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The Telecom Digest for July 13, 2012
Volume 31 : Issue 170 : "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
Internet. All contents here are copyrighted by Bill Horne and
the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other
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Date: 12 Jul 2012 02:17:52 -0000
From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Looking for a new RespOrg for my personal 888 number
Message-ID: <20120712021752.60472.qmail@joyce.lan>
I've been happy with Pioneer Tel:
http://pioneertelephone.com/
800 numbers are 99c/mo and about 3c/min. If you get your bill by email
there's no monthly minimum. Their rates for dial-1 service are pretty
good, too.
R's,
John
Date: Wed, 11 Jul 2012 23:26:33 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: The Phone That Wasn't There: 11 Things You Need to Know About Phantom Vibrations
Message-ID: <p06240816cc23f4171fb8@[10.0.1.6]>
The Phone That Wasn't There: 11 Things You Need to Know About Phantom
Vibrations
Robinson Meyer
The Atlantic
JULY 10 2012
No, "Phantom Vibrations" are not a terrible "Beach Boys Meet the
Munsters Cover Tribute Band."
You're sitting at work. Your phone vibrates in your pocket. As you
reach for it, you look up... and see your phone, sitting on the table.
You just experienced a phantom vibration.
A new study was released this week on the phenomenon. Led by IU-PU
Fort Wayne's Michelle Drouin, it was published in the journal of
Computers in Human Behavior. It's only the third study on this new
phenomenon of the mobile age, so we can fairly say that these are the
eleven things we know about phantom vibrations:
...
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/the-phone-that-wasnt-there-11-things-you-need-to-know-about-phantom-vibrations/259638/
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2012 00:51:45 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: What You Need To Know About The Latest Twitter Privacy Ruling
Message-ID: <p06240827cc240782acb0@[10.0.1.6]>
What You Need To Know About The Latest Twitter Privacy Ruling
By Adam Cohen
July 9, 2012
Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets have a great deal of
information about all of us - and the government wants to be able to
see it. Last week, the government scored a major win - and Internet
privacy lost big - when a judge ruled against Twitter in a fight over
a trove of information about a political activist.
New York prosecutors asked Twitter to hand over tweets that Malcolm
Harris, an Occupy Wall Street protester, sent over a three-and-a-half
month period. It might not seem like a privacy invasion to read
people's tweets, but the government's request included other kinds of
information that Twitter has about Harris, which could include
private communications and records of his physical whereabouts. This
is just the sort of stuff we should be worried about the government
getting easy access to, and just the sort of precedent that should
worry anyone who uses social media.
...
http://ideas.time.com/2012/07/09/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-latest-twitter-privacy-ruling/
http://www.law.yale.edu/news/15785.htm
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2012 02:28:06 +0000 (UTC)
From: wollman@bimajority.org (Garrett Wollman)
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Anyone else get locked out of Twitter?
Message-ID: <jto13m$2rne$1@grapevine.csail.mit.edu>
I've been using Twitter for a few months now, mainly as a way to keep
up with friends and a few bloggers who post pointers to their new
posts. I think I'm a pretty normal user in all respects but one:
While I primarily use the company's officially-supported client for
Android, I rarely use the browser-based user interface at all, and I
use Cameron Kaiser's excellent "ttytter" Perl script from the command
line (both to send and also as a background job with updates scrolling
by in a separate window). I'm certainly not a spammer or a
pornographer, and my password is a long string of pseudorandom
characters and thus extremely unlikely to be guessed by an attacker.
On Sunday evening, both of these clients mysteriously started
reporting "authentication failure", with no explanation. After
restarting, reentering my password a few times, and similar measures,
I opened up the browser interface, logged in there, and it told me
that my account was "suspended".
No reason was given, and following their official support links
ultimately sends an email which says, in effect, "if you don't reply
to this message, we will close your support request without looking at
it". So I replied, and have done so faithfully for the past four
days, without receiving any sort of feedback at all from the company
in general or the helpdesk in particular.
Has anyone else had a similar experience? What did the problem turn
out to be? I have a theory that the account blocking is done
automatically, without human intervention, by some sort of
machine-learning system, so it may be that there simply is no
meaningful "reason" to offer other than "the classifier said so".
(This is often the case with machine-learning systems; the "reason" is
a complex and non-human-interpretable function of the system's
internal state structure.)
-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | What intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft
wollman@bimajority.org| repeated, than the story of a large research program
Opinions not shared by| that impaled itself upon a false central assumption
my employers. | accepted by all practitioners? - S.J. Gould, 1993
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