Wed, 8 Jun 2005 03:51:19 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #255 Message-Id: <20050608075119.EF24C15106@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 03:51:19 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.7 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Wed, 8 Jun 2005 03:51:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 255 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Personal Data for 3.9 Million Lost in Transit (Monty Solomon) Apple Vows to Make Podcasting Easier (Monty Solomon) Valued Added Caller ID Spoofing (T. Sean Weintz) Cannot Cancel AT&T Service After Moving to Vonage (johnspilker@msn.com) Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (Steve Sobol) Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (John Levine) Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? (Isaiah Beard) Re: From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell (Steve Sobol) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Robert Bonomi) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Scott Dorsey) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Thor Lancelot Simon) Re: Coal, was From Our Archives, History of Standard Oil (Thor Simon) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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, 8 Jun 2005 00:22:43 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Personal Data for 3.9 Million Lost in Transit By TOM ZELLER Jr. In one of the largest breaches of data security to date, CitiFinancial, the consumer finance subsidiary of Citigroup, announced yesterday that a box of computer tapes containing information on 3.9 million customers was lost by United Parcel Service last month, while in transit to a credit reporting agency. Executives at Citigroup said the tapes were picked up by U.P.S. early in May and had not been seen since. The tapes contained names, addresses, Social Security numbers, account numbers, payment histories and other details on small personal loans made to millions of customers through CitiFinancial's network of more than 1,800 lending branches, or through retailers whose product financing was handled by CitiFinancial's retail services division. The company said there was no indication that the tapes had been stolen or that any of the data in them had been compromised. It was, however, the latest in a series of recent data-security failures involving nearly every kind of institution that compiles personal information -- ranging from data brokers like ChoicePoint and LexisNexis to financial institutions like Bank of America and Wachovia to the media giant Time Warner to universities like Boston College and the University of California, Berkeley. All these institutions have reported data breaches in the last five months, affecting millions of individuals and spurring Congressional hearings and numerous bills aimed at improving security in the handling of sensitive consumer information. The fear is that Social Security numbers, when combined with a consumer's name, address and date of birth, can be used by thieves to open new lines of credit, secure loans and otherwise steal someone's identity. Whether the recently reported breaches indicate an epidemic of data loss is unclear. Many privacy and security advocates have suggested that a California law, requiring that consumers be notified of data security breaches, has led to more confessions of data losses and increased awareness of a longstanding problem. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/07/business/07data.html?ex=1275796800&en=c99c395251d1dec5&ei=5090 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I'll tell you the latest thing the phishers are doing: A phisher dressed up like a UPS delivery man or Federal Express person shows up at the company to get the daily shipment to the credit bureaus (yes, it is a _daily_ transfer). The person of course has no connection to the delivery service; he just does what is called 'reverse engineering' or 'social engineering' on the bank employees responsible for making the transfer of the tapes. A variation on this happened a number of years ago when two guys dressed as postal employees showed up at the Amoco Oil Company credit card office in the (presumably secure) area where new plastics were issued and mailed out to new customers. Because Amoco had been tipped off the day before that this was going to happen, they were able to prevent it with FBI guys on hand to arrest the pair who were posing as postal workers coming to get the daily output of fresh cards to go in the mail. I am surprised the phishers have not thought of this before: rather than one by one trying to trick information out of people, instead trick the relative handful of people in charge of data transfer between bank and credit bureau. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 14:33:21 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Apple Vows to Make Podcasting Easier By RACHEL KONRAD AP Technology Writer SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Apple Computer Inc. CEO Steve Jobs called podcasting "the hottest thing going in radio" on Monday and promised to make it easier for audiophiles to create and distribute the digital recordings. Amateur and professional disk jockeys have established more than 8,000 podcasts, downloadable audio files that focus on everything from electronic gadgets to movies and astronomy. They can be played on computers or digital music players, such as Apple's popular iPod. Business Week, Forbes, Disney and Sirius have podcasts, as do hundreds of individuals including wine aficionados, baseball fans and political junkies. Productions range from stream-of-consciousness rants to slick shows and, unlike conventional radio broadcasts, podcasts have no time limits, deadlines or government oversight. At a technology conference on Monday, Jobs previewed iTunes version 4.9. The software allows users to click on and subscribe to different podcasts, then automatically delivers the shows to any connected iPod _ far less cumbersome than the third-party applications many listeners now need. The newest iTunes will include a directory of podcasts, and creators will be able to register their shows with Apple's iTunes Music Store. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49684276 ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Valued Added Caller ID Spoofing Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 17:43:04 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Caller ID spoofing services being available to the general public were bad enough. This service not only spoofs caller ID, it allows you to set up automated harrassment! You pick pre-recorded sound bites to play, and you can set it up to call someone repeatedly. http://www.tricktel.com ------------------------------ From: johnspilker@msn.com Subject: Cannot Cancel My AT&T Service After Moving to Vonage Date: 7 Jun 2005 18:46:25 -0700 Anyone know how I can get AT&T to cancel long distance service to my home number? We moved our home number to Vonage from Qwest with AT&T long distance service. Qwest cancelled the service promptly and even gave us a refund. AT&T refuses to cancel the long distance service. They maintain the cancellation must be done through Qwest. Qwest says the notification has been sent to AT&T. A Qwest representative said she had heard of several instances where AT&T will not cancel long distance service of numbers moved over to VOIP. Any ideas? Thanks. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Is this a situation where AT&T is charging you some monthly fee for 'handling' your account? If not, and you are just billed for calls you actually make then it does not matter. Just ignore it; let them call you a 'customer' if they wish, since there are no calls being made via AT&T, the account will always have a zero balance. Now if AT&T is charging some sort of monthly fee, then a letter sent registered to the company should help. For example, one side of SBC _still_ persists in referring to me as a 'customer' while another part of the company is trying to win me back (with all sorts of outrageous deals these days, free service, etc). PAT] ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 11:40:56 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info wrote: > Go to GoDaddy.com on Wednesday evening, > they set up a chat room to go along with their streaming radio show. > You can even call up an 800 number to get on "air" I think. I'm going to try pinging GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons first. He's supposed to be really good about responding to email. JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ Date: 7 Jun 2005 19:06:24 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > But registrars can't be expected to filter prospective registrants > to remove potential, or even actual, spammers. It would be more accurate to say that registrars aren't willing to filter actual spammers since that would cost money and they're more interested in short term revenue than the long term good of the Internet. For years I've been saying that the Internet biz needs a credit bureau so that when people try to sing up, it's possible to find out if they've been booted off before for nonpayment, misbehavior, and other problems. Everyone says it's a great idea, but so far not great enough to do it. R's, John [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I wonder if anyone has considered a class action suit (netters versus registrars) on the theory that if the registrars had not given safe harbor to those cretins they would have had no way to spam the world. I think the idea of a 'credit bureau' approach is a good one. Every person or company which applies for an IP address or name space in a domain has to have their request put up for public discussion/approval. You want to register an IP address, and find a registrar willing to accept you, then regardless of which registrar you wish to use, your application is made public to the net, such as requesting an FCC license. After some period of time -- let's say 60 days -- if there are no serious complaints about you, your 'license' (or IP address or name space) is granted. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Isaiah Beard Subject: Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2005 00:07:20 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Joseph wrote: >> That's interesting. Both Verizon and Sprint have disabled SMS >> completely when I requested it. Why can't T-Mobile? > Maybe it has to do with the way GSM works. You didn't mention AT&T > Wireless or Cingular. SMS is part of the GSM spec. I don't know if > that's the case with CDMA. It is, but can be inhibited if need be. I have to say, SMS seems to be GSM's achilles' heel. A lot of signalling functions on GSM appear to be handled by thinly vieled SMS messages, stuff that would be handled on a more formal level in CDMA through the paging channel. I'm willing to bet that T-Mobile is unwilling to fully disable SMS on an account because in many markets, they still use it for voicemail and other notifications. E-mail fudged to thwart spammers. Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply. ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell System Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 11:46:53 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Justin Time wrote: > The AMOCO label has been gone from the Chicago area for several years. > They're all BP now. > And every time I see a BP station I think back to Dick Martin and "You > bet your bippee!" When I used to work at a BP station I jokingly called them the Big Prices Oil Company. The amusing and highly ironic thing about my nickname is that BP bought Atlantic Richfield in 2000. ARCO's stations are positioned as price leaders. In fact, only Valero (another discount brand, owned by Diamond Shamrock) matches BP's prices at the ARCO stations in this area. Chevron is far and away the most expensive gas station chain in SoCal. Often the local Chevron is 10-15c/gal more expensive than a nearby ARCO. JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 22:45:27 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , wrote: > Robert Bonomi wrote: >>> Sorry, but I know too many government agencies that have strict rules >>> on what their employees may say using any government equipment, and >>> AFAIK these rules are perfectly legal and upheld. >> Generally, true, *today*. There is a _long_ history of attempts at >> such rules that have been held partially or wholly void, necessitating >> re-writes. > Until around 1975 government employees were under many restrictions. > There was a law, the Hatch Act, that prohibited politicking by > government employees. Don't tell anybody, but the Hatch Act is *still* on the books. Significantly modified, for federal (and D.C.) employess _only_), in 1993. Don't take my word for it -- see > That made sense in the idea it was to avoid > government employees serving as patronage or beholden to elected > officials for their jobs. Until that time Federal employees had to > sign off that they weren't Communists. Pssst! Many, if not all, federal agency employees are *still* required to sign loyalty oaths. While they don't mention the Communist Party by name (the Supreme Court threw that out several times in the 1950's and 1960's) the employ does swear that he 'is not, and will not become' a mamber of any organization dedicated to the overhtrow of the United States Government. Many states require it as well -- Calif, Okla, Fla, Arizona, Lousiania, Georgia, just to mention a few. > They didn't even want to see bumper stickers on cars in employee > parking lots. They wanted the appearance of strict neutrality. > The laws today are different. There certainly does remain some > restrictions within the workplace. Oh, lets see. *NO* federal (or District of Columbia) employee may: -- be a candidate for public office in partisan elections -- engage in political activity while: + on duty + in a government office + wearing an official uniform + using a government vehicle -- wear partisan political buttons on duty In addition, employees in 'select' departments/agencies/etc, may not: -- campaign for or against a candidate or slate of candidates in partisan elections -- make campaign speeches -- collect contributions or sell tickets to political fund raising functions -- distribute campaign material in partisan elections -- organize or manage political rallies or meetings -- hold office in political clubs or parties -- circulate nominating petitions -- work to register voters for one party only -- wear political buttons at work Note that for those 'select' employes that for all but the last item, those restrictions apply to on AND _off_the_job_ activities. The Hatch Act restrictions for State-level employees of agencies that get Federal funding are somewhat more restrictive than the first set of Federal restrictions above. >> Government-as-employer is a _very_ complex legal situation. There is a >> difficult balancing act between exercise of 'rights' _as_employer_ and >> infringing on the 'civil rights' of the employee. >> The body of law regarding what is allowable/acceptable in a government >> work-place is significantly different that what is allowable/ >> acceptable in a private employer's workplace. > There is substantial variety among government employers and private > employers. But I am not aware of "significant" differences between > public and private as to day-to-day workplace activity. (There may be > differences in hiring and firing procedures on account of civil > service, but some unionized private companies aren't very different in > that regard. Ok, so you "don't know what you don't know". Just one example: In private industry, and employer can allow use of company property for non-work activities by employees -- e.g. using the copy machine to run off flyeres for a local club activity. In a federal government agency, if an employee does that it they are comitting a *crime* -- one with _prison time_ attached to it. Whether or not they have the 'ok' of their supervisor. 18 USC 641 Incidentally, that same statute can be used to prosecute those who send unwanted commercial solication (aka "spam") e-mails to fed government mail-servers. Then see above, regarding "Hatch Act" restrictions on political activity. If a Federal employee violates any of those rules, and the review board finds that the violation does *not* merit their getting fired, they lose a month's pay, guaranteed. Those are the _only_ two penalties allowed -- to be fired or 'fined' a month's pay. At the State/local level, if the agency does not fire the violator, they must give back Fed Funding to the tune of _two_years_ worth of the funding for that violator's salary, or lose *all* future funding. >>> Sorry, but rules do exist prohibiting "specific things" in government >>> and in schools. >> Would you care to itemize the 'saying specific things' forbidden by >> those rules? > Among other things: > 1) No pornography. Doesn't meet the 'SAYING specific things is forbidden' requirement. Not a 'speech' issue. > 2) Illegal pornography will be turned over to the police. Doesn't meet the 'SAYING specific things is forbidden' requirement. Not a 'speech' issue. > 3) No harassment (per sexual harassment standards). That one is, *peripherally*, a speech issue. HOWEVER, case law holds that 'pattern and manner of behavior' is _much_ more of a determining factor than the words used. "Go suck a fag", or "what time shall I knock you up?", for example, are not necessarily sexually related. Harrassment is much more about _how_ a thing is said, than *what* is said. > 4) No non-work related material (doesn't apply in the library). Doesn't meet the 'SAYING specific things is forbidden' requirement. Not a 'speech' issue. > 5) No release of private or restricted information. *NOT* a 'speech' issue -- although it has the superficial appearance of being speech related. > 6) Compliance with policy on inter-dept communications (doesn't > apply in the library). Whatever _that_ means. Is it "If you're going to speak to another department, this is how it shall be done?" Or '_you_ are not allow to ask this other department to do things -- the request must come from your boss?" Or what? This is probably a restriction on _how_ things are to be said, as distinct from _what_ may be said. > 7) Compliance with various technical rules to protect system > integrity. Doesn't meet the 'SAYING specific things is forbidden' requirement. Not a 'speech' issue. Final score: 0.25 out of 7 >> That aside, Because something _is_ publicly funded, and made available >> to the public, 'at large', *does* mean that there are restrictions and >> limitations that the government can exercise over what 'the public' >> can do on/with that 'something'. > There are restrictions on EVERYTHING in this world. A building has to > comply with zoning and fire codes. A private building open to the > public (ie a store or restaurant) must comply with further > regulations. "So what?" applies. The fact that some kinds of restrictions _are_ allowed does not disprove a claim that other kinds of restrictions are *NOT* allowed. I didn't dispute that some kinds of restrictions are allowed. I do claim that governmental activities are prohibited from engaging in *some* kinds of restrictions. > None the less, within the law, owners of property, BOTH government or > private, may enact their own rules of conduct and procedure within > their properties. Years ago (before the laws), a governmentn director > banned smoking in his dept, for example. Certain attire may be > required, for example. Again, "so what?" Some kinds of governmental restrictions are allowed. Some are *NOT*. I can cite a Supreme Court ruling expressly invalidating a governmental unit 'dress code' item that forbade the wearing of certain items of apparel. An organization in 'private industry' would have had *NO* problem enforcing that particular dress-code item.. > Indeed, in some cases government employees have more restrictions than > private employees, such as poll workers and cops showing neutrality > while on duty during an election. Again, "so what?" Evidence of the existance of some kinds of restrictions is neither 'evidence against", nor "disproof of", a claim that some kinds of restrictions are proscribed. [ restoring context that the prior poster "conveniently" forgot to include ] || There is no such thing as unlimited free speech. Try screaming a || tirade at your neighbor and you'll get a summons for disorderly || conduct. There are many examples. >> Which has nothing to do with 'free speech', in point of fact. The >> summons is for _how_ you did things, not _what_ you said. > It has EVERYTHING to do with what is SAID. Wrong. Disproof by counter-example. If you said _exactly_ the same words to that neighbor, in a calm and reasoned tone of voice, you will *NOT* get a summons for 'disorderly conduct'. *HOW* you said those things is what gets the summons for "disorderly CONDUCT". It is the _conduect_ that is the problem, not the language. > If I threaten to kill you, > you can have me arrested and convicted for making threats. You're obviously ignorant of the existing 'case law' on *that* point. With the exception of a remark of that nature about the President of the United States, one cannot be charged/convicted *just* for making such a remark. The *words* "I'm going to kill you", or "I could kill you", or similar are _not_ illegal to say. They can be said in many ways that do *not* constitute a 'threat'. Saying the words is not forbidden by any law. Making a (believable) _threat_, is a different matter, *regardless* of the words used. Saying _exactly_ the same words, in a manner and/or context that does not constitute a threat is *not* illegal I, personally, have shouted "Fire!" in a crowded theater -- one of the 'textbook' examples of 'prohibited' speech. Strangely enough, the two cops standing less than 15 feet away from me, did *absolutely* nothing. Can you guess why? > Other statements can result in conviction for disorderly conduct FALSE TO FACT. No statement, _in_and_of_itself_, constitutes disorderly conduct. The "style", and "manner", in which the statement was made is what constutes the 'conduct' that is objectionable. > harassment. The 'words' do not constitute harassment. The *pattern*of*behavior* does. > If I libel or slander you, you can sue me for damages. Which is *UTTERLY* irrelevant to 1st Amendment rights, and restrictions on *governmental* prohibitions on speech. The _government_ does *not* prohibit your saying libelous/slanderous things. The -government- does *not* prescribe any specific penalties for those actions. Anyway, not bad for a strawman argument. Very nice 'selective editing' -- too bad you got caught at it. >> Regulating/restricting the _content_ of speech has very high barriers >> to overcome. >> Regulating/restricting the _form_ of speech faces far, _far_ lower >> barriers. > The barriers are not as high as you think. The court record confirms that the barriers are there. Cases that have gone to the Supreme Court, and the attempted governmental prohibition on a particular form of speech has been held to be "not permissible". Just *try* to find a case where a _private_industry_ prohibition has been held invalid. On 1st Amend. grounds. > Further, many argue (I don't quite agree) that regulating the form of > speech effectively limits the content of speech. What 'many argue' is not compelling law. That aside, the question *is* a thorny one. A great deal depends on the 'availability' of _alternate_ forms of speech. It is long-standing policy that regulation of 'time, place, and manneer' of speech _is_ allowable where there is a bona-fide public interest being served. Regulation of the "content" of speech reguire a "compelling" public interest, and such regulation must be drawn 'as narrowly as practical' to accomplish the stated goal. > For instance, some > demand that free speech be allowed in shopping malls (which are > private property) because the malls are the "new Main Street". Courts > have been mixed on that. Not very mixed, at least at the Federal level. Unless the mall operator is "acting in the role of government", for which there are an articulated set of tests, the mall *is* private property and the operator is free to restrict access as they see fit. It is possble that State law may impose different limits, on a local basis. > Many advocates argue that standing on a > corner handing out leaflets (a very classic form of free speech) has > so little impact that they should be allowed stronger forms of speech. Which they have _ready_ access to. Newspaper ads, radio & TV commericals. But, they don't have the _money_ for that. So they think they deserve 'special treatment'. *sigh* ------------------------------ From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: 7 Jun 2005 20:11:20 -0400 Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000) Thomas A. Horsley wrote: > I was in Grady Elementary school in Tampa many long decades ago. The > school went through 6th grade, no higher grades around. I was also in > 6th grade, highest grade taught at the school. I tried to check out a > Sherlock Holmes book from the library, and the librarian wouldn't let > me because it was "too hard" for a 6th grader (not true, by the way). > What was it doing in the library if 6th graders shouldn't be reading > it? More important, why would a librarian object to a kid attempting > a little brain stretching even if it was too hard? I went to two high schools. My first high school had an enormous library, with a librarian who would not only point students at books but would get books from the nearby college library for them when needed. And journal articles. They had the whole UN Atoms for Peace series, which was my introduction to nuclear physics. They had a whole section of fine electronics books that was better than some college libraries I have seen. Anybody in the school, even a first-grader, could check these out. Then my parents moved, and I went to a different high school for my past two years. The librarian there was a Mrs. Ianuzzi, and talking with her, she basically told me that she considered her job to be protecting the books from students. She considered herself a saviour in the wilderness of book-destroying children who might want to read books. (Also, the library was dreadful ... my father actually owned more volumes of fiction than the library did and I did not hesitate to point this out). > Thus began my lifelong love affair with bookstores and shunning of > libraries (perhaps the real story behind the librarian's actions > involved some kind of guerilla marketing campaign by bookstores to > turn kids off of libraries while they are young and impressionable > :-). This is a sad thing. Some of my best times were spent in libraries. I sort of maybe lost my virginity in one of them, even. And I think the job of the librarian is a very important one, because bad librarians can scar children forever. --scott "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: 7 Jun 2005 13:26:08 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Did the court actually put the choir > out of business? It sounds to me like it did. Yes. They were ordered shut down. > Did the choir try going the 'free association' direction as the one > did in Chicago? That is to say, pick up their music and other > belongings (and since it was after school hours) simply skip the > premises to do their thing? That I don't know. If they formed as an independent group they shouldn't have had any trouble. However, this particular school was a city-wide magnet school so it would've been hard to find a good meeting location convenient to all. What bothered many people was that the school's supposedly policy was "open use". Somehow the school was "promoting religion" even though the staff person involved was a volunteer. I guess if school kids sit on the steps and sing rap songs with nasty lyrics of rape and violence that's perfectly ok and free speech, but if they sing religious songs life as we know it will come to an end. That hypocrisy bothered a lot of people. IMHO, this is similar to the "Ten Commandments" issue -- with people demanding plagues of them be removed from court houses. Frankly, I would not build a courthouse with one today. But in the 1920s, when these things were built, it was considered appropriate and dignified decoration. It bothers me that suddenly 80 year old stuff is deemed religious and has to come out. IMHO arguing against such plaques and volunteer choirs kills public support for such activist groups and has undesirable political consequences. People will be tolerant only to a point of radical political views, then they will dig in their heels and fight hard. Activists need to pick their battles better. ------------------------------ From: tls@panix.com (Thor Lancelot Simon) Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 05:30:25 +0000 (UTC) Organization: Public Access Networks Corp. Reply-To: tls@rek.tjls.com In article , Gary Novosielski wrote: > Fred Atkinson wrote: >> Sorry to come down on you this hard, but limiting student access to >> information simply because we think they don't 'need' access to it is >> a pretty short sighted opinion for an educator to take. > You're presuming that it's educators who are in favor of blocking > technology, but I think that's jumping to an unsupported conclusion. As both an educator and a student, I am, in fact, in favor of "blocking technology". The last thing I need is students distracted by more crap on their laptops while I'm lecturing -- and the last thing I need, as a student, is more distraction. I'm always happy, in either role. when I walk into a classroom, turn on my laptop, and discover that there is no wireless network connectivity in that particular room. Thor Lancelot Simon tls@rek.tjls.com "The inconsistency is startling, though admittedly, if consistency is to be abandoned or transcended, there is no problem." - Noam Chomsky ------------------------------ From: tls@panix.com (Thor Lancelot Simon) Subject: Re: Coal, was From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 06:41:51 UTC Organization: Public Access Networks Corp. Reply-To: tls@rek.tjls.com > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I'd personally like to see more wide- > spread research/development/use of solar power, especially for things > like heating our homes in the winter. Oops, I forgot to include the > mantra from the petroleum industry on this: "Solar power is not > practical nor efficient." PAT] For what it's worth, many estimates are that it takes more energy to fuse silica to make solar panels than will be output by those panels as electricity over their expected service lifetimes, at sea level in most temperate climes. However, what that analysis does ignore is that you cannot get more local -- that is, less transmission loss -- than the energy generation and consumption from the panels in the typical intertie solar setup. So, if the energy to make the panels is generated in, at least, a not terribly dirty way, and the panels aren't made far from where that power is generated, due to transmission losses solar panels in many locations are a serious net win. Thor Lancelot Simon tls@rek.tjls.com "The inconsistency is startling, though admittedly, if consistency is to be abandoned or transcended, there is no problem." - Noam Chomsky ------------------------------ 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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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 V24 #255 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Jun 8 17:39:50 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 2DCA714F36; Wed, 8 Jun 2005 17:39:50 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #256 Message-Id: <20050608213950.2DCA714F36@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 17:39:50 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.7 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Wed, 8 Jun 2005 17:40:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 256 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson AOL to Feature SBC, BellSouth's Online Yellow Pages (Lisa Minter) UK Man Accused of Hacking Pentagon Appears in Court (Lisa Minter) Strange Problem w/KX-TA624 Hybrid Phone System (Kevin) AOL to Offer YellowPages.com Listings (Telecom dailyLead from USTA) SBC New Low Price; Continued Thread From ba.internet (AES) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Scott Dorsey) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com) Re: From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell System (Wesrock) Re: Cannot Cancel My AT&T Service After Moving to Vonage (Tim@Backhome) Re: Valued Added Caller ID Spoofing (AES) Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (Joseph) Last Laugh! Funny Telephone Picture (Rich Greenberg) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: AOL to Feature SBC, BellSouth's Online Yellow Pages Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 11:29:58 -0500 America Online on Wednesday said it will feature advertising from the Web-based Yellow Pages of SBC Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. in an effort to beef up the Internet service's local search. Yellowpages.com, a joint venture between SBC and BellSouth that includes SBC's Smartpages.com and BellSouth's RealPages.com, will be included in AOL's Yellow Pages feature. The ability to search for businesses, restaurants and events within specific cities and towns has emerged as a battleground among Internet media sites such as Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: UK Man Accusted of Hacking Pentagon Appears in Court Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 11:32:11 -0500 A British man the United States accused of carrying out the world's "biggest military computer hack" appeared in court in London Wednesday at the start of extradition hearings. Gary Mckinnon was arrested Tuesday on charges of computer fraud issued in November 2002 by U.S. prosecutors claiming he illegally accessed 97 U.S. government computers -- including Pentagon and Nasa systems -- over a 12-month period from February 2002, causing $700,000 worth of damage. If found guilty, he could face up to $1.75 million in fines and 70 years in jail. Mckinnon was released on bail to July 27 and banned from using the Internet. The 39-year-old entered Bow Street magistrates' court dressed in light green combat trousers, blowing kisses to the public gallery. The U.S. has admitted that although Mckinnon -- whose hacking name was Solo -- accessed sensitive files there was no evidence that he downloaded classified information or forwarded files to foreign governments. At the time of the indictment, Paul McNulty, US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said: "Mr McKinnon is charged with the biggest military computer hack of all time." Mckinnon's defense lawyer told the court his client planned to vigorously fight extradition to the United States. Hackers have plagued increasingly nervous governments in recent years, with British courts last week also beginning extradition hearings for a couple wanted in connection with the theft of sensitive Israeli defense data. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: kevin Subject: Strange Problem w/KX-TA624 Hybrid Phone System Date: 8 Jun 2005 09:56:06 -0700 We have a Panasonic KX-TA624 Hybrid Phone System with TVS50 Voice Mail Module and a number of 7735 and 7730 phones. Our Phone system Works fine EXCEPT one extension. (#107) If the person at this extension answers the phone and attempts to transfer the caller to another extension, and nobody picks up at that other extension, it never drops into the transferees' voicemail. If the person waiting for someone to answer on the other end hangs up, the phone continues to ring in the office to which the call was transferred in the first place unless killed by extension 107. Also, if extension 107 tries to transfer a call directly to another extensions' voicemail, the menu comes up as if the owner of the mailbox is dialing in. (it says "you have zero new messages........") The transfer feature only works correctly if the receiving extension is there to actually answer the phone. Otherwise, the phone either rings forever, or goes into the wrong menu as stated above. We have already replaced this phone one time with a brand new phone. Thank you for your assistance. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 13:21:53 EDT From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: AOL to offer YellowPages.com listings Telecom dailyLead from USTA June 8, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=3D22187&l=3D2017006 NEWS OF THE DAY * AOL to offer YellowPages.com listings BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Sprint, Yahoo! in wireless e-mail pact * Adelphia creditors ask court to scrap $715M settlement * News from SUPERCOMM USTA SPOTLIGHT * Don't Miss SUPERCOMM Exhibits in Chicago EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Nintendo to launch Wi-Fi network REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * Colorado PUC lifts price controls for Qwest in some areas * Cable industry wants limits on local franchising authority over cable Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=3D22187&l=3D2017006 ------------------------------ From: AES Subject: SBC New Low Price Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2005 09:39:53 -0700 Organization: Stanford University Excerpts from a recent long-running thread [1] on ba.internet: -------------------------------- >>>> There's a law that the landlord must provide a working phone jack. >> This isn't a Berkeley or SF law, it's CA State Law. A working phone >> line is a required feature of a residential rental, the same as hot >> water, running water, electric service, no vermin, etc. -------------------------------- > Contrary to your post, a working phone line is not required for > habitability. Only a functional jack and inside wiring to that jack. > Whether or not there is breakable dialtone, or whether there is a good > drop bridged to the inside wire, is not the responsibility of the > landlord. >>> The law requires landlords to >>> maintain inside wiring to one phone jack. It does not require them to >>> maintain the drop or the service. It does NOT require them to act on >>> the tenant's behalf to fix billing or service problems with phone >>> companies. -------------------------------- >> ... the landlord does have the responsibility to >> provision a working pair to the unit *when the tenant moves in*. -------------------------------- > No, he doesn't. The law covers only the inside wiring, that which was > divested from telco years ago. It doesn't cover anything else. -------------------------------- I have no dog in this fight, but am just curious at this point as to what the truth really is. Anyone able to provide it? [1] "Re: SBC new low price" on ba.internet: The specific incident that started it was one where a departing tenant vanished, leaving a sizable phone bill unpaid; the telco allegedly refuses to release the line to a new tenant until the old bill is paid; and the landlord is supposedly trapped in the middle, unable to provide phone service to the new tenant unless he's willing to pay the unpaid charges for the old tenant. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Who had the responsibility for the phone service in the first place; the tenant or the landlord? If the landlord was _historically_ providing the phone service (and collecting on same from tenants), then landlord is responsible. This type of situation usually only occurs when the landlord is providing phone service in a hotel/motel type situation, where telco believes it is more convenient for a landlord to deal with transients than it is for telco. In those cases, telco usually provides a commission to landlord in exchange for handling the collection and customer service functions. In a _really transient_ situation, such as overnight or weekly tenants, telco is generally obligated to quote any charges for service as they occur, to give the landlord a reasonable opportunity to 'post' the charges and make collection for same. If telco fails to quote time and charges in a timely way and as a result tenant is gone before landlord can collect, that is telco's problem. There are all kinds of audit trails and proofs on whether or not telco made the quote in a timely way, operator ticket serial numbers, etc. In those cases, if telco was advising landlord of the bill due on telephone service, the landlord was diligently 'posting' these entries to a ledger and the tenant skipped without payment, then it is indeed the landlord's problem. After all, says telco, we were paying you a commission on traffic revenue to attend to this sort of thing. On the flip side of the coin, if tenant was _historically_ paying for telephone service (that is, an apartment or similar but with his own wiring and jack and his own obligations to telco) then the problem is telco's unless telco can demonstrate fraud on the part of some third party such as landlord. If I, independently, contracted with telco for service, at some point was unable or unwilling to pay for same, and skipped then telco is responsible. Telco could have, after all, installed a pay-station outside my door or in the parking lot or wherever, but instead chose to take my word (based on credit reports or whatever) regards my ability and willingness to pay for service. So I guess my question would be _who_ originally agreed to pay for the service of the tenant who skipped? We would need more details on this. Telco is protected against attempts to defraud it, however. If telco can demonstrate that something transparent took place, then telco is entitled to withhold service until the problem is cured. For example, several years ago here in this Digest, we learned of the case of a person who skipped with unpaid bills, then that person's mother and father 'conveniently' took over the very same apartment, and kept insisting 'not responsible for the bills of other person', which may in fact have been true, but telco was unwilling to accept that transparency. Is this case by any chance that very same one from several years ago? _That one_ was on the west coast somewhere, and either the child had run off not paying his bills and the parents did not feel responsible or maybe it was the other way around. Are we still dealing with that case? In that case in the Digest from years ago, I think we detirmined that tenants had historically paid their own telephone bill; that tenant had skipped; and that tenant's family members had moved in. The new person kept insisting landlord 'had to' help them explain the problem to telco; landlord attempted to do so, and telco would not accept the explanation. Is this the same case? AES, you said this was a 'long running thread in ba.internet' ... the suggestion made in that long ago case here was that if the landlord felt so strongly inclined to help the tenant, my suggestion was to either give telco a personal guarentee (_not_ a corporate guarentee, telco is not a bunch of fools after all!) on payment or pay the bill and collect it from the new tenant, or perhaps supply the new tenant with a cell phone under the same kind of personal guarentee conditions until the problem got solved. Assuming telco is correct, that it is all just some transparency intended to rip them off, then appeals to the Commission won't help; telco will stick to it's guns, rightfully. If telco is incorrect, and tenants/landlord can prove it, then they will get phone service, albiet perhaps grudgingly, and perhaps with a substantial deposit required. In the meantime, (appeals to the Commission can go on for months until resolved) for phone service for these wonderful new wrongly accused put-upon tenants, if landlord _must_ get involved, then get them a cell phone, and a new rental lease which makes it very clear: Each time the tenant pays any money, the money is _first_ applied to the telephone bill, then it is applied to any rent due. Reasoning is, in the 'unlikely' event the new tenant decides to try the same thing as the old one and stall on paying his bills _due to you_ i.e. rent and by default his phone bill, it is always easier for a landlord to evict a tenant on non-payment of rent than for non-payment of sundry items. PAT] ------------------------------ From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: 8 Jun 2005 10:40:44 -0400 Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000) Thor Lancelot Simon wrote: > Gary Novosielski wrote: >> Fred Atkinson wrote: >>> Sorry to come down on you this hard, but limiting student access to >>> information simply because we think they don't 'need' access to it is >>> a pretty short sighted opinion for an educator to take. >> You're presuming that it's educators who are in favor of blocking >> technology, but I think that's jumping to an unsupported conclusion. > As both an educator and a student, I am, in fact, in favor of > "blocking technology". The last thing I need is students distracted > by more crap on their laptops while I'm lecturing -- and the last > thing I need, as a student, is more distraction. I'm always happy, in > either role. when I walk into a classroom, turn on my laptop, and > discover that there is no wireless network connectivity in that > particular room. That is a different thing altogether. That is not a matter of regulating what the student can look at on the net, but when the student can look at it. THAT is absolutely essential to do if you allow students to use laptops in class at all (which I would strongly discourage, personally). --scott "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: 8 Jun 2005 10:18:15 -0700 Robert Bonomi wrote: > In private industry, and employer can allow use of company property > for non-work activities by employees -- e.g. using the copy machine to > run off flyeres for a local club activity. > In a federal government agency, if an employee does that it they are > comitting a *crime* -- one with _prison time_ attached to it. There are state government agencies where that is NOT that case. There are private sector units that mirror the Fed policy you state above. I would be extremely surprised if people were sent to prison solely for personal use of a federal copier machine. However, some private firms are very fussy about employee theft and have criminally charged their employees. > 1) No pornography > Doesn't meet the 'SAYING specific things is forbidden' requirement. > Not a 'speech' issue. It most certainly is a speech issue. If someone writes something pornographic in nature it is forbidden. Thus, specific speech is indeed restricted. > I can cite a Supreme Court ruling expressly invalidating a > governmental unit 'dress code' item that forbade the wearing of > certain items of apparel. Virtually every government organization I know has a dress code. You may be referring to very narrow situations. (There's a case in the NYC subway system over wearing a religious turban and hat badge. It's ONE case out of 50,000 employees). > An organization in 'private industry' would have had *NO* problem > enforcing that particular dress-code item.. Actually, in some cases private employers have gotten into trouble on some dress code requirements. > *HOW* you said those things is what gets the summons for "disorderly > CONDUCT". It is the _conduect_ that is the problem, not the language. >> If I threaten to kill you, >> you can have me arrested and convicted for making threats. > You're obviously ignorant of the existing 'case law' on *that* point. > With the exception of a remark of that nature about the President of > the United States, one cannot be charged/convicted *just* for making > such a remark. If what you say is true, there's a lot of people wrongly in trouble and fined or even jailed by local courts for making terroristic threats. The "how" was irrelevent, it was the threat that counts. Whether it was shouted or whispered, or discretely written on a piece of paper didn't matter. Indeed, some of the quietest threats are treated the most seriously. [rest snipped] I am not lawyer nor claim to be a legal expert. However, I have quite a number of years out there and have seen quite a few things over and over again. Basically, I do not agree with your post. My real issue on disagreement is not on case law but rather actual practice. On some of your arguments, frankly, you seem to be splitting hairs. That does not resolve the question in terms of real life practice. The reality is that there are many laws that are not enforced and people get away with stuff. Likewise, we have theorectically rights that we can't effectively exercise because it would be too expensive or time-consuming to fight for them. One of the things a good lawyer does is advise on the reality of a particular situation. "Yes, you're absolutely right but to fight them will cost $100,000 in legal fees." Stating what is on paper seriously misses the issue. Actual practice is what counts. (If I may point out, in another discussion on Autovon phones, you said those phones were "standard". There may be a piece of paper saying just that, but the vast majority of Touch Tone phones out there do not comply with that standard because they don't have the fourth column. Indeed, there are a lot of official technical standards out there that are basically ignored and unwritten practices that are essentially standard.) FWIW, in a previous discussion it was insisted certain estate legal certifications were required. I was just working with some one on that and the cited certifications were not required to deal with an external agency to obtain a refund. Again, what is said on paper is not always reality. Anyone with a legal question should consult a competent reputable attorney. (How to find one that is competent? Tough to say.) ------------------------------ From: Wesrock@aol.com Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 09:33:38 EDT Subject: Re: From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell System In a message dated Tue, 07 Jun 2005 11:46:53 -0700, was written: > The amusing and highly ironic thing about my nickname is that BP > bought Atlantic Richfield in 2000. ARCO's stations are positioned as > price leaders. In fact, only Valero (another discount brand, owned by > Diamond Shamrock) matches BP's prices at the ARCO stations in this > area. Chevron is far and away the most expensive gas station chain in > SoCal. Often the local Chevron is 10-15c/gal more expensive than a > nearby ARCO. You have it backwards about the relationship of Valero and Diamond Shamrock. Valero is the parent company; Diamond Shamrock is one of several brands they market under. Pricing relationships vary from market to market, and often in different geographic parts of the same market. Wes Leatherock wesrock@aol.com wleathus@yahoo.com ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: Cannot Cancel My AT&T Service After Moving to Vonage Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2005 07:11:19 -0700 Organization: Cox Communications > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Is this a situation where AT&T is > charging you some monthly fee for 'handling' your account? If not, > and you are just billed for calls you actually make then it does > not matter. Just ignore it; let them call you a 'customer' if they > wish, since there are no calls being made via AT&T, the account > will always have a zero balance. Now if AT&T is charging some sort > of monthly fee, then a letter sent registered to the company should > help. For example, one side of SBC _still_ persists in referring to > me as a 'customer' while another part of the company is trying to > win me back (with all sorts of outrageous deals these days, free > service, etc). PAT] The moral of the story: Don't do business with AT$T, either directly or indirectly. What a sorry spectacle of a once great company. Of course, the same can be said of a lot of banks and (ugh) credit card companies. ------------------------------ From: AES Subject: Re: Valued Added Caller ID Spoofing Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2005 09:14:47 -0700 Organization: Stanford University In article , T. Sean Weintz wrote: > Caller ID spoofing services being available to the general public were > bad enough. > This service not only spoofs caller ID, it allows you to set up > automated harrassment! You pick pre-recorded sound bites to play, and > you can set it up to call someone repeatedly. > http://www.tricktel.com There sure are times when I'd be sorely tempted to use a service -- and it would be against targets that truly deserve being subjected to automated harrassment. (The list would include most telemarketers, all spam faxers, and certain firms with some kind of automated or robot phone systems that have one of my numbers erroneously programmed into their system and even if I can identify who the firm is, I can't contact anyone who will correct the error.) I guess the only thing that stops me is that I doubt that the Tricktel people are any more trustworthy or responsible than the people I'd be going after. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And did you notice the Tricktel people do not work for free either; I think I saw on their web site where the rate for their 'services' ranges from 25 cents up to one dollar per incident, depending on what they think about you as a customer. Let's assume you pay one dollar per call made. Can you afford that? I sure cannot. I think Tricktel also said that depending on how tough things get on them (in the event of a complaint) they may or may not protect your 'privacy'. I just don't know you can trust them. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2005 10:24:36 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Tue, 07 Jun 2005 03:27:55 GMT, [Telecom Digest Editor] writes: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I would like to ask you just one > question: _Why_ can't a registrar be expected to screen potential or > actual spammers? If registrars started doing that, they'd be heros > in the eyes of most netters. PAT] If you're going to use that logic you might as well use it on the telephone company for selling service to fly-by-night boiler room scamsters in South Florida and Montreal as well. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: One small problem with your logic. Telco is a common carrier; they are required by law to supply service to _anyone_ asking for service on the condition the potential subscriber has demonstrated an ability and willingness to pay for the service. Registrars are not common carriers, they are free to accept or reject customers at will; for most of them, all that seems to matter is getting the ten dollar fee every couple years or so. That should not be the case. Registrars could be our front line defense against spammers/scammers/phishers if the netters and or ICANN demanded it. But of course, ICANN won't demand anything. They _like_ things the way they are now. And of course there is always some idiot who will speak out and say "oh, but if we were to impose on Itzy-Pooh Corporation and refuse to carry their traffic because of the huge amount of spam they overlook, why then Itzy-Pooh may sue some registrar or something like that." All I can say to that is God Bless America and God Bless ICANN. Lets begin to turn the screws on the registrars and get them contractually committed to a few simple facts: If Itzy Pooh gets bounced by some registrar for malfeasance, no other registar can touch him until whatever got him bounced in the first place gets cured. PAT]n ------------------------------ From: richgr@panix.com (Rich Greenberg) Subject:Last Laugh! Funny Telephone Picture Date: 8 Jun 2005 13:45:49 -0400 Organization: Organized? Me? Take a look at: http://www.jillsjokeline.com/canuhearme.shtml Rich Greenberg Marietta, GA, USA richgr atsign panix.com + 1 770 321 6507 Eastern time. N6LRT 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 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 V24 #256 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Jun 9 01:23:06 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 5CD2C15033; Thu, 9 Jun 2005 01:23:06 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #257 Message-Id: <20050609052306.5CD2C15033@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 01:23:06 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.0 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,BIZ_TLD, MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT,NORMAL_HTTP_TO_IP autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Thu, 9 Jun 2005 01:22:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 257 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Pay Phone Regulations (Robert Pierce) T-Mobile Tzones on Motorola A630 - Really 72 Hours to Setup? (Jason) MCI Now Charging Extra Payphones When Using Phone Card! (hizark21) Pre-Fabricated Cell Phone Retail Store? (officeforlease@gmail.com) Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (Brad Houser) Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (Robert Bonomi) Re: Valued Added Caller ID Spoofing (T. Sean Weintz) Re: Do Not do Business With Sprint PCS ! (SELLCOM Tech support) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Robert Bonomi) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Barry Margolin) Re: From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell (Steve Sobol) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Pay Phone Regulations Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2005 17:03:42 -0400 From: Robert Pierce [Pat, please remove my e-mail address. thx] Good afternoon. I have a client who would like to have a pay phone in their break area for employee use. The COCOT vendor they were using wasn't making enough money, and so they pulled out. They're not looking to turn a profit; they just want to give employees without cell phones a chance to call home etc. without having to open up an outside line to long distance charges, abuse, etc. They would like to put a simple pay phone in place -- something like a "Model 909." o What kind of federal or state (of Florida) regulations would apply here? A google didn't help, but perhaps I used the wrong search terms. o What kind of drawbacks/pitfalls would they be looking at by going this route? o Does anyone have a better idea of how to set this up? o Does anyone have any experience with programming this type of payphone? I was hoping to find the documentation on line, but no luck. Thanks, Rob Pierce ------------------------------ From: jason@cyberpine.com Subject: T-Mobile Tzones on Motorola A630 - Really 72 Hours to Setup? Date: 8 Jun 2005 14:30:30 -0700 It's now been 48 hours since I subscribed to T-zones $4.99. But still get "your plan does not support this feature" when attempting to Go to URL for wap sites I know that work. On the phone I'm able to go to T-zones Home page and I see the T-zone animation. But, also, when I select Games & Applications I get the same "your plan does not support this feature" message. T-mobile saying wait the full 72 hours ... though I got a feeling, it never really takes this long. ------------------------------ From: hizark21@yahoo.com Subject: MCI Now Charging Extra on Payphones When Using Phone Card! Date: 8 Jun 2005 17:52:19 -0700 MCI now charging extra payphones when using their phone card!!! MCI has started charging a 65 cent surcharge on calls using their phone cards ... I have a MCI phone card and it is a pretty good deal, because you can make calls from a payphone for 3 or 5 cents a minute. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Where they get you is that a person near a landline phone or with a cell phone would not need to use a payphone. I would think the main reason for using _any_ calling card would be to avoid dropping coins in a payphone box. So although they _claim_ a decent rate of 3-5 cents per minute, they know the actual rate will be 65 plus 3-5 cents (or 68-70 cents) for one minute. PAT] ------------------------------ From: officeforlease@gmail.com Subject: Pre-fabricated cell phone retail store??? Date: 8 Jun 2005 13:59:17 -0700 Hi Guys, I got a postcard in the mail that got accidentally misplaced. This company was advertising a cell phone store solution which was a standard 317 square feet, with a standardized setup which can be placed at pretty much any parking lot. Basically, it was a pre-fabricated store. I forgot the name of the company or the website. The website started with http://www.cellular ... Anyone out there know what I am referring to? Thanks, John ------------------------------ From: brad.houser@gmail.com Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Date: 8 Jun 2005 16:48:18 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com PAT Wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I would like to ask you just one > question: _Why_ can't a registrar be expected to screen potential or > actual spammers? If registrars started doing that, they'd be heros > in the eyes of most netters. PAT] Asking a registrar to be responsible for what an internet site does is not like asking a landlord to be responsible for what his tenants do in his apartment. (If a landlord knows his tenant is breaking the law by growing pot, the landlord can break a lease.) The registrar provides a pointer, like a signpost to Michael Jackson's house. No one forces you to go there. What goes on there is not the fault of the sign. > _Why_ can't a registrar be expected to screen potential or actual > spammers? Because they have no control. I can register 100 domain names and have them all point to the same server. The server is where the bad stuff is done, just like the alleged Neverland. They have not control, it is the _hosting_ site that _might_ have the hardware the spammers rely on. Note that anyone with an internet connection can be their own host. In that case they need an ISP to connect through. Then you might ask how can ISPs screen people. Well, they can't. How would they determine what you plan on doing? They can enforce the service agreement and terminate you, but only if you do something bad. What needs to be fixed is the email systems need to be able to put a wrapper around messages identifying the true source and make it impossible to spoof return addresses. Then spammers can be located. Brad Houser [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But landlords can (or not, as they wish) choose to rent an apartment to someone. If they get bad vibes about it, prior to rental, then they just don't rent. Landlords can also consult credit bureaus to detirmine the wisdom of renting (or not) to someone. As long as the landlord does not discriminate for various illegal reasons (for example, the proposed tenant's race or religion or sex or age) he is free to rent or not as he chooses. Of course, greedy landlords, like greedy registrars rent as much and as often as they can, saying we will let the future take care of itself. I used to know a landlord of furnished apartments in Chicago. Her philosophy was 'the best apartment in this complex is the one which is _vacant_, because I know what is going on there; nothing. PAT] ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 01:15:35 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , TELECOM Digest noted in response to Joseph : > On Tue, 07 Jun 2005 03:27:55 GMT, [Telecom Digest Editor] writes: >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I would like to ask you just one >> question: _Why_ can't a registrar be expected to screen potential or >> actual spammers? If registrars started doing that, they'd be heros >> in the eyes of most netters. PAT] > If you're going to use that logic you might as well use it on the > telephone company for selling service to fly-by-night boiler room > scamsters in South Florida and Montreal as well. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: One small problem with your logic. > Telco is a common carrier; they are required by law to supply service > to _anyone_ asking for service on the condition the potential > subscriber has demonstrated an ability and willingness to pay for > the service. Registrars are not common carriers, they are free to > accept or reject customers at will; for most of them, all that seems > to matter is getting the ten dollar fee every couple years or so. That > should not be the case. Registrars could be our front line defense > against spammers/scammers/phishers if the netters and or ICANN > demanded it. But of course, ICANN won't demand anything. They _like_ > things the way they are now. And of course there is always some > idiot who will speak out and say "oh, but if we were to impose on > Itzy-Pooh Corporation and refuse to carry their traffic because of > the huge amount of spam they overlook, why then Itzy-Pooh may sue > some registrar or something like that." All I can say to that is > God Bless America and God Bless ICANN. Lets begin to turn the screws > on the registrars and get them contractually committed to a few > simple facts: If Itzy Pooh gets bounced by some registrar for > malfeasance, no other registar can touch him until whatever got him > bounced in the first place gets cured. PAT]n Of course, spammers/scammers/phishers can, and *do* use raw IP addresses, without having domain-names attached. So can anybody else. e.g. http://208.31.42.81/index.html or mailto:esteemedmoderator@[208.31.42.98] Thanks to the wonders of HTML, unsophisticated readers need never _see_ the above forms, you do something like a href=http://208.31.42.81/>Telecom Digest or a href=mailto:esteemedmoderator@[208.31.42.98] email Patrick Townson or fatuously: email a href=mailto:esteemedmoderator@[208.31.42.98] AlGore@whitehouse.gov/ Domain-names are not necessary. They are simply a 'convenience'. Is 'directory assistance' (a non-common-carrier, *non-regulated* ancillary service for the PSTN) responsible when you get telemarketing calls? or harassment calls? Is _directory assistance_ responsible for checking out the 'history' of the person who buys into having their name 'indexed' in the database? ILEC telephone service usually includes getting entered into the database. CLEC telephone service often does *NOT*. Frequently you have to order that separately, sometimes via the CLEC, sometimes directly from the ILEC. Just like the way you can get your non-ILEC, or even VOIP number listed in the ILEC 'white pages' phone book. Registrars serve an essentially identical function to 'directory assistance'. [TELECOM Digest Editors' Note: No, directory services are not responsible for that type of phone call. But we can and do prevent that type of phone call by having our numbers unlisted/non-pub. And I do not agree that the registrar serves an 'essentially identical' function. One difference might be that telco makes the number assign- ment and _forwards_ that information to the various directory services where no single entity tells the registrar what numerics will be applied; the registrar simply assigns the requested name and tells the root servers to deal with the names. If no registrar ever listened to you and assigned the name you wanted, thus no root servers would ever know of that name, then how would anyone be able to reach you _by number only_ if the root servers did not know what to do with the number? So I, John Q. Spammer go to an ISP and ask for a connection. I tell ISP I want to be known as 'spam.com'. I do not tell the ISP I want to be known as '208.31.42.98' ... ISP says I will take care of all that once you get installed by a registrar. Quite a difference, the registrar _is_ like directory assistance, but different in the sense that directory assistance does not _assign_ anything, but simply reports on what has been assigned. So if the registrar was not a greedy son-of-a-bitch and started saying NO! that would help a lot. Oh yes, I know that John Q. Spammer could try to cut a deal under the table direct with the ISP, or whomever it is that physically makes his connections in and out, but ISPs working in concert with registrars could do a lot to clean up the mess. And like the old system which was used with FIDO, when a site becomes a nuisance, he gets delisted, and if others up the line do not cooperate then _they_ get delisted also. The rule ISP's and registrars would use is that if John Q. Spammer was expelled by whoever, then no one touches him or works with him. PAT] ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Re: Valued Added Caller ID Spoofing Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2005 18:03:34 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Pat wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And did you notice the Tricktel people > do not work for free either; I think I saw on their web site where the > rate for their 'services' ranges from 25 cents up to one dollar per > incident, depending on what they think about you as a customer. Let's > assume you pay one dollar per call made. Can you afford that? I sure > cannot. I think Tricktel also said that depending on how tough things > get on them (in the event of a complaint) they may or may not protect > your 'privacy'. I just don't know you can trust them. PAT] Not only that, but clearly the service is aimed at making harrassing calls. Making such calls is illegal, is it not? So here we have a business who's only line of service is set up to make illegal harrassing phone calls. I'd think they would be pretty easy to shut down under the RICO statutes. Could make a pretty good "criminal enterprise" argument. I doubt they'd be able to do much to protect anyone if their ISP access logs are all subpoenaed by some DA. If ya DO use it, use an anonymous prepaid debit card, and only go to their server via an anonymous proxy! ------------------------------ From: SELLCOM Tech support Subject: Re: Do Not do Business With Sprint PCS ! Organization: www.sellcom.com Reply-To: support@sellcom.com Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2005 22:45:57 GMT pierreberto@yahoo.fr posted on that vast internet thingie: > I've been a customer of them > for four years, but it took four years for me to suddenly figure out > what an unethical company Sprint is. They're awful. Avoid them at > all costs! Well, around here for the Internet and handheld computer / phone they are about half the price of a similar plan with Verizon, yes about HALF. In a recent matter they refused to honor a rebate promise made by their sales person. I simply documented everything and made a complaint with the state Atty General consumer protection. Suddenly they have decided to honor their word! Check your state website. File a complaint, protect the next guy. Steve at SELLCOM (Opinions expressed are not necessarily the official opinions of any company though they should be) http://www.sellcom.com Discount multihandset cordless phones by Panasonic 5.8Ghz 2line; TMC ET4300 4line Epic phone, OnHoldPlus, Brickmail voicemail Brick wall "non MOV" surge protection. Firewood splitters www.splitlogs.com If you sit at a desk www.ergochair.biz. New www.electrictrains.biz ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 00:24:02 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , wrote: > Robert Bonomi wrote: >> In private industry, and employer can allow use of company property >> for non-work activities by employees -- e.g. using the copy machine to >> run off flyeres for a local club activity. >> In a federal government agency, if an employee does that it they are >> comitting a *crime* -- one with _prison time_ attached to it. > There are state government agencies where that is NOT that case. Nearly every State in the Union, has a statute that reads almost identically to 18 USC 641. In governmental employ (at whatever level) one would be a fool to assume that such a prohibition did not exist -- absent exhaustive research into the statutes and/or ordinances covering that particular jurisdiction. I, admittedly, have not done an exhaustive search, but in every jurisdiction where I have had occasion to check, such a prohibition _was_ enshrined in law. > There are private sector units that mirror the Fed policy you state > above. So? The fact that they choose to do so, does not mean that they are _required_ do do so. For Feds, it is -not- "policy", it is the _law_. And *that* law (18 USC 641) does _not_ apply to any private employment situation. Regardless of what the employer's policies might be. A private employer _cannot_ avail themselves of that law, in the event of employee misfeasance. They may be able to avail themselves of municipal or state law, regarding 'petty theft', In general, however, the penalties for that are generally an order of magnitude less than that for 18 USC 641. > I would be extremely surprised if people were sent to prison solely > for personal use of a federal copier machine. I've sat in a federal courtroom, and witnessed sentencing for an 18 USC 641 violation. It wasn't a single egregious act, but an ongoing series of really 'little' things. After having been reminded by management "not to". The idjit had a side-line personal business, and was doing stuff for it at the office, after hours -- writing correspondence, and printing it out, doing estimates in a spread-sheet, a little bit of photo-copying, etc. > However, some private firms are very fussy about employee theft and > have criminally charged their employees. Again, you miss the fundamental point. A private employer _can_ allow such private use. A Federal (nor in many states) agency employer *cannot*. The fact that _some_ private employers do not do so does not invalidate the difference. "Are not forbidden to" is an *entirely* different thing from "are not allowed to". Even if specific implementations under the two different sets of 'rules' happen to be similar. >> I can cite a Supreme Court ruling expressly invalidating a >> governmental unit 'dress code' item that forbade the wearing of >> certain items of apparel. > Virtually every government organization I know has a dress code. You > may be referring to very narrow situations. (There's a case in the > NYC subway system over wearing a religious turban and hat badge. It's > ONE case out of 50,000 employees). Cite: TINKER ET AL. v. DES MOINES INDEPENDENT COMMUNITY SCHOOL DISTRICT, 393 U.S. 503 (1969) >> An organization in 'private industry' would have had *NO* problem >> enforcing that particular dress-code item.. > Actually, in some cases private employers have gotten into trouble on > some dress code requirements. In the above-mentioned situation, I can state as fact that private employers banning exactly the same apparel did *NOT* have any problems. One of the plaintiffs in the above-mentioned case actually got _fired_ from a private-industry job at the same time that case was proceeding. For wearing the specific item of apparel -- after having been instructed not to -- that was the subject of the lawsuit. >> *HOW* you said those things is what gets the summons for "disorderly >> CONDUCT". It is the _conduect_ that is the problem, not the language. >>> If I threaten to kill you, >>> you can have me arrested and convicted for making threats. >> You're obviously ignorant of the existing 'case law' on *that* point. >> With the exception of a remark of that nature about the President of >> the United States, one cannot be charged/convicted *just* for making >> such a remark. > If what you say is true, there's a lot of people wrongly in trouble > and fined or even jailed by local courts for making terroristic > threats. The "how" was irrelevent, it was the threat that counts. > Whether it was shouted or whispered, or discretely written on a piece > of paper didn't matter. Indeed, some of the quietest threats are > treated the most seriously. What I said _is _true. "Words alone" do *NOT* constitute a threat. There are other elements that _must_ be present before a speaking or a writing is a threat. BTW, My claim was that "how" a thing is said is a primary element of a "disorderly conduct" charge. "How" you came to conclude that it is relevant to a charge of 'making threats', I do not follow. If it is not obvious to you, different laws (and different crimes) have different 'required elements' as to what constitutes a violation. Prosecution for "making threats" is an *entirely* different matter, with entirely different component requirements than 'disorderly conduct'. > [rest snipped] > I am not lawyer nor claim to be a legal expert. However, I have quite > a number of years out there and have seen quite a few things over and > over again. > Basically, I do not agree with your post. My real issue on > disagreement is not on case law but rather actual practice. Any time you start asserting claims about how someone/something is required or forbidden to act, that _is_ the realm of law. Actual practice -- how people/organizations 'do' or 'do not' act, is a significantly different set of boundaries. What "is" allowed is considerably more restrictive than what 'can be' allowed. What "is not" allowed is much more restrictive than what 'cannot be' allowed. That which 'is allowed' is often more restrictive than 'that which is not forbidden'. That which 'is not allowed' is often *much* more restrictive than 'that which is not forbidden. *ALL* of our differences of opinion come from your co-mingling of those distinct classifications. > On some of your arguments, frankly, you seem to be splitting hairs. That, kiddo, *IS* the way the law works. Get used to it. If you want to assert what is required/forbidden by law, you have to get the details right. > That does not resolve the question in terms of real life practice. > The reality is that there are many laws that are not enforced and > people get away with stuff. Likewise, we have theorectically rights > that we can't effectively exercise because it would be too expensive > or time-consuming to fight for them. One of the things a good lawyer > does is advise on the reality of a particular situation. "Yes, you're > absolutely right but to fight them will cost $100,000 in legal fees." > Stating what is on paper seriously misses the issue. Actual practice > is what counts. > (If I may point out, in another discussion on Autovon phones, you said > those phones were "standard". There may be a piece of paper saying > just that, but the vast majority of Touch Tone phones out there do not > comply with that standard because they don't have the fourth column. > Indeed, there are a lot of official technical standards out there that > are basically ignored and unwritten practices that are essentially > standard.) Since you bring it up. I will repeat that the *FULL* standard _does_ specifies a 4x4 matrix of frequency pairs. The Autovon phones were 100% compliant with the specifications in the standard. The 'vast majority' of Touch-Tone phones in existence for the 'civilian' (shall we say) market do not implement the _full_ standard, They are, none the less "standards-compliant", as a "subset implementation", which is recognized and allowed for in the standard. And, since you have chosen to bring it up, your prior assertation about the Arsenal having "Autovon" phones that were pulse-dial, behind a cord-board switchboard is utter cr*p. The actual Autovon system was '4-wire' -- with outgoing audio on a _separate_ wire-pair from incoming audio. This 4-wire architecture was carried all the way through to the telephone sets. For sets that were used both for PSTN and Autovon, there _was_ a hybrid in the phone, for PSTN call use -- disconnected and bypassed, when an Autovon call was made. > FWIW, in a previous discussion it was insisted certain estate legal > certifications were required. You wouldn't want to try to _prove_ that statement, would you? I said that certain certifications were the only thing that parties were *required* _to_accept_. If you offer 'something else', they _may_ accept it, or they MAY NOT. And, if they do not accept it, "tough cookies" applies. You cannot force them to accept that 'inadequate documentation'. You have to go get 'the real thing'. The full-blown works are not always 'necessary', they are, however _guaranteed_ to be 'sufficient'. > I was just working with some one on > that and the cited certifications were not required to deal with an > external agency to obtain a refund. Again, what is said on paper is > not always reality. "Reality' is in the details. What 'may' work in some situations is unrelated to what is guaranteed to work in *all* situations. If, as in the case of the ISP and the deceased soldier, the party refuses to accept any 'lesser standerd', there is nothing that one can do, but provide the court order. As that soldiers kin did, and which was then accepted. Now, go back and review what I _actually_ said on that subject. Which was that *IF* the external agency demands 'proof', of the right to access the property of another, that the only document that they are *required* to accept is the order from the probate court. They may _choose_ to accept some 'lesser standard', but they are *not* _required_ to accept anything short of the court order of executorship. As with *any* legal mater, the precise details of the specific situation make _all_the_difference_in_the_world_. Accessing a bank account established 'with right of survivorship' is fairly trivial. Accessing a safety-deposit box, where no such provision had been made, and no alternate signatory was on record, can be a much different story. Especially if you don't have the key in hand. _In_the_event_ that an external agency 'refuses to accept' whatever 'lesser standard' documentation you provide, you are simply SOL until you get the 'real thing'. There is no way, practically, *or* legally, to force them to accept the 'inadequate' documentation offered. Note that just because the 'external agency' is required to accept a thing as proof, does not mean that _you_ are required to present that thing. If they will accept a 'lesser standard', well and good. IF they refuse to do so, you have no alternative, but to present the 'real thing'. > Anyone with a legal question should consult a competent reputable > attorney. (How to find one that is competent? Tough to say.) Referrals from those you know who have been in 'like' situations is a good start. A referral from a competent (in other areas) attorney is also a good beginning. If you don't know any competent attorneys yourself, and if you don't know people who have been in 'like situations', then you start looking for people you know, who know a competent attorney. And ask them for a referral in the area you have need. ------------------------------ From: Barry Margolin Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Organization: Symantec Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2005 22:26:51 -0400 In article , tls@panix.com (Thor Lancelot Simon) wrote: > In article , > Gary Novosielski wrote: >> Fred Atkinson wrote: >>> Sorry to come down on you this hard, but limiting student access to >>> information simply because we think they don't 'need' access to it is >>> a pretty short sighted opinion for an educator to take. >> You're presuming that it's educators who are in favor of blocking >> technology, but I think that's jumping to an unsupported conclusion. > As both an educator and a student, I am, in fact, in favor of > "blocking technology". The last thing I need is students distracted > by more crap on their laptops while I'm lecturing -- and the last > thing I need, as a student, is more distraction. What does this have to do with technology being used in the appropriate place, like a library? You don't want students doing other things when they're supposed to be listening to you. That's not particular to technology -- before IM, you'd have had to deal with kids passing paper notes between each other. Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu Arlington, MA *** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me *** ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell System Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2005 21:35:31 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Wesrock@aol.com wrote: > You have it backwards about the relationship of Valero and Diamond > Shamrock. Valero is the parent company; Diamond Shamrock is one of > several brands they market under. Thank you for the correction. To make it more confusing, the Valero and Beacon stations here all used to be Ultramar stations, and I know Ultramar at one point *was* an independent Canadian refiner and marketer, but I have no idea of their status *now.* :) I'm pretty sure the Beacon stations are owned by ... well, I guess it's Valero ... :) JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ 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 V24 #257 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Jun 9 15:49:43 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 7AF9215194; Thu, 9 Jun 2005 15:49:43 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #258 Message-Id: <20050609194943.7AF9215194@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 15:49:43 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.8 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT,NORMAL_HTTP_TO_IP autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Thu, 9 Jun 2005 15:50:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 258 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson FBI Disputes Reports of Tech Woes (Lisa Minter) Walt Disney to Aquire Minds Eye (Lisa Minter) Is There True Pay-as-You-Go Cellphone? (Barry Margolin) BT 5DD Set to Launch Hybrid Phone (Telecom Daily Lead from USTA) Re: MCI Now Charging Extra on Payphones When Using Phone Card (Burstein) Re: MCI Now Charging Extra on Payphones When Using Phone Card (R Bonomi) Re: Valued Added Caller ID Spoofing (jmeissen@aracnet.com) Re: Valued Added Caller ID Spoofing (Tim@Backhome.org) Re: Pay Phone Regulations (Justin Time) Re: Pay Phone Regulations (Tim@Backhome.org) Re: Pay Phone Regulations (Lisa Hancock) Re: SBC New Low Price (Tim@Backhome.org) Re: T-Mobile Tzones on Motorola A630 - Really 72 Hours Setup? (Joseph) Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (Dave Garland) Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (Robert Bonomi) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-Mail Sites (Lisa Hancock) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: FBI Disputes Reports of Tech Woes Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 10:17:23 -0500 By Andrew Zajac Washington Bureau Clobbered by a three-day wave of bad publicity about its bungled efforts to update its technology systems, the FBI on Wednesday attempted to rebut allegations about the costs of straightening out the agency's computer woes. But even after the bureau's top technology executive detailed progress made in overhauling the cyber-operations, what stood out was the magnitude of what remains undone: A fully functioning computer system remains about four years and unknown hundreds of millions of dollars into the future. "What we don't have is an efficient way of working with our information," said Zalmai Azmi, the agency's chief information officer. "What I mean by that is that we're still paper-based." Still, Azmi said, "We're not missing anything in terms of capability, except for efficiency." Azmi emphasized that the bureau has assembled information for terrorism investigations into a database that can be shared by agents and analysts. In addition, Azmi said the bureau's $500 million-plus Trilogy upgrade, including improved links with other agencies, and installation of 60,000 new computers is "80 percent done." Azmi disputed a House Appropriations Committee report released earlier this week alleging that the FBI withheld information on 400 glitches in a contractor's case management software, thus squandering its chances to cut its losses by killing the project sooner than it did, in March. Azmi said the contractor, San Diego-based SAIC Corp., worked with the bureau to uncover the bugs in the Virtual Case File system. A company spokesman declined to comment about its performance in developing the system. The case file program was developed over a four-year period at a cost of at least $104 million. Azmi also disputed an account in U.S. News and World Report, published Wednesday, that a new case-management system would cost nearly $800 million. But he declined to offer his own estimate of how much a case-management system would cost because he said it might lead prospective contractors to inflate their bids. Azmi said the FBI would take bids on a new case-management program, dubbed Sentinel, this summer. Work on it should start by the end of the year and should be complete in slightly less than four years, he said. In an effort to avoid mistakes made with Virtual Case File, Sentinel will be built in four parts, so it can be debugged in stages and assembled more quickly. Developers will use off-the-shelf products as much as possible to reduce cost and complexity, and an experienced project manager, Miodrag Lazarevich, recruited from the CIA, will oversee Sentinel, Azmi said. Copyright 2005 Chicago Tribune NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Walt Disney to Acquire Minds Eye TV Game Developer Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 10:11:18 -0500 The Walt Disney Internet Group on Wednesday announced its acquisition of British game developer Minds Eye Productions in a move signaling Disney's commitment to interactive television gaming, the companies said. Disney entered interactive gaming last year with its launch of Disney Channel Play, carried on the UK's Sky satellite system. Disney Channel Play featured games centered on Disney characters, TV shows and movies, such as "Kim Possible" and "The Lion King." In a statement, Disney said the purchase of Minds Eye demonstrates its commitment to the iTV games market and to finding new growth opportunities for Disney. Minds Eye joins a stable of other Disney assets developing interactive content for Disney in Europe, a Disney spokesman said. Minds Eye has developed interactive TV games such as "Monopoly" and "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire" for Sky Active platform, as well as games for Disney Channel Play. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Barry Margolin Subject: Is There True Pay-as-You-Go Cellphone? Organization: Symantec Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 09:04:22 -0400 I have a cellphone, but I use it very infrequently -- maybe about 5 minutes a month. I bought a Virgin Mobile prepaid cellphone, but they require that I purchase $20 of time every 90 days to keep it active. So I have to spend nearly $7/mo when I use at most $2/mo. Is there a cellphone plan closer to my needs? Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu Arlington, MA *** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me *** [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: One plan I use myself for a supplementary cell phone I have is Cingular Wireless (as they inherited it from AT&T 'Free to Go' (the old AT&T prepaid plan). They let you purchase a hundred dollars worth of prepaid time and it never runs out, or maybe runs out after a year. For less than $100 the purchase increments run out every 90 days just as with your existing service. Another reasonable plan is Alltel, which I do not think has any expiry time on its prepaid minutes, although it is bit more expensive per call. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 13:24:51 EDT From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: BT D5DD Set to Launch Hybrid Phone Telecom dailyLead from USTA June 9, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=3D22221&l=3D2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * BT set to launch hybrid phone BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Sierra Wireless to end smart phone venture * Microsoft's IPTV plans behind schedule * News from SUPERCOMM USTA SPOTLIGHT * SUPERCOMM wraps up; Plan now for TELECOM 05 EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * TiVo, Microsoft in portable video deal REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * WorldCom settlement may be close * RIM-NTP patent dispute flares up again * Cisco, Boeing do work for military Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=3D22221&l=3D2017006 ------------------------------ From: Danny Burstein Subject: Re: MCI Now Charging Extra on Payphones When Using Phone Card! Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 05:13:25 +0000 (UTC) Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC In hizark21@yahoo.com writes: > MCI now charging extra payphones when using their phone > card!!! > MCI has started charging a 65 cent surcharge on calls using their phone > cards ... While this may be news to the earlier poster, a drop-fee of this (rough amount) has been in place by most, if not all, cards for nearly a decade. The FCC has mandated a kickback to the owner/operator of payphones whenever a non-coin workaround such as a call to a "toll free [a]" number is placed. Last time I looked this was set at about a quarter [b]. Throw in the usual overheads, as well as the fact that this is almost invisible to the card user, and you get actual charges in the fifty to seventy-five cent range. (or more...) The rationale is that the payphone operator is entitled to some sort of compensation for giving you a place to stand, make the call, and have access to the phone network. Incidentally, some phone cards have (or at least had ... it's been a while since I've had occasion to check into this in detail) so-called "local" regular, that is, normal pay rate access numbers. In these cases you'd place the $0.25 or thereabouts into the coinbox just like you would for a standard call, and there's no extra surcharge from the card balance. [a] in quotes because it's not really a free call. the recipient (the "owner" of the number) pays for it. In fact, because of this extra payphone kickback surcharge, many places with toll free numbers do NOT take calls from coin phones. [b] fcc info on ayphone kickbaks: http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/News_Releases/1999/nrcc9005.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: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: MCI Now Charging Extra on Payphones When Using Phone Card! Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 09:57:45 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , wrote: > MCI now charging extra payphones when using their phone > card!!! > MCI has started charging a 65 cent surcharge on calls using their phone > cards ... > I have a MCI phone card and it is a pretty good deal, because you can > make calls from a payphone for 3 or 5 cents a minute. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Where they get you is that a person > near a landline phone or with a cell phone would not need to use a > payphone. I would think the main reason for using _any_ calling card > would be to avoid dropping coins in a payphone box. So although they > _claim_ a decent rate of 3-5 cents per minute, they know the actual > rate will be 65 plus 3-5 cents (or 68-70 cents) for one minute. PAT] That 65 cents _looks_ like a lot, but it is close to 'break even'. Remember, you use those cards by dialing a toll-free number first. That means that the toll-free number operator has to pay the COCOTS operator 30-some cents for that call. In addition to that, there is the cost-accounting nightmare associated with keeping track of those charges -- for *every* mom-and-pop coin-op phone operator out there. And sending that check for $1.35 for three month's worth of calls. Figure postage, plus the $0.10/check that banks typically charge business accounts, a few sents for handling, and you've got a 'check writing' overhead of $0.15/call, for that 4-call check. Plus the cost of all that 'un-necessary' accounting software, and the *auditing* cost to make sure that that software *is* doing things right. It wouldn't surprise me if they were realizing a 'profit' of less than a nickel -- and likely _far_less_ than that -- out of that $0.65 charge. ------------------------------ From: jmeissen@aracnet.com Subject: Re: Valued Added Caller ID Spoofing Date: 9 Jun 2005 06:06:37 GMT Organization: http://extra.newsguy.com In article , T. Sean Weintz wrote: > Not only that, but clearly the service is aimed at making harrassing > calls. Making such calls is illegal, is it not? So here we have a > business who's only line of service is set up to make illegal harrassing > phone calls. > I'd think they would be pretty easy to shut down under the RICO > statutes. Could make a pretty good "criminal enterprise" argument. I > doubt they'd be able to do much to protect anyone if their ISP access > logs are all subpoenaed by some DA. I doubt US law enforcement could do much. According to their website they're located in Gothenburg, Sweden. John Meissen jmeissen@aracnet.com ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: Valued Added Caller ID Spoofing Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 03:48:19 -0700 Organization: Cox Communications TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to T. Sean Weintz: > Pat wrote: >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And did you notice the Tricktel people >> do not work for free either; I think I saw on their web site where the >> rate for their 'services' ranges from 25 cents up to one dollar per >> incident, depending on what they think about you as a customer. Let's >> assume you pay one dollar per call made. Can you afford that? I sure >> cannot. I think Tricktel also said that depending on how tough things >> get on them (in the event of a complaint) they may or may not protect >> your 'privacy'. I just don't know you can trust them. PAT] > Not only that, but clearly the service is aimed at making harrassing > calls. Making such calls is illegal, is it not? So here we have a > business who's only line of service is set up to make illegal harrassing > phone calls. > I'd think they would be pretty easy to shut down under the RICO > statutes. Could make a pretty good "criminal enterprise" argument. I > doubt they'd be able to do much to protect anyone if their ISP access > logs are all subpoenaed by some DA. > If ya DO use it, use an anonymous prepaid debit card, and only go to > their server via an anonymous proxy! Some folks may not have a vindictive agenda; rather they want to spoof a friend with a call with a mutual friend's caller id and some silly message. I think that is what this is about. So, is that type of call a harassing call under the intent of the law. I seriously doubt it. It seems a lot more like a more sophistated rendering of prank calls. If my view stands, then the issue becomes spoofing of caller id. It seems the FCC lost control of that one starting with its 1995 Caller ID Decision, in which it reserved the issue of PBX-type customer-generated Caller ID, and never subsequently addressed the issue. So, for me at least, I look to the FCC for the first case of blame with all this. ------------------------------ From: Justin Time Subject: Re: Pay Phone Regulations Date: 9 Jun 2005 05:22:52 -0700 As your company in question was using a COCOT and the phone was pulled for lack of revenue, did the company offer to make up the difference between the actual and expected revenue? The company may again try contacting the same COCOT and make that offer. When offering to make up the difference in revenue, you will need to determine what the COCOT deems is revenue from the phone. If they are only counting coin drop, then offer to make up the difference between the coin drop and the monthly cost of the line. If they count the revenue from 800 numbers, long distance and operator services, then you have the right to ask for a monthly statement of all revenue generated by the phone and then what their minimum expected revenue is for all phones. The alternative is to pay for the phone line and let the COCOT have all revenue from the phone, which as there are no line costs should increase significantly. The COCOT would have the specs for ordering a line from the LEC or CLEC. Be certain to sign a contract that has all the expectations and costs listed -- saves arguing later. Rodgers Platt ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: Pay Phone Regulations Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 07:35:18 -0700 Organization: Cox Communications Robert Pierce wrote: > [Pat, please remove my e-mail address. thx] > Good afternoon. > I have a client who would like to have a pay phone in their break area > for employee use. The COCOT vendor they were using wasn't making > enough money, and so they pulled out. > They're not looking to turn a profit; they just want to give employees > without cell phones a chance to call home etc. without having to open > up an outside line to long distance charges, abuse, etc. > They would like to put a simple pay phone in place -- something like a > "Model 909." > o What kind of federal or state (of Florida) regulations would apply > here? A google didn't help, but perhaps I used the wrong search terms. > o What kind of drawbacks/pitfalls would they be looking at by going > this route? > o Does anyone have a better idea of how to set this up? > o Does anyone have any experience with programming this type of > payphone? I was hoping to find the documentation on line, but no luck. > Thanks, > Rob Pierce I see them in a lot of restaurants so they must work. I note their site suggests you contact the state public utilities/service commission for the rules that govern the 909 in that state. There are enough 909s being used they should know. Far better than getting the wrong info here. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: Pay Phone Regulations Date: 9 Jun 2005 12:08:42 -0700 Robert Pierce wrote: > I have a client who would like to have a pay phone in their break area > for employee use. The COCOT vendor they were using wasn't making > enough money, and so they pulled out. There are other vendors, perhaps another vendor would be more interested. Was the shortfall so much that the company wouldn't want to make it up? Perhaps the payphone could be put in the lobby or someplace accessible to more people than just the break room so as to do more volume. > They're not looking to turn a profit; they just want to give employees > without cell phones a chance to call home etc. without having to open > up an outside line to long distance charges, abuse, etc. Even old PBXs had a feature to limit outside calls to local numbers, not long distance; I would presume this kind of thing is still available. I would strongly consider a phone of this nature. Might be a lot simpler than putzing around with a pay phone. > o What kind of drawbacks/pitfalls would they be looking at by going > this route? One way payphones make money is through very high long distance charges. If one of the employees makes a collect or calling card call and subsequently discovers a $25 charge for a 1 minute call, they won't be very happy. The price of long distance is up to the property owner and need not be so high but then the phone might not pay for itself. (The Philadelphia transit carrier, SEPTA, has Verizon pay phones at its stations with relatively reasonably priced coin long distance. NJ Transit, in contrast, has the high rates and no coin long distance.) ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: SBC New Low Price Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 04:00:24 -0700 Organization: Cox Communications Typical folk-lore that results from half-reading California PUC rules. After wiring on the customer side of the NID became the customer's property and responsibility to maintain, the California PUC established some state rules pertaining to inside wiring. The rule on-point is that the landlord is the owner of inside wiring in rental untils, not the tenants. So, either through a SBC maintenace program, an outside maintenance program, or on his own, the landlord has to keep the inside wiring (and presumably one jack) in good repair. Whether dial tone is established on that viable pair is not the landlord's obligation in any manner. That is a service that the tenant has to decide to provide for himself. Now, California also has highly subsidized basic dial tone service for those who certify an income below a threshold level, that varies with the number of household dependants. But, there is still a small monthly fee and it is strictly up to the tenant whether he wants to pay that low fee for dial tone. There is nothing mandatory about providing this "life-line" subsidized service except on the part of the LEC and then only if the subscriber orders it and qualifies by certification. None of this has anything to do with the landlord in any case. The low-cost "life-line" service is subsidized by all other California wireline subscribers, who do not qualify for socialized telephone service. A more interesting twist is where the property has affluent renters and perhaps some of them want multiple phone lines, which the landlord cannot practically provide. I believe it has thus far been the practice of the CAL PUC to force this inside wiring mandate for only one line per rental unit. But, I could be wrong on that one. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: As I read the original thread here, I was of the impression it was not the wire pair(s) in question, it was getting dial tone on that pair which telco would not supply because of a billing dispute with a previous tenant. Telco could care less about the wire pair; run as many of them as you wish, but then get telco to interconnect. Was I wrong on this assumption? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: T-Mobile Tzones on Motorola A630 - Really 72 Hours to Setup? Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 08:20:21 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On 8 Jun 2005 14:30:30 -0700, jason@cyberpine.com wrote: > It's now been 48 hours since I subscribed to T-zones $4.99. > But still get "your plan does not support this feature" when > attempting to Go to URL for wap sites I know that work. > On the phone I'm able to go to T-zones Home page and I see the T-zone > animation. But, also, when I select Games & Applications I get the > same "your plan does not support this feature" message. > T-mobile saying wait the full 72 hours ... though I got a feeling, it > never really takes this long. Did you wait 72 hours? Did it work before then? That's your answer. If after 72 hours it doesn't work you have cause to complain. They told you 72 hours so I don't see what the problem is. If you think that's too long you are of course free to find someone else who will do it more expeditiously for you. ------------------------------ From: Dave Garland Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 01:42:46 -0500 Organization: Wizard Information It was a dark and stormy night when PAT wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But landlords can (or not, as they > wish) choose to rent an apartment to someone. If they get bad vibes > about it, prior to rental, then they just don't rent. Landlords can > also consult credit bureaus to detirmine the wisdom of renting (or > not) to someone. Around here, landlords also charge an "application fee" of $40 or so to cover the cost of making those checks (or, in some cases, just to pocket the extra money), nonrefundable and no guarantee that they'll rent to you. How much would you be willing to spend to apply (no guarantee of acceptance) to register "telecom-digest.com"? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: As I have always said, if you can't win points any other way, then always get personal about it, and that _should_ work. It won't in this case however, since (a) I _already_ have http://telecom-digest.com and have it aliased to its ".org" version instead. Same with http://telecom-digest.net . Try them and see where it gets you. I prefer to use, and only publish the '.org' version of my name space, and (b) if I thought for forty dollars and no guarentees I could buy my way out of the horrible spam infestation I deal with each day, I'd be glad to do it. It always amazes me how people feel by 'getting personal' -- that is, taking the real life circumstances of the person speaking, they can 'prove' the person is being hypocritical by not wanting what he suggests for others should apply to himself. In other words, 'they' should be subject to regulation X and fee-plan Y and rule Z, but oh, wouldn't 'I' feel just awful if those same rules and regulations and fees, etc applied to me. If regulations and rules were such that it was impossible to comply with and continue to publish Telecom Digest, then I would regretfully close it down. (and I have come >thisclose< to doing just that in the past mainly on account of how trashy the entire net has become in recent years, so I doubt there would be _that much_ regret in the long term. I have enough of an 'anarchist spirit' in me that I _would_ regret very strongly any efforts to reform the net _to the fullest extent_ possible, but I can see that happening sometime sooner or later, probably sooner, when the government (and after all, who is more likely) gets a belly-full of the nonsense and decides a _total crackdown_ is called for. Like many others, that would totally shock me, but if you are intellectually honest with yourself and others, you could not say it was unexpected or uncalled for. So many netizens have not only _refused_ to submit to any form of voluntary clean up efforts; always providing much obtusification in 25-30 K 'replies' to messages from those who ask -- beg -- for some relief; gladly explaining over and over why (plan X) will not work. You make up plan X however you like: many of the long term netters will insist it will not work, but like ICANN and Vint Cert, I honestly do not think many of them want it to work. After all, if we can get the private little club we used to have here by using the spammers/scammers as tools to drive away the others, why not do it? Let the spam/scam people do thier thing, we can sit here and use 25-30 K 'replies' to obtusificate as needed. PAT] ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 09:38:45 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And now, for today's 16 K-byte Gospel lesson, here is our resident Gospel teacher. PAT} In article , Robert Bonomi wrote: > In article , > TELECOM Digest noted in response to Joseph : >> On Tue, 07 Jun 2005 03:27:55 GMT, [Telecom Digest Editor] writes: >>> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I would like to ask you just one >>> question: _Why_ can't a registrar be expected to screen potential or >>> actual spammers? If registrars started doing that, they'd be heros >>> in the eyes of most netters. PAT] >> If you're going to use that logic you might as well use it on the >> telephone company for selling service to fly-by-night boiler room >> scamsters in South Florida and Montreal as well. >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: One small problem with your logic. >> Telco is a common carrier; they are required by law to supply service >> to _anyone_ asking for service on the condition the potential >> subscriber has demonstrated an ability and willingness to pay for >> the service. Registrars are not common carriers, they are free to >> accept or reject customers at will; [[.. munch ..]] [ *sigh* ham-handed editing by the moderator manages to completely ruin ] [ the examples in the two paragraphs below. Thank you, PAT ] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: You are quite welcome, I am sure. I am always glad to be of assistance. PAT] > Of course, spammers/scammers/phishers can, and *do* use raw IP addresses, > without having domain-names attached. So can anybody else. e.g. > http://208.31.42.81/index.html or mailto:esteemedmoderator@[208.31.42.98] > Thanks to the wonders of HTML, unsophisticated readers need never _see_ > the above forms, you do something like > a href=http://208.31.42.81/>Telecom Digest or > a href=mailto:esteemedmoderator@[208.31.42.98] email Patrick Townson or fatuously: > email a href=mailto:esteemedmoderator@[208.31.42.98] > AlGore@whitehouse.gov/ > Domain-names are not necessary. They are simply a 'convenience'. > Is 'directory assistance' (a non-common-carrier, *non-regulated* > ancillary service for the PSTN) responsible when you get telemarketing > calls? or harassment calls? > Is _directory assistance_ responsible for checking out the 'history' > of the person who buys into having their name 'indexed' in the > database? ILEC telephone service usually includes getting entered > into the database. CLEC telephone service often does *NOT*. > Frequently you have to order that separately, sometimes via the CLEC, > sometimes directly from the ILEC. Just like the way you can get your > non-ILEC, or even VOIP number listed in the ILEC 'white pages' phone > book. > Registrars serve an essentially identical function to 'directory > assistance'. > [TELECOM Digest Editors' Note: No, directory services are not > responsible for that type of phone call. But we can and do prevent > that type of phone call by having our numbers unlisted/non-pub. And > I do not agree that the registrar serves an 'essentially identical' > function. 'Directory assistance' provides a 'name to number' mapping function, nothing more. Registrars provide a 'name to number' mapping function, nothing more ... The only real difference between the two is that the 'numbers' are in different address-spaces. The PSTN does not rely on 'directory assistance' for the basic functionality. calls *must* be placed to a 'number'. If you have a 'name', you must *first* translate it into a number, before you can attempt to make contact. The Internet does not rely on 'naming services' for the basic functionality. Packets *must* be sent to a 'numeric address'. If you have a 'name, you must *first* translate it into a number, before you can attempt to make contact. It is 'convenient' to remember and use names instead of numbers, and to use 'directory assistance' to map those names into telephone numbers. It is 'convenient' to remember and use names instead of numbers, and to use the registrars databases to map those names into "internet" numbers. The 'essentially identical' nature of the operations should be obvious. > One difference might be that telco makes the number assignment and > _forwards_ that information to the various directory services where > no single entity tells the registrar what numerics will be applied; > the registrar simply assigns the requested name and tells the root > servers to deal with the names. "not exactly". (A) sometimes it is the _end-user_customer_ who tells 'directory assistance' what information should be there -- name *and* number, maybe including address. And directly _pays_ the operator of the directory-assistance service to carry that information. (B) When you register a name, you have to provide the *address* of the machine(s) that will answer questions about things 'under' that name. If you fail to provide the addresses for those machines, then *nothing* works. > If no registrar ever listened to you and assigned the name you > wanted, thus no root servers would ever know of that name, then how > would anyone be able to reach you _by number only_ if the root > servers did not know what to do with the number? Rhetorical question #1: How does the PSTN know how to route your call, if directory assistance doesn't know about your number? Rhetorical question #2: How do you think the Internet functioned _before_ there were 'root servers' (and DNS)? It is really *easy*. The 'root servers' are *NOT*INVOLVED*AT*ALL* in getting packets to a _numeric_address_. Each and every router on the entire Internet has a set of 'forwarding rules' in it, that describes, for _every_possible_ address on the internet, where the 'next step' en route to that destination is. That is _all_ the router needs to know; where to send it 'next'. and that next step does the same thing. "And so on, and so on." Eventually, by recursive application of that 'send it to the next step along the way", it arrives at it's destination. To make things "easy" on (a) users, (b) application software, and (c) software developers, the standard 'name to address' look-up functionality has always worked on the basis of 'given a name as input, go find the address for it; given an address as input, simply return _that_ address." Note that that latter functionality does *not* require any consultation with the 'root servers', or anything else (even a 'hosts' file) for that matter. > So I, John Q. Spammer go to an ISP and ask for a connection. And you get a circuit, and some IP address numbers. *PERIOD*. That is _all_ you get when you buy basic service. > ISP I want to be known as 'spam.com'. You do *not* have to do that. You _may_ ask them to handle "all that stuff" for you, but you're engaging in a purchase of 'additional', _optional_ services from the ISP. when you do that. Depending on the provider, they may offer to do it 'at no additional cost', or they may charge for it. Price on the 'basic service' is better from those who _do_ charge extra for that optional service. Of course, you can be known to the world at large as 'spam.com' *without* any intervention by that ISP. *WITHOUT*, in fact, the ISP even being aware that you are using that name. You can either contract with "somebody else" (other than that ISP) to handle the DNS-related stuff, or you can 'do it yourself'. My ISP, for example, has no idea what domain-names I am using for what machines, at which of the addresses they supplied me. I can change the host names, and domain names, any time I choose. Without their knowledge or consent. I can add a new domain name, and deploy servers under that name, and the ISP has no knowledge, nor any awareness that I have done so. > I do not tell the ISP I want to be known as '208.31.42.98' ... True. The ISP *tells* you that you _will_ be addressed as '208.31.42.98'. You do not have any real choice as to what your 'number' is -- you must use whatever number(s) you get assigned. EXACTLY the way that the telephone company tells you what your phone number will be. > ... ISP says I will take care of all that once you get installed by > a registrar. Quite a difference, You apparently "don't know what you don't know" about how the process actually works. The ISP says "I will play middle-man with the directory service, if you want me to, or you can have somebody else do it, or you can deal with them directly yourself." The CLEC says "I will play middleman with the directory service, if you want me to, or you can have somebody else do it, or you can deal with them directly yourself." As you say, "quite a difference." > registrar _is_ like directory assistance, but different in the sense > that directory assistance does not _assign_ anything, but simply > reports on what has been assigned. A registrar doesn't "assign" anything either, it simply reports info on what names are 'in use'. There is a design difference in the architecture -- the name-to-address mapping service in the Internet realm requires that names be 'unique'; In database terms, you are only allowed one record with any particular 'key'. The telephone 'name-to-address mapping service' is not that restrictive. There can be several "John A. Smith" listings, with different numbers. How do you know _which_one_ is the one you're looking for? That _is_ the problem -- there's no way to tell. You have to get all the numbers, and call each one and ask "are you _the_ John. A. Smith that...?" > So if the registrar was not a greedy son-of-a-bitch and started > saying NO! that would help a lot. Totally ignoring the fact, as described in the botch-edited material above, that the spammer can do everything he needs, *without* relying on a domain- name _at_all_. Domain names are a 'convenience', nothing more. HTML makes it 'trivially doable' to 'conceal' the fact that one is *not* using a domain-name -- _and_ to give the appearance of using _somebody_else's_ domain name, but -actually- connecting to your own servers instead. > Oh yes, I know that John Q. Spammer could try to cut a deal under the > table direct with the ISP, or whomever it is that physically makes > his connections in and out, You continue to display your lack of understanding of how things actually work. There isn't any need for any sort of 'under the table' dealing. You just order basic service from the ISP. Period. You can then: (a) handle domain-name stuff _yourself_, without *any* ISP involvement, (b) contract with the ISP to handle it for you, (c) contract with 'somebody else' to handle it for you, or (d) not bother with it _at_all_. ALL the ISP knows is whether or not you contracted with them to handle things. If you didn't, they have no way of telling whether (a), (c) or (d) applies. Nor do they care -- either way, _they_ aren't providing any related service, and that is the entire extent of their interest (more properly lack thereof :) in the matter. Almost all big commercial accounts buy 'just connectivity' from the ISP, or more likely ISPs (plural) that they use. And handle all the 'other stuff', including interfacing with 'directory assistance' themselves. The people that provide Internet connectivity to General Mills don't have _any_idea_ as to what domain-names are being used. They don't care either -- *all* the data packets they see have a _numeric_ address in them; all they have to do is get things to the proper numeric address, and let the customer do whatever processing is appropriate. > but ISPs working in concert with registrars could do a lot to clean > up the mess. ISPs _alone_ could completely clean up the mess. If they wanted to. The problem is that, collectively, they *don't* want to. And there is nothing that we, the users who _do_ care, can do to make them change their mind about it -- as long as there are "sufficient numbers" of people who are willing to buy services from those 'uncaring' providers. Since 'many' ISPs are demonstrably *not* interested in doing so, the idea of 'ISPs working in concert with registrars' is similarly nothing but a pipe dream. I wish it wasn't that way, but it *is*. "Reality sucks" applies. > And like the old system which was used with FIDO, when a site > becomes a nuisance, he gets delisted, and if others up the line do > not cooperate then _they_ get delisted also. The rule ISP's and > registrars would use is that if John Q. Spammer was expelled by > whoever, then no one touches him or works with him. PAT] Don't I wish!! Unfortunately that approach works *only* when 'almost all' of the players agree on, and _enforce_ the same set of rules. When the 'node' (or 'network') that carries 40% of _all_ the traffic in North America decides that they _will_ deal with 'John Q. Spammer', regardless of his history, it _really_ "doesn't matter much" what the 'rest of the world thinks' about it. They _are_ too big and 'too important' to be _effectively_ 'shunned'. It's like the old joke: "what are the little brown bumps between elephant's toes?" Answer: "Slow natives." And you apparently don't remember the great schism in Fidonet -- when two major nodes blackballed each other; and the 'rest of the world' had to choose sides. Resulting in two different 'fido nets' that didn't talk to each other. Unfortunately, on the Internet, there is nobody in that '800 lb gorilla' position with the interest/gumption to do that black-balling. And when the pygmy tries it, he just ends up as another 'little brown bump'. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Since you seem to have so many hassles with my editing, why don't _you_ start a Digest in which you could witness the Gospel to everyone? I do remember the Fidonet schism, and it was unfortunate, but it all eventually came back together did it not? And thats really what we need here on Internet, where a large number of the 'pygmies' as you call us, walk away and start doing our own thing, a sort of 'Internet2' approach. And when the 800 pound gorilla MCI comes around saying, "oh you must really be sorry about losing all our customers (who by and large, as Spamhaus indicates are spammers) from your circle of communications," my response would be "not really. Numbers do not mean everything; so now we have only 60 percent of the users we used to have ... so what .. we have the _quality_ users with us." Of the approximatly thousand items of mail this 'pygmy' recieved today, if I had not gotten 400 of them, and 395 of those 400 were spam anyway, somehow I think I would get over it. Yeah, Robert, you really have it made; start your own BONOMI Digest (as I offered to help you with when I sent back that 48 K-byte rebuttal you sent a couple weeks ago) and you will never again have to worry or fret over my 'ham-handed' editing. PAT] ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: 9 Jun 2005 10:25:21 -0700 Robert Bonomi wrote: >> On some of your arguments, frankly, you seem to be splitting hairs. > That, kiddo, *IS* the way the law works. Get used to it. > If you want to assert what is required/forbidden by law, you have to > get the details right. > As with *any* legal mater, the precise details of the specific > situation make _all_the_difference_in_the_world_. I stand by my original statement. You are splitting hairs and that is irrelevent in the real world. Every organization and every government has a long list of rules and laws. The reality of life is that some are strictly enforced, but a great many are virtually ignored. Some laws/ rules are utilized as an easy way to prosecute someone who has done other things wrong but are harder to prove. You seem to be focusing solely what is on paper and not in practice. In the days of the Bell System, it was said they could disconnect your phone service if they found an illegal extension hooked up on your line. (I don't know if that's a myth or not). Bell Labs Record announced an automated device to test the load of telephone lines to compare it to company records to see if unauthorized sets were in use. (In those days people would disconnect the ringer to avoid detection that way.) Anyway, rules are not, in the grand scheme of things I really doubt that a significant number of extension violators actually lost their telephone service. Indeed, I wonder how many of those automated detector devices were actually built and used in service. (Finding an illegal extension as part of a repair request is another story -- Mother calls 611 not knowing that Son has a bootleg phone in his room.) The legal system is not interested in the trivial or frivolous under normal conditions. (There are always extreme exceptions.) The basic question of this discussion is the impact of the US Constitution (not passed laws) on the operation of government agencies vs. the private sector, such as the power of schools libraries, or govt agencies to censor communications. I stand by my original assertion that computer systems that are the property of some government agency may be regulated by that agency just as a private company would regulate the equipment. I'm sure someone will run out and dig up some exceptions, but overall that is case. I also stand by my assertion that there is no such thing as totally "free speech". What is argued is the permissable _degree_ of the speech in terms of both content and form. You cited a case where someone was prosecuted for illegal use of a govt copying machine. Well, in your example, the person was making an extensive use of it for an outside business. My point is that in reality, government employees everywhere are making copies of recipes, directions to a house party, and other personal stuff every day, and I really doubt anyone will be prosecuted for doing that. Maybe you'll dig up an exception or two here and there, but my point remains. Any other thoughts out there? [public replies please] ------------------------------ 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) RSS Syndication of TELECOM Digest: http://telecom-digest.org/rss.html For syndication examples see http://www.feedroll.com/syndicate.php?id=308 and also http://feeds.feedburner.com/telecom ************************************************************************* * 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 V24 #258 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Jun 9 23:38:47 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 4A686151A2; Thu, 9 Jun 2005 23:38:47 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #259 Message-Id: <20050610033847.4A686151A2@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 23:38:47 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.2 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,CLICK_BELOW, HOME_EMPLOYMENT,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT,NO_COST autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Thu, 9 Jun 2005 23:38:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 259 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Digest New Sponsorship (TELECOM Digest Editor) Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (Steve Sobol) Verizon Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon (Monty Solomon) Hatch Act (Gary Novosielski) Microwave Fading 6 Gig (HarryHydro) Surgery 6 Days Ago (Carl Moore) Last Laugh! Funny Telephone Picture (Rich Greenberg) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Digest New Sponsorship Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 20:57:06 -0400 I am pleased to welcome a new sponsor to the TELECOM Digest as of today. Main Resource http://www.MainResource.com has signed on to serve readers here. I will let Alisa Meredith explain about their products: http://www.MainResource.com - Buy Refurbished Comdial, Executone, Inter-tel, Isoetec, Premier and Toshiba telecom equipment on-line or by phone. Also offering unused PCS Digital systems. All our refurbished equipment and our repairs are covered by a one-year warranty. Also at http://www.MyHeadsets.com - Buy GN Netcom, Inter-tel, Plantronics and VXI headsets; you can search by brand or type. ======================= You can see Ms. Meredith's ad on our home page, http://telecom-digest.org in the far right hand column. I hope all readers will stop in to say hello and review the products offered at Main Resource. The shop is coincidentally located in the State of Maine, 74 Evergreen Drive, Portland, ME 04103. ======================== In other web site changes/additions, sometimes when I am very angry, as I was after putting out the earlier issue on Thursday, #258, I look for ways to improve our own site here. I look for ways I can be of service to the internet community, and I did that today with a few new PSAs, or Public Service Announcments. I happen to believe that each of us who are entrusted with name space on the internet have certain obligations to do things to help the overall community at large. These are not profit-making things, but simple attempts to be of service. For one, I repaired the link to the Hunger Site; by clicking there each day (it is off our top, home page at http://telecom-digest.org ) you can donate food to hungry children and adults around the world; just click where shown then read one of the messages from the Hunger Site sponsors. Every time you click, another cup of food is given. You do not pay anything. To see it at work now, look at http://hungersite.com . People are not the only beings who get hungry of course; injured and homeless animals living in shelters also need your support. You can also make a click to http://theanimalrescuesite.com and provide bowls of food for dogs and cats. Again, no expense to yourself, simply read the ads provided by Purina Chow and others who supply the actual food at no cost to the shelters. Then last for today, I call your attention to the Missing and Exploited Children's program, which is described on pages reached through http://telecom-digest.org/missingkids.html .Please review the javascript pictures there, then read about them on the page linked through the javascript. I had to repair that Applet also to make it work correctly. Please review these new PSA things, human food, animal food, and missing chidren. They are all on the front page of our web site http://telecom-digest.org in the far right column, along with our paid sponsors like Ms. Meredith, Mike Sandman, Judith Oppenheimer, Oklahoma State University and MIT. Thank you! Patrick Townson ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 12:47:45 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com TELECOM Digest Editor queried Brad Houser brad.houser@gmail.com: >> _Why_ can't a registrar be expected to screen potential or actual >> spammers? > Because they have no control. No. You're right, but the reason is wrong. They CAN de-register spamming domains, and some do (GoDaddy is one of them; reports vary as to how quick/consistent they are about it) The real reason is that domain names are something you typically sign up for online with no interaction with a human. That makes any decent amount of screening quite difficult, if not impossible. > Note that anyone with an internet connection can be their own host. In > that case they need an ISP to connect through. Then you might ask how > can ISPs screen people. Well, they can't. How would they determine > what you plan on doing? They can enforce the service agreement and > terminate you, but only if you do something bad. There are a couple things that can be done beforehand like checking spam blacklists, but that's about it, and at that point you'd need to be very careful to use a BL that doesn't have false positives. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But landlords can (or not, as they > wish) choose to rent an apartment to someone. If they get bad vibes > about it, prior to rental, then they just don't rent. The landlord is also talking to the prospective tenant in person before they rent. Do you think something similar happens with domain name registrations? JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Of course not, the registrars are too greedy to do anything but an automated sign up process. Terra World (our local ISP) said that by requiring prospective users (and he gets them from all over, not just s.e. Kansas) to actually _speak_ on the phone and letting _them_ know that _he_ knows what they are about, spam going out of that network is zilch, or nearly so. He has a couple of high school/college age guys who work the 'help desk' there on nights and weekends. All smart kids, he gives them a print out of new subscribers each day. The kids know what to look for, of course, and tell Duane the next day if they see something askance. A spammer who is exposed to daylight seldom continues doing it for very long. Of course that may be why he does not get that many new customers; he won't tolerate that spamming/scamming the way MCI does. When I worked his help desk for a short time after my brain aneurysm I knew what to look for also with new customers. But he still has a very successful small ISP business. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 15:21:15 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon Wireless Phones When New Messages Arrive Home and Business Customers in N.Y.C. and New England Can Receive TXT Alerts on Their Verizon Wireless Phones NEW YORK, June 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Verizon home and business voice mailboxes now can alert customers on their Verizon Wireless phone that someone has left a message. Starting today, Verizon voice-messaging customers in New York City and New England can add a feature that sends a text message to any Verizon Wireless short text messaging-capable phone with an alert that a new voice message has been left on the customer's landline phone. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49739949 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What is supposed to make that so exceptional? Cingular Wireless has always had an icon on the display screen indicating voice message waiting, and I have always had my phone set to make three chirps when that icon is turned on. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Gary Novosielski Subject: Hatch Act Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 01:12:45 GMT hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote: > Until around 1975 government employees were under many restrictions. > There was a law, the Hatch Act, that prohibited politicking by > government employees. That made sense in the idea it was to avoid > government employees serving as patronage or beholden to elected > officials for their jobs. Until that time Federal employees had to > sign off that they weren't Communists. They didn't even want to see > bumper stickers on cars in employee parking lots. They wanted the > appearance of strict neutrality. > The laws today are different. Not that different. The Hatch Act, dated and obsolescent though it may be, is alive and well in 2005. It was tested here in New Jersey only a year or two ago by a postal employee who attempted to run for Congress as a Green Party candidate, explicitly to try to test (and if possible overturn) the Hatch Act. He got enough petition signatures to get on the ballot, but the government got an injunction against his performing any campaign activities, and when the case finally got to court (District Court, or Circuit Court, or whatever; IANAL, obviously) the judge upheld the Act in spite of all the excellent arguments that could be made against it. I think his name actually did appear on the ballot, but having not been able to run a campaign, he got nowhere near enough votes to make the election outcome anything but moot. ------------------------------ From: HarryHydro Subject: Microwave Fading 6 Gig Date: 9 Jun 2005 12:45:17 -0700 Hi Folks: I wrote a qbasic program that scans 4 Alcatel radios. It also pages me on problems. I was called almost 10 times around 1:30AM this morning (6/9/05) and again around 4:00AM even more times! My heel are draggin'. Anyway, this has been going on for the last few days. These are not stormy evenings, or even windy. In the plots this program makes, I see signals dropping, or maybe it's noise level increasing, enough to break microwave paths. This is 6gig stuff ... The 4 radios at this site point in different directions, and the radios almost go wacky the same time, but not exactly. For a half hour, the signal on one radio faded to almost break while the others were doing OK. Sometimes the two receivers on one radio will fade together, sometimes not. (diversity) I've associated some of these to mag storms, but most are weather related. However, these last few days have been pretty stable. Could it be temperature inversions at 1:30 in the morning doing this? Harry ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 17:37:00 EDT From: Carl Moore Subject: Surgery 6 Days Ago I am back on office email for the first time since June 2. I had gall bladder surgery on June 3. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Sorry to hear about it, Carl, and I am sure other readers join me in wishing you a speedy recovery. Carl is one of our original, charter subscribers, dating back to the middle 1980's here on the Digest. PAT] ------------------------------ From: richgr@panix.com (Rich Greenberg) Subject:Last Laugh! Funny Telephone Picture Date: 9 Jun 2005 13:45:49 -0400 Organization: Organized? Me? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This orignally appeared two days ago here, but due to a technical glitch in some parts of the Useless Net distribution it got messed up; so here it is again so that everyone can laugh at it. PAT] Take a look at: http://www.jillsjokeline.com/canuhearme.shtml Rich Greenberg Marietta, GA, USA richgr atsign panix.com + 1 770 321 6507 Eastern time. N6LRT 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 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) RSS Syndication of TELECOM Digest: http://telecom-digest.org/rss.html For syndication examples see http://www.feedroll.com/syndicate.php?id=308 and also http://feeds.feedburner.com/telecom ************************************************************************* * 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 V24 #259 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Jun 10 15:24:28 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 34E34151AE; Fri, 10 Jun 2005 15:24:28 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #260 Message-Id: <20050610192428.34E34151AE@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 15:24:28 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.2 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,CLICK_BELOW, HOME_EMPLOYMENT,MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Fri, 10 Jun 2005 15:25:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 260 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson New Services Link Mobile Users to Online Magazines (Lisa Minter) Verisign to Manage .net Web Registry 6 More Years (Lisa Minter) California Forest Cameras Snoop on Wildlife (Lisa Minter) Fancy Math Takes on je ne sais Quoi (Lisa Minter) 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic ? (jg@earthlink.net) Re: Is There True Pay-as-You-Go Cellphone? (John McHarry) Re: Is There True Pay-as-You-Go Cellphone? (Joseph) Re: Microwave Fading 6 Gig (GlowingBlueMist) Re: Microwave Fading 6 Gig (Tony P.) Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon (P Romfh) Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon (Justin) Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon (Tim) Re: MCI Now Charging Extra on Payphones Using Phone Card! (Van Hefner) Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? (jon@earthlink.net) Re: SBC New Low Price (Tim@Backhome.org) Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (T. Sean Weintz) Re: Cannot Cancel My AT&T Service After Moving to Vonage (johnspilker) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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 Services Link Mobile Users to Online Magazines Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 22:08:10 -0500 Two companies are combining online-only glossy magazines with mobile short message texting services to link mobile handset users to Internet publications even when they are not online. The companies -- Norwegian publisher Fast Forward Media Group and Belgian technology company Allisblue -- presented their new ways of connecting consumers to publications on Thursday at a conference of European publishers. Many of the publishers are struggling to find ways to earn money on the Internet, which is luring away readers of their print publications. With the new combination, consumers on the go will be able to send keywords to a short telephone number from their handsets, after which they will be sent emails with links to magazines they have requested, the two companies said. The animated magazines, which can be leafed through like real magazines, feature links to music, film and other multimedia content, which is sponsored by advertisers or which can be bought and paid for from the mobile phone account. Fast Forward Media said it would start the service with free online magazines such as PlayMusicMagazine.com. It expected to add more keywords, enabling consumers to compile tailored magazines and messages. Allisblue provides patented SMS-to-email technology, which allows consumers to send text messages instantly after picking up keywords from friends, billboards or on the radio and then find links to magazines in their email inboxes when they log on. "Almost everyone has a mobile phone, and 70 percent have email addresses, but outside the office, 18 to 35 years olds are only online for an average 35 minutes a day. The rest of the time they're in the real world, carrying a mobile. This connects them to the online world," said Allisblue Chief Executive Eric Delfosse. He said he was talking to three venture capitalist firms about additional funds to boost expansion of this service. Allisblue is starting in Belgium on short dial 3699 and will bring the service to other European countries. Telecoms operators can also expect to get a cut from the premium SMS services. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Verisign to Manage .net Web Registry 6 More Years Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 22:09:33 -0500 By Spencer Swartz VeriSign Inc., the top manager of Internet domain names that allow people to find and surf Web sites, will keep control of Internet addresses that end in .net for six more years, the group that oversees Internet address allocation said on Thursday. The decision was expected after VeriSign in March got a tentative nod for the continued operation of the .net registry, which has provided VeriSign with about $20 million annually in revenue. VeriSign beat four other applicants for the registry, said the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, the private-public Internet oversight group. VeriSign's current agreement for .net was scheduled to expire on June 30. Under VeriSign's new contract, which takes effect in July, the company will charge $4.25 annually for a new .net registry from $6 previously. The .net registry is a relatively small part of total Internet domain registrations, accounting for 7 percent of all domain name registration. The .com registry accounts for 47 percent of all domain name registrations, according to the company. VeriSign retains the rights to the .com registry until 2007 when it will have to renew that contract, which provides the company with about $200 million annually in revenue. Analysts have generally believed that losing the .net registry would have been more of a "headline" risk than a big revenue or profit problem to VeriSign. VeriSign took over the .net registry in 2000 after it bought Network Solutions, which had been running the domain. VeriSign, through a spokesman, said it was pleased with ICANN's decision and would continue to make investments in operating Internet domains. In April, the company said it will add high-powered computer servers that deliver up Web pages to users' browsers over the next two years to meet increased Internet use in emerging markets such as Brazil, India and eastern and central Europe. VeriSign, which posted about $1.2 billion in revenues in 2004, is also a top provider of ringtones, and processes millions of e-commerce transactions every day for thousands of businesses who effectively outsource their online payment systems to VeriSign. VeriSign's stock on Thursday closed up 2 cents at $30.82 on Nasdaq. The stock's 52-week high is $36.09. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I would hope that as ICANN sets up these new registrar contracts they would be insisting on certain conditions to protect the integrity of the net. Probably they are not, however. Just allow things to go like status-quo at present which is considered 'good enough'. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: California Forest Cameras Snoop on Wildlife Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 10:30:51 -0500 A 30-acre patch of forest near Idyllwild has been outfitted with robotic cameras and other high-tech gadgets that spy on wildlife, trees and even roots as part of a pioneering effort by scientists to take nature's pulse. Scientists sitting hundreds of miles away can remotely operate mostly wireless devices, including a camera that swings on cables through the trees, to watch bluebird eggs hatch, measure the growth of ferns and study the impact of air pollution. Devices in the outdoor laboratory allow nonintrusive, around-the-clock monitoring. "This is definitely going to change the way we do science," Michael Allen, director of University of California, Riverside's Center for Conservation Biology, told the Riverside Press-Enterprise. "This is going to fill in the gaps of our knowledge," said Michael Hamilton, director of the James San Jacinto Mountain Reserve where the high-tech devices have been installed. "You want to know when those hot moments occur," he said. "Is the forest going to disappear in the next 50 years if the temperature changes by three degrees? Now we have a window into those variables." The information obtained could one day save lives and Earth itself, Hamilton said. The technology could eventually uncover ways to combat global warming, track the deadly mosquito-borne West Nile virus, detect water pollution before people drink it and predict the course of invasive plants that alter landscapes and choke off water sources. "The technology has profound implications," said Deborah Estrin, director of the Center for Embedded Network Sensing at the University of California, Los Angeles. The James Reserve is a partner of the center, which was established in 2002 when it won $40 million in funding from the National Science Foundation. Of that, $4 million went to the reserve, Hamilton said. Sensors scattered throughout the reserve record temperature, humidity, wind, rain, lightning and even how cool air sweeps in at night. "It's a subtle but important change ecologically," Hamilton said, explaining that the cool air can trigger seedlings to sprout. Scientists at UC Riverside and UCLA can analyze the computerized data. "That's kind of the downside -- we'll be spending too much time staring at computer screens," Allen said. On The Net: http://www.jamesreserve.net Information from: The Press-Enterprise, http://www.pe.com Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 12:08:14 -0400 From: Lisa Minter Subject: Fancy Math Takes on je ne sais quoi Click here to read this story online: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0602/p13s02-stct.html Byline: Gregory M. Lamb Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor (MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF.)English rules the Internet, which can be a frustrating thing for the world's 1.3 billion Chinese and 322 million Spanish-speakers. They outnumber Anglophones. Even online, two-thirds of users speak something other than English at home. So when someone promises a smoother and easier translation program, people around the world tend to perk up their ears. It's a step closer to a truly "worldwide" Web where every page would be available for everyone to read in his or her own language. The latest step comes later this month when the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an arm of the United States government, announces results of its tests of several machine- translation systems. The agency is expected to give top honors, not to the linguistic-savvy programs at universities and elsewhere, but to a newcomer: Internet search company Google. Google's apparent success suggests that a new approach to translation -- fancy math rather than linguistic know-how -- may be the way forward in a field that has struggled with the nuance and ambiguity of human language. "Nobody in my team is able to read Chinese characters," says Franz Och, who heads Google's machine-translation (MT) effort. Yet, they are producing ever more accurate translations into and out of Chinese -- and several other languages as well. To demonstrate the software's prowess, Mr. Och displayed an Arabic newspaper headline at a recent media tour of Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. One commercially available MT program translated it: "Alpine white new presence tape registered for coffee confirms Laden." Then he displayed the translation from Google's prototype, which made considerably more sense: "The White House Confirmed the Existence of a New Bin Laden tape." Of course, every MT program can point to strengths in its approach versus weakness in others', experts say. The key is whether statistical systems have become powerful enough to outperform the intensive, rules-based systems now available. "These translations were impossible a few years ago," Och says. But the advent of ever-cheaper and faster data-crunching and the mushrooming number of online documents have changed the equation. Google has improved the algorithms for its MT program, he says, by feeding its computers the equivalent of 1 million books of text, using sources such as parallel translations of United Nations documents. Google's MT system is still under development and not available to the public. Talking about it at an event for journalists and industry analysts may mean that at least a test version will be coming in the next few months, observers speculate. "The results were very impressive, not the stupid machine translation you see on the Internet, which isn't really good," says Philipp Lenssen, who's been writing about Google in his online blog, Google Blogoscoped, since May 2003. "This opens up a lot of new possibilities because you don't really want to read machine translation at the moment," Mr. Lenssen says. He speculates that it could be a perfect part of a Google Web browser, should the company decide to release one. A user might search the entire Web in his native language and have pages returned to him already translated. "You can apply it to so many situations," he says. Many translations, one root ... Today, nearly every translation service offered on the Web -- AOL, Alta Vista, Babblefish, even Google's -- is powered by translation technology developed by Systran. The company, based in San Diego and Paris, has been involved in MT for more than 30 years. Each day, it translates more than 25 million Web pages. MT involves years of hard work creating rules for translation between a pair of languages, says Dimitris Sabatakakis, chief executive officer of Systran. Using statistical methods, such as Google does, is a well-known technique. "There is no technology breakthrough," he says. "Everybody does the same." Machine translations, he says, work best if the original text is written with care to make it easily translatable, avoiding problematic or ambiguous words and phrases. More and more websites, especially those interested in e-commerce, are trying to create text that is easily translated, Mr. Sabatakakis says. Though machine translations are often less than perfect, he says, they're still useful to gain a quick idea of what a website is all about. Today, Systran offers translations between 40 language pairs, and in the next 12 months it will add 40 more, he says. Each of the two approaches to MT -- hand-tailoring rules for translation between pairs of languages or using statistical analysis to detect patterns -- has its strengths and weaknesses, says Robert Frederking, who teaches at the Center for Machine Translation at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Rules-based systems are time-consuming to develop and expensive, but great for specialized tasks, such as translating a manual on bulldozers, which might have a number of specific and unique terms. "Systran has put literally hundreds of person years over a 30-year period into building each language pair that they translate," Dr. Frederking says. Statistical systems have yet to prove that they can produce superior translations, says Frederking, who hasn't seen the results of the most recent NIST evaluations. But doing well at NIST means more than showing off a few specific examples of better translations to reporters, he says. Even evaluating the quality of translations is difficult and expensive, Frederking says. Since 2002 NIST has used a computer program called Bleu to do its evaluations. It works "reasonably well," he says. Unofficially good ... The results of the NIST evaluation won't be released until later this month. "Google did do _very_ well," says Mark Przybocki, the machine-translation project coordinator at NIST, without confirming Google's score. Some 20 research groups asked to be evaluated, each trying new techniques not yet in commercial use. Each group was given 100 news items to translate from Arabic and Chinese into English. Both rules-based and statistical MT systems can stumble badly on such generalized reading. One problem is the vast and changing vocabulary. One analysis of The Wall Street Journal, Frederking says, found that 1 or 2 percent of each edition consists of words that have never before appeared in the paper. A statistical principle called Zipf's Law holds that with so many words available, nearly every article will have some uncommon words, he says. Unless statistical MT programs have seen these words in many previous contexts, they can mistranslate them. Proper nouns are a special challenge. Crooner Julio Iglesias, for example, shouldn't be translated as July Churches, the literal English translation of his Spanish name. An MT system should be able to spot which words are names and not translate them, he says. But even that doesn't help, if the translation is from Japanese or Chinese characters. "You have to translate them into some kind of Latin letters," he says. Frederking predicts that eventually rules-based and statistical methods will merge, with some knowledge of grammar and syntax being added to the statistical approach, making for translation programs that are both broad and deep. Meanwhile, Google's announcement that it's working on a better MT system creates interest in the field "and that's a good thing" says Sabatakakis of Systran. But "we know that there are no magic solutions. You don't learn a language with statistical methods." Countries with the most Internet users (in millions): 1. United States: 185.6 2. China: 99.8 3. Japan: 78.1 4. Germany: 41.9 5. India: 37.0 6. Britain: 33.1 7. South Korea: 31.7 8. Italy: 25.5 9. France: 25.5 10. Brazil: 22.3 Source: CIA World Factbook Copyright 2005 The Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science Monitor -- an independent daily newspaper providing context and clarity on national and international news, peoples and cultures, and social trends. Online at http://www.csmonitor.com Click here to order a free sample copy of the print edition of the Monitor: http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/sample_issue.html Sign up to have the Monitor's headlines sent directly to your inbox. http://www.csmonitor.com/email (or view http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra.nytimes.html and review the far right hand column.) NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Quite a few years ago, prior to my illness, I had several Digest web pages available in various languages, and I am thinking about starting that again. PAT] ------------------------------ From: jg@earthlink.net Subject: 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic ? Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 06:13:12 -0500 Hi, I believe my 'voice line' is being tapped [the line feeds through the 'opponents' switchboard]. How difficult is it for them to 'decode' my modem [to ISP] traffic ? I'm guessing/hoping that my modem has to 'synchronise' with the ISP's in analog mode, so it's difficult for a '3rd' party to listen ? Is this right ? Thanks for any info. == John Grant. ------------------------------ From: John McHarry Subject: Re: Is There True Pay-as-You-Go Cellphone? Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 03:03:28 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net On Thu, 09 Jun 2005 09:04:22 -0400, TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to Barry Margolin: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Another reasonable plan is Alltel, > which I do not think has any expiry time on its prepaid minutes, > although it is bit more expensive per call. PAT] I have that. It is something like $.35/min. incoming and outgoing. There is a nasty monthly charge if you don't use it at all for a month, but nothing if you use even one minute. Since I use it for alarms from a public radio station transmitter site, it is almost perfect. The only catch is that there is no roaming. The local area is quite large, so that is not often a problem. ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Is There True Pay-as-You-Go Cellphone? Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 20:50:09 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Thu, 09 Jun 2005 09:04:22 -0400, Barry Margolin wrote: > I have a cellphone, but I use it very infrequently -- maybe about 5 > minutes a month. I bought a Virgin Mobile prepaid cellphone, but they > require that I purchase $20 of time every 90 days to keep it active. > So I have to spend nearly $7/mo when I use at most $2/mo. > Is there a cellphone plan closer to my needs? A company that resells AT&T Wireless/Cingular TDMA IS-136 service "Beyond Wireless" will activate any qualifying phone free with the requirement that you make a call at least every 60 days. Theoretically with their service you could have phone service for months on end and not pay anything unless you used up all your minutes. The drawback (you knew there had to be one) is that they only have local numbers in a limited number of locations so if the number wasn't local to people calling you they would pay a toll charge to call you. Outgoing calls cost 15 cents/minute down to 10 cents/minute if you purchase a large number of minutes refill voucher. I have two former AT&T Wireless TDMA phones that I've activated on their service to use if the need arises. I should also add that calls that are not "on network" are charged at four times the regular rate so if you are in an area where AT&T Wireless never had service it would not be a good fit for you as any minutes you would use would be off network and would cost you four times the regular amount. If however you are in an AT&T network area it's a good deal especially for the casual caller. Theoretically you could go to a resale/thrift shop and get a used AT&T wireless handset and have Beyond activate it for you and you'd have an extremely economical package. http://gobeyond2.chainreactionweb.com/catalog/airtime_rates.php And there's a trick to ordering minutes from them if you're not in one of the areas they serve. Set up an account using one of the states that they do serve and use your credit card billing address minus the state (use one of the states served.) Otherwise you won't be able to set up an account to buy minutes. ------------------------------ From: GlowingBlueMist Subject: Re: Microwave Fading 6 Gig Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 03:12:18 -0500 Organization: SunSITE.dk - Supporting Open source HarryHydro wrote in message news:telecom24.259.5@telecom-digest.org: > Hi Folks: > I wrote a qbasic program that scans 4 Alcatel radios. It also > pages me on problems. I was called almost 10 times around 1:30AM this > morning (6/9/05) and again around 4:00AM even more times! My heel are > draggin'. Anyway, this has been going on for the last few days. > These are not stormy evenings, or even windy. In the plots this > program makes, I see signals dropping, or maybe it's noise level > increasing, enough to break microwave paths. This is 6gig stuff ... The > 4 radios at this site point in different directions, and the radios > almost go wacky the same time, but not exactly. For a half hour, the > signal on one radio faded to almost break while the others were doing > OK. Sometimes the two receivers on one radio will fade together, > sometimes not. (diversity) I've associated some of these to mag > storms, but most are weather related. However, these last few days > have been pretty stable. > Could it be temperature inversions at 1:30 in the morning doing this? > Harry nI don't know about your location but when I was monitoring microwave sites for the military in Germany, most of the temperature inversion problems we ran into was in the early morning. The hills would cool off but the valleys would hold the heat unless a breeze was blowing. As you have already identified, the fact that your diversity beams tend to drop out at slightly different times helps to point to a temperature inversion problem if weather was ruled out. We did tend to have one other problem with fighter aircraft using our towers as practice targets. Either the bulk of the aircraft themselves or the aircraft electronic systems would drop the link as they came in for the final run. ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Microwave Fading 6 Gig Organization: ATCC Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 07:11:40 -0400 In article , harryhydro@hotmail.com says: > Hi Folks: > I wrote a qbasic program that scans 4 Alcatel radios. It also > pages me on problems. I was called almost 10 times around 1:30AM this > morning (6/9/05) and again around 4:00AM even more times! My heel are > draggin'. Anyway, this has been going on for the last few days. > These are not stormy evenings, or even windy. In the plots this > program makes, I see signals dropping, or maybe it's noise level > increasing, enough to break microwave paths. This is 6gig stuff ... The > 4 radios at this site point in different directions, and the radios > almost go wacky the same time, but not exactly. For a half hour, the > signal on one radio faded to almost break while the others were doing > OK. Sometimes the two receivers on one radio will fade together, > sometimes not. (diversity) I've associated some of these to mag > storms, but most are weather related. However, these last few days > have been pretty stable. > Could it be temperature inversions at 1:30 in the morning doing this? It is possible. 6GHz is millimeter radio, and water vapor does a number on that. ------------------------------ From: Pete Romfh Subject: Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 05:53:40 -0500 Organization: Not Organized Monty Solomon wrote: > Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to > Verizon Wireless Phones When New Messages Arrive > Home and Business Customers in N.Y.C. and New England Can > Receive TXT Alerts on Their Verizon Wireless Phones > NEW YORK, June 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Verizon home and > business voice mailboxes now can alert customers on their > Verizon Wireless phone that someone has left a message. > Starting today, Verizon voice-messaging customers in New > York City and New England can add a feature that sends a > text message to any Verizon Wireless short text messaging- > capable phone with an alert that a new voice message has > been left on the customer's landline phone. > http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49739949 > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What is supposed to make > that so exceptional? Cingular Wireless has always had an > icon on the display screen indicating voice message > waiting, and I have always had my phone set to make three > chirps when that icon is turned on. PAT] The "New" feature is having the voicemail on your home phone send a message to your cellphone saying a message has been left. Most voicemail systems have had this feature for years. You could have it call your cellphone or a pager. The SMS message is sort of a new wrinkle on an existing service. Pete Romfh, Telecom Geek & Amateur Gourmet. promfh at hal dash pc dot org ------------------------------ From: Justin Time Subject: Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon Date: 10 Jun 2005 05:31:34 -0700 Hey -- anything to drive the number of minutes of usage up. (OBTW Pat, they are not talking about voicemail left on the cell phone, but on your landline.) ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 05:41:13 -0700 Organization: Cox Communications I find forwarding our home phone to my cell phone when we are on a trip works better. Monty Solomon wrote: > Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon > Wireless Phones When New Messages Arrive > Home and Business Customers in N.Y.C. and New England Can Receive TXT > Alerts on Their Verizon Wireless Phones [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That's how I do it also, even though I don't go on many car trips. Prairie Stream (local telco) has my landline set to 'forward on busy/no answer' to my Cingular cell phone. And since we here get unlimited local area calling, my landline 620-331 phone forwards after 3 rings to my cellular 620-330 number. My regular callers know they are getting forwarded to my cell phone when after 3 audible rings (in their ear) they hear a couple seconds of silence as the call is 'pulled away' from the landline and transferred to my cell phone. When I am truly not available, then the Cingular cell phone voice mail takes the call. PAT] ------------------------------ Reply-To: From: William Van Hefner Subject: Re: MCI Now Charging Extra on Payphones When Using Phone Card! Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2005 23:27:05 -0700 Organization: Vantek Communications, Inc. hizark21@yahoo.com wrote about: MCI Now Charging Extra on Payphones When Using Phone Card! on: 8 Jun 2005 17:52:19 -0700 > MCI now charging extra payphones when using their phone card!!! > MCI has started charging a 65 cent surcharge on calls using their = phone cards ... Most companies have been adding payphone surcharges to their calling cards for a long, long time. This is absolutely nothing new. I have some MCI pre-paid calling cards that I bought at Costco last Christmas, and they plainly state that all calls made from payphones will be hit with a 10 minute/unit surcharge. At the rate I bought the cards at, that is a 29 cent surcharge. It's simple to understand why carriers are charging this fee. First of all, carriers have been forced to pay surcharges to payphone providers (via their carrier, OSP or reseller) on each call for years now. The compensation rate for these charges was raised more than six months ago to an all-time high. When you add the existing charges to the fact that carriers like MCI have to cut individual checks to hundreds of different carriers and resellers each month, you are talking about a major accounting nightmare. In some cases, MCI itself may be the payphone carrier, and it then has to cut a check to a division of its own company, which in turn has to send checks to literally thousands of independent payphone owners all over the country. If the payphone uses an MCI reseller or OSP, you have to add yet another middleman. You can blame our own Federal Communications Commission for caving-in to payphone owners and others involved in the industry for raising the limit on these surcharges. I guess that they feel sorry for the payphone companies, who have probably seen their revenues drop by 90% in the past 10 years. William Van Hefner Editor - TheDigest.Com http://www.thedigest.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But I have to wonder what was wrong with the old 'Separations and Settlements' process AT&T used for about ninety years. And by the way, we had a response on this yesterday as well, where the writer claimed that the 'fee to write checks' also cut into the profit telco made on calls using calling cards, etc. Actually, even without a master 'Separations and Settlements' process like AT&T used to administer, the telcos all have their own proceedures for this, and for the benefit of our writer yesterday, each time someone makes a call from a payphone, the carrier does not sit down and write a check for 65 cents or whatever. They go for about a year at a time, then they subtract what one owes the other from what the second one owes the first one and settle up the difference. In other words, John Q. Payphone Owner has a thousand dollars due him from MCI, and he owes MCI nine hundred fifty dollars. MCI offsets what they owe each other, and send John Q. Payphone Owner the difference, if any, or a bill if he owes them. Now John Q. may have been collecting the aggragate differences each month from the local telco -- let's call them Verizon for example (via the same technique) so when MCI makes an annual or semi-annual settlement with Verizon one of them says "do not forget about John Q and what he has coming"; they compare notes and give John his few dollars due. There is _not_ all that massive numbers of checks written and 'major expenses which cuts down on the profits' as our correspondent yesterday claimed. PAT] ------------------------------ From: jon@earthlink.net Subject: Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 05:56:13 -0500 Joseph wrote: >>> That's interesting. Both Verizon and Sprint have disabled SMS >>> completely when I requested it. Why can't T-Mobile? >> Maybe it has to do with the way GSM works. You didn't mention AT&T >> Wireless or Cingular. SMS is part of the GSM spec. I don't know if >> that's the case with CDMA. Isaiah Beard wrote: > It is, but can be inhibited if need be. I have to say, SMS seems to > be GSM's achilles' heel. A lot of signalling functions on GSM appear > to be handled by thinly vieled SMS messages, stuff that would be > handled on a more formal level in CDMA through the paging channel. Are there on-line specs for GSM and/or CDMA ? > I'm willing to bet that T-Mobile is unwilling to fully disable SMS on > an account because in many markets, they still use it for voicemail > and other notifications. Do they send the voicemail 'digitally compressed' [eg. simulated] ? What is the average bits/sec which they need ? Thanks for any info. Chris Glur ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: SBC New Low Price Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 05:47:07 -0700 Organization: Cox Communications > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: As I read the original thread here, I > was of the impression it was not the wire pair(s) in question, it > was getting dial tone on that pair which telco would not supply > because of a billing dispute with a previous tenant. Telco could care > less about the wire pair; run as many of them as you wish, but then > get telco to interconnect. Was I wrong on this assumption? PAT] Perhaps the thread was bifurcated, but I didn't see the discussion about a billing dispute. The message I responded to was the debate about whether dial tone is required for a rental unit, as opposed to a good pair that is capable of working. And, to what extent the landlord is responsible. As to a billing dispute, in California, all the landlord would have to do is certify to the LEC that the deadbeat tenant has moved out. If the LEC refused to provide service to the new tenant at that point the California PUC could resolve that in short order. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The part of the thread we got here from AES discussed how the original tenant skipped owing money, and that although the landlord (apparently, I do not recall reading it) did in fact tell telco he had _new_ tenants, telco did not accept that as the complete story _in the proper context_ and said they wanted their money. And, if telco's version was correct, then the PUC would back them up. PAT] ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 11:22:29 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Pat wrote: > So I, John Q. Spammer go to an ISP and ask for a connection. I tell > ISP I want to be known as 'spam.com'. I do not tell the ISP I want > to be known as '208.31.42.98' Um, Pat -- that's not correct. The ISP has absolutely nothing to do with your domain name. You don't tell him what you want to be known as at all in most cases. Usually they just assign you an IP address. If you have your own AS number and assigned block and are going to run BGP, you tell them what your IP is. But in either case, no domain names are involved. The only time the ISP might nbeed to know that info is if in addition to being your ISP they are also providing additional value added services, above and beyond just being an ISP, such as DNS hosting or SMTP mail. > ... ISP says I will take care of all that once you get installed by > a registrar. The registrar is the only business that needs to know about your domain name. Our ISP does not know/need to know/care what our domain name is. > Quite a difference, the registrar _is_ like directory assistance, > but different in the sense that directory assistance does not > _assign_ anything, but simply reports on what has been assigned. So > if the registrar was not a greedy son-of-a-bitch and started saying > NO! that would help a lot. Oh yes, I know that John Q. Spammer > could try to cut a deal under the table direct with the ISP, or > whomever it is that physically makes his connections in and out, but > ISPs working in concert with registrars could do a lot to clean up > the mess. Given that in most cases involving spammers, the ISP has no way of knowing what registered domains are using a block of addresses, that won't work. > And like the old system which was used with FIDO, when a site > becomes a nuisance, he gets delisted, and if others up the line do > not cooperate then _they_ get delisted also. The rule ISP's and > registrars would use is that if John Q. Spammer was expelled by > whoever, then no one touches him or works with him. PAT] There is such a system in place more or less. The ROKSO list run by spamhaus is pretty much what you describe. It's of limited use, however. The spammers use prepaid debit cards under phoney names to register domains, so they can't be identified before hand by the registrar. Most spammers these days don't even really have an internet connection for their business per se -- they hire a sleazy overseas company to host their server for them. They use fake names again to do this. The spam is sent as follows -- somone gets a consumer level dsl, dial up, or cable internet account. They then use this ISP connection to get trojan infected PC's worldwide to send the spam for them. Since no spam comes form their own account, it never gets traced to that account. The only identifiable things are the domain name of the server, the registrar of the domain name, and the company hosting the server. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Seems like an awfully convoluted way of running your business, IMO. So my response would be to kill the domain name of the server, chop off the registrar's head, and burn down the company hosting the server. Fair enough? As one writer here yesterday pointed out, the ISPs could cure a huge amount of the problem (but I would say give the registrars some part of the job also) if they gave a Good God Damn, which many of them do not, such as MCI. And don't forget, MCI uses their employee Vint Cerf as their front man/mouthpiece with ICANN, truly God's Gift to Netters everywhere. And the small business people who run local ISP operations who _do_ care and _do_ attempt to check out new customers are treated like imbiciles, the same as your Esteemed Moderator. PAT] ------------------------------ From: johnspilker@msn.com Subject: Re: Cannot Cancel My AT&T Service After Moving to Vonage Date: 10 Jun 2005 09:20:22 -0700 They are charging us a monthly fee that amounts to $8 a month with taxes. I did send a registered letter to AT&T legal department and got a simple form letter that told me to contact Qwest. What an insult. I've contacted Qwest for confirmation that the account was closed on April 20. I'm not sure what to do next. I suppose I could file a complaint with the FCC but I wouldn't expect any quick results. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Forget for a minute that the FCC does not care one way or the other about insults you have endured. AT&T claims that Qwest is their agent, so send another registered letter to Qwest (a copy of your original letter to AT&T) with a cover note saying "remove my AT&T service immediatly". 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 V24 #260 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Jun 10 19:54:50 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 99ADB15112; Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:54:49 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #261 Message-Id: <20050610235449.99ADB15112@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:54:49 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.3 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,DO_IT_TODAY, MAILTO_TO_REMOVE,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:54:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 261 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Telecom Update #485, June 10, 2005 (Angus TeleManagement Group) Bellsouth Caller ID (Choreboy) Altigen Workgroup Outbound caller ID (citius21j@yahoo.com) Nortel's President Resigns (Telecom dailyLead from USTA) US Robotics 005605 Modem and VOIP (colin@nomailspam.com) Can Verizon Phone Be Used With Bell Mobility in Canada? (aqabbas) Access Personal Contacts, Notes Through Text Messaging (Phil) Re: 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic ? (mc) Re: 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic ? (Robert Bonomi) Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon (Joseph) Re: Cannot Cancel AT&T Service After Moving to Vonage (Danny Burstein) Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? (Isaiah Beard) Re: MCI Now Charging Extra on Payphones When Using Phone Card! (Levine) Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (T. Sean Weintz) Re: Digest New Sponsorship (T. Sean Weintz) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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, 10 Jun 2005 12:16:41 -0700 Subject: Telecom Update #485, June 10, 2005 From: Angus TeleManagement Group Reply-To: Angus TeleManagement Group ************************************************************ TELECOM UPDATE ************************************************************ published weekly by Angus TeleManagement Group http://www.angustel.ca Number 485: June 10, 2005 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: ** Policy Review Asks 106 Questions ** Nortel President, CTO Resign ** Cogeco Enters Local Phone Business ** Some VoIP Providers Get 9-1-1 Extension ** RIM's Patent Settlement Stalls ** Consortium Wants 5-1-1 for Weather & Travel Info ** Bell Announces Global VoIP Trial ** Nortel Offers Unified Applications Platform ** Sierra Gives Up on Smartphone ** Building Access Rules Include Utelcos ** Rogers Extends Ultra-Lite to Newfoundland ** PIAC Wants Price Cap Amendments ** Telus and IEEE Sponsor Student Contest ** Bell Buys Western ERP Integrator ** Call Genie Names New CEO ** Allstream's Macdonald on Medical Leave ** CIRA Warns Against Password Fraud ** Orion Holds Research Summit ============================================================ POLICY REVIEW ASKS 106 QUESTIONS: The Telecom Policy Review Committee's consultation paper, released on Monday, invites comments on a broad range of issues in order "not to prejudge or prematurely eliminate areas of interest and potential reform." ** "Canada has generally been well served by the policy and regulatory framework that evolved over the last century," says the paper, but asks, "Should changes be made [to this framework] to better equip Canada to reap future benefits from developments in telecommunications and ICT as these become more powerful enablers of our social and economic lives?" ** 106 specific questions are organized in seven sections: the changing telecom environment, the regulatory framework, regulatory institutions, Canada's connectivity agenda, making the most of technology, other issues, and implementation. ** First-round submissions are due August 15; comments on the submissions are to be made by September 15. The panel hopes to make its recommendations before the end of 2005. www.telecomreview.ca/epic/internet/intprp-gecrt.nsf/en/h_rx00015e.html NORTEL PRESIDENT, CTO RESIGN: Newly recruited President and CTO Gary Daichendt has resigned from Nortel Networks as a result of what CEO Bill Owens terms "divergent management styles and ... business views." CTO Gary Kunis, who previously worked with Daichendt in Cisco Systems and joined Nortel following Daichendt's appointment, has also left the company. COGECO ENTERS LOCAL PHONE BUSINESS: On June 8, Cogeco Cable launched digital telephone service in Burlington and Oakville, Ontario. The company says it will extend service to most of the cities it serves by December 2006. ** Service is $44.99 for customers who also take Cogeco High Speed Internet and cable TV; $49.95 for those who take only Internet. ** Included: unlimited Canada and U.S. long distance; voice mail and four other features; 4-1-1, 6-1-1, and 9-1-1; and eight-hour battery back up. SOME VOIP PROVIDERS GET 9-1-1 EXTENSION: In response to applications by Vonage, SaskTel, BananaTel, MTS Allstream, Primus, and Globility, the CRTC has given these providers until August 17 to ensure that their nomadic VoIP 9-1-1 calls are routed to the correct emergency center. (See Telecom Update #482) www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/ENG/Letters/2005/lt050527.htm RIM'S PATENT SETTLEMENT STALLS: Research In Motion says it has reached an impasse in efforts to finalize its patent licensing agreement with NTP Inc. and is taking court action to enforce the settlement. (See Telecom Update #473) NTP says it will now ask for a court injunction blocking BlackBerry sales in the U.S. CONSORTIUM WANTS 5-1-1 FOR WEATHER & TRAVEL INFO: The Canada 511 Consortium, consisting of Environment Canada, Transport Canada, Canadian Urban Transit Association, Transportation Association of Canada, the Intelligent Transportation Systems Society of Canada, all ten provincial governments, and the Yukon Territorial government, has asked the CRTC to assign the 5-1-1 as a telephone number for the free delivery of weather and travel information to the public. www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/ENG/Notices/2005/pt2005-5.htm BELL ANNOUNCES GLOBAL VoIP TRIAL: Bell Canada has begun trials of Global Voice over Internet Protocol, which provides flat-rate intra-company international long distance service over a virtual private IP network. International connectivity is from BT Infonet. NORTEL OFFERS UNIFIED APPLICATIONS PLATFORM: Nortel Networks has announced its new Applications Center, which provides a open standards and SIP-based platform for contact center, speech recognition, unified messaging, and multimedia collaboration tools. Also announced: ** New releases of Nortel's Contact Center Suite (formerly Symposium), CallPilot Unified Messaging, and CS 1000 IP-PBX. ** IP Phone 2007, Nortel's first full colour screen phone. ** Nortel's new Multimedia Office Client, which provides multimedia enhancement of Microsoft Office Outlook. SIERRA GIVES UP ON SMARTPHONE: Sierra Wireless says it will sell or shut down its Voq Professional Phone business in order to focus on its core PC card business. Voq, a competitor of BlackBerry and Treo smartphones, secured a $9.5 million federal government investment but sold only an estimated 4,000 units. (See Telecom Update #403, 427) BUILDING ACCESS RULES INCLUDE UTELCOS: In response to a 2003 application, the CRTC has extended the multi-dwelling unit access agreement guidelines set in Telecom Decision 2003-45 to include members of the Coalition of Hydro Telecom Service Providers. (See Telecom Update #402) www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/ENG/Decisions/2005/dt2005-33.htm ROGERS EXTENDS ULTRA-LITE TO NEWFOUNDLAND: Rogers Cable has begun offering its Hi-Speed Internet Ultra-Lite service in Newfoundland. The service offers speeds of up to 128 Kbps download and 64 Kbps upload for $19.95 per month. PIAC WANTS PRICE CAP AMENDMENTS: Responding to the CRTC's proposal to extend the current price cap regime for two years (see Telecom Update #481), the Public Interest Advocacy Centre says that current consumer price levels are too high, and has asked for an extended process to review them. The CRTC has postponed the comment deadline to June 20, but says its proposal "does not contemplate a detailed review of any aspect" of the current regime. www.crtc.gc.ca/PartVII/eng/2005/8678/c12_200505729.htm#4a TELUS AND IEEE SPONSOR STUDENT CONTEST: Telus and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers have initiated an annual contest for Information Computing and Telecommunications projects submitted by undergraduate engineering or technology students. The IEEE Telus Innovation Award features $20,000 in cash prizes. www.ieee.ca/students/telus_award/index.htm BELL BUYS WESTERN ERP INTEGRATOR: Bell Canada has acquired Winnipeg-based CSB Systems, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems integrator that specializes in Microsoft mid- market ERP software products Navision and Syspro. CSB will become part of the recently-formed Bell Business Solutions organization. CALL GENIE NAMES NEW CEO: Call Genie, a Calgary-based supplier of voice directory technology, management, and support services, has named Michael Durance, a VP of Toshiba's telecom division, as Chief Executive Officer. ALLSTREAM'S MACDONALD ON MEDICAL LEAVE: John McDonald, President of MTS's Allstream division, began medical leave on June 10 for undisclosed reasons. MTS announced that CEO Bill Fraser will be overseeing Allstream until MacDonald returns. CIRA WARNS AGAINST PASSWORD FRAUD: The Canadian Internet Registration Authority warns against fake email messages purporting be from CIRA, which ask dot-ca domain name holders for their CIRA user account number or password. Do not share this information with anyone, CIRA says. ORION HOLDS RESEARCH SUMMIT: The Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network (ORION), which provides high bandwidth connectivity to Ontario universities and research institutions, is holding its 2005 summit in Toronto June 13 and 14. Registration is open to the public, at $295 for the two-day event. www.orion.on.ca/events/ontariorandesummit.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 late Friday afternoon each 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 2005 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: Choreboy Subject: Bellsouth Caller ID Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 13:45:43 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Caller ID won't show names for some cellphone callers. I decided to ask Bellsouth if their Caller ID would show names of cellphone callers with any cellphone carriers, and if so, what carriers. Bellsouth loves calling customers for telemarketing but doesn't like having customers call Customer Service. I decided to try email. I was redirected to a page telling me I wouldn't be allowed on unless I downloaded Netscape or Explorer. Some sites won't work very well with some browsers, but this is the first time a website wouldn't allow me on except with specified browsers. Netscape 7 is unacceptable for Mac OS9 because Netscape dropped support and left it full of serious bugs. I happened to have Explorer but prefer two newer browsers that are more versatile and standards-compliant. Bellsouth expected me to do a 15 MB download before I could email them. It's not a customer-friendly company. As they'd warned, Bellsouth made me wait 48 hours. The answer was that whether Caller ID showed a name for a cellphone caller would depend on what carrier the caller was using. So Bellsouth won't tell me what cellphone carriers provide names for their Caller ID. Is this information available anywhere? ------------------------------ From: citius21j@yahoo.com Subject: Altigen Workgroup Outbound Caller ID Date: 10 Jun 2005 11:20:29 -0700 Hi, Could someone please help me with this. We are using the ALTIGEN SYSTEM We have 2 workgroups set up for two separate businesses we are running. I have entered two different transmitted CID numbers for them but they dont seem to be displayed when an agent logged into the workgroup is making an outbound call. It seems to pull up the transmitted CID number for the agent. Please guide me as how to get the different business number show up when the agent is making outbound call from the workgroup. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 12:35:39 EDT From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: Nortel's President Resigns Telecom dailyLead from USTA June 10, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22249&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * Nortel's president resigns BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Nokia, Intel form WiMAX alliance * BellSouth's extensive fiber network may help IPTV plans * Adelphia offers broadband music service USTA SPOTLIGHT * Order Today! Newton's Telecom Dictionary -- 21st Edition EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Tech whiz talks open source VOIP DOWNLOAD * Gartner: IP telephony security threat overhyped * Agilent targets cable VoIP REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * Kurth pulls out of FCC consideration Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22249&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 ------------------------------ Subject: US Robotics 005605 Modem and VOIP From: colin@nomailspam.com Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 15:40:08 -0500 I have a US Robotics 005605 (aka Model 0525) 56k Voice Faxmodem. The last time I used it was several years ago with a Win 98 OS. Having converted to Win 2000 pro, I downloaded the USB firmware flash program for this model from the US Robotics support site. http://www.usr.com/support/product-template.asp?prod=5605 The problem is that I'm not sure what driver to use. There's a USB driver but I can't get a dialtone from my Sipora 2000 VOIP modem with it. The OS recognizes the modem. Is it possible that it doesn't recognize VOIP connections? US Robotics tech support states the following: "In Control Panel, double-click Modems and remove extra modem entries" Does that also mean I should remove these options from the Advanced tab? Microsoft H.323 TAPI Service Provider Microsoft Multicast Conference TAPI Service Provider NDIS Proxy TAPI Service Provider TAPI Kernel-Mode Service Provider Unimodem 5 Service Provider I'm going to try using the serial cable now. If anyone has experience with VOIP and analog modems, please contribute! ------------------------------ From: aqabbas@yahoo.com Subject: Can Verizon Phone be Used With Bell Mobility in Canada? Date: 10 Jun 2005 15:09:40 -0700 Can a Verizon phone be used with Bell Mobility in Canada? I know they both use CDMA. I am specifialy interested in the Kyocera 7135. ------------------------------ From: phil Subject: Access Personal Contacts, Notes, Through Text Messaging Date: 10 Jun 2005 15:10:58 -0700 Navin Communications Inc. developed a new service which allows you to access your Contacts, Calendar, Notes, ... through text messaging. The service is still in BETA and can be used for free at this moment. Try it out at www.telixo.com Phil ------------------------------ From: mc Subject: Re: 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic ? Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 15:38:14 -0400 Organization: Speed Factory (http://www.speedfactory.net) wrote in message news:telecom24.260.5@telecom-digest.org: > Hi, > I believe my 'voice line' is being tapped [the line feeds through the > 'opponents' switchboard]. > How difficult is it for them to 'decode' my modem [to ISP] traffic ? > I'm guessing/hoping that my modem has to 'synchronise' with the ISP's > in analog mode, so it's difficult for a '3rd' party to listen ? I'm not sure about current modems. With early modem technology (1200 baud and below), eavesdropping was easy. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic ? Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:40:27 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , wrote: > Hi, > I believe my 'voice line' is being tapped [the line feeds through the > 'opponents' switchboard]. > How difficult is it for them to 'decode' my modem [to ISP] traffic ? > I'm guessing/hoping that my modem has to 'synchronise' with the ISP's > in analog mode, so it's difficult for a '3rd' party to listen ? > Is this right ? > Thanks for any info. Short answer: "it depends". With old 'Bell 103" type modems, 'copying' the line communication was comparatively trivial with nothing more than an off-the-shelf modem. With 'Bell 202' type stuff, it was even simpler -- they worked that way automatically. Bell 212 type stuff required some _very_ minor hardware tweaking to turn an off-the-shelf unit into a 'tap'. Above 2400 baud, you need some "somewhat specialized" equipment. Nothing terribly exotic, but you have to know 'where to look'. Generally impractical to modify 'retail, off-the-shelf' modems to the purpose. ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 09:18:34 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Thu, 9 Jun 2005 15:21:15 -0400, Monty Solomon wrote: > Starting today, Verizon voice-messaging customers in New York City and > New England can add a feature that sends a text message to any Verizon > Wireless short text messaging-capable phone with an alert that a new > voice message has been left on the customer's landline phone. > - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49739949 > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What is supposed to make that so > exceptional? Cingular Wireless has always had an icon on the display > screen indicating voice message waiting, and I have always had my > phone set to make three chirps when that icon is turned on. PAT] I had a private voicemail service that did this. Unfortunately they went bust. As to Pat's comment, perhaps you didn't notice that this was to notify you on your cellphone when you have a message on your *landline* phone. Most all cellphones get an indication of a message left in your cellphone voicemail box either o_o or some other icon or if not an icon some send an actual text message to your handset saying "you have a voicemail dial 123 to retrieve" and also will have an audible sound to alert you that you have waiting messages. ------------------------------ From: Danny Burstein Subject: Re: Cannot Cancel My AT&T Service After Moving to Vonage Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 18:54:29 UTC Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC In johnspilker@msn.com writes: > They are charging us a monthly fee that amounts to $8 a month with > taxes. I did send a registered letter to AT&T legal department and got > a simple form letter that told me to contact Qwest. [ snip of the usuals problems ] Once again, in most states sending off a letter to the public service//utilities commission (and it never hurts to add the AG) gets results for straightforward and (relatively low cost) matters like this. I personally did, in fact, do this with AT&T service here in NYC. About a week after I dropped my letter in the mail box I got back a standard form letter from the PSC in ALbany, NY, and a couple of days later I got a "we've fixed it" note from AT&T. Which they did. (Other people have reported to me similar effectiveness courrtesy of web-page writeups, but I prefer paper. This gives me my own hard copy to refer to). Note that this was a couple of years ago prior to the latest rounds of corporate shuffles, but the process should probably still work. Again, that's _most_ states. Some are pretty useless. _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] ------------------------------ From: Isaiah Beard Subject: Re: Can You Disable Text Messaging? Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 16:05:51 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com jon@earthlink.net wrote: >> It is, but can be inhibited if need be. I have to say, SMS seems to >> be GSM's achilles' heel. A lot of signalling functions on GSM appear >> to be handled by thinly vieled SMS messages, stuff that would be >> handled on a more formal level in CDMA through the paging channel. > Are there on-line specs for GSM and/or CDMA ? I'm sure there are. Google is your friend. :) >> I'm willing to bet that T-Mobile is unwilling to fully disable SMS >> on an account because in many markets, they still use it for voicemail >> and other notifications. > Do they send the voicemail 'digitally compressed' [eg. simulated] ? > What is the average bits/sec which they need ? You misunderstand. I was referring to voicemail *notification*. As in, the voicemail icon on your phone? In CDMA, a flag is set on your handset via the paging channel. On T-Mobile and older generation GSM networks, the flag is not sent (though that is starting to change on T-Mobile, slowly). Instead, you get an explicit SMS message that reads something like "you have 1 unread voice mail message." E-mail fudged to thwart spammers. Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply. ------------------------------ Date: 10 Jun 2005 21:35:05 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: MCI Now Charging Extra on Payphones When Using Phone Card! Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > You can blame our own Federal Communications Commission for caving-in > to payphone owners and others involved in the industry for raising > the limit on these surcharges. Yes. In a few areas I see payphone providers with a few grains of sense who are pricing their calls to be competitive, e.g., 10 cpm for a lot of international calls on VZ phones in New York. The rest are in a suicidal circle of higher prices leading to less use leading to yet higher prices. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But I have to wonder what was wrong > with the old 'Separations and Settlements' process AT&T used for > about ninety years. Nothing, so long as all the pay phones belonged to the ILEC and the long distance rates were high enough to pay for a lot of manual work. In a world where there's thousands of COCOT owners and the real cpm for domestic calls is a penny a minute, it's a problem. R's, John [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: There was a fellow when I lived in Chicago, who owned a bunch of COCOTS and he deliberatly priced his _less_ than Ameritech. When Ameritech went to 30 cents per call several years ago, he put signs on all his COCOTS saying 'this phone still just 25 cents" and he offered long distance to anywhere for just _one dollar_ for 3 minutes and some small amount of overtime, I think maybe 10 seconds. He really raked in money on those phones of his. PAT] ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 17:41:25 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com PAT wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Seems like an awfully convoluted way > of running your business, IMO. Well, professional criminals tend to have to do things in convoluted ways if they want to avoid getting caught. This goes for all type of criminals, from hitmen to conmen to spammers. > So my response would be to kill the domain name of the server, chop > off the registrar's head, and burn down the company hosting the > server. YES! Easy enough for the first two steps, but burning down the company hosting the server will require a visa to get into Russia, China, or some other country where US laws generally don't stick. > Fair enough? As one writer here yesterday pointed out, the ISPs > could cure a huge amount of the problem (but I would say give the > registrars some part of the job also) if they gave a Good God Damn, > which many of them do not, such as MCI. And don't forget, MCI uses > their employee Vint Cerf as their front man/mouthpiece with ICANN, > truly God's Gift to Netters everywhere. Agreed. ISP's do NOT do anywhere NEAR enough to ensure they don't have spammers on their networks. However in all fairness it is not always easy for them to catch. Especially for tier one providers such as MCI. > And the small business people who run local ISP operations who _do_ > care and _do_ attempt to check out new customers are treated like > imbeciles, the same as your Esteemed Moderator. PAT] Who treats local ISPs that do care like imbeciles? Did I miss something here? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Exactly how do you define a 'tier one provider'? What makes 'tier one' different than 'tier two' or 'tier three' for example? Is it the amount of money a provider has to spend on connectivity and bandwidth? If that is the case, then why don't some of the 'tier one' providers spend at least a little money on customer service and investigations, etc? An imbecile is anyone who dares to suggest to the old-school netters that things _could_ and _should_ be better regards spam/scam, and refuses to listen to the old-school guys as they rationalize why it is impossible. To make yourself politically incorrect around here, suggest any course of action other than (1) more filtration, (2) faster processing speed or (3) get out of our playground and totally quit computing to any of the old-school guys. I dare say you will get not one but several 25-50 K-byte or larger messages explaining the error of your ways. PAT] ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Re: Digest New Sponsorship Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 18:05:35 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com TELECOM Digest Editor wrote: > I am pleased to welcome a new sponsor to the TELECOM Digest as of > today. Main Resource http://www.MainResource.com has signed on > to serve readers here. I will let Alisa Meredith explain about > their products: > http://www.MainResource.com - Buy Refurbished Comdial, Executone, > Inter-tel, Isoetec, Premier and Toshiba telecom equipment on-line > or by phone. Also offering unused PCS Digital systems. All our > refurbished equipment and our repairs are covered by a one-year warranty. > Also at http://www.MyHeadsets.com - Buy GN Netcom, Inter-tel, > Plantronics and VXI headsets; you can search by brand or type. > ======================= > You can see Ms. Meredith's ad on our home page, > http://telecom-digest.org in the far right hand column. > I hope all readers will stop in to say hello and review the products > offered at Main Resource. The shop is coincidentally located in the > State of Maine, 74 Evergreen Drive, Portland, ME 04103. Awsome. Very nice experience to go to a telecom website and instantly see a picture of a phone that is identical to the one sitting next to my monitor (an Inter-Tel 4500 executive keyset, for any who care to know). [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I guess Ms. Meredith sells those things after they are refurbished, and I suspect a lot cheaper than when they were new. Thanks for checking out http://www.mainresource.com and considering her when you need telecom equipment. And don't forget, for whatever energy it takes for moving your mouse a bit and clicking a couple times, you can also feed a dog or a cat in an animal shelter with no other obligations at http://theanimalrescuesite.com . 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 V24 #261 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sat Jun 11 21:54:26 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 874CC15048; Sat, 11 Jun 2005 21:54:25 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #262 Message-Id: <20050612015425.874CC15048@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 21:54:25 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.1 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,HOME_EMPLOYMENT, MAILTO_TO_REMOVE,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Sat, 11 Jun 2005 21:54:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 262 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Internet Telephony Grows With Do-it-Yourself Help (Lisa Minter) Yahoo Sees Larger Opportunity in Voice Services (Lisa Minter) Another Virus Disguised as Jackson Suicide Rumor (Lisa Minter) Cell Phone Rental in Europe (marty@ceflorida.com) Cellphone Curiosity (Thomas A. Horsley) Mac iBook and Bluetooth Cordless Headphones? (AES) Re: Cannot Cancel My AT&T Service After Moving to Vonage (Rick M) Re: Cannot Cancel My AT&T Service After Moving to Vonage (Tony P.) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Fred Atkinson) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (nospam4me@mytrashmail.com) Re: Can Verizon Phone be Used With Bell Mobility in Canada? (M Crispin) Re: Can Verizon Phone be Used With Bell Mobility in Canada? (Joseph) Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon (S Sobol) Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon (Tony P.) Re: Bennett LeBow? (David Wolff) Re: Coal, was From our Archives: Standard Oil and Bell (Tim Keating) Re: Bellsouth Caller ID (Robert Bonomi) Re: Altigen Workgroup Outbound Caller ID (Robert Bonomi) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Internet Telephony Grows With Do-it-Yourself Help Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:36:37 -0500 PluggedIn: Internet telephony grows with do-it-yourself help By Adam Pasick After nipping at the heels of the major telephone providers for years, Internet telephony is finally taking a big bite out of telephone call traffic. Leading the way is a Luxembourg-based startup, Skype, which has signed up 40 million users for its Internet telephone service and is growing at a remarkable 150,000 users a day. It's managed this feat with a tried and true method for Internet startups -- giving away its service for free. But like its predecessors, Skype could fall victim of its own hype as bigger, better-funded competitors are drawn to the market it created. It wouldn't be the first time a high-tech pioneer stumbled after an early success. For now, Skype's blazing the trail with software that enables free phone calls to any other Skype user around the globe. All it takes is a headset or telephone connected to a computer and a broadband Internet connection, The free service poses a challenge to Vonage, long the leader in low-priced Internet telephony using normal telephones plugged directly into broadband connections. Internet giants Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN are also rolling out free Internet telephony services that are bundled with their popular instant messenger programs . Skype is turning its fast-growing user base into a clear competitive advantage. A core of do-it-yourself Skype enthusiasts have rushed to create new capabilities for the service, most of which are also free. They've built voice mail, text messaging and call recording capability for the network. That, in turn, has spurred creation of a range of add-ons, from video conferencing to foreign language tutorials. The thriving Skype developer community gives the company an edge as it girds itself for competition from Microsoft and Yahoo, which Skype Chief Executive Niklas Zennstrom has called "the biggest threats" to Skype. It's similar to the third-party software applications gave Palm's handheld devices an early lead in the PDA market in the 1990s. Other Skype add-ons include programs that let users record their telephone conversations ( http://www.hotrecorder.com/ ), send and receive voicemail messages, collaborate with coworkers ( http://www.jybe.com/site/index.aspx ) and send text messages to mobile phones ( http://www.connectotel.com/sms/skype.html ). One of the newest Skype add-ons combines the service with the emerging format of the podcast, a home-spun radio show distributed over the Internet, in what has come to be called a Skypecast. LOOKING FOR BUSINESS For enthusiastic users like Rob Walker, who lives in England and remotely manages a small Latin American market research business using Skype, any additional capabilities will be more than welcome. "We're communicating between Mexico, Argentina, Chile and Brazil, and we're looking into using video conferencing, which would be quite useful," he said. Walker said his business already makes significant savings from using Skype's free calls: Even discount phone carriers commonly charge rates of 30 pence per minute between Britain and Latin America, and Walker spends hours each day talking to his employees. "As a small business, why wouldn't we use it?" he said. OPEN UP Skype's business plan has been to offer its basic service for free and then charge for additional services. But Zennstrom said the company has intentionally given developers free reign, even if their offerings compete with Skype's own offerings. The privately-held company made a crucial decision early on to open its API -- a set of protocols and routines that coders use to build new software applications -- which allowed developers to write their own applications that fit neatly together with Skype. The move involved surrendering a certain amount of control over how Skype is used. Indeed, some of the add-ons, such as "answering machine" software and a video conferencing application called Video4Skype ( http://www.video4skype.com/ ), bump up against some of the products that Skype itself plans to offer. "We want to be as open as we can. It's about creating an ecosystem around Skype," he told Reuters in an interview. "We have no problem with those things -- the more the merrier. Even if there's no direct monetary benefit to us, we believe this is helping us." The Skype add-ons extend to hardware as well, including a device from Siemens that links the service with cordless phones, and a hobbyist project to hook up Skype to a salvaged pay phone. Phillip Torrone, a technology writer for Make magazine and Popular Science, has posted a video link showing off his Skype payphone creation on the Make Web site ( http://downloads.oreilly.com/make/skype.mov ). "Skype payphone is moving along, right now you can use it to make receive any Skype call," he said in an email to Reuters. "It's become my full time phone here at home since it looks so cool." Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Yahoo Sees Larger Opportunity in Voice Services Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:35:10 -0500 By Justin Hyde Internet services company Yahoo Inc. is looking to boost its business in the Internet's next big growth area -- voice communications. The largest U.S. provider of Web e-mail services, Yahoo already has deals with several landline and wireless telephone companies, including SBC Communications , Verizon Communications Inc. and Sprint Corp. , for a variety of Web-based services. In addition to voice services, Yahoo is also expanding the reach of its e-mail service, saying earlier this week it would allow Sprint wireless customers to manage their e-mail accounts through their cell phones. Last month, Yahoo announced an upgrade of its messenger service, boosting the ability to make free voice calls between computers. For what the future could hold, Yahoo points to its deal with Britain's BT Group Plc , which sells the BT Communicator -- a version of Yahoo's Messenger that can not only handle voice calls between computers but make and receive telephone calls. "We view voice as a fundamental aspect of the instant messaging experience," said Brad Garlinghouse, vice president of communications products for Yahoo, in an interview Thursday with Reuters. "We will continue to enhance and expand the voice functionality within Messenger." The market for the intersection of computer messaging and telephone service has been dominated by Skype, a European software company. The free Skype software allows users to call to any other Skype user globally for free and to make and receive calls at low cost. With little advertising, Skype typically has up to 3 million users online. Garlinghouse declined to offer specifics of Yahoo's future plans for voice services. But officials at SBC say they were considering a Skype-like service that could be sold with Yahoo. "We could put one together real quickly," said Scott Helbing, senior vice president for consumer marketing, in a recent interview with Reuters. "We don't have that service right now, but we're interested in it and we're investigating time to market and the services that are out there." Garlinghouse said Yahoo preferred to work with telephone companies like BT and SBC instead of pursuing customers independently. "By working with the carriers, we've found there's a very nice symbiotic relationship," Garlinghouse said. With voice messenger services, "one of the nice things with working with BT is it allows us to deliver a much higher call quality." Garlinghouse said Yahoo saw an opportunity to simplify the growing sprawl of customers' e-mail accounts and voice mail boxes. As part of the SBC deals, SBC customers will be able to access voice mails through Yahoo's e-mail service. "You're seeing these huge collisions occur, and over time we won't think about ... voice mail, e-mail, or IM," he said. "I think we'll increasingly think about it as 'I have an inbox."' Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Virus Poses as Michael Jackson Suicide Rumor Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:29:47 -0500 Hackers use Jackson suicide rumor to spread virus Emails claiming pop star Michael Jackson, on trial on sex abuse charges, has tried to kill himself are being spread by hackers as a means to break into computers, a British anti-virus firm said on Friday. The hackers have sent emails with the subject "Re: Suicidal attempt" and the message text: "Last night, while in his Neverland Ranch, Michael Jackson has made a suicidal attempt," said security software specialists at Sophos. Other versions claim the suicide was successful and all versions offer lurid photos of the event. Jackson is awaiting a California court verdict on charges of child molestation. The email asks recipients to click on a link that takes them to a Web Site which secretly installs malicious code on their computers. "If you click on the link, the Web Site displays a message saying it is too busy, which may not surprise people who think it might contain genuine breaking news or lurid pictures about Michael Jackson's "suicide," said Carole Theriault, security consultant at Sophos. There are no such pictures, there was no such incident. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: marty@ceflorida.com Subject: Cell Phone Rental in Europe Date: 11 Jun 2005 09:39:40 -0700 Traveling to Greece and Turkey (Istanbul)and am seeking a reliable and competitively priced company to rent a cell phone from. Would also like a recommendation as to which phone I should select. ------------------------------ Subject: Cellphone Curiosity From: tom.horsley@att.net (Thomas A. Horsley) Organization: AT&T Worldnet Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 21:51:39 GMT Now that my silly gadget for making my phone's ring loud enough works: http://home.att.net/~Tom.Horsley/markII/markII.html I have come to wonder about I thing I see all the time: People in cars talking on cellphones while the stero is cranked up lound enough to rattle windows a block away. How do they hear? How does the person on the other end hear? How did they hear it ring to know to answer it (or maybe they only make outgoing calls to let their friends know how lound their sound system is? :-). >>==>> The *Best* political site >>==+ email: Tom.Horsley@worldnet.att.net icbm: Delray Beach, FL | Free Software and Politics <<==+ ------------------------------ From: AES Subject: Mac iBook and Bluetooth Cordless Headphones? Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 10:19:57 -0700 Organization: Stanford University Is it possible to listen to the audio output from a Bluetooth-equipped Mac using a Bluetooth cordless headphone? [iBook G4 with a D-Link Bluetooth adapter in one of the USB ports, listening to audio streamed from the XM Satellite Radio site with Netscape 7 working together with (I think) Windows MultiMedia.] Will this interfere with simultaneous use of Apple-brand Bluetooth cordless keyboard and mouse? What System Prefs and other setting will I have to fiddle with to get this to work? Is there an audio or Bluetooth group that would be a better place to ask about this? [I'm frankly intimidated, or impressed, by all the technologies that will have to work together to make this work: Bluetooth, USB, Netscape, Windows MultiMedia, and Mac audio output -- not to mention Airport, Ethernet, a Cayman router, and a DSL link to get from the Mac to the Internet -- so I'm asking for a little reassurance before I start on this.] ------------------------------ From: Rick M Subject: Re: Cannot Cancel My AT&T Service After Moving to Vonage Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 23:33:32 -0500 Reply-To: r.muscoplat_nospam@vikingelectronics.com Followup with Public Utilities Commission AND go on to the FCC web site and file a compaint about AT&T. I did both and heard back from AT&T in about two weeks. Problem solved. On 7 Jun 2005 18:46:25 -0700, johnspilker@msn.com wrote: > Anyone know how I can get AT&T to cancel long distance service to my > home number? We moved our home number to Vonage from Qwest with AT&T > long distance service. > Qwest cancelled the service promptly and even gave us a refund. AT&T > refuses to cancel the long distance service. They maintain the > cancellation must be done through Qwest. Qwest says the notification > has been sent to AT&T. A Qwest representative said she had heard of > several instances where AT&T will not cancel long distance service of > numbers moved over to VOIP. > Any ideas? > Thanks. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Is this a situation where AT&T is > charging you some monthly fee for 'handling' your account? If not, > and you are just billed for calls you actually make then it does > not matter. Just ignore it; let them call you a 'customer' if they > wish, since there are no calls being made via AT&T, the account > will always have a zero balance. Now if AT&T is charging some sort > of monthly fee, then a letter sent registered to the company should > help. For example, one side of SBC _still_ persists in referring to > me as a 'customer' while another part of the company is trying to > win me back (with all sorts of outrageous deals these days, free > service, etc). PAT] ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Cannot Cancel My AT&T Service After Moving to Vonage Organization: ATCC Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 11:20:51 -0400 In article , dannyb@panix.com says: > In johnspilker@msn.com writes: >> They are charging us a monthly fee that amounts to $8 a month with >> taxes. I did send a registered letter to AT&T legal department and got >> a simple form letter that told me to contact Qwest. > [ snip of the usuals problems ] > Once again, in most states sending off a letter to the public > service//utilities commission (and it never hurts to add the AG) gets > results for straightforward and (relatively low cost) matters like > this. > I personally did, in fact, do this with AT&T service here in > NYC. About a week after I dropped my letter in the mail box I got back > a standard form letter from the PSC in ALbany, NY, and a couple of > days later I got a "we've fixed it" note from AT&T. Which they did. > (Other people have reported to me similar effectiveness courrtesy of > web-page writeups, but I prefer paper. This gives me my own hard copy > to refer to). It is absolutely effective. Whenever dealing with a telephone company these days its almost standard procedure to cc everything to the PUC. ------------------------------ From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Reply-To: fatkinson@mishmash.com Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 02:45:48 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net On 6 Jun 2005 09:34:28 -0400, kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote: > Yes, I think that restricting web access at school and some workplaces > is probably a very good thing. What is bad is that it is usually done > by people who don't know very much about the web or about the blocking > technology, and it is often done by management folks who refuse to > take responsibility for their own actions. > There are other work environments where blocking any traffic is a very > bad thing. I work at a government facility where pornographic sites > are blocked. To my mind, it would be much more effective just to fire > people who spend their workday looking at porn on the internet; in > this case network blocking results in employees being retained who > would be better off gone. --scott > "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." I agree with you that Web blocking is a necessary thing in the school system. I further agree that it is done blindly and without looking at the big picture. Blocking sites like QSL Net is ignorant and untrained. The state of Georgia blocks 2600.com in their colleges. I can understand the high schools and below, but what about those that are doing research on computer security and networking. Depriving them of access to such information is incredibly short sighted. When I was taking network security in graduate school, we learned a lot from 2600 magazine and their Web site. I subscribe to 2600 magazine myself and it can be bought at most major bookstores. On 6 Jun 2005 06:58:28 -0700, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote: > You must remember that the contents of libraries have always been > "censored", though perhaps the better word is "selected". So, then you are saying that they should remove ham radio books from the library? I don't think so. > For younger readers, books are selected appropriate to their reading > skill as well as their age. Most 12 year olds would not know what to > do with ancient literature written in the original Greek or Latin, and > such books would be inappropriate for them. No argument there. > A second consideration is book quality. There are lots and lots of > books out there on any given subject, including "vanity" books > published by the authors themselves. Quality varies dramatically. > Libraries attempt (not always successfully) to use generally respected > and quality works. This is true. But there are a number of well known ham radio books that can be placed in the library. > Lastly, some common sense is applied. Should a children's or school > library really contain books on bomb-making or other extremely intense > subjects? I agree with you there, especially in light of Columbine. But how does ham radio compare with bomb making? Please explain that to me. > As to the Internet: There is a great deal of mis-information out > there, some of it even dangerous. Anybody can set up a site and put > anything they want on it; that by no means makes it authoritative or > appropriate. Even legitimate organizations screw up on their Internet > sites by failing to keep the information timely and accurate. There has been misinformation in publications since the beginning of time. Anyone can write and sell a book if they want to go to the trouble. How is this any different? >> Sorry to come down on you this hard, but limiting student access to >> information simply because we think they don't 'need' access to it >> is a pretty short sighted opinion for an educator to take. > As mentioned, student "access" is already quite limited in many ways. So, we justify limiting them to things that could be beneficial to them to achieve that end? Sorry, I don't think so. Fred [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: See the next issue of our Digest later Saturday night which will include an archives reprint "Informing Ourselves to Death" which hopefully you will find interesting. PAT] ------------------------------ From: nospam4me@mytrashmail.com Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 16:33:00 UTC Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC Robert Bonomi wrote: > I've sat in a federal courtroom, and witnessed sentencing for an 18 > USC 641 violation. It wasn't a single egregious act, but an ongoing > series of really 'little' things. After having been reminded by > management "not to". The idjit had a side-line personal business, and > was doing stuff for it at the office, after hours -- writing > correspondence, and printing it out, doing estimates in a > spread-sheet, a little bit of photo-copying, etc. So what kind of sentence did the above malfeasant Federal employee get for doing the above? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Herb Oxley Reply-to: address IS Valid. ------------------------------ From: Mark Crispin Subject: Re: Can Verizon Phone be Used With Bell Mobility in Canada? Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 17:22:25 -0700 Organization: Networks & Distributed Computing On Fri, 10 Jun 2005, aqabbas@yahoo.com wrote: > Can a Verizon phone be used with Bell Mobility in Canada? I know they > both use CDMA. I am specifialy interested in the Kyocera 7135. Technically, a Verizon phone can be used. Verizon phones are completely unlocked. Administratively, it is up to Bell Mobility whether or not they will accept a phone that they did not sell. I know that Telus Mobility does not. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum. ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Can Verizon Phone be Used With Bell Mobility in Canada? Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 06:42:42 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On 10 Jun 2005 15:09:40 -0700, aqabbas@yahoo.com wrote: > Can a Verizon phone be used with Bell Mobility in Canada? I know they > both use CDMA. I am specifialy interested in the Kyocera 7135. It all depends on BM's policies. Many CDMA operators will not allow you to use equipment (even if compatible) on their networks unless the ESN of the handset is in their database. I believe BM's policy is to not allow ESNs not in their database. I'm not sure if they do this to be obstinate or if there's some other reason. CDMA and TDMA operators are the only ones who do this. GSM operators don't care what equipment you use on their networks and for the end user all they need to know is that their handsets are not "SIM locked" i.e. the handsets have not been prevented from using another SIM by locking out other operator's SIMs. ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 22:49:10 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Justin Time wrote: > Hey -- anything to drive the number of minutes of usage up. (OBTW Pat, > they are not talking about voicemail left on the cell phone, but on > your landline.) You could let the call go to voicemail on your cell phone. Verizon Wireless does not charge for voicemail retrieval from a landline. Besides, some people may find the feature convenient. VZW does tend to nickel-and-dime their customers, but I'll stick up for them and VZ this time. JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon Organization: ATCC Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 11:15:48 -0400 In article , promfhTAKE@OUThal- pc.org.invalid says: > Monty Solomon wrote: >> Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to >> Verizon Wireless Phones When New Messages Arrive >> Home and Business Customers in N.Y.C. and New England Can >> Receive TXT Alerts on Their Verizon Wireless Phones >> NEW YORK, June 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Verizon home and >> business voice mailboxes now can alert customers on their >> Verizon Wireless phone that someone has left a message. >> Starting today, Verizon voice-messaging customers in New >> York City and New England can add a feature that sends a >> text message to any Verizon Wireless short text messaging- >> capable phone with an alert that a new voice message has >> been left on the customer's landline phone. >> http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49739949 >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What is supposed to make >> that so exceptional? Cingular Wireless has always had an >> icon on the display screen indicating voice message >> waiting, and I have always had my phone set to make three >> chirps when that icon is turned on. PAT] > The "New" feature is having the voicemail on your home phone send a > message to your cellphone saying a message has been left. Most > voicemail systems have had this feature for years. You could have it > call your cellphone or a pager. The SMS message is sort of a new > wrinkle on an existing service. But in most cases the outcalling feature is turned off because it is a huge security hole. ------------------------------ From: dwolffxx@panix.com (David Wolff) Subject: Re: Bennett LeBow? Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 00:38:59 UTC Organization: Public Access Networks Corp. In article , wrote: > I was wondering about the background of this fellow. > He is a wealthy businessman who has donated a great deal of money to > colleges that have named stuff for him. > According to Google, we had a post mentioning him in the bankruptcy > proceedings of Western Union some years ago, and he was involved in > that somehow. > I get the impression he was kind of an aggressive corporate takeover > artist. > I was wondering if readers here had any opinions of him beyond the > official history. > Thanks. > [public replies please] All this is just my understanding, which could be off. Bennett Lebow is/was a "corporate raider." He bought controlling interest in various struggling companies, slashed expenditures to the bone and thereby dooming the company (eg no more R&D, therefore no new products). This resulted in good profits until all the current customers left for competitors who had new products, at which point the victim company could go into bankruptcy and be flushed down the toilet. Even companies such as Prime Computer, which survived his attempt to buy them out, wasted huge amounts of time and money and were thereby damaged. He hurt many, many people. Thanks -- David, (Remove "xx" to reply.) ------------------------------ From: Tim Keating Subject: Re: Coal, was From our Archives: History of Standard Oil and Bell Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 08:18:19 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com On Wed, 8 Jun 2005 06:41:51 UTC, tls@panix.com (Thor Lancelot Simon) wrote: >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I'd personally like to see more wide- >> spread research/development/use of solar power, especially for things >> like heating our homes in the winter. Oops, I forgot to include the >> mantra from the petroleum industry on this: "Solar power is not >> practical nor efficient." PAT] > For what it's worth, many estimates are that it takes more energy to > fuse silica to make solar panels than will be output by those panels > as electricity over their expected service lifetimes, at sea level in > most temperate climes. Your estimates are both inaccurate and obsolete.. The amount of energy consumed in glass production is a small fraction of overall energy input ... ref page 3 of ... http://www.homepower.com/files/pvpayback.pdf Next, lookup your area's climate/solar radiation data. http://rredc.nrel.gov/solar/old_data/nsrdb/redbook/atlas/ I suggest starting out by changing two of the defaults: "2. Select a month" set to "Annual" "3. Select an instrument orientation" set to "Flat Plate Tilted South at Latitude" From the map produced, one will see that most of the continental US, falls into 4 to 7 kWh/M^2/day categories. The number increases substantially if one uses some tracking technology. As for payback ... http://www.nrel.gov/ncpv/energy_payback.html "What is the Energy Payback for PV?" (Note: Payback calc uses ~4.6kWh/m^2/day as a reference). Additional links ... EPT drops with mass production. http://www.apec-vc.or.jp/solar/outline/outlne09.htm "Energy payback time (EPT) = Eo/Eg" > However, what that analysis does ignore is that you cannot get more > local -- that is, less transmission loss -- than the energy generation > and consumption from the panels in the typical intertie solar setup. > So, if the energy to make the panels is generated in, at least, a not > terribly dirty way, and the panels aren't made far from where that > power is generated, due to transmission losses solar panels in many > locations are a serious net win. In the future, please distribute more accurate information. The world doesn't need more people adding to streams of dis-information being advertised as facts. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, ex----cuse me, won't you please? I am _not_ in a position to validate everything which is submitted by readers here. Anyway, I always thought the main purpose of the internet was to spread dis-information. PAT] ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Bellsouth Caller ID Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 15:57:28 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , Choreboy wrote: [[.. munch ..]] > So Bellsouth won't tell me what cellphone carriers provide names for > their Caller ID. Is this information available anywhere? Not suprising. Bellsouth *doesn't*know* who provides names, and who doesn't. All they can do is pass along what is supplied. Probably just knowing the cell carrier is not sufficient. It probably depends on the type of servicecontract as well. e.g., I doubt names are even available to the carrier for 'pre-paid' phones. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Altigen Workgroup Outbound Caller ID Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 16:03:46 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , wrote: > Hi, > Could someone please help me with this. We are using the ALTIGEN > SYSTEM We have 2 workgroups set up for two separate businesses we are > running. I have entered two different transmitted CID numbers for > them but they dont seem to be displayed when an agent logged into the > workgroup is making an outbound call. It seems to pull up the > transmitted CID number for the agent. Please guide me as how to get > the different business number show up when the agent is making > outbound call from the workgroup. It may not be possible in your situation. Some telcos allow customers to transmit 'anything' as the CID info. Some telcos allow customers to transmit 'anything that belongs to them' as the CID info. Some telcos over-ride whatever the customer transmits with the 'true' line ID. If you're in the latter category, you're simply SOL. ------------------------------ 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 V24 #262 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sat Jun 11 23:10:04 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 2EF9C150EC; Sat, 11 Jun 2005 23:10:03 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #263 Message-Id: <20050612031003.2EF9C150EC@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 23:10:03 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.7 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Sat, 11 Jun 2005 23:10:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 263 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Archives Reprint: Informing Ourselves to Death (TELECOM Digest Editor) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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, 11 Jun 2005 21:20:05 EDT From: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu (TELECOM Digest Editor) Subject: Informing Ourselves to Death [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in TELECOM Digest in January, 1994, about eleven years ago, and was a speech given in 1990 -- now about fifteen years ago, by Neil Postman at an IBM conference in Germany. In 1994, then Vice-President Gore gave a glowing report on the 'new thing' available called the 'internet', and how it was going to revolutionize the entire world. In those long ago times -- the early 1990's -- _before_ spam, _before_ most of the ills which plague us on the modern day net -- to say nothing of four years earlier when _almost no one_ was on the net, Mr. Postman was right on the mark, IMO. And sometime around 1995 or so (I do not remember the exact date), I put a message out saying "wait about ten or fifteen years, until almost everyone is connected". Well, that time has come, or rather, it is well on the way. I thought maybe Postman's message from 1990 would be a good refresher course for us. PAT] ========================= from 1994 ==================== Awhile back, I sent out a transcript of a speech made by Vice-President Gore discussing the 'superhighway' concept going around these days. A response was received from Bill Pfeiffer, passing along an interesting alternative viewpoint to that of the White House, and I thought you would be interested in seeing it. PAT From: rrb@deja-vu.aiss.uiuc.edu (Bill Pfeiffer) Subject: Rebuttle (of sorts) to Gore's Speech Date: Tue, 18 Jan 1994 18:12:41 -0600 (CST) Dear TELECOM: Here is a file of a speech by Neil Postman who has a slightly different perspective on the Information Superhighway. Bill Pfeiffer Editor AIRWAVES RADIO JOURNAL (info@airwaves.chi.il.us) Source: Neil Postman, German Informatics Society, 11 Oct 90, Stuttgart Following speech was given at a meeting of the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft fuer Informatik) on October 11, 1990 in Stuttgart, sponsored by IBM-Germany. INFORMING OURSELVES TO DEATH ____________________________ by Neil Postman The great English playwright and social philosopher George Bernard Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the common folk. He meant that those who belong to elite trades -- physicians, lawyers, teachers, and scientists -- protect their special status by creating vocabularies that are incomprehensible to the general public. This process prevents outsiders from understanding what the profession is doing and why - and protects the insiders from close examination and criticism. Professions, in other words, build forbidding walls of technical gobbledegook over which the prying and alien eye cannot see. Unlike George Bernard Shaw, I raise no complaint against this, for I consider myself a professional teacher and appreciate technical gobbledegook as much as anyone. But I do not object if occasionally someone who does not know the secrets of my trade is allowed entry to the inner halls to express an untutored point of view. Such a person may sometimes give a refreshing opinion or, even better, see something in a way that the professionals have overlooked. I believe I have been invited to speak at this conference for just such a purpose. I do not know very much more about computer technology than the average person -- which isn't very much. I have little understanding of what excites a computer programmer or scientist, and in examining the descriptions of the presentations at this conference, I found each one more mysterious than the next. So, I clearly qualify as an outsider. But I think that what you want here is not merely an outsider but an outsider who has a point of view that might be useful to the insiders. And that is why I accepted the invitation to speak. I believe I know something about what technologies do to culture, and I know even more about what technologies undo in a culture. In fact, I might say, at the start, that what a technology undoes is a subject that computer experts apparently know very little about. I have heard many experts in computer technology speak about the advantages that computers will bring. With one exception - namely, Joseph Weizenbaum - I have never heard anyone speak seriously and comprehensively about the disadvantages of computer technology, which strikes me as odd, and makes me wonder if the profession is hiding something important. That is to say, what seems to be lacking among computer experts is a sense of technological modesty. After all, anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided. The invention of the printing press is an excellent example. Printing fostered the modern idea of individuality but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and social integration. Printing created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression. Printing made modern science possible but transformed religious sensibility into an exercise in superstition. Printing assisted in the growth of the nation-state but, in so doing, made patriotism into a sordid if not a murderous emotion. Another way of saying this is that a new technology tends to favor some groups of people and harms other groups. School teachers, for example, will, in the long run, probably be made obsolete by television, as blacksmiths were made obsolete by the automobile, as balladeers were made obsolete by the printing press. Technological change, in other words, always results in winners and losers. In the case of computer technology, there can be no disputing that the computer has increased the power of large-scale organizations like military establishments or airline companies or banks or tax collecting agencies. And it is equally clear that the computer is now indispensable to high-level researchers in physics and other natural sciences. But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steel workers, vegetable store owners, teachers, automobile mechanics, musicians, bakers, brick layers, dentists and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes? These people have had their private matters made more accessible to powerful institutions. They are more easily tracked and controlled; they are subjected to more examinations, and are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them. They are more often reduced to mere numerical objects. They are being buried by junk mail. They are easy targets for advertising agencies and political organizations. The schools teach their children to operate computerized systems instead of teaching things that are more valuable to children. In a word, almost nothing happens to the losers that they need, which is why they are losers. It is to be expected that the winners - for example, most of the speakers at this conference - will encourage the losers to be enthusiastic about computer technology. That is the way of winners, and so they sometimes tell the losers that with personal computers the average person can balance a checkbook more neatly, keep better track of recipes, and make more logical shopping lists. They also tell them that they can vote at home, shop at home, get all the information they wish at home, and thus make community life unnecessary. They tell them that their lives will be conducted more efficiently, discreetly neglecting to say from whose point of view or what might be the costs of such efficiency. Should the losers grow skeptical, the winners dazzle them with the wondrous feats of computers, many of which have only marginal relevance to the quality of the losers' lives but which are nonetheless impressive. Eventually, the losers succumb, in part because they believe that the specialized knowledge of the masters of a computer technology is a form of wisdom. The masters, of course, come to believe this as well. The result is that certain questions do not arise, such as, to whom will the computer give greater power and freedom, and whose power and freedom will be reduced? Now, I have perhaps made all of this sound like a wellplanned conspiracy, as if the winners know all too well what is being won and what lost. But this is not quite how it happens, for the winners do not always know what they are doing, and where it will all lead. The Benedictine monks who invented the mechanical clock in the 12th and 13th centuries believed that such a clock would provide a precise regularity to the seven periods of devotion they were required to observe during the course of the day. As a matter of fact, it did. But what the monks did not realize is that the clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours but also of synchronizing and controlling the actions of men. And so, by the middle of the 14th century, the clock had moved outside the walls of the monastery, and brought a new and precise regularity to the life of the workman and the merchant. The mechanical clock made possible the idea of regular production, regular working hours, and a standardized product. Without the clock, capitalism would have been quite impossible. And so, here is a great paradox: the clock was invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; and it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who wished to devote themselves to the accumulat- ion of money. Technology always has unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, at the beginning, who or what will win, and who or what will lose. I might add, by way of another historical example, that Johann Gutenberg was by all accounts a devoted Christian who would have been horrified to hear Martin Luther, the accursed heretic, declare that printing is "God's highest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward." Gutenberg thought his invention would advance the cause of the Holy Roman See, whereas in fact, it turned out to bring a revolution which destroyed the monopoly of the Church. We may well ask ourselves, then, is there something that the masters of computer technology think they are doing for us which they and we may have reason to regret? I believe there is, and it is suggested by the title of my talk, "Informing Ourselves to Death". In the time remaining, I will try to explain what is dangerous about the computer, and why. And I trust you will be open enough to consider what I have to say. Now, I think I can begin to get at this by telling you of a small experiment I have been conducting, on and off, for the past several years. There are some people who describe the experiment as an exercise in deceit and exploitation but I will rely on your sense of humor to pull me through. Here's how it works: It is best done in the morning when I see a colleague who appears not to be in possession of a copy of {The New York Times}. "Did you read The Times this morning?," I ask. If the colleague says yes, there is no experiment that day. But if the answer is no, the experiment can proceed. "You ought to look at Page 23," I say. "There's a fascinating article about a study done at Harvard University." "Really? What's it about?" is the usual reply. My choices at this point are limited only by my imagination. But I might say something like this: "Well, they did this study to find out what foods are best to eat for losing weight, and it turns out that a normal diet supplemented by chocolate eclairs, eaten six times a day, is the best approach. It seems that there's some special nutrient in the eclairs - encomial dioxin - that actually uses up calories at an incredible rate." Another possibility, which I like to use with colleagues who are known to be health conscious is this one: "I think you'll want to know about this," I say. "The neuro-physiologists at the University of Stuttgart have uncovered a connection between jogging and reduced intelligence. They tested more than 1200 people over a period of five years, and found that as the number of hours people jogged increased, there was a corresponding decrease in their intelligence. They don't know exactly why but there it is." I'm sure, by now, you understand what my role is in the experiment: to report something that is quite ridiculous - one might say, beyond belief. Let me tell you, then, some of my results: Unless this is the second or third time I've tried this on the same person, most people will believe or at least not disbelieve what I have told them. Some- times they say: "Really? Is that possible?" Sometimes they do a double-take, and reply, "Where'd you say that study was done?" And sometimes they say, "You know, I've heard something like that." Now, there are several conclusions that might be drawn from these results, one of which was expressed by H. L. Mencken fifty years ago when he said, there is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will believe it. This is more of an accusation than an explanation but in any case I have tried this experiment on non- professors and get roughly the same results. Another possible con- clusion is one expressed by George Orwell - also about 50 years ago - when he remarked that the average person today is about as naive as was the average person in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what. But I think there is still another and more important conclusion to be drawn, related to Orwell's point but rather off at a right angle to it. I am referring to the fact that the world in which we live is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact - whether actual or imagined - that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction. We believe because there is no reason not to believe. No social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical or spiritual reason. We live in a world that, for the most part, makes no sense to us. Not even technical sense. I don't mean to try my experiment on this audience, especially after having told you about it, but if I informed you that the seats you are presently occupying were actually made by a special process which uses the skin of a Bismark herring, on what grounds would you dispute me? For all you know - indeed, for all I know - the skin of a Bismark herring could have made the seats on which you sit. And if I could get an industrial chemist to confirm this fact by describing some incomprehensible process by which it was done, you would probably tell someone tomorrow that you spent the evening sitting on a Bismark herring. Perhaps I can get a bit closer to the point I wish to make with an analogy: If you opened a brand-new deck of cards, and started turning the cards over, one by one, you would have a pretty good idea of what their order is. After you had gone from the ace of spades through the nine of spades, you would expect a ten of spades to come up next. And if a three of diamonds showed up instead, you would be surprised and wonder what kind of deck of cards this is. But if I gave you a deck that had been shuffled twenty times, and then asked you to turn the cards over, you would not expect any card in particular - a three of diamonds would be just as likely as a ten of spades. Having no basis for assuming a given order, you would have no reason to react with disbelief or even surprise to whatever card turns up. The point is that, in a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise. In fact, George Orwell was more than a little unfair to the average person in the Middle Ages. The belief system of the Middle Ages was rather like my brand-new deck of cards. There existed an ordered, comprehensible world-view, beginning with the idea that all knowledge and goodness come from God. What the priests had to say about the world was derived from the logic of their theology. There was nothing arbitrary about the things people were asked to believe, including the fact that the world itself was created at 9 AM on October 23 in the year 4004 B. C. That could be explained, and was, quite lucidly, to the satisfaction of anyone. So could the fact that 10,000 angels could dance on the head of a pin. It made quite good sense, if you believed that the Bible is the revealed word of God and that the universe is populated with angels. The medieval world was, to be sure, mysterious and filled with wonder, but it was not without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women might not clearly grasp how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the grand and benevolent design, but they had no doubt that there was such a design, and their priests were well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not rational, at least coherent. The situation we are presently in is much different. And I should say, sadder and more confusing and certainly more mysterious. It is rather like the shuffled deck of cards I referred to. There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore, in a sense, we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything. The skin of a Bismark herring makes about as much sense as a vinyl alloy or encomial dioxin. Now, in a way, none of this is our fault. If I may turn the wisdom of Cassius on its head: the fault is not in ourselves but almost literally in the stars. When Galileo turned his telescope toward the heavens, and allowed Kepler to look as well, they found no enchantment or authoriza- tion in the stars, only geometric patterns and equations. God, it seemed, was less of a moral philosopher than a master mathematician. This discovery helped to give impetus to the development of physics but did nothing but harm to theology. Before Galileo and Kepler, it was possible to believe that the Earth was the stable center of the universe, and that God took a special interest in our affairs. Afterward, the Earth became a lonely wanderer in an obscure galaxy in a hidden corner of the universe, and we were left to wonder if God had any interest in us at all. The ordered, comprehensible world of the Middle Ages began to unravel because people no longer saw in the stars the face of a friend. And something else, which once was our friend, turned against us, as well. I refer to information. There was a time when information was a resource that helped human beings to solve specific and urgent problems of their environment. It is true enough that in the Middle Ages, there was a scarcity of information but its very scarcity made it both important and usable. This began to change, as everyone knows, in the late 15th century when a goldsmith named Gutenberg, from Mainz, converted an old wine press into a printing machine, and in so doing, created what we now call an information explosion. Forty years after the invention of the press, there were printing machines in 110 cities in six different countries; 50 years after, more than eight million books had been printed, almost all of them filled with information that had previously not been available to the average person. Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it since. But what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge of chaos. If I may take my own country as an example, here is what we are faced with: In America, there are 260,000 billboards; 11,520 newspapers; 11,556 periodicals; 27,000 video outlets for renting tapes; 362 million tv sets; and over 400 million radios. There are 40,000 new book titles published every year (300,000 world-wide) and every day in America 41 million photographs are taken, and just for the record, over 60 billion pieces of advertising junk mail come into our mail boxes every year. Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19th century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Above are 1990 statistics. 15 years ago. PAT] The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it. And there are two reasons we do not know what to do with it. First, as I have said, we no longer have a coherent conception of ourselves, and our universe, and our relation to one another and our world. We no longer know, as the Middle Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going, or why. That is, we don't know what information is relevant, and what information is irrelevant to our lives. Second, we have directed all of our energies and intelligence to inventing machinery that does nothing but increase the supply of information. As a consequence, our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable. We don't know how to filter it out; we don't know how to reduce it; we don't know to use it. We suffer from a kind of cultural AIDS. Now, into this situation comes the computer. The computer, as we know, has a quality of universality, not only because its uses are almost infinitely various but also because computers are commonly integrated into the structure of other machines. Therefore it would be fatuous of me to warn against every conceivable use of a computer. But there is no denying that the most prominent uses of computers have to do with information. When people talk about "information sciences," they are talking about computers - how to store information, how to retrieve information, how to organize information. The computer is an answer to the questions, how can I get more information, faster, and in a more usable form? These would appear to be reasonable questions. But now I should like to put some other questions to you that seem to me more reasonable. Did Iraq invade Kuwait because of a lack of information? If a hideous war should ensue between Iraq and the U. S., will it happen because of a lack of information? If children die of starvation in Ethiopia, does it occur because of a lack of information? Does racism in South Africa exist because of a lack of information? If criminals roam the streets of New York City, do they do so because of a lack of information? Or, let us come down to a more personal level: If you and your spouse are unhappy together, and end your marriage in divorce, will it happen because of a lack of information? If your children misbehave and bring shame to your family, does it happen because of a lack of information? If someone in your family has a mental breakdown, will it happen because of a lack of information? I believe you will have to concede that what ails us, what causes us the most misery and pain - at both cultural and personal levels - has nothing to do with the sort of information made accessible by computers. The computer and its information cannot answer any of the fundamental quest- ions we need to address to make our lives more meaningful and humane. The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking. It cannot provide a means of understanding why we are here or why we fight each other or why decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most. The computer is, in a sense, a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most needed to confront - spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future. Does one blame the computer for this? Of course not. It is, after all, only a machine. But it is presented to us, with trumpets blaring, as at this conference, as a technological messiah. Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better - best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it. I said a moment ago that computers are not to blame for this. And that is true, at least in the sense that we do not blame an elephant for its huge appetite or a stone for being hard or a cloud for hiding the sun. That is their nature, and we expect nothing different from them. But the computer has a nature, as well. True, it is only a machine but a machine designed to manipulate and generate information. That is what computers do, and therefore they have an agenda and an unmistakable message. The message is that through more and more information, more conveniently packaged, more swiftly delivered, we will find solutions to our problems. And so all the brilliant young men and women, believing this, create ingenious things for the computer to do, hoping that in this way, we will become wiser and more decent and more noble. And who can blame them? By becoming masters of this wondrous technology, they will acquire prestige and power and some will even become famous. In a world populated by people who believe that through more and more information, paradise is attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I maintain that all of this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent and energy. Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were turned to philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to education? Who knows what we could learn from such people - perhaps why there are wars, and hunger, and homelessness and mental illness and anger. As things stand now, the geniuses of computer technology will give us Star Wars, and tell us that is the answer to nuclear war. They will give us artificial intelligence, and tell us that this is the way to self-knowledge. They will give us instantaneous global communicat- ion, and tell us this is the way to mutual understanding. They will give us Virtual Reality and tell us this is the answer to spiritual poverty. But that is only the way of the technician, the fact-mongerer, the information junkie, and the technological idiot. Here is what Henry David Thoreau told us: "All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end." Here is what Goethe told us: "One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it is possible, speak a few reasonable words." And here is what Socrates told us: "The unexamined life is not worth living." And here is what the prophet Micah told us: "What does the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?" And I can tell you - if I had the time (although you all know it well enough) - what Confucius, Isaiah, Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Spinoza and Shakespeare told us. It is all the same: There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory. Even the humblest cartoon character knows this, and I shall close by quoting the wise old possum named Pogo, created by the cartoonist, Walt Kelley. I commend his words to all the technological utopians and messiahs present. "We have met the enemy," Pogo said, "and he is us." ------------------- [TELECOM Digest Editor's 1994 Note: My sincere thanks to Bill for passing along this article to us. It certainly does give us something to meditate upon as we travel down the 'information superhighway' so highly touted by the present occupant of the White House and his staff. PAT] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Did you notice Postner's 1990 remarks about "if a hideous war should ensue between Iraq and the USA"? Indeed, that very war is going on now. What did (or does) the 'computer' have to do with all this? And why have we gotten to the point that we still, albiet feebly, try to protect so much information in the 'real world' from our children with web site blocking? I hope you enjoyed re-reading this file from a decade ago. 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) RSS Syndication of TELECOM Digest: http://telecom-digest.org/rss.html For syndication examples see http://www.feedroll.com/syndicate.php?id=308 and also http://feeds.feedburner.com/telecom ************************************************************************* * 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 V24 #263 ****************************** TELECOM Digest Sun, 12 Jun 2005 16:30:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 264 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Hubble Telescope to View Comet Collision (Lisa Minter) Not Ready for Their Close-Up (Monty Solomon) Companies Subvert Search Results to Squelch Criticism (Monty Solomon) Latest Bluetooth Attack Makes Short Work of Weak Passwords (M Solomon) Internet Satellite Service in Africa (Tom Rossi) Bidfraud Website "Grand Opening" -- Read About Capabilities (Stop Fraud) Re: Cellphone Curiosity (Tim@Backhome.org) Re: Cellphone Curiosity (Joseph) Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe (Joseph) Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe (John Levine) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Robert Bonomi) Re: Bellsouth Caller ID (Choreboy) Re: Mac iBook and Bluetooth Cordless Headphones? (Joseph) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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 <lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com> Subject: Hubble Telescope to View Comet Collision Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 21:45:19 -0500 By ALEX DOMINGUEZ, Associated Press Writer The Hubble Space Telescope will be watching when the University of Maryland's Deep Impact space probe crashes into a comet July 4, setting off a cosmic firework that may be visible on Earth. The best view is expected to be had by the Deep Impact probe itself, but officials at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which coordinates Hubble's use, say they are ready for anything. "We will be here and we'll be working," said Cheryl Gundy, a spokeswoman for the Space Telescope Science Institute. Hubble was also trained on the collision of comet Shoemaker Levy and Jupiter in 1994 and "had those great results. We're hoping well see something similar," Gundy said. While the Shoemaker Levy collision was the first collision of two solar system bodies ever observed, if all goes well, the Deep Impact mission will mark the first time a spacecraft has struck a comet. As Deep Impact nears the end of its six-month journey, the Hubble is also observing the comet to help guide mission officials, Gundy said. Observations by Hubble and the Spitzer space telescopes in 2004 helped paint a clearer picture of the comet, showing it to be about 8.7 miles by 2.5 miles, or half the size of the island of Manhattan, with a matte black color. Mission officials said Thursday that the probe is on course and they have a method to deal with one camera that is not focusing properly. Deep Impact, launched Jan. 12, has two parts, an "impactor" that will be released to collide with Tempel 1, possibly creating a stadium-size gouge, and a fly-by craft with instruments to observe the collision. NASA announced in March that the High Resolution Instrument on the fly-by craft was not focusing properly, and mission officials said Thursday they will use a mathematical process called deconvolution to reverse the distortion. The High Resolution Instrument is designed to deliver light simultaneously to a multispectral camera and to an infrared spectrometer. The fly-by spacecraft also carries a Medium Resolution Instrument, which is a smaller telescope, and the impactor also has a camera. Comets are believe to contain raw materials from the birth of our solar system and scientists hope the collision will reveal secrets contained since the comet was created billions of years ago. In addition to instruments on board the spacecraft, the impact will also be observed by NASA's Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes, and by big telescopes on Earth. With all of those eyes on the sky, no one is really sure what they will see, said the mission's principal investigator, University of Maryland professor of astronomy Michael A'Hearn. "The important point everyone has to realize is the uncertainty is so large we don't know what to expect," A'Hearn said at a preview briefing Thursday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The University of Maryland provides overall mission management while the Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., built the spacecraft for NASA. "It is possible that the change will be so small you can't see it with anything less than a four-meter telescope. It could be much more than that, it could be that you could see the change with binoculars," A'Hearn said. "You just have to be aware of the uncertainty." On the Net: http://www.nasa.gov/deepimpact Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 08:00:14 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> Subject: Not Ready for Their Close-Up By CLIVE THOMPSON Cap Lesesne, a New York plastic surgeon, hears from a lot of women worried about aging. Late last year, he says, he had one visitor, a female newscaster, whose inquiries puzzled him. She was only in her 30's, he says, and still looked terrific. (Lesesne, citing doctor-patient confidentiality, wouldn't identify the woman.) When he asked her why she wanted surgery, she explained that her show was about to begin broadcasting in 'high-definition,' the hot new digital technology that makes TV images look as crisp and sharp as IMAX films. On normal TV, she said, you can't see her few tiny wrinkles; in high-def, they stand out like folds of origami. "When she walked in here," Lesesne says, " 'high-def' was the first thing that came out of her mouth." Celebrities are considered attractive at least in part because they're suited to the technology of the age. The transition from silent movies to talkies destroyed many actors' careers, as did the shift from black-and-white to color. While almost all prime-time TV on the major broadcast networks is shot in high-def, there are only 18 million of the pricey, wide-screen sets in use. But that number is expected to more than triple by next year, and the new scrutiny that comes with high-def is already making some on-camera talent nervous. "There are a lot of people who are going to be affected by this," says Deborah Paulmann, a makeup artist for "Late Night with Conan O'Brien." http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/magazine/12PHENOM.html?ex=1276228800&en=d395cd722b894f27&ei=5090 NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. Read New York Times on line here each day with _no_ registration nor login requirements. Just click headlines and read the stories at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/nytimes.html . ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 14:49:15 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> Subject: Companies Subvert Search Results to Squelch Criticism It's not illegal, but it's SEO gone bad. Companies such as Quixtar are using Google-bombing, link farms and Web spam pages to place positive sites in the top search results -- which pushes the negative ones down. By Mark Glaser Someone tells you they have the opportunity of a lifetime for you. A way to make money by becoming an independent business owner through Quixtar. You're not sure about Quixtar and want to learn more, so you consult your favorite Internet search engine -- Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves -- and type in the word "Quixtar." What you see next are search results, and most likely you'll just check out the first page or two of links. But the first result you see in Google is a Weblog called Quixtar Blog, and in fact, the official Quixtar site, Quixtar.com, doesn't even appear on the first page of results. What's going on here? How could Google rank an independent blog that is not even affiliated with Quixtar as the top result? The answer isn't a simple one and can't be answered directly as Google and other search engines will not spell out exactly how their top secret algorithms work. But after reading through Quixtar Blog, the picture becomes clearer: The company, a revamped online version of Amway, has had trouble with critics online and decided to fight them by unloading an arsenal of search engine optimization (SEO) techniques that go against accepted marketing techniques and into the muddy world of Web page spam, also known as link farms and Google bombing. To put it simply, Quixtar enlisted various people to help create dozens of Weblogs that linked to each other and were filled with positive stories and key words. The idea is to help put these newer blogs at the top of search results for phrases such as "Quixtar success" and "Quixtar opportunity," while more critical sites such as Quixtar Blog and Amquix.info would drop down. But Quixtar is not alone. Every major company, non-profit and religious group now has to worry about their Web reputation and has to pay very close attention to that first page of search results. http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050601glaser/ NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 15:00:33 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> Subject: Latest Bluetooth Attack Makes Short Work of Weak Passwords Robert Lemos, SecurityFocus Phones, PCs and mobile devices that use the wireless Bluetooth standard for short-range communications are open to eavesdropping attacks if their users do not set long passwords, researchers said this week. The two-step attack can cause two devices to reestablish the link between them, a process known as "pairing," and then use the data exchanged during pairing to guess the password that secures the connection in well under a second. A successful attack could allow an attacker to eavesdrop and potentially issue commands to the other device, said Avishai Wool, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Tel Aviv University in Israel and a co-author of the paper. "At a minimum, it allows the attacker to eavesdrop on all the subsequent encrypted communication between two Bluetooth devices," Wool said in an e-mail interview. "If the attacker can also fake his own Bluetooth device address, he can potentially pretend to be one device and pair with the other, which may allow him to issue commands." The attacker could conceivable mimic any other supported Bluetooth device, such as a headset for a phone, he said. If the one device could extract personal data from or issue commands to the other, then so could the attacker. The paper, which was presented at the MobiSys 2005 conference on Monday, caused a stir among security experts because the technique is the first general purpose attack to threaten Bluetooth devices. Past attacks only worked against devices that improperly implemented Bluetooth or under special circumstances. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the organization that sets the specifications for the standard, placed the latest attack in the latter category, because devices that have longer, alphanumeric PINs are effectively protected against the technique. http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11202 http://www.eng.tau.ac.il/~yash/Bluetooth/ ------------------------------ From: TomRossi7 <tomrossi7@gmail.com> Subject: Internet Satellite Service in Africa Date: 12 Jun 2005 12:10:55 -0700 Does anyone have any experience with the IPSky2e or any other Internet Satellite providers in Africa? I need to pick one and there seems to be HUGE differences between the prices, equipment, etc. Thanks, Tom ------------------------------ From: Stop Fraud <thankyou@x.com> Subject: Bidfraud Website "Grand Opening" -- Read Inside for capabilities Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 16:08:19 GMT Organization: Road Runner Bidfraud Website "Grand Opening" -- Read Inside for capabilities After 1000 plus hours in development - Bidfraud.com is "breathing." http://www.bidfraud.com Features: Capable of archiving ebay auction transactions locally on our server. This is important, as ebay deletes transactions every few months. It is as simple as entering an ebay item number when creating a report. Example of archived ebay page: http://www.bidfraud.com/cachedpages/6113839605/alouette-amusement/6113839605.html The above archived page, while it still exists at bidfraud.com, no longer exists at ebay.com Report templates contain an area to write a narrative as well as an interface to upload as many as 10 images/files (word & excel, etc.) The use of pictures as well as other supporting documents will help to substantiate and validate a claim. Example of report with pictures: http://www.bidfraud.com/example.php Easy search interface capable of finding a suspect by user name, email or item number at various sites. Simple private messaging, including a chat system are provided. Registration is Free. Easy to use interface. If you wish to advertise on the site, it is free, but space is limited. Please use contact page on http://www.bidfraud.com to make a request. Example of ad layout/dimensions: http://www.bidfraud.com/ads.htm Next time you leave negative feedback at ebay or any other site, please reference them to bidfraud. Thank you. ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: Cellphone Curiosity Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 07:02:24 -0700 Organization: Cox Communications Thomas A. Horsley wrote: > Now that my silly gadget for making my phone's ring loud enough works: > http://home.att.net/~Tom.Horsley/markII/markII.html > I have come to wonder about I thing I see all the time: People in cars > talking on cellphones while the stero is cranked up lound enough to > rattle windows a block away. > How do they hear? How does the person on the other end hear? How did > they hear it ring to know to answer it (or maybe they only make > outgoing calls to let their friends know how lound their sound system > is? :-). How do they drive? (Answer: Terribly) ------------------------------ From: Joseph <JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com> Subject: Re: Cellphone Curiosity Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 07:49:40 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Sat, 11 Jun 2005 21:51:39 GMT, tom.horsley@att.net (Thomas A. Horsley) wrote: > I have come to wonder about I thing I see all the time: People in cars > talking on cellphones while the stero is cranked up lound enough to > rattle windows a block away. They have to turn it up so loud because they have lost most of their hearing from turning it up so loud that the windows in the neighborhood rattle. ------------------------------ From: Joseph <JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com> Subject: Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 07:44:57 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On 11 Jun 2005 09:39:40 -0700, marty@ceflorida.com wrote: > Traveling to Greece and Turkey (Istanbul)and am seeking a reliable and > competitively priced company to rent a cell phone from. Would also > like a recommendation as to which phone I should select. You do not state how long you will be in Greece and Turkey, but in any event if it is at least a couple weeks you would be advised to *not* rent a cell phone. Rental rates for cell phones are exhorbitant. With what you spend on rentals you could buy your own equipment and buy local prepaid SIMs (internal phone cards) for the phone during your time in Greece and Turkey. A used dual band handset which you would need in Greece and Turkey can likely be found on eBay for $50 or less if you're willing to settle for used equipment. Personally I'd recommend a Nokia unit such as the Nokia 3310/3410 or 3510. Prepaid in Turkey can be had for as little as an initial outlay of 13 Euros. In Greece you can get a prepaid SIM for anywhere between 9 and 19 Euros and topups for 5 Euros or so. It's likely that you'll pay around $20/day for the privilege of renting a cell phone. It's much smarter to buy a second-hand phone and either save it for future trips or sell it when you get home. Check out http://prepaidgsm.net ------------------------------ Date: 12 Jun 2005 15:47:25 -0000 From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> Subject: Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > Traveling to Greece and Turkey (Istanbul)and am seeking a reliable > and competitively priced company to rent a cell phone from. Would > also like a recommendation as to which phone I should select. Unless you're only going to be there for a couple of days, you'll be much better off if you buy a phone and get prepaid SIMs once you get there. It costs as much to rent a phone for a week or two as to buy one. You can get a euro 900/1800 or triband 900/1800/1900 phone on ebay for under $50. Be sure to get one that has been unlocked to work on any GSM carrier. (Not "can be" unlocked, any phone can be unlocked, in theory.) When you get to Greece and to Turkey, buy local prepaid SIMs, or if you want, you can buy them online ahead of time which costs more but you know in advance what your numbers will be. If your goal is primarily so that people in the US can reach you, and you have a Cingular, AT&T, or T-Mobile GSM phone here, you can use your current SIM in a euro phone. The per-minute rates are quite high, but you keep your own US phone number. Call them before you go to get international roaming enabled, and ask if they have an addon plan with lower roaming rates. Another possibility is a "universal" SIM with a Liechtenstein or Monaco phone number. Their rates are not as cheap as a local SIM, but you can get one SIM and use it all over Europe and Turkey at the same not too awful rate. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 05:47:11 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article <telecom24.262.10@telecom-digest.org>, <nospam4me@mytrashmail.com> wrote: > Robert Bonomi <bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com> wrote: >> I've sat in a federal courtroom, and witnessed sentencing for an 18 >> USC 641 violation. It wasn't a single egregious act, but an ongoing >> series of really 'little' things. After having been reminded by >> management "not to". The idjit had a side-line personal business, and >> was doing stuff for it at the office, after hours -- writing >> correspondence, and printing it out, doing estimates in a >> spread-sheet, a little bit of photo-copying, etc. > So what kind of sentence did the above malfeasant Federal employee get > for doing the above? "Merely" 6 months in prison (max. term is 1 year). No fine, as I recall. ------------------------------ From: Choreboy <choreboyREMOVE@localnet.com> Subject: Re: Bellsouth Caller ID Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 04:12:48 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Robert Bonomi wrote: > In article <telecom24.261.2@telecom-digest.org>, > Choreboy <choreboyREMOVE@localnet.com> wrote: > [[.. munch ..]] >> So Bellsouth won't tell me what cellphone carriers provide names for >> their Caller ID. Is this information available anywhere? > Not suprising. Bellsouth *doesn't*know* who provides names, and who > doesn't. > All they can do is pass along what is supplied. > Probably just knowing the cell carrier is not sufficient. > It probably depends on the type of servicecontract as well. e.g., I > doubt names are even available to the carrier for 'pre-paid' phones. I wonder what carriers would supply names? With a land line, if you pay for an unpublished number, your name won't show up on a Caller ID display, will it? It seems to me that a cellphone customer is paying for an unpublished number. Unwanted calls to a cellphone can be terribly inconvenient as well as costing the customer minutes. Suppose in a traffic jam, you call the dentist to say you'll be ten minutes late. Six months later your cell phone rings as you drive to work. You have told nobody your number except your wife and daughter, and they know you don't want to be called while driving. Thinking it must be an emergency, you reach for the phone and wreck your car. The next day your phone begins chirping during a funeral. Because your wife and daughter are with you, you never expected this. By the time you turn it off you are getting dirty looks. The day after that, it rings while you are in the checkout line at a supermarket. It's the dentist's receptionist reminding you to schedule a checkup. You are in no position to check your schedule. If you start getting calls like that because a receptionist's computer got your cellphone number from Caller ID, won't you be likely to change carriers? ------------------------------ From: Joseph <JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com> Subject: Re: Mac iBook and Bluetooth Cordless Headphones? Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 07:47:51 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Sat, 11 Jun 2005 10:19:57 -0700, AES <siegman@stanford.edu> wrote: > Is there an audio or Bluetooth group that would be a better place to > ask about this? On Usenet: alt.cellular.bluetooth It's not a terribly active group, but it's likely that if you ask a question there someone may have any answer. You might ask a question in the mac applications group on usenet as well. ------------------------------ 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 V24 #264 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Jun 13 14:45:43 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 7FB9615094; Mon, 13 Jun 2005 14:45:42 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #265 Message-Id: <20050613184542.7FB9615094@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 14:45:42 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.1 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_REMOVE, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: R TELECOM Digest Mon, 13 Jun 2005 14:45:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 265 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Http Request Smuggling (Lisa Minter) Snocap Opens to Independent Artists (Lisa Minter) Nokia Cooperates With Apple on New Web Browser (Lisa Minter) Hong Kong Plans to Enact New Anti-Spam Law (Lisa Minter) Qualcomm Announces Winners of BREW 2005 Developer Awards (Monty Solomon) Cable Outlets Decline to Air Abstinence ad (Monty Solomon) T-Mobile: 450,000 People Paid to Use WiFi (Monty Solomon) T-Mobile Focuses on WiFi (Telecom DailyLead from USTA) Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe (John Stahl) Re: Companies Subvert Search Results to Squelch Criticism (Steve Sobol) Re: 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic ? (John McHarry) Re: Bellsouth Caller ID (Joseph) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Lisa Hancock) Re: Microwave Fading 6 Gig (Harry Hydro) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Http Request Smuggling Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 21:10:39 -0500 Some comments of interest from SlashDot over the weekend you might find interesting to read: Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday June 12, @11:28AM from the this-could-get-fun dept. cyphersteve writes "Multiple vendors are vulnerable to a new class of attack named 'HTTP Request Smuggling' that revolves around piggybacking a HTTP request inside of another HTTP request, which could let a remote malicious user conduct cache poisoning, cross-site scripting, session hijacking, as well as bypassing web application firewall protection and other attacks. HTTP Request Smuggling works by taking advantage of the discrepancies in parsing when one or more HTTP devices are between the user and the web server. CERT has ranked this attack and the associated vulnerabilties found in multiple products as High Risk. The authors (Amit Klein, Steve Orrin, Ronen Heled, and Chaim Linhart) have published a whitepaper describing this technique in detail." The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way. by ilyanep (823855) on Sunday June 12, @11:34AM (#12795033) (Last Journal: Thursday June 09, @07:18PM) Now let's take packet A. Do an MD5 sum (or similar) on it. Send it to the end user. Have the end user's browser do a similar check on it and send it to the server. IF the server green flags it, then show the page. This shouldn't become a speed problem on broadband machines because it'll only mean 2 or 3 times more packets (but you can always increase packet size). Call the new standard something like HTTPS 2.0. [ Reply to This ] a.. Re:Validation by Anonymous Coward (Score:3) Sunday June 12, @11:40AM b.. Re:Validation by mp3LM (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @11:40AM a.. Ah! by ShaniaTwain (Score:3) Sunday June 12, @11:58AM b.. Re:Validation by Jeff DeMaagd (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @12:19PM a.. Re:Validation by Master of Transhuman (Score:1) Sunday June 12, @05:10PM a.. 1 reply beneath your current threshold. c.. Re:Validation by AndroidCat (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @11:52AM a.. That's already what Apache does by wtarreau (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @12:33PM a.. Re:That's already what Apache does by AndroidCat (Score:1) Sunday June 12, @01:00PM d.. Re:Validation by Lord Kano (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @02:30PM e.. Re:Validation by Bert690 (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @02:55PM f.. 3 replies beneath your current threshold. This has been going on for some time. (Score:2, Flamebait) by WindBourne (631190) on Sunday June 12, @11:41AM (#12795077) (Last Journal: Sunday September 21, @09:34PM) I noticed that 3 months ago. [ Reply to This ] Article Text (Score:3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 12, @11:43AM (#12795088) AC = No Karma Whoring HTTP REQUEST SMUGGLING CHAIM LINHART (chaiml@post.tau.ac.il) AMIT KLEIN (aksecurity@hotpop.com) RONEN HELED AND STEVE ORRIN (sorrin@ix.netcom.com) A whitepaper from Watchfire TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 1 Executive Summary 1 What is HTTP Request Smuggling? 2 What damage can HRS inflict? 2 Example #1: Web Cache Poisoning 4 Example #2: Firewall/IPS/IDS evasion 5 Example #3: Forward vs. backward HRS 7 Example #4: Request Hijacking 9 Example #5: Request Credential Hijacking 10 HRS techniques 10 Protecting your site against HRS 19 Squid 19 Check Point FW-1 19 Final note regarding solutions 19 About Watchfire 20 References 21 ABSTRACT This document summarizes our work on HTTP Request Smuggling, a new attack technique that has recently emerged. We'll describe this technique and explain when it can work and the damage it can do. This paper assumes the reader is familiar with the basics of HTTP. If not, the reader is referred to the HTTP/1.1 RFC [4]. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY We describe a new web entity attack technique - "HTTP Request Smuggling." This attack technique, and the derived attacks, are relevant to most web environments and are the result of an HTTP server or device's failure to properly handle malformed inbound HTTP requests. HTTP Request Smuggling works by taking advantage of the discrepancies in parsing when one or more HTTP devices/entities (e.g. cache server, proxy server, web application firewall, etc.) are in the data flow between the user and the web server. HTTP Request Smuggling enables various attacks - web cache poisoning, session hijacking, cross-site scripting and most importantly, the ability to bypass web application firewall protection. It sends multiple specially-crafted HTTP requests that cause the two attacked entities to see two different sets of requests, allowing the hacker to smuggle a request to one device without the other device being aware of it. In the web cache poisoning attack, this smuggled request will trick the cache server into unintentionally associating a URL to another URL's page (content), and caching this content for the URL. In the web application firewall attack, the smuggled request can be a worm (like Nimda or Code Red) or buffer overflow attack targeting the web server. Finally, because HTTP Request Smuggling enables the attacker to insert or sneak a request into the flow, it allows the attacker to manipulate the web server's request/response sequencing which can allow for credential hijacking and other malicious outcomes. HTTP REQUEST SMUGGLING © Copyright 2005. Watchfire Corporation. All Rights Reserved. 2 WHAT IS HTTP REQUEST SMUGGLING? HTTP Request Smuggling ("HRS") is a new hacking technique that targets HTTP devices. Indeed, whenever HTTP requests originating from a client pass through m Read the rest of this comment... [ Reply to This ] a.. patent blanket! by matt me (Score:1) Sunday June 12, @03:17PM b.. Re:Article Text -- Karma whoring???? by camusflage (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @02:02PM c.. 1 reply beneath your current threshold. piggybacking (Score:2, Funny) by Edzor (744072) on Sunday June 12, @11:53AM (#12795146) I like to use 'piggybacking' as well, it makes me sound technical but cool at the same time. [ Reply to This ] Why is this news? (Score:2, Insightful) by duh_lime (583156) on Sunday June 12, @11:54AM (#12795156) If there is ANY communications path, it can be used for anything... If you have cooperating applications, anything that passes at least "a bit" can be subverted for another purpose. You could do Morse code using ICMP Echo Requests, with the packet size determining whether it's a dot or a dash... Whatever... Again, why is this particular technique news? [ Reply to This ] a.. Re:Why is this news? by cduffy (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @12:39PM Re:Why is this news? (Score:5, Insightful) by segmond (34052) on Sunday June 12, @03:26PM (#12796508) (http://www.segmond.com/) Shut up! RTFP! The attack allows attack worse than XSS if an XSS vulnerability exists since this time, it doesn't require you to intereact with the client. It allows cache poisoning. It allows you to smuggle data past some firewall/filters that try to prevent HTTP attacks by parsing requests, for example, so servers will filter out GET requests like /foo/../../../whatever or /foo?cmd.exe You can use this to bypass it. This is NEWS because it is a NEW attack. This is not about using HTTP as a tunnel for other form of communication. This exploits the fact that the cache server/firewall and webserver might parse the same request different when it has two "Content Length:" in it... Read the paper. [ Reply to This | Parent ] a.. Re:Why is this news? by argent (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @10:02PM b.. 1 reply beneath your current threshold. I think this appeared in DDJ sometime ago... (Score:1) by soapdog (773638) on Sunday June 12, @11:54AM (#12795158) (http://www.soapdog.org/) Folks, hiding one HTTP request inside another is not the same HTTP request hijacking technique that appeared in Doctor Dobbs journal some months ago... I can't recall the edition... [ Reply to This ] a.. Re:I think this appeared in DDJ sometime ago... by cyphersteve (Score:1) Sunday June 12, @02:57PM Question of Compatibility vs. Reliability (Score:5, Insightful) by l2718 (514756) on Sunday June 12, @11:55AM (#12795161) This exploit is interesting, and is related to a cultural issue: how do you handle malformed input? There are two basic approached to this: either you reject it (the sound, security-concious way), or you attempt to make sense of it (the compatible way). The second solution allows your software to interface with badly-written external code, at the cost of interfacing with intentionally malformed requests like the exploit the describe. The reason the exploit works is that different people have different methods for determining what the sender of the malformed packet really meant, and if two different interpretations are applied to the same packet you can use the resulting "confusion" to your advantage. Different recount results which depend on guessing "voter intent" from malformed ballots in Florida comes to mind. [ Reply to This ] Re:Question of Compatibility vs. Reliability (Score:4, Insightful) by iabervon (1971) on Sunday June 12, @01:11PM (#12795669) (http://iabervon.org/~barkalow/ | Last Journal: Saturday May 31, @03:01AM) The actual issue is cases where someone makes sense of malformed input and then passes that input on to something else. The proper thing to do is always pass on correctly-formed input. If you get malformed input and interpret it somehow, you then need to pass on your interpretation, not the original. The guideline is to be permissive in what you accept and strict in what you transmit; when you're passing something on, you need to canonicalize it in transit. A good example of this is how the legal system works. When a court makes a decision on the application of a law to an unclear situation, that becomes part of the case law, such that there is a consistent interpretation, rather than an ambiguous situation being interpreted randomly each time it occurs. [ Reply to This | Parent ] a.. Re:Question of Compatibility vs. Reliability by Lord Kano (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @02:39PM Be very careful (Score:5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 12, @11:58AM (#12795178) It is unethical and immoral. Some HTTP requests even time-out and have died doing this! Also be aware that some vigilante border gateway protocols have sprung up in the south looking for smuggled HTTP requests. Also new federal legislation may require all web servers to validate the HTTP request's green packets before responding. [ Reply to This ] a.. Re:Be very careful by PerspexAvenger (Score:1) Sunday June 12, @12:08PM b.. 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Possible way to burn down RSS? (Score:3, Interesting) by krowten21 (891493) on Sunday June 12, @12:03PM (#12795215) Scenario: Vulnerable web server for popular blogging site, compromised by this or other attack, RSS feed used to broadcast exploit against vulnerable IE 7.0 clients. predicted at www.threatchaos.com att he beginning of the year. [ Reply to This ] a.. Re:Possible way to burn down RSS? by SpaceLifeForm (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @04:55PM Quick Summary (Score:3, Informative) by MojoRilla (591502) on Sunday June 12, @12:08PM (#12795244) Due to bad handling of borderline html, some web servers will see extra requests that front end servers (cache, proxies) don't see. This is due http keepalive (so that more than one request can be processed in a stream) and malicious http headers. This seems to be implemented mostly by sending duplicate or invalid content length headers. I'm sure that all of these problems will be quickly patched. All of these issues would be fixed by tighter HTTP parsing specifications. However, buggy software will always exist, and always be exploited. [ Reply to This ] a.. Re:Quick Summary by wfberg (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @01:10PM a.. Re:Quick Summary by John Hasler (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @02:26PM b.. Re:Quick Summary by MooseGuy529 (Score:3) Sunday June 12, @02:38PM c.. 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Hype it up? (Score:1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 12, @12:12PM (#12795264) This paper discusses potential exploitation of poor HTTP parsing in specific applications. Potential applications include cache poisoning and hijacking user credentials but it requires the victim to be behind a vulnerable proxy/firewall. Why not just issue seperate advisories and inform the respective vendors? Seems to me like they bundled multiple flaws in multiple products so they could be creditied with discovering a new class of vulnerability. [ Reply to This ] a.. Re:Hype it up? by Sven Tuerpe (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @12:46PM b.. 2 replies beneath your current threshold. publicfile (Score:2, Informative) by sugarmotor (621907) on Sunday June 12, @12:12PM (#12795271) (http://stephan.sugarmotor.org/) http://cr.yp.to/publicfile.html [cr.yp.to], publicfiloe, is not mentioned. [ Reply to This ] Well this is not good (Score:2, Insightful) by suitepotato (863945) on Sunday June 12, @12:33PM (#12795404) From TFA: Conclusion: We have seen that there are many pairs (proxy/firewall servers and web servers) of vulnerable systems. Particularly, we demonstrated that the following pairs are vulnerable: PCCA o IIS/5.0 o Tomcat 5.0.19 (probably with Tomcat 4.1.x as well) Squid 2.5stable4 (Unix) and Squid 2.5stable5 for NT o IIS/5.0 o WebLogic 8.1 SP1 Apache 2.0.45 o IIS/5.0 o IS/6.0 o Apache 1.3.29 o Apache 2.0.45 o WebSphere 5.1 and 5.0 o WebLogic 8.1 SP1 o Oracle9iAS web server 9.0.2 o SunONE web server 6.1 SP4 ISA/2000 o IIS/5.0 o Tomcat 5.0.19 o Tomcat 4.1.24 o SunONE web server 6.1 SP4 DeleGate 8.9.2 o IIS/6.0 o Tomcat 5.0.19 o Tomcat 4.1.24 o SunONE web server 6.1 SP4 Oracle9iAS cache server 9.0.2 o WebLogic 8.1 SP1 SunONE proxy server 3.6 SP4 o Tomcat 5.0.19 o Tomcat 4.1.24 o SunONE web server 6.1 SP4 FW-1 Web Intelligence kernel 55W beta (the IIS 48K technique probably works with R55W) o IIS/5.0 This is a partial list - there are many pairs we did not test and there are likely many other web servers and cache servers we did not test for lack of hardware and software. Of course, there are probably many more similar techniques. Yeah, really? I'd like to see a much broader list laid out, and preferably before it becomes another net disaster. If this was strictly a Microsoft thing we'd be hearing cries for blood, or at least an app to check if your setup was vulnerable. Since it is much broader than that, if checking for this doesn't become part of a security toolkit, we may well wish it had. Oh well. At least we got this much warning this much in advance. Anyone want to take bets on how long till some malware weasels make this a point and click thing in another script kiddie kit? My guess is before the security world makes a test app to check for it. [ Reply to This ] a.. Tomcat workaround by mparaz (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @03:24PM Working example available? (Score:2) by pongo000 (97357) on Sunday June 12, @12:36PM (#12795423) The world is full of hypotheticals...can someone actually point us to a working example of this alleged exploit? If not, I'll just file it away as "cool information with little practical impact on my daily life." [ Reply to This ] a.. Re:Working example available? by failure-man (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @01:25PM b.. Re:Working example available? by slavemowgli (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @01:44PM PCCA?? (Score:2, Interesting) by d3ac0n (715594) on Sunday June 12, @12:56PM (#12795570) (Last Journal: Monday October 13, @10:39AM) Does anyone have any idea what the Popular Commercial Cache Appliance is? The PDF doesn't say and we have a few cache appliances at my office (intranet and internet). I'd like to know just vunerable we are to this type of thing. [ Reply to This ] a.. Re:PCCA?? by cyphersteve (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @02:50PM b.. Re:PCCA?? by d3ac0n (Score:1) Sunday June 12, @01:25PM c.. 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Smuggling, eh? (Score:1) by Aldric (642394) on Sunday June 12, @03:43PM (#12796617) When will HTTP Customs be introduced as a fix? [ Reply to This ] Re:Problem reading the PDF... (Score:3, Funny) by Dogers (446369) on Sunday June 12, @11:39AM (#12795064) (Last Journal: Saturday May 07, @10:10AM) Tried to do a copy and paste, but the lameness filter wont let me. DRM in force! ;) [ Reply to This | Parent ] a.. I AC posted the article by camusflage (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @11:50AM b.. Re:Problem reading the PDF... by Damhna (Score:1) Sunday June 12, @11:54AM Re:and here's where... (Score:3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 12, @11:59AM (#12795191) Actually the whitepaper sates that IIS and Apache automatically dump the malformed packet. Microsoft does write a few good lines of code. [ Reply to This | Parent ] a.. Re:and here's where... by ohzero (Score:1) Sunday June 12, @12:15PM b.. Re:and here's where... by gtwilliams (Score:1) Sunday June 12, @01:12PM c.. Re:and here's where... by drumist (Score:1) Sunday June 12, @05:06PM Re:Problem reading the PDF... (Score:3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 12, @12:00PM (#12795197) Here is a link: http://www.gatech-edu.org/HTTP-Request-Smuggling.p df [gatech-edu.org] [ Reply to This | Parent ] a.. Re:Problem reading the PDF... by arose (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @01:37PM b.. Re:Problem reading the PDF... by shepmaster (Score:1) Sunday June 12, @05:25PM Re:and here's where... (Score:1) by ohzero (525786) on Sunday June 12, @12:12PM (#12795272) (http://www.f8entertainment.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday September 09, @02:59PM) flamebait? Anyone with half a clue would understand that this is just a fact. If you don't believe me.. watch the updates. I guarantee you that headlines will read almost verbatim what I said come Monday. Then again, this is slashdot... I guess I shouldn't expect people to understand things. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Prediction (Score:1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 12, @12:36PM (#12795426) This is Slashdot, News for Nerds, not "your average bloke on the street". Your post would make alot more sense if the article was mentioned on CNN.com or the like, but not here. [ Reply to This | Parent ] Re:Old news... (Score:2) by Panaflex (13191) on Sunday June 12, @01:57PM (#12795941) I wrote my own web server 5 years ago.. faster than Apache, cheaper than others. Doesn't have this problem. -Pan [ Reply to This | Parent ] a.. Re:Old news... by rbarreira (Score:2) Sunday June 12, @03:45PM b.. 1 reply beneath your current threshold. Re:Old news... (Score:2) by JRHelgeson (576325) on Sunday June 12, @02:26PM (#12796125) (Last Journal: Sunday October 19, @05:54PM) Bah, I'm a reseller who enjoys a product... is it so wrong to share it with people? I have no dog in this fight. [ Reply to This | Parent ] a.. 9 replies beneath your current threshold. By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2005 OSTG. [ home | awards | contribute story | older articles | OSTG | advertise | about | terms of service | privacy | faq | rss ] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Snocap Opens to Independent Artists Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 10:18:14 -0500 The online music service Snocap said on Monday that it would allow independent artists and small record labels to register their songs to receive payment when they are traded over Internet "peer-to-peer" networks. Snocap, the latest venture of Napster founder Shawn Fanning, uses digital "fingerprint" technology to identify songs that are swapped online. Peer-to-peer networks can use Snocap to block unauthorized copies of songs and replace them with protected versions that can be controlled by their owners. Only one peer-to-peer service has signed up to use Snocap so far, but the company says it is in talks with others. Snocap officials hope that existing peer-to-peer services like Kazaa and LimeWire will turn to Snocap as a way to end their legal battles with recording companies and convert the millions of songs that are copied over their networks into a steady revenue stream. Three out of the four major labels -- Universal Music Group, (EAUG.PA) Sony BMG (6758.T)(BERT.UL) and EMI Group Plc (EMI.L) -- have registered their songs with Snocap, as have larger independent labels like TVT and Rykodisc. Snocap said it is in talks with the fourth major label, Warner Music Group Corp. (NYSE:WMG - news). Snocap founder Fanning first shot to notoriety when he turned the music industry upside down with Napster, the first software program that allowed users to copy music from each others' hard drives for free. Napster has since been relaunched as an industry-approved download service. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Nokia Cooperates With Apple on New Web Browser Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 10:20:25 -0500 Nokia is developing a mobile browser for its Series 60 smartphone software in cooperation with Apple Computer Inc. , the Finnish telecoms equipment maker said on Monday. Nokia said in a statement the new browser will use the same open source components as Apple's Safari Internet browser. Nokia added the browser will be available during the first half of 2006 and said it would continue to cooperate with Apple. In March, Nokia signed a deal with Apple's competitor, Norway's Opera Software, to put Opera's mobile Internet software on more Nokia phones, after having licensed Opera's browser for a total of 11 Nokia models in recent years. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Hong Kong Plans to Enact Anti-Spam Law Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 21:12:45 -0500 Hong Kong plans to enact an anti-spam law next year to crack down on companies that send unsolicited e-mails or make automated telemarketing calls to consumers, an official has said. The government has consulted with industry groups to craft a law that would combat junk faxes, e-mails, text messages and telemarketing calls. Au Man-ho, director-general of the Telecommunications Authority, said in a statement Saturday that direct marketing companies using automated calling on an unsolicited basis "can be considered a spam problem." However, Au said the law -- to take effect at an unspecified date in 2006 -- would not cover "manually made cold calls" to avoid interfering with normal business activities. He said the issue still requires public discussion and that the government was working with fixed-line and mobile operators to create a code of practice for telemarketing. Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 21:08:37 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Qualcomm Announces Winners of BREW 2005 Developer Awards - U.S. and International Wireless Publishers and Developers Receive Recognition at BREW 2005 - SAN DIEGO, June 6 /PRNewswire/ -- QUALCOMM Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM), pioneer and world leader of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) digital wireless technology, today announced the winners of its BREW 2005 Developer Awards, a global awards program that recognizes and promotes the best BREW(R) applications created by wireless publishers and developers. The winners were revealed during an awards ceremony at the BREW 2005 Conference, being held at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego. QUALCOMM congratulates the BREW 2005 Developer Awards winners: -- Most Innovative Use of Technology: AtlasBook by Networks in Motion (U.S.) and Buggy Boom with Motion Detection by MEDIASEEK Inc. (Japan)/3G Vision Inc. (Israel) -- Best Business Application: Remo by Remoba Inc. (U.S.) -- Best Location-Based Service Application: Friend-Finder Service by Pointi Corporation (Korea) -- Best Communications Application: Pop Mailer by MEDIA SOCKET Inc. (Japan) -- Best Information Application: Diabetes Management by Healthpia Inc. (Korea) -- Best Entertainment Application: Song IDentity by Rocket Mobile Inc. (U.S.) -- Best Game Application: Asphalt: Urban GT by Gameloft (France) -- Best Ringtone Application: Modtones DJ by Moderati (U.S.) -- People's Choice Award: Song IDentity by Rocket Mobile Inc. (U.S.) - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49654232 ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 22:11:42 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Cable Outlets Decline to Air Abstinence Ad By Associated Press FALL RIVER -- A television ad urging teenagers to abstain from sex has been deemed inappropriate for young children by some networks on Comcast Corp. cable television and will not be seen on several channels geared to younger viewers. The spot, sponsored by the Catholic Social Services program, ACTION, which stands for Abstinence Challenging Teens in Our Neighborhood, was supposed to run on cable stations in seven communities in southeastern Massachusetts. An official with Comcast said the decisions were up to the individual networks and not the cable company. http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/06/12/cable_outlets_decline_to_air_abstinence_ad/ ------------------------------ From: Monty Solomon Subject: T-Mobile: 450,000 People Paid to Use Wi-Fi Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 13:00:00 CDT By BRUCE MEYERSON AP Business Writer NEW YORK (AP) -- T-Mobile USA disclosed user statistics from its Wi-Fi business for the first time Monday, reporting that 450,000 customers have paid to access the wireless Internet service in the past three months. The cell phone company declined to provide a year-ago customer tally for comparison, but did release figures showing a sharp increase in usage for the service, which provides high-speed Internet access for laptops at locations such as Starbucks coffee shops, airports and hotels. For example, T-Mobile Hotspot users are staying online an average of 64 minutes per login in 2005, up from 45 minutes last year and 23 minutes in 2003. The total number of log-ins has totaled 3 million in the past three months, vs. about 8 million in all of 2004. The Wi-Fi service is a key business for T-Mobile, which unlike many of its mobile phone rivals is not upgrading its cellular network to deliver high-speed Internet access in addition to phone service. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49800520 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 12:54:51 -0400 (EDT) From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: T-Mobile Focuses on Wi-Fi Telecom dailyLead from USTA June 13, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22285&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * T-Mobile focuses on Wi-Fi BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Analysis: Daichendt's exit a setback for Nortel * Microsoft picks Aruba for corporate Wi-Fi network * SOMA raises $50M * Vonage gives away wireless routers USTA SPOTLIGHT * USTAs VoIP Webinar Series: Now Available On Demand! HOT TOPICS * Nortel's president resigns * Qwest eyes XO, source says * BT set to launch hybrid phone * VoIP has a long way to go * FCC makes E911 order official EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Broadcom, France Telecom test HDTV over DSL * Ericsson unveils technology to allow in-flight calls REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * Dispute over wireless e-mail patents gets messier Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22285&l=2017006 ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 15:59:50 -0400 From: John Stahl Subject: Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe My wife frequently travels to Europe, Asia, etc. so she has needs for a cell phone. She uses phones from an outfit called CellHire USA. Their URL is http://www.cellhire.com/. She has found this outfit easy to work with and they pay for the freight to send you the phone just before you leave and for its return upon your return home. Not sure about phones, rates, etc. but you can check them out at the above URL as they show various phones for various countries depending upon your travel plans. John Stahl Data/Telecom Consultant Aljon Enterprises ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Companies Subvert Search Results to Squelch Criticism Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 14:47:22 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Monty Solomon wrote: > It's not illegal, but it's SEO gone bad. Companies such as Quixtar are > using Google-bombing, link farms and Web spam pages to place positive > sites in the top search results -- which pushes the negative ones > down. Yeah, and there may be no laws against it, but if it's done on a large enough basis you can bet they'll get sued. Quixtar's slimy anyhow ... it doesn't surprise me that they were used as the example in the quoted article. JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ From: John McHarry Subject: Re: 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic ? Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 23:34:39 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net On Fri, 10 Jun 2005 06:13:12 -0500, jg wrote: > Hi, > I believe my 'voice line' is being tapped [the line feeds through the > 'opponents' switchboard]. > How difficult is it for them to 'decode' my modem [to ISP] traffic ? > I'm guessing/hoping that my modem has to 'synchronise' with the ISP's > in analog mode, so it's difficult for a '3rd' party to listen ? > Is this right ? I don't think it is difficult at all. The modems negotiate a speed that will work over the link, but if the tap is getting as good a signal as the end points, it should be no problem to listen in. Your only hope would be to use some form of encryption with shared secrets. You are not likely to have an ISP that supports that. ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Bellsouth Caller ID Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 18:20:18 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Sun, 12 Jun 2005 04:12:48 -0400, Choreboy wrote: > The next day your phone begins chirping during a funeral. Because > your wife and daughter are with you, you never expected this. By the > time you turn it off you are getting dirty looks. If you are such an insensitive clod to not put your phone on silent or shut it off they *should* give you dirty looks. Ever heard of using a little common sense? Shut the damned thing off when you're in a movie, a concert, a funeral or any number of other situations where it's not just tacky it's rude. Take some personal responsibility for your own actions. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: First of all (going back to the original complaint about someone getting your cell phone number from caller ID) use *67 on cell phones in the same way you use it on your landline phone. Caller ID is not passed in that case.) Second, I _always_ put my cell phone on silent (or sometimes just turn it off) whenever I am in a church or at a concert or lecture. Usually I just turn it to silent mode or battery vibrating mode, then I can glance at the display and if it is a call I want to receive, I can excuse myself and go outside to deal with it. PAT] ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: 13 Jun 2005 07:48:17 -0700 Fred Atkinson wrote: > So, then you are saying that they should remove ham radio books from > the library? I don't think so. I wouldn't think a reputable quality ham-radio book would present any problem in a school library. Because the book would be for younger readers, I would hope that the book contains prominent cautions and warnings about any power dangers in the equipment or installing outside aerials. When I was a kid there were ham radio books in both school and public libraries. It was considered a wholesome hobby. There were also ham radio clubs in school. >> As to the Internet: There is a great deal of mis-information out >> there, some of it even dangerous. Anybody can set up a site and put >> anything they want on it; that by no means makes it authoritative or >> appropriate. Even legitimate organizations screw up on their Internet >> sites by failing to keep the information timely and accurate. > There has been misinformation in publications since the beginning of > time. Anyone can write and sell a book if they want to go to the > trouble. How is this any different? While anyone can write a book and pay to publish it, getting it distributed and purchased is another matter entirely. There is a big difference between book publishing and Internet web pages. Anyone can set up a web page at very modest cost that looks authoritative and accurate but may be actually garbage or even a scam. On the other hand, to get a book published and distributed takes a lot of effort. Reputable book publishers make some effort to edit serious non-fiction offerings (not including fad books such as diet books). Books for libraries are reviewed and rated. It is by no means a perfect system; but my point is that there is at least some editing and selection process going on at various levels; on the Internet there is none whatsoever. >> As mentioned, student "access" is already quite limited in many ways. > So, we justify limiting them to things that could be beneficial to > them to achieve that end? The original argument "students are now being limited to what they can see" was a bad premise to begin with -- kind of a "Have you stopped beating your wife yes/no?" question. Every time this issue comes up activists get all excited about supposed constitutional rights, etc., and things get blown all out of proportion. Starting statements like that is bad public discourse. My response remains merely that for a variety of reasons things were always limited to students. I also note that schools and institutions bear much liability if kids abuse what they have. That is, the school and its administrations get into the trouble, not the kids who did the mischief. It is only reasonable for the administrators to take steps to protect themselves. It is no different that employers who limit employee's Internet access or "free speech" in the workplace to cover their liability. It's easy for outsiders, who bear no liability risks, to tell other people what to do and what risks to bear. But not exactly fair. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Lisa Hancock, I really do not care for your attitude on this. If books are good (because they were very time-consuming and costly to prepare and edit) and web pages are bad (basically for the lack of the same reasons) then how do you explain some of the total crap which has been published over the years, such as the literature published by A. Hitler and others in Germany during the 1920-30's and much also in America? And although I am only a mere web publisher and could not begin to meet the expenses required of having an editorial/fact-checking staff, my attitude is that the _truth will eventually prevail_ and any sort of ethical web publisher tries his best to make room for _all sides_ of an issue to be aired. What you have done is give a slap in the face to everyone who has attempted to present some social issue or another using the web as the media of choice because of its low cost and ease of use. Not everyone can _afford_ the cost of fancy printing and binding; all they want to do is present the facts as they know them to the largest number of people possible. Many or most of us under those circumstances do at least use a kind of peer-review policy. PAT] ------------------------------ From: HarryHydro Subject: Re: Microwave Fading 6 Gig Date: 13 Jun 2005 11:03:59 -0700 GlowingBlueMist wrote: > HarryHydro wrote in message > news:telecom24.259.5@telecom-digest.org: >> Hi Folks: >> I wrote a qbasic program that scans 4 Alcatel radios. It also >> pages me on problems. I was called almost 10 times around 1:30AM this >> morning (6/9/05) and again around 4:00AM even more times! My heel are >> draggin'. Anyway, this has been going on for the last few days. >> These are not stormy evenings, or even windy. In the plots this >> program makes, I see signals dropping, or maybe it's noise level >> increasing, enough to break microwave paths. This is 6gig stuff ... The >> 4 radios at this site point in different directions, and the radios >> almost go wacky the same time, but not exactly. For a half hour, the >> signal on one radio faded to almost break while the others were doing >> OK. Sometimes the two receivers on one radio will fade together, >> sometimes not. (diversity) I've associated some of these to mag >> storms, but most are weather related. However, these last few days >> have been pretty stable. >> Could it be temperature inversions at 1:30 in the morning doing this? >> Harry > I don't know about your location but when I was monitoring microwave > sites for the military in Germany, most of the temperature inversion > problems we ran into was in the early morning. The hills would cool > off but the valleys would hold the heat unless a breeze was blowing. > As you have already identified, the fact that your diversity beams > tend to drop out at slightly different times helps to point to a > temperature inversion problem if weather was ruled out. > We did tend to have one other problem with fighter aircraft using our > towers as practice targets. Either the bulk of the aircraft > themselves or the aircraft electronic systems would drop the link as > they came in for the final run. Hi: Thanks for the reply: I'm in Jersey. Our microwave runs out of Southern Pennsylvania, into Jersey, then out Northern PA. Hills all over. We're having all kinds of MW problems this morning, but this time signals look good, but maybe multipath. Plus, there is a rather long Magnetic storm happening. It's slowly clearing up, at the same time everyone is trying to 'fix' it..;-) Take Care! Hydro ------------------------------ 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 V24 #265 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Jun 13 18:15:39 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id BFF4D14CA8; Mon, 13 Jun 2005 18:15:36 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #266 Message-Id: <20050613221536.BFF4D14CA8@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 18:15:36 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.0 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT, NO_COST autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Mon, 13 Jun 2005 18:14:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 266 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Internet Boom Alters Political Process in Iran (Lisa Minter) Sony-Ericcson Unveils New Phone (Lisa Minter) Cellular Phone Spam - What is the Internet Coming to? (Lisa Minter) T-Mobile HotSpot Announces Network Expansion, Roaming (Monty Solomon) Acadamy Services Nuisance Calls 215-320-0424 (zortan@email.com) Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe (John Levine) Re: 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic? (John Levine) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Lisa Hancock) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Internet Boom Alters Political Process in Iran Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 15:08:01 -0500 By Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY If Iran's revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were alive today, he'd undoubtedly have his own Web site. All eight of those allowed to run for president by Iran's clerical establishment in elections this Friday have official Web sites as well as other sites run by supporters. Internet usage is growing faster in Iran than anywhere in the Muslim Middle East, according to a recent Stanford University study. Although the Internet has not altered the power structure of the government, it has transformed campaigning and laid the groundwork for political change, Iranians inside and outside of the country say. "We had our first revolution 100 years ago after the introduction of the telegraph; we got the Islamic revolution (in 1979) through the telephone and cassette tapes, and now we have the Internet," says Mohsen Sazegara, a regime official turned dissident who is organizing an Internet campaign for a referendum to replace Iran's Islamic constitution. "So you have to expect another change," says Sazegara, currently a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Personal freedom is a major issue in the presidential campaign, as are the economy and Iran's relative isolation from the West. "There's no talk of revolution or Islam. It's all about how to respond to the people's needs," says Hadi Semati, a political science professor at Tehran University and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington. Candidates often use the unofficial political sites "to spread rumors and trash other candidates," says Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian who introduced blogging in Farsi three years ago and returned to Tehran Sunday to report on the campaign for his weblog, www.hoder.com. Iranian newspapers print the information, citing the Web sites. "They are using this mix of media to influence the public. This is the first time in Iran," Derakhshan says. The Internet allows the campaigns to bypass far more restrictive state-run television and the limited number of newspapers. One example: Pictures of young people in stylish Western clothes carrying banners supporting Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who is a leading candidate, appeared on Web sites run by conservative opponents. The intention was to discredit Rafsanjani among devout voters, but the effect may have been the reverse, Derakhshan says, because of declining support for strict Islamic laws that have been in effect since the 1979 revolution. On Saturday, a story on a conservative Web site reported that Rafsanjani would do a live interview on CNN for which he had paid the network. CNN confirmed that an interview is planned, but spokeswoman Mara Gassmann denied that any money had changed hands. The object of the false claim: to show that Rafsanjani is beholden to the West. Rafsanjani, 70, a veteran of the revolution, is leading in the polls. But the gap is narrowing with Mustafa Moin, 54, a former minister of higher education who is appealing to President Mohammed Khatami's reformist supporters. The third-ranking candidate is Mohammed Bakr Qalibaf, 44, a former air force commander in the paramilitary Revolutionary Guards and national police chief. If no candidate wins 50% of the vote, there will be a runoff between the top two vote-getters. Because of the limited choice, many Iranians may boycott the vote. A campaign urging them to stay home is also being promoted on the Internet. And whoever is elected president must still defer to the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Internet explosion in late '90s Nearly 5 million of Iran's 69 million people were Internet users in 2003, according to the Geneva-based International Telecommunication Union. There may be as many as 100,000 blogs in the Farsi language, Derakhshan says. The Internet was introduced in Iran in 1992 at the Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics in Tehran. It remained an academic tool until 1997. Then the election of Khatami, a moderate cleric, as president led to a quick expansion. By 1999, there were 1,200 Internet cafes in Tehran, according to Benham Tabrizi and Lily Sarafan, an associate professor and graduate student, respectively, in management and engineering at Stanford University. They delivered a paper at Stanford's Hoover Institution last year that said the number of Internet users could be at 15 million by the end of 2005. "Three-fourths of Internet users are between the ages of 21 and 32, and 14% use the Internet 38 hours or more per week," Tabrizi and Sarafan wrote. "Iran's young population is more likely to turn to Google than Qom (Iran's main Shiite Muslim theological center) for the answers to their questions." The campaign has dominated the Internet in Iran, including thousands of weblogs, known as blogs. Derakhshan started the trend. A Web designer who wrote tech columns for Iranian newspapers, Derakhshan, 30, immigrated to Canada in 2000 after the hard-line Iranian judiciary closed his paper, Asr-e-Azadegan, along with other reform-minded publications. In 2002, he devised a way to use Farsi with free software and provided instructions on his site. Soon, Iranian writers shut out of the newspapers, young people looking for dates and others hungry for independent information moved into the blogosphere. Farsi is now the third most common language of blogs, according to Tabrizi and Sarafan, after English and French. Iranians reuniting over Web Unlike China, which has devised a way of blocking dissident sites, the Iranian government either does not have the means or has chosen not to filter out all political sites, Derakhshan says. Last fall, the government arrested a few dozen bloggers whose sites were overtly political. Most have been released. About a third of Farsi-language blogs originate in Iran and the rest in a sizable Iranian diaspora of about 3 million, 2 million in the USA, Derakhshan says. Among the most popular sites within Iran are Gooya.com, which originates in Belgium, and the Farsi service of the British Broadcasting Corp. Others include the weblogs of the reformist candidate Moin and Mohammed Abtahi, a former vice president. An encouraging aspect of the Internet boom, says Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford, is that it has reunited Iranians in Iran with those who fled the Islamic revolution, a dynamic that could dramatically accelerate democratic change. "We in the diaspora can seriously participate in Iranian politics as vibrantly as those inside," Milani says." "allowing democratic forces to keep in touch." "Those guys (in the Iranian leadership) don't know what has hit them yet," he says. Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. To read USA Today on line each day with no registration or login requirements, go to http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/othernews.html ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Sony Ericsson Unveils New Phones Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 15:04:16 -0500 Mobile phone group Sony Ericsson, a venture of Sony Corp and Ericsson, on Monday introduced five new phones that it hopes will boost its presence in the low and mid-segment market. The group, the world's fifth largest mobile phone maker, unveiled the W600, a version of its Walkman brand music phone aimed at North American consumers; the S600, aimed at the youth market; and a clamshell-shaped phone, the Z520. It also presented the J210, for those who want mainly simple functions like making calls and writing messages; and a new third-generation (3G) high-speed data phone, the K608i. "We are widening our range in the low cost and medium segment," Per Alksten, product market chief, told Reuters. The announcements were made on the same day that Sony Ericsson's biggest rival, Nokia, launched seven new phones, including a 3G phone and three other high-end camera phones. Sony Ericsson, which used to focus on advanced, more expensive models, has said that it wants to expand its low-end range to become a top-three player. The company did not reveal precise prices for the new phones but Alksten said the J210 is expected to cost less than 2,000 crowns ($362). Urban Gillstrom, president of the company's U.S. unit, said he expects the W600 digital music phone to go on sale in the fourth quarter for less than $300. Ohman analyst Helena Nordman-Knutson said she was positive about the launch of the new Sony Ericsson phones for expanding the market segments where the group was already present. "But I still expect them to release a basic telephone for under 50 euros," she added. She said Nokia sold a fifth of its phones in the first quarter of the year for less than that price. (Additional reporting by Sinead Carew in New York) ($1=5.525 Crown) Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Cellular Phone Spam Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 13:26:53 -0500 WesSalmon.com The personal ramblings of Wes Salmon What is the Internet coming to? What is the Internet coming to when I have to be more concerned with spam in my inbox than "l33t h4x0rs" or viruses bringing my system down? Case in point, last night before bed my phone beeps, I have an SMS waiting. This is odd in itself since I rarely get an SMS unless I'm at a trade show or other event where people are trying to catch up with me. I check the message, and low and behold ... it's spam, and not even well targeted spam since it's a message offering me a back-to-school loan. What made this one especially annoying is that SMS messages aren't free for the most part, I buy 'em in blocks and this SMS spam just directly cost me up to a dime! Sure a dime is chump change, but I'm a chump who doesn't like being advertised to at my own expense. To compound my frustration, this morning before venturing out into the unbelievably crazy morning rush hour here in Seattle, (5 miles in 30 minutes, but that's another story entirely) I check my newly created Hotmail account that I plan to use for IM'ing at my new job. Guess what, more spam. Already I'm a marketing target and the email address is not even 12 hours old. I guess I'm partly to blame for using my name as the email, but what kind of crazy, mixed up Internet world are we living in where we have to disguise our own names just so we can have an email account void of "See Britney Spears nude!!!" messages in our inbox? I can't even USE my old hotmail account (4+ years old) due to all the porn spam I get since I'm sure even the subject lines would get me fired. *sigh* Posted by: Kalel on July 9, 2002 10:36 AM you get 50 SMS for $5?! I get 100 per month with Cingular for $2.99 What service provider do you use for your phone? Posted by: Kalel on July 9, 2002 10:38 AM also with Cingular I could bump up my SMS messages to where I could get 250 per month for $5.99 or 500 for $9.99 Posted by: ronb on July 9, 2002 10:52 AM We pay 2 cents per, no minimum charge. Posted by: ronb on July 9, 2002 10:54 AM Sorry, that's on my wife's phone. Mine are no cost to receive, but don't tell your spammer friend. Posted by: ronb on July 9, 2002 11:19 AM But to comment on the main point here ... I had a similar situation when buying a new PC a year or so ago. Free MSN for a year at Best Buy. Picked a user name at the register. Get home, set up PC, log on and there is porn spam waiting for me. What's it coming to? I really think this is going to be the death of the Internet as we have known it. I've read plenty of ideas on how spam might be dealt with. Most of the ideas plain aren't going to work. Can't legislate something if you can't enforce it from overseas. Can't charge for email unless EVERYONE, including overseas, charges. Anything that might work is going to split us off onto a separated sub-internet or require significant maintainence on the part of the user. It's too bad, really. The only thing I can think of is if you use a private domain name, spammers will be less apt to find it. But that costs you extra and you make your email address that much harder for people to remember. As for SMS, the network is a lot more under control, and with fewer players. The providers will have to deal with it or people will churn. Posted by: Wes on July 9, 2002 11:55 AM Thanks for the comments guys, I'll have to check my bill to see what I'm currently paying for my SMS package. I'm with Cingular and when I signed up earlier this year, the deal included a $4.99 messaging package. It's possible I've been moved to a newer, cheaper SMS plan or that I'm still paying a premium because I haven't bothered to look. :) On another note, did anyone who is subscribed to get notifications when I post an article (sign up on the front page if you missed it) get two copies of the notification email? I got two myself and I want to make sure the system isn't doubling up for some reason. Posted by: Steve on July 9, 2002 12:48 PM Re: Spam. Don't feel bad. I work for IBM and one of the hot items on the company intranet is how to deal with spam. Apparently some wise person listed the entire company directory on the IBM website a few years ago, thinking it would facilitate communications between potential customers and IBMers. What it did is open the entire company e-mail system to spam. They're able to filter a lot, but employees still get the occasional porn or commercial spam. Some folks are getting overloaded by it ... Sigh... Posted by: PDA Gerbil on July 9, 2002 01:00 PM You guys PAY to recieve SMS????? Weird. Here is the UK it's sender pays - a much better system. You phone, you pay, you SMS, you pay, fair really. RE: 10 cents per SMS Looking at Cingular's messaging pricing here: http://www.cingular.com/beyond_voice/im_pricing it would seem I'm getting the short end of the stick if I'm still paying $5 for 50 messages. Reminds me of my good 'ol days with Sprint PCS (what am I talking about, I still have two phones with them. :( ) when you'd have to call in every few months to switch to the new, cheaper pricing plan to get more hours and goodies. The catch was every time you changed your plan, you committed to another year of service from that point forward. Sneaky dogs. I'll call Cingular and get a better SMS plan if I don't already have it, besides I need to get GPRS up and running on my phone pronto. Posted by: Michael Ducker on July 9, 2002 03:52 PM I get 500 SMS messages for $2.99 extra from VoiceStream. That's on top of the 50 that are included. Plus, receiving SMS on voicestream AFAIK is always free :) Posted by: scottmag on July 9, 2002 03:55 PM I don't want to open a can of worms here, but this is one area where the U.K. "caller/sender pays" system is far superior. Spam is absolutely destoying the Internet's "killer app" - email. I just read a great article on spam and email filtering in the latest issue of TidBITS. Check it out here: http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-637.html I highly recommend it. (TidBITS itself is mainly Mac-focused, but I highly recommend it as well.) Scott Posted by: Wes on July 9, 2002 06:29 PM RE #2: 10 cents per SMS Ok so I've figured it out after looking at my bill and Cingular's offerings. I pay $4 a month to use my minutes as data minutes, then $2.99 for wireless messaging (100 messages apparently), with every message over my allotment costing me 10 cents. I knew I had a dime per message in there somewhere, just in the wrong place. I've updated the story a little to reflect my confusion of my Cingular bill where even the itemizations are itemized. Now I see why I simply look at the total, and if it's near what I expected to pay, I pay it. I'm just the type of sheep .. err I mean consumer the phone companies love for this very reason. So to conclude, this spam cost me 3 cents since I haven't used up my 100 messages, unless of course I get 50 free additional messages with my internet package, bringing the total cost to 2 cents. :) Posted by: Shane on July 10, 2002 11:03 AM I fixed my SMS message problem with getting spam. I'm a Voicestream customer so SNS messaging is included, but it eats into my minutes. I got a spam message once, and what I did was call the number back that was listed in the message, and told the answering service that answered that if they continue to send me messages to my phone, that it costs me money. If they did not immediately stop sending me messages I would report them to the FCC and also to the Better Business Bureau for harassment. It worked like a charm, and I never got another message. As for the Hotmail account, I've learned that you can't use your real name or any version of it. What I've found to be the biggest contributor of spam to my Hotmail mailbox is the Hotmail service itself. I hate my AOL account, because it gets so much crap from other AOL members. I've started to just report any and all objectional pieces of e-mail to AOL. Posted by: RLBorg on July 11, 2002 07:29 AM Well, MS hotmail seems to be a hot bed of spam. I don't use my name on my hotmail, but constantly get the junk anyway. My guess is that MS allows companies to spam to pay for the service. I get far more spam their than I get in any of my other email ids. Posted by: Arminius on July 11, 2002 07:41 AM You use Sprint??? HAHAHA :P Posted by: nobody on July 15, 2002 09:14 AM Wes, What would you expect from Microsoft services? I mean really, Hotmail, MSN? MSFT is like a junky and needs massive amounts of green in it's veins. Income from SPAM is probably part of their business plan for those "services". I'll bet if you read the fine print you'll see that you gave them the rights to everything that goes thru their servers. So don't write or email any articles on those accounts that you want to copyright. Netscape or Yahoo will be better about this. After all, they've not been found guilty of illegal business practices. ================================ My thanks to Wes Salmon for allowing the use of this old thread (not that old, really) on cellphone spam via Cingular. Patrick just now told me he has gone for years with his cell phone and never gotten any spam through the email function; now in the past two weeks, two blasts of it, five or ten pieces at a time. Lisa ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 13:52:39 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: T-Mobile HotSpot Announces Network Expansion, Roaming Agreements BELLEVUE, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 13, 2005--T-Mobile HotSpot, the largest carrier grade, commercial Wi-Fi network in the United States, today announced continued wireless broadband leadership with strong customer growth and usage statistics, and new roaming relationships. Since the service launch in 2002, T-Mobile HotSpot has evolved to become an expansive wireless broadband network. T-Mobile HotSpot meets the needs of mobile professionals and wireless data hungry consumers, whether they're on-the-go in the United States or roaming while traveling abroad. These same customers are accessing the service more frequently, using the service for longer periods of time and are moving more data across the network. Customers typically now spend 64 minutes online per session, up from 45 minutes last year. This growth in time spent online demonstrates that T-Mobile HotSpot's premium branded locations are where people already go and want to spend their time -- in some cases these locations serve as their office away from the office. The Wi-Fi generation has embraced T-Mobile HotSpot as a category leader, and that is being further proven as T-Mobile HotSpot today serves more than 450,000 unique customers who have paid for T-Mobile HotSpot service in the past 90 days. This number is in addition to previously reported T-Mobile voice and data customers. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49802170 ------------------------------ From: zortan@email.com Subject: Acadamy Services Nuisance Calls 215-320-0424 Date: 13 Jun 2005 13:10:55 -0700 This company has been calling and hanging up for over a month now. They are located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They apparently can not spell very well as the correct spelling is Academy. If anyone knows anything about this company please respond. ------------------------------ Date: 13 Jun 2005 18:34:17 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > Their URL is http://www.cellhire.com/. Cellhire is perfectly legitimate, but why pay $99/mo to rent a phone that you could buy for under $50, with airtime at about $2/min? R's, John ------------------------------ Date: 13 Jun 2005 18:47:31 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic ? Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA >> How difficult is it for them to 'decode' my modem [to ISP] traffic ? On modern modems at 9600 bps and up it's fairly hard. The traffic in both directions uses the full bandwidth, and each end does echo cancellation, subtracting out a time-delayed copy of what it sent, to recover the other end's signal. If you're sniffing in the middle without a copy of what's been sent from either end, I suppose it's possible with a sufficiently sophisticated signal processor, but it's not something you could do by plugging in an off the shelf modem and tweaking settings like you could do at 1200 bps. R's, John ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: 13 Jun 2005 12:07:36 -0700 > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Lisa Hancock, I really do not care for > your attitude on this. If books are good (because they were very > time-consuming and costly to prepare and edit) and web pages are bad > (basically for the lack of the same reasons) then how do you explain > some of the total crap which has been published over the years, such > as the literature published by A. Hitler and others in Germany during > the 1920-30's and much also in America? I didn't say "all books are good and are web pages are bad". What I discussed was the conditions that tend to make books a more authoritative source than web pages. Certainly some very trashy books have been and continue to be published and distributed. But I dare say it is harder for one to find such trashy books in normal channels than it is for one to find trashy stuff on the Internet. Finding paper copies of hardcore material requires some effort and some material may not be available to children; but that stuff is freely available on the Internet. My concern is that there is a lot of garbage masquerading as fact on the Internet. The controls that exist on other printed matter do not exist and the unscrupulous take advtg of that. (For instance, I learned long ago that many sites pulled up by a search engine are actually porn sites loaded with common key words to trigger a hit.) People have put up health-information sites and claimed to be a doctor when after some careful reading it proved to be garbage. Sure some of the Internet garbage is merely inconvenient, not harmful. Like when someone recommended a particular restaurant and I went to it, only to find it had been closed for several years. The poster who recommended it 'thought' he had been there very recently but then maybe it was a few years after all. This was an honest error and of no great harm. But I know there are some computer users out there who are quite malicious, and some of them will go to considerable trouble to post seriously misleading advice or information just to be an SOB or satisfy their own immaturity. They thrive on the anonymity of the Internet. Presently, there is no real check or balance on such web pages. There are some posters whom I feel know nothing (and probably more than a few who feel that way about me.) > And although I am only a mere web publisher and could not begin to > meet the expenses required of having an editorial/fact-checking > staff, my attitude is that the _truth will eventually prevail_ and > any sort of ethical web publisher tries his best to make room for > _all sides_ of an issue to be aired. That's all well and good. There is certainly useful information to be found, and I hope I've contributed a bit of it from time to time. But there is no guarantee all posts include _all sides_ of an issue to begin with. Further, there is no guarantee that any one post is totally accurate. > What you have done is give a slap in the face to everyone who has > attempted to present some social issue or another using the web as > the media of choice because of its low cost and ease of use. Not > everyone can _afford_ the cost of fancy printing and binding; all > they want to do is present the facts as they know them to the > largest number of people possible. Many or most of us under those > circumstances do at least use a kind of peer-review policy. PAT] I most certainly did not give any "slap in the face". I merely pointed out the fact that not all web pages may contain reliable authoritative information, and I stand by that statement. Yes, there's not guarantee that a healthcare book from the library is 100% authoritative, but at least a published book has an audit trail of reviews where as a web page does not. Discussing social issues are more of a matter of opinion so there's less of an issue of facts being right or wrong. Often people agree on a fact but disagree beyond that. For example: it is a fact that long distance rates went down after AT&T divested. I say that was merely a continuation of technical improvements that had been going on all along. But others disagree and say it was due to competition forcing prices down. Who is right? But I will note I've seen web sites who claimed that before divesture "the phone company offered any telephone set you wanted as long as it was black", which we all know is nonsense. I've also seen newsgroups ruined because of one or two people constantly flood the group with nasty postings disagreeing and disrupting every discussion. I don't think the truth gets out in such cases. I think moderated groups -- with a reasonable moderation policy -- are better to get out the "truth", but then many complain of censorship. Is the person with the biggest bullhorn saying the truth? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That 'biggest bullhorn' effect has come close to happening even here. As you may have noticed, Lisa, some of our readers do not like to be contradicted. You respond to them with a 5 K-byte message; their more agressive response comes back with all of the previous message quoted and another 10 K-byte reply. If you respond to that, then they return with a full quote and another 20-25 K-byte response. The more the discussion continues, the 'louder' and 'longer' the blast on the bullhorn. They'd be content, I suspect, if the entire Digest overflowed with one loud, long blast on the bullhorn. And what is the truth? Often times, my only honest answer can be 'you tell me' ... And regards the 'slap on the face', here is what you _actually_ said in issue 265 earlier today: > While anyone can write a book and pay to publish it, getting it > distributed and purchased is another matter entirely. > There is a big difference between book publishing and Internet web > pages. Anyone can set up a web page at very modest cost that looks > authoritative and accurate but may be actually garbage or even a scam. > On the other hand, to get a book published and distributed takes a lot > of effort. Reputable book publishers make some effort to edit serious > non-fiction offerings (not including fad books such as diet books). > Books for libraries are reviewed and rated. It is by no means a > perfect system; but my point is that there is at least some editing > and selection process going on at various levels; on the Internet > there is none whatsoever. You've heard, I assume of 'vanity presses' or 'vanity publishers'; people who pay to have their books printed. One of the biggest of the 'vanity presses' is a company called Unity Press (?). They print anything and everything handed to them; of course you, the author, have to pay them a couple grand up front. _If_ they can sell your book, then fine; if they cannot sell it they ship you the several hundred copies which were printed, and _you_ try to sell them, along with all the footnotes on each page, and the preface and the addendum in the back, etc. Either in hard cover, cloth or paper-back; they don't care ... they print it as you requested. Some of us just regard the internet as the "poor man's vanity press system". As we 'Inform Ourselves to Death' (see the Digest #263, over last weekend), it has truly gotten to the point that information has no value any longer. But Lisa, some of us do _try_ at least. 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 V24 #266 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Jun 14 15:16:43 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 71979150C3; Tue, 14 Jun 2005 15:16:43 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #267 Message-Id: <20050614191643.71979150C3@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 15:16:43 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.4 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Tue, 14 Jun 2005 15:17:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 267 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Third IEEE Int Conf on Management of Innovation, Technology (ICMIT2006) Cell Phones For Spies (Michael Quinn) Wi-Fi Liability: Potential Legal Risks Accessing, Operating (M Solomon) Koppel: Take My Privacy, Please! (Monty Solomon) DSL and Speakerphone Problems!? (Steven O.) China's Broadband Market Booms (Telecom dailyLead from USTA) Re: Cellular Phone Spam (Mark Crispin) Re: Cellular Phone Spam (NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info) Re: Companies Subvert Search Results to Squelch Criticism (B Margolin) Re: 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic? (PrinceGunter) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Lisa Hancock) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Fred Atkinson) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: ICMIT2006 Subject: Third IEEE Int Conf on Management of Innovation and Technology Date: 13 Jun 2005 19:53:50 -0700 =========== CALL FOR PAPERS - ICMIT2006 =========== www.icmit.net Third IEEE Int Conf on Management of Innovation and Technology - Managing Innovation in Emerging Markets 21-23 June 2006, Singapore Organized by: IEEE Engineering Management Society, Singapore Chapter Co-organizers and supporting organizations IEEE Singapore Section Center for Management of Science and Technology About ICMIT2006 ICMIT2006 continues a series of international conferences (ICMIT2000, ICMIT2002 and IEMC2004) devoted to the area of innovation and technology management first initiated by the IEEE Engineering Management Society Singapore Chapter. These conferences aim to provide a platform for international scholars to meet and exchange ideas in exciting locations within Asia. With the conference theme "Managing Innovation in Emerging Markets" the organizers hope to channel attention to emerging geographical markets with widespread impact such as China and India and the potential markets for emerging products and technologies. The management challenges for these emerging markets are numerous and multi-faceted. How should entrepreneurs exploit the emerging markets? How should the energy appetite of China and India be managed? What and how specific innovations (technological and otherwise) could be introduced into these markets to make more efficient use of energy? With China now being the country with the highest number of mobile phones in use, how will 3-G technologies be exploited and how should product and technology providers position themselves there? Evolving around these and similar questions there must be a lot of scope for all those interested in innovation and technology management to think about and to exchange ideas at the conference. In addition, managing innovation to create affordable and successful products and services targeted for the developing nations, such as disruptive innovation, would be of great interest to both academics and industrialist/entrepreneurs. We invite papers for presentation at the conference. All interested persons should submit one page abstracts (500-750 words) through the conference website (www.icmit.net). Each submission will be peer reviewed for technical merit and content. Papers accepted for presentation will appear in the Conference Proceedings provided at least one author registers for the conference. The full paper shall have to be IEEE Explore compliant. Topics for the conference include but are not limited to the following: Technology Management New Product Development Innovation Policy and Management Entrepreneurship Managing IT and E-Commerce Organizational Culture Human Resource Management Intellectual Property Knowledge Management R&D and Risk Management Project Management Six Sigma and Quality Management Supply Chain Management Business Strategy Sustainable Development Globalization Patent Strategy and Mapping Management/industry case studies Publication Proceedings will enter the IEEE book broker program and papers are indexed in common Engineering abstract databases (COMPENDEX/INSPEC etc). Special issues of selected/expanded papers will be published in refereed journals. Deadlines Submission of Abstract: 1 January 2006 Notification of Acceptance: 1 February 2006 Camera-Ready Copy: 1 April 2006 Online submission http://cms.inmeet.com/delegate/login/login.asp?confid=conf85 General Chair: CC HANG Program Committee Chair: KH CHAI (International Program committee is being formed) Organizing Committee Chairman: M XIE Publicity Chair: R JIAO Finance Chair: V H MOK Logistic Chair: S L HO Public Relations Chair: H K TANG Sponsorship Chair: A YEE Publication Chair: A K VARMA Exhibition Chair: D L WAIKAR Industry Liaison Chair: S J PASSEY Organizing Committee Member: B HE Y C NG For further information, please contact: ICMIT2006 Secretariat C/O Integrated Meetings Specialist 1122A Serangoon Road, Singapore 328206 Tel: (65) 6295 5790, Fax: (65) 6295 5792, E-mail: icmit2006@inmeet.com.sg Web: www.icmit.net ------------------------------ Subject: Cell Phones For Spies Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 13:57:57 -0400 From: Michael Quinn This is an excerpt from a newsletter entitled "NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: M. E. KABAY ON SECURITY, 06/09/05" forwarded to me by a colleague. I'm not personally familiar with the newsletter or Mr. Kabay, but I thought the subject might be of interest to Telecom Digest readers. Contact data for the author is listed at the bottom, rest has been snipped in the interest of brevity. Fair use caveat may apply. Regards, Mike NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: M. E. KABAY ON SECURITY 06/09/05 Today's focus: Cell phones for spies By M. E. Kabay Anyone can use even an ordinary mobile phone as a microphone by covertly dialing out; for example, one can call a recording device at a listening station and then simply place the phone in a pocket or briefcase before entering a conference room. However, my friend and colleague Chey Cobb recently pointed out a device from Nokia that is unabashedly being advertised as a "Spy Phone" because of additional features that threaten corporate security. This $1,800 device works like a normal mobile phone but also allows the owner to program a special phone number that turns the device into a transmission device under remote control: http://wirelessimports.com/ProductDetail.asp?ProductID=347 In addition, the phone can be programmed for silent operation: "By a simple press of a button, a seemingly standard cell phone device switches into a mode in which it seems to be turned off. However, in this deceitful mode the phone will automatically answer incoming calls, without any visual or audio indications whatsoever ... A well placed bug phone can be activated on demand from any remote location (even out of another country). Such phones can also prove valuable in business negotiations. The spy phone owner leaves the meeting room, (claiming a restroom break, for instance), calls the spy phone and listens to the ongoing conversation. On return the owners' negotiating positions may change dramatically." It makes more sense than ever to ban mobile phones from any meeting that requires high security. David Bennahum wrote an interesting article in December 2003 about these questions and pointed out that businesses outside the U.S. are turning to cell phone jamming devices (illegal in the U.S.) to block mobile phone communications in a secured area. Bennahum writes, "According to the FCC, cell phone jammers should remain illegal. Since commercial enterprises have purchased the rights to the spectrum, the argument goes, jamming their signals is a kind of property theft." Seems to me there would be obvious benefits in allowing movie houses, theaters, concert halls, museums, places of worship and secured meeting locations to suppress such traffic as long as the interference were clearly posted. No one would be forced to enter the location if they did not agree with the ban, and I'm sure there would be some institutions catering to those who actually _like_ sitting next to someone talking on a cell phone in the middle of a quiet passage at a concert. Bennahum mentioned another option -- this one quite legal even in the U.S.: cell phone detectors such as the Cellular Activity Analyzer from NetLine: http://www.netline.co.il/Netline/CAAdetector.htm This handheld computer lets you spot unauthorized mobile phones in your meeting place so that you act accordingly. Finally, one can create a Faraday cage that blocks radio waves by lining the secured facility with appropriate materials such as copper mesh or, more recently, metal-impregnated wood: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage A high-security version of such a room is called a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) in U.S. military security jargon. RELATED EDITORIAL LINKS Vendors tout vulnerability mgmt. wares Network World, 06/06/05 http://www.networkworld.com/nlsec2472 Internet security ... writ very small Network World, 06/06/05 http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/060605widernet.html?rl To contact: M. E. Kabay M. E. Kabay, Ph.D., CISSP, is Associate Professor in the Division of Business and Management at Norwich University in Northfield, Vt. Mich can be reached by e-mail mailto:mkabay@norwich.edu and his Web site http://www2.norwich.edu/mkabay/index.htm NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. *** 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, M.E. Kabay and Network World. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 09:17:30 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Wi-Fi Liability: Potential Legal Risks in Accessing, Operating http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=692881 Wi-Fi Liability: Potential Legal Risks in Accessing and Operating Wireless Internet ROBERT V. HALE II Independent Santa Clara Computer and High Technology Law Journal, Vol. 21, p. 543 Abstract: Suppose you turn on your laptop while sitting at the kitchen table at home and respond OK to a prompt about accessing a nearby wireless Internet access point owned and operated by a neighbor. What potential liability may ensue from accessing someone else's wireless access point? How about intercepting wireless connection signals? What about setting up an open or unsecured wireless access point in your house or business? Attorneys can expect to grapple with these issues and other related questions as the popularity of wireless technology continues to increase. This paper explores several theories of liability involving both the accessing and operating of wireless Internet, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, wiretap laws, as well as trespass to chattels and other areas of common law. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of key policy considerations. Keywords: Wi-Fi, WLAN, WAP, wireless, IEEE, 802.11b, 802.11a, 802.11g, CFAA, HotSpot, VOIP, Sablan, Verio, AOL, Security, encryption, internet, ISP, wardriving, warchaulking http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=692881 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 09:25:16 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Koppel: Take My Privacy, Please! By TED KOPPEL THE Patriot Act - brilliant! Its critics would have preferred a less stirring title, perhaps something along the lines of the Enhanced Snooping, Library and Hospital Database Seizure Act. But then who, even right after 9/11, would have voted for that? Precisely. He who names it and frames it, claims it. The Patriot Act, however, may turn out to be among the lesser threats to our individual and collective privacy. There is no end to what we will endure, support, pay for and promote if only it makes our lives easier, promises to save us money, appears to enhance our security and comes to us in a warm, cuddly and altogether nonthreatening package. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/opinion/13koppel.html?ex=1276315200&en=ca684bc680a0d6c0&ei=5090 ------------------------------ From: Steven O. Subject: DSL and Speakerphone Problems!? Reply-To: null@null.com Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 04:15:38 GMT Ever since I got DSL (from Verizon), I have been having problems with the speakerphone service. I've tried two or three phones, and for some reason, although I can hear people speaking when I try to use the speakerphone on my regular phone, no one can hear me when I speak. Has anyone else had similar problems with DSL service? For what it's worth, the volume seems fine both when I am speaking and listening on the handset, and also when I listen using the speakphone. The problem only occurs with trying to speak into the speakerphone -- no one can hear me. The phone is on an outlet that is also connected to the DSL modem (a Westell 2200) with Linksys Router. There is also a connection to a plain old modem in the PC, and an answering machine. However, I tried connecting the phones (again, I've tried several) to another outlet that has no computer or other loads, and I still can't get the speakerphone to hear me (on any of the phones I tried). Any suggestions? Steve O. "Spying On The College Of Your Choice" -- How to pick the college that is the Best Match for a high school student's needs. http://www.SpyingOnTheCollegeOfYourChoice.com ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 12:14:49 EDT From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: China's Broadband Market Booms Telecom dailyLead from USTA June 14, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22325&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * China's broadband market booms BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Nokia unveils new phones * Siemens sets sights on IPTV market * AOL to push free music, video * Sprint posts details of EV-DO launch * Free Wi-Fi turns into enemy for some cafe owners USTA SPOTLIGHT * In the Telecom Bookstore: Phone Facts Plus 2005 EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Singapore TV station to launch show on 3G phones REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * Report: Illegal file-sharing not major drag on music business Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22325&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: Mark Crispin Subject: Re: Cellular Phone Spam Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 15:38:58 -0700 Organization: Networks & Distributed Computing On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, was written: > Case in point, last night before bed my phone beeps, I have an > SMS waiting. This is odd in itself since I rarely get an SMS unless > I'm at a trade show or other event where people are trying to catch up > with me. I check the message, and low and behold ... it's spam, and > not even well targeted spam since it's a message offering me a > back-to-school loan. What made this one especially annoying is that > SMS messages aren't free for the most part, I buy 'em in blocks and > this SMS spam just directly cost me up to a dime! Sure a dime is chump > change, but I'm a chump who doesn't like being advertised to at my own > expense. Call your cell phone provider, tell them the date/time/contents of the spam, and demand that your account be credited. If it's Verizon, they may already have done this for you. If they won't credit you, tell them that you want to close your cell phone account immediately. You'll get sent over to account retention, and when they hear that it's over a $.10 charge for SMS spam they'll credit you. Trust me. I don't know what happens now that Cingular owns it, but the old AT&T Wireless didn't charge for incoming SMS. Nor, for that matter, does Dobson Cellular One (which is who took over my AT&T Wireless account in Alaska). IIRC, Sprint doesn't charge for incoming SMS either. > To compound my frustration, this morning before venturing out into the > unbelievably crazy morning rush hour here in Seattle, (5 miles in 30 > minutes, but that's another story entirely) I check my newly created > Hotmail account that I plan to use for IM'ing at my new job. Guess > what, more spam. Already I'm a marketing target and the email address > is not even 12 hours old. I had that happen to me. I opened the Hotmail account, never sent anything on it or announced the email address, yet within a few hours it was getting porn spam. I immediately closed it, and told them the reason why. There's some hole through which spammers are able to collect Hotmail addresses. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The very same thing happened to me when I opened an AOL account a few years ago. 'The hole through which spammers collect new addresses' is usually some technical employee (at the email system in question) has cut a deal with some spammer to provide them with new account names. I complained about that very same situation regards AOL, a couple people here on the telecom mailing list (or maybe they were from the c.d.t. side of things, I do not remember) immediatly poo-poo'ed me and said "not so, the spammer was using a dictionary attack method". I guess by coincidence in his forced searching, he had gotten up to the letter /T/ as in 'Townson' about the time I signed up. It only took ten minutes after I was installed on AOL for the first of the porn spams to arrive. All a mere coincidence I was told. And what do you know ... 'mere coincidence using a dictionary attack' struck again, in your case at Hotmail within a few hours. Now do you see why I say those of us who complain vigorously about spam and make suggestions on ways to end it are treated like imbiciles, or perhaps mentally-challenged kindergarteners. We are not supposed to be able to add two plus two and get the right answer. And given the preponderance of evidence on the net (spammers/virus writers running rampant, a supervising authority [ICANN] as corrupt as can be, and many sysadmins who are frankly, too smart for their own good), why should we think any differently? PAT] ------------------------------ From: NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info Subject: Re: Cellular Phone Spam Date: 13 Jun 2005 19:11:26 -0700 > The only thing I can think of is if you use a private domain name, > spammers will be less apt to find it. But that costs you extra and you > make your email address that much harder for people to remember. The domain name I am using right now only cost me one dollar for one year. I will be selling tho as I own many. Each one allows 100 disposible email address to forward email anywhere. I have some forwarding to my Virgin Mobile phone. If I get too much spam I can close an email. My "NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info" started getting spam within 24 hours of using it on Usenet. Needless to say it is now REALLY NOTvalid. --------- 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 at https://www.OneSuite.com/ No monthly fee or minimum. Use Promotion/SuiteTreat Code: FREEoffer23 for some FREE time [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Oh, yet another netter victimized by the 'mere coincidence of a spammer using directory attacks'. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Barry Margolin Subject: Re: Companies Subvert Search Results to Squelch Criticism Organization: Symantec Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 20:38:37 -0400 In article , Steve Sobol wrote: > Monty Solomon wrote: >> It's not illegal, but it's SEO gone bad. Companies such as Quixtar are >> using Google-bombing, link farms and Web spam pages to place positive >> sites in the top search results -- which pushes the negative ones >> down. > Yeah, and there may be no laws against it, but if it's done on a large > enough basis you can bet they'll get sued. On what grounds? Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu Arlington, MA *** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me *** [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: They don't need any 'grounds'. 'Grounds' only belong to coffee you have prepared. When large organizations, i.e. film and recording industries do not get their way, they _always_ file suit; it costs them virtually nothing, where it costs small web site owners and regular users a slight fortune to defend themselves against frivilous lawsuits, which is what such a lawsuit (as manipulating a search engine) would be. PAT] ------------------------------ From: PrinceGunter Subject: Re: 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic ? Date: 14 Jun 2005 08:41:37 -0700 > I believe my 'voice line' is being tapped [the line feeds through the > 'opponents' switchboard]. Who is this "opponent?" If it's an LEA, you've been PWNED. CALEA requirements dictate that all your communications be stored in a massive bucket, where the LEA can expend all the time and technology necessary to decode your communications. Not even encryption will prevent your messages from being read, if the LEA really want to read them bad enough. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: 14 Jun 2005 07:45:48 -0700 > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: > As we 'Inform Ourselves to Death' (see the Digest #263, over last > weekend), it has truly gotten to the point that information has no > value any longer. But Lisa, some of us do _try_ at least. PAT] Regarding vanity press, the reality is that most books printed that way end up in the author's basement. I recall reading a "tell-all" book about the phone company a disgruntled employee wrote years ago. He made fun of the standardized office layout, decor, and furnishings of each level of management. His books had an occassional point of interest, but most of it was griping of someone who just didn't fit in a strictly standardized world (and a lot of people do have trouble with that.) If they had the Internet back then, I bet he have a huge web page collecting gripes from every person who had a fight with their service rep. My argument is that sure -- there were plenty of disgruntled Bell System employees and plenty of customers poorly served. But one must look at the bigger picture of the TOTAL number of happy employees and satisfied customers. I doubt the above writer would bother to mention that statistic on his webpage. I doubt too many people read his book (I found it at a yard sale). But with the ease of the Internet and search engines it may have reached more people and spread inaccurate information. Another concerns is that information overload depreciates the value of information. Part of that concern is the ease of Internet information. I've been in a number of discussions (both on-line and off-line) about issues where debaters use Internet sources to bolster their case. But often times those sources tell only a small part of the story. For issues that interest me, I have printed copy references from either books I own or library resources that tell a bigger picture and different story. For example, in a debate about public transit in Philadelphia, several people claimed the system was losing money for years and near collapse. I have the company's annual reports that show that claim was wrong. In debates about Amtrak, I have printed literature stating Amtrak's purpose was to supplement highways and airways that were unable to handle all national travel needs. The ease of the Internet/computer databases are a wonderful tool and I don't dispute that at all (more below). But I remain troubled that the Internet has too much garbage on it drowning out valid information. * * * Admittedly, researching material in print is tiring. I recently did some research the old fashioned way -- pulling out bound indexes, scanning them multiple times in multiple years for various keywords, then writing down the hits. Then, I searched the microfilm rolls for journals and dates for the hits. Then, the individual roll of microfilm had to threaded through the reader and slowly searched sequentially for the particular issue date and finally the article. Sometimes the reward for this would be merely two sentences. THEN, I have to start all over with another reel. After a while this gets quite tiring. The only saving grace is that no one seems to use microfilm anymore and I have the reader room all to myself. ------------------------------ From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Reply-To: fatkinson@mishmash.com Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 01:35:37 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net On 13 Jun 2005 12:07:36 -0700, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote: > Certainly some very trashy books have been and continue to be > published and distributed. But I dare say it is harder for one to > find such trashy books in normal channels than it is for one to find > trashy stuff on the Internet. Finding paper copies of hardcore > material requires some effort and some material may not be available > to children; but that stuff is freely available on the Internet. Is it really harder [to find trashy books]? Have you ever visited a pornographic book store? If not, do you deny they are out there or what kind of books are distributed? Have you ever seen 'The People versus Larry Flynt'? > My concern is that there is a lot of garbage masquerading as fact on > the Internet. The controls that exist on other printed matter do not > exist and the unscrupulous take advtg of that. (For instance, I > learned long ago that many sites pulled up by a search engine are > actually porn sites loaded with common key words to trigger a hit.) > People have put up health-information sites and claimed to be a doctor > when after some careful reading it proved to be garbage. And there's a lot of stuff published by hate groups and other extremists, too. Do we give up freedom of speech to keep this stuff from being disseminated? > Sure some of the Internet garbage is merely inconvenient, not harmful. > Like when someone recommended a particular restaurant and I went to > it, only to find it had been closed for several years. The poster who > recommended it 'thought' he had been there very recently but then > maybe it was a few years after all. This was an honest error and of > no great harm. If we shot everyone who was wrong about something, most of us would be dead, wouldn't we? > But I know there are some computer users out there who are quite > malicious, and some of them will go to considerable trouble to post > seriously misleading advice or information just to be an SOB or > satisfy their own immaturity. They thrive on the anonymity of the > Internet. Presently, there is no real check or balance on such web > pages. There are telephone users who are quite malicious (ask the telephone company as they have to investigate obscene and/or harrassing callers from time to time), their are licensed automobile drivers who are quite malicious (I've nearly been hit by more than a few), there are truck drivers who are quite malicious (and I drove eighteen wheelers for just under a year and I know), there are police officers who are quite malicious, and the list goes on and on. But for the most part, the intentionally malicious ones are very much in the minority. And I've had more than one police or security officer in trouble with his superiors over completely inappropriate behavior that I observed. That is because I determined it was inappropriate and I dealt with it by contacting superiors. What if I hadn't been afforded the opportunity to learn to be able to determine that it was indeed wrong? The behavior they exhibited and inflicted upon others would have continued. I once wrote an article that was published (in Telecom Digest) about how I had been confronted by someone who was only pretending to be a police officer so he could cut in front of a long row of people in line at the drive through. Because of the training I'd received in the Citizen's Academy program (at the county police academy), it only took me a moment or two to determine that he was a phony. I called the county police and had them after him. The county police checked him out (through the license tag number I provided them) and determined that I was absolutely right, that he was not a police officer. They were able to investigate him and deal with the matter because I had learned to make a good call on something like that. And it goes back to not believing everything you read or hear. Kids have to learn to balance it sometime. Depriving them of that information robs them of the chance to learn to decide for themselves. When my mother taught English, she was called into the principal's office one day and asked if 'The Scarlet Letter' was actually on her approved reading list. She said that it was. The principal was shocked. Then she asked him if he'd ever read 'The Scarlet Letter'. His reply was that he had not. Hmm. And he believed that kids shouldn't be reading it? Based upon having never read it himself? And what about schools that took books like that off the library shelves? What about Huckleberry Finn? Tom Sawyer? And the list goes on and on? With Mark Twain's writing style as it was, it would be be considered quite racist by today's standards. Do we censor it? Of course not. > There are some posters whom I feel know nothing (and probably more > than a few who feel that way about me.) And it is the reader's job to decide how they feel about who is posting or writing and whether their views should be taken seriously. It is not anyone else's perogative to decide for them. There isn't anyone on Telecom Digest that I agree with one hundred per cent of the time. Are we really protecting the kids when we deprive them of the opportunity to learn to decide for themselves? Or are we going to have to protect them from it all their lives? And if they don't learn, who's going to protect *their* kids? And what about when we pass on and leave them to their own judgement? > That's all well and good. There is certainly useful information to be > found, and I hope I've contributed a bit of it from time to time. But > there is no guarantee all posts include _all sides_ of an issue to > begin with. Further, there is no guarantee that any one post is > totally accurate. There never is that guarantee at any time. In fact, it rarely happens. > I most certainly did not give any "slap in the face". I merely > pointed out the fact that not all web pages may contain reliable > authoritative information, and I stand by that statement. Yes, > there's not guarantee that a healthcare book from the library is 100% > authoritative, but at least a published book has an audit trail of > reviews where as a web page does not. You should think about how you were perceived, since he said that to you. What you say about books having audit trails is not always true. There are a number of books written with unsupported information. When I was doing two-way radio work, I was frequently approached by Citizen's Banders asking for help with their radio equipment. I always declined, citing that I couldn't do it on company time (on the advice of my immediate superiors). Some of the things these CBers would tell me (and the other very experienced radio technicians I worked with) were off this planet. One told me that the trucker's antennas were for keeping you from messing up your SWR while you have a 'huge metallic load' behind you. Another told a coworker of mine that putting an audio amplifier between your microphone and your radio caused more output power to the radio because there was more input power to the audio. I rarely tried to explain to them the error of their information because about two thirds of the time they would tell you you didn't know what you were talking about even though you were a licensed and trained radio technician. But, I'd never deprive them of their right to write about this, ignorant as it is. If the kids don't learn about radio theory, how could they learn to tell that this information is wrong? These people obviously never had. So depriving them of access to information about ham radio on QSL Net (most of which is written by people who have been examined by the FCC and found to have a reasonable understanding of radio theory) is a 'good thing'? I don't think so. > Discussing social issues are more of a matter of opinion so there's > less of an issue of facts being right or wrong. Often people agree on > a fact but disagree beyond that. For example: it is a fact that long > distance rates went down after AT&T divested. I say that was merely a > continuation of technical improvements that had been going on all > along. But others disagree and say it was due to competition forcing > prices down. Who is right? So, no one should exercise an opinion because it *might* be wrong? Is that what you are actually saying? Regarding divestiture, I'd have to disagree with your position. Have you ever studied economics and the principles thereof? The telephone system never improved all that much over the years (at least, to the perception of the end user) until the Bell companies had to compete. Thus, competition played a big role in bringing prices down. And the end user got a lot more say so about his/her telephone service(s) and got what they wanted at prices they could afford. I remember when an answering machine could only be provided and installed by the phone company. The cost was enormous and there were no other alternatives. Then came Carterphone, thank goodness. And then came competition between carriers ... and the walls came a tumbling down (with apologies to 'Joshua'). Because everyone was trying to provide something that the other carriers didn't provide (to target their niche in the marketplace), the technology began to develop and new things were offered. I often doubt that we'd have ever seen the Internet if the industry hadn't become competitive (or at least not for many more years to come). > But I will note I've seen web sites who claimed that before divesture > "the phone company offered any telephone set you wanted as long as it > was black", which we all know is nonsense. And it is for the reader to judge as it appears that you did in this case (which is fine). But you haven't the right to decide for me whether I should believe it is true or not or for you to censor it because you don't agree with it. In this case, I happen to agree with you. But then, I might not have on another issue or two. > I've also seen newsgroups ruined because of one or two people > constantly flood the group with nasty postings disagreeing and > disrupting every discussion. I don't think the truth gets out in such > cases. I think moderated groups -- with a reasonable moderation > policy -- are better to get out the "truth", but then many complain of > censorship. Is the person with the biggest bullhorn saying the truth? No. War boards rarely do. But 'moderating' doesn't mean censorship. It means governing behavior so that all points of view can be presented in a non-hostile and constructive manner. A good moderator regulates behavior more so than content. And with that, I'll point out that I just paid Mr. Townson a big complement. Thanks, Pat, for doing such an effective job of moderating. Pat generally publishes even in the event he is in complete disagreement with the user. He might attach opposing comments from the editor's desk, but that's what it's all about. He published yours even though he took issue with your position, didn't he, Lisa? Fred [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Here is a question for the collected readership: _If_ Bell had not gotten divested, and was still in charge of most everything relating to telecommunications, what would the internet be like today? Would it all be run by 'the telephone company'? Would we be getting all our attachments and peripherals from the telephone company? I suggest that might be the case. What do the rest of you think? 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 V24 #267 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Jun 14 22:37:04 2005 Received: from localhost by massis.lcs.mit.edu with SpamAssassin (2.63 2004-01-11); Tue, 14 Jun 2005 22:38:09 -0400 From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #268 Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 22:37:02 -0400 (EDT) TELECOM Digest Tue, 14 Jun 2005 22:35:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 268 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Yahoo Buys Internet Phone Provider Dialpad Communications (Lisa Minter) Norwegian Start up Opens Skype to all Mobile Users (Lisa Minter) EBay Ends Live 8 Ticket Sale After Geldof Jibe (Lisa Minter) Another Kiddie Porn Sweep Nets Sixty More Arrests (Lisa Minter) Spanish Firm Aims to Revolutionize Online Music (Lisa Minter) 1A2 Ringer Matrix Blocks (Henry Cabot Henhouse III) Please Explain LATA (pisicuta60634@yahoo.com) Recommendations Wanted for Good External Faxmodems (Colin) Re: 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic (Laura Halliday) Re: Bellsouth Caller ID (Isaiah Beard) Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe (Sandyman) Re: Koppel: Take My Privacy, Please! (Lisa Hancock) Re: Cellular Phone Spam (John Levine) Re: Cellular Phone Spam (Mark Crispin) Re: Cellular Phone Spam (Jared) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Dean M.) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Lisa Hancock) The Internet If There Had Been no Divestiture (Lisa Hancock) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Yahoo Buys Internet Phone Provider DialPad Communications Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 17:24:07 -0500 By RACHEL KONRAD, AP Technology Writer Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news) said Tuesday it had acquired DialPad Communications Inc., a 6-year-old company whose software lets people to place calls over the Internet for a fraction of the cost of regular telephone service. The companies would not release financial details of the deal, which closed Monday. The Internet's leading portal will use DialPad to expand its product array in the burgeoning niche of Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, said company spokeswoman Joanna Stevens. The technology converts conversations into data packets that traverse the Internet over broadband connections. Some in the industry think VoIP will eventually nudge the 130-year-old circuit-switched phone network into obsolescence. Milpitas-based DialPad, which has about 40 employees, competes with a growing number of startups that reroute calls from computers to servers to telephones. Current mainstream VoIP services let callers use standard phone handsets or even cell phones to make or receive calls, a big improvement on the computer-to-computer of early Internet telephony. Depending on the subscription plan, Dialpad charges as little as 1.7 cents per minute for calls, including international calls to more than 200 countries. DialPad subscribers can also buy a prepaid VoIP calling card. The company has been offering calling plans for about two years and has more than 14 million users. New products from Yahoo that integrate DialPad technology could debut within a month, Stevens said. It's unclear what Yahoo might charge for VoIP service involving calls to traditional phones. "We still need to integrate the technology and roll out a product, and we haven't disclosed those details," Stevens said. The acquisition is Yahoo's second VoIP announcement in less than a month. In May, Yahoo introduced a test version of its instant messaging software with an Internet telephony component that lets users make free computer-to-computer calls. On the Net: http://www.yahoo.com http://www.dialpad.com Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Norwegian Start up Opens Skype to all Mobile Users Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 14:34:10 -0500 An invention by a Norwegian start-up company allows consumers to use their everyday mobile phones to make free long distance Skype calls over the Internet, for the price of a local call. The company, called IPdrum, said on Tuesday its software enables consumers to call their own personal computer (PC) from any standard mobile phone and set up a Skype call over the Internet. Skype calls can also be received on that cellphone. Skype's free software is used by 42 million individuals and the company is adding 150,000 new customers every day. The three-year-old firm, with offices in London and Luxembourg, said it was not involved in the project. Skype users usually make phone calls sitting at front of their PC with an attached headset, limiting its usability. The trick with IPdrum's software is that a second mobile phone is connected to the PC with a small USB cable. IPdrum's software uses that cellphone to set up a connection between the Skype application on the computer and the consumer's cellphone in his or her pocket. "You still need to pay for the local call between the two cellphones, but most mobile operators offer flat rates for local calls or selected numbers," said IPdrum's boss Kjetil Mathisen. The product will be available worldwide by mid-August for a price between $60 and $80. The company has a distributor in Europe and is in talks with distributors in Asia and America. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: EBay Ends Live 8 Ticket Sale After Geldof Jibe Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 14:35:47 -0500 By Kate Holton Internet auction site eBay ended a sale of free Live 8 tickets on Tuesday after Bob Geldof, the organizer of the awareness-raising concerts, labeled the site an "electronic pimp" and urged people to swamp it. Tickets to the star-studded London show, which aims to pressure world leaders into fighting poverty in Africa, were given away to the winners of a text lottery. But they immediately started appearing on eBay for hundreds of pounds. Geldof criticized the site and urged people to swamp it with bogus offers of tickets or massively inflated bids. "What I would ask you to do tonight is to get on eBay and mess up the system," he told Sky News. "Everyone should go on and pretend they have got tickets for Live 8 ... otherwise go on and bid ridiculous amounts of money for the tickets already on the site," said the feisty Irish rocker. His appeal did not go unheeded. Within minutes bids which had been running in the hundreds of pounds surged to 10 million pounds. eBay, which earlier on Tuesday rejected Geldof's call to end the sale saying there was nothing illegal about it, capitulated. "eBay has decided to not allow the resale of Live 8 tickets on the site," a spokesman told Reuters. "We have listened to eBay's community of users and the message has been clear -- that they do not want the tickets to be sold on the site. Once we are made aware of any Live 8 tickets being resold they will be taken down," he added. Geldof organized the July 2 concert 20 years after his Live Aid sensation which raised money to help the starving in Ethiopia. Rather than raise money, the 2005 concert aims to raise the profile of African poverty and influence leaders of the G8 group of industrialized nations who meet in Scotland next month. Four other concerts will be held in Paris, Rome, Berlin and Philadelphia on the same day and a sixth on July 6 in Edinburgh -- the day the two-day G8 summit starts in nearby Gleneagles. More than 2 million text messages were sent by people hoping to get tickets in the draw. Performers for the London concert include a reformed Pink Floyd, U2, Paul McCartney, Coldplay, Madonna and REM. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Here in the USA, we Episcopalians had been giving money to help with the various social problems and poverty in Africa; not through concert ticket sales or anything like that -- more just get in pocket, take out money and hand it over, and as a church, Episcopalians have _almost_ as much money as Catholics, coming from the same historical background, etc. But the Africans said "we do not want your money any longer" and asked us to quit giving it, which we did. Its something to do with our beliefs with which they disagree. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Another Kiddie Porn Sweep Nets Sixty More Arrests Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 17:32:23 -0500 Child Porn Sweep Nets Nearly 60 Busts Posted by Robert T DeMarco on 06/13/05 @ 23:10:43 A task force established to fight internet crimes against children carried out more than 50 search warrants this past week netting a few local (in the Carolinas) arrests. The State Bureau of Investigation has carried out more than 50 search warrants in the past week to fight the spread of child pornography, says Attorney General Roy Cooper. The North Carolina Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force led by the SBI has served a total of 58 search warrants since June 6 on suspects in Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Charlotte and other cities across North Carolina. The joint operation involved 45 law enforcement agencies across the state and is expected to yield charges that will be prosecuted by local district attorneys and federal prosecutors. Already 10 of the searches have resulted in arrests of suspects with several other cases pending forensic review of computer evidence seized by the SBI during the searches. "Those who trade in child pornography exploit children and seek to make a profit off of their victims' pain," said Cooper. "Using technology and good cooperation with local and federal law enforcement, SBI agents have been able to bust dozens of suspects who thought they were safe sitting behind a computer screen." The operation began in October 2004 with SBI investigations that culminated in a statewide sweep over the past week to fight the growing use of file sharing programs to trade and distribute child pornography. Investigators with the SBI Computer Crimes Unit worked with investigators from across the country to locate Internet addresses in North Carolina that were being used to share child pornography videos and images via peer-to-peer networks. One well known example of a peer-to-peer network is the Fastrack Network over which programs like KaZaa operate and allow users to share files with each other. Users of the peer-to-peer software have been targeted in the past for sharing illegal copies of everything from software to music. Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) is a nationwide network of law enforcement agencies and prosecutors dedicated to protecting children from online dangers. The United States Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention founded ICAC and provides funding for it. The SBI has been a member of ICAC since 2000. To help local law enforcement track criminals who use the Internet to exploit children, Cooper has also asked legislators to expand the SBI Computer Crimes Unit that he helped create by adding four new field agents. The agents would partner with the ICAC Task Force to crack down on child pornography and online predators who cruise the Internet in search of victims. In addition, Cooper is seeking three more computer forensic experts to recover and analyze information from computers submitted to the SBI Crime Lab. The NC House on Friday indicated that it would include funding for all seven of these new agents in its budget. A bill backed by Cooper that will give SBI agents and local law enforcement more tools to catch predators who pursue children online recently passed the NC House and Senate. The Child Exploitation Prevention Act would make it a felony for an Internet predator to solicit anyone, including an undercover officer, he or she believes to be a child. Under current law, a predator who solicits an officer posing as a minor could only be charged with a misdemeanor. The measure would also require convicted online predators to be added to the state's Sex Offender Registry and to provide DNA samples for the state's convicted offender database. "Good law enforcement is essential to cracking down on criminals who use the Internet to hurt our children, but parents also need to get involved," said Cooper. "By using parental controls and setting household rules for Internet use, parents can give their kids the wonders of the Internet while shutting out its dangers." The sweep netted several local people: -56 Male White Burlington Alamance SW NC SBI, Burlington Police 6/10/2005 Pending Forensic Review - 18 Male White Winston-Salem Forsyth SW NC SBI, Winston-Salem PD 6/8/2005 Pending Forensic Review - 28 Male White Winston-Salem Forsyth SW NC SBI, Winston-Salem PD 6/8/2005 Pending Forensic Review - 25 Male White Greensboro Guilford SW NC SBI, Greensboro PD 6/7/2005 6/7/2005 Poss Intent to Sell And Deliver Greensboro Guilford SW NC SBI, Greensboro PD 6/7/2005 Pending Forensic Review - 33 Male White Greensboro Guilford SW NC SBI, Greensboro PD 6/7/2005 6/7/2005 2nd Degree Sexual Exploitation of a Minor - 32 Male White Greensboro Guilford SW NC SBI, Greensboro PD 6/7/2005 Pending Forensic Review - 15 Male White Trinity Randolph SW NC SBI, Randolph Co. Sheriff's Office 6/7/2005 Pending Forensic Review - 31 Male White Reidsville Rockingham SW NC SBI, Rockingham Co. Sheriff's Office 6/7/2005 Pending Forensic Review NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. *** 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, Watch Right.com For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Spanish Firm Aims to Revolutionize OnLine Music Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 14:32:48 -0500 By Daniel Flynn A Spanish Internet start-up that tracks how people listen to music on computers and other devices hopes to profit from enhancing the success of the online music business, its chairman said on Tuesday. MusicStrands aims to grow by using its exclusive new technology to delve into listeners' computers, mobile phones or i-Pods to help determine their preferences, not just what they purchase, and make recommendations. "You can have fairly crude forms of recommendation technology, which is just if someone picks A then you recommend B," Chairman Derek Reisfield told Reuters. "We are going to the next level. We can personalise the recommendation. "We'll look at your hard-drive and see what's out there and make recommendations based on your music library," said Reisfield, a former president of CBS New Media. "We look at actual behavior patterns in terms of usage, not just purchases." The technology can make selections based even on the time of day or the type of music the user typically listens to following another type of music, he said. The company asks its members for permission before accessing their files, he said. A third of the company's 30 employees have doctorate degrees, including Andreas Weigend, the former chief scientist at Amazon.com Inc. from 2002 to 2004. Musicstrands offers its service free to users via its Internet site. It earns revenues by licensing its technology to other companies and by making referrals to online music stores such as Amazon.com and Buy.com Inc. For each referral that turns into a sale, it collects a fee. The company, which launched its Web site in February, aims to have revenues in seven figures next year and to turn a profit within three to five years. "Creating the surprises of a physical shopping experience is very difficult on the Internet, and that is something we want to address," said Reisfield. "We want to give people different ways to navigate." Microsoft Corp., the world's largest software maker, said last week it was interested in offering an online music subscription service. It launched its MSN Music download service last year to rival Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Henry Cabot Henhouse III Subject: 1A2 Ringer Matrix Blocks Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 13:59:39 -0700 I've search high and low, I've Googled and Yahooed, I've checked with the local Psychic, and can't seem to find a couple of the old 1A2 ringer diode matrix blocks with a bunch of pins. I'm wondering if any of the Digest readers may know of a place to find them. Thanks! Dave ------------------------------ From: pisicuta60634@yahoo.com Subject: Please Explain LATA Date: 14 Jun 2005 14:38:42 -0700 Can somebody tell me what LATA is? Thanks. ------------------------------ Subject: Recommendations for Good External Faxmodems? From: colin@nospamamail.com Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 18:35:39 -0500 Are there any good external faxmodems to be used for a VOIP connection for under $35? ------------------------------ From: Laura Halliday" Subject: Re: 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic ? Date: 14 Jun 2005 16:33:02 -0700 PrinceGunter wrote: > Not even encryption will prevent your messages from > being read, if the LEA really want to read them bad > enough. Depends on the encryption. Properly applied, one-time pad encryption cannot be cracked. The mathematics are clear (and beyond the scope of this newsgroup), but you might consider how to create an algorithm to crack encryption that wasn't generated by an algorithm in the firs place. All examples of one-time pad encryption being cracked (e.g. Venona) are the result of agents misusing key data. Laura Halliday VE7LDH "Que les nuages soient notre Grid: CN89mg pied a terre..." ICBM: 49 16.05 N 122 56.92 W - Hospital/Shafte ------------------------------ From: Isaiah Beard Subject: Re: Bellsouth Caller ID Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 15:42:30 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Choreboy wrote: > Caller ID won't show names for some cellphone callers. I decided to > ask Bellsouth if their Caller ID would show names of cellphone callers > with any cellphone carriers, and if so, what carriers. > So Bellsouth won't tell me what cellphone carriers provide names for > their Caller ID. Is this information available anywhere? Only through BellSouth really. The reason is that in order to pass Caller ID name data, Bellsouth (and other landline phone companies, for that matter) must either subscribe to a third party database that can cross reference phone numebrs to their subscriber names, OR directly negotiate with the various carriers to pass the name information. Generally, a telecom company (wireless or wireline) will charge a fee per name that is passed along, while the number-only information is free. What frequently happens is that a wireline phone company will decide they are paying too much for this service (prices typically run $.02 to $.04 per name accessed), and refuse to sign a new contract until the originating carrier is willing to negotiate a lower price. The idea is that the wireline company beleives they can strong-arm the other carrier; if caller id for that carrier is "broken," then they believe that customers will not want to subscribe to that competing phone company. So in essence, you are right in contacting BellSouth. They have made a decision not to provide accompanying name data, beacause they don't want to pay other phone companies for the privelege (yet they're probably quite happy to charge others for the same info). E-mail fudged to thwart spammers. Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply. ------------------------------ From: Sandyman Subject: Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe Date: 14 Jun 2005 13:02:13 -0700 Try Roadpost http://www.roadpost.com . You can get a rental that includes 30 flat rate minutes (no long distance charges!) for less than $60 or $70 if I remember right, with their summer special. If you get their Greece service, the incoming calls when you're in Greece will be free. I think that phone will also work in Turkey. I've used them, I was very happy. marty@ceflorida.com wrote: > Traveling to Greece and Turkey (Istanbul)and am seeking a reliable and > competitively priced company to rent a cell phone from. Would also > like a recommendation as to which phone I should select. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Koppel: Take My Privacy, Please! Date: 14 Jun 2005 13:09:48 -0700 Monty Solomon wrote: > By TED KOPPEL > THE Patriot Act - brilliant! Its critics would have preferred a less > stirring title, perhaps something along the lines of the Enhanced > Snooping, Library and Hospital Database Seizure Act. But then who, > even right after 9/11, would have voted for that? This was an excellent article. I wonder if kids today read 1984 in school as we did. Even if they do, does the now old title lower the book's impact? IIRC, the book was written soon after WW II reflecting on the changes in society coming in both England and the Soviet Union. England was introducing television and having the govt much more involved in people's lives. The Soviets were totalitarian--people were dirt poor and every aspect of life was controlled by the govt. England also had the V-2 experience. WW II ended with east and west facing each other. Since much of this history has changed and other parts become so distant, I wonder if the book is as meaningful toward young readers today. We don't have nuclear war hanging over our heads as in the 1950s and 1960s and the conflicts between the west/China/USSR. I wonder if it bothers people that so much of their daily movements is tracked by CCTV cameras everywhere they go -- in schools, on the job, in stores, and along the road. People have been arrested wrongly based on CCTV viewings (a school principal was fired after being "seen" alone in a room with a student). On the one hand, I suppose the cameras could clear us if we were accused of a crime by providing us with an alibi proving we were where we said we were. But on the other hand, if we happened to be near a crime scene when it occured, could we be falsely accused of that crime (like the principal)? Does anyone out there think this lack of privacy and constant electronic and data surveillance is a good thing? ------------------------------ Date: 15 Jun 2005 00:23:23 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: Cellular Phone Spam Organization: I.E.C.C. Trumansburg NY USA > If they won't credit you, tell them that you want to close your cell > phone account immediately. Good idea. I'll try that next time. > I immediately closed it, and told them the reason why. There's some > hole through which spammers are able to collect Hotmail addresses. No, they just blast spam a billion randomly generated addresses every day. R's, John ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 17:31:42 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time) From: Mark Crispin Subject: Re: Cellular Phone Spam Organization: Networks & Distributed Computing On Tue, 15 Jun 2005, John Levine wrote: >> If they won't credit you, tell them that you want to close your cell >> phone account immediately. > Good idea. I'll try that next time. Good luck. AFAIK, Verizon credits the victims of SMS spam automatically. >> I immediately closed it, and told them the reason why. There's some >> hole through which spammers are able to collect Hotmail addresses. > No, they just blast spam a billion randomly generated addresses every day. I know that's the case for "mrc", but I think that it's rather unlikely that they could have randomly guessed my late unlamented Hotmail userid. It would have required trillions, not billions. Also, a blast-spam of one billion requires a sustained rate of 12,000 spams/second. Mark http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 19:23:28 -0600 From: jared@nospam.au (jared) Subject: Re: Cellular Phone Spam It seems to me that in this case, the spam would originate from someone harvesting e-addresses from the Usenet. It wouldn't take much to do this automatically; it wouldn't be surprising if there were such software on the net and/or for sale. > My "NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info" started getting spam within 24 hours of > using it on Usenet. Needless to say it is now REALLY NOTvalid. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Oh, yet another netter victimized by > the 'mere coincidence of a spammer using directory attacks'. PAT] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Oh, indeed there is. I get offers at least daily to buy the same from other spammers. PAT] ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites From: Dean M. Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 22:31:54 GMT A couple of thoughts on this issue: I don't believe there's any way to prove the Internet is less reliable than printed material. What makes any information source reliable is the value it places on it's reputation. That generally translates to more trust and thus brings back the consumers of that source's information. That in turn usually translates into money (hey, maybe there's a way to measure it: how big is the online vs offline information market). The Internet is still new. However, it is continuously evolving and producing better ways for us to rate information providers who thus quickly build an online reputation which can make them or brake them. The more the Internet helps do that, the more the qualityof the information improves (as opposed to only the quantity) whether it be ebay/amazon ratings or the online reputations of bloggers, publishers or news organisations. It'll always be imperfect (the long tail can hide a lot of trash) but I think unltimately it is a better information market than printed matter. Dean On Tue, 14 Jun 2005 07:45:48 -0700, wrote: >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: >> As we 'Inform Ourselves to Death' (see the Digest #263, over last >> weekend), it has truly gotten to the point that information has no >> value any longer. But Lisa, some of us do _try_ at least. PAT] > Regarding vanity press, the reality is that most books printed that > way end up in the author's basement. > I recall reading a "tell-all" book about the phone company a > disgruntled employee wrote years ago. He made fun of the standardized > office layout, decor, and furnishings of each level of management. > His books had an occassional point of interest, but most of it was > griping of someone who just didn't fit in a strictly standardized > world (and a lot of people do have trouble with that.) If they had > the Internet back then, I bet he have a huge web page collecting > gripes from every person who had a fight with their service rep. > My argument is that sure -- there were plenty of disgruntled Bell > System employees and plenty of customers poorly served. But one must > look at the bigger picture of the TOTAL number of happy employees and > satisfied customers. I doubt the above writer would bother to mention > that statistic on his webpage. > I doubt too many people read his book (I found it at a yard sale). > But with the ease of the Internet and search engines it may have > reached more people and spread inaccurate information. > Another concerns is that information overload depreciates the value of > information. Part of that concern is the ease of Internet > information. > I've been in a number of discussions (both on-line and off-line) about > issues where debaters use Internet sources to bolster their case. But > often times those sources tell only a small part of the story. For > issues that interest me, I have printed copy references from either > books I own or library resources that tell a bigger picture and > different story. > For example, in a debate about public transit in Philadelphia, several > people claimed the system was losing money for years and near > collapse. I have the company's annual reports that show that claim > was wrong. In debates about Amtrak, I have printed literature stating > Amtrak's purpose was to supplement highways and airways that were > unable to handle all national travel needs. > The ease of the Internet/computer databases are a wonderful tool and I > don't dispute that at all (more below). But I remain troubled that > the Internet has too much garbage on it drowning out valid > information. > * * * > Admittedly, researching material in print is tiring. I recently did > some research the old fashioned way -- pulling out bound indexes, > scanning them multiple times in multiple years for various keywords, > then writing down the hits. Then, I searched the microfilm rolls for > journals and dates for the hits. Then, the individual roll of > microfilm had to threaded through the reader and slowly searched > sequentially for the particular issue date and finally the article. > Sometimes the reward for this would be merely two sentences. THEN, I > have to start all over with another reel. After a while this gets > quite tiring. The only saving grace is that no one seems to use > microfilm anymore and I have the reader room all to myself. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: 14 Jun 2005 14:58:46 -0700 Fred Atkinson wrote: > Is it really harder [to find trashy books]? Yes, it is. Porn books supposedly do not allow minors to enter. Porn bookstores are often off the beaten track. I dare say there are a lot more legitimate bookstores and newstands than porn stores out there. To find other trashy printed material, one must make somewhat of an effort, such as to find and get to a specialty store. > Have you ever visited a pornographic book store? No. I have heard from several sources that beyond the items they sell, they also serve as a meeting place to set up liasons; and some activity takes place in back rooms. > If not, do you deny they are out there or what kind of books are > distributed? Of course not. But they are harder to get than ordinary books. > Have you ever seen 'The People versus Larry Flynt'? No. > And there's a lot of stuff published by hate groups and other > extremists, too. Do we give up freedom of speech to keep this stuff > from being disseminated? Again, it is harder to find hate group literature than ordinary publications. The stores in my town have a rack for the free community newspaper and several have racks for newspapers and magazines. However, none stock any hate speech literature. Obviously that stuff is around if one chooses to go out and search for it. My point is that in hard copy it is harder to find. > If we shot everyone who was wrong about something, most of us would be > dead, wouldn't we? Your point being? >> But I know there are some computer users out there who are quite >> malicious, and some of them will go to considerable trouble to post >> seriously misleading advice or information just to be an SOB or >> satisfy their own immaturity. They thrive on the anonymity of the >> Internet. Presently, there is no real check or balance on such web >> pages. > There are telephone users who are quite malicious (ask the telephone > company as they have to investigate obscene and/or harrassing callers > from time to time), their are licensed automobile drivers who are > quite malicious (I've nearly been hit by more than a few), there are > truck drivers who are quite malicious (and I drove eighteen wheelers > for just under a year and I know), there are police officers who are > quite malicious, and the list goes on and on. But for the most part, > the intentionally malicious ones are very much in the minority. And > I've had more than one police or security officer in trouble with his > superiors over completely inappropriate behavior that I observed. > That is because I determined it was inappropriate and I dealt with it > by contacting superiors. What if I hadn't been afforded the > opportunity to learn to be able to determine that it was indeed wrong? > The behavior they exhibited and inflicted upon others would have > continued. You are making an apples to oranges comparison. You are talking about _actions_ that have always been around, my point was about _information distribution_ that is a new thing. Yes, you have channels to do something about bad cops, but what are the channels to deal with a web site giving out bad info? AFAIK, not a thing, even if the information is really bad. In extreme cases, where the aggrieved have a lot of money (ie Hollywood stars), they can take legal action; most of us don't have that luxury. > And it goes back to not believing everything you read or hear. Kids > have to learn to balance it sometime. Depriving them of that > information robs them of the chance to learn to decide for themselves. Are you saying there should be no age restrictions on what kids can see or read (ie "R, X, NC-17" rated movies, X-rated literature?) Are you saying you would have no objection of some kid brought in and distributed hate literature at an elementary school? Are you saying you would have no objection if someone put up a non-traceable offshore website saying the most vile things about you, your family, and your job? Or if someone distributed literature around the neighborhood calling you a criminal of the lowest sort who ought to be ejected from the neighborhood? > And what about schools that took books like that off the library > shelves? What about Huckleberry Finn? Tom Sawyer? And the list goes > on and on? With Mark Twain's writing style as it was, it would be be > considered quite racist by today's standards. Do we censor it? Of > course not. I stand by my statement that schools and libraries 'censor' reading materials all the time, for a variety of reasons. Who decides what is "literature" and what is "trash"? There are a zillion books out there and schools and libraries do not have the money for every one. They must make choices on what to buy. They also make choices on what to discard. Is that "censorship"? > And it is the reader's job to decide how they feel about who is > posting or writing and whether their views should be taken seriously. Yes, it is. But that job is made harder by the Internet, when it is harder to have a benchmark to judge the quality of a work, especially on an unfamiliar topic. I will generally give an article in the New York Times more credibility than an article in a supermarket tabloid because I know of the quality concerns of each publisher. But what is the quality of some website? For instance, recently Robert B and I had an debate here on various legal issues and we disagreed. How would an outside reader, unfamiliar with the law, know who, if any, is correct or as you say, "to be taken seriously"? I know my local newspaper, before publishing a guest editorial or news article, requires substatiating claimed facts. They would not except either of our posts without some backup, and would also consult with their inhouse sources. Thus, a reader of the newspaper has more (note I didn't say total) confidence in accuracy than something on the 'net. > Are we really protecting the kids when we deprive them of the > opportunity to learn to decide for themselves? Or are we going to > have to protect them from it all their lives? And if they don't > learn, who's going to protect *their* kids? And what about when we > pass on and leave them to their own judgement? Certainly kids do learn to decide for themselves but kids also need protection, too. Most kids in third grade aren't ready to learn calculus so we don't tell them about it. Likewise with other subjects that may be too advanced for a kid to properly and safely understand. Otherwise, the right to vote and legal status would be in effect at birth rather than age 18. Some kid in my area was just arrested for having a very considerable amount of bomb making chemicals in his room at home. The kid was making bomb threats at school. How did the kid get these dangerous chemicals? How did he learn about them? Did the kid fully understand the import of what he was doing? To put it another way, should be we bother with childproof locks on gun cabinets? Regarding your comments on whacky radio ideas, I agree about free speech. However, how would you feel if someone had a nice looking web page filled with the stuff you heard -- given as advice to new users? Lisa Hancock ------------------------------ From: Lisa Hancock Subject: Internet With an Undivested Bell System Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 18:00:00 EDT TELECOM Digest Editor posted a question to the group: What would the internet be like today if Bell System had not been divested. Would it all or most of it, be run by the telephone company? I will discuss this more later in this message. As to the Bell System: > The telephone system never improved all that much over the years (at > least, to the perception of the end user) until the Bell companies had > to compete. The Bell System was greatly improved over the years. Users had greater reliability, more service options, and lower costs. While perhaps a home user didn't see as much change (other than Touch Tone and ESS features), business users saw many improvements. Long Distance rates were dropping rapidly before divesture > Thus, competition played a big role in bringing prices > down. I submit that Bell Labs technology and greater economies of scale bought prices down. I also note that the initial chief competitor, MCI, got into the market through lawsuits, and their more recent history of fraud isn't not exactly nice. We must also subtract from total net savings the losses from fraud like Norvergence and others. (Like the horrendous prices charged at pay phones for collect calls!) That's all part of the new world, too and must be included. Not everybody did so well from divesture. Further, costs merely SHIFTED from the phone company to businesses themselves. That is, stuff the Bell System did for business as part of the base service now had to be done by the business itself. (Many Bell System employees took jobs at their clients). Shifted costs are not saved costs. Lastly, businesses suffered from finger pointing between equipment owner, local company, and long distance company. For data senders, this was a nightmare. Many network adms told me divesture greatly added to costs from aggravation and finger pointing. In the old days, they'd call Bell and Bell would fix it. Now, Bell would blame AT&T or MCI, and MCI would blame the customer's equipment. Add that cost in. > And the end user got a lot more say so about his/her telephone > service(s) and got what they wanted at prices they could afford. I > remember when an answering machine could only be provided and > installed by the phone company. Not true. Answering machines were available that used a lever to lift the handset and speakers to transmit the message in the early 1960s. Remember the logic technology to control an answering machine's function wasn't as freely available in those days. Many people preferred to use a human answering service anyone for better customer service. And in the early 1960s, Touch Tone was rare so it would've been hard to access messages remotely. > Then came Carterphone, thank goodness. Carterphone was a separate issue than divesture. > Because everyone was trying to provide something that the other > carriers didn't provide (to target their niche in the marketplace), > the technology began to develop and new things were offered. I often > doubt that we'd have ever seen the Internet if the industry hadn't > become competitive (or at least not for many more years to come). You must remember that electronic technology was rapidly growing AT THE SAME TIME of divesture and that was responsible for the low cost of many products and services. At the time of divesture, personal computers, for example, were very expensive yet very limited compared to today. Newer chips in both CPU and memory kept coming and the price went down and performance went up. That same growth enabled telephone products and services to become cheaper. Divesture didn't inspire cellular telephone service, but cheap enough electronics to do everything a cell phone and base switching station needs to do. How much would a computer with today's RAM, disk space, and CPU horsepower cost in 1980? I don't know. But I do know memory and disk space were a lot more expensive in those days. The Bell System utilized the same technology as everyone else. It sounds like you expect the Bell System to have had today's cheap electronics back in 1970. Not realistic. The cheap electronics also reduced the cost of long distance by increasing media capacity and the cost of the terminal units and that helped lower long distance pricing. > He published yours even though he took issue with your position, > didn't he, Lisa? I agree that Pat does a good job. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Here is a question for the collected > readership: _If_ Bell had not gotten divested, and was still in > charge of most everything relating to telecommunications, what would > the internet be like today? Would it all be run by 'the telephone > company'? Would we be getting all our attachments and peripherals from > the telephone company? I suggest that might be the case. What do the > rest of you think? PAT] Undoubtedly the Bell System would've continued to improve the technology and price/performance of its network and customer equipment. It was doing so already. "Divesture" was specifically the break up of AT&T owning the local phone companies. The customer ownership of equipment didn't have to come along with it, or it could've come along separately. I understand the Bell System was looking to dump the old system anyway since the cost to them of having men ready to go out at 2am to fix an extension set in a home no longer was cost justified. I think they realized the cost of building a telephone set to last 50 years was not justified either. The IBM Corp went through a tremendous turmoil in the 1990s and even without divesture AT&T would have, too. IBM is a very different company today, though it actually has returned to its roots of selling service. I don't know how the Bell System would've evolved--unlike IBM, much depended on the regulators. Remember too that AT&T (like IBM) was forbidden to enter many markets. AT&T had hoped at divesture to enter those forbidden markets and make a lot of money, though it bombed out. IBM got rid of its restrictions and entered new markets successfully. I don't know how the Internet would've evolved in a Bell System world. But I wonder if its random growth and mysterious relay stations (per our other discussion) would've been better managed. Pat, what do you think? [public replies please] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I will withhold comments on 'Internet in an Undivested Bell System World' until we get a few more responses. For now I want to comment only briefly on one statement of Lisa's: fatkinson said: > he published your's even with disagreements. hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com replied: > Pat does a good job. But PAT says: Not everyone would agree with you, Lisa. If we go back to the middle 1980's when I inherited this assignment from Jon Solomon, _many_ of the old-line netters (meaning, in context, netters who had been around from the 1970's and early 1980's) were definitly _NOT_ pleased to see me move into their playground. Now, a quarter-century later, some of them are still around and still as hostile as they were 'way back when'. You see, I did not come from the same sort of background as most of them. Instead of a university background with a god-given right to connectivity, as they presumed they had, and a very generous and liberal employer who allowed them to spend considerable time each day on their .arpa and Usenet newsgroups, which they took for granted, I came from the original non-university ISP to gain admission to the net, a company named Portal Communications, out of the San Francisco Bay area, in Cupertino, CA I think. Prior to that, I 'did' a couple BBS's locally in Chicago, such as the Chicago Public Library BBS, and was active on Ward Christianson and Randy Suess' CBBS system in Chicago. Many guys looked down their noses at me from 'that sort of background' and others, just on the general principal so prevalent in those days about 'allowing outsiders' (meaning non university [that they approved of] users in their playground.) That was long, long before AOL or any other ISP had any connections here at all. No Google, no Yahoo, no AOL, no Compuserve, no Panix, nothing; just .edu this and .edu that. They were all afraid that by letting in non (approved of) university users, they would inherit a bunch of idiots. I started posting messages here in telecom when I was a user at Portal Communications. Jon Solomon said to me one day that "the reason 'they' (meaning the old-guard on the net in those days) decided to allow Portal Com to come on the net was because 'Townson is not _as much of an asshole_ as most of _those people_'. " Everything is relative I guess. And there are other participants who do not care for my more 'activist' position on many issues. They feel a moderator should be seen, but not heard, I guess. I still feel like somewhat of an outsider on the net. And Bill Pfieffer was more of an outsider than myself, by anyone's definition, but I trained him and got him and his Usenet group r.r.b. (that's all we had in those days) started while the old-guard sat around with their jaws hanging open at his (Pfieffer) and my audacity at saying we would play in the same playground with or without their cooperation or help or friendship. Some are still hostile for that reason, but that is their loss, not mine. 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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Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V24 #268 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Jun 15 17:03:49 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 46E6915138; Wed, 15 Jun 2005 17:03:49 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #269 Message-Id: <20050615210349.46E6915138@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 17:03:49 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.0 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,EARN_MONEY, MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Wed, 15 Jun 2005 17:02:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 269 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Front Lines Legal Report June 15, 2005 (Jonathan Marashlian) Jeff Pulver Has a Dream (Lisa Minter) Intermix Settles Lawsuit With New York AG Spitzer (Lisa Minter) AOL Users Most Likely to Make Zombie of Your Computer (Lisa Minter) Email to Former AT&T Phones Now Cingular (NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info) BT Launches World's First Fixed Mobile Service (Telecom DailyLead USTA) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Michael D. Sullivan) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Charles Cryderman) Re: Cellular Phone Spam (Lisa Hancock) Re: Cellular Phone Spam (NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info) Re: Please Explain LATA (Michael D. Sullivan) Re: Please Explain LATA (burris) Re: Please Explain LATA (hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com) Re: Please Explain LATA (Clark W. Griswold, Jr.) Re: Please Explain LATA (Joseph) Re: Please Explain LATA (Tim@backhome.org) Re: Please Explain LATA (Charles Cryderman) Re: DSL and Speakerphone Problems!? (Dave Grebe) Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe (Joseph) Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe (John Levine) Re: Companies Subvert Search Results to Squelch Criticism (Steve Sobol) Re: Recommendations for Good External Faxmodems? (Robert Bonomi) Re: Recommendations for Good External Faxmodems? (T. Sean Weintz) Last Laugh! Netter Wants to Help Me Get Rich! (Patrick Townson) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Jonathan Marashlian Subject: The Front Lines - June 15, 2005 Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 16:06:44 -0400 Organization: The Helein Law Group http://www.thefrontlines-hlg.com/ The FRONT LINES http://www.thlglaw.com/ Advancing The Cause of Competition in the Telecommunications Industry NOTICE: REDUCED THIRD QUARTER 2005 UNIVERSAL SERVICE FUND CONTRIBUTION FACTOR EFFECTIVE JULY 1st The Wireline Competition Bureau of the FCC announced that the Universal Service Fund contribution factor for the Third Quarter of 2005 will be 10.2%, nearly a full percentage decrease from the prior quarterly factor of 11.1%. The 10.2% contribution factor will become effective unless the FCC takes action in response to the proposed increase, which is not anticipated. Contributors are reminded that they may not mark up federal universal service line-item amounts above the contribution factor. Thus, contributors may not, during the third quarter of 2005, recover from end users through a federal universal service line item an amount that exceeds the interstate telecommunications charges on a customer's bill times 10.2%. FCC OPENS PROCEEDING TO EVALUATE ADMINISTRATION OF UNIVERSAL SERVICE FUND PROGRAM, REDUCE FRAUD & ABUSE, AND IMPROVE COMPLIANCE On June 14, 2005, the Federal Communications Commission launched a broad inquiry into the management, administration and oversight of the Universal Service Fund. The FCC's goals are to improve the operation of the program for its beneficiaries and contributors and to enhance program integrity. Since 1997, the Universal Service Administrative Company ("USAC"), which administers the USF Program, has disbursed approximately $30.3 billion from the fund. The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking proceeding will provide an opportunity for the FCC to work with all USF stakeholders to learn from the experience of the past eight years and find new, constructive ways to both meet the needs of those who depend on the USF and protect the integrity of the program. In particular, the FCC is seeking comment in the following areas: * Managing the Program: The FCC is exploring ways to simplify and streamline the management of the program. In particular, the FCC tentatively concludes that a multi-year application process for telecommunications services for the E-rate and Rural Healthcare programs would simplify the process in a way that still guards against potential abuse. The FCC also seeks comment on, among other things, reducing or consolidating application forms and adopting deadlines and other criteria to provide certainty to program applicants. * Improving Oversight: The FCC seeks comment on the effectiveness of existing efforts to protect the fund against potential misuse. The FCC tentatively concludes that more aggressive debarment procedures are necessary to safeguard the fund and seeks comment on ways to improve the debarment rules. In addition, the FCC seeks comment on establishing independent audits for certain USF beneficiaries and contributors and seeks comment on what rules would help ensure that any audits are effective and fair. The FCC is also seeking comment on establishing rules for recovering USF monies that were not used in accordance with program rules. * Administrative Structure: The FCC is examining the effectiveness of the existing administrative structure and seeks comment on whether any rule changes are needed to ensure the USF is administered in an effective, competitively neutral way. * Performance Measures: The FCC is seeking comment on establishing performance measures to assess the effectiveness of the program Through the rulemaking process, the FCC will determine whether it needs to change any rules in order to manage and administer the USF more effectively while deterring waste, fraud and abuse. The Front Lines is a free publication of The Helein Law Group, LLLP, providing clients and interested parties with valuable information, news, and updates regarding regulatory and legal developments primarily impacting companies engaged in the competitive telecommunications industry. The Front Lines does not purport to offer legal advice nor does it establish a lawyer-client relationship with the reader. If you have questions about a particular article, general concerns, or wish to seek legal counsel regarding a specific regulatory or legal matter affecting your company, please contact our firm at 703-714-1313 or visit our website. The Helein Law Group, LLLP 8180 Greensboro Drive, Suite 700 McLean, Virginia 22102 ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: VOIP Pioneer Aims For End of Regular Phone Networks Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 09:48:07 -0500 By Steven Scheer Jeff Pulver has a dream: That his invention a decade ago of making phone calls using the Internet will eventually be used by everyone and traditional phone networks and copper wires will be a thing of the past. "Whether that will happen in my lifetime is another story but my hope is to basically enable people to be free -- to have the freedom to define what their communications experience is," Pulver said in an interview with Reuters during a visit to Israel, which he calls the birthplace of commercial use of Internet phone calling. Pulver is a pioneer of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology and is a co-founder of fast growing VoIP provider, Vonage, as well as founder of a half-dozen other VoIP firms. Vonage has more than 700,000 subscribers and is adding 15,000 a week in the expectations of hitting 1 million by year end. A number of competitors -- as well as many cable companies and large telcommunication firms -- have sprouted up around the United States and around the world as Internet voice services have become cheaper than traditional phone offerings, while quality and reliability continue to improve. As a result, Pulver estimates there are some 9 million paying VoIP customers around the world -- 6 million of them in Asia -- and millions more with Skype, the Web site that allows for phone calls around the world for free to and from computers. "Skype is a major player," Pulver said. "So, if you look to the future there is an opportunity to grow big. The market can bear a few more Skypes." Pulver believes the industry is at a crossroads, with so much room for growth but a host of regulatory and financial issues confronting it. "The last 125 years the telephone industry has replicated and replicated but now, the DNA has changed," he said. "The challenge is regulation and how it is adopted by governments protecting (telecom) incumbents," Pulver said. "And, some companies are so focused on the bottom line that they can't look outside the box." Pulver said there is a huge market where a company like dominant phone company Bezeq Israel Telecom, for instance, could offer virtual Israeli phone numbers to its citizens living abroad using VoIP. The same could be said for any country, he said, adding another focus for VoIP would be to blend messaging offerings into intergrated devices. "It's up to the kids now in high school," Pulver said. "They need to look at the technology they are playing with and commercialise those." Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. For a good combination of USA Today/United Press International news and BBC World Service Radio, check out http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/internetnews.html ; never any login or registration requirements. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Intermix Media Settles Lawsuit With Sptizer, NY Attorney General Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 09:51:42 -0500 Company settles 'spyware' lawsuit for $7.5 mln Intermix Media Inc. has agreed to pay the state of New York $7.5 million to settle a lawsuit charging it with bundling hidden "spyware" along with millions of programs it gave away for free, the company said on Tuesday. The company also said it would permanently discontinue distribution of its adware, redirect and tool bar programs, all of which Intermix noted it has previously stopped distributing. Intermix said it did not admit any wrongdoing or liability. Intermix shares rose $1.50, or 24.6 percent, to $7.60 in after-hours trading on Inet following the news. The settlement deal follows New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's April lawsuit charging that the company's practice of bundling hidden spyware violated state laws prohibiting false advertising and deceptive business practices. It also came as the company on Tuesday posted a fourth quarter net loss of $409,000 compared with a loss of $4.4 million a year ago. Revenue rose to $24.1 million from $14.4 million, boosted by gains at its Alena business unit and network segment. The results also reflected a gain of $6.3 million related to an investment in its newly-formed, majority-owned subsidiary MySpace Inc. and a $6.9 million reserve established in connection with Spitzer's lawsuit, Intermix said. Spitzer's office had sought to stop Los Angeles-based Intermix from secretly installing software on users' computers, make it return money it made from the process and pay a fine. These programs were secretly bundled with others designed to deliver pop-up advertising or steer Web traffic to an Intermix search engine, Spitzer charged in the lawsuit. Under terms of the settlement, Intermix agreed to pay $7.5 million to the state over three years. Since Spitzer's initial inquiry, Intermix also said it has created the position of chief privacy officer and worked with federal regulators to help protect Internet consumers. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. Also see http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/nytimes.html for daily reports from New York Times, Christian Science Monitor and NPR News. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: AOL Users Most Likely to Make Zombie of Your Computer Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 09:55:31 -0500 By Andy Sullivan Internet "zombie" attacks that attempt to knock computer systems offline are more likely to come from users of America Online than any other source, according to a report released by a security company on Tuesday. AOL and other large Internet service providers serve as launching pads for most "denial of service" attacks, according to Prolexic Technologies, which helps companies fend off such attacks. Other top sources of such attacks include T-Mobile's German-based service; Wanadoo, a French Internet provider; and Comcast Corp. Prolexic chief technology officer Barrett Lyon said the report could indicate that some Internet providers don't protect their customers as much as companies like EarthLink Inc. that don't show up on the list. "Their clients may be exposed differently or they may be doing a poor job of filtering certain things from their clients," Lyon said in an interview, referring to AOL and the other providers named in the report. But such figures only show that AOL has a much larger user base than other Internet providers who account for nearly as many attacks, spokesman Andrew Weinstein said. "This survey is a huge victory for our members. If they're three to four times less likely to be compromised than their peers that's not a bad thing," Weinstein said. AOL provides antivirus, anti-spyware and firewall services for its members, and those who are compromised probably haven't updated their software recently, he said. Denial-of-service attacks harness thousands of computers in a coordinated effort to knock Web sites or other computer systems offline through an unrelenting data blitz. Early DDoS attacks targeted the U.S. government or high-profile online vendors like eBay. Over the past year, criminals have used DDoS attacks to extort payments from online gambling operations, banks and other businesses, or to attack competitors. Cybercriminals use worms or viruses to secretly hijack unprotected computers to use in such attacks. Zombie networks also are used by spammers to cover their tracks. DDoS attacks are increasing in frequency from one or two a month to one or two a week as attackers constantly try different methods to take down their targets, Lyon said. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission last month asked Internet providers to disconnect their customers' computers if they find they have been compromised. Law enforcers in 25 other countries are also taking efforts to shut down such "zombie" networks. Though U.S.-based computers were responsible for the largest portion of DDoS traffic at 18 percent, countries like Hong Kong, Germany, Malaysia and the United Kingdom had higher percentages of infected computers, Prolexic said. Prolexic based its report on attacks it saw over the last six months. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 12:45:53 EDT From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: BT Launches World's First Fixed-Mobile Service Telecom dailyLead from USTA June 15, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22352&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * BT launches world's first fixed-mobile service BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * MCI shareholder launches proxy fight * Yahoo! buys Internet telephony company * Verizon cuts DSL price by 33% * Sirius, Sprint strike mobile music deal * RBOCs seek data on GPONs USTA SPOTLIGHT * See USTA's Small Company Summit Presentations Online -- Free EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Napster goes wireless with Ericsson REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * FCC to review USF Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22352&l=2017006 ------------------------------ From: NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info Subject: Email to Former AT&T Phones Now Cingular Date: 15 Jun 2005 09:30:05 -0700 AT&T: 10-digit-number@mobile.att.net formerly worked but no longer Cingular: 10-digit-number@mobile.mycingular.net may work for original Cingular customers. What is the current methods to send text msgs to former AT&T now Cingluar cell phone numbers? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think @mobile.mycingular.com (or .net) works for the AT&T displaced customers as well. PAT ------------------------------ From: Michael D. Sullivan Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 05:31:13 GMT > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Here is a question for the collected > readership: _If_ Bell had not gotten divested, and was still in > charge of most everything relating to telecommunications, what would > the internet be like today? Would it all be run by 'the telephone > company'? Would we be getting all our attachments and peripherals from > the telephone company? I suggest that might be the case. What do the > rest of you think? PAT] The Internet wouldn't be run by the "telephone company." It would be a very limited linkup between universities and defense contractors who could afford to pay for the $1000+ per month 256k high-speed lines needed. The rest of us would still be using the Source, Compuserve, and BIX over dialup, using special utilities to minimize toll call time. Michael D. Sullivan Bethesda, MD (USA) (Replace "example.invalid" with "com" in my address.) [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: _You_ might be doing that, but I suspect I would be doing like I was around 20-25 years ago: I called into eecs.nwu.edu on my user account there, since it was a local call, then telnetted over to either bu.edu or lcs.mit.edu where I could work in peace. In those days, I was a Unix account collector. I had Unix accounts on several university systems, such as Northwestern, Boston University, Berkeley in California and a couple others. The only one that was local to me (in terms of the telco charges) was Northwestern University in Evanston, where I had an account on alpha.eecs.nwu.edu (which was also known as alpha.nwu.bitnet). After Bill Pfieffer started his rec.radio.broadcasting newsgroup using the University of Illinois at Chicago computers, he got for me an account on uics.edu as well, and I traded to him one of my accounts at Berkeley; a machine known these days as remarque.org but back then it was (something).berkeley.edu . I suspect I would get along okay. Admittedly I would not spend the _hours_ each day logged into massis I do now. I prefer (or did prefer, before my own brain got so scrambled up) to use a shell in my work -- preferably tc-shell or c-shell (I use tc-shell and emacs in putting this Digest together each day (along with various other scripts) and whenever I have reason to chat with an ISP, one of my first questions to them is 'if I place my account with you, can I have a shell to work with and use my scripts?' Their answer is always no, so that ends the discussion. PAT] ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 12:00:14 -0400 From: Charles Cryderman The one thing I have noticed in this thread is that nobody has mentioned the fact that the reason could be e-mails with virus or Trojan Horses. My employer had no issue with employees checking outside e-mail accounts but has since blocked all outside access due to these problems. It is hard to believe that someone working for a communications company can be duped into opening these e-mails which infect the company's intranet, so what would you expect of a child? This could simply be nothing more then the schools trying to keep their network safe, as well as helping to remove a distraction that the kids don't need. Chip Cryderman [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That is a very good point! PAT] ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Cellular Phone Spam Date: 15 Jun 2005 10:22:34 -0700 > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: 'The hole through which > spammers collect new addresses' is usually some technical employee (at > the email system in question) has cut a deal with some spammer to > provide them with new account names. Doesn't it bother people that employees are leaking confidential information that results in inconvenience and higher cost to customers? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Somehow I doubt that the miscreant employee tells his supervisor what he is doing in his spare time. Or hell, maybe it _is_ his supervisor who is doing it. And what do you mean about 'inconvenience and higher cost'? Any real man knows how to fix his computer to get rid of all that stuff and run faster than ever; either that or he just accepts his lot in life and calls it quits. After all, we cannot tell other sites how to do business. PAT] ------------------------------ From: NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info Subject: Re: Cellular Phone Spam Date: 15 Jun 2005 09:03:23 -0700 I am tempted to try this test: Set up an email as a catch-all so that I get anything sent to '*@mydomain.Info". Then post a message on usenet with anyname@mydomain.Info and see if after the '*@mydomain.Info".gets harvested dictionary blasts are used. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: You might very well, and certainly dictionary attacks are common enough, but it is far more likely, IMO, one or more spams within a few minutes of opening the account is more that likely a devious registrar employee who has a deal on the side of his own with some spammer operation. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Michael D. Sullivan Subject: Re: Please Explain LATA Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 05:42:34 GMT pisicuta60634@yahoo.com wrote: > Can somebody tell me what LATA is? Local Access and Transportation Area. It's a term from the 1982 Modification of Final Judgment -- the consent decree breaking up AT&T -- that represented the "exchange area" for purposes of local telephone service. The LATA is the area within which a Bell local telephone company could transport calls. Anything beyond the LATA had to be handed off to an Interexchange Carrier, or IXC. Some LATAs were very large, and as a result, even though the intraLata traffic was deemed "local" for purposes of the MFJ and could be provided by the Bell LEC, it was actually divided up into multiple exchange areas for purposes of call rating. This led to "IntraLata toll" or "short-distance" calls that the Bell could handle even though they were considered toll calls, with a per-minute charge. Michael D. Sullivan Bethesda, MD (USA) (Replace "example.invalid" with "com" in my address.) ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 05:57:24 -0400 From: burris Subject: Re: Please Explain LATA pisicuta60634@yahoo.com wrote: > Can somebody tell me what LATA is? > Thanks. This is the definition ... you can dig in from here ... http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/L/LATA.html ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Please Explain LATA Date: 15 Jun 2005 07:25:33 -0700 pisicuta60634@yahoo.com wrote: > Can somebody tell me what LATA is? It used to have more significance than it has now. If you are concerned about long distance telephone charges, keep in mind that today many local telephone companies (the Baby Bells) offer long distance service and long distance carriers carry local calls so the LATA is not as significant anymore. IMHO, what really matters is the overall rate plan for all toll calls (short distance and long distance) that you make. A very brief definition would the boundary between a local and long distance calling area. Calls within a LATA were handled by your local company (even if toll), calls between LATAs were handled by your long distance company. The front of your telephone directory should have a LATA map. However, there were numerous exceptions right fromt the start. As mentioned, long distance companies now carry local calls and local companies now carry long distance calls. LATAs may contain multiple area codes, or split up area codes. LATAs may span multiple states or be within a state. ------------------------------ From: Clark W. Griswold, Jr. Subject: Re: Please Explain LATA Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 20:42:27 -0600 pisicuta60634@yahoo.com wrote: > Can somebody tell me what LATA is? Local Access and Transport Area -- but you could have learned that from Google. This goes back to the days when Long Distance really meant something. As a part of the AT&T breakup oh so many years ago and the introduction of competitive long distance, the country was divided up into a bunch of small areas. The local operating company was permitted to handle calls within the LATA, but had to hand the call off to a long distance company for calls outside the LATA. Although LATAs had number similar to area codes, there was no correlation. In low density areas (like North Dakota), the LATA and area code covered the same territory. In high density areas an single area code could have manay LATAs. While LATAs almost certainly still exist on the books, the rules changed a few years ago to allow local operating companies into the long distance business. I'm not sure LATAs have any meaningful significance anymore. ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Please Explain LATA Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 10:32:16 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On 14 Jun 2005 14:38:42 -0700, pisicuta60634@yahoo.com wrote: > Can somebody tell me what LATA is? Local Access and Transport Area. Essentially the geographical area defining local telephone service. Generally LATAs have "local" interests in common for example the Portland, Oregon LATA carves out a section of northwest Oregon and southwest Washington state. The eastern Massachusetts LATA includes most of eastern Massachusetts from Worcester to Boston/Newberryport to Cape Cod. Washington state is devided into three LATAs western Washington excluding the southwestern portion, Portland-Vancouver LATA and eastern Washington east of the Cascade range. ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: Please Explain LATA Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 10:47:16 -0700 Organization: Cox Communications Local Access Transport Area. They generally are within a state, but can cross state lines within a common area of interest. They were the areas where local phone companies could carry "local" long distance calls. The lines are pretty much blurred now, though. pisicuta60634@yahoo.com wrote: > Can somebody tell me what LATA is? > Thanks. ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Please Explain LATA Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 16:21:46 -0400 From: Charles Cryderman pisicuta60634 inquired as to what LATA is. Well the simple answer is imaginary boundaries that were created to out line the local telephone company monopolies had exclusive control over. They were created after Judge Green broke apart AT&T into the long distance company and the Baby Bells. See: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/L/LATA.html Chip Cryderman ------------------------------ From: Dave Grebe Subject: Re: DSL and Speakerphone Problems!? Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 02:04:15 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net Steven O. wrote: > Ever since I got DSL (from Verizon), I have been having problems with > the speakerphone service. I've tried two or three phones, and for > some reason, although I can hear people speaking when I try to use the > speakerphone on my regular phone, no one can hear me when I speak. > Has anyone else had similar problems with DSL service? Do you have a DSL filter in series with the speaker phone? My DSL kit came with several "Z-Blocker" DSL filters, you're supposed to put them in series with all the phones since some phones will interfere with DSL, and DSL will interfere with some phones. Dave Grebe ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 10:21:19 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On 14 Jun 2005 13:02:13 -0700, Sandyman wrote: > Try Roadpost http://www.roadpost.com . You can get a rental that > includes 30 flat rate minutes (no long distance charges!) for less > than $60 or $70 if I remember right, with their summer special. If > you get their Greece service, the incoming calls when you're in Greece > will be free. I think that phone will also work in Turkey. I've used > them, I was very happy. You say $60 or $70 per week is certainly no bargain when you can get a second-hand phone to *keep* for that kind of money and just buy a local prepaid account readily available in lots of local places. Also, you may not be aware, but it's likely that if you rent a phone in Greece the phone may work in Turkey if you're "renting" a post paid account. It's also likely even if you are you'll pay huge roaming costs outside the home country. Sure it will work, but at what cost? ------------------------------ Date: 15 Jun 2005 03:09:05 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > Try Roadpost http://www.roadpost.com . You can get a rental that > includes 30 flat rate minutes (no long distance charges!) for less > than $60 or $70 if I remember right, with their summer special. Why would you want to pay $70 to rent a phone that you could buy and keep for under $50? I went and priced Greek prepaid SIMs. You can get them for E19.90 which includes E8 of airtime, which is about 25 local minutes. If you talk more than that, you can buy more airtime credit. > If you get their Greece service, the incoming calls when you're in > Greece will be free. I think that phone will also work in Turkey. All European countries use GSM 900/1800 phones, so a phone that works in one country will work in all of them. They all are caller pays, so as long as you have a SIM and phone number for the country you're in, incoming calls are always free to you, although rather pricey to the caller. R's, John ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Companies Subvert Search Results to Squelch Criticism Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 20:21:18 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Barry Margolin wrote: >>> It's not illegal, but it's SEO gone bad. Companies such as Quixtar are >>> using Google-bombing, link farms and Web spam pages to place positive >>> sites in the top search results -- which pushes the negative ones >>> down. >> Yeah, and there may be no laws against it, but if it's done on a large >> enough basis you can bet they'll get sued. > On what grounds? Google has money and I'm sure they have hired competent, resourceful attorneys who could find something reasonable and make it stick. Something fraud-related, possibly, or they might be able to point to violations of their Terms of Service. > against frivilous lawsuits, which is what such a lawsuit (as manipulating > a search engine) would be. PAT] Oh, really? Creating fraudulent search engine results is not a valid reason for a lawsuit? JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Recommendations for Good External Faxmodems? Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 04:51:31 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , wrote: > Are there any good external faxmodems to be used for a VOIP connection > for under $35? "You can have it 'good', or you can have it 'cheap'. Pick one." Fax over VoIP is somewhat 'iffy' anyway. unless the VoIP provider expressly provides support for it. The audio characteristics are significantly different from voice conversation, ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Re: Recommendations for Good External Faxmodems? Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 12:11:43 -0400 colin@nospamamail.com wrote: > Are there any good external faxmodems to be used for a VOIP connection > for under $35? Under $35? No. ------------------------------ From: Dennis Adams Reply-To: Dennis Adams Subject: Last Laugh! Fw: You Can Make 30k in 30 Days Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 13:37:56 -0600 Hello there future business owner, Would you like at least $1500.00 to $3500.00 per day, just for returning phone calls? I do! If you have a telephone and can return calls you are fully qualified for this program. Give Us A Call At: 1 888 238 3164 Anytime, 24 hours/day. Sincerely, Dennis Adams [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Sounds like a great deal to me! I would love to make $1500-3500 per day in my business. Lord only knows I do not make that much from the cheats at Google with their Ad-Sense program; no where close. This sounds like such excitement and fun I am going to suggest to other readers here that they call you for more information. Of course, a lot of the guys are busy and on the road, so they may have to call you from pay phones, but you know the routine I imagine. Thanks for writing to tip me off to this great opportunity to make me rich. 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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Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V24 #269 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Jun 16 01:22:48 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id AC8F515291; Thu, 16 Jun 2005 01:22:47 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #270 Message-Id: <20050616052247.AC8F515291@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 01:22:47 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.4 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Thu, 16 Jun 2005 01:23:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 270 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson ID Theft Fears Hurt Online Shopping (Lisa Minter) Hackers Run Unauthorized Programs on PSP (Monty Solomon) Re: Email to Former AT&T Phones (Forrest Nelson) Re: Email to Former AT&T Phones Now Cingular (Joseph) Re: AOL Users Most Likely to Make Zombie of Your Computer (Sean Weintz) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Robert Bonomi) Re: Please Explain LATA (Wesrock@aol.com) Re: Please Explain LATA (Tony P.) Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy (Brad Houser) Re: Cellular Phone Spam (NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info) Re: Companies Subvert Search Results to Squelch Criticism (jtaylor) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: ID Theft Fears Hurt Online Shopping Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 22:43:29 -0500 Nearly half of U.S. voters say they don't shop online because they fear identity thieves may capture their bank-account information, according to a survey released on Wednesday by a technology-industry trade group. Amid a rash of corporate foul-ups that have exposed consumers to identity theft, the Cyber Security Industry Alliance found that 71 percent of voters it surveyed believe that new laws are needed to protect consumer privacy online. Some 64 percent said they wanted the government to do more to protect computer security. Congress is considering several measures designed to increase corporate data security. Most would require companies to tell customers when a security breach has placed them at risk of identity theft. Some would require companies to take more concrete steps, such as encrypting customer information. The survey of 1,003 likely voters had a margin of error of 3 percent. Members of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance include Juniper Networks. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 23:12:19 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Hackers Run Unauthorized Programs on PSP NEW YORK (AP) -- Gaming enthusiasts have figured out how to run unauthorized programs and games on the U.S. version of Sony Corp.'s new handheld game console. Like its rivals, Sony had tried to keep its new PlayStation Portable on a tight leash, installing controls so it couldn't run programs and games not vetted and licensed by the company. But the PSP, released in the United States in March, has been the target of fervent attempts to unlock its capabilities, which go beyond any previous handheld game machine. Sony's restrictions were defeated by a program disseminated on the Internet this week. It requires two memory cards, which are switched while the PSP is working. The exploit may not be practical or safe (an accompanying warning says it could cause damage if done improperly), but it represents a challenge to Sony's policy of tight control and opens the possibility that PSP games could be pirated. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49885647 ------------------------------ From: Forrest Nelson Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 14:25:50 -0700 Subject: Re: Email to Former AT&T Phones Now Cingular 1XXXXXXXXXX@mmode.com works for my former AT&T now Cingular phones ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Email to Former AT&T Phones Now Cingular Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 14:29:16 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On 15 Jun 2005 09:30:05 -0700, NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info wrote: > AT&T: 10-digit-number@mobile.att.net formerly worked but no longer > Cingular: 10-digit-number@mobile.mycingular.net may work for original > Cingular customers. > What is the current methods to send text msgs to former AT&T now > Cingluar cell phone numbers? > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think @mobile.mycingular.com (or .net) > works for the AT&T displaced customers as well. PAT Also, what works for all North American mobile numbers is 10digits@teleflip.com e.g. 3115552368@teleflip.com ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Re: AOL Users Most Likely to Make Zombie of Your Computer Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 17:22:36 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Lisa Minter wrote: > By Andy Sullivan > Internet "zombie" attacks that attempt to knock computer systems > offline are more likely to come from users of America Online than any > other source, according to a report released by a security company on > Tuesday. > AOL and other large Internet service providers serve as launching pads > for most "denial of service" attacks, according to Prolexic > Technologies, which helps companies fend off such attacks. Then this post should have been titled "AOL users most likely to have their machines made into zombies", not "AOL Users Most Likely to Make Zombie of Your Computer". The title you used implies that AOL users are attacking machines and making them zombies, which is not the case. AOL machines are launching DOS attacks because they ARE zombies. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Regarding Zombies, it takes one to make another, doesn't it. Lisa apologizes for being unclear on that headline. PAT] ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 23:38:36 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Here is a question for the collected > readership: _If_ Bell had not gotten divested, and was still in > charge of most everything relating to telecommunications, what would > the internet be like today? Would it all be run by 'the telephone > company'? Would we be getting all our attachments and peripherals from > the telephone company? I suggest that might be the case. I think you forget about the CarterPhone decision. Final decision, merely six years before the filing of the lawsuit that led to the Bell system divestiture. Bell system (nor any other telco) could not require use of "their" interface equipment. So the 'third party' market for 'attachments and peripherals' would have bloomed -- as it, in fact, did -- regardless. The primary "alternative" long-distance carriers (United Telecom and MCI) were already building out their own long-haul _physical_plant_ infrastructure long before the Bell system break-up occurred. Well before the the lawsuit was even filed. As "_off_ ARPAnet/NSFnet" IP use spread, going to the 'alternative' carriers for point-to-point _data_ connectivity was a "natural". both ends were going to be in 'bigger towns' -- the places the alternative carriers serviced _first_; it was *not* covered at all by PSTN regulations, none of the regulatory/tax issues of 'by-pass' came into play, etc. And those alternative carriers could offer better quality circuits, *cheaper*. And, of course, MFS had been doing the same under-cutting in the city-center for high-cap 'local loop'. If the "Bell System/AT&T/Western Electric" had remained a monolithic entity, The rate of change in the "Internet" would likely have been much slower. There probably would not have been the telecom boom/bust of circa 5 years ago, OTOH, DSL would not likely be ubiquitous, as it is today; "high speed" to the residence would probably mean 2-B ISDN.; today's "date" would probably be "September five-thousand-and-something" instead of the current number. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Sounds a little grim to me. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Wesrock@aol.com Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 19:40:17 EDT Subject: Re: Please Explain LATA In a message dated14 Jun 2005 14:38:42 -0700, pisicuta60634@yahoo.com writes: > Can somebody tell me what LATA is? > Thanks. Local Access and Transport Area. The area, under Judge Green's decree, where the local Bell company could carry traffic. If the call crosses LATA lines, it must be carried by a long distance company. Many, perhaps most, Bell companies have now been given the right (on a state by state basis) to carry interLATA, interstate and international long distance calls. Wes Leatherock wesrock@aol.com wleathus@yahoo.com ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Please Explain LATA Organization: ATCC Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 20:16:19 -0400 In article , userid@camsul.example.invalid says: > pisicuta60634@yahoo.com wrote: >> Can somebody tell me what LATA is? > Local Access and Transportation Area. It's a term from the 1982 > Modification of Final Judgment -- the consent decree breaking up AT&T > -- that represented the "exchange area" for purposes of local > telephone service. The LATA is the area within which a Bell local > telephone company could transport calls. Anything beyond the LATA had > to be handed off to an Interexchange Carrier, or IXC. Some LATAs were > very large, and as a result, even though the intraLata traffic was > deemed "local" for purposes of the MFJ and could be provided by the > Bell LEC, it was actually divided up into multiple exchange areas for > purposes of call rating. This led to "IntraLata toll" or > "short-distance" calls that the Bell could handle even though they > were considered toll calls, with a per-minute charge. Yes, I remember when it was a toll to call from Warwick to parts of Coventry, RI for the longest time. Warwick is geographically right next to Coventry so it never made sense unless you understood that New England Telephone never though Coventry would experience growth and thus the trunk capacity to Coventry 397 was extremely tight. Of course some interesting changes have taken place in calling areas. But with the advent of VoIP it doesn't matter where you are. In essence my LATA is the entirety of North America. Pretty damned cool if you ask me. ------------------------------ From: Brad Houser Subject: Re: Why There Are Questions About GoDaddy Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 17:34:23 -0700 Organization: Intel Corporation Reply-To: bradDOThouser@intel.com On 8 Jun 2005 16:48:18 -0700, brad.houser@gmail.com wrote: > PAT Wrote: >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I would like to ask you just one >> question: _Why_ can't a registrar be expected to screen potential or >> actual spammers? If registrars started doing that, they'd be heros >> in the eyes of most netters. PAT] > Asking a registrar to be responsible for what an internet site does is > not like asking a landlord to be responsible for what his tenants do > in his apartment. (If a landlord knows his tenant is breaking the law > by growing pot, the landlord can break a lease.) > The registrar provides a pointer, like a signpost to Michael Jackson's > house. No one forces you to go there. What goes on there is not the > fault of the sign. Snip > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But landlords can (or not, as they > wish) choose to rent an apartment to someone. If they get bad vibes > about it, prior to rental, then they just don't rent. Landlords can > also consult credit bureaus to detirmine the wisdom of renting (or > not) to someone. As long as the landlord does not discriminate for > various illegal reasons (for example, the proposed tenant's race or > religion or sex or age) he is free to rent or not as he chooses. > Of course, greedy landlords, like greedy registrars rent as much and > as often as they can, saying we will let the future take care of > itself. I used to know a landlord of furnished apartments in Chicago. > Her philosophy was 'the best apartment in this complex is the one > which is _vacant_, because I know what is going on there; nothing. > PAT] Actually, my analogy was not a good one. I managed to munge the two things together that I wanted to keep separate! 1. Registrars create name to IP address lookups (eg Sign Posts) 2. Web hosting sites provide a server to host web pages (eg Landlords) They are not the same thing. GoDaddy happens to provide both services. Making the registrar responsible for the content is not the same as making the web host responsible. You can have as many domain names (sign posts) as you like, all pointing to the same web host (landlord's property). The signs are OK, it is the content of the web host that is the problem. Making the host responsible for content is what is practical and possible (although probably not going to happen soon, except in China). Making the registrar responsible does nothing except threaten to send someone to another registrar. Brad Houser [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But, if the registrars were required to stick together, (God forbid that ICANN should do something useful in the contracts they write up that everyone has to sign), then the user could go looking for all the registrars he wanted. _None_ would be able to help him; if he had been expelled by any of them, then the registrars and ISPs working together would essentially blackball the offensive user. PAT] ------------------------------ From: NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info Subject: Re: Cellular Phone Spam Date: 15 Jun 2005 17:45:52 -0700 I have over 50 domain names registered thru GoDddy. I am in show biz as an actor but also create photo portfolios for other actors and give each their own domain name. In over one year, I have only gotten ONE spam via an Email addy that would only be available to GoDaddy employees and harvesters of WhoIs. ------------------------------ From: jtaylor Subject: Re: Companies Subvert Search Results to Squelch Criticism Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2005 21:46:07 -0300 Organization: MCI Canada News Reader Service Steve Sobol wrote in message news:telecom24.269.21@telecom-digest.org: > Barry Margolin wrote: >>>> It's not illegal, but it's SEO gone bad. Companies such as Quixtar are >>>> using Google-bombing, link farms and Web spam pages to place positive >>>> sites in the top search results -- which pushes the negative ones >>>> down. >>> Yeah, and there may be no laws against it, but if it's done on a large >>> enough basis you can bet they'll get sued. >> On what grounds? > Google has money and I'm sure they have hired competent, resourceful > attorneys who could find something reasonable and make it > stick. Something fraud-related, I'd be interested in seeing you point to statute which would define the actions described as fraud. > possibly, or they might be able to > point to violations of their Terms of Service. And how, exactly, would actions such as those described, be in any way connected with Google's "terms of service"; assuming that such exist? > Oh, really? Creating fraudulent search engine results is not a valid > reason for a lawsuit? If it were, somehow, it would not be Quixtar but Google who would create the search engine results. If they don't like what Quixtar is doing, they should change their software. ob googlewhack: billabong microstepping [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But Google's claim would be they were fraudulently induced to create false results. It would be something akin to postal fraud (but not with the same legal ramifications): To commit 'postal fraud' one does not need to physically put a fraudulent item in the mail; inducing someone else to do so is likewise fraud _on your part_. So you induced Google, in this instance, to draw up and present false or fraudulent search results. Their scheme for doing so was always working pretty well, but then you screwed it up. And to ask them to change their software is a lot like saying when someone gets a credit card through fraudulent circumstances, the credit card company deposits the plastic and the monthly bills in the U.S. Mail, so you say if they don't like the fraud, then let them change the way they dispense cards. Yeah, Google does periodically refine its software, just as the credit card people periodically refine their techniques for processing applications. But now and then, someone slips past either of them. But the law is intended to protect the weakest party, is it not? And in this instance, Google got defrauded, just as the credit card people get defrauded sometimes. And who gets punished? Not the credit card people nor Google, as long as they were following their 'normal' procedures. 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 V24 #270 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Jun 16 14:31:02 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 25AA7150CD; Thu, 16 Jun 2005 14:31:02 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #271 Message-Id: <20050616183102.25AA7150CD@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 14:31:02 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.7 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Thu, 16 Jun 2005 14:30:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 271 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Nokia PR (Monty Solomon) Sony Ericsson PR (Monty Solomon) Leveraging Mobile Content: Creating Value in Wireless World (M Solomon) Power outage Knocks CheckFree Offline (Monty Solomon) Keeping Your Data Secret is Up to You (Monty Solomon) Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe (Spyros Bartsocas) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Justin Time) Re: AOL Users Most Likely to Make Zombie of Your Computer (Sean Weintz) Re: Companies Subvert Search Results to Squelch Criticism (jtaylor) Re: Email to Former AT&T Phones Now Cingular (Dean M.) Bell Divesture (was Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail) (Lisa Hancock) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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, 16 Jun 2005 02:04:24 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Nokia PR Avaya and Nokia Collaborate to Deliver Next Phase of Fixed to Mobile Convergence Applications for Enterprises - Jun 13, 2005 03:00 AM (PR Newswire) - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49801340 'Human Technology' at the Heart of Nokia's Vision of Mobility - Jun 13, 2005 03:11 AM (PR Newswire) - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49801517 Simple Pleasures: Nokia Introduces Seven New Mobile Phones - Jun 13, 2005 03:23 AM (PR Newswire) - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49801552 Nokia Launches New Network Services and Solutions Initiatives - Jun 13, 2005 03:29 AM (PR Newswire) - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49801565 Nokia to Expand Elisa's Networks, Bring High Data Speeds to 3G - Jun 13, 2005 03:36 AM (PR Newswire) - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49801611 Avaya and Nokia Collaborate to Deliver Next Phase of Fixed to Mobile Convergence Applications for Enterprises - Jun 13, 2005 03:43 AM (PR Newswire) - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49801638 Nokia Collaborates With Enterprise Voice Leaders to Offer Extended Mobility to Businesses - Jun 13, 2005 03:44 AM (PR Newswire) - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49801651 Nokia and OnRelay Collaborate to Create Mobile Deskphone - Jun 13, 2005 03:53 AM (PR Newswire) - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49801681 New Consumer Research by Nokia Lifts Lid on What Really Drives New Growth Markets - Jun 13, 2005 04:27 AM (PR Newswire) - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49801919 Nokia and OnRelay Collaborate to Create the Mobile Deskphone Bringing Advanced Voice Applications to the Enterprise - Jun 13, 2005 09:01 AM (BusinessWire) - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49807782 Nokia Delivers Three Diverse Handset Designs to the CDMA Market - Jun 13, 2005 10:00 AM (PR Newswire) - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49809446 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 02:05:16 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Sony Ericsson PR Sony Ericsson Redefines Music on the Move With W600 Walkman(R) Phone for North American Consumers - Jun 13, 2005 09:30 AM (PR Newswire) - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49808654 Appello's WISEPILOT Turns the Sony Ericsson P910a Into a Powerful Personal Navigation Device - Jun 13, 2005 09:30 AM (PR Newswire) - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49808667 Sony Ericsson Introduces Fashionable Clamshell Phone for North America; Sony Ericsson Z520a Incorporates Bluetooth(TM), Camera and Cool Curves - Jun 13, 2005 09:30 AM (PR Newswire) - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49808691 Sony Ericsson Introduces New Generation of Bluetooth(TM)-Enabled Accessories for North America - Jun 13, 2005 09:30 AM (PR Newswire) - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49808702 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 02:10:28 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Leveraging Mobile Content: Creating Value in a Wireless World http://www.researchchannel.org/program/displayevent.asp?rid=2506 Join a panel of experts as they discuss the prospects, complexities, and expertise needed to leverage mobile content and create value in a wireless world. Increasing data transfer rates and the proliferation of mobile phones with sophisticated media capabilities, has made mobile content is a hot commodity. The market for mobile content is expected to reach $78 billion by 2007. In order to emerge as a player in this burgeoning market, organizations need to have access to content and its associated rights, possess technology that can aggregate content and easily merchandise it, and access to wireless customers and billing capabilities. http://www.researchchannel.org/program/displayevent.asp?rid=2506 ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 02:45:02 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Power outage knocks CheckFree offline By Alorie Gilbert A power outage has disabled CheckFree's online bill payment service, causing its Web site and service to be unavailable, the company said Wednesday. The problem began Wednesday morning when the power in CheckFree's data center in Norcross, Ga., went out, knocking its computers offline. http://news.com.com/2100-1038-5748539.html ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 11:14:18 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Keeping Your Data Secret is Up to You THE COLOR OF MONEY Keeping your data secret is up to you By Michelle Singletary If you had to guess, how many companies would you say have enough of your personal data stored in various databases to make even a rookie crook ready for prime-time conning? You probably don't know the answer, and that is the problem. In the last six months, the personal data of millions of consumers have been lost, stolen, or sold to thieves. The most recent case involved a financial unit of Citigroup Inc. CitiFinancial, which provides a wide variety of consumer loan products, said that personal information (Social Security numbers, loan account data, and addresses) of 3.9 million customers was lost by UPS in transit to a credit bureau. So far, CitiFinancial said it has no reason to believe the information has been used inappropriately. So far. Every time we hear of one of these cases, the companies involved tell their customers not to worry. Trust us, they say. They pledge to enhance their security procedures. http://www.boston.com/business/personalfinance/articles/2005/06/12/keeping_your_data_secret_is_up_to_you/ [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I never hear the companies involved nor the credit bureaus nor the carrier service say they have followed through with an audit on the paperwork; showing _who_ signed for the files when taken from the company, nor _which of their personnel_ accepted it, nor _when, exactly_ it somehow got lost. And this leads me to believe that maybe occassionally the tapes never got picked up by the carrier but instead got picked up by some imposter/phisher who merely claimed to be the carrier. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Spyros Bartsocas Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 09:34:08 +0300 Subject: Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe You say $60 or $70 per week is certainly no bargain when you can get a second-hand phone to *keep* for that kind of money and just buy a local prepaid account readily available in lots of local places. Why buy second hand? I just made a quick check at one of the four Greek mobile operators and you can get a phone to keep plus some initial call time as follows: (all prices in Euros): a)19,90 euros with 8 euros call time b)14,99 euros with 6 euros call time You have a choice of the following phones: Alcatel O.T.153 Ericsson T290 LG L341i Motorola C155 NEC 331i Nokia 2650 Siemens A65 Time renewal comes in 7 and 15 euros. Phones provided with prepaid accounts are usually blocked to the carrier for six months. On the other hand with similar prices you can get a second phone in Turkey and pay less than the rental or second hand prices mentioned by other readers. Spyros ------------------------------ From: Justin Time Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: 16 Jun 2005 06:19:13 -0700 > The Internet wouldn't be run by the "telephone company." It would be > a very limited linkup between universities and defense contractors who > could afford to pay for the $1000+ per month 256k high-speed lines > needed. The rest of us would still be using the Source, Compuserve, > and BIX over dialup, using special utilities to minimize toll call time. > Michael D. Sullivan But it wasn't until sometime around 1993 or '94 that the last Internet BACKBONE segment was upgraded from 9600 baud to a T-1. I remember the announcement, and I am certain the last segment upgraded was one of the major labs in the far southwest (Arizona, NM, or even perhaps the Livermore lab in Ca.) The government agency I was working at at that particular time got its feed from Carnegie-Mellon and was shipped down to our office in Washington on a 56K line. Of course back in those days IP addresses were plentiful and we had an entire Class B to subnet in our offices. Rodgers Platt ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Re: AOL Users Most Likely to Make Zombie of Your Computer Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 11:01:29 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Pat wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Regarding Zombies, it takes one to make > another, doesn't it. Lisa apologizes for being unclear on that > headline. PAT] No, generally it does NOT take a zombie to make another zombie in the PC world. Most zombie type infections come from trojan downloads rather than propagating directly from machines that are already zombies, since most zombie infections do not act as worms. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Ooops, I was thinking of humanoid type Zombies. In a movie on television the other night, "Village of the Undead", after some damn fool went and dug up a grave at the local cemetery, the Zombie thus resurrected went around the town creating more of his kind. He would touch and kill one person; that person became a Zombie. Then the two Zombies created more of their kind the same way, finding new people, killing them, and bringing them back to life as new Zombies. After about an hour of this (one Zombie creates another Zombie, etc) eventually the few remaining actual living people in this village thought it prudent to call in the police, or some kind of militia to do in the bunch of them, which is how the movie ended. It was sort of like two old movies I saw, 'The Zombies of Mora Tau' and 'Abbott and Costello Meet the Zombie'. With humanoid zombies, first someone has to dig one up, then that one goes around reproducing his own kind from other people. I guess computers don't have to do it that way. PAT] ------------------------------ From: jtaylor Subject: Re: Companies Subvert Search Results to Squelch Criticism Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 12:56:50 -0300 Organization: MCI Canada News Reader Service > If they don't like what Quixtar is doing, they should change their > software. > ob googlewhack: billabong microstepping > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But Google's claim would be they > were fraudulently induced to create false results. It would be > something akin to postal fraud (but not with the same legal > ramifications): To commit 'postal fraud' one does not need to > physically put a fraudulent item in the mail; inducing someone > else to do so is likewise fraud _on your part_. So you induced > Google, in this instance, to draw up and present false or > fraudulent search results. But how are these results "fraudulent" or "false"? It is up to Google to define its results, and the software they use to achieve them. If Google a) had a contract with another party to develop search engine software; b) that contract said that the results should not be influenced by Quixtar's (or any similar) actions; and c) the results were in fact so influenced then Google might have a cause of action against that company - but if they themselves develop the software, they cannot claim fraud if the software does exactly what they design it to do. There is no party (except themselves) that has injured them. Businesses make badly designed products all the time; and when the defects come to light it is there job to make them better, not to complain that the completely legal actions of others are to blame. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Yes, the software does what it was designed to do, just like credit card processing does what it is supposed to do. But if you were (in this instance at least) a bit smarter than Google, or the credit card people and caused something to happen by employing fraud, then the law, which is theoretically always intended to protect the weak against the strong will side with Google (or the credit card people). PAT] ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Email to Former AT&T Phones Now Cingular From: Dean M. Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 05:07:40 GMT I'm quite certain it is 10digitphonenumber@mmode.com Dean On Wed, 15 Jun 2005 09:30:05 -0700, wrote: > AT&T: 10-digit-number@mobile.att.net formerly worked but no longer > Cingular: 10-digit-number@mobile.mycingular.net may work for original > Cingular customers. > What is the current methods to send text msgs to former AT&T now > Cingluar cell phone numbers? > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think @mobile.mycingular.com (or .net) > works for the AT&T displaced customers as well. PAT ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Bell Divesture (was Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites) Date: 16 Jun 2005 07:14:02 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Robert Bonomi wrote: > If the "Bell System/AT&T/Western Electric" had remained a monolithic > entity, The rate of change in the "Internet" would likely have been > much slower. There probably would not have been the telecom boom/bust > of circa 5 years ago, What is your basis to claim "the rate of change in the Internet would likely have been much slower"? It seems that many critics of the former Bell System "freeze it" at the time of divesture. That is, they presume the Bell System's physical plant and operating policies would never change and remain in 1983 technology. That premise is absurb. Throughout its history the Bell System was improving its plant. The system of 1983 was radically different than the system of 1973, and clearly the system of 1993 and 2003 would be radically different than 1983. I know that data communications improved greatly just during the late 1970s, for example. Digital lines replaced analog lines for faster speed and higher reliability. Private line costs were coming down. It is also clear operating policies and service plans would have changed, too. (They were always envolving in the past). How or what is tougher to say -- it depends on the external environment. Don't forget the Bell System was heavilly controlled by (1) regulation and (2) the consent decree. We know that deregulation became popular later on. It's possible the Bell System may have been allow to adjust its rates so the the profitable corridors (the "cream") may have gotten discounts so Bell could compete fairly against newcomers. It's possible the Bell System may have escaped the consent decree--just as IBM was able to do -- and go into new markets previously closed to it. Who knows, perhaps LANS and WANS would've been bult FASTER had the Bell System been allowed to be involved and use it strengths. Fred Atkinson wrote: > Regarding divestiture, I'd have to disagree with your position. Have > you ever studied economics and the principles thereof? Yes, I have studied economics. I know that "competition" in as much by itself is no guarantee of lower prices. There are a great many more significant variables that must be considered. In the case of the Bell System, it must be remembered that Bell's prices were NOT set by being a monopoly, but rather set by the govt in accordance with social policy. It was easy for MCI to undercut Bell's pricing because MCI focused solely on the most lucrative markets and unlike Bell, did not have to spread its costs and revenues a wide base. MCI didn't have to build microwave towers high in the Rockies yet charge no more. Nor did MCI have to carry deadbeat or higher cost customers or provide support service. That's not free competition. > The telephone system never improved all that much over the years (at > least, to the perception of the end user) until the Bell companies had > to compete. That is utter nonsense. If your statement was true, then the Bell System would still be at a 1910 technical level. Obviously it went beyond that. The reality is that the Bell System was continually improving its switchgear, transmission media, customer service, and subscriber equipment right up until divesture. Long distance rates were falling. Before divesture my employer was getting faster, more reliable, and cheaper private line data service and Centrex service. > Thus, competition played a big role in bringing prices down. And > the end user got a lot more say so about his/her telephone > service(s) and got what they wanted at prices they could afford. The divesture result in costs being _shifted_, not coming down. For many subscribers, cost went UP. Users could define their service requirements before divesture. One cost shifting was moving former telco employees into the employ of corporations they once served. That didn't really save any money, indeed, for many employers, it increased costs. That is, instead of contracting out specialized work to specialists, one now had to hire those specialists in house. > I remember when an answering machine could only be provided and > installed by the phone company. The cost was enormous and there > were no other alternatives. Then came Carterphone, thank goodness. > And then came competition between carriers ... and the walls came a > tumbling down (with apologies to 'Joshua'). There were answering machines available in the early 1960s. Back then the technology was limited to what a machine could cost effectively do (not a lot of microprocessors in the early 1960s). Many business people preferred human answering services to provide superior customer service. BTW, Carterphone was not Divesture. Separate issue. > Because everyone was trying to provide something that the other > carriers didn't provide (to target their niche in the marketplace), > the technology began to develop and new things were offered. I often > doubt that we'd have ever seen the Internet if the industry hadn't > become competitive (or at least not for many more years to come). Your statement implies there was no technology development prior to divesture. I suggest you read some Bell Laboratories Record magazines to see all the things that were going on. A great many of the technologies of the 1990s were originally developed at Bell Labs. As to the Internet, as mentioned the cost of private lines was declining while speed was going up before divesture. This would continue. Indeed, I wonder if the old Bell System had stayed around and had a hand in regulating the Internet, some of the problems we have today would not exist. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Here is a question for the collected > readership: _If_ Bell had not gotten divested, and was still in > charge of most everything relating to telecommunications, what would > the internet be like today? Probably better. Pat, look at the many problems you articulated about Internet control and supervision. I dare say the Bell System would have handled it better. > Would it all be run by 'the telephone company'? Would we be getting > all our attachments and peripherals from the telephone company? I > suggest that might be the case. What do the rest of you think? Carterphone already removed a big barrier and private lines were already free to hook up their own stuff. So, many attachments would be available from private sources. However, I suspect a healthy Bell System would've kept Western Electric, modified it to meet modern business needs, and been a competitive player. Much would've depended on the regulators. IBM was able to radically change as a company and save itself because it was freed from its 1956 consent decree and got into some lines of business previously forbidden to it and not forced to share free very valuable research patents. Presumably there'd be deregulation of the Bell System. Private services would be allowed as well as long distance interconnection. But at the same time, Bell would be allowed to modify its rates to meet specific market conditions and compete better, and get revenues from new services previously forbidden, just like IBM. Let's remember that MCI got a foothold in many doors not by offering superior service and lower rates, but by suing regulators or other agencies to force itself in the door. That's not "free market" activity either. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Recall please that MCI got its start by filing a fraudulent petition with the Illinois Commerce Commission. The radio repair shop in Joliet, Illinois (MCI's humble beginnings) _claimed_ all they wanted to do was run a microwave link for a small, selected handful of their private customers between Joliet, Chicago and St. Louis. Illinois Bell protested, but to no avail. ICC allowed Microwave Communications (the small private dealer of radio equipment and repair of same) to install a link between Chicago and St. Louis. Soon thereafter, Microwave Communications somehow 'snuck in' an interconnection to the 'outside' world via a telephone central office in Chicago and one in St. Louis. Regards how they initially built up their customer base, MCI took advantage of two things: (1) the public's general dislike for Bell System (remember, VietNam, anti-everything big business in the 1960's) and (2) whether they were 'anti-everything' or not, the general ignorance of the public regards the working of things telephonic. Knowing nothing about the concepts of Separations and Settlements, nor the costs of running big telcos versus rural telcos, nor the profits to be had in the east coast corridor versus the heavy expenses of putting repair people to work atop telephone poles in the Rocky Mountains in the dead of winter, when MCI proffered 'much cheaper rates for calls by using us instead of them', between that and (1, above) people jumped at the chance to 'get one over on Ma Bell' ... As Charlie Brown, AT&T's Chairman during Divestiture once phrased it, "When was the last time MCI had two of their long-time, dedicated workers fall to their deaths from a high peak in the Rockies in the dead of winter when they had gone out to repair lines for a small community of a few hundred people who otherwise would have had to go without phone service until spring when the lines could be safely restored? If AT&T did not have to deal with hideous conditions like that in the interest of providing round the clock phone service to small, rural areas, then I could afford to give cut rate long distance service also." And he continued, "the nerve of those people to tell customers to use _our_ directory service (which we provide for 'free' as part of our over all expense in running the telephone company) and then to place the _revenue_ portion of the call using their facilities 'because they are cheaper, and why would you want to spend money on Bell when you could get it for less' ..." 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'. 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End of TELECOM Digest V24 #271 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Jun 16 23:32:43 2005 Received: from localhost by massis.lcs.mit.edu with SpamAssassin (2.63 2004-01-11); Thu, 16 Jun 2005 23:33:25 -0400 From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #272 Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 23:32:43 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <20050617033243.4D11D1519D@massis.lcs.mit.edu> X-Spam-Flag: YES X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: Yes, hits=2.3 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,HOME_EMPLOYMENT, MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT,PORN_4 autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: ** MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="----------=_42B24485.5C38DB25" Status: RO Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 4D11D1519D; Thu, 16 Jun 2005 23:32:43 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #272 Message-Id: <20050617033243.4D11D1519D@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 23:32:43 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) TELECOM Digest Thu, 16 Jun 2005 23:33:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 272 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Project Seeks to Bring Rural India Online (Telecom dailyLead from USTA) Send Text Message to a Russian Cell Phone (cronept) Broadvoice (Gary) XO Communications (Steven Lichter) Re: AOL Users Most Likely to Make Zombie of Your Computer (Scott Dorsey) Re: AOL Users Most Likely to Make Zombie of Your Computer (Sean Weintz) Re: Companies Subvert Search Results to Squelch Criticism (Lisa Hancock) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Scott Dorsey) Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon (R Herber) Re: Email to Former AT&T Phones Now Cingular (Isaiah Beard) Re: Bell Divesture (was Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail) (Tim) Re: Bell Divesture (Fred Goldstein) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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, 16 Jun 2005 13:32:05 EDT From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: Project Seeks to Bring Rural India Online Telecom dailyLead from USTA June 16, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22399&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * Project seeks to bring rural India online BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Motorola antes up in China * Carnival Cruise lures business travelers with Wi-Fi * AOL is "not for sale" * Comcast close to deal for branded wireless services USTA SPOTLIGHT * Telecom Crash Course -- The must-have book for telecom professionals EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Akimbo hurt by bad reviews REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * New York regulators reject petition to stop Verizon's FTTH rollout * Will new rules require ISPs to track users? * Virginia city taxes mobile phone users * Airline passengers, workers against lifting cell phone ban Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22399&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: cronept Subject: Send Text Message to a Russian Cell Phone Date: 16 Jun 2005 13:56:06 -0700 Hi, I have a friend who is in Russia. I am in the states. She is using a GSM cell phone. I am wondering if I can send text message to her from the Internet? I tried AIM but I do not know how to send to a cellphone outside the US. Does anybody know any websites or any software can do that? Thanks alot. I appciate it. Jim ------------------------------ From: Gary Subject: Broadvoice Date: 16 Jun 2005 14:11:54 -0700 Before being lured by some good prices, you should check out www.broadvoicesucks.com and read about their quality. ------------------------------ From: Steven Lichter Organization: I Kill Spammers, Inc. (c) 2005 A Rot in Hell Co. Subject: XO Communications Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 19:00:00 CDT We had an outage today involving them and Verizon in San Bernardino, California. Anyone know anything about this. The only thing I could get out of them was that 3 DS3's were lost. I would think that there would have been backups and they would have been able to reroute within a few minutes. The only good spammer is a dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? (c) 2005 I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot in Hell Co. ------------------------------ From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: AOL Users Most Likely to Make Zombie of Your Computer Date: 16 Jun 2005 15:36:15 -0400 Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000) > Pat wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Ooops, I was thinking of humanoid > type Zombies. In a movie on television the other night, "Village of > the Undead", after some damn fool went and dug up a grave at the > local cemetery, the Zombie thus resurrected went around the town > creating more of his kind. He would touch and kill one person; that > person became a Zombie. Then the two Zombies created more of their > kind the same way, finding new people, killing them, and bringing > them back to life as new Zombies. After about an hour of this (one > Zombie creates another Zombie, etc) eventually the few remaining > actual living people in this village thought it prudent to call in > the police, or some kind of militia to do in the bunch of them, > which is how the movie ended. It was sort of like two old movies I > saw, 'The Zombies of Mora Tau' and 'Abbott and Costello Meet the > Zombie'. With humanoid zombies, first someone has to dig one up, > then that one goes around reproducing his own kind from other > people. I guess computers don't have to do it that way. PAT] No, computers for the most part do it like Bela Lugosi in WHITE ZOMBIE, in which the Zombi Master administers zombification fluid to corpses or living people in order to bring them under his power. White Zombie is one of the first of the zombie films and by far the best. scott "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Re: AOL Users Most Likely to Make Zombie of Your Computer Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 17:17:30 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to T. Sean Weintz: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Ooops, I was thinking of humanoid > type Zombies. In a movie on television the other night, "Village of > the Undead", after some damn fool went and dug up a grave at the > local cemetery, the Zombie thus resurrected went around the town > creating more of his kind. He would touch and kill one person; that > person became a Zombie. Then the two Zombies created more of their > kind the same way, finding new people, killing them, and bringing > them back to life as new Zombies. After about an hour of this (one > Zombie creates another Zombie, etc) eventually the few remaining > actual living people in this village thought it prudent to call in > the police, or some kind of militia to do in the bunch of them, > which is how the movie ended. It was sort of like two old movies I > saw, 'The Zombies of Mora Tau' and 'Abbott and Costello Meet the > Zombie'. With humanoid zombies, first someone has to dig one up, > then that one goes around reproducing his own kind from other > people. I guess computers don't have to do it that way. PAT] Yeah. Movie zombies do work that way. I'm afraid I don't know any of those movies. But 'Night of the Living Dead' illustrates the same concept. However not all humanoid zombies work that way -- traditional African and Haitian voodoo folklore zombies (a tradition predating the existence of movies) are created one at a time by voodoo priest or "Bokor". These zombies are the supposedly used as slaves by the bokor. They can't themselves make others into zombies -- in fact they are completely under the control of the bokor, and do his/her bidding only. That is the type of zombie I think whomever coined the phrase for computer use had in mind. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, in this movie on television, a professor was giving a lecture on the Voodoo religion, and someone raised the point of how there in that town, a person who had been thought to be a Witch or a Zombie or something like that had been sacrificed and put to death by the town authorities a couple hundred years earlier. Nothing would do but this professor had to go dig up the corpse and examine it to look for signs of Witchcraft or Voodoo-ism or whatever. Well ... unearthing that corpse and its casket is what got all the trouble started. It turned out to be a Zombie, who was quite angry at having been made to wait two hundred years to get dug up so he could get back to his business. Although many townfolk were victimized (turned into Zombies themselves and left for 'undead' to continue the rampage as more and more of them got created) in the course of the movie, of course the Professor and his female research assistant got away unscathed, as you would expect. PAT] ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Companies Subvert Search Results to Squelch Criticism Date: 16 Jun 2005 11:01:34 -0700 Steve Sobol wrote: > Yeah, and there may be no laws against it, but if it's done on a large > enough basis you can bet they'll get sued. On what grounds? AFAIK, there's no grounds to sue them. There is nothing illegal about a company touting its own horn. I find this particular thread interesting given the responses to my criticism of inaccuracy on the Internet. It seems that this thread supports my assertion. ------------------------------ From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: 16 Jun 2005 14:03:03 -0400 Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000) Fred Atkinson wrote: > On 13 Jun 2005 12:07:36 -0700, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote: >> Certainly some very trashy books have been and continue to be >> published and distributed. But I dare say it is harder for one to >> find such trashy books in normal channels than it is for one to find >> trashy stuff on the Internet. Finding paper copies of hardcore >> material requires some effort and some material may not be available >> to children; but that stuff is freely available on the Internet. > Is it really harder [to find trashy books]? Have you ever visited a > pornographic book store? If not, do you deny they are out there or > what kind of books are distributed? Have you ever seen 'The People > versus Larry Flynt'? As a person who, as an adolescent, was very interested in trashy books, I can say that it is indeed much harder for the average high school student to find pornography than it is to go to their local library. On the other hand, I can also say that as an adolescent it was easier for me to find pornography than a coherent explanation of electromagnetic fields and how antennas really work. My school library was lacking in both respects. >> My concern is that there is a lot of garbage masquerading as fact on >> the Internet. The controls that exist on other printed matter do not >> exist and the unscrupulous take advtg of that. (For instance, I >> learned long ago that many sites pulled up by a search engine are >> actually porn sites loaded with common key words to trigger a hit.) >> People have put up health-information sites and claimed to be a doctor >> when after some careful reading it proved to be garbage. > And there's a lot of stuff published by hate groups and other > extremists, too. Do we give up freedom of speech to keep this stuff > from being disseminated? I don't think it's a freedom of speech issue at all, in part because kids are a special case. I think that restricting stuff published by hate groups is a bad thing in general, but restricting it to elementary school kids is not a bad thing. There are a lot of materials that kids shouldn't have access to without some outside assistance to show them what is valid and what isn't, and therefore I think giving kids unrestricted network access in school is a bad thing. The thing is that the network _is_ a place of complete free speech, where anyone can say anything without regard to truth, and this is a bad thing for kids who haven't yet learned how to filter what is true and what is not. (On the other hand, with proper supervision, it can be an excellent way for them to learn about how to filter). You could make the argument to block the sites about the Cross-Field Antenna, since the explanation of E-field behaviour on them is incorrect too. There are a lot of incorrect things on the net and kids (and adults) need to learn to distinguish them. But until they have learned, I can understand the need to restrict things somewhat. > And it goes back to not believing everything you read or hear. Kids > have to learn to balance it sometime. Depriving them of that > information robs them of the chance to learn to decide for themselves. This is true, but they _need_ supervision to learn to decide this. And sadly that is the thing that is most missing in school situations today. > When my mother taught English, she was called into the principal's > office one day and asked if 'The Scarlet Letter' was actually on her > approved reading list. She said that it was. The principal was > shocked. Then she asked him if he'd ever read 'The Scarlet Letter'. > His reply was that he had not. Hmm. And he believed that kids > shouldn't be reading it? Based upon having never read it himself? > And what about schools that took books like that off the library > shelves? What about Huckleberry Finn? Tom Sawyer? And the list goes > on and on? With Mark Twain's writing style as it was, it would be be > considered quite racist by today's standards. Do we censor it? Of > course not. No, but we explain it when we teach it, and we don't just hand it out to kids without explanation. (Well, hopefully ... I have seen some English classes that weren't much better than that). But then, I got in big trouble for refusing to read James Fenimore Cooper in school, and for citing Twain as a source for my belief that he was no good as a writer. > Are we really protecting the kids when we deprive them of the > opportunity to learn to decide for themselves? Or are we going to > have to protect them from it all their lives? And if they don't > learn, who's going to protect *their* kids? And what about when we > pass on and leave them to their own judgement? You can't completely protect kids, and I agree that current society goes quite out of control in an attempt to protect kids. But unless kids have supervision, they aren't going to learn to decide anyway. > If the kids don't learn about radio theory, how could they learn to > tell that this information is wrong? These people obviously never > had. So depriving them of access to information about ham radio on > QSL Net (most of which is written by people who have been examined by > the FCC and found to have a reasonable understanding of radio theory) > is a 'good thing'? I don't think so. Certainly depriving them of access to QSL.NET is a bad thing, and an example of terrible misuse of filtering. But depriving them of access to sites talking about the danger of electromagnetic radiation damaging your psychic aura is probably a reasonable use of filtering. scott "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon Organization: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (DoE, URA) From: herber@ncdf107.fnal.gov (Randolph J. Herber) Date: 16 Jun 2005 11:35:08 -0700 In article , Monty Solomon wrote: > Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon > Wireless Phones When New Messages Arrive > Home and Business Customers in N.Y.C. and New England Can Receive TXT > Alerts on Their Verizon Wireless Phones > NEW YORK, June 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Verizon home and business voice > mailboxes now can alert customers on their Verizon Wireless phone that > someone has left a message. > Starting today, Verizon voice-messaging customers in New York City and > New England can add a feature that sends a text message to any Verizon > Wireless short text messaging-capable phone with an alert that a new > voice message has been left on the customer's landline phone. > - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49739949 > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What is supposed to make that so > exceptional? Cingular Wireless has always had an icon on the display > screen indicating voice message waiting, and I have always had my > phone set to make three chirps when that icon is turned on. PAT] I opine that what makes it exceptional is the tie between _Verizon home and business voice mailboxes_ and _Verizon Wireless short text messaging-capable phone[s]_. This is not the same as the icon that a cellphone may display after _its_ service receives a voice message. Randolph J. Herber, herber@fnal.gov, +1 630 840 2966, CD/CDFTF PK-149F, Mail Stop 318 Fermilab Kirk & Pine Rds., PO Box 500, Batavia, IL 60510-0500, USA. (Speaking for myself and not for US, US DOE, FNAL nor URA.) (Product, trade, or service marks herein belong to their respective owners.) ------------------------------ From: Isaiah Beard Subject: Re: Email to Former AT&T Phones Now Cingular Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 15:45:44 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Joseph wrote: > Also, what works for all North American mobile numbers is > 10digits@teleflip.com e.g. 3115552368@teleflip.com If you value your friendship or business relationship with the person you are messaging, then you would probably want to avoid teleflip. Neatly tucked into the recesses of their user agreement is a provision which permits them to "send messages through the service to any and all users" about "new or existing products or services to be offered by Teleflip." In other words, they receive the right SMSpam people. 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: Bell Divesture (was Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites) Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 13:30:21 -0700 Organization: Cox Communications > The reality is that the Bell System was continually improving its > switchgear, transmission media, customer service, and subscriber > equipment right up until divesture. Long distance rates were falling. The No. 1ESS was basically a No 5XBAR with stored program control (SPC). The real motivator was to cut labor cost and secondarily to be able to market special calling features. Not knocking that nice forward step in switching, but it was good for Ma Bell first, and the customer could (would) ride along for whatever benefits it gave to the subscribers. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have said more or less the same thing for several years. Please recall that through the 1960's, fraud against the telephone company had reached scandalous levels. Everyone, or nearly everyone 'who mattered' knew how 'the system' worked. No one paid for anything from telco they could avoid. For example, consider the old style 'calling cards' with the numbers and 'key letter' combination. Calling cards _used to_ consist of the RAO (Regional Accounting Office) code, ten digits (a/c plus phone number) and a 'key letter' (such as 'A' though 'J') . As their little secret, telco took one of the ten digits [normally the fourth, fifth or sixth digit] of the phone number, and tied it into the 'key letter'. For example, if the fifth digit in your phone number was a '7' then the key letter for that year was 'B'. Bell would announce in internal memos each year what (positioned) digit would be used, and what letter would be associated. No one was supposed to know how it worked, except for telephone operators, so that if you said to the operator that you wanted to make a calling card call she could at least tell if you got the logistics correct (by the key letter and number thing) even if you were full of malarkey about the number to be charged, which she could _not_ tell if you were using a pay station. Illinois Bell wrote off _millions of dollars_ in calling card fraud each year, as did New York Telephone. Things had gotten to be so bad that not only did people rip off phone calls like crazy (most phreaks never paid for phone calls) but far too many people otherwise were 'too smart for their own good' in Bell System's opinion on things such as how calls were traced as needed. A phreak once said to me, "pay no attention to all that stuff in the movies where someone calls the operator and says 'trace that call I just recieved'; I can tell you that _if_ an _attempt_ is made to trace the call, they will send some guy back to the frames, he is going to look and look and look and look some more then he will discover the origin of the call is some other central office so he has to call over there, and someone there has to go in the frames and look and look and look and look some more. And just about the time he thinks he has the call traced, he hears a sickening crash as the tandem (call connection circuitry) collapses because the call was disconnected, and it was a wasted effort. So if I am 'on a call' and some old bitch tells me she is going to 'have the call traced' and get me in trouble I just her 'go ahead and do that' ... I figure I can chat with her for another 20-30 minutes at least before it gets to the point that it is going to matter." In Chicago, there was an 'elite society' of phreaks who always had a meeting once a year in January: after first making solemn oaths to _not_ abuse each other's personal calling cards, everyone laid their calling card out on a table for everyone else to see. The idea was to by process of elimination detirmine the formula for the key letters and which positioned digit was chosen for that year. The more people present, the wider variety of examples to use in seeing how it worked for that year. Once they were reasonably certain how things would work, they put in a couple of 'test calls', to verify their hypothesis (this year it is the digit in the nth position, and the associated letters are [etc]). Bell got hit so bad for a few years, they finally decided they had to rebuild the entire phone system from the ground up, and the answer to that was ESS. So as you stated, Bell did not develop ESS in order to make a few dollars selling 'custom calling features' to users; ESS was developed so the telephone company could regain control of a network which was rapidly getting out of control. When Bell was able to give users a free (or nearly free) ride on the new technology, they did so. They didn't develop 'caller ID' or 'call waiting' or 'three way calling' for _your_ benefit; everything Bell did was for its own benefit first and foremost. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 22:26:57 -0400 From: Fred Goldstein Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture At 6/14/2005 03:16 PM, Pat wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Here is a question for the collected > readership: _If_ Bell had not gotten divested, and was still in > charge of most everything relating to telecommunications, what would > the internet be like today? Would it all be run by 'the telephone > company'? Would we be getting all our attachments and peripherals from > the telephone company? I suggest that might be the case. What do the > rest of you think? PAT] This is an interesting question, and like any "what if", one can only speculate. Here's my take. Divestiture was one stage in the evolution of the PSTN. It was AT&T's choice, since they were being sued to divest themselves of WECo (now Lucent), and chose to give up the BOCs instead. Vertical integration was causing all sorts of problems, like slow progress, accounting questions, and cross-subsidization of competitive goods by monopoly-BOC goods. If the BOCs hadn't been spun off, would WECo have been? It took over a decade before AT&T figured out on their own that it should be. Terminal equipment competition (Carterfone) was firmly in place before Divestiture. So was Computer II, which deregulated and detariffed terminal equipment. That latter decision, which took effect in 1983 after Divestiture was announced (and thus was often confused with it), was arguably more important for the future Internet! Besides its impact on equipment, it also drew a bright line between BOC regulated common carrier activities and (non-BOC-owned) "information" services. Divestiture changed who owned the BOCs, and did a lot for the independent long distance industry by keeping the RBOCs out for a while, but it alone wasn't nearly as important as people make it out to be. Here's my core thesis: Major regulatory changes tend to lag, rather than lead, technical changes. Regulation changes when old regimes cause too much friction. Carterfone came long after it was due. Long distance competition came when it was obviously practical. Local competition (TA96) came about because it was long overdue; the old monopoly system was not working. Yes, the RBOCs are now taking advantage of political clout to kill off many competitors, but that doesn't mean that de jure monopolies are the right way. So there are multiple scenarios we could be talking about. No Carterfone? Perish the thought. Monopolies in LD transmission? That would have held up the price of data transmission, slowing down all sorts of datacomm. Ma Bell viewed leased lines, so necessary for data, as a substitute for profitable long distance minutes of use, so they overpriced them. The RBOCs still do the same thing with their Special Access tariffs! Now the Internet happened to some extent independent of the phone companies. Had AT&T owned essentially *all* transmission, as it did in 1970, it could have held the price so high that the Internet could only be afforded by Uncle Sam and big corporations. A low-bandwidth BBS/Usenet culture might have persisted, though. Let's say digital leased line rates were, instead, regulated at cost-based levels. Thanks to fiber optics, which would have been gradually installed (more slowly than they were), the Internet would have had its backbone bandwidth. Divestiture did not technically lead to the Access Charge system that replaced Separations (the FCC's earlier MTS and WATS Orders did), but I doubt AT&T would have had the balls to claim that ISP-bound calls were all Long Distance, as the RBOCs tried in their 1987 Modem Tax escapade. But without local competition in 1996, and with the Internet going public when it did in 1992, I suggest that the BOC networks would have collapsed in 1996! The RBOC networks came within months of doing so. Dial-up Internet traffic was exploding. Bell System culture bought switches on a 5-year planning schedule, so they could not react quickly. CLECs were authorized in February, 1996, and by the end of the year they were carrying substantial dial-up ISP traffic. Remember "America On Hold"? AOL did not use CLECs in 1996, and the RBOCs could not provide circuits fast enough (I know; I was working on AOLnet at the time). Other ISPs did, and that prevented more RBOC switches from melting down under the load. All told I think Divestiture was a very good thing, and the pending acquisitions of AT&T and MCI by RBOCs is a national tragedy which should not be allowed, but will be. America will, as a result, fall even farther behind the rest of the world in most matters of telecom. Fred Goldstein k1io fgoldstein "at" ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.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! 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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 V24 #272 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Jun 17 16:04:14 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id F1CC514F96; Fri, 17 Jun 2005 16:04:13 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #273 Message-Id: <20050617200413.F1CC514F96@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 16:04:13 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.2 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT,NO_OBLIGATION autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Fri, 17 Jun 2005 16:04:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 273 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Your ISP as Net Watchdog (Lisa Minter) Cellphone Tax (Lisa Minter) Converting 4-Wire Autovon Phone to 2-Wire (Scott Norwood) Intel Develops All-in-One Wi-Fi Chip (Telecom dailyLead from USTA) Monitor/Recorder for Residential Power Line Outages? (AES) Re: Email to Former AT&T Phones Now Cingular (Joseph) Need Help on Wireless (PatETC) Re: Bell Divestiture (Lisa Hancock) Re: Bell Divestiture (Robert Bonomi) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Your ISP as Net Watchdog Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 23:16:24 -0500 By Declan McCullagh Staff Writer, CNET News.com The U.S. Department of Justice is quietly shopping around the explosive idea of requiring Internet service providers to retain records of their customers' online activities. Data retention rules could permit police to obtain records of e-mail chatter, Web browsing or chat-room activity months after Internet providers ordinarily would have deleted the logs -- that is, if logs were ever kept in the first place. No U.S. law currently mandates that such logs be kept. In theory, at least, data retention could permit successful criminal and terrorism prosecutions that otherwise would have failed because of insufficient evidence. But privacy worries and questions about the practicality of assembling massive databases of customer behavior have caused a similar proposal to stall in Europe and could engender stiff opposition domestically. The U.S. Department of Justice is mulling data retention rules that could permit police to obtain records of e-mail, browsing or chat-room activity months after ISPs ordinarily would have deleted the logs -- if they were ever kept in the first place. Bottom line: Data retention could aid criminal and terrorism prosecutions, but privacy worries and questions about the practicality of assembling massive databases of customer behavior could engender stiff opposition to the proposal. In Europe, the Council of Justice and Home Affairs ministers say logs must be kept for between one and three years. One U.S. industry representative, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Justice Department is interested in at least a two-month requirement. Justice Department officials endorsed the concept at a private meeting with Internet service providers and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, according to interviews with multiple people who were present. The meeting took place on April 27 at the Holiday Inn Select in Alexandria, Va. "It was raised not once but several times in the meeting, very emphatically," said Dave McClure, president of the U.S. Internet Industry Association, which represents small to midsize companies. "We were told, 'You're going to have to start thinking about data retention if you don't want people to think you're soft on child porn.'" McClure said that while the Justice Department representatives argued that Internet service providers should cooperate voluntarily, they also raised the "possibility that we should create by law a standard period of data retention." McClure added that "my sense was that this is something that they've been working on for a long time." This represents an abrupt shift in the Justice Department's long-held position that data retention is unnecessary and imposes an unacceptable burden on Internet providers. In 2001, the Bush administration expressed "serious reservations about broad mandatory data retention regimes." The current proposal appears to originate with the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, which enforces federal child pornography laws. But once mandated by law, the logs likely would be mined during terrorism, copyright infringement and even routine criminal investigations. (The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.) "Preservation" vs. "Retention" At the moment, Internet service providers typically discard any log file that's no longer required for business reasons such as network monitoring, fraud prevention or billing disputes. Companies do, however, alter that general rule when contacted by police performing an investigation -- a practice called data preservation. A 1996 federal law called the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act regulates data preservation. It requires Internet providers to retain any "record" in their possession for 90 days "upon the request of a governmental entity." "We were told, 'You're going to have to start thinking about data retention if you don't want people to think you're soft on child porn.'" -- Dave McClure, president, U.S. Internet Industry Association Child protection advocates say that this process can lead police to dead ends if they don't move quickly enough and log files are discarded automatically. Also, many Internet service providers don't record information about instant-messaging conversations or Web sites visited -- data that would prove vital to an investigation. "Law enforcement agencies are often having 20 reports referred to them a week by the National Center," said Michelle Collins, director of the exploited child unit for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. "By the time legal process is drafted, it could be 10, 15, 20 days. They're completely dependent on information from the ISPs to trace back an individual offender." Collins, who participated in the April meeting, said that she had not reached a conclusion about how long log files should be retained. "There are so many various business models ... I don't know that there's going to be a clear-cut answer to what would be the optimum amount of time for a company to maintain information," she said. McClure, from the U.S. Internet Industry Association, said he counter-proposed the idea of police agencies establishing their own guidelines that would require them to seek logs soon after receiving tips. Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, compared the Justice Department's idea to the since-abandoned Clipper Chip, a brainchild of the Clinton and first Bush White House. Initially the Clipper Chip -- an encryption system with a backdoor for the federal government -- was supposed to be voluntary, but declassified documents show that backdoors were supposed to become mandatory. "Even if your concern is chasing after child pornographers, the packets don't come pre-labeled that way," Rotenberg said. "What effectively happens is that all ISP customers, when that data is presented to the government, become potential targets of subsequent investigations." A divided Europe The Justice Department's proposal could import a debate that's been simmering in Europe for years. In Europe, a data retention proposal prepared by four nations said that all telecommunications providers must retain generalized logs of phone calls, SMS messages, e-mail communications and other "Internet protocols" for at least one year. Logs would include the addresses of Internet sites and identities of the correspondents but not necessarily the full content of the communication. Even after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush adminis- tration criticized that approach. In November 2001, Mark Richard from the Justice Department's criminal division said in a speech in Brussels, Belgium, that the U.S. method offers Internet providers the flexibility "to retain or destroy the records they generate based upon individual assessments of resources, architectural limitations, security and other business needs." France, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Sweden jointly submitted their data retention proposal to the European Parliament in April 2004. Such mandatory logging was necessary, they argued, "for the purpose of prevention, investigation, detection and prosecution of crime or criminal offenses including terrorism." But a report prepared this year by Alexander Alvaro on behalf of the Parliament's civil liberties and home affairs committee slammed the idea, saying it may violate the European Convention on Human Rights. Also, Alvaro wrote: "Given the volume of data to be retained, particularly Internet data, it is unlikely that an appropriate analysis of the data will be at all possible. Individuals involved in organized crime and terrorism will easily find a way to prevent their data from being traced." He calculated that if an Internet provider were to retain all traffic data, the database would swell to a size of 20,000 to 40,000 terabytes -- too large to search using existing technology. On June 7, the European Parliament voted by a show of hands to adopt Alvaro's report and effectively snub the mandatory data retention plan. But the vote may turn out to have been largely symbolic: The Council of Justice and Home Affairs ministers have vowed to press ahead with their data retention requirement. Copyright 2005 CNET Networks, Inc. and Declan McCullagh. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. *** 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, CNET Networks, Inc. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Cellphone Tax Started in Alexandria, VA Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 23:22:21 -0500 By Robert MacMillan Special to The Washington Post Using a cell phone is Alexandria is about to become more expensive -- $3 a month more expensive. The City Council approved a new tax on cell phones as part of the fiscal 2006 budget. It will help make up some of the money that the city will lose after the real estate tax rate was lowered in order to provide relief to homeowners. Residents will see the new charge on their cell phone bills starting in September. The tax will bring in an estimated $1.7 million in fiscal 2006, city officials said, about one-third of 1 percent of the city's $468 million budget. Residents will pay $3 a month on cell phone bills of more than $30, while those on lower-cost plans will be charged 10 percent of their monthly bill. Other measures passed to offset the real estate tax cut include a 20-cent increase in cigarette sales tax and a new entertainment surcharge on items such as movie tickets. Taxing the growing number of cell phone users should help offset the losses created by a reduction in the real estate tax rate, Mayor William D. Euille (D) said. "I was just sitting in my car at the intersection. I looked around at 15 or 20 other cars, and everybody had a cell phone," said Euille, who estimates that he spends more than $100 a month on cell service. Barry Murphy, a 46-year-old realty agent and Alexandria homeowner, said the tax amounts to about a latte a month for him. He carries two cell phones -- one that runs on Cingular's network and another on the Verizon Wireless network-- and uses whichever one gets better reception in a given part of town. "I don't mind paying some taxes as long as [we get] more value" from the city, said Murphy, who pays several hundred dollars a month in cell phone bills. But some residents said $3 could make the difference between being able to afford a cell phone and going without. Tawanda Moore said she works 25 hours a week at the Fuddruckers restaurant on Duke Street for $7.50 an hour. She said the tax will make it difficult for her to buy a cell phone. "There are other ways for [the government] to get their money," said Moore, 33. For years, Alexandria has relied on a dependable 25 percent tax on local phone service, bringing in an average of $7.50 per phone line every month. But the revenue stream has been drying up as more residents drop their regular phone service for a cell phone-only lifestyle. There were about 113,000 residential and business land lines in operation in the city as of July 2004, a drop from more than 120,000 two years earlier, according to Bruce Johnson, director of the city's Office of Management and Budget. Federal Communications Commission statistics show a similar change nationwide -- a 6 percent drop in U.S. land lines from 2000 to 2004. Four percent of U.S. households say they have cut the cord altogether in favor of cell phones, but that number could swell to 12 percent by next year, according to a report released in May by Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. In another indication of an accelerating shift from hard-wired phones to mobile handsets, there were 173.2 million active phone lines as of the end of 2004, while cell phone companies counted 178.2 million users, according to IDC, a research firm also based in Cambridge. "Obviously, a lot of people have figured out that they have two phones in their life and they both serve the same purpose," said Kevin Burden, a telecommunications analyst with IDC. Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William and Spotsylvania counties already have cell phone taxes. In Maryland, however, cell phone taxes sparked an ongoing multimillion-dollar lawsuit by four cellular service providers against Montgomery County and the city of Baltimore. Montgomery County collects a $2 monthly tax on cell usage, while Baltimore collects $3.50 per month for each phone. Cell phone companies argue that the fees amount to an illegal sales tax. Montgomery County expects to raise more tax dollars from cell phones than from land lines in 2005, the first time this has happened, said Robert Hagedoorn, chief of the county's Treasury Division. Verizon Wireless is one of the companies suing Baltimore and Montgomery County, along with Cingular, Sprint and T-Mobile. It also sued Pennsylvania to force the state to repeal a 5 percent gross-receipts tax on cell phone use. That lawsuit is also pending. Verizon officials say they do not plan to sue Alexandria or any other Virginia jurisdiction because the state has a law in place that allows local cell phone taxes, said Annabelle Canning, assistant general counsel for tax policy for Verizon Wireless. Instead, the cell phone industry will try to persuade the Virginia General Assembly to approve legislation next year that would require all telecommunications services to be taxed the same way throughout the state. A similar effort to set a straight 5 percent state tax failed earlier this year after satellite companies such as DirecTV started a letter-writing campaign, urging customers to write their representatives and ask them to oppose what the companies said would be a new tax on their service. The Virginia effort highlights a debate about how different services should be taxed when technological advances allow people to communicate through a variety of devices. For example, people who use cell phones, BlackBerrys and land-line phones will be taxed in Alexandria, but not people who use increasingly popular Internet-based phone services such as Vonage, because calls made over the Internet are protected by a seven-year-old nationwide ban on Internet access taxes. Robert MacMillan is a staff writer for washingtonpost.com. He writes the Web site's Random Access column, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/technology. Copyright 2005 The Washington Post Company NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: snorwood@redballoon.net (Scott Norwood) Subject: Converting 4-Wire Autovon Phone to 2-Wire Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 17:05:19 UTC Organization: Society for World Domination Reply-To: snorwood@redballoon.net It seems that I am now the proud (?) owner of an ex-military 3568 Autovon phone. I would like to convert it to work on a standard 2-wire POTS line. This particular one is a 1A2-type 6-button set, with a 50-pin Amphenol connector on the end of the cable. Is there an easy way to do this (preferably using the network from a 2500 set or other easily obtainable parts) without actually modifying the innards of phone itself? Connecting pins 1 and 26 to tip and ring allows listening and dialing on line 1, but (obviously) doesn't allow transmitting speech. Ideally, I would like the phone to ring, but that isn't necessary. I don't care about whether the button lights or hold function work. If anyone has the full pin configuration for this phone, I would be very interested. It looks like there is a buzzer and potentially other fun stuff inside it. Thanks for any suggestions. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 12:54:51 EDT From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: Intel Develops All-in-One Wi-Fi Chip Telecom dailyLead from USTA June 17, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22433&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * Intel develops all-in-one Wi-Fi chip BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Motorola invests in Irish software maker * BellSouth beefs up broadband staff * Telecoms buying more online ads USTA SPOTLIGHT * USTA Webinar: How to Get the Most from Your Resources EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Google tests mobile search technology VOIP DOWNLOAD * Skype flies high in North America * Analysis: Yahoo! accelerates VoIP push with acquisition * XO offers business VoIP service in San Antonio * Comcast: Phone exec exit won't affect VoIP plans REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * Verizon changes plan to expedite TV service rollout in New Jersey * RIM offers technology that skirts patent claims * Klausner sues AOL over voice technology Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22433&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: AES Subject: Monitor/Recorder for Residential Power Line Outages? Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 10:41:55 -0700 Organization: Stanford University Any have pointers to a gadget that will monitor and log power outages or glitches on 110V or 220V residential electrical service? Looking for a home or retail level gadget that will work either connected to a dedicated computer, or preferably free-standing with periodic read-out to a computer, logging time and duration of both longer outages and short glitches (anything long enough to cause digital clocks and appliance displays to reset). Asking on this group because a lot of tech-savvy people seem to hang out on this group; glad to accept pointers to any other group. Any way to make the computer itself (e.g., Mac iBook) do the sensing and recording? ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Email to Former AT&T Phones Now Cingular Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 22:47:55 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 15:45:44 -0400, Isaiah Beard wrote: > Joseph wrote: >> Also, what works for all North American mobile numbers is >> 10digits@teleflip.com e.g. 3115552368@teleflip.com > If you value your friendship or business relationship with the person > you are messaging, then you would probably want to avoid teleflip. > Neatly tucked into the recesses of their user agreement is a provision > which permits them to "send messages through the service to any and > all users" about "new or existing products or services to be offered > by Teleflip." In other words, they receive the right SMSpam people. Of course anyone can be paranoid that their number will be shared. I've used the service and never have been spammed. If you are so worried you probably shouldn't be sending text messages at all. Text messages are hardly secure. ------------------------------ From: PatETC Subject: Need Help on Wireless Date: 17 Jun 2005 05:23:42 -0700 I want to get a laptop computer to take when traveling and be able to access the Internet. I know absolutely nothing about wireless. I currently use AOL on a dial-up (the only thing available in my area). I do know that I can use a laptop within a certain distance from the wireless connection. If I were to have a laptop in a location where wireless Internet is available would I be able to access AOL and still be able to use my desktop when home? Do new laptops come with the wireless card or must it be purchased separately? Is wireless something I can have at home, even though I use dial-up for AOL? My granddaughter lives with us when not in college and she has a laptop. I'd like her to be able to use wireless when here. What equipment will I need? As you can tell I don't know much about this although I've had a desktop computer for many years and am quite computer literate -- not just about wireless. Thanks. Pat [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Wireless connections consist of at least two parts: the thin card (about the size/shape of a credit card) which fits in the side of a laptop computer, and the 'base station', which typically will be a 'wireless router' or some other device which feeds into the modem. Typically, this 'base station' is attached to some high speed, or broadband internet connection. I suppose it could feed into a dial up connection, but I have never seen it done that way. You _can_ use AOL or any other ISP on a high speed connection, such as you have probably read about. To your modem (or router and modem) the WiFi 'base station' is the computer, although you often times have to 'register' the MAC address of the wireless device with the ISP, as a 'new computer being used at your location'. At least, that is needed on cable internet or DSL. When I have purchased new routers for my system here, and put them on the cable, the first thing the cable provider did was wake up and say, "oh, something new" and take me to a 'registration screen' where the cable internet provider wanted to know all about the 'new computer' it would be dealing with. If you buy a new laptop for your grandchild, you may get a wifi card as part of the deal, but if you do not need a new laptop, I suggest you buy the unit as a separate thing. A NetGear wireless router and WiFi card costs about a hundred dollars total, but you can buy the cards as a separate thing if you already have the 'base station'. The card costs maybe $40-50 by itself for a decent card to use in a home computer/laptop, and comes with a full instruction/set up manual. An important word of caution: The range for these units is typically between 100-200 feet, more or less, and line-of-sight is important for best performance. _Anyone_ with a wireless card in _their_ computer within that range will be able to intercept and monitor your work, any passwords or other details, unless you take a few precautions: (1) it is a good idea to _not_ 'broadcast' your wireless station's availability, and (2) it is a good idea to encrypt your transmissions. Your instruction book will explain all that in more detail. The encryption process will slow down your transmission speed a little, but if you are going to be working via dialup as you said, it probably will not make much difference. If you are paranoid like me, only two or three people here in town even know of my wireless connection: I can sit on my back porch or back yard garden by the bird sanctuary and communicate pretty well, then I can come inside the house and switch to my desktop machine (a different port on the same router) and continue from there. I _can_ go out on my front sidewalk and sit on the ledge there also but when people occassionally walk past they see me doing it; and anyway, there is a fellow across the streeet with a Wi-fi set up and I have noticed I can get now and then _his_ setup, so I assume he can 'see' mine also. But not from my backyard. If you get a wireless router (as well as the card) then you should be able to go back and forth between desktop and laptop with ease. And when your grandchild is there she should be able to use her laptop with the wireless card as well, but probably not both of you at once unless you get a bigger 'pipe' than dialup. Do you have any more questions? I am sure the experts here will be glad to help you or walk you through the installation as needed. PAT] ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Date: 17 Jun 2005 07:00:37 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Fred Goldstein wrote: > Monopolies in LD transmission? That > would have held up the price of data transmission, slowing down all > sorts of datacomm. Ma Bell viewed leased lines, so necessary for > data, as a substitute for profitable long distance minutes of use, so > they overpriced them. The RBOCs still do the same thing with their > Special Access tariffs! But long distance rates for both switched and private line service were both on the way down well before actual divesture. Also, faster and faster digital lines were being installed before divesture. I maintain it was mostly technology -- cheaper terminal equipment and carrier media followed by higher call volume and greater economies of scale -- that caused and still cause long distance rates to fall. As Pat noted in his comments, in the early days MCI had a big advanage serving only the high profit markets with no obligation to handle the expensive stuff or provide support services. Any time a phone call had trouble they dump it into AT&T's lap. > Let's say digital leased line rates were, instead, regulated at > cost-based levels. Are you sure they weren't? I'm not that familiar with private line tarrifs, but as mentioned my own employer's network went down in price and up in speed before divesture. Private networks, such as owned and run by railroads, were shifted over to AT&T since it was cheaper for AT&T to provide it than doing it themselves. Considering they already had a network in place, there must be have been good cost savings to dump it for AT&T. > But without local competition in 1996, and with the Internet going > public when it did in 1992, I suggest that the BOC networks would have > collapsed in 1996! The RBOC networks came within months of doing so. > Dial-up Internet traffic was exploding. Bell System culture bought > switches on a 5-year planning schedule, so they could not react > quickly. CLECs were authorized in February, 1996, and by the end of > the year they were carrying substantial dial-up ISP traffic. ... > AOL did not use CLECs in 1996, and the RBOCs could > not provide circuits fast enough (I know; I was working on AOLnet at > the time). Other ISPs did, and that prevented more RBOC switches from > melting down under the load. I'm not sure "months of collapse" is an accurate characterization. The Internet boom did not happen suddenly overnight. Remember that since the 1960s people used dial-up to communicate with computers and this traffic continued to grow. Hobbyists with early home computers began to talk to each other then BBS's came along. The RBOC were serving this growing traffic all along; and it was well recognized and expected it would increase greatly. There were the early services such as Compuserve and Prodigy. Remember too that many users got a second telephone line for their computer use. At the same time, the real (inflation adjusted) cost of local phone service went down and more people got second lines for their kids. The phone companies were planning and responding to this all along -- expanding switch and local loop capacity. > America will, as a result, fall even farther behind the rest of the > world in most matters of telecom. Is the U.S. really "behind" the rest of the world? Ironically, prior to divesture the U.S. was by far the leader in telecom service. Indicators like cost, lines per person, etc. all were best for the U.S. Tim@Backhome.org wrote: > The No. 1ESS was basically a No 5XBAR with stored program control > (SPC). The real motivator was to cut labor cost and secondarily to be > able to market special calling features. Well, basically every switch was an advancement on the basic Strowger unit which itself was to eliminate manual operators. But I suspect the ESS offered more benefits than you suggest. I believe it took up less floor space and operated faster, so it could handle more calls in the same building. I believe it was more reliable and more flexible. Also, since the Bell System's rates were based partly on cost, cost savings would be passed along to the customer which they were. In a time of great inflation local rates remain nearly level. > Not knocking that nice forward step in switching, but it was good for > Ma Bell first, and the customer could (would) ride along for whatever > benefits it gave to the subscribers. But isn't that what EVERY business does? Any large business has teams of engineers figuring out ways to do things cheaper. Then the marketing people tell us something that is more inconvenient is actually an "improvement". When airlines buy new jet planes, they do so because the planes are more fuel efficient and need less crew to fly, rather than making flying better for the passenger. Indeed, in many telephone service has gotten worse for us end users because of cost savings. Instead of a live PBX operator serving us, we get a machine and phone mail jail. Ironically, the old Bell System constantly implored its business customers to provide excellent service on their PBXs -- it offered training and guides and support services. [Telecom Editor's Note] > Bell got hit so bad for a few years, they finally decided they had > to rebuild the entire phone system from the ground up, and the answer > to that was ESS. So as you stated, Bell did not develop ESS in order > to make a few dollars selling 'custom calling features' to users; ESS > was developed so the telephone company could regain control of a > network which was rapidly getting out of control. Another major reason for the system rebuild was to protect the network itself. The "phone phreaks" were using 'blue boxes' to take control of the network and lock up long distance trunks. While mostly used to save money, it was potentially very dangerous. As to the issue of not interested in providing the customer with advanced features, I'm not sure I agree. According to Bell Labs Record and the history books, advanced service features (especially for business users) were important. The Bell System did not have to retrofit Step-by-step exchanges with Touch Tone converters -- it didn't save them any money. But they still developed four models for various SxS situations. The Bell System didn't have to develop the Princess or Trimline telephone sets. But they did. And we know they put a heck of a lot of effort into optimizing the design for user comfort. The entire history of the Bell System has been one of improving the economies of scale to lower the cost to get more traffic and make more money. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Bell Divesture (was Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites) Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 16:17:18 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , wrote: > Robert Bonomi wrote: >> If the "Bell System/AT&T/Western Electric" had remained a monolithic >> entity, The rate of change in the "Internet" would likely have been >> much slower. There probably would not have been the telecom boom/bust >> of circa 5 years ago, > What is your basis to claim "the rate of change in the Internet > would likely have been much slower"? A knowledge of telecom history. :) Bell system/AT&T/WEco was _very_ conservative in outlook. They didn't deploy anything until it was thoroughly tested and determined to be sufficiently reliable. They were driven mostly by "what is best for the telephone company", and only incidentally by 'what is best for the telephone customer". Most "improvements" in customer capabilities came because the monolith waqs -pushed- into it. And were implemented on a "gouge the end-user for all it is worth" basis. Look at the deployment of 'touch tone' dialing for one example. The primary advantage of touch-tone was to the telco. it reduced the time that 'expensive' switching resources were tied up for the handling of a given call; this allowed the telco to reduce the _number_ of such expensive resources required to handle a given volume of calls; thus reducing the telco's _cost_ for handling that volume of calls. Yet the telco made the user _pay_extra_ to use this 'save the telco money' feature. As a result, some FORTY YEARS LATER, the telco _still_ has to support 'pulse' dialing. And the expenses of *two* signal schemes for dialing. Imagine what would have happened if the telco had offered a _discount_ (even a small one, say $0.50/month) for lines that were touch-tone dialing *only*, from day 1. I suspect that 'pulse' dial would have dropped out of the tariffs 20 years ago; because nobody was using it. The Bell/AT&T/WEco record on 'data communications' is similarly 'lagging edge'. I've _never_ heard of a "Bell Standard" for speeds above 1200 baud over voice-grade (aka dial-up) circuits. And that specification was 'unusable' except for direct-connect hardware; If you were stuck with 'acoustic coupler' interface requirements, The best telco spec was "Bell 103", 450 baud or below, (an 'enhanced' specification, added later, pushed the upper-limit to 600 baud -- wow!) Racal-Vadic, on the other hand, had an acoustic coupler capable specification for 1200 baud that worked. And with far less of a 'noise' problem than "Bell 212". Don't forget U.S.Robotics, or Hayes, who had 9600-baud over dial-up units. Or Trailblazer, that had one capable of 19,200 baud. Yet, the Bells only offered 'lease-line' service for 2400 and above. either 4-wire lease-line for 202, 206, 208, 209, etc type modems, or DDS. And, DDS was priced at "an arm and half a leg". > It seems that many critics of the former Bell System "freeze it" at > the time of divesture. That is, they presume the Bell System's > physical plant and operating policies would never change and remain in > 1983 technology. That premise is absurb. Strawman argument. > Throughout its history the Bell System was improving its plant. The > system of 1983 was radically different than the system of 1973, and > clearly the system of 1993 and 2003 would be radically different > than 1983. > I know that data communications improved greatly just during the late > 1970s, for example. Digital lines replaced analog lines for faster > speed and higher reliability. Private line costs were coming down. > It is also clear operating policies and service plans would have > changed, too. (They were always envolving in the past). How or what > is tougher to say -- it depends on the external environment. > Don't forget the Bell System was heavilly controlled by (1) > regulation and (2) the consent decree. We know that deregulation > became popular later on. It's possible the Bell System may have > been allow to adjust its rates so the the profitable corridors (the > "cream") may have gotten discounts so Bell could compete fairly > against newcomers. It's possible the Bell System may have escaped > the consent decree -- just as IBM was able to do -- and go into new > markets previously closed to it. > Who knows, perhaps LANS and WANS would've been bult FASTER had > the Bell System been allowed to be involved and use it strengths. Actual history argues against that 'unfounded speculation'. Starting with their 'concept' of how high-speed/high-volume data networking should be done (ATM). Which, because of the miniscule size of the 'payload', has an _incredible_ layer of overhead; with all sorts of 'per connection' overhead carried in _every_ packet -- primarily to ensure that every packet could have 'cost accounting' done at _every_intermediate_ point. And it disregards the existance of the various 'public packet-data networks' (Tymenet, Telenet, Bitnet, Autonet, etc.) that were _already_ in existence. ------------------------------ 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 V24 #273 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Jun 17 18:48:21 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 8EDFD15164; Fri, 17 Jun 2005 18:48:20 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #274 Message-Id: <20050617224820.8EDFD15164@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 18:48:20 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.7 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Fri, 17 Jun 2005 18:48:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 274 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Telecom Update (Canada) #486, June 17, 2005 (John Riddell) California AG Settles Norvergence Cases (Lisa Minter) Minnesota AG Settles With AT&T (Lisa Minter) Re: Your ISP as Net Watchdog (Danny Burstein) Re: Send Text Message to a Russian Cell Phone (Isaiah Beard) For a Brief Shining Moment: The Lorimer Brothers Invention (Lisa Minter) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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. 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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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: Telecom Update (Canada) #486, June 17, 2005 Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 15:13:42 -0400 From: John Riddell ************************************************************ TELECOM UPDATE ************************************************************ published weekly by Angus TeleManagement Group http://www.angustel.ca Number 486: June 17, 2005 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: ** CRTC Okays Bell VoIP Tariff ** Telcos Apply to Appeal VoIP Winback Rules ** Feds Issue RFI for Dark Fibre ** BT Offers Fusion Phone ** Avaya, Nokia Trial Dual-Mode Handsets ** RIM Faces New Suit ** National Supercomputing Net Launched ** Consumer Guide to Local Phone Competition Posted ** Navigata Names New CEO ** Ericsson, Napster Plan Wireless Music Service ** CRTC Sets Scope of Local Forbearance Proceeding ** Allstream Wins Ruling on Edmonton LRT Lands ** CATA Forms Committee for Telecom Policy Submission ** Broadcasters Challenge Mobile TV Plans ** Research Centre Opened in Saint John ** Videotron, Unions Extend Contracts ** Telus Union Bans Overtime ** Nortel Intros Mobile Security ** Skype Offers Voicemail ** ORION Award Winners Named CRTC OKAYS BELL VoIP TARIFF: The CRTC has given interim approval to Bell Canada's proposed tariffs for its IP-based Digital Voice service, effective June 14. The Commission says it will issue a Public Notice in the near future to give parties an opportunity to comment on the tariff (TN 6874). ** Unlimited calling within a province is $35/month; unlimited calling to Canada and the U.S. is $44/month. The previously announced Unlimited Canada plan is no longer available for new installations. ** The tariffs also include columns for "Minimum Rate" and "Maximum Rate," but the CRTC has allowed those rates to remain confidential. ** Equal access to competitors' long distance services, required by CRTC Telecom Decision 2005-28, is not included. (See Telecom Update #481) www.crtc.gc.ca/8740/eng/2005/b2.htm TELCOS APPLY TO APPEAL VoIP WINBACK RULES: On June 13, Bell Canada, SaskTel, and Telus jointly asked the Federal Court for leave to appeal the "winback rules" component of the CRTC's recent VoIP decision (see Telecom Update #481). The telcos say the ban on calls to customers who switch to other carriers violates their right to freedom of expression under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. ** Rogers, Shaw, Cogeco, EastLink, and the Canadian Cable Television Association have asked to be added to the application as respondents, so that they can file opposing arguments. ** Bell Canada says it plans to appeal the whole decision to Cabinet but has not announced timing. FEDS ISSUE RFI FOR DARK FIBRE: The Department of Public Works has issued a Request for Information "to inform Industry of its intention to develop Shared Fibre Infrastructure" linking government facilities in the Ottawa-Gatineau area, and requesting feedback on architecture, technology, operation, and budgetary costs. The deadline for responses is July 25. See Solicitation EN716-050001/A at www.merx.com. BT OFFERS FUSION PHONE: The UK's BT Group has launched BT Fusion, a wireless phone that automatically switches between the public cellphone network and a home wireless hub that transmits calls over a BT broadband (DSL) connection. The Motorola-built phone uses Bluetooth technology to detect and transmit to the home network hub. ** In a recent interview with Business Communications Review, the CEO of BT Wholesale, Paul Reynolds, said that BT plans to be "the first telco to switch off the PSTN," replacing it with an IP-MPLS backbone connected to all end locations by DSL. AVAYA, NOKIA TRIAL DUAL-MODE HANDSETS: Customer trials are under way for Nokia cellular phones equipped with Avaya software that enables them to access corporate WLANs and utilize corporate PBX features. RIM FACES NEW SUIT: A British court has allowed Research In Motion to fast-track its legal challenge against a patent held by Luxembourg-based Inpro Licensing Sarl. In December, Inpro filed suit to halt BlackBerry sales by RIM's major German distributor, claiming that BlackBerry infringes on Inpro's British patent. NATIONAL SUPERCOMPUTING NET LAUNCHED: Two of Canada's most powerful research computing nets are now connected by a dedicated lightpath, the first step in creating a pan- Canadian High-Performance Computing facility. The link, operated by CANARIE, connects SHARCNET in Southern Ontario to WestGrid in B.C. and Alberta. ** Future plans call for optical connections to academic networks in Eastern Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada. CONSUMER GUIDE TO LOCAL PHONE COMPETITION POSTED: The CRTC website now provides a consumer guide to competition in the residential telephone market. The guide does not deal with VoIP or with business phone service. www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/INFO_SHT/t1023.htm NAVIGATA NAMES NEW CEO: James Pitt, formerly a VP for Group Telecom and Shaw, has been named CEO of Navigata, a SaskTel subsidiary that provides business telecom services in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec. ERICSSON, NAPSTER PLAN WIRELESS MUSIC SERVICE: Ericsson and Napster have formed a global alliance to offer "the first complete, fully integrated digital music service" for cellular carriers. The service, compatible with current handset models, is to be launched in Europe by mid-2006. CRTC SETS SCOPE OF LOCAL FORBEARANCE PROCEEDING: In Telecom Decision 2005-35, the CRTC announces which services offered by the incumbent telcos will be included in the proceeding on local phone service forbearance (see Telecom Update #479). www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/ENG/Decisions/2005/dt2005-35.htm ALLSTREAM WINS RULING ON EDMONTON LRT LANDS: Resolving a 2003 dispute, CRTC Telecom Decision 2005-36 rules that Edmonton's light rail transit lands are an "other public place" under the Telecom Act, and directs the City and Allstream to negotiate a cost-based fee for Allstream's continued use of conduit in LRT tunnels.(see Telecom Update #393) www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/ENG/Decisions/2005/dt2005-36.htm CATA FORMS COMMITTEE FOR TELECOM POLICY SUBMISSION: The Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance has formed a TelecomACT Working Group to develop a telecom industry submission to the Telecom Policy Review (see Telecom Update #485). www.cata.ca/Media_and_Events/Press_Releases/cata_pr06130501.html BROADCASTERS CHALLENGE MOBILE TV PLANS: The Canadian Association of Broadcasters has asked the CRTC to regulate mobile TV offerings by Rogers, Bell, and Look under the Broadcasting Act. Rogers, which plans to launch mobile TV within weeks, claims the service is exempt from regulation under the New Media Exemption Act, adopted in 1999. RESEARCH CENTRE OPENED IN SAINT JOHN: The Bell-Aliant SMB Innovation Centre in Saint John, N.B., was launched June 13. The centre will develop IP-based applications for small and medium businesses. VIDEOTRON, UNIONS EXTEND CONTRACTS: Videotron's unionized employees have accepted an agreement to extend existing contracts to 2009, 2010, and 2011, with 2.5%/year salary increases in the last three years. TELUS UNION BANS OVERTIME: On June 16, the Telecommunications Workers Union banned overtime by its members at Telus as a protest against the telco's failure to engage in "real bargaining." (See Telecom Update #480) ** The following day, Telus made several improvements to its offer of settlement, including increased pension plan and wage payments, creation of a Common Interest Forum for dialogue with union leaders, and a promise to reinvest savings from outsourcing. NORTEL INTROS MOBILE SECURITY: Nortel Networks says its new Secure Information Access and Secure Multimedia enables enterprises to protect information and communications regardless of whether users are outside or inside their offices. SKYPE OFFERS VOICEMAIL: Skype, which provides free worldwide Internet telephony, now offers a voicemail service for $23/year. The service can also send voice messages to any Skype user. ORION AWARD WINNERS NAMED: The Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network announced its first awards honouring research and education network pioneers. The ORION Award recipients were: ** Dr. Ross H. Paul, President of the University of Windsor and founding Chair of ORION. ** Andy Bjerring, President CANARIE. ** Robert Chambers and Eugene Siciunas of the University of Toronto, John Drake of McMaster University, and Roger Watt of the University of Waterloo. ** Joan McCalla, the Government of Ontario's Corporate Chief Strategist. ** Warren C. Jackson, retired advanced networking leader. ** Roger Taylor former executive director of ORION's predecessor, ONet Networking. HOW TO SUBMIT ITEMS FOR TELECOM UPDATE E-MAIL: editors@angustel.ca FAX: 905-686-2655 MAIL: TELECOM UPDATE=20 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 late Friday afternoon each 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 2005 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 Subject: California AG Settles Norevergence Cases Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 15:59:50 -0500 California Settles with NorVergence Leasing Co. California businesses will receive up to $2.6 million in financial benefits under an agreement between Attorney General Bill Lockyer and U.S. Bancorp (USB), resolving a case connected to a consumer fraud perpetrated by NorVergence, Inc., a bankrupt New Jersey-based telecommunications company. "NorVergence scammed nearly 1,000 California small businesses," said Lockyer. "And when it went under, NorVergence left its victims on the hook to pay thousands of dollars for nonexistent service and high-priced equipment. This agreement with U.S. Bancorp provides a much-deserved remedy to defrauded California companies." Under the agreement approved by the San Diego County Superior Court, USB subsidiary Lyon Financial Services (Lyon), Inc. will forego collecting on potential rental contract obligations totaling approximately $2.6 million. USB is one of the finance companies that bought rental contracts from NorVergence. Starting in 2002 until its bankruptcy in July 2004, NorVergence defrauded small businesses across the country in marketing and selling telecommunications services and equipment. NorVergence promised victims multi-year savings of up to 30 percent on their phone, cellular and Internet bills. The savings would be produced, NorVergence told customers, by a "Matrix" black box installed on businesses' premises that would allow customers to integrate their telecommunications systems. The Matrix services cost businesses between $500 and $2,000 a month under rental contracts that typically lasted five-years. For fast cash, NorVergence sold the contracts at a discount to about 40 finance companies, including USB. Contrary to NorVergence's representations, there was nothing special about the Matrix black box. It was nothing more than standard routing equipment that had no value without a connection to phone carriers' networks. NorVergence had no means to guarantee the long-term savings it promised because it had no long-term contracts with carriers. NorVergence's victims totaled an estimated 11,000 nationwide, including about 1,000 in California. When NorVergence filed for bankruptcy, USB and other finance companies that bought the rental contracts demanded that businesses continue making payments under their five-year agreements, even though the businesses were not receiving the promised services. The contracts purported to require customers to pay in full even if they received no services. Additionally, customers often found it difficult to challenge charges because the contracts allowed the finance companies to pursue collection lawsuits in venues far from customers' locations. USB's venue of choice was its home state of Minnesota, an extremely inconvenient forum for California businesses. Under the settlement, customers will have the opportunity to bring their contract current through January 31, 2005, and will have the option of making such payments in installments. In return, USB will forgive the balance of the contract obligations. If all California customers accept, USB will forgive about $2.6 million in payments. USB will mail to eligible customers a notice advising them of the opportunity to participate in the settlement, with instructions on how to participate. As part of the settlement, USB has agreed to not enforce the provision of the rental contracts that purportedly allows USB to choose the venue to resolve disputes. Copyright 2003-2005 ConsumerAffairs.Com Inc. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Minnesota AG Settles With AT&T Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 16:01:59 -0500 The state of Minnesota and AT&T have reached an agreement that resolves the consumer protection lawsuit filed against the long distance carrier. AT&T Billing . AT&T Settles Minnesota Suit . AT&T to Pay Missouri $50,000 for Improper Billing . AT&T Will Pay FCC $500,000 . Judge Allows Florida Case to Proceed . Florida Orders Refunds . AT&T Agrees to Pay Refunds to New Yorkers . Class Action Charges AT&T Slammed Non-Customers . MA, NY Complaints . Minnesota Sues AT&T The agreement settles the state's claim that AT&T erroneously billed some 25,939 Minnesota citizens in 2004 for services never ordered or provided. Under the terms of the settlement, AT&T has refunded or credited Minnesotans who were wrongly billed and has agreed to provide 300-minute long distance calling cards to Minnesotans adversely affected by its erroneous billing and to make a $200,000 payment to the State. The State's final settlement with AT&T specifically includes the following: . AT&T agreed to credit and refund all Minnesotans incorrectly assessed calling plan charges and to stop marketing to callers who had been billed in error. Over 25,000 Minnesotans have received credits to date for a total of $308,000. . In addition, the 25,000-plus Minnesotans who received credits are also eligible for a 300-minute calling card. Eligible citizens will receive a letter in the mail detailing how to submit an application for a calling card. The consumer calling card restitution has a retail value of up to $780,000. . AT&T will make a $200,000 payment to the State of Minnesota. The state's lawsuit was the result of an investigation that revealed that over 25,000 Minnesotans were erroneously billed on their local phone bill for long distance calling plan charges by AT&T beginning in January 2004. When the company started assessing a $3.95 monthly charge to its long distance "Basic Rate Plan" customers, AT&T billed not only customers on its "Basic Rate Plan" for the $3.95 and other associated fees, but also an additional 25,939 Minnesotans who did not order services from AT&T or who had other AT&T calling plans. In addition, when those citizens called AT&T to inquire about the charges, rather than helping consumers, AT&T placed Minnesotans on hold for extensive periods of time, transferred them to customer service representatives who tried to "hard sell" AT&T services, and, in some cases, the company told consumers they would had to sign up for an AT&T calling plan to get their money back or charges credited. A letter is being sent to those Minnesotans who were incorrectly billed by AT&T, directing those citizens how to receive their calling card. Eligible consumers will simply have to check a box on a claim form, fill in the claim number found on the letter, sign and mail the form back to the Minnesota Attorney General's Office by August 15, 2005, or send an email to the Office at phonecard.settlement@state.mn.us. The email must include the customer's name, address, the reason for requesting the calling card, and the claim number on the letter. Copyright 2003-2005 ConsumerAffairs.Com Inc. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. (Also see the far left column on the above page for all the ConsumerAffairs.com recent stories.) ------------------------------ From: Danny Burstein Subject: Re: Your ISP as Net Watchdog Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 19:37:32 UTC Organization: PANIX Public Access Internet and UNIX, NYC ( snip of the latest gov't trial balloon about mandatory ISP logging ) With the very strong emphasis that I'm not speaking for any ISP with which I'm connected: The problem here is the clear and evident slippery slope. To carry this to an extreme example: Office bathrooms with video cameras. If a bomb went off in the building, most (although not all) people would accept having Eliot Ness looking through the tapes to see if there's any footage of the person putting it together. The Big Problem is that everyone is well aware that once those cameras are around, it won't just be Mr. Ness having access to them after a bombing. Same thing with ISP records. Most (not all, of course) would agree to hand over material for use in tracking (or stopping) Timothy McVeigh. But everyone is well aware that once these records are available, they'll be used for lots and lots of other things. And not just gov't witch hunts. Throw in more or less routine crimes (certainly of concern to the victims) and then move sideways to civil litigation, divorces, etc. _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] ------------------------------ From: Isaiah Beard Subject: Re: Send Text Message to a Russian Cell Phone Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 16:47:43 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com cronept wrote: > Hi, > I have a friend who is in Russia. I am in the states. She is using a > GSM cell phone. I am wondering if I can send text message to her from > the Internet? I tried AIM but I do not know how to send to a cellphone > outside the US. Does anybody know any websites or any software can do > that? Thanks alot. I appciate it. It would most likely depend on waht kind of cell phone you have. If you have a GSM phone, I would try +[country code] [number]. If a CDMA, phone try 011 [country code] [number]. E-mail fudged to thwart spammers. Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: For a Brief Shining Moment: The Lorimer Brothers; Machine Telephony Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 12:10:57 -0500 For some special reading this weekend, I have selected -- not from our own Archives -- but from _Telecom History_ in 1995, a story I thought you might be interested in. Lisa M. ======================================= For A Brief Shining Moment: The Lorimer Brothers and Machine Telephony By Jean-Guy Rens Published in Telecom History, 1995 - 1. Before the separation of Northern Telecom (then Northern Electric) from Western Electric following the Consent Decree between American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) and the Justice Department in 1956, Canada was a technological wasteland from a telecommunications standpoint. All innovation was imported from the U.S. by Canadian companies that simply manufactured the new products under license. But there was one notable exception: the Lorimer brothers' commercially brief but technologically shining adventure with switching at the turn of the century. Following invention of the step-by-step switch by Almon B. Strowger in 1889, the U.S. telecommunications industry went into technological overdrive. Unfortunately, all the switching systems developed at that time, including step-by-step, had one common drawback: they grew ever more complex as the number of subscribers required ever more wires, posing an insurmountable problem not only for manufacturers but above all for system operators. Callender the Pioneer The most significant alternative to step-by-step came from Canada. The first of the Canadian competitors, Romaine Callender, was closely associated with Alexander Graham Bell. Callender taught music and manufactured organs in Brantford, Ontario, and his main claim to fame was having built an automatic organ player. Then he founded the Callender Telephone Exchange Company, a modest undertaking which, at the height of its activities, employed 14 people, among them two young brothers, George William and James Hoyt Lorimer, from the nearby village of St. George. Their father had died at an early age, and the eldest brother, George, went to work as a telephone operator. Hoyt had begun his law studies, but then became fascinated with the telephone and convinced his older brother to get involved in research work under Callender. Between 1892 and 1896, Callender took out three series of patents. His first two switches, tested in Brantford, were such complete failures that he had to try and raise money in New York, where he opened a new shop in the spring of 1894. The Lorimer brothers followed him there, and work began again, under slightly more auspicious conditions. Notwithstanding Hoyt's frail health due to bouts of typhoid, the first successful experiment took place in New York in January 1895 using a wooden model known alternately as the Brantford Exchange or the Callender Exchange. A dozen calls were put through automatically which, for the time, was considered an amazing phenomenon. The little team then returned to Brantford at the request of their Canadian backers. It is not entirely clear why Callender gave up his research activities, but he left Canada for England in July or August 1896 where he formed a company under the name Callender Rapid Telephone Company, of which all trace has been lost. The Lorimer brothers carried on his research work and, after considerable financial difficulties, they opened their own company, Canadian Machine Telephone, in Peterborough, Ontario, in March 1897. There they produced the first commercial version of the Callender Exchange, which was put into service by an independent telephone company in Troy, Ohio, in 1897. The system the Lorimers sold to the American company was so rudimentary that it still needed major development, and a workshop was set up in nearby Piqua to handle the work. An experimental switching system built in the Piqua shop was used as an internal switchboard in the shop. The Lorimer brothers continued to work on their system, to the point where it bore no further resemblance to the one developed by their former boss Callender. By the end of 1899, a definitive commercial model of the switchboard was finally ready. Shortly after this, the Lorimers enlarged their Piqua shop into a true production facility, which they named the American Machine Telephone, and it was this name they used in their international activities. They took out their own patent in the U.S. in 1900 and the following year in Canada, and launched a brisk marketing program for their new switches; too brisk, perhaps, as the systems were never completely satisfactory. The Lorimer Brothers Launch a Canadian Switching System The "mechanical genius" of the Lorimer family, as the newspapers of the time had christened him, was Hoyt. He died of typhoid fever on November 6, 1901, at the age of 25, completely exhausted from overwork. The youngest Lorimer brother, Egbert, then joined the company, but the creative spark was lost, and there were no further advances. And yet, the Lorimer brothers seem to have been effective salesmen. They had a switching system with several hundred lines on display for two months in Ottawa. The leading Canadian telecommunications consultant at the time, engineer Francis Dagger, made a report to the Toronto City Hall with a strong recommendation to test the Lorimer technology: "Those who have been privileged to see this system in operation and to inspect the manufacturing plant at Piqua, Ohio, are forced to admit that, as far as human intelligence is competent to pass judgment in such matters, the problem of machine telephony is solved, and a result, a new era is about to open in which the largest exchanges will be able to give service at rates which, with manual systems, would never have been possible." It even appears that Canadian Machine Telephone moved its plant from Peterborough to Toronto in hopes of winning a city contract for a 6,000-line switching system with the capacity to expand to 10,000 lines. But City Hall gave up its telephone service plans and the Lorimer brothers had to fall back on small independent companies in Ontario. In 1905, Lorimer switches went into operation in Peterborough, where the Canadian manufacturing plant was located, and in Brantford, home of the former Callender plant. By 1908, other systems were installed in Burford, Saint George and Lindsay, all in Ontario. But the biggest Lorimer switchboard ever installed, with 500 lines, appears to have been in Augusta, Georgia. What Canadian Machine Telephone needed was a major client to act as a technological showcase. When the Edmonton Telephone Department placed an order with the Lorimers in 1906, the brothers thought their day had finally come. But they were unable to produce a model to suit the customer's requirements, and the cutover was delayed from month to month. After waiting for two years, Edmonton turned to the Strowger solution, depriving the Lorimer brothers of the chance to provide service to the Alberta capital. Automatic Electric got the contract and installed a step-by-step switching system in two months flat. Compared to the Strowger professionals, the Lorimer brothers looked like rank amateurs. The three reasons for Edmonton's initial choice are, however, of interest: the cost of a Lorimer line was only $34, compared to $40 for a Strowger line; the system took up only half as much space, and its centralized technology seemed more simple and elegant than the competitor, even if connection time was slightly longer. Apart from these unpromising "sales", this Canadian technology met with some successf overseas. The European rights were transferred to a French concern that in May 1908 set up the Société Internationale de l'Autocommutateur Lorimer, with European headquarters in the Galerie Vivienne in Paris. France purchased two switching systems, Britain another two, and Italy one. Despite all these efforts, the system was not adopted by the Post, Telegraph and Telephone (PTT) organizations in these countries, since it consistently failed to prove sufficiently reliable. Also lacking was the polish that could only have been provided by the type of powerful research team that produced the Strowger system. To make things worse, Canadian Machine Telephone never seemed to be able to deliver in any reasonable length of time, as shown in the Edmonton example. The company finally declared bankruptcy in 1923 and was placed in receivership. Bell acquired the company two years later. The Callender-Lorimer Technology If the Lorimer brothers deserve mention in the history of telecommunications, it is much more for their theoretical contribution than for their business sense. Their principles have influenced the entire process of electromechanical switch development, in particular the AT&T systems. When that company went automatic, it adopted technology derived from the Lorimer principles. International switching specialist Robert J. Chapuis enthusiastically recounts this little-known historical fact: "Onto the vigorous and resilient sapling planted by the Lorimer brothers, Western Electric engineers proceeded to graft the shoot that would turn it into a healthy and productive fruit tree." The great innovation of the Lorimer switch is in fact a Callender concept, the principle of preselection. Instead of having as many connection mechanisms as there are subscriber lines, the Callender system is based on the principle that people do not all make calls at the same time and thus use only a small percentage of connection mechanisms. This results in the use of about 90% less mechanical equipment. As well, the great challenge in the early days of automatic switching was speed, so that customers would not have to wait too long for a dial tone. Introduced by Callender in 1893, this innovation was later adopted by all switch manufacturers, including Strowger. More generally, the Callender-Lorimer system is based on the action of a perpetually turning wheel. Contacts are established by stopping the movement of the wheel at a place that corresponds to each number dialled. Only one motion is needed to select a contact instead of two as in the step-by-step system. The Lorimer switch was also entirely modular, with panels containing 100 lines, making it simple to increase the capacity of a system rather than replacing it as the number of customers grew. Instead of a dial, the Lorimer telephone set itself had a series of levers, one each for units, tens, hundreds and thousands. All the caller had to do was move each of the four levers to the desired figure to make up the telephone number. This process was modelled on systems like those used in railway signals or cash registers. Another advantage was that the telephone set did not need batteries, since it was powered by a central battery system. One of the main criticisms of automatic exchanges was the fact that subscribers were required to perform highly complex operations. This was why it was important to design a telephone that would be as simple as possible to operate. The Lorimer sets seemed to meet this requirement. Historical Impact of the Lorimer Research The Lorimer technology was the last work in automatic switching at the turn of the century. Observers at the time were quick to recognize this Canadian contribution, and the American expert Kempster B. Miller wrote in 1914: "These young men, with no prior training and 'so they say' without ever having seen the inside of a telephone exchange, invented and developed the system in question and put it into operation. Knowing something of their struggles and efforts to achieve their purpose, we find their creation one of the most remarkable we have ever seen, whatever the value of the system." Further proof of this recognition is found in a 1925 opinion expressed by Professor Fritz Lubberger, a German telephone switching specialist: "In Canada towards 1900, the Lorimer brothers invented a system which, although it has not been introduced anywhere, is of such richly inventive design that even today any specialist in automatic systems would benefit from studying it in detail." But the most convincing proof of the value of the Lorimer brothers' research came from AT&T. In 1903, the American giant bought the Lorimer patent and decided to turn what had until then been just another piece of laboratory equipment into a commercially viable product. They put not one, but two research teams on the project, which produced two of the most popular systems in the history of electromechanical switching, the Panel and the Rotary. Both used the Lorimer principle of one-step selection, and the Rotary switch also used the principle of the permanently rotating motor (thus its name). AT&T chose the Panel system and used in the majority of large U.S. cities until the 1950s, when it began to be replaced by the crossbar. It was never used outside the United States. The Rotary system, on the other hand, won the approval of many European telephone administrations, particularly in France. When ITT bought Western Electric's International Division in 1925, it also inherited its Rotary production lines. The principles of the Lorimer system thus passed into international posterity, both in the U.S. and Europe, but the Lorimers themselves won no posthumous fame until the very recent rediscovery of their work by Robert Chapuis. A legitimate question would be why the Lorimer brothers' switching system sank into such total oblivion. Most telephone engineers have never even heard of their technology. Chapuis has an interesting suggestion: "The reason for its posthumous eclipse is that most of the works published on switching describe former or existing systems of telecommunications manufacturing companies that were well established, which ... was soon no longer the position of the Lorimer brothers' company." Whatever the true answer, it is still intriguing to note that Canada's only technological contribution to the development of telecommunications before the contemporary period was in the field of electromechanical switching. Three-quarters of a century later, Northern Telecom was to repeat this exploit with the DMS digital switch, although this time with considerably more commercial success. Switches are the brains of a network. They are the key to its development. The inescapable conclusion, is that Canadians, separated as they are by such vast distances, realized that the mastery of telecommunications was essential to their survival as a society. And the switch, as the key to the system, was also the key to this mastery and thus their survival. Excerpt from Chapter 8 of the - Birth of Northern Telecom and technological progress, in particular sub-chapters: The true inventor of Brantford The Lorimer brothers launch a Canadian switch Outline of Callender-Lorimer technology The Lorimer brothers' work lives on Copyright ScienceTech Communications Inc. Montreal, 1995-2005 ------------------------------ 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 V24 #274 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sat Jun 18 02:03:08 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 3972B14EE2; Sat, 18 Jun 2005 02:03:08 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #275 Message-Id: <20050618060308.3972B14EE2@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 02:03:08 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.2 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT,NO_OBLIGATION autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Sat, 18 Jun 2005 2:03:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 275 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Security Breach Could Expose _40 Million Users_ to Fraud (Monty Solomon) Marketers Seek To Make Cookies More Palatable (Monty Solomon) Review of the Firefly Mobile Phone for Kids (Monty Solomon) Blackberry Network Down for Hours (Monty Solomon) DittyBot (Monty Solomon) 700-555-4141 Does Not Work (Ted Klugman) Invitation to Venice, Slovenia, and New York Conferences (IPSI Conf) 40 Million Credit Card Holders Exposed to Fraud (Lisa Minter) Cell Phones Now Playing Role of Wallet (Monty Solomon) Re: Bell Divestiture (Robert Bonomi) Re: Monitor/Recorder For Power Line Outages (Robert Bonomi) Re: For a Brief Shining Moment: The Lorimer Brothers (Kenneth P. Stox) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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, 17 Jun 2005 18:53:39 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Security Breach Could Expose _40 Million Users_ to Fraud The worst phishing/hacking case ever to date! By JOE BEL BRUNO Associated Press Writer NEW YORK (AP) -- A security breach of customer information at a credit card-processing company could expose to fraud up to 40 million cardholders of multiple brands, MasterCard International Inc. said Friday. The credit card giant said its security division detected multiple instances of fraud that tracked back to CardSystems Solutions Inc. of Tucson, Ariz., which processes transactions for banks and merchants. MasterCard said in a news release late Friday afternoon that it was notifying its card-issuing banks of the problem. CardSystems was hit by a computer virus that captured customer data for the purpose of fraud, said company spokeswoman Sharon Gamsin. The FBI was investigating. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49937208 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I asked Lisa Minter to scan our news wires for a full report on this, the largest phishing/hacking fraud to date anywhere ... 40 million credit card users. Her report appears elsewhere in this issue. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 22:32:46 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Marketers Seek To Make Cookies More Palatable By DAVID KESMODEL THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE Online marketers are scrambling to protect one of the key tools of their trade: the cookie. Faced with reports showing that more and more computer users regularly delete the tracking files automatically downloaded by Web browsers, marketers and Web site publishers are launching a "cookies can be good for you" campaign. They argue that cookies -- small files that Web sites use to identify users and to serve up targeted ads -- don't deserve their bad reputation and shouldn't be lumped together with such Web scourges as spyware and viruses. http://online.wsj.com/public/article/0,,SB111896105917661957-CnY_WkjgYkrL6ky6y9Idi079ZPE_20060617,00.html ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 23:00:15 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Review of the Firefly Mobile Phone For Kids Review by Michael Oryl June 16, 2005 Mobile Burn We first spoke of the Firefly mobile phone for kids back in February when Firefly Mobile, the company, first introduced the device. The Firefly is a device that has been designed from the ground up for kids aged 8 to 12. It lacks a lot of traditional mobile phone features, including a numeric keypad, in the name of cost control and safety. For more background on the Firefly, and its intended purposes, check out our original news story. http://www.mobileburn.com/review.jsp?Id=1431 http://www.mobileburn.com/news.jsp?Id=1110 ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 21:01:04 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Blackberry Network Down for Hours By BRUCE MEYERSON AP Business Writer NEW YORK (AP) -- The BlackBerry e-mail service suffered a nationwide outage Friday morning, but the nearly four-hour disruption only appeared to affect devices connected to certain types of cellular networks. Research in Motion Ltd., which makes the popular mobile devices and provides a service connecting them to corporate networks, did not respond to phone calls seeking comment. But three of the nation's biggest cellular carriers confirmed the outage. Cingular Wireless said RIM's outage lasted for three hours and 49 minutes. T-Mobile USA said service was restored by noon EDT. Nextel Communication Inc. reported that only some customers experienced trouble, and in those cases it was a delay in e-mails rather than a full-fledged service disruption. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49935802 ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 18:25:17 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: DittyBot Excerpt from http://plasticbugs.com/index.php?p=267 What DittyBot Does: You send a text message from your mobile phone to your POP email account. Your text message should contain the keywords of a song title (and possibly an artist name) that you want to hear. DittyBot finds that email (he checks Mail every 45 seconds) and copies the song name into a text file. The song name is then copied into iTunes and a playlist is created from your search. Next, DittyBot loads Skype (the internet telephony app) and begins calling your mobile phone. Your mobile phone rings and when you pick it up, you should hear your song start playing in all its compressed glory. DittyBot will play your selection to you over your phone until you hang up. Mind you, this all should happen within 1 minute of sending your song request (depending on the speed of your POP server). Sometimes it's even quicker! http://plasticbugs.com/index.php?p=267 ------------------------------ From: Ted Klugman Subject: 700-555-4141 Does Not Work Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 19:41:39 -0400 Organization: Optimum Online Recently, my long distance carrier (TTI National, somehow a subsidary of MCI) informed me that they're going to start charging a "monthly fee" of $1.99. So I decided it was time to switch. My new carrier's website instructs new users to call 700-555-4141 to verify when the LD carrier has been changed. I hadn't dialed the number in quite a while, so for kicks, I dialed it. "We're sorry, your call can not be completed as dialed." This didn't happen the last time I tried it (more than a year ago) (Yes, I tried it with a "1" in front of the number) So, any thoughts on how I can check who my LD carrier is? TIA [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: It seems to work here, but in a sort of half-baked way. Prairie Stream is at present getting their long distance service through Qwest Communications. When I dialed 1-700-555-4141, a recording answered and said two things (but sort of like one long sentence): "Thank you for using Qwest Communications, your call cannot be completed as dialed" with the second part of that being more emphasized than the first part. So it could be you did not have the phone to your ear listeing _closely_ when the first two or three words were stated. At least, that was my experience just now trying it. PAT] ------------------------------ Subject: Invitation to Venice, Slovenia, and New York; From: IPSI Conferences Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 03:40:07 +0200 Dear potential Speaker: On behalf of the organizing committee, I would like to extend a cordial invitation for you to attend one of the upcoming IPSI BgD multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary conferences. --------------------------------------- The first one will take place in the Venice, Italy: IPSI-2005 VENICE Hotel Luna Baglioni (arrival: 9 November 05 / departure: 14 November 05) New Deadlines: 25 June 05 (abstract) / 1 August 05 (full paper) ---------------------------------------- The second one will take place on the Bled lake, Slovenia: IPSI-2005 SLOVENIA Hotel Toplice (arrival: 8 December 05 / departure: 11 December 05) New Deadlines: 10 July 05 (abstract) & 1 September 05 (full paper) ------------------------------------------ The third one will take place in New York City, NY, USA: IPSI-2005 NEW YORK Hotel Beacon (arrival: 5 January 06 / departure: 8 January 06) New Deadlines: 1 August 05 (abstract) & 1 October 05 (full paper) -------------------------------------------- All IPSI BgD conferences are non-profit. They bring together the elite of the world science; so far, we have had seven Nobel Laureates speaking at the opening ceremonies. The conferences always take place in some of the most attractive places of the world. All those who come to IPSI conferences once, always love to come back (because of the unique professional quality and the extremely creative atmosphere); lists of past participants are on the web, as well as details of future conferences. These conferences are in line with the newest recommendations of the US National Science Foundation and of the EU research sponsoring agencies, to stress multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research (M+I+T++ research). The speakers and activities at the conferences truly support this type of scientific interaction. One of the main topics of this conference is "E-education and E-business with Special Emphasis on Semantic Web and Web Datamining" Other topics of interest include, but are not limited to: * Internet * Computer Science and Engineering * Mobile Communications/Computing for Science and Business * Management and Business Administration * Education * e-Medicine * e-Oriented Bio Engineering/Science and Molecular Engineering/Science * Environmental Protection * e-Economy * e-Law * Technology Based Art and Art to Inspire Technology Developments * Internet Psychology If you would like more information on either conference, please reply to this e-mail message. If you plan to submit an abstract and paper, please let us know immediately for planning purposes. Note that you can submit your paper also to the IPSI Transactions journal. Sincerely Yours, Prof. V. Milutinovic, Chairman, IPSI BgD Conferences ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Card Holders Affected Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 19:23:34 -0500 Security Breach Could Expose 40 Million Card Holders to Fraud By JOE BEL BRUNO, Associated Press Writer A security breach of customer information at a credit card transaction company could expose to fraud up to 40 million cardholders of multiple brands, MasterCard International Inc. said Friday. The credit card giant said its security division detected multiple instances of fraud that tracked back to CardSystems Solutions Inc., which processes credit card and other payments for banks and merchants. The compromised data included names, banks and account numbers - not addresses or Social Security numbers, said MasterCard spokeswoman Sharon Gamsin. Such data could be used to steal funds but not identities. It was the latest in a series of security breaches affecting valuable consumer data at major financial institutions and data brokers in an increasingly database-driven world. The breach appears to be the largest yet involving financial data, said David Sobel, general counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "The steady stream of these disclosures shows the pressing need for regulation of the industry both in terms of limitation in the amount of personal information that companies collect and also liability when these kinds of disclosures occur," Sobel said. A flurry of disclosures of breaches affecting high-profile companies including Citigroup Inc., Bank of America Corp. and DSW Shoe Warehouse has prompted federal lawmakers to draw up legislation designed to better protect consumer privacy. CardSystems was hit by a virus-like computer script that captured customer data for the purpose of fraud, Gamsin said. She said she did not know how the script got into the system. The FBI was investigating. MasterCard, which said about 14 million of its own cards were exposed, first announced the breach in a news release late Friday afternoon, saying it was notifying its card-issuing banks of the problem. Under federal law, credit card holders are liable for no more than $50 of unauthorized charges, and many card issuers including MasterCard will even waive the $50. Reached on his cell phone, CardSystems' chief financial officer, Michael A. Brady, said: "We were absolutely blindsided by a press release by the association." He refused to answer any questions and referred calls to the company's chief executive, John M. Perry, and its senior vice president of marketing, Bill N. Reeves. A message left for Perry and Reeves at the company's Atlanta offices was not immediately returned. CardSystems processes less than 0.5 percent of American Express' domestic transactions, said company spokeswoman Judy Tenzer. She said a small number of its cardholders were affected, though she did not have an exact figure. "We are aware of the situation, we're closely monitoring it and we do have an investigation under way," Tenzer said. Discover Financial Services Inc. said it was aware of the situation and would not say whether any of its cards were involved. Visa USA and a large issuer of cards, MBNA Corp., did not immediately calls seeking comment. CardSystems, which has a processing center in Tuscon, Ariz., has been in business for more than 15 years and handles transactions for more than 115,000 small to mid-sized businesses, according to the company's Web site. The company says it processes transactions worth more than $15 billion annually. Sobel said the fact that the latest breach involved a third party "indicates that this is a shadowy industry where the consumer never really knows who is going to be handling and using their personal information," he added. "Presumably, the affected consumers thought they were dealing with MasterCard." Earlier this month, Citigroup said United Parcel Service lost computer tapes with sensitive information from 3.9 million customers of CitiFinancial, a unit that provides personal and home loans. There have also been breaches involving other kinds of sensitive data. ChoicePoint Inc. said in February that thieves using stolen identities had created 50 dummy businesses that pulled data including names, addresses and Social Security numbers on as many as 145,000 people. In March, LexisNexis Inc. disclosed that hackers had commandeered a database and gained access to the personal files of as many as 32,000 people. The company has since increased its estimate of the people affected to 310,000. Information accessed included names, addresses and Social Security and driver's license numbers, but not credit history, medical records or financial information, corporate parent Reed Elsevier Group PLC said in a statement. "Hardly a week goes by without startling new examples of breaches of sensitive personal data, reminding us how important it is to pass a comprehensive identity theft prevention bill in Congress quickly," said Sen. Charles Schumer (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y. AP writers Anick Jesdanun, Adam Geller, Harry Weber, Ted Bridis, Arthur Rotstein and Marcy Gordon contributed to this report. Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My thanks to Lisa for rounding up this item. So what do we do now? Discontinue any/all shopping on the web where Card Systems is the processor? What information _is_ safe to give over the net any longer? Any at all? PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 00:11:34 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Cell Phones Now Playing Role of Wallet By BRUCE MEYERSON AP Business Writer NEW YORK (AP) -- Already a device of multiple disguises, from camera to music player and mini-TV, the cell phone's next trick may be the disappearing wallet. After all, since more than a quarter of the people on the planet already carry around cell phones, and hundreds of millions are joining them every year, why should they bring along credit and debit cards when a mobile device can make payments just as well? At the simplest level, all that's needed is to embed phones with a short-range radio chip to beam credit card information to a terminal at a store register. It's not unlike the wireless system used to pay tolls on many highways or the SpeedPass keychain wand used to buy gas at Exxon Mobile Corp. pumps. This is already a reality in Japan, where NTT DoCoMo Inc. says 3 million cell phone subscribers use its Mobile Wallet service to buy things at 20,000 stores and vending machines. Similar services may be on the way in the United States and Europe. MasterCard International Inc. has been testing phone-based versions of its PayPass contactless payment technology since 2003, and may conduct a significant market trial next year. But there also are more ambitious visions brewing that contemplate the cell phone as a new focal point for managing your personal finances. The phone would supplant not only credit and debit cards, but wallets, checkbooks, Web sites, computer programs like Quicken, and online bill payment services such as PayPal or CheckFree. While the mightiest players in Western banking have yet to embrace that notion, and some are dubious of the appeal, the concept has drawn interest in other regions and may get a tryout here soon. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49940191 ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 03:57:09 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , wrote: > Fred Goldstein wrote: >> Monopolies in LD transmission? That >> would have held up the price of data transmission, slowing down all >> sorts of datacomm. Ma Bell viewed leased lines, so necessary for >> data, as a substitute for profitable long distance minutes of use, so >> they overpriced them. The RBOCs still do the same thing with their >> Special Access tariffs! > But long distance rates for both switched and private line service > were both on the way down well before actual divesture. Also, faster > and faster digital lines were being installed before divesture. I _guarantee_ that AT&T and the Bells were not 'voluntarily' reducing the prices just because of a decrease in costs. There were precisely *two* possible reasons for a price reduction: 1) pressure from competition. 2) enough 'pent up demand' that the price reduction brought in 'more than enough additional volume' to make up for the reduction in profitability. >> I maintain it was mostly technology -- cheaper terminal equipment and >carrier media followed by higher call volume and greater economies of >scale -- that caused and still cause long distance rates to fall. The _rate_ of deployment, however, was driven by the competition _doing_it_ FIRST. > As Pat noted in his comments, in the early days MCI had a big advanage > serving only the high profit markets with no obligation to handle the > expensive stuff or provide support services. Any time a phone call > had trouble they dump it into AT&T's lap. "In the early days" all Internet connectivity was between those 'high profit markets' -- making the 'alternative' carriers an excellent fit for delivering such service at a lower cost than AT&T/Bell/WEco could possibly offer. >> Let's say digital leased line rates were, instead, regulated at >> cost-based levels. > Are you sure they weren't? I'm not that familiar with private line > tarrifs, In Chicago, in the early 80s a 'dry pair' for data service between point A and point B cost several *hundred* dollars a month. This was for renting the bare wire-pair between 'point A' and the C.O. a cross- connect in the C.O., and the bare wire-pair out to 'point B'. Yet, you could rent those same two sets of wire-pairs, *and* the use of C.O. switching equipment connecting to the PSTN, for less than $40/month. Interestingly they would rent those _same_ dry pairs, for 'alarm service' signalling at a fraction of the "data service" price. 'DDS' service was priced even higher. > but as mentioned my own employer's network went down in price > and up in speed before divesture. Private networks, such as owned and > run by railroads, were shifted over to AT&T since it was cheaper for > AT&T to provide it than doing it themselves. Can you name a single railroad that had a developed long-haul telecom network that _voluntarily_ converted to AT&T service? The one that I am aware of where that happened did it _because_ the railroad was *sold*, but the prior owner _kept_ the telecom operation *(including R-O-W on all that railroad's trackage) rather than including it in the sale. > Considering they already had a network in place, there must be have > been good cost savings to dump it for AT&T. >> But without local competition in 1996, and with the Internet going >> public when it did in 1992, I suggest that the BOC networks would have >> collapsed in 1996! The RBOC networks came within months of doing so. >> Dial-up Internet traffic was exploding. Bell System culture bought >> switches on a 5-year planning schedule, so they could not react >> quickly. CLECs were authorized in February, 1996, and by the end of >> the year they were carrying substantial dial-up ISP traffic. ... >> AOL did not use CLECs in 1996, and the RBOCs could >> not provide circuits fast enough (I know; I was working on AOLnet at >> the time). Other ISPs did, and that prevented more RBOC switches from >> melting down under the load. > I'm not sure "months of collapse" is an accurate characterization. It is not inaccurate. Demand ramped up *far*faster* than the Bell system projections indicated. There were numerous big-city locations where you _could_not_get_ RBOC phone lines in quantity, when you wanted them. 'Rationing' _was_ in effect. For a variety of reasons -- lack of field workers to do physical interconnects, lack of C.O. capacity, among the big ones. When you're down to the last few thousand numbers available out of a C.O. that serves 100,000 numbers, and the new switch isn't due for delivery for another 18 months, you _don't_ have many choices. > The Internet boom did not happen suddenly overnight. Remember that > since the 1960s people used dial-up to communicate with computers and > this traffic continued to grow. Hobbyists with early home computers > began to talk to each other then BBS's came along. Home computers didn't *exist* until the mid 1970s. The Altair 8800 plans ran in PE's Jan 1975 issue. The APPLE-II didn't exist until late 1977. The first BBS went online in Feb 1978. Within two years, the operator of that system had crossed swords with the local telco _at_least_three_times_, where they refused to install the additional residential lines he wanted. Claiming he "had" to be running a business. Public-utility commission complaints ensued, and the telco did, in each case, end up installing the additional lines. Other large-scale "hobby BBSs" across the country reported similar problems. There were telco capacity problems in the mid 80s, and in the mid 90s. The first one was _not_ (at least directly) Internet related. That one gets blamed on the public packet-data networks. The fireworks started when Telenet announced a program to let hobbiests take advantage of the (tremendous amount of) excess capacity they had 'after business hours', This program was called "PC Pursuit", and allowed one to dial into the Telenet network, and then dial *out* to a BBS (or "whatever") in a remote location -- as long as that destination was a 'local' call from the Telenet 'portal' in that area. Telenet found that they couldn't build on capacity _fast_enough_ to keep up with the demand. And most telco 'usage projections' went in the trashcan. In some areas, it took less than 5 months to reach levels that had not been predicted to be reached in 2 years. The mid-90's debacle _was_ Internet driven. dial-up usage was ramping up much faster than projections had called for. 'last mile' service was forcibly opened to the CLECs DSL was being pushed. Those who weren't interested in DSL itself, _still_ got curious about "what's all the excitement about", which contributed to the dial-up demand. In many places ILECs _didn't_have_ the manpower to keep up with the demand. Install dates -- even for additional _voice_ service -- were running 8-10 weeks behind. It took me thirteen weeks(!) to get a DSL line in, over 12 of that was ILEC problems. > The RBOC were serving this growing traffic all along; and it was > well recognized and expected it would increase greatly. There were > the early services such as Compuserve and Prodigy. Which were a drop in the bucket, compared to the public packet-data networks that let you connect to any of a myriad of host systems. > Remember too that many users got a second telephone line for their > computer use. At the same time, the real (inflation adjusted) cost of > local phone service went down and more people got second lines for > their kids. The phone companies were planning and responding to this > all along -- expanding switch and local loop capacity. It is a fact, nonetheless, that the growth outstripped *all* expectations. Line availability _was_ 'rationed' in some areas, due to inadequate C.O. service availability. Number availability was rationed in some areas, due to 'near exhaustion' of space in the NPA -- there are several 'splits' that were implemented on _very_short_ time-lines. >> America will, as a result, fall even farther behind the rest of the >> world in most matters of telecom. > Is the U.S. really "behind" the rest of the world? Ironically, prior > to divesture the U.S. was by far the leader in telecom service. > Indicators like cost, lines per person, etc. all were best for the > U.S. "Was" is not "is". Even prior to divestiture, the 'road signs' were there for anyone to read. "Measurements" for quality of U.S. service were flat-lining, and in some cases, actually declining. While other in areas, particularly Europe, and the more developed areas of the Pac. Rim, service 'quality' was approaching that of traditional U.S. levels, *and* showing no signs of leveling out. The most common dial-tone (residential or small business) in most of the developed world is ISDN, at cost roughly equivalent to POTS in the U.S. ISDN, except for hi-cap service, is moribund, if not entirely dead in the U.S. ISDN calls for less equipment in the CO than POTS (so it -should- price lower), provides better voice quality, and offers a flock of capabilities that are simply 'not available' on a POTS line. > Tim@Backhome.org wrote: >> The No. 1ESS was basically a No 5XBAR with stored program control >> (SPC). The real motivator was to cut labor cost and secondarily to be >> able to market special calling features. > Well, basically every switch was an advancement on the basic Strowger > unit which itself was to eliminate manual operators. > But I suspect the ESS offered more benefits than you suggest. I > believe it took up less floor space and operated faster, so it could > handle more calls in the same building. I believe it was more > reliable and more flexible. Space was not an issue, generally. Possibly in a few central-city facilities in a few of the largest cities. "Speed" is not related to call-handling capacity. The reliability benefit was mostly to the telco -- less service personnel on the payroll. > Also, since the Bell System's rates were based partly on cost, cost > savings would be passed along to the customer which they were. In a > time of great inflation local rates remain nearly level. The Bell system, like any regulated monopoly was _guaranteed_ a certain minimum rate-of-return on investments. Very, *very* rarely was 'how' that money was spent questioned. If there was a way that was 90% as good, but only cost 10% as much, they *still* got to use the 'expensive' way that they did things as the base for their 'profit' margin. Oh, yeah, there wasn't any "cap" on the profits either. If they were making 'excessive' profits, there wasn't any 'price reduction' program. Of course, rate increases would not be approved while the profit margin was above the required level. when phone rates "didn't go up" for many years, it was because the telco was making more than their 'fair, guaranteed, profit' for all those many years. > [Telecom Editor's Note] >> Bell got hit so bad for a few years, they finally decided they had >> to rebuild the entire phone system from the ground up, and the answer >> to that was ESS. So as you stated, Bell did not develop ESS in order >> to make a few dollars selling 'custom calling features' to users; ESS >> was developed so the telephone company could regain control of a >> network which was rapidly getting out of control. > Another major reason for the system rebuild was to protect the network > itself. The "phone phreaks" were using 'blue boxes' to take control > of the network and lock up long distance trunks. While mostly used to > save money, it was potentially very dangerous. All that 'non revenue' traffic was the real killer. It was so easy to do, and becoming *so*widespread* that it was having a measurable impact on over-all revenues, and the ability to deliver revenue services. > As to the issue of not interested in providing the customer with > advanced features, I'm not sure I agree. According to Bell Labs > Record and the history books, advanced service features (especially > for business users) were important. Can you name a feature/capability introduced by the Bell System after 1970 that was not present in third-party-provided, customer-owned, PBX equipment first? The only one I can think of is the "picturephone". Even "caller id" (for internal calls) was available on a Rolm CBX years before the telco's offered it. 3-way calling, conference calling, call waiting, speed-dial, call 'camping', etc. Standard features on PBXs years before there was Centrex availability. And even longer before they were offered on plain-jane POTS service. > The Bell System did not have to retrofit Step-by-step exchanges with > Touch Tone converters -- it didn't save them any money. But they > still developed four models for various SxS situations. 'Native touch-tone' was far less expensive for the telco than native pulse dialing. "Pre-converting" end-users to touch-tone was some expense 'now', for less expense 'later'. Pulse converters in front of native touch-tone was _still_ a cost win, albeit not as much as pure touch-tone. the pulse converter, and the touch-tone decodes could now be multiplexed across many lines. You only needed as many sets of those devices as there were calls being _dialed_ at any given time, not one for each line through the switch. The reduction is several orders of magnitude. > The Bell System didn't have to develop the Princess or Trimline > telephone sets. But they did. And we know they put a heck of a lot > of effort into optimizing the design for user comfort. Do you know *why* those phones were developed? Telephone _line_ sales had reached the 'saturation' point, Nearly everybody that was likely to buy telephone service *had* service. The only place for 'revenue growth' was in "add-on sales". 'Additional extensions' was the big-money item in this class. extra jacks were one-time revenue item. 'Long cords' (set to wall, or handset to base) couldn't justify much of a recurring charge. Additional sets, on the other hand, were almost pure gravy. With only one line there was, in general, only one phone in use at a time, so the wear-and-tear on the second phone was mostly covered by the increased life-expectancy of the first one. Bell was trying to sell the idea that you needed more than one phone at home -- Ideally, 'one in every room'. But they only had about three phones to offer -- the standard desk set or two types of wall set. Those alternatives were fine for the workplace, but woefully inadequate -- from a marketing standpoint -- for the residential market. If it clashed with the decor, the lady of the house was *not* going to permit it. So, if Bell wanted to "make money faster", they had to "sell" more extension phones. To "sell" more extensions, they _had_ to have something that was 'acceptable' decor-wise to the decision-maker in the household. So, the "Princess" phone was expressly designed for the bedroom. Compact, a rounded 'blend in anywhere" shape, a lighted dial, to facilitate use in the dark, etc. etc. And the "TrimLine" for other places where you didn't want something that "looked like a business phone". e.g. the parlor, or a 'family room'. The Bell System *did* have to develop those phones -- or something of a similar nature -- *IF* they wanted to sell 'additional phones' to the then- existing customer base. Those phones were not intended as 'replacement' for the existing office-type phone in the residence, but as _additions_ to it. > The entire history of the Bell System has been one of improving the > economies of scale to lower the cost to get more traffic and make more > money. Disproof by counter-example: the practices and policies leading up to the Carterphone decision. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Before Charlie Brown became Chairman of AT&T, he was President and CEO of Illinois Bell. At that time, he lived about two blocks from me in Rogers Park, a north side neighborhood in Chicago. In chatting with him at his home one day, he said to me basically what Robert Bonomi claims above. I specifically recall one conversation we had: I had business service in downtown Chicago (office was WEbster 9-4600 and my recorded message lines were on HARrison-7-1234 (and upward in number). Both sets of lines were served from the real old, clunky, stepping switches out of Wabash CO. All the lines were just dreadful sometimes, in terms of noise and crosstalk. Normally of course, I just dealt with the Business Office like anyone would do; it wasn't and still isn't my thing to drop names or appeal to the Chairman's office unless absolutely required. But one day, attempting to make a call from my office phone, the dialing and setup of the call sounded just like the nickname telco guys had for the central office: The Wabash Cannonball. (Chicago-Wabash was the central office, at Congress Blvd. and Wabash Avenue.) It was called the 'Wabash Cannonball' because of the amount of noise those relays would make when a bunch were setting or resetting within a couple seconds of each other; very noisy to be in the frames anytime. I called repair service and asked them "please, are you doing _any_ routine these days there, or just letting it all go to hell since you plan to have the ESS up and running in about three months?" The repair clerk said to me, "Sir, we do _not_ just allow our equipment to 'go to hell' as you put it. We maintain it regularly, and I will put in a service request for your lines." A night or two later, I walked past Charlie Brown's home (he was getting ready to move up to Wilmette because the RP neighborhood was getting so bad) and I mentioned that experience to him. His somewhat guarded response was that the techs had been told to 'do what was absolutely needed' to keep the old system up and running, but not a lot more. Then came the weekend it was all cut over to ESS (Wabash did not go through several years of crossbar stuff first, just straight from stepping switches to ESS) and ah ... the blessed _quiet_ during the call setups. And the speed! If you did not know better, you would have thought you dialed an extra digit or two in error and were going to get an intercept or a wrong number; under ESS the instant your finger came off the dial, the other end started ringing. No more of the Wabash Cannonball chugging down the tracks and about half the time the switch train getting derailed by accident. PAT] ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Monitor/Recorder for Residential Power Line Outages? Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 04:15:58 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , AES wrote: > Any have pointers to a gadget that will monitor and log power outages > or glitches on 110V or 220V residential electrical service? > Looking for a home or retail level gadget that will work either > connected to a dedicated computer, or preferably free-standing with > periodic read-out to a computer, logging time and duration of both > longer outages and short glitches (anything long enough to cause > digital clocks and appliance displays to reset). > Asking on this group because a lot of tech-savvy people seem to hang > out on this group; glad to accept pointers to any other group. > Any way to make the computer itself (e.g., Mac iBook) do the sensing > and recording? It should be obvious that any such device will need to be powered by some sort of UPS. Whereupon you may as well use a UPS. Most modern "smart" UPS systems have a capability for signalling a host computer about the state of the incoming power, and the state of the UPS batteries. Allowing, among other things, 'controlled' shutdown of a UPS-protected device when the UPS batteries are about to expire. However, if you have a 'dumb' UPS, it is trivially easy to create a sensor that can be monitored by a computer serial port. A simple 120VAC relay does the job. Wire it so that when power goes *off*, the a "modem control" signal is asserted that indicates the serial port is "usable". When the power is on, and you try to "open" that port for use, the operation will wait for the right modem-control signal. The power goes off, the signal appears, and 'whatever it is' your software does after the 'open' on the port succeeds will happen. Like logging the fact that the power went off. When power returns, that signal will be dropped, and you'll get a status-change on that successfully opened port. Voila! You can log that power returned. *IF* the computer loses power, _and_ is set to automatically restart when power returns, then you simply log the "power returned" when the machine boots up. ------------------------------ From: Kenneth P. Stox Organization: Ministry of Silly Walks Subject: Re: For a Brief Shining Moment: The Lorimer Brothers Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 03:18:48 GMT Lisa Minter wrote: > Before the separation of Northern Telecom (then Northern Electric) > from Western Electric following the Consent Decree between American > Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) and the Justice Department in 1956, Has anyone ever done a "genealogy" of all the companies that have spun off from AT&T at one point or another? Ma Bell sure had a lot of kids in her time. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This would make a very interesting report for the Digest, if anyone feels like compiling it. 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End of TELECOM Digest V24 #275 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sat Jun 18 17:25:09 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 12CF414D60; Sat, 18 Jun 2005 17:25:08 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #276 Message-Id: <20050618212508.12CF414D60@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 17:25:08 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.1 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_REMOVE, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Sat, 18 Jun 2005 17:25:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 276 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Statement from Consumers Union About Huge Credit Card Theft (L Minter) Re: Worst Phishing/Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards (mc) Re: Worst Phishing/Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards (Steve Sobol) Re: Worst Phishing/Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards (Jared) New Free DataBase Has Details on _Everyone_ (Patrick Townson) Embarassing Email Mistake (Lisa Minter) Sprint, Verizon Opening Door to Mobile Content (Lisa Minter) Pod Slurp Dangerous for Your Business (Lisa Minter) DSL Speed (Choreboy) Report: Google to Start New Payment System (Monty Solomon) Re: Bell Divestiture (Arthur Kamlet) Re: Cell Phones Now Playing Role of Wallet (The Kaminsky Family) Re: 700-555-4141 (Michael Muderick) Re: Monitor/Recorder for Residential Power Line Outages? (David Clayton) Re: Monitor/Recorder for Residential Power Line Outages? (AES) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Statement from Consumers Union About Huge Credit Card Theft Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 01:42:26 -0500 Consumers Union: MasterCard Security Breach Underscores How Lax Data Security Puts Consumers at Risk of ID Theft Contact: Susanna Montezemolo, 202-498-6746 (cell) or Michael McCauley, 415-431-6747, ext. 126, both for Consumers Union WASHINGTON, June 17 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is a statement by Susanna Montezemolo, policy analyst, Consumers Union's Financial Privacy Now Campaign: "MasterCard International's announcement today that more than 40 million credit cards of all brands potentially have been exposed to fraud is a startling reminder of how vulnerable consumers are to having their sensitive information stolen by crooks. While MasterCard has indicated that Social Security numbers and birth dates were not accessed in the incident from the 13.9 million MasterCard-brand cards involved, there is no information yet available about the remaining 26.1 million other credit cards that were part of this massive data security breach. If such sensitive information was accessed from the other cards, then tens of millions of Americans may be at heightened risk of identity theft." "Regardless of what information was stolen, this incident should serve as a wake-up call for lawmakers to give consumers stronger tools to protect themselves, such as the right to put a security freeze on credit files to prevent identity thieves from opening new accounts in their names. And lawmakers must enact new safeguards to hold companies accountable for ensuring that strict data security practices are in place and followed." For more information on the identity theft safeguards advocated by Consumers Union, see: http://www.consumersunion.org/pdf/616-privacy.pdf --- Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, is an independent, nonprofit testing and information organization serving only the consumer. We are a comprehensive source of unbiased advice about products and services, personal finance, health nutrition, and other consumer concerns. Since 1936, our mission has been to test products, inform the public, and protect consumers. http://www.usnewswire.com/ [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I suggest _DEFINITLY_ begin watching your credit/debit card statements very closely. I suggest you may want to request copies of your credit bureau reports from at least the three major bureaus. Many of the affected credit card companies are now giving these away free, for the asking. _Do not hesitate_ to question anything/everything of a degratory nature on those reports that you do not recall. PAT] ------------------------------ From: mc Subject: Re: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards Affected Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 15:08:36 -0400 Organization: Speed Factory ( http://www.speedfactory.net ) Why is this "phishing"? The reports indicate that it was an intrusion into a single business's computers, not a phishing attack in which people are tricked into giving their identifying information to an impostor. And I don't see anything in the reports to indicate that it has anything particularly to do with the Internet. Does it? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The word 'phishing' may have not been the best way of phrasing things. As I understand what happened (and they are being sort of tight lipped about it) the perpetrator(s) installed some sort of 'back door' into the software to deliberatly capture the card numbers and other details. 'Traditional phishing' -- if we can use that term -- does generally refer to social engineering done manually, case by case. I put up a phony web page and trick you into revealing those same details. On the other hand, 'traditional hacking' usually refers to brute force removal of the desired data or manipulation of same, no password required. What terms should be used when there is a case of 'social engineering' where a computer 'trusts' that what it is doing is what it _should_ be doing, i.e. a back door built in by someone, and the computer goes right along innocently doing its thing? And what term should apply when instead of 'traditional phishing' (one person after another being tricked) the phisherman grows impatient and decides to get them all in one swoop by posing as a delivery person and tricking the one person (let's call him the 'master data collector' [who is honest]) into giving up his hoard? I honestly suspect that is what happened in the one case last week with the 'missing UPS' shipment. Neither UPS nor the employee-in-the-trick-bag is willing to admit it; some fool in the proper-looking uniform socially engineered the 'master data collector' into turning over his hoard of lawfully collected data. We probably need new common-names for all this deviant behavior; 'phisher', 'cracker' and 'hacker' are just not enough any longer. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards Affected Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 12:37:09 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Lisa Minter wrote: > "Hardly a week goes by without startling new examples of breaches of > sensitive personal data, reminding us how important it is to pass a > comprehensive identity theft prevention bill in Congress quickly," > said Sen. Charles Schumer (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y. Startling? I am not even surprised by junk like this anymore. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My thanks to Lisa for rounding up this > item. So what do we do now? Discontinue any/all shopping on the > web where Card Systems is the processor? What information _is_ safe > to give over the net any longer? Any at all? PAT] ??? Who said anything about the Internet? This particular breach would affect much more than just Internet transactions. This is apparently a backend system that was breached. Non-Internet transactions could also have been exposed. And there's no way to avoid Card Systems, because we don't do business with them directly, and as far as I know, neither do the merchants. They deal with the card issuers. JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 14:26:40 -0600 From: jared@nospam.au (jared) Subject: Re: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards Affected The problem with this article's title is that it was not a phishing attack. Note that the article says virus-like, the following is an excerpt from an article attributed to the LA Times. Reportedly someone planted a harvesting programme which is virus like in the sense that it operates stealthily but may not be like a virus in how it propagates. By Joseph Menn Los Angeles Times The largest reported breach of personal data, hackers infiltrated the computers at a credit card processing center and stole as many as 40 million card numbers, it was disclosed Friday. MasterCard International said card numbers and expiration dates were harvested by a rogue program planted inside the computer network at CardSystems, one of the low-profile companies that process merchant requests for credit-card authorization. When a retailer swipes a customer's card, the information goes to companies such as CardSystems for approval before getting passed along to banks. At least 68,000 accounts have had fake charges posted to them, said MasterCard Vice President Linda Locke. Most credit card companies reverse fraudulent charges that are reported to them. Social Security numbers or other items of personal information were not taken. The attack exposed the numbers of 13.9 million MasterCards and an unknown number of other brands of cards, including American Express. Atlanta-based CardSystems processes $15 billion in charges annually for MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover and other cards. Officials at Visa did not return a call seeking comment. "I think all four (of the major card issuers) will be tainted," said Chris Hoofnagle, west coast director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "This is the biggest security breach by far." Hackers and identity thieves trade and sell pilfered credit card numbers in online chat rooms, making it relatively easy for a single big theft to affect thousands of cards quickly. MasterCard, which uncovered the incursion, would not divulge the dollar amount of the fraud uncovered so far or say when the improper charges began. "Several banks reported atypical patterns of fraud (this week)," Locke said. With the help of security company CyberTrust , she said, "We traced disparate patterns of fraud back to CardSystems." After examining the computers there, she said, "We believe that a hacker intruded and installed some malicious code that captured card information." The FBI is investigating. MasterCard said CardSystems hadn't been using industry safeguards at its Tucson, Ariz., processing center, suggesting to analysts that the numbers had not been encrypted. CardSystems did not return phone calls seeking comment. ================================ The statement from the processor follows, though there is precious little detail. Statement from CardSystems Solutions, Inc. (June 17, 2005) CardSystems Solutions, Inc., identified a potential security incident on Sunday, May 22nd. On Monday, May 23rd, CardSystems contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Subsequently, the VISA and MasterCard Card Associations were notified to alert them of a possible security incident. CardSystems immediately began a remediation process to ensure all systems were secure. Additionally, CardSystems immediately engaged an independent 3rd party to validate systems security. Since that time, concurrent to the investigation proceedings, CardSystems is completing the installation of enhanced/additional security procedures recommended by the security assessor involved in the investigation. We understand and fully appreciate the seriousness of the situation. Our customers and their customers are our lifeblood. We are sparing no effort to get to the bottom of this matter. Our goal is to cooperate fully with the FBI to complete the investigation and ensure that we do nothing that might compromise the investigation. ------------------------------ From: Patrick Townson Subject: New Free Database Has _Everyone_ Listed Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 12:43:46 -0500 Some email I got from a family member this past week: Beginning this month (May '05) a new database will be available to the general public, free of charge, that displays your personal information (names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates). The database is found at http://www.zabasearch.com. I urge you to forward this email to family and friends. Check to see if your name and information is in their database. If so and you want it removed, send them an e-mail at info@zabasearch.com to request it be removed. I do not know how our names are appearing there, but I checked my own and a few other random ones, and they are all in this database! After opting out by email, check back after a few days to make certain your information has been removed. Displaying such information should be a crime. (End of letter) ============================================= Well, I dunno how much of a crime it should be, except that a random check of my own information and a few test, controlled cases show that although it is _generally accurate_ there are some mistakes and omissions, about like any such database. Anyway, its all there at http://www.zabasearch.com. It appears they have put a lot of 'hooks' into the cgi-bin things of _other_ databases so you do not have to keep re-entering the names/addresses to look in different areas of interest. For instance, you put in your name, some information is provided, then links are given to take you off to various other data bases, directly to information about the name you (originally) entered. Such as, enter a name, it comes up with an address, then by clicking on the link you can get the map of the location, the aerial or satellite photo of same, and lots more. One link goes off to Yahoo Photos, another to newspaper clippings, etc. Like William Burroughs in his book _Naked Lunch_ now we all get to see precisely what is on the end of the other guys' forks. So far as I can tell, they do not have _naked photos_ of any of us yet on display, but I have not checked it all out. You begin your review by going to http://www.zabasearch.com and filling in a little template. Then the computer takes over. Patrick Townson ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Email Embarrasses 119 Failing Students Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 13:18:52 -0500 More than 100 students who failed their classes at the University of Kansas last semester found out who shared their misfortune. The school's Office of Student Financial Aid sent an e-mail to 119 students Monday notifying them that they were in jeopardy of having their aid revoked. But the names of the students were included on the e-mail address list -- meaning everyone who got the e-mail could see the names of all the other recipients. "It was a completely inadvertent, unintentional mistake," university spokesman Todd Cohen said Thursday. "It was our error, our mistake and we deeply regret it." Nancy George, a student on the list, said the mistake was tantamount to releasing the grades of students without their permission, which the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act prohibits. "Nobody should have known that I failed a class or that I even had a student loan," said George, who says she failed because her daughter had developed pneumonia. Cohen said the university is contacting students to apologize. She also said the incident had been reported to the Department of Education so it could determine if there was a violation of the federal law. Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Sprint, Verizon Opening Doors to Mobile Content Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 13:35:28 -0500 By Antony Bruno Sprint and Verizon Wireless may soon lower the walls on their networks, allowing their subscribers greater access to third-party content, including ringtones and graphics. The mobile phone giants are responding to U.S. cell phone users' growing interest in buying content from sources other than their wireless carrier. Allowing subscribers to access non-network content is a common practice for mobile operators in Europe, as well as U.S. carriers Cingular, Nextel and T-Mobile. Sprint and Verizon, however, have taken a "walled garden" approach, restricting content to that offered directly through their own delivery portals. Sprint is testing a system that would let content providers target its subscribers with sales and marketing campaigns through premium SMS messaging, otherwise known as "short codes." A short code is a four- or five-digit number that works like an e-mail address but across various wireless carriers. Companies can place the short code in their advertising to generate customer responses. In turn, subscribers can send a text message to a short code to request information or make purchases. The reply is delivered to the subscriber as a text message attachment. The charge is added to the mobile bill. TEST RUN According to John Styers, Sprint director of data communications services, the carrier is conducting short-code delivery trials with various partners, including Sony BMG and Warner Music Group. "Both of them are in the midst of launching a premium SMS service," he says. "They want to be able to offer on their artist-specific Web sites the artists' content in ringtone fashion through SMS. So we are working with them to launch some of their artists' Web sites as well." He says Sprint will slowly open its network after these trials, based on technology performance and customer feedback. Verizon, which has operated the most tightly controlled network of all U.S. carriers, uses a content delivery system called BREW. Only content written and delivered via the BREW system can operate on Verizon's network and phones. But Qualcomm, which created the BREW technology, has introduced a new version that would support non-BREW content. Sources say Verizon has told content aggregators that it intends to open its network to off-portal content before the end of the year. The carrier declined to comment for this story. According to executives at QPass, a wireless transaction management firm, off-portal sales in the United States are beginning to explode. The company manages the off-portal sales activity for Cingular, Nextel, Boost Mobile and other carriers that together represent about half of the U.S. market. In the last year, these carriers have seen off-portal content sales grow at a compound annual rate of 410 percent. In the last six months, total off-portal sales activity skyrocketed 1,024 percent, with a month-over-month growth of 141 percent this past quarter alone. Even with the crumbling of these garden walls, however, less than 10 percent of all wireless content transactions in the United States are non-carrier. This pales in comparison with Europe, where about 80 percent of all mobile content sold is off-portal. Reuters/Billboard Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Pod Slurping Dangerous to Your Company Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 13:41:11 -0500 Nearly a year ago, an analyst from Gartner recommended that enterprises should think about banning Apple's iPods -- and similar small-sized portable storage devices -- for fear of data walking out the door. Now, with data being lost in more ways than once thought possible -- backup tapes lost by UPS, Social Security numbers sold to criminals, and hackers breaking in to networks remotely -- a researcher has demonstrated just how easy it is to walk off with megabytes of sensitive material when armed with only the ubiquitous iPod and simple software. With more than 30 million iPods in circulation and models packing as much as 30GB of storage space, the gizmo makes a perfect tool for data theft, wrote computer security expert Abe Usher in his blog. Dubbing the practice "pod slurping," Usher created a proof-of-concept application that runs from an iPod that, when the device is connected to a PC, will sniff through a PC's hard drive to find and copy all the Microsoft Office documents it finds. "An unauthorized visitor shows up after work hours disguised as a janitor and carrying an iPod (or similar portable storage device)," posited Usher. "He walks from computer to computer and 'slurps' up all of the Microsoft Office files from each system. "Within an hour he has acquired 20,000 files from over a dozen workstations. He returns home and uploads the files from his iPod to his PC. Using his handy desktop search program, he quickly finds the proprietary information that he was looking for." The thief could even access PCs that require a log-in username/password by using a boot CD, a specially-crafted CD that sidesteps log-in authentication, said Usher. Gartner's 2004 advice would block pod slurping, added Usher, if enterprises adopted the research firm's recommendations to lock down desktops by disabling USB functionality or Windows' Universal Plug and Play. Copyright 2005 CMP Media LLC. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. *** 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, CMP Media. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Choreboy Subject: DSL Speed Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 01:35:35 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com A relative has a farm. His phone service comes in on 700 yards of ordinary telephone cable buried along his driveway. Last week he got Bellsouth DSL. It comes in on the same conductors as before, but I've seen speeds fifty times faster than dialup. I thought 56K was the fastest speed possible with conventional telephone cable. How can DSL be so much faster with the same old cable? ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 14:30:03 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Report: Google to Start New Payment System MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) -- Online search-engine leader Google Inc. is preparing to introduce an electronic payment system later this year in a move that would pose a financial threat to one of its biggest advertisers, Internet auctioneer eBay Inc. The Wall Street Journal reported Google's plans on its Web site late Friday, citing sources familiar with the Mountain View-based company's plans. The Journal did not provide any details about Google's strategy. A Google spokesman declined to comment on the report. The likelihood of Google rolling out an online payment system to rival eBay's popular PayPal service became a hot topic during an Internet conference hosted Thursday by Piper Jaffray. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49940180 ------------------------------ From: kamlet@panix.com (Arthur Kamlet) Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 18:43:21 UTC Organization: Public Access Networks Corp. Reply-To: ArtKamlet@aol.REMOVE.com In article , Robert Bonomi wrote: > It is not inaccurate. Demand ramped up *far*faster* than the Bell system > projections indicated. > There were numerous big-city locations where you _could_not_get_ RBOC > phone lines in quantity, when you wanted them. 'Rationing' _was_ in > effect. For a variety of reasons -- lack of field workers to do > physical interconnects, lack of C.O. capacity, among the big ones. > When you're down to the last few thousand numbers available out of a > C.O. that serves 100,000 numbers, and the new switch isn't due for > delivery for another 18 months, you _don't_ have many choices. Number Ageing. As recently as 10 years ago, the RBOCs had pretty much a consistent 12-month number aging policy. When the crunch came in selected offices, those offices were generally allowed to use faster aging, but the software generally could not accommodate different aging for speciic exchanges. Their choices were to lower aging company wide or have the service order processor override 12 month aging case by case. Neither a great solution, but aging changes did free up thousands of numbers. Today I'd be surprised if anyone really cares about aging any more, especially with wireless. > Telephone _line_ sales had reached the 'saturation' point, Nearly > everybody that was likely to buy telephone service *had* service. The > only place for 'revenue growth' was in "add-on sales". 'Additional > extensions' was the big-money item in this class. extra jacks were > one-time revenue item. 'Long cords' (set to wall, or handset to base) > couldn't justify much of a recurring charge. Additional sets, on the > other hand, were almost pure gravy. With only one line there was, in > general, only one phone in use at a time, so the wear-and-tear on the > second phone was mostly covered by the increased life-expectancy of > the first one. We're talking Western Electric phone sets, here. The kind that when they pulled samples and dropped them 50,000 times to see if it would break, it would't. The building housing the phone would disintegrate before the phone would break No wear and tear concerns. In my OCAP assignment, I rode along with a repairman one day, on an NDT complaint (No Dial Tone.) It turns out the husband got mad at the wife and threw the phone through the wall. Big hole in the wall, and the phone wires pulled out of of the box. Repaired the box, reattached the wires, and the phone worked perfectly! Didn't fix the hole in the wall One day Western woke up and found the retail cost of a new phone at Radio Shack was less than Western's cost of parts for a 500 deskset. So after some marketing shifts, they got out of the handset business. Today, break a phone? Buy a new one. Just like a TV. -- Art Kamlet ArtKamlet @ AOL.com Columbus OH K2PZH ------------------------------ From: The Kaminsky Family Reply-To: kaminsky@kaminsky.org Organization: None Whatsoever Subject: Re: Cell Phones Now Playing Role of Wallet Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 09:12:36 GMT Monty Solomon wrote: > By BRUCE MEYERSON AP Business Writer > NEW YORK (AP) -- Already a device of multiple disguises, from camera > to music player and mini-TV, the cell phone's next trick may be the > disappearing wallet. Nice juxtaposition of this message with the earlier one about the lack of security for our financial data. I think "disappearing wallet" will shortly become "disappearing money". Mark ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 05:42:33 -0400 From: Michael Muderick Subject: Re: 700-555-4141 I also posted a while back that the number no longer works. Tried it from a number of different locations in the 610 area. mm> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The only way I found out it worked here in 620-land was by listening _very carefuly_ to the recorded message. After a barely audible two word message 'Qwest Communications' then a loud, clear, 'Number Not in Service' recording. That is not going to necessarily be your experience, of course. PAT] ------------------------------ From: David Clayton Subject: Re: Monitor/Recorder for Residential Power Line Outages? Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 14:57:52 +1000 On Fri, 17 Jun 2005 10:41:55 -0700, AES wrote: > Any have pointers to a gadget that will monitor and log power > outages or glitches on 110V or 220V residential electrical service? > Looking for a home or retail level gadget that will work either > connected to a dedicated computer, or preferably free-standing with > periodic read-out to a computer, logging time and duration of both > longer outages and short glitches (anything long enough to cause > digital clocks and appliance displays to reset). > Asking on this group because a lot of tech-savvy people seem to hang out > on this group; glad to accept pointers to any other group. > Any way to make the computer itself (e.g., Mac iBook) do the sensing and > recording? Doesn't UPS equipment output this sort of stuff on their serial ports to the monitoring software that is usually supplied with them? Regards, David Clayton, e-mail: dcstar@XYZ.myrealbox.com Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. (Remove the "XYZ." to reply) Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a measure of how many questions you have. ------------------------------ From: AES Subject: Re: Monitor/Recorder for Residential Power Line Outages? Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 07:32:31 -0700 Organization: Stanford University In article , bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) wrote: > It should be obvious that any such device will need to be powered by > some sort of UPS. Whereupon you may as well use a UPS. I don't see why a simple power monitor/logger gadget can't be battery powered, or more precisely, line powered with battery power to carry it over the hopefully rare occasions when the line power fails, preserving the already logged data and keeping its internal clock running. We're talking about logging mostly short losses of voltage in household electric service that's mostly on -- and battery backup should keep a simple logger gadget running for days if not months. In my household the built-in wall oven apparently has a built-in battery; it's clock and other settings will still be valid after a 20 minute outage. Some electric clocks and most of the cordless and cell phones will retain settings for a day or more; and of course all the laptop computers for much longer. The thermostats for the HVAC ditto. The microwave oven's clock display, however, is flashing "==12.00==" over and over after even a sub-second glitch, as are many other electric clocks. The coffee maker with a built-in auto-start feature to make coffee just before 6:00 am each morning has lost all its settings -- but comes back up with its heating element still on if it was on when the power failed; lovely safety feature, that. Most annoying is the expensive, highly touted Bose radio: it loses all its settings -- time, station presets, etc -- on even the slightest power glitch. (Lots of other things not to like about this overpriced radio as well -- DON'T BUY BOSE is my recommendation.) > Most modern "smart" UPS systems have a capability for signalling a > host computer about the state of the incoming power, and the state of > the UPS batteries. Allowing, among other things, 'controlled' > shutdown of a UPS-protected device when the UPS batteries are about to > expire. Sounds like I'll have to look at this -- but I don't really want UPS, especially for the household appliances, and would initially just like to assemble some data on how badly PG&E is really doing. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Now wait a minute! I have a Bose radio and that does not happen. The radio has a battery compartment which keeps everything in place. The battery does _not_ continue to play the radio, but when our power goes out here, I do not have to reset the clock or the presets, etc. Do you have a battery in your Bose radio? 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 V24 #276 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sun Jun 19 02:12:16 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 5CE9F1501A; Sun, 19 Jun 2005 02:12:16 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #277 Message-Id: <20050619061216.5CE9F1501A@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 02:12:16 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.1 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_REMOVE, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT,REMOVAL_INSTRUCTIONS autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Sun, 19 Jun 2005 02:12:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 277 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson '80' Country Code (Geoff) ISP Hunting (DevilsPGD) Inscription: Surveillance Turned Inside Out (Monty Solomon) Treo 650 Updater 1.12 (for Sprint PCS) (Monty Solomon) MasterCard Says 40 Million Files Put at Risk (Monty Solomon) Re: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards (Steve Sobol) Re: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards (Robert Bonomi) Re: New Free Database Has _Everyone_ Listed (jared) Re: New Free Database Has _Everyone_ Listed (Steve Sobol) Re: DSL Speed (John R. Levine) Re: DSL Speed (Robert Bonomi) Re: DSL Speed (William Warren) Re: Sprint, Verizon Opening Doors to Mobile Content (Steven Lichter) Re: Bell Divestiture (hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com) Re: Cellphone Tax Started in Alexandria, VA (Joseph) Re: Need Help on Wireless (Joseph) Re: Monitor/Recorder for Residential Power Line Outages? (Robert Bonomi) Re: Sprint, Verizon Opening Doors to Mobile Content (Steve Sobol) Re: 700-555-4141 Does Not Work (LAalone@aol.com) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Geoff Subject: '80' Country Code Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 21:46:08 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net I was looking at my call logs and have an international call from Spain and another country. The number for the other country starts with '803' but there is no country with an '80' and '803' dialing code. Any ideas where the call came from? Thanks. -g ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: ISP Hunting Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 15:47:15 -0600 Organization: Disorganized I'm going to be just outside of Chicago (Skokie, if you must know) for an unknown period of time and looking to find out what the cheapest way to get internet access would be. I have no need for anything other then basic connectivity, and the ability to establish HTTPS connections to a known IP and PPTP connections to another known IP (not even DNS is required) and I certainly will not need ISP provided email, webspace, or anything of the sort. I also absolutely refuse to install any crapware provided by an ISP. I'm eyeballing dialup access through ISP.COM which offers $8.95 - 56K Regular Dial-up -- any thoughts, good or bad? Can I do better? Any thoughts? ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 16:58:31 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Inscription: Surveillance Turned Inside Out http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=101694 By Howard Rheingold, Thu Jun 16 08:15:00 GMT 2005 Using mobile devices to snoop on ourselves could augment our memories, improve our health and better our lives, says a Microsoft researcher. Keep your eye on Marc Smith, the new manager of the social computing group at Microsoft Research, who is thinking about ways to use tomorrow's panoptic snooping technologies -- cameras, microphones, even sensors of your bodily processes -- as a new kind of authoring. "Inscription," he calls it, an artifact of his sociology background. Smith is worth watching because of his prescient research instincts as well as for the place he works: 15 years ago, he was one of the first sociology graduate students to study social cyberspace: check out Netscan if you want to see a mind-blowing graphical representation of Usenet's hundreds of thousands of discussions. Five years ago, he encouraged me to look into mobile phones and collective action (and suggested that I use the term "smart mobs" to describe what I found). The last time I was at his house, Smith turned me loose with a mobile barcode Googler. http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=101694 ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 17:06:49 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Treo 650 Updater 1.12 (for Sprint PCS) Excerpt from http://www.palmone.com/us/support/downloads/treo650updater/sprint.html New with version 1.12: * Enables Bluetooth Dial-Up Networking * Updates VersaMail to version 3.1 to enhance stability and add improvements * Adds support for more Bluetooth carkits including Acura, BMW, Chrysler, Toyota Prius (see all compatible car kits) * Reduces post-dial delay before a call is connected * Send SMS messages from Missed Call Alert or Call Log * Now there's a new user guide that incorporates the changes after running the Treo 650 Updater: Treo 650 User Guide (PDF) http://www.palmone.com/us/support/downloads/treo650updater/sprint.html ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 23:29:49 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: MasterCard Says 40 Million Files Put at Risk By ERIC DASH and TOM ZELLER Jr. June 18, 2005 MasterCard International reported yesterday that more than 40 million credit card accounts of all brands might have been exposed to fraud through a computer security breach at a payment processing company, perhaps the largest case of stolen consumer data to date. MasterCard said its analysts and law enforcement officials had identified a pattern of fraudulent charges that were traced to an intrusion at CardSystems Solutions of Tucson, Ariz., which processes more than $15 billion in payments for small to midsize merchants and financial institutions each year. About 20 million Visa and 13.9 million MasterCard accounts were compromised; the other accounts belonged to American Express or Discover cardholders. The accounts affected included credit cards and certain kinds of debit cards. The F.B.I. said it was investigating. A MasterCard spokeswoman, Sharon Gamsin, said an infiltrator had managed to place a computer code or script on the CardSystems network that made it possible to extract information. She would not elaborate on how long the breach might have lasted, on when the inquiry began or on whether any infiltrators had been identified. She did say that the breach occurred this year. Deborah McCarley, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. field office in Phoenix, said that her agency was trying to establish the scope of the breach and that "the investigation is just beginning." MasterCard said its investigation found that CardSystems, in violation of MasterCard's rules, was storing cardholders' account numbers and security codes on its computer systems. That information, MasterCard said, was supposed to be transferred to the bank handling the merchants' transactions but not retained by CardSystems. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/18/business/18cards.html ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards Affected Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 16:07:18 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com jared wrote: > The problem with this article's title is that it was not a phishing > attack. > Note that the article says virus-like, the following is an excerpt > from an article attributed to the LA Times. Reportedly someone planted > a harvesting programme which is virus like in the sense that it > operates stealthily but may not be like a virus in how it propagates. The report seems to indicate it was a trojan, not a phish attempt, actually. But I misread - CardSystems DOES process for merchants as well as financial institutions. My statement still stands, however, since it'd be tough to find out who does the processing for any given merchant. Often, the merchant won't even know because it's not important to them as long as the payments get processed. Being someone who's worked with e-commerce systems that are only compatible with certain processing platforms, I often have to know, but I'm not Joe Average, of Uncle Joe's Gift Shop, who only needs to swipe cards and have the payments go through... JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards Affected Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 02:23:22 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , Steve Sobol wrote: > Lisa Minter wrote: >> "Hardly a week goes by without startling new examples of breaches of >> sensitive personal data, reminding us how important it is to pass a >> comprehensive identity theft prevention bill in Congress quickly," >> said Sen. Charles Schumer (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y. > Startling? I am not even surprised by junk like this anymore. >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My thanks to Lisa for rounding up this >> item. So what do we do now? Discontinue any/all shopping on the >> web where Card Systems is the processor? What information _is_ safe >> to give over the net any longer? Any at all? PAT] > ??? > Who said anything about the Internet? This particular breach would > affect much more than just Internet transactions. This is apparently a > backend system that was breached. Non-Internet transactions could also > have been exposed. > And there's no way to avoid Card Systems, because we don't do business > with them directly, and as far as I know, neither do the > merchants. They deal with the card issuers. Not exactly. Card systems is a payment clearinghouse. Merchants submit transactions to a clearinghouse, who route things to the correct card company, who route it to the issuing bank. A few "very large" retailers (e.g. sears, walmart) may deal directly with the CC companies, but it is unlikely. Some card issuers _also_ run a payment clearinghouse, and thus short-cut the processing of their cards, when processed through their clearinghouse. The merchants that use Card Systems, know who they use to processes card charges. Customers of those merchants, however, have no way of telling, nor of finding out, who the merchant uses to 'clear' the CC transactions. Folks like Card Systems serve a similar purpose to "aggregators" and/or "freight forwarders" in the shipping business. They provide access to the high-volume channels, for those who don't have the justification for 'direct' access to those channels. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And other than that one sort of skimpy and guarded press release they gave out (and we printed here on Saturday), they have had nothing more to say about it. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 15:52:07 -0600 From: jared@nospam.au (jared) Subject: Re: New Free Database Has _Everyone_ Listed > The database is found at http://www.zabasearch.com Chasing a link for an address the following came up; interesting. > TerraServer.com Is Not Affiliated With ZabaSearch ATTENTION: You have > redirected to this page because we have detected that you have come > ZabaSearch.com. Although ZabaSearch.com did not make this clear, when > you clicked the Get Satellite Photo button you were transferred to our > website. > TerraServer.com is not affiliated in any way with ZabaSearch, nor does it > endorse it. We do not have access to any of the databases that ZabaSearch > accesses on their site to display personal information on a person's name, > so we cannot remove any of your information. As ZabaSearch says they pull > the information for the searches from public domain databases, we have > doubts if you can completely remove yourself. We have discovered that > e-mailing info@zabasearch.com will get you an automated response with > removal instructions. You will have to decide for yourself based on the > amount of information you have to give them if you follow through with > their removal instructions. > Although most of the data they use already existed out there, what > ZabaSearch has done is bring it together in one location on the Internet > for free, removing all the legwork someone would have to do in the past. > Yes, we do feel that it brings up many, many privacy issues. Plus, their > linking to existing mapping tools out there, like TerraServer.com, has > made it even more powerful. > It appears that ZabaSearch modified their page on June 11th to link > address searches into our address search tool and get a list of search > results. This was done after the previous site they linked to requested > them to stop. It is done quite transparently that many Internet users do > not realize that they have gone to a different website. Because of the > misdirected frustration from Internet users directed at us instead of > ZabaSearch, we are currently working to get them to cease and desist using > our logo and linking to our site. In the meantime, we have "broken" the > method ZabaSearch was using to link to us so that address results are not > seemlessly displayed and you are taken to this page instead. > TerraServer.com, Inc. is a reputable company headquartered in Raleigh, > North Carolina. Our business is to sell custom selected aerial and > satellite imagery and this imagery is browsable on our site at 8 meters > and above for free and below that for subscribers. Now that you're here, > please feel free to look through our website and do not hold us > responsible to the methods used by ZabaSearch.com. > Thank you, > TerraServer.com ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: New Free Database Has _Everyone_ Listed Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 16:01:40 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Patrick Townson wrote: > Some email I got from a family member this past week: > Beginning this month (May '05) a new database will be available to the > general public, free of charge, that displays your personal > information (names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates). > The database is found at http://www.zabasearch.com. I urge you to forward > this email to family and friends. Check to see if your name and > information is in their database. If so and you want it removed, send > them an e-mail at info@zabasearch.com to request it be removed. I do > not know how our names are appearing there, but I checked my own and a > few other random ones, and they are all in this database! > After opting out by email, check back after a few days to make certain > your information has been removed. > Displaying such information should be a crime. Give me a break. The information is publically available anyhow. I looked up Steven Sobol ... Among others, I found Steven J. Sobol at 2000 Cottage Grove Drive, Cleveland, OH, 216-397-9396. That's an old address and phone number of mine. It was listed in the phone book. Note that the street sign at Cottage Grove and Cedar Road actually says Cottage Grove *Avenue*, which is the correct street name, but I listed myself with the phone company at 2000 Cottage Grove *Drive* because at the time, that's what I thought was correct (the big street sign hadn't gone up yet, and the signs on the poles didn't say "avenue" or "road" or "drive" on them back then). So this listing is obviously from the phone company's database ... I also found myself at 26241 Lake Shore Boulevard, Euclid, Ohio. 216-289-6586. I was also in the phone book when I was listed there. My current address and phone number, which we have chosen not to make available in the phone book, isn't listed, and I've lived in Apple Valley, California for two years now. Background searches are available to anyone paying for them, not just over the web either; employers routinely run background checks. I've had to do background and drug tests for several organizations I've worked for recently. > Well, I dunno how much of a crime it should be, except that a random > check of my own information and a few test, controlled cases show that > although it is _generally accurate_ there are some mistakes and > omissions, about like any such database. Anyway, its all there at > http://www.zabasearch.com. It appears they have put a lot of 'hooks' > into the cgi-bin things of _other_ databases so you do not have to > keep re-entering the names/addresses to look in different areas of > interest. For instance, you put in your name, some information is > provided, then links are given to take you off to various other data > bases, directly to information about the name you (originally) > entered. That is my impression too. JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ From: johnl@iecc.com (John R. Levine) Subject: Re: DSL Speed Date: 18 Jun 2005 20:59:17 -0400 Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > I thought 56K was the fastest speed possible with conventional > telephone cable. How can DSL be so much faster with the same old > cable? The 56K is the limit of a voice channel on a phone switch, not of a copper cable. Rather than going through the phone switch, the DSL signal is split out at the central office and feeds into a device called a DSLAM which is sort of a super duper high speed modem that can run several megabits/sec over a good enough copper pair. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: DSL Speed Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 01:47:39 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , Choreboy wrote: > A relative has a farm. His phone service comes in on 700 yards of > ordinary telephone cable buried along his driveway. Last week he got > Bellsouth DSL. It comes in on the same conductors as before, but I've > seen speeds fifty times faster than dialup. > I thought 56K was the fastest speed possible with conventional > telephone cable. How can DSL be so much faster with the same old > cable? You thought 'wrongly'. "56k" is the theoretical maximum speed you can get across a (mostly analog) POTS service circuit. The limit is not in the wiring, per se, but in the _equipment_ (the 'switch' in the telco 'central office') that that signal has to pass through. "Voice" calls, including data modem, and fax, over POTS PSTN, leave your house as analog signals. at the telco, the first thing that happens is that they are converted to a _digital_ data-stream. this conversion is done at a rate of 8000 samples/second., with 8-bits of data 'precision' for each sample. This means that there is 64,000 bits/second of digital data flowing through the switch for a voice line. You cannot send more data than that via _analog_ origin signalling, And, to achieve that 64,000 bit/second, your signalling must exactly match (and be synchronized with) the intervals used by the analog-to-digital conversion gear in the C.O. If there is _precisely_one_ analog/digital conversion in the path, then, with some fancy games on the 'digital' end, you can come 'close' to that 64,000 bit/sec limit, _without_ requiring the exact synchronization. The _wire_, itself, is capable of passing a much broader range of signals. *If* the signal doesn't have to go through the 'voice' switching equipment, you are not restricted by the limits of _that_ equipment. This is how DSL works, it bypasses the _voice_ switching gear. It uses just the 'bare wire' between the telco C.O. and the customer premises. The special eqipment in the C.O. puts a *different*kind* of signal on the wires, that the "DSL modem" at the customer premises understands, and the 'modem' at the customer location does 'something similar', to communicate back to that special equimpent at the Telco offices. Voila! the limitations/restrictions of the telco _voice_ switching equipment are bypassed, and thus 'not relevant' to this communication. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 17:36:56 -0400 From: William Warren Subject: Re: DSL Speed Choreboy wrote: > A relative has a farm. His phone service comes in on 700 yards of > ordinary telephone cable buried along his driveway. Last week he got > Bellsouth DSL. It comes in on the same conductors as before, but I've > seen speeds fifty times faster than dialup. > I thought 56K was the fastest speed possible with conventional > telephone cable. How can DSL be so much faster with the same old > cable? How can a Porshe be so much faster than a Volkswagon on the same road? ------------------------------ From: Steven Lichter Reply-To: Die@spammers.com Organization: I Kill Spammers, Inc. (c) 2005 A Rot in Hell Co. Subject: Re: Sprint, Verizon Opening Doors to Mobile Content Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 22:04:46 GMT I have Sprint and have been able to D/L ringtones and screensavers from sites like 3GForfree for sometime. Lisa Minter wrote: > By Antony Bruno > Sprint and Verizon Wireless may soon lower the walls on their > networks, allowing their subscribers greater access to third-party > content, including ringtones and graphics. > The mobile phone giants are responding to U.S. cell phone users' > growing interest in buying content from sources other than their > wireless carrier. > Allowing subscribers to access non-network content is a common > practice for mobile operators in Europe, as well as U.S. carriers > Cingular, Nextel and T-Mobile. > Sprint and Verizon, however, have taken a "walled garden" approach, > restricting content to that offered directly through their own > delivery portals. > Sprint is testing a system that would let content providers target its > subscribers with sales and marketing campaigns through premium SMS > messaging, otherwise known as "short codes." > A short code is a four- or five-digit number that works like an e-mail > address but across various wireless carriers. Companies can place the > short code in their advertising to generate customer responses. > In turn, subscribers can send a text message to a short code to > request information or make purchases. The reply is delivered to the > subscriber as a text message attachment. The charge is added to the > mobile bill. > TEST RUN > According to John Styers, Sprint director of data communications > services, the carrier is conducting short-code delivery trials with > various partners, including Sony BMG and Warner Music Group. > "Both of them are in the midst of launching a premium SMS service," he > says. "They want to be able to offer on their artist-specific Web > sites the artists' content in ringtone fashion through SMS. So we are > working with them to launch some of their artists' Web sites as well." > He says Sprint will slowly open its network after these trials, based > on technology performance and customer feedback. > Verizon, which has operated the most tightly controlled network of all > U.S. carriers, uses a content delivery system called BREW. Only > content written and delivered via the BREW system can operate on > Verizon's network and phones. > But Qualcomm, which created the BREW technology, has introduced a new > version that would support non-BREW content. Sources say Verizon has > told content aggregators that it intends to open its network to > off-portal content before the end of the year. The carrier declined to > comment for this story. > According to executives at QPass, a wireless transaction management > firm, off-portal sales in the United States are beginning to > explode. The company manages the off-portal sales activity for > Cingular, Nextel, Boost Mobile and other carriers that together > represent about half of the U.S. market. > In the last year, these carriers have seen off-portal content sales > grow at a compound annual rate of 410 percent. In the last six months, > total off-portal sales activity skyrocketed 1,024 percent, with a > month-over-month growth of 141 percent this past quarter alone. > Even with the crumbling of these garden walls, however, less than 10 > percent of all wireless content transactions in the United States are > non-carrier. This pales in comparison with Europe, where about 80 > percent of all mobile content sold is off-portal. > Reuters/Billboard > Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. > NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the > daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at > http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new > articles daily. The only good spammer is a dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? (c) 2005 I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot in Hell Co. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Date: 18 Jun 2005 13:50:37 -0700 Robert Bonomi wrote: > I _guarantee_ that AT&T and the Bells were not 'voluntarily' reducing the > prices just because of a decrease in costs. > There were precisely *two* possible reasons for a price reduction: > 1) pressure from competition. > 2) enough 'pent up demand' that the price reduction brought in 'more > than enough additional volume' to make up for the reduction in > profitability. Neither of those make sense. There was not significant competition before divesture except from other modes (ie writing a letter, telegram). If you say the Bell System had no interest in the customer, then it would not have lowered rates to meet that "pent up demand", rather just put in more lines and made all the more money. >> I maintain it was mostly technology -- cheaper >> terminal equipment and >carrier media followed by higher call >> volume and greater economies of >scale -- that caused and still >> cause long distance rates to fall. > The _rate_ of deployment, however, was driven by the competition > _doing_it_ FIRST. Again that fails to explain the continual rate reductions before divesture. > Can you name a single railroad that had a developed long-haul telecom > network that _voluntarily_ converted to AT&T service? The one that I > am aware of where that happened did it _because_ the railroad was > *sold*, but the prior owner _kept_ the telecom operation *(including > R-O-W on all that railroad's trackage) rather than including it in the > sale. The Pennsylvania Railroad/Penn Central network was privately owned, maintained, and operated, then turned over to AT&T. Other systems include private networks of SEPTA and the City of Philadelphia. > There were numerous big-city locations where you _could_not_get_ RBOC > phone lines in quantity, when you wanted them. 'Rationing' _was_ in > effect. For a variety of reasons -- lack of field workers to do > physical interconnects, lack of C.O. capacity, among the big ones. Would you name those big city locations and the time frames for which rationing was in effect? > Home computers didn't *exist* until the mid 1970s. The Altair 8800 > plans ran in PE's Jan 1975 issue. The APPLE-II didn't exist until > late 1977. But businesses and schools were heavy users of time sharing by the mid 1960s -- using dial-up Teletypes. Businesses were also getting dial up dataphone services between computers. > The first BBS went online in Feb 1978. Within two years, the operator > of that system had crossed swords with the local telco > _at_least_three_times_, where they refused to install the additional > residential lines he wanted. Claiming he "had" to be running a > business. Public-utility commission complaints ensued, and the telco > did, in each case, end up installing the additional lines. > Other large-scale "hobby BBSs" across the country reported similar > problems. That is a tarrif issue. Rates for a business and residential line are based on expected use. A non-profit is still considered a business. Seems to me a high volume BBS should've been classified as a business line due to high volume of use. > The mid-90's debacle _was_ Internet driven. That was after divesture and the Bell System no longer existed at that point. > Even prior to divestiture, the 'road signs' were there for anyone to > read. "Measurements" for quality of U.S. service were flat-lining, > and in some cases, actually declining. Could you provide specifics of the measurements, areas in question (presumably representing significant population centers, not just an isolated location), and the time frames? > Space was not an issue, generally. Possibly in a few central-city > facilities in a few of the largest cities. Space IS a MAJOR issue. Real estate is expensive in growing areas, whether city or suburb. ESS takes up a far smaller footprint than the equivalent No 5 crossbar location. > "Speed" is not related to call-handling capacity. Yes, it is. I believe you yourself said it was the to the advtg of common control equipment to get in and out of the call as quickly as possible. A faster common control can handle more calls. > The Bell system, like any regulated monopoly was _guaranteed_ a > certain minimum rate-of-return on investments. Regulated monopolies were NOT _guaranteed_ a minimum rate of return. If they were Western Union would not have gone broke nor would the railroads. In some locations of the Bell System and even today, regulators mandate below-cost services for social reasons or deny rate increases. > Very, *very* rarely was 'how' that money was spent questioned. *NO*, is _not_ true. As Pat pointed out, Ma Bell was under constant scrutiny by the news media and govt and advocates. Shareholder gadflies made a point of disrupting stockholders' meetings every year. Activists filed constant lawsuits against the system. > Can you name a feature/capability introduced by the Bell System after > 1970 that was not present in third-party-provided, customer-owned, PBX > equipment first? The only one I can think of is the "picturephone". I guess to really answer that claim one would have to list the latest PBX offerings of the Bell System of 1970, their cost, and the competition's offerings. How many third party PBXs were available in 1970? Getting back to your claim the Bell System did nothing it didn't have to, let's not forget the Princess, Trimeline, Panel, Home Interphone, and Bell Chime units. The Eng & Sci history of the Bell System describes a multitude of PBX systems and features. > 3-way calling, conference calling, call waiting, speed-dial, call > 'camping', etc. Standard features on PBXs years before there was > Centrex availability. And even longer before they were offered on > plain-jane POTS service. All available on Bell PBXs of the 1960s. > 'Native touch-tone' was far less expensive for the telco than native pulse > dialing. Not in SxS, which required extra equipment. See Eng & Sci book. > To "sell" more extensions, they _had_ to have something that was > 'acceptable' decor-wise to the decision-maker in the household. Most families we knew did not bother paying extra for "premium" telephone *sets*, BUT *did* pay +extra+ for _extensions_ in various _rooms_ and particular of a house. Having three (3) phones-- 'basement', 1st fl, 2nd fl, was very _common_ to -save- steps. Most families we knew did not bother paying extra for premium telephone sets, but did pay extra for extensions in various rooms and particular floors of a house. Having three phones -- basement, 1st fl, 2nd fl, was very common to save steps. [Side note: Are the emphasis symbols really necessary? Compare the two paragraphs above.] > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Before Charlie Brown became Chairman of > AT&T, he was President and CEO of Illinois Bell. At that time, he > lived about two blocks from me in Rogers Park, a north side > neighborhood in Chicago. In chatting with him at his home one day, he > said to me basically what Robert Bonomi claims above. I'm not sure which claims you're referring to. I'm not claiming the Bell System was perfect, however, my own experience as a customer in large organizations was that the service was generally excellent and the company responsive, and that rates were on a decline before divesture. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I was talking about Robert Bonomi's claims that Bell System did just what the law required of them, and not much else, unless it worked to their advantage. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Cellphone Tax Started in Alexandria, VA Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 15:00:54 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 23:22:21 -0500, Lisa Minter quoted a news report: > By Robert MacMillan > Special to The Washington Post > Using a cell phone is Alexandria is about to become more expensive -- > $3 a month more expensive. If you copied this you sure didn't proofread it. If the original article was like this they didn't bother to proof it either! On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 23:22:21 -0500, Lisa Minter continued quoting the news report: > The City Council approved a new tax on cell phones as part of the > fiscal 2006 budget. It will help make up some of the money that the > city will lose after the real estate tax rate was lowered in order to > provide relief to homeowners. Can we say telephone gravy train? This is about typical though isn't it? ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Need Help on Wireless Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 15:06:48 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On 17 Jun 2005 05:23:42 -0700, PatETC : > You _can_ use AOL or any other ISP on a high speed connection, such as > you have probably read about. To your modem (or router and modem) the > WiFi 'base station' is the computer, although you often times have to > 'register' the MAC address of the wireless device with the ISP, as a > 'new computer being used at your location'. At least, that is needed > on cable internet or DSL. As another alternative you can use data cables or bluetooth connections with your mobile phone and access the net. Depending on the service and the way you set up the connection you can have connections with speeds of 9600 bps up to several hundred bps depending on whether you use "dial up" GPRS with a GSM provider, EDGE which is much faster with a GSM provider, UMTS with 3G service providers, EVDO with CDMA providers all give faster speed. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Monitor/Recorder for Residential Power Line Outages? Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 22:16:56 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , AES wrote: > In article , > bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) wrote: >> It should be obvious that any such device will need to be powered by >> some sort of UPS. Whereupon you may as well use a UPS. > I don't see why a simple power monitor/logger gadget can't be battery > powered, or more precisely, line powered with battery power to carry > it over the hopefully rare occasions when the line power fails, That battery "back-up" _is_ a UPS. A "simpleton" DC-output variety, but a UPS nonetheless *grin* > preserving the already logged data and keeping its internal clock > running. We're talking about logging mostly short losses of voltage > in household electric service that's mostly on -- and battery backup > should keep a simple logger gadget running for days if not months. > In my household the built-in wall oven apparently has a built-in > battery; Usually a 'super-cap', rather than a real battery. > it's clock and other settings will still be valid after a 20 > minute outage. Some electric clocks and most of the cordless and cell > phones will retain settings for a day or more; and of course all the > laptop computers for much longer. The thermostats for the HVAC ditto. > The microwave oven's clock display, however, is flashing "==12.00==" > over and over after even a sub-second glitch, as are many other > electric clocks. The coffee maker with a built-in auto-start feature > to make coffee just before 6:00 am each morning has lost all its > settings -- but comes back up with its heating element still on if it > was on when the power failed; lovely safety feature, that. > Most annoying is the expensive, highly touted Bose radio: it loses all > its settings -- time, station presets, etc -- on even the slightest > power glitch. (Lots of other things not to like about this overpriced > radio as well -- DON'T BUY BOSE is my recommendation.) >> Most modern "smart" UPS systems have a capability for signalling a >> host computer about the state of the incoming power, and the state of >> the UPS batteries. Allowing, among other things, 'controlled' >> shutdown of a UPS-protected device when the UPS batteries are about to >> expire. > Sounds like I'll have to look at this -- but I don't really want UPS, > especially for the household appliances, and would initially just > like to assemble some data on how badly PG&E is really doing. Right. Use the UPS to supply power to an 'always on' computer, that logs the data reported by the UPS. UPS for a microwave, or a coffee maker is _expensive_, not to mention sort-of silly -- they draw a lot of power. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Now wait a minute! I have a Bose radio > and that does not happen. The radio has a battery compartment which > keeps everything in place. The battery does _not_ continue to play > the radio, but when our power goes out here, I do not have to reset > the clock or the presets, etc. Do you have a battery in your Bose > radio? PAT] Depends on the model, Pat. Bose does make more than one. ;) [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have the expensive one which came out about 4-5 years ago; charcoal grey, with buttons on the top of it in addition to the remote control. I do not have the very new one advertised in the past year which has remote control only and no buttons on the top which can play several CDs one after another. Mine has green LEDs which brighten or dim according to the amount of light in the room. I also have my television set (a separate thing) plugged into it via the AUX switch to get pseudo-'stereo' sound from the television audio. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Sprint, Verizon Opening Doors to Mobile Content Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 16:05:29 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Lisa Minter wrote: > Sprint and Verizon Wireless may soon lower the walls on their > networks, allowing their subscribers greater access to third-party > content, including ringtones and graphics. > Sprint and Verizon, however, have taken a "walled garden" approach, > restricting content to that offered directly through their own > delivery portals. This is so incorrect it's outrageous. It's true of Verizon, but unless Sprint's drastically changed things in the past six months, it's nowhere near true of Sprint. Sprint has, in the past, allowed me to download *my own Java apps* to *my own phone* from *my own website.* I've used other third-party websites to facilitate downloading content too. And in the case of my own website, I'm registered as a developer with Sprint PCS, but have not added the website with my app on it, and I'm not an officially-approved Sprint content provider. JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ From: LAalone@aol.com Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 20:42:18 EDT Subject: Re: 700-555-4141 Does Not Work In Glendale, CA (SBC: 818-500-XXXX), I get "Thank you for being an SBC Long Distance customer." ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, Yahoo Groups, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occasional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 50 Independence, KS 67301 Phone: 620-402-0134 Fax 1: 775-255-9970 Fax 2: 530-309-7234 Fax 3: 208-692-5145 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe: telecom-subscribe@telecom-digest.org Unsubscribe:telecom-unsubscribe@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. 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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 V24 #277 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sun Jun 19 18:59:17 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 521E314CA8; Sun, 19 Jun 2005 18:59:17 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #278 Message-Id: <20050619225917.521E314CA8@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 18:59:17 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.1 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_REMOVE, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Sun, 19 Jun 2005 18:59:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 278 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson New Wi-Fi Workbook from Wireless LAN Pioneer (ChinDi Mah) Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan (Frank Booth) Verizon Wireless 400 Percent Rate Increase (Gary Novosielski) Re: Email to Cellular AT&T Phones Now Cingular (notvalid@xmasNYC.info) Re: ISP Hunting (Fred Atkinson) Re: ISP Hunting (NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info) Re: ISP Hunting (Choreboy) Re: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards Affected (mc) Re: MasterCard Says 40 Million Files Put at Risk (Tim@Backhome.org) Re: Bell Divestiture (Tony P.) Re: Bell Divestiture (Fred Goldstein) Re: Pod Slurping Dangerous to Your Company (David Clayton) Re: DSL Speed (Choreboy) Re: Monitor/Recorder for Residential Power Line Outages? (AES) Re: XO Communications (Al Gillis) Re: '80' Country Code (Robert Bonomi) Re: Cellphone Tax Started in Alexandria, VA (Steven Lichter) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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, 19 Jun 2005 08:41:21 PDT From: ChinDi Mah Subject: New Wi-Fi Workbook from Wireless LAN Pioneer The following book has just been released. The author has written some best selling wireless books in the past (see accompanying biography). Please distribute to interested colleagues. Thank you for your attention. All in a Wi-Fi Network: A Comprehensive Workbook on Wireless LAN Technologies by Benny Bing Available from: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/097667520X/ Wi-Fi applications have blossomed tremendously over the last few years.What started out as cable replacement for static desktops in indoor networks has been extended to fully mobile broadband applications involving wide-area outdoor community networks, moving vehicles, high-speed trains, and even airplanes. Wi-Fi data rates have also continued to increase from 2 to 54 Mbit/s with current 802.11n proposals topping 500 Mbit/s. This development may eventually render wired Ethernet redundant in the local network. All in a Wi-Fi Network is a workbook designed to fill the need for a comprehensive yet compact and easy-to-use reference, specifically for anyone who wish to study the underlying principles of past, present, and emerging Wi-Fi technologies. It contains the latest information with unique features for quick and effective self-study. The workbook's refreshing teaching style sets itself apart from other books. Quantitative concepts are explained visually while the bullet text brings out the key ideas in a manner that is self-contained, concise, and to the point. The graphics are engineered towards maximum clarity and are used generously. Whether you are an entrepreneur, a CTO, a business executive or a scientist, you will discover that the thought-provoking exercises at the end of the book not only help you master the subject but also serve as a rich source of interesting ideas. The contents of the workbook have been carefully class-tested at many of the author's teaching assignments on the subject, including professional courses for industry, government agencies, and academic institutions, as well as tutorials for researchers at prestigious IEEE conferences. A companion website is available exclusively for users of this book, providing updates to this fast developing field, related websites, and additional learning resources and supplements. The workbook provides valuable insights on a broad range of topics: * Introduction to WLANs: Evolution, current standards, evolving * technologies Fundamentals of WLAN Design and Deployment: WLAN * classifications, physical layer transmission, MAC protocols, network * topologies, security, switches, deployment considerations (e.g., * office, home, public hotspots/hotzones) 802.11 Standard and * Amendments: Physical and MAC layers (802.11b/a/g), advanced security * (802.11i), QoS support (802.11e) Performance Evaluation of WLANs: * Throughput, delay, prioritization Emerging Technologies and New * 802.11 Initiatives: High-speed MIMO systems, wireless VoIP, * intelligent wireless systems, wireless broadband access (long-range, * multihop/mesh technologies), wireless peer to peer applications All in a Wi-Fi Network is written by an author whose books on wireless networks are highly regarded by many technology visionaries. They contain forewords from both chairmen of the IEEE 802.11 Working Group since its inception, the inventor of Internet technology, and the inventor of the first wireless protocol. In early 2000, his groundbreaking book on wireless LANs was adopted by Cisco Systems to launch the Cisco-Aironet Wi-Fi product. A multimedia CD was specially prepared by Cisco to accompany the book. The Aironet product has since enjoyed phenomenal success, dominating the corporate arena and capturing over 60% of the Wi-Fi market share. The author was subsequently invited by Qualcomm Inc. to conduct a customized course on wireless LANs for its engineering executives. In 2002, his edited book on wireless LANs was extensively reviewed by illustrious research journals such as the IEEE Communications Magazine, IEEE Network, and ACM Networker, the first time a book has been reviewed by all three journals. The author has worked on wireless LAN technologies well before it was known as Wi-Fi. He has also contributed significantly to the field of wireless LANs, being the first to emphasize the importance of improving range performance and throughput (versus raw data rate). These concepts have since been applied to Wi-Fi. The author carries over 12 years of teaching and research experience. His research publications have appeared in many leading journals, including the IEEE Spectrum and the MIT Technology Review. To date, he has over 100 research citations and over 40 research papers. In 2003, he was selected as one of ten best wireless designers in the U.S. by BICSI, a 22,000 industry member association based in Tampa, Florida. He is currently a technical editor for the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, a senior member of IEEE, a research faculty member with the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta, GA, USA, and an associate director with the Georgia Tech Broadband Institute. ------------------------------ From: FrankBooth Subject: Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan? Date: 19 Jun 2005 14:22:37 -0700 I'm trying to buy a cell phone WITHOUT A PLAN. I am sending it to a relative in another country where they will activate it. So far I have not found a local shopping establishment that sells them. Can anyone recommend somewhere online where a cell WITHOUT A PLAN can be purchased? Is it even possible? Thanks in advance! FB ------------------------------ From: Gary Novosielski Subject: Verizon Wireless 400% Rate Increase Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 21:22:05 GMT My most recent wireless bill had a note that VZW was raising the rates for inbound TXT messages from $.02 to $.10 each, effective in August. Now that's what I call a "whopping" increase. ------------------------------ From: NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info Subject: Re: Email to Former AT&T Phones Now Cingular Date: 19 Jun 2005 13:02:17 -0700 > 1XXXXXXX ...@mmode.com works for my former AT&T now Cingular phones Thanks. I tried a whole bunch of different ways and the one above is the only one that worked. Receiver said she couldn't reply though. Maybe she doesn't know how. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 04:37:24 PDT From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Re: ISP Hunting Reply-To: fatkinson@mishmash.com > I'm going to be just outside of Chicago (Skokie, if you must know) for > an unknown period of time and looking to find out what the cheapest > way to get internet access would be. > I have no need for anything other then basic connectivity, and the > ability to establish HTTPS connections to a known IP and PPTP > connections to another known IP (not even DNS is required) and I > certainly will not need ISP provided email, webspace, or anything of > the sort. I also absolutely refuse to install any crapware provided > by an ISP. > I'm eyeballing dialup access through ISP.COM which offers $8.95 - 56K > Regular Dial-up -- any thoughts, good or bad? Can I do better? > Any thoughts? http://www.thelist.com is a composite list of worldwide Internet Service Providers. It's broken down by area code, country, and U.S. State. http://broadband.thelist.com/all/areacode/847/ and http://broadband.thelist.com/all/areacode/224/ would have information about the Skokie area. Good luck. Fred ------------------------------ From: NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info Subject: Re: ISP Hunting Date: 19 Jun 2005 12:42:20 -0700 Look at http://Freedomlist.com --they list all the cheap ISPs in NA. Read the reviews for All2Easy which is $4.95/mo ------------------------------ From: Choreboy Subject: Re: ISP Hunting Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 12:06:58 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com DevilsPGD wrote: > I'm going to be just outside of Chicago (Skokie, if you must know) for > an unknown period of time and looking to find out what the cheapest > way to get internet access would be. > I have no need for anything other then basic connectivity, and the > ability to establish HTTPS connections to a known IP and PPTP > connections to another known IP (not even DNS is required) and I > certainly will not need ISP provided email, webspace, or anything of > the sort. I also absolutely refuse to install any crapware provided > by an ISP. > I'm eyeballing dialup access through ISP.COM which offers $8.95 - 56K > Regular Dial-up -- any thoughts, good or bad? Can I do better? > Any thoughts? Don't you want news-server access? That's the most common deal-breaker for me. Budget ISPs often contract with dialup providers. The quality of service can depend on this, and the ISP's representative may not be in a position to know what's wrong. At $9.95 I've been with localnet a couple of years, I guess. At times I've looked for alternatives, but in the long run things have worked out. Last January I began experiencing incidents where I'd get an error message when I tried to send email. I kept assuming it would quickly be fixed. When it happened over a period of months I finally called. Mine was the first report of trouble. From their end, their servers checked out fine. I discovered that it happened when I was assigned IPs from a certain sequence, and it didn't matter what email application or what OS I used. They agreed that it must have been affecting all their customers in my area for months, so they were glad I'd reported it. They called back to say they thought it was fixed. I had to complain a couple more times before they solved the problem. Still, it was a positive experience for me. Some ISP reps tend to insist that any problem is at the customer's end. Others try to help but don't get anywhere. Localnet reps didn't know what was going on at first, but they listened to me and pursued the problem until they fixed it. ------------------------------ From: mc Subject: Re: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards Affected Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 01:52:09 -0400 Organization: Speed Factory (http://www.speedfactory.net) > We probably need new common-names for all this deviant behavior; > 'phisher', 'cracker' and 'hacker' are just not enough any longer. PAT] I agree. If the detectives are doing their jobs, the accounts released to the public of how it was done are probably deliberately just a bit inaccurate. They don't want to reveal what trail they're following. One credit card company reacted to this yesterday afternoon by cancelling my credit card (with no prior notice) while my wife was in the middle of a shopping trip. No fraudulent charges had been attempted; they just felt it had been "compromised." This could be jolly inconvenient for travelers! Are credit cards liable to be yanked at any time because of security breaches? Is that how the industry is going to start reacting? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Not: They are, and yes it is. Customer incon- venience is not a big issue with them when they are threatened with the possible loss of a few dollars in fraud. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: MasterCard Says 40 Million Files Put at Risk Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 02:23:56 -0700 Organization: Cox Communications Monty Solomon wrote: > MasterCard said its investigation found that CardSystems, in > violation of MasterCard's rules, was storing cardholders' account > numbers and security codes on its computer systems. That information, > MasterCard said, was supposed to be transferred to the bank handling > the merchants' transactions but not retained by CardSystems. Bankers have been some of the greatest proponents of deregulation over the past 20, or so years, saying "We can self regulate our banking industry far better than can government." Right ... [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And look at the mess they have made of things in this latest fiasco; all sorts of personal information given away. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Organization: ATCC Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 09:55:40 -0400 In article , kamlet@panix.com says: > In article , Robert Bonomi > wrote: >> It is not inaccurate. Demand ramped up *far*faster* than the Bell system >> projections indicated. >> There were numerous big-city locations where you _could_not_get_ RBOC >> phone lines in quantity, when you wanted them. 'Rationing' _was_ in >> effect. For a variety of reasons -- lack of field workers to do >> physical interconnects, lack of C.O. capacity, among the big ones. >> When you're down to the last few thousand numbers available out of a >> C.O. that serves 100,000 numbers, and the new switch isn't due for >> delivery for another 18 months, you _don't_ have many choices. > Number Ageing. > As recently as 10 years ago, the RBOCs had pretty much a consistent > 12-month number aging policy. When the crunch came in selected > offices, those offices were generally allowed to use faster aging, but > the software generally could not accommodate different aging for > speciic exchanges. Their choices were to lower aging company wide or > have the service order processor override 12 month aging case by case. > Neither a great solution, but aging changes did free up thousands of > numbers. > Today I'd be surprised if anyone really cares about aging any more, > especially with wireless. >> Telephone _line_ sales had reached the 'saturation' point, Nearly >> everybody that was likely to buy telephone service *had* service. The >> only place for 'revenue growth' was in "add-on sales". 'Additional >> extensions' was the big-money item in this class. extra jacks were >> one-time revenue item. 'Long cords' (set to wall, or handset to base) >> couldn't justify much of a recurring charge. Additional sets, on the >> other hand, were almost pure gravy. With only one line there was, in >> general, only one phone in use at a time, so the wear-and-tear on the >> second phone was mostly covered by the increased life-expectancy of >> the first one. > We're talking Western Electric phone sets, here. The kind that when > they pulled samples and dropped them 50,000 times to see if it would > break, it would't. > The building housing the phone would disintegrate before the phone > would break No wear and tear concerns. > In my OCAP assignment, I rode along with a repairman one day, on an > NDT complaint (No Dial Tone.) It turns out the husband got mad at the > wife and threw the phone through the wall. Big hole in the wall, and > the phone wires pulled out of of the box. > Repaired the box, reattached the wires, and the phone worked > perfectly! Didn't fix the hole in the wall > One day Western woke up and found the retail cost of a new phone at > Radio Shack was less than Western's cost of parts for a 500 deskset. > So after some marketing shifts, they got out of the handset business. > Today, break a phone? Buy a new one. Just like a TV. -- Or, hold on to that old Western Electric gear that is perfectly functional. The only newer pieces of phone gear in my house are a 900MHz cordless phone, a 2500 set and a Trimline. Everything else is older than me. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 14:53:27 -0400 From: Fred R. Goldstein Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Hi Pat, If you could mung my address for me (fred goldstein @ withheld will do) it'd be appreciated. Thanks. At 18 Jun 2005 13:50:37 -0700, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote, > rb> There were precisely *two* possible reasons for a price reduction: >> 1) pressure from competition. >> 2) enough 'pent up demand' that the price reduction brought in 'more >> than enough additional volume' to make up for the reduction in >> profitability. > Neither of those make sense. There was not significant competition > before divesture except from other modes (ie writing a letter, > telegram). If you say the Bell System had no interest in the > customer, then it would not have lowered rates to meet that "pent up > demand", rather just put in more lines and made all the more money. Wrong. Monopolies sometimes do lower prices to make more money. We covered this in Economics 102 (intro to microec) so it's not exactly rocket science! This is because there is a demand curve which causes sales volume to rise as the price goes down. So there's a point, the profit maximization point, at which the total profit, well, is the maximum. Pricing higher causes demand to fall faster than profit margins rise. If monopoly phone calls were ten bucks a minute, there's be less profit, not more. So well-run unregulated monopolies seek out that point. Sometimes that price is called "incremental willingness to pay". A competitive industry has a lower price, because supply-demand equilibrium is met when price equals "economic cost", which includes a fair rate of return on capital. Lack of competition allows the higher profit-maximization point to be used for pricing. Regulation was supposed to hold the price to that which retursn a fair rate of return, as a substitute for competition. >> There were numerous big-city locations where you _could_not_get_ RBOC >> phone lines in quantity, when you wanted them. 'Rationing' _was_ in >> effect. For a variety of reasons -- lack of field workers to do >> physical interconnects, lack of C.O. capacity, among the big ones. > Would you name those big city locations and the time frames for which > rationing was in effect? I was there. I was doing traffic engineering for AOLnet in 1996, during the America On Hold debacle. There were numerous cities where we had pending orders for *dozens* of PRIs (23 modems apiece) that the Bells couldn't fill. A particularly extreme case was Virginia Beach. We were more than a dozen PRIs behind, service stank, and Bell Atlantic wanted six months to a year to provision more circuits. They said that it would take that long to get additional PRI ports from Lucent, since Lucent was overwhelmed with demand too. That was, however, just one case. It was bad in lots of places. Things stayed bad into 1997, but by 1998 they started using more CLECs and things got better. >> Home computers didn't *exist* until the mid 1970s. The Altair 8800 >> plans ran in PE's Jan 1975 issue. The APPLE-II didn't exist until >> late 1977. > But businesses and schools were heavy users of time sharing by the mid > 1960s -- using dial-up Teletypes. Businesses were also getting dial > up dataphone services between computers. The volume of dial-up was still a lot lower then than when it was a big consumer item. >> The mid-90's debacle _was_ Internet driven. > That was after divesture and the Bell System no longer existed at > that point. Going to my point -- the Telecom Act of 1996 prevented a total meltdown of the network because it allowed CLECs to take over the high-volume dial-in traffic *just in time*. >> The Bell system, like any regulated monopoly was _guaranteed_ a >> certain minimum rate-of-return on investments. > Regulated monopolies were NOT _guaranteed_ a minimum rate of return. > If they were Western Union would not have gone broke nor would the > railroads. In some locations of the Bell System and even today, > regulators mandate below-cost services for social reasons or deny rate > increases. Common argument, but academic. Mr. Bonomi was technically wrong to say that there was a guarantee. There wasn't. On the other hand there is and was no guarantee that Lisa won't get bonked on the head by a meteorite as she walks across the supermarket parking lot. The supermarket doesn't make a guarantee, but it's certainly not a likely problem. Bell rates of return were targets, not guarantees, but it took really, really bad mismanagement to miss them on the low side by much. Now pricing was irrational, by design. Many services were priced below cost. That was factored into the high prices for other things. Rate of return was computed per the Uniform System of Accounts, which took all revenue on one hand, all expenses on the other, and compared the difference to the rate base. There was no linkage of specific costs to specific prices. Economically inefficient, but politically handy. >> Very, *very* rarely was 'how' that money was spent questioned. > *NO*, is _not_ true. > As Pat pointed out, Ma Bell was under constant scrutiny by the news > media and govt and advocates. Shareholder gadflies made a point of > disrupting stockholders' meetings every year. Activists filed > constant lawsuits against the system. Noise, a minor annoyance, and with rare exceptions never a real problem to the Bell managers. >> Can you name a feature/capability introduced by the Bell System after >> 1970 that was not present in third-party-provided, customer-owned, PBX >> equipment first? The only one I can think of is the "picturephone". > I guess to really answer that claim one would have to list the latest > PBX offerings of the Bell System of 1970, their cost, and the > competition's offerings. > How many third party PBXs were available in 1970? Robert said "after 1970", not "in"; Carterfone had just taken effect, and the PBX market hadn't developed yet. AT&T/WECo hurried the Dimension analog PBXs to market in 1976 or so in response to the newfangled computer-controlled digital PBXs from Northern Telecom and Rolm, both out in 1975, as well as the somewhat more primitive PBXs from Farinon (Harris) DTS, Tele-Resources, and others that had been out even sooner. Bell PBXs were never market leaders. (Disclaimer: In 1977, I co-authored on a book called "Dimension PBX and Alternatives." I researched a bunch of systems, comparing feature lists, capacities, architecture, etc.) > The Eng & Sci history of the Bell System describes a multitude of PBX > systems and features. Astonishingly primitive compared to what competition wrought. Fred Goldstein k1io fgoldstein "at" ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My first 'home computer' was in 1978 when I bought an OSI-C1P (Ohio Scientific) with all of 4K memory. However, from sometime around 1970-71 when I was working at the Standard Oil Credit Card Office in Chicago I had an IBM terminal on my desk. I knew very little about the thing, except that it was intended to eventually replace the punch cards which were around everywhere. By 'everywhere' I mean that there were shopping carts like used in a grocery store, and women would push these carts around the room all day, every day, taking 'trays' (metal containers with four or five hundred cards) off your desk, put them in the shopping cart with others that had been gathered up, leave you a few new 'trays' of several hundred cards each in their place, then come back in a couple hours and repeat the process. As we examined and made correc- tions to the cards, we were to keep them in _exactly_ the same order (within the tray) as they had been given to us. I got the OSI computer from a neighbor who decided instead to get an Atari computer. We had a mutual friend who had just purchased a Tandy Model 1 computer. I sent away in the mail to a company which had new chips for the OSI, increasing its memory to 8 K, and installed it myself. About the same time, I got my Z-19 terminal from the Zenith/Heathkit people with a 150/300 baud Hayes modem, and I used that to get on line with Usenet, while the OSI was used for other things. That would have been in 1978. The Apple ][ came out that year as I recall, followed by the Apple ][+, which is what the Chicago Public Library had for its BBS. And Apple licensed Microsoft Basic for its machines, but gave it a new name 'Applesoft DOS' instead. I thought it was sort of expensive (my salary from the Library was not that good) so I waited on getting one. Sometime in 1977 or early 1978 the Bell and Howell Company of Skokie, Illinois cut a deal with Apple Computer to buy up a huge number of 'special issue' computers. Instead of the cream-colored cases used for Apples, they were in charcoal color and had the insignia 'Bell and Howell Computers' on them. People knew of them under the street name 'Black Apples', and they had all of _48K_ memory in them, but Bell and Howell decided to get out of that business and sold them all at a substantial loss, so I got one of those instead, and started my own BBS instead, in 1979, about six months after the library had started its (A)pple BBS. Chicago is where the BBS concept got started. Randy Seuss and Ward Christianson started the very first one. (In yesterday's Digest, Robert Bonomi mentioned how Randy had such hassles with Illinois Bell getting the lines he needed). Bell and Howell computers _were_ Apple ][+ machines except for the lable on the front of them, and many of them, such as mine, had not only a 300 baud modem card on a slot inside, but an 'expanded memory' card as well, to go in another slot inside, and a 'clock card' plus a couple of floppy disk driver cards. I would guess that by 1980 there were a dozen or more BBS's operating, all in Chicago or nearby suburbs, and almost none anywhere else in the world. The Library had their BBS (BELmont 5-3200) based on Bill Blue's *People's Message System* as did a guy in Downers Grove, IL. Rogers Park ABBS (973-ABBS [2227]) used some other kind of software for Apple as I did with my original BBS called 'First Choice' (SHEldrake-3-0001). But I soon decided to work with a different BBS 'skeleton' to make 'Lake Shore Modem Magazine' on my other phone line SHEldrake-3-0002 instead, and Lake Shore Modem Magazine went on line in July, 1981. Tim had his Tandy Model 4 operating "Think BBS" (based on the old IBM slogan) and Randy Suess kept plugging along with his CBBS, until he eventually decided to go 'multi-user' with his Chinet system, which was when all the trouble with the telephone company got started, in 1984 I think. Ward and Randy were not only first with the BBS concept, I think they were first with the multi-user concept also (regards home or residential service). There was a guy in Oak Park, Illinois using his Tandy Model-4 to run a FIDO multi-user node around that same time, but I never did much care for the FIDO people; they all seemed so prissy and authoritarian, IMO. I did maintain a user group out of his node for six months or so, but the FIDO bosses decided to ex-communicate his entire system, so that was good enough for me: I had been off and on using Usenet (via Portal) for a couple years at that point and decided to give up on FIDO and use Usenet exclusively instead, and I did that mostly with my Zenith Z-19 terminal and modem. From Randy Suess one day I got a bunch of other very good working terminals and modems as well; that was around 1983. I finally shut down my BBS (Lakeshore Modem Magazine) on December 31, 1985 for good. PAT] ------------------------------ From: David Clayton Subject: Re: Pod Slurping Dangerous to Your Company Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 11:44:48 +1000 On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 13:41:11 -0500, Lisa Minter wrote: > The thief could even access PCs that require a log-in username/password > by using a boot CD, a specially-crafted CD that sidesteps log-in > authentication, said Usher. Only on the assumption that data is actually on the hard drive, most major organisations that I know of prohibit storage of any data on a local hard drive and have it all on more secure network storage. If they leave data on a local hard drive, and don't lock out booting from a CD or Floppy (and having the BIOS password protected), then more fool them. > Gartner's 2004 advice would block pod slurping, added Usher, if > enterprises adopted the research firm's recommendations to lock down > desktops by disabling USB functionality or Windows' Universal Plug and > Play. And stopping booting another OS to bypass that disabling, otherwise it could be a waste of time. Regards, David Clayton, e-mail: dcstar@XYZ.myrealbox.com Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. (Remove the "XYZ." to reply) Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a measure of how many questions you have. ------------------------------ From: Choreboy Subject: Re: DSL Speed Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 11:02:19 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Robert Bonomi wrote: > In article , > Choreboy wrote: >> A relative has a farm. His phone service comes in on 700 yards of >> ordinary telephone cable buried along his driveway. Last week he got >> Bellsouth DSL. It comes in on the same conductors as before, but I've >> seen speeds fifty times faster than dialup. >> I thought 56K was the fastest speed possible with conventional >> telephone cable. How can DSL be so much faster with the same old >> cable? > You thought 'wrongly'. > "56k" is the theoretical maximum speed you can get across a (mostly > analog) POTS service circuit. The limit is not in the wiring, per se, > but in the _equipment_ (the 'switch' in the telco 'central office') > that that signal has to pass through. "Voice" calls, including data > modem, and fax, over POTS PSTN, leave your house as analog signals. at > the telco, the first thing that happens is that they are converted to > a _digital_ data-stream. this conversion is done at a rate of 8000 > samples/second., with 8-bits of data 'precision' for each sample. > This means that there is 64,000 bits/second of digital data flowing > through the switch for a voice line. You cannot send more data than > that via _analog_ origin signalling, And, to achieve that 64,000 > bit/second, your signalling must exactly match (and be synchronized > with) the intervals used by the analog-to-digital conversion gear in > the C.O. If there is _precisely_one_ analog/digital conversion in the > path, then, with some fancy games on the 'digital' end, you can come > 'close' to that 64,000 bit/sec limit, _without_ requiring the exact > synchronization. If 56K is the theoretical limit usually given, does this mean only seven bits are useful to the customer? It seems as if modems negotiate speeds in increments of 4% or so. I wonder why that is. > The _wire_, itself, is capable of passing a much broader range of > signals. *If* the signal doesn't have to go through the 'voice' > switching equipment, you are not restricted by the limits of _that_ > equipment. On dialup, the farm couldn't negotiate modem speeds quite as fast as I could in town. I assumed the limitation was in the wire. That's why I was amazed to see that DSL seems to use the wire in the same way as dialup. Was I wrong to think the reason dialup data rates were slower at the farm was that the wire to the CO is longer? > This is how DSL works, it bypasses the _voice_ switching gear. It > uses just the 'bare wire' between the telco C.O. and the customer > premises. The special eqipment in the C.O. puts a *different*kind* > of signal on the wires, that the "DSL modem" at the customer > premises understands, and the 'modem' at the customer location does > 'something similar', to communicate back to that special equimpent > at the Telco offices. > Voila! the limitations/restrictions of the telco voice_ switching > equipment are bypassed, and thus 'not relevant' to this > communication. What's the downside for the telco? With the right pricing, I think they could tap a huge market for increased bandwidth. ------------------------------ From: AES Subject: Re: Monitor/Recorder for Residential Power Line Outages? Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 08:33:28 -0700 Organization: Stanford University Multiple mea culpas or brain glitches of my own to apologize for: >> In article , >> bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) wrote: >>> It should be obvious that any such device will need to be powered by >>> some sort of UPS. Whereupon you may as well use a UPS. I missed (or misinterpreted) the . >> In my household the built-in wall oven apparently has a built-in >> battery; > Usually a 'super-cap', rather than a real battery. Makes sense, and adds a small item to my EE education. >> Most annoying is the expensive, highly touted Bose radio: it loses all >> its settings -- time, station presets, etc -- on even the slightest >> power glitch. (Lots of other things not to like about this overpriced >> radio as well -- DON'T BUY BOSE is my recommendation.) >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Now wait a minute! I have a Bose radio >> and that does not happen. The radio has a battery compartment which >> keeps everything in place. The battery does _not_ continue to play >> the radio, but when our power goes out here, I do not have to reset >> the clock or the presets, etc. Do you have a battery in your Bose >> radio? PAT] > Depends on the model, Pat. Bose does make more than one. ;) On closer inspection mine does have 9 V battery backup -- and the battery was dead. (My radio is installed in a tight space, hard to pull it very far out, and I missed the battery compartment on the bottom.) Still seems to have poor FM reception however. Adjusting the antenna that came with it to all possible positions never gets clear reception of a weak local station that a $25 armband sport radio with no antenna brings in with no trouble. ------------------------------ From: Al Gillis Subject: Re: XO Communications Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 12:26:04 -0700 Organization: http://extra.newsguy.com Well Steven, an outage involving three DS-3s would likely be related to an OC-3 failure (an OC-3 at ~155 megabits/second will carry three DS-3s or just over 2,000 voice channels). I'd guess one of two failure types caused your emotional trauma: Traditional "back hoe fade" or an OC-3 to DS-3 mux went on "time out" for a while. For example, at my work we've got several kinds of access -- one flavor has a small mux (a Fujitsu FLM-150) arranged on a SONET ring to a companion mux in a nearby CO. That's great, except that both sides of the SONET ride in the same fiber sheath -- so if it gets dug up (the aforementioned syndrome of "back hoe fade") down she goes! Also, of course, if some of the common stuff in either mux (on either end of the SONET circuit) fails down she goes! And who knows? Maybe this mux in San Bernardino wasn't even configured for SONET -- Maybe it was just single ended! Like many things in life now-a-days, communications is more fragile than we might expect or like! Steven Lichter wrote in message news:telecom24.272.4@telecom-digest.org: > We had an outage today involving them and Verizon in San Bernardino, > California. Anyone know anything about this. The only thing I could get > out of them was that 3 DS3's were lost. I would think that there would > have been backups and they would have been able to reroute within a > few minutes. > The only good spammer is a dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? > (c) 2005 I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot in Hell Co. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: '80' Country Code Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 09:11:42 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , Geoff wrote: > I was looking at my call logs and have an international call from > Spain and another country. The number for the other country starts > with '803' but there is no country with an '80' and '803' dialing > code. Any ideas where the call came from? Best guess: somewhere around Helsinki, Finland. ------------------------------ From: Steven Lichter Reply-To: Die@spammers.com Organization: I Kill Spammers, Inc. (c) 2005 A Rot in Hell Co. Subject: Re: Cellphone Tax Started in Alexandria, VA Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 13:12:36 GMT The city Of Riverside, Calif. tried to do this about 15 yeara ago, it caused a firestorm, at the time most that had cell phones did not even use them in the city, but just had a billing address, they dropped it and as of yet have not tried that again. Joseph wrote: > On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 23:22:21 -0500, Lisa Minter > quoted a news report: >> By Robert MacMillan >> Special to The Washington Post >> Using a cell phone is Alexandria is about to become more expensive -- >> $3 a month more expensive. > If you copied this you sure didn't proofread it. If the original > article was like this they didn't bother to proof it either! > On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 23:22:21 -0500, Lisa Minter > continued quoting the news report: >> The City Council approved a new tax on cell phones as part of the >> fiscal 2006 budget. It will help make up some of the money that the >> city will lose after the real estate tax rate was lowered in order to >> provide relief to homeowners. > Can we say telephone gravy train? This is about typical though isn't > it? The only good spammer is a dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? (c) 2005 I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot in Hell Co. ------------------------------ 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 V24 #278 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Jun 20 00:32:01 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 1882514CA8; Mon, 20 Jun 2005 00:31:58 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #279 Message-Id: <20050620043158.1882514CA8@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 00:31:58 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.1 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_REMOVE, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Mon, 20 Jun 2005 00:30:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 279 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Power Strips for Home Networks (Fred Atkinson) Re: DSL Speed (Robert Bonomi) Re: ISP Hunting (Julian Thomas) Re: ISP Hunting (Fred Atkinson) Re: XO Communications (Steven Lichter) Re: XO Communications (Tony P.) Re: 700-555-4141 Does Not Work (John McHarry) Re: 700-555-4141 Does Not Work (Fred Atkinson) Re: Pod Slurping Dangerous to Your Company (Tony P.) Re: Monitor/Recorder for Residential Power Line Outages? (J McHarry) Re: '80' Country Code (Joseph) Re: Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan? (John McHarry) Re: Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan? (Joseph) Re: Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan? (NOTvalid@Xmas) Re: Bell Divestiture (Lisa Hancock) Re: Bell Divestiture (Robert Bonomi) Re: Bell Divestiture (Tony P.) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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, 19 Jun 2005 17:49:42 PDT From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Power Strips for Home Networks Reply-To: fatkinson@mishmash.com I suspect that some of you are experiencing this or have already solved it. So, maybe one of you can tell me where I can find something to solve this problem. I've accumulated so many devices on my home network (and some devices that are not network related as well) that power strips are an issue. Most of these devices have the big 'calculator charger' type of power supply that plugs directly into the AC outlet. I've been looking for some type of power strip that has eight or more outlets that are spaced far enough apart that you can plug all of these things into them without overlapping each other. Searching the Internet, I've not found anything like this. The best is one of those long power strips that you usually install on the wall as a permanent part of the house electrical system. I think there might be something much better. Or maybe someone has a better suggestion. Any ideas? Fred [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What I have done is use the 'normal' size power strips, and daisy-chained three of them together. That is, the final outlet on one of them is used to feed the next strip, etc. Lisa's mother came in one day to do her housecleaning work and screamed at me saying "you are going to burn the whole house down like that!" That would not surprise me. PAT] ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: DSL Speed Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 01:09:19 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , Choreboy wrote: > Robert Bonomi wrote: >> In article , >> Choreboy wrote: >>> A relative has a farm. His phone service comes in on 700 yards of >>> ordinary telephone cable buried along his driveway. Last week he got >>> Bellsouth DSL. It comes in on the same conductors as before, but I've >>> seen speeds fifty times faster than dialup. >>> I thought 56K was the fastest speed possible with conventional >>> telephone cable. How can DSL be so much faster with the same old >>> cable? >> You thought 'wrongly'. >> "56k" is the theoretical maximum speed you can get across a (mostly >> analog) POTS service circuit. The limit is not in the wiring, per se, >> but in the _equipment_ (the 'switch' in the telco 'central office') >> that that signal has to pass through. "Voice" calls, including data >> modem, and fax, over POTS PSTN, leave your house as analog signals. at >> the telco, the first thing that happens is that they are converted to >> a _digital_ data-stream. this conversion is done at a rate of 8000 >> samples/second., with 8-bits of data 'precision' for each sample. >> This means that there is 64,000 bits/second of digital data flowing >> through the switch for a voice line. You cannot send more data than >> that via _analog_ origin signalling, And, to achieve that 64,000 >> bit/second, your signalling must exactly match (and be synchronized >> with) the intervals used by the analog-to-digital conversion gear in >> the C.O. If there is _precisely_one_ analog/digital conversion in the >> path, then, with some fancy games on the 'digital' end, you can come >> 'close' to that 64,000 bit/sec limit, _without_ requiring the exact >> synchronization. > If 56K is the theoretical limit usually given, does this mean only > seven bits are useful to the customer? It seems as if modems > negotiate speeds in increments of 4% or so. I wonder why that is. The answers to *that* are long, involved, and _very_ technical. A vastly over-simplified explanation is that an A/D conversion has a theoretical best accuracy of +/- 1/2 bit. meaning that there is an inherent error range of a full one-bit worth >> The _wire_, itself, is capable of passing a much broader range of >> signals. *If* the signal doesn't have to go through the 'voice' >> switching equipment, you are not restricted by the limits of _that_ >> equipment. > On dialup, the farm couldn't negotiate modem speeds quite as fast as I > could in town. I assumed the limitation was in the wire. It is, and it isn't. How far can you yell, and be heard? How far can you talk on a radio, and be heard? The technology used makes a big difference. > That's why I was amazed to see that DSL seems to use the wire in the > same way as dialup. Was I wrong to think the reason dialup data > rates were slower at the farm was that the wire to the CO is longer? "Sort-of". It wasn't the actual _length_ of the wire. If you build the wire differently, you will get different effects over the same length of wire. One of the things that goes on, when you run a _pair_ of wires for any distance is that there is a capacitance between the two wires. this is proportional to the length of the run, inversely proportional to the distance between the wires, the thickness of the insulation, and a number of other factors. Capacitance between the signal-carrying leads has the effect of 'blurring' the signal. which puts a limit on how fast you can "effectively" change signal levels, to pass information from one end to the other. The _methodology_ used to accomplish the signalling determines where, and to what extent, that 'blurring' degrades the transmission. DSL _does_ suffer degradation with distance, just as analog POTS modems do. If you have 15-18,000 feet of wire between you and the C.O., you will get much slower maximum rates than if you are less than a thousand feet from the C.O. DSL uses a differnt _kind_ of signalling -- which calls for differently designed transmitters and receivers -- to get the higher data rate on the bare wires. >> This is how DSL works, it bypasses the _voice_ switching gear. It >> uses just the 'bare wire' between the telco C.O. and the customer >> premises. The special eqipment in the C.O. puts a *different*kind* >> of signal on the wires, that the "DSL modem" at the customer >> premises understands, and the 'modem' at the customer location does >> 'something similar', to communicate back to that special equimpent >> at the Telco offices. >> Voila! the limitations/restrictions of the telco voice_ switching >> equipment are bypassed, and thus 'not relevant' to this >> communication. > What's the downside for the telco? With the right pricing, I think > they could tap a huge market for increased bandwidth. Connected to _what_? "Multi-megabit bandwidth" to the C.O. is -useless-, unless there is "something interesting" to connect to. Who needs the capability for a dozen or two (or more) simultaneous voice telephone calls from their house? For anything other than voice, you have to have that 'something else' available for access at the point that that high-capacity circuit from the customer premises terminates. Getting _to_ the C.O. from the customer premises is the 'cheap' part. Whether it is POTS, or DSL, or whatever. Amortizing the equipment over, say, 5 years, you're talking about circa $3-5 dollars/month. The 'wire' cost, amortized over the useful life (50 years+) of the wire pair, is of the same order, maybe a bit lower. All the rest of the money goes towards "what to do with it, _after_ it arrives at the C.O." For voice, to calls to a number in a different C.O, you have to have inter-connects to get the call _to_ that C.O. If there isn't a direct trunk circuit, you have to go through another layer of switches (called "tandems") -- at least one, possibly several -- to get to the destination 'local' switch. 