31 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981
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The Telecom Digest for January 3, 2013
Volume 32 : Issue 3 : "text" Format
====== 31 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
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Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the
Internet. All contents here are copyrighted by Bill Horne and
the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other
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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: 2 Jan 2013 04:50:28 -0000
From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: MCI Mail, was Verizon Announces End of 900 Number Billing
Message-ID: <20130102045028.5047.qmail@joyce.lan>
>Does what's left of MCI still include any MCI Mail, aka mcimail.com?
>
>Just curious, is all, as a former MCI Mail customer :-) . Cheers, -- tlvp
No, they shut it down in 2003, killed by ubiquitous unmetered Internet
email.
Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2013 15:00:14 -0800 (PST)
From: "John C. Fowler" <johnfpublic@yahoo.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: MCI Mail, was Verizon Announces End of 900 Number Billing
Message-ID: <1357167614.80260.YahooMailClassic@web163903.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
>> Does what's left of MCI still include any MCI Mail, aka mcimail.com?
> No, they shut it down in 2003, killed by ubiquitous unmetered Internet
> email.
Those of us who were still MCI Mail customers on the very last day of
service got a special message from Vint Cerf, who worked at MCI at the
time. I saved a copy. I just ran a search through Google, and I
don't see it anywhere else, so with 2013 being the 10th anniversary of
the demise of MCI Mail (and the 30th anniversary of its start), this
is probably a good time to share it.
Date: Mon Jun 30, 2003 9:37 am CDT
From: Vinton G. Cerf / MCI ID: 105-0002
Subject: MCIMAIL September 27th, 1983 - July 1st, 2003
Dear Friend and Valued Customer of MCI Mail,
This letter is the final commercial email being sent from the MCI
Mail team to all of its customers. It marks a major milestone in an
era of electronic communication at MCI that began on September 27,
1983. The introduction of MCI Mail transformed MCI from a feisty
long distance service provider into a complete communications
company. MCI Mail brought remarkably advanced concepts into being
including the ability to send postal, overnight courier, and
conventional email as well as Telex with a single email letter. The
ability to send fax was added a few years later.
But all good things must eventually come to an end. So we thank you,
our valued customers, for your loyal support and dedication over
nearly 20 years.
This message system will self-destruct at Midnight, 30 June 2003.
With warmest wishes,
Vint Cerf
Sr. VP, Architecture and Technology
MCI
[And it did.]
John C. Fowler, johnfpublic@yahoo.com
Date: 2 Jan 2013 04:48:27 -0000
From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Disruptions: The Real Hazards of E-Devices on Planes
Message-ID: <20130102044827.5020.qmail@joyce.lan>
>I don't CARE if there's only a 0.001% chance of a dumbphone or a
>laptop or a notepad or a pda interfering with an aircraft's
>radios. ...
People leave vast numbers of phones and computers turned on in their
briefcases and coats in the overhead bins out of sheer forgetfulness,
not malice. I've done it a few times.
If there were any actual hazard due to these things, planes would be
falling out of the sky every day.
Also, don't forget that a lot of planes are now retrofitted with in
flight wifi, such as the 737 I flew on today, and in Europe there are
a fair number of equally old planes with in flight mobile service.
(It's easier there, since all phones are GSM and nearly all work on
international roaming networks.) I am fairly sure they do not change
the avionics when they install this stuff.
R's,
John
Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2013 03:24:25 -0500
From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Disruptions: The Real Hazards of E-Devices on Planes
Message-ID: <20130102082425.GA18755@telecom.csail.mit.edu>
On Wed, Jan 02, 2013 at 04:48:27AM -0000, John Levine wrote:
> Bill Horne wrote:
> >I don't CARE if there's only a 0.001% chance of a dumbphone or a
> >laptop or a notepad or a pda interfering with an aircraft's
> >radios. ...
>
> People leave vast numbers of phones and computers turned on in their
> briefcases and coats in the overhead bins out of sheer forgetfulness,
> not malice. I've done it a few times.
>
> If there were any actual hazard due to these things, planes would be
> falling out of the sky every day.
If planes were falling out of the sky every day, the problem would be
obvious, and therefore it would be easy to deal with. After all,
nobody debates the need to ground a fleet when doors fall off or some
other defect becomes plain for all to see.
Interference to air navigation and communications systems is much
harder to deal with: it's expedient to ignore the risk, precisely
because it is not obvious, just as shoring up the levees in New
Orleans was an easy-to-ignore solution to a "Maybe, someday" problem
of having to deal with a Category Five hurricane. Bluntly put, humans
are terrible at assessing and addressing risk when they have to give
up anything in order to do it, such as the money to reinforce
levees. We are merely awful at doing it when it costs nothing or even
delivers real, tangible benefits: look at the rates of heart disease
associated with high-fat diets and lack of exercise.
