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The Telecom Digest for November 24, 2011
Volume 30 : Issue 298 : "text" Format
====== 30 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
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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
are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because
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: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:54:07 -0500
From: tlvp <tlvp.remove-this@and-this-too.msn.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Sophos Security's take on Google's latest "_nomap" opt-out offer
Message-ID: <BLU0-SMTP13268853FB8802230AEB616DBC90@phx.gbl>
>From Sophos, a heads-up regarding Google's decision to let ordinary folks
"opt out" of having their wireless access point's SSIDs catalogued, indexed,
and exploited by Google's location service by the simple expedient (?) of
appending a "_nomap" to the SSID, i.e., recasting the SSID from <NetworkName>
to <NetworkName_nomap>. For details and commentary, see the Sophos announcement
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/11/17/google-forces-opt-out-wi-fi-snooping/
.
Cheers, -- tlvp
***** Moderator's Note *****
This submission arrived with a note attached, and I'm pasting some of
it here FYI the readers.
My usual NNTP server acting flaky this evening, I thought I'd
write directly to you with the following little tidbit...
ALL submissions to the Telecom Digest have an EQUAL chance of being
seen and/or published. It does NOT matter how you send them in,
neither figuratively nor literally. Everything arrives in the same
mailbox, because that's the way Usenet handles posts that need
approval - they are emailed to me!
If you deem it post-worthy, I'll be grateful to see it posted.
If not, who am I to argue :-) ?
You are a contributor, and you can always ask me to reconsider a
moderation decision. That doesn't mean I always will, of course, but
you're entitled to ask. See the FAQ.
--
Bill Horne
Moderator
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 07:21:16 -0800 (PST)
From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Hedy Lamarr--actress/radio inventor
Message-ID: <a75c9a30-4123-4755-b28f-a0c5d03ef61f@g7g2000vbd.googlegroups.com>
Actress Hedy Lamarr is credited with inventing key concepts used in
radio and telephony to this day. Her biography, by noted author
Richard Rhodes, has been published.
book review from Newsweek:
"Actresses often long to turn director, but how many of them yearn
to turn inventor? Given the success that the screen siren Hedy
Lamarr achieved in that realm revealed in Richard Rhodes's
fascinating biography, Hedy's Folly it's a pity more of them don't
consider it. In 1940, while acting alongside Jimmy Stewart and
Judy Garland in the MGM musical Ziegfeld Girl, the 26-year-old
Lamarr spent her free time devising a radio-controlled submarine
missile-guidance system to help the U.S. Navy in World War II. What
moved her to do this? "She didn't drink and she didn't like to
party, so she took up inventing", Rhodes explains. Of course, there
was more to it than that. The torpedo was not the starlet's only
invention: she also came up with an antiaircraft shell with a
proximity fuse, and a fizzing cube that could turn a plain glass of
water into soda."
For full article please see:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/11/20/hedy-lamarr-biography-hedy-s-folly-by-richard-rhodes-review.html
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 04:51:11 -0500
From: tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: OT: Electronics store with classic parts
Message-ID: <1xhmoyu0fjle3.1mub80tvpn0wc$.dlg@40tude.net>
On 22 Nov 2011 10:29:10 -0500, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> tlvp <mPiOsUcB.EtLlLvEp@att.net> wrote:
>> ... 12BE6, 12BA6, 12AV6, 50C5, 35W4 :-) ! ...
>> ...
>>'Zat what you were after, Bill? Or were you looking for the post-octal
>>follow-up to these (their miniature 9-pin counterparts)? Cheers, -- tlvp
>
> Those are the 7-and 9-pin minis. I don't remember the early octal ones,
> but they weren't quite as standardized.
> --scott
(Ulp!) You're right, scott. So much of that RC-18 is octal stuff I never
bothered checking whether those 5 were or weren't, just assumed they were.
Sorry to have misled so badly! And thanks for steering us all right again.
