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The Telecom Digest for September 19, 2013
Volume 32 : Issue 197 : "text" Format
====== 32 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
|
Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the
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We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we
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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, and other stuff of interest.
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Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 02:10:10 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: NSA: No one "had a full understanding" of 2009 call-checking program
Message-ID: <p06240812ce5aff88ac78@[10.0.1.7]>
NSA: No one "had a full understanding" of 2009 call-checking program
In call prior to FISA Court doc release, top intel officials defend policy.
by Cyrus Farivar
Sept 10 2013
Ars Technica
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has
released a new batch of secret National Security Agency (NSA)
documents Tuesday afternoon. The documents come from the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and they detail NSA
violations of spying protocols from 2006 to 2009. They were released
in relation to an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit.
On a Tuesday morning phone call with reporters, two top intelligence
officials downplayed the court's findings, insisting that the court
"did not find any intentional effort" to violate the law.
"These are some incredibly complicated systems that NSA was not able
to fully and accurately articulate to the court, in large part
because no one at NSA had a full understanding of how the program was
operating at the time," said Robert Litt, general counsel of the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The new documents show that in 2009, the NSA checked an "alert list"
of nearly 18,000 telephone numbers against daily reports it got of
Americans' phone calls. The numbers on the alert list were supposed
to be from suspected terrorists, but most of them didn't meet the
standard of "reasonable articulable suspicion" (RAS). Specifically,
an FISC judge wrote in March 2009 that "only 1,935 of the 17,835
identifiers on the alert list were RAS-approved."
The FISC court judge slammed the government for exceeding its mandate
and verging on dishonesty, but the government's lawyers clearly don't
see it that way.
...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/nsa-no-one-had-a-full-understanding-of-2009-call-checking-program/
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 02:12:17 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: The iPhones of Fall
Message-ID: <p06240813ce5afff5c602@[10.0.1.7]>
The iPhones of Fall
By Ian Bogost
The Atlantic
When Apple launched the iPhone 4 in 2010, the company's website
featured large images of the device with the text "This changes
everything. Again."
Change has been a constant refrain in Apple's marketing over the
years. The famous 1984 Macintosh ads framed the computer as an agent
of revolution. And the "Think Different" ads of the 1990s implied
that purchasing one of these underdog machines put you in the same
company as other misunderstood genius underdogs. But it goes back
further than that, too. Ads for the Apple II and the
business-oriented Apple III in the early 1980s compared their power
to that of famous inventors of ages past, including Henry Ford,
Thomas Jefferson, and Ben Franklin, among others.
If you watch the original 2007 iPhone announcement, you'll be
hard-pressed to deny the device's overall revolutionary claims.
But the "change" associated with subsequent models has been fairly
modest, despite Apple's frequent claims to the contrary. The iPhone 4
or 5S hardly compare to the Apple II, the Macintosh, or even the
original iPhone in their implications and impact. They have offered
small but important updates: high-resolution displays, more sensors,
increased battery capacity, faster processors, better cameras.
Fingerprint security in iPhone 5S is an interesting advance, but it's
hardly an innovation akin the printing press or the airplane or the
personal computer. Indeed, it's not an innovation at all, but merely
a refinement and systematic roll-out of an old idea that hadn't yet
caught on, but might be ready to do so.
...
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/09/the-iphones-of-fall/279620/
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 03:06:21 -0700 (PDT)
From: Neal McLain <nmclain.remove-this@and-this-too.annsgarden.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Overland Park, Kansas waves yellow flag at Google Fiber
Message-ID: <d358e93c-f0bb-448a-8310-517292ec08a8@googlegroups.com>
By Jim Barthold, FierceCable, September 17, 2013
| A technicality in the legal agreement between Overland Park,
| Kansas and Google Fiber has caused the city to wave a yellow
| flag in front of the search-engine-and-more's fast-moving
| ultra-high-speed broadband network plans.
|
| While city officials didn't specify what, exactly, was
| bothering them, The Kansas City Star suggested in a story that
| this issue was a liability concern in the legal agreement
| between the two parties that needed to be resolved before the
| matter could proceed. A vote to approve or reject the
| agreement is expected to be held Oct. 14 after both sides have
| further studied the matter.
