---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message-ID: <nnestu$sm6$1@news.albasani.net> Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 06:26:07 +0000 (UTC) From: Bob Prohaska <bp@www.zefox.net> Subject: Re: Alternatives to AT&T DSL service Frank Stearns <franks.pacifier.com@pacifier.net> wrote: > To Dave and the OP: any WISPs (wireless ISPs) in your areas? A few > years back I moved to semi-rural Utah and that's all they had (not > even any DSL this far out). I was not keen on the idea of wireless, > but needed a connection -- particularly as I was also going VOIP for > the phones. I was so disgusted with Centurylink in my old location > that I never wanted to deal with them again, ever, and they're the > copper provider here. > > After some growing pains during the first year I can say now that I > love the system. My connection to the tower that's 3 miles away is > capable of 60 MBpS (though I'm only paying for 10 @ $35/month and > with VOIP there is no phone bill). The LAN connection I have to my > brother's house using similar hardware (Ubiquity) can do 300 > MBpS. He's 1000 feet away. I suspect that wireless would require a rather formidable antenna tower to obtain useful line of sight range. The neighborhood is populated by trees fifty and more feet high. From the rooftop only sky is visible, and not much of that. There are wireless ISPs around, but far as I can tell they service folks outside wireline range and tend to charge more than wireline rates. I'm not looking for particularly high speed; 1.5MB/sec is fast enough, but I'd like static addresses to simplify running some hobby servers. I'd also like to keep my telco-powered landline, to have connectivity when the power goes down. This afternoon I spent some time on the phone with AT&T while the line was slow. The CSR clearly didn't know much, but he did agree to open a service ticket for a tech visit Saturday afternoon. The usual ping time (DSL modem to AT&T peer) is normally ~50 ms. A few times per hour a single ping will take 1 sec or so, and once or twice a day ping times will exceed 2 sec for intervals of several minutes. During the tech support call ping times were around 3 sec for a span of about one hour before returning to normal for the rest of the evening. Does this behavior ring a bell with anybody? The copper has been a known troublemaker in the past, with similar intermittency. However, that problem only affected voice, not DSL. It's been suggested the modem is "too old", but I can't reconcile that notion with self-test results (all good) and the spontaneous correction observed. But, the modem _is_ eleven years old. It's a Cayman 3546, firmware 6.4.0 (build R2). If anybody knows where to find a firmmware upgrade that might be worth trying. Thanks for reading and all your ideas, bob prohaska ------------------------------ Message-ID: <1CCC346C-70F3-4185-9F51-96C0C7B49ED9@roscom.com> Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 11:13:03 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> Subject: Anti-theft kill switches in smartphones just got a little less creepy Anti-theft kill switches in smartphones just got a little less creepy Some of the largest smartphone vendors and mobile carriers in the US say they have hit a milestone in the use of privacy-friendly anti-theft tools. The 16 members of the Smartphone Anti-Theft Voluntary Committee said Tuesday that as of the end of the month, all smartphones they ship and activate in the US will not only be pre-installed with anti-theft options including remote wipe, remote lock, and restore-on-recovery, but will also give owners the option to disable those tracking and anti-theft tools if desired. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/26/phone_maker_antitheft_tools/ ------------------------------ Message-ID: <868D600E-9B63-4372-81AF-26896F5C270B@roscom.com> Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2016 23:10:29 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> Subject: Smile for the Phone, Creep That nonlethal weapon, the smartphone, can deliver justice. But only if you can unlock it. by Juliette Borda I was assaulted the other evening when I was strolling along the High Line. Maybe groped is the more physically accurate word, but given the nature of the violation and the feelings of anger and helplessness it kicked off, I can't help considering it an assault. It happened a little after 7 p.m. on a brutally humid evening, but a promising one. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/nyregion/smile-for-the-phone-creep.html ------------------------------ Message-ID: <008a01d1eac3$2adc2d90$809488b0$@nc.rr.com> Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 20:33:32 -0400 From: "Bob Goudreau" <BobGoudreau@nc.rr.com> Subject: Re: Microsoft Confirms Windows 10 New Monthly Charge Lisa Hancock wrote: > But the key issue here is that businesses want to _choose_ for > themselves whether to lease or purchase, not having [the choice] > forced on them as M/S apparently is doing. For some business, for a > variety of reasons, leasing is better, for others, purchase is > better. (Just as some businesses choose to purchase the buildings > they occupy while others lease them.) Just as a commercial real estate landlord is under no obligation to sell its property instead of renting it out to tenants, a commercial software provider is under no obligation (absent government coercion) to sell its wares instead of offering them as a subscription-based service. No doubt some potential customers would prefer to buy instead of rent/subscribe, and they would probably even prefer a purchase cost of $0 if they had their druthers. But it's not their property, so they don't get to set the terms. If they don't like the terms that the owner is offering, they are free to decline the offer and take their business elsewhere. If you prefer not to use Windows 10 Enterprise, alternatives include a vast ecosystem of companies offering Linux-based enterprise solutions, for example. >> Heck, my wife's employer is the world's largest privately-held >> software firm, and virtually their entire revenue stream comes from >> software subscriptions and associated services, not one-time >> sales. So Microsoft will hardly be blazing a trail by offering >> Windows 10 Enterprise as a subscription-based service. The large >> companies that use Windows 10 Enterprise (which, remember, is not a >> consumer-level product) are already used to that pricing model for >> all sorts of other enterprise software they use. > I don't know who your wife's employer is, but I must respectfully > disagree. I do know that in the mainframe world, many once > independent vendors were bought out by a large company which now has > a near monopoly on independent mainframe software. Why this isn't > an anti-trust issue I don't know--it sure seems like it is. Anyway, > many of the software products are stable and haven't been advanced > in decades, but are still used by mainframe customers. None the > less, the prices charged for them are extremely high-- thousands of > dollars per year. Seems to me that a functionally stabilized > product should have a modest lease charge. I'm not sure which statement you're disagreeing with. For the record, my wife works at SAS Institute Inc., which is well documented as the largest privately held software company, and which earns most of its revenue from licensing (not selling) its software to customers. If you're taking issue with my statement that "the large companies that use Windows 10 Enterprise... are already used to that pricing model for all sorts of other enterprise software they use", then you seem to have agreed with, not refuted, that point with your observation about yearly lease charges for mainframe software. So to sum up: Mr. Horne implied that the prospect of MS licensing some of its enterprise software on a subscription basis was some sort of new and iconoclastic development. Garrett Wollman demonstrated that, on the contrary, it has been a common business model for many decades. It's hardly surprising that a company striving to increase its penetration in the enterprise market would adopt such a proven industry-standard go-to-market approach. Bob Goudreau Cary, NC ***** Moderator's Note ***** Actually, you inferred that I implied it! ;-) Bill Horne Moderator ------------------------------ Message-ID: <20160731211903.GA4256@telecom.csail.mit.edu> Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 17:19:03 -0400 From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> Subject: Is there a VoIP service that will serve a Quintum Tenor AX? As part of my new job, I have a stock of Quintum AXM2400 units on hand. It would be nice to have a VoIP service which will provide dial tone to it, so that I could test units and phones. If any reader knows of one, please tell me. TIA. Bill -- Bill Horne (Remove QRM from my email address to write to me directly) ------------------------------ Message-ID: <cd6e0648-3fb7-4698-a796-2037006b8828@googlegroups.com> Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 12:40:00 -0700 (PDT) From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org> Subject: History--convention communications sixty years ago Old Western Union employee newsletters* described the work involved in serving a national political convention and the 1950s and early 1960s. Sixty years ago (1956), the press sent about ten million words of news stories for the Democratic National convention in Chicago; usually it was about five million words. A Western Union operator would type the news story into a teleprinter for transmission. They needed 200 operators to handle the load. One operator still dispatched articles via Morse. The photographs showed teleprinter operators jammed into a small room, shoulder to shoulder, front to back. Operators could be men or women, in a time when most jobs were classified as to being for solely men or women. After the convention, Western Union assigned four representatives to follow each candidate (president and vice-president of each party) to act as coordinators between the candidate, reporters, and Western Union. The 1964 Democratic convention, held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, required special preparations since Atlantic City was not on a main telegraph trunk line. They