Cheers, -- tlvp
--
Avant de repondre, jeter la poubelle, SVP.
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 07:30:08 -0800 (PST)
From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: MSNBC/NYT: Caller ID Forging
Message-ID: <8ba88f93-78b7-4535-8df2-ff4f3e73db2b@i8g2000vbh.googlegroups.com>
[Quote from MSNBC]
Caller ID has been celebrated as a defense against unwelcome
phone pitches. But it is backfiring. Telemarketers increasingly
are disguising their real identities and phone numbers to provoke
people to pick up the phone. "Humane Soc." may not be the Humane
Society. And [do you] think the I.R.S. is on the line? Think
again.
Caller ID, in other words, is becoming fake ID.
For full article please see:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45413739/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:19:43 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Universal Service Reform Order Yields a Surprise or Two
Message-ID: <p06240856caf2bea9f810@[10.0.1.4]>
Universal Service Reform Order Yields a Surprise or Two
11/21/11
by Joan Engebretson
Weighing in at 750 pages, the Universal Service and inter-carrier
compensation reform order from the FCC was made public on Friday. The
commission issued a fairly detailed executive summary in late October
when the order was adopted- and in large part, the final order
essentially just adds more detail to what was outlined in the
executive summary. But after an initial review, I did find a few
elements in the order that had not been previously announced.
http://www.telecompetitor.com/universal-service-reform-order-yields-a-surprise-or-two/
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 09:37:32 -0800 (PST)
From: Tom Horne <hornetd@gmail.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Police radio encryption
Message-ID: <c9354516-36d1-40d3-a19a-cbccf974d3e4@h42g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>
On Nov 21, 2:31 pm, withh...@invalid.telecom-digest.org (HAncock4)
wrote:
>
> USA Today article discussing pros and cons of police encrypting
> their radio transmissions. Police say it's to keep criminals from
> listening, but journalists object saying it makes government less
> transparent.
It seems rather a straight forward question to me. Preventing people
from listening in real time is needed by law enforcement. Preventing
people from listening in at all is not in the interest of government
accountability. Police should have to maintain a complete record of
everything that is said and they should be required to turn over those
records in response to a Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA, or it's
state level equivalent) request. To allow police to completely
conceal everything they say on the radio is going to allow them to
engage in misconduct more easily without fear of that misconduct being
discovered. I would think that the video of the UC Davis campus
police spraying pepper spray on non violent demonstrators proves that
police have a tendency to overreact to being defied even when that
defiance is a legitimate exorcise of the defiant citizens rights.
When a police officer says jump a citizen should be able to say "why"
rather than "how high." So I think encryption has short term benefits
and long term liabilities. Hiding police conduct from the press and
the public is not a good thing.
There has been some interest on the part of Emergency Medical Service
(EMS) administrators in encrypting ambulance radios because of the
need to protect patients' private information. In that case, where the
encryption is done on the medical control channels, I think that
encryption would be a perfectly legitimate tool to use in protecting
patient rights. Encrypting administrative and dispatch traffic of EMS
agencies however has little legitimate purpose that I am able to
discern.
The reason that there is a temptation to encrypt is that the news
media outlets often act irresponsibly when they have immediate access
to some types of information. As we all know "If it bleeds, it
leads." That is how a mercury spill at a public high school becomes
"Chemical leak at High School! Film at noon." We have a slogan in
Fire & Rescue which reminds us that "The principal difference between
the parent of an endangered child and a terrorist is that you have a
faint hope of negotiating with the terrorist." So when the news
outlet resorts to sensationalism in order to sell the soap they
endanger the children and the responders who are trying to protect
them. For the responders and their leadership, that gets old pretty
fast.
Like many other things in public life there is no easy answer. And,
like the pendulum of a working clock, there is no resting in the middle:
it will only pause briefly at the extremes.
