The Telecom Digest for October 08, 2010
Volume 29 : Issue 270 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
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Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2010 18:15:56 -0700
From: Sam Spade <sam@coldmail.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: 'Robo-call' law in limbo after lawsuit fails
Message-ID: <s-GdnUp0If_QgjDRnZ2dnUVZ_gqdnZ2d@giganews.com>
danny burstein wrote:
> In <94096.50087.qm@web52706.mail.re2.yahoo.com> Joseph Singer <joeofseattle@yahoo.com> writes:
>
>
>>This is a story about a man, a message, a federal lawsuit and some
>>very unintended consequences.
>
>
>>James Cubbage is an Olympia businessman who came home one day last
>>year to this prerecorded message on his answering machine: "Hi, it's
>>Julie calling from Talbots with a reminder that you have only a few
>>days left to take advantage of your exclusive 20 percent savings pass
>>and free shipping...
>
>
>>http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2013067060_donotcall04m.html?syndication=rss
>
>
>>or: http://goo.gl/qe7P
>
>
> I don't see the (bigger) problem here. For better or worse, the
> man's wife was a customer of the store, and they took advantage
> of that "pre existing relationship" loophole.
>
> So the law, in general, hasn't been vacated.
>
> (That's not to say the law is anywhere near perfect. It's
> pretty lame, and rarely enforced. I just receiver Yet Another
> Robot Call from "Rachel of Account Services", a business that's
> gazillions of complaints to the FTC and related regulatory
> groups, and ain't nothing happening).
>
>
>
It takes a long time for the "pre existing relationship" to expire. It
sounds like the plantiff was loaded and cocked to shoot the intruter
before he came through the door.
Date: Thu, 07 Oct 2010 11:34:06 -0700
From: Steven <diespammers@killspammers.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: 'Robo-call' law in limbo after lawsuit fails
Message-ID: <i8l3r0$a42$1@news.eternal-september.org>
On 10/6/10 6:15 PM, Sam Spade wrote:
>>
>> I don't see the (bigger) problem here. For better or worse, the
>> man's wife was a customer of the store, and they took advantage
>> of that "pre existing relationship" loophole.
>>
>> So the law, in general, hasn't been vacated.
>>
>> (That's not to say the law is anywhere near perfect. It's
>> pretty lame, and rarely enforced. I just receiver Yet Another
>> Robot Call from "Rachel of Account Services", a business that's
>> gazillions of complaints to the FTC and related regulatory
>> groups, and ain't nothing happening).
>>
>>
>>
> It takes a long time for the "pre existing relationship" to expire. It
> sounds like the plantiff was loaded and cocked to shoot the intruter
> before he came through the door.
>
All they had to do with tell the offending caller that they no longer
wanted them on their do not call list, at that point should they call
again, then there is cause of an action.
--
The only good spammer is a dead one!! Have you hunted one down today?
(c) 2010 I Kill Spammers, Inc. A Rot in Hell Co.
Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2010 21:14:45 -0400
From: Ron <ron@see.below>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: A Simple Swipe on a Phone, and You're Paid
Message-ID: <nm6qa6d2ok0sdqkmbah149vlkln9t5d2hq@4ax.com>
John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
>>In Australia Mastercard are introducing the "Swipe and go" system where
>>you just wave your card at a terminal for transactions under under a
>>certain amount - no signing, not PIN to enter, just grab your receipt and
>>go (TV ads are running now promoting it).
>
>That's called Paypass. My Mastercard debit card here in the US has
>it, but I've never used it. If my credit card had it, I would use it.
Chase calls it "Blink" on their credit card.
I destroy this feature on any credit card that comes equipped with
it. I don't know what (or whether) the designers were thinking.
"Let's put a feature on our credit card that will let anyone with
the right equipment tracelessly read all information on the card,
from a distance.
Cites:
http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/no-swipe-credit-cards-1273.php
http://www.tombom.co.uk/extreme_rfid.pdf
and many others
--
Ron
(user telnom.for.plume
in domain antichef.com)
Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2010 22:29:56 -0400
From: tlvp <tPlOvUpBErLeLsEs@hotmail.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Help needed differentiating email, texting and SMS
Message-ID: <op.vj6o76m4itl47o@acer250.gateway.2wire.net>
On Wed, 06 Oct 2010 03:38:46 -0400, Thad Floryan <thad@thadlabs.com> wrote:
> On 10/5/2010 4:25 PM, tlvp wrote:
>> On Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:48:37 -0400, Thad Floryan <thad@thadlabs.com> wrote:
>>
>>> ... I know for a fact my phone receives email sent to the
>>> "cellphone#@txt.att.net" address, but what is this method termed?