It was, of course, wishful thinking to expect that the Ninth ward of
New Orleans would never have to face the fact that it is below sea
level, but our politicians have raised wishful thinking to a high art,
aided by the ever-so-persuasive lobbyists that whisper in their ears:
* They wish that confiscating fluids from air travellers would make
planes safe, even though Bruce Schneier pointed out that the TSA's
"Security Theater" imposes no penalty for failure, and so a bomber
can simply go through the checkpoint again and again until he
succeeds.
* They wish that terrorists will confine their attention to our air
transport industry, and not bother the millions of gallons of poison
gas - excuse me, I meant water treatment chemicals - that moves by
rail through our major cities on a daily basis.
* They wish that nobody ever felt the need to write them and complain
about pesky flight attendents telling airline passengers to turn off
their electronic devices.
All this wishful thinking is caused by an inconvenient political
truth: voters go nuts when anyone tells them "No". It doesn't matter
if the travelling public is utterly clueless about the risks of mixing
1940's navigation aids with twenty-first-century hand-held computers,
because the politicians know that they won't be blamed for plane
crashes caused by undefinable or inconclusive evidence, and they also
know that cellular providers and Internet merchants will back their
opponents if they keep travellers from using cellphones and/or
laptops.
The travelling public doesn't want to know that air travel can be
dangerous, and being forced to turn off electronic distractions just
at the times when they are most nervous - takeoffs and landings - is
the hottest of hot-button issues. We may as well tell airline
passengers that they must pay for their seats based on their body
weight, or travel to a different city to ease traffic congestion
around their chosen destination. Such ideas, although they make sense
to an engineer, are anathema to political leaders.
There is yet another toadstool in this soup: nobody wants to hear
about the difference between "AM" and "Spread Spectrum" or "Single
Sideband", and nobody wants to get their head around the fact that a
cellular "telephone" is really an radio-frequency transceiver, or the
fact that their expensive new ipad contains an electronic oscillator
which generates radio-frequency interference. As a practical matter,
it's impossible to educate the travelling public about the ways that
aircraft "Navigational Systems" are in use even on cloudless days, or
that an interference source ten feet away from the cockpit can be
hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than the navigation
transmitters located miles away on the ground, because of the
square-law rule which determines signal strength.
In summary, we have a situation where the risks are distant, poorly
defined, subject to debate, and easy to dismiss. The "benefits", OTOH,
are immediate, apparent, and tangible. The passengers want to act
normal in a tense and clautrophobic environment, and they resent
"experts" telling them "no".
I'm surprised that the planes haven't fallen out of the sky. Then
again, we'll never know if they haven't already.
Bill
--
Bill Horne
(Remove QRM from my address to email me directly)
Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2013 16:20:21 +0000 (UTC)
From: danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: hazard mitigation, was Disruptions: The Real Hazards of E-Devices on Planes
Message-ID: <kc1mo5$7in$1@reader1.panix.com>
In <20130102082425.GA18755@telecom.csail.mit.edu> Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> writes:
[snip of some good comments re: security theater]
>* They wish that terrorists will confine their attention to our air
> transport industry, and not bother the millions of gallons of poison
> gas - excuse me, I meant water treatment chemicals - that moves by
> rail through our major cities on a daily basis.
Actually... there's a huge amount of retrofitting and changes
in high risk industries in general, and in water treatment
plants in particular. Specifically because of post 9/11 concerns.
Check with your local water treatment plant, for example.
There's a good chance they've switched from using chlorine
tanks, which if breached would cause massive ugliness, to
using, umm, some chlorinated compound whose name escapes me.
If the new stockpile was damaged it still wouldn't be any fun,
but the destructive potential is far less.
One related reaction is to encase the "road level", so to speak,
portions of the NYC area bridge support cables in a concrete
tube. So while you can walk alongside them, you can no longer
grab the actual metal.
The concept here is that... if some unfriendly type or another
slaps an explosive knapsack on the (now covered) cable, the
blast might still take out that one riser, but the other half
dozen neighbors won't get affected.
Is this/are these overreactions? Maybe, maybe not. But this
sort of stuff is low cost and non intrusive. And the changes
in water treatment protocols reduce the general, not just
the 9/11, dangers.
--
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dannyb@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2013 12:56:33 -0500
From: Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: hazard mitigation, was Disruptions: The Real Hazards of E-Devices on Planes
Message-ID: <20130102175633.GC887@telecom.csail.mit.edu>
On Wed, Jan 02, 2013 at 04:20:21PM +0000, danny burstein wrote:
> In <20130102082425.GA18755@telecom.csail.mit.edu> Bill Horne <bill@horneQRM.net> writes:
> [snip of some good comments re: security theater]
>
>> * They wish that terrorists will confine their attention to our air
>> transport industry, and not bother the millions of gallons of poison
>> gas - excuse me, I meant water treatment chemicals - that moves by
>> rail through our major cities on a daily basis.