--
Tom Horne
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:47:29 +0000 (UTC)
From: "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: How 1-800-ITS-UNIX changed the world
Message-ID: <jaj831$8ps$1@news.albasani.net>
Thad Floryan <thad@thadlabs.com> wrote:
>Background: for those who are unaware of Andrew Tanenbaum:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum
>
>which begins:
>" Andrew Stuart "Andy" Tanenbaum is a professor of computer science
>" at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is
>" best known as the author of MINIX, a free Unix-like operating
>" system for teaching purposes, and for his computer science
>" textbooks, regarded as standard texts in the field. He regards
>" his teaching job as his most important work.
>An interview several days ago with Andrew Tanenbaum can be read here
>in English:
>
> http://linuxfr.org/nodes/88229/comments/1291183
>
>Several interesting passages in the interview caught my eye:
>" The reason MINIX 3 didn't dominate the world has to do with one mistake
>" I made about 1992. At that time I thought BSD was going to take over
>" the world. It was a mature and stable system. I didn't see any point in
>" competing with it, so I focused MINIX on education. Four of the BSD
>" guys had just formed a company to sell BSD commercially. They even had
>" a nice phone number: 1-800-ITS-UNIX. That phone number did them and me
>" in. AT&T sued them over the phone number and the lawsuit took 3 years
>" to settle. That was precisely the period Linux was launched and BSD was
>" frozen due to the lawsuit. By the time it was settled, Linux had taken
>" off. My mistake was not to realize the lawsuit would take so long and
>" cripple BSD. If AT&T had not brought suit (or better yet, bought BSDI),
>" Linux would never have become popular at all and BSD would dominate the
>" world.
Would AT&T have been prohibted from buying BSDI, either by the court order
that broke them up a few years earlier or by the non-commercial license
they'd given to Univ of Cal at Berkeley in early days? I thought all
commercial Berkeley-style Unixes were licensed by the university.
Having learned SysVRel4 and earlier, Berkeley-style Unixes have always
struck me as weird. Also, inflicting sendmail upon the world was evil.
I have comments about sendmail exploits, either built in or that I created
due to misconfigurations because sendmail is painful, but they wouldn't
be good for the children to hear.
***** Moderator's Note *****
Want to borrow my Exim4 book?
Bill Horne
Moderator
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 07:49:12 -0800 (PST)
From: grumpy44134 <grumpy44134@gmail.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: OT: Electronics store with classic parts
Message-ID: <46ae0465-8a88-4b54-9407-9bd0141ab960@r28g2000yqj.googlegroups.com>
On Nov 22, 10:29 am, klu...@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
> Those are the 7-and 9-pin minis. I don't remember the early octal ones,
> but they weren't quite as standardized.
> --scott
>
12SA7, 12SK7 . . . . . . . ?
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 07:44:20 -0800 (PST)
From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Mall tracks shoppers by their cellphones
Message-ID: <f262246a-9075-407c-a88e-9e4ac90d92de@da3g2000vbb.googlegroups.com>
A small article in the LA Times says a shopping mall is using a new
computer program that will track the movements of Thanksgiving weekend
shoppers using their cellphones. Thee Temecula Promenade is one of
two malls testing out the new technology, which mall operators said is
designed to monitor how shoppers flow through the center.
for full article please see:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/11/mall-monitoring-shoppers-by-tapping-into-their-cellphones.html
(The technical details of how this is done were not described. Given
that and the impending robocalls to cell phones, I am glad I keep my
cellphone off most of the time.)
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 08:47:42 -0800 (PST)
From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Telephony on TV
Message-ID: <0bda8a01-e93e-4bb4-8081-90f19552cb86@r9g2000vbw.googlegroups.com>
On Nov 21, 2:39 am, David Thompson <dave.thomps...@verizon.net> wrote:
> 'The Sting' relies on interception of newswire (race results). Quite a
> few movies showed Teletypes, either newswire, cable (e.g. WU, C&W), or
> business telex/TWX. They are nicely cinematic with the thudding and
> the dinging and the typehead moving and the words appearing. Ordinary
> people wouldn't encounter a Teletype but I'm not sure they're obscure.