>>> Is it SMS or simply email? ...
>>
>> As ever, "that depends" -- does it come through with all characters
>> that were beyond the first 150 or so truncated away?
>>
>> If so, that was SMS.
>>
>> Does it come through in its entirety (except perhaps missing some
>> graphics components)? If so, that was probably either MMS or real
>> email.
>
> Amazing. I just sent a 5-line email to it alternating between
> "Now is the time ..." and "The quick brown fox ..." (each line
> is 69 characters long) and all 350 characters arrived albeit
> split into "pages". I thought there was a limit, perhaps not.
> Maybe it was my Nokia 6162i that had a limit with its "text
> messages" (no "SMS" is its manual and no way to test (today)).
Interesting. That 5-line email you sent ... was plain-text ASCII only?
Or mail that got itself HTML-formatted?
If the former, then YES, perhaps, the at&t email-to-xMS gateway may well
have converted it to "multi-page" SMS. I suspect that if the latter, instead,
or an e-mail with an image (.jpg, .wbmp, etc.) attached or embedded,
that gateway would convert it to MMS for transmission to your phone
(particularly if the RAZR V3).
Test? Come up with a test message of, say, 1000 characters or so,
HTML-formatted. Send it to your phone once as HTML-formatted mail,
and another time in purely ASCII-only "plain-text" mode (let the
Subject lines distinguish between them). How do these arrive?
> 'Sfunny, I posted URLs to pictures of all my cellphones since
> 1992 in a Yahoo photo group earlier today since we were discussing
> equipment lifetime re: Motorola MicroTAC Lite, Nokia 6162i, RAZR V3:
>
> http://thadlabs.com/PIX/Thad_cellphones_1.jpg top views
> http://thadlabs.com/PIX/Thad_cellphones_2.jpg side views
> http://thadlabs.com/PIX/Thad_V3_charger+batts.jpg bought last month
>
> The Nokia was dual mode TDMA and AMPS and the RAZR V3 is GSM, and
> my cellphone carrier account is grandfathered all the way from the
> original Cellular One through Cingular to today's AT&T Mobility.
>
>> [...]
>> My own handsets segregate inbound messages into separate IN-boxes,
>> one for SMS items, one for MMS items. (They don't "do" email.)
>>
>> (MMS = "MultimediaMessageService", SMS = "ShortMessageService".)
>
> Interesting. The RAZR V3 manual is poorly written and extremely
> lacking examples and definitions. Since I only need a PHONE it
> works fine for me and the fact it can receive email is a plus but
> I'm not sure it's working with the AlertSCC service since I never
> received a "test message" from them last year. Perhaps I should
> ask them to do so for me and for the several friends in Palo Alto
> I'm helping to assure all is setup correctly.
Looking not at a RAZR V3 but at the more or less contemporaneous SLVR L2,
I see that under Messaging I can either Create Message -- which then lets
me choose among New Text Msg, New Multimedia Msg, or Multimedia Template
(I guess the former is for SMS, the latter two, MMS) -- or see my Inbox,
which I guess accepts messages of both sorts.
Nokia 6610, OTOH, at least as branded for T-Mo, has
separate Inboxen for SMS and for MMS.
>> [...]
>> In T-Mobile's service, I have yet to come up with any reliable criterion
>> for determining whether an email addressed to my "cellphone#@tmomail.net"
>> gets delivered to me as an SMS or an MMS at the handset -- I've received
>> emails either way, at different times, with neither rhyme nor reason
>> (nor even T-Mo CS) able to provide any clue as to why :-) .
>
> Hah hah! You should try dealing with AT&T Mobility. Though their
> service works fine for me, their support people (even in the local
> store) are about as clueless as a rock.
>
> Thanks for your reply! Since 2004 I've been assuming my RAZR could
> only receive up to 140 or so chars via email and now, after testing
> per your implied suggestion, I now know different.