>
> Actually... there's a huge amount of retrofitting and changes
> in high risk industries in general, and in water treatment
> plants in particular. Specifically because of post 9/11 concerns.
>
> Check with your local water treatment plant, for example.
> There's a good chance they've switched from using chlorine
> tanks, which if breached would cause massive ugliness, to
> using, umm, some chlorinated compound whose name escapes me.
> If the new stockpile was damaged it still wouldn't be any fun,
> but the destructive potential is far less.
I'm sorry to say that the destructive potential is actually greater:
it's not our lives that terrorists want to end, but our life*style*. A
leak or spill of a less dangerous chemical is more disruptive than one
of chlorine gas, for several reasons:
1. There's only one procedure in place for chemical spills, and only
one option when they occur: evacuation and containment. It doesn't
matter if there "should" be a lower response level for a "less
dangerous" chemical: as a practical matter, the first-responders
must be trained to deal with each event in the same way.
2. No matter how dangerous the chemical, there will be panic. Every
mother will demand that her kid be removed from day care, and every
business in the affected area will have to shut down.
3. U.S. Media always hype the danger of any chemical spill, and so the
public perception of an attack will be as great, or greater, than
it would be for a chrorine leak.
This thread is about the dangers of electronic devices on airplanes,
but it's also about the ways we assess and deal with risk. The most
effective terrorist attack is not a firestorm or a flood: it is the
smell of some unknown substance burning, combined with a leaking roof,
because the terrorist wants to leverage our own fear to maximize the
effect of his attacks. I'll paraphrase Bruce Schneier: Al Queda cannot
terrorize us. Only we can do that.
Bill
OBTelecom: If you think the cellular networks were jammed during
hurricane Sandy, wait until you try to make a call during a hypefest
event like a "Dangerous Chemical Spill".
--
Bill Horne
(Remove QRM from my address to write to me directly)
Copyright (C) 2013 E.W. Horne. All Rights Reserved.
Date: 2 Jan 2013 09:26:03 -0500
From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey)
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Verizon Announces End of 900 Number Billing
Message-ID: <kc1g1r$b83$1@panix2.panix.com>
Joseph Singer <joeofseattle@yahoo.com> wrote:
> It's interesting that in the Netherlands 0900 (equivalent to North
> American 1-900 service) isused for just about everything. To call
> the police (non 112), infomercial order, telephone customer service,
> ordering concert tickets well, just about anything will have a 0900
> pay by the minute premium number attached to it. I remember
> inquiring in a Netherlands telecom news group and the Dutch think
> this is ordinary and in fact the way it should be. It's no wonder
> really why you never see 0800 number listed and that some 0800
> numbers are only four digits.
This is because in the Netherlands, it's possible to have 0900 calls
with fairly small minimum payments. The large minimum payment in the
US pretty much killed services like that.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2013 14:50:36 -0800
From: John Reiser <jreiserfl@comcast.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Verizon Announces End of 900 Number Billing
Message-ID: <bc6dnVzLQJLnJHnN4p2dnAA@giganews.com>
On 01/02/2013 06:26 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> Joseph Singer <joeofseattle@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> It's interesting that in the Netherlands 0900 (equivalent to North
>> American 1-900 service) is used for just about everything.
> This is because in the Netherlands, it's possible to have 0900 calls
> with fairly small minimum payments. The large minimum payment in the
> US pretty much killed services like that.
Please quantify. Can the billed charge be as low as 0.30 euro?
What do you believe was the US minimum: 2 dollars?
--
Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2013 08:48:57 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Teacher arrested after husband caught her having sex with 16-year-old exchange student in parking lot
Message-ID: <p06240809cd09ea2c4017@[10.0.1.4]>
Teacher arrested after husband caught her having sex with 16-year-old
exchange student in parking lot
BY MEENA HART DUERSON / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
NOVEMBER 14, 2012
Amie Neely was arrested on Nov. 10 on a charge of unlawful sex with a minor.
A Florida teacher was arrested on felony charges this weekend after
she was caught with her pants down having sex with a 16-year-old
foreign exchange student.
Amie Neely, 38, was taken into custody on Sunday, police told South
Florida's WPTV, after her husband tracked her location using the GPS
on her phone and found her getting it on with the teenager in a
nearby parking lot.
...
Her husband had followed them using an app that pinpointed his wife's
location using the GPS information on her phone, and discovered them
in the act around 10 a.m. on Saturday.
...
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/teacher-caught-sex-teen-parking-lot-article-1.1201771
***** Moderator's Note *****
A teacher caught In Flagrante with a foreign exchange student gives a whole new meaning to
"Global Positioning".
Bill Horne
Moderator
Moderator's Note Copyright (C) 2013 E.W. Horne. All Rights Reserved.
TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly to telecom-
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This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm-
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