From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Aug 12 22:03:46 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id WAA15065; Thu, 12 Aug 1999 22:03:46 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 22:03:46 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908130203.WAA15065@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #301 TELECOM Digest Thu, 12 Aug 99 22:03:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 301 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Mission Impossible: The Emergence of Self-Destructing E-Mail (M. Pollock) Mexican Service/Access Codes (was Re: Mexico's Version of 911) (M. Cuccia) Re: Lexington/Northern Kentucky Will Get NPA 859 (Matt Simpson) Re: Lexington/Northern Kentucky Will Get NPA 859 (Ed Ellers) Re: Minitel Emulation Freeware (Frederic Faure) Re: Minitel Emulation Freeware (Brad Houser) Re: Real Competition in the Local Loop (Roy Smith) Re: US West In Court Over ISDN Net Service Speeds (Tad Cook) Re: Need to Convert One Line Phone to Two Line (Matt Bartlett) Re: Two-Letter State (etc) Codes (Neal McLain) Telegeography Map (Joseph Wineburgh) Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Bob Banks) Small Voice Mail Mystem: Looking For Opinions (dmitri@ryutov.com) Re: What to Do With a Used AMPS Cell Phone? (steven@primacomputer.com) Re: Worldcom's Customer Service (Ken Dulin) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 21:07:41 EDT From: itsamike@yahoo.com (Mike Pollock) Subject: Mission Impossible: The Emergence of Self-Destructing E-Mail This message was forwarded to you from ZDNet (http://www.zdnet.com) by itsamike@yahoo.com. --------------------------------------------------------------------- This article is from ZDNN (http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/). Visit this page on the Web at: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2314024,00.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- "This message will self-destruct in five seconds." Like something out of Mission: Impossible, a London-based firm hopes to sell Web surfers on the next level of privacy: Encrypted self-destructing e-mail. "There are thousands of cases where people have gotten in trouble because of their e-mail," said Leo Scheiner, CEO of Internet venture Global Markets Ltd. -- the owner of Web-based e-mail start-up 1on1. "They'll send out e-mail without any thoughts of the consequences of what they are saying. That's well and good, but those words have a way of coming back and hitting you in the face." Privacy or paranoia? Call it e-mail for the paranoid. Requiring a custom e-mail client, the Web e-mail service promises unbreakable encryption to give individuals privacy and corporations some protection against competitors and lawsuits. "What we have is a service that provides what any businessman would want: Confidentiality, reliability, and the ability to assure that your e-mail has arrived," said Scheiner. [TABLE NOT SHOWN] With 2,048-bit encryption, trying to break the code hiding users' messages is impossible, he said. Yet, the service has only been running for a week, and is relatively untested. Not for long. The company invites hackers to try their hand at breaking the encryption by offering a standard reward of $50,000 to whoever can do it. The company adds other features as well. To avoid that pesky e-mail that comes back to bite the writer, 1on1 can automatically be set to delete e-mail after a certain period of time has passed. As an added benefit, the security features of the system also make it nigh impossible to send spam to its users. More is not necessarily better Yet, despite its short history, the service is already gathering critics. "(2,048-bit encryption) is ridiculous," said Bruce Schneier, noted cryptographer and author of Applied Cryptography. "It is irrelevant. The security is determined by the password anyway. If the user picks a bad one, the security is bad." [TABLE NOT SHOWN] Dov Smith, spokesman for Internet privacy service Zero Knowledge Systems Inc., agrees. "It's less important to look at key length as a barometer of security and more important to look at the implementation," he said. "We look at privacy as a lot more than e-mail." Zero Knowledge's service, known as the Freedom Net, encrypts all communications to the Internet, essentially hiding the user's identity. Another encrypted e-mail service, known as Hushmail, is also critical of the self-destructing e-mail component of the service. "That's a gimmick," said Jon Gilliam, spokesman for Hush Communications Inc., which runs the Hushmail service. "It's nothing new." Are there secrets? Yet, for lawyers, doctors and financial firms, such privacy-enhancing features are gaining popularity, said Global Markets' Scheiner. On that, at least, Hushmail's Gilliam agrees. The Aguilla-based company has also seen a lot of interest from such professionals. The reason is no mystery. Last year during the anti-trust suit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, Microsoft Corp.'s chief and several other execs had to defend, not just against the government, but their own e-mails. That event and others scared some companies, Gilliam said. "When they see Bill Gates fighting his own e-mail in court, that means something," he said "If he can't stop it, who can?" For 1on1 mail, the answer is obvious.