If memory serves, the closing scene of "All The President's Men" show
a Teletype printing out a news story ending the story. That film also
had extensive of use of telephones (black rotary 500's with plastic
dial) in the office and in phone booths (modern lower case "phone"
sign, but with old Bell System logo).
Many offices had Teletypes for one reason or another, so they weren't
that unusual in the workplace. Many had receive only to get news,
weather, or special bulletins from headquarters. Others had TWX or
Telex for two-way communication. News programs often showed a bank of
Teletypes in the background, and newsradio stations used the thudding
noise in the background. They continued using that noise even after
mechanical Teletypes were replaced with computer screens. The classic
film Casablanca opens with a police officer ripping an urgent bulletin
from the Teletype, a common cinematic theme.
The film, "Airport", recently available on cable. made extensive use
of telephone and radio conversations to move the plot along. The
airport manager had a fancy telephone setup on the wall behind his
desk. The maintenance supervisor had a mobile phone in his car.
Other personnel had radios in their cars with the handheld microphone
pulled out on its coiled cord, a popular cinematic device. The film
was made around the time Touch Tone was coming out, and important
people in the film had colored Touch Tone sets, while mere mortals had
plain black rotary sets. Ironically, the airport's PBX switchboard
was a quiet board--for a crazy busy airport like that in a snowstorm
the board should've been a lot busier.
> 'The President's Analyst' has important roles for several fictional
> (we hope!) telco -- but not quite telephone -- technologies.
In "The Day the Earth Stood Still", a somber army general picks up the
phone, spins the dial at zero, and states grimly, "get me the
President!". That was a common cinematic device.
> TV series 'Cannon' frequently used an IMTS (I believe) car phone at a
> time when they were uncommon and 'sexy' but not unknown.
Did Mannix have a car phone? I remember back then that VIPs would be
shown with a car phone, which were very rare back then. You're right,
it added some "sexy" or coolness to the show.
> 'Green Acres' had Eddie Albert (often?) climb a pole to directly use
> the cable, but this was just a yuk, not important to plot.
That was an ongoing joke that the backward town couldn't or wouldn't
get enough wire to finish extending the line from the pole into the
house. It served for other jokes such as dropping the phone to the
ground and hitting someone or having a tough time talking in bad
weather. I think the phone portrayed was actually a butt test set.
In old days Bell dials made a scratchy sound when dialed while AE
dials were much quieter. But in old movies that scratchy sound could
add to the drama of a scene when a character was slowly and
deliberately making a phone call of importance to the plot (such as
toward the end in Casablanca with Capt Renoit forced to make a call at
gunpoint or several times in Maltese Falcon).
Question: In conducting business, Hollywood studios made extensive
use of the telephone, even going way back. I wonder if they Bell
System provided them with advanced PBX switchboards or networks to
accomodate their demand. I wonder if studio lots had more telephone
extensions than a typical industrial site.
[public replies, please]
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:19:43 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: FCC Connect America Fund Order Clarifies Inter-Carrier Compensation, VoIP
Message-ID: <p06240857caf2bee90715@[10.0.1.4]>
FCC Connect America Fund Order Clarifies Inter-Carrier Compensation, VoIP
11/23/11
by Joan Engebretson
The FCC's Universal Service and inter-carrier compensation (ICC)
reform order, also known as the Connect America Fund Order, provides
further details about several key mandates outlined when the order
was adopted last month - mandates designed to minimize access
stimulation and phantom traffic and to resolve long-standing
questions about whether VoIP traffic is subject to long-distance
access charges.
http://www.telecompetitor.com/fcc-connect-america-fund-order-clarifies-inter-carrier-compensation-voip/
TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly to telecom-
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