Continued:
http://tinyurl.com/mcvwstu
This article cites an article from the Kansas City Star:
http://tinyurl.com/k4n884l
Some of the comments in the comment section of the KSC article do a better job of explaining the altercation than either FierceCable or KSC does.
Neal McLain
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 13:58:26 +0000 (UTC)
From: danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Overland Park, Kansas waves yellow flag at Google Fiber
Message-ID: <l1cbi2$lq1$1@reader1.panix.com>
In <d358e93c-f0bb-448a-8310-517292ec08a8@googlegroups.com> Neal McLain <nmclain.remove-this@and-this-too.annsgarden.com> writes:
[snip]
>Continued:
>http://tinyurl.com/mcvwstu
>
>This article cites an article from the Kansas City Star:
>
>http://tinyurl.com/k4n884l
>
>Some of the comments in the comment section of the KSC article do a better job of explaining the altercation than either FierceCable or KSC does.
Thanks for the pointer to the comments. My default browser
settings block the Facebook addition that carries them
so I wouldn't have seen them otherwise.
They made it a lot clearer.
--
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dannyb@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 02:15:55 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Senator Asks Cellphone Carriers: What Exactly Do You Share With Government?
Message-ID: <p06240814ce5b00f7025e@[10.0.1.7]>
Senator Asks Cellphone Carriers: What Exactly Do You Share With Government?
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
SEPTEMBER 12, 2013
Last year, Edward J. Markey, then a member of the House of
Representatives, asked the country's major cellphone carriers to
disclose how many data requests they received from federal and local
law enforcement agencies. More than one million in 2011 alone, they
said, revealing for the first time how ubiquitous cellphone records
had become in criminal investigations.
Now a member of the Senate, Mr. Markey is asking for this year's
numbers and with more details. What exactly does the government seek
from the carriers, he wants to know. How often do they ask for
cellphone tower dumps, location data, content of text messages,
browsing history and so on. How many of those requests did the
companies comply with and how many did they deny and why?
The letter to eight companies, including the largest carriers, AT&T,
T-Mobile, and Verizon, was sent Thursday. It comes against the
backdrop of mounting revelations about secret surveillance of
Americans communications.
...
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/12/senator-asks-cellphone-carriers-what-exactly-do-you-share-with-government/
Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 09:16:41 -0500 (CDT)
From: "B. Z. Lederman" <LEDERMAN@Encompasserve.org>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: X.25 links still available?
Message-ID: <01OYK6286E0I00GIEA@Encompasserve.org>
| To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org
| Subject: Fwd: X.25 links still available?
| Reply-To: lederman@encompasserve.org
|
| From: sampsal@gmail.com
| Subject: X.25 links still available?
| Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 18:40:41 -0700 (PDT)
|
| Does anybody know if it is possible to get an X.25 hook up nowadays?
|
| Ideally over the D channel of a basic ISDN connection.
|
| sampsa
The anwer is almost certainly "no", unless you are already
an existing customer.
I was working at Digital Equipment / Compaq / HP when
the port to Itanium was being done, back in the early
2000s. At that time, we had to decide what layered
products to port. Since I had a background in
Telecommunications, I researched the question of
porting the PSI product set. Even back then,
all of the carriers in North America and Europe that
I could find had stopped accepting new customers for
X.25 and related services: they only supported
businesses that had their own private networks running
over the packet network. At most, there was one very
small carrier in Finland or Iceland that was privately
operated that accepted new customers, and possibly
one in Korea (couldn't read all of the web site). Most
of the companies that had offered X.25 in the U.S.
no longer existed at all.
More than 10 years later, I would expect even most
support for private networks to be gone.
Bart
***** Moderator's Note *****
I thought all the credit-card processing networks were on X.25 - not so?
Come to think of it, what happened to Tymnet and Telenet? Weren't they
using X.25?
Bill Horne
Moderator
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