[TABLE NOT SHOWN] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 15:54:51 -0500 From: Mark J. Cuccia Subject: Mexican Service/Access Codes (was Re: Mexico's Version of 911) Martin McCormick (wb5agz@dc.cis.okstate.edu) wrote: > I was once listening to XEW, a Mexican national broadcasting > network. My Spanish is admittedly very slow, but I heard something > that got my interest. A man was being interviewed on a public > affairs-type program about an emergency telephone number that could > be called in Mexico City. The examples for use sounded like the > guidelines for all well-managed 911 systems in the United States in > that people could use the number to report crimes, fires, > accidents, etc. The number to call was 080, repeated many times so > I am sure of what I heard. > Some time later, I corresponded with a person who lives in Warez > and I happened to ask him about the emergency number. He said it > was 060, there. The "generic" list of Mexican special service codes prior to changes in the dialing and numbering scheme in 1997/98 had '06' for Emergencies and '08' for the Police. The generic list of special codes since the 1997/98 numbering/dialing expansion shows '060' for Emergencies and '080' for the Police. Maybe different towns prefer one to call one rather than the other, similar to 911 (more or less standard throughout the NANP) vs. the newer 311 used in some parts of the US for "non-emergency" access to the police or other government/ health services. Incidently, there are several competing interests for a "standard" use of 211 here in the NANP. The United Way wants 211 to become a US standard to reach an agency referals center, while many local/state/county governments or associations want 211 to be a standard code for (government supplied) weather and/or traffic/ highway/travel info. In Canada, various groups for the blind and print-handicapped want 211 to be used for "audiotext" - i.e. some form of "newspapers and magazines for the blind". As for Mexico, the OLD (pre-97/98) numbering/dialing scheme for special services used '9X+' codes for dialing various types of toll calls - different 9X+ access codes depending on whether direct "sent-paid" dial vs. Operator assisted, or whether one was calling a cellular, domestic toll, NANP-toll, or International/Overseas, and '0X' codes for things like the Operator, Police, Repair, Directory, etc. The current scheme (phased in during 97/98) uses '0NX' codes for special services such as the Operator, Police, Directory, etc., mostly taking the old '0X' code and adding a third digit '0' to it. Thus, there can be additional future special service codes available '0N1' through '0N9'. The older '9X+' access codes have been changed to '01+', '02+', '010+', '00+', '09+' and '090+', which include codes to access alternate long distance carriers, such as the NANP's '101+' in such 101-XXXX+ Carrier Access Codes (the new format for the NANP is REALLY the generic 101-XXXX+, NOT "just" the so-called "ten-ten" codes "10-10-XXX+"). Also, the older (and even the new/current) format of Mexican access and special service codes weren't necessarily standard throughout Mexico. Particularly in the northwestern Mexican towns bordering the US states of California and Arizona. Some of them have phased some of their older codes to conform with the new Mexican dialing format, but others which have been "unique" to the northwestern Mexican border might still be used, such as '123' for the Business Office, and a range of '13X' codes for accessing various government and social service offices. And, at one time, the northwest Mexican border towns were using _NANP_ format dialing and access codes! These northwestern Mexican border towns are not served directly by TelMex, but by TelNor which since the early 1980's has been a SUBSIDIARY of TelMex. Prior to that, the telco was Telefonica Fronteriza, which I've been told was partially held (but significantly) by executives of Pacific (Bell) Telephone and AT&T. And prior to 1980, these northwestern Mexican border towns were part of NANP (+1) Area Code 903 (since reclaimed in 