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The Telecom Digest for February 2, 2012
Volume 31 : Issue 33 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
Re: Teen boots banned on account of cell phone smuggling (Pete Cresswell)
The cereal box goes digital (HAncock4)
EFF assisting megaupload.com users in retrieving files (danny burstein)
Re: Cloud-based PBX service (Geoffrey Welsh)
Re: Justices Say GPS Tracker Violated Privacy Rights (Adam H. Kerman)

====== 30 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======

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 journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using any name or email address included herein for any reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to that person, or email address owner.
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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

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Date: Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:50:21 -0500
From: Pete Cresswell <PeteCress@invalid.telecom-digest.org>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Teen boots banned on account of cell phone smuggling 
Message-ID: <14kii754rba8so39juehq56rmqmcjd78se@4ax.com>

Per tlvp:
>Heh-heh ... in my day, it wasn't cell phones but shivs or zip guns
>that kids would smuggle into school, and not in "Uggs" but in their
>galoshes.

When I was living in Hawaii back in the sixties, I briefly shared
a house with a guy from Texas who never went anywhere without
his 1914 Colt .45  - and seemed to wear cowboy boots 24-7.

"Dallas, how on earth did you get that thing over here?".

"Ahhhh I just stuck it in my boot".
-- 
Pete Cresswell




Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2012 07:07:46 -0800 (PST)
From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: The cereal box goes digital 
Message-ID: <d9e7a76b-47cc-4775-bac4-d281bc67296a@y10g2000vbn.googlegroups.com>

USA Today reported that General Mills, home of Cheerios, Pillsbury,
Green Giant, and Betty Crocker, is looking into digital add-ons to its
packaging.   QR [Quick Response] codes, apps, augmented reality and
all the other things smartphones can do in their digital pantry.  One
possible approach is to update the marketing concept of offering a
surprise inside the cereal box. Instead, kids could point a smartphone
at the box and "see visual surprises."

for full article please see:

http://goo.gl/s7fmi

-or-

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/talkingtech/story/2012-01-31/general-mills-tech/52906314/1




Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2012 12:26:04 -0500
From: danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: EFF assisting megaupload.com users in retrieving  files
Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.1202011213480.7040@panix5.panix.com>

Putting aside the Big Arguments about the US gov'ts
shutdown about the Megaupload.com file sharing service,
one undisputed fact is that many completely "innocent"
(term used very, very, loosely) subscribers were
victims of collateral damage.

Far too many of them didn't maintain their own
local copies of their material, and now had no way
to retrieve it.

The kind and wise folk over at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation ("EFF") have gotten handshakes from
the various service providers who worked with
Megaupload to refrain from deleting those files,
and to establish a framework to give the original
owners access to them.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/eff-requests-information-innocent-megaupload-users

or:
http://goo.gl/7vv54

_____________________________________________________
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, 1 Feb 2012 19:23:42 -0500
From: "Geoffrey Welsh" <gwelsh@spamcop.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Cloud-based PBX service 
Message-ID: <68ca5$4f29d768$d1b716e1$5827@PRIMUS.CA>

> ***** Moderator's Note *****
> I'm uncomfortable with the idea that using a laptop for phone
> calls makes it into a "soft" phone: I think it makes a very expensive
> telephone instrument with a built-in analog-to-digital adapter.

Well, I did say "assuming that you already have a computer with
speaker and microphone."  I wouldn't recommend getting a PC just to
turn it into a soft client... after all, I was suggesting the soft
client as a way to save money, not to spend more of it.

> some VoIP services demand that users endure pop-up ads and DNS
> redirections, and they don't allow users to port numbers in or out
> of the "service" they have subscribed to.

While that may be true it should scare you away from the provider and
not all soft clients.  I mentioned Bria because it doesn't do anything
bad, it's not tied to any provider, it tags along with the laptop that
I drag almost everywhere anyway, brings my phone service wherever my
laptop has an internet conenction, and is less expensive than a
physical Nortel, Cisco or an Aastra IP phone.  It does seem to have an
issue with connecting to my VoIP provider's proxy when I'm behind a
firewall with a SIP application gateway - that seems to be a common
issue with soft SIP clients - so it may be wise to try before you buy.

> I'd rather price a system with dedicated devices, and then
> consider what, if anything, I can save by using a PC in place of one
> or more of the dedicated devices.

Exactly. In my case the service was ordered with SIP phones, but we
could have saved money and had an acceptable result if we ordered the
same service with Bria (or any number of similar products) in stead of
the phone.




Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2012 01:31:09 +0000 (UTC)
From: "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Justices Say GPS Tracker Violated Privacy Rights 
Message-ID: <jgcp0t$2r7$2@news.albasani.net>

Garrett Wollman <wollman@bimajority.org> wrote:
>Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:

>>Huh. That's a poor summary of the case.

>SCOTUSblog's Tom Goldstein posted a long piece criticizing the
>reporting on the story the other day.

>>The Supreme Court let the reversal stand. The government tried to bring up
>>an argument, disallowed as it was not raised in the lower courts, that
>>there was reasonable suspicion and thus probable cause and therefore the
>>search wasn't unconstitutional.

>"Reasonable suspicion" and "probable cause" are two different
>standards.  "Probable cause" is a much stronger standard than
>"reasonable suspicion".  The Court didn't say which standard it
>favored.

Oops. That was an error. The prosecution needs probable cause to obtain
a search warrant.

The government's disallowed argument was that they had reasonable suspicion
to conduct the search because the defendant was one of the leaders of a
criminal conspiracy to distribute drugs. The defendant was being investigated
for evidence of his involvement in the criminal conspiracy, so that's a
circular argument. The government was not allowed to raise an issue it
had not raised in a lower court.

I expect the government to try to raise the issue again in future.






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