7 figure price-tags, per unit. Same thing connecting to the 'internet' -- you generally have to 'pay somebody' to pass your traffic on to the rest of the world, Costs for that depend on "how much" traffic you have. More traffic, more cost. and bigger, more expensive equipment. ------------------------------ From: Julian Thomas Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 20:16:57 -0400 Subject: Re: ISP Hunting In <20050619061216.5CE9F1501A@massis.lcs.mit.edu>, on 06/19/05 at 02:12 AM, was written: > I'm going to be just outside of Chicago (Skokie, if you must know) for an > unknown period of time and looking to find out what the cheapest way to > get internet access would be. Check out bamnet.net Julian Thomas: jt@jt-mj.net http://jt-mj.net In the beautiful Finger Lakes Wine Country of New York State! Warpstock 2005: Hershey, Pa. October 6-9, 2005 - http://www.warpstock.org -- -- Headline: Energizer Bunny arrested, charged with battery. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 17:40:57 -0700 (PDT) From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Re: ISP Hunting Reply-To: fatkinson@mishmash.com > Don't you want news-server access? That's the most common > deal-breaker for me. It shouldn't be a concern. If the price is cheap enough for an ISP you've chosen and they don't provide a news server, also get a news account at Newsguy http://www.newsguy.com . They have a special plan that they offer one year of news server access for forty dollars. I used them once when a ten dollar a month ISP I was then using dropped their news server without telling anyone. The service was very good. And they add new news groups pretty quickly when you request them. I'm not using them now because my cablemodem provider provides me with news server access. But I'd resort to them in an instant if my provider didn't offer it as part of the package. Regards, Fred ------------------------------ From: Steven Lichter Reply-To: Die@spammers.com Organization: I Kill Spammers, Inc. (c) 2005 A Rot in Hell Co. Subject: Re: XO Communications Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 22:39:26 GMT I'm retired from GTE, almost 10 years now so I have been away from it, but to me it there should have been a backup or B side running, besides it was out 7 1/2 hours. It was the company I work for that lost all of their calls coming into Riverside from San Bernardino and a few out of state calls, yet our incoming 800 number worked fine, it had been an AT&T number until we switched companies, so maybe that was still running through them and was not affected by the outage. I think we should go back to Step by Step, much better. Al Gillis wrote: > Well Steven, an outage involving three DS-3s would likely be related > to an OC-3 failure (an OC-3 at ~155 megabits/second will carry three > DS-3s or just over 2,000 voice channels). I'd guess one of two > failure types caused your emotional trauma: Traditional "back hoe > fade" or an OC-3 to DS-3 mux went on "time out" for a while. > For example, at my work we've got several kinds of access -- one > flavor has a small mux (a Fujitsu FLM-150) arranged on a SONET ring to > a companion mux in a nearby CO. That's great, except that both sides > of the SONET ride in the same fiber sheath -- so if it gets dug up > (the aforementioned syndrome of "back hoe fade") down she goes! Also, > of course, if some of the common stuff in either mux (on either end of > the SONET circuit) fails down she goes! > And who knows? Maybe this mux in San Bernardino wasn't even > configured for SONET -- Maybe it was just single ended! > Like many things in life now-a-days, communications is more fragile > than we might expect or like! The only good spammer is a dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? (c) 2005 I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot in Hell Co. ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: XO Communications Organization: ATCC Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 19:36:36 -0400 In article , alg@aracnet.com says: > Well Steven, an outage involving three DS-3s would likely be related > to an OC-3 failure (an OC-3 at ~155 megabits/second will carry three > DS-3s or just over 2,000 voice channels). I'd guess one of two > failure types caused your emotional trauma: Traditional "back hoe > fade" or an OC-3 to DS-3 mux went on "time out" for a while. A backhoe undoubtedly being operated by Backhoe Bob. Apparently at a recent gathering of IT folks involved with the Help America Vote Act this was a common refrain. ------------------------------ From: John McHarry Subject: Re: 700-555-4141 Does Not Work Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 23:21:31 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net On Fri, 17 Jun 2005 19:41:39 -0400, Ted Klugman wrote: > Recently, my long distance carrier (TTI National, somehow a subsidary > of MCI) informed me that they're going to start charging a "monthly > fee" of $1.99. So I decided it was time to switch. > My new carrier's website instructs new users to call 700-555-4141 to > verify when the LD carrier has been changed. I hadn't dialed the > number in quite a while, so for kicks, I dialed it. > "We're sorry, your call can not be completed as dialed." This didn't > happen the last time I tried it (more than a year ago) > (Yes, I tried it with a "1" in front of the number) > So, any thoughts on how I can check who my LD carrier is? That test number was part of the Modified Final Judgment, I believe. If your local carrier is a BOC, tell them to fix it. I ran into this years ago with Bell Atlantic Wireless, and had to write them a letter. They told me to call some guy who fixed it. ------------------------------ From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Re: 700-555-4141 Does Not Work Reply-To: fatkinson@mishmash.com Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 03:24:23 GMT On Fri, 17 Jun 2005 19:41:39 -0400, Ted Klugman wrote: > Recently, my long distance carrier (TTI National, somehow a subsidary > of MCI) informed me that they're going to start charging a "monthly > fee" of $1.99. So I decided it was time to switch. > My new carrier's website instructs new users to call 700-555-4141 to > verify when the LD carrier has been changed. I hadn't dialed the > number in quite a while, so for kicks, I dialed it. > "We're sorry, your call can not be completed as dialed." This didn't > happen the last time I tried it (more than a year ago) > (Yes, I tried it with a "1" in front of the number) > So, any thoughts on how I can check who my LD carrier is? > TIA Do you have 900, 700, and 976 blocking on your phone? If you do, that explains it completely. Try dialing '00' and see what happens. Fred ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Pod Slurping Dangerous to Your Company Organization: ATCC Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 19:22:33 -0400 In article , dcstar@myrealbox.com says: > On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 13:41:11 -0500, Lisa Minter wrote: >> The thief could even access PCs that require a log-in username/password >> by using a boot CD, a specially-crafted CD that sidesteps log-in >> authentication, said Usher. > Only on the assumption that data is actually on the hard drive, most > major organisations that I know of prohibit storage of any data on a > local hard drive and have it all on more secure network storage. > If they leave data on a local hard drive, and don't lock out booting > from a CD or Floppy (and having the BIOS password protected), then > more fool them. BIOS passwords are only as good as that little CR-2032 lithium battery. Remove or short the battery and kiss passwords goodbye. >> Gartner's 2004 advice would block pod slurping, added Usher, if >> enterprises adopted the research firm's recommendations to lock down >> desktops by disabling USB functionality or Windows' Universal Plug and >> Play. > And stopping booting another OS to bypass that disabling, otherwise it > could be a waste of time. As I showed above, you could remove/short the battery and then boot up Knoppix and copy files to CD-R, USB memory key, etc. ------------------------------ From: John McHarry Subject: Re: Monitor/Recorder for Residential Power Line Outages? Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 23:35:37 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net On Fri, 17 Jun 2005 10:41:55 -0700, AES wrote: > Any have pointers to a gadget that will monitor and log power outages > or glitches on 110V or 220V residential electrical service? > Looking for a home or retail level gadget that will work either > connected to a dedicated computer, or preferably free-standing with > periodic read-out to a computer, logging time and duration of both > longer outages and short glitches (anything long enough to cause > digital clocks and appliance displays to reset). Your best bet is likely to be a UPS. Some of them use their PC link to write a log of when power went out and returned. Mine sends a message to the system terminal (Linux), but that could probably be redirected to a log file. Actually, I think it keeps logs normally, but I have never bothered with them. ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: '80' Country Code Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 16:45:27 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Sun, 19 Jun 2005 09:11:42 -0000, bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) wrote: > In article , Geoff > wrote: >> I was looking at my call logs and have an international call from >> Spain and another country. The number for the other country starts >> with '803' but there is no country with an '80' and '803' dialing >> code. Any ideas where the call came from? > Best guess: somewhere around Helsinki, Finland. That is a pretty wild guess considering that country codes beginning with an 8 are usually in the far east. Finland's country code is 358! If it's not a country it may be a certain service. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Or maybe it was _area code_ 803, which I think is somewhere in the Carolinas? PAT] ------------------------------ From: John McHarry Subject: Re: Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan? Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 23:12:49 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net On Sun, 19 Jun 2005 14:22:37 -0700, FrankBooth wrote: > I'm trying to buy a cell phone WITHOUT A PLAN. I am sending it to a > relative in another country where they will activate it. > So far I have not found a local shopping establishment that sells > them. > Can anyone recommend somewhere online where a cell WITHOUT A PLAN can > be purchased? Is it even possible? Last I knew, which was several years ago, the cellular carriers controlled the distribution of the phones, so you couldn't do that. You might be able to find some way of adding one to an existing plan with pooled minutes so you could use the minutes but give away the phone. The other problem is that most countries use GSM, which uses frequencies that differ from the "GSM" used by some carriers in the US. I think the US protocol is also somewhat bastardized. Be sure you get a phone that is intended to roam in the country you intend to send it to. ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan? Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 16:53:32 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On 19 Jun 2005 14:22:37 -0700, FrankBooth wrote: > I'm trying to buy a cell phone WITHOUT A PLAN. I am sending it to a > relative in another country where they will activate it. > So far I have not found a local shopping establishment that sells > them. > Can anyone recommend somewhere online where a cell WITHOUT A PLAN can > be purchased? Is it even possible? > Thanks in advance! For post paid service the only one that I know of in the US is Cingular. You will not be eligible for any promotional rates. You will also of course pay the standard activation fee (around $35 IIRC.) You will also likely need to pass a US credit check or if that's not possible they may ask for a substantial deposit on the account. If that's not possible you may be relegated to using prepaid service. There's also a newer service called Consumer Cellular http://www.consumercellular.com which will give you monthly service on the old AT&T TDMA network. You can get a free phone to join. My only comment on them is their rates don't appear to be anywhere as good as most of the majors such as cingular, T-Mobile, Sprint PCS, etc., but if you just want service without a contract that's an option. I don't know what their requirements are regarding whether you need to have a credit check with them. ------------------------------ From: NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info Subject: Re: Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan? Date: 19 Jun 2005 17:17:25 -0700 Radio Shack used to do that for sure in California but it cost like an extra $200.00. Look on Cargsllist for local people selling a used one real cheap Also Ebay. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Date: 19 Jun 2005 19:38:27 -0700 > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I was talking about Robert Bonomi's > claims that Bell System did just what the law required of them, and > not much else, unless it worked to their advantage. PAT] Well, isn't that how all businesses work? Geez, they're not a charity or a non-profit. Mr. B.'s writing seemed very indignant when he said the Trimline and Princess phones were only used to make extra profit. Again, isn't that what businesses do? If the customers didn't like the premium sets, they wouldn't have rented them. Yet they did. Obviously it was a win-win -- the customers got something they wanted (and were willing to pay for), and the company made money. What is so wrong with that? Anyway, as far as the claim they merely followed the law, I believe they spent quite a bit of money designing both the 300 and 500 telephone sets. The 500 G handset -- still in use today fifty years later -- was carefully researched to be as comfortable and fit as many people as possible. As a monopoly, the phone company did NOT have to go to that much trouble. Further, they had a renown industrial designer, Henry Dreyfus, design the set itself. This effort was not cheap, and certainly not required by law or service. As to the claims of not being able to support BBS's demands for new lines, I believe that occured well after Divesture, so it was not a Bell System problem (assuming it was as widespread as claimed). ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 22:43:25 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , wrote: > Robert Bonomi wrote: >> I _guarantee_ that AT&T and the Bells were not 'voluntarily' reducing the >> prices just because of a decrease in costs. >> There were precisely *two* possible reasons for a price reduction: >> 1) pressure from competition. >> 2) enough 'pent up demand' that the price reduction brought in 'more >> than enough additional volume' to make up for the reduction in >> profitability. > Neither of those make sense. There was not significant competition > before divesture except from other modes (ie writing a letter, > telegram). No competition for telephones, answering machines, fax machines, PBX's, modems? No competition for long-distance telephone calls? Do you know when divestiture occurred? Do you know how many years *earlier* MCI was founded? Do you have any idea when the company now known as Sprint was founded? Do you have any idea how many local telephone lines the company now known as Sprint was serving, in, say, 1976? Would you believe three and a half million lines? Do you know when MFS started laying its own 'bypass' fiber? Do you know when Merrill-Lynch laid the first bypass fiber loop in the U.S? > If you say the Bell System had no interest in the customer, I did not say that. They were *very* interested in the customer -- as a milkable source of revenue. > then it would not have lowered rates to meet that "pent up > demand", rather just put in more lines and made all the more money. 'Pent up demand" describes a _price-sensitive_ phenomenon. i.e., where the price is the primary barrier to additional sales. People want the product, but they _will_not_ buy more of it, at that high price. Drop the price, and people do buy more. If lowering the profit margin on a product by 25% only brings in 10% more business, you are better off with the smaller volume of sales. If lowering the profit margin on a product by 10% brings in 25% more business, you are 'money ahead' to do so. The latter scenario *precisely* describes the situations in which the Bell System lowered prices. They lowered their _profit_margin_ by *less* than the factor of increased sales, and thus pulled in more money from the customers. >>> I maintain it was mostly technology -- cheaper >>> terminal equipment and >carrier media followed by higher call >>> volume and greater economies of >scale -- that caused and still >>> cause long distance rates to fall. >> The _rate_ of deployment, however, was driven by the competition >> _doing_it_ FIRST. > Again that fails to explain the continual rate reductions before > divesture. Not to those who know the actual history. And that competition *was* there in the profit-making areas, a decade or more before divestiture. The Bell System's primary _profit_ sources were: (1) value-added business telephone services / equipment, (2) long-distance-derived revenues. Residential service was usually priced at break-even, or maybe a little below that. It was a 'necessary evil', to make the bread-and-butter business services a 'salable' item. BOTH of those profit sources were under significant competitive pressures, long (as in "well more than a decade") before divestiture. >> Can you name a single railroad that had a developed long-haul telecom >> network that _voluntarily_ converted to AT&T service? The one that I >> am aware of where that happened did it _because_ the railroad was >> *sold*, but the prior owner _kept_ the telecom operation *(including >> R-O-W on all that railroad's trackage) rather than including it in the >> sale. > The Pennsylvania Railroad/Penn Central network was privately owned, > maintained, and operated, then turned over to AT&T. Not, exactly a ringing endorsement for the approach -- Penn Central's management made so many "smart" decisions that the company went bankrupt and closed its doors. >> Home computers didn't *exist* until the mid 1970s. The Altair 8800 >> plans ran in PE's Jan 1975 issue. The APPLE-II didn't exist until >> late 1977. > But businesses and schools were heavy users of time sharing by the mid > 1960s -- using dial-up Teletypes. Revisionist history at work. Computer "time sharing" did not exist _at_all_ before mid-1964. By September of that year, DTSS could handle an amazing =seven= terminals. By 1968, capacity was up to several dozen simultaneous-use terminals. IBM didn't have an interactive time-sharing system offering until late 1967. As of 1970 it is doubtful that there were 10,000 simultaneous dial-up 'modem' calls active at any given time, across the entire United States. But the landscape _was_ changing rapidly. >> The first BBS went online in Feb 1978. Within two years, the operator >> of that system had crossed swords with the local telco >> _at_least_three_times_, where they refused to install the additional >> residential lines he wanted. Claiming he "had" to be running a >> business. Public-utility commission complaints ensued, and the telco >> did, in each case, end up installing the additional lines. >> Other large-scale "hobby BBSs" across the country reported similar >> problems. > That is a tariff issue. Rates for a business and residential line are > based on expected use. A non-profit is still considered a business. > Seems to me a high volume BBS should've been classified as a business > line due to high volume of use. _WHAT_ business?? In Randy's case it *was* just a hobby. No income, no membership 'fees', no nothing. All the expenses came out of his personal pocket. >> The mid-90's debacle _was_ Internet driven. > That was after divesture and the Bell System no longer existed at > that point. Well, it was the "Baby Bells" that couldn't handle the demand. didn't have enough physical ports on switches, hadn't properly projected the growth, and didn't have phone numbers to assign. Same management, same planning process. >> Even prior to divestiture, the 'road signs' were there for anyone to >> read. "Measurements" for quality of U.S. service were flat-lining, >> and in some cases, actually declining. >> Space was not an issue, generally. Possibly in a few central-city >> facilities in a few of the largest cities. > Space IS a MAJOR issue. Real estate is expensive in growing areas, > whether city or suburb. ESS takes up a far smaller footprint than the > equivalent No 5 crossbar location. Where the telco had an existing facility, there was no net savings realized by the fact that the replacement box had a smaller footprint than the box it replaced. Bell System bought/built facilities with planned-for 75-100 year life-spans, _including_ projected growth. >> "Speed" is not related to call-handling capacity. > Yes, it is. Speed of call set-up is irrelevant to the number of _connected_and_running_ calls that can be handled > I believe you yourself said it was the to the advantage of > common control equipment to get in and out of the call as quickly as > possible. A faster common control can handle more calls. Yes there is an advantage. It has nothing to do with the number of connected calls that can be passing through the switch at any given time. The advantage is that you can set-up/tear-down more calls, with _less_ equipment. As long as you have 'enough' equipment to set-up/tear-down more calls than the system can handle, in _less_ total time than the average duration of a call, the speed of the equipment does not constitute a limiting factor in capacity of the equipment. if the equipment is 'slow', then you merely have to have more elements, to achieve the required overall capacity. When the 'performance limit' is elsewhere -- e.g. as in the number of communications-paths through the matrix -- speeding up the 'common control' equipment has *zero* effect on the number of simultaneous calls that can be handled. >> The Bell system, like any regulated monopoly was _guaranteed_ a >> certain minimum rate-of-return on investments. > Regulated monopolies were NOT _guaranteed_ a minimum rate of return. You know not that of which you speak. You can find percentage figures spelled out in the franchise documents, granting the monopolies. > If they were Western Union would not have gone broke nor would the > railroads. Western Union and most of the railroads were 'regulated common carriers'. Not regulated monopolies. > In some locations of the Bell System and even today, regulators > mandate below-cost services for social reasons or deny rate > increases. > Very, *very* rarely was 'how' that money was spent > questioned. >> *NO*, is _not_ true. >> As Pat pointed out, Ma Bell was under constant scrutiny by the news >> media and government and advocates. Shareholder gadflies made a point >> of disrupting stockholders' meetings every year. Activists filed >> constant lawsuits against the system. Primarily a 1970's and later phenomenon. You can generally count on your thumbs the number of rate increase requests that were _not_ granted in their entirety, between the end of WW 1, and, say, 1965. >> Can you name a feature/capability introduced by the Bell System after >> 1970 that was not present in third-party-provided, customer-owned, PBX >> equipment first? The only one I can think of is the "picturephone". > I guess to really answer that claim one would have to list the latest > PBX offerings of the Bell System of 1970, their cost, and the > competition's offerings. That does _not_ answer the question posed, Carterphone opened the door WIDE for third-party suppliers. Allow a couple of years for their first-generation gear to hit the market, and then start looking at _who_ introduces the new capabilities *first*. Aside from "picturephone", I can't think of _one_ where Bell/AT&T/WEco was first. > How many third party PBXs were available in 1970? A fair number. Rolm was the 800lb gorilla of the bunch. > Getting back to your claim the Bell System did nothing it didn't have > to, I did not say that. I said that what they did was for *their* advantage first, and if the customer benefited, well, that was an unimportant incidental. > let's not forget the Princess, Trimeline, Panel, Home Interphone, > and Bell Chime units. Princes and Trimline were 'marketing gimmicks' first and foremost. The market for 'additional' extension phones was stagnant, if not moribund. Princess and Trimline were "kickers" that marketing could sell up. 'Panel' was an interesting unit -- the house I grew up in had the first, and for more than 10 years, the _only_, residential installation of one of those phones in the entire state. The concept was better than the implementation; maintenance was an ongoing issue. Panel's "marketing gimmick" selling point was "Look, Ma no cord!" when the phone was hung up. As well as not sticking out into the room as far as a regular 'surface mount' wall phone. Bell had the customer's interest _so_much_ at heart that the customer had to _buy_ the enclosure for that phone (at significantly over $100 in 1964 dollars) *and* 'rent' (at the usual price) all the regular phone innards that were inside it). Home Interphone, and Bell Chime also fell into the category of 'marketing gimmick' _first_, An un-needed high-markup item that 'sales' could artificially create a demand for, and then fill. Primarily a revenue booster. >> 3-way calling, conference calling, call waiting, speed-dial, call >> 'camping', etc. Standard features on PBXs years before there was >> Centrex availability. And even longer before they were offered on >> plain-jane POTS service. > All available on Bell PBXs of the 1960s. "All", eh? Including the part of that list that you so carefully cut off? You are claiming that these features were available on Bell-provided PBX gear on customer premises, before they were available on Bell-provided PBX gear in the central office. >> 'Native touch-tone' was far less expensive for the telco than >> native pulse dialing. > Not in SxS, which required extra equipment. See Eng & Sci book. Hint: the SxS _was_not_capable_ of *native* touch-tone operation, a front end translation from touch-tone to pulse was required. >> To "sell" more extensions, they _had_ to have something that was >> 'acceptable' decor-wise to the decision-maker in the household. > Most families we knew did not bother paying extra for "premium" > telephone *sets*, BUT *did* pay +extra+ for _extensions_ in various > _rooms_ and particular of a house. Having three (3) phones-- > 'basement', 1st fl, 2nd fl, was very _common_ to -save- steps. The 'tolerance point' varied by household. _Average_ number of extensions per household, in households with more than one phone, climbed appreciably after introduction of Princess/Trimline, after having been comparatively stagnant for several years ... As in "something close to 80% of the total number of Princess/Trimline phones manufactured". >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Before Charlie Brown became Chairman of >> AT&T, he was President and CEO of Illinois Bell. At that time, he >> lived about two blocks from me in Rogers Park, a north side >> neighborhood in Chicago. In chatting with him at his home one day, he >> said to me basically what Robert Bonomi claims above. > I'm not sure which claims you're referring to. > I'm not claiming the Bell System was perfect, however, my own > experience as a customer in large organizations was that the service > was generally excellent and the company responsive, and that rates > were on a decline before divesture. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I was talking about Robert Bonomi's > claims that Bell System did just what the law required of them, and > not much else, unless it worked to their advantage. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Organization: ATCC Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 19:34:44 -0400 In article , TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response: > Chicago is where the BBS concept got started. Randy Seuss and Ward > Christianson started the very first one. (In yesterday's Digest, > Robert Bonomi mentioned how Randy had such hassles with Illinois Bell > getting the lines he needed). Bell and Howell computers _were_ Apple > ][+ machines except for the lable on the front of them, and many of > them, such as mine, had not only a 300 baud modem card on a slot > inside, but an 'expanded memory' card as well, to go in another slot > inside, and a 'clock card' plus a couple of floppy disk driver > cards. I would guess that by 1980 there were a dozen or more BBS's > operating, all in Chicago or nearby suburbs, and almost none anywhere > else in the world. > The Library had their BBS (BELmont 5-3200) based on Bill Blue's > *People's Message System* as did a guy in Downers Grove, IL. Rogers > Park ABBS (973-ABBS [2227]) used some other kind of software for > Apple as I did with my original BBS called 'First Choice' > (SHEldrake-3-0001). But I soon decided to work with a different BBS > 'skeleton' to make 'Lake Shore Modem Magazine' on my other phone > line SHEldrake-3-0002 instead, and Lake Shore Modem Magazine went on > line in July, 1981. Tim had his Tandy Model 4 operating "Think BBS" > (based on the old IBM slogan) and Randy Suess kept plugging along > with his CBBS, until he eventually decided to go 'multi-user' with > his Chinet system, which was when all the trouble with the telephone > company got started, in 1984 I think. Ward and Randy were not only > first with the BBS concept, I think they were first with the > multi-user concept also (regards home or residential service). There > was a guy in Oak Park, Illinois using his Tandy Model-4 to run a > FIDO multi-user node around that same time, but I never did much > care for the FIDO people; they all seemed so prissy and > authoritarian, IMO. I did maintain a user group out of his node for > six months or so, but the FIDO bosses decided to ex-communicate his > entire system, so that was good enough for me: I had been off and on > using Usenet (via Portal) for a couple years at that point and > decided to give up on FIDO and use Usenet exclusively instead, and I > did that mostly with my Zenith Z-19 terminal and modem. From Randy > Suess one day I got a bunch of other very good working terminals and > modems as well; that was around 1983. I finally shut down my BBS > (Lakeshore Modem Magazine) on December 31, 1985 for good. PAT] Interesting about the TRS-80 Model 4 multi node. If I'm not mistaken that was running SIDOS. Here is the story behind SIDOS: In 1982 a friend of mine convinced me to spend hard earned money on a modem so I could connect the the NYBBLINK BBS here in Providence. A month after I'd gotten the modem NYBBLINK went down for good. So my friend Don Lambert decided to re-wire his Model III so that it had multiple RS-232 ports, and ISAM file system, as well as all sorts of communications enhancements to TRSDOS, enough so that it was a different O/S once he got through with it. After a few months of the two of us brainstorming and testing the crap out of the system Syslink was born. SIDOS was then run on two other BBS's in RI that spawned a major communications player. PowerNet and PowerCor both ran SIDOS. The operator of PowerCor then procured through some nefarious means a DEC MicroVax II and formed Intelecom Data Systems, or IDS. The assets of IDS were rolled up and became Conversent Communications. All because I didn't want to be stuck with a modem and nothing to connect to locally. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Very, very interesting. There are a lot of good stories, mostly untold, from the early years of BBS'ing and networking. I'll bet an entire newsgroup could be started and maintained with just such accounts. But was SIDOS running on Model 4 as it came out of the factory? My friend with the Think BBS and the guy in Oak Park who ran a FIDO node brought their boxes home from Radio Shack, and plugged them in and started their sites within a day or two; no adaptation needed that I recall them saying. 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 V24 #279 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Jun 20 16:11:56 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 0F76614F9C; Mon, 20 Jun 2005 16:11:56 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #280 Message-Id: <20050620201156.0F76614F9C@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 16:11:56 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.7 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Mon, 20 Jun 2005 16:11:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 280 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Lost Credit Data Improperly Kept, Company Admits (Monty Solomon) Cablevision Seeks to Go Private and Spin Off Non-Cable Assets (Solomon) Spam Sign-up Man Convicted of Harassment (Monty Solomon) Thanks to Geniuses in Congress, TV May No Longer Work (Monty Solomon) Skulls Trojan Poses as Antivirus (Monty Solomon) Ping Between PC Through PABX (yuniarsetiawan@gmail.com) France Telecom Eyes Cable & Wireless Takeover (Telecom dailyLead USTA) Re: '80' Country Code (John R. Levine) Re: '80' Country Code (Geoff) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (Bit Twister) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (Bob Vaughan) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (James Carlson) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (David B. Horvath, CCP) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (John Hines) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (Howard Wharton) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (Robert Bonomi) Re: DSL Speed (Lisa Hancock) Re: Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan? (John Levine) Re: Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan? (Joseph) Re: Bell Divestiture (hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com) Re: Bell Divestiture (hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com) Re: Bell Divestiture (AES) Re: Bell Divestiture (Michael D. Sullivan) Re: Pod Slurping Dangerous to Your Company (jtaylor) Re: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards (Wondrous One) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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, 20 Jun 2005 01:45:54 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Lost Credit Data Improperly Kept, Company Admits By ERIC DASH The chief of the credit card processing company whose computer system was penetrated by data thieves, exposing 40 million cardholders to a risk of fraud, acknowledged yesterday that the company should not have been retaining those records. The official, John M. Perry, chief executive of CardSystems Solutions, indicated that the records known to have been stolen covered roughly 200,000 of the 40 million compromised credit card accounts, from Visa, MasterCard and other card issuers. He said the data was in a file being stored for "research purposes" to determine why certain transactions had registered as unauthorized or uncompleted. "We should not have been doing that," Mr. Perry said. "That, however, has been remediated." As for the sensitive data, he added, "We no longer store it on files." Under rules established by Visa and MasterCard, processors are not allowed to retain cardholder information including names, account numbers, expiration dates and security codes after a transaction is handled. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/20/technology/20credit.html?ex=1276920000&en=04e9ba4fe5ae0543&ei=5088 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 01:50:03 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Cablevision Seeks to Go Private and Spin Off Non-Cable Assets By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN June 20, 2005 The Dolans, one of New York's most powerful and fractious families, moved yesterday to buy out the public shareholders of their media empire, Cablevision Systems, and create a separate company for its prized entertainment assets, which include Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall. In a letter to the company's board, the family made a $7.9 billion bid to take Cablevision's lucrative cable systems in New York's suburbs private. The move came two weeks after the family succeeded in staving off competition for Madison Square Garden by blocking the construction of a stadium on the West Side of Manhattan. As part of the transaction, the family proposed putting all of its other entertainment assets -- which also include the New York Knicks, the New York Rangers and several cable channels like American Movie Classics -- into a separate company. The deal would move the Dolans, who own 71 percent of the voting rights of Cablevision, away from the spotlight and scrutiny of Wall Street, which has grown concerned in recent months about the company's direction amid a series of strategy shifts and feuds within the family. Charles F. Dolan, the company's 78-year-old founder and chairman, and a son, Thomas C. Dolan, lost a boardroom showdown earlier this year with another son, James L. Dolan, Cablevision's chief executive, over the sale of a money-losing high-definition satellite unit. For a time, Charles and James Dolan stopped speaking to each other. Charles Dolan then ousted several of the company's directors who had voted against him and replaced them with his friends. Then, in April, Mr. Dolan, by then reconciled with his son James, again surprised Wall Street by making an 11th-hour bid for Adelphia Communications, a move that was roundly derided by analysts, in part because it would have diluted its focus on the New York area. Adelphia was later sold to Time Warner and Comcast. In their letter yesterday to the board of Cablevision, which is based in Bethpage, N.Y., Charles and James Dolan said they believed that the cable business could do better as a private business without the pressure to meet quarterly earnings targets. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/20/business/20cable.html?ex=1276920000&en=c74dc9a230b3f3c9&ei=5088 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 00:14:20 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Spam Sign-up Man Convicted of Harassment By John Leyden (john.leyden at theregister.co.uk) A US man who signed his boss up to various spam lists has been convicted of harassment. Scott Huffines, 41, from Essex County near Baltimore, Maryland, was sentenced to probation and 100 hours community service this week after pleading guilty to misuse of electronic mail, the Baltimore Sun reports http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bal-bz.md.email09jun09,1,7553997.story?coll=bal-local-headlines . The Web designer signed Alex Vitalo, his female supervisor at Maryland Public Television, up to dating services and job sites. But the revenge ploy backfired when his victim forced an investigation that traced the sign up messages back to Huffines. The case is reckoned to be the first of its kind considered by US courts. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/06/10/spam_harrassement_lawsuit/ Baltimore Sun story also at http://www.baltimoresun.com/technology/bal-bz.md.email09jun09,1,4404859.story ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 00:15:28 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Thanks to Geniuses in Congress, Your TV May no Longer Work Mike Himowitz ONE DAY in the not-too-distant future, all the TV sets in your home that aren't hooked to cable boxes will turn into pumpkins. If you want to receive over-the-air broadcasts, you'll have to replace them with sets that cost at least twice as much, or pay a $100 "digital TV tax" for each set. That's what I call the estimated cost of a converter that will enable your set to do what it did for free the day before -- receive TV broadcasts. You can thank Congress for this opportunity. Back in 1996, our lawmakers, the nation's broadcasters, the Federal Communications Commission and the folks who make consumer electronics hatched a scheme that will cost households hundreds, if not thousands of dollars each for something they have demonstrated only a marginal appetite for so far -- high definition digital television (HDTV). Collectively, the cost will run to billions, most of which will go into driving up a trade deficit that's already past 100 percent on the scary meter. And as usual, the burden will fall heaviest on those who can afford it least. Every now and then, the Federal Communications Commission does something more to remind me just how stupid this deal really is. Last week, it voted to speed up the pace at which TV manufacturers will have to make sets with digital tuners available to the public. Not that manufacturers have paid much attention to past deadlines. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Here's how the scheme works: http://www.baltimoresun.com/technology/bal-bz.himowitz16jun16,1,3109176.column?coll=bal-technology-headlines ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 00:28:06 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Skulls Trojan Poses as Antivirus Skulls Trojan puts on antivirus mask By Joris Evers A new variant of the Skulls Trojan horse for cell phones is trying to trap victims by posing as antivirus software, F-Secure has warned. The Skulls Trojan horse, which affects Symbian-based cell phones, first surfaced in November. This latest Skulls.L variant is similar to Skulls.C, the only difference being that it's disguised as a pirated copy of F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus, the Finnish antivirus maker said in an alert posted Thursday. Like earlier versions, the new Trojan attempts to disable system applications and replace their icons with images of skulls. It also drops two versions of the Cabir worm on the device. The worms aren't activated until the user clicks on their icons, F-Secure said. http://news.com.com/2100-7349-5741033.html ------------------------------ From: yuniarsetiawan@gmail.com Subject: Ping Between PC Through PABX Date: 20 Jun 2005 00:08:26 -0700 Hi there, I'm trying to connect two computer using PABX. So the PABX will be act like a hub. This is the diagram: [Computer 1] -> [Modem] -> [PABX] <- [Modem] <- [Computer 2] Both computer using Windows 2000 and both has sucessfully connected to the PABX after doing dial up. But why can't I ping between those computer? Both computer has been connected to the pabx, but they just can't ping/communicate each other. Is there anything wrong here? It is possible to do this, right? Thank you so much for the response. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 12:52:46 EDT From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: France Telecom Eyes Cable & Wireless Takeover Telecom dailyLead from USTA June 20, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22469&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * France Telecom eyes Cable & Wireless takeover BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Dolans seek to take Cablevision private * Report: Africa has world's lowest Internet penetration * Telecoms plan WiMAX trials * TBWA\C\D to handle ad launch for Sprint-Nextel merger USTA SPOTLIGHT * Marketing Strategies Webinar: How to Get the Most from Your Resources HOT TOPICS * BT launches world's first fixed-mobile service * Free Wi-Fi turns into enemy for some cafe owners * T-Mobile focuses on Wi-Fi * Nokia unveils new phones * Sprint posts details of EV-DO launch EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Startup makes computer networks run faster * Cash? Nah, I'll pay with my cell REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * High Court ruling expected on file-swapping * High Court to issue precedent-setting ruling in broadband case Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22469&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: '80' Country Code Date: 20 Jun 2005 00:06:08 -0400 Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > with '803' but there is no country with an '80' and '803' dialing > code. Any ideas where the call came from? You can download the current country code list from the ITU's web site, and it says that code 800 is international freephone, and all other 80x are unassigned and reserved. Possibly the number was screwed up in your logs, which certainly happens. Or maybe Pat's right and a leading 1 fell off on the way and it was really from South Carolina. Regards, John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY http://www.taugh.com PS: Helsinki? ------------------------------ From: Geoff Subject: Re: '80' Country Code Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 07:10:16 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Or maybe it was _area code_ 803, > which I think is somewhere in the Carolinas? PAT] I do not think so because for calls within the US, the number is displayed as (803) xxx-xxxx. This number was displayed as +803xxxxxxxxx. -g ------------------------------ From: Bit Twister Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks Organization: home user Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 01:50:35 -0500 On Sun, 19 Jun 2005 17:49:42 PDT, Fred Atkinson wrote: > I've accumulated so many devices on my home network (and some devices > that are not network related as well) that power strips are an issue. > Most of these devices have the big 'calculator charger' type of power > supply that plugs directly into the AC outlet. One solution I saw was an extension cord about 3 inches long. That let you use every slot on the strip and let the _wall wart_ hang off to one side. ------------------------------ From: techie@tantivy.tantivy.net (Bob Vaughan) Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 12:17:15 UTC Organization: Tantivy Associates In article , Fred Atkinson wrote: > I suspect that some of you are experiencing this or have already > solved it. So, maybe one of you can tell me where I can find > something to solve this problem. > I've accumulated so many devices on my home network (and some devices > that are not network related as well) that power strips are an issue. > Most of these devices have the big 'calculator charger' type of power > supply that plugs directly into the AC outlet. > I've been looking for some type of power strip that has eight or more > outlets that are spaced far enough apart that you can plug all of > these things into them without overlapping each other. > Searching the Internet, I've not found anything like this. The best > is one of those long power strips that you usually install on the wall > as a permanent part of the house electrical system. I think there > might be something much better. Or maybe someone has a better > suggestion. > Any ideas? You mean something like: 10 outlets, (5 duplex outlets side by side). (II) (II) (II) (II) (II) 15' cord (II) (II) (II) (II) (II) I've been able to fit 10 smaller wall warts on a single strip, or 6 large wall warts, plus 4 cords. Belkin F9D1000-15 (I've found these at Home Depot, but not on the Belkin website) or Waber UL800CB-15 http://www.waber.com/products/product.cfm?productID=1961 Waber/Tripp-Lite also has the long (4-6') strips with cord/plug. http://www.waber.com/products/powerstrips/index.cfm power strips PS2408 (24"/8 outlets) PS3612 (36"/12 outlets) PS4816 (48"/16 outlets) PS6020 (60"/20 outlets) PS7224 (72"/24 outlets) surge strips SS7415 (48"/16 outlets) SS7619 (72"/24 outlets) -- Welcome My Son, Welcome To The Machine -- Bob Vaughan | techie @ tantivy.net | | P.O. Box 19792, Stanford, Ca 94309 | -- I am Me, I am only Me, And no one else is Me, What could be simpler? -- ------------------------------ From: James Carlson Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks Date: 20 Jun 2005 08:55:36 -0400 Organization: Sun Microsystems Fred Atkinson writes: > I've accumulated so many devices on my home network (and some devices > that are not network related as well) that power strips are an issue. > Most of these devices have the big 'calculator charger' type of power > supply that plugs directly into the AC outlet. How I hate those wall warts ... > Searching the Internet, I've not found anything like this. The best > is one of those long power strips that you usually install on the wall > as a permanent part of the house electrical system. I think there > might be something much better. Or maybe someone has a better > suggestion. There are short (1' or less) extension cables available to move the transformer off of the power strip: http://www.pccables.com/01208.htm (There are probably other sources of these things; I just found this one on a quick Google search.) James Carlson, KISS Network Sun Microsystems / 1 Network Drive 71.234W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.497N Fax +1 781 442 1677 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 09:39:50 -0400 Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks From: David B. Horvath, CCP wrote: > I've accumulated so many devices on my home network (and some devices > that are not network related as well) that power strips are an issue. > Most of these devices have the big 'calculator charger' type of power > supply that plugs directly into the AC outlet. Yes, you are not the only one with this problem. My current solution is multiple power strips plugged into multiple outlets. However, I've also seen (sorry, can't remember where, try a web search) short extension cords for use with wall-worts and power strips. The cords get the blocks away from the strip so you can use all the available power jacks. - David ------------------------------ From: John Hines Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 09:32:09 -0500 Organization: www.jhines.org Reply-To: john@jhines.org Fred Atkinson wrote: > I suspect that some of you are experiencing this or have already > solved it. So, maybe one of you can tell me where I can find > something to solve this problem. www.cyberguys.com part number 121 2510 or search for "liberator" and find a bunch of solutions. Here is a clunky url which may work. http://www.cyberguys.com/templates/searchdetail.asp?T1=121+2510&dept=lch28&search=1ca54&child= ------------------------------ From: dwolffxx@panix.com (David Wolff) Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 17:02:40 UTC Organization: Public Access Networks Corp. In article , Fred Atkinson wrote: > I suspect that some of you are experiencing this or have already > solved it. So, maybe one of you can tell me where I can find > something to solve this problem. > I've accumulated so many devices on my home network (and some devices > that are not network related as well) that power strips are an issue. > Most of these devices have the big 'calculator charger' type of power > supply that plugs directly into the AC outlet. > I've been looking for some type of power strip that has eight or more > outlets that are spaced far enough apart that you can plug all of > these things into them without overlapping each other. Another solution is short extension cords, probably available from all electric / electronic supply places. They are heavy-duty, three-prong cords about a foot long. So the normal-sized three-prong ends fit nicely in any power strip. They're also pretty cheap. Thanks, David (Remove "xx" to reply.) ------------------------------ From: Howard S. Wharton Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 13:27:05 -0400 Organization: The University at Buffalo Pat, By daisy chaining your power strips, you are causing the first ones in the chain to be overloaded and possibility the circuit it's plugged into. And it is a fire waiting to happen. Howard S. Wharton Fire Safety Technician Occupational and Environmental Safety Services State University of New York at Buffalo ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 18:46:39 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , Fred Atkinson wrote: > I suspect that some of you are experiencing this or have already > solved it. So, maybe one of you can tell me where I can find > something to solve this problem. > I've accumulated so many devices on my home network (and some devices > that are not network related as well) that power strips are an issue. > Most of these devices have the big 'calculator charger' type of power > supply that plugs directly into the AC outlet. > I've been looking for some type of power strip that has eight or more > outlets that are spaced far enough apart that you can plug all of > these things into them without overlapping each other. > Searching the Internet, I've not found anything like this. The best > is one of those long power strips that you usually install on the wall > as a permanent part of the house electrical system. I think there > might be something much better. Or maybe someone has a better > suggestion. > Any ideas? "build it yourself", using "PlugMold", from wire-mold corp. Available at most of the home-improvement superstores. (this is the permanent wiring stuff.) Radio Shack used to sell exactly what you're looking for, their part 61-2155 *discontinued*. Browse through industrial supply catalogs, looking for outlet strips to go into 'Rack cabinets'. Be prepared to pay $100 or so. *Somebody* -- AHA! here it is! "Improvements" sells bundles of 'shortie' (ie. 1-foot) extension cords, for exactly that use. (plug the wall-wart into the extension cord, and the extension cord into the strip.) my catalog shows a package of 5, for $13. Their item #238359 There are also "strips" (they're not really strips, but biggish rectangles) made expressly for wall-warts, have the outlets located 'sideways' to typical, so that the xformer hangs off the side of the thing. And have several inches of space between the outlets, to accomodate the width of the xformer. Check a biggish hardware store and/or the home-improvement stores. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: DSL Speed Date: 20 Jun 2005 10:38:11 -0700 Choreboy wrote: > On dialup, the farm couldn't negotiate modem speeds quite as fast as I > could in town. I assumed the limitation was in the wire. That's why > I was amazed to see that DSL seems to use the wire in the same way as > dialup. Was I wrong to think the reason dialup data rates were slower > at the farm was that the wire to the CO is longer? The length of the wire DOES play a part. Also, how the wire is buried or cabled, along with it being 'concentrated' by multiplex equipment en route to the central office. This is why the farm would be slower than in town. > What's the downside for the telco? With the right pricing, I think > they could tap a huge market for increased bandwidth. There is no downside for the telco and there is a huge market for increased bandwidth. The speed of DSL will vary though depending on physical set up of the wire pair between the home and central office, as mentioned. What is perfectly fine for voice may cause interference in high speed data transmission and force the speed to be lower. The physical arrange- ment of the wire, known as the "loop plant" varies tremendously. Some of it is old. Some of it is bundled in cables in such a way that works for voice but not so good for data due to tiny bits of interference -- just enough to cause a bit drop out in high speed communication. Other cables go through multiplexors that may limit throughput. ------------------------------ Date: 20 Jun 2005 04:12:10 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan? Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > Can anyone recommend somewhere online where a cell WITHOUT A PLAN can > be purchased? Is it even possible? eBay. I buy phones there all the time. But you have to understand what you need and what you're buying or you're likely to end up with something that for your purposes is only a pricey paperweight. > I'm trying to buy a cell phone WITHOUT A PLAN. I am sending it to a > relative in another country where they will activate it. I hope you realize that mobile networks in North America use different frequencies and signalling schemes than everywhere else. Tell us what country, and maybe we can give you some more useful advice. R's, John ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan? Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 06:35:07 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Sun, 19 Jun 2005 23:12:49 GMT, John McHarry wrote: > The other problem is that most countries use GSM, which uses > frequencies that differ from the "GSM" used by some carriers in the > US. From *some* carriers in the US? All carriers in the US use either 1900 Mhz "PCS" or 800/850 Mhz "cellular" frequencies. Most of the rest of the world except for the Americas uses 900 and 1800 Mhz (with a very few minor exceptions in South America [Venezuela] and Cuba.) > I think the US protocol is also somewhat bastardized. Be sure you > get a phone that is intended to roam in the country you intend to send > it to. And what is *that* supposed to mean? GSM is GSM and the specifications are the same no matter where it's used. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Date: 20 Jun 2005 07:17:47 -0700 Fred R. Goldstein wrote: > I was there. I was doing traffic engineering for AOLnet in 1996, > during the America On Hold debacle. > Going to my point -- the Telecom Act of 1996 prevented a total > meltdown of the network because it allowed CLECs to take over the > high-volume dial-in traffic *just in time*. None the less, by that time the Bell System was LONG GONE. The telephone system was running under a totally different mold. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: [1978] ... > Standard Oil Credit Card Office in Chicago I had an IBM terminal on > my desk. I knew very little about the thing, except that it was > intended to eventually replace the punch cards which were around > everywhere. By 'everywhere' I mean that there were shopping carts > like used in a grocery store, and women would push these carts around > the room all day, every day, taking 'trays' (metal containers with > four or five hundred cards) off your desk, put them in the shopping > cart with others that had been gathered up, leave you a few new > 'trays' of several hundred cards each in their place, then come back in > a couple hours and repeat the process. As we examined and made correc- > tions to the cards, we were to keep them in _exactly_ the same order > (within the tray) as they had been given to us. I'm surprised such a high volume installation wasn't using a new technology such as the previously mentioned Mohawk Data Systems key-to-disk. Your cards may have been from an old style 'reproducer*' that read gas station charge slips and converted the contents to a punch card (that's why the charge number and amount were in those funny letters). But again I'm not surprised more modern electronic readers weren't in use since they were common by the late 1970s. (*IBM reproducers also converted the tiny tickets from dept. store clothing purchases into punch cards. They were also used go gang-punch common information into a series of cards, or copy permanent information from a master card into a transaction card.) > Sometime in 1977 or early 1978 the Bell and Howell Company of Skokie I see their name advertised sometimes. They were big into commercial film equipment (ie move projectors, slides, microfilm). I wonder what became of the company now? At one time many companies used 16 mm sound films as a way to communicate to employees, stockholders, and customers. The largest companies had their own film depts while smaller ones contracted it out. A great many large firms had at least one 16 mm sound projector available to show training or otherwise films. There were somewhat portable models corporate spokesmen would take around to social clubs and organizations and show a film showing the company. Today these films are extremely valuable historically. They show attitudes and trends of business. Sadly, I suspect a great many are being destroyed as companies merge or fold. Some films from the Bell System (which made a great many) are available on VHS from collectors. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My grandfather got me on at Standard Oil in the credit card office in Chicago in June, 1967, _not_ in 1978! His boss had gotten me the phone room job at University of Chicago when I was in high school in 1959; grandpa was with the company as an executive at Whiting Refinery for several years, but did not think I should be doing refinery work. You see, I am not really all that good at doing hard labor jobs. Grandpa's boss was going to put me to work in the superintendent's office either in Whiting or maybe send me back to Neodesha, KS (where grandfather had worked at one time); I thought I should stay around Chicago where my friends were so he suggested the marketing department or credit card processing office would be good for me. In the credit card processing office in 1967 they had IBM 370 computers but also relied heavily on a combination of optical scanning and key punching and manual verification. That's when we had those women with their 'shopping carts' full of metal trays which in turn were full of cards. The tray-full of cards was considered a 'batch'. No desktop terminals in sight anywhere. After we had corrected mistakes found in the batches all the cards were taken to an IBM 'gang-punch' machine where they were stacked up thousands at a time, and run through a machine which could read them and punch them. The cards fell out in two pockets. One pocket was the correctly punched cards; what fell in the other pockets were rejects, and you had to put this stack in a second time in the hopes _that time_ they would get punched correctly. Some cards just never would punch for some reason. There were other cards which got mangled up or mutilated by the gang punch machine, and these had be handled specially/ I had to use a rubber stamp and stamp the letters 'NMU' on the card (these were all gas station customer invoices.) Then I had to take a fresh, crisp blank card, which was entitled 'substitute for invoice', fill in all the details by hand and run that one through the gang-punch instead, along with another 'control punch' in one of the columns which meant it was intended to replace the NMU (or Non Machine Usable) card. That special punch caused the card to fall out of the stack when the customer bills were sent out (about seven hundred thousand customers were billed each day, 22 days per month), and when that one fell out, that customer's tickets were taken to someone who kept the mangled card in a pile on her desk, and the substitute was swapped out for the mangled card which was actually sent out, at the end of the line. In 1970 I guess, I do not remember for sure, they brought around terminals, sat them on the desks and told people 'Do not Touch These' until we explain what to do, which was about a month later. We were told these would be replacing some of the job functions that had been done manually before. PAT] ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Date: 20 Jun 2005 00:00:00 EDT Robert Bonomi wrote: > Revisionist history at work. Computer "time sharing" did not exist > _at_all_ before mid-1964. It was running at Dartmouth College -- the pioneer -- in 1963. It quickly became a commercial service. Let's remember too that dataphones were coming into use. In 1964 my bank installed an on-line teller system. The work was developing in the 1950s and coming into actual service in the early 1960s Let's also remember that on-line or "real-time" computer processing was developed and used in the 1950s and gradually rolled out to wide service in the early 1960s. IBM lagged behind on this for commercial service. > By 1968, capacity was up to several dozen simultaneous-use > terminals. By 1968 even public schools had dial up time sharing terminals. Soon mini computers were providing widespread time sharing use in the early 1970s. Big LIFE magazine article about it in 1969. > IBM didn't have an interactive time-sharing system offering until > late 1967. IBM was a late-comer on this and time sharing was a lesser priority. Other computers, such as GE, had it out. >> That is a tariff issue. Rates for a business and residential line are >> based on expected use. A non-profit is still considered a business. >> Seems to me a high volume BBS should've been classified as a business >> line due to high volume of use. > _WHAT_ business?? In Randy's case it *was* just a hobby. No income, > no membership 'fees', no nothing. All the expenses came out of his > personal pocket. Repeat: A non-profit is still considered a business. Who paid for it wasn't the issue. Bell was correct to charge business rates for this service. > Well, it was the "Baby Bells" that couldn't handle the demand. That is irrelevent. We're talking about the pre-divesture Bell System. Once divesture was decided (even before it happened), it was a whole different ball game. > Same management, same planning process. NO! Once divesture was decided upon everything the Bell System once stood for turned on its head. The old priorities and ways of doing business no longer mattered a bit. The "Planning" style under the Bell System was completely obsolete by divesture because all the _rules_ AND _players_ had changed. There was no longer a seamless tie with all those involved in providing service to a customer. As mentioned, large organizations had to change, too, and spend a lot of money hiring telecom people to do what previously was done automatically. The process became far more complex and expensive. As others pointed out, in the new model there was more _specific_ cost/profit control, so each tech unit had to know what it was getting into and what it would get out of it. > Speed of call set-up is irrelevant to the number of > _connected_and_running_ calls that can be handled Sorry, but faster speed makes for a more efficient system. Faster speed allows a more sophisticated route selection and alternative paths. Control and connection need not even be in the same physical place. Connection facilities could be shared among a wider audience because the fast connection gear can make use of many more choices. >> Regulated monopolies were NOT _guaranteed_ a minimum rate of return. Others confirmed that statement. > Western Union and most of the railroads were 'regulated common > carriers'. Not regulated monopolies. The Bell System was a common carrier. Railroads had "monopolies" in their service territories; they were hurt because those service territories were very narrowly defined in a very different age (the distance a farm wagon could travel). > You are claiming that these features were available on Bell-provided > PBX gear on customer premises, before they were available on > Bell-provided PBX gear in the central office. Go read the Bell Labs Eng & Sci history book and you'll see what they were doing. Go read Ball Labs Records for the 1960s and you'll see what they were doing. > Hint: the SxS _was_not_capable_ of *native* touch-tone operation, a > front end translation from touch-tone to pulse was required. Right. That contradicts your claim that Touch Tone actually saved the company money. ------------------------------ From: AES Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 08:52:38 -0700 Organization: Stanford University One thing the pre-divestiture Bell System did well was to 1) Set specific, quantitative numerical standards for quality and reliability of service, and publish them internally. [E.g., how many service outages per year a residential customer could expect to experience and for how long; the average number of rings a customer would have to wait before a service or inquiry call was answered; and so on.] [I was once told that the standard for service outages, for example, said that no residential customer should be without dial tone for more than 18 minutes/year for any reasons under Bell System control (including for example line losses due to failure to trim tree limbs regularly).] 2) Then actually **measure**, record, and monitor their own performance (i.e., the performance of individual LBOCs) to these standards. 3) And finally, actually respond when their performance was below standard. I once asked a Bell Labs old-timer, "So, did the career advancement of a local Bell company manager actually depend in any way on their performance against these standards?" Answer was, "You bet it did!!!". Interesting to ask your current electrical power provider, for example, what their **published, quantitative standards** for power service outages are? Or ask your airline frequent flyer plan when you call in seeking award seats what their published, quantitative standards are for providing you an award seat on the day you want to go. ------------------------------ From: Michael D. Sullivan Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 06:56:59 GMT hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote: >> Home computers didn't *exist* until the mid 1970s. The Altair 8800 >> plans ran in PE's Jan 1975 issue. The APPLE-II didn't exist until >> late 1977. > But businesses and schools were heavy users of time sharing by the mid > 1960s -- using dial-up Teletypes. Businesses were also getting dial > up dataphone services between computers. Very large businesses were moderate users of time sharing by the mid 1960s, and smaller and midsize businesses were not. Schools were not. Commercial time sharing only got started in the 1962-64 time frame. Dartmouth began its time sharing system -- the first academic TSS, the first step into TSS for its vendor, GE, and the first broadbased TSS -- in 1964. I used it starting in 1965, when my high school got a single TTY connected to it, either the only or one of a very few high schools connected to time sharing in the mid 1960s. (Dartmouth professors Kemeny and Kurtz invented BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) for the Dartmouth TSS in 1964; it initially allowed only 26 variables (A-Z), and no string variables. By 1965, it allowed A-Z and A0-Z9, or 286 variables, as well as matrices, so it became a bit more useful.) By the late 1960s, time-sharing was much more widespread and was heavily used. But not in the mid-60s. >> The Bell system, like any regulated monopoly was _guaranteed_ a >> certain minimum rate-of-return on investments. > Regulated monopolies were NOT _guaranteed_ a minimum rate of return. > If they were Western Union would not have gone broke nor would the > railroads. In some locations of the Bell System and even today, > regulators mandate below-cost services for social reasons or deny rate > increases. They are not, and have not been, guaranteed anything strictly speaking. They are allowed a "reasonable" rate of return for purposes of ratemaking, which has traditionally meant they have been permitted to set a target of X% return on used-and-useful investment in plant, where X is based on cost of capital plus a kicker. The standard ratemaking formula is that R, the "revenue requirement," equals X times the used-and-useful investment in plant (after depreciation) plus reasonable expenses plus depreciation. That revenue requirement is then used as the target in setting rates for a plethora of services, some of which are priced below "cost" for many reasons and others are priced above "cost" to offset them. So if the PUC says that rural residential subscribers pay the same as urban, residential service is below "cost" (i.e., doesn't pay the required return), and other services are priced to make it up -- i.e., business and long-distance services. The problem for regulators and regulated telcos comes when the services that are providing the subsidy for below-cost residential service are subject to competition. If you were MCI in the late 1960s, you would have targeted your service (after getting into the business by saying you'd be providing specialized microwave service for truck lines) to businesses paying phone bills providing the highest subsidies for residential service. This was referred to as cream-skimming. It only makes sense. The problem is, it upset all of the factors on which the traditional ratemaking scheme depended. MCI could offer long-distance service for half the price of AT&T because AT&T was using the excess revenues of long-distance service to keep residential and rural service prices low to please regulators. When MCI came along, AT&T had to lower the prices of its most profitable services, but it couldn't raise the price of residential service due to those darn regulators. As a result, AT&T earned below its regulatorily-established rate of return. It wasn't guaranteed, after all. Of course, AT&T then got the FCC to move the subsidies around by creating access charges, and then there was the divestiture, which changed everything. Now AT&T was in the same position as MCI with respect to subsidies. >> Very, *very* rarely was 'how' that money was spent questioned. > *NO*, is _not_ true. > As Pat pointed out, Ma Bell was under constant scrutiny by the news > media and govt and advocates. Shareholder gadflies made a point of > disrupting stockholders' meetings every year. Activists filed > constant lawsuits against the system. I can't speak to the issues raised by shareholders, or activists' suits. There were, however, many regulatory inquiries into the "costs" incurred by the telcos and the pricing of their services. The FCC was very diligent in trying to prevent abuse of the telcos' ability to classify costs. Unfortunately, cost is a very complex concept in the area of regulated telephone service, because a given expense is used to support many different services. How the cost is allocated is a can of worms: in the old days, AT&T had an incentive to allocate costs to long-distance, to keep that price as high as possible within its rate of return and keep local residential service low, but with competition, telcos have an incentive to allocate costs to the services least subject to competitition, keeping those prices as high as possible. Back in the old days before MCI, when there was no real long-distance competition, the FCC conducted an inquiry into the below-cost pricing of TELPAK service (a high-volume long-distance service used by large businesses and the government) and was unable to come to any definitive conclusions after ten years because the costs were as slippery as eels, so it defused the issue by allowing resale and shared use of long-distance circuits, including TELPAK, and AT&T responded by discontinuing TELPAK, which it had to do because otherwise resale of TELPAK would have eliminated its captive retail long-distance traffic. And AT&T's TELPAK tariff was, in turn, a response to the FCC's 1959 "Above 890" decision that allowed private entities to set up private microwave networks instead of having to use AT&T for long-distance service. The Above 890 and Resale and Shared Use decisions presaged the end of the traditional Bell System and set the stage for our current competitive telecom arena. I can't think of a single shareholder gadfly or consumer lawsuit that had a comparable effect. There were much more significant cost allowance and allocation issues in other regulated industries, such as whether to allow electric utilities to charge consumers for the humongous cost of constructing nuclear power plants before they were producing electricity. >> Can you name a feature/capability introduced by the Bell System after >> 1970 that was not present in third-party-provided, customer-owned, PBX >> equipment first? The only one I can think of is the "picturephone". Your one example is off. AT&T introduced the picturephone at the NY World's Fair in 1964 and the Bell System never introduced it into service at all, as far as I can tell. Does your phone show pictures? Michael D. Sullivan Bethesda, MD (USA) (Replace "example.invalid" with "com" in my address.) ------------------------------ From: jtaylor Subject: Re: Pod Slurping Dangerous to Your Company Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 09:37:18 -0300 Organization: MCI Canada News Reader Service Tony P. wrote in message news:telecom24.279.9@telecom-digest.org... > BIOS passwords are only as good as that little CR-2032 lithium > battery. Remove or short the battery and kiss passwords goodbye. I believe this to be incorrect. On Ebay there is a brisk trade in BIOS password chips, as well as kits for soldering them onto the motherboard. More trouble than shorting a jumper, to be sure, but it requires more equipment, and that equipment is unlikely to have any other reasonable purpose; being discovered with such tools would be a dead giveaway. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 10:56:10 -0500 From: The Wondrous One Reply-To: The Wondrous One Subject: Re: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Card Holders I read the article and could not find any evidence of phishing as defined at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing at all. Was something left out of the article? I see evidence of fraud due to lax security, lack of data protection, lack of verifying "authorized" agents, but no phishing. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: 'Phishing' as strictly defined, was probably the wrong term to use. Phishing is when one individual does social engineering to obtain details from other (usually not as smart individuals is it not? What is the correct term for building in a 'back door' or amending the software to cause the computer to do things it was not intended to do? 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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Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V24 #280 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Jun 20 22:32:01 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 14848150D6; Mon, 20 Jun 2005 22:32:01 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #281 Message-Id: <20050621023201.14848150D6@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 22:32:01 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.1 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_REMOVE, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Mon, 20 Jun 2005 22:32:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 281 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Adelphia Executives Get Sent to Prison (Lisa Minter) Think Small if You Want to Hack Big! (Lisa Minter) Don't Bet on Web Gambling Crackdown (Lisa Minter) Re: Bell Divestiture (Tony P.) Re: Bell Divestiture (Lisa Hancock) Re: ISP Hunting (J Kelly) Re: Ping Between PC Through PABX (Dave Garland) Re: Ping Between PC Through PABX (T. Sean Weintz) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (John Levine) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (Bob Vaughan) Re: Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan? (Lisa Hancock) Re: '80' Country Code (Robert Bonomi) Re: DSL Speed (Choreboy) New Virus: Was _He_ Actually Guilty? $1000 For Opinion (Pat Townson) Last Laugh! Cruise Info With a Toll Free Number (Steven Lichter) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Adelphia Executives Sent to Prison Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 19:33:20 -0500 Adelphia Head, Son Sentenced in Fraud Case By ERIN McCLAM, Associated Press Writer John Rigas, who turned a $300 investment a half-century ago into cable behemoth Adelphia Communications Corp., was sentenced to 15 years in prison Monday for his role in the looting and debt-hiding scandal that pummeled the company into bankruptcy. Rigas' son Timothy, 49, who like his father was convicted last year of bank fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy, was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Sand could have sentenced both men to life. The sentences are among the harshest handed down in any U.S. court since the fall of Enron in 2001 touched off a rash of corporate scandals that rocked the markets and have cost investors billions of dollars. Raising the possibility that the frail, 80-year-old Rigas could die behind bars, U.S. District Judge Leonard Sand said the sentence might be cut short if Rigas serves at least two years and prison doctors believe he has less than three months to live. "This is a tragedy lacking in heroes," the judge said. Adelphia prosecutors had accused the Rigases of using complicated cash-management systems to spread money around to various family-owned entities and as a cover for stealing about $100 million for themselves. They were accused of spending the money on a lengthy list of personal luxuries. Prosecutors said John Rigas had ordered two Christmas trees flown to New York for his daughter at a cost of $6,000, ordered as many as 17 company cars and had the company buy 3,600 acres of timberland -- for $26 million -- to preserve the view outside his Pennsylvania home. Worse still for investors, the company collapsed into bankruptcy in 2002 after it disclosed a staggering $2.3 billion in off-balance-sheet debt that prosecutors said was deliberately hid by the Rigases. "Our intentions were good. The results were not," Timothy Rigas told the judge. Adelphia, founded by John Rigas in tiny Coudersport, Pa., and the lifeblood of that town for 50 years, now operates under bankruptcy protection in Greenwood Village, Colo. The nation's fifth-largest cable company, Adelphia has more than 5 million customers in 31 states and Puerto Rico. Sand declined to force the two men to pay restitution, noting the family has already agreed to forfeit more than $1.5 billion to settle regulatory charges. At the most dramatic moment of a hearing that stretched nearly three hours Monday afternoon, John Rigas slowly rose from his chair just before being sentenced, shuffled to a lectern and addressed the judge, speaking slowly and softly. "In my heart and in my conscience, I'll go to my grave really and truly believing that I did nothing but try to improve the conditions of my employees," he said. He said repeatedly he had led a blessed life, and even thanked members of the military "that fought for America and gave their lives because they believed in America and what it stood for." "If I did anything wrong, I apologize," he said. Just after he was sentenced, the elder Rigas, hunched forward in his seat, held his right hand over his mouth and dabbed at his eyes and nose with a white tissue. The judge, while expressing concern for Rigas' age and poor health, made repeated reference to the investors who had placed their trust in the Rigas family, many losing their retirement security. At one point, Rigas' lawyer Peter Fleming tried to convince Sand that his client believed deeply in philanthropy, loved the town of Coudersport and was "obviously scared to death of prison." The judge interjected: "Do you see what he did? What he did to Coudersport, what he did with assets and by means which were not appropriately his?" "To be a great philanthropist with other people's money really is not very persuasive," Sand said. Both men were ordered to report to prison Sept. 19, but lawyers told the judge they planned to file motions for their clients to stay out of prison pending appeal. One defense lawyer said he hoped the U.S. Bureau of Prisons would assign John Rigas to the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minn. The sentences come as some of the highest-profile white-collar fraud cases in the post-Enron era lurch toward their conclusions in courts around the country. Just Friday, former Tyco International Ltd. CEO L. Dennis Kozlowski and former CFO Mark Swartz were convicted of looting that company of $600 million. They are to be sentenced in August. Next month, former WorldCom Inc. chief Bernard Ebbers faces sentencing for orchestrating the $11 billion accounting scandal at that company. Already 63, Ebbers could spend the rest of his life in prison. In October 2004, former Rite Aid Corp. attorney Franklin C. Brown, 76, was sentenced to 10 years for his conviction on several crimes related to the drugstore chain's accounting scandal. Five months earlier, former Rite Aid CEO Martin L. Grass was sentenced to eight years in prison. A former finance executive of Dynegy Inc., Jamie Olis, was sentenced in March 2004 to 24 years in prison for his role in a fraudulent accounting scheme at the Houston-based energy company. In Birmingham, Ala., jurors have deliberated for a month in the fraud case against fired HealthSouth Corp. CEO Richard Scrushy. And three top Enron executives will go on trial in Houston early next year. In the Adelphia case, a second Rigas son, Michael, the company's former executive vice president for operations, faces retrial in October after jurors were deadlocked on securities fraud and bank fraud charges against him. Former Adelphia assistant treasurer Michael Mulcahey was tried with the Rigases but was acquitted of all charges. As he left the courthouse in Manhattan and faced a phalanx of reporters and cameras, John Rigas was asked how it felt to watch his son be sentenced to prison. "It just crushes me," he said. Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Think Small in Order to Hack Big Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 19:35:45 -0500 Hackers score big by thinking small, experts say By Andy Sullivan A recent computer security breach that left 40 million credit cards vulnerable to fraud shows how online criminals are scoring big by thinking small, experts said on Monday. Cybercriminals are increasingly crafting more focused attacks with a potential for profit as they target one or two companies at a time, rather than blasting out Internet virus attacks across the globe, according to security experts. The payoffs can be enormous. MasterCard International said on Friday that an outsider gained access to as many as 40 million credit and debit cards from CardSystems Solutions Inc., a payment processor. A MasterCard spokeswoman said on Monday that the attacker had placed a malicious computer script on CardSystems computers. In Israel, police are investigating a massive case of industrial espionage that used a "Trojan horse" computer program to copy confidential information from some of the country's top businesses. Security vendors say such attacks are increasingly common. "We have seen several examples of targeted, manually crafted Trojans that people write and implement for a very small number of companies," said Aladdin Security Vice President Shimon Gruper. MessageLabs chief technical officer Mark Sunner said that since January the company has seen a 150 percent increase in attacks that only target one or two companies. Experts said there are a number of reasons behind the shift. Playful hackers looking for kicks could write viruses that plagued companies and computers around the world but brought them no financial return. They have been elbowed aside by organized criminals, often based in Eastern Europe, who are motivated by profit and willing to launch a sustained, sophisticated assault. Targeted attacks have another key advantage: they are usually small enough to stay off the radar of Internet security firms that are looking for broader attacks. That gives the high-tech criminals the time to research a company thoroughly before trying to penetrate it. "You know there's specific technology, a piece of intellectual property, how much money is in their accounts," said RSA Security Inc. CEO Art Coviello. "That's the advantage -- you have a little bit more knowledge." Attackers can then send individual, personalized e-mails to the target company's employees, or pose as an IT administrator who needs to install a software update. Once in, they can use simple spyware programs to pick up passwords, account numbers and other valuable information. "When you see a focused attack like this, this is kind of your worst-case scenario. These are people who are going to actually do something with those credit cards once they get them," said Mike Gibbons, a Unisys Corp. vice president and former FBI cybercrime chief. E-mail viruses have lost their teeth now that more people are using antivirus software properly, said Alfred Huger, senior director of engineering at the antivirus provider Symantec Corp. While old viruses continue to circulate, "they're background noise," he said. At the same time, Microsoft Corp. has patched the most gaping holes in its Windows operating system and companies have learned to install those patches quickly, said John Pescatore, a vice president at the consulting firm Gartner Inc. Identity thieves who used to go through trash bins to find credit-card receipts have learned that it's more worthwhile to extract such information from companies that collect it. "Two years ago I would say one of the things you should do is shred your trash. Now that is completely obsolete advice," said Bruce Schneier, chief technical officer for Counterpane Internet Security Inc. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have said on a few occassions that the phisher people would begin to grow impatient at the limited success to be had by sending a piece of fraud email to someone asking for bank account information, etc. Smart phisher people now get the same files wholesale, from the source at the bank, wherever. I mean, which makes more sense to you; typing in a jillion letters purporting to be from one bank or another, hoping that an occassional fool will respond with the details you need, or putting on a delivery man's uniform and dealing with some disinterested fool of a clerk in a bank somewhere? Which method will get the phisher person more and better results? Oh sure, they still send out those letters also, I got six or eight requests today alone from 'Bank of America' and 'Pay Pal' which I promptly pitched out, but why not just go for the full load all at once, as happened last week? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Don't Bet on Web Gambling Crackdown Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 19:37:04 -0500 By Andy Sullivan Online-poker company PartyGaming has warned investors that the U.S. government could interfere with its operations, but observers say that's about as likely as drawing four aces in a game of five-card stud. U.S. law enforcers are unlikely to directly pursue PartyGaming -- which plans a public stock offering in London next week -- or any other online-gambling company due to unresolved legal questions, several industry experts said. "It's so remote that the chances approach those of being hit by lighting," said Joseph Kelly, a professor of business law at the University of Buffalo law professor who has helped other countries draft online-gambling rules. The U.S. Justice Department says several laws that prohibit interstate gambling apply to the Internet as well, and it intends to prosecute violators. Under pressure from the Justice Department, services like Visa and PayPal have blocked payments to gambling sites, while media outlets and search engines like Yahoo Inc. have declined to run their ads. That hasn't stopped millions of U.S. citizens from placing bets on offshore Web sites like PartyGaming's PartyPoker.com, which is based in Gibraltar. Online casinos like Bodog.com sponsor glitzy Las Vegas conferences, and other payment services like e-gold have stepped in to handle the business that Visa and eBay Inc.'s PayPal are leaving on the table. PartyGaming plans to go public by June 27 in what promises to be the London Stock Exchange's largest IPO in four years. The company warned last week that anti-gambling efforts by the United States could make it difficult to advertise and collect payments, and could even result in jail time for company officials. The Justice Department has so far prosecuted only one online gambling operation, an Antiguan sports-betting Web site run by a U.S. citizen, in 2000. Justice Department officials said that several other companies have pleaded guilty before going to trial. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in November 2002 that the 1961 Wire Act, which forbids interstate telephone betting, only applies to sports-betting operations, not online casinos or poker rooms. The World Trade Organization ruled last year that the United States's anti-gambling stance violates international trade agreements, a decision the U.S. government has appealed. "I think the Department of Justice is just sending out all these messages to avoid a confrontation where they might have to prove it in a court of law," said Frank Catania, a former gambling regulator for the state of New Jersey who now works as a consultant to the industry. Justice Department officials said they haven't brought more cases because of a lack of resources, not a shaky legal foundation. Even if the Fifth Circuit's decision stands, two other 1960s-era anti-gambling laws can be used against Internet gambling sites, they said. Efforts to pass an anti-gambling law that applies specifically to the Internet have stumbled in Congress since at least the late 1990s amid a thicket of competing interests: horse racing, dog racing, state lotteries, Indian casinos and anti-gambling crusaders. Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl (news, bio, voting record) is expected to introduce another anti-gambling bill soon. Though the bill will be updated "to reflect the explosive growth of the industry," PartyGaming's upcoming IPO is not a factor, a Kyl spokesman said. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Organization: ATCC Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 17:39:42 -0400 In article , kd1s@nospamplease.cox.reallynospam.net says: > In article , TELECOM Digest > Editor noted in response: >> Chicago is where the BBS concept got started. Randy Seuss and Ward >> Christianson started the very first one. (In yesterday's Digest, >> Robert Bonomi mentioned how Randy had such hassles with Illinois Bell >> getting the lines he needed). Bell and Howell computers _were_ Apple >> ][+ machines except for the lable on the front of them, and many of >> them, such as mine, had not only a 300 baud modem card on a slot >> inside, but an 'expanded memory' card as well, to go in another slot >> inside, and a 'clock card' plus a couple of floppy disk driver >> cards. I would guess that by 1980 there were a dozen or more BBS's >> operating, all in Chicago or nearby suburbs, and almost none anywhere >> else in the world. >> The Library had their BBS (BELmont 5-3200) based on Bill Blue's >> *People's Message System* as did a guy in Downers Grove, IL. Rogers >> Park ABBS (973-ABBS [2227]) used some other kind of software for >> Apple as I did with my original BBS called 'First Choice' >> (SHEldrake-3-0001). But I soon decided to work with a different BBS >> 'skeleton' to make 'Lake Shore Modem Magazine' on my other phone >> line SHEldrake-3-0002 instead, and Lake Shore Modem Magazine went on >> line in July, 1981. Tim had his Tandy Model 4 operating "Think BBS" >> (based on the old IBM slogan) and Randy Suess kept plugging along >> with his CBBS, until he eventually decided to go 'multi-user' with >> his Chinet system, which was when all the trouble with the telephone >> company got started, in 1984 I think. Ward and Randy were not only >> first with the BBS concept, I think they were first with the >> multi-user concept also (regards home or residential service). There >> was a guy in Oak Park, Illinois using his Tandy Model-4 to run a >> FIDO multi-user node around that same time, but I never did much >> care for the FIDO people; they all seemed so prissy and >> authoritarian, IMO. I did maintain a user group out of his node for >> six months or so, but the FIDO bosses decided to ex-communicate his >> entire system, so that was good enough for me: I had been off and on >> using Usenet (via Portal) for a couple years at that point and >> decided to give up on FIDO and use Usenet exclusively instead, and I >> did that mostly with my Zenith Z-19 terminal and modem. From Randy >> Suess one day I got a bunch of other very good working terminals and >> modems as well; that was around 1983. I finally shut down my BBS >> (Lakeshore Modem Magazine) on December 31, 1985 for good. PAT] > Interesting about the TRS-80 Model 4 multi node. If I'm not mistaken > that was running SIDOS. > Here is the story behind SIDOS: > In 1982 a friend of mine convinced me to spend hard earned money on a > modem so I could connect the the NYBBLINK BBS here in Providence. A > month after I'd gotten the modem NYBBLINK went down for good. > So my friend Don Lambert decided to re-wire his Model III so that it > had multiple RS-232 ports, and ISAM file system, as well as all sorts > of communications enhancements to TRSDOS, enough so that it was a > different O/S once he got through with it. After a few months of the > two of us brainstorming and testing the crap out of the system Syslink > was born. > SIDOS was then run on two other BBS's in RI that spawned a major > communications player. PowerNet and PowerCor both ran SIDOS. The > operator of PowerCor then procured through some nefarious means a DEC > MicroVax II and formed Intelecom Data Systems, or IDS. > The assets of IDS were rolled up and became Conversent Communications. > All because I didn't want to be stuck with a modem and nothing to > connect to locally. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Very, very interesting. There are a lot > of good stories, mostly untold, from the early years of BBS'ing and > networking. I'll bet an entire newsgroup could be started and maintained > with just such accounts. But was SIDOS running on Model 4 as it came > out of the factory? My friend with the Think BBS and the guy in Oak > Park who ran a FIDO node brought their boxes home from Radio Shack, > and plugged them in and started their sites within a day or two; no > adaptation needed that I recall them saying. PAT] It's entirely possible that Don sold SIDOS to Tandy. I was out of the loop at that point. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Date: 20 Jun 2005 13:36:29 -0700 Michael D. Sullivan wrote: > I used it starting in 1965, when my high school got a > single TTY connected to it, either the only or one of a very few high > schools connected to time sharing in the mid 1960s. > By the late 1960s, time-sharing was much more widespread and was heavily > used. But not in the mid-60s. Our school system got it in 1967. Is that "mid" or is that "late" 1960s? In any event, the point is that the demand data lines were growing and the Bell System was responding to that demand. Of course let's remember Teletype (a Bell unit) developed a faster machine (the 33 and 35) that used the new ASCII code. > The problem for regulators and regulated telcos comes when the > services that are providing the subsidy for below-cost residential > service are subject to competition. ... > ... in the old days, AT&T had an incentive > to allocate costs to long-distance, to keep that price as high as > possible within its rate of return and keep local residential > service low ... Many people have stated that long distance rates were higher to cross-subsidize residential service. But where is that documented as to _original_ reliable source? Further, what was the dollars/percentage impact of that cross-subsidy? That is, how much more would residential service have cost and how much less would long distance? Does anyone have an authoritive source? I must note that accurate cost allocation between a "toll call" and a "local call" would be extremely difficult in the old Bell System because the infrastructure was so tightly integrated. More distant calls would get transferred to Long Lines for microwave or carrier transmission, but even Long Lines used local Bell buildings. Telephone operators handled local problems and toll connections. And of course there was the charge to handle to the last mile to the destination. More importantly, toll calls were charged by distance, not real cost. As Pat noticed, it was dangerous work to maintain transmission units in the Rocky Mountains and people were killed doing it. I dare say toll calls that passed over such locations didn't have to pay anywhere near what it cost to make that possible. Conversely, toll calls in highly developed corridors could use high volume microwave or coax circuits that were quite cheap on a per-call basis. I think this mileage rate was where the real "cream skimming" occured. As noted, MCI did not offer operator or directory assistance or even enough circuits to guarantee good quality. They had the comfort of AT&T there as a backup. Under those conditions, it was very easy for MCI to unfairly undercut AT&T on prices and make AT&T "look bad". > Your one example is off. AT&T introduced the picturephone at the NY > World's Fair in 1964 and the Bell System never introduced it into > service at all, as far as I can tell. Does your phone show pictures? I believe Picturephone was offered in public service as a trial in some location, as typical Bell System practice of trying out something new in a single location to see how it works. It was also offered to some govt agencies as a tryout. A revised system had magnifiers to allow transmittal of documents on a table rather than just people. Obviously it failed to attract much attention. I believe the Bell System then offered picture-conferencing service, where a conference room was set up with cameras, microphones, and monitors. A whole group of people could meet this way. I believe this was moderately successful and still offered today by private vendors. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: In Chicago, PicturePhone service was made available to businesses for a couple years, and at the Illinois Bell Headquarters building downtown, they had a 'shopping mall' sort of arrangement for the general public to use. You could go in these little booths and use a picture phone with a speed dialer which had all the stores around town who subscribed to picture phone service in its repretoire. You could go into the little stall entitled 'flowers' and press the button on the phone for the various florists in town with picture phone. In a couple seconds, the screen would light up and the clerk in the store would be seen with all the flowers for sale. You could place your order via PicturePhone after you had seen the various arrangement they had. You would then be asked by the merchant to punch in your credit card number and hold the card clearly in front of the camera (on your end) so the clerk could see it as she rang up the sale. Or, go to the PicturePhone set up for the 'housewares department' or the 'clothing department' and do the same thing. But it only lasted a few months (the 'shopping mall' at the phone company offices) and then was closed. PAT] ------------------------------ From: J Kelly Subject: Re: ISP Hunting Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 15:45:09 -0500 Organization: http://newsguy.com Reply-To: jkelly@*newsguy.com On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 15:47:15 -0600, DevilsPGD wrote: > I'm eyeballing dialup access through ISP.COM which offers $8.95 - 56K > Regular Dial-up -- any thoughts, good or bad? Can I do better? > Any thoughts? I used ISP.com for a couple years, I dropped them last month when I switched to using Newsguy.com (I already had been using Newsguy for years for Newsgroup access) to save a few bucks. I used ISP.com over Newsguy at first due to the extra POPs available that Newsguy didn't have. I no longer need those extra POPs. ------------------------------ From: Dave Garland Subject: Re: Ping Between PC Through PABX Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 18:24:30 -0500 Organization: Wizard Information It was a dark and stormy night when yuniarsetiawan@gmail.com wrote: > Both computer has been connected to the pabx, but they just can't > ping/communicate each other. Does the PABX have modems of its own? Or is it just providing a connection between the two computers? If the latter, when you run a term program (such as hyperterm) do you see 'RING' at the recipient computer? Does it answer when given the appropriate AT command? (Assuming it uses the Hayes command set.) Do they establish a connection? (If you get garbage, make sure speed, parity, word length settings are the same for both computers.) Try setting a very low speed (e.g. 1200 bps) for a start. Don't use a speed >28.8K. ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Re: Ping Between PC Through PABX Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 15:43:55 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com yuniarsetiawan@gmail.com wrote: > Hi there, > I'm trying to connect two computer using PABX. So the PABX will be act > like a hub. This is the diagram: > [Computer 1] -> [Modem] -> [PABX] <- [Modem] <- [Computer 2] > Both computer using Windows 2000 and both has sucessfully connected to > the PABX after doing dial up. But why can't I ping between those > computer? > Both computer has been connected to the pabx, but they just can't > ping/communicate each other. Is there anything wrong here? It is > possible to do this, right? > Thank you so much for the response. Not clear exactly how you are doing this. I assume one computer is dialing the other thru the PBX? And you are using RAS? How are IP addresses being assigned? ------------------------------ Date: 20 Jun 2005 20:26:02 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > By daisy chaining your power strips, you are causing the first ones > in the chain to be overloaded and possibility the circuit it's > plugged into. And it is a fire waiting to happen. Really? Wall warts are pretty low power. The big one for my laptop is 150W, the little ones for the phone TA and the ethernet switch are more like 20W. Plug in 10 of them and you're unlikely to draw more than 500W. Every power strip I've seen is fused for at least 1000W. Where's the overload? ------------------------------ From: techie@tantivy.tantivy.net (Bob Vaughan) Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 21:03:28 UTC Organization: Tantivy Associates In article , Howard S. Wharton wrote: > Pat, > By daisy chaining your power strips, you are causing the first ones in > the chain to be overloaded and possibility the circuit it's plugged into. > And it is a fire waiting to happen. > Howard S. Wharton > Fire Safety Technician > Occupational and Environmental Safety Services > State University of New York at Buffalo If the first power strip has a circuit breaker, then everything downstream of that strip is limited to the current available on that single power strip. It dosen't matter how many strips are plugged together, the current limitation will stay the same, unless there are smaller circuit breakers downstream, in which case the limitation will decrease at that point. I do note your concern about overloading, and I will note that it's not so much that the circuit will be overloaded, as it is that the single outlet on either the first power strip, or the wall may become overloaded. What matters most is the condition of the wiring, including the power strips, and it is for that reason that I suggest using quality power strips, from a known vendor, and avoiding the generic plastic strips made in the third world. Keep your power strips in good condition, and dispose of them when they show signs of abuse or wear. Strips that have broken ground pins should be disposed of, or have the plugs replaced. Large loads such as laser printers or copiers, should be plugged into wall circuits if at all possible. Wall outlets that are worn, or otherwise abused, should be replaced by a electrician, or other qualified person. I prefer not to daisy chain strips together, but instead pick a high quality strip to be the master, and use that to feed the other strips, thus distributing the load across multiple outlets on the power strip. It would also be a good idea to mount your power strips to a board, desk, wall, or other fixed object to keep the wiring from becoming a tangled mess. Try to keep your wall warts separated enough so that cooling does not become a problem. Do not pile stuff on top of power strips. Do not let wall warts get buried in the carpet. Your typical wall wart is going to draw between .1amp and 2amps, although some may draw more, check the nameplate rating. A quick sampling of the wall warts in my office comes up with the following: radio charger 24w(0.2amp), ethernet switch 18w(0.15amp), cellphone charger 6w(0.05amp), wireless bridge 30w(0.25amp), dsl bridge 18w(0.15amp), Palm charger 18w(0.15amp), etc ... Total load of the 6 wall warts in this example = 108w = 0.9a A generic power strip is normally protected with a 15amp circuit breaker. Since many of the power strips available today are cheap plastic junk, I would advise that those be derated even further, to no more than 10amps. Your normal wall circuit is going to be either 15 or 20amps. A circuit should not be loaded to more than 80% of it's rated capacity under normal usage, which says that the maximum load on a 15amp power strip should be no more than 12 amps, assuming that nothing else is plugged into the same circuit. In a house, there may be 1-12 (or more) outlets on a single circuit depending on when the home was built, how cheap the builder was, and if the homeowner/handyman/etc has added outlets without proper capacity planning. P(watts) = I(current)*E(voltage), so: 2400w @120v = 20a 1800w @120v = 15a 1440w @120v = 12a 1200w @120v = 10a 600w @120v = 5a 120w @120v = 1a 12w @120v = 0.1a As you can see, it takes a lot of your typical wall warts to overload a normal household circuit, or even a cheap generic power strip. -- Welcome My Son, Welcome To The Machine -- Bob Vaughan | techie @ tantivy.net | | P.O. Box 19792, Stanford, Ca 94309 | -- I am Me, I am only Me, And no one else is Me, What could be simpler? -- [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I changed my setup today to use the three outlets on the back of a UPS to connect the three power strips each separately. Then I used the two newly gained outlets on the power strips (where strip 2 was fed from 1 and where strip 3 was fed from strip 2) to plug in the two devices which lost their home when the plugs on the back of the UPS were taken over. It seems to have balanced the load a little better. PAT] ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan? Date: 20 Jun 2005 10:45:06 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com FrankBooth wrote: > I'm trying to buy a cell phone WITHOUT A PLAN. I am sending it to a > relative in another country where they will activate it. Cingular is presently advertising a plan that costs 10c per minute of use plus $1/day of any use. I don't know what the phone will cost or added fees. For very occassional users this might work out better than a contract. Note that some providers do offer cheaper plans (ie $20/month) but don't push them and you must ask firmly about them. Radio Shack had some phones for sale that came with a pay-as-you go plan. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: '80' Country Code Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 18:23:24 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , Joseph wrote: > On Sun, 19 Jun 2005 09:11:42 -0000, bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com > (Robert Bonomi) wrote: >> In article , Geoff >> wrote: >>> I was looking at my call logs and have an international call from >>> Spain and another country. The number for the other country starts >>> with '803' but there is no country with an '80' and '803' dialing >>> code. Any ideas where the call came from? >> Best guess: somewhere around Helsinki, Finland. > That is a pretty wild guess considering that country codes beginning > with an 8 are usually in the far east. > Finland's country code is 358! No shit, sherlock. Now, how many digits are displayed on the caller ID? How many digits does Finland use for local numbeers? What is the 'city code' for Helsinki? Can you *GUESS* what happens when you take an 8-digit local number, prefix it with the Helsinki city code ('0'), prefix that with country code 358, and show only the last 10 digits? > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Or maybe it was _area code_ 803, > which I think is somewhere in the Carolinas? PAT] Correct, NPA 803 is the Columbia SC vicinity. OP said, however, it was an international call. If we assume he _didn't_ know what he was talking about, there is no reason to assume that the digits were reported accurately either, and thus, the call could have come from (literally) _anywhere_. *grin* [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And what if we assume that _you_ don't know what you are talking about either, Sherlock. Then does anything mean anything at all? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Choreboy Subject: Re: DSL Speed Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 15:18:33 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Robert Bonomi wrote: > In article , > Choreboy wrote: >> On dialup, the farm couldn't negotiate modem speeds quite as fast as I >> could in town. I assumed the limitation was in the wire. > It is, and it isn't. > How far can you yell, and be heard? How far can you talk on a radio, > and be heard? It seems to me that dialup and DSL would be analagous to two ways of yelling across a field; like two ways of yelling, DSL and dialup use the same medium. Naturally, Walter Winchell could speak faster on the radio than FDR could address a crowd outdoors without loutspeakers because FDR's high frequencies wouldn't reach the audience. If Winchell had a way of yelling by which he could stand without a microphone and read the audience a newspaper article in the time it took FDR to say, "We have nothing to fear..." that sounds like saying DSL can be 50 times faster than dialup simply because it "yells" differently. I wish I knew more about it. >> That's why I was amazed to see that DSL seems to use the wire in the >> same way as dialup. Was I wrong to think the reason dialup data >> rates were slower at the farm was that the wire to the CO is >> longer? > "Sort-of". It wasn't the actual _length_ of the wire. If you build > the wire differently, you will get different effects > over the same length of wire. Think what would have happened if RG-59 hadn't been invented. Everybody would have used RG-6, which looks nearly the same but attenuates uhf much less. With better reception there would have been more uhf stations and less demand for cable. > One of the things that goes on, when you run a _pair_ of wires for any > distance is that there is a capacitance between the two wires. this is > proportional to the length of the run, inversely proportional to the > distance between the wires, the thickness of the insulation, and a > number of other factors. Capacitance between the signal-carrying > leads has the effect of 'blurring' the signal. which puts a limit on > how fast you can "effectively" change signal levels, to pass > information from one end to the other. > The _methodology_ used to accomplish the signalling determines where, > and to what extent, that 'blurring' degrades the transmission. > DSL _does_ suffer degradation with distance, just as analog POTS > modems do. If you have 15-18,000 feet of wire between you and the > C.O., you will get much slower maximum rates than if you are less than > a thousand feet from the C.O. > DSL uses a differnt _kind_ of signalling -- which calls for > differently designed transmitters and receivers -- to get the higher > data rate on the bare wires. >>> This is how DSL works, it bypasses the _voice_ switching gear. It >>> uses just the 'bare wire' between the telco C.O. and the customer >>> premises. The special eqipment in the C.O. puts a *different*kind* >>> of signal on the wires, that the "DSL modem" at the customer >>> premises understands, and the 'modem' at the customer location does >>> 'something similar', to communicate back to that special equimpent >>> at the Telco offices. Between the CO and the customer, isn't voice service just bare wire? Are there inline amps? If so, they could preemphasize high frequencies. I don't understand what kind of signal dsl uses to carry so much more data than dialup without needing broadband cable. >> What's the downside for the telco? With the right pricing, I think >> they could tap a huge market for increased bandwidth. > Connected to _what_? "Multi-megabit bandwidth" to the C.O. is > -useless-, unless there is "something interesting" to connect to. > Who needs the capability for a dozen or two (or more) simultaneous > voice telephone calls from their house? For anything other than > voice, you have to have that 'something else' available for access at > the point that that high-capacity circuit from the customer premises > terminates. So many people have more than one phone line that I must dial ten digits to call across the street. At times, a family might benefit by being able to talk on several channels while keeping others open. > Getting _to_ the C.O. from the customer premises is the 'cheap' part. > Whether it is POTS, or DSL, or whatever. Amortizing the equipment > over, say, 5 years, you're talking about circa $3-5 dollars/month. > The 'wire' cost, amortized over the useful life (50 years+) of the > wire pair, is of the same order, maybe a bit lower. > All the rest of the money goes towards "what to do with it, _after_ it > arrives at the C.O." For voice, to calls to a number in a different > C.O, you have to have inter-connects to get the call _to_ that C.O. > If there isn't a direct trunk circuit, you have to go through another > layer of switches (called "tandems") -- at least one, possibly several > -- to get to the destination 'local' switch. 7 figure price-tags, per > unit. > Same thing connecting to the 'internet' -- you generally have to 'pay > somebody' to pass your traffic on to the rest of the world, Costs for > that depend on "how much" traffic you have. More traffic, more > cost. and bigger, more expensive equipment. At one time, automobiles were for wealthy people who lived near factory-operated dealerships. Going sixty was sport. The ability to go twenty would have made a big difference at farms, where distances were great and public transportation not available. Price and repair obstacles kept farmers out of the market. Henry Ford spent years developing a vehicle suited to rural budgets, roads, and mechanics. Once it was available, it became so useful that it revolutionized rural America. I think at one point Ford was selling more vehicles than all the other brands in the world. If you have a second phone line for your modem, a $25 ISP, Direct TV, and perhaps other Bellsouth services, they will give you a price where going to DSL will lower your costs. However, for somebody whose only cost is $100 a year for an ISP, DSL would add $500 to his annual budget. Many feel they can't afford it, just as farmers before the Model T felt that they had no choice but to stick with slow, inconvenient horses and wagons. You say internet costs depend on how much traffic you have. With DSL the customer can download about 150 kB/s. Suppose budget DSL were 10% as fast. That would still be three times faster than dialup, and the phone would be available. Budget customers would add much less to peak use, and they would probably download less in the course of a week; with one-tenth the speed, you're less likely to download big files you don't need. I think there's a big untapped market for DSL, and it could be profitable at a low price. Cadillac did not introduce the Model T, and I guess Bellsouth doesn't want to offer existing customers something cheaper. ------------------------------ Date: 19 Jun 2005 18:37:06 -0400 From: Patrick Townson Subject: New Virus: Was He Actually Guilty? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Poor Michael Jackson. For a couple weeks, viruses were being circulated via a bogus press release which claimed he 'committed suicide'. Now a new virus is making the rounds purporting to be a questionairre on his guilt or innocence, and offering prizes to the people who venture their opinions on same. PAT] ====================== Michael Jackson Not Guilty! Do You Agree? ************************************************* Michael Jackson is NOT Guilty on all accounts! Do you agree with the Jury's decision? Give us your opinion and get a free* $1,000 gift card. http://onlinerewardsnews.com/c/93482/mjyprrwwwwr2(deleted) -------------NEW Exclusive Offers!!!------------ Get FREE Movie Tickets for One Year! A $500 value–yours FREE! http://onlinerewardsnews.com/c/93483/mjyprrwwwwr2(deleted) Claim your FREE* $500 Costco, Sam Club or Smart & Final gift Card. http://onlinerewardsnews.com/c/93484/mjyprrwwwwr2(deleted) [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And lots of other 'valuable prizes' deleted here in the interest of preventing viruses from spreading around. The (deleteds) above all take you to a nasty thing. I think these guys are going to milk that Michael Jackson debacle for all its worth; there are always some greedy fools who will click on anything they see if they think they can get a prize. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Steven Lichter Reply-To: Die@spammers.com Organization: I Kill Spammers, Inc. (c) 2005 A Rot in Hell Co. Subject: Last Laugh! Cruise Info With a Toll Free Number Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 00:20:23 GMT Thought the Digest readers might be interested in the following; I found the best way to contact them is via a payphone: > Are you still interested? If so you must call toll free 1.866.702.0972 > to reserve before the promotion ends. The packages are open dated so > you can use a few days at a time or all at once. You do not even need > to know when you are going to go since you have up to two full years > to select travel dates. The only good spammer is a dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? (c) 2005 I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot in Hell Co. ------------------------------ 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 V24 #281 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Jun 21 15:05:12 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 5763D15084; Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:05:12 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #282 Message-Id: <20050621190512.5763D15084@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:05:12 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.4 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:05:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 282 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Companies Want _US_ to Pay For Their Mistakes (Lisa Hancock) Which Video Plug-in For Skype? Video4Skype.com/vSkype.com? (totojepast) EFFector 18.17: Congress Considers PATRIOT Expansion Behind (M Solomon) EFFector 18.18: Action Alert - Urge Congress to Reform PATRIOT (Solomon) CFP: IEEE in Co-operated International Conf on Comp Intell (Secretary) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (AES) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (Robert Bonomi) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (ellis@no.spam) Re: Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan? (Paul) Re: Monitor/Recorder for Residential Power Line Outages? (Scott Dorsey) Re: DSL Speed (Lisa Hancock) Re: '80' Country Code (Robert Bonomi) Re: '80' Country Code (Colum Mylod) Re: '80' Country Code (Gerard Bok) Re: Ping Between PC Through PABX (Barry Margolin) Re: Pod Slurping Dangerous to Your Company (ellis@no.spam) Re: Bell Divestiture (Robert Bonomi) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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 Subject: Companies Want _US_ to Pay For Their Mistakes Date: 21 Jun 2005 09:23:30 -0700 I called my credit card carrier to check my balance. Instead of getting the automated answer, I was connected right through to a real person. He tried hard to pitch me with credit card insurance costing $100. ABC News, when reporting on the recent multiple credit card information thefts, also mentioned the availability of consumer insurance to protect against ID theft. They said it took a victim 600 hours of time to correct everything and the insurance would cover lost wages. This really irked me. It's the companies' fault, not ours. Why shouldn't the credit card companies assume all costs for identify theft and card theft? After all, in most cases it was their sloppiness? Do they aggressively go after violators? No, they do not, and small guys get away with it (ie photocopying a credit card/driver's license then using it fraudently). Those people aren't prosecuted "too much trouble". Does anyone support the companies? [public replies please] ------------------------------ From: totojepast Subject: Which Video Plug-in For Skype? Video4Skype.com or vSkype.com? Date: 21 Jun 2005 04:38:35 -0700 Would you recommend me Video4Skype.com or vSkype.com for Skype video calls? Is it possible to use these plug-ins when only one of the participants uses a webcam? ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 23:44:37 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: EFFector 18.17: Congress Considers PATRIOT Expansion EFFector Vol. 18, No. 17 May 26, 2005 donna@eff.org A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ISSN 1062-9424 In the 333rd Issue of EFFector: * Congress Considers PATRIOT Expansion Behind Closed Doors * Court Date Set for Showdown Over BnetD Videogame Software * EFF Supporters Liberate Digital TV * MiniLinks (8): PWN3D by the Feds * Administrivia http://www.eff.org/effector/18/17.php ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 23:45:35 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: EFFector 18.18: Action Alert - Urge Congress to Reform PATRIOT, EFFector Vol. 18, No. 18 June 9, 2005 donna@eff.org A Publication of the Electronic Frontier Foundation ISSN 1062-9424 In the 334th Issue of EFFector: * Action Alert: Urge Congress to Reform PATRIOT, Not Expand It! * Transparent Lobbying for E-voting Reform This Week * Tor Named One of the Year's Best Products * Fighting Infringement on Campus Peer-to-Peer Networks: EFF White Paper Helps Universities Understand Their Options * MiniLinks (15): Three Notes Bad * Administrivia http://www.eff.org/effector/18/18.php ------------------------------ From: Conference Secretary Subject: CFP: IEEE in Co-operated International Conference Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 17:32:17 +1000 CALL FOR PAPERS International Conference on Computational Intelligence for Modelling, Control and Automation 28 - 30 November 2005 Vienna, Austria http://www.ise.canberra.edu.au/conferences/cimca05/ In co-operation with: IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Conference Proceedings will be published as books by IEEE in USA Sponsored by: European Society for Fuzzy Logic and Technology - EUFLAT International Association for Fuzzy Set in Management and Economy - SIGEF Japan Society for Fuzzy Theory and Intelligent Informatics - SOFT Taiwan Fuzzy Systems Association - TFSA World Wide Web Business Intelligence - W3BI Hungarian Fuzzy Association - HFA University of Canberra Jointly with International Conference on Intelligent Agents, Web Technologies and Internet Commerce http://www.ise.canberra.edu.au/conferences/iawtic05/ Honorary Chair: Lotfi A. Zadeh, University of California, USA Stephen Grossberg, Boston University, USA The international conference on computational intelligence for modelling, control and automation will be held in Vienna, Austria on 28 to 30 November 2005. The conference provides a medium for the exchange of ideas between theoreticians and practitioners to address the important issues in computational intelligence, modelling, control and automation. The conference will consist of both plenary sessions and contributory sessions, focusing on theory, implementation and applications of computational intelligence techniques to modelling, control and automation. For contributory sessions, papers (4 pages or more) are being solicited. Several well-known keynote speakers will address the conference. Conference Proceedings will be published as books by IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering) in USA and will be indexed world wide. All papers will be peer reviewed by at least two reviewers. Topics of the conference include, but are not limited to, the following areas: Modern and Advanced Control Strategies: Neural Networks Control, Fuzzy Logic Control, Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Control, Model-Predictive Control, Adaptive and Optimal Control, Intelligent Control Systems, Robotics and Automation, Fault Diagnosis, Intelligent agents, Industrial Automations Hybrid Systems: Fuzzy Evolutionary Systems, Fuzzy Expert Systems, Fuzzy Neural Systems, Neural Genetic Systems, Neural-Fuzzy-Genetic Systems, Hybrid Systems for Optimisation Data Analysis, Prediction and Model Identification: Signal Processing, Prediction and Time Series Analysis, System Identification, Data Fusion and Mining, Knowledge Discovery, Intelligent Information Systems, Image Processing, and Image Understanding, Parallel Computing applications in Identification & Control, Pattern Recognition, Clustering and Classification Decision Making and Information Retrieval: Case-Based Reasoning, Decision Analysis, Intelligent Databases & Information Retrieval, Dynamic Systems Modelling, Decision Support Systems, Multi-criteria Decision Making, Qualitative and Approximate-Reasoning Paper Submission: Papers will be selected based on their originality, significance, correctness, and clarity of presentation. Papers (4 pages or more) should be submitted to the following e-mail or the following address: CIMCA'2005 Secretariat School of Information Sciences and Engineering University of Canberra, Canberra, 2616, ACT, Australia E-mail: cimca@canberra.edu.au Electronic submission of papers (either by E-mail or through conference website) is preferred. Draft papers should present original work, which has not been published or being reviewed for other conferences. Important Dates: 31 August 2005 Submission of draft papers 30 September 2005 Notification of acceptance 21 October 2005 Deadline for camera-ready copies of accepted papers 28-30 November 2005 Conference sessions Special Sessions and Tutorials: Special sessions and tutorials will be organised at the conference. The conference is calling for special sessions and tutorial proposals. All special session proposals should be sent to the conference chair (by email to: masoud.mohammadian@canberra.edu.au) on or before 5th of August 2005. CIMCA'05 will also include a special poster session devoted to recent work and work-in-progress. Abstracts are solicited for this session. Abstracts (3 pages limit) may be submitted up to 30 days before the conference date. Visits and social events: Sightseeing visits will be arranged for the delegates and guests. A separate program will be arranged for companions during the conference. Further Information: For further information either contact cimca@ise.canberra.edu.au or see the conference homepage at: http://www.ise.canberra.edu.au/conferences/cimca05/default.htm Organising Committee Chair: Masoud Mohammadian, University of Canberra, Australia International Program Committee: H. Adeli, The Ohio State University, USA W. Pedrycz, University of Manitoba, Canada A. Agah, The University of Kansas, USA T. Fukuda, Nagoya University, Japan J. Bezdek, University of West Florida, USA R. C. Eberhart, Purdue University, USA F. Herrera, University of Granada, Spain T. Furuhashi, Nagoya University, Japan A. Agah, The University of Kansas, US E. André, Universität Augsburg, Germany A. Kandel, University of South Florida, USA J. P. Bigus, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA J. Liu, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong A. Namatame, National Defense Academy, Japan K. Sycara, Carnegie Mellon University, USA B. Kosko, University of Southern California, USA T. Baeck, Informatic Centrum Dortmund, Germany K. Hirota, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan E. Oja, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland H. R. Berenji, NASA Ames Research Center, USA H. Liljenstrom, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden A. Bulsari, AB Nonlinear Solutions OY, Finland J. Fernandez de Cañete, University of Malaga, Spain W. Duch, Nicholas Copernicus University, Poland E. Tulunay, Middle East Technical University, Turkey C. Kuroda, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan T. Yamakawa, Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan J. Liu, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong A. Namatame, National Defense Academy, Japan A. Aamodt, Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Norway International Liaison: Canada and USA Liaison: Robert John, De Montfort University, UK Nasser Jazdi, Institut für Automatisierungs- und Softwaretechnik, Germany Europe Liaison: Dr. Eng. Djamel Khadraoui, Centre de Recherche Public, Luxembourg Frank Zimmer, SES ASTRA, Luxembourg Asia Liaison: Renzo Gobbin, University of Canberra, Australia R. Amin Sarker, ADFA, Australia Local Arrangements and Public Relation: Zohreh Pahlavani, AVIP, Austria C Meier, Australia Publicity: C. Meier, Australia Zohreh Pahlavani, AVIP, Austria Publication: Masoud Mohammadian, Australia In cooperation with: University of Canberra, (Masoud Mohammadian) Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, (José-Luis Fernández-Villacañas Martín) University of Guelph, (Simon X. Yang) ------------------------------ From: AES Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 20:40:38 -0700 Organization: Stanford University Daisy chaining plug strips anywhere in your lab gets you a citation from the governmental health and safety inspectors whenever they come around on an inspection visit, as they do periodically in my university. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 07:32:04 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , Howard S. Wharton wrote: > Pat, > By daisy chaining your power strips, you are causing the first ones in > the chain to be overloaded and possibility the circuit it's plugged into. > And it is a fire waiting to happen. How many 50 watt wall-warts can you daisy-chain off a strip with a 15 A breaker in it, before the built-in breaker overloads and trips? I just surveyed a batch of my wall-warts. The AC draw is mostly between 21 and 35 watts each. with one 50 watter in the mix. It's going to take, oh, about _30_ of those to equal the draw of my toaster. Assuming that they are drawing at their maximum rated load. The rat's nest of wires is an invitation to trip over, agreed. The "reliability" of such an arrangement is also laughable. But an _overload_ problem?? Or a fire-safety hazard?? Who do you think you're kidding? I've got one set-up with over _forty_ devices, running of a medium-large (1500VA) UPS. The instrumentation built into the UPS says the total draw is about 60% of rated capacity. There's one 12-outlet strip, two 8-outlet strips, and five 6-outlet strips, involved, in total. With two pieces of gear plugged directly into the UPS itself. The strips aren't all hooked into a single chain, but there is one series that is 3 long. Should I mention that the set-up _passed_ City fire-safety inspection. ------------------------------ From: ellis@no.spam Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 01:01:18 -0000 Organization: S.P.C.A.A. In article , Howard S. Wharton wrote: > By daisy chaining your power strips, you are causing the first > ones in the chain to be overloaded and possibility the circuit > it's plugged into. And it is a fire waiting to happen. Every power strip I own has a breaker in it. Please explain just show daisy chaining power strips to power low wattage power supplies cubes is able to overload anything without tripping the breakers. http://yosemitenews.info/ [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think the problem would arise when the circuit breaker goes out of order, for example, melted into place where it should not be. I had a very old (too old to inquire about refund/replacement) Radio Shack device: 13.5 volts by 3 amps, DC power. I called it my little 'power house'. I had it sitting out in my garden shed, plugged in, providing power to a CB radio out there. In addition to an assortment of plugs allowing me to draw current from it in various ways (to run radios, etc), it also had a 'reset button' on the back side, when an overload or a short circuit somewhere caused it to trip. With little squat legs, it sat on a table back there, and had a 'cigarette lighter' style plug on the front it it (such as in an automobile) to either plug in a cigarette lighter or one of the more permanent plugs used to operate a cell phone or a ham/CB radio in a car. One day I went out to the shed to get the bird food (seeds and corn I put out for the little guys by their nests in my back yard); I could literally _smell_ that thing cooking when I went in the shed. I reached up to the outlet and pulled the plug. The power house was _red hot_ ... just just warm, but _hot_. The little red reset switch on the back seemed to be stuck. Looking inside the unit, I found the plastic from the reset switch was melted where the breaker was supposed to be. That seems to be the problem; not that the strips would overload and blow their reset buttons, but that the reset buttons would be old and faulty and fail to work as they should. Fortunatly, my garden shed did not burn down, but as an experiment I took a few newspapers and laid them on top of the red hot power supply. The papers did get a few scorch marks on them. That same day I cut the head (outlet plug in) off the power house (so no one else [the garbage collectors for example] would be tempted to retrieve it and try to use it), then ditched the whole thing in the trash. For another $39.00 (Radio Shack's price in 1990 approximatly) I can afford another one easier than I could afford to rebuild my walk-in shed behind my house. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Paul Subject: Re: Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan? Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 07:55:23 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com > I'm trying to buy a cell phone WITHOUT A PLAN. I am sending it to a > relative in another country where they will activate it. I saw this $49 GSM phone recently advertised in a magazine: http://www.mobalrental.com/gsm/ -- Paul ------------------------------ From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: Monitor/Recorder for Residential Power Line Outages? Date: 21 Jun 2005 11:01:21 -0400 Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000) Robert Bonomi wrote: > In article , AES > wrote: >> In article , >> bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) wrote: >>> It should be obvious that any such device will need to be powered by >>> some sort of UPS. Whereupon you may as well use a UPS. >> I don't see why a simple power monitor/logger gadget can't be battery >> powered, or more precisely, line powered with battery power to carry >> it over the hopefully rare occasions when the line power fails, > That battery "back-up" _is_ a UPS. A "simpleton" DC-output > variety, but a UPS nonetheless *grin* Guys, this is a simple commercial product, and it's sold by a bunch of companies. Fluke makes a very nice one. You can probably rent one from a local test equipment rental, or you might be able to call your power company and have them leave one on your line for a week or two. --scott "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: DSL Speed Date: 21 Jun 2005 09:44:01 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Choreboy wrote: > It seems to me that dialup and DSL would be analagous to two ways of > yelling across a field; like two ways of yelling, DSL and dialup use > the same medium. A very simple analogy might be yelling, then using a megaphone to yell. The megaphone doesn't "amplify" your voice, but directs it a little better so it can be heard further. Adding this analogy, imagine yelling across a field crowded with people talking as opposed yelling across an empty field. The speech of the other people will interfere with your yelling. Another analogy might be signalling across a field using colored flags. In all cases you are using reflected light. But the ability to see the distant flag will vary based on the color of the flag. A person holding a green flag standing in front of trees will be difficult to discern compared to someone holding an orange flag. The _carrier_ of your signal--the reflected color of the flag, is different and different carriers are more efficient. Let's note that the limitation isn't just in the plain copper wire that comes out of your telephone. There's also a limitation in the telephone company facilities. A voice conversation doesn't need much "room" (bandwidth) to be clearly understood. (Notice if you play music over a telephone that sounds terrible at the other end -- that's because the phone doesn't have the bandwidth for the more complex sounds of music compared to voice). Anyway, the telephone company has your voice share space with other voices. While this is fine for voice, it limits data transmission to 56K. > Between the CO and the customer, isn't voice service just bare wire? > Are there inline amps? If so, they could preemphasize high > frequencies. That varies tremendously from customer to customer. > I don't understand what kind of signal dsl uses to carry so much more > data than dialup without needing broadband cable. It uses digital. Crisp, to the point. As mentioned above, an orange flag transmits 'better' than a green flag. Both are using the same medium. Digital transmits better and can make better use of a pair of wires. > If you have a second phone line for your modem, a $25 ISP, Direct TV, > and perhaps other Bellsouth services, they will give you a price where > going to DSL will lower your costs. However, for somebody whose only > cost is $100 a year for an ISP, DSL would add $500 to his annual > budget. Many feel they can't afford it, just as farmers before the > Model T felt that they had no choice but to stick with slow, > inconvenient horses and wagons. AFAIK, if you get DSL, you no longer need a second phone line and everything can come over your DSL line. That is, you can talk on the phone and use the computer at the same time, and get faster computer response. The pricing of services is a function of marketing, not technology. A consumer has to choose the best price/service suited to their needs. Sometimes a bundled package may end up still cheaper than a la carte. > You say internet costs depend on how much traffic you have. That's not really accurate. Internet costs whatever you want it to cost. If need your response RIGHT NOW, you should get a higher speed connection. If you're doing a lot of work and don't like the long waits, you should get a higher speed connection. If you don't mind slow response time, you can make do as is. Plenty of people do. There are even higher speed connections than DSL, although at some point you're limited by the overall Internet traffic and the response time of remote sites. Indeed, often times what appears as slow connections is actually not related to your own connection, but at intermediate or distant ends. > I think there's a big untapped market for DSL, and it could be > profitable at a low price. Cadillac did not introduce the Model T, > and I guess Bellsouth doesn't want to offer existing customers > something cheaper. What is being offered is changing rapidly as technologies change and new equipment is installed. Many cable companies offer service over their lines as well in competition with Bell companies. Some Bell companies are offering "FIOS" which is extra high speed. Some of us whose modems keep getting fried by lightning are making do with 14.4. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: '80' Country Code Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 01:42:33 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , John R. Levine wrote: >> with '803' but there is no country with an '80' and '803' dialing >> code. Any ideas where the call came from? > You can download the current country code list from the ITU's web > site, and it says that code 800 is international freephone, and all > other 80x are unassigned and reserved. > Possibly the number was screwed up in your logs, which certainly > happens. Or maybe Pat's right and a leading 1 fell off on the way and > it was really from South Carolina. > Regards, > John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY > http://www.taugh.com > PS: Helsinki? Yeah, John, HELSINKI. 358 0 {mumble} Guess what happens if the first 2 digits get cut off. Seemed more likely than somewhere in Bangladesh (country code 880), wherever city code '3' is. ------------------------------ From: Colum Mylod Subject: Re: '80' Country Code Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 12:26:03 +0100 Organization: Me own Reply-To: cmylod@despammed.com On Mon, 20 Jun 2005 18:23:24 -0000, bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) wrote: > Can you *GUESS* what happens when you take an 8-digit local number, > prefix it with the Helsinki city code ('0'), prefix that with country > code 358, and show only the last 10 digits? Helsinki changed its code from 0 to 9 when the access code changed the other way -- 9 to 0. I think it's more likely that the OP is seeing a national number with the international flag set en route, perhaps it's a French or Spanish "derived"/"virtual" number or a bad presentation number. In many countries national calls are routed abroad and back to take advantage of settlement rates. This can cause local numbers to be sent with mixed flags and truncated lengths. But we can only guess unless the OP can nab the caller the next time. New anti-spam address cmylod at despammed dot com ------------------------------ From: bok118@zonnet.nl (Gerard Bok) Subject: Re: '80' Country Code Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:34:06 GMT On Mon, 20 Jun 2005 07:10:16 GMT, Geoff wrote: >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Or maybe it was _area code_ 803, >> which I think is somewhere in the Carolinas? PAT] > I do not think so because for calls within the US, the number is displayed > as (803) xxx-xxxx. This number was displayed as +803xxxxxxxxx. My 2 cents: Commonly the + prefix is used to indicate an international number. But it could also be used to indicate a number that has more digits than the display allows to show. Maybe the caller was calling from the 803 area while passing more digits than just your number ? Easy to test, I guess. Dial your own number, add 1234 and see how the display handles it :-) Kind regards, Gerard Bok ------------------------------ From: Barry Margolin Subject: Re: Ping Between PC Through PABX Organization: Symantec Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 20:55:16 -0400 In article , yuniarsetiawan@gmail.com wrote: > Hi there, > I'm trying to connect two computer using PABX. So the PABX will be act > like a hub. This is the diagram: > [Computer 1] -> [Modem] -> [PABX] <- [Modem] <- [Computer 2] > Both computer using Windows 2000 and both has sucessfully connected to > the PABX after doing dial up. But why can't I ping between those > computer? > Both computer has been connected to the pabx, but they just can't > ping/communicate each other. Is there anything wrong here? It is > possible to do this, right? > Thank you so much for the response. One of them has to run PPP server software, i.e. it has to act like the terminal server that an ISP has connected to its dialup modems. Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu Arlington, MA *** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me *** ------------------------------ From: ellis@no.spam Subject: Re: Pod Slurping Dangerous to Your Company Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 00:56:16 -0000 Organization: S.P.C.A.A. In article , jtaylor wrote: > On Ebay there is a brisk trade in BIOS password chips, as well > as kits for soldering them onto the motherboard. > More trouble than shorting a jumper, to be sure, but it requires > more equipment, and that equipment is unlikely to have any other > reasonable purpose; being discovered with such tools would be a > dead giveaway. If you are already opening up the computer, why not just steal the hard drive? http://yosemitenews.info/ ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 01:07:05 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , wrote: > Robert Bonomi wrote: >> Revisionist history at work. Computer "time sharing" did not exist >> _at_all_ before mid-1964. > It was running at Dartmouth College -- the pioneer -- in 1963. You apparently know more about DTSS than _Dartmouth_ does. I checked the Dartmouth history before posting that. Yes, Dartmouth invented time-sharing, I acknowledged that. Development _started_ in 1963, but it wasn't operational until May of 1964. (It supported an entire *TWO* terminals in its original form.) Quote: "In September, 1963, under the direction of mathematics professors John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, a project to establish a time-sharing system at Dartmouth got under way. The fruits of this project were BASIC, a simplified programming language, and a time-sharing system -- using the GE-235 and Datanet-30 computers. This system began operations in May, 1964. In 1965, Dartmouth placed off-campus terminals in secondary schools in the area. " By September '64, they had upped the capacity to a whopping 7 terminals. >> _WHAT_ business?? In Randy's case it *was* just a hobby. No income, >> no membership 'fees', no nothing. All the expenses came out of his >> personal pocket. > Repeat: A non-profit is still considered a business. Who paid for > it wasn't the issue. Bell was correct to charge business rates for > this service. Your opinion does not agree with the official rulings of the Illinois regulatory authorities. Thus, it is safe to say that in the jurisdiction where the events occurred, you are quite wrong. >> Speed of call set-up is irrelevant to the number of >> _connected_and_running_ calls that can be handled > Sorry, but faster speed makes for a more efficient system. Faster > speed allows a more sophisticated route selection and alternative > paths. Control and connection need not even be in the same physical > place. Connection facilities could be shared among a wider audience > because the fast connection gear can make use of many more choices. Yes, there are benefits (a few 'direct', many 'indirect') to 'speed'. *NO*, they do not relate to the *number* of established calls that can be handled simultaneously. Putting a bigger engine in a Corvette will let it "go faster"; it is utterly irrelevant, however, to increasing the number of passengers that that car can carry. Faster control elements does _not_ let you handle more calls, unless you had an insufficient number of control elements to begin with. The limiting constraint on call-volume handling is "elsewhere". What "faster speed" does is let you handle the *same* load of calls with fewer control elements. This is not an increase in 'capacity'; merely a decrease in 'unit cost'. >>> Regulated monopolies were NOT _guaranteed_ a minimum rate of return. > Others confirmed that statement. Some people have seen franchise documents with fixed numbers specified. One can even find regulatory agency filings where it was argued that the franchise-guaranteed rate was insufficient, due to the present rate of inflation. >> Western Union and most of the railroads were 'regulated common >> carriers'. Not regulated monopolies. > The Bell System was a common carrier. Railroads had "monopolies" in > their service territories; You've never seen tracks for two competing railroads running side-by-side? Tell me, in 1950, say, who had the 'monopoly' for passenger service between New York City, and Chicago? Or for freight between those locations, for that matter? Bell System held _exclusive_ franchises -- including the exclusive right to run telephone cabling on public right-of-way -- for telephone operations in many areas of the country. In other areas, Central Telephone, or United Telephone (later, United Telecom) held that franchise. Where such exclusive franchise existed, they were a de jure monopoly. as well as being a common- carrier. >> Hint: the SxS _was_not_capable_ of *native* touch-tone operation, a >> front end translation from touch-tone to pulse was required. > Right. That contradicts your claim that Touch Tone actually saved the > company money. Repeating for the illiterate: 'native' touch-tone operation was substantially cheaper for the telco than was 'native' pulse dialing. They retrofitted dial-to-pulse conversion on SxS switches so that they could 'pre-convert' customers to touch-tone before the switch was converted to native touch-tone dialing. This was a "short-term" expenditure of money now, to maximize "long-term" benefits. By having a significant "installed base" of touch-tone users *already*in*place* when the C.O. was converted to _native_touch-tone_ handling, they could get by with far fewer sets of digit decoders (dial or pulse). With 'pulse' tieing up the decoders for average more than five times as long as touch-tone, there _was_ significant benefit to be obtained. getting even 20% of the calls on touch-tone, meant a _halving_ of the number of decoder elements required. The intent was to 'spend a little money now' to 'save a _lot_ of money later'. Especially since that 'spend a little money now' could be done by making the customers pay for _that_ money, when the 'savings' did *not* have to be given back. It can be entertaining, in a morbid sort of way, to look at just _how_much_ money the ILECs were raking in -- from that $1.00-1.50/month/line 'touch-tone surcharge' -- vs. the 'piddling cost' of installing the 'added cost' items (touch-tone converters) in SxS switches. the return on investment will make your head spin. In article , Michael D. Sullivan wrote: > Your one example is off. AT&T introduced the picturephone at the NY > World's Fair in 1964 and the Bell System never introduced it into > service at all, as far as I can tell. Does your phone show pictures? Picturephone *was* offered to the public, in 'limited' markets. for a few years. It wasn't really marketed, because it was still quasi-experimental, the picture part worked only on local calls. but it was available. A few exchanges in Chicago, similarly in Los Angeles. And, I believe, at least one east-coast location as well. In article , TELECOM Digest Editor noted in respnse to : > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My grandfather got me on at Standard > Oil in the credit card office in Chicago in June, 1967, _not_ in 1978! > His boss had gotten me the phone room job at University of Chicago > when I was in high school in 1959; grandpa was with the company as an > executive at Whiting Refinery for several years, but did not think I > should be doing refinery work. You see, I am not really all that good > at doing hard labor jobs. Grandpa's boss was going to put me to work > in the superintendent's office either in Whiting or maybe send me back > to Neodesha, KS (where grandfather had worked at one time); I thought > I should stay around Chicago where my friends were so he suggested the > marketing department or credit card processing office would be good > for me. > In the credit card processing office in 1967 they had IBM 370 > computers Historical note: the IBM 370 line was announced in June, 1970, with first customer shipments the following spring. http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PR370.html No doubt Standard Oil was one of the early S/370 customers. > In 1970 I guess, I do not remember for sure, they brought around > terminals, sat them on the desks and told people 'Do not Touch These' > until we explain what to do, which was about a month later. We were > told these would be replacing some of the job functions that had been > done manually before. PAT] Probably '71 or '72. After upgrade to a S/370 gave them the horsepower to run 'online' CICS. The 360 didn't have the speed/power to do all the records work that SO threw at it, _and_ handle the overhead of on-line processing. In article , wrote: > Michael D. Sullivan wrote: >> I used it starting in 1965, when my high school got a >> single TTY connected to it, either the only or one of a very few high >> schools connected to time sharing in the mid 1960s. >> By the late 1960s, time-sharing was much more widespread and was heavily >> used. But not in the mid-60s. > Our school system got it in 1967. Is that "mid" or is that "late" > 1960s? That would be generally considered "late" in the decade. Typically, x0-x3 was 'early', x4-x6 was 'mid', and 'x7-x9' was 'late. Sometimes people would blur things, and do things like call x6-x7 'late mid". > In any event, the point is that the demand data lines were growing and > the Bell System was responding to that demand. The data-line growth at that time was the proverbial 'drop in the bucket' compared to a decade later. > Of course let's remember Teletype (a Bell unit) developed a faster > machine (the 33 and 35) that used the new ASCII code. Nit: Teletype Corp. was, since 1930, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Electric. Teletype also had competition in the manufacture of such devices. GE, among the 'big name' manufacturers. Also people like Xerox, Northeast Electronics, and even Fujitsu. >> The problem for regulators and regulated telcos comes when the >> services that are providing the subsidy for below-cost residential >> service are subject to competition. ... >> ... in the old days, AT&T had an incentive >> to allocate costs to long-distance, to keep that price as high as >> possible within its rate of return and keep local residential >> service low ... > Many people have stated that long distance rates were higher to > cross-subsidize residential service. But where is that documented as > to _original_ reliable source? Is Judge Greene, or the FCC, enough of an authority? > Further, what was the dollars/percentage impact of that cross-subsidy? > That is, how much more would residential service have cost and how > much less would long distance? Does anyone have an authoritive > source? After divestiture, there is a documented hard-dollar amount that the IXCs had to pay LECs _per_customer_ to make up the 'lost revenues' from the prior LD to local service subsidation. A declining amount over the years, but initially several dollars per month/line. placing it at circa 20-25% of what customers were billed for basic local service. It was set initially to be roughly equivalent total revenues to what the local service operations got in 'subsidy' from the long distance operation. ------------------------------ 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 V24 #282 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Jun 21 20:47:08 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 6285F150E1; Tue, 21 Jun 2005 20:47:07 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #283 Message-Id: <20050622004707.6285F150E1@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 20:47:07 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.7 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Tue, 21 Jun 2005 20:45:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 283 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Book Review: Guide to Telecommunications - Annabel Dodd (P. Townson) NFL in Talks With Sprint, Others For Wireless Video (Telecom dailyLead) Re: New Virus: Was He Actually Guilty? (hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (Dan Lanciani) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (Scott Dorsey) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (Dale Farmer) Re: Bell Divestiture (Wesrock@aol.com) Re: Bell Divestiture (John Levine) Re: Bell Divestiture (hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com) Re: Bell Divestiture (Tony P.) Re: XO Communications (Scott Dorsey) Re: Which Video Plug-in For Skype? Video4Skype.com/vSkype.com? (Dean M.) Re: Ping Between PC Through PABX (T. Sean Weintz) Re: Ping Between PC Through PABX (Dave Garland) Re: Monitor/Recorder for Residential Power Line Outages? (Lisa Hancock) Re: Companies Want _US_ to Pay For Their Mistakes (mc) Re: '80' Country Code (Mark Crispin) Re: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards Affected (mc) Re: Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan? (Joseph) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Book Review: Essential Guide to Telecommunications - Dodd Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 16:02:28 EDT A new reference book for all of you I highly recommend: Annabel Z. Dodd's The Essential Guide to Telecommunications, Fourth Edition It is described in detail at http://telecom-digest.org/doddbook.html and it can also be ordered direct from the publisher, Prentice Hall. http://www.phptr.com/title/0131487256 is a detailed description of the book, and chapter 1 has been placed on line here in .pdf format. Ms. Dodd is a professor of telecommunications in the Boston area, and she has been on the Digest mailing list for a long time, and I under- stand will be contributing to our discussions here from time to time. Please check out her credentials at http://telecom-digest.org/doddbook.html then also check out her web site and welcome her to our discussions. PAT ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 12:37:30 EDT From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: NFL in Talks With Sprint, Others for Wireless Video Telecom dailyLead from USTA June 21, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22505&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * NFL in talks with Sprint, others for wireless video deals BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * More Web surfers switch to broadband * BSkyB offers broadband TV service * Cable companies eye privatization to ease phone entry * Worldwide Wi-Fi hotspots surpass 65,000 USTA SPOTLIGHT * In the Telecom Bookstore: Broadband Facts EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Cisco unveils AON REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * High Court rejects property rights case * Adelphia's Rigases get stiff sentences Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22505&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 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What exactly is supposed to be 'wireless video'? Isn't that just a wireless cam (such as I have a couple of) one for the back yard birds and one for my weather station http://weatherforecast.us.tf or is it something a bit more elegant and fancy? My cameras and the associated base stations only cost about a hundred dollars each, with a range of a couple hundred feet or so. PAT] ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: New Virus: Was He Actually Guilty? Date: 21 Jun 2005 10:32:31 -0700 Patrick Townson wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Poor Michael Jackson. For a couple > weeks, viruses were being circulated via a bogus press release > which claimed he 'committed suicide'. Now a new virus is making > the rounds purporting to be a questionairre on his guilt or > innocence, and offering prizes to the people who venture their > opinions on same. PAT] How much money did they spend to investigate and prosecute Jackson? How much money are they spending to investigate and prosecute virus producers? Likewise, what are they doing to investigate and prosecute the black market vendors in stolen credit cards (see today's NYT at http://telecom-digest.org/nytimes.html )? P.S. FWIW, Lifetime Channel is running a movie about a teen boy who gets hooked on Internet porn. IMHO their stuff is not accurate and is just overwrought melodramas. To put it another way, are kids really committing suicide as a result of "Internet bullying"? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I am told the prosecution of Michael Jackson took _BIG $$_. So big, the county had to borrow money from other accounts to be able to do any other prosecutions at all this year. Poor prosecutor ... for a dozen years now he has had his heart set on winning that case. It looks like he struck out again; but I am certain with some meditation and effort and the cheering squad at Fox News behind him, he will try again in another year or so. Regards virus producers, I don't think they are doing anything. ICANN would not approve of it, and anyway, as the hotshot netters would say, we cannot dictate how other users run their sites, and the term 'obnoxious' is undefined in their minds. Interesting you should comment on Lifetime Channel; IMO they are tied for last place with Fox News. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 14:03:55 -0400 (EDT) From: Dan Lanciani Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks fatkinson@mishmash.com (Fred Atkinson) wrote: > I suspect that some of you are experiencing this or have already > solved it. So, maybe one of you can tell me where I can find > something to solve this problem. > I've accumulated so many devices on my home network (and some devices > that are not network related as well) that power strips are an issue. > Most of these devices have the big 'calculator charger' type of power > supply that plugs directly into the AC outlet. > I've been looking for some type of power strip that has eight or more > outlets that are spaced far enough apart that you can plug all of > these things into them without overlapping each other. > Searching the Internet, I've not found anything like this. The best > is one of those long power strips that you usually install on the wall > as a permanent part of the house electrical system. I think there > might be something much better. Or maybe someone has a better > suggestion. > Any ideas? Others have already mentioned the mini extension cords and power strips specially designed for wall warts. (I just picked up two 8-outlet Power Sentry strips at Walmart for less than $8 each. These have three outlets on one side with extra space and five on the other with more normal space. They are cheaply constructed and are not surge suppressors, the latter being a feature. :) Before the market developed those targeted solutions I became rather creative with ordinary 3-way taps. These can be used both to elevate one wall wart enough to clear another in the next outlet space and to move one or more wall warts off to the side. This all works best when the outlet strip is in an outlet-up orientation. Cheap ungrounded 3-way taps come in three basic styles: ones which do not rotate the top tap outlet relative to the plug, ones that rotate it 90 degrees clockwise, and ones that rotate it 90 degrees counter-clockwise. (The distinction between the last two is important when you are dealing with polarized plugs.) It helps to have an assortment of styles on hand. Heavier grounded T-style taps are also useful when (obviously) you have a (less common) grounded wall wart and when you want a slightly more robust mounting and/or side-hanging arrangement. Dan Lanciani ddl@danlan.*com ------------------------------ From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks Date: 21 Jun 2005 14:39:57 -0400 Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000) Fred Atkinson wrote: > I've accumulated so many devices on my home network (and some devices > that are not network related as well) that power strips are an issue. > Most of these devices have the big 'calculator charger' type of power > supply that plugs directly into the AC outlet. These are called "Wall Warts." > I've been looking for some type of power strip that has eight or more > outlets that are spaced far enough apart that you can plug all of > these things into them without overlapping each other. One thing you can do is run several devices off of one power supply, if you have enough of them with the same voltage demands. But I think what you want is "Dr. Ferd's Wart Remover." --scott "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ From: Dale Farmer Organization: The fuzz in the back of the fridge. Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 20:17:43 GMT Fred Atkinson wrote: > I suspect that some of you are experiencing this or have already > solved it. So, maybe one of you can tell me where I can find > something to solve this problem. > I've accumulated so many devices on my home network (and some devices > that are not network related as well) that power strips are an issue. > Most of these devices have the big 'calculator charger' type of power > supply that plugs directly into the AC outlet. > I've been looking for some type of power strip that has eight or more > outlets that are spaced far enough apart that you can plug all of > these things into them without overlapping each other. > Searching the Internet, I've not found anything like this. The best > is one of those long power strips that you usually install on the wall > as a permanent part of the house electrical system. I think there > might be something much better. Or maybe someone has a better > suggestion. > Any ideas? For two pin wall warts, I use these oddball extension cords they sell for Christmas tree lights. One plug connected to the wall, and then over the next 15 or so feet of cable, there are three separate plug blocks with three sets of plugs. This easily accepts six wall warts, and if I have wall warts that are not polarized, three more can usually be added. You can also buy more expensive power strips that have outlets spaced further apart. Dale [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Don't you have any trouble with those blinking off and on every couple seconds? I used those one time specifically to make an automatic 'intercom buzzer'. I wired a couple telephone sets in series with a battery-eliminator in the middle to do the intercom talking path, then I wired part of the network in the phone itself to make a connection when either phone went off hook (so as to activate the 'buzzer' in the phone on the other end. So that it sounded 'realistic' and the buzzer did not make constant noise until the other phone was also taken off hook (to answer) I wired that part of it through a 'christmas tree' socket; the effect was to make the desired phone go 'buzz ... buzz, buzz ... buzz' until it got answered. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Wesrock@aol.com Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 16:32:40 EDT Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture In a message dated Tue, 21 Jun 2005 01:07:05 -0000, bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) writes: > Repeating for the illiterate: > 'native' touch-tone operation was substantially cheaper for the telco > than was 'native' pulse dialing. > They retrofitted dial-to-pulse conversion on SxS switches so that they > could 'pre-convert' customers to touch-tone before the switch was > converted to native touch-tone dialing. > This was a "short-term" expenditure of money now, to maximize > "long-term" benefits. By having a significant "installed base" of > touch-tone users *already*in*place* when the C.O. was converted to > _native_touch-tone_ handling, they could get by with far fewer sets of > digit decoders (dial or pulse). With 'pulse' tieing up the decoders > for average more than five times as long as touch-tone, there _was_ > significant benefit to be obtained. getting even 20% of the calls on > touch-tone, meant a _halving_ of the number of decoder elements > required. What was the cost of the touch-tone oscillator for a telephone set, vs. the cost of a rotary dial? There were millions of telephone sets out there, and at the time that was introduced the phones were installed, owned and maintained by the telco. The cost of the oscillators (key pads) would be considerable expense, particularly if the cost was significantly higher than a rotary dial. Wes Leatherock wesrock@aol.com wleathus@yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: 21 Jun 2005 20:49:09 -0000 From: John Levine Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > You apparently know more about DTSS than _Dartmouth_ does. I checked > the Dartmouth history before posting that. Yes, Dartmouth invented > time-sharing, I acknowledged that. Actually, an early version of CTSS was running at MIT in November 1961. By 1963 they had dialup terminal users connecting via 103A modems through the MIT PBX. SDC's Q-32 time-sharing system was also running in 1963. DTSS was a technical marvel, but they were quite aware of CTSS which was only a few hours away by car or train. I'd say that the two big advances in DTSS were Basic, which was designed to make computing accessible to non-technical students, and the clever internal design of DTSS as mostly a transaction monitor so they could run 100 users on a GE 635 that was no faster than a PDP-10 that could only handle 20. R's, John ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Date: 21 Jun 2005 14:03:51 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Robert Bonomi wrote: > You apparently know more about DTSS than _Dartmouth_ does. I checked > the Dartmouth history before posting that. Yes, Dartmouth invented > time-sharing, I acknowledged that. Development _started_ in 1963, but > it wasn't operational until May of 1964. (It supported an entire *TWO* > terminals in its original form.) Thank you for being ever so precise. We'll come back to this later. > Your opinion does not agree with the official rulings of the Illinois > regulatory authorities. Thus, it is safe to say that in the > jurisdiction where the events occurred, you are quite wrong. What were the rulings of all the other states? How was it handled in Canada? > Putting a bigger engine in a Corvette will let it "go faster"; it is > utterly irrelevant, however, to increasing the number of passengers > that that car can carry. Yes, it does. For one, the car could make multiple trips. The passengers might spend the same amount of time doing their shopping or whatever, but a faster car will cut down the travel down. Further, if roads are blocked, a fast car can make more choices to get around the blockade, perhaps go way out of its way to get through. > You've never seen tracks for two competing railroads running > side-by-side? Tell me, in 1950, say, who had the 'monopoly' for > passenger service between New York City, and Chicago? Or for freight > between those locations, for that matter? There are certainly tracks running side by side, but NOT for the entire distance from origin and destination points or the route via intermediate points. For your example, there were multiple railroads between NYC and Chicago, but all took their own routing and began and ended in different places. (Some railroads used tracks or terminals of another). > This was a "short-term" expenditure of money now, to maximize > "long-term" benefits. That's very. But earlier you made it sound as if that practice was somehow 'bad' i.e., "the Bell System never did anything unless it was forced to". Well, I don't see anyone forcing Bell to go Touch Tone, but I see a business becoming more efficient. What's wrong with that? How is that different from any other business? >> In 1970 I guess, I do not remember for sure, they brought around >> terminals, sat them on the desks and told people 'Do not Touch These' >> until we explain what to do, which was about a month later. We were >> told these would be replacing some of the job functions that had been >> done manually before. PAT] > Probably '71 or '72. After upgrade to a S/370 gave them the > horsepower to run 'online' CICS. The 360 didn't have the speed/power > to do all the records work that SO threw at it, _and_ handle the > overhead of on-line processing. Some corrections: Do you know _exactly_ when Standard Oil upgraded their mainframe and operations units? Otherwise you are making some incorrect assumptions: 1) CICS was not IBM's only online terminal processing system. There were and remain others*, too. CICS evolved to be the most common. [*for extra large and extra small online processing.] 2) A System/360 could and did handle online transactions. It wasn't as fancy as the S/370 CICS 3270 system, but it did so. The high end S/360s units were quite powerful. We had a low-end S/360 that handled both online and batch processing. It's possible SO may have had multiple computers for different tasks. 3) It would seem strange to post the credit card transaction clips Pat mentioned via CICS data entry when the slips were already machine readable. > That would be generally considered "late" in the decade. Typically, > x0-x3 was 'early', x4-x6 was 'mid', and 'x7-x9' was 'late. Sometimes > people would blur things, and do things like call x6-x7 'late mid". > The data-line growth at that time was the proverbial 'drop in the bucket' > compared to a decade later. "Typically"? "Drop in the bucket"? That doesn't sound very precise. Are you referring to some _standard_? What is a "drop"? What is a "bucket"? Yes, I'm intentionally being snarky here because you're constantly citing some obscure standard for this or for that. To be consistent, you should be quoting _exactly_ how many total lines the Bell System had from 1967 through 1983 and exactly how many of those lines were used for _any_ kind of dial-up data transmission, Teletype, or BBS service, so we could see the growth of both. I don't know the specific numbers. However I do know back in those days (late 60s, whatever you want to define that as) that lots of businesses and schools were getting Teletypes and getting hooked in. Into the early 1970s other faster terminals (300 speed) made their appearance as well. These hookups were getting widespread publicity. At the same time, many computers were getting dialup to connect remote data centers to a central one. The point is that this was a clearly growing business and the Bell System was gearing up for it. Early on it added the # and * to TT keypads. Teletype itself was developing faster terminals. > Is Judge Greene, or the FCC, enough of an authority? What exactly did he say? What exactly did the FCC say and when did they say it? Was this a long established intentionally established policy or did it sort of evolve? As to Judge Greene, not everbody agreed with him. The history of Mountain Bell clearly demonstrates the incredible waste of splitting up a tightly integrated infrastructure and I'm sure that went on in other Bell units as well. Oslin, the author of the Western Union history, noted many deficiencies of Greene's decisions from a telecommunications point of view. For us everyday consumers (who no one obviously cares about), we saw our short-distance toll charges GO UP. We found ourselves paying 25c a minute for a cross LATA phone call that AT&T previously charged us 5c a minute. We found ourselves paying $25 a minute unsuspectingly at pay phones. The few people who called cross country often came out ahead. Of course our local rates went up, too. Then there were the scams of cheap rates but under a $5 monthly "fee". Well, if you weren't even making $5 worth a toll calls, they the new plan would cost you MORE money. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: They used CICS data entry because they did not have equipment to read them directly in the early years, and some of the cards were readable by a human eye (using some imagination and thought) but were not readable by a machine eye with any degree of accuracy. You know, like make your digit '2' just like so, and only in the little box allocated for it, and use a certain kind of pencil or marking pen. It was hard to train the dealers properly. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Organization: ATCC Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 17:57:08 -0400 In article , TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: In Chicago, PicturePhone service was > made available to businesses for a couple years, and at the Illinois > Bell Headquarters building downtown, they had a 'shopping mall' sort > of arrangement for the general public to use. You could go in these > little booths and use a picture phone with a speed dialer which had > all the stores around town who subscribed to picture phone service > in its repretoire. You could go into the little stall entitled > 'flowers' and press the button on the phone for the various florists > in town with picture phone. In a couple seconds, the screen would > light up and the clerk in the store would be seen with all the flowers > for sale. You could place your order via PicturePhone after you had > seen the various arrangement they had. You would then be asked by > the merchant to punch in your credit card number and hold the card > clearly in front of the camera (on your end) so the clerk could see > it as she rang up the sale. Or, go to the PicturePhone set up for the > 'housewares department' or the 'clothing department' and do the same > thing. But it only lasted a few months (the 'shopping mall' at the > phone company offices) and then was closed. PAT] The problem with PicturePhone was that Bell would have had to build an entirely separate network to switch those video circuits. But now when you look at a 5ESS or a DMS-100 they have the capability to do voice, data, video, etc. People just didn't want to see the person they were talking to back then. Now we're overrun with web cams. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And sometimes people think it is not very prudent to allow others to see them while they are doing whatever. PAT] ------------------------------ From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: XO Communications Date: 21 Jun 2005 14:43:03 -0400 Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000) Tony P. wrote: > In article , alg@aracnet.com > says: >> Well Steven, an outage involving three DS-3s would likely be related >> to an OC-3 failure (an OC-3 at ~155 megabits/second will carry three >> DS-3s or just over 2,000 voice channels). I'd guess one of two >> failure types caused your emotional trauma: Traditional "back hoe >> fade" or an OC-3 to DS-3 mux went on "time out" for a while. > A backhoe undoubtedly being operated by Backhoe Bob. Apparently at a > recent gathering of IT folks involved with the Help America Vote Act > this was a common refrain. We call this "BIPL" or "Backhoe-Induced Packet Loss." scott "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Which Video Plug-in For Skype? Video4Skype.com or vSkype.com? From: Dean M. Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 19:12:54 GMT On Tue, 21 Jun 2005 04:38:35 -0700, totojepast wrote: > Would you recommend me Video4Skype.com or vSkype.com for Skype video > calls? I've tried both and found vSkype.com is *very* Beta still. Video4Skype works ok for me, but experiences can vary. > Is it possible to use these plug-ins when only one of the participants > uses a webcam? Yes (usually). ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Re: Ping Between PC Through PABX Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:19:20 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Barry Margolin wrote: > One of them has to run PPP server software, i.e. it has to act like > the terminal server that an ISP has connected to its dialup modems. > Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu > Arlington, MA > *** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me *** Exactly. In this case, assuming both are windows boxes, one of them needs to be running RAS. ------------------------------ From: Dave Garland Subject: Re: Ping Between PC Through PABX Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 16:00:49 -0500 Organization: Wizard Information It was a dark and stormy night when Barry Margolin wrote: > One of them has to run PPP server software, i.e. it has to act like > the terminal server that an ISP has connected to its dialup modems. Why not just modem to modem serial? I used to run a BBS and we didn't need no steenkin PPP. Of course, I suppose it all depends on what exactly OP is trying to do, which he hasn't told us, other than he wants them to "communicate". If he insists on TCP/IP, you may well be right. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Monitor/Recorder for Residential Power Line Outages? Date: 21 Jun 2005 14:17:32 -0700 AES wrote: > Any have pointers to a gadget that will monitor and log power outages > or glitches on 110V or 220V residential electrical service? Many years ago the electric company put a test unit on our line in response to our complaints. The unit drew a big graph of the power supply. The test confirmed our complaint was valid and the improved the service. As others mentioned, you could find such a device commercially. A secondary question is what will you do with the information? Since power deregulation (another stupid idea), power companies are not as responsive to service quality. Many have cut back. Having a log of repeated power outages may be meaningless. I strongly doubt temporary transient outages -- enough to cause clocks to go blink -- will be of any concern. As others mentioned, if you are running critical electronic equipment of any kind, you must have UPS as well as good surge protection. [Hmm, I sound like a high school gym teacher telling the guys to always wear their ...] but the principle is true -- be protected. I think every household should have one of those flashlights that plug into an outlet and go on in a power failure. Candles cause fires. ------------------------------ From: mc Subject: Re: Companies Want _US_ to Pay For Their Mistakes Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 16:40:35 -0400 Organization: Speed Factory (http://www.speedfactory.net) Agreed. The "blame the victim" mentality is running rampant, and the credit card issuers are behind it. The very term "identity theft" is designed to blame the victim. When someone "steals my identity" it sounds as if they have pried loose something I was supposed to be guarding. But the reality is that they haven't stolen anything of *mine* at all. They are impersonating me in order to steal from the bank. We don't refer to rape as "chastity theft." ------------------------------ From: Mark Crispin Subject: Re: '80' Country Code Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 13:44:11 -0700 Organization: Networks & Distributed Computing For what it's worth, I've received international calls in which the *last* two digits were truncated in caller ID. For example, my Japanese cell phone (dual W-CDMA/GSM, roaming on US GSM networks) has received a few calls where the caller ID was 0118190402016. Breaking that down, we get 011-81-90-4020-16xx. 011 is the North American IDD prefix, 81 is Japan, 90 is mobile, and 402x-xxxx means that it's assigned to NTT DoCoMo. That number does not belong to any of my friends in Japan who would have my Japanese mobile number; plus they'd all know to send me email rather than trying to call since I'm currently in the USA. No message has been left on my voicemail, and its greeting is bilingual Japanese/English, so I don't think that it's a wrong number. So, it's most likely a "wangiri". "Wangiri" is a common form of spamming mobile phones used in Japan. The word is a contraction meaning "one ring, hang up"; the spammer calls your phone, lets it ring once, then hangs up. The idea is to leave the spammer's phone number in your call history to trick you into calling back. Japan is a country in which the caller pays both to call a mobile phone and to place a call from a mobile phone. Thus, if you are foolish enough to call a wangiri back, you pay not only your mobile phone charges to make the call, but also the spammer's mobile phone charges! In sending me a wangiri, the spammer just wasted the resources of NTT DoCoMo (his mobile company), Vodafone Japan (my mobile phone company), the international carrier(s) to the US, and T-Mobile in the USA to deliver a truncated (and hence useless) wangiri to someone who knows quite well not to call unknown numbers. Vodafone Japan's instructions quaintly state the following about wangiri calls: "simply ignore it, never call back, and erase the record from call history. Answering or returning such calls may lead to you receiving threats or to become involved in an incident." I wonder if Europe has similar problems, since they also practice caller pays. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum. ------------------------------ From: mc Subject: Re: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards Affected Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 16:45:26 -0400 Organization: Speed Factory (http://www.speedfactory.net) > One credit card company reacted to this yesterday afternoon by > cancelling my credit card (with no prior notice) while my wife was in > the middle of a shopping trip. No fraudulent charges had been > attempted; they just felt it had been "compromised." > This could be jolly inconvenient for travelers! Are credit cards > liable to be yanked at any time because of security breaches? Is that > how the industry is going to start reacting? > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Not: They are, and yes it is. Customer incon- > venience is not a big issue with them when they are threatened with the > possible loss of a few dollars in fraud. PAT] Ah, the noose around their own necks! Between loan-shark practices of raising interest rates sharply on little notice, and this new practice of cancelling cards at the drop of a hat, they're quickly losing our confidence. Maybe we *will* learn to live without credit cards. ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Is it Possible to Buy a Cell Phone With no Plan? Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:53:55 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Tue, 21 Jun 2005 07:55:23 -0400, Paul wrote: >> I'm trying to buy a cell phone WITHOUT A PLAN. I am sending it to a >> relative in another country where they will activate it. > I saw this $49 GSM phone recently advertised in a magazine: > http://www.mobalrental.com/gsm/ Yes, that is a pretty good price. *However* as it applies to this thread it won't work seeing as the Nokia 1100 which is the $49 phone will only work on 900 and 1800 Mhz which are European and Asian GSM frequencies. For $99 they offer a GSM phone that will work in North America as well as in Europe and Asia. (But only of course on GSM operators.) ------------------------------ 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 V24 #283 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Jun 22 12:14:34 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 3433915115; Wed, 22 Jun 2005 12:14:34 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #284 Message-Id: <20050622161434.3433915115@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 12:14:34 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.5 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_REMOVE, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT,NORMAL_HTTP_TO_IP autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Wed, 22 Jun 2005 12:15:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 284 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson ID Theft: 40 Million Served (Lisa Minter) Google Developing Online Payment System (Lisa Minter) T-Online Cuts DSL Rate in Half (Lisa Minter) Breakup Revisited (D. Dude) Is This Kind of Machine Made? (wizard_chef) Re: Worst Phishing/Fraud Attack Ever; 40 Million Cards (Ed Clarke) Re: XO Communications (Tony P.) Re: Which Video Plug-in For Skype? Video4Skype/vSkype? (Stanley Ulbrych) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (Dan Lanciani) Re: NFL in Talks With Sprint, Others for Wireless Video (jmeissen) Re: Bell Divestiture (Tony P.) Re: Bell Divestiture (Robert Bonomi) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: ID Theft: 40 Million Served Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 08:08:23 -050 by Steve Wexler Identity theft is a huge and growing problem, and the confession that up to 40 million MasterCard, Visa and American Express cardholders have been jeopardized in a theft at third-party credit card processor, CardSystems Solutions Inc., is just the latest cyber crime to be reported. The breach compromised account holder names, banks and account numbers. It seems robbing banks is back in vogue and Jim Stickley, with over 100 successful heists to his credit, is laughing all the way to the ... bank. Unlike traditional bank robbers, he steals personally identifiable information such as names, addresses, Social Security numbers, credit card numbers and passwords. Most bank robbers only get away with a few thousand dollars. Stickley gets away with information worth millions of dollars. Luckily, Stickley isn't a criminal in the common sense of the word; he's a social engineer. Financial institutions hire Stickley's company, TraceSecurity, a security compliance software firm based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to perform vulnerability audits of their banks. His firm has been getting a lot of calls lately as banks begin beefing up their information privacy practices, motivated by the recent spate of high-profile identity thefts as well as by an increasing number of information privacy and disclosure regulations. Social engineering is a concept that has been around the computer security industry for many years. Social engineers prey on human weaknesses to gain the trust of their victims, and then they trick their victims into unknowingly becoming the co-conspirators in the social engineer's grand plan, which usually involves stealing something. "Most banks are surprisingly vulnerable to identity theft," said Stickley. "They spend millions of dollars a year on high-tech computer security defenses, but often fail to address the simplest, most critical aspect of information security: the human element. A bank can have the strongest doors on their vaults, but if they invite me in and allow me to _wander their office_, I can steal much more than their money." Stickley and his team successfully complete their heists 90 per cent of the time. The other 10 per cent of the time, vigilant bank staffers thwart their heist. It's not at all unusual for a single TraceSecurity social engineering team to rob three or four bank branches in a single day. And it's surprisingly easy. Stickley and his team start their social engineering adventures by _impersonating someone of trust or authority_, such as an air conditioning technician, a pest exterminator or a fire marshal. The team's planning for their heists begins weeks in advance, often by mailing a letter to a bank branch on forged stationery, informing them of a planned "inspection." By the time they show up in their _fake uniforms_ with fake badges and fake identification cards, the front receptionist often welcomes them with coffee. Within minutes, they have free range of the bank as they crawl under desks, steal backup tapes, and install spyware on the computers. In the evening, the TraceSecurity team returns to dumpster dive, an activity that often yields a surprising amount of sensitive customer account information. Once the heist is completed, the TraceSecurity team returns the stolen information to the bank's executives who hired them, and provides recommendations on how to prevent actual criminals from perpetuating the same crime. And if by some chance Stickley's team gets caught, he always carries with him his "get-out-of-jail-free" paperwork which confirms the bank hired him, and provides the bank's executives' cell phone numbers to confirm Jim's story. "The secret to an effective information security strategy," said Stickley, "is to balance security technology investments with better employee training, and better policy and procedure enforcement." Copyright 2005 Integratedmar.com Corporation NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. *** 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, Integratedmar.com Corporation. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think I have been saying for awhile now that the best phisher people are not the ones who sit at their computer pecking out letters to a jillion people; now and then getting lucky with a sucker who responds. The smart guys know to get the data they want on a _wholesale_ basis. And where Stickley in this story always returns what he took, what about the dozens of UPS and FedEx 'delivery men' out there who go calling each day at all the banks and other business places? They are in and out with the wink of an eye, and what receptionist bothers to question or challenge them? This is an old, old trick, actually. In the mid- 1970's, guys posing as 'postal employees' attempted to hijack several thousand new credit cards just being issued at Amoco Standard Oil, at the credit card office. They just walked in, as was the daily custom, and said they were there to get the outgoing registered mail. (In those days, all new, outgoing plastics were sent registered mail to 'insure their safety'). These guys, with pseudo-postal worker uniforms walked right in and started gathering up the tubs and trays and boxes of outgoing mail that day. Considering what a hell-hole (at least to work at) the credit card office had become by the mid 1970's, it was not surprising no one questioned them about what they were doing. But Amoco security officers had been tipped off a day or two before, and caught the guys going down on the freight elevator with a dolly cart full of boxes of outgoing mail. It turns out it was an 'inside job'. The credit card office 'cleaned house' that day; they got rid of twenty or thirty employees they suspected knew too much about the _overall operation_ of the system and a few months later the entire operation was moved to Des Moines, Iowa where the managers thought they would find a lot of farmer's wives and daughters (a smaller ratio of racially diverse people) to work for them than they had in Chicago, plus smaller salaries and much less corruption at the city government level. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Google Developing Online Payment System Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 08:29:03 -0500 By Lisa Baertlein Web search leader Google Inc. is developing an online payment system but not a direct rival to eBay Inc.'s PayPal, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said on Tuesday. Schmidt spoke after several days of heated speculation over reports that Google was working on a potential rival to PayPal, eBay's popular online payment system. Schmidt said Google does not intend to offer a "person-to-person stored-value payments system" like PayPal's, in which money briefly resides in PayPal's control during the transaction, but he did not give details of how the Google system would differ. "The payment services we are working on are a natural evolution of Google's existing online products and advertising programs, which today connect millions of consumers and advertisers," Schmidt told Reuters in a brief telephone interview in which he declined to elaborate. "We believe that e-commerce can be improved and we are working on ways to improve the user experience," Schmidt said. The company declined to say when a product would be available. By avoiding PayPal's model, Google may also bypass a replay of the regulatory battles that were among the thorniest obstacles PayPal faced in its early days as an independent company. The biggest issue was PayPal's plan to briefly hold money on account, generally a bank function, and the saga was chronicled in a book called "The PayPal Wars." Google currently accepts payments from advertisers and sends money to participants in its AdSense program, which pays Web publishers when Google ads are displayed on their sites. Google advertisers pay each time a Web surfer clicks on an ad that is generated through the company's AdWords program. In March, Google said it began testing a third-party electronic funds transfer service to send payments to Web sites that carry Google ads. The Web search darling recently launched a video search service, which will sell content. The company also operates a price-comparison shopping engine called Froogle, which analysts think could one day become the heart of a full-fledged e-commerce system. For its part, eBay has been working to expand PayPal's reach beyond its online marketplace and has signed up a variety of retailers including Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes service that sells individual songs for 99 cents each. Analysts on Monday said the biggest and most immediate risk to PayPal from a Google payment system would be a cap on growth in PayPal's off-eBay business, prompting a 2 percent drop in eBay shares. Google's stock on Tuesday closed up $1.14, or 0.4 percent, to $287.84. Shares of eBay finished down 34 cents, or 0.9 percent, to $36.90 prior to Schmidt's comments. Both stocks trade on the Nasdaq. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: T-Online Cuts DSL Rate in Half Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 08:50:25 -0500 By Boris Groendahl Deutsche Telekom's Internet unit is cutting prices for DSL high-speed Internet access in half to stop rivals, including Vodafone's German fixed-line arm, eating away its market share. T-Online International Chief Executive Rainer Beaujean told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday he would cut rates from July to protect its and Deutsche Telekom's grip on the lucrative broadband Internet market. Vodafone's Arcor unit stepped up an already fierce price war earlier this month, undercutting T-Online's prices by as much as 80 percent. Rivals freenet.de and United Internet had cut rates and increased marketing since March. T-Online will reduce the monthly rate for its best-selling DSL flat-rate tariff to 14.95 euros per month, from 29.95 euros for the current best-selling flat-rate tariff. "If we notice that our competitors would like to end the price war they've started themselves, that's the right moment for us to say, 'Here we are,"' Beaujean said. Germans flocked to sign up for DSL (digital subscriber line) after the price cuts, and T-Online could not keep up with the pace with its old, high fees in the second quarter. "We observe a similar development of our customer base as in last year's second quarter," Beaujean said. T-Online added 181,000 new DSL subscribers in the second quarter of 2004, fewer than in the first quarter of this year, when it added 295,000. "But the key issue is that the market is expanding faster," unlike last year, Beaujean said. "As we're not only active in Germany, but in Spain and France as well, we also know the trends abroad. We have learned in France that (market leader France Telecom's) Wanadoo waited for too long. We learned from that and act faster." SHARES FALL The move by Germany's market leader sent shares in Deutsche Telekom as well as other Internet stocks into negative territory. Deutsche Telekom fell 0.2 percent, United Internet fell 2.4 percent, and freenet dropped 1.4 percent. Internet providers are keen on broadband customers as DSL is cheaper to provide and its users are more likely to download music or movies over the Internet and use it for phone calls or other services the providers can charge for. To better compete for broadband customers, Deutsche Telekom is currently fully taking over and re-integrating T-Online. Not all rivals, however, are equally bad news for Deutsche Telekom. United and freenet rent and resell DSL lines from the country's dominant phone operator, so if T-Online loses customers to them, they still bring in revenue at Deutsche Telekom. But if customers defect to operators who own their own network, such as Arcor and Telecom Italia's HanseNet, they are lost completely for T-Online's parent. Beaujean said that is where things are headed: "More and more, our competitors are the network operators." T-Online will cut and streamline less popular tariffs, too, by up to 60 percent. The new rates are available for existing as well as new customers, leading overall to a revenue shortfall of 400 million euros this year, Beaujean said. He had previously forecast 2.5 billion euros in revenues this year, up from 2 billion euros in 2004. He said his goal was still to reach his forecast for core earnings of 300 million euros, down from 472 million in 2004. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: D. Dude Subject: Breakup Revisited Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 12:54:18 GMT Organization: Global Dial Pty Ltd Readers other than Australians may not be aware that Sol Trujillo one-time CEO of US West and formerly an executive with Orange Europe. has recently been appointed as CEO of Telstra, Australia's largest telecommunications provider and former monopoly provider. One of the major issues concerning the full privatisation of Telstra (currently 51% government owned) is whether and how retail and wholesale functions of Telstra should be separated to prevent unfair competition from Telstra. In an interview published in the /Sunday Telegraph/ (an Australian Murdoch tabloid) on June 19, 2005, by Jim Dickens, Trujillo is quoted as saying, referring to "similar" moves overseas: "It didn't work well, didn't work well for the customer, didn't work well for the shareowners and ultimately it didn't work well for the marketplace." Of course, I expect him to say that. I'm prepared to accept that he may be largely correct in regard to share owners of incumbent carriers, but I see little truth that (assuming he is referring to the US) customers and the marketplace aren't better off overall. I'd be interested to know whether you disagree and whether a true retail/wholesale style separation is a better proposition than what has occurred in the US. With both my consumer hat and share holder hat's on, I'm in favour of maximum separation with the wholesale arm being able to offer any product currently offered by the retail arm and the retail arm being free to choose obtain product from any wholesaler. However, it's unlikely to come to that: with the government seeking to maximise the price of the offering for the remainder of shares and with a majority in both houses of parliment, it's likely the outcome will be an internal separation only aimed at providing transparent pricing. ------------------------------ From: wizard_chef Subject: Is This Kind of Machine Made? Date: 21 Jun 2005 18:21:25 -0700 I need an answering machine that: a) answers on double rings instead of single rings; b) allows the caller to select among several prerecorded messages. Is such a machine made?? wizard_chef ------------------------------ From: Ed Clarke Subject: Re: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards Affected Date: 22 Jun 2005 14:32:07 GMT Organization: Ciliophora Associates, Inc. On 2005-06-21, TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to mc : >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Not: They are, and yes it is. Customer incon- >> venience is not a big issue with them when they are threatened with the >> possible loss of a few dollars in fraud. PAT] > Ah, the noose around their own necks! Between loan-shark practices of > raising interest rates sharply on little notice, and this new practice > of cancelling cards at the drop of a hat, they're quickly losing our > confidence. Maybe we *will* learn to live without credit cards. I went through our credit card bills yesterday. LLBean Visa 27% APR. Delta Skymiles AmEx 25%. I paid them both off in full and won't be using them again. AmEx charges $15 for an over-the-phone eCheck but the INTEREST on the damn card was several dollars per day. By the time the physical check would arrive and clear, I would have that much in interest. And this is sort of telecom related too. I'm in New York, ConEd country. With a Cisco 7206VXR for a router, and highly reliable but older servers and SCSI raid arrays I discovered that I am paying about $500 per month for electricity ( this includes home usage as well ). I'm about to dump all my Cisco switches (2900 Catalyst series, 5000 series) and the RAID stuff onto eBay. Simply shutting them down and replacing them with a 100 watt ReadyNAS 600 will save me hundreds of dollars per month even if I just threw them out. Cost of ownership seems to be more than cost to buy plus cost of maintenance. Ah well, the education of a new small business owner continues ... This signature left blank. ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: XO Communications Organization: ATCC Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 21:46:51 -0400 In article , kludge@panix.com says: > Tony P. wrote: >> In article , alg@aracnet.com >> says: >>> Well Steven, an outage involving three DS-3s would likely be related >>> to an OC-3 failure (an OC-3 at ~155 megabits/second will carry three >>> DS-3s or just over 2,000 voice channels). I'd guess one of two >>> failure types caused your emotional trauma: Traditional "back hoe >>> fade" or an OC-3 to DS-3 mux went on "time out" for a while. >> A backhoe undoubtedly being operated by Backhoe Bob. Apparently at a >> recent gathering of IT folks involved with the Help America Vote Act >> this was a common refrain. > We call this "BIPL" or "Backhoe-Induced Packet Loss." This gives me a queasy feeling. We're moving one of our offices to an area that's former industrial property, industrial in the sense of early 20th century. And we've chosen to use a fiber based network. Come to think of it, both the carriers in the building now (Verizon and Cox) come in on fiber, not copper. So it's very likely I'll suffer from BIPL at some point. But power won't be an issue -- nice little 30KW diesel generator will be used for the computer room which will house 3 server racks with 4 servers in each, a Definity Prologix, and assorted networking gear, and HVAC for the computer room. ------------------------------ From: Stanley Ulbrych Subject: Re: Which Video Plug-in For Skype? Video4Skype.com or vSkype.com? Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 22:50:42 -0400 Organization: Cox Communications On 21 Jun 2005 04:38:35 -0700, totojepast wrote: > Would you recommend me Video4Skype.com or vSkype.com for Skype video > calls? While vskype is stll beta and needs work, I like it over vidio4skype. Vskype has a better picture. I like the ability to hold a video conference with two or more people. And once installed, you can activate the program while in Skype ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 23:05:53 EDT From: Dan Lanciani Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks > One thing you can do is run several devices off of one power supply, > if you have enough of them with the same voltage demands. You have to be very careful when attempting this with devices that have external connections to other systems. Some wall-wart-powered gadgets rely on the isolation provided by the power supply to implement various regulation and voltage-splitting tricks. That is, the negative side of the power input may not be at the same level as common of any i/o port. If you try to power two devices that disagree about common from the same supply and they share some other common path you will at best cause failure and possibly cause damage. I have an IR i/o box whose power-input, IR-in/out, and RS232 commons are all different. Of course, this kind of problem can bite you even without sharing power supplies. I have a text-to-speech box whose audio-out "ground" is really the bottom leg of a push-pull driver of some sort. If I plugged this output into a grounded amplifier without an isolation transformer the driver would be shorted through my computer's ground connection to the box's RS232 port. Dan Lanciani ddl@danlan.*com ------------------------------ From: jmeissen@aracnet.com Subject: Re: NFL in Talks With Sprint, Others for Wireless Video Date: 22 Jun 2005 00:35:58 GMT Organization: http://extra.newsguy.com In article , Telecom dailyLead from USTA wrote: > Telecom dailyLead from USTA > June 21, 2005 > http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22505&l=2017006 > TODAY'S HEADLINES > NEWS OF THE DAY > * NFL in talks with Sprint, others for wireless video deals > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What exactly is supposed to be > 'wireless video'? Isn't that just a wireless cam (such as I > have a couple of) one for the back yard birds and one for my > weather station http://weatherforecast.us.tf or is it something > a bit more elegant and fancy? In this context I believe they are referring to delivery of live streaming video content to an appropriately capable cell phone (or similar device). John Meissen jmeissen@aracnet.com ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Organization: ATCC Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 21:38:50 -0400 In article , Wesrock@aol.com says: > In a message dated Tue, 21 Jun 2005 01:07:05 -0000, > bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) writes: >> Repeating for the illiterate: >> 'native' touch-tone operation was substantially cheaper for the telco >> than was 'native' pulse dialing. >> They retrofitted dial-to-pulse conversion on SxS switches so that they >> could 'pre-convert' customers to touch-tone before the switch was >> converted to native touch-tone dialing. >> This was a "short-term" expenditure of money now, to maximize >> "long-term" benefits. By having a significant "installed base" of >> touch-tone users *already*in*place* when the C.O. was converted to >> _native_touch-tone_ handling, they could get by with far fewer sets of >> digit decoders (dial or pulse). With 'pulse' tieing up the decoders >> for average more than five times as long as touch-tone, there _was_ >> significant benefit to be obtained. getting even 20% of the calls on >> touch-tone, meant a _halving_ of the number of decoder elements >> required. > What was the cost of the touch-tone oscillator for a telephone set, > vs. the cost of a rotary dial? There were millions of telephone sets > out there, and at the time that was introduced the phones were > installed, owned and maintained by the telco. The cost of the > oscillators (key pads) would be considerable expense, particularly if > the cost was significantly higher than a rotary dial. Considering that a rotary dial was nothing but springs and gears, while a DTMF pad had coils (Bell loved those ferrous cup cores!), resistors, transistors, specially plated contacts, etc. But the basics of the phone were just a 500 set with updated housing. All that really changed was the dial. But then I stop and think how much effort went into making reliable rotary dials. They were probably roughly equal in cost using adjusted dollar amounts. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 06:44:17 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , wrote: > Robert Bonomi wrote: >> You apparently know more about DTSS than _Dartmouth_ does. I checked >> the Dartmouth history before posting that. Yes, Dartmouth invented >> time-sharing, I acknowledged that. Development _started_ in 1963, but >> it wasn't operational until May of 1964. (It supported an entire *TWO* >> terminals in its original form.) > Thank you for being ever so precise. We'll come back to this later. You "corrected" me, remember? >> Putting a bigger engine in a Corvette will let it "go faster"; it is >> utterly irrelevant, however, to increasing the number of passengers >> that that car can carry. > Yes, it does. For one, the car could make multiple trips. The > passengers might spend the same amount of time doing their shopping or > whatever, but a faster car will cut down the travel down. How many more people can you fit into the Corvette at one time as a result of that? The bigger engine _may_ allow the car to travel faster, and thus make more trips. This is, however, totally unrelated to how many passengers it can carry per trip. AND, if the travel speed is limited by things other than engine capacity -- e.g. speed limits, out-of-sync traffic lights, congestion, etc. then the car is _unable_ to make use of the larger engine, and there is no increase in speed possible. > Further, if roads are blocked, a fast car can make more choices to get > around the blockade, perhaps go way out of its way to get through. Again, how many more people fit into it at one time as a result of that? I've seen *one* occasion when the capabilities of a car gave extra choices for getting around a blockade. Northbound traffic is backed up -- nearly stationary -- for a couple of miles on a road with essentially *no* alternatives. there was a place a ways back, where you could turn left, and go six miles before you found another road going North. Or you could go back another half-mile, turn right, and go only 4 miles to find a chance to go North. The perpetrator of this ducked over on the shoulder, went up a few hundred feed, and turned in at the _dead_end_ city park entrance. Somebody decided he 'knew something", and followed. And somebody else, And somebody else. A solid stream of cars following him down the _one_lane_ road. It got really funny, when the 'leader of the pack' got to lake -- to the boat ramp, and ... see (Same type of vehicle, *not* the instance I'm relating.) There had to have been at least 75 cars following him, up to that point. Now, with *nowhere* to go, no place for them all to turn around, and the road in is totally blocked with the 'me too!' crowd. I was out in the main traffic jam, laughing my head (or other portions of the anatomy) off. I don't know _how_ they ever got that mess straightened out. >> You've never seen tracks for two competing railroads running >> side-by-side? Tell me, in 1950, say, who had the 'monopoly' for >> passenger service between New York City, and Chicago? Or for freight >> between those locations, for that matter? > There are certainly tracks running side by side, but NOT for the > entire distance from origin and destination points or the route via > intermediate points. For your example, there were multiple railroads > between NYC and Chicago, but all took their own routing and began and > ended in different places. (Some railroads used tracks or terminals > of another). So much for the claim that they were monopolies, then. >> This was a "short-term" expenditure of money now, to maximize >> "long-term" benefits. > That's very. But earlier you made it sound as if that practice was > somehow 'bad' i.e., "the Bell System never did anything unless it was > forced to". Well, I don't see anyone forcing Bell to go Touch Tone, > but I see a business becoming more efficient. What's wrong with that? > How is that different from any other business? I merely claimed that Bell/AT&T/WEco had their own self-interest as their primary, foremost, and over-riding consideration in running their business, and that any 'benefit' to the consumer came about because either it was 'incidental' to that self-interest, or because it was mandated by governmental authorities. It is trivial to point to things that Bell/WEco/AT&T did that were _not_ in the best interest of the customers, but operated to Bell's advantage. See the 'Hushphone' lawsuit, for one of the more egregious examples. >>> In 1970 I guess, I do not remember for sure, they brought around >>> terminals, sat them on the desks and told people 'Do not Touch These' >>> until we explain what to do, which was about a month later. We were >>> told these would be replacing some of the job functions that had been >>> done manually before. PAT] >> Probably '71 or '72. After upgrade to a S/370 gave them the >> horsepower to run 'online' CICS. The 360 didn't have the speed/power >> to do all the records work that SO threw at it, _and_ handle the >> overhead of on-line processing. > Some corrections: Do you know _exactly_ when Standard Oil upgraded > their mainframe and operations units? Otherwise you are making some > incorrect assumptions: I don't have to know when the upgrade was. I do know that the 'idle' CPU cycles were *not* there on the old machines to support on-line operations. BTW, if you're going to claim a "correction", you are required to supply the 'correct' data to replace that which is, according to you, "in error". If you _don't_ know the data, *yourself*, it is arrogance, cum hubris, to assert that someone else is 'incorrect'. > 1) CICS was not IBM's only online terminal processing system. There > were and remain others*, too. CICS evolved to be the most common. > [*for extra large and extra small online processing.] The CICS predecessor was IBM's first successful on-line system. Originally developed for Virginia Electric Power, in 1968, and given away to other users, until mid-1969, when IBM rolled it out as a 'pay for' product, under the CICS name. What 'others' there were, and/or are. is irrelevant, as PAT confirms that S.O. was using CICS. IBM's "official" in-house-developed terminal-processing system had a "little" problem. It took more than 10 minutes to IPL, and almost invariably crashed less than 10 minutes after that. > 2) A System/360 could and did handle online transactions. It wasn't > as fancy as the S/370 CICS 3270 system, but it did so. The high end > S/360s units were quite powerful. We had a low-end S/360 that handled > both online and batch processing. It's possible SO may have had > multiple computers for different tasks. At the time the 370 came out, it was five times the processing power/speed if the high end of the 360 line, according to the IBM announcement, that is, But, like with Dartmouth, you may have better information. Yes, a S/360 could run CICS. but you lost a 'non-trivial' amount of the CPU to the 'overhead' of doing so. If the machine did not have the 'spare' capacity to absorb that overhead, you could not run CICS and still get all the necessary work done. The machine was 'too small', and/or 'too heavily loaded', depending on your viewpoint ... S.O was running close enough to hardware capacity, with the batch only operations, on the 360 that "available horsepower" to allow running CICS just "wasn't there". > 3) It would seem strange to post the credit card transaction clips > Pat mentioned via CICS data entry when the slips were already > machine readable. "Strange" to you, maybe. In the real world, however, according to PAT.... > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: They used CICS data entry because they > did not have equipment to read them directly in the early years, and > some of the cards were readable by a human eye (using some imagination > and thought) but were not readable by a machine eye with any degree > of accuracy. You know, like make your digit '2' just like so, and only > in the little box allocated for it, and use a certain kind of pencil > or marking pen. It was hard to train the dealers properly. PAT] >> Is Judge Greene, or the FCC, enough of an authority? > What exactly did he say? What exactly did the FCC say and when did > they say it? Was this a long established intentionally established > policy or did it sort of evolve? You can find, and read Greene's decrees, for yourself. The FCC rule-makings are a matter of public record, and available for your perusal as well. The initial fund flow back to the ILECs was part-and-parcel of the divestiture, and the related equal access for competing IXCs. > As to Judge Greene, not everbody agreed with him. The history of > Mountain Bell clearly demonstrates the incredible waste of splitting > up a tightly integrated infrastructure and I'm sure that went on in > other Bell units as well. Oslin, the author of the Western Union > history, noted many deficiencies of Greene's decisions from a > telecommunications point of view. Your point being? You asked for an "official" source. It's hard to get more "official" than the Judge who issued the court orders. (Note: I personally, would rather have seen IBM broken up, and the Bell System left alone, but that is _entirely_ irrelevant). > For us everyday consumers (who no one obviously cares about), we saw > our short-distance toll charges GO UP. We found ourselves paying 25c > a minute for a cross LATA phone call that AT&T previously charged us > 5c a minute. We found ourselves paying $25 a minute unsuspectingly at > pay phones. The few people who called cross country often came out > ahead. Of course our local rates went up, too. Yup. As another poster stated, the telephone charge structure was "irrational" for a _long_ time. When the various components had to be priced based on costs for _that_ components, there was a "rude awakening". for a lot of people. I, personally, _never_ understood those exorbitant 'in-state' inter-LATA rates, either. It was incomprehensible to me, how a 2000 mile call to the west coast could be 1/4(!!) the cost of a 100-mile in-state call. What I saw was that inter-state rates plummeted, while inter-LATA intra-state rates declined "a bit", and intra-LATA calls got a lot more expensive. > Then there were the scams of cheap rates but under a $5 monthly "fee". > Well, if you weren't even making $5 worth a toll calls, they the new > plan would cost you MORE money. Yup. complete agreement. Which is why I *don't* have any long-distance carrier or 'plan' today. It's cheaper to pay the 'single call' rates, when I make maybe 2-3 L.D. calls, with a total of under 5 minutes per month. The salescritters hawking those 'plans' get really upset when I suggest that their rates work out to over $1/minute, for my calling pattern. ------------------------------ 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. 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End of TELECOM Digest V24 #284 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Jun 22 17:35:21 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id ED71A15186; Wed, 22 Jun 2005 17:35:20 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #285 Message-Id: <20050622213520.ED71A15186@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 17:35:20 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) 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,LONG_DISTANCE, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT,WORK_AT_HOME autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: * Status: RO TELECOM Digest Wed, 22 Jun 2005 17:35:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 285 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Norvergence in the News, Again (Michael Quinn) Telstra Ends Internet TV Deal With Microsoft (Telecom dailyLead USTA) 40 U.S. Senators Offer BiPartisan ID Theft Bill (Lisa Minter) Re: Send Text Message to a Russian Cell Phone (John Cummings) Re: Bell Divestiture (Lisa Hancock) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Norvergence in the News, Again Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 13:03:30 -0400 From: Michael Quinn A somewhat long article, but I believe of interest to Telecom Digest participants, given prior posts on the subject. Promised Savings, They Rented the Boxes And Now They're Really Paying for It; NorVergence Went Bankrupt; Customers Still Owe By Dina ElBoghdady Washington Post Staff Writer The smooth-talking salesman with his glossy brochure promised Kelly Vogan huge savings on his firm's telephone, cell phone and Internet bills if only he'd rent a "revolutionary" piece of high-tech gadgetry called the Matrix box. With the lure of 30 to 60 percent savings, Vogan signed up with New Jersey-based NorVergence Inc. and even insured the small red box as required. He paid $435 a month to rent the box and an additional $13 for services, including unlimited long distance. Last summer NorVergence filed for bankruptcy, and customers like Vogan, who owns a home remodeling firm in Silver Spring, found that their troubles went far beyond the loss of phone service. They discovered they were obligated to keep paying rent on the boxes to third parties, which had bought the rental contracts from NorVergence. "The more I think about it, I'm not sure I even understand how it all worked," Vogan said. "But it worked just fine for a while." Vogan's company and 11,000 other small businesses nationwide are entangled in an alleged scam that has attracted attention from the Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general in about two dozen states. In the Washington area, at least $6.6 million in rental fees owed by 350 businesses in the District and Maryland is at stake. Numbers for affected Virginia firms are not available. The fallout from NorVergence's collapse illustrates how vulnerable small-business owners are to those who prey on their lack of technology know-how, said Jonathan Zuck, president of the Association for Competitive Technology, which represents small information-technology businesses. "Small-business owners are particularly susceptible to fraud ... because they lack in-house expertise" and sometimes end up overpaying for services, Zuck said. The FTC, for example, charges that the box NorVergence persuaded its customers to rent was nothing more than a mix of standard routers that help connect telephone equipment to long-distance providers' lines. NorVergence and its former chief executive, Peter J. Salzano, deny any wrongdoing. NorVergence filed for Chapter 11 protection in June 2004. The filing was later converted to Chapter 7 liquidation. The FTC accuses NorVergence of defrauding customers by charging inflated rents for the boxes -- $400 to $5,700 a month -- and then selling the rental contracts at a discount to third-party finance companies for quick cash. "NorVergence was able to provide a few early customers with 'discounted' services only because it used the proceeds of contracts from new customers," the FTC said in November when it filed a civil action against the company in U.S. District Court in New Jersey. Here is how it worked: NorVergence bought services, such as e-mail and Internet connections, from well-known firms such as Qwest Communications International Inc. or Sprint Corp. at wholesale rates. It would then re-brand, re-price and resell the services under its own brand name, while making money off the box rentals. In the brochure presented to Vogan, NorVergence promoted its partnership with Qwest and Nortel Networks Corp. Both those firms distance themselves from NorVergence. "We did not lend our name. That was used without our permission," said Claire Mylott, a spokeswoman for Qwest. "The reason we don't lend our name [to any vendor] is because we can't control how our name would be used." Bryan Zidar, a spokesman for T-Mobile USA Inc., which provided handsets to NorVergence, said his firm was as much a victim of NorVergence's situation as the many small-business customers. "When NorVergence filed for bankruptcy, we were owed significant money," Zidar said. "So we asked the judge for the monies owed. We didn't get it. But we were granted the opportunity to reach out to wireless customers with T-Mobile handsets and switch them over to T-Mobile service." Vogan said he got a similar offer from Sprint and switched over as soon as he learned of NorVergence's bankruptcy. Had his troubles ended there, Vogan would have brushed off the episode as a minor inconvenience. Instead, the finance company in charge of his rental contract continued to bill him $435 a month for his Matrix box. That is because the fine print on NorVergence's rental agreements locked customers into long-term contracts even if NorVergence failed to deliver service. In Vogan's case, that meant he was responsible for an additional $19,000 to cover the balance of his five-year contract. Reluctantly, he paid the monthly fee to protect his company's credit. Others who refused to do so found themselves engaged in legal battles when the finance companies sued them. "It was frustrating," Vogan said. "I had about 3 1/2 years worth of payments left on my contract and I had nothing to show for it but a useless red box." But relief is in sight. Last month, a few of the 40 finance firms that handled NorVergence's rental agreements agreed to forgive most of the debt owed under a settlement reached with attorneys general in 18 states. In Maryland and the District, settlements were reached with CIT Technology Financing Services Inc. and CIT Group/Equipment Financing Inc., General Electric Capital Corp., U.S. Bancorp Business Equipment Finance Group Inc., and Wells Fargo Financial Leasing Inc. Each firm agreed to forgive about 85 percent of the rental fees. If a small business has paid more than the 14 or 15 percent due after July 2004, it will receive a refund of the amount it paid over that percentage. The deal wipes out $5.7 million in debt for 278 businesses in Maryland and $924,000 in debt for 39 businesses in the District. "We believe we have done the best we can do," said Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. "We were not able to convince the finance firms to take the entire loss. They came back and said: 'We are victims too. Why should we suffer the entire loss?' " Vogan plans to take part in the settlement. Other small-business owners are not so sure. Jean Hurley of Ellicott City said she and her husband have not yet decided whether to settle because it would mean backing out of a class-action lawsuit against NorVergence. "The settlement just hit my desk," Hurley said last week. Hurley said her husband's real estate firm, Hobelmann Corp., rented the Matrix box for $269 a month. "I asked my attorney to look at [the settlement] and he said it sounded like a good idea." So far, no one is taking responsibility for the NorVergence debacle. Salzano, the company's former chief executive, has filed for personal bankruptcy. Through his attorney, he said his firm was a victim of its own success. It could not hook up the Matrix boxes fast enough given its backlog of customers, said Michael D. Sirota, Salzano's attorney. The leasing companies got spooked by the delay in hookups and refused to buy rental contracts until the hookups were completed, Sirota said. "The leasing companies changed the rules of the game on NorVergence," Sirota said. "That created a cash crunch for NorVergence and that was the downfall" of the company because it was financed by selling the leases to the leasing companies. As for Vogan and Hurley, they both have their Matrix boxes in their respective offices, a token of caution when salesmen come calling. (c) 2005 The Washington Post Company NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. *** 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 Washington Post Company. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 13:48:23 EDT From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: Telstra Ends Internet TV Deal With Microsoft Telecom dailyLead from USTA June 22, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22535&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * Telstra ends Internet TV deal with Microsoft BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Orlando shuts down public Wi-Fi network * Motorola to offer Wi-Fi/cellular handset in Japan * Microsoft seeks supremacy in smart phone market * Report: VoIP, wireless on the rise in W. Europe USTA SPOTLIGHT * New Offices, New Logo -- US Telecom Reflects the Dynamic Telecom Industry * Marketing Strategies Webinar Tomorrow: How to Get the Most from Your Resources EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * AT&T aims to spearhead FMC REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * Cities worry VoIP will erode tax revenue Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22535&l=2017006 ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: 40 U.S. Senators Offer BiPartisan Data Breach Bill Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 15:25:13 -0500 Business leaders who fail to tell consumers when they may be at risk of identity theft could face jail under a bipartisan bill expected to be introduced in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter and Sen. Patrick Leahy, the committee's top Democrat, would also restrict a freewheeling trade in Social Security numbers that are prized by identity thieves. The bill, the first to draw Republican sponsorship, comes on the heels of the largest security breach announced to date after an outsider gained access to 40 million credit-card accounts held by CardSystems Solutions Inc., a payment processor. Dozens of similar breaches have been disclosed this year after a California state law required businesses to make such incidents public. Businesses and consumers have urged the Republican-controlled Congress to pass a national version of the California notification law. Specter and Leahy's bill would require businesses across the nation to make data-security breaches public. Those that do not could face criminal prosecution. According to a summary obtained by Reuters, their bill also would sharply limit the trade in Social Security numbers that can be used in identity theft. Businesses would not be able to require consumers to reveal their Social Security numbers in return for goods or services, and they would be forbidden to buy or sell Social Security numbers without consumer permission. Consumers would also be able to access the profiles maintained by "data brokers" like ChoicePoint Inc. and fix any errors, as they are currently able to do with credit reports. Businesses would have to protect consumer accounts from unauthorized access, and criminal penalties for such activity would be increased. At least three Senate Democrats have introduced data-security bills, but business groups have been quietly lobbying against them out of concerns the regulations would be too strict. Republicans in the House of Representatives are preparing efforts of their own. Texas Republican Rep. Joe Barton (news, bio, voting record), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, is working on a bill that would also limit the trade in Social Security numbers. Florida Republican Rep. Cliff Stearns (news, bio, voting record), who chairs a consumer-protection subcommittee, is drafting a bill that would include incentives for businesses to improve their security. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: John Cummings Subject: Re: Send Text Message to a Russian Cell Phone Organization: BellSouth Internet Group Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 12:39:14 -0600 cronept wrote: > Hi, > I have a friend who is in Russia. I am in the states. She is using a > GSM cell phone. I am wondering if I can send text message to her from > the Internet? I tried AIM but I do not know how to send to a cellphone > outside the US. Does anybody know any websites or any software can do > that? Thanks alot. I appciate it. > Jim At the GSMworld site, you'll find this page listing all of the Russian cellphone operators. http://www.gsmworld.com/roaming/gsminfo/cou_ru.shtml Once you know whose service she's buying, you can hunt through her operator's website. Do you read Russian, or some Cyrillic characters? Better still, ask her to do the search. John C. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Date: 22 Jun 2005 13:08:43 -0700 >> What was the cost of the touch-tone oscillator for a telephone set, >> vs. the cost of a rotary dial? > Considering that a rotary dial was nothing but springs and gears, > while a DTMF pad had coils (Bell loved those ferrous cup cores!), > resistors, transistors, specially plated contacts, etc. It is hard for us to believe today, but it took a very long time for the price of electronics to come down far enough to be cheaper than equivalent mechanical devices. In 1965 some consumer electronic things like radios, tape recorders, and TV sets still used some vacuum tubes because they were still cheapter than transistors at that point in time. So, stamping out and assembling springs and gears was cheaper than making and assembling transistors for a Touch Tone pad in those years. All components were discrete in those days. As mentioned, in another thread it was stated that it was cheaper to do many pre-processing steps on electro-mechanical gear than in the electronic CPU because the CPU was so damn expensive compared to the EAM gear. Most computer centers of that era had EAM gear on standby to do supplemental tasks like card sorting or card deck printing rather than have the expensive computer do it. Further, it was even cheaper despite the cost of paying a person to run the EAM machine instead of the automatic computer. While others claim Touch Tone saved the phone company money, I still assert it was more expensive for them, esp in non-common- control offices. I don't think tone interpreters for common- control offices were that cheap either. I note that PBX operators had 20 pps dials while the rest of us had 10 pps. Some kids experimented and found 20 pps worked at home. Now, it was easy to modify the dial to go faster -- so why didn't Bell have everyone at 20 pps -- faster utilization of equipment? I strongly suspect there were valid technical reasons not to. Indeed, from what I recall from Bell Labs Record, it took quite some time (well into the 1970s) that Bell equipment could really make good use of fast dialing. Eventually they would start interpreting digits as they came in and begin route set up before the whole number was dialed. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I had a couple of Hayes Modems which could be switched between pulse and tone dialing, and you could set the 'speed' of the pulsing or the 'speed' of the tone signals. You could make both modes go quite fast; with tone dialing so fast that it was little more than just a single blip in your ear, and most times it would work quite well. Only on occassion the modem would give its short little blip or tone burst when dialing *before* the line was set up to allow it, and you would have to redial, but usually it worked okay. 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 V24 #285 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Jun 23 14:59:53 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 8C54715083; Thu, 23 Jun 2005 14:59:53 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #286 Message-Id: <20050623185953.8C54715083@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 14:59:53 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.2 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_REMOVE, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT,WORK_AT_HOME autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Thu, 23 Jun 2005 15:00:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 286 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Samsung Phone Offers Wireless Broadband But Has Drawbacks (M Solomon) Dial/Touch Tone Speeds (was Re: Bell Divestiture) (Lisa Hancock) Hayes Smartmodems (was Re: Bell Divestiture) (Fred Atkinson) User Manual For BellSouth Phone (Ralph) BT Avoids Breakup (Telecom dailyLead from USTA) This Guy is Just Stupid (Steven Lichter) Re: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards Affected (mc) Re: Companies Want _US_ to Pay For Their Mistakes (DevilsPGD) Re: DSL Speed (Choreboy) Re: Bell Divestiture (Tony P.) Re: ISP Hunting (DevilsPGD) Re: 700-555-4141 Does Not Work (Ted Klugman) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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, 23 Jun 2005 11:36:15 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Samsung Phone Offers Wireless Broadband, But It Has Drawbacks By WALTER S. MOSSBERG For Americans who want a smart cellphone with a built-in keyboard for typing email, the best choice by far has been PalmOne's Treo 650, sold by most major U.S. wireless carriers. The standard BlackBerry hand-helds from Research In Motion make clunky phones, and the slimmer BlackBerry 7100, while an acceptable phone, lacks a full keyboard. The models using Microsoft's hand-held software have either lacked keyboards altogether or been too large to make comfortable phones. In contrast, the Treo is both roomy enough to be a good hand-held email device and compact enough to be a good phone. Starting today, Verizon Wireless will introduce in the U.S. the first Microsoft-based smart phone with a built-in keyboard that is about the same shape, size and weight as the Treo. This new phone, the $599 Samsung i730, has one major capability the $399 Treo lacks -- the ability to surf the Web and to send and receive email at broadband speeds. The new Samsung can operate at speeds roughly comparable to home digital subscriber line, or DSL, connections through Verizon's wireless Broadband Access network, which works on a wireless technology called EVDO. Or it can use speedy Wi-Fi wireless networking at places like coffee shops and airports. I don't expect to see an EVDO-capable Treo until very late this year or early in 2006. And the Treo lacks Wi-Fi capability. So the Samsung is the fastest email and Web device with a built-in keyboard that is small enough to be used comfortably as a phone. It will be available starting today for corporate customers and will be in Verizon stores in a couple of weeks. I have been testing the new i730 and comparing it to the Treo 650 from Sprint that I carry as my own phone. The Samsung worked as promised for making voice calls, accessing Web sites, and sending and receiving emails. It also played music and videos and displayed photos, though unlike my Sprint Treo, the configuration Verizon sells lacks a camera. http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20050623.html ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Dial/Touch Tone Speeds (was Re: Bell Divestiture) Date: 23 Jun 2005 06:52:58 -0700 hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote: > I note that PBX operators had 20 pps dials while the rest of us had 10 > pps. Some kids experimented and found 20 pps worked at home. Now, it > was easy to modify the dial to go faster -- so why didn't Bell have > everyone at 20 pps -- faster utilization of equipment? I strongly > suspect there were valid technical reasons not to. Note -- I subsequently learned we were served by a #1 Crossbar at the time. I believe the office serving the PBX was a panel, as was most of the city. I have no idea whether the fast dials on the PBX switchboard required a special mod at the central office. As mentioned, someone tried it at home and it worked fine (around 1971). > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I had a couple of Hayes Modems which > could be switched between pulse and tone dialing, and you could set > the 'speed' of the pulsing or the 'speed' of the tone signals. You > could make both modes go quite fast; with tone dialing so fast that > it was little more than just a single blip in your ear, and most > times it would work quite well. Only on occassion the modem would > give its short little blip or tone burst when dialing *before* the > line was set up to allow it, and you would have to redial, but > usually it worked okay. PAT] Modems were easy to adjust using the AT commands. I adjusted my Touch Tone speed to be a little faster than the default, but too fast would not go through. I never tinkered with changing the pulse rate, but there were AT commands to do that as well. I think in foreign countries the "make/break" ratio of pulses was different and I didn't want to risk screwing up my modem/software with an oddball setting. Now it doesn't matter and I ought to experiment with it. FWIW, I have a Panasonic telephone with an auto dialer. It was rather slow on pulse mode, whether from memory or entered via keys. I could dial a call faster on a real rotary phone than the Panasonic. In the 1980s I found that some locations not equipped with Touch Tone would still take it but others would not. Now it is included almost everywhere. Would anyone remember in what year dual-mode phones (keypad with a little switch to convert to pulse if necessary) came out in wide quantity? I think that was around the time they stopped using real ringer bells. My guess is the late 1980s. ------------------------------ From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Hayes Smartmodems (was Re: Bell Divestiture) Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 19:26:35 -0400 > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I had a couple of Hayes Modems which > could be switched between pulse and tone dialing, and you could set > the 'speed' of the pulsing or the 'speed' of the tone signals. You > could make both modes go quite fast; with tone dialing so fast that > it was little more than just a single blip in your ear, and most > times it would work quite well. Only on occassion the modem would > give its short little blip or tone burst when dialing *before* the > line was set up to allow it, and you would have to redial, but >usually it worked okay. PAT] I had a Hayes 300 modem when 1200 baud was considered astronomically fast. I kept it until I upgraded to a Hayes 2400 baud modem. I think both of them are still in one of my goody boxes put away, for all the good they'll be to me now. I had become very familar with the Smartmodem when it first came out. I was working for MCI at the time. One day, we got a phone call from a salesman who was at one of our customer sites. This customer had several MCI long distance lines hooked up to his PBX. The salesman had sold them a Smartmodem 1200 but was unable to make it work through the PBX. When the customer mentioned the MCI lines, the salesman pointed the finger at MCI. So the customer called and put the salesman on the phone with one of our people. That person just happened to know I knew a lot about the Smartmodem and transfered the salesman to me. I got him to describe the setup. Then I asked him how he was making it dial. He told me that he was typing in 'ATD9,' and then the area code and the number. I knew immediately what was wrong when he said that. I told him to try typing in 'ATDT9,' and the area code and the number. He took this attitude that how could a telephone technician know anything about a Smartmodem. I asked him what he had to lose by trying it. So, finally, he did. I heard him typing, then I heard the dial tone from the Smartmodem, then I heard it outpulse digit 9 in DTMF. I then heard secondary dialtone and then the area code and number outpulsed in DTMF. Then, I heard the distant modem answer, the local modem respond in carrier, and then the speaker went silent. I then heard the salesman shout, 'IT WORKS'. Then he came back to the telephone. His voice was showing that he was very embarrassed. I knew I was going to laugh out loud, so I needed to get off the phone quickly. I told him I was glad to help him and that he should call me back if he ever needed more help. Thank you and goodbye, so to speak. I laughed hysterically for several minutes after I got off the phone. The boss was very grateful. This was a customer we wanted to keep a very good relationship with. He thanked me very much. When Hayes designed the Smartmodem, they should have had the unit default to touch-tone instead of outpulsing rotor dialing by default. Incidents like this could have been avoided. I happened to know that this customer's PBX did not support rotary dialing. The 'T' I added to the string switched the unit from default rotary dialing to touch tone. Problem solved. Regards, Fred Atkinson [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think we used 'ATT' for tone dialing and 'ATP' for pulse dialing. Fred, (in a help desk capacity) did you ever run across customers who _lied_, told you they had tried to do something but in fact had not done it at all. When I used to work at TerraWorld several years ago (even then, the oldest employee they had working there) overnight shift on the help desk, I would make suggestions to customers such as 'unplug and reboot your modem' and people would not do it! They'd tell you they had 'already done that' but you _knew_ they had not and were just looking for someone to argue with . It sounds to me like your salesman was sort of the same way. There was no where else he could pass the buck off to, so decided to argue with you instead. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 17:24:15 -0700 From: Ralph Subject: User Manual for BellSouth Phone Reply-To: Ralph Shaffer K & M Enterprises 13782 De Foe Avenue Sylmar, CA 91342 818-367-3875 mailto:Ralph@mamao.com Are you still looking for a user manual for the BellSouth 4300GR phones? I am looking for the actual phone to replace a broken one. Drop me a e-mail. Thank you. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 12:51:54 EDT From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: BT Avoids Breakup Telecom dailyLead from USTA June 23, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22569&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * BT avoids breakup BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Q-and-A with Motorola's Ed Zander * Report: Pay-per-call ads to reach $1.4B * TelecomNEXT gets a leg up in poll USTA SPOTLIGHT * Just Released: The US Telecom IP Video EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Japan's Jupiter prepares 100 Mbps service * Siemens gets serious about VoIP REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * Telecom providers lobby against municipal networks * China may delay 3G licenses Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22569&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: Steven Lichter Reply-To: Die@spammers.com Organization: I Kill Spammers, Inc. (c) 2005 A Rot in Hell Co. Subject: This guy is Just Stupid Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 03:09:55 GMT Each day I have gotten 2 e-mails from him as well as 2 more selling nail fungal removal. I called the number and talked to someone there, they said they have gotten hundreds of calls complaining about the spasm, but the fool continues. I guess this guy just needs a few hundred thousand more calls from payhones to get the idea. Or maybe someone in Orlando can visit him and clear him up on his bad advertising. Are you still interested? If so you must call toll free 1.866.702.0972 to reserve before the promotion ends. The packages are open dated so you can use a few days at a time or all at once. You do not even need to know when you are going to go since you have up to two full years to select travel dates. The only good spammer is a dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? (c) 2005 I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot in Hell Co. ------------------------------ From: mc Subject: Re: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards Affected Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 17:41:03 -0400 Organization: Speed Factory (http://www.speedfactory.net) Ed Clarke wrote in message news:telecom24.284.6@telecom-digest.org: > I went through our credit card bills yesterday. LLBean Visa 27% APR. > Delta Skymiles AmEx 25%. I paid them both off in full and won't be > using them again. AmEx charges $15 for an over-the-phone eCheck but > the INTEREST on the damn card was several dollars per day. By the > time the physical check would arrive and clear, I would have that much > in interest. You will probably find that they still have an amount due the next month, to mop up finance charges. As I understand it, some cards charge interest on the average balance for the month rather than the actual balance, which means they can keep charging interest on a loan you've paid off! > I'm about to dump all my Cisco switches (2900 Catalyst series, 5000 > series) and the RAID stuff onto eBay. Simply shutting them down and > replacing them with a 100 watt ReadyNAS 600 will save me hundreds of > dollars per month even if I just threw them out. I remember when Yale University gave away an IBM 370 for just that reason. The whole new computer cost less than the saving on electricity from turning the old one off. ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: Re: Companies Want _US_ to Pay For Their Mistakes Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 21:35:35 -0600 Organization: Disorganized In message hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote: > I called my credit card carrier to check my balance. Instead of > getting the automated answer, I was connected right through to a real > person. > He tried hard to pitch me with credit card insurance costing $100. That's beautiful! The law sets your maximum liability for credit card fraud at $50, and that's only if fraud occurs. Paying $100/year whether or not fraud occurs is brilliant! > ABC News, when reporting on the recent multiple credit card > information thefts, also mentioned the availability of consumer > insurance to protect against ID theft. They said it took a victim 600 > hours of time to correct everything and the insurance would cover lost > wages. Would cover lost wages 'eh? Maybe the $100/year is worth it then; I'd sure spend a lot more then 600 hours if they were paying my salary in the process. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think they are a little too tricky to fall for that, however. They _might_ pay for one or two hours of your time -- maybe -- but I imagine they would tie it in with getting some statement from your employer about time off the job. They are not going to just send you a couple of regular payroll checks however. And if you took time off from work to cure this 'fraud' was it a situation you could not have accomplished during regular off hours from work? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Choreboy Subject: Re: DSL Speed Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 17:01:33 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote: > Choreboy wrote: >> It seems to me that dialup and DSL would be analagous to two ways of >> yelling across a field; like two ways of yelling, DSL and dialup use >> the same medium. > A very simple analogy might be yelling, then using a megaphone > to yell. The megaphone doesn't "amplify" your voice, but directs > it a little better so it can be heard further. Couldn't technology analogous to a megaphone be applied to dialup as well as DSL? > Adding this analogy, imagine yelling across a field crowded with > people talking as opposed yelling across an empty field. The speech > of the other people will interfere with your yelling. Ah, crosstalk! It seems to me that if DSL uses the same wire dialup used, the same crosstalk will be present. > Another analogy might be signalling across a field using colored > flags. In all cases you are using reflected light. But the ability > to see the distant flag will vary based on the color of the flag. A > person holding a green flag standing in front of trees will be > difficult to discern compared to someone holding an orange flag. The > _carrier_ of your signal--the reflected color of the flag, is > different and different carriers are more efficient. I'm interested in how the DSL signal is different. > Let's note that the limitation isn't just in the plain copper wire > that comes out of your telephone. On dialup, it seemed to be the wire that wouldn't let me connect at the farm at the same speed I could connect a block from the CO. I wonder how the farm wire, that wouldn't take 50k on dialup, will carry 1.5M or more on DSL. > There's also a limitation in the > telephone company facilities. A voice conversation doesn't need much > "room" (bandwidth) to be clearly understood. I have trouble understanding on the phone, and I often resort to the phonetic alphabet to be understood. I think the problem may be more in the typical quality of phones than in bandwidth. Who don't phone manufacturers list frequency response, distortion, and sensitivity for speaking and listening? A control to match the telephone's impedence to the line impedence at your location might also help. > (Notice if you play music over a telephone that sounds terrible at > the other end -- that's because the phone doesn't have the bandwidth > for the more complex sounds of music compared to voice). With better fidelity I might know for sure which family member answered the phone. > Anyway, the telephone company has your voice share space with other > voices. While this is fine for voice, it limits data transmission > to 56K. Does a POTS line from the CO to a house carry multiple voices? Anyway, DSL at the farm uses the same line that the phones at the farm still use. > Between the CO and the customer, isn't voice service just bare wire? > Are there inline amps? If so, they could preemphasize high > frequencies. That varies tremendously from customer to customer. If there are inline amps, preemphasis could be set according to the length of wire between the customer and the CO. >> I don't understand what kind of signal dsl uses to carry so much more >> data than dialup without needing broadband cable. > It uses digital. Crisp, to the point. As mentioned above, an orange > flag transmits 'better' than a green flag. Both are using the same > medium. Digital transmits better and can make better use of a pair of > wires. Digital is clear because the receiver need recognize only two states. Marconi invented the digital (telegraphic) radio transmitter in 1895. In 1979, ships were still required to have telegraph operators because nothing could match Marconi's radio for range and clarity. The data stream was slow. FSK allowed a faster data stream (between teletype machines), but it operated at a higher frequency, which reduced range, and with a wider bandwidth, which made it less clear and reliable. Satellites made Marconi's radio obsolete at sea. I understand satellite channels offer wide bandwidths, which have room for fast data streams. If at the farm I can download 1.5 Mb/s, it sounds as if those miles of POTS telephone wire have a bigger bandwidth than I'd thought. >> If you have a second phone line for your modem, a $25 ISP, Direct TV, >> and perhaps other Bellsouth services, they will give you a price where >> going to DSL will lower your costs. However, for somebody whose only >> cost is $100 a year for an ISP, DSL would add $500 to his annual >> budget. Many feel they can't afford it, just as farmers before the >> Model T felt that they had no choice but to stick with slow, >> inconvenient horses and wagons. > AFAIK, if you get DSL, you no longer need a second phone line and > everything can come over your DSL line. That is, you can talk on the > phone and use the computer at the same time, and get faster computer > response. The same POTS wires feed all devices including the DSL modem. You plug in phones, answering machines, and dialup modems through inline filters. Bellsouth says the filters protect the conventional devices from high frequencies. I think the filters also keep those high frequencies from draining through those devices. Besides using a DSL computer and a phone at the same time, you can use two or more computers with DSL modems at the same time. That surprises me because I think all computers on the same DSL line are assigned the same IP. > The pricing of services is a function of marketing, not technology. > A consumer has to choose the best price/service suited to their needs. > Sometimes a bundled package may end up still cheaper than a la carte. A bundle can be cheaper if you would have bought all the services anyway. For marketing, bundling can entice a customer who would not otherwise have bought them all. You lose the customer who wnats just one and doesn't have money to waste. That's why Henry Ford didn't bundle his cars with garages. >> You say internet costs depend on how much traffic you have. > That's not really accurate. Internet costs whatever you want it to > cost. I was speaking of Bellsouth's costs. I understood million-dollar switches were the big cost for voice service, while equipment to carry heavy internet traffic was the big cost for DSL. > If need your response RIGHT NOW, you should get a higher speed > connection. If you're doing a lot of work and don't like the long > waits, you should get a higher speed connection. If you don't mind > slow response time, you can make do as is. Plenty of people do. > There are even higher speed connections than DSL, although at some > point you're limited by the overall Internet traffic and the response > time of remote sites. I'm talking about another possibility. For example, sometimes I go to to NWS to download ten radar images showing the progression of any storms in the area over the last hour. Suppose they total 10 Mb (1MB). That's: 12 minutes at 14.4kb 6 minutes at 28.8 4 minutes at 40 3 minutes at 50 1 minute at 150kb 7 seconds at 1.5 Mb 12 minutes for 1 MB shows why not many people surf at 14.4. I never want to go back to 28.8, which would take 6 minutes instead of 3. If DSL let me download those images at let me download at 1.5Mb/s, I could save another 173 seconds. If I contracted for DSL that would deliver only 10% of that speed, I would still save 120 seconds compared to 56k. > Indeed, often times what appears as slow > connections is actually not related to your own connection, but at > intermediate or distant ends. That's another reason DSL with a limited speed would be interesting. >> I think there's a big untapped market for DSL, and it could be >> profitable at a low price. Cadillac did not introduce the Model T, >> and I guess Bellsouth doesn't want to offer existing customers >> something cheaper. > What is being offered is changing rapidly as technologies change and > new equipment is installed. Many cable companies offer service over > their lines as well in competition with Bell companies. Some Bell > companies are offering "FIOS" which is extra high speed. > Some of us whose modems keep getting fried by lightning are making > do with 14.4. That happened to me with a 14.4 modem before I discovered that my phone ground and power ground hadn't been bonded. Is a 14.4 modem more lightning proof than a 56k? ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture Organization: ATCC Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 17:13:22 -0400 In article , hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com says: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I had a couple of Hayes Modems which > could be switched between pulse and tone dialing, and you could set > the 'speed' of the pulsing or the 'speed' of the tone signals. You > could make both modes go quite fast; with tone dialing so fast that > it was little more than just a single blip in your ear, and most > times it would work quite well. Only on occassion the modem would > give its short little blip or tone burst when dialing *before* the > line was set up to allow it, and you would have to redial, but > usually it worked okay. PAT] Yes I remember those Hayes modems. We use to run the DTMF at 30ms on ESS switches, and 70ms on SxS switches that were adapted to interpret DTMF. In some cases with a good pair you could get as low as 20ms but it wasn't reliable. ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: Re: ISP Hunting Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 21:35:36 -0600 Organization: Disorganized In message Choreboy wrote: > DevilsPGD wrote: >> I'm going to be just outside of Chicago (Skokie, if you must know) for >> an unknown period of time and looking to find out what the cheapest >> way to get internet access would be. >> I have no need for anything other then basic connectivity, and the >> ability to establish HTTPS connections to a known IP and PPTP >> connections to another known IP (not even DNS is required) and I >> certainly will not need ISP provided email, webspace, or anything of >> the sort. I also absolutely refuse to install any crapware provided >> by an ISP. >> I'm eyeballing dialup access through ISP.COM which offers $8.95 - 56K >> Regular Dial-up -- any thoughts, good or bad? Can I do better? >> Any thoughts? > Don't you want news-server access? That's the most common > deal-breaker for me. Nope. No web hosting, no email, no usenet, no technical support, hell, they don't even need a tollfree customer service number. DNS is about the only thing I'd use (other then IP transit) but it's not mandatory, I run my own DNS servers anyway (and most of the stuff I'll be accessing will be through my VPN and in-house proxies anyway) Once the VPN is up I can access literally everything I need right through there. Just PPTP at the moment, although if I have the time to get IPSec working, I might switch over. > Budget ISPs often contract with dialup providers. The quality of > service can depend on this, and the ISP's representative may not be in > a position to know what's wrong. True enough. > At $9.95 I've been with localnet a couple of years, I guess. At times > I've looked for alternatives, but in the long run things have worked > out. I'll check 'em out, thanks! Any idea what they're like for short-term access? In message Fred Atkinson wrote: >> Don't you want news-server access? That's the most common >> deal-breaker for me. > It shouldn't be a concern. > If the price is cheap enough for an ISP you've chosen and they don't > provide a news server, also get a news account at Newsguy > http://www.newsguy.com . They have a special plan that they offer > one year of news server access for forty dollars. I used them once > when a ten dollar a month ISP I was then using dropped their news > server without telling anyone. http://www.readfreenews.net/ -- You can't beat free. Oh, and as soon as Mike updates the page, my name will be appearing on http://www.readfreenews.net/donations.html too :) ------------------------------ From: Ted Klugman Subject: Re: 700-555-4141 Does Not Work Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 12:11:44 -0400 Organization: Optimum Online On Mon, 20 Jun 2005 03:24:23 GMT, Fred Atkinson wrote: > On Fri, 17 Jun 2005 19:41:39 -0400, Ted Klugman > wrote: >> Recently, my long distance carrier (TTI National, somehow a subsidary >> of MCI) informed me that they're going to start charging a "monthly >> fee" of $1.99. So I decided it was time to switch. >> My new carrier's website instructs new users to call 700-555-4141 to >> verify when the LD carrier has been changed. I hadn't dialed the >> number in quite a while, so for kicks, I dialed it. >> "We're sorry, your call can not be completed as dialed." This didn't >> happen the last time I tried it (more than a year ago) >> (Yes, I tried it with a "1" in front of the number) >> So, any thoughts on how I can check who my LD carrier is? >> TIA > Do you have 900, 700, and 976 blocking on your phone? If you do, that > explains it completely. > Try dialing '00' and see what happens. Dialing '00' produced nothing. Nothing at all. Yes, I did have 900, 700, and 976 blocking. Got rid of that and it works fine now. The odd thing is that I have *always* had 900, 700, and 976 blocking, since I got the line in 1998. One would think that telcos would still allow 700-555-4141, and block all other numbers. Oh well. ------------------------------ 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) RSS Syndication of TELECOM Digest: http://telecom-digest.org/rss.html For syndication examples see http://www.feedrollpro.com/syndicate.php?id=308 and also http://feeds.feedburner.com/TelecomDigest ************************************************************************* * 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. 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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 V24 #286 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Jun 24 05:12:22 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 6B83C1504C; Fri, 24 Jun 2005 05:12:21 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #287 Message-Id: <20050624091221.6B83C1504C@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 05:12:21 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.1 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_REMOVE, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Fri, 24 Jun 2005 05:12:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 287 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach (Marcus Didius Falco) Ubiquitous Technology, Bad Practices Drive Up Data Theft (Marcus Falco) Yahoo Closes All User Defined Chat Rooms (Lisa Minter) SBC DSL Total Fee Per Month (jrefactors@hotmail.com) Re: ISP Hunting (Choreboy) Re: Hayes Smartmodems (was Re: Bell Divestiture) (Lisa Hancock) Re: Hayes Smartmodems (was Re: Bell Divestiture) (Tony P.) Re: 40 U.S. Senators Offer BiPartisan Data Breach Bill (Thomas Horsley) Re: DSL Speed (Lisa Hancock) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (ellis@no.spam) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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, 24 Jun 2005 00:51:47 -0400 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach -- Washington Post I had been planning to call my active credit card companies to determine whether any had been compromised. This article caused me to start the process this morning, calling American Express, my most active account. After thanking me for carrying their card for 21 years, they refused to tell me whether any of my three cards was among those compromised. They tried to tell me that they have all sorts of "anti-fraud" procedures. Even so, it was Master Card and not American Express that first uncovered the problem, and there is no way I can reliably double check an account that has dozens of charges a month, many of them posted in the name of parent companies located at head offices in other cities, so that many of the charges are not easily verified and must usually be taken on faith. Accordingly, I told them to cancel all three cards and send me new ones. They were not happy, but were unwilling to tell me whether the cards had been compromised. Perhaps if they have the expense of replacing many customers credit cards, some necessarily and many unnnecessarily, they will start taking security and customer service more seriously. When I get the new American Express cards I will call the second most active card in my wallet, and so on down the list. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/22/AR2005062202 037.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/22/AR2005062202 037_pf.html washingtonpost.com Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach Some Banks Decline to Tell Customers Whether Accounts Were Compromised By Mike Musgrove Consumer advocates said credit card customers have been denied crucial information in the wake of a recent data breach, as some major banks are declining to tell cardholders whether their account may have been accessed by hackers. In a security lapse disclosed by MasterCard International Inc. last week, 40 million credit card and debit card numbers were exposed to an intruder who gained access sometime last year through a credit-processing firm. An interagency group of federal banking regulators has begun an investigation into the incident. Meanwhile, Internet security firm Secure Computing Corp. warned yesterday that a fresh appearance of an old e-mail scam appears to come from opportunistic fraudsters hoping to use fear about the recent data theft as a way to trick MasterCard customers into giving up their account information. Companies such as J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., American Express Co. and MBNA Corp. said that they are not automatically alerting their customers that their information may have been exposed but that they are more closely monitoring the accounts that may have been affected. The policy was reported yesterday on CNetNews.com. Such credit-card-issuing banks said MasterCard and Visa have shared with them lists of account numbers that may have been compromised. Though such accounts may earn heightened scrutiny from the banks that issued them, customers may never know whether their account numbers were among those stolen by hackers. "Those accounts have been flagged, and we're watching them even more closely than we otherwise would," said Jim Donahue, spokesman at MBNA. "If we start to see an unusual rate of fraud [among the set of compromised accounts], we would consider notifying those customers impacted -- but we haven't seen that yet." MasterCard said yesterday that it is up to banks that issue credit cards to determine whether to contact cardholders. Consumer watchdog groups decried such policies as bad for consumers. "That sounds really bad to us," said Chanelle Hardy, legislative counsel at Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. "Any time that any unauthorized person gets access to sensitive or personal information, [the cardholder] should be notified," she said. "For a consumer, it's the first line of defense. It's almost their only line of defense." The breach reported last week occurred at a processing center in Tucson operated by CardSystems Solutions Inc. and may have been the largest such theft. CardSystems did not return a call for comment yesterday. The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council has issued guidelines for when a bank should disclose to its customers that account information may have been stolen. Michael L. Jackson, chairman of the FFIEC's information technology subcommittee, said yesterday that it was too early in the investigation to recommend one course or another. There has not yet been any fraudulent activity associated with the stolen credit card numbers, said Sharon Gamsin, vice president of communications at MasterCard. If bogus charges do show up, customers often are not held responsible but can spend years clearing their credit ratings if someone steals their identity. Within 24 hours of last week's news of the breach, a new version of an Internet scam was circulating on the Web. In an e-mail forged to look as if it had come from MasterCard, recipients were urged to log in to a counterfeited MasterCard site and enter their account information. That Web site had apparently been taken down yesterday afternoon. It was registered in the name of Tucson resident Donald Cuppe, whose wife said in an interview yesterday that the couple knew nothing about the site but had received a call from their bank on Monday alerting them that their Visa debit card number was stolen. Washingtonpost.com staff writer Brian Krebs contributed to this report. Copyright 2005 The Washington Post Company NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. *** 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: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 00:57:46 -0400 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: FWD: Ubiquitous Technology, Bad Practices Drive Up Data Theft The next day the Post reported that many large card issuers have NOT chosen to notify customers. Indeed, as I report, American Express refused to inform me when I called them, causing me to have to change the numbers on my cards. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/21/AR2005062101615.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/21/AR2005062101615_pf.html washingtonpost.com Ubiquitous Technology, Bad Practices Drive Up Data Theft By Jonathan Krim Call 2005 the year of the data breach. One day, tapes with the Social Security numbers of 1.2 million federal workers are reported missing. Another day it's hackers gaining access to private information on 120,000 alumni at Boston College. Then, last Friday, comes word that 40 million credit card numbers fell prey to computer criminals. Collectively, nearly 50 million accounts have been exposed to the possibility of identity fraud since the beginning of the year, a significant increase from last year. Security experts, law enforcement officials and privacy advocates agree that while computer crime is on the rise, it is hardly new. So why the apparent escalation? In part, organizations are telling their customers or employees about incidents more than they used to, many complying with a California notification law that is being considered as the basis of possible federal legislation. After data broker ChoicePoint Inc. reported in February that it was infiltrated by identity thieves posing as legitimate customers, the company received a second black eye when reports surfaced that it did not notify consumers about a previous breach, before California's law took effect. Now, most organizations are choosing to notify potential victims. Experts see other factors contributing to the data-theft siege. A boom in data collection has created a marketplace of valuable information stored on computers in thousands of places, many with weak security. "The current fiascos in cyber-security have been occurring for the past 10 years," said Tom Kellermann, who recently left his position as senior data risk management specialist for the World Bank. Kellermann and others blame poorly designed software, inattention to data security and an underappreciation of the problem by top management in corporations and other institutions. "We've used weak practices for some time," said Chuck Wade, an Internet security and commerce consultant. "The vulnerabilities are well known, and we have not been improving the security measures ... as we should have been." At the same time, some hackers who used to get their kicks merely being disruptive are pooling efforts with organized criminals, said Jonathan J. Rusch, a special counsel in the fraud section of the Justice Department. "The motivation now is money," Rusch said. In addition to using stolen data for credit card or other financial fraud, a thriving black market for the stolen data itself exists online, run in large part from Eastern Europe. Among the most extreme examples of data for sale are offerings known in the online underground as "fulls." These reports include not only Social Security and credit card numbers, but also account passwords for Web sites that a consumer might use, such as eBay or a bank. "There's so much information that has been leaked out over the years, it may be that there are, outside of the country, criminal elements with huge databases on American consumers," Wade said. With more and more people getting high-speed Internet connections, and participating in online commerce and banking, the targets of opportunity for criminals only grow. Wade and others argue that many industry players have not responded aggressively enough because they are insulated from the financial consequences of breaches. Banks and credit card companies, for example, pay nothing when a criminal uses someone's credit card for a fraudulent charge. The same is true for credit card processing companies such as CardSystems Solutions Inc., which announced last week that it housed the 40 million credit card numbers that hackers may have obtained. Payment processors and banks collect fees for charges that are reversed. "They are making money on fraudulent transactions," said Brian Mortensen, head of a New Jersey company that sells telecommunications equipment. "They should not be allowed to do that." Mortensen said that as a result of fraudulent purchases, his firm has lost $12,000 to $15,000 on equipment that will never be recovered and owes several thousand dollars more in various fees. Although consumers generally don't have to pay for fraudulent charges on their credit cards, if their identity has been compromised it can take years and thousands of dollars to restore good credit. Some security experts say many financial companies have been slow to adopt multiple layers of customer verification, such as requiring a password and a second identification number. Many companies also are not encrypting stored data. But many firms argue that while data protection is a top priority, such measures could make online commerce too inconvenient for consumers without adding appreciably to security. And security already is a large business expense. Companies must monitor their computer networks and "patch" vulnerabilities in software that are discovered regularly. That can be especially complex when firms merge and one company's system needs to be incorporated into another's, said David Thomas, head of the FBI's computer intrusion section. "It's very, very difficult to stay on top of it," Thomas said. Moreover, said Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor who works for an Internet security firm, "The company has to try to protect against every kind of attack. The intruder only needs to find one." Some breaches, such as mortgage data from General Motors Acceptance Corp. that was stored on a laptop stolen from a car, leave consumers wondering how seriously companies take information security. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), one of several on Capitol Hill sponsoring identity theft legislation, said the CardSystems incident last week "is a clear sign that industry's efforts to self-regulate when it comes to protecting consumers' sensitive personal data are failing." Thomas F. Holt Jr., an attorney who represents companies involved in breach cases, said he expects things to change when large class-action suits begin to get filed against firms for improperly protecting information. "When that game is afoot ... companies will begin to redouble their security efforts and reexamine a lot of assumptions they have regarding the gathering and storing of sensitive data," Holt said. Copyright 2005 The Washington Post Company NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. *** 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: Lisa Minter Subject: Yahoo Shuts Down Chat Rooms Amid Child Sex Concerns Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 14:11:38 -0500 By Duncan Martell Yahoo Inc. the most-used Internet site, has shut down all its user-created Internet chat rooms amid concerns that adults were using the sites to try to have sex with minors. The giant Internet media company closed down those chat rooms and the ability to create new ones "in the past week," said Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako. Chat rooms created and sponsored by Yahoo itself remain open, Osako said. The number of user-created chat rooms is variable at any given time and Yahoo does not track that figure, she said. The user-created chat rooms in question, where Internet users converse in real time, had names including "Girls 13 And Under For Older Guys" and "Girls 13 And Up For Much Older Men" and were all listed under "education chat rooms," Houston television station KPRC reported. "We are working on improvements to the service to enhance users' experience and their compliance with our terms of service," Osako said. "Yahoo condemns the use of Internet tools for illegal activities." KPRC reported last month that major advertisers including PepsiCo Inc., Georgia-Pacific Corp. and State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. removed their ads after the station found the ads were appearing on Yahoo user-created chat rooms that were aimed at sex with children. "As soon as we found out we pulled our ads," said Pepsi spokesman Dave DeCecco. "We were totally unaware our ads were associated with those chat rooms -- and that was back in April." Pepsi continues to advertise on other parts of Yahoo's site, mostly in sports and music sections, but pulled all its ads in user-created chat rooms. "They were down the same day we found out about it," DeCecco said, referring to the ads on user chat rooms. "We were horrified to find out we were on those sites," said Georgia-Pacific spokeswoman Robin Keegan, who said that the company still advertises on other parts of Yahoo. "As soon as we found out, that day we pulled that advertising." A spokesperson for State Farm was not immediately available to comment. The concern over online safety for children using the Internet has surged with the number of people using the Internet, which allows for anonymous and sometimes hard-to-trace communication and content. It's also not the first time that Yahoo has faced the issue of users taking advantage of its free services to lure young children. A minor and his parents in May filed a $10 million lawsuit against Yahoo and a man who once operated a Yahoo Groups site where members traded child pornography. Many attorneys argue that the Communications Decency Act shields Web sites from responsibility for material posted by users. But the lawsuit, filed on May 9 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, charged that Yahoo breached its duties by allowing co-defendant Mark Bates and others to share child pornography on a site, called Candyman, that Mister Bates created and moderated via the Yahoo Groups service. A child pornography investigation led by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and dubbed Operation Candyman targeted Yahoo Groups users and ultimately resulted in the arrest of more than 100 people in the United States. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. ------------------------------ From: jrefactors@hotmail.com Subject: SBC DSL Total Fee Per Month Date: 23 Jun 2005 21:30:22 -0700 I haven't subscribed SBC DSL before. I am interested in the Express package that charges 14.95 per month, but it excludes tax and FUSF fee. I want to ask usually how much it will charge for each month in my case? Please advise. Thanks!! [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I don't think they themselves know exactly how much it will cost from one month to the next. When I used to allow SBC here in my home two or three years ago, for local phone service _and_ DSL, the total bill each month was never less than one hundred dollars per month, and I was allegedly eligible for discounts given to senior citizens and disabled people under their 'lifeline' program. Even though SBC was instructed by the Kansas commmissioners to apply those rates to me, SBC retaliated with a phone bill which was _26 pages_ long full of all sorts of 'partial month credits' and 'rerates' for things, and the end result was the bill was eighteen dollars more than the month before! They lie about their prices and plans. For example, they told me _three years ago_ that I could have that $14.95 per month rate on DSL 'as long as you have Cingular cell phone service as well ...' I've had Cingular for a long time, but then SBC decided I as not eligible. They were also charging me for 'anonymous call blocking' but then not blocking anonymous calls, and their chairman's office claimed that if a caller passed a string of 'zeros' or 'ones' as their caller ID, that was sufficient and did not qualify for blocking purposes. I'd be very cautious about accepting their word on any of their plans; they find so many ways to make promises and then not keep them. You'd be better off going with a more reputable company, or perhaps cable internet. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Choreboy Subject: Re: ISP Hunting Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 15:08:03 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com DevilsPGD wrote: > In message Choreboy > wrote: >> Don't you want news-server access? That's the most common >> deal-breaker for me. > Nope. No web hosting, no email, no usenet, no technical support, > hell, they don't even need a tollfree customer service number. > DNS is about the only thing I'd use (other then IP transit) but it's > not mandatory, I run my own DNS servers anyway (and most of the stuff > I'll be accessing will be through my VPN and in-house proxies anyway) > Once the VPN is up I can access literally everything I need right > through there. Just PPTP at the moment, although if I have the time > to get IPSec working, I might switch over. >> Budget ISPs often contract with dialup providers. The quality of >> service can depend on this, and the ISP's representative may not be in >> a position to know what's wrong. > True enough. >> At $9.95 I've been with localnet a couple of years, I guess. At times >> I've looked for alternatives, but in the long run things have worked >> out. > I'll check 'em out, thanks! Any idea what they're like for short-term > access? They charge $12 setup, so the first month would be $21.95, if that's what you mean. There were no problems for my first several months. Sometimes episodes of repeated annoyances have made me think of switching, but they got fixed. That's what I mean by "the long run." As someone pointed out, freedomlist.com has lots of cheap ISPs, and some are probably very good. They say localnet is too expensive. I tried access4less based on recommendations there. As it turned out, their service had recently gone bad. It was terrible in many ways: the signup, download speeds, and customer service. A few days after I signed up, they dropped dialup. I was glad I hadn't dropped localnet. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Hayes Smartmodems (was Re: Bell Divestiture) Date: 23 Jun 2005 13:29:19 -0700 Fred Atkinson wrote: > I got him to describe the setup. Then I asked him how he was making > it dial. He told me that he was typing in 'ATD9,' and then the area > code and the number. > When Hayes designed the Smartmodem, they should have had the unit > default to touch-tone instead of outpulsing rotor dialing by default. > Incidents like this could have been avoided. I happened to know that > this customer's PBX did not support rotary dialing. The 'T' I added > to the string switched the unit from default rotary dialing to touch > tone. Problem solved. I'm confused. IIRC, the command was four characters, either ATDT or ATDP. Are you saying it would work with three? Also, for dialing out of a PBX, wasn't a 'pause' character needed to allow time for the second dial tone? Way back then a lot of people still had rotary service and most systems supported both. I don't think early on defaulting to pulse was such a bad idea for those days. IIRC, Hayes was the leader in modems, but didn't they end up going bankrupt? I didn't understand that. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think we used 'ATT' for tone dialing > and 'ATP' for pulse dialing. Fred, (in a help desk capacity) did you > ever run across customers who _lied_, told you they had tried to do > something but in fact had not done it at all. That certainly does happen. But more commonly is people who _think_ they did something when they actually didn't, or for some reason what they entered didn't take (ie keyboard locked up and they didn't realize it -- that's very common.) ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Hayes Smartmodems (was Re: Bell Divestiture) Organization: ATCC Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 17:23:48 -0400 In article , TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to fatkinson@mishmash.com: >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I had a couple of Hayes Modems which >> could be switched between pulse and tone dialing, and you could set >> the 'speed' of the pulsing or the 'speed' of the tone signals. You >> could make both modes go quite fast; with tone dialing so fast that >> it was little more than just a single blip in your ear, and most >> times it would work quite well. Only on occassion the modem would >> give its short little blip or tone burst when dialing *before* the >> line was set up to allow it, and you would have to redial, but >> usually it worked okay. PAT] > I had a Hayes 300 modem when 1200 baud was considered astronomically > fast. I kept it until I upgraded to a Hayes 2400 baud modem. I think > both of them are still in one of my goody boxes put away, for all the > good they'll be to me now. > I had become very familar with the Smartmodem when it first came out. > I was working for MCI at the time. One day, we got a phone call from > a salesman who was at one of our customer sites. This customer had > several MCI long distance lines hooked up to his PBX. The salesman > had sold them a Smartmodem 1200 but was unable to make it work through > the PBX. When the customer mentioned the MCI lines, the salesman > pointed the finger at MCI. > So the customer called and put the salesman on the phone with one of > our people. That person just happened to know I knew a lot about the > Smartmodem and transfered the salesman to me. > I got him to describe the setup. Then I asked him how he was making > it dial. He told me that he was typing in 'ATD9,' and then the area > code and the number. > I knew immediately what was wrong when he said that. I told him to > try typing in 'ATDT9,' and the area code and the number. He took this > attitude that how could a telephone technician know anything about a > Smartmodem. > I asked him what he had to lose by trying it. So, finally, he did. > I heard him typing, then I heard the dial tone from the Smartmodem, > then I heard it outpulse digit 9 in DTMF. I then heard secondary > dialtone and then the area code and number outpulsed in DTMF. > Then, I heard the distant modem answer, the local modem respond in > carrier, and then the speaker went silent. > I then heard the salesman shout, 'IT WORKS'. Then he came back to the > telephone. His voice was showing that he was very embarrassed. > I knew I was going to laugh out loud, so I needed to get off the phone > quickly. I told him I was glad to help him and that he should call me > back if he ever needed more help. Thank you and goodbye, so to speak. > I laughed hysterically for several minutes after I got off the phone. > The boss was very grateful. This was a customer we wanted to keep a > very good relationship with. He thanked me very much. > When Hayes designed the Smartmodem, they should have had the unit > default to touch-tone instead of outpulsing rotor dialing by default. > Incidents like this could have been avoided. I happened to know that > this customer's PBX did not support rotary dialing. The 'T' I added > to the string switched the unit from default rotary dialing to touch > tone. Problem solved. > Regards, > Fred Atkinson > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think we used 'ATT' for tone dialing > and 'ATP' for pulse dialing. Actually it was ATD and ATDT if you wanted to be fussy. AT was the attention grabber, followed by the command and then any parameters. If I recall correctly you could set one of the S registers to a value to default DTMF dialing on ATD. ------------------------------ Subject: Re: 40 U.S. Senators Offer BiPartisan Data Breach Bill From: tom.horsley@att.net (Thomas A. Horsley) Organization: AT&T Worldnet Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 22:49:12 GMT > Businesses and consumers have urged the Republican-controlled Congress > to pass a national version of the California notification law. But notification is the least of the problems. Most companies won't even know they've been hacked (the most recent problem only showed up when they started working backwards from bogus charges noticed by consumers). What is needed is enforcement of better standards for protecting the data in the first place. >>==>> The *Best* political site >>==+ email: Tom.Horsley@worldnet.att.net icbm: Delray Beach, FL | Free Software and Politics <<==+ ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: DSL Speed Date: 23 Jun 2005 13:54:16 -0700 Choreboy wrote: > Couldn't technology analogous to a megaphone be applied to dialup as > well as DSL? Yes. > Ah, crosstalk! It seems to me that if DSL uses the same wire dialup > used, the same crosstalk will be present. Not necessarily. Remember AM and FM radio waves go through the same air, but AM is much more sensitive to lightning and other static than is FM. DSL service may be arrangeed to minimize crosstalk. > On dialup, it seemed to be the wire that wouldn't let me connect at > the farm at the same speed I could connect a block from the CO. I > wonder how the farm wire, that wouldn't take 50k on dialup, will carry > 1.5M or more on DSL. Because it's NOT just the wire to the farm, but ALSO other parts of the telephone plant being set up for DSL. > I have trouble understanding on the phone, and I often resort to the > phonetic alphabet to be understood. I think the problem may be more > in the typical quality of phones than in bandwidth. You could have broadcast quality microphones and loudspeakers and it will still sound like a telephone because of the limited bandwidth. Since bandwidth is limited, telephone components aren't high fidelity as it would be a waste to make them so. (I believe the modern "K" handset is clearer than the older "G" handset.) > Does a POTS line from the CO to a house carry multiple voices? Depending on the location, often times yes. Between central offices or within the CO almost always yes. I mean if you live across the street from the CO you probably have dedicated copper pair, but you live some distance you probably are multiplexed over a carrier line. The degree of multiplex determines your bandwidth. > A bundle can be cheaper if you would have bought all the services > anyway. What matters is the total price. When I got a car it came bundled with power windows, which I didn't want. Multiple dealers told me I'd pay _more_ to go a la carte and not have the power windows because it was a special order to them. So I got the power windows. (Turned out I like them. Sure, I could've hunted for a dealer who'd give me a better deal, but at some point the cost of the hunt would've exceeded any benefit). > For marketing, bundling can entice a customer who would not > otherwise have bought them all. You lose the customer who wnats just > one and doesn't have money to waste. That's why Henry Ford didn't > bundle his cars with garages. Remember that while Henry Ford did very well at first, eventually General Motors and Chrysler surpassed him with their cars. They couldn't be the Model T on price, but they had better marketing. What was great in 1918 wasn't so great in 1928. Henry Ford was so stubborn he almost ruined the company and his family had to take it away from him. Even his wife voted her shares with the others and he was forced out. It's a shame such a brilliant man was also such an mean SOB. His "$5/day" wages was partly myth. > I was speaking of Bellsouth's costs. I understood million-dollar > switches were the big cost for voice service, while equipment to carry > heavy internet traffic was the big cost for DSL. In many cases, if not all, the equipment is the same. Today voice talk is converted to digital for transmission, and those digital signals share the lines with DSL signals. I'd say the biggest investment (beyond more capacity) was in local loops so that customers could have reasonable speed on DSL. Not everyone can get it. > Is a 14.4 modem more lightning proof than a 56k? No, they're just easy to find laying around idle so one may take them and others will be glad you removed some old clutter. ------------------------------ From: ellis@no.spam Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks Date: Thu, 23 Jun 2005 21:24:45 -0000 Organization: S.P.C.A.A. In article , TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to : > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think the problem would arise when > the circuit breaker goes out of order, for example, melted into place > where it should not be. But chaining strips would increase the chances of a breaker tripping since there would be more 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. 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) RSS Syndication of TELECOM Digest: http://telecom-digest.org/rss.html For syndication examples see http://www.feedrollpro.com/syndicate.php?id=308 and also http://feeds.feedburner.com/TelecomDigest ************************************************************************* * 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. 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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 V24 #287 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Jun 24 16:30:00 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 9E8A31507C; Fri, 24 Jun 2005 16:29:58 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #288 Message-Id: <20050624202958.9E8A31507C@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 16:29:58 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=1.0 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,HOME_EMPLOYMENT, MAILTO_TO_REMOVE,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT,WORK_AT_HOME autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: * Status: RO TELECOM Digest Fri, 24 Jun 2005 16:29:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 288 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Australia Outlaws Using Internet to Encourage Suicide (Lisa Minter) Saint Exupery Estate Wins Cybersquatting Case (Lisa Minter) ISPs and Telcos Attempt to Stop Municipal Broadband and Wifi (L Minter) A Big Bang and the Small Fry Who Get to Watch it (Lisa Minter) Tutorial: What is Broadband (Lisa Minter) Groups Laud Yahoo For Shutting Down Chat Rooms (Lisa Minter) Net2Phone Review and Caution (jabadehut@hotmail.com) NTT DoCoMo Revs 4G (Telecom dailyLead from USTA) Re: Which Video Plug-in For Skype? Video4Skype.com/vSkype.com (J Marc) Re: SBC DSL Total Fee Per Month (Dean M.) Re: SBC DSL Total Fee Per Month (Robert Bonomi) Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach (Robert Bonomi) Re: DSL Speed (Choreboy) Re: Bell Divestiture (David Wilson) Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach (Steve Sobol) Re: Dial/Touch Tone Speeds (was Re: Bell Divestiture) (Tim@Backhome.org) Re: Dial/Touch Tone Speeds (was Re: Bell Divestiture) (Robert Bonomi) Re: Hayes Smartmodems (was Re: Bell Divestiture) (Robert Bonomi) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Australia Outlaws Using Internet to Incite Suicide Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 12:54:01 -0500 People who use the Internet to incite others to commit suicide or teach them how to kill themselves face fines of up to A$550,000 ($430,000) under tough new laws passed in Australia on Friday. Using the Internet to counsel or incite others to commit suicide or to promote and provide instruction on ways to do it has been outlawed but the new laws were not designed to stifle debate about euthanasia, Justice Minister Chris Ellison said. "These offences are designed to protect the young and the vulnerable, those at greatest risk of suicide, from people who use the Internet with destructive intent to counsel or incite others to kill themselves," Ellison said in a statement. Individuals convicted of such offences face a fine of up to A$110,000, while corporations face a fine of up to A$550,000. Use of the Internet to organize suicide pacts emerged as a grim problem for Japan last year, with dozens of Japanese killing themselves in Internet-linked group suicides. Helping someone to commit suicide is illegal in Australia but there has been a long-simmering debate about euthanasia. Dr Philip Nitschke shot to fame in 1997 when he helped four people die in the Northern Territory, where the practice was briefly legal before the national government stepped in to overturn local laws. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Saint-Exupery Estate Wins Cybersquatting Case Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 12:56:01 -0500 The literary estate of French author Antoine de Saint-Exupery on Friday won a cybersquatting case to evict a Virgin Islands operator whose Web Site sells memorabilia linked to the creator of "The Little Prince." Arbitrators ruled La Societe Civile pour l'Oeuvre et la Memoire d'Antoine de Saint Exupery-Succession Saint Exupery, set up by relatives to manage his literary estate, had proved The Holding Company had no right to three disputed domain names. The Holding Company, which registered the domain names, had used a "valid, registered trademark in a commercial context, i.e. with the intent to generate commissions on sales of books and other memorabilia concerning Antoine de Saint-Exupery. This does not constitute bona fide use," the ruling said. Saint-Exupery, a pilot whose fable "The Little Prince" is considered a classic of flight, love and loneliness, disappeared in July 1944 during a wartime aerial reconnaissance mission. His literary estate said it was authorized by the author's heirs to be the sole owner and manager of trademarks and other intellectual property rights tied to his work, life and name. The three neutral arbitrators were named by the U.N. World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) whose arbitration center resolves disputes in a low-cost, fast-track procedure. Ownership of the domain names is transferred within 10 days unless the loser launches a court case challenging the decision. The domain names are (antoinedesaintexupery.com), and (saintexupery.com). J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter children's books, and the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien, late author of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, have also won cases at WIPO. ; Geneva Newsroom tel. 41-22-733 3831) Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: ISPs and Telcos Attempt to Stop Public Broadband Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 12:58:23 -0500 by Tom Spring When tiny north Kansas City, Missouri and several other small towns in Kansas and Missouri, announced that they planned to offer affordable high-speed Internet access much the way it does other public services, local attorney Brian Hall was ecstatic. Though Hall could get DSL service from SBC Communications, he says that he found the service unreliable, supplying lower speeds than he expected. But then goliath Time Warner Cable asked a Missouri federal court to block the city's efforts. Time Warner's initial case was dismissed, but the company appealed the ruling and vows to stop North Kansas City from offering services it plans to provide residential customers later this year. Other cable and telecommunications companies are fighting similar battles in major cities and rural communities across the United States, to prevent the municipalities from supplying their residents with fast, low-cost reliable Internet access, either via wireless or high-speed fiber wired networks. In places where no laws currently prohibit a city or town from entering the broadband-provider market, the companies are lobbying for new legislation that would. If a municipality can offer Net access at lower prices than most telephone and cable TV companies, why shouldn't it, municipal-broadband advocates argue. The opponents counter that cities would have an unfair competitive advantage and that service and support might not be as good as that from private companies. Case for the City Cities see wireless broadband as a low-cost way to offer low-income residents Internet access. High-speed offerings are good for local businesses, schools, and hospitals, they argue, and make the community a better place to live. And when private industry can't or won't give the service, how can you blame the city for doing it, asks Jim Baller, an attorney who represents municipalities. Lafayette, Louisiana, mayor Joey Durel says that his city "begged" its phone and cable companies for years to wire it with fiber-optic access -- to no avail. The city now plans to build its own fiber network, but Bell South and Cox Communications have filed court motions to stop the plan. Independence, Kansas is in the same prediciment. "The practices of corporate telco and cableco are hurting communities like Lafayette," he says. Durel says a Lafayette-owned fiber network delivering Internet, cable TV, and phone service would save residents over 20 percent on their monthly bills, and would let the city give its schools fast Net access. The Opposition The municipal Internet trend is irking giants such as Bell South, Comcast, SBC, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon Communications. SBC representative Marty Richter says basic policy and conflict-of- interest issues arise when government enters markets where it can tax and regulate its private-sector rivals, making the competition unfair. However, cities and towns can't regulate telecom providers or ISPs -- that's up to state and federal agencies. Cities do regulate cable franchises; but where cities offer such services, they are still subject to state and federal rules, says attorney Baller. Though it has acted to block municipal Wi-Fi efforts in Philadelphia, Verizon says it is prepared to compete with municipalities. Verizon says it can do a better job of network management and customer care. "Cities need to go into these projects with their eyes wide open," says Eric Rabe, spokesperson for Verizon. SBC plans the same agressive approach against towns in Missouri and Kansas who try the same thing. Many of these networks have high up-front costs -- the Lafayette plan will cost $125 million -- and there will be service and maintenance costs. If too few users sign up, revenue may not cover upkeep costs, and the city will lose money. This year, for example, Washington State's Whatcom County had to sell its unfinished fiber system for $126,000 after spending $2.3 million on it. Private firms jumped in and saturated the broadband market, say county representatives. Besides, "do you really want to call city hall when your Internet access goes down?" Verizon's Rabe asks. For Mayor Durel, who says service from his local phone company is awful, the answer to Rabe's question is yes. Copyright 2005 PC World Communications, Inc. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. *** 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, PC World. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Here in southeast Kansas, the city of Coffeyville has been in charge of electrical power for many years. They've offered to help Independence with the same arrangement, but Westar, the electric utility for much of eastern Kansas has been objecting. Independence has thought about fiber, wifi and municipal broadband for quite a while now, but Southwestern Bell (SBC) has been fighting us every step of the way. SBC claims 'our DSL service is good enough for you' and they were the main objectors when Cable One took over the cable internet service here from Time Warner a couple years ago. Of course, Bell's DSL also requires that people be locked in to Bell's crummy telephone service also, where with the other providers of phone service here, Prairie Stream and Gage, they are more than happy to work along with either Cable One or the Dish network, as well as Cox, the cableco serving Coffeyville. They are all good corporate citizens; I do not know why SBC has to be so hateful toward our entire community. I know they fought furiously against allowing Prairie Stream to go in business here, and they thought 'for sure' the Kansas Commission would be on their side; imagine their surprise when the Commission gave approval not only for just Independence, as Prairie Stream originally started out, but for _any_ community in Kansas where Southwestern Bell was the telco 'of record'. Then the Commission later said competition would be allowed in the United Tel/Sprint territory for the rest of Kansas as well. That should have told SBC where they stand here in Kansas, but I guess they did not get the hint. Now Prairie Stream has their little switches all over the state. They have a 2000-line switch here in Independence for example, which serves our town and elsewhere in Montgomery County. Great service, and super-cheap rates, local service (ported through our 'traditional' exchange here in town [620-331]) and 100 minutes of long distance service as part of the package. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: A Big Bang, and the Small Fry Who Get to Watch it Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 13:02:17 -0500 http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0623/p14s01-stss.html By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor As cosmic objects go, Tempel 1 is something only an astronomer could love -- a pockmarked potato half the size of Manhattan spewing dust and gas, as it sputters along through the sky. Nevertheless, the comet is getting star treatment of late from hundreds of people across six continents who have been tracking its movements with telescopes and feeding images of the comet to professional astronomers. The reason? On July 4, an American spacecraft will launch a projectile to slam into the comet and offer clues to what Tempel 1 is made of. Whatever secrets it uncovers, the mission -- dubbed Deep Impact -- also highlights the key role amateur scientists play in several aspects of astronomy. Unlike the world of, say, biology or physics, the cosmos remains one of the few realms of science where dedicated amateurs can still make consistent, significant contributions. They feed professional scientists with data that track changes in variable stars. They discover and track comets and asteroids, hunt for planets beyond the solar system, and record changes in the afterglow of powerful gamma-ray bursts. And while the glory associated with Deep Impact will go to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the scientists who conceived the mission and will record the July 4 collision with mighty mountaintop telescopes, some credit should be given to the amateur astronomers doing reconnaissance work. "Observations from the amateurs ... have proved very useful," says Tony Farnham, a University of Maryland astronomer. The key is telescope time. Precious commodity Dr. Farnham has been observing the comet once a month since January from the Kitt Peak Observatory near Tucson, Ariz. That's generous for professionals, who must vie for hours at major observatories. But "ideally, we would like to get images more frequently" in order to track changes in the comet's output of dust and gas, any sudden emergence of jets of gas, or changes in the form and structure of the comet's features, he adds. The data amateurs provide help fill those gaps. And they aid in planning his next mountaintop observing run. The images are not as detailed as those from the telescope he uses. Still, "there are some very talented observers out there, and they have been getting some very high-quality images." At least 250 amateur and professional astronomers are participating in the small-telescope science program. Sixty-nine are individuals operating from small observatories and backyard sites. Others are working in teams averaging at least four members apiece. Their telescopes host light-gathering optics that range in size from 6 to 36 inches across. Some are commercially made, some are homemade, and none of the setups comes cheap. The participants must replace their eyepieces with digital imaging equipment sophisticated enough to meet the Deep Impact team's specifications. That can run into several thousand dollars. Amateur groups got tapped in a roundabout manner, says Gary Emerson, an engineer and amateur astronomer who works for Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Golden, Colo., which built the Deep Impact spacecraft. The impact may kick up enough dust to brighten the comet from a telescope-only object to one visible to the naked eye under dark skies or via binoculars under less favorable conditions. So the mission's public-outreach coordinator initially came to Mr. Emerson and asked about opportunities to involve amateur astronomers in visiting schools to give talks or hosting comet-collision parties during which the public could view the comet through amateurs' telescopes. Indeed, the mission has a component -- the amateur observers' program -- that follows through on that idea. "But I said: 'There's a lot of really advanced amateurs around the world who would love to get involved in some serious science,' " Emerson recalls. He says he'll be recording the event from a new backyard observatory at his retirement spot in southwestern New Mexico. Squashed like a bug When the comet slams into the spacecraft's impactor at some 23,000 miles an hour -- an event one astronomer has likened to a 767 colliding with a mosquito -- no one knows what the outcome will be. The projectile could ding the comet's ice-and-rock surface, excavating a crater the size of a house. Or it could carve a hole as wide as a football stadium and 14 stories deep. The Deep Impact spacecraft will observe the proceedings -- fleetingly -- as it speeds past the comet, then beam the results back to Earth for the first close-up of the anatomy of a comet. But long after the big telescopes have turned elsewhere, the cadre of amateurs will still be staring at the afterglow of the celestial fireworks of the Fourth of July. Copyright 2005 The Christian Science Monitor. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. Also read the Monitor on line here each day with no login nor registration requirements at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/nytimes.html in the far right side column. *** 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, Christian Science Publishing Society. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This proposed collision of the comet and the satellite on July 4 has caused some interest at the Independence High School and the Community College, where the Astronomy class plans to observe it through a telescope that day. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Tutorial: What is Broadband? Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 13:05:26 -0500 A tutorial from Broadband Reports: Broadband refers to telecommunication that provides multiple channels of data over a single communications medium, typically using some form of frequency or wave division multiplexing. Broadband access is a vehicle that allows the delivery of an entirely new breed of media services and communications-oriented applications. In the long run, it is these new services and applications that will differentiate broadband from dial-up Internet access and give consumers a reason for subscribing to broadband. Audio and video are the obvious cornerstones of this coming high-speed revolution. Speedy connections coupled with always-on access will improve the consumer multimedia experience and change the types of business models that are viable in the interactive marketplace. As use of broadband grows to more than 20 million subscribers by 2004, traditional media companies may uncover opportunities for growth and acquisition in these alternative content categories enabled by the high-speed Internet. Broadband will not replace traditional media formats as they exist today. But it will emerge as a new source of fragmentation, siphoning off enough listeners and viewers to affect established media entities and their long-term growth. Federal Full broadband lines are lines with information carrying capability in excess of 200 Kbps in both directions, simultaneously. One-way broadband lines are lines with information carrying capacity in excess of 200 Kbps in one direction (typically downstream) and less than or equal to 200 Kbps in the other direction (typically upstream). Broadband Access for Consumers is either through DSL (Digital Subscriber Lines) or via cable modem. See attached FCC Document DSL is a technology for bringing high-speed and high-bandwidth, which is directly proportional to the amount of data transmitted or received per unit time, information to homes and small businesses over ordinary copper telephone lines already installed in hundreds of millions of homes and businesses worldwide. With DSL, consumers and businesses take advantage of having a dedicated, always-on connection to the Internet. There are currently at least six different types of DSL. They are Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL), Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line (SDSL), ISDN Digital Subscriber Line (IDSL), High-bit-rate Digital Subscriber Line (HDSL), Very high-bit-rate Digital Subscriber Line (VDSL), and Rate-Adaptive Digital Subscriber Line (RADSL). Each one has different technical ranges, capabilities, and limitations. Cable modems (CM) are designed to operate over cable TV lines to provide high-speed access to the Web or corporate Intranets. A power splitter and a new cable are usually required. The splitter divides the signal for the "old" installations and the new segment that connects the cable modem. No television sets are accepted on the new string that goes to the cable modem. There are three types of CM: external modem, internal modem, and interactive set-top cable box. A number of different cable modem configurations are possible. Over time more systems will arrive. Cable modem services offer shared bandwidth between your and your neighbors. Your speed will vary with how many people are on the cable modem network, which may be a disadvantage. With DSL service, you have a dedicated connection to your home. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. *** 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, Broadband Reports.com For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Groups Laud Yahoo For Closing Chat Rooms Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 13:07:45 -0500 By GREG SANDOVAL, AP Technology Writer Family advocacy groups lauded Yahoo Inc. on Thursday for closing its chat rooms to clean up areas that allegedly were used to prey on children. Over the past month, pressure has been building on Yahoo to crack down on chat rooms that promoted sex with minors. After learning some of their advertisements were showing up in such chat rooms, companies such as PepsiCo Inc., Georgia-Pacific Corp. and State Farm Insurance removed their ads. Yahoo's move came after a lawsuit was filed against the Internet portal last month on behalf of a 12-year-old molestation victim and following a long campaign by watchdog groups to persuade Yahoo and other large Internet portals to purge their sites of child porn. The suit seeks $10 million in damages. "The specific reason for the closure not withstanding, this is a positive a step in the online fight against child exploitation," said Michelle Collins, director of the exploited children unit at The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, based in Alexandria, Va. Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako said the company closed down user-created sites to make enhancements and to ensure users were adhering to the site's terms of service. But after years of trying to persuade Sunnyvale-based Yahoo to go after child pornographers operating within the chat rooms, critics suspect the threat of a costly civil suit and the potential loss of advertising dollars likely prompted Yahoo to act. Patrick Truman, a senior legal counsel for the conservative Christian group, Family Research Council and a former federal prosecutor, believes Yahoo has the means to police its site more effectively than it does. The company acknowledges that it does not monitor its chat rooms. "I'm glad a suit has finally been brought because it will give someone access to the way Yahoo operates," Truman said. "Records can now be subpoenaed that will show the kind of knowledge Yahoo has about the trade of child pornography in its chat rooms." In 2002, an FBI investigation revealed that child pornography was being distributed on a Yahoo Group called Candyman. Yahoo Groups are similar to chat rooms but allow members to access their own Web site within Yahoo and communicate via e-mail. Candyman operated two months before being shut down. Among the photographs circulated on Candyman was one of a 12-year-old boy from Georgia who was molested and photographed committing sex acts against his will, according to the boy's attorney, Adam Voyles. The lawsuit claims Yahoo, which has until July to respond to the suit, is liable for what transpired within Candyman. "These problems are not new," Voyles said. "It's been going on since the 1990s. Yahoo has not changed its behavior. I hope it does. I hope they take this opportunity to clean up." Meanwhile, Yahoo must move to shore up its relationship with some of its sponsors. Pepsi removed ads that were being displayed in the suspect chat rooms, but continued to advertise elsewhere on Yahoo. But Atlanta-based Georgia-Pacific, the maker of Brawny paper towels, removed all its ads from Yahoo, company spokeswoman, Robin Keegan said. "We were absolutely horrified to find out about this," Keegan said, adding that the company had no knowledge that their ads were appearing in the chat rooms in question. Some users who obeyed the site's rules were upset by Yahoo's decision to close down all user-created sites, posted online complaints about the decision. Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. To see a complete stream of news headlines from AP and other news sources, check out any of the 'FeedRoll' streams in the Telecom Digest Extra pages; the index to same is in the column on the left side of the screen, or at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra ------------------------------ From: jabadehut@hotmail.com Subject: Net2Phone Review and Caution Date: 24 Jun 2005 06:51:15 -0700 I will say that the process for getting Net2Phone is pretty easy. I *was* trying to use Net2Phone but the call quality is very, very poor. I've get to get a conversation where the person I'm calling doesn't hang up and call me on my land line. The thing that really ticks me off though is that you have to keep the BargainsBuddy spyware installed or the product doesn't work, which it didn't work in a useful fashion anyway. The product also does not have a phone book to store your "to phone" contacts, only your "in network" contacts. Very poor product. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 12:44:27 EDT From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: NTT DoCoMo revs 4G Telecom dailyLead from USTA June 24, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22612&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * NTT DoCoMo revs 4G BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Sprint Nextel Corp. unveils branding plan * Finland picks Flarion for wireless broadband network * AT&T extends reach to new markets * Cingular to stop selling Ogo device * Telecoms using Microsoft face snags with TV plans USTA SPOTLIGHT * Free Webinar: Understanding Your Customer Increasing Revenue EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Video search emerges on the scene VOIP DOWNLOAD * MCI tests commercial VoIP * Comcast launches VoIP in Portland area * VoIP comes to mobile phones * Japanese companies launch joint mobile IP project * Once VoIP-focused Fonality launches new PBX option REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * Reports: P2P still popular Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22612&l=2017006 ------------------------------ From: Jean Marc Subject: Re: Which Video Plug-in For Skype? Video4Skype.com or vSkype.com? Date: 24 Jun 2005 10:08:18 -0700 I agree, vSkype, even with bugs, offers more features (group/sharing). ------------------------------ Subject: Re: SBC DSL Total Fee Per Month From: Dean M. Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com Date:Fri, 24 Jun 2005 06:49:49 GMT I can tell you that in my case the FUSF is ~$2. As best I can read the bill, there are no other taxes associated with the DSL line; they're all associated with the phone line (which of course is necessary for the DSL but that's another story). -Dean On Thu, 23 Jun 2005 21:30:22 -0700, wrote: > I haven't subscribed SBC DSL before. I am interested in the Express > package that charges 14.95 per month, but it excludes tax and FUSF > fee. I want to ask usually how much it will charge for each month in > my case? > Please advise. Thanks!! ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: SBC DSL Total Fee Per Month Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 10:36:07 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , wrote: > I haven't subscribed SBC DSL before. I am interested in the Express > package that charges 14.95 per month, but it excludes tax and FUSF > fee. I want to ask usually how much it will charge for each month in > my case? There's actually a reason they don't advertise an 'all in' cost -- "it varies by location". There are Federal taxes, State-level taxes, and _municipal_ level taxes that one has to cope with. And usually several items of _each_ type. The "Universal Service Fee" shouldn't apply if DSL is being added as a 'shared' service on the POTS pair. You're already paying that as part of the POTS service. The 'package' deals are a whole lot messier, because you've got several kinds of service included. each with its _own_ bundle of taxes -- Not all taxes apply to all kinds of service in the bundle, and even when they do, they may be at different percentages depending on the particular service in the bundle. In _broad_ terms, for POTS service, taxes can add around 20-25% to the 'base' billing, maybe even more. For DSL, there's a lot more variability -- some people quote 'all in' numbers; for those that don't, figure at least 5% tacked on. possibly as high at 20% (rare) > Please advise. Thanks!! Call SBC and ask for the exact figures for _your_ address. If the front-line salesdroid can't come up with them, ask for a supervisor. Then, to be a _real_ PITA, ask them for a -written- quote. MAILED, not e-mailed. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach -- Washington Post Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 11:02:59 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , Marcus Didius Falco wrote: > I had been planning to call my active credit card companies to > determine whether any had been compromised. This article caused me to > start the process this morning, calling American Express, my most > active account. > After thanking me for carrying their card for 21 years, they refused > to tell me whether any of my three cards was among those > compromised. Well, they don't *know* which cards were actually compromised. NOBODY _knows_ which card numbers were actually stolen from CardSystems. CardSystems only knows which card numbers were _vulnerable_ to have being stolen -- data as to which of those _were_ stolen is simply not available. > They tried to tell me that they have all sorts of "anti-fraud" > procedures. Even so, it was Master Card and not American Express > that first uncovered the problem, NOT surprising. MC has a _lot_ more cards out there, and a *lot* more transactions/day than AMEX does. Identifying 'suspect' transactions is one thing -- you look for things that are 'inconsistent' with the history _for_that_account. Identifying *where* a 'data theft' occurred, is a whole different kettle of fish. You have to have a _volume_ of accounts with similar suspect transactions first, and then go looking for 'common history' in prior activity on those accounts. If only because of the larger number of cardholders, and thus the larger volume of transactions, I would _expect_ MC to find 'statistically significant' correlations sooner than Amex. > and there is no way I can reliably double check an account that has > dozens of charges a month, many of them posted in the name of parent > companies located at head offices in other cities, so that many of > the charges are not easily verified and must usually be taken on > faith. Well, unless, _you_ keep a record of everything you charge -- date and amount. And match them against the statements you get. It's not really rocket science. I used to do it every month, for several corporate cards that had several _hundred_ charges/month. Life was _really_ fun when the Company President's son (away at college) used daddy's card to sign up for Internet access (and the fact that the initial posting was 'late', and was for _4_ months services). That one _jumped_ off the statement at me -- the company had it's own dial-up pool, and everybody used _that_ for home access. If you choose not to do so, and 'uncritically' accept their accounting, that _is_ your choice. > Accordingly, I told them to cancel all three cards and send me new > ones. They were not happy, but were unwilling to tell me whether > the cards had been compromised. Perhaps if they have the expense of > replacing many customers credit cards, some necessarily and many > unnnecessarily, they will start taking security and customer service > more seriously. > When I get the new American Express cards I will call the second > most active card in my wallet, and so on down the list. Note: if you are in the UK, as your email address seems to indicate, it is _unlikely_ that any of your cards were exposed via the CardSystems 'problem'. Unless you're doing siginficant credit-card buying in the U.S., that is. CardSystems clears almost exclusively for U.S.-based merchants. ------------------------------ From: Choreboy Subject: Re: DSL Speed Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 12:10:26 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote: > Choreboy wrote: >> Ah, crosstalk! It seems to me that if DSL uses the same wire dialup >> used, the same crosstalk will be present. > Not necessarily. Remember AM and FM radio waves go through the same > air, but AM is much more sensitive to lightning and other static than > is FM. By your analogy comparing a noisy room to a quiet one, I thought you meant the wiring for DSL had no crosstalk. > DSL service may be arranged to minimize crosstalk. So there's less crosstalk on wiring used for DSL? >> On dialup, it seemed to be the wire that wouldn't let me connect at >> the farm at the same speed I could connect a block from the CO. I >> wonder how the farm wire, that wouldn't take 50k on dialup, will carry >> 1.5M or more on DSL. > Because it's NOT just the wire to the farm, but ALSO other parts of > the telephone plant being set up for DSL. At the farm, it seems to be the wire that limited my dialups to 46k when I got 52k in town. If the wire wouldn't carry more than 46k, it wouldn't matter what the telco did at their end. I wonder how a DSL signal can carry 1.5M through those mile of wire. >> I have trouble understanding on the phone, and I often resort to >> the phonetic alphabet to be understood. I think the problem may be >> more in the typical quality of phones than in bandwidth. You could >> have broadcast quality microphones and loudspeakers and it will >> still sound like a telephone because of the limited bandwidth. >> Since bandwidth is limited, telephone components aren't high >> fidelity as it would be a waste to make them so. (I believe the >> modern "K" handset is clearer than the older "G" handset.) Military AM and SSB are limited to 300-3000 Hz. Shortwave radios can be filtered that way for tuning and difficult conditions. Speach comes across pretty clearly. If telephone voices are harder to understand, I think the problem must be something besides the nominal bandwidth of a telephone. >> Does a POTS line from the CO to a house carry multiple voices? > Depending on the location, often times yes. Between central offices > or within the CO almost always yes. I mean if you live across the > street from the CO you probably have dedicated copper pair, but you > live some distance you probably are multiplexed over a carrier line. > The degree of multiplex determines your bandwidth. Would you be able to connect with V90 on a multiplexed line? >> For marketing, bundling can entice a customer who would not >> otherwise have bought them all. You lose the customer who wnats just >> one and doesn't have money to waste. That's why Henry Ford didn't >> bundle his cars with garages. > Remember that while Henry Ford did very well at first, eventually > General Motors and Chrysler surpassed him with their cars. They > couldn't be the Model T on price, but they had better marketing. What > was great in 1918 wasn't so great in 1928. Henry Ford was so stubborn > he almost ruined the company and his family had to take it away from > him. Even his wife voted her shares with the others and he was forced > out. It's a shame such a brilliant man was also such an mean SOB. > His "$5/day" wages was partly myth. I think it was speed and price. Roads had improved by 1928, and other brands were faster than the Model T. I suppose the competition was also more affordable than it had been in 1908. Similarly, consumers who once settled for 14.4 modems now want faster speeds, depending on the price. >> I was speaking of Bellsouth's costs. I understood million-dollar >> switches were the big cost for voice service, while equipment to carry >> heavy internet traffic was the big cost for DSL. > In many cases, if not all, the equipment is the same. Today voice > talk is converted to digital for transmission, and those digital > signals share the lines with DSL signals. I'd say the biggest > investment (beyond more capacity) was in local loops so that customers > could have reasonable speed on DSL. Not everyone can get it. Earlier in the thread I learned that the switches for voice calls are very expensive. As far as capacity goes, I don't know how fast is the digital stream for a voice call, but I'm sure DSL at 2.5Mb/s requires much more of the telco's capacity. ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture From: David Wilson Date: 24 Jun 2005 17:06:43 +1000 Organization: University of Wollongong TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to a writer: > And Apple licensed Microsoft Basic for its machines, but gave it a > new name 'Applesoft DOS' instead. Applesoft BASIC = Microsoft 6502 cassette BASIC + Apple graphic commands It took 10KB (5x 2KB ROMs) and used 5 byte floating point numbers. The OSI Superboard had an 8KB Microsoft 6502 cassette BASIC and used 4 byte floating point numbers -- same range (up to 10**38 if I recall) but less accuracy. The funky 2 character error codes were due to an oversight -- the high bit of the second character was not cleared resulting in a graphic symbol instead of the appropriate letter (it should have been "NF" for NEXT without FOR and "/0" for division by zero etc). Apple DOS was written in house at Apple and added disk commands (in a rather unique kluge due to the cassette BASIC not having any DOS hooks built into it). David Wilson School of IT & CS, Uni of Wollongong, Australia ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach -- Washington Post Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 00:12:14 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Marcus Didius Falco wrote: > After thanking me for carrying their card for 21 years, they refused > to tell me whether any of my three cards was among those > compromised. Amex sucks. Tear the card up and get another to replace it. > When I get the new American Express cards I will call the second most > active card in my wallet, and so on down the list. Why not do all of them at once? If the data is at risk, you're best off doing it sooner rather than later. > Such credit-card-issuing banks said MasterCard and Visa have shared > with them lists of account numbers that may have been > compromised. Though such accounts may earn heightened scrutiny from > the banks that issued them, customers may never know whether their > account numbers were among those stolen by hackers. Which, of course, screws the customers to a certain extent, but screws the merchants even more because the merchants bear the losses. Amex is the worst to deal with if you're a merchant. They are expensive and have very merchant-unfriendly policies. (I think some of their cardholder policies aren't very friendly, either.) > "Those accounts have been flagged, and we're watching them even more > closely than we otherwise would," said Jim Donahue, spokesman at > MBNA. "If we start to see an unusual rate of fraud [among the set of > compromised accounts], we would consider notifying those customers > impacted -- but we haven't seen that yet." Yeah. What a load of self-serving crap. It's not just about the credit cards. It's about SSNs and other personal information. To withhold information about such breaches is criminal. > "That sounds really bad to us," said Chanelle Hardy, legislative > counsel at Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer > Reports magazine. "Any time that any unauthorized person gets access > to sensitive or personal information, [the cardholder] should be > notified," she said. "For a consumer, it's the first line of > defense. It's almost their only line of defense." Exactly. JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: Dial/Touch Tone Speeds (was Re: Bell Divestiture) Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 01:40:02 -0700 Organization: Cox Communications hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote: > hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote: >> I note that PBX operators had 20 pps dials while the rest of us had 10 >> pps. Some kids experimented and found 20 pps worked at home. Now, it >> was easy to modify the dial to go faster -- so why didn't Bell have >> everyone at 20 pps -- faster utilization of equipment? I strongly >> suspect there were valid technical reasons not to. During the transition period of deployment to electronic switching, a lot of step-by-step office were provided with DTMF-to-dial-pulse converters so the Bell System and independent LEC could sell DTMF service to subscribers. That implementation was definately limited to something not far above the recommened interval for DTMF tones. As to speeding up dial pulse, that would work on a Crossbar because the origin dial pulse was not driving the switching matrix, where is was on a stepper switch. Any PBX hooked to a stepper switch had to have its dial pulse limited to 10 pps. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Dial/Touch Tone Speeds (was Re: Bell Divestiture) Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 10:19:08 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , wrote: > Would anyone remember in what year dual-mode phones (keypad with a > little switch to convert to pulse if necessary) came out in wide > quantity? I think that was around the time they stopped using real > ringer bells. My guess is the late 1980s. Third-party manufacturers of phones for direct attach to the PSTN offered it from nearly day one. That way you could have th 'fancy looking' push-button phone _without_ having to pay the telco extra every month for Touch-Tone(tm) service. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Hayes Smartmodems (was Re: Bell Divestiture) Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 10:10:43 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , wrote: > Fred Atkinson wrote: >> I got him to describe the setup. Then I asked him how he was making >> it dial. He told me that he was typing in 'ATD9,' and then the area >> code and the number. >> When Hayes designed the Smartmodem, they should have had the unit >> default to touch-tone instead of outpulsing rotor dialing by default. >> Incidents like this could have been avoided. I happened to know that >> this customer's PBX did not support rotary dialing. The 'T' I added >> to the string switched the unit from default rotary dialing to touch >> tone. Problem solved. > I'm confused. IIRC, the command was four characters, either > ATDT or ATDP. Are you saying it would work with three? You remember incorrectly. "ATD" was basic "dial" command. It dialed the number in whatever was the default mode configured for the modem. OPTIONALLY, you could 'prefix' the number to be dialed with either a 'T' or a 'P' to force dialing in a particular manner. > >Also, for dialing out of a PBX, wasn't a 'pause' character needed to >allow time for the second dial tone? That depended on the PBX. You could also do it at two separate commaneds -- e.g: ATDT9; ATDT18005551212 > Way back then a lot of people still had rotary service and most > systems supported both. I don't think early on defaulting to pulse > was such a bad idea for those days. Entirely correct. tone dialing was ubiquitous at businesses, but did not have anywhere the same degree of penetration on residential lines. A lot of people refused to pay the extra per month charge. > IIRC, Hayes was the leader in modems, but didn't they end up going > bankrupt? I didn't understand that. Hayes was the _early_ leader in building affordable modems for the home/hobby market. they did a poor job of adapting to the changes in the marketplace, as speeds went above 2400 baud. the 'higher speed' market became fractured, as there were _not_ any standards to follow. There were a number of 'proprietary' schemes implemented -- resulting in manufactur A's high speed modem not being able to talk to manufacturer B's unit, except by falling back to 2400, or maybe 1200. The Pac Rim 'copycat' manufacturer's came along, and were putting 'price pressure' on the lower end of the line, while 'incompatibility' problems plagued the high-end sales. >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think we used 'ATT' for tone dialing >> and 'ATP' for pulse dialing. If so, it was not a genuine Hayes unit. Some of the copycat manufacturers did build in those 'shortcut' commands. In the true Hayes command set, the 'T' or 'P' was part of the 'dialed number', not part of the command. for modems that 'saved' numbers, for 'speed dial", or for 'auto-dial', the 'T' or 'P' was kept as part of the stored number. You just issued an: "AT {mumble} 4" for example, to speed-dial stored number #4, where the string stored as #4 was "T 555-1212". ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. 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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 V24 #288 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Jun 24 23:35:07 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 6913E1507E; Fri, 24 Jun 2005 23:35:06 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #289 Message-Id: <20050625033506.6913E1507E@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 23:35:06 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.1 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_REMOVE, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Fri, 24 Jun 2005 23:35:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 289 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Telecom Update #486, June 24, 2005 (Angus TeleManagement Group) Microsoft Plans to Include RSS in Versions of Windows (Lisa Minter) 3G-324M Protocol Implementation (Daniel Rhee) Re: DSL Speed (Tony P.) Re: DSL Speed (Robert Bonomi) Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach (Robert Bonomi) Re: More Trouble From 877-467-3277 (Keri Fletcher) Re: Hayes Smartmodems (Fred Atkinson) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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, 24 Jun 2005 11:58:13 -0700 Subject: Telecom Update #486, June 24, 2005 From: Angus TeleManagement Group Reply-To: Angus TeleManagement Group ************************************************************ TELECOM UPDATE ************************************************************ published weekly by Angus TeleManagement Group http://www.angustel.ca Number 487: June 24, 2005 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: ** Telecom Update Takes a Holiday ** Aliant Launches IP TV ** EastLink Boosts Internet Speed ** Bell to End $5 Long Distance ** Bell and Telus to Offer VoIP 9-1-1 Routing ** Mixed Response to Price Cap Extension ** Bell Plans Business IP Voice ** Outages Hit Blackberry Users ** Good News for RIM from U.S. Patent Office ** CRTC Wants Input on "Reverse 9-1-1" ** ITU Aims to "Connect the World" by 2015 ** Telus Union Announces "Super Service" ** Cogeco Renews Union Contracts ** CRTC Streamlines International Licensing ** Local Forbearance Comments Submitted ** BT Forced to Spin Off Access Services Unit ============================================================ TELECOM UPDATE TAKES A HOLIDAY: Telecom Update is taking a week off. The next issue will be published Friday, July 8. ALIANT LAUNCHES IP TV: Aliant has launched an IP-based digital television service delivering 150 TV and 70 music channels. Aliant TV, initially available to Aliant High-Speed Internet customers in "select areas of Clayton Park West, Wedgewood and Rockingham in Halifax," will eventually expand to "other select areas of Halifax" and some other cities in Atlantic Canada. Introductory pricing begin at $29.95/month. EASTLINK BOOSTS INTERNET SPEED: EastLink has introduced 10 Mbps Internet access across all its serving areas in the Maritimes. Ethernet Bundled service customers will receive the upgrade for free; the service can be rented on a standalone basis for $54.95/month. BELL TO END $5 LONG DISTANCE: Speaking to an analyst briefing this week, Kevin Crull, President of Bell Canada's Consumer Solutions organization, said the telco will eliminate its $5 long distance offering soon. The year-old plan provides 1,000 minutes a month of Canada/U.S. calling to customers who subscribe to two of Bell's wireless, high-speed Internet, or TV services. (See Telecom Update #438) BELL AND TELUS TO OFFER VoIP 9-1-1 ROUTING: Bell Canada and Telus have filed tariffs allowing them to route VoIP 9-1-1 calls to the correct emergency centres on behalf of other VoIP providers and alternate operator service providers. They have asked for effective dates in early July (see Telecom Update #476). www.crtc.gc.ca/8740/eng/2005/b2/tn6879.zip www.crtc.gc.ca/8740/eng/2005/T42.htm#200506983 MIXED RESPONSE TO PRICE CAP EXTENSION: Comments from incumbents and other parties show that some support the CRTC's proposal to extend the current price cap regime for two years to 2008, some argue for just a one-year extension, while others say the regime needs modifying, in particular by scrapping the deferral account mechanism. (See Telecom Update #481) www.crtc.gc.ca/PartVII/eng/2005/8678/c12_200505729.htm#2b www.crtc.gc.ca/PartVII/eng/2005/8678/c12_200505729.htm#4b BELL PLANS BUSINESS IP VOICE: There's been no official announcement, but Bell Canada's website says that "Bell Business IP Voice" will be available this summer. The service, which has not yet received tariff approval, appears to be an access-independent VoIP service aimed at small and medium-sized business customers. www.bell.ca/shop/en_CA_ON/Sme.Sol.Telephony.VOIP.page OUTAGES HIT BLACKBERRY USERS: BlackBerry users across Canada and the U.S. reported widespread service outages on June 17 and June 22, ranging from a few minutes to several hours. We have seen no official statement from Research In Motion about the failures. GOOD NEWS FOR RIM FROM U.S. PATENT OFFICE: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has struck down two more of the NTP Inc. patents at issue in its suit against Research In Motion. Seven of the eight contested NTP patents have now been overruled. NTP says these rulings are preliminary, subject to appeal, and "won't have any bearing" on the case. CRTC WANTS INPUT ON "REVERSE 9-1-1": The CRTC has asked for more input on whether to allow municipalities to access 9-1-1 databases to call residents in case of emergencies, "and if so, under what circumstances and with what safeguards." To participate, notify the Commission by July 8. (See Telecom Update #439) www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/ENG/Notices/2005/pt2005-7.htm ITU AIMS TO "CONNECT THE WORLD" BY 2015: The International Telecommunication Union has launched Connect the World, a multi-stakeholder effort to bring telecom access to the 800,000 villages, inhabited by one billion people, that still lack a telephone. The ITU aims to connect all communities by 2015. TELUS UNION ANNOUNCES "SUPER SERVICE": The Telecommunications Workers Union has begun a work-to-rule campaign aimed at convincing Telus to "engage in serious bargaining." Union members are urged to provide "super service to customers," obey all safety regulations, and catch up on assigned training courses. ** The TWU says Telus's supplementary offer last week was "another attack on female employees," and is preparing a counteroffer. (See Telecom Update #486) COGECO RENEWS UNION CONTRACTS: Cogeco employees in Quebec, affiliated to the Canadian Union of Public Employees, have voted to extend their contracts with the cablecos to 2008. The contracts include 2% annual pay increases. CRTC STREAMLINES INTERNATIONAL LICENSING: The CRTC has reduced the amount of reporting required by new or already licensed international long distance carriers. New licences will be for 10-year periods, and existing licences are extended by four years from the current expiry dates. www.crtc.gc.ca/archive/ENG/Circulars/2005/ct2005-8.htm LOCAL FORBEARANCE COMMENTS SUBMITTED: The CRTC has received first-round comments from participants in the proceeding on whether and how the incumbent telcos' local telephone service should be deregulated (see Telecom Update #479). Predictably, the incumbents' proposals would lead to earlier and more complete forbearance, while competitors want a more cautious approach. www.crtc.gc.ca/PartVII/eng/2005/8640/c12_200505076.htm#2b www.crtc.gc.ca/PartVII/eng/2005/8640/c12_200505076.htm#4b BT FORCED TO SPIN OFF ACCESS SERVICES UNIT: BT Group has agreed to implement the British regulator's order to convert its wholesale division into an operationally separate unit, with separate physical locations, separate bonus schemes, and separate branding. The Access Services group will rent local loops to BT and competitors. ============================================================ 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 late Friday afternoon each 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 2005 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 Subject: Microsoft to Tie RSS Instant-Updates into Windows Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 21:22:11 -0500 By Spencer Swartz Microsoft Corp., the world's biggest software company, on Friday said it plans to add Really Simple Syndication, a popular technology for reading news and information on the Web, in its next version of Windows. Known as RSS, the technology invented by one-time arch-rival Netscape Communications Corp. allows Internet users to track freshly updated information -- without having to surf through a long list of Web pages. Microsoft said it wants to reach beyond the current limited audience of hard-core Internet users by making RSS convenient for mainstream computer users in its upcoming version of Windows, code-named Longhorn. The Redmond, Washington-based company is planning to offer a set of underlying extensions to RSS code that will make it easier for Web sites to publish lists such as photo albums, music playlists and other sorts of Top 10 lists as RSS feeds. Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's manager in charge of RSS, is set to tell an audience of technology enthusiasts attending the annual Gnomedex conference in Seattle on Friday of how Microsoft will tie RSS capabilities into Windows. Hachamovitch is set to embrace the Creative Commons license backed by many leading RSS supporters. The license provides looser copyright restrictions on creative work but stops short of entirely giving up all claims of ownership. "That's groundbreaking for Microsoft," Joe Wilcox, an analyst at Jupiter Research, said of the software giant's embrace of Creative Commons, which has served as a rallying point for computer users opposed to Microsoft's industry dominance. KEEPING UP ON WHAT'S NEW The RSS capabilities will be embedded into Microsoft's Longhorn operating system, expected to be released in trial form this summer and made available to consumers as the next new release of Windows in 2006. "Microsoft wants to make this more than just about getting more people to use RSS. They want to turn this (capability) into a developer platform, kind of like what they did with the Web browser," he said. With the new Windows, users will be able to receive updated headlines through an illuminated RSS icon with a click of a button. This in turn will automatically make the selected RSS feeds able to run in any Windows-based application designed to accept RSS. Microsoft is looking to encourage outside software developers to build a variety RSS features into new software. The move has won the support of Dave Winer, RSS's most tireless advocate over the years, and Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford Law School, the founder of Creative Commons and a sometime Microsoft adversary. "The people at Microsoft noticed something that I had seen, only peripherally -- that there were applications of RSS that aren't about news," Winer wrote on Wednesday at his Web site (http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/2005/06/22#a634/). "I think what they're doing is cool," Winer said. RSS has aided the proliferation of Web logs. Blogs, the easy-to-publish Web sites that allow users to offer quick commentaries on issues that matter to them, use RSS feeds to stay up-to-date with other blogs. (with additional reporting by Eric Auchard) Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: daniel.rhee@gmail.com Subject: 3G-324M Protocol Implementation Date: 24 Jun 2005 11:25:51 -0700 Hi, I am trying to implement the 3G-324M protocol stack from the scratch. It doesn't look like a simple job after reading a brief summary. Has anyone implemented 3G-324M? Could you share your experience? What's the scale of the job? Thank you, Dan ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: DSL Speed Organization: ATCC Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 17:34:12 -0400 In article , hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com says: > Choreboy wrote: >> Couldn't technology analogous to a megaphone be applied to dialup as >> well as DSL? > Yes. >> Ah, crosstalk! It seems to me that if DSL uses the same wire dialup >> used, the same crosstalk will be present. > Not necessarily. Remember AM and FM radio waves go through the same > air, but AM is much more sensitive to lightning and other static than > is FM. > DSL service may be arrangeed to minimize crosstalk. You've hit it on the head. Both AM and FM use radio bandwidth, but each uses a different form of modulation. AM stands for Amplitude Modulation -- the amplitude is how high a particular sine wave rises or falls. FM is frequency modulation, the carrier frequency varies depending on what signal is being fed to it. It's sort of the same setup on DSL with the data signals occupying a higher frequency. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: DSL Speed Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 02:33:15 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , Choreboy wrote: > At the farm, it seems to be the wire that limited my dialups to 46k > when I got 52k in town. Yes, and no. The particular _type_of_signaling_used_ over that wire was limited by that wire to 46k. > If the wire wouldn't carry more than 46k, it wouldn't matter what > the telco did at their end. *NOT* exclusively a 'wire' limitation. Also a limitation of the signalling technology employed. the distributed capacitance of the wire was such that it 'blurred' the signal such that reconstruction of the original waveform =after= the *VOICE*GRADE* analog-to-digital conversion in the CO switch lost the 'fidelity' required for the higher data rate. > I wonder how a DSL signal can carry 1.5M through those mile of wire. DSL uses a different 'signalling technology' for sending the data down the wire. The DSL signal does _not_ go through those 'voice-grade' analog-to-digital converters that PSTN calls do. the signal is isolated before that point, and dumped into a totally _different_ kind of receiver. DSL _does_ suffer 'performance losses', as the wire length gets greater. The degree of degradation is considerably worse than with POTS modems. E.g., at 1,000' from the C.O. you may be able to get several megabits/sec. at 15000 ft, you'll be lucky to get 256k. At 18,000 ft, even 144kbit/sec is iffy. Beyond 25,000 ft, "forget it" applies -- an analog POTS modem is higher performance. >>> I have trouble understanding on the phone, and I often resort to >>> the phonetic alphabet to be understood. I think the problem may be >>> more in the typical quality of phones than in bandwidth. You could >>> have broadcast quality microphones and loudspeakers and it will >>> still sound like a telephone because of the limited bandwidth. >>> Since bandwidth is limited, telephone components aren't high >>> fidelity as it would be a waste to make them so. (I believe the >>> modern "K" handset is clearer than the older "G" handset.) > Military AM and SSB are limited to 300-3000 Hz. Shortwave radios can > be filtered that way for tuning and difficult conditions. Speach > comes across pretty clearly. If telephone voices are harder to > understand, I think the problem must be something besides the nominal > bandwidth of a telephone. The official specification for a voice-grade POTS call is that same 300-3000Hz passband. Modern digital systems deliver a 'high end' of 4000hz. and often have a lower 'low end' as well. >>> Does a POTS line from the CO to a house carry multiple voices? >> Depending on the location, often times yes. Between central offices >> or within the CO almost always yes. I mean if you live across the >> street from the CO you probably have dedicated copper pair, but you >> live some distance you probably are multiplexed over a carrier line. >> The degree of multiplex determines your bandwidth. > Would you be able to connect with V90 on a multiplexed line? Only in *very* rare situations. > As far as capacity goes, I don't know how fast is the digital stream > for a voice call, After digitalization, a standard POTS voice-grade call uses 64000 bits/sec. > but I'm sure DSL at 2.5Mb/s requires much more of the telco's > capacity. "Not Exactly" applies here. The DSL signal rides the wires from the customer premises _to_ the telco switching facility. *BUT* before it would get to the telco switching gear, it is separated out, segeregated, and sent to some *entirely*different* equipment -- called a DSLAM, if you care. Frequently that DSLAM equipment does *NOT* belong to the telephone company, but to the company providing DSL services. the 'upstream' connection out of the DSLAM is a dedicated data circuit -- possibly rented from the telco, but often _also_ supplied by the company that runs the DSLAM. Regardless, it is not using up any capacity on the Telco's VOICE network. ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach -- Washington Post Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 01:58:57 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , Steve Sobol wrote: [[.. munch ..]] > Yeah. What a load of self-serving crap. It's not just about the credit > cards. It's about SSNs and other personal information. To withhold > information about such breaches is criminal. Steve, _that_ is a bunch of crap. A credit-card clearinghouse does *NOT* have any of that kind of information. All they have is transaction data. No "personal" data, no SSN's, none of that. They have the card number,. the transaction amount, maybe the 'security code', or the mag-stripe code, or the digits (only) of the street address and/or zip-code. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 18:13:28 PDT From: Keri Fletcher Reply-To: kerivoice@yahoo.com Subject: More Trouble from 877-467-3277 I was trying to find out who the phone# 877-467-3277 belonged to as they keep calling me. In my search I came across two posts at your Telecom Digest Online bulletin board regarding this same number from people wondering who the phone number belonged to. I just called them and the recording said: "Thank you for calling Sears Home Improvement Products. For quality service.." blah blah blah Anyway, just thought the posters might like to know and when I tried to post I was sent a link to your email so if you or anyone else wants to know ... that's who the number 877-467-3277 belongs to. Smile:) Keri www.kerifletcher.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Thanks for the tipoff, Keri. 877-467-3277 is an old offender; they have been calling people and hanging up for a long time. No one seems to be able to stop them. I guess no one has yet slapped them hard enough with lawsuits to get the point across to them. We'll just add your complaint to the total received on Sears Home Improvements. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Re: Hayes Smartmodems (was Re: Bell Divestiture) Reply-To: fatkinson@mishmash.com Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 02:48:08 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net On 23 Jun 2005 13:29:19 -0700, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote: > I'm confused. IIRC, the command was four characters, either > ATDT or ATDP. Are you saying it would work with three? Yes. With ATD, it would default to rotor dialing. > Also, for dialing out of a PBX, wasn't a 'pause' character needed to > allow time for the second dial tone? That's what the comma did. But actually in most electronic PBXs, the pause wasn't really necessary. > Way back then a lot of people still had rotary service and most > systems supported both. I don't think early on defaulting to pulse > was such a bad idea for those days. I don't agree. When the Smartmodem came out, touch tone was greatly in the majority and really was a better choice for lines that did both. > IIRC, Hayes was the leader in modems, but didn't they end up going > bankrupt? I didn't understand that. I *do* understand it. They were a bit pigheaded about their pricing. I believe that that is what did them in. They thought people would pay four hundred for a Hayes modem (versus seventy-five for a Hayes-compatible (non-Hayes) modem). In other words, they thought people would continue to pay the big money to drive a Cadillac. I believe it did them in. It made me very sad, too. I believed in Hayes quality. When I was at SkyTel, we used a bunch of them for our field equipment and on our PCs at the office to call up that equipment. >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think we used 'ATT' for tone dialing >> and 'ATP' for pulse dialing. Fred, (in a help desk capacity) did you >> ever run across customers who _lied_, told you they had tried to do >> something but in fact had not done it at all. I'm sure it did. But all you can do in most cases is to take their word. After all, they are the customer. > That certainly does happen. But more commonly is people who _think_ > they did something when they actually didn't, or for some reason what > they entered didn't take (ie keyboard locked up and they didn't > realize it -- that's very common.) I know it's common. But it's something you have to live with. Fred ------------------------------ 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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End of TELECOM Digest V24 #289 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sat Jun 25 02:45:06 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id CA87B14DE7; Sat, 25 Jun 2005 02:45:04 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #290 Message-Id: <20050625064504.CA87B14DE7@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 02:45:04 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.8 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_REMOVE, MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Sat, 25 Jun 2005 02:45:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 290 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Western Union History (From our Archives, via Lisa Minter) HP 7210 all-in-one and Faxstream (James Emery) Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (Kathleen Carmody) Have You Yet Started Using VOIP? (TELECOM Digest Editor) Major Advertisers Caught in Spyware Net (Monty Solomon) RIM Offers Few Blackberry Outage Details (Monty Solomon) Re: DSL Speed (Choreboy) Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach (Steve Sobol) Re: SBC DSL Total Fee Per Month (Sid Zafran) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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, 25 Jun 2005 00:45:05 EDT From: Lisa Minter Subject: Western Union History For your reading this weekend, a look though the Digest Archives at the Western Union Telegraph Company, as presented by Jim Haynes in this Digest in February, 1992. The original series of articles appeared in three articles that weekend, now 13 years ago. Patrick reminds me that in addition to the cross references shown in this report (all of which also appear in our archives) you may wish to examine the directory entitled 'Western Union Technical Review', which is the entire 22 year run of issues of this technical journal, which was the equivilent of the Bell System technical publication. In this file: 3 part series "Things Looked Rosy For Western Union, appeared in TELECOM Digest February 20-24, 1992. ============================================== Also, "Early History of Western Union, from Digest February 24, 1992. Also see 'history of telex' file and references to Morkrum Company. Also see articles on 'Western Union Clocks' during 1991-92 in Digest. Lisa Minter ============================================== From: haynes@cats.UCSC.EDU (Jim Haynes) Date: Thu, 20 Feb 92 22:51:55 -0800 Subject: Things Looked Rosy for Western Union in 1960 - Part I The August 27, 1960 issue of {Business Week} showed W. U. President Walter P. Marshall on the front cover, with a pushbutton message switching position in the background, and the following story inside. (page 86 ff) "Electronics Puts Young Blood in Old Company" "When Walter P. Marshall (cover) stepped into the president's job at Western Union in December, 1948, it looked as if his tenure might be short and unhappy. Western Union, once the backbone of fast and dependable long-distance communications in the United States, was, quite plainly, a deathly sick old company. It was saddled with high labor costs, old equipment, crushing debt, and local operations that often cost more to run than they returned in gross revenue. "Some Western Union executives were waiting for a declaration of bankruptcy; many doubted that the company would survive to celebrate its 100th anniversary in 1951. "-Rejuvenation- But in the ensuing 10 years, Western Union not only has pulled through, but it has thoroughly rejuvenated itself. Instead of a winded oldster that could only look back at the days when its competition was the Pony Express, it now resembles an electronics adolescent with a bright and profitable future. The company's new strength already is evident: Last year its revenues and earnings set an all-time high. "Western Union can be expected to keep on growing. In the next five years, management hopes to spend $350-million on expansion. Next year, the company plans to spend $105-million for plant and equipment on top of $45-million this year. Completion of a transcontinental microwave network will increase the system's circuit capacity 10 times, and will add enormously to the range of services it can offer. It will be able to provide increased telegraphic service, leased voice channels, facsimile, closed-circuit television, and perhaps most important of all, high-speed data processing channels that can handle digital information at computer speeds. "-I. Financial Turnaround "The job of turning Western Union around from a faltering centenarian to an eager and aggressive competitor in the communications field was a difficult one. Before the company could even think about modernization, it had a raft of complex financial problems to solve. Few outside the company realized just how close to extinction it was 10 years ago. "A look at the books shows how deeply in trouble the company was: "- Operating losses were about $1-million a month. "- Bond issues totaling $30-million were maturing in 1950 and 1951, and bond issues and notes totaling $35-million were due in 1960, but no provisions for paying them were being made. "- Labor costs were eating up 69.2% of the company's gross revenues, leaving little money for maintenance or modernization. "- Message service, Western Union's basic revenue source, was declining steadily. It dropped from $178-million in 1947 to $146- million in 1949. "- Competition was formidable. More and more, business communication was going over long-distance telephone lines, and American Telephone & Telegraph's TWX service, a teletypewriter exchange network, was diverting a tremendous amount of business from Western Union's wires. "So the yellow glow of the familiar Western Union offices burned red in Western Union's ledgers. The many local offices it maintained hung like a weight around the company's neck, pulling it deeper toward losses. Yet to abandon some of the offices or even limit their hours required not only months of delay but also expensive hearings. "-Quick Action - These are problems that Marshall set about solving when he took over in 1948. He was 47 and had a background in financing and accounting. Unlike most of his predecessors, he had long experience in the telegraph business. With the exception of Joseph Egan, Marshall's immediate predecessor, Western Union's presidents since the 1930s all had been railroad men. "Marshall had come to Western Union in 1943 as assistant to the president when the company absorbed Postal Telegraph, where he had been executive vice-president. For years, Postal Telegraph had been on the verge of insolvency, and its troubles provided familiar experience. Marshall's first actions as president of Western Union were to organize the company's debts and to start cutting labor costs. "He took care of debts by selling off property and leasing it back, by selling pole lines, cashing in securities, and selling such subsidiaries as Teleregister and American District Telegraph. For example, the big Western Union building in downtown New York was sold to Woodmen of the World Life Insurance ... [illegible] company for over $12-million. "Then Marshall shocked the board of directors by announcing immediate plans to spend millions of dollars on a broad modernization and expansion program for services such as Desk-Fax, a method of transmitting telegrams by facsimile directly to business offices. He also accelerated the program for installing automatic switching centers in 15 cities. He got management behind a big push to get more private wire business and to increase facsimile services. All of this cost a lot of money. And with the company's history of steadily diminishing revenues, it looked risky indeed. "-Quick Results- Losses in 1949 amounted to nearly $4.5-million on sales of $181-million. But by the end of 1950, Marshall's moves began to show results. Unprofitable local offices were being cut out and automatic switching centers were beginning to increase efficiency. That year alone, labor costs were cut by nearly $6-million, revenues went up to almost $188-million, and the company turned a $7-million profit. There has been no red ink since then, and in 1959 earnings were a record $16-million on sales of $276-million. "The company's debt position also has been reversed. All the outstanding bond issues have been paid in full or advantageously refinanced." [Moderator's Note: This is part one of three parts. Part two will appear in the Digest Friday night, and part three on Saturday. PAT] From: haynes@cats.UCSC.EDU (Jim Haynes) Date: Thu, 20 Feb 92 22:52:16 -0800 Subject: Things Looked Rosy for Western Union in 1960 - Part II [Moderator's Note: This is part two of three parts of an article which appeared in {Business Week} magazine over thirty years ago, back in 1960. Part one appeared Friday morning; part three will appear here on Saturday morning. PAT] "-II. Leap to Modernization- "So, with its financial house in order, Western Union is in a position to take off in new directions to insure its future. And in many respects, never has there been so fortuitous a time for the company to modernize. "During the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, startling progress has been made in electronics and communications technology. Two developments particularly were important to Western Union: (1) the perfection of high frequency radio relay system - microwave - which provided a logical and much less expensive way to increased long-distance facilities; and (2) development of computers and automatic electronic switching systems, which promised big increases in efficiency at high reliability levels. "-Big Jump- With much of its plant obsolete, Western Union was able to go from old manual systems to the most modern automatic equipment in one big jump. For example, in the 1940s almost all of Western Union's services were carried on telegraph channels of a very narrow frequency range of 170 cycles per second, providing a top communications speed of only 60 to 100 words a minute. Today, the company's nearly complete transcontinental microwave system will consist of two 6-million cycle channels capable of carrying broadband television, handling over 12,000 simultaneous telegraph messages, transmitting computer tapes at high speed, or carrying voice communication or facsimile. These so-called broad band signals can't be carried on ordinary wires, but require coaxial cable or ultra-high-frequency radio beam carriers. "Had its modernization started earlier and been more gradual, the company would have sought to increase its capacity slowly through intermediate steps. These would have been expensive and yet they would not have been able to provide the facilities the company now feels it needs. "-Decreasing Dependency- The new broad-band system also will reduce Western Union's dependence on other communications carriers. Western Union particularly has been dependent on the Bell System for leased facilities. In the early 1950s, about 70% of Western Union's circuit mileage was leased, mostly from AT&T. "Although the number of leased wires has not been reduced in absolute terms, today their proportion has decreased to about 60%. S. M. Barr, Western Union vice-president in charge of planning, expects this percentage to drop to 40% in the next few years, hopes to get the proportion of leased facilities down to 20% eventually. 