1980, and reassigned in 1990 to split 214 in Texas), and they actually "homed" on the AT&T/PacBell/MntnBell toll switches in California and Arizona. And most of these border towns connected with the Mexican interior (Country Code +52) via these US-based "Bell System" toll switches. While these border towns presently use the 0X+ and 0NX access and service codes for toll and for the operator, directory, and repair, back in the 1970's, they dialed the OLD NANP service codes (used in Step offices) of '113' for Directory and '114' for Repair and also dialed '0' for the Operator! Some of these older NANP-like codes were used into the late 1980's and early 1990's in the northwestern border towns. MARK_J._CUCCIA__PHONE/WRITE/WIRE/CABLE:__HOME:__(USA)__Tel:_CHestnut-1-2497 WORK:__mcuccia@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu|4710-Wright-Road|__(+1-504-241-2497) Tel:UNiversity-5-5954(+1-504-865-5954)|New-Orleans-28__|fwds-on-no-answr-to Fax:UNiversity-5-5917(+1-504-865-5917)|Louisiana(70128)|cellular/voicemail- ------------------------------ From: msimpson@uky.edu (Matt Simpson) Subject: Re: Lexington/Northern Kentucky Will Get NPA 859 Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 09:05:31 -0400 Organization: University of Kentucky Computing Center In article , w9vhe@earthlink.net (Scott Wilkerson) wrote: > I have seen an article in a local KY paper that the governor has > requested to keep Lexington in the 606 area code. Wrong. Actually, according to an article in the 8/10 Lexington (KY) Herald-Leader, Gov. Patton was one of "a small number" who requested that 606 be assigned to Eastern KY instead of letting Lexington keep it. See http://www.kentuckyconnect.com/heraldleader/news/081099/businessdocs/10AreaCodeBox.htm For the geographically challenged, Lexington is not in Eastern KY. 606 currently includes the entire eastern half of the state, including Lexington and the Northern KY metro area near Cincinnati OH. When a split was first proposed, they considered overlay vs. geographic split. Apparently nobody liked the overlay idea, so they split the 606 area, with the Lexington/Northern KY area going in one area and Eastern KY getting the other. Next question was who got to keep 606; lots of folks presumed it would be the faster-growing Lex/Northern area. The state PSC made the decision to take it away from Lexington, and Gov. Patton was one of the ones who requested that they do so. Matt Simpson - Paris, KY ------------------------------ From: Ed Ellers Subject: Re: Lexington/Northern Kentucky Will Get NPA 859 Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 00:37:20 -0400 Darren Stuart Embry (dsembr01@ox.slug.louisville.edu) wrote: > So have any other such "vanity" area codes been assigned? :) The one I know of is 321, for the Space Coast region of Florida. (As in "3-2-1-blastoff!") BTW, do you realize that University of Louisville phone numbers now begin with "UL?" [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When the former 809 code was broken up into several parts, a lot of the former users got vanity codes in the form of numbers which matched abbreviations of their country names. PAT] ------------------------------ From: ffaure@bigSPAMGAZETTAIDAMEfoot.com (Frederic Faure) Subject: Re: Minitel Emulation Freeware Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 18:25:36 GMT Organization: What? Me, organized? Reply-To: ffaure@bigSPAMGAZETTAIDAMEfoot.com On Wed, 11 Aug 1999 12:03:51 +0200, Mourad Komiha wrote: > I am looking after a Minitel (French standard) emulation freeware for > Windows 98, any suggestion will be much appreciated. HyperTerminal handles this, provided your modem supports V.23. FF. The system required Windows 95 or better, so I installed Linux! ------------------------------ From: Brad Houser Subject: Re: Minitel Emulation Freeware Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 12:34:01 -0700 Organization: Intel Corporation Try HTPE, at: http://www.hilgraeve.com/htpe/index.html << Brad Houser "Not Speaking for Intel" >> Mourad Komiha wrote in message news:telecom19. 298.16@telecom-digest.org: > I am looking after a Minitel (French standard) emulation freeware for > Windows 98, any suggestion will be much appreciated. ------------------------------ From: roy@endeavor.med.