---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message-ID: <77D1AC13-6734-4C2D-9305-0096BEED34CB@roscom.com> Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2016 07:43:06 -0500 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> Subject: Rail Crossing Warnings Are Sought for Mapping Apps By Daisuke Wakabayashi The National Transportation Safety Board asked tech companies to add the locations of grade crossings into digital maps and to provide alerts for drivers. SAN FRANCISCO - Following directions from Google Maps on a smartphone last year, Jose Alejandro Sanchez-Ramirez turned a Ford truck, hauling a trailer, where he thought the app was telling him to go. But he ended up stuck on the railroad tracks at a poorly marked California crossing. Soon after Mr. Sanchez-Ramirez abandoned the truck, a commuter train barreled into it, killing the engineer and injuring 32 others. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/technology/google-digital-maps-railroad-crossings-ntsb.html ------------------------------ Message-ID: <F77A7FAB-373C-4D84-B04C-F4FDD965445B@roscom.com> Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2016 08:54:28 -0500 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> Subject: The state(s) of texting and driving in the US Phones and the urge to click aren't going away. Neither are the tragedies. By THomas Wells We plow through five mile markers then slide 60 feet along the edge of the shoulder before enough snow piles up to scrape our ride to a halt. This is the good outcome. The three tons of steel traveling 55 miles an hour could have flipped and rolled in a second, killing everyone inside. But after disentangling my heart from my esophagus, we determine that everyone's fine. Dad pulls himself out of the car to catch his breath on the side of the road, and he looks to his smartphone GPS to figure out how far we are from West Yellowstone, Montana. It's below freezing, and the phone doesn't have anything remotely resembling service. This is the second time he's glanced at his phone for the GPS; the first is what landed us here. How'd this happen? My guess is it has something to do with the dopamine. I'm going to play fast and loose and speculate that a major component of cellphone interaction comes from "wanting" that dopamine response. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that gives us little jolts of pleasure to motivate us to go and seek out more pleasurable experiences. It would seem to me that smartphones facilitate this process - every time you punch a button, you get a little jolt of dopamine, as that button push has the potential to take you somewhere pleasurable. Thanks to the device's ability to easily access the Internet, we have at our fingertips an unlimited amount of available seeking. The satisfaction of clicking on a new thing keeps dopamine flowing along at a healthy thrum. Today, we also have all sorts of connectivity to apps that offer validation - a double-tap on Instagram gives us the jolt that we love. http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/12/the-states-of-texting-and-driving-in-the-us/ ------------------------------ Message-ID: <o36q81$aiq$1@panix2.panix.com> Date: 18 Dec 2016 15:06:25 -0500 From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) Subject: Re: Verizon's Buyer's remorse has gone too far HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org> wrote: >As an aside, when Paramount bought Desilu studio, they were upset to >discover that Star Trek and Mission Impossible were losing serious money >on each episode. (Desilu claimed all data was presented to Paramount >in advance). Anyway, Star Trek turned out to be a very valuable >property, and even Mission Impossible generated a few future movies. >Ironically, Paramount was mainly interested in Desilu for its real >estate. These are almost opposite examples. In the case of Desilu, Lucy had been putting a huge amount of money into producing episodic programs, knowing that she wouldn't get that money back from the networks airing them, but in the hopes that the syndication later on would more than make up for it. Star Trek was especially expensive, but she viewed it as a long-term investment. If she'd been able to hold on to the company for another six to nine months when the first season syndication money started coming in on Star Trek, her monthly books would have been in the black again. But she wasn't able to. Paramount knew exactly what they were buying... they were surprised to see the exact numbers and how far out on a limb Lucy was willing to go, but they sure understood they were buying a long-term cash cow. Being able to knock that wall down between the two studios sure did make them happy though. Contrast this with Yahoo which basically has no value. They don't have a large or dedicated customer base. They don't have much in the way of infrastructure. Even their IP space is poisoned and not worth much. By that I mean that so much of their space is blocked downstream because it has been a source of hacking attempts and spamming. The name has bad associations with potential customers. There is absolutely nothing anybody would want because Yahoo has made no attempts to build real value for the future. You might as well just flush your money down the toilet and save some time. --scott -- "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." ------------------------------ Message-ID: <7382B318-DF8E-4543-B31D-276720B4A6E4@roscom.com> Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2016 01:02:00 -0500 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> Subject: Home routers under attack in ongoing malvertisement blitz DNSChanger causes network computers to visit fraudulent domains. By Dan Goodin As you read these words, malicious ads on legitimate websites are targeting visitors with malware. But that malware doesn't infect their computers, researchers said. Instead, it causes unsecured routers to connect to fraudulent domains. Using a technique known as steganography, the ads hide malicious code in image data. The hidden code then redirects targets to webpages hosting DNSChanger, an exploit kit that infects routers running unpatched firmware or are secured with weak administrative passwords. Once a router is compromised, DNSChanger configures it to use an attacker-controlled domain name system server. This causes most computers on the network to visit fraudulent servers, rather than the servers corresponding to their official domain. http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/12/home-routers-under-attack-in-ongoing-malvertisement-blitz/ ------------------------------ ********************************************* End of telecom Digest Wed, 21 Dec 2016