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The Telecom Digest for July 8, 2013
Volume 32 : Issue 149 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
Re: Remedies for Better Cellphone Signal and Quality (John Levine)
T-Mobile to Pay $308 Million for More Spectrum (Monty Solomon)
What It's Like to Get a National-Security Letter (Monty Solomon)
With Montana's Lead, States May Demand Warrants for Cellphone Data (Monty Solomon)
Dangers of Distracted Walking (Monty Solomon)
Re: Disruptions: Mobile Competition Shifts to Software Design (T)

====== 31 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======

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Date: 6 Jul 2013 17:09:38 -0000
From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Remedies for Better Cellphone Signal and Quality 
Message-ID: <20130706170938.53382.qmail@joyce.lan>

>Remember the Sprint "pin drop" TV ads? Could a cellular company
>differentiate their service by offering quality audio?

Yes.  Would enough people be willing to pay for it to make it a viable
business?  Don't be silly.

You can get much better audio quality at the cost of higher latency
using applications like Skype.  I gather that LTE audio is all VoIP
underneath, so maybe there'll be a button you can adjust.




Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2013 00:08:47 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: T-Mobile to Pay $308 Million for More Spectrum
Message-ID: <p0624083ccdfaa58fcb12@[10.0.1.12]>

T-Mobile to Pay $308 Million for More Spectrum

By BRIAN X. CHEN
JUNE 28, 2013

T-Mobile USA, the fourth-largest American carrier, has agreed to pay 
$308 million to pick up a swath of spectrum, the radio waves that 
carry phone calls and data. The spectrum would enable the carrier to 
expand its new fourth-generation wireless network in 29 cities for 32 
million people, the company said Friday.

...

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/t-mobile-to-pay-308-million-for-more-spectrum/




Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2013 18:26:17 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: What It's Like to Get a National-Security Letter
Message-ID: <p06240806cdfe49b244c6@[10.0.1.4]>

What It's Like to Get a National-Security Letter

Posted by Maria Bustillos
The New Yorker
June 28, 2013

In the summer of 2011, while he was fighting an indictment for 
alleged computer crimes, Aaron Swartz, an information activist, read 
Kafka's "The Trial" and commented on it at his Web site.

A deep and magnificent work. I'd not really read much Kafka before 
and had grown up led to believe that it was a paranoid and hyperbolic 
work, dystopian fiction in the style of George Orwell. Yet I read it 
and found it was precisely accurate-every single detail perfectly 
mirrored my own experience. This isn't fiction, but documentary.

Swartz committed suicide a year and a half later. (Larissa 
MacFarquhar told the story of the end of his life in a piece for The 
New Yorker; Swartz was also involved in developing what became the 
magazine's Strongbox.) His words came back to me in force last week 
when I spoke with Brewster Kahle, the founder of the nonprofit 
Internet Archive, perhaps the greatest of our digital libraries, and 
of the Wayback Machine, which allows you to browse an archive of the 
Web that reaches back to 1996. He is one of very few people in the 
United States who can talk about receiving a national-security 
letter. These letters are one of the ways government agencies, in 
particular the F.B.I., can demand data from organizations in matters 
related to national security. They do not require prior approval from 
a judge, only the assertion that the information demanded is relevant 
to a national-security investigation. Recipients of a 
national-security letter typically are not allowed to disclose it.

Kahle's experience has new purchase in light of recent stories of 
secret courts and mass surveillance; the machinery of our government 
seems to have taken on an irrational life of its own. We live in a 
surreal world in which a "transparent" government insists on the need 
for secret courts; our President prosecutes whistle-blowers and 
maintains a secret "kill list"; and private information is collected 
in secret and stored indefinitely by intelligence agencies.

Google, which has recently challenged them in court, has been 
advocating for greater transparency about its receipt of the letters; 
it revealed that it had received between zero and nine hundred and 
ninety-nine national-security letters each year from 2009 to 2012.

Hundreds of thousands of national-security letters have been sent. 
But only the plaintiffs in the three successful challenges so 
far-Kahle; Nicholas Merrill, of Calyx Internet Access; and the 
Connecticut librarians George Christian, Barbara Bailey, Peter Chase, 
and Janet Nocek-are known to have had them rescinded, together with 
all or part of their related gag orders, according to Nate Cardozo, a 
staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In March of 
this year, as the result of a petition, brought by the E.F.F. on 
behalf of an unidentified telephone-service provider, the federal 
judge Susan Illston ruled that the gag-order provisions of 
national-security letters violate First Amendment rights, and ordered 
the government to stop issuing them. The order was stayed for long 
enough for the government to appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court.

Meanwhile, Kahle is one of a handful of people who can publicly 
discuss getting such a letter.

Here is our exchange.

...

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/06/what-its-like-to-get-a-national-security-letter.html




Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2013 00:06:58 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: With Montana's Lead, States May Demand Warrants for Cellphone Data
Message-ID: <p0624083bcdfaa53bb77f@[10.0.1.12]>

With Montana's Lead, States May Demand Warrants for Cellphone Data

By SOMINI SENGUPTA
JULY 2, 2013

The law rarely keeps up with technological advances - except in Montana.

Legislators in that state recently passed a bill that requires the 
police to obtain a search warrant, based on probable cause, before 
they can use a cellphone carrier's records to establish a suspect's 
location.

That kind of "metadata" can be incredibly valuable, as law 
enforcement agencies discovered long before the rest of us. The 
cellphones we carry everywhere establish a clear log of our daily 
travels and can go a long way in telling the story of our lives.

In recognition of that fact, the Montana Legislature this spring 
passed a location information privacy bill, which requires a search 
warrant for location information recorded by an "electronic device." 
There are exceptions to the warrant requirement, including when the 
cellphone is reported stolen or to respond to a cellphone user's 
emergency call.

Steve Bullock, the governor of Montana, signed it into law on May 6. 
The American Civil Liberties Union, which tracks cellphone tracking 
laws across the country, called it the first such state legislation.

In so doing, Montana stole California's thunder: that state's 
Legislature had passed a warrant law for location tracking last year, 
but Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed it, saying that it did not "strike the 
right balance" between the needs of citizens and law enforcement.

...

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/02/with-montanas-lead-states-may-demand-warrants-for-cellphone-data/




Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2013 00:11:23 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Dangers of Distracted Walking
Message-ID: <p0624083ecdfaa64ff83c@[10.0.1.12]>

Dangers of Distracted Walking

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
JUNE 28, 2013

Driving a car while talking or texting on a cellphone is a widely 
recognized risk factor for accidents. Now a new study reports that a 
growing number of people who walk while talking or texting are ending 
up in the emergency room.

Using data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, 
which collects detailed case information from a sample of emergency 
rooms across the country, researchers estimated the number of 
pedestrians nationwide who were injured seriously enough while using 
cellphones to be treated in an emergency room from 2004 to 2010.

...

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/dangers-of-distracted-walking/




Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2013 13:14:11 -0400
From: T <kd1s.nospam@cox.nospam.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re:  Disruptions: Mobile Competition Shifts to  Software Design
Message-ID: <MPG.2c421a69840b4ab9989e1e@news.eternal-september.org>

In article <p06240833cdfaa2670dcc@[10.0.1.12]>, monty@roscom.com says...
> That's all very nice, but can I set it to run HDOS in STANDALONE mode? ;-)
> 
> Bill Horne
> Moderator
> 
> 

Good luck with that Bill. And the i devices still suffer from a few 
things the Android devices don't. Like being able to swap the battery 
for one. 






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