'You can see the kind of growth we expect, then, if we see no reduction and a possible increase in the number of leased facilities,' he says. "The big increase in traffic that Western Union anticipates for its new system is not likely to come from public message services, which have been the backbone of its business. This type of service basically is tied to population growth, and to some extent to merchandising gimmicks such as singing birthday greetings, flowers and candy by wire, and other special services. [1] "-Private Expansion- But it does expect its private wire services to expand greatly. Here, particularly, Western Union's new facilities will be of help in solving communications problems for private customers. Western Union already has a good deal of savvy when it comes to tailoring a special system to a customer's needs. About 2,000 companies in the U.S. -- among them U.S. Steel, General Electric, Sylvania, and United Air Lines -- have private communications networks leased from Western Union. And its bank wire service interconnects 213 banks in 55 cities with pushbutton switching. "Western Union got into the private systems business without much selling effort. In most cases, it just waited for customers to come to it. But those days, like the days of the hand-operated message centers, are long since gone. "Now the company is pushing leased systems aggressively, and the results show it. In 1950, private wire revenues brought in $8-million, or about 5% of Western Union's message business. In 1959, private wires sang a $52.3-million tune on the cash register. It won't be long, Marshall believes, before the revenues from private wires top those from public message services. "-Meeting the Competition- Until recently, however, Western Union could not compete directly with AT&T's TWX network, which offers direct customer-to-customer teleprinter connection through a central exchange system similar to a telephone network. Several years ago, FCC gave Western Union permission to purchase TWX from AT&T, but the price was too high. Now, Western Union is expanding a roughly similar system called Telex that will offer direct customer-to-customer dialing. [2] "Besides direct dialing, the biggest difference between Telex and TWX is the method of billing customers. Telex customers are charged only for the time that the facilities are in use plus a 50-cent connection charge. A short order to a New York broker from, say, Chicago via Telex might be subject only to a 10-second time charge, compared with a three-minute basic charge on TWX. "-Growing Network- At present, Telex service is available only between New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. But before yearend, 19 more cities will be added. In 1961, it will cover 23 more cities, and management hopes to get approval from the board of directors to cover 128 cities by 1962." [1] One would think that a writer for such an astute publication as {Business Week} would have noted the price elasticity of personal communication. This would have suggested that the dropping price of long-distance telephony would devastate public Telegram service, as it did. [2] Dial Telex service began in Germany in 1933, just three years after AT&T introduced manual TWX service in the U.S. Telex used modified SxS telephone switching equipment. Western Union imported the European technology and equipment, even to the 50-baud teleprinters. One wonders if AT&Ts conversion to dial TWX was at all in response to competition from Telex, or if it was simply a matter of taking advantage of the switched telephone network for transmission. I assume that manual TWX calls were timed using Calculagraphs, just as voice calls were. Telex used a simpler charging mechanism, no doubt because it originated long before automated telephone billing. At the time a Telex call was set up the customer's charging register was connected to a pulse generator, the pulse rate depending on the distance to the called station. The charges could be reduced at night simply by slowing down the pulse generators. At least in Germany there were Telex PBXs in hotels; in this case the pulses were relayed to the PBX so that the hotel guest could be billed. Telex was always customer-dialed long-distance service. [Moderator's Note: Although telex was always customer-dialed, provision was made for an operator's help in completing a difficult connection. Dialing (was it? ) '17' from the telex unit connected the user to WU's 'manual assistance positions' in Bridgeport, MO. An operator there communicated with the user by typing back and forth on the keyboard, like a modern day 'chat', and the operator could then do what any telco operator could do: complete the connection, verify a busy terminal, busy circuits, out of order, or number not in service condition on the receiving end. In addition, the WU manual assistance operator was used to place 'collect' (reverse charge) connections and special or third-party billing. I think dialing '19' connected the user to WU directory assistance where help was given by 'chatting'. Part three of this article will appear in the Digest on Saturday. PAT] From: haynes@cats.UCSC.EDU (Jim Haynes) Date: Thu, 20 Feb 92 23:44:55 -0800 Subject: Things Looked Rosy for Western Union in 1960, part III [Moderator's Note: This is part three of three parts of an article about Western Union which appeared in {Business Week} magazine more than thirty years ago, in 1960. Parts one and two appeared in the Digest on Friday morning and Friday evening. To continue this series about Western Union, an issue Saturday overnight/Sunday morning will include an article from {Fortune Magazine}, March, 1959, also supplied by Jim Haynes. PAT] "-III. Building For the Future- "Western Union has great hopes that Telex will increase its revenue load many fold. Even so, it's hard to imagine that such business will fill all the extra traffic capacity that Western Union's new microwave system provides. And so, once again, President Marshall is counting on electronics technology to help him out. Three out of every four systems that Western Union is now installing for customers include provision for handling data processing information. Communication between computers, or tape-to-tape digital messages between dispersed plants, offices, and data processing centers may eventually equal the volume of voice and message communication. AT&T President Frederick R. Kappel, too, thinks that's possible. "-Expandable System- So Marshall believes his modern plant is coming on stream just in time to catch the new flood of data processing business. The transcontinental microwave network's two 6-million cycle channels each are capable of handling transcontinental telecasts, or thousands of telegraphic, voice, and data processing channels. The system is designed to carry up to seven broad-band channels, and these will be added as needed. "The Transcontinental network, with extension legs, will cost $56-million, but once the microwave relay towers are in place, the system's capacity can be doubled for about 15% to 20% of this cost. Eventually, Western Union will have a great loop of microwave routes that will interconnect North and South as well as East and West. The full system may cost $250- million between now and 1970. "-Government Contracts- Part of the load the new microwave system will carry is already under contract. The U.S. Air Force hired Western Union to build an automatic system of data and message handling that will interconnect all domestic Air Force bases. The combat and logistics network (COMLOGNET) [1] also costs, coincidentally, $56- million and will be operated by Air Force personnel. Western Union also built for the Air Force an international automatic switching telegraph network, [2] which was completed last May, and has put in a high-speed weather map facsimile system for the Strategic Air Command. In addition, it built a nationwide weather map facsimile system for the Weather Bureau that serves several hundred points. "To work out new communications applications to keep its microwave system busy, Western Union has enlarged its engineering and research departments. The company is now spending about $6-million a year on research and development -- more than ever before in its history. Of course, Bell Laboratories spends a lot more. But Marshall has some pretty definite ideas on how to get the most mileage out of research expenditures. "'One problem,' he admits, 'is getting the right kind of people that can really come through with innovations, and I'm not at all sure it is possible to hire this kind of person off the street, even if you have the most wonderful facilities in the world. Some people just don't like to work for big organizations.' "-Research Interests- To tap that kind of talent, Western Union has purchased large interests in a number of small companies that offer intriguing technological or manufacturing competence: "Microwave Associates, Inc., a leading developer of microwave elements such as waveguides, tubes, and semiconductor elements. "Technical Operations, Inc., a Boston company engaged in contract research for the government and industry in computing, physics, mechanical engineering and electronics. "Dynametrics Corp., another Boston company, which produces electronic measuring equipment that possibly could be related to future production control systems. Such systems might fit into an integrated data processing system built around a Western Union network. "Hermes Electronics Co., a producer of crystal filters for microwave uses and designer of part of the telemetering system for the Titan missile. Hermes also has done a lot of work on computer translators that change binary code to decimal readouts. "Gray Mfg. Co., Hartford, manufacturer of switchboards, dictating machines, and electronic gear. "Teleprinter Corp., which has developed the smallest page teleprinter on the market. [3] "These six companies dovetail so well as a combined research, engineering, and manufacturing operation that there are incessant rumors that Western Union intends to meld them into one big outfit. Marshall denies such an intent, disputes the logic of such a move on the ground that the talent attracted by these companies comes from their small size and independence. Actually, Western Union benefits substantially from the present management. As part owner, it can use the services of the individual companies and also coordinate their activities to some degree. "In addition to these six companies, Western Union also has invested in Teleprompter Corp. But this company falls into a different category. Teleprompter is not a manufacturer of communications equipment. It custom-designs office communication centers, assembling equipment made by others and mounting it on its own furniture. But Teleprompter's work in closed-circuit and pay TV and in other fields jibes with Western Union's interests. "-Dynamic Outlook- These new interests and Western Union's own research efforts all point to a greatly expanded future for the company. Although it still has some problems to solve, the company is in vastly better shape than it was ten years ago. Instead of sitting back and being outdated by new technology, Western Union very definitely is counting on the latest electronic wizardry to win a bigger piece of the communications market for itself." [1] COMLOGNET started out as a bunch of IBM card transceiver machines, which used internal modems to transmit punched cards over private telephone lines connecting the Air Materiel Command bases. When the Air Force set out to replace these with a Real communication system, both the name and the scope of the project changed several times as is typical of government projects. Names that followed COMLOGNET were first AFDATACOM and ultimately AUTODIN (automatic digital network), which became the main record communication system for the whole DOD. The original terminals consisted of a Model 28 ASR teletypewriter, an IBM card reader/punch, and a refrigerator-sized electronics package made by IBM. Transmission was synchronous using a modified Fieldata code. All transmissions were encrypted. This was somewhat to the dismay of the materiel people, who had started out with the card transceivers in their Base Supply offices; the AUTODIN terminals had to be locked up in secure Base Communications buildings because of the encryption equipment. So the supply people had to carry their cards between buildings on the base. There were also a few magnetic tape AUTODIN terminals. This was in the days before IBMs tape format became a de facto standard of the industry; so the terminals had to be designed to read and write the kind of tapes appropriate to the kind of computer they were to be used with. AUTODIN provided both message switching (i.e. store-and-forward) and circuit switching a la Telex. The switching centers for AUTODIN used computers made by RCA, originally discrete-transistor machines contemporary with the RCA 301-501-601 line, later replaced by machines of RCAs Spectra 70 line. Having to replace all those original computers after only five years or so must have been terribly galling to old Western Union hands, as some of the company's own offices were still using teleprinters made by Morkrum-Kleinschmidt prior to 1930. [2] This system was Western Union's Plan 55, based on paper tape store and forward technology. The switching centers used a combination of electromechanical and vacuum-tube electronic technology. Cross- office transmission was at 200 wpm, requiring electronic transmitting and receiving distributors and parallel-input reperforators. Plan 55 was superseded by AUTODIN when the latter acquired Teletype as well as punched card capabilities. [3] Perhaps Western Union hoped to use Teleprinter Corp. to free itself from dependence on AT&Ts Teletype subsidiary. W.U. had made some previous efforts to build its own teletypewriters. As things turned out the Teleprinter product, MITE (Miniature Integrated Teleprinter Equipment), was popular with the military for its small size and weight but never achieved much of a commercial market. From: haynes@cats.UCSC.EDU (Jim Haynes) Date: Sat, 22 Feb 92 00:01:43 -0800 Subject: Early History of Western Union This is excerpted from {Fortune Magazine}, March 1959 - an excellent article with nice pictures, "Western Union, by Grace of FCC and AT&T". "Many legends have blurred the history of Western Union. Contrary to widely held belief, for instance, the company was not founded by Samuel F. B. Morse, the portrait painter who invented the first telegraph. Initially, as a matter of fact, it didn't even use the Morse patents and, relatively speaking, it was a latecomer to the field. "Morse did his pioneering work on the telegraph in the 1830's. By 1850 there were fifty telegraph companies operating between various cities in the U.S., most of them with licenses on the Morse patents. "In 1846, Royal E. House of Vermont had come up with a device that permitted the electrical impulse to imprint letters and numbers on tape, eliminating the dot-dash symbols. The House printer became the basis for a new company financed and operated by a group of Rochester[3] investors headed by Hiram Sibley. This was the New York & Mississippi Valley Telegraph Co., formed to link upper New York State to St. Louis. But even as Sibley's plans began to unfold, the competition in the telegraph industry became chaotic. Some cities were being served by three competing patent systems. Meanwhile the war in rates was ruinous. "Sibley had a simple solution: consolidate all the telegraph companies into one. New York & Mississippi Valley Telegraph was reincorporated as the Western Union Co., with licenses on both Morse and House patents, in New York State in 1856. Its avowed purpose was to bring together into one company all the telegraph firms then operating beyond the Hudson -- hence 'Western' Union. "Western Union grew at a fantastic rate. The New York company gobbled up hundreds of competing telegraph companies, made exclusive, and advantageous, deals with the railroads, and reached all the way to the Pacific Coast. By 1866 it had a virtual monopoly. In the first ten years of its life its capital had grown from $500,000 to $41 million. "-The war with the telephone- "The company's first brush with the telephone came in 1877, when it imperiously declined an opportunity to buy the invention of Alexander Graham Bell for $100,000. Soon after, Western Union decided to enter the telephone field via the American Speaking Telephone Co., which would exploit voice-communication patents by Elisha Gray [1] and Thomas Edison. The Western Union system was quite as good as Bell's, and Western Union began to grow in the telephone field. But in 1878, Bell sued for patent infringement. As part of the settlement, reached the next year, Western Union agreed to stay out of the voice business and Bell agreed to stay out of the telegraph business. But Bell slipped out of the agreement when it formed, in 1885, a new company called the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. "In 1909, AT&T won stock control of Western Union by purchasing the shares held by the estate of Jay Gould. Theodore Vail, a distant cousin of the Alfred Vail who had helped Morse start his telegraph line, was president of Bell at the time, and he planned to integrate the two companies. To begin with he had himself elected president of Western Union and began using it to promote the telephone by encouraging people to phone in their telegrams. Western Union had already developed a private-wire business with a volume of $3 million annually, and AT&T took this over, too, adding it to the small private-wire service it had developed on its own. "In 1914, to avert government antitrust action, AT&T disposed of its Western Union holdings, but stayed in the private-wire business. After AT&T and Western Union parted, expansion of the telgraph system merely kept pace with the increase in population. By the Thirties the business was contracting. More and more Americans forsook telegrams for long-distance phone calls and air mail. Western Union was now bothered also by competition from the Postal Telegraph Service, a system formed in the 1880's. Postal had been taken over by Sosthenes Behn of IT&T in 1928, and thereafter fought Western Union hard. As if this were not enough, AT&T introduced in 1931 its TWX service, whereby subscribers could have direct telegraphic connection with each other through a central exchange. (AT&T invited Western Union to join it in the TWX network, and later even considered selling the system to Western Union, but Western Union couldn't pay the price.) "In the early Thirties a debate began on whether there was enough telegraph business to support two telegraph companies -- meaning Western Union and Postal, but not AT&T, which most people thought of as a telephone service only. The debate was not resolved until 1943, when Congress authorized a merger of the two companies. An amendment to the same law authorized Western Union to buy the telegraphic services of AT&T -- but it did not make it mandatory for AT&T to sell." The following material comes from a {Business Week} article of approximately ten years earlier than the {Fortune} article: Nov 19, 1949. "Western Union's only all-telegraph competitor of recent years in the domestic field, Postal Telegraph, Inc. started in the 1880s. It competed with Western Union with indifferent success, but Western Union was prevented by law from buying its competitor. "Finally, during the war, it became obvious that Postal couldn't go on. Operations for several years had been dependent on RFC [2] loans. So Congress finally permitted Western Union to absorb its competitor (BW - Aug. 7 '43, p102). "Western Union was probably not too eager to acquire Postal in 1943. For one thing, Postal's facilities partly duplicated its own. Further it had (1) to take over Postal's $12.5-million debt to RFC, and (2) to guarantee jobs for most of Postal's staff for four years, despite its own heavy labor costs. "However, Western Union didn't have much choice. Otherwise the government might have taken over Postal. "Another competitor is the government-operated communications systems. The armed services and the State Department have their own networks of 'record' communications (any means of communication that produces a permanent record on paper) ..." [This seems like a silly remark to me, since the government-operated systems were based on private wires leased from the common carriers.] [1] This is the Elisha Gray who lost the race to the Patent Office to Bell. I remember in the 50s or so there was a "Gray Telephone Pay Station Co.", making pay stations almost identical in appearance to the Bell phones, for the independent companies. I wonder if this is connected with the Gray Mfg. Co. that was listed as a Western Union affiliate in another article? [2] RFC = Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a Depression-era government agency in the business of lending money to business firms to help them get back on their feet. [3] I wonder if the late Larry Lippman, in clearing out the Western Union office there, was aware that Western Union was started in Rochester. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: (From June, 2005). My thanks to Lisa Minter for digging this old item out of our archives. We are certainly lucky to have such a good collection of ancient articles available for research today, years later. And ... how many of our readers here remember Larry Lippman? Oh, I know _some_ of you do, even though he passed in 1991; he was quite regular with his submissions here in the Digest for many, many years in the 1980's. I recall on several occassions in email he wrote me (personally) about 1989-90 and asked if I would _please_ be interested in joining him as he worked to clean out the (then, recently) closed WUTCO public office in Rochester, NY. I am _very sorry_ I was unable to meet him and work with him at the time. In case you are interested in the Western Union Technical Review, we have the entire 22 year run of this publication, from 1947 when it started, through 1969 when it, and Western Union essentially went out of business in our archives. Look at URL: http://telecom-digest.org/archives/technical/western-union-tech-review (an entire sub-directory, then note the individual issues therein, all as .jpg files). I wonder if whomever is running this Digest twenty years from now -- I am sure I will be gone by then -- will do a reprint on the glory years of AT&T after it has also gone out of business, as I am sure it will. I know that sounds incredible to many of you, but think about it. When this Digest began, in 1981, there was but one company, the 'Bell System'. It has been gone now for twenty years; and from the 1960-70's everyone _just assumed_ Bell would be around forever, just like Western Union. Thanks again, Lisa, for reminding me it was time to do this again. PAT] ------------------------------ From: James Emery Subject: HP 7210 All-in-One and Faxstream Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 14:05:03 +1000 To whom it may concern, I am trying to get my new 7210 All-in-one working with Duet Faxstream but I am unsure of the correct settings. I currently have the Device set up to Auto Answer Distinctive rings. However, The fax machine is still answering all incoming calls and cutting off my voice calls. Can you please help me with the correct settings. Thanks, James Emery [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Can you retard the Auto-Answer for a couple more rings (let's say pick up on ring three or ring four for example) to give _you_ time to answer first if you are there and wish to answer? PAT] ------------------------------ Subject: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? From: Kathleen Carmody Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 23:22:42 -0500 (No lectures or legal opinions needed nor desired, please). Anyone know where to purchase a cellular phone jammer, preferable stateside. There are vendors off shore, but none here in CONUS that I know of. Please post here any vendors that sell cellular jammers. (Extra points for relating your experience with using one.) ------------------------------ Subject: Have You Yet Started Using VOIP? Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 00:33:16 EDT From: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu (TELECOM Digest Editor) Although many netters have tested out VOIP-style telephones there are some guys who have not yet gotten their VOIP adapters and experimented with this new method for making telephone calls. I just noticed that I have not explained the Vonage system in detail for quite a while here, so wanted to give the late-comers a chance to look into the program. If you would like an e-coupon good for a month of free service from Vonage, one of the premier VOIP services, please let me know. If you like the plans you see offered at http://vonage.com then send me email and ask for an e-coupon. You'll get a month of free service in the process of signing up via this Digest. Send me email at ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu and ask for your free month of Vonage. PAT ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 00:59:53 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Major Advertisers Caught in Spyware Net By MICHAEL GORMLEY Associated Press Writer ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- Unwanted software slithered into Patti McMann's home computer over the Internet and unleashed an annoying barrage of pop-up ads that sometimes flashed on her screen faster than she could close them. Annoying, for sure. But the last straw came a year ago when the pop-ups began plugging such household names as J.C. Penney Co. and Capital One Financial Corp., companies McMann expected to know better. Didn't they realize that trying to reach people through spyware and its ad-delivering subset, called adware, would only alienate them? "It irritated the heck out of me," said McMann, a 45-year-old former corporate executive from Klamath Falls, Ore. "It took a week to take off every little piece of crap that was put on my computer. Every time I rebooted, it started to come up again." Pop-up ads carried by spyware and adware aren't just employed by fringe companies hawking dubious wares _ such as those tricky messages that tell you your computer has been corrupted. You can count some big tech companies among its users, including broadband phone provider Vonage Holdings Corp., online employment agency Monster Worldwide Inc. and online travel agencies Expedia Inc., Priceline.com Inc. and Orbitz LLC. These companies acknowledge they've used adware to reach potential customers, though they say they shun any programs that monitor online surfing or extract personal information. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=50080329 ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 01:05:04 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: RIM Offers Few BlackBerry Outage Details By BRUCE MEYERSON AP Business Writer NEW YORK (AP) -- Research In Motion Ltd. is offering few details about two major outages in a week with its popular BlackBerry service, which delivers e-mail to wireless devices that many users affectionately call CrackBerries. RIM, which makes the pioneering mobile devices and provides the e-mail service over cellular networks, attributed a June 17 outage lasting nearly four hours to a software upgrade "that did not operate consistent with prior testing." The Canadian company said a second North American outage on Wednesday was the result of an unrelated "hardware failure." A RIM statement said a "back-up system functioned with lower capacity than expected and the lower capacity then caused latency in message delivery for some customers." RIM declined to elaborate on the number of customers affected or the nature of the software and hardware involved in the two incidents. The company also seemed to dispute the magnitude and length of last week's disruption. Cellular carriers Cingular Wireless and T-Mobile said on June 17 that service for all of their BlackBerry users _ at least 1 million people, but probably many more _ was down nationwide nearly four hours. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=50080322 ------------------------------ From: Choreboy Subject: Re: DSL Speed Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 01:09:15 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Tony P. wrote: > In article , hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com > says: >> Choreboy wrote: >>> Couldn't technology analogous to a megaphone be applied to dialup as >>> well as DSL? >> Yes. >>> Ah, crosstalk! It seems to me that if DSL uses the same wire dialup >>> used, the same crosstalk will be present. >> Not necessarily. Remember AM and FM radio waves go through the same >> air, but AM is much more sensitive to lightning and other static than >> is FM. >> DSL service may be arrangeed to minimize crosstalk. > You've hit it on the head. Both AM and FM use radio bandwidth, but > each uses a different form of modulation. AM stands for Amplitude > Modulation -- the amplitude is how high a particular sine wave rises or > falls. FM is frequency modulation, the carrier frequency varies > depending on what signal is being fed to it. Broadcast AM uses a channel 10 kHz wide. Broadcast FM mono uses 150 kHz. > It's sort of the same setup on DSL with the data signals occupying a > higher frequency. Frequency shift keying and phase modulation could be called forms of FM. Modems have used them for decades. I think dialups use a carrier of 2kHz or so. I think the baud rate is the samples per second. I think the 14.4k modem used 2400 baud with phase modulation so precise that each sample yielded 6 bits. Amazing! It's incredible that they found a way to get 56k out of a carrier somewhere around 2k. Do you mean DSL has a much higher carrier frequency? I haven't found anything about it, but it could explain how it can carry 50 times more bits. ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach -- Washington Post Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 22:24:09 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Robert Bonomi wrote: > In article , Steve Sobol > wrote: > [[.. munch ..]] >> Yeah. What a load of self-serving crap. It's not just about the credit >> cards. It's about SSNs and other personal information. To withhold >> information about such breaches is criminal. > Steve, _that_ is a bunch of crap. A credit-card clearinghouse does > *NOT* have any of that kind of information. But the banks do, and some of the breaches have been at major banks; besides, > All they have is transaction data. No "personal" data, no SSN's, > none of that. They have the card number,. the transaction amount, > maybe the 'security code', or the mag-stripe code, or the digits > (only) of the street address and/or zip-code. The clearinghouse has the account numbers. The first six digits of a MC/Visa number indicate the issuing bank, and Discover and Amex cards are only issued by one company. (Diners Club too, IIRC.) The clearinghouse SHOULD be informing the bank, and the bank SHOULD be informing their customers. JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ From: Sid Zafran Subject: Re: SBC DSL Total Fee Per Month Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 03:17:00 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net On Fri, 24 Jun 2005 10:36:07 -0000, bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) wrote: > In article , > wrote: ...snip... > The "Universal Service Fee" shouldn't apply if DSL is being added as a > 'shared' service on the POTS pair. You're already paying that as part > of the POTS service. Not so. See telecom22.700.9@telecom-digest.org That is one of my principal complaints with SBC and its devious billing practices. ------------------------------ 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 V24 #290 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sat Jun 25 18:29:41 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 1C9CD151CC; Sat, 25 Jun 2005 18:29:41 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #291 Message-Id: <20050625222941.1C9CD151CC@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 18:29:41 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.3 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,FOR_FREE, MAILTO_TO_REMOVE,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Sat, 25 Jun 2005 18:30:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 291 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson 16 to 25? Pentagon Has Your Number, and More (Monty Solomon) An Army of Soulless 1's and 0's (Monty Solomon) Verizon Wireless 3G Expansion in New York and New Jersey (Monty Solomon) Federal Laws Needed on ID Theft Notice (Monty Solomon) Re: DSL Speed (Choreboy) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (Bruce L. Bergman) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (Joseph) Re: Breakup Revisited (Thomas A. Horsley) Re: Companies Want _US_ to Pay For Their Mistakes (DevilsPGD) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (DevilsPGD) Re: ISP Hunting (DevilsPGD) Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach -- Washington Post (panoptes) Re: Dial/Touch Tone Speeds (was Re: Bell Divestiture) (Tim@Backhome.org) Last Laugh! You Got the Wrong Number! (Patrick Townson) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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, 25 Jun 2005 02:30:28 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: 16 to 25? Pentagon Has Your Number, and More By DAMIEN CAVE The Defense Department and a private contractor have been building an extensive database of 30 million 16-to-25-year-olds, combining names with Social Security numbers, grade-point averages, e-mail addresses and phone numbers. The department began building the database three years ago, but military officials filed a notice announcing plans for it only last month. That is apparently a violation of the federal Privacy Act, which requires that government agencies accept public comment before new records systems are created. David S. C. Chu, the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, acknowledged yesterday that the database had been in the works since 2002. Pentagon officials said they discovered in May 2004 that no Privacy Act notice had been filed. The filing last month was an effort to correct that, officials said. Mr. Chu said the database was just a tool to send out general material from the Pentagon to those most likely to enlist. "Congress wants to ensure the success of the volunteer force," he said at a reporters' roundtable in Washington. "Congress does not want conscription, the country does not want conscription. If we don't want conscription, you have to give the Department of Defense, the military services, an avenue to contact young people to tell them what is being offered. It would be na=EF=BF1=8E2ve to believe that in any enterprise, that you are going to do well just by waiting for people to call you." On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that the notification in The Federal Register had drawn criticism from a coalition of eight privacy groups that filed a brief opposing the database's creation. Yesterday, many of those privacy advocates, learning that the database had been under development for three years, called its existence an egregious violation of the Privacy Act's rules and intent. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/politics/24recruit.html?ex=1277265600&en=10803fe5d6f59fe1&ei=5090 ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 02:31:45 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: An Army of Soulless 1's and 0's By STEPHEN LABATON WASHINGTON, June 23 - For thousands of Internet users, the offer seemed all too alluring: revealing pictures of Jennifer Lopez, available at a mere click of the mouse. But the pictures never appeared. The offer was a ruse, and the click downloaded software code that turned the user's computer into a launching pad for Internet warfare. On the instructions of a remote master, the software could deploy an army of commandeered computers - known as zombies - that simultaneously bombarded a target Web site with so many requests for pages that it would be impossible for others to gain access to the site. And all for the sake of selling a few more sports jerseys. The facts of the case, as given by law enforcement officials, may seem trivial: a small-time Internet merchant enlisting a fellow teenager, in exchange for some sneakers and a watch, to disable the sites of two rivals in the athletic jersey trade. But the method was far from rare. Experts say hundreds of thousands of computers each week are being added to the ranks of zombies, infected with software that makes them susceptible to remote deployment for a variety of illicit purposes, from overwhelming a Web site with traffic -- a so-called denial-of- service attack -- to cracking complicated security codes. In most instances, the user of a zombie computer is never aware that it has been commandeered. The networks of zombie computers are used for a variety of purposes, from attacking Web sites of companies and government agencies to generating huge batches of spam e-mail. In some cases, experts say, the spam messages are used by fraud artists, known as phishers, to try to trick computer users into giving confidential information, like bank-account passwords and Social Security numbers. Officials at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department say their inquiries on the zombie networks are exposing serious vulnerabilities in the Internet that could be exploited more widely by saboteurs to bring down Web sites or online messaging systems. One case under investigation, officials say, may involve as many as 300,000 zombie computers. While the use of zombie computers to launch attacks is not new, such episodes are on the rise, and investigators say they are devoting more resources to such cases. Many investigations remain confidential, they say, because companies are hesitant to acknowledge they have been targets, fearful of undermining their customers' confidence. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/technology/24zombie.html?ex=1277265600&en=c003ced33d1adfcf&ei=5090 ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 02:34:49 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Verizon Wireless 3G Expansion in New York and New Jersey New V CAST Consumer Wireless Multimedia Service and BroadbandAccess Fast Data Connections for Business Now Available in More Places ORANGEBURG, N.Y., June 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Continuing to build on its strategy to provide its customers superior wireless services in the United States, Verizon Wireless today expanded its Evolution-Data Optimized (EV-DO) third generation (3G) wide-area network in the New York metropolitan area. Verizon Wireless' 3G EV-DO network enables V CAST -- the nation's first wireless broadband multimedia service for consumers -- and BroadbandAccess, the fastest wide-area wireless Internet access service available in the nation. In New York City, Verizon Wireless' V CAST and BroadbandAccess services now are available to more residents of Brooklyn and Queens. The services were launched in Manhattan, portions of Queens and Brooklyn, and at LaGuardia and JFK International Airports earlier this year. On Long Island, the high speed data network now is available to residents and summer vacationers along the entire southern shore and in portions of the north shore including Port Jefferson and Centerport. North of the City, V CAST and BroadbandAccess services now are available in southern Rockland County including Nyack and Pearl River, and in southern and central portions of Westchester County including White Plains. In New Jersey, the service now extends south along the Jersey Shore to the Ocean County border, west into Morris and Somerset counties, and north to Alpine in Bergen County. Businesses and consumers in large portions of northeastern New Jersey including Essex, Hudson and Union counties and at Newark Liberty International Airport have enjoyed V CAST and BroadbandAccess services for more than six months. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=50066733 ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 02:39:24 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Federal Laws Needed on ID Theft Notice By RACHEL BECK AP Business Writer NEW YORK (AP) -- The names and bank account details of up to 40 million credit-card holders have been exposed to fraud. Too bad the only way that information reached the public was largely thanks to California. That's right, the rest of the nation has been made aware of serious identity breaches because California forces companies to notify consumers when such theft happens. The federal government, in the meantime, hasn't done anything to require the same. Even though other states are following its California's lead, Congress can't afford to drag its feet on this national issue anymore. The reason is simple: Consumers have the right to know when their private information has been compromised. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=50068256 ------------------------------ From: Choreboy Subject: Re: DSL Speed Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 02:11:52 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Robert Bonomi wrote: > In article , Choreboy > wrote: >> At the farm, it seems to be the wire that limited my dialups to 46k >> when I got 52k in town. > Yes, and no. The particular _type_of_signaling_used_ over that wire > was limited by that wire to 46k. >> If the wire wouldn't carry more than 46k, it wouldn't matter what >> the telco did at their end. > *NOT* exclusively a 'wire' limitation. Also a limitation of the > signalling technology employed. the distributed capacitance of the > wire was such that it 'blurred' the signal such that reconstruction of > the original waveform =after= the *VOICE*GRADE* analog-to-digital > conversion in the CO switch lost the 'fidelity' required for the > higher data rate. >> I wonder how a DSL signal can carry 1.5M through those mile of wire. > DSL uses a different 'signalling technology' for sending the data down > the wire. > The DSL signal does _not_ go through those 'voice-grade' > analog-to-digital converters that PSTN calls do. the signal is > isolated before that point, and dumped into a totally _different_ kind > of receiver. Is DSL modulated into some sort of analog signal? It's hard to imagine carrying hig-frequency digital pulses on copper telephone lines. > DSL _does_ suffer 'performance losses', as the wire length gets > greater. The degree of degradation is considerably worse than with > POTS modems. E.g., at 1,000' from the C.O. you may be able to get > several megabits/sec. at 15000 ft, you'll be lucky to get 256k. At > 18,000 ft, even 144kbit/sec is iffy. Beyond 25,000 ft, "forget it" > applies -- an analog POTS modem is higher performance. The farm appears to be 35,000 feet from the central office. My browser often shows downloads faster than 1.5 Mb/s (150kB/s). >>>> I have trouble understanding on the phone, and I often resort to >>>> the phonetic alphabet to be understood. I think the problem may be >>>> more in the typical quality of phones than in bandwidth. You could >>>> have broadcast quality microphones and loudspeakers and it will >>>> still sound like a telephone because of the limited bandwidth. >>>> Since bandwidth is limited, telephone components aren't high >>>> fidelity as it would be a waste to make them so. (I believe the >>>> modern "K" handset is clearer than the older "G" handset.) >> Military AM and SSB are limited to 300-3000 Hz. Shortwave radios can >> be filtered that way for tuning and difficult conditions. Speach >> comes across pretty clearly. If telephone voices are harder to >> understand, I think the problem must be something besides the nominal >> bandwidth of a telephone. > The official specification for a voice-grade POTS call is that same > 300-3000Hz passband. Modern digital systems deliver a 'high end' of > 4000hz. and often have a lower 'low end' as well. Some modern phones sound very good. It depends on who's calling. >>>> Does a POTS line from the CO to a house carry multiple voices? >>> Depending on the location, often times yes. Between central offices >>> or within the CO almost always yes. I mean if you live across the >>> street from the CO you probably have dedicated copper pair, but you >>> live some distance you probably are multiplexed over a carrier line. >>> The degree of multiplex determines your bandwidth. >> Would you be able to connect with V90 on a multiplexed line? > Only in *very* rare situations. >> As far as capacity goes, I don't know how fast is the digital stream >> for a voice call, > After digitalization, a standard POTS voice-grade call uses 64000 bits/sec. Is that between telco facilities? >> but I'm sure DSL at 2.5Mb/s requires much more of the telco's >> capacity. > "Not Exactly" applies here. The DSL signal rides the wires from the > customer premises _to_ the telco switching facility. *BUT* before it > would get to the telco switching gear, it is separated out, > segeregated, and sent to some *entirely*different* equipment -- called > a DSLAM, if you care. Frequently that DSLAM equipment does *NOT* > belong to the telephone company, but to the company providing DSL > services. the 'upstream' connection out of the DSLAM is a dedicated > data circuit -- possibly rented from the telco, but often _also_ > supplied by the company that runs the DSLAM. Regardless, it is not > using up any capacity on the Telco's VOICE network. If the telco owns the DSLAM, won't their investment cost depend on capacity? If they contract for the DSLAM service, won't they be charged according to traffic? ------------------------------ From: NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: 25 Jun 2005 12:30:58 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Within walking distance of CONUS is Canada. I think some are sold there. Maybe someone going there for their prescriptions could pick one up. Google and also search Ebay. 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 at https://www.OneSuite.com/ No monthly fee or minimum. Use Promotion/SuiteTreat Code: FREEoffer23 for FREE time. ------------------------------ From: Bruce L. Bergman Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 21:05:50 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net Patrick, please strip or mung my E-mail address from Telecom Digest for spam purposes. A courtesy E-mail copy of this reply was also sent to the original poster. On Fri, 24 Jun 2005 23:22:42 -0500, Kathleen Carmody wrote: > (No lectures or legal opinions needed nor desired, please). > Anyone know where to purchase a cellular phone jammer, preferable > stateside. There are vendors off shore, but none here in CONUS > that I know of. Please post here any vendors that sell cellular > jammers. (Extra points for relating your experience with using one.) How Rude! Do you think that I would actually give you a lecture or legal opinion simply based on your innocent sounding question? ... Hell Yes, I Would - and if needed, I'll do it again, whether you ask or not. It would be far worse if nobody had the courage to speak up. I refer you first to the FCC Regulations on the subject, quoted and referenced at the bottom of the reply. There is a VERY GOOD REASON why nobody sells or imports jamming devices like that into the United States, because they are very illegal. I would strongly suggest you drop all thoughts as to buying or installing them. It would be a fun device to keep people from making or receiving cell calls and interrupting your City Council meetings. But let's say someone has a heart attack while alone in a stall in the public restroom right outside the Council Chambers, and they die while trying to call 911 for help from their jammed cellphone. The minute someone figures it out (and with CSI and NCIS giving people pointers on where to look, someone will check the phone and see the failed calls in the Outgoing Calls log) I guarantee you that all holy hell is going to break loose. Or there is a disturbance in the Council Chambers, and a local policeman is delayed in making his radio call for backup and assistance. Or a commercial airplane making an instrument approach into the local airport in bad weather or heavy fog is 1/4 mile from the runway, and suddenly sees his whole instrument landing beacon system go blank ... The type jammers used for this service are not very selective, they will wipe out all communications over a broad spectrum of radio frequencies and services including commercial, industrial, public safety, and aeronautic services, not just the narrow segments serving cellular telephone communications. And if you are worried about bugging or malicious transmissions, you are just going to have to hire an expert to actively sweep for them. They can be anywhere in the electromagnetic spectrum, from DC to light, and a cellular jammer will probably miss the intended target. --<< Bruce >>-- http://wireless.fcc.gov/services/cellular/operations/blockingjamming.html > Operations > Blocking & Jamming > The operation of transmitters designed to jam or block wireless > communications is a violation of the Communications Act of 1934, > as amended ("Act"). See 47 U.S.C. Sections 301, 302a, 333. The Act > prohibits any person from willfully or maliciously interfering with > the radio communications of any station licensed or authorized under > the Act or operated by the U.S. government. 47 U.S.C. Section 333. > The manufacture, importation, sale or offer for sale, including > advertising, of devices designed to block or jam wireless > transmissions is prohibited. 47 U.S.C. Section 302a(b). Parties in > violation of these provisions may be subject to the penalties set > out in 47 U.S.C. Sections 501-510. Fines for a first offense can > range as high as $11,000 for each violation or imprisonment for up > to one year, and the device used may also be seized and forfeited > to the U.S. government. 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: Joseph Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 00:51:34 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Fri, 24 Jun 2005 23:22:42 -0500, Kathleen Carmody wrote: > Anyone know where to purchase a cellular phone jammer, preferable > stateside. There are vendors off shore, but none here in CONUS > that I know of. Please post here any vendors that sell cellular > jammers. (Extra points for relating your experience with using one.) No lecture just be aware that if the FCC catches you using it in the US you'll get fined big time. ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Breakup Revisited From: tom.horsley@att.net (Thomas A. Horsley) Organization: AT&T Worldnet Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 18:30:09 GMT I always felt that the one thing we really need is total separation of bandwidth providers from content providers -- in these days of modern times bits is bits, who cares if it is voice or data, TV or internet, allowing the content providers to also control the bandwidth restricts your choices and enables the providers to price gouge to their hearts content. (Of course, as long as all the politicians are for sale to the highest bidder, this is one telcom reform we'll never get :-). >>==>> The *Best* political site >>==+ email: Tom.Horsley@worldnet.att.net icbm: Delray Beach, FL | Free Software and Politics <<==+ ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: Re: Companies Want _US_ to Pay For Their Mistakes Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 01:34:03 -0600 Organization: Disorganized In message DevilsPGD wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think they are a little too tricky to > fall for that, however. They _might_ pay for one or two hours of your > time -- maybe -- but I imagine they would tie it in with getting some > statement from your employer about time off the job. They are not > going to just send you a couple of regular payroll checks however. Why not? If I'm taking 600 hours of time to correct everything, and I'm paying for insurance that covers lost wages due to dealing with fraud ... > if you took time off from work to cure this 'fraud' was it a situation > you could not have accomplished during regular off hours from work? > PAT] That's a good point -- I don't know about you, but my off-hours are more important then my work hours. In fact, there is even a basis in law for this, in my area overtime pay is a minimum of 1.5x your base pay rate. ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 01:34:03 -0600 Organization: Disorganized In message David B. Horvath, CCP PAT -- please remove email address, too much SPAM. > On Sun, 19 Jun 2005 17:49:42 PDT, Fred Atkinson > wrote: >> I've accumulated so many devices on my home network (and some devices >> that are not network related as well) that power strips are an issue. >> Most of these devices have the big 'calculator charger' type of power >> supply that plugs directly into the AC outlet. > Yes, you are not the only one with this problem. My current solution > is multiple power strips plugged into multiple outlets. However, I've > also seen (sorry, can't remember where, try a web search) short > extension cords for use with wall-worts and power strips. The cords > get the blocks away from the strip so you can use all the available > power jacks. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=392778 This is the best solution I've seen so far, you can not only use the extension for a brick, but you can also stack tall bricks over+above smaller bricks too. In message "Howard S. Wharton" wrote: > Pat, > By daisy chaining your power strips, you are causing the first ones in > the chain to be overloaded and possibility the circuit it's plugged into. > And it is a fire waiting to happen. The risk isn't generally relevant in the case of typical brick adapters. I have a bunch of powerbars in the basement that are rated between 5 Amp and 12 Amps each, and are chained. I tossed in a meter in front of the only powerbar that actually connects to the wall and the whole thing is actively using less then 2 Amp. The power spikes up to 4 Amp right when the power is initially connected, but that's about it. ------------------------------ From: DevilsPGD Subject: Re: ISP Hunting Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 01:34:02 -0600 Organization: Disorganized In message Julian Thomas wrote: > In <20050619061216.5CE9F1501A@massis.lcs.mit.edu>, on 06/19/05 > at 02:12 AM, was written: >> I'm going to be just outside of Chicago (Skokie, if you must know) for an >> unknown period of time and looking to find out what the cheapest way to >> get internet access would be. > Check out bamnet.net 200 minutes later it has cost me more then ISP.COM would cost me for the entire month. I'll probably spend more then 200 minutes a day online, so I think I'll go for an unlimited plan. Thanks for the suggestion though :) ------------------------------ From: panoptes@iquest.net Subject: Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach -- Washington Post Date: 25 Jun 2005 10:59:13 -0700 Steve Sobol wrote: > The clearinghouse has the account numbers. The first six digits of a > MC/Visa number indicate the issuing bank, and Discover and Amex cards > are only issued by one company. (Diners Club too, IIRC.) The > clearinghouse SHOULD be informing the bank, and the bank SHOULD be > informing their customers. At least one bank is informing their customers. "Your Visa account number was in that group of accounts. We have already established a new account number to replace your old account. Please watch for your new cards in the mail in approximately 10 business days. We will not block your existing account until we believe you have had time to receive the new cards. While we believe that your account is secure we are taking this step to insure that your account will not be used for fraudulent activity in the future." The letter goes on to remind me that I am not liable for fraudulent transactions and that I should review my statements and make any disputes in writing. They got my street name wrong on this letter; my bill (which arrived in the same batch of mail) has it correctly. This suggests that someone is putting in a lot of keyboard time. ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: Dial/Touch Tone Speeds (was Re: Bell Divestiture) Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 11:36:18 -0700 Organization: Cox Communications Robert Bonomi wrote: > In article , > wrote: >> Would anyone remember in what year dual-mode phones (keypad with a >> little switch to convert to pulse if necessary) came out in wide >> quantity? I think that was around the time they stopped using real >> ringer bells. My guess is the late 1980s. > Third-party manufacturers of phones for direct attach to the PSTN > offered it from nearly day one. That way you could have th 'fancy > looking' push-button phone _without_ having to pay the telco extra > every month for Touch-Tone(tm) service. I recall a few models that only did DP, but with buttons like a DTMF pad. The far more common application, though, was a phone with a DTMF pad, but could be switched between DTMF and DP. There were still pockets of switches around until into the 1990s that could not handle DTMF. ------------------------------ From: Patrick Townson Subject: Last Laugh! You Got the Wrong Number Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 02:26:18 -0500 Some 'Dancing' Voters Call Wrong Number MOUNT PLEASANT, Mich. - An apparent phone number mix-up has voters for an ABC reality show calling a central Michigan answering service instead. Fans of "Dancing with the Stars" were mistakenly calling a toll-free 888 number to vote for the dance team lead by actor John O'Hurley, known for his role as J. Peterman on the sitcom "Seinfeld." The phone number to vote for his team was an 866 number, according to ABC's Web site. "People are saying that they are getting the number off the screen," phone operator Alannah Turnwald told the Morning Sun for a recent story. Kathy Klein, owner of Mt. Pleasant Answering Service, said she was getting 200 to 300 mistaken calls on Wednesdays, when the show airs. "You can tell when the show ends at every time zone because the phones ring off the hook at the top of every hour," she said. Calls cost Klein's answering service 6 cents per minute, plus the cost of an extra employee she has been forced to hire to weed them out. She said she wants ABC to reimburse her for the calls. The network learned of the mix-up Thursday and is investigating, said Lauren Tobin, a spokeswoman for ABC. "It's clearly a case of people misreading the number on the screen," Tobin said. Information from: Morning Sun, http://www.themorningsun.com/ Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ 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 V24 #291 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sun Jun 26 19:39:30 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 7196B14FEB; Sun, 26 Jun 2005 19:39:29 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #292 Message-Id: <20050626233929.7196B14FEB@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 19:39:29 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.1 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_REMOVE, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Sun, 26 Jun 2005 19:40:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 292 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Little Agreement on Spyware Guidelines (Lisa Minter) Some Businesses Say E-Bay Starting to Slip (Lisa Minter) States Bar Teen Drivers and Cell Phones (Lisa Minter) Users Overlook XP's Non-Admin Security; Least Privilege (Monty Solomon) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (Steve Sobol) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (Fred Atkinson) Re: Major Advertisers Caught in Spyware Net (John McHarry) Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (Fred Atkinson) Re: Companies Want _US_ to Pay For Their Mistakes (Fred Atkinson) Re: Federal Laws Needed on ID Theft Notice (Wesrock@aol.com) Re: DSL Speed (Robert Bonomi) Re: Last Laugh! You Got the Wrong Number (John McHarry) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Little Agreement on Spyware Guidelines Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 16:40:47 -0500 By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer Many anti-spyware programs scour computer hard drives for those data-tracking files called cookies that we often get from Web visits. Microsoft Corp.'s tool does not. And there are disputes aplenty about whether certain widely used advertising programs circulating on the Internet are clean of spyware. No surprise, then, that there's little agreement on what should be considered spyware, and what adware is exactly. Or on whether adware, which delivers ads, is a form of spyware or a breed apart. Consumers are confounded. Is their computer-cleaning overzealous or not thorough enough? Are they removing useful programs with the dreck? No less vexed are makers of anti-spyware software. They're beset by legal headaches, constantly challenged for what their products define and target as malware. "It certainly distracts us from the job at hand," said David Moll, chief executive of Webroot Software Inc. Help may be on the way. Led by the tech-advocacy group Center for Democracy and Technology, the anti-spyware industry is crafting definitions and plans to eventually set up dispute-resolution procedures. A draft is expected by late summer. "A definition is the foundation," said Ari Schwartz, the center's associate director. "If a consumer's going to make a decision in the marketplace about what they have and what software they are going to use, it's helpful to have a basis to do that on." Similar efforts, however, have failed before. Part of the challenge stems from how the term "spyware" evolved. "It started out as being called spyware because a lot of it was spying on people and sending personal information," said Dave Methvin, chief technology officer with tech diagnostic site PC Pitstop. "It's a catchy, quick word that is always easy for people to understand and say." But the term stuck even as some of these programs, in response to consumer complaints, began sending back less data and became less sneaky. In some people's minds, spyware came to include programs that change Web browser settings without asking or trick users into racking up huge phone bills by making the equivalent of "900" calls to foreign porn sites. "Spyware has sort of become the euphemism for any software I don't want," said Wayne Porter, co-founder of SpywareGuide.com. The result is chaos. Microsoft, for instance, chose not to scan cookies because many sites need them to remember passwords and otherwise customize a surfer's experience. Cory Treffiletti of the online ad agency Carat Interactive says cookies help sites identify repeat visitors so the same ads aren't shown over and over. But other spyware hunters flag cookies on the grounds that they help advertisers track behavior. EarthLink Inc.'s Scott Mecredy says anti-spyware programs have gotten sophisticated enough to distinguish good cookies from bad. Then there's the question of whether "spyware" includes adware. Claria Corp., formerly known as Gator Corp., has sued several anti-spyware companies and Web sites for calling its advertising software "spyware." PC Pitstop rewrote some of its materials as part of a settlement. Even "adware" isn't good enough for some. Joseph Telafici, director of operations for McAfee Inc.'s security research unit, says the company now gets one or two complaints a week, compared with two or three per quarter last year from companies whose programs it has dubbed spyware or adware. McAfee is in the process of assigning a full-time lawyer. Symantec Corp. sought to pre-empt a lawsuit by filing one itself, asking a federal court to declare that it had the right to call Hotbot.com Inc.'s toolbar adware. Hotbot did not respond to requests for comment. Symantec still faces a lawsuit by Trekeight LLC, whose product Symantec brands adware. Though it has yet to sue, 180solutions Inc. takes issue with "adware," preferring "searchware" or "sponsorware." "Adware" has become too linked with bad actors, and the industry needs more differentiation, said its chief executive, Keith Smith. Most anti-spyware vendors, however, still put 180solutions in that category. Aluria Software LLC says one company, WhenU.com Inc., has changed its practices enough that it is now spyware- and adware-safe. But America Online Inc., though it uses Aluria's technology, prefers a different test: What its users think. AOL found that users overwhelmingly choose to rid their computers of WhenU's SaveNow application when anti-spyware scans uncover it, so AOL continues to list as adware. Adding to the confusion is the fact that many legitimate programs - including Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system and Web browser - send out data without making the user fully aware, one of the common attributes of spyware. And many programs that spy do have legitimate functions - people may run a keystroke recorder to monitor spouses whom they suspect of cheating. Or they may willingly accept adware in exchange for a free game or screensaver. Anti-spyware software companies say they leave removal decisions to customers, though many users simply follow their recommendations, failing to distinguish the mild from the malicious. "If an anti-spyware company recommends that the software (gets) blocked, consumers will typically block it," said Keith Smith, chief executive of 180solutions. "It doesn't matter how good an experience they have with it." Alex St. John, chief executive of WildTangent Inc., says anti-spyware companies have an incentive to overlist programs: It makes their products appear effective. Better definitions, he said, would help clear his company's game-delivery product. "We want to do anything under our power to be clearly defined as a legitimate, upright consumer company," he said. "We would love to have something to adhere to." Guidelines could give anti-spyware vendors a better defense. For consumers, said Tori Case of Computer Associates International Inc., "if we start using the correct terminology, we can demystify it a bit and help people understand what the real risks are." Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Some Businesses Say E-Bay Starting to Slip Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 16:34:26 -0500 By RACHEL KONRAD, AP Technology Writer SAN JOSE, Calif. - Jewelry dealer Michael Jansma used to be one of eBay Inc.'s biggest cheerleaders. The entrepreneur from Largo, Fla., sells roughly $250,000 worth of baubles every month on the auction site. But the revenue Jansma gets from eBay has declined over the past year, and in January the company raised fees, denting his profits. To compensate, he added inventory on his own site, gemaffair.com, which sells about $60,000 worth of pearls and other luxuries each month. In November, he opened an account with Overstock.com, where he sells $35,000 in merchandise per month. And in February, he began selling on Amazon.com, where sales have more than doubled each month. "I hope eBay gets the message: People have choices, and if we're not happy we'll look elsewhere," Jansma said. "I hope eBay will rise to the occasion." With roughly 150 million registered users, eBay ranks among the world's most powerful companies, online or otherwise. It had more than 1.4 billion items listed last year. For every $100 spent online worldwide, $14 was spent on eBay. But some say eBay's blockbuster growth has engendered arrogance. Entrepreneurs grumble that executives pander to big-ticket electronics vendors and industrial manufacturers -- not the teddy bear enthusiasts and numismatists who were faithful a decade ago, when eBay was founded and enjoyed a kitschy obscurity. They complain about shoddy customer service, including site crashes and anti-fraud software that too often mistakes a legitimate business for a huckster. Meanwhile, eBay executives are looking for new revenue as growth slows in North America and competition heats up from Amazon, Yahoo Inc. , Google Inc. and plucky startups. Business experts agree that eBay faces daunting obstacles, such as cracking the nascent Chinese e-commerce market and broadening the audience for PayPal, the online payment division that still does 71 percent of its transactions through eBay. "They've made good strides but haven't fully monetized other opportunities," said David Edwards, an analyst at American Technology Research in San Francisco. "The nature of a marketplace is that once you have a critical mass, it tends to stick, and there's not a lot that can unseat it. But that's not to say that eBay doesn't have significant challenges ahead." EBay foes concede that it would be nearly impossible to eclipse the world's largest online auction company. But that hasn't stopped them from carving out niches where they perceive eBay to be weak. Take fraud, for example. EBay maintains that less than one-hundredth of 1 percent of all listings are fraudulent, but scammers target high-priced items such as plasma TVs, and some victims have lost thousands of dollars. Although eBay's fraud-detection software alerts internal investigators of suspicious listings, executives say it's impossible to police a site receiving as many as 2,000 new listings per second. By contrast, Chicago-based UBid Inc. verifies addresses and checks bank references for all 3,700 of its sellers. Service representatives place random orders to ensure prompt delivery, said CEO Bob Tomlinson. "EBay's taking a hands-off approach to fraud that makes some users uncomfortable," Tomlinson said. "We're taking a hands-on approach." EBay has also gained a reputation as unresponsive to complaints, a company that acts like an unregulated monopoly and only recently has extended an olive branch. In mid-January, eBay warned sellers in a terse e-mail that the monthly fee to operate an "Basic eBay Store" would increase from $9.95 to $15.95, and standard listing fees would double, to 40 cents. Sellers peppered eBay executives with angry mail, forcing the company to reduce some fees. EBay CEO Meg Whitman acknowledges that some of eBay's user relationships have been difficult. But the company, which routinely flies in buyers and sellers for focus groups, has "redoubled" efforts to be innovative, she said. "Sometimes it's a little bit like being a politician," Whitman said. "We have work to do in understanding our users' sentiments." Bill Cobb, president of eBay North America, said the company would try to mollify disgruntled sellers with a new rule. If a winning bid comes from someone who has no intention of paying, the seller's rating will not suffer in eBay's "feedback" feature. Sellers often complain of too many fake bidders, particularly on cultural zeitgeist items. For example, in November, a grilled cheese sandwich purportedly depicting the Virgin Mary sold for $28,000, but only after the posting received 1.7 million hits and several astronomical fake bids were eliminated. Such changes are a departure from the original mission of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar -- to create a site that would act as an intermediary between buyers and sellers, devoid of oversight or bureaucracy. "Pierre never in effect wanted customer support because the marketplace was supposed to work everything out," Cobb said. "But when you scale to 150 million members, you have to account for the margins. Unfortunately you have a very small percentage of people who will try to disrupt the marketplace." But eBay's contrition may be too late. Salt Lake City-based Overstock.com launched an auction site eight months ago that addresses complaints from eBay sellers partly by charging roughly one-third of eBay's listing and transaction fees. It has 225,000 listings, from tractors to sneakers. Holly MacDonald-Korth, senior vice president of Overstock auctions, takes calls directly from sellers. By contrast, eBay only stopped sending automated e-mail responses to sellers in February. "Larger sellers give us a depth of inventory that we need, but the smaller sellers really give us the flavor," MacDonald-Korth said. Despite the complaints, eBay still maintains an enviable, passionate user base. More than 10,000 sellers converged in San Jose last week for eBay's 10th anniversary, which ended Saturday with a concert by The B-52s. Glenna Woolard of Santa Cruz, who sported a temporary eBay tattoo and a woven ponytail in eBay's logo colors, has been a seller since 1999. A stay-at-home mother of four, she hawks items purchased from local estate liquidations, garage sales and industrial auctions, with monthly revenue of $3,000. "EBay takes the 9-to-5 world away, so even someone like me can fit into the economy," Woolard said. She hopes to spend next summer collecting items to sell on eBay while driving cross-country in her Fleetwood Bounder, a mobile home she purchased on eBay for $29,000. Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: States Bar Teenage Drivers and Cell Phones Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 16:42:22 -0500 By ROBERT TANNER, AP National Writer There are a few things that the average teenager absolutely must have in 21st century America -- a license to drive is one, a cell phone is another. But police officers, parents, and, increasingly, lawmakers are coming to the conclusion that those essentials are a dangerous mix when combined with inexperience on the road. A growing number of states are creating legal barriers to keep young drivers from using cell phones, even as few ban adults from talking -- at least handsfree -- while driving. "It's not a silver bullet solution, but it's one piece of a puzzle we need to put in place if we're serious about eliminating highway deaths, highway crashes, as the No. 1 cause of death of young Americans," said Maryland Delegate William Bronrott. The year began with just two states limiting cell phone use for teen drivers. But as legislative sessions moved ahead, lawmakers in six states passed bills to bar all cell phones, handheld or handsfree, for teenage drivers with learner permits or provisional licenses. Now, laws in Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland and Tennessee say young drivers must keep the phone off. Illinois's measure is waiting for Gov. Rod Blagojevich to sign it into law, but his staff says he intends to. Maine already bars cell phones for drivers with provisional licenses up to age 21, and New Jersey bans them for those drivers at any age. At least a dozen more states considered similar measures in recent months and balked, though advocates say they'll be back. Lawmakers don't necessarily expect teenagers to like it -- and they don't. "I don't know anybody who says it's a good idea, or it's fair to single out 16- or 17-year-olds," said Adam Bonefeste, a 17-year-old from Springfield, Ill. Nearly all his friends have their own cell phone, and everybody needs to drive for work, school and social life, he said. "I drive and talk on my cell phone all the time," he said. "I've never had any problems, never run into anything or got a ticket." Whether or not they're using cell phones, teenagers are much more likely than older drivers to get into accidents. At age 16, boys get into 27 crashes per million miles driven and girls 28 crashes. Those numbers drop quickly as drivers age. By the time drivers reach the 20-to-24-year-old group, there are eight crashes per million miles for men, and nine crashes for women, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, based on 2001 data. Those crashes take a deadly toll. The insurance institute says that 32 16-year-olds died per 100,000 drivers in 2003, four times the fatality rate of the 30-to-59 age group. Researchers say there is clearly a problem with teenage drivers becoming easily distracted on the road. Their work has bolstered efforts to ease teenagers into the driving world, giving them more time to learn, restricting nighttime driving and barring other teenage passengers, who sometimes incite dangerous behavior. Now 45 states have some version of what's called graduated drivers licenses. But many researchers say convincing evidence is lacking on any link between cell phone use and accidents -- even with academic studies like one published last winter that found young motorists talking on cell phones react as slowly as senior citizens, and are more impaired than drunk drivers. "It's just not clear," said Susan Ferguson, vice president of research at the insurance institute. The National Transportation Safety Board and the Governors Highway Safety Association both endorse bans for cell phone for novice drivers. But they back off on bans for adult drivers. State legislators and governors, too, have proved largely reluctant to limit or ban cell phones for all drivers. New York banned handheld devices in 2001, and since then only New Jersey in 2004, and the Connecticut legislature -- this year -- approved a ban. Connecticut's law is waiting on the governor's signature. "This is part of an evolution, part of a revolution as we learn more and more about human factors in driving," said Ellen Engleman Conners, the chairman designate at the National Transportation Safety Board. More research is being pursued to shape public policy, but until then, it makes sense to protect teenagers because their vulnerability to distractions and accidents is indisputable, she said. It's easy to pass a law, but harder to change behavior, said Sheriff Dave Owens in McLean County, Ill. "Just the fact that that becomes law ... is that enough to get people to stop? We have speeding laws in this country and people routinely speed," he said. In Maryland, advocates had pushed for years to get tougher restrictions on teenagers that included many of the elements of graduated drivers licenses. They had always failed -- until this year, when a series of fatal crashes sharpened public attention to the problem. "There were 18 teens killed in about three months," said Bronrott, a longtime advocate of safe driving rules. "It was a huge wakeup call." On the Net: Insurance Institute for Highway Safety: http://www.iihs.org National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 12:58:53 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Users Overlook XP's Non-Admin Security; Least Privilege By Ryan Naraine Microsoft is sparing no expense to spread the Least-privileged User Account security gospel ahead of next year's Longhorn launch, but a little-known fact-especially among IT administrators and end users-is that the technology is already available in the Windows operating system. The LUA principle, also known as non-admin or minimum rights, is accepted within software security circles as a key to reducing damage from malicious hacker attacks, but on Windows systems, although the option is available, experts say end-user adoption remains "frighteningly low." http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1830637,00.asp Least Privilege' Can Be the Best By David Coursey Opinion: Forcing administrator privileges to be set as the default for all accounts leaves users exposed to malware. Want fewer security hassles? Demote yourself! Want to do something right now that can help protect you from malware? Then stop being an administrator. No, I am not suggesting a career change, though I suppose that would have much the same effect. Rather, I hope you'll consider using your desktop's administrator account only when absolutely necessary and creating a user account for general computing. Why am I making this suggestion? Because too many people do all their computing as administrators -- even those whose user name is something besides "Administrator." http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1772361,00.asp ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 15:01:06 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com NOTvalid@XmasNYC.Info wrote: > Within walking distance of CONUS is Canada. Not within walking distance of Brooklyn Center. Brooklyn Center, MN is a suburb of Minneapolis. Not a border town by any stretch of the imagination. It's on the wrong side of the state to be a border town. JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Reply-To: fatkinson@mishmash.com Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 01:35:21 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 21:05:50 GMT, Bruce L. Bergman wrote: >> The operation of transmitters designed to jam or block wireless >> communications is a violation of the Communications Act of 1934, >> as amended ("Act"). See 47 U.S.C. Sections 301, 302a, 333. The Act >> prohibits any person from willfully or maliciously interfering with >> the radio communications of any station licensed or authorized under >> the Act or operated by the U.S. government. 47 U.S.C. Section 333. >> The manufacture, importation, sale or offer for sale, including >> advertising, of devices designed to block or jam wireless >> transmissions is prohibited. 47 U.S.C. Section 302a(b). Parties in >> violation of these provisions may be subject to the penalties set >> out in 47 U.S.C. Sections 501-510. Fines for a first offense can >> range as high as $11,000 for each violation or imprisonment for up >> to one year, and the device used may also be seized and forfeited >> to the U.S. government. > 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. Don't miunderstand me here. I basically agree with your position. But didn't the more recent communications act render the Communications Act of 1934 obsolete? I don't think that cell phone technology was considered when it was written, either. I do think that perhaps use of such jamming devices (if properly designed) might be useful in prisons where there is a problem with contraband cell phones running being used for drug deals and other problematic things. Of course, we'd have to address the issues and how to correctly make it legal for use (so that situations like you've described can be avoided). Fred ------------------------------ From: John McHarry Subject: Re: Major Advertisers Caught in Spyware Net Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 22:23:58 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 00:59:53 -0400, Monty Solomon wrote: > By MICHAEL GORMLEY Associated Press Writer > Pop-up ads carried by spyware and adware aren't just employed by > fringe companies hawking dubious wares _ such as those tricky messages > that tell you your computer has been corrupted. It strikes me that _any_ company doing that is fringe and hawking dubious wares. Just because they have a recognizable name doesn't mean they are trustworthy. ------------------------------ From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 18:55:27 -0400 > http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo392778 > This is the best solution I've seen so far, you can not only use the > extension for a brick, but you can also stack tall bricks over+above > smaller bricks too. This is the same as a previous suggestion http://www.cyberguys.com/templates/searchdetail.asp?T1=121+2510 . And it looks like a pretty fair one. I would warn you off about Tiger Direct, though. My experience with them was never very good. When I would call them, their customer service people were very rude. They'd tell me that they never received an order I'd called in. When I'd ask to speak to a supervisor, they'd tell me (in a very obnoxious tone of voice) that I didn't need to speak to a supervisor because the order was never placed. Turns out, they had created four different accounts on me and he was looking in the wrong account. I didn't place the order, huh? When I finally did get to speak to a supervisor (about two or three calls later), he discovered the multiple accounts and found my order. When I would call back for information about some of the equipment I had ordered (I'd lost the invoice and told them I didn't have the order number). The guy just kept asking me for the order number anyway. After about the fifth time I told him that the invoice was lost, I pointed out that he was sounding like a broken record. He said, "Goodbye" and hung up on me. (And you don't have an order number? And you don't have an order number? And you don't have an order number? And you don't have an order number? And you don't have an order number? And you don't have an order number? ). Sheesh. I spoke to a supervisor about these kind of unprofessional behaviors. He was quite shocked and assured me that he'd look into it. But, it never changed. I wrote the company twice about their customer service's behavior problems. They never even answered the letters. I resolved not to do business with them again. But, I might get some from Cyberguys. It'll be a trial basis for them. If they work out all right, I might start using them for a supplier. Regards, Fred Atkinson ------------------------------ From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Re: Companies Want _US_ to Pay For Their Mistakes Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 19:39:45 -0400 > In message DevilsPGD > wrote: >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think they are a little too tricky to >> fall for that, however. They _might_ pay for one or two hours of your >> time -- maybe -- but I imagine they would tie it in with getting some >> statement from your employer about time off the job. They are not >> going to just send you a couple of regular payroll checks however. > Why not? If I'm taking 600 hours of time to correct everything, and > I'm paying for insurance that covers lost wages due to dealing with > fraud ... TELECOM Digest Editor noted: >> if you took time off from work to cure this 'fraud' was it a situation >> you could not have accomplished during regular off hours from work? >> PAT] > That's a good point -- I don't know about you, but my off-hours are more > important then my work hours. > In fact, there is even a basis in law for this, in my area overtime > pay is a minimum of 1.5x your base pay rate. I admit I've come in on the middle of this and maybe I'm missing something here. If you are refering to correcting work that was incorrectly performed by your company, why wouldn't you be required to correct with without additional charge? They've already paid you for the work to be done the right way. Why should they pay you again for fixing work that you performed incorrectly? When I was helping my employer (SkyTel) with the telephone grid at the new office, I proposed installing a Homaco distribution frame. I got a bid on the thing and they accepted the bid. When we met with [then] Bell Atlantic (now Verizon, I believe), I didn't want them terminating RJ-21s on our distribution frame as that wasn't what RJ-21 should or would have ever been considered for (why should you install a device with a twenty-five pair amphenol connector on it when the interconnects were going to be done with cross-connect wires?). I wanted Bell Atlantic to terminate our house cables on the wall in a phone closet and we would amphenol some twenty-five pairs cables to run to the frame so we could put their appearance on split sixty-six blocks. Bell Atlantic said they'd prefer to terminate directly on our frame. We said we'd agree to that only if split sixty-six blocks were used as we wouldn't permit RJ-21s (amphenol connectors) being terminated on our frame. They agreed and we cleared them to terminate on our distribution frame based upon that agreement. Several months later (after the frame had been installed in our new office), I stopped by to see how well the frame was progressing with the cables (from all the contractors). Guess what I found terminated on the frame? You guessed it. There were eighteen RJ-21s on our frame. I told the telco guy that was standing there to prepare to remove them. He was quite shocked, but I didn't care. When I returned to the old office, I spoke to our director and we immediately initiated a conference call to Bell Atlantic on the matter. I asked our account representative if she recalled our agreement about them terminating on our frame. She confirmed that she knew that and remembered it quite well. I then asked her why the RJ-21s had been installed against our agreement. She pulled out the paperwork she had sent through and said she had indeed written it up right and apparently someone had changed it further down the chain of command. She set us up to meet with the installers and their supervisor. I got the standard, "that's the way the FCC requires us to do it" speech. I told them I didn't care what the FCC required and that they were going to terminate it on the frame the way we had agreed to. The supervisor was taken by surprise when I told him that we had an agreement with Bell Atlantic that he had apparently not been told about. But, he proposed an alternative solution. He wanted to remove the amphenol connectors and the wires off the RJ-21s, effectively turning them into split sixty-six blocks. I had them do one right then. It turned out pretty neatly so I gave them an OK to do it that way. And it worked pretty well over the time we were in there. I still have trouble understanding thinking that you are required to install something with the wrong type of connection to please the FCC. But, that mentality runs prevalent among Telcos (and I know I'm going to get jumped here). Of course, we had to pay for all their time to come back and fix their mistake. They didn't seem to think that they should be required to do the work the way we agreed to rather than charging us again for their time to correct their faulty work. Time showed that I was right as the frame turned into a pretty efficient and professional means of interconnecting both our office grid and all of the equipment in the paging center. In fact, my name received prominent mention for it when our board of directors sent down an 'attaboy' letter for all who were on the committee to plan and implement this distribution frame (because I had proposed it and personally managed the quality of the installation), the computer center, and the office grid. It made our interconnct management much easier. The morning after we moved into the new office (we had relocated the paging computer and the rest of its facilities over that weekend and the cutover went without a hitch), the V.P. and directors from engineering stopped at my desk and shook my hand congratulating me on how well it had been managed and how quickly and efficiently they'd been able to hook everything up over the weekend because of that distribution frame. And it went so well because I never had any reservation about making Telco or any other contractor redo their work in the correct manner. There were a number of times when I made other contractors pull it out and do it entirely over again. The director of engineering always backed me when I told them to redo it. And time always showed that I was right. But it always amazes me how quick these folks (and I'm not singling Telco out here) are to charge you for correcting their own deficient work. Regards, Fred [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Actually, we were discussing in this instance how a certain credit card company wanted to sell you insurance to pay for 'credit card fraud' which you are not responsible for anyway. And in their pitch to purchase their insurance, they offered as how it could compensate you for all the 'worry' and 'time lost from work' that you would spend correcting _their screw-up_. I mean, can't you imagine some guy telling his boss, "oh, I will be coming in to work two hours late tomorrow; I have to call the credit card people, chances are likely I will be kept on hold for at least an hour before reaching a live person; when I reach a live person, more than likely I will be 'worried sick' from all the paperwork they will make me go through, I may not be in at all tomorrow." Well, that's what the 'credit card fraud insurance' was going to cover if you bought some. As for me, I'd rather just pay the fifty dollar maximum loss if they did not agree (nor volunteer to) write it off after I had harassed them. But your point, of telco totally disregarding instructions on a work order, then trying to force you to pay for their mistakes is also a good one. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Wesrock@aol.com Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 19:46:45 EDT Subject: Re: Federal Laws Needed on ID Theft Notice In a message dated Sat, 25 Jun 2005 02:39:24 -0400, Monty Solomon writes: > By RACHEL BECK AP Business Writer > NEW YORK (AP) -- The names and bank account details of up to 40 > million credit-card holders have been exposed to fraud. Too bad the > only way that information reached the public was largely thanks to > California. I wonder if this was really 40 million credit card holders or records of 40 million transactions. Wes Leatherock wesrock@aol.com ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: DSL Speed Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 02:05:23 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , Choreboy wrote: > Robert Bonomi wrote: >> In article , Choreboy >> wrote: >>> At the farm, it seems to be the wire that limited my dialups to 46k >>> when I got 52k in town. >> Yes, and no. The particular _type_of_signaling_used_ over that wire >> was limited by that wire to 46k. >>> If the wire wouldn't carry more than 46k, it wouldn't matter what >>> the telco did at their end. >> *NOT* exclusively a 'wire' limitation. Also a limitation of the >> signalling technology employed. the distributed capacitance of the >> wire was such that it 'blurred' the signal such that reconstruction of >> the original waveform =after= the *VOICE*GRADE* analog-to-digital >> conversion in the CO switch lost the 'fidelity' required for the >> higher data rate. >>> I wonder how a DSL signal can carry 1.5M through those mile of wire. >> DSL uses a different 'signalling technology' for sending the data down >> the wire. >> The DSL signal does _not_ go through those 'voice-grade' >> analog-to-digital converters that PSTN calls do. the signal is >> isolated before that point, and dumped into a totally _different_ kind >> of receiver. > Is DSL modulated into some sort of analog signal? It's hard to imagine > carrying hig-frequency digital pulses on copper telephone lines. Get thee to a _library_. they have entire books on the subject. >> DSL _does_ suffer 'performance losses', as the wire length gets >> greater. The degree of degradation is considerably worse than with >> POTS modems. E.g., at 1,000' from the C.O. you may be able to get >> several megabits/sec. at 15000 ft, you'll be lucky to get 256k. At >> 18,000 ft, even 144kbit/sec is iffy. Beyond 25,000 ft, "forget it" >> applies -- an analog POTS modem is higher performance. > The farm appears to be 35,000 feet from the central office. My browser > often shows downloads faster than 1.5 Mb/s (150kB/s). That which "appears" to be the situation is often not the reality. There may be a 'remote node' outlying from where you "think" the central office is. The DSLAM equipment can be located there. >>>>> I have trouble understanding on the phone, and I often resort to >>>>> the phonetic alphabet to be understood. I think the problem may be >>>>> more in the typical quality of phones than in bandwidth. You could >>>>> have broadcast quality microphones and loudspeakers and it will >>>>> still sound like a telephone because of the limited bandwidth. >>>>> Since bandwidth is limited, telephone components aren't high >>>>> fidelity as it would be a waste to make them so. (I believe the >>>>> modern "K" handset is clearer than the older "G" handset.) >>> Military AM and SSB are limited to 300-3000 Hz. Shortwave radios can >>> be filtered that way for tuning and difficult conditions. Speach >>> comes across pretty clearly. If telephone voices are harder to >>> understand, I think the problem must be something besides the nominal >>> bandwidth of a telephone. >> The official specification for a voice-grade POTS call is that same >> 300-3000Hz passband. Modern digital systems deliver a 'high end' of >> 4000hz. and often have a lower 'low end' as well. > Some modern phones sound very good. It depends on who's calling. Some phones are made cheaper than others. >>>>> Does a POTS line from the CO to a house carry multiple voices? >>>> Depending on the location, often times yes. Between central offices >>>> or within the CO almost always yes. I mean if you live across the >>>> street from the CO you probably have dedicated copper pair, but you >>>> live some distance you probably are multiplexed over a carrier line. >>>> The degree of multiplex determines your bandwidth. >>> Would you be able to connect with V90 on a multiplexed line? >> Only in *very* rare situations. >>> As far as capacity goes, I don't know how fast is the digital stream >>> for a voice call, >> After digitalization, a standard POTS voice-grade call uses 64000 > bits/sec. > Is that between telco facilities? Or even between the telco and _customer_ facilities that use 'digital entrance' to the telco. >>> but I'm sure DSL at 2.5Mb/s requires much more of the telco's >>> capacity. >> "Not Exactly" applies here. The DSL signal rides the wires from the >> customer premises _to_ the telco switching facility. *BUT* before it >> would get to the telco switching gear, it is separated out, >> segeregated, and sent to some *entirely*different* equipment -- called >> a DSLAM, if you care. Frequently that DSLAM equipment does *NOT* >> belong to the telephone company, but to the company providing DSL >> services. the 'upstream' connection out of the DSLAM is a dedicated >> data circuit -- possibly rented from the telco, but often _also_ >> supplied by the company that runs the DSLAM. Regardless, it is not >> using up any capacity on the Telco's VOICE network. > If the telco owns the DSLAM, won't their investment cost depend on > capacity? If they contract for the DSLAM service, won't they be > charged according to traffic? If the telco itself is offering/providing DSL service, then it is virtually certain that they own the DSLAM equipment. If a third-party provider is doing the DSL provisioning, then the incumbent telco may, or _may_not_ have any involvement with the DSL equipment. As to 'how things are priced/charged-for', that's a whole 'nuther kettle of fish. Some arrangements are 'flat rate', where you pay a fixed price for the capacity that is available to you. Pthers are so-called 'burstable' rates, where you pay based on how much traffic you send. ------------------------------ From: John McHarry Subject: Re: Last Laugh! You Got the Wrong Number Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 22:20:01 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 02:26:18 -0500, Patrick Townson wrote: > Some 'Dancing' Voters Call Wrong Number > MOUNT PLEASANT, Mich. - An apparent phone number mix-up has voters for > an ABC reality show calling a central Michigan answering service > instead. Remember that series a number of years ago where a probation office or some such accidentally printed an old lady's number on its stationery? They refused to do anything about it until Telecom Digest published their number and they started getting thousands of calls for her. In the end, they corrected their printing, and rerouted her number through their switchboard to screen her calls until the situation quieted down. She is probably still mythologized as the Sweet Little Old Lady from Hell around there. ------------------------------ 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 V24 #292 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sun Jun 26 21:59:34 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 7F10615004; Sun, 26 Jun 2005 21:59:34 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #293 Message-Id: <20050627015934.7F10615004@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 21:59:34 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.9 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT,OFFERS_ETC autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Sun, 26 Jun 2005 22:00:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 293 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Should VOIP be Put on 'Hold'? (Lisa Minter) VOIP Security Concerns are Severe, Say Some Experts (Lisa Minter) Spit in Here, Please (Lisa Minter) Technology Has its Own Hangups For Users (Lisa Minter) WECO 302 Wiring Question (David Perrussel) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Jammer (Dale Farmer) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Should VOIP be Put on 'Hold' For Now? Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 18:59:17 -0500 A controversial series of articles about VOIP came across my desk over the weekend; I am sharing them with you to get some opinions on the topic. Lisa Let's Put VOIP on Hold By David Coursey May 17, 2005 Opinion: Until better defenses are available against phone hackers and voice spam, hang up. So you think your buying a VOIP telephone system for your company was really smart? You certainly have reason to: Your users love the tight integration between the phone system, their e-mail, and other PC features. And the chief financial officer loves the "deal" you got on long-distance rates. Everyone agrees: You're a hero. Not so fast-and, probably, not for long. How do you think people are going to feel about your VOIP (voice over IP) system when they arrive one morning to find their voice mail boxes completely filled with voice spam? When they read about hackers listening in on what's being said in people's offices, even though the phone is still on the hook? VOIP has been around for a few years and, so far, seems to have been pretty secure. But that's only because the bad guys have yet to turn it into a major target. When they do, life promises to be very different. And not in a good way. Last week, I moderated another of our eSeminars, this one an eye-opening discussion of VOIP security issues. I say "issues" because there weren't too many solutions to discuss. The panel included Wayne Rash, who writes much of our VOIP security coverage; Andrew Graydon, of the VOIP Security Alliance, a trade group; and Tom Leh, of VOIP Inc. a vendor. [Lisa notes: See another article today here regards VOIP security threats.] If you've got an hour, you can watch and listen to a replay of the presentations. I walked away from the event convinced there shouldn't be any more VOIP installations until we have a better idea of how to protect them. VOIP takes all the security problems associated with PCs and all the security problems associated with the Internet, and throws in a bunch of new telephony hardware, new protocols, and different user behavior and expectations. The possibilities for voice spamming, called SPIT, for SPam over Internet Telephony, ought to give every network administrator pause. [Lisa notes: We also talk about SPIT {or VOIP spam} in this issue and the potential for SPIT, or voice spamming.] Then comes eavesdropping, both of phone calls and room conversations, and a whole new set of opportunities for what used to be called phone phreaking. We really don't know what's possible for the VOIP hacker, but we do know that the hobby hacker has been replaced by the criminal hacker. On thing's certain: This time phone phreaking won't be a fairly harmless bunch of kids blowing Cap'n Crunch whistles to get free long-distance calls. ost people don't realize how secure our telephone network has been. Sure, you get spam phone calls, despite the "no-call" list. But, on the whole, your hardwired telephone is quite secure, especially the one in your home. Getting at your conversations generally requires a physical tap on your line. Modern cordless telephones can be hacked, but you still have to be close enough to pick up the radio signals. With IP telephony, an intrusion can be launched from almost anywhere. And even if the VOIP system is well-protected, each PC with a "soft phone" application installed provides a potential door for a hacker to exploit. On basic principles, I am not wild about running our nation's critical telecom infrastructure entirely over the Internet. Or even mostly. There is too much at stake and the network is too insecure and perhaps too brittle for the job. Despite my grave misgivings, however, VOIP is here to stay. But until we have seen what the hackers can do, I'll keep VOIP away from my network and I recommend you do the same. Check out eWEEK.com's VOIP & Telephony Center for the latest news, views and analysis on voice over IP and telephony. Copyright 1996-2005 Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Next, Lisa presents an article on security concerns when you install VOIP. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Severe Vulnerabilities Possible in VOIP According to Experts Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 19:02:30 -0500 By Wayne Rash April 5, 2005 Dr. Shashi Phoha, director of the Information Technology Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said she thinks that the growth of VOIP technology brings with it some significant risks that users need to be prepared to address. "The vulnerabilities are severe," she said, pointing to a list that included ways to spoof or spy that aren't easily available on regular phones. One of the biggest sources for vulnerabilities is the involvement of personal computers in creating VOIP solutions. She said that while it may not appear to be that critical, the fact that it can be relatively easy to hack into computers can also expose the phone system to fraud and abuse. Phoha's list went on to address the availability of open source eavesdropping tools, that digital phone calls could be edited by digital voice editors to add, remove or change words without any possibility of detection. She also said that the government was worried that it would be relatively easy with VOIP phones to bug a room using on-hook audio. This is a technique in which hackers or spies can turn on the microphone in a VOIP handset while it remains on its cradle. This way, the phone would appear to be operating properly while actually transmitting every sound within its range to a remote site. Other things that keep Phoha worried, she says, are the vulnerabilities related to soft phones, which are applications that work like phones, but are entirely software and are run on personal computers. She said that these phones are vulnerable to worms, viruses and Trojan horses, and could spread these problems throughout the voice network. [Lisa notes: And you know, she has good points. Consider how many computers are 'Zombies' which spend their time attacking other computers. Would it be that much of a hassle to continue the 'zombification' to include the VOIP terminals on computers? Read my third article today in this series about SPIT (spam over Internet telephony) which has begun to make its appearance.] She says that what worries her the most, however, are "attacks we haven't thought of yet." Phoha made her remarks at a panel discussing VOIP held at the National Press Club a few weeks ago. Phoha said that it's possible to combat some of the threats her organization is finding by careful design and risk analysis. She said that risk can also be reduced by using encryption of the voice traffic, and by using VOIP-specific intrusion detection systems and firewalls. She also advocated keeping data traffic and VOIP on logically separate networks. She noted that her group is also working to develop new security architectures for use by the government, but that commercial and private users should also consider following the NIST recommendations, which are available on the agency's Web site. Check out eWEEK.com's VOIP & Telephony Center for the latest news, views and analysis on voice over IP and telephony. Copyright 1996-2005 Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Spit in Here, Please Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 19:00:47 -0500 SPIT Into This, Please By Wayne Rash March 16, 2005 Opinion: VOIP faces threats from spam and offshoring, but how bad? Picture the world of voice traffic on the Internet as a dark and forbidding place, rife with mobsters, con artists and shadowy sellers of dubious products. Now picture getting hundreds of calls from these people every day. Imagine your worst day ever of telemarketing, back before the Do Not Call list, and then magnify it 10 times over. That's the depressing future of VOIP (voice over IP), according to a report just released by the Burton Group. According to analyst Daniel Golding, the report's author, low costs brought on by outsourcing and offshoring, coupled with VOIP communications that are essentially free, can bring you exactly that kind of future, unless you take precautions. According to Golding, current federal laws prohibiting such unsolicited calls are also part of the driving force for those overseas call centers. "The big issue here is: How much do I have to spend to get a certain number of responses?" Golding explained. He predicts that most of the calls will come from organizations operating illegally or committing fraud. He said this will mean that they won't care about the Do Not Call list, or about the hostility telemarketers currently meet. "They don't care if 99 percent of the people hate them," Golding said. "They know that 1 percent are idiots." Despite all of the hoopla about just how much of a problem VOIP spam might be, there's little agreement. In fact, there's little agreement on what constitutes VOIP spam (sometimes called "SPIT," for spam over Internet telephony). On one hand, you'll hear that U.S. consumers are about to feel an onslaught of tens of thousands of telemarketing calls from overseas call centers taking advantage of cheap calling, and using their location to avoid U.S. do-not-call regulations. On another, you'll hear that the real threat is more traditional spam aimed at VOIP systems, or perhaps denial of service attacks on these systems. And on a third hand, you'll hear that the problem isn't all that bad, and that it can be managed. Copyright 1996-2005 Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. *** 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 Holdings, Inc. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So ordinarily, we hear many good things about VOIP; how it will revolutionize the telecom industry, etc, which I am sure is the case. But there is a dark side to it all, as these three special articles in this issue of the Digest indicate. Will in fact the people who have turned so many computers into Zombies continue their work with VOIP? If you think not, then why not? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Technology Has its Own Hangups For Users Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 18:54:27 -0500 Dateline: Pittsburgh, Pa. Sunday, June 26, 2005 Technology has its own hangups for users. For better or worse, techn- ology that allows us to screen callers can throw a wrench into timely communications. We want answers, and we want them fast. And when the speed with which these answers arrive isn't up to our expectations, we look for someone -- or something -- to blame. Technology, it seems, is an easy target. In a recent survey, 67 percent of the 1,750 people interviewed by Siemens Communications Inc. took target practice at telephone and online communications, saying they spend too much time leaving voice mails and sending e-mails when quick answers are what they need. And when answers finally do arrive, these same people reported the calls often came back too late. Society is plugged in as never before -- with PDAs, cell phones, e-mail, faxes, caller ID and voice mail -- and experts offer varying opinions about the cause and effect. Some say Americans are feeling increasingly unplugged, disconnected and out of control, trapped in a never-ending game of phone tag. Others say that the ability to screen phone calls through caller ID, sift through e-mail and, particularly for businesses, handle customer calls through automated voice systems is worth any inconvenience and potential waiting game. "Isn't it interesting that we blame the technology?" said Richard Thompson, a professor and director of the graduate program in telecommunications at the University of Pittsburgh. Thompson worked for 20 years at AT&T Bell Labs before coming to Pitt in 1989. "Isn't this like being annoyed about traffic congestion, so we blame the inventors of the automobile? It sounds to me like when people need information from someone else, that 67 percent of them put off getting it until the last possible minute. "I think this complaint says a lot about how busy we are and how hectic our jobs are, on both sides of the phone call or e-mail, but especially on the calling party's side." Barry Lawrence of Siemens, the survey folks, says productivity is declining because it's so hard to reach people. And our personal lives have grown more frustrating because it's hard to reach a live person at your health club or day-care center. The communications technology designed to make our lives easier is affecting our work, lifestyles and mental health, Lawrence said. Playing phone tag also is making our skins thinner, said Wu Zhou, a senior analyst for Boston-based IDC, a top telecommunications research firm, because we never know when or if the person we're trying to reach listens to voice mail or reads e-mails. But technology doesn't give people a license to be rude, said Martin Weiss, associate professor of telecommunications at Pitt. "It's like the argument about guns," he said -- do you blame the people who use the technology for not returning calls or e-mails, or the technology that allows them to screen your communication? And is caller ID something the complainer covets himself because he can screen, say, persistent telemarketers? "You can't have it both ways," Weiss said. Zhou argued that those who do listen to voice mails and read e-mails could be using that time more productively. It's a balancing act, these questions of civility versus service, efficiency versus delay, and which side you fall on depends mostly on which side of the phone line you happen to be on. Out of reach "We are so bombarded by information that we are defending ourselves with tools such as caller ID," said Pier Forni, an expert on manners at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and author of "Choosing Civility: The 25 Rules of Considerate Conduct." "If a talkative friend is calling and you are busy, you have the good, traditional option of answering. Just state that you are busy, and that you will call back later." But not responding to voice or e-mails "is a form of non-acknowledgement; hence it's rude," Forni said. Once again, Pitt's Thompson advised not to blame the messenger. In an e-mail -- a prompt answer to a query about this article -- he set up a premise, explaining that he is "usually someone from whom people want information, instead of the one seeking the information. People have a question about my master's program, so they call me or send an e-mail." He notes that most questions could be answered by viewing the University's Web site, "but they're too lazy or too busy to work independently." So a percentage of that group might call him and wind up leaving voice mail, setting up a potential phone-tag situation. "If they had sent me an e-mail, with the question in the e-mail, I could respond directly, at least by the next day," Thompson said. "I think many of us haven't learned how to use the appropriate technology for the given task." Any human will do ... The one universal villain in advanced telecommunications seems to be automated voice mail. All telephone users have visited that special ring of Hades where automated menus reside. Last week, Gene Dwyer of Crafton called the Pennsylvania American Water Co. to report a problem with muddy, rusty water. "I went through three or four button pushes until a lady came on wanting my account number, my Social Security number and telephone number, and then they were willing to listen to my story," says Dwyer. The woman told him they hadn't received any other complaints but that one of their water experts would look into it. Dwyer also called KQV radio, reporting the muddy water as a news tip. They, too, said they'd look into it. "You go through a long series of automated phone menus, then you pick the number closest to your topic," Dwyer says. "Go through four menus, then in the fourth menu, you go through two additional sub menus." When Dwyer has called Duquesne Light during a power outage, he has been given another number to call. "You have to get a flashlight to make the call," he says. "I won't even get into trying to contact a doctor, credit-card company, Blue Cross, airlines, banks, etc.," says writer Patricia Orendorff Smith, 62, of Indiana, Indiana County. "I am put on hold after punching number after number only to hear a computerized voice. It drives me nuts. I want to talk to a real live person, one in the flesh." Joanna L. Krotz, in a report titled "'Voice-mail jail' and other blunders of automation" for www.microsoft.com, acknowledged that "increasingly, customer care is being managed and massaged by automation." She added that more than 70 percent of midmarket companies say they plan to invest in contact center or e-mail management systems within the next two years, according to a survey from AMR Research, a Boston-based market analyst. Although automated systems may come at a cost to customers' time and nerves, they also save the company money, a savings that should filter back to clients. "There's no question that computerized services offer dramatic savings," Krotz wrote. "Typically, it costs an exorbitant $50 or more for a human agent to field a customer's call. By contrast, self-service interactions on the Web run mere pennies. In between, combinations of human agents and technologies ... cost a few bucks per call." Weiss admitted that automated voice mail isn't winning any fans. "I hate them, everybody hates them. But does it mean that, let's say, the bank having them can offer me cheaper services? If it does, then it's a trade-off. Life is full of trade-offs. This is just one of them." Interpreting the survey We began with a poll that says a majority of us are ticked off about the time ticking away as we wait for an answer. The follow-up question we asked experts is: Are the trade-offs -- such as caller ID and cheaper services -- worth the waiting game? "I think the technology has raised our expectation that we can get the information we need easier and sooner," Thompson said. "Like the automobile has raised our expectation that we can commute from Harmar Township to Smithfield Street in 25 minutes. Since we can't do it, because we spend 20 minutes trying to get through the traffic light at Route 28 and the 31st Street Bridge, we vent our frustration on the technology in some survey." If the survey implies that things are worse than they used to be, then it's giving a false impression, Thompson said. "I don't want to appear defensive about telecom technology, but what did we do before we had voice mail and e-mail? That was a different time, when we all weren't so frantic, so it's hard to make an A-B comparison." The survey reminded Pitt's Weiss of a time when caller ID was a case for the Federal Communications Commissions and the courts. "Back around the late '80s, early '90s, one of the big debates was whether caller ID should be allowed at all because of privacy issues," he said. "Some 15 years later, it's become ubiquitous," he said. "And where before we were complaining about privacy invasion ... now we have it and people are taking advantage of it. You can't have it both ways." Liz Raphael Helegesen, 41, who records messages for corporate America's voice mail systems, screens calls with caller ID and says she returns all voice mails. "When I'm on the other line, in a conference, in a recording session, parenting or eating a meal, it would be inappropriate to interrupt an existing conversation, meeting or family time to take a phone call," she said. To Helegesen, caller ID is an important tool. "People rely on caller ID because they don't want to talk to you," said Jeff Kagan, a national telecommunications analyst in Atlanta. Added management consultant April Callis of Lansing, Mich.: People use voice mail "to collect calls they don't want to deal with and don't plan on returning." Weiss quotes an article that he thinks sums it up when he said caller ID and other telecom tools are "a way of defending ourselves from the information onslaught, and I think that's true." The future, he adds, is bound to include more intelligent screening devices as the onslaught of information continues unabated. "I think we'll see a lot of different techniques for helping us cope," Weiss said. But that doesn't mean we'll see an end to complaints. (Bill Hendrick of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Post-Gazette staff writer L.A. Johnson contributed to this story.) Copyright 1997-2005 PG Publishing Co., Inc. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. *** 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, PG Publishing, Pittsburgh, PA. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: David Perrussel Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 19:46:54 -0400 Subject: WECO 302 Wiring Question Pat, please withhold my posting address for obvious resons. I have a friend who has an old Western Electric 302 phone. He would like to hook it up to the modern PSTN network, but doesn't know how to connect the wires. This is how he explains it: Inside is a transformer with connections labeled GN, R, Y(L2), L1, and C, and on the base is a terminal block with connections labeled GND and K. The connections labeled Y(L2), and L1 have screws for additional connections that appear to have been removed; the screws are unscrewed up off the metal connector. Could someone provide us with instructions of how to connect this phone to a modern phone jack? We would appreciate any help you can give me. Thanks! David Perrussel [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I _thought_ most WE 302 phones had all (or most of their guts) in the 'side ringer' box which was mounted on the wall. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Dale Farmer Organization: The fuzz in the back of the fridge. Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 23:49:03 GMT Fred Atkinson wrote: > On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 21:05:50 GMT, Bruce L. Bergman > wrote: >>> The operation of transmitters designed to jam or block wireless >>> communications is a violation of the Communications Act of 1934, >>> as amended ("Act"). See 47 U.S.C. Sections 301, 302a, 333. The Act >>> prohibits any person from willfully or maliciously interfering with >>> the radio communications of any station licensed or authorized under >>> the Act or operated by the U.S. government. 47 U.S.C. Section 333. >>> The manufacture, importation, sale or offer for sale, including >>> advertising, of devices designed to block or jam wireless >>> transmissions is prohibited. 47 U.S.C. Section 302a(b). Parties in >>> violation of these provisions may be subject to the penalties set >>> out in 47 U.S.C. Sections 501-510. Fines for a first offense can >>> range as high as $11,000 for each violation or imprisonment for up >>> to one year, and the device used may also be seized and forfeited >>> to the U.S. government. >> 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. > Don't miunderstand me here. I basically agree with your position. > But didn't the more recent communications act render the > Communications Act of 1934 obsolete? I don't think that cell phone > technology was considered when it was written, either. > I do think that perhaps use of such jamming devices (if properly > designed) might be useful in prisons where there is a problem with > contraband cell phones running being used for drug deals and other > problematic things. Of course, we'd have to address the issues and > how to correctly make it legal for use (so that situations like you've > described can be avoided). > Fred And here you fall into that common fallacy. 'We can't have these people doing this bad behavior that we outlawed. So lets ban one of their instrumentalities to stop their bad behavior.' Remember how effective those laws against flagrant beeper use in the 80s were at stopping the drug dealers? You would be far better served by going after the root causes of the bad behavior, then by blocking this or that object from functioning, or making the object more difficult to obtain legally for the ordinary citizen. --Dale ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, Yahoo Groups, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occasional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 50 Independence, KS 67301 Phone: 620-402-0134 Fax 1: 775-255-9970 Fax 2: 530-309-7234 Fax 3: 208-692-5145 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe: telecom-subscribe@telecom-digest.org Unsubscribe:telecom-unsubscribe@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. 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End of TELECOM Digest V24 #293 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Jun 27 03:14:30 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 60A72150A2; Mon, 27 Jun 2005 03:14:30 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #294 Message-Id: <20050627071430.60A72150A2@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 03:14:30 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.4 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Mon, 27 Jun 2005 03:15:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 294 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Beginning of the End for AT&T (Lisa Minter) Objections to SBC Purchase of AT&T (Lisa Minter) At PartyGaming, Everything's Wild (Monty Solomon) Using Comcast to Host Web Site (autogoor@yahoo.com) Re: WECO 302 Wiring Question (Michael Muderick) Re: WECO 302 Wiring Question (Tony P.) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (Fred Atkinson) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (mc) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (Bruce L. Bergman) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (Steve Sobol) Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach (Marcus Didius Falco) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Beginning of the End for AT&T Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 18:48:09 -0500 by Ross Wehner, The Denver Post DENVER -- AT&T's shareholders -- at what will probably be their last meeting -- are expected to approve a $16 billion merger with SBC Communications in Denver on Thursday, forming the largest telecommunications company in the nation. The deal, together with the upcoming Verizon-MCI merger, represents an unprecedented consolidation of the telecom industry. Both deals are expected to gain regulatory approval in the next six months to a year. Denver-based Qwest dropped out of a bidding war for MCI last month after the MCI board rebuffed it four times in favor of lower bids from Verizon. "Qwest faces added pressure after losing MCI," said Standard & Poor's analyst Todd Rosenbluth. "Qwest is on the outside looking in at a soon-to-be-consolidated telecom market." Here's what the new telecom landscape will look like: SBC and Verizon will be able to compete in Qwest's territory for business customers by offering the two most far-reaching national telecommunications networks. They could poach Qwest's residential customers by bundling wireless and long distance. They could offer Internet phone service over Qwest's DSL lines at the same time as cable companies like Comcast also are munching on Qwest's broadband customers. SBC and Verizon already own the two largest wireless operations in the United States and control nearly two-thirds of local phone lines nationwide. The mergers will further boost their financial mass, customer base and technological firepower in relation to Qwest. Each of the new companies will have market values more than a dozen times greater than Qwest, which is burdened with $17.3 billion in debt. SBC in particular will benefit by integrating AT&T's CallVantage Internet phone service and reviving AT&T's remaining 23 million residential long-distance clients, said Rosenbluth. "SBC and Verizon, with these mergers, are becoming worldwide telecom players," said Janco Partners analyst Donna Jaegers. "Qwest is stuck in the rural local phone league." Qwest CEO Richard Notebaert has been one of the most vocal critics of the SBC and Verizon mergers. At the same time, he is shopping for other assets that may help Qwest become what he calls the "third leg of the stool" in the increasingly consolidated industry. One of Notebaert's main arguments before regulators is the hotly contested idea that the SBC-AT&T and Verizon-MCI mergers are restitching the 1984 breakup of the AT&T monopoly. In the process, Notebaert claims, businesses will see fewer choices and higher prices. "When five of the seven companies that resulted from the breakup of the AT&T monopoly are reconfigured into two companies that will control the business wire-line market, that's a duopoly," wrote Notebaert in a letter last month to the Wall Street Journal. SBC and AT&T disagree. "The competitive landscape has changed radically since the breakup of the Ma Bell system," said SBC spokesman Joe Izbrand. "The argument just doesn't wash." "The current industry restructuring is a far cry from putting back together the Ma Bell system," said AT&T spokesman Andy Backover. Both Izbrand and Backover point to an increasingly fragmented and technology-driven marketplace that includes cable companies that offer phone service, cell phone companies that allow consumers to ditch their land lines and a growing bevy of Internet phone companies that compete across the nation. Phil Weiser, an associate professor of law and telecommunications at the University of Colorado, sees both sides of the argument. "On the consumer side, wireless, cable and other broadband providers offer competitive alternatives," Weiser said. "But the consolidation of networks in the business market is a huge concern." A recent study sponsored by Qwest found that SBC and Verizon will control access to more than nine out of 10 office buildings in Chicago and Los Angeles, two cities that lie within SBC and Verizon territory. Notebaert has predicted that the SBC and Verizon mergers will be approved. His strategy is to convince regulators that the telecom titans need to divest overlapping network assets, which Qwest could then buy to beef up its own money-losing national fiber-optic network. "With MCI, Notebaert failed to win the whole business," said Rosenbluth. "Now he is looking at picking up the pieces. But is it going to be sufficient to improve Qwest's operations?" AT&T, the 120-year-old phone company that monopolized U.S. phone service for years as the largest company on the planet, held past meetings in Denver in 1972 and 1988. But this Thursday's event -- in Qwest's back yard -- came about by chance. The company could not fix a meeting date until merger documents were approved last month by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Colorado Convention Center was one of the few facilities that was still available. "This meeting is a very sad and ironic demise of what was once America's greatest corporation," said Weiser. "It has been a demise that has been 50 years in the making that has resulted from deregulation, technological change and management mistakes." Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Newspaper Group NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Objections to SBC Purchase of AT&T Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 18:49:42 -0500 Objections to telephone merger filed Consumer, industry groups protest SBC purchase of AT&T Ryan Kim, Chronicle Staff Writer The proposed marriage of telecom titans SBC and AT&T would eliminate competition on the wholesale market and could lead to increased prices for business and residential customers, corporate rivals and consumer groups argued in briefs filed on Friday. In written testimony presented to the California Public Utility Commission, critics of the planned merger spelled out why the deal would be bad for ratepayers and what conditions should be imposed to limit its negative impacts. SBC, the dominant local telephone company, is seeking to acquire long- distance carrier AT&T in a $16 billion deal that would create the nation's largest telecommunications company. The commission, which is taking testimony in the case, is expected to rule on the application by the end of the year. The California Association of Competitive Telecommunications Companies, which represents more than 30 companies, has not formally opposed the merger but has pushed for measures to ensure continued competition in the business market. In its filings, the group urged the commission to consider caps to lock in wholesale prices for telecom competitors. AT&T and SBC compete to lease access to smaller telecom companies which, in turn, sell their services to local businesses. The group said the price caps would ensure SBC's wholesale prices would not rise dramatically with the loss of AT&T as a competitor. "The only way that the commission can approve this merger is if it adopts parallel reforms that will enable competition to continue despite the massive resource imbalance the merger will produce," said economist Joseph Gillan, who testified on behalf of the association. The group also questioned whether SBC would be willing to provide access to its equipment after the merger. The Utility Reform Network said the merger would adversely affect competition and would not be in the public's interest. The San Francisco consumer group demanded that ratepayers receive an estimated $1 billion in savings by SBC in California if the deal is approved. SBC spokesman John Britton said the concerns about the merger are unfounded. He said the company, which faces increased competition from cable, wireless and other rivals, wants to provide more services at competitive prices. "This merger will have tremendous benefits for business and consumers," he said. "The financial strength of a combined SBC and AT&T will mean more investment and faster deployment of new communication technology to more people more quickly." He said pricing will remain low for ratepayers, while wholesale customers continue to enjoy access to SBC and AT&T's telephone lines and equipment. Britton said SBC and AT&T are not obligated by law to share savings with local ratepayers, but he said the savings in the state would be minimal because there is little overlap in the two systems' infrastructure and staffing. E-mail Ryan Kim at rkim@sfchronicle.com. Copyright 2005 San Francisco Chronicle NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 21:55:57 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: At PartyGaming, Everything's Wild By KURT EICHENWALD As a rule, companies don't often draw attention to business practices that could land their executives in jail. But for PartyGaming PLC, potential illegalities aren't just a secret hidden in its business plan -- they are the centerpiece of its business plan. A giant in the online gambling business, PartyGaming is an often-overlooked megasurvivor from the dot-com crash of the late 1990's. As hundreds of profitless commercial sites disappeared into the digital ether, PartyGaming's popular gambling sites - like PartyPoker.com - soared, with revenues and profits growing exponentially year after year. This week, the company will go public in what is expected to be the largest offering in years on the London Stock Exchange, one that will make billionaires out of its ragtag assortment of founders and major stockholders - including a California lawyer who earned her first fortune in online pornography and phone-sex lines. All told, as much as $9 billion is expected to be raised, with all of the cash going to private shareholders selling portions of their stakes. But there will be no Wall Street investment houses lapping up fees in the giant deal, no victory dances in the offices of American corporate lawyers. That is because PartyGaming, based in Gibraltar, has no assets in the United States, and its officers or directors could risk being served with a civil suit - or an arrest warrant - if they came to the United States on business. The reason? The Justice Department and numerous state attorneys general maintain that providing the opportunity for online gambling is against the law in the United States - and PartyGaming does it anyway. Indeed, of its $600 million in revenue and $350 million in profit in 2004, almost 90 percent came from the wallets and bank accounts of American gamblers. To justify this, PartyGaming walks a very thin line. Providing online gambling is not illegal per se in the United States, the company argues -- federal prosecutors just say it is. The company has already received an e-mail message from the Louisiana attorney general demanding that it cease providing online gambling in that state; PartyGaming simply ignored the communication and waited for additional action that never came. The company's prospectus -- a British document that is not available in the United States -- at times reads something like a legal brief, citing American case law to support the company's position that no prosecution would ever take place. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/business/yourmoney/26poker.html?ex=1277438400&en=a47371cd660556db&ei=5090 NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. Read this article and others from NY Times on line here each day with no login or registration requirement at: http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/nytimes.html ------------------------------ From: autogoor@yahoo.com Subject: Using comcast to Host Web Site Date: 26 Jun 2005 20:19:42 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com I developed a web site and would like to host it with my own computer at home. I am thinking using Comcast Cable broadband as my ISP. Does Comcast allow web host? Anyone has experience? Anyone has any other ISP suggestions? I am in California. Thanks. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Did you ask Comcast about their rules on this? PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 22:09:46 -0400 From: Michael Muderick Subject: Re: WECO 302 Wiring Question HERE'S A GOOD LINK WHICH SHOWS THE HOOKUPS FOR THE 302 SERIES http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Campus/1491/WE.htm Usually it's L1 and L2 and the yellow gets tied to one of those for the ringer. The 302's had the guts in the phones. It's the earlier sets with the narrow neck that used the ringer boxes and the space saver sets that mounted on the sides of the desk did as well. > From: David Perrussel > Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 19:46:54 -0400 > Subject: WECO 302 Wiring Question > > like to hook it up to the modern PSTN network, but doesn't know how to > connect the wires. Michael Muderick ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: WECO 302 Wiring Question Organization: ATCC Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 22:21:03 -0400 In article , diamond45 @withheld_on_request says: > Pat, please withhold my posting address for obvious resons. > I have a friend who has an old Western Electric 302 phone. He would > like to hook it up to the modern PSTN network, but doesn't know how to > connect the wires. This is how he explains it: > Inside is a transformer with connections labeled GN, R, Y(L2), L1, and > C, and on the base is a terminal block with connections labeled GND > and K. The connections labeled Y(L2), and L1 have screws for > additional connections that appear to have been removed; the screws > are unscrewed up off the metal connector. > Could someone provide us with instructions of how to connect this > phone to a modern phone jack? We would appreciate any help you can > give me. > Thanks! > David Perrussel > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I _thought_ most WE 302 phones had > all (or most of their guts) in the 'side ringer' box which was mounted > on the wall. PAT] 302's are all-in-one units with the ringer, network and dial integrated. L1 and L2 are the line in. I understand where some of the confusion comes from though as I had to re-wire my 684 subset for my Imperial by jumpering the yellow wire to the RING terminal in order to get the ringer to work. ------------------------------ From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 22:10:38 -0400 > And here you fall into that common fallacy. 'We can't have these > people doing this bad behavior that we outlawed. So lets ban one of > their instrumentalities to stop their bad behavior.' Remember how > effective those laws against flagrant beeper use in the 80s were at > stopping the drug dealers? You would be far better served by going > after the root causes of the bad behavior, then by blocking this or > that object from functioning, or making the object more difficult to > obtain legally for the ordinary citizen. > --Dale And *you* think that you are going to stop the black market trade and the self abusive behaviors that goes on inside of prisons by 'dealing with it'? I'm afraid you're in never never land. It's not going to happen. That's like saying that we should let people who have committed heinous crimes go because they were mistreated as a child or they could be treated with therapy rather than face the consequences of their actions. It's a bunch of bull, we all know that. We can't solve all of their problems. Sure, some of them can be helped and I'm not saying that the ones that can and want to be helped shouldn't be. But they are in the minority. Most of them don't want to be helped. Using technology like this for better security in our prisons isn't a bad idea. Fred ------------------------------ From: mc Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 23:21:42 -0400 Organization: Speed Factory (http://www.speedfactory.net) Fred Atkinson wrote in message news:telecom24.292.6@telecom-digest.org: > Don't miunderstand me here. I basically agree with your position. > But didn't the more recent communications act render the > Communications Act of 1934 obsolete? Not as far as I know. The Communications Act of 1934 gets amended all the time, but it is still, as far as I know, the basis of radio regulation in this country (and, yes, television and cell phones are, physically, radio). Did it go away when I wasn't looking? > I do think that perhaps use of such jamming devices (if properly > designed) might be useful in prisons where there is a problem with > contraband cell phones running being used for drug deals and other > problematic things. Of course, we'd have to address the issues and > how to correctly make it legal for use (so that situations like you've > described can be avoided). Probably by amending the regulations. Another thing that would be useful would be to have a "turn off cell phone" signal that all cell phones would be programmed to receive and obey. It could be transmitted periodically around hospitals, theaters, etc. The idea is that in a real emergency, you could still turn your cell phone on manually. Much safer than jamming. If cell phones are jammed in, say, a theater, you create an ideal place to take hostages. ------------------------------ From: Bruce L. Bergman Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 03:32:48 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net On Sun, 26 Jun 2005 01:35:21 GMT, Fred Atkinson wrote: > On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 21:05:50 GMT, Bruce L. Bergman > wrote: >>> The operation of transmitters designed to jam or block wireless >>> communications is a violation of the Communications Act of 1934, >>> as amended ("Act"). See 47 U.S.C. Sections 301, 302a, 333. The Act >>> prohibits any person from willfully or maliciously interfering with >>> the radio communications of any station licensed or authorized under >>> the Act or operated by the U.S. government. 47 U.S.C. Section 333. >>> The manufacture, importation, sale or offer for sale, including >>> advertising, of devices designed to block or jam wireless >>> transmissions is prohibited. 47 U.S.C. Section 302a(b). Parties in >>> violation of these provisions may be subject to the penalties set >>> out in 47 U.S.C. Sections 501-510. Fines for a first offense can >>> range as high as $11,000 for each violation or imprisonment for up >>> to one year, and the device used may also be seized and forfeited >>> to the U.S. government. > Don't miunderstand me here. I basically agree with your position. > But didn't the more recent communications act render the > Communications Act of 1934 obsolete? I don't think that cell phone > technology was considered when it was written, either. Note that IANA Communications Lawyer. There are probably more recent laws and more relevant rulings, I just did a search at the FCC Website and that was the first cite that popped up. Since they still list it, I'm willing to bet it's more or less still relevant. > I do think that perhaps use of such jamming devices (if properly > designed) might be useful in prisons where there is a problem with > contraband cell phones running being used for drug deals and other > problematic things. Of course, we'd have to address the issues and > how to correctly make it legal for use (so that situations like you've > described can be avoided). Jamming wouldn't be very effective. They would have to block the entire 800, 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz bands to get all cellulars, with enough power that they would splatter them within at least 1/2 mile around the facility (if not more) - and that would miss things like Nextel iDEN service, commercial radio, amateur radio, and other services. And if they have the capability to do spread spectrum that would make it even harder to stop. If the prisoners are making illegal communications from a contraband phone or other device inside a prison, they probably don't care that they are not operating in the proper band on an assigned channel, they'll use whatever they can make work. Aircraft, marine, military, CB, FRS or GMRS, an unused broadcast TV channel ... Heck, avoid radio -- use a modulated IR laser beam aimed out a window to a transceiver secreted on a nearby hilltop. (Or rooftop in an urban setting.) If they want to stop those communications, they need to attack them at the source: regularly lock the cellblocks down and do top to bottom strip searches of prisoners and the cells & common areas, severely restrict the types and amounts of prisoner personal property allowed in the cells to approved items only -- like special TV and Radio sets with clear cases sold in the canteen. Trashing any even slightly questionable items. And let the ACLU lawsuits commence ... --<< Bruce >>-- ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 23:07:29 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Dale Farmer wrote: > after the root causes of the bad behavior, then by blocking this or > that object from functioning, or making the object more difficult to > obtain legally for the ordinary citizen. So what legitimate reasons are there to use a cell phone jammer? (Note that I said legitimate, not legal.) Dale Farmer wrote: > And here you fall into that common fallacy. 'We can't have these > people doing this bad behavior that we outlawed. So lets ban one of > their instrumentalities to stop their bad behavior.' Remember how > effective those laws against flagrant beeper use in the 80s were at > stopping the drug dealers? You would be far better served by going > after the root causes of the bad behavior, then by blocking this or > that object from functioning, or making the object more difficult to > obtain legally for the ordinary citizen. And by the way, the act of jamming is illegal, regardless of which type of equipment you use. JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2005 23:37:49 -0400 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) wrote about Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach -- Washington Post on Fri, 24 Jun 2005 11:02:59 -0000 > In article , Marcus Didius Falco > wrote: >> I had been planning to call my active credit card companies to >> determine whether any had been compromised. This article caused me to >> start the process this morning, calling American Express, my most >> active account. >> After thanking me for carrying their card for 21 years, they refused >> to tell me whether any of my three cards was among those >> compromised. > Well, they don't *know* which cards were actually compromised. NOBODY > _knows_ which card numbers were actually stolen from CardSystems. > CardSystems only knows which card numbers were _vulnerable_ to have > being stolen -- data as to which of those _were_ stolen is simply not > available. Fair enough. But they can tell me whether my cards are safe or at risk. >> and there is no way I can reliably double check an account that has >> dozens of charges a month, many of them posted in the name of parent >> companies located at head offices in other cities, so that many of >> the charges are not easily verified and must usually be taken on >> faith. > Well, unless, _you_ keep a record of everything you charge -- date and > amount. And match them against the statements you get. It's not > really rocket science. For checks, that's practical. (It helps if you get the original checks back, something that will end in the US soon).) Where there are dozens or hundreds of transactions as on really busy cards, it becomes difficult. Particularly since the name and date of the payer on the statement may differ from that on the receipt. And, in the case of international transactions, the amount will differ, too. > I used to do it every month, for several corporate cards that had > several _hundred_ charges/month. Life was _really_ fun when the > Company President's son (away at college) used daddy's card to sign up > for Internet access (and the fact that the initial posting was 'late', > and was for _4_ months services). That one _jumped_ off the statement > at me -- the company had it's own dial-up pool, and everybody used > _that_ for home access. Well, if you have a full time job, and can spend a day or two at it, then you might succeed. except that you have to spot that a charge for $5 to $10 from "Strange Parking" isn't the same as the receipt you may have for a similar amount from "Storage Parking". > If you choose not to do so, and 'uncritically' accept their > accounting, that _is_ your choice. If they want to send my a diskette of my charges. (No, I won't trust it to the internet for reasons that have been explored very thoroughly in this Digest in the past.) >> When I get the new American Express cards I will call the second >> most active card in my wallet, and so on down the list. > Note: if you are in the UK, as your email address seems to indicate, > it is _unlikely_ that any of your cards were exposed via the > CardSystems 'problem'. Unless you're doing siginficant credit-card > buying in the U.S., that is. CardSystems clears almost exclusively > for U.S.-based merchants. They would have processed charges in the US for foreign cards, and charges on US-based cards for holders dwelling abroad. > From: Steve Sobol > Subject: Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach -- Washington Post > Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 00:12:14 -0700 > Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com > Marcus Didius Falco wrote: >> After thanking me for carrying their card for 21 years, they refused >> to tell me whether any of my three cards was among those >> compromised. > Amex sucks. Tear the card up and get another to replace it. Actually, I have less trouble with Amex than with most of my other cards. >> When I get the new American Express cards I will call the second most >> active card in my wallet, and so on down the list. > Why not do all of them at once? If the data is at risk, you're best off > doing it sooner rather than later. I could do this, because I have several credit cards that are almost NEVER used for retail transactions. This is because I travel, and it can be a real hassle to have a lost or compromised in a foreign country, particularly if you are on the move and particularly if the country does not have a good mail system. In many countries FEDEX does not operate very well. (I can tell stories about a shipment to Canada that took 2 weeks, and many stories about 4 days to Europe or Canada.) ------------------------------ 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 V24 #294 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Jun 27 15:22:38 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 1474014FC1; Mon, 27 Jun 2005 15:22:38 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #295 Message-Id: <20050627192238.1474014FC1@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 15:22:38 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.8 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_REMOVE, MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Mon, 27 Jun 2005 15:21:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 295 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Supreme Court Overturns Ruling on Cable Internet Lines (Lisa Minter) File Trading Networks Can Be Held Liable (Lisa Minter) Supreme Court Backs Cable in FCC v. Brand X (Telecom dailyLead USTA) Re: DSL Speed (Neal McLain) Re: DSL Speed (Choreboy) Re: WECO 302 Wiring Question (Joseph) Re: WECO 302 Wiring Question (Lisa Hancock) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (Clark W. Griswold, Jr.) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (mc) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (Joseph) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (Fred Atkinson) Re: Using Comcast to Host Web Site (Clark W. Griswold, Jr.) Re: Using Comcast to Host Web Site (T. Sean Weintz) Re: Using Comcast to Host Web Site (Bit Twister) Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach (mc) Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach (Robert Bonomi) Re: Beginning of the End for AT&T (Lisa Hancock) Re: Objections to SBC Purchase of AT&T (Steve Sobol) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Court Overturns Ruling on Cable Internet Lines Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 10:04:30 -0500 The Supreme Court on Monday overturned a ruling that cable high-speed Internet lines must be opened to rival online service providers, handing a victory to the Federal Communications Commission. By a 6-3 vote, the justices overturned a U.S. appeals court ruling that cable high-speed Internet service, known as broadband, has a telecommunications component and is subject to traditional telephone network access requirements. The appeals court overturned an FCC decision in 2002 that cable broadband was an information service and therefore free from most traditional telephone service rules, like requirements to lease network access to rivals. At the time, FCC officials said the move was necessary to spur more investment in high-speed Internet services. Cable companies have invested billions of dollars in upgrading their networks and are aggressively pushing those services. Telephone companies, which also offer Internet services, have long complained that the FCC rules put them at a competitive disadvantage because they have to lease some of their high-speed Internet lines to rivals. In appealing to the Supreme Court, the government and cable companies argued the appeals court did not extend the required deference to the agency's expertise and decision-making process. Internet service providers opposed the appeal. Justice Clarence Thomas agreed in the majority opinion that the appeals court had erred. He said the FCC's conclusion that broadband cable modem companies are exempt from mandatory common-carrier regulation is a lawful construction of the Communications Act. Justices Antonin Scalia, David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented. The cable industry has about 21 million high-speed Internet access subscribers. Independent Internet service providers like EarthLink Inc. and public interest groups have worried that, without some safeguards by the FCC, consumers would have limited choices for providers or Web-surfing capabilities. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: File-Trading Networks Can be Held Liable Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 10:07:16 -0500 A unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that Internet file-trading networks can be held liable when their users copy music, movies and other protected works without permission. The justices set aside a U.S. appeals court ruling that the peer-to-peer networks cannot be held liable for copyright infringement because they can be used for legitimate purposes as well. "We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright ... is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties," Justice David Souter wrote for the court. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Now wait a minute ... FTP is also a 'file trading scheme' is it not? Admittedly a bit longer to transfer files, and perhaps sort of klutzy compared to the newer schemes, but it is used to transfer files from one place to another, is it not? And the Supreme Court ruled today that 'legitimate purposes' will not be a good enough reason any longer. So point one, if I am willing to spend hours or days downloading an illegal copy of a video from somewhere via my FTP account, that means Cable One (or heck, even mit.edu for example) can get sued for 'facilitating' the device (FTP) which made the transfer possible? Or will FTP somehow be treated 'differently'? Point two, what about VCRs, tape recorders, and the like: all have legitimate purposes, but the Supremes said today that isn't good enough ... will they be treated 'differently' also? Point three, what about when the _real villians_ in the eyes of the Music and Film Industry _totally repudiate_ the transfer of 'illegal' files and insist (on their web sites and elsewhere) that the only intended purpose of their software (or devices) is to swap public domain files and that they (the villians) totally repudiate the transfer of illegal stuff. Might that be enough to prevent lawsuits; that in combination with them inquiring 'why are we getting sued but MIT and Harvard are _not_ getting sued (with their FTP stuff)?' PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 12:31:39 EDT From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: Supreme Court Backs Cable in FCC v. Brand X Telecom dailyLead from USTA June 27, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22641&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * Supreme Court backs cable in FCC v. Brand X BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Supreme Court rules file-sharing sites may be sued * Cingular interested in iTunes phone * IPTV finds acceptance, growth in Asia USTA SPOTLIGHT * Register for TELECOM '05 by June 30 and Save $300! HOT TOPICS * BT avoids breakup * France Telecom eyes Cable & Wireless takeover * Siemens gets serious about VoIP * Cities worry VoIP will erode tax revenue * NTT DoCoMo revs 4G EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * Extreme takes wraps off Wi-Fi solution REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * Cable, phone companies seek relief from franchise regs Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22641&l=2017006 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 05:26:56 -0500 From: Neal McLain Reply-To: nmclain@annsgarden.com Subject: Re: DSL Speed Choreboy wrote: > A relative has a farm. His phone service comes in on 700 yards > of ordinary telephone cable buried along his driveway. Last > week he got Bellsouth DSL. It comes in on the same conductors > as before, but I've seen speeds fifty times faster than dialup And in a subsequent post, wrote: > Between the CO and the customer, isn't voice service just bare > wire? Not necessarily. But let's clarify some terminology first. I assume that: - By "between the CO and the customer," you mean what's commonly known as the "local loop." - By "bare wire" you don't really mean "bare" (as in uninsulated); you're simply implying that there's nothing in the wirepair, other than copper conductors, that would affect the transmission of signals. Based on those assumptions, here's an attempt to explain "local loop": it's a pair of metallic (usually copper) conductors between the customer's premises and the telco's facilities. The conductors are designated "ring" and "tip." These terms originated from the physical configuration of the plugs used in old manual switchboards. Photo: http://tinyurl.com/9pjla . Note that the term "ring," as used here, does not mean "ringing the telephone." The two conductors are usually twisted together, and contained inside a cable along with several other wirepairs. At the customer's premises, the conductors may run parallel (not twisted) in the drop cable from the pole (or pedestal) to the building. At the telco's end, the loop may terminate at the CO, or it may terminate at a "digital loop carrier remote terminal" (DLCRT, or just RT). Telcos often deploy RTs to provide POTS service to outlying areas (e.g., new residential neighborhoods or business parks) in order to reduce the number and/or length of wirepairs needed to provide service to additional customers. Photo: http://tinyurl.com/dlj7o . Each RT is connected to a host CO, and from the point of view of the customer, it's indistinguishable from the CO. POTS lines served from the RT are switched at the CO; the RT simply relays signals back and forth between the customer and the CO. Numbers are part of the same NPA-NXX blocks as the host CO. Each RT is connected to its host CO by one or more digital circuits. Depending on the number of POTS lines needed, the digital connection can be as simple as a single T1 implemented over two copper wirepairs, or it can be some multiplexed combination of several T1s implemented over coax, fiber, or microwave. See http://tinyurl.com/9oqru . Whether or not these digital circuits are part of the "local loop" is a matter of some confusion: I've heard it both ways. For the purpose of this explanation, I don't include them. Now slightly restating the original definition, we can state: the local loop consists of two copper conductors between the customer's premises and the telco's CO or RT. For POTS service, this copper pair carries an amazing number of signals: - Balanced baseband analog voice signals in the range 300 to 3000 Hz., carried in both directions simultaneously. - Audio control signals carried in the same 300-3000 voice passband: DTMF signaling tones, dialtone, ring, busy, fault tones, etc. - DC loop current resulting from a DC bias voltage ("battery") applied at the CO or RT. Originally, this current was necessary to operate the carbon microphones (or "transmitters" as they were called) of older telephones. Modern telephones don't use carbon mikes, but they still need DC operating power for their transistor or IC circuits. Because this voltage is applied directly across the talk circuit, it must be an absolutely pure DC voltage (no noise, no ripple). Typical battery voltages, applied at the CO or RT, are: Tip = ground Ring = -48 volts - On hook/off hook status, implemented by interrupting the DC loop current: Loop open = no current = on hook. Loop closed = current > 20 ma. = off hook. - Rotary-dial pulses, implemented by interrupting the DC loop current at specified intervals: One pulse = "1" Two pulses = "2" etc. Ten pulses = "0" - Caller ID data, carried as analog data in the voice passband. - Ring voltage to ring the customer's phone. The typical ring voltage for a single-party line is 90 volts at 20 Hz, asserted across the ring and tip conductors. In party-line service, several alternatives have been used: Different frequencies (up to about 70 Hz). Different connections (tip-to-ground; ring-to-ground) Different ring cadences (one long, two short, etc.) Combinations of above. All of the above signals are carried at frequencies below 4000 Hz. Although the voice passband is limited to 300-3000 Hz, the actual range of the audio channel extends to 4000 Hz. The 3000-Hz cutoff represents the highest frequency necessary for good voice communication. That may not be very good by modern hi-fi standards, but it's fine for voice. Dialup modems (data, fax, home-security, whatever) all utilize this same frequency band. There are several modulation schemes floating around, but they all do basically the same thing: they modulate the data signals onto one or more analog audio carriers, which are then carried over the loop in the 300-3000 Hz voice band. Every audio signal arriving at the CO (or RT) is digitized at a rate of 8000 samples per second before any further switching or transmission takes place. This sampling rate is dictated by the Nyquist Sampling Theorem, which states that the sampling rate must be at least twice the highest frequency being sampled. See http://tinyurl.com/474f9 After sampling, each sample is quantized at one of 256 discrete levels, and the resulting value is encoded as an 8-bit binary number. The final result is a PCM data stream of 64,000 bits per second. This data stream is then transported to the customer's ISP over the PSTN. Note that dialup-modem data signals carried in the 300-3000 Hz voice passband are not demodulated at the CO or RT; instead, they are sampled at 8000 sps just like voice or any other audio signal. This fact imposes an absolute theoretical maximum dial-up data rate of 64Kbps. As other contributors have noted, it's impossible to attain even that rate in practice due to synchronization errors between the user's modem and the sampling rate. Note further that this 4000-Hz limitation is imposed by the CO (or RT) equipment, not by the wires themselves. It's possible to use frequencies above 4000 Hz for other signals. And that's exactly what DSL does. At the CO, a separate piece of equipment, called a "Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer" (DSLAM) is connected ahead of the voice processing equipment so that it can provide an independent path for the DSL signals. Small DSLAMs can be installed in RTs. The DSLAM acts as a modem at the telco's end of the loop: it communicates with the customer's DSL modem using RF carriers in two frequency bands: Uplink (Modem to DSLAM) 30- 110 KHz Downlink (DSLAM to Modem) 110-1100 KHz The DSLAM demodulates uplinked data carriers to recover the original data stream. It then sends that data stream to the customer's ISP over whatever data link the ISP has installed (which might even be another DSL link). For downlink data, the DSLAM accepts data from the ISP and modulates it onto a downlink carrier for transmission to the customer's DSL modem. The maximum speed is limited by the speed of the two data links, the equipment involved, and the policies of the telco and the ISP. Images: Large DSLAM for CO installation: http://tinyurl.com/7atcq Small DSLAM for RT installation: http://tinyurl.com/7nobj NOTE THIS DISTINCTION: - Dialup modem signals are carried to your ISP over the PSTN as a 64Kbps digital representation of the analog signal that your dialup modem originally generated. - DSL modem signals are carried to your ISP as the actual data stream your DSL modem started with. Choreboy also asked or commented: > Are there inline amps [between the CO and the customer]? There are no inline amps, but there are plenty of other things that can impair DSL signals (and, for that matter, POTS): NOISE. Wirepairs inside a multipair cable are not individually shielded (although the cable as a whole may be shielded). Each wirepair is twisted so that inductive crosstalk from neighboring wirepairs is cancelled out, but some residual crosstalk (particularly from other DSL-carrying loops) may not be completely cancelled. External signals, such as power-line transients or AM radio station carriers, may be inductively coupled into the cable. Drop cables at customer premises are usually not shielded; these cables are also vulnerable to external noise sources, particularly from nearby power-line transients. All of these noise sources collectively impair the ability of the loop to carry DSL signals. Noise can be mitigated by careful testing to track down noise sources, and then by making appropriate repairs. Several manufacturers make test equipment for this purpose; see http://tinyurl.com/7pnbz for an example. SIGNAL ATTENUATION. Like any other electrical circuit, telco wirepairs comply with a fundamental law of physics: the higher the frequency, and/or the longer the wire, the greater the attenuation. This situation results from the interaction between the interconductor capacitance and the DC resistance of the conductors themselves. Taken together, these two parameters cause the wirepair to act like an RC circuit (textbooks frequently represent a wirepair as series of lumped RC circuits; see http://tinyurl.com/cm5mn for an example). This problem can be mitigated by careful selection of transmission voltages and by judicious consideration of the tradeoff between loop length and transmission speed. Ultimately, however, this situation is one reason for the limitation on the length of loops that can be used for DSL. LOAD COILS. The frequency-dependent attenuation characteristics of the loop (as described above) also affect voice band frequencies (300-3000 Hz), resulting in rolloff of the higher frequencies of voice signals. To solve this problem, telcos have traditionally installed "load coils" at 6000-foot intervals on long (typically >18K feet) loops. A load coil is a small inductor installed across the conductors to cancel the affects of interconductor capacitance. Although load coils reduce high-frequency rolloff within the voice band, they cause severe attenuation above 4000 Hz. See http://tinyurl.com/8njv3 . This problem can be resolved by removing the load coils and/or by restricting DSL service to loops without load coils. Of course, removing the load coils brings back the original problem: rolloff in the voice band. Furthermore, any attempt to remove load coils assumes that the telco actually knows where they are (anyone who has ever worked with telco outside-plant records will recognize the futility of that assumption). Appropriate test equipment can be used to determine if load coils are present, and to indicate their approximate locations. BRIDGED TAPS. In a typical telco distribution network, big multipair "feeder" cables leave of the CO or the RT, and head off throughout the service territory, often along main streets. Smaller (fewer wirepair) distribution cables split off from the feeders to serve the customers in a "serving area." As the distribution cables pass through the serving area, "drop terminals" are installed at intervals. From these terminals, drop cables feed individual buildings. A single-family home is usually connected by a two- or three-pair drop; larger buildings are connected by appropriately larger drop cables. In areas where outside plant (OSP) is installed on utility poles, telco drop terminals are called "aerial terminals" or "boots"; typically, a terminal is installed at each pole. Images: Aerial terminal: http://tinyurl.com/7qzan Aerial terminal: http://tinyurl.com/74y7y Pole with terminal: http://tinyurl.com/7qqru Drawing of interior: http://tinyurl.com/b62ej page 74 of 77 In areas where OSP is buried, drop terminals are installed in pedestals. In urban areas, telco peds are usually installed in easements along rear-property lines. In rural areas, peds are usually installed along roadways, at the edge of the right-of-way. Telco peds are often placed in "ped clusters" near CATV peds, power peds, and power transformers. Images: Telco ped, closed: http://tinyurl.com/apd3y Telco ped, open: http://tinyurl.com/8pok7 Ped cluster: http://tinyurl.com/cqjk7 Each drop terminal has: - Two cable ports for the distribution cable: input and output. When a drop terminal is installed, these ports are often sealed as protection against water intrusion. These seals make it virtually impossible to gain access to the individual wirepairs within the distribution cable. - Several drop ports, one for each wirepair in the distribution cable. These ports are usually implemented with screw terminals or punchdown blocks. Every wirepair appears at every drop terminal. When a drop is installed, the installer connects it to the assigned drop port at the nearest terminal; electrically, the drop is bridged across the wirepair. But the portion of the wirepair downstream from the bridge remains connected, and unterminated at the far end. These unterminated downstream wirepairs have come to be known as "bridged taps." These unterminated wirepairs act like tuned-stub filters. Since they're unterminated, arriving signals are reflected back; these reflected signals interfere with the primary signals. In the extreme case -- when the reflected signal is 180 degrees out-of-phase with the primary signal -- the primary signal is severely attenuated. This problem can only be solved by locating and removing bridged taps. This can be an exceedingly difficult job if the distribution cable is sealed at that point where it exits the drop terminal. Test equipment, such as the Fluke 990 http://tinyurl.com/7pnbz , can be used to determine if bridged taps are present, and if so, their severity. If the effect of a bridged tap is "minimal" (Fluke's term, not mine), it can probably be left in place. > Is DSL modulated into some sort of analog signal? DSL signals are modulated onto carriers in two bands: Uplink (Modem to DSLAM) 30- 110 KHz Downlink (DSLAM to Modem) 110-1100 KHz > It's hard to imagine carrying hig-frequency digital pulses on > copper telephone lines. Well, T1 circuits do just that. But carrying high-frequency pulses on a POTS loop would present a different problem: overlap with the voice passband. > The farm appears to be 35,000 feet from the central office. My > browser often shows downloads faster than 1.5 Mb/s (150kB/s). If the farm is indeed 35,000 feet from the CO, then I'd have to conclude that the loop between the telco and the farm is actually connected to a DSLAM-equipped RT, not directly to the CO. Look for a large metal box somewhere along the road between the farm and the CO. It will have an electric meter; it will probably be set on a concrete pad, and it might be surrounded by a security fence. > On dialup, the farm couldn't negotiate modem speeds quite as > fast as I could in town. I assumed the limitation was in the > wire. That's why I was amazed to see that DSL seems to use the > wire in the same way as dialup. Was I wrong to think the reason > dialup data rates were slower at the farm was that the wire to > the CO is longer? I'm not sure that it is longer. See previous answer. > I don't understand what kind of signal dsl uses to carry so much > more data than dialup without needing broadband cable. I hope I've answered that question. > Ah, crosstalk! It seems to me that if DSL uses the same wire > dialup used, the same crosstalk will be present. Crosstalk is indeed present, but it's usually only a problem when two DSL-carrying loops crosstalk to each other. > Does a POTS line from the CO to a house carry multiple > voices? Anyway, DSL at the farm uses the same line that > the phones at the farm still use. In current practice, there's usually just one analog voice channel per loop. Historically, telcos have used various "pair gain" schemes. In one scheme, additional voice channels ride on RF carriers superimposed across the primary voice channel. See http://tinyurl.com/9oqru . In another scheme, a "phantom" channel is run on two loops, yielding a total of three voice channels on two loops. As far as I know, these schemes have been phased out by now, but I suppose there might be a few still in service somewhere. Of course, T1 circuits running on copper are still widely used today. Drive down country roads, and you'll often see T1 repeaters spaced at (approximately) one-mile intervals. Each T1 can carry 24 voice channels over two copper pairs. But a T1 wouldn't normally go to a farm. Photo: http://tinyurl.com/cgp6p . > I have trouble understanding on the phone, and I often resort to the > phonetic alphabet to be understood. I think the problem may be more > in the typical quality of phones than in bandwidth. I agree; however, the limited bandwidth is also a factor. In a previous life, when I worked for a radio station, we sometimes used phone patches for connections to remote locations. At each end, we'd connect a "phone patch box" directly to the ring-and-tip of a phone line. Then we'd dial up a connection with a conventional phone, switch in resistors to keep the line open, and hang up the phones. Voice quality wasn't as good as it would have been with a wideband audio circuit, but it was certainly far better than it would have been if we'd used the telephones themselves. More than adequate for a sports or news report. Of course, making a direct electrical connection to a phone line was illegal back in those days (late 50s, early 60s). But we were on good terms with the phone guys, so they just looked the other way. > If the telco owns the DSLAM, won't their investment > cost depend on capacity? Yes. But the equipment doesn't have to be installed all at once. Once the initial investment in the infrastructure (cabinets, racks, power supplies, etc.) has been made, circuit cards can be added as needed (equipment manufacturers call this approach "scalable"). It's the same approach telcos take to POTS. > If they contract for the DSLAM service, won't they be charged > according to traffic? Telcos don't "contract for DSLAM service"; they contract with other ISPs (e.g. Covad) who wish to offer their own DSL service over telco loops. The telco charges them for the use of their loops. Telco's claim they can't charge enough to recover their costs, but that's a whole different story -- one that will precipitate a thread even longer than this one. > Think what would have happened if RG-59 hadn't been invented. > Everybody would have used RG-6, which looks nearly the same but > attenuates uhf much less. With better reception there would have > been more uhf stations and less demand for cable. As a former cable guy, I don't agree with that. Many UHF stations depended on cable TV systems to distribute their signals throughout their "specified zones" (which, back in the '60s and '70s, was a 35-mile radius around the city of license). This was particularly true in mountainous areas where cable TV systems carried UHF signals to specified-zone communities that were beyond the reach of their transmitters. Neal McLain ------------------------------ From: Choreboy Subject: Re: DSL Speed Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 02:47:17 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Robert Bonomi wrote: > In article , > Choreboy wrote: >>>> I wonder how a DSL signal can carry 1.5M through those mile of wire. >>> DSL uses a different 'signalling technology' for sending the data down >>> the wire. >>> The DSL signal does _not_ go through those 'voice-grade' >>> analog-to-digital converters that PSTN calls do. the signal is >>> isolated before that point, and dumped into a totally _different_ kind >>> of receiver. >> Is DSL modulated into some sort of analog signal? It's hard to imagine >> carrying hig-frequency digital pulses on copper telephone lines. > Get thee to a _library_. they have entire books on the subject. There's no library around here. I have searched the internet without success. I hope you'll share your knowledge. >>> DSL _does_ suffer 'performance losses', as the wire length gets >>> greater. The degree of degradation is considerably worse than with >>> POTS modems. E.g., at 1,000' from the C.O. you may be able to get >>> several megabits/sec. at 15000 ft, you'll be lucky to get 256k. At >>> 18,000 ft, even 144kbit/sec is iffy. Beyond 25,000 ft, "forget it" >>> applies -- an analog POTS modem is higher performance. >> The farm appears to be 35,000 feet from the central office. My browser >> often shows downloads faster than 1.5 Mb/s (150kB/s). > That which "appears" to be the situation is often not the reality. > There may be a 'remote node' outlying from where you "think" the central > office is. The DSLAM equipment can be located there. You said DSL speed depends on the distance from the CO. I told you how far it is to the CO. I don't understand how the presence of a node would mean the CO was somewhere else. I have read that with a new cluster of houses, the teclo may use a high-speed cable to bring service to a terminal near the houses. I understand the terminal will make it impossible for residents to dial up at V.90 speeds. That doesn't sound like the case at the farm, where we had V.90. >> Some modern phones sound very good. It depends on who's calling. > Some phones are made cheaper than others. Features other than sound make phones expensive. How many people listen before buying? If you get it home and the sound isn't clear, it may not be clear that the problem is with the phone. If frequency response and distortion were published, they could be strong selling points, as with hi-fi gear. >>>> As far as capacity goes, I don't know how fast is the digital stream >>>> for a voice call, >>> After digitalization, a standard POTS voice-grade call uses 64000 >> bits/sec. >> Is that between telco facilities? > Or even between the telco and _customer_ facilities that use 'digital > entrance' to the telco. >>>> but I'm sure DSL at 2.5Mb/s requires much more of the telco's >>>> capacity. >>> "Not Exactly" applies here. The DSL signal rides the wires from the >>> customer premises _to_ the telco switching facility. *BUT* before it >>> would get to the telco switching gear, it is separated out, >>> segeregated, and sent to some *entirely*different* equipment -- called >>> a DSLAM, if you care. Frequently that DSLAM equipment does *NOT* >>> belong to the telephone company, but to the company providing DSL >>> services. the 'upstream' connection out of the DSLAM is a dedicated >>> data circuit -- possibly rented from the telco, but often _also_ >>> supplied by the company that runs the DSLAM. Regardless, it is not >>> using up any capacity on the Telco's VOICE network. >> If the telco owns the DSLAM, won't their investment cost depend on >> capacity? If they contract for the DSLAM service, won't they be >> charged according to traffic? > If the telco itself is offering/providing DSL service, then it is > virtually certain that they own the DSLAM equipment. If a third-party > provider is doing the DSL provisioning, then the incumbent telco may, > or _may_not_ have any involvement with the DSL equipment. > As to 'how things are priced/charged-for', that's a whole 'nuther > kettle of fish. Some arrangements are 'flat rate', where you pay a > fixed price for the capacity that is available to you. Pthers are > so-called 'burstable' rates, where you pay based on how much traffic > you send. I understood another poster to say the telco's big cost for DSL is in the DSLAM equipment they must purchase for a peak capacity. If 1,000 customers had DSL at 1.5Mb/s, I wonder how much peak capacity they would need compared to 1,000 DSL customers limited to 150kb/s. ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: WECO 302 Wiring Question Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 00:22:12 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Sun, 26 Jun 2005 19:46:54 -0400, Telecom Digest Editor noted in response: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I _thought_ most WE 302 phones had > all (or most of their guts) in the 'side ringer' box which was mounted > on the wall. PAT] The WECO 302 was the first model to have both the network and the ringer inside the base of the phone. The earlier models such as 102 and 202 had a separate ringer/network box. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: WECO 302 Wiring Question Date: 27 Jun 2005 07:09:22 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I _thought_ most WE 302 phones had > all (or most of their guts) in the 'side ringer' box which was mounted > on the wall. PAT] As others mentioned, the WE 302, which came out in 1938, has all the parts in one unit. This was an advance since a separate ringer box was no longer required, simplifying maintenance. Also, the 302 has much better transmission than the 202 (the first Bell "French" style phone). Many 202 sets had their old handset ("E") replaced with a 302 handset ("F") and remained in service for many more years. No changes should be required to a 302 set to put it into regular service (other than cleaning it up and checking the internal wiring for shorts and rot). Obviously rotary service is needed and a regular line. Some office lines intended for advanced phones may not support a basic phone. There have been some books published on wiring/repair of old phones. If interested, I'll post the titles. TCI and ATCA are always helpful. I have a 302 in service at my cube at work. I still need a 2500 set to get my voice mail msgs and connect to other stuff. But the 302 has a unique ringer so when it rings I can tell my phone from all the others and know to run for it. ------------------------------ From: Clark W. Griswold, Jr. Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 07:41:35 -0600 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Bruce L. Bergman wrote: > Jamming wouldn't be very effective. They would have to block the > entire 800, 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz bands to get all cellulars Actually, it's not all that hard. Even though there are hundreds of channels in those frequency bands, there are relatively few control channels. All you need to do is block the control channels and you prevent the phone from operating. There is another technique that is somewhat more elegant -- spoofing the tower. Since cell phones will latch onto the strongest signal, you just need a signal that is slightly stronger than the towers in the area. That signal has enough of the correct protocol behind it that the phone uses it and doesn't connect to the real system. This is a variation on the pico-cell concept that they are talking about for aircraft, subways, etc. ------------------------------ From: mc Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 11:08:42 -0400 Organization: Speed Factory (http://www.speedfactory.net) > Jamming wouldn't be very effective. They would have to block the > entire 800, 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz bands to get all cellulars, with > enough power that they would splatter them within at least 1/2 mile > around the facility (if not more) - and that would miss things like > Nextel iDEN service, commercial radio, amateur radio, and other > services. And if they have the capability to do spread spectrum that > would make it even harder to stop. That is the real problem. Radio signals don't stop at property lines. If you jam all the cell phones in a theater, you take out several surrounding office buildings too, at least intermittently. A rule of thumb I've used in ham radio is that if a signal goes 1 mile reliably, it will go 10 miles a lot of the time and 100 miles some of the time. And similarly for any distance. Now what might work is a device to detect that cell phones are in use and complain about them. Cell phones transmit an identifying signal periodically even when you're not talking on them, so that the towers will know where they are. ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 08:23:09 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Sun, 26 Jun 2005 23:21:42 -0400, mc wrote: > If cell phones are jammed in, say, a theater, you create an ideal > place to take hostages. And you don't have to go back too far to remember what happened in Russia to show that! ------------------------------ From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Reply-To: fatkinson@mishmash.com Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 08:22:47 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net On Sun, 26 Jun 2005 23:21:42 -0400, mc wrote: > Not as far as I know. The Communications Act of 1934 gets amended > all the time, but it is still, as far as I know, the basis of radio > regulation in this country (and, yes, television and cell phones > are, physically, radio). Did it go away when I wasn't looking? Well, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was enacted. I had assumed that it replaced the Communications Act of 1934. I guess I was wrong on that assumption. Do we have any lawyers on here that can clarify that issue? http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html ------------------------------ From: Clark W. Griswold, Jr. Subject: Re: Using Comcast to Host Web Site Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 07:50:27 -0600 autogoor@yahoo.com wrote: > I developed a web site and would like to host it with my own computer > at home. I am thinking using Comcast Cable broadband as my ISP. Does > Comcast allow web host? Anyone has experience? Anyone has any other ISP > suggestions? I am in California. You really need to reconsider. I gave up hosting on my own computer several years ago. There was a literally continuous stream of attacks from around the world. Even though I was using a Linux based machine as my host, it was still a pain to review the logs and keep up with all the patches. I shudder to think what it would be like on a Windows machine. Comcast used to ban hosting on local machines. Don't know if they've relaxed that or not. Comcast does allocate some web space for home users on their servers, but you do have to go to the control panel and activate it. Not sure what their rules are regarding business use and the amount of bandwidth they permit though. I would recommend a hosting company like www.1and1.com. They sell very reliable low volume web hosting for a few dollars a month. No security hassles and they have really easy upgrades for bandwidth and space if you need it. (No connection, no referral -- just a satisfied customer.) ------------------------------ From: T. Sean Weintz Subject: Re: Using Comcast to Host Web Site Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 12:35:32 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com autogoor@yahoo.com wrote: > I developed a web site and would like to host it with my own computer > at home. I am thinking using Comcast Cable broadband as my ISP. Does > Comcast allow web host? Anyone has experience? Anyone has any other ISP > suggestions? I am in California. > Thanks. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Did you ask Comcast about their rules > on this? PAT] Unless you spend about $250 for their business service with a static address, then officially no, you can't. They can terminate your service if they catch you at it -- it's in their TOS. No servers. However, in reality, if the site is non-commercial and there is not that much traffic to the site, you can probably get away with it. ------------------------------ From: Bit Twister Subject: Re: Using Comcast to Host Web Site Organization: home user Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 01:43:52 -0500 On 26 Jun 2005 20:19:42 -0700, autogoor@yahoo.com wrote: > I developed a web site and would like to host it with my own computer > at home. I am thinking using Comcast Cable broadband as my ISP. Does > Comcast allow web host? Comcast High-Speed Internet Acceptable Use Policy http://www.comcast.net/terms/use.jsp XIV. Should answer the question. ------------------------------ From: mc Subject: Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 11:06:01 -0400 Organization: Speed Factory (http://www.speedfactory.net) Marcus Didius Falco wrote in message news:telecom24.294.11@telecom-digest.org: >> Well, unless, _you_ keep a record of everything you charge -- date and >> amount. And match them against the statements you get. It's not >> really rocket science. > For checks, that's practical. (It helps if you get the original checks > back, something that will end in the US soon).) > Where there are dozens or hundreds of transactions as on really busy > cards, it becomes difficult. Particularly since the name and date of > the payer on the statement may differ from that on the receipt. And, > in the case of international transactions, the amount will differ, > too. What we *need* is more information on our statement about each credit-card transaction. I'm annoyed by companies that operate under multiple names and make genuine charges look fake. Here's what should be required for each transaction: Name of seller (which MUST BE THE SAME as was given to the customer at time of purchase); City and state or country of seller; Telephone number of seller, which MUST BE CORRECT or the charge is considered invalid; Description of item purchased (or of the most expensive single item if there are several on the invoice) That would make it a lot easier to reconcile credit card statements. The present system still seems to be designed for people back in the 1970s who had only a couple of charges per month. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: One problem with your list of requirements is that sometimes, in a family, one member of the family -- let's say the husband for example -- likes to use the net to look at some, well, 'perverted' stuff and charge his viewing of same to the family credit card. But then, some other member of the family -- let's say the wife for example -- has the duty of reconciling and paying the credit card bill each month. The husband does _not_ want his wife seeing an entry for a purchase on the credit card bill entitled "Lisa's Big Boobs" or whatever, which is what attracted the husband to the site to start with. So to protect his privacy and security (from his wife, secretary, bookkeeper, whoever) the purveyor of all that filth tells the man, "you don't have to be embarrassed about what you did/saw/thought about doing ... just look for an entry on your credit card from 'Acme Universal Corporation', (which is d/b/a Lisa's Big Boobs.)" PAT] ------------------------------ From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) Subject: Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 11:52:55 -0000 Organization: Widgets, Inc. In article , Marcus Didius Falco wrote: > bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) wrote about Re: > Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach -- Washington Post on > Fri, 24 Jun 2005 11:02:59 -0000 >> In article , Marcus Didius Falco >> wrote: > Where there are dozens or hundreds of transactions as on really busy > cards, it becomes difficult. My real-world experience over several years indicates otherwise. > Particularly since the name and date of the payer on the statement > may differ from that on the receipt. There is a 'transaction date', and a 'posting date'. The posting date can wander fairly widely, although it is always _after_ the date of the actual transaction. The recorded transaction date is also guaranteed to be 'on or after' the date the purchaser has recorded. Except in cases of 'delayed' shipments, it is almost invariably (at least in my experience) within 2-3 days of that date. In nearly 3 years, I had a grand total of 4 'suspect' transactions that required a 'non-trivial' amount of work to sort out. By that, I mean more than a minute or so. "Average" time was a few seconds per transaction. 2 were cleared up with a total of about 15 minutes work each -- a check with the card user to see if they recognized the seller (just failed to turn in a record of the transaction -- unrecognized name ), phone call to the seller, asking for info on the transaction -- which _was_ consistent with a company purchase; and' included the name of _their_ division that the purchase was made through. Confirmed as correct, by the card user for a phone order they'd placed. #3 was the company President's son using daddy's card to sign up for ISP service. That one consumed a fair part of an afternoon -- most of it in getting to the 'right people' at the (somewhat disorganized) ISP, who actually had access to the answers, and the authority to 'do something' ... #4 was a bad charge, all around. The merchant couldn't find anything that matched it, when I called them. Forwarded that to AMEX, for them to deal with, while disputing the charge. Turned out to be a transcription error -- applied to wrong card number; yeah, the check-digit is supposed to catch things like that, but in this case it didn't ... > And, in the case of international transactions, the amount will > differ, too. >> I used to do it every month, for several corporate cards that had >> several _hundred_ charges/month. Life was _really_ fun when the >> Company President's son (away at college) used daddy's card to sign up >> for Internet access (and the fact that the initial posting was 'late', >> and was for _4_ months services). That one _jumped_ off the statement >> at me -- the company had it's own dial-up pool, and everybody used >> _that_ for home access. > Well, if you have a full time job, and can spend a day or two at it, > then you might succeed. Except that you have to spot that a charge for > $5 to $10 from "Strange Parking" isn't the same as the receipt you may > have for a similar amount from "Storage Parking". Reconciling circa 1000 transactions on 3 active cards generally took me less than an afternoon. Mistaking that 'Strange Parking' charge tends not to be a problem, when the charge from 'Storage Parking' is _also_ on the statement. The fact that there are more _items_ on the statement, than there are items in the user- maintained record, *is* a little hard to miss. >> If you choose not to do so, and 'uncritically' accept their >> accounting, that _is_ your choice. > If they want to send my a diskette of my charges. (No, I won't trust > it to the internet for reasons that have been explored very thoroughly > in this Digest in the past.) Strange. I never needed anything more than the 'detail' data that came with the mailed statement. >> Note: if you are in the UK, as your email address seems to indicate, >> it is _unlikely_ that any of your cards were exposed via the >> CardSystems 'problem'. Unless you're doing siginficant credit-card >> buying in the U.S., that is. CardSystems clears almost exclusively >> for U.S.-based merchants. > They would have processed charges in the US for foreign cards, Make that "may have", for _some_ foreign card purchases in the U.S., and you'll be correct. > and charges on US-based cards for holders dwelling abroad. *VERY* unlikely. The _merchant_ the purchase was made from would have to be using CardSystems as *their* charge processor. CardSystems is by no means the only player in that field. They are a fairly large one, but there are *lots* of other firms (as in "hundreds") in the same business in the U.S. They are nothing more that a 'middleman' (one of _many_ possible such agents) between the merchant and the various CC companies. The merchant 'talks' to the middle-man's computers, who 'talks' to the CC company's computers, which "talk" to the issuing institution computers (in some cases, like AMEX, this _is_ the CC company; in the case of 'bank' cards, it is not), which accept/decline the charge. Any characteristics of the customer are wholly irrelevant to the matter of who the particular merchant uses as the 'middleman'. For purchases made through merchants who use a different company to process their transactions, there is no possible exposure from the CardSystems security failure -- the data never went near CardSystems' machines. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Beginning of the End for AT&T Date: 27 Jun 2005 07:21:47 -0700 Lisa Minter wrote: > DENVER -- AT&T's shareholders -- at what will probably be their last > meeting -- are expected to approve a $16 billion merger with SBC > Communications in Denver on Thursday, forming the largest > telecommunications company in the nation. While that might be the official "end" of AT&T, it's end started a long time ago. AT&T planned to expand into new businesses after divesture. It went after cable, wireless, and computers. None of these worked out very well. That's the risks of business. There aren't too many 100 year old businesses out there still intact. Those that survived are usually very different than the businesses they once were. US Steel, for example, was once an economic powerhouse high up in the Fortune 500, but now it is much smaller. IBM survived two crises in its life, first the transition to electronic computers which it almost missed, and second the transition to services rather than hardware which it now is doing. (Unisys, the merger of two old once giant companies, is very small and is mostly services now.) > The deal, together with the upcoming Verizon-MCI merger, > represents an unprecedented consolidation of the telecom industry. I agree that it sure looks like rebuilding a single telecom monopoly -- in some BUT NOT ALL ways. But I think the present trend is good for customers. The forced isolation of local Bell companies out of some fields only raised prices and inconvenience for some consumers. When Verizon was allowed to go into Long Distance, I switched over to them and saved a lot of money and time over AT&T. I'm back to a single monthly check and statement. (They even merged my wireless line into my regular phone book which I like too). Customers still have a choice of equipment suppliers, LD carriers, local service, and a multitude of other options if they so chose. Too bad nobody builds telephone sets the way Western Electric used to. (I have had good service from one Panasonic set and also their answering machines, but are they still in the phone business? I don't seem to see any of their traditional consumer electronic products as I used to.) [public replies please] ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Objections to SBC Purchase of AT&T Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 01:08:44 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com Lisa Minter wrote: > SBC spokesman John Britton said the concerns about the merger are > unfounded. I think I might have to agree. SBC's service can't get much worse than it already is. :P JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ 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 V24 #295 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Jun 27 16:50:43 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 8CD5D15024; Mon, 27 Jun 2005 16:50:42 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #296 Message-Id: <20050627205042.8CD5D15024@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 16:50:42 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.7 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Mon, 27 Jun 2005 16:50:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 296 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Taking Chances With Open-Source Software (Lisa Minter) Web Site Makes Government Reports Available (Lisa Minter) Youbet.com Files For $50 Million Mixed Shelf (Lisa Minter) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (Scott Dorsey) Re: Dial/Touch Tone Speeds (Paul Coxwell) Re: Hayes Smartmodems (Paul Coxwell) Re: Western Union History (Lisa Hancock) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Taking Chances With Open-Source Software Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 14:41:23 -0500 by Philip H. Albert, newsfactor.com Decisions, decisions, decisions. Do I want cable or satellite TV? Should I dump the SUV for a hybrid? East or West Coast? Like most major decisions, making the move to open-source software -- or not -- can cause a lot of genuine hand-wringing. Despite all the innuendo and bias regarding the pros and cons associated with such a decision, the legal analysis of using open-source software is the same as the legal analysis for using proprietary software. The devil is in the details; and those details provide risk and opportunities. The trick is to make sure you are set up to maximize the opportunities and minimize the risks. It is well established that if you have access to code authored by another and you incorporate some or all of it into your own code, that incorporation is a "derivative work." The original author (or the owner of that author's copyrights) can prevent dissemination of your code unless you have a license to that original code. That can really put a damper on sales, especially if the borrowed code propagates throughout many projects. New Risks The increasing use of open-source code in commercial settings introduces new risks related to practical matters rather than to licensing. In a typical, well-run business, there are business-development folks, purchasing officers, engineers, programmers, lawyers and contract negotiators. Business development tells contracting what software it needs to "in-license" and how the company plans to use it. The contract negotiators then get a suitable license and coordinate with the purchasing officers. Only when all of those steps are completed does the vendor ship the code base to the technical team. As a result, there is no access to the in-licensed code until licenses consistent with the organization's business plans are in place. With open-source software, the same process should happen, albeit with a gravitas appropriate for the significance of the code being brought in. Thus, if millions of dollars of investment are to be made in product development, marketing, packaging and promotion, the full process must be used even if the purchasing step can be skipped. Another risk that is sometimes present with open source is that of provenance. You might have a license to a code base from one party, but if there are other claimants to the code, you also might need licenses from others. That means you must know where all of the code came from, a requirement that is not always more difficult to fulfill with open-source code than with proprietary software. Even if there are other claimants to copyright in the code -- especially in cases where open-source code is licensed and used in closed-source projects -- those claimants might never know that their code is being incorporated into the closed source. With open-source licensing that requires that the source code be distributed in any future distributions, the code base will be more available to claimants and could raise the chances of claims being asserted. None of these risks are specific to open source and they should not matter when a company is careful about licensing. If you licensed code properly from all interested parties, the manner of acquiring the code base and its availability for review should not lead to copyright claims against you. Recognizing the Opportunities So, if properly used, there is no real increased legal risk of using open-source software versus proprietary software. There are, however, many opportunities that are unique to open-source code. Some of these advantages -- such as the ability to leverage the development efforts of a large community of programmers that you don't have to pay -- are well known. Other benefits are less obvious unless you happen to be a lawyer. Litigation is messy. Sophisticated users of legal services know this, so they generally try and avoid litigation even if their opponent is a disagreeable character. If a dispute can be settled with finality at a cost considerably less than litigation, there will be saber rattling, but a deal will happen. On the other hand, if one side wants something that will cause a shut-down of the other side's business operations, litigation is almost inevitable. For example, when someone asserts a patent claim against Research In Motion -- the company that makes the BlackBerry PDA -- and asks the court to shut down the company, RIM is stuck. It has to litigate. Designing Around the Problem A dispute over the use of open-source code is less likely to get to litigation because it is a lot easier to design around the problem -- except for the SCO v. IBM situation, which is an anomaly all around. If a company finds that it might have used copyrightable material in a way that was not permitted by the license under which it used the material, it can design around the problem -- rather than litigate the issue -- by removing the offending code and creating replacement code from scratch. Because the source code is available, it is more likely that the company will be able to understand the operation of the code and how to create a replacement. Duplicating the functionality of software is not covered by copyrights, although the line between permissible copying of functions and ideas and impermissible copying of expression is not always clear. This ability to design around licenses has interesting second-order effects on the parties to a dispute. If an aggrieved copyright holder knows that a user of the code can easily strip it out and move on, the copyright holder is going to be more willing to make a deal that allows the copier to keep using the code under terms that might be acceptable to the copier. Permission Granted In the domain of intellectual property, the maxim "it is easier to obtain forgiveness than it is to obtain permission" doesn't apply. Being forgiven for unlicensed use of intellectual property is almost always more expensive than buying permission in the first place. Given a choice, you should always negotiate for permission before using someone else's intellectual property. Nonetheless, there are situations in which it is not clear until well into a project that permission was needed in the first place. To minimize the impact of such developments, developers facing a choice among various flavors of open-source code should opt for the one most likely to grant forgiveness. For example, if you are developing a new printer series and want to provide Linux drivers, there are likely many existing open-source projects to form a base for your offering. Suppose you have a choice of open-source code downloaded from a large printer manufacturer (your eventual competitor) or from a small software house. If it later turns out that you needed more permissions than were granted in the license, which company is going to be easier to deal with? The large printer manufacturer might opt for litigation to wear you down until you quit the business, just as Polaroid did with Kodak in the instant-photography business. By contrast, the smaller developer might grant the necessary permissions in exchange for exposure and other noncash benefits. Like most major decisions, the choice to use open-source software offers both great opportunities and serious risks. Done correctly, the risk is no greater than with any other in-licensing of copyrightable material. And the opportunities are greater. Life is about choices. At some point, we need to decide if we are ready to grab the brass ring the next time it comes around. Philip H. Albert is a patent attorney and partner with the San Francisco office of the intellectual property law firm Townsend and Townsend and Crew LLP. Copyright 2005 NewsFactor Network, Inc. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. *** 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, NewsFactor Network, Inc. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Web Site Makes Government Reports Available Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 14:38:33 -0500 By TED BRIDIS, Associated Press Writer A new Web site aims to make widely available to the public certain government reports about topics from terrorism to Social Security that congressional researchers prepare and distribute now only to lawmakers. The site -- http://www.opencrs.com -- links more than a half-dozen existing collections of nearly 8,000 reports from the Congressional Research Service and centrally indexes them so visitors can find reports containing specific terms or phrases. It also encourages visitors to ask their lawmakers to send them any reports not yet publicly available -- and gives detailed instructions to do this -- so these can be added to the collection. None of the reports is classified or otherwise restricted. The site, being announced Monday, is operated by the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based civil liberties group. The project is a response to years of rumbling and wrangling by open-government advocates over a lack of direct accessibility to reports from the policy research arm of Congress. "This initiative ought to embarrass the Congress into changing its policy and making these documents universally available," said Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy for the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists. Aftergood has collected hundreds of CRS reports and distributes them from his group's own Web site. The research service, with a staff of more than 700 and a nearly $100 million budget, does not object to public distribution of its reports, said Jill Brett, a spokeswoman for the Library of Congress, the service's parent organization. "It's up to Congress when they're made public and how they're made public," Brett said. "The law says we only make them available to Congress." Lawmakers often cite the reports during congressional debates, but the research is generally not available to the public. Congress does allow lawmakers to publish reports on their individual Web sites and send them to constituents who request them. On the Net: Congressional Research Service: http://www.loc.gov/crsinfo Federation of American Scientists: http://www.fas.org Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Youbet.com Files for $50 Million Mixed Shelf Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 14:37:04 -0500 http://Youbet.com which maintains a Web site that allows members to watch and bet on horse races, filed on Monday to periodically sell up to $50 million in debt securities, common and preferred stock, and other securities. The Woodland Hills, California-based company said in a registration statement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it will use the proceeds from the offering for general corporate purposes, including working capital, debt repayment and acquisition financing. Under a shelf registration, a company may sell securities in one or more separate offerings, with the size, price and terms to be determined at the time of sale. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: 27 Jun 2005 15:05:26 -0400 Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000) Fred Atkinson wrote: > Don't miunderstand me here. I basically agree with your position. > But didn't the more recent communications act render the > Communications Act of 1934 obsolete? I don't think that cell phone > technology was considered when it was written, either. Sadly, the ECPA has replaced much of the Communications Act. This is bad, since the ECPA is a badly-written piece of junk. > I do think that perhaps use of such jamming devices (if properly > designed) might be useful in prisons where there is a problem with > contraband cell phones running being used for drug deals and other > problematic things. Of course, we'd have to address the issues and > how to correctly make it legal for use (so that situations like you've > described can be avoided). If jamming were the only way to prevent prisoners from using cellphones, I might consider this possibly a good idea. But there are plenty of other ways to eliminate cell use in prisons, varying from Faraday shields around new construction, confiscating phones from prisoners, and building prisons in distant areas with no cell coverage. That being the case, the unpleasant side effects of cell jamming are not worth the benefit. Kathleen Carmody wrote: > (No lectures or legal opinions needed nor desired, please). > Anyone know where to purchase a cellular phone jammer, preferable > stateside. There are vendors off shore, but none here in CONUS > that I know of. Please post here any vendors that sell cellular > jammers. (Extra points for relating your experience with using one.) Since they are illegal, I don't think you will find any folks in the US selling them, especially given how easy it is to hide behind a foreign web site. If I did know of any, I'd be reporting them in a very different forum. I have already have nightmares with these things throwing trash out in aviation bands. scott "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 10:05:37 +0100 From: Paul Coxwell Subject: Re: Dial/Touch Tone Speeds > I never tinkered with changing the pulse rate, but > there were AT commands to do that as well. I think in foreign > countries the "make/break" ratio of pulses was different and I didn't > want to risk screwing up my modem/software with an oddball setting. Yep. Here in England it was common to have an AT&P1 command in the initialization string to set the modem to a 67/33 ratio. In practice, the default U.S. setting almost always worked perfectly anyway. I don't recall ever having problems on the default setting when dialing out from the small SxS office which served my area in the early 1980s. The make/break ratio would probably become a problem only if tolerances on a particular switch were right on the limits. - Paul. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 10:05:02 +0100 From: Paul Coxwell Subject: Re: Hayes Smartmodems > I'm confused. IIRC, the command was four characters, either > ATDT or ATDP. Are you saying it would work with three? You could use just ATD and if a mode which included dialtone detection was in use, the modem would "adaptive dial." It would attempt to dial the first digit using DTMF, then check to see if dialtone was still present. If not, it would dial out the remainder of the number as DTMF, otherwise it would switch to pulse and start over. I can't remember if it did this only after a reset (power-up or ATZ) and then latched into tone or pulse mode for future ATD commands or whether it tried DTMF every time. I have a SmartModem2400 somehwre in a box with a manual, but might take a while to find! > Also, for dialing out of a PBX, wasn't a 'pause' character needed to > allow time for the second dial tone? Yes, e.g. ATDP9,234-5678 where the comma indicates a default 2-second pause. You could change the comma delay period via one of the S-registers. Again, in modes which included dialtone detection you could also insert a W into the chain to tell the modem to wait for a new dialtone before continuing. - Paul. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Western Union History Date: 27 Jun 2005 09:55:40 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Lisa Minter wrote: > For your reading this weekend, a look though the Digest Archives at > the Western Union Telegraph Company, as presented by Jim Haynes in > this Digest in February, 1992. The original series of articles > appeared in three articles that weekend, now 13 years ago. Thanks for posting it. Very interesting. I am always curious as to the recent history of Western Union. There are many books on its pre-1900 history "The Victorian Internet", but little on its post 1900, and esp WW II and later except for Oslin's. I know that around 1975 WU carried relatively few classic telegrams, the bulk of its businses was money transfers (which it still does, under new owners). It also had Mailgram that seemed reasonably popular in the business world. But I don't understand how WU missed the explosion of computers. It had a microwave system in place. It even put up a satellite. I think it could've been a long distance carrier, perhaps a niche player, but a carrier just the same -- with a good name. I do know WU was saddled with an old physical plant (they knew it in 1960, but had a long way to go to get rid of it) and expensive union labor. I knew a fellow student who worked for them and earned great money for a kid -- they had huge wage rates; certainly that didn't help. A dying company is awfully hard to turn around. The trick is for management to foresee the future and turn a company to deal with that future. It sure seems that way back in 1960 WU mgmt saw the future -- correctly -- in data communications, yet somehow later on they missed the boat. > It will be able to provide increased telegraphic service, leased voice > channels, facsimile, closed-circuit television, and perhaps most > important of all, high-speed data processing channels that can handle > digital information at computer speeds. AFAIK, this was completed. I wonder how effectively it was used to earn revenue during the 1960s. One would think it would do a lot. > "Although the number of leased wires has not been reduced in absolute > terms, today their proportion has decreased to about 60%. S. M. Barr, > Western Union vice-president in charge of planning, expects this > percentage to drop to 40% in the next few years, hopes to get the > proportion of leased facilities down to 20% eventually. Did they get the reduction they forecast? The expense of leased lines was a big problem for Western Union in the 1970s. I heard they were mostly dependent on AT&T even then. > "-Private Expansion- But it does expect its private wire services to > expand greatly. Here, particularly, Western Union's new facilities > will be of help in solving communications problems for private > customers. Western Union already has a good deal of savvy when it > comes to tailoring a special system to a customer's needs. About > 2,000 companies in the U.S. -- among them U.S. Steel, General > Electric, Sylvania, and United Air Lines -- have private > communications networks leased from Western Union. And its bank wire > service interconnects 213 banks in 55 cities with pushbutton > switching. So, did this service -- where the money is -- expand or contract in the 1960s? Obviously eventually it contracted. Why? > [1] One would think that a writer for such an astute publication > as {Business Week} would have noted the price elasticity of personal > communication. This would have suggested that the dropping price of > long-distance telephony would devastate public Telegram service, > as it did. But I think in 1960 WU recognized just that and was getting out of that business. Maintaining local telegraph offers for that service was very expensive. > "-Government Contracts- Part of the load the new microwave system will > carry is already under contract. The U.S. Air Force hired Western > Union to build an automatic system of data and message handling that > will interconnect all domestic Air Force bases. The combat and > logistics network (COMLOGNET) [1] also costs, coincidentally, $56- > million and will be operated by Air Force personnel. Western Union > also built for the Air Force an international automatic switching > telegraph network, [2] which was completed last May, and has put in a > high-speed weather map facsimile system for the Strategic Air Command. > In addition, it built a nationwide weather map facsimile system for > the Weather Bureau that serves several hundred points. Again, this is good business. What happened to the government contracts? > "Finally, during the war, it became obvious that Postal couldn't go > on. Operations for several years had been dependent on RFC [2] loans. > So Congress finally permitted Western Union to absorb its competitor > (BW - Aug. 7 '43, p102). According to Oslin's book, the government _forced_ WU to absorb Postal and Postal was in miserable shape. He says the Postal addition badly hurt WU. > [2] RFC = Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a Depression-era > government agency in the business of lending money to business firms > to help them get back on their feet. Side note: The RFC was started during the Hoover Administration as a way to fight the Depression. Many people credit it as part of FDR's New Deal, but it was a Hoover program. Hoover did more than credited to fight the Depression. [Other perspectives welcome. public replies please] ------------------------------ 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 V24 #296 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Jun 28 00:26:47 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 32CCD14DCD; Tue, 28 Jun 2005 00:26:47 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #297 Message-Id: <20050628042647.32CCD14DCD@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 00:26:47 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.4 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Tue, 28 Jun 2005 00:27:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 297 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Film, Music Companies Hail Grokster Ruling (Lisa Minter) Sony Eyes Grokster Despite the Court Ruling (Lisa Minter) Ex-Enron Internet Chief Describes Losing Power (Lisa Minter) 50 Year Unisys Employee Retires (Lisa Hancock) G3 for Dialup Users! (Patrick Townson) Softswitch Switch Type In LERG? (essay182@gmail.com) Vonage and E911: Customer Service Response (RodneyG) Foreign Listings, Again (Fred Atkinson) VOIP and PSTN to Single Handset (Marc Popek) Re: Have You Yet Started Using VOIP? (Dennis G. Rears) Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach (David Harmon) Re: Beginning of the End for AT&T (Tony P.) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Film, Music Companies Hail Grokster Ruling Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 20:53:20 -0500 By Bob Tourtellotte Hollywood studios and music companies hailed a ruling by the U.S Supreme Court on Monday backing their position in a landmark copyright case, saying it could spur the development of the Internet as a commercial platform for distribuing movies and songs. In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that file-trading networks like Grokster and Morpheus can be held liable when their users trade copyrighted material without permission, clearing the way for a trial at a lower court. Legal experts cautioned that it could still take years for the trial, if it takes place, to work its way through a verdict and appeals. But entertainment executives said the strength of the Supreme Court decision in the case against Grokster could prompt file sharing networks to begin using filtering software that would ensure songs and videos downloaded across their networks are not illegal copies. They also hope the Supreme Court decision will lead to greater use of current, legal download services like Napster and iTunes for music or Movielink and CinemaNow for films, industry representatives said. "If the Supreme Court ... can come to a unanimous decision about this case, surely the content industries like movies and music and the high-tech sector can come together," said Dan Glickman, chief of the Motion Picture Association of America. "This decision will help spur that process," he told reporters. An MPAA spokesman said the industry trade group would take a "wait-and-see" approach to filing new lawsuits but would reserve the right to file them. Mitch Bainwol, chief of the Recording Industry Association of America, said the groups also would not immediately approach the U.S. Congress with proposals for new laws. In recent years, content providers have sued computer networks that offer software for downloading and trading songs and videos that have been copied without paying a fee. Through the MPAA and the Recording Industry Association of America, movie and music companies also sued individuals and sought new laws to bar illegal downloads. Content providers argue that illegal copying and swapping costs them billions of dollars in lost revenues annually. Technology advocates contend that shutting down file-sharing networks will stifle innovation. The Supreme Court decision means the lower court can go ahead with a trial, and technology companies said they welcomed the chance to argue their case in the lower court. "We are confident it will be proven that Morpheus does not promote or encourage copyright infringement," said Michael Weiss, who heads StreamCast Networks Inc, which was also a defendant in the Grokster case. Jennifer Urban, a specialist in intellectual property law with the University of Southern California, said a trial could take years if fully tried and the outcome is appealed. "This ruling says that if you actively promote (illegal downloading), you might be liable. Now we have to find out exactly what that means," she said. Attorney Carey Ramos, who had argued the case on appeal for songwriters and publishers, said the Supreme Court's decision was so strong that the lower court might bypass a full trial. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Sony Eyes Grokster Version Despite Court Ruling Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 20:54:32 -0500 By Derek Caney Sony BMG's chief executive said on Monday the record label wants to move forward with a legal version of the Grokster file sharing service, despite a U.S. Supreme Court decision that holds the service and others like it responsible for the copyright infringement of its users. The highest court in the United States set aside a lower court ruling that Grokster and Morpheus, which allow millions of Internet users to copy music and movies for free from each others' computers, were not liable for infringement since the services could also be used for legitimate purposes. "I'm hopeful we will move forward with a legitimate version of Grokster," Andy Lack, chief executive of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, said in an interview. "It won't be called Grokster, and it certainly won't be what Grokster is today," he added. A Grokster spokesman said, "File sharing is not going away regardless of today's developments so talks like this only make sense and seemingly further validate its popularity in the marketplace." Sony BMG's Lack said the ruling in the MGM vs. Grokster case would open up opportunities for different technologies that use so called peer-to-peer networks, which allow digital media files o be shared between individual computer users without a centralized server. "There's an opportunity to employ lots of different technologies that legitimize these file sharing services," Lack said. "A lot of them didn't want to come to the table until this ruling." Asked if the ruling would lead to a rash of lawsuits against peer-to-peer networks, he said, "If I were a lawyer representing those clearly illegal services, I'd be advising my clients either make a dramatic change in the way those companies are doing business or get out of business." Lack said the most striking aspects of the decision were that it was unanimous and transparent. "Everyone on both sides of the debate -- be it content companies or Grokster -- feared there would be no clarity. The most challenging concern is that the decision would be open to interpretation. This decision pre-empts that kind of debate." Sony BMG, home to such artists as Bruce Springsteen and Britney Spears, is working with several other technology companies to create a legal file sharing network. One such company, Snocap, makes software that can block unauthorized songs from being copied through peer-to-peer services. The technology is the latest venture of Shawn Fanning, who created Napster, the grandfather of all peer-to-peer sites. Sony BMG is also working with Mashboxx, a peer-to-peer network that offers authorized songs for download. Its chief executive, Wayne Rosso, is a founder of Grokster. Sony BMG is a 50-50 joint venture between Japan's Sony Corp. and Germany's Bertelsmann AG. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Did I read correctly earlier today that the Supreme Court has stated even techologies for which legitimate uses are available are not excused from lawsuits if they (the technologies) are misused? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Ex-Enron Internet Chief Describes Losing Power Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 20:55:57 -0500 By Mark Babineck The former Oregon-based co-chief executive of Enron Corp.'s broadband unit watched helplessly as the Houston home office gradually assumed control and shaped the division, he said on Monday in his fraud and conspiracy trial. Joseph Hirko, under questioning by his defense lawyer that began last week, explained how Enron started taking greater control of Enron Communications Inc. (ECI) in 1999, first by appointing Enron insider Kenneth Rice to be his co-CEO. By the end of 1999, most of ECI's leadership roles had been filled by people from Houston-based Enron Corp. "(Rice) brought in new people and new departments as well," Hirko said. Hirko, along with former Internet unit executives Rex Shelby, Scott Yeager, Kevin Howard and Michael Krautz, is on trial for conspiracy and fraud. Hirko, Shelby and Yeager also are accused of insider trading and money laundering. All five men have pleaded innocent. Rice was a fellow co-defendant until he entered into a plea agreement and testified against his former co-workers, saying they conspired to illegally promote the broadband division even though they knew it could not back up their promises. On cross-examination Monday afternoon, prosecutor Ben Campbell pressed Hirko about a scathing January 2000 analysis of the unit's network security that Rice testified was a sign "the network was in disarray." Hirko dismissed the appraisal, saying the problems were limited and he was told at the time they were being addressed. Campbell later showed jurors several slides Hirko used in 1999 presentations that implied many of ECI's capabilities were operational. Hirko disputed the characterization, saying his overlaying oral descriptions of the business were accurate. Hirko told jurors he felt his power diminishing in 2000 and he eventually was forced out of the company by Rice and Enron Chief Operating Officer Jeffrey Skilling, who went on to be corporate CEO and stands charged in a separate indictment. Skilling has pleaded innocent and awaits trial next year. According to Hirko, Skilling said Hirko needed to move from Portland, Oregon, to Houston to remain atop of the unit, which by mid-2000 was called Enron Broadband Services (EBS). Hirko refused, citing a contract clause that called for him to remain in Portland with his adolescent son. "(Skilling) said, 'Frankly, I think the reason you didn't want to move is stupid,"' Hirko said. Ultimately, Hirko said he agreed to commute to Houston on weekdays, but it was too late. Skilling appointed Rice to lead EBS in July 2000 and "involuntarily terminated" Hirko. Hirko quoted Skilling as saying: "I've decided to go with Ken. I'm more confident he'll build the business I want." EBS imploded about a year later. Enron Corp. declared bankruptcy in December 2001. Nevertheless, Hirko told jurors he always believed in the unit and even held onto between $8 million and $9 million in Enron stock that ultimately became worthless. "I was very proud of what the company and the people accomplished," Hirko said. "This was probably the most exciting time of my career." Lawyers estimated the trial, which began in April and originally was forecast to be winding down by now, probably would go until mid-July. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: 50 Year Unisys Employee Retires Date: 27 Jun 2005 13:44:41 -0700 The Philadelphia Inquirer did a feature article on a man, age 68, who was retiring from Unisys after 50 years of service. (He started with Unisys precedessor Burroughs). It's extremely rare today for someone to work 50 years for the same corporation. In 1986 Unisys had 123,000 employees, now it has 36,400. Only 15% of Americans 65 and over are still working and the average person retiring today has been with his employer 10 years, not 50. The man, Bill Brown, started out with Burroughs in 1955 as an errand boy in Detroit. He went to college at night then designed adding machine parts -- it took two weeks for two men to design the curves for a cam, then computers cut the time to 18 hours. After Burroughs and Univac merged he moved to Blue Bell PA. He said the first 35 years were a lot of fun, but the last 15 were tougher with the changes. In the future, more workers will have to retire later because they won't be able to afford to stop. (for full article see www.philly.com "50 years at one firm"). Before divesture there were a great many long-time employees in the Bell System. Probably quite a few 50 year ones who perhaps started while in high school and stayed with the company their whole working life, or kept working past 65. Now seniority means nothing. I heard Verizon laid off a group of long time employees without regard to seniority-- they just shut down a particular sub-unit and fired everyone in it; many had started when it was still Bell Telephone. Likewise AT&T let many long time employees go. I know some consultants who have made a very great deal of money being hired to clean up the mess companies made after doing the above. They think their only eliminating 'fat' by these mass layoffs, but they're actually getting rid of critically needed muscle. It hits the news when sales drop dramatically and consumer groups file lawsuits over horrendus service. How stupid are the managers who come up with and authorize these actions? All they do is lose business; they don't save any money at all. Were the managers so damn cynical they thought the whole workforce was playing computer games or looking at porn all day long? Unlike government, generally the idiotic miskakes of the private sector -- that ruin people's lives by mass firings -- aren't widely reported in the media. The stock market seems to applaud such moves. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: One important reason companies do not keep around 40-50 year employees any longer is because that employee's benefits package is usually so extravagant. For example, I recall one fellow who had worked for Standard Oil more than twenty years back in the 1960's, when I was there. Working there that long, he was entitled to five weeks paid vacation every year, and first choice of the available times for vacation. He _always_ managed to parlay that five week vacation into _six_ weeks by scheduling his vacation times around weeks which had holidays in them, which entitled him to an extra vacacation day. For example, vacation during the week which contained Memorial Day, also the week which contained Independence Day and Labor Day got him _three extra days_ right there. So he would then take those three extra days vacation and either use them for the Monday <-> Wednesday of Thanksgiving Week when the entire office got two days (Thursday and Friday) off anyway. Or, depending on how the calendar worked out that year, maybe he would take those three days during Christmas/New Years week. Needless to say, Standard Oil got quite annoyed at having to legally pay him for not being there for large gaps of time. Eventually, they had a whole bunch of people in that situation and of course, if you can find an excuse for letting the person go, then you also have to pay them for the _company's share_ of their 401-K plan or whatever, _plus_ their severance pay, _plus_ their pension, etc. And there is absolutely no reason a good supervisor cannot find an excuse -- _any_ lawful excuse will do, to can you if they wish to do so. That is one reason most companies do not like to have employees around that long; to their way of thinking, the person has gotten just to expensive for them. And ditto with the telephone company over the years. I recall a complaint I heard from a couple of very old, long term 'inside plant' technicians who got laid off by Illinois Bell just a week or two prior to some milestone for them (such as maybe reaching the point they were entitled to that very coveted fifth week of vacation each year). This was right around the time Wabash was cutting over to ESS, in 1974 or thereabouts. They both said Bell was extremely secretive about the new system. Although they both, by virtue of their longevity, had the run of the whole inside plant, the frames, etc, Bell kept the area where the computers for ESS were located totally 'off limits' with locked doors, to most of the older guys. "The only guys allowed to go in that area were the real young smart-alecks who knew something about computers. Those of us who knew nothing about computers were _not_ allowed to go in that area at all." PAT] ------------------------------ Subject: G3 for Dialup Users From: Patrick Townson Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 19:33:38 -0300 There have been some commercials on television lately I do not understand at all. The announcer says, 'first there was dial up, then there was accelerated dial up, now there is G3, which is about the fastest you can go _without_ being on DSL or cable.' Exactly what is G3 for dialup users? If I decided my cable internet was too expensive, and decided to resort to 'G3 for dialup' what would I get different than what I have now? PAT The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made. -Groucho Marx (1890-1977) ------------------------------ From: essay182@gmail.com Subject: Softswitch Switch Type In LERG? Date: 27 Jun 2005 15:50:10 -0700 I remember seeing that a lot of Verizon end offices in California were being upgraded from DMS switches to the new Nortel Succession Soft Switches. I was just curious to what the "Equipment Type" listing for these packet based switches is in LERG now. If its any help, I think "MTVRWAXXDS1" was the first of these Nortel Succession Soft Switches deployed by Verizon. Thanks! ------------------------------ From: RodneyG Subject: Vonage and E911: Customer Service Response Date: 27 Jun 2005 18:56:08 -0700 I wrote to Vonage Customer Service today (I am a customer) and told them I found out that another VoIP provider (Time-Warner RoadRunner) in my city (Charlotte, NC) could provide me with true E911. I asked why Vonage could not. I further asked when I could expect true E911 from Vonage. Below is the response, a direct quotation. I admit I haven't been following all the twists and turns 100%, but isn't this reply a bit of a stretch (or worse) from what we know? Or did I miss something? Thanks, rodney ---------- begin response from Vonage Customer Service ---------- Dear customer, In response to your email, we are supposed to be E911 compliant by the end of the summer. I hope I have answered your question and thank you for contacting customer care. Sincerely, Kristen ---------- end response from Vonage Customer Service ---------- [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That was their entire response? I guess technically, they are correct. FCC gave them all 90 days to comply, as of mid-May. So mid-June (1), mid-July (2) and mid-August (3) gets us to 90 days, around to approximatly the end of the summer. You'd think that Kristen might have elaborated on it just a little; but who knows, maybe the bosses told Kristen to avoid any conversations with customers on the topic while they (the bosses) try to worm their way into an extension of time, either formally or informally. Maybe they told Kristen to be most careful about saying anything which could be construed as a 'promise' or a 'commitment'. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Fred Atkinson Subject: Foreign Listings Again Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 22:30:15 -0400 Well, Some of you may remember that last year (when I switched over to VOIP) that I went round and round with Bellsouth trying to get my VOIP number listed with directory assistance. Bellsouth doesn't properly inform their CSRs that they do list numbers with directory assistance and in the phone book for phones that are not provided by Bellsouth. It is called a foreign listing. They create what is called a special account to bill you for it. Bellsouth charges me $2.20 per month and bill it annually. I understand that the rate varies depending upon the call center that you are listed in. To refresh memories and inform those who are just now hearing about this, Bellsouth kept telling me they were transfering me to 'someone who could help me' and then transfered me blindly back into the queue. I went through person after person who couldn't help me. Once I went through fifteen people and still couldn't get it done. Some of them had the nerve to tell me it couldn't be done. I knew that wasn't true. So, I escalated to the South Carolina Public Service Commission. I was very promptly contacted by someone at Bellsouth who immediately took my information and got my number listed in directory assistance. It's been listed with directory assistance for over a year now. Call directory assistance and ask for Fred Atkinson in Columbia, SC and you will get my Vonage number. Positive proof. Well, I just accepted a position in western North Carolina. I will be living in a small city called Sylva, NC. As Vonage doesn't provide service there, I had to go with one of three alternate VOIP providers. I chose a company called Voicepulse. Even though I haven't moved into the house I've rented up there yet, I've already got my telephone service and my phone number for the Sylva area. The local provider is Verizon. I had corresponded with their customer service via email. They had told me that it was no problem to get my number listed as soon as I had it. They even quoted the rate for it (about $1.10 per month billed annually). After I got my Voicepulse number, I emailed them with the information they said they needed. They didn't answer, and didn't answer, and didn't answer. So I called their customer service number to get help. Several of them told me it couldn't be done. I insisted upon speaking to someone else. Unlike Bellsouth (who blindly transfers you to someone else who can't help you), Verizon puts you on music on hold and just leaves you there. After fifteen to thirty minutes, you figure you've been completely forgotten about and hang up and call back. After a couple of days of futility, I called the North Carolina PSC. They said they'd call Verizon and get this done for me. While waiting, I continued to try to get through to the customer service number. After one more customer service person incorrectly told me that it couldn't be done, I began to get a little upset. Turns out a supervisor was monitoring the call. She broke in and told me that she could help me. She took my information and said an order taker would call me in a few minutes to verify the information and give me an order number. Surprisingly, it actually happened. A few hours later, I got a call from a person that was with what I believe she called Verizon complaint investigation. I told her that I had finally gotten someone to take the order and gave her the order number asking that she make sure it actually got done. She did and called me back saying it was in the system and finalized. I thanked her for calling. I called directory assistance this morning and asked for Fred Atkinson in Sylva, North Carolina. Sure enough, they gave me my Voicepulse telephone number. It seems ridiculous that one should have to go through regulatory channels to get a simple telephone listing done. And it doesn't seem to matter which phone company you go to for this. However, if anyone here is trying to do that with either Verizon or Bellsouth, they can refer to my foreign residential listings when they tell you it 'can't be done'. Short of that, call the appropriate state PSC for help. . Fred Atkinson ------------------------------ From: Marc Popek Subject: VOIP and PSTN Many Line to Single Handset Answering Machine; Fax Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 03:03:13 GMT Organization: AT&T Worldnet There is a simple automatic switching device combine-a-line that routes PSTN and VOIP to a single line handset, answering machine, Fax, etc. This might work. Marco http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5785155151&rd=1&sspagename=STRK%3AMESE%3AIT&rd=1 ------------------------------ From: Dennis G. Rears Subject: Re: Have You Yet Started Using VOIP? Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 22:57:45 -0400 Organization: Optimum Online TELECOM Digest Editor wrote in message news:telecom24.290.4@telecom-digest.org: > Although many netters have tested out VOIP-style telephones there are > some guys who have not yet gotten their VOIP adapters and experimented > with this new method for making telephone calls. I just noticed that I > have not explained the Vonage system in detail for quite a while here, > so wanted to give the late-comers a chance to look into the program. > If you would like an e-coupon good for a month of free service from > Vonage, one of the premier VOIP services, please let me know. If > you like the plans you see offered at http://vonage.com then send me > email and ask for an e-coupon. You'll get a month of free service in > the process of signing up via this Digest. Send me email at > ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu and ask for your free month of Vonage. Hi Pat: I just want to put in a good word for Vonage. I got it in December and I love it. I have saved over $300 since I got it. There are some initial problems with getting your number transferred over, however, this is not due to Vonage but the LECs. I do international calling especially to Australia. Unlike the long distance companies they do not charge you exorbitant rates because you are not on a international long distance plan. There have been complaints about the 911 service but the complaints are unwarranted. You just go to the website and give them your correct address. Since Vonage is centered in NJ I have to pay all the taxes still my bill is less than $29 a month inclusive of taxes and everything else. I love the fact that when I go on travel I can forward to my cell phone. If you do go to Vonage, please sign up via this digest/newsgroup. It helps to pay the bills. Dennis It's only been a couple of weeks since I last posted as opposed to a decade for my previous post. Thanks for remembering me. It is through this digest that I got my interest stoked in telephony. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: You know, and I know it is about that simple to sign up with Vonage and get _reasonable_ 911 service, even if not perfect, as in 'e-911'. And although there were some problems in general with VOIP sound quality (due to limits on bandwidth in the beginning, it has gotten much better in recent months). I still have Vonage e-coupons available for anyone who wants a month of free Vonage service. Just write me and ask for one, ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu and you will have it back in email a day or two later. And I notice it did not take you another decade to write to me again, and for that I thank you! But you never did tell me if you were still in the Milwaukee area, nor whatever happened to your newsgroup/Digest. PAT] ------------------------------ From: David Harmon Subject: Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach Organization: This space inadvertently left blank. Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 03:02:26 GMT On Mon, 27 Jun 2005 11:06:01 -0400 in comp.dcom.telecom, TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to mc : > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: One problem with your list of > requirements is that sometimes, in a family, one member of the family > -- let's say the husband for example -- likes to use the net to look > at some, well, 'perverted' stuff and charge his viewing of same to the > family credit card. I guess that shortly after the credit card companies are required to track and reproduce all that stuff we will see the news report on how some security breach disclosed details of the perverted buying habits of forty million customers. ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: Beginning of the End for AT&T Organization: ATCC Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 17:48:37 -0400 In article , hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com says: > Too bad nobody builds telephone sets the way Western Electric used to. > (I have had good service from one Panasonic set and also their > answering machines, but are they still in the phone business? I don't > seem to see any of their traditional consumer electronic products as I > used to.) There are several people who have huge collections of older 500 and 2500 sets. They peddle them out at $25 to $50 a pop. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Just think ... 500/2500 sets used to be as common (or more so) than Western Union clocks, and just as easy to come by ... walk in an office, walk out with one or two. Now clocks, as well as Genuine Bell telephones are getting quite hard to come by, and the people who sell them (for a slight fortune) are quite willing to pick your pockets in the process. I wish I could get one or two of the 2500 phones ... :( 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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Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V24 #297 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Jun 28 15:17:46 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id 9BA7C150CF; Tue, 28 Jun 2005 15:17:45 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #298 Message-Id: <20050628191745.9BA7C150CF@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 15:17:45 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.5 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,EARN_MONEY, LOTS_OF_STUFF,MAILTO_TO_REMOVE,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Tue, 28 Jun 2005 15:18:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 298 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Customer Given Access to Others' Accounts (Monty Solomon) Comcast / Starz Video-on-Demand (Monty Solomon) BT Selects Microsoft TV as Software Platform for TV (Monty Solomon) Verizon Wireless BroadbandAccess (Monty Solomon) Verizon Wireless Leads Industry With Natl Wireless Broadband (M Solomon) Grokster Decision Launches Debate (Telecom dailyLead from USTA) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (Dale Farmer) Re: Vonage and E911: Customer Service Response (Steve Sobol) Re: Vonage and E911: Customer Service Response (RodneyG) Re: 50 Year Unisys Employee Retires (Steven Lichter) Re: 50 Year Unisys Employee Retires (Lisa Hancock) Re: G3 for Dialup Users (Nathan Strom) Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach (mc) Re: DSL Speed (Choreboy) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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, 27 Jun 2005 23:52:06 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Customer Given Access to Others' Accounts By Chris Reidy, Globe Staff Bank of America Corp. says its recent conversion of FleetBoston accounts to its computer network went smoothly, but don't tell that to Mark Levy, who accidentally got online access to about $90,000 of other people's money. When Levy went to the bank's website to check his accounts, the freelance writer from Brookline said, he also had access to several accounts that weren't his. If he were criminally inclined, he said, he could have emptied those accounts. Bank spokesman Ernesto Anguilla said that what happened was an isolated incident caused by 'human error' and 'unrelated to the conversion.' While Levy got access to about 10 accounts, it appears that they belonged to two customers, Anguilla said. There was no way those customers could have suffered financial losses, Anguilla said, because all Bank of America customers 'would be fully reimbursed by the bank for any unauthorized transactions.' Bank of America acquired FleetBoston Financial Corp. last year and converted many FleetBoston accounts to its computer network this month. http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2005/06/27/customer_given_access_to_others_accounts/ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 08:46:49 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Comcast / Starz video-on-demand Comcast and Starz Entertainment Group Announce Groundbreaking Movie Deal Largest Movie Video-On-Demand Agreement to Date Long-term Starz and Encore Channels Agreement PHILADELPHIA, and ENGLEWOOD, Colo., June 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK), the country's leading provider of cable, entertainment and communications products and services, and Starz Entertainment Group LLC (SEG), the largest provider of premium movie services in the United States, today announced that they will offer more than 1,500 movies a year from SEG's extensive library to Comcast's ON DEMAND video-on-demand service. This is the single largest video-on-demand movie content agreement to date. The agreement also covers the launch of two new SEG premium movie channels on Comcast systems and provides for the extension of the affiliation agreement between the two companies into the next decade. Finally, the agreement provides Comcast more control over future programming costs while providing SEG greater predictability in its long-term revenue stream. The comprehensive agreement paves the way for Comcast to bring Starz to more Comcast customers and expand Encore and its thematic channels to additional digital cable customers. In addition to access to these channels, the agreement covers broad video-on-demand rights. Comcast plans to offer digital cable customers who subscribe to Starz 325 top movie titles per month, and offer Encore customers 250 of these movie titles per month - all at no additional charge. Digital cable customers who would have paid $3-4 per movie to receive top movies now will each be able to receive up to $1,000 per month worth of value at no additional charge from Comcast. Comcast will also make available for no additional charge 100 of the 250 Encore movies as part of a new digital cable package that will be the gateway to video-on-demand for those customers who have previously experienced traditional television content. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=50121576 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 08:48:03 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: BT Selects Microsoft TV as Software Platform for TV BT Selects Microsoft TV as Software Platform for TV Over Broadband in the United Kingdom - Jun 28, 2005 06:48 AM (PR Newswire) BT Plans to Test Services in Early 2006 REDMOND, Wash. and LONDON, June 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) and BT today announced BT's intention to use the Microsoft(R) TV Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) Edition software platform to deliver TV over broadband in the United Kingdom. The announcement further strengthens Microsoft's continued commitment to working with the world's leading network operators to bring next-generation television services to consumers. BT plans to trial TV over broadband services powered by Microsoft TV IPTV Edition in early 2006, with delivery of a commercial service expected to begin in the summer of 2006. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=50121136 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 11:08:41 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Verizon Wireless Broadband Access Verizon Wireless Announces BroadbandAccess Wireless Broadband Service Availability In Airports Nationwide NEW YORK and BEDMINSTER, N.J., June 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Verizon Wireless, operator of the nation's largest and fastest wireless broadband network, announced today its BroadbandAccess wireless broadband service is available to travelers in airports from coast to coast. BroadbandAccess from Verizon Wireless gives enterprise customers a fast, reliable resource to help them be productive and in touch with the office and customers when they are traveling, enabling them to tap into applications and tasks that are more suited to broadband data speeds. Verizon Wireless' BroadbandAccess gives customers the speed, mobility, productivity and simplicity ideal for mobile professionals in businesses small and large. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=50128314 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 11:10:51 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Verizon Wireless Leads Industry With National Wireless Broadband Verizon Wireless CEO Denny Strigl: Company Continues to Deliver Popular BroadbandAccess and V CAST Services to Customers Across the Nation NEW YORK and BEDMINSTER, N.J., June 28 /PRNewswire/ -- From the Yankee Group Conference today in New York, Denny Strigl, president and chief executive officer of Verizon Wireless, the leader in wireless broadband services, said the company continues to launch new major markets, expand existing markets and it is on track to make its two EV-DO (Evolution-Data Optimized) based services, BroadbandAccess and V CAST, available to half the U.S. population by the end of this year. With these services, customers can do everything from work remotely at similar speed and functionality as if they were in the office, to being on the cutting-edge of entertainment -- downloading cool 3D games, viewing short original programs made exclusively for cell phones and watching music videos and concert performances from favorite artists. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=50126576 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 13:43:32 EDT From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA Subject: Grokster Decision Launches Debate Telecom dailyLead from USTA June 28, 2005 http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22681&l=2017006 TODAY'S HEADLINES NEWS OF THE DAY * Grokster decision launches debate BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH * Analyzing the Brand X decision * BT enlists Microsoft for TV service * Cisco snaps up security startup * Cablevision unveils 100 Mbps broadband USTA SPOTLIGHT * Free Webinar: Understanding Your Customer -- Increasing RevenueTomorrow, Wednesday, June 29, 12:00 PM ET Register now! EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES * BusinessWeek report looks at wireless technologies REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE * Level 3 beefs up e911 coverage Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others. http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22681&l=2017006 ------------------------------ From: Dale Farmer Organization: The fuzz in the back of the fridge. Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 05:11:46 GMT Steve Sobol wrote: > Dale Farmer wrote: >> after the root causes of the bad behavior, then by blocking this or >> that object from functioning, or making the object more difficult to >> obtain legally for the ordinary citizen. > So what legitimate reasons are there to use a cell phone jammer? (Note > that I said legitimate, not legal.) The only reason I can think of offhand is for a bomb squad to use to block one possible source of remote detonation. I started to type that a hostage situation would also be one, but then it occurred to me that there may be non-hostage innocents trapped in there as well, who might want to call the police for assistance in escaping. A cell phone enabled scanner would be indicated, and a quick call trace from the cellular carrier when needed. Fred Atkinson wrote: >> And here you fall into that common fallacy. 'We can't have these >> people doing this bad behavior that we outlawed. So lets ban one of >> their instrumentalities to stop their bad behavior.' Remember how >> effective those laws against flagrant beeper use in the 80s were at >> stopping the drug dealers? You would be far better served by going >> after the root causes of the bad behavior, then by blocking this or >> that object from functioning, or making the object more difficult to >> obtain legally for the ordinary citizen. > And *you* think that you are going to stop the black market trade and > the self abusive behaviors that goes on inside of prisons by 'dealing > with it'? I'm afraid you're in never never land. It's not going to > happen. Solving the problems of bad stuff happening in prisons by blocking just one or a couple bands of radio frequency is not going to happen either. > Using technology like this for better security in our prisons isn't a > bad idea. > Fred Except it doesn't work. Better to put scanners up and listen to their transmissions. --Dale ------------------------------ From: Steve Sobol Subject: Re: Vonage and E911: Customer Service Response Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 21:42:26 -0700 Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com RodneyG wrote: > I wrote to Vonage Customer Service today (I am a customer) and told > them I found out that another VoIP provider (Time-Warner RoadRunner) > in my city (Charlotte, NC) could provide me with true E911. I asked > why Vonage could not. I further asked when I could expect true E911 > from Vonage. > Below is the response, a direct quotation. I admit I haven't been > following all the twists and turns 100%, but isn't this reply a bit of > a stretch (or worse) from what we know? Or did I miss something? The CSR's response is in line with what I understand to be the case (that VoIP providers are being required by the FCC to start offering E911 within the next couple months). > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That was their entire response? I guess > technically, they are correct. FCC gave them all 90 days to comply, as > of mid-May. So mid-June (1), mid-July (2) and mid-August (3) gets us > to 90 days, around to approximatly the end of the summer. You'd think > that Kristen might have elaborated on it just a little; but who knows, > maybe the bosses told Kristen to avoid any conversations with > customers on the topic while they (the bosses) try to worm their way > into an extension of time, either formally or informally. Maybe they > told Kristen to be most careful about saying anything which could be > construed as a 'promise' or a 'commitment'. PAT] I don't know about the former, but I'm sure the latter did happen. JustThe.net - Steve Sobol / sjsobol@JustThe.net / PGP: 0xE3AE35ED Coming to you from Southern California's High Desert, where the temperatures are as high as the gas prices! / 888.480.4NET (4638) "Life's like an hourglass glued to the table" --Anna Nalick, "Breathe" ------------------------------ From: RodneyG Subject: Re: Vonage and E911: Customer Service Response Date: 28 Jun 2005 05:53:25 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com RodneyG wrote: > ---------- begin response from Vonage Customer Service ---------- > Dear customer, > In response to your email, we are supposed to be E911 compliant by the > end of the summer. > I hope I have answered your question and thank you for contacting > customer care. > Sincerely, > Kristen > ---------- end response from Vonage Customer Service ---------- > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That was their entire response? I guess > technically, they are correct. FCC gave them all 90 days to comply, as > of mid-May. So mid-June (1), mid-July (2) and mid-August (3) gets us > to 90 days, around to approximatly the end of the summer. You'd think > that Kristen might have elaborated on it just a little; but who knows, > maybe the bosses told Kristen to avoid any conversations with > customers on the topic while they (the bosses) try to worm their way > into an extension of time, either formally or informally. Maybe they > told Kristen to be most careful about saying anything which could be > construed as a 'promise' or a 'commitment'. PAT] Yes, that was the entire response. I thought it was lazy and ill-worded. But now that I think about it in the context of your comments, "we are supposed to be" might actually be *carefully* worded. ------------------------------ From: Steven Lichter Reply-To: Die@spammers.com Organization: I Kill Spammers, Inc. (c) 2005 A Rot in Hell Co. Subject: Re: 50 Year Unisys Employee Retires Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 10:43:19 GMT TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to Lisa Hancock: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: One important reason companies do not > keep around 40-50 year employees any longer is because that employee's > benefits package is usually so extravagant. For example, I recall one > fellow who had worked for Standard Oil more than twenty years back in > the 1960's, when I was there. Working there that long, he was > entitled to five weeks paid vacation every year, and first choice of > the available times for vacation. He _always_ managed to parlay that > five week vacation into _six_ weeks by scheduling his vacation times > around weeks which had holidays in them, which entitled him to an > extra vacacation day. For example, vacation during the week which > contained Memorial Day, also the week which contained Independence Day > and Labor Day got him _three extra days_ right there. So he would then > take those three extra days vacation and either use them for the > Monday <-> Wednesday of Thanksgiving Week when the entire office got > two days (Thursday and Friday) off anyway. Or, depending on how the > calendar worked out that year, maybe he would take those three days > during Christmas/New Years week. > Needless to say, Standard Oil got quite annoyed at having to legally > pay him for not being there for large gaps of time. Eventually, they > had a whole bunch of people in that situation and of course, if you > can find an excuse for letting the person go, then you also have to > pay them for the _company's share_ of their 401-K plan or whatever, > _plus_ their severance pay, _plus_ their pension, etc. And there is > absolutely no reason a good supervisor cannot find an excuse -- _any_ > lawful excuse will do, to can you if they wish to do so. That is one > reason most companies do not like to have employees around that long; > to their way of thinking, the person has gotten just to expensive for > them. > And ditto with the telephone company over the years. I recall a > complaint I heard from a couple of very old, long term 'inside plant' > technicians who got laid off by Illinois Bell just a week or two prior > to some milestone for them (such as maybe reaching the point they were > entitled to that very coveted fifth week of vacation each year). This > was right around the time Wabash was cutting over to ESS, in 1974 or > thereabouts. They both said Bell was extremely secretive about the new > system. Although they both, by virtue of their longevity, had the run > of the whole inside plant, the frames, etc, Bell kept the area where > the computers for ESS were located totally 'off limits' with locked > doors, to most of the older guys. "The only guys allowed to go in that > area were the real young smart-alecks who knew something about > computers. Those of us who knew nothing about computers were _not_ > allowed to go in that area at all." PAT] I don't know about Standard Oil and Illinois Bell, but I was a long term employee of GTE and went into the Electronic Projects when they first started. A lot of senior employees did not want to learn the new stuff and others were needed to keep the old equipment running, but in the end the senior people learned the new stuff, transfered or retired. In the end there were a few who got laid off, GTE did dump most of the frame people and I could never figure that move out. As to vacations, I would take the week of Thanksgiving through the end of the year, and I would get extra days to my vacation, but no more then if I had just taken them without the vacation time. The only good spammer is a dead one!! Have you hunted one down today? (c) 2005 I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot in Hell Co. ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: 50 Year Unisys Employee Retires Date: 28 Jun 2005 08:34:49 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: One important reason companies do not > keep around 40-50 year employees any longer is because that employee's > benefits package is usually so extravagant. For example, I recall one > fellow who had worked for Standard Oil more than twenty years back in > the 1960's, when I was there. Working there that long, he was > entitled to five weeks paid vacation every year ... You are correct -- companies hate dealing with that. They respond in different ways: 1) Simply eliminating those vacation and pension benefits. 2) Outsourcing the department. 3) Making life a living hell for the employee so he quits and gets no severance. 4) Transferring the employee across the country and/or to a dumpy location. Often such employees are pretty settled and it would involve uplifting kids at a bad time in their lives. Companies today no longer provide those nice benefits people used to enjoy. There was a good business reason for those benefits: it encouraged longevity which meant companies had experienced people and didn't need to retrain and rehire (which is expensive). But now companies don't care and look at their people no differently than desk chairs or computer monitors. Years ago the house organ for companies would proudly feature their veteran employees on the cover. No more. That fifth week of vacation isn't as much concern as pension costs (very high) or health benefits. Government agencies also had good benefits but they too are under fire to eliminate them. In some cases they "privitize" which is another way of saying 'outsource'. The employees lose all seniority and benefits. There was an article in Fortune Mag recently about corporate executives in their 50s who face the same problem. These very well paid high-powered people find themselves out of the street along with everyone else (including people they likely had a hand in putting out on the street). Age discrimination is now illegal, but corporations are creative are circumventing that. As you said, they make a new area restricted to the young turks so the veterans get squeezed out. The sad part is modern "outsourcing" companies offer next to nothing in benefits. Sometimes the workers aren't even 'employees', but reclassified as "independent contractors" which is even worse for most workers. Back in the Depression my mother got a job for a small outfit owned by what then was called a "skinflint" boss. If an employee erred and a letter was returned mis-addressed, the employee had to pay for the postage out of their own pocket. When the boss was there, he'd sit behind his roll top desk staring at the staff. But when he was on vacation -- which was often -- the atmosphere was much more relaxed and pleasant. Today the "boss" never takes a vacation. Companies monitor and record every keystroke, every screen, every phone call, and every restroom break. If you fail to meet quota you're out. If a customer has a tough problem that needs extra time, too bad. When I came of age I thought unions were too powerful -- they had a lot and seemed to be too greedy. But now the pendulum has swung the other way. We do need unions in many white collar jobs to protect workers. When corporate profits and CEO salaries are so damn high while workers' wages languish, something is out of balance and needs correction. [public replies please] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Even in the olden days of manual telephone service, operators were expected to keep up a pace of a certain number of calls per minute/hour. The supervisors would see that each operator had a large number of cord pairs up on calls. No certain number of cords, just an average which matched more or less the other operators. Now let's say an operator got some sort of very 'tough' call to handle; it took a few minutes extra to handle. Since operators were taught to 'overlap' (that is, pull down the cords on a finished call while installing a new call [new cord pairs] in the process) after a couple minutes into handling the tough call, her existing connections would have mostly finished and the cords come down, so in essence she was sitting there with 'nothing on her board' except the one tough call she was trying to complete. Sure as the world, that was the moment the supervisor would happen to walk past, and inquire, not necessarily in a gracious way, "what is going on here? You don't seem to stay as busy as your neighbors." It seems the supervisors could not understand that not all calls handled by the operators were routine: (with cord in hand) 'number please', (virtually toss the cord at the jack, start the ringing process) and say 'thank you'; then click off and move on to the next call in the never ending queue. Sometimes the operators _had_ to engage in conversation for a few seconds with a customer, and during that few seconds or maybe a minute of conversation her position would get de-nuded of other connections. And God forbid the customer had a _real_ emergency and the operator had to stay on the line with them for a minute or two, which of course they were trained to do. _An operator had a heart attack once while I was speaking to her_. I had called something 555-1212 to get information; the operator answered and took my request; apparently in the process of looking up the desired number, she was stricken; the line went silent, but I could hear people in the background talking, but it was muffled, but obviously a group of anxious people chattering. Curious, I just sat there trying to listen. After about a minute, someone else picks up the headset and says, "may I help you?" and I gave the request again, and got a very prompt answer. I asked what happened to the person who originally answered me? The new voice said to me, "it appears she had a heart attack, the medics are here now to take charge." My goodness! And Myrtle Murphy, an elderly lady who had been a phone operator for Illinois Bell all of her working career comes to mind. She was the very first _union steward_ in the Franklin Coin office in downtown Chicago. When Ms. Murphy started working for the company, it was not unionized -- in other words just like Sprint or Walmart today. She was approached by some people who asked her to be their representative at the CWA (Communications Workers of America), and she agreed. Many of her fellow employees laughed and mocked her, saying "no one will ever be able to organize the Bell ..." and the supervisors treated her like a pariah; and told the other 'girls' they had better stay away from Myrtle ... she is a trouble maker; associate with her and she will get _YOU_ in trouble as well. Well, the other operators did associate with her, and many of them signed the union cards she presented. And like Walmart, which doesn't hesitate to throw its weight around and make hassles in every community it enters, Illinois Bell threw a lot of its weight around also -- and these were the depression years when if you had a job at all you were very lucky -- and fought to keep the union away. So Lisa, the olden times were not much different than today. The same ugly corporations and the same ugly bosses in charge of things (I mean, is there a worker around anywhere who does not hate his supervisor?) but the modality is all that has changed. We don't call it 'the Bell' any longer, now we call it 'SBC' and the bosses all use ugly computers to keep the workers on their toes. But same difference. PAT] ------------------------------ From: nstrom@ananzi.co.za (Nathan Strom) Subject: Re: G3 for Dialup Users Date: 28 Jun 2005 06:22:06 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Patrick Townson wrote in message news:: > There have been some commercials on television lately I do not > understand at all. The announcer says, 'first there was dial up, > then there was accelerated dial up, now there is G3, which is > about the fastest you can go _without_ being on DSL or cable.' > Exactly what is G3 for dialup users? If I decided my cable internet > was too expensive, and decided to resort to 'G3 for dialup' what > would I get different than what I have now? I've never heard of it, but a Google search shows it's Netzero's new offering. Basically, it's just a standard 56K dialup or whatever, with some special software running on the client end. Think lots of extra caching on the local end, link prefetching, maybe some transparant HTTP proxy servers on the ISP end, and possible image compression. All in all, the same as "accelerated dialup" to me -- in short, a joke. If you're downloading files or doing anything else on the internet than browsing web pages, you won't notice a difference from standard dialup. From http://www.techsupportforum.com/showthread.php?t=57748: > 06-18-2005, 07:55 AM · #2 > Terrister > Moderator, Hardware Forum > This page explains it. http://account.netzero.net/s/landing?action=viewProduct&productId=iso-acc-monthly&cf=sellpage > It is standard dialup with caching. The speeds are the same as > normal dial up. The speed increase comes from storing > information(caching) on your hard drive so you do not have to > download it again. Hope this helps, Pat. Don't believe the hype :) ------------------------------ From: mc Subject: Re: Cardholders Kept in Dark After Breach Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 09:51:54 -0400 Organization: Speed Factory (http://www.speedfactory.net) >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: One problem with your list of >> requirements is that sometimes, in a family, one member of the family >> -- let's say the husband for example -- likes to use the net to look >> at some, well, 'perverted' stuff and charge his viewing of same to the >> family credit card. Surely the person paying the bills has the right to know what they're for! ------------------------------ From: Choreboy Subject: Re: DSL Speed Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 01:34:56 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Neal McLain wrote: > Choreboy wrote: >> A relative has a farm. His phone service comes in on 700 yards >> of ordinary telephone cable buried along his driveway. Last >> week he got Bellsouth DSL. It comes in on the same conductors >> as before, but I've seen speeds fifty times faster than dialup > And in a subsequent post, wrote: >> Between the CO and the customer, isn't voice service just bare >> wire? > Not necessarily. But let's clarify some terminology first. > I assume that: > - By "between the CO and the customer," you mean what's > commonly known as the "local loop." If only I had remembered the right term! > - By "bare wire" you don't really mean "bare" (as in > uninsulated); you're simply implying that there's nothing in > the wirepair, other than copper conductors, that would affect > the transmission of signals. Oops, I was thinking "not coaxial" and "bare" popped into my head. > Based on those assumptions, here's an attempt to explain "local loop": > it's a pair of metallic (usually copper) conductors between the > customer's premises and the telco's facilities. The conductors are > designated "ring" and "tip." These terms originated from the physical > configuration of the plugs used in old manual switchboards. Photo: > http://tinyurl.com/9pjla . Note that the term "ring," as used here, > does not mean "ringing the telephone." > The two conductors are usually twisted together, and contained inside > a cable along with several other wirepairs. At the customer's > premises, the conductors may run parallel (not twisted) in the drop > cable from the pole (or pedestal) to the building. > At the telco's end, the loop may terminate at the CO, or it may > terminate at a "digital loop carrier remote terminal" (DLCRT, or just > RT). Telcos often deploy RTs to provide POTS service to outlying > areas (e.g., new residential neighborhoods or business parks) in order > to reduce the number and/or length of wirepairs needed to provide > service to additional customers. Photo: http://tinyurl.com/dlj7o . I'll know to look for something the resembles the sermon billboard in front of a church. > Each RT is connected to a host CO, and from the point of view of the > customer, it's indistinguishable from the CO. POTS lines served from > the RT are switched at the CO; the RT simply relays signals back and > forth between the customer and the CO. Numbers are part of the same > NPA-NXX blocks as the host CO. Is it indistinguishable if the customer has a V.90 modem? I think I've read that an RT won't allow 56k dialups. > Each RT is connected to its host CO by one or more digital circuits. > Depending on the number of POTS lines needed, the digital connection > can be as simple as a single T1 implemented over two copper wirepairs, > or it can be some multiplexed combination of several T1s implemented > over coax, fiber, or microwave. See http://tinyurl.com/9oqru . Does an RT entail an extra A/D conversion? > Whether or not these digital circuits are part of the "local loop" is > a matter of some confusion: I've heard it both ways. For the purpose > of this explanation, I don't include them. > Now slightly restating the original definition, we can state: the > local loop consists of two copper conductors between the customer's > premises and the telco's CO or RT. > For POTS service, this copper pair carries an amazing number of signals: > - Balanced baseband analog voice signals in the range > 300 to 3000 Hz., carried in both directions simultaneously. > - Audio control signals carried in the same 300-3000 voice > passband: DTMF signaling tones, dialtone, ring, busy, fault > tones, etc. > - DC loop current resulting from a DC bias voltage ("battery") > applied at the CO or RT. Originally, this current was > necessary to operate the carbon microphones (or "transmitters" > as they were called) of older telephones. Modern telephones > don't use carbon mikes, but they still need DC operating power > for their transistor or IC circuits. Because this voltage is > applied directly across the talk circuit, it must be an > absolutely pure DC voltage (no noise, no ripple). Typical > battery voltages, applied at the CO or RT, are: > Tip = ground > Ring = -48 volts > - On hook/off hook status, implemented by interrupting the > DC loop current: > Loop open = no current = on hook. > Loop closed = current > 20 ma. = off hook. > - Rotary-dial pulses, implemented by interrupting the DC loop > current at specified intervals: > One pulse = "1" > Two pulses = "2" etc. > Ten pulses = "0" > - Caller ID data, carried as analog data in the voice passband. > > - Ring voltage to ring the customer's phone. The typical ring > voltage for a single-party line is 90 volts at 20 Hz, > asserted across the ring and tip conductors. In party-line > service, several alternatives have been used: > Different frequencies (up to about 70 Hz). > Different connections (tip-to-ground; ring-to-ground) > Different ring cadences (one long, two short, etc.) > Combinations of above. > All of the above signals are carried at frequencies below 4000 Hz. > Although the voice passband is limited to 300-3000 Hz, the actual > range of the audio channel extends to 4000 Hz. > The 3000-Hz cutoff represents the highest frequency necessary for good > voice communication. That may not be very good by modern hi-fi > standards, but it's fine for voice. > Dialup modems (data, fax, home-security, whatever) all utilize this > same frequency band. There are several modulation schemes floating > around, but they all do basically the same thing: they modulate the > data signals onto one or more analog audio carriers, which are then > carried over the loop in the 300-3000 Hz voice band. > Every audio signal arriving at the CO (or RT) is digitized at a rate > of 8000 samples per second before any further switching or > transmission takes place. This sampling rate is dictated by the > Nyquist Sampling Theorem, which states that the sampling rate must be > at least twice the highest frequency being sampled. See > http://tinyurl.com/474f9 > After sampling, each sample is quantized at one of 256 discrete > levels, and the resulting value is encoded as an 8-bit binary number. > The final result is a PCM data stream of 64,000 bits per second. This > data stream is then transported to the customer's ISP over the PSTN. > Note that dialup-modem data signals carried in the 300-3000 Hz voice > passband are not demodulated at the CO or RT; instead, they are > sampled at 8000 sps just like voice or any other audio signal. This > fact imposes an absolute theoretical maximum dial-up data rate of > 64Kbps. As other contributors have noted, it's impossible to attain > even that rate in practice due to synchronization errors between the > user's modem and the sampling rate. A carrier vor V.90 must have some very precise modulation. It's amazing that an 8kHz sampling can capture it well enough to be useful. > Note further that this 4000-Hz limitation is imposed by the CO (or RT) > equipment, not by the wires themselves. It's possible to use > frequencies above 4000 Hz for other signals. And that's exactly what > DSL does. At the CO, a separate piece of equipment, called a "Digital > Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer" (DSLAM) is connected ahead of the > voice processing equipment so that it can provide an independent path > for the DSL signals. Small DSLAMs can be installed in RTs. The DSLAM > acts as a modem at the telco's end of the loop: it communicates with > the customer's DSL modem using RF carriers in two frequency bands: > Uplink (Modem to DSLAM) 30- 110 KHz Downlink (DSLAM to Modem) 110-1100 > KHz > The DSLAM demodulates uplinked data carriers to recover the original > data stream. It then sends that data stream to the customer's ISP > over whatever data link the ISP has installed (which might even be > another DSL link). For downlink data, the DSLAM accepts data from the > ISP and modulates it onto a downlink carrier for transmission to the > customer's DSL modem. The maximum speed is limited by the speed of > the two data links, the equipment involved, and the policies of the > telco and the ISP. Images: Large DSLAM for CO installation: > http://tinyurl.com/7atcq Small DSLAM for RT installation: > http://tinyurl.com/7nobj They can bond copper loops to go as high as 27 Mbps! > NOTE THIS DISTINCTION: > - Dialup modem signals are carried to your ISP over the > PSTN as a 64Kbps digital representation of the analog > signal that your dialup modem originally generated. > - DSL modem signals are carried to your ISP as the actual > data stream your DSL modem started with. > Choreboy also asked or commented: >> Are there inline amps [between the CO and the customer]? > There are no inline amps, but there are plenty of other things that > can impair DSL signals (and, for that matter, POTS): > NOISE. Wirepairs inside a multipair cable are not individually > shielded (although the cable as a whole may be shielded). Each > wirepair is twisted so that inductive crosstalk from neighboring > wirepairs is cancelled out, but some residual crosstalk (particularly > from other DSL-carrying loops) may not be completely cancelled. > External signals, such as power-line transients or AM radio station > carriers, may be inductively coupled into the cable. Drop cables at > customer premises are usually not shielded; these cables are also > vulnerable to external noise sources, particularly from nearby > power-line transients. Twisting is like low-tech coax. It was advised when using a 300-ohm flat cable from a rooftop TV antenna. I imagine it could help for telephone drop cables. With one ISP, I kept dropping connections around lunch time. One day I had no trouble. I noticed the mill down the street was closed. The drop line to the guard shack comes from the same aerial terminal as mine. The guard shack would get a lot of calls at lunch time. I wondered if crosstalk from his ring signal was getting me. > All of these noise sources collectively impair the ability of the loop > to carry DSL signals. Local loop cables (trunk cables?) seem to deteriorate. Phone men seem to look for available pairs when customers complain of noise. I wonder if voltage from nearby lightning strikes might cause pinhole damage to the insulation of twisted pairs, and over the years it gets hard to find a good pair. > Noise can be mitigated by careful testing to track down noise sources, > and then by making appropriate repairs. Several manufacturers make > test equipment for this purpose; see http://tinyurl.com/7pnbz for an > example. I used a DMM to check milliamps. My noise came from a spade terminal in the wall jack. I cleaned off the patina and the noise was gone. Low tech! > SIGNAL ATTENUATION. Like any other electrical circuit, telco > wirepairs comply with a fundamental law of physics: the higher the > frequency, and/or the longer the wire, the greater the attenuation. > This situation results from the interaction between the interconductor > capacitance and the DC resistance of the conductors themselves. Taken > together, these two parameters cause the wirepair to act like an RC > circuit (textbooks frequently represent a wirepair as series of lumped > RC circuits; see http://tinyurl.com/cm5mn for an example). > Th is problem can be mitigated by careful selection of transmission > voltages and by judicious consideration of the tradeoff between loop > length and transmission speed. Ultimately, however, this situation is > one reason for the limitation on the length of loops that can be used > for DSL. > LOAD COILS. The frequency-dependent attenuation characteristics of > the loop (as described above) also affect voice band frequencies > (300-3000 Hz), resulting in rolloff of the higher frequencies of voice > signals. To solve this problem, telcos have traditionally installed > "load coils" at 6000-foot intervals on long (typically >18K feet) > loops. A load coil is a small inductor installed across the > conductors to cancel the affects of interconductor capacitance. > Although load coils reduce high-frequency rolloff within the voice > band, they cause severe attenuation above 4000 Hz. See > http://tinyurl.com/8njv3 . At DSL frequencies I would have thought coil impedance would be too high to matter. I don't quite grasp it. Load coils might be one reason a particular phone sounds distorted at a particular location. > This problem can be resolved by removing the load coils and/or by > restricting DSL service to loops without load coils. Of course, > removing the load coils brings back the original problem: rolloff in > the voice band. Furthermore, any attempt to remove load coils assumes > that the telco actually knows where they are (anyone who has ever > worked with telco outside-plant records will recognize the futility of > that assumption). Appropriate test equipment can be used to determine > if load coils are present, and to indicate their approximate > locations. > BRIDGED TAPS. In a typical telco distribution network, big multipair > "feeder" cables leave of the CO or the RT, and head off throughout the > service territory, often along main streets. Smaller (fewer wirepair) > distribution cables split off from the feeders to serve the customers > in a "serving area." As the distribution cables pass through the > serving area, "drop terminals" are installed at intervals. From these > terminals, drop cables feed individual buildings. A single-family > home is usually connected by a two- or three-pair drop; larger > buildings are connected by appropriately larger drop cables. > In areas where outside plant (OSP) is installed on utility poles, > telco drop terminals are called "aerial terminals" or "boots"; > typically, a terminal is installed at each pole. Images: > Aerial terminal: http://tinyurl.com/7qzan That's what somebody pointed out to me as an inline amp. If I could remember who it was, I'd correct him! > Aerial terminal: http://tinyurl.com/74y7y > Pole with terminal: http://tinyurl.com/7qqru > Drawing of interior: http://tinyurl.com/b62ej page 74 of 77 > In areas where OSP is buried, drop terminals are installed in > pedestals. In urban areas, telco peds are usually installed in > easements along rear-property lines. In rural areas, peds are usually > installed along roadways, at the edge of the right-of-way. Telco peds > are often placed in "ped clusters" near CATV peds, power peds, and > power transformers. > Images: Telco ped, closed: http://tinyurl.com/apd3y > Telco ped, open: http://tinyurl.com/8pok7 Ped > cluster: http://tinyurl.com/cqjk7 > Each drop terminal has: > - Two cable ports for the distribution cable: input and output. > When a drop terminal is installed, these ports are often > sealed as protection against water intrusion. These seals > make it virtually impossible to gain access to the individual > wirepairs within the distribution cable. As I recall, a phone man appeared to have an aerial terminal open after I lost phone service one day. He said he'd made a mistake and would try to figure out how to reconnect me. > - Several drop ports, one for each wirepair in the distribution > cable. These ports are usually implemented with screw > terminals or punchdown blocks. Across the street, a small trunk line (cable with lots of wire pairs) comes from the aerial terminal down a couple of feet to a fusebox on the utility pole. (I think the telco calls them something besides fuses.) The drop cables come out of that box. > Every wirepair appears at every drop terminal. When a drop is > installed, the installer connects it to the assigned drop port at the > nearest terminal; electrically, the drop is bridged across the > wirepair. But the portion of the wirepair downstream from the bridge > remains connected, and unterminated at the far end. These > unterminated downstream wirepairs have come to be known as "bridged > taps." > These unterminated wirepairs act like tuned-stub filters. Since > they're unterminated, arriving signals are reflected back; these > reflected signals interfere with the primary signals. In the extreme > case -- when the reflected signal is 180 degrees out-of-phase with the > primary signal -- the primary signal is severely attenuated. Offhand, that sounds like a stub of 1/4 wavelength. Could the modems could mitigate the problem by the frequency they negotiate? > This problem can only be solved by locating and removing bridged taps. > This can be an exceedingly difficult job if the distribution cable is > sealed at that point where it exits the drop terminal. > Test equipment, such as the Fluke 990 http://tinyurl.com/7pnbz , can be > used to determine if bridged taps are present, and if so, their > severity. If the effect of a bridged tap is "minimal" (Fluke's term, > not mine), it can probably be left in place. >> Is DSL modulated into some sort of analog signal? > DSL signals are modulated onto carriers in two bands: > Uplink (Modem to DSLAM) 30- 110 KHz > Downlink (DSLAM to Modem) 110-1100 KHz I wonder how they're modulated. >> It's hard to imagine carrying hig-frequency digital pulses on >> copper telephone lines. > Well, T1 circuits do just that. But carrying high-frequency pulses on > a POTS loop would present a different problem: overlap with the voice > passband. >> The farm appears to be 35,000 feet from the central office. My >> browser often shows downloads faster than 1.5 Mb/s (150kB/s). > If the farm is indeed 35,000 feet from the CO, then I'd have to > conclude that the loop between the telco and the farm is actually > connected to a DSLAM-equipped RT, not directly to the CO. Look for a > large metal box somewhere along the road between the farm and the CO. > It will have an electric meter; it will probably be set on a concrete > pad, and it might be surrounded by a security fence. >> On dialup, the farm couldn't negotiate modem speeds quite as >> fast as I could in town. I assumed the limitation was in the >> wire. That's why I was amazed to see that DSL seems to use the >> wire in the same way as dialup. Was I wrong to think the reason >> dialup data rates were slower at the farm was that the wire to >> the CO is longer? > I'm not sure that it is longer. See previous answer. >> I don't understand what kind of signal dsl uses to carry so much >> more data than dialup without needing broadband cable. > I hope I've answered that question. >> Ah, crosstalk! It seems to me that if DSL uses the same wire >> dialup used, the same crosstalk will be present. > Crosstalk is indeed present, but it's usually only a problem when two > DSL-carrying loops crosstalk to each other. >> Does a POTS line from the CO to a house carry multiple >> voices? Anyway, DSL at the farm uses the same line that >> the phones at the farm still use. > In current practice, there's usually just one analog voice channel per > loop. > Historically, telcos have used various "pair gain" schemes. In one > scheme, additional voice channels ride on RF carriers superimposed > across the primary voice channel. See http://tinyurl.com/9oqru . In > another scheme, a "phantom" channel is run on two loops, yielding a > total of three voice channels on two loops. As far as I know, these > schemes have been phased out by now, but I suppose there might be a > few still in service somewhere. > Of course, T1 circuits running on copper are still widely used today. > Drive down country roads, and you'll often see T1 repeaters spaced at > (approximately) one-mile intervals. Each T1 can carry 24 voice channels > over two copper pairs. But a T1 wouldn't normally go to a farm. > Photo: http://tinyurl.com/cgp6p . >> I have trouble understanding on the phone, and I often resort to the >> phonetic alphabet to be understood. I think the problem may be more >> in the typical quality of phones than in bandwidth. > I agree; however, the limited bandwidth is also a factor. > In a previous life, when I worked for a radio station, we sometimes > used phone patches for connections to remote locations. At each end, > we'd connect a "phone patch box" directly to the ring-and-tip of a > phone line. Then we'd dial up a connection with a conventional phone, > switch in resistors to keep the line open, and hang up the phones. > Voice quality wasn't as good as it would have been with a wideband > audio circuit, but it was certainly far better than it would have been > if we'd used the telephones themselves. More than adequate for a > sports or news report. I wonder if the phone patch box had adjustments to flatten the frequency response. I used to listen to Koss studio headphones (with liquid-filled cushions) plugged into the jack on the front of a stereo. One day it occurred to me that with 220-ohm series resistors, the impedance was too high for 32-ohm phones. I used resistors to make voltage dividers with an output impedance of 1 ohm or so. What a difference! With a phone line, I guess it's not just a question of impedance. It might need a graphic equalizer. > Of course, making a direct electrical connection to a phone line was > illegal back in those days (late 50s, early 60s). But we were on good > terms with the phone guys, so they just looked the other way. Could you have gone to the federal penitentiary? Was there a good reason for the law? >> If the telco owns the DSLAM, won't their investment cost depend on >> capacity? > Yes. But the equipment doesn't have to be installed all at once. > Once the initial investment in the infrastructure (cabinets, racks, > power supplies, etc.) has been made, circuit cards can be added as > needed (equipment manufacturers call this approach "scalable"). It's > the same approach telcos take to POTS. >> If they contract for the DSLAM service, won't they be charged >> according to traffic? > Telcos don't "contract for DSLAM service"; they contract with other > ISPs (e.g. Covad) who wish to offer their own DSL service over telco > loops. The telco charges them for the use of their loops. Telco's > claim they can't charge enough to recover their costs, but that's a > whole different story -- one that will precipitate a thread even > longer than this one. >> Think what would have happened if RG-59 hadn't been invented. >> Everybody would have used RG-6, which looks nearly the same but >> attenuates uhf much less. With better reception there would have >> been more uhf stations and less demand for cable. > As a former cable guy, I don't agree with that. Many UHF stations > depended on cable TV systems to distribute their signals throughout > their "specified zones" (which, back in the '60s and '70s, was a > 35-mile radius around the city of license). This was particularly > true in mountainous areas where cable T systems carried UHF signals > to specified-zone communities that were beyond the reach of their > transmitters. With a bow-tie antenna, a good UHF amp, a rotator, and RG-6U, we could receive so many channels that we weren't interested in cable. > Neal McLain Thanks, Neal. ------------------------------ 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 V24 #298 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Jun 29 00:59:46 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id BD7AB15073; Wed, 29 Jun 2005 00:59:45 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #299 Message-Id: <20050629045945.BD7AB15073@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 00:59:45 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.3 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,FOR_FREE, MAILTO_TO_REMOVE,MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: R TELECOM Digest Wed, 29 Jun 2005 01:00:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 299 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Wheelock Outdoor/Loud Noise Environment Ringer (Mike Riddle) VoIP Phone Home? (fiatlux) Re: Western Union History (Jim Haynes) Re: Western Union History (Wesrock@aol.com) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (Joseph) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (AES) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (Michael D. Sullivan) Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? (Danny Burstein) Re: 50 Year Unisys Employee Retires (Tony P.) Re: DSL Speed (nmclain@annsgarden.com) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Mike Riddle Organization: Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish & Short Subject: Wheelock Outdoor/Loud Noise Environment Ringer Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 21:10:17 -0500 Recently acquired an old Bell Systems outdoor/loud area ringer made by Wheelock. Number "KS-16301" stamped inside. Large cast iron or steel case, uses 110VAC for the ringer, signalled by 20Hz, 60Hz, or DC. Anyone have any source for wiring diagrams/options? N.B. Either this or something similar in external appearance was used for alert horns at SAC bases -- possible still in use at ACC bomber installations. Thanks, Mike Riddle mriddle%nospam@ivgate.omahug.org "To Reply Remove the Obvious" http://www.mikeriddle.com ------------------------------ From: fiatlux Subject: VoIP Phone Home? Date: 28 Jun 2005 11:11:12 -0700 Written by: Jason Canon Peach ePublishing LLC VoIP Phone Home? The movie Extra Terrestrial (ET) coined the phrase "phone home" and each year American's look for more cost effective ways to do just that. The past 10 years have seen the development and growing popularity of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technologies to achieve cost savings over the traditional circuit-switched telephone networks. The two dominate technologies used for VoIP are: (1) the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and (2) Peer-2-Peer (P2P). For business and educational institutions SIP VoIP solutions have produced substantial savings. For home voice users, however, SIP VoIP is still value challenged. A typical circuit-switched landline phone costs about $19.95 per month (plus tax). The good old American landline phone should be graphically depicted beside the word "reliable" in the dictionary. Not only does it keep working, even when all electrical power fails, but it can even provide you with a light to dial with. At $15 dollars per month SIP VoIP is still value challenged due to the lack of full support for E9-1-1 emergency services and of course the reliability issues inherent with using a real time application over a "best effort" network like today's Internet. Although few VoIP articles still reference Internet Request For Comments (RFC) 3714 "IAB Concerns Regarding Congestion Control," the technical challenges associated with VoIP are widely known. Further, even with the recent dubious edict by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that VoIP service providers will provision support for E9-1-1 within 90 days, this still leaves the reliability issues unresolved. The use of adaptive rate CODEC's to prevent congestion collapse is a swell idea if it applies to my neighbor's service but not my own. Using adaptive rate CODEC's to elicit voluntary user preemption has no appeal in the modern world. Technology is supposed to be getting better and it is clearly not better that users receive disconnects or degraded service quality in order to constrain network bandwidth consumption. Quality of Service (QoS) has been the four letter word of the Internet for a very long time. Yet, we know that real time applications such as video and voice are a mismatch for "best effort" service models. Cost savings are important, but not if they require users to accept backward technology leaps. After 9/11 the United States should have begun standardization efforts to insure that VoIP QoS levels would be equivalent to circuit-switched networks, especially where emergency E9-1-1 calls are concerned. The recent FCC order only requires that E9-1-1 call center traffic be properly routed. It does nothing to insure QoS of the connection once the call is completed. As for SIP VoIP in the home, there is too little incentive for savvy consumers to part with more of their hard earned communications dollars for an industry offering that simply does not meet the needs of the user. Until something concrete can be done to move SIP VoIP forward, service based on P2P such as Skype seems to be the only sensible choice on the kitchen table. Why should home users pay $15 or more per month for less reliable communications than they already have with their land line? Skype gives users the ability to experience "best effort" voice over the Internet for FREE. Could this be the reason why more than 125 million copies of Skype's P2P software has been downloaded? And for the occasions where interconnection with the existing circuit-switched telephone networks is required, Skype offers a very competitive 2 cents per minute interconnection rate. With Skype you can talk for 12 =BD hours interconnected to the phone system for the same cost as a basic rate SIP VoIP service. Until genuine changes are made to support SIP VoIP QoS there does not appear to be a convincing or compelling reason today for users to choose anything other than P2P VoIP services such as Skype to render Internet "best effort" home phone services. You can read the complete article and view associated graphics online at: http://canon.org/VoIP_Phone_Home.html. Copyright 2005 Peach ePublishing, LLC Jason Canon has authored numerous technical research papers including: photonic switching, gigabit networking, VoIP E9-1-1 and others. He is an expert author for EzineArticles.com. E-mail: Jason Canon at jmc@canon.org. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Western Union History Reply-To: jhaynes@alumni.uark.edu Organization: University of Arkansas Alumni From: haynes@alumni.uark.edu (Jim Haynes) Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 19:28:11 GMT In article , wrote: > [Other perspectives welcome. public replies please] I composed the following a few days ago and was going to take it to private email, which bounced. So here it is. Oslin also repeats the Western Union article-of-faith that the Bell System broke its agreement with W.U. when it began offering TWX service. And he accuses the U.S. govt., probably correctly, of favoritism toward ITT, which had something to do with the merger with Postal. One could say that Western Union's goose was cooked when they were offered the chance to buy the Bell patents and turned it down. Of course it was a perfectly reasonable decision for them. They were in the long distance communication business, and the early telephone wouldn't transmit very far. And it was fair enough at that stage to say the telephone was a curiosity rather than a useful business machine. Further they had the operational view that people brought them telegrams and their operators transmitted them and they delivered them. It was hard for them to understand that customers might wish to speak directly to each other (in an age when people of good breeding sent handwritten notes to invite their friends to meet with them, and to reply to such invitations). Their goose was cooked because the telephone was destined to outgrow the telegraph in bandwidth and distance, and would have the advantage of economy of scale. A second opportunity was lost when the government forced AT&T to divest its controlling interest in W.U. Without that we might have had a coherent national system of voice and record communication, instead of forcing the two so use separate plant facilities and compete with each other. Seems like Postal was the main beneficiary of that action, since it could not have competed effectively with the AT&T-WU combine. I presume AT&T didn't "really" violate any agreement with W.U. when it introduced TWX. Otherwise W.U. could have sued an won. W.U. could have started a competing service at that time, but they lacked the local loops it would have required, and would have had to put in their own or lease from Bell. Or maybe they considered it and found they couldn't make it pay. (Bell getting local loops for TWX at the marginal cost of loops for telephony; while W.U. would have had to construct them from scratch.) Following the tenure of Newcomb Carlton, Vail's hand-picked successor at W.U., the company seems to have gone through a long period of lackluster leadership. One who is more interested in business than I could see who were the directors at the time and perhaps what their motives were. Seems like I read somewhere that W.U. was once offered the opportunity to buy Teletype and turned it down. They didn't want to be in the manufacturing business. The merger with Postal is portrayed as being both government mandated and as being on terms very costly to W.U. If this is true then it is another instance of the government hobbling a company that was not in very good shape to begin with. W.U. did get some good people out of Postal -- their president W. P. Marshall and engineer Gilbert Vernam are two I can think of. W.U. got into the microwave business, which provided a lot more bandwidth than they needed. For whatever reason they were not able to sell their excess bandwidth to the TV networks. Maybe they didn't have the capital to serve the places the networks wanted to go; and again AT&T had the economy of scale to their advantage. W.U. could have done what MCI later did, selling bandwidth in competition with AT&T on high-traffic routes. AT&T put MCI through a bruising legal fight on that one, and maybe W.U. didn't have the stomach for it. And then W.U. was a member of the club of common carriers, while MCI was an outsider trying to get in. The government forced W.U. to divest their cable business. Then W.U. brought Telex to the U.S. This seems like a major mistake to me. It put them into head-to-head competition with TWX, and AT&T owned all the local loops. They couldn't profit from the ability of Telex to work internationally because they had been divested of their cable business. They had to buy a lot of switching equipment to establish the service, and it was equipment about to be obsoleted by electronic switching. Meanwhile AT&T proceeded to put TWX onto the voice switched network, where it was just a marginal cost. W.U. operated a lot of local telegraph offices long after they had ceased to pay for themselves. In some cases the FCC required the company to keep the offices open. W.U. should have had a plan to convert them to contract agencies; although the best way to do this would probably involve having the agencies use TWX. W.U. spent tons of money developing FAX technology. Not much ever came of it. They had their Desk-Fax machines, which relied on the model of using dedicated local loops and having customers send messages to the W.U. office for further transmission rather than direct to their destinations. Today's fax, very successful, makes use of technologies that were not available when W.U. was in the business and of end-to-end connections made possible by the excellence of the telephone system and by the Carterfone regulatory ruling. W.U. built the Plan 55 message switching system for the Air Force; but then after a few years it was replaced by AUTODIN which W.U. also supplied. I wonder if the lost a lot of money on Plan 55 because of the short life of the system and the amount of equipment that was made surplus. AUTODIN used computer switching technology and I suspect they took a bath on that because computers were generally overpriced and became obsolete in such a short time. And then there's the matter of software always turning out to be a lot more costly than expected. Then W.U. got into the business of remote data processing, but didn't make a go of it. I don't know what went wrong there; other companies succeeded (G.E. Information Services for one). They introduced a dialup data service where you could choose the bandwidth at the time you dialed the connection. This seems like a goofy thing to me. Some business machines were only capable of operating at one particular data rate anyway, so the availability of other rates at different prices was not useful. It must have been very costly to provide a switching system that accomodated variable bandwidth selection. (It would be fairly easy to do today now that transmission is digital; but at the time it was not easy.) They did other goofy things in the consumer area, such as CandyGrams and Gift America. Maybe the failure of those didn't entail much of a writeoff; I don't know. And they tried some rather pitiful service offerings in the voice business. 've always wondered if perhaps W.U. was too New York centric in its management attitudes. I know that AT&T had the practice of bringing in middle managers on temporary duty from the Bell operating companies. Thus they kept headquarters aware of what like was like out in the faraway regions, and took the systemwide perspective back with them when they returned to their home companies. I wonder if W.U. did anything like that with its managers. Also AT&T had the New York Telephone Co. to run the business in the city, whereas W.U. had its corporate headquarters and its major operating activity in the same building in the city where it did most of its business, along with most of its R&D organization. There may have been a tendency to overlook the problems out in the hinterlands in favor of those at 60 Hudson St. That's enuf for now. jhhaynes at earthlink dot net [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I always thought most of the smaller, less profitable Western Union offices were run as contract agencies; the 'agent' (or person who put up the money to pay the rent on the location, the phone bills and the payroll) was also the person who got the twelve to eighteen percent commission Western Union paid on 'sent paid' and 'received collect' traffic through the office. WUTCO did supply the big, bulky, very noisy, each one weighed a ton teletypewriter machines for the locations, and the telco circuits to operate them. The business was usually marginal enough that the agent would pay his clerks minimum wage and stay financially alive by locating his office around other 24/7 facilities such as bus stations and train depots. _If_ the agency started making any _real_ profit as evidenced by the monthly reports the agent had to submit to the company, then WUTCO would yank the agency back and turn it into a corporate location, although usually retaining the agent and his employees as WUTCO employees instead. I know Greyhound Bus has done that since its beginning: _if_ there is any money to be made, then we will make it; if not, then _you_ run it as an agency location, living off the 12-15 percent commission we agreed to pay you along with whatever sundries and other items you sell there on your own, assuming _we_ approved of that part as well. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Wesrock@aol.com Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 14:02:21 EDT Subject: Re: Western Union History In a message dated 27 Jun 2005 09:55:40 -0700, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com writes: > But I don't understand how WU missed the explosion of computers. It > had a microwave system in place. It even put up a satellite. I think > it could've been a long distance carrier, perhaps a niche player, but > a carrier just the same -- with a good name. They were a long distance carrier at one time, complete with 10XXX code. I used them a time or two, and I believe I knew of a business that was pic'ed to them, probably through a reseller. Wes Leatherock wesrock@aol.com wleathus@yahoo.com ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 17:22:12 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Tue, 28 Jun 2005 05:11:46 GMT, Dale Farmer wrote: > Except it doesn't work. Better to put scanners up and listen to their > transmissions. Which with digital encryption will be a mighty task! ------------------------------ From: AES Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 19:34:08 -0700 Organization: Stanford University In article , Dale Farmer wrote: >> So what legitimate reasons are there to use a cell phone jammer? (Note >> that I said legitimate, not legal.) Maybe built into an auto, just enough signal strength to be effective inside the auto, comes on when the ignition is turned on and the gearshift is anywhere but Park? (with maybe a DISABLE button accessible only from the back seat, which has to be held in continuously to keep the jammer off) I'm not seriously proposing this, just noting that some might think it a legitimate safety requirement. ------------------------------ From: Michael D. Sullivan Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 02:43:02 GMT Fred Atkinson wrote: > On Sun, 26 Jun 2005 23:21:42 -0400, mc wrote: >> Not as far as I know. The Communications Act of 1934 gets amended >> all the time, but it is still, as far as I know, the basis of radio >> regulation in this country (and, yes, television and cell phones >> are, physically, radio). Did it go away when I wasn't looking? > Well, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was enacted. I had assumed > that it replaced the Communications Act of 1934. I guess I was wrong > on that assumption. Do we have any lawyers on here that can clarify > that issue? No, the 1996 Telecom Act did not replace the Communications Act of 1934; it amended some sections of it and added some new sections to it. I am a wireless telecom lawyer in a Washington, D.C. firm, and those are facts, not legal opinions. As to jammers, they are completely illegal to import, manufacture, or use in the United States (unless you are an arm of the federal government or have an experimental license permitting jammer use for testing purposes -- which would require you not to jam licensed cellular signals. In fact, the FCC just reissued a public notice to that effect. Entitled, "Sale or Use of Transmitters Designed to Prevent, Jam or Interfere with Cell Phone Communications is Prohibited in the United States," Document # DA-05-1776, and dated June 27, 2005, it's available at . Here's the text: [FCC Public Notice Letterhead] DA-05-1776 June 27, 2005 Sale or Use of Transmitters Designed to Prevent, Jam or Interfere with Cell Phone Communications is Prohibited in the United States In response to multiple inquiries concerning the sale and use of transmitters designed to prevent, jam or interfere with the operation of cellular and personal communications service (PCS) telephones, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is issuing this Public Notice to make clear that the marketing, sale, or operation of this type of equipment is unlawful. Anyone involved with such activities may be subject to forfeitures, fines or even criminal prosecution. Cellular and PCS telephones provide valuable wireless communications services to the American public for business and personal communications. Recently, however, the FCC has seen a growing interest in devices -- called 'cellular jammers' or 'cell phone jammers' -- designed to deliberately jam or disrupt wireless communications. Inquiries about the use of cellular jammers are often accompanied by comments that the use of wireless phones in public places is disruptive and annoying. Advertisements for cellular jammers suggest that the devices may be used on commuter trains, in theaters, hotels, restaurants and other locations the public frequents. The Communications Act of 1934, as amended, and the FCC rules prohibit the manufacture, importation, marketing, sale or operation of these devices within the United States (See Section 302(b) of the Communications Act, 47 USC 302a(b) and Section 2.803(a) of the FCC's rules, 47 CFR 2.803(a)). In addition, it is unlawful for any person to willfully or maliciously interfere with the radio communications of any station licensed or authorized under the Act or operated by the U.S. Government (See Section 333 of the Communications Act, 47 USC 333). Further, Section 301 of the Act, 47 USC 301, requires persons operating or using radio transmitters to be licensed or authorized under the Commission's rules. Parties violating the provisions of the Communications Act and/or FCC rules mentioned above may be subject to the penalties set forth in 47 USC 501-510. Monetary forfeitures for a first offense can be as much as $11,000 a day for each violation and could subject the offender to criminal prosecution. Equipment may also be seized by the United States Marshals and forfeited to the U.S. Government. For additional information, contact Brian Butler, Spectrum Enforcement Division, Enforcement Bureau, at (202) 418-1160 or brian.butler@fcc.gov. By the Enforcement Bureau, Office of Engineering and Technology, and Wireless Telecommunications Bureau. ============================= As the Public Notice says, if you have any questions, call the FCC's spectrum cop, Brian Butler. He's the dedicated spokesperson on this issue for the Enforcement and Wireless bureaus as well as the Office of Engineering and Technology. Personally, I don't see much ambiguity in what the FCC said. Jammers are illegal. Period. Michael D. Sullivan Bethesda, MD (USA) (Replace "example.invalid" with "com" in my address.) ------------------------------ From: dannyb@panix.com (danny burstein) Subject: Re: Where to Buy a Cellular Phone Jammer? Date: 28 Jun 2005 15:23:25 -0400 In Dale Farmer writes: >> So what legitimate reasons are there to use a cell phone jammer? (Note >> that I said legitimate, not legal.) > The only reason I can think of offhand is for a bomb squad to use to > block one possible source of remote detonation. I started to type > that a hostage situation would also be one, but then it occurred to me > that there may be non-hostage innocents trapped in there as well, who > might want to call the police for assistance in escaping. The various hostage rescue groups have access to cellular blockers, as well as contact numbers at the cellcos, to do various degrees of restricting cellular usage. The main reason is to prevent the hostage takers from being able to talk to other folk, but there are plenty of secondary ones as well. Oh, and when they _really_ need to block cellular communications, they have been known to physically shut down the local cell towers. _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] ------------------------------ From: Tony P. Subject: Re: 50 Year Unisys Employee Retires Organization: ATCC Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 20:36:48 -0400 In article , hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com says: > The Philadelphia Inquirer did a feature article on a man, age 68, who > was retiring from Unisys after 50 years of service. (He started with > Unisys precedessor Burroughs). > It's extremely rare today for someone to work 50 years for the same > corporation. In 1986 Unisys had 123,000 employees, now it has 36,400. > Only 15% of Americans 65 and over are still working and the average > person retiring today has been with his employer 10 years, not 50. I'm a state employee. Our legislature just handed us a bon mot that says most of us won't be able to retire until 70, and at that we won't get the same benefit as those before us. It's funny -- our director of finance is retiring end of this year. We were joking about it. I said she should be happy that we're financing her retirement. My boss said she should invite us over for the dinner we paid for. It was too funny but demonstrated that retirement systems are in fact Ponzi Schemes. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: One important reason companies do not > keep around 40-50 year employees any longer is because that employee's > benefits package is usually so extravagant. For example, I recall one > fellow who had worked for Standard Oil more than twenty years back in > the 1960's, when I was there. Working there that long, he was > entitled to five weeks paid vacation every year, and first choice of > the available times for vacation. He _always_ managed to parlay that > five week vacation into _six_ weeks by scheduling his vacation times > around weeks which had holidays in them, which entitled him to an > extra vacacation day. For example, vacation during the week which > contained Memorial Day, also the week which contained Independence Day > and Labor Day got him _three extra days_ right there. So he would then > take those three extra days vacation and either use them for the > Monday <-> Wednesday of Thanksgiving Week when the entire office got > two days (Thursday and Friday) off anyway. Or, depending on how the > calendar worked out that year, maybe he would take those three days > during Christmas/New Years week. > Needless to say, Standard Oil got quite annoyed at having to legally > pay him for not being there for large gaps of time. Eventually, they > had a whole bunch of people in that situation and of course, if you > can find an excuse for letting the person go, then you also have to > pay them for the _company's share_ of their 401-K plan or whatever, > _plus_ their severance pay, _plus_ their pension, etc. And there is > absolutely no reason a good supervisor cannot find an excuse -- _any_ > lawful excuse will do, to can you if they wish to do so. That is one > reason most companies do not like to have employees around that long; > to their way of thinking, the person has gotten just to expensive for > them. Hell, with the comp time I generate I get about 6 weeks a year. U.S. employers are very stingy about time off. All comes down to that Calvinist work ethic. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think you meant to say the 'Protestant Work Ethic' instead of 'Calvinist'; but anyway, don't be so harsh with John Calvin. He was an 'okay' guy ! PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 21:10:54 -0600 From: nmclain@annsgarden.com Subject: Re: DSL Speed Choreboy wrote: >>> Between the CO and the customer, isn't voice service >>> just bare wire? > Neal McLain wrote: >> Not necessarily. But let's clarify some terminology first. >> I assume that: >> - By "bare wire" you don't really mean "bare" (as in >> uninsulated); you're simply implying that there's nothing in >> the wirepair, other than copper conductors, that would affect >> the transmission of signals. > Oops, I was thinking "not coaxial" and "bare" popped into my head. Actually, it is possible for a local loop to be "bare." It's called "open wire" -- bare uninsulated conductors attached to glass or ceramic insulators supported by crossarms. Phone companies used open-wire lines for years. As recently as 2003, the Union Pacific RR still had a few open-wire circuits in use. http://tinyurl.com/dzu5z (Figures 12-15). >> Each RT is connected to a host CO, and from the point of view of the >> customer, it's indistinguishable from the CO. POTS lines served >> from the RT are switched at the CO; the RT simply relays signals >> back and forth between the customer and the CO. Numbers are part of >> the same NPA-NXX blocks as the host CO. > Is it indistinguishable if the customer has a V.90 modem? I think > I've read that an RT won't allow 56k dialups. Some RTs allow V.90 modems; some don't. Apparently, yours does (assuming that's the reason the farm can be so far from the CO and still get DSL). A good tutorial on this issue is at http://www.aztek-eng.com/TIA-paper.PDF . >> Each [digital loop carrier] RT is connected to its host CO by one or >> more digital circuits. Depending on the number of POTS lines >> needed, the digital connection can be as simple as a single T1 >> implemented over two copper wirepairs, or it can be some multiplexed >> combination of several T1s implemented over coax, fiber, or >> microwave. See http://tinyurl.com/9oqru . > Does an RT entail an extra A/D conversion? Some do; some don't. The tutorial cited above describes the differences. >> Note that dialup-modem data signals carried in the 300-3000 Hz voice >> passband are not demodulated at the CO or RT; instead, they are >> sampled at 8000 sps just like voice or any other audio signal. This >> fact imposes an absolute theoretical maximum dial-up data rate of >> 64Kbps. As other contributors have noted, it's impossible to attain >> even that rate in practice due to synchronization errors between the >> user's modem and the sampling rate. > A carrier vor V.90 must have some very precise modulation. It's > amazing that an 8kHz sampling can capture it well enough to be > useful. Frequently it can't, which is why your modem downgrades to a slower speed. >> All of these noise sources collectively impair the ability of the loop >> to carry DSL signals. > Local loop cables (trunk cables?) seem to deteriorate. Phone men seem > to look for available pairs when customers complain of noise. I > wonder if voltage from nearby lightning strikes might cause pinhole > damage to the insulation of twisted pairs, and over the years it gets > hard to find a good pair. Nearby lightning strikes likely would do a lot more than cause "pinhole damage." But you're right about telco cables deteriorating over time. Water intrusion can cause severe interference ("every time it rains, I get static on my telephone!"). >> LOAD COILS. The frequency-dependent attenuation characteristics of >> the loop (as described above) also affect voice band frequencies >> (300-3000 Hz), resulting in rolloff of the higher frequencies of voice >> signals. To solve this problem, telcos have traditionally installed >> "load coils" at 6000-foot intervals on long (typically >18K feet) >> loops. A load coil is a small inductor installed across the >> conductors to cancel the affects of interconductor capacitance. >> Although load coils reduce high-frequency rolloff within the voice >> band, they cause severe attenuation above 4000 Hz. See >> http://tinyurl.com/8njv3 . > At DSL frequencies I would have thought coil impedance would be too > high to matter. I don't quite grasp it. Any other reader want to tackle this question? > Load coils might be one reason a particular phone sounds distorted at > a particular location. I doubt that, but I guess it's possible. >> In areas where outside plant (OSP) is installed on utility poles, >> telco drop terminals are called "aerial terminals" or "boots"; >> typically, a terminal is installed at each pole.... > That's what somebody pointed out to me as an inline amp. If I could > remember who it was, I'd correct him! Maybe that somebody was pointing to a cable TV amplifier. They look somewhat like aerial terminals, except that cable amps are usually aluminum rather than black. http://www.sbe24.org/archive/c24jun98.asp#six Drawings 8 and 9. >> Each drop terminal has: >> - Two cable ports for the distribution cable: input and output. >> When a drop terminal is installed, these ports are often >> sealed as protection against water intrusion. These seals >> make it virtually impossible to gain access to the individual >> wirepairs within the distribution cable. > As I recall, a phone man appeared to have an aerial terminal open > after I lost phone service one day. He said he'd made a mistake and > would try to figure out how to reconnect me. Those damn OPS records again! >> - Several drop ports, one for each wirepair in the distribution >> cable. These ports are usually implemented with screw >> terminals or punchdown blocks. > Across the street, a small trunk line (cable with lots of wire pairs) > comes from the aerial terminal down a couple of feet to a fusebox on > the utility pole. (I think the telco calls them something besides > fuses.) The drop cables come out of that box. Probably just a junction box. >> These unterminated wirepairs act like tuned-stub filters. Since >> they're unterminated, arriving signals are reflected back; these >> reflected signals interfere with the primary signals. In the extreme >> case -- when the reflected signal is 180 degrees out-of-phase with the >> primary signal -- the primary signal is severely attenuated. > Offhand, that sounds like a stub of 1/4 wavelength. Could the modems > could mitigate the problem by the frequency they negotiate? I believe the DSLAM can select both the downstream frequency (that it uses) and the upstream frequency (that it tells the customer's DSL modem to use). Perhaps some other reader can give us a more complete answer. >> DSL signals are modulated onto carriers in two bands: >> Uplink (Modem to DSLAM) 30- 110 KHz >> Downlink (DSLAM to Modem) 110-1100 KHz > I wonder how they're modulated. Can any other reader answer this question? >> In a previous life, when I worked for a radio station, we sometimes >> used phone patches for connections to remote locations. At each end, >> we'd connect a "phone patch box" directly to the ring-and-tip of a >> phone line. Then we'd dial up a connection with a conventional phone, >> switch in resistors to keep the line open, and hang up the phones. >> Voice quality wasn't as good as it would have been with a wideband >> audio circuit, but it was certainly far better than it would have been >> if we'd used the telephones themselves. More than adequate for a >> sports or news report. > I wonder if the phone patch box had adjustments to flatten the > frequency response. I don't think it did, but that was a long time ago. >> Of course, making a direct electrical connection to a phone line was >> illegal back in those days (late 50s, early 60s). But we were on good >> terms with the phone guys, so they just looked the other way. > Could you have gone to the federal penitentiary? AT&T prohibited any direct electrical connections to its network, but I don't think anybody ever went to jail for violating it -- AFAIK, all AT&T could do was pull the plug. > Was there a good reason for the law? The story of how AT&T was forced to relax its no-connections rule, and how subsequent events eventually led to AT&T's ultimate (if still pending) demise, are perennial topics here on TD. Tom Farley's "Telephone History Series" relates the story in detail at http://www.privateline.com/TelephoneHistory/History1.htm . The direct-connection subplot starts on page 10 http://www.privateline.com/TelephoneHistory4/History4A.htm . Mike Sandman's website has a history page (intermixed with pitches for products he's selling) at http://www.sandman.com/telhist.html . Mike is a long-time sponsor of TD, so feel free to buy something from him. >>> Think what would have happened if RG-59 hadn't been invented. >>> Everybody would have used RG-6, which looks nearly the same but >>> attenuates uhf much less. With better reception there would have >>> been more uhf stations and less demand for cable. >> As a former cable guy, I don't agree with that. Many UHF stations >> depended on cable TV systems to distribute their signals throughout >> their "specified zones" (which, back in the '60s and '70s, was a >> 35-mile radius around the city of license). This was particularly >> true in mountainous areas where cable T systems carried UHF signals >> to specified-zone communities that were beyond the reach of their >> transmitters. > With a bow-tie antenna, a good UHF amp, a rotator, and RG-6U, we could > receive so many channels that we weren't interested in cable. Well, obviously you don't live in a place like Mahanoy City Pennsylvania, Tuckerman Arkansas, or Astoria Oregon -- places where it simply isn't possible to get any station -- UHF or VHF -- off the air. Cable TV started in all three of those communities in 1948, and all three still claim to have been first. Neal McLain [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And don't forget Independence, KS where until cable came along (via Time Warner in the 1980's) our television reception consisted of TWO channels; channel 6 and channel 9, but only one of those two if you wanted a good picture. Most people had very _high_ antennas on their house if they wanted television, and they compromised by using a 'rotor' attached to their TV set to turn the rooftop antenna one way or the other. If they could not afford the rotor, then they left the antenna turned sort of in the middle and lived with that. We got one station from Tulsa, Oklahoma (80 miles almost straight south) and one station from Joplin, Missouri (90 miles more or less straight east.) Around here, 'big city' (as in presence of television stations) means Wichita, KS which is 110 miles northwest, or Topeka KS which is about 150 miles straight north, and we could not get those stations very well at all in those days. 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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Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of TELECOM Digest V24 #299 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Jun 29 14:54:44 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (Postfix, from userid 11648) id CD4EA150A6; Wed, 29 Jun 2005 14:54:43 -0400 (EDT) To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V24 #300 Message-Id: <20050629185443.CD4EA150A6@massis.lcs.mit.edu> Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 14:54:43 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org (TELECOM Digest Editor) X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on massis.lcs.mit.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.1 required=2.0 tests=BAYES_00,MAILTO_TO_REMOVE, MSGID_FROM_MTA_SHORT autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Spam-Level: Status: RO TELECOM Digest Wed, 29 Jun 2005 14:55:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 300 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Pakistan Internet Link Repairs Will Take Three Days (Lisa Minter) New Worm Lures Users With 'Breaking News' (Lisa Minter) Microsoft Unveils Cut Rate Windows XP (Lisa Minter) Science is Perfect! (Stephen Greene) CVS Limits ExtraCare Info Access (Monty Solomon) IESG Approves Publication of Anti-Spam Mechanisms (Peter Godwin) Cellular Jamming? Think Again (Joseph) Iran's Holiest Shrine Opens to Virtual Pilgrims (Lisa Minter) Sony BMG Cuts Deal With Mashboxx (Lisa Minter) T-Mobile Cuts Deal With Google (Lisa Minter) Publishing Executive Caught up in Child Porn Trap (Lisa Minter) Bluetooth Device on Two PCs (YesBalala) Re: DSL Speed (W Howard) Re: Western Union History (Lisa Hancock) Re: Using Comcast to Host Web Site (William Warren) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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: Pakistan Internet Link Repairs to Take Three Days Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 10:34:42 -0500 Pakistan's data and Internet links with the outside world will be affected until at least the weekend as repairs are carried out on a faulty undersea fiber-optic cable, telecommunications officials said on Wednesday. The cable developed a fault late on Monday, cutting the country's international data links, including the Internet, and causing chaos for businesses across the country. Satellite back-up systems were brought on-stream on Wednesday, restoring some Internet access. "Data connectivity will not be as fast as it normally is but we've provided satellite back-up," said Mashkoor Hussain, vice president of operations at Pakistan Telecommunication Co. Ltd., which operates the data link. Telephone links had not been affected, he said. "Two satellite back-up systems have been provided from 9 a.m. (0400 GMT) to ensure that banks and other businesses like airline ticketing can be provided with Internet data facilities as normal as possible," he said. Hussain said an attempt to repair the cable -- Pakistan's sole international cable Internet link -- early on Wednesday had failed. A repair ship from the company that laid the cable was due to set off from Dubai on Wednesday afternoon and it should reach the site, about 50 km (30 miles) off the coast, on Thursday afternoon. Repair work was then expected to take 48 hours, he said. "The repair work is major, the cable will have to be taken out and repaired," another PTCL official said. Hussain said the repairs would not have an impact on neighboring countries, including India, which are also linked up to the faulty cable. Those countries had back-up cables, he said. Business people in Pakistan said things were a bit better but they were still facing serious difficulties. "The situation has slightly improved today but we're still facing a lot of problems. Most of our work is being carried out manually," said a foreign bank dealer. Records of bank transactions were not being logged electronically, a local bank dealer said. "A large backlog has built up and it's increasing all the time. It's a big disaster," the second dealer said. Nasir Ali of the private Air Blue airline said his company's Web-based booking system was working, but very slowly. "PTCL has given us some relief but our system is still very slow," Ali told Reuters. The head of Pakistan's Internet Service Providers' Association, V.A. Abdi, said the providers normally had total bandwidth of 600 megabites at their disposal but now they had just 34. Pakistan has about 10 million Internet users, he said. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: New Worm Lures Users With 'Breaking News' Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 00:46:18 -0500 Scarlet Pruitt, IDG News Service LONDON--Internet users alarmed over news of Michael Jackson's death or dark conspiracies behind the demise of Pope John Paul II should perhaps just be worried that they received another new e-mail worm. Researchers at security firm Sophos today warned of the spread of the Kedebe-F e-mail worm, which carries a variety of subject headers and messages touting breaking news. However, users who click on the attached file could have their security software and firewall disabled, according to Sophos. Possible messages include "someone sent me this document which is stolen from a secret government body ... about John Paul's death." Other messages try to entice recipients into opening the attached file by claiming Michael Jackson has died,(lurid picures attached!) Osama bin Laden has been captured by U.S. soldiers, (more pictures of him being led away by police!) or the MyDoom e-mail worm author has been arrested by Microsoft,(still more lurid pictures!) Sophos said. Nothing New Using supposed "breaking news" to persuade users to open a message and click on an attachment is a long-favored method among virus writers, according to Graham Cluley, Sophos's senior technology consultant. "This is a fairly common trick. It doesn't take Albert Einstein to think this one up," Cluley said. Although the worm is currently slow-spreading, Cluley flagged it as an example of the kinds of social-engineered threats that users should watch out for. The worm spreads via e-mail or peer-to-peer file sharing networks. It appears to be targeted at both news hounds and geeks, with mentions of the MyDoom worm, Cluley said. Also, it spreads on P-to-P networks by copying itself to the directory for sharing information on the server, purporting to be source code for the Sasser worm. Users are advised to update their antivirus software to fight the threat. Copyright 2005 PC World Communications, Inc. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. *** 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, PC World Communications, Inc. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My suggestion is to _never_ open any email attachments; just return them to the sender unopened with a note saying you do not accept those things. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Microsoft Unveils Cut Rate Windows XP Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 00:47:56 EDT By THERESA BRAINE, Associated Press Writer Beset by rampant counterfeiting across Latin America, Microsoft on Tuesday introduced a cut-rate, reduced version of Windows XP that is aimed at first-time, low-income computer users who might otherwise run pirated software. XP Starter Edition helps users learn to use a mouse and other computer devices, but strips out networking, limits the number of programs that can open and won't work on top-level processors. The program "is for people who want access to legal software," said Microsoft Mexico General Director Felipe Sanchez Romero. The company sees a large potential market, given that 83 percent of Mexicans don't have personal computers. The company says most novice users don't need the advanced functions and it says it has designed the bottom-tier version of XP to be "an affordable and simple introduction to personal computing." Microsoft launched the Spanish language version of the program at a news conference in Mexico City that featured several partners, including a state-owned lending agency, the main phone company Telmex and local computer manufacturers Texa, Lanix and Hergo. The software will be available only pre-installed on machines, not as a boxed product. Microsoft has not offered it in the United States or western Europe. The company earlier had released versions in Thailand, India, Russia, Malaysia and Brazil -- other markets where counterfeiting is common. A report by the Gartner consulting company last year criticized the product for limiting upgrade opportunities as people gain expertise. Sanchez Romero said last week that about 65 percent of the software used in Mexico is pirated. Even some small local computer makers include counterfeit versions of Microsoft Office on their machines and counterfeit software is sold openly at hundreds of impromptu stalls on Mexico City sidewalks. While mainline computer makers usually include Windows, customers who want to buy a legal boxed version of Windows XP Home must pay more than $300 - almost a month's wage for the average Mexican worker. A boxed package of XP Pro costs about $500 at major computer stores in Mexico City. The ubiquity of pirated Windows software also may have slowed Mexico's adoption of a Windows rival, the open-source software Linux, which has grown more rapidly in other Latin American nations. Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Stephen Greene Subject: Science is Perfect! Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 06:21:31 GMT Organization: EarthLink Inc. -- http://www.EarthLink.net Mark Crispin wrote: > http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from > voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para > bellum. You must be a janitor there. Science has been corrupted by politics, ideology, and economics from day one. The vast majority of scientists cannot afford the expensive educations, equipment and facilities they must have (on TOP of making a living.). These are BIG bucks. And if the scientists don't find what the people who are putting up the bucks (almost always large corruptions, directly and indirectly) want them to find, they find themselves flipping burgers at McDonalds, and blacklisted to boot. As for politics, it's almost impossible to seperate it from economics, but I recall reading about all of the scientists who lost their jobs and their reputations in the latter part of the 19th century for insisting that particles smaller than an atom existed. When was the last time you heard of a scientist winning the Noble Prize for discovering or developing something that hurt a major corporation? Or a scientist in the employ of a major corporation (the vast majority) who published findings that hurt that corporation's business? Who funds the major educational institutions? The corporations. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 03:49:02 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: CVS Limits ExtraCare Info Access After Expose By Marion Davis, Staff Writer The CVS Corp. has cut off Web access to ExtraCare card holders' detailed purchase information after a consumer group showed reporters how easily an intruder could log into the system and find out, say, how many condoms or enema kits someone's bought. CVS has issued about 50 million of the loyalty cards, which allow the drugstore chain to track each customer's purchases and, in exchange, provide a 2-percent rebate on those purchases, along with customized coupons. To log into your account on CVS.com, all you need is the card number, your ZIP code, and the first three letters of your surname. Even now, anyone with that information can easily find out the card holder's home address, phone number, and total purchases each quarter. But until last week, the Web site also allowed customers to request a detailed purchase report to be emailed to them -- to any address they put in. http://www.pbn.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/115431 CVS ends Web site feature over privacy concerns An unauthorized person could track other customers' purchases by e-mail News Story by Todd R. Weiss JUNE 23, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Retail drugstore chain CVS Corp. has temporarily disabled a feature on its Web site that allowed an unauthorized person to improperly obtain customer purchase records via e-mail. In a statement yesterday, Woonsocket, R.I.-based CVS acknowledged that it had disabled a feature that allows registered users of its CVS ExtraCare loyalty cards to track purchases made under "flexible spending accounts" (FSA) set up through their employers. The loyalty cards offer discounts to shoppers who register for the cards and allow CVS to gather information about their purchases. More than 50 million customers use its ExtraCare loyalty cards, CVS said. http://www.computerworld.com/databasetopics/data/story/0,10801,102716,00.html ------------------------------ From: Peter Godwin Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 16:38:18 +0200 Organization: Internet Society Subject: IESG Approves Publication of Anti-Spam Mechanisms IESG APPROVES PUBLICATION OF ANTI-SPAM MECHANISMS AS EXPERIMENTAL RFCs Reston, VA - 29th June 2005 - The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) has approved two groups of documents as experimental RFCs for proposed anti-spam mechanisms. RFCs to be entitled 'Sender Policy Framework (SPF) for Authorizing Use of Domains in E-Mail' and 'Sender ID: Authenticating E-Mail' describe two different approaches to domain-based authorization for systems sending mail. The current document approvals are part of ongoing activities within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to explore new technical solutions that combat the problem of spam. Experimental RFCs are not standards -- they are specifications that are published for the general information of the Internet technical community. While many proposals for domain-based authorization have been under consideration, no consensus has yet been reached concerning a single technical approach. The IESG does not endorse either of the two mechanisms documented in the experimental RFCs - their publication is intended to encourage further discussion and experimentation in order to gain experience that can be used to write future standards in this space. While some solutions based on both mechanisms have already been deployed, the IETF cautions that an experimental phase is essential before moving towards standards because they affect such a significant part of the Internet infrastructure. Given the importance of the worldwide e-mail and DNS systems, it is critical that future standards support their continued stability and smooth operation. At the same time, the IETF continues to consider other ways in which standards measures can be used to combat spam. Such measures will most likely need to work alongside social and legal mechanisms. Examples of other IETF anti-spam activities include: * consideration of a proposal to use cryptographic signatures to authenticate e-mail senders. * consideration of a draft for a protocol that would enable operators to communicate details of spam and phishing incidents in an automated real-time manner. This protocol (draft-jevans-phishing-xml-00) allows operators to have the information needed to take action against those sending spam or mounting phishing attacks. * publication of RFC 3865, which provides a mechanism that legitimate commercial e-mailers can use to mark messages. This standard may provide a tool for governments and service providers to use when labeling e-mail. The IETF also published RFC 4096, which gives advice to regulatory authorities considering using the subject line of messages for mandatory labels. NOTE TO EDITORS: Texts of the related Internet Drafts are available here: Sender Policy Framework (SPF): http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-schlitt-spf-classic-02.txt Sender ID: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-katz-submitter-01.txt http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-lyon-senderid-core-01.txt http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-lyon-senderid-pra-01.txt Texts of the RFCs will be available here when published: http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html The IETF (http://www.ietf.org), which has provided leadership in the development of Internet standards for nearly 20 years, is a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual. The technical work of the IETF is done in its working groups within areas managed by Area Directors (ADs). The ADs are members of the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). ABOUT ISOC The Internet Society (http://www.isoc.org) is a not-for-profit membership organization founded in 1991 to provide leadership in Internet related standards, education, and policy. With offices in Washington, DC, and Geneva, Switzerland, it is dedicated to ensuring the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of people throughout the world. ISOC is the organizational home of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and other Internet-related bodies who together play a critical role in ensuring that the Internet develops in a stable and open manner. For over 13 years ISOC has run international network training programs for developing countries and these have played a vital role in setting up the Internet connections and networks in virtually every country connecting to the Internet during this time FOR FURTHER DETAILS: Peter Godwin Communications Manager, Internet Society E-mail: godwin@isoc.org 4, rue des Falaises 1205 Geneva Switzerland ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Cellular Jamming? Think Again. Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 05:54:31 -0700 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com http://www.rcrnews.com/news.cms?newsId=23199 FCC Re-iterates Cell-Phone Jammers Are Illegal WASHINGTON-People who want to use cell-phone jammers to get rid of annoying mobile-phone use should think again. It is against the law. Those found using, selling, manufacturing or distributing cell-phone jammers could be subject to an $11,000-per-day fine and seizure of their equipment by the United States Marshals, warned the Federal Communications Commission. "In response to multiple inquiries concerning the sale and use of transmitters designed to prevent, jam or interfere with the operation of cellular and PCS telephones, the FCC is issuing this public notice to make clear that the marketing, sale or operation of this type of equipment is unlawful. Anyone involved with such activities may be subject to forfeitures, fines or even criminal prosecution," said the FCC. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Iran's Holiest Shrine Opens to Virtual Pilgrims Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 10:37:03 -0500 Visiting Iran's holiest Shi'ite Muslim Shrine is now just one click away thanks to a new Internet service for those who cannot visit in person. Shi'ite Muslims all over the world can make a virtual pilgrimage to the tomb of Imam Reza in the northeastern city of Mashhad by connecting to www.aqrazavi.org. "It is for those impatient Shi'ites who want to feel permanently connected to the eighth Imam," the supervisor of the shrine wrote on the site. Shi'ite Muslims believe Imam Reza was the eighth successor to the prophet Mohammad who was allegedly poisoned in 817 while traveling through Mashhad, then a tiny village. Mashhad has since grown into Iran's second biggest city, pulling in much of its income from about two million pilgrims who visit the shrine each year. Some of Iran's most senior clerics already have Web sites, posting religious edicts on the Web. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Sony BMG Inks Deal With P2P Firm Mashboxx Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 10:39:00 -0500 Music giant Sony BMG has finalized its deal with the legal file-sharing network Mashboxx, two days after a U.S. court dealt a blow to Mashboxx's unauthorized rivals such as Grokster. Mashboxx, headed by former Grokster president Wayne Rosso, is a peer-to-peer file-sharing network that requires users to pay for copyrighted songs. The companies said on Wednesday that Sony BMG songs will cost $0.99 each, in line with the price charged by Apple's market-leading iTunes online music store. Unlike iTunes, users will be able to preview entire tracks for a limited number of plays for free. Mashboxx is designed to work closely with the technology company Snocap, headed by Napster founder Shawn Fanning, which identifies songs by their digital "fingerprint" and determines if they are copyrighted. The efforts of Snocap and Mashboxx got a boost from the U.S. Supreme Court this week. The court ruled that Grokster could be held liable for copyright infringement, in part because it had taken no steps to prevent users from sharing copyrighted music and movie files. Sony BMG Chief Executive Andy Lack told Reuters after the Grokster ruling that he had hopes that unauthorized peer-to-peer services would change their tune by utilising technology like Snocap's. "There's an opportunity to employ lots of different technologies that legitimise these file-sharing services," he said. "A lot of them didn't want to come to the table until this ruling." Snocap has deals in place with all four major music labels -- Vivendi's Universal Music, Sony BMG, EMI and Warner Music. Rosso said on Wednesday that negotiations are under way with the other music majors as well as a number of independents. Sony BMG is a 50-50 joint venture between Sony Corp (NYSE:SNE - news) and Bertelsmann. (Additional reporting by Derek Caney in New York) Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: T-Mobile Teams Up With Google for Instant Mobile Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 10:41:48 -0500 Deutsche Telekom's mobile arm T-Mobile will use Web search leader Google as the starting point for its clients who surf the Internet on their mobile phones, T-Mobile said on Wednesday. The Google deal is part of a campaign in which T-Mobile, Europe's second-largest mobile operator, will offer full access to the Internet on its phones, abandoning the "walled garden" concept in which operators hand-pick Web sites. "With the Google homepage we want tell our customers from the first moment that they are carrying with them the Internet they know from home," said T-Mobile board member Ulli Gritzuhn at a news conference in T-Mobile's Bonn headquarters. The moves follow the years-long failure by mobile operators to convince subscribers to use their mobile phones for more than phone calls and text messages. With falling call prices, they need their clients to use their phones for more. Many customers have shunned mobile Internet services such as T-Mobile's old "t-zones" or market leader Vodafone's "Live!," often finding them complicated and expensive. As part of the Internet campaign, dubbed "web'n'walk," T-Mobile will also launch mobile devices with larger displays, better suited to the Web, and will offer cheaper tarriffs to encourage Internet usage, Gritzuhn said. Web'n'walk will launch in July in Germany and Austria, and later this year in Britain, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. Gritzuhn said T-Mobile expected a high six-digit number of subscribers to use web'n'walk by the end of 2006, and aimed to generate additional revenue of 10 euros per user per month through the offering. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Subject: Publishing Exec Indicted on Child-Porn Charges Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 00:49:21 -0500 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A former publishing executive who was a member of New York's state education board has been indicted on child-pornography charges, U.S. authorities said on Tuesday. Robert Johnson, 59, who was publisher of Long Island's Newsday newspaper from 1986 to 1994, faces up to 50 years in prison and a fine of up to $750,000 for downloading child pornography including a movie titled "Real Child Rape," U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said. He also faces obstruction-of-justice charges for erasing more than 12,000 files from his company computers after learning of the investigation in May 2004. Johnson resigned abruptly that month as chief executive of the financial-printing firm Bowne & Co. Inc. and gave up his seat on New York State's Board of Regents, citing personal reasons. Federal authorities said Johnson erased the computer files after a Bowne executive told him he was under investigation. A Bowne spokesman directed inquiries to Johnson's personal attorney, who was not available for comment. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation has led to the arrest of nearly 6,000 people on child-pornography charges in the past two years. Many of them were found through the records of a Belorussian company that handled payments for several child-pornography sites. "Those who believe that cyberspace can conceal their online child pornography purchases are mistaken," ICE Deputy Special Agent Marvin Walker said in a statement. Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. ------------------------------ From: YesBalala Subject: Bluetooth Device on 2 PCs Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 13:57:00 -0400 I have a portal Bluetooth USB adapter which is shared between my office and home PC, to exchange data to my PDA phone. From my PC, I can discover, assign the passphase, and resync the data. Then when I come back home, I will need to do the discover again, and assign the passphrase in order to work. Then, when I am back to the office, will have to do discovery again. This holds true even if I am using the same passphase. As far as I understand, the device address is the only thing to identify the device. Then how came with the same passphase, I cannot access the device from different PC? Is there anyway that it will work, so I don't need to buy another adapter? ------------------------------ From: whoward@login2.srv.ualberta.ca (W Howard) Subject: Re: DSL Speed Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 05:52:27 UTC Organization: University of Alberta In article , wrote: > Choreboy wrote: >>> Each RT is connected to a host CO, and from the point of view of the >>> customer, it's indistinguishable from the CO. POTS lines served >>> from the RT are switched at the CO; the RT simply relays signals >>> back and forth between the customer and the CO. Numbers are part of >>> the same NPA-NXX blocks as the host CO. >> Is it indistinguishable if the customer has a V.90 modem? I think >> I've read that an RT won't allow 56k dialups. > Some RTs allow V.90 modems; some don't. Apparently, yours does > (assuming that's the reason the farm can be so far from the CO and > still get DSL). A good tutorial on this issue is at > http://www.aztek-eng.com/TIA-paper.PDF . Many RTs do not maintain signal phase when multiplexing many signals onto one pair. Doesn't much matter for voice, but high-speed modems use phase modulation so it matters a lot for them. >>> [ more snippage ] >>> LOAD COILS. The frequency-dependent attenuation characteristics of >>> the loop (as described above) also affect voice band frequencies >>> (300-3000 Hz), resulting in rolloff of the higher frequencies of voice >>> signals. To solve this problem, telcos have traditionally installed >>> "load coils" at 6000-foot intervals on long (typically >18K feet) >>> loops. A load coil is a small inductor installed across the >>> conductors to cancel the affects of interconductor capacitance. >>> Although load coils reduce high-frequency rolloff within the voice >>> band, they cause severe attenuation above 4000 Hz. See >>> http://tinyurl.com/8njv3 . If the load coil is installed between the conductors, it would cause low-frequency rolloff, not decrease high-frequency rolloff. This could flatten the total frequency response curve but also requires boosting the whole signal to make up for all those rolloffs. >> At DSL frequencies I would have thought coil impedance would be too >> high to matter. I don't quite grasp it. > Any other reader want to tackle this question? I betcha they aren't plain inductors. For use at those rather low frequencies, they are probably wound on some iron core, and were designed to do the right thing for voiceband frequencies. For a long time, it didn't matter how they behaved at 500 kHz because telco did not intend to have 500 kHz signals on the wires. For the curious, current flowing through an iron-core inductor tries to induce little current loops in the iron. Higher frequencies induce physically smaller loops. So the iron core is sliced or powdered to make sure no piece of it is small enough to hold a current loop of the frequencies of interest -- those current loops are lost energy for the signal. If the cores were designed to be OK for 4 kHz, they could absorb most of the energy at 40 or 400 kHz (and convert it to heat). ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Western Union History Date: 29 Jun 2005 06:21:17 -0700 Wesrock@aol.com wrote: > They were a long distance carrier at one time, complete with 10XXX > code. I used them a time or two, and I believe I knew of a business > that was pic'ed to them, probably through a reseller. Yes, they were. I do remember some advertising, but IIRC it was rather short lived. But what happened? Jim Haynes wrote: > I composed the following a few days ago and was going to take it to > private email, which bounced. So here it is. Thanks for making your post public. You make a lot of good points and others should have the chance to read it. > One could say that Western Union's goose was cooked when they were > offered the chance to buy the Bell patents and turned it down. Of > course it was a perfectly reasonable decision for them. ... At the time they made the decision, the telephone had a long way to go technically before it would become widespread. Companies make buy/don't buy decisions like that all the time. Usually what is brought doesn't offer very much. > I presume AT&T didn't "really" violate any agreement with W.U. when it > introduced TWX. Otherwise W.U. could have sued an won. It may have been a handshake verbal agreement, not a formal one. Obviously not enforceable, but not necessarily ethical for AT&T. > Following the tenure of Newcomb Carlton, Vail's hand-picked successor > at W.U., the company seems to have gone through a long period of > lackluster leadership. One who is more interested in business than I > could see who were the directors at the time and perhaps what their > motives were. Oslin doesn't seem to think too much of WU's leaders through those years. In contrast, AT&T tried to have strong leadership oriented toward innovation and growth. I sense the ex-railroad leaders of WU were more of a "this is our service, take it or leave it". (Not all RR mgmt had that attitude--many were quite progressive.) > Seems like I read somewhere that W.U. was once offered the opportunity > to buy Teletype and turned it down. They didn't want to be in the > manufacturing business. Again that is a decision companies make all the time. IBM varied over the years between making some components and farming them out. IBM had a lot of trouble with buying vaccum tubes in its early days -- radio tubes just weren't up to digital needs. IBM considered making their own and experimented with this; they developed better tubes. But they decided to show the existing makers what could be done and bought from outside. (Note -- it took MANY years until transistors were cheaper than tubes). > The merger with Postal is portrayed as being both government mandated > and as being on terms very costly to W.U. If this is true then it is > another instance of the government hobbling a company that was not in > very good shape to begin with. ... I think that is a very important point. Many people think that because AT&T was a regulated common carrier it would be 'guaranteed' nice profits. We see by the WU example and the railroads that being in that status is by no means any guarantee. Excessive and ridiculous govt regulation ruined the railroads. It was one thing to force providing a subset service at below cost "for the social good", but another to make the whole enterprise run at below cost. > W.U. got into the microwave business, which provided a lot more > bandwidth than they needed. For whatever reason they were not able to > sell their excess bandwidth to the TV networks. Maybe they didn't > have the capital to serve the places the networks wanted to go; and > again AT&T had the economy of scale to their advantage. W.U. could > have done what MCI later did, selling bandwidth in competition with > AT&T on high-traffic routes. AT&T put MCI through a bruising legal > fight on that one, and maybe W.U. didn't have the stomach for it. And > then W.U. was a member of the club of common carriers, while MCI was > an outsider trying to get in. I tend to agree that as a regulated common carrier, WU didn't want to try to push into AT&T's as MCI did. The govt probably would've hit WU hard. But I wish I knew more about their microwave system -- what it did for them and what it didn't. > The government forced W.U. to divest their cable business. Which seems unfair. > W.U. operated a lot of local telegraph offices long after they had > ceased to pay for themselves. In some cases the FCC required the > company to keep the offices open. W.U. should have had a plan to > convert them to contract agencies; although the best way to do this > would probably involve having the agencies use TWX. I suspect it was both FCC and unions that forced the local offices to stay open. Ironically, I am not aware of any pressure on the Bell System to provide or not provide public business offices. > 've always wondered if perhaps W.U. was too New York centric in its > management attitudes. ... Interesting point. Thanks again for your response. I'm coming to the conclusion that (1) Western Union's management and staff was old and tired, perhaps because of seniority, unions, and cutbacks. In a declining business, the best or younger people pick up and go elsewhere, the lesser or older ones stay. If you were a bright person in 1970, my guess is that a Western Union facility might have seen a little stale compared to the rest of the world (though they were developing computer systems, see below). (2) WU technically kept missing the boat, being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong technology, as described above. Being kind of a traditionalist, I have patronized a lot of organizations "past their prime" and it's very sad to see a once proud thriving company now tired and tattered -- literally and figuratively. I've talked about this a lot on this newsgroup because I've seen some old proud companies (like IBM and Verizon) rebuild themselves and stay healthy yet others decline and die. I find WU of interest because despite being very old, it was in a very thriving field -- data communications. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I always thought most of the smaller, > less profitable Western Union offices were run as contract agencies; > the 'agent' (or person who put up the money to pay the rent on the > location, the phone bills and the payroll) was also the person who got > the twelve to eighteen percent commission Western Union paid on > 'sent paid' and 'received collect' traffic through the office. In 1980 WU had both contract agents and local offices. The local office in one small city was a dumpy little place with some frames and a single Teletype in the back. In 1980 the bulk of their business was money transfers. The contract agents didn't need a Teletype for that, they merely used an 800 number to call WU and WU used WATS lines to call out. Agents had a password card called "BINGO" to validate a money transfer. Basically in that time most WU activity was operators taking requests for money transfers either directly from customers or agents, entering them into the computer, and another operator passing the information along by voice. There was a little Mailgram and traditional service. Most traditional telegrams were read over the phone by another agent. I think back then a Telegram had a formal status to it similar to a Certified Letter; that is, it constituted a legal notice; I don't know if that status still exists for any Telegrams sent today. Businesses were still using Telex to some extent, esp for overseas work where telephone still cost a lot of money. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 11:15:09 -0400 From: William Warren Subject: Re: Using comcast to Host Web Site autogoor@yahoo.com wrote: > I developed a web site and would like to host it with my own computer > at home. I am thinking using Comcast Cable broadband as my ISP. Does > Comcast allow web host? Anyone has experience? Anyone has any other ISP > suggestions? I am in California. > Thanks. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Did you ask Comcast about their rules > on this? PAT] Comcast has been blocking port 80 (HTTP) for a while now, and they've recently started blocking port 25 (SMTP) as well. IMNSHO, it's only a matter of time before they start blocking all syn packets and charging extra for ANY incoming connection, but for now you can do it with some workarounds. In short, if your flavor of Comcast is like mine, you can't host a server unless you pay extra or are willing to employ some dynamic port mapping service. However, they do provide web hosting for customers, so if your aim is to host a web site and you don't care which computer it uses, that would work. If you're more interested in operating your own server, I suggest you sign on as a junior system administrator at any organization that will have you: you'll have better hours than if you do it at home. William, who was once woken at 3 AM by a System Admin in California who wanted to help me fix my mailing loop problem *RIGHT NOW*. ------------------------------ 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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