>
> I still don't know if the RAZR can do SMS or not,
"do" = "send"? Almost surely yes. Messaging | Create Message , and then
see above; Finally, there should be a set of Send To options, ranging
from a number in your phone book, through a New Number (both for SMS),
to a New Email Address (that will have to go through at&t's standard
SMS/MMS-to-email gateway, about which all I know is that the standard
T-Mobile SMS-to-email gateway is the T-Mobile short-code number 500).
> ... and what's really
> odd is that after the email test the "GPRS" icon went away; it appeared
> for the first time ever about a month ago and I have no idea why, the
> manual isn't clear about GPRS, and there are no explicit commands on
> the RAZR to enable/disable GPRS.
On T-Mobile's service, the GPRS flag appears only intermittently, generally
when a GPRS connection first becomes active. Starting a WAP connection
through either the built-in WAP browser or the add-on Opera Mini browser
generally raises that GPRS flag, and after the page selected has been
loaded for a minute or so, that flag evaporates again, not to reappear
until I start to load another WML page.
Cheers, -- tlvp
--
Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP
Date: Thu, 07 Oct 2010 06:29:16 -0700
From: Sam Spade <sam@coldmail.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: cite, kind of, was: Delivery of ANI on a non-IN WATS call?
Message-ID: <J8-dnQWZE7ixVjDRnZ2dnUVZ_uadnZ2d@giganews.com>
danny burstein wrote:
>
> So yes, groups operating their own central-office type equipment
> are mandated to follow these rules even in house.
>
>
Because this is an intra-state issue I presume this section of the
California Public Utilities Code governs:
2893. (a) The commission shall, by rule or order, require that
every telephone call identification service offered in this state by
a telephone corporation, or by any other person or corporation that
makes use of the facilities of a telephone corporation, shall allow a
caller to withhold display of the caller's telephone number, on an
individual basis, from the telephone instrument of the individual
receiving the telephone call placed by the caller. However a caller
shall not be allowed to withhold the display of the caller's business
telephone number when that number is being used for telemarketing
purposes.
Date: 7 Oct 2010 17:06:08 -0000
From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: A Simple Swipe on a Phone, and You're Paid
Message-ID: <20101007170608.24132.qmail@joyce.lan>
>AMEX fees have to be higher, since they make far less money off interest
>charges than the other cards do. (Amex -really- wants you to pay off the
>entire outstanding balance each month.)
Depends on the flavor of Amex card. Some are charge cards which
require that you pay in full each month. Some are revolving credit
cards with the usual unconscionable interest rates. (I have one of
each, the former billed in euros, the latter billed in dollars.) Some
aren't even issued by Amex, just Amex branded but run by large banks,
just like MC and V. Whatever logic there once was for Amex to charge
more has long gone away, and now they charge more just because they
can.
ObTelecom: my ILEC phone company only takes MC/V, but my long distance
and VoIP providers take all three.
R's,
John
Date: 7 Oct 2010 17:10:24 -0000
From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: A Simple Swipe on a Phone, and You're Paid
Message-ID: <20101007171024.25174.qmail@joyce.lan>
>> That's called Paypass. My Mastercard debit card here in the US has it,
>> but I've never used it. If my credit card had it, I would use it.
>The thing with any unauthenticated transaction system is that is
>assumes the person with the card (token of authority) is the owner of
>the card - what happens if your card is lost/stolen and someone goes
>on a spending spree of multiple transactions for potentially days
>before you realise and get the card blocked?
You're confusing two things, tap vs. swipe and signed vs. unsigned. I
swipe my card at my local supermarket, but they don't ask for a
signature for charges under $50. And even when I do sign, it's on a
pad the cashier can't see. I've been writing things like BOGUS or NOT
ME for years, and nobody's noticed.
They have presumably figured out that the small gain in cashier
productivity from not waiting for th signature outweighs the small
increase in fraud from not having a signature.
R's,
John
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2010 17:58:20 +0000 (UTC)
From: moroney@world.std.spaamtrap.com (Michael Moroney)
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: 'Robo-call' law in limbo after lawsuit fails
Message-ID: <i8l1ns$7lq$2@pcls6.std.com>
danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com> writes:
> I just receiver Yet Another
>Robot Call from "Rachel of Account Services", a business that's
>gazillions of complaints to the FTC and related regulatory
>groups, and ain't nothing happening).
Speaking of which, how does "Rachel" and her gang get into the public
telephone system with such high volume, undetected (undetected enough
so that apparently nobody can seem to find them) ? VOIP?
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