had to install 82 special circuits and add 250 people to the normal staff of 15. That convention required 25 supervisors and 134 teleprinter operators for press transmissions. To deliver telegrams, 75 boys were recruited from local high schools. They would have to track down an addressee out of 75,000 people in the convention halls and hotels. The 1964 conventional also began the use of Telex, WU's switched teleprinter service. Not mentioned was whether AT&T's competing TWX service was used, too. While the convention delegates got to enjoy strolls on the boardwalk and visits to the beach, Western Union personnel were busy in a cramped basement telegraph office sending and receiving a heavy flow of messages. Western Union once offered a special service, Public Opinion Message, where someone could send a discounted telegram to a state capital or Washington, DC. The 1964 convention generated 65,000 POM messages. This service was easy to provide since Western Union had a receiving office in every state capitol building and Washington. Citizens used telegrams to express their political views well into the Nixon era. The newsletter said serving a convention was financially a break-even effort at best but was done as a public service. Western Union once provided temporary offices to serve various special events. When Princess Grace married Prince Rainer in Monaco, WU handled the 100,000 words the press sent. When the Boy Scouts held a national jamboree with thousands of boys camping out, Western Union set up a tent to send and receive messages from home and also money transfers for the Scouts. Fast forward to today--how do modern print reporters submit their stories to their newspapers and receive email instructions? Presumably, reporters type up their story on a laptop, but how does it get uploaded and transmitted? * TGN041, TGN043, TGN086, TGN119. ------------------------------ Message-ID: <6C39FAF8-70A5-4F17-81EF-E1A388B38969@roscom.com> Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 11:35:52 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> Subject: There are limits to two-factor authentication There are limits to 2FA and it can be near-crippling to your digital life By Kapil Haresh As a graduate student studying cryptography, security and privacy (CrySP), software engineering and human-computer interaction, I've learned a thing or two about security. Yet a couple of days back, I watched my entire digital life get violated and nearly wiped off the face of the Earth. That sounds like a bit of an exaggeration, but honestly it pretty much felt like that. Here's the timeline of a cyber-attack I recently faced on Sunday, July 24, 2016 (all times are in Eastern Standard): http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/07/there-are-limits-to-2fa-and-it-can-be-near-crippling-to-your-digital-life/ ------------------------------ Message-ID: <E15E286E-BD8F-4ABC-B12A-93544AAA9386@roscom.com> Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2016 09:07:05 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> Subject: Yahoo and the Online Universe According to Verizon In amassing Yahoo, AOL and other online services, Verizon is preparing for the day when its most important clients are advertisers, not users. By DAVID GELLES Verizon Communications' $4.83 billion acquisition of Yahoo has the technology cognoscenti scratching their heads. What does Verizon, the country's biggest wireless company, see in an internet also-ran? Fortune criticized "The Problem With Verizon-Yahoo." T-Mobile's chief executive, John Legere, derided the deal as a "slippery slope." The chief executive of Sprint, Marcelo Claure, said that when telecommunications companies try to get into the content business, "history has proven that every single one of them has failed." http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/31/business/media/yahoo-and-the-online-universe-according-to-verizon.html ------------------------------ Message-ID: <72D5245E-46A3-46BD-B71D-DA86AAB06537@roscom.com> Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2016 13:26:14 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> Subject: Chines Group to Pay $4.4 Billion for Caesars' Mobile Games The deal with Caesars Interactive Entertainment is a sign that investors are willing to pay increasingly large sums for smartphone games. By Paul Mozur HONG KONG - Gambling may be illegal in mainland China, but that is not stopping Chinese tech investors from betting on casino-style mobile games. In the most recent example in a growing trend of big deals for smartphone-based games, a consortium of Chinese investors led by the game company Shanghai Giant Network Technology said in a statement on Saturday that it would pay $4.4 billion to Caesars Interactive Entertainment for Playtika, its social and mobile games unit. Caesars Interactive is controlled by the owners of Caesars Palace and other casinos in Las Vegas and elsewhere. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/01/business/dealbook/china-caesars-mobile-games-playtika.html ------------------------------ ********************************************* End of telecom Digest Mon, 01 Aug 2016