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) Subject: Re: Real Competition in the Local Loop Organization: NYU School of Medicine, Educational Computing Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 16:16:13 -0400 > RCN has evidently negotiated a long-term contract with the landlord > under which the landlord may not allow any other telecommunications > carrier into the building to install cable of any type. There is another issue here, and it's (literally) a messy one. As the past president of a co-op board in an apartment building, I (unfortunately) have some taste of what things look like from the landlord side of the fence. Cabling in a typical residential building is a nightmare. The only places to run the wires are usually surface-mount raceway in the hallways or exterior drops to each apartment. We supervised one cabling project (rooftop antenna/distribution-amp system before cable was available in our area). We used the exterior drop method. It was a real effort to end up with an installation which was neat and clean, unobtrusive, weathertight, didn't have workmen destroying the roof of the building, etc. The thought of going through that several times over for each of N competing operators who wanted to install their own cable plants is mind-numbing. Hard to blame a landlord for wanting a single-carrier contract. Roy Smith New York University School of Medicine ------------------------------ Subject: Re: US West In Court Over ISDN Net Service Speeds Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 14:57:12 PDT From: tad@ssc.com (Tad Cook) hudsonl@skypoint.com (Hudson Leighton) wrote: > Yes and no, I have a USWest 256K DSL Connection, I rarely > see speeds higher than 100K, usually in the 60K - 90K range, > and if I hit a busy site forget it, my old 28.8K modem would > be just as good. I have had the basic 256K DSL service from US West for several months now, and I find it blazingly fast compared to my old V.90 connection. I live just a few blocks from the LAkeview C.O. in Seattle, and my old V.90 connection to the same ISP (aa.net) was good. It really shines on sites that have lots of high density content, like Microsoft's Terraserver. Recently I connected to some sort of test page that the computer section of MSN was running, (I think at http://computingcentral.msn.com) and it reported my throughput at the time at about 216 kbps. The throughput probably varies according to the quality of the connection that your ISP has to the net, and of course another factor will be the connection and traffic to whatever web site you may be trying to view. Tad Cook tad@ssc.com Seattle, WA ------------------------------ From: Matt Bartlett Subject: Re: Need to Convert One Line Phone to Two Line Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 00:56:47 -0400 Organization: EarthLink Network, Inc. Hey I resent that ... j/k. Anyway we stopped carrying that automatic two line switch I believe about a year and a half ago. Matt Dennis Metcalfe wrote in message ... >> I have an old one line phone that I'd like to use on two lines. I'm >> looking for a simple box with incoming and outgoing phone jacks (four >> conductor and two conductor respectively), where you can select either >> line one or line two and then call out on that line. From the phone's >> perspective, it's always calling on line one. Does such a thing >> exist? >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Tandy/Radio Shack has exactly what you >> are looking for. They even have a model that will force the phone onto >> whichever line is ringing automatically in the case of an incoming call. >> You press a button on the little plastic box to use whichever line you >> want for outgoing purposes. LEDs on the box show which line is in use, >> which line is ringing, etc. PAT] > If you can't find at Radio Shack ... I bought a couple of these from > Mike Sandman in January ... $14.95 each plus tax ... called Jasco Two > Line Telephone Adaptor, model 1950 > http://www.sandman.com/ > Dennis Metcalfe > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: And frankly, Mike's merchandise is a > lot better quality than Radio Shack. He is an important sponsor of > this Digest as well, so help him (and me!) out when you can. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 07:13:01 -0400 From: Neal McLain Subject: Re: Two-Letter State (etc) Codes In TD 19:297, Mark J Cuccia wrote: > Also, there are always going to be conflicts and inconsistancies > amongst the two-letter Internet domain extensions, "official" Postal > abbreviations, NON-official but POPULAR (postal) abbreviations, and > telco abbreviations... and even telco-assigned abbreviations might > vary between different countries as to what each country considers > "official" for their internal purposes! Even different branches of the US government can't agree. Here in Wisconsin, the postal code is WI. But register a boat and the Coast Guard tells you it's WS. Stupid. Neal McLain nmclain@compuserve.com ------------------------------ From: Joseph Wineburgh Reply-To: Subject: Telegeography Map Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 09:13:21 -0400 What can I say besides - Awesome! It's printed on Thick (and I mean thick - almost posterboard) vinylized anti-tear paper, the actual coloring of the areas on the map are shaded by average number of minutes per citizen. It details the connectivity between continents/countries as far as pipes and minutes per pipe. Another neat thing is that the time zone key along the bottom starts with eastern time (one at the top for GMT), where I am. There are charts that show outgoing international call minutes by country, by carrier and by region. They also break down the traffic within some of the continents to and from cities. One other thing I like is that it has the country codes over the respective countries. That way, when someone calls me to complain they can't get through, I just walk over to the map on the wall and figure out where they were really calling (hehehe) ... I can't wait to get the internet/satellite chart as well. I just need to make some room for it! They are literally 3 feet by 4 feet in size. Oh, and in one day, I received a few comments as well - ranging from 'what the heck is that' to 'awesome'. Enjoy. #JOE ------------------------------ From: Bob Banks Subject: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 08:34:36 -0500 Organization: Microsoft Corporation I hope you can help me. I'm a student and our Telecom teacher was asked why a 66 block is called that. He did not know and told us for extra credit find out what the 66 means. I called AT&T and Ameritech yesterday and no one there could help me. If you could help I would really appreciate it, I hope you don't mind I've book marked your page; it looks like a great source of information. Thanks, Bob [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, can anyone tell Bob why a 66 block is called by that name? And yes Bob, you are free to bookmark this site or link to pages here. Visitors are always welcome. PAT] ------------------------------ From: dmitri@ryutov.com Subject: Small Voice Mail System: Looking For Opinions Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 12:02:42 -0400 Hello all, I am currently evaluating a couple of voice mail systems for about 30 users, namely Active Voice Lingo and Comdial Small Office system. Does anybody have any experiences with those two? If so, could you share them with me? Are there any other systems in this price range that are worth looking at? Any help is appreciated. ------------------------------ From: steven@primacomputer.com (Steven) Subject: Re: What to Do With a Used AMPS Cell Phone? Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 19:58:42 +0800 Organization: Prima Computer Paint it red, glue small wheels onto the sides and give it to your kids to play with. The battery is a good source of vitamins and minerals such as cadmium. Steven In article , Wlevant@aol.com says... > What can one do with one of these? Since the carriers here all give > away AMPS phones with AMPS activation (and, at least in my case, they > replace 'em free when stolen), the resale value here is nil. ------------------------------ From: Ken Dulin Subject: Re: Worldcom's Customer Service Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 12:30:28 -0500 Organization: Jump.Net Amazing ... they have a problem and they don't care :) I have been told by a representative of MCI that it is their policy to avoid contact with customers. Why? I don't know, but I was never able to reach anybody who could help me over three or four months of trying. I talked to live people a few times, but nobody could help. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That's nothing new where not caring about problems is concerned. Bank One has had some severe security problems with their online banking web site since they merged with First Chicago a few months ago. Hearing from customers who are con- cerned about the difficulty they have in logging in and the ability of others to use cut and paste techniques to 'deep link' into pages with customer's balances, etc is the last thing they care about. Try sometime going to Bank One's home page for customer login and source it ... review the source ... it looks like something a twelve year old beginning hacker would put together. So you think MCI tries to avoid customer contact whenever possible? Why don't you simply avoid paying them whenever possible, and see if that encourages them to make themselves a little bit more avail- able. PAT] ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #301 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Aug 13 00:50:57 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id AAA21214; Fri, 13 Aug 1999 00:50:57 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 00:50:57 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908130450.AAA21214@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #302 TELECOM Digest Fri, 13 Aug 99 00:50:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 302 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Cramming is Down, But Not Out (Monty Solomon) InfoWorld and Deep Linking (Monty Solomon) Don't Link or I'll Sue! (Monty Solomon) Re: Deep Linking Proposal (Barry Margolin) Accessible Telecommunications Course - Section 255 (Jim Tobias) Who the Heck Makes AT&T Phones Now? (Ed Ellers) Re: Real Competition in the Local Loop? (Tony Pelliccio) Re: Real Competition in the Local Loop? (Thor Lancelot Simon) Re: Universal ANI Number Wanted (Bruce Kille) Re: VP on Steps to Address Unlawful Conduct on Internet (Chuck Forsberg) Prison Rules, (was Re: Families of Michigan Prisoners (Danny Burstein) Re: Families of Michigan Prisoners Refusing Collect Calls (BV124@aol.com) Starium Promises Phone Privacy (Monty Solomon) Last Laugh! A Very Wrong Number (Monty Solomon) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 02:06:39 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Cramming is Down, But Not Out WASHINGTON, DC ... "Cramming," the number one complaint reported to the National Consumers League's National Fraud Information Center in 1998, has fallen to number two in the first six months of 1999. Cramming complaints have dropped from an average of 228 per month in 1998 to 60 per month in 1999, a 74 percent decrease. "We have spoken to several telephone companies that bill on behalf of third-party vendors for miscellaneous services and they also report that the volume of cramming complaints is going down," said Susan Grant, NFIC Director. "It's still too early to declare victory, but it looks like crammers are on the run." http://www.fraud.org/news/news.htm ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 14:13:05 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: InfoWorld and Deep Linking Another message from Dave Winer passed along FYI: Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 15:48:45 GMT From: dave@scripting.com (DaveNet email) Subject: InfoWorld and Deep Linking From Scripting News... It's DaveNet! Released on 8/12/99; 8:46:30 AM PST ***Good morning! The Deep Linking thread continues. Lawrence Lee, the editor of Tomalak's Realm, sent me a pointer: http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStat.pl?/readerservices/permissions.htm The title of the page is "Using copyrighted material from InfoWorld". ***Quote "Like most online publications, InfoWorld Electric has a policy regarding links. When we refer to a link, we mean a hypertext link, where you post the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of some content on our site to your site. This can be simply including the link in text form or attaching a URL to one of our logos for the reader to click on. "To link to an article on InfoWorld Electric, send an e-mail request to Meera Srinivas with the URL of the InfoWorld content you want to link to. If your request is approved, we will ask you to confirm back to us the exact URL of the place on your site where we can find the link." ***Why this is a problem After reading this page, I posted this notice: "We have been linking to InfoWorld.Com since the inception of Scripting News. We're going to keep doing it until we hear otherwise from InfoWorld. I assume their linking policy is an old not-updated page explaining an old not-enforced policy. However, if they object, we will stop linking to them in the future." ***The policy is serious I received an email from an InfoWorld insider, a friend, who said that the policy is serious. My correspondent asked not to be identified, and I'm respecting that. "Dave, there's a strong feeling here that allowing other sites to link to us would draw people away from our home page." ***Questions Do they have facts to back up that belief? Do they know for a fact that if I link to an InfoWorld story that there will be fewer reads of their home page? Would the readers of my site read the InfoWorld piece if I didn't link to it? I don't know, do they? If they read an article a second time because I link to it, does that harm InfoWorld? How does that deprive them of a view of their home page? And why are views of their home page so important? Isn't there a link to the home page on every article? (There is.) And finally does InfoWorld require that search engines get permission before linking to an InfoWorld article? (I checked with a few search engines, they link to InfoWorld, completely disregarding their policy.) ***Irony Isn't it ironic that the rest of the web is looking for ever-more-creative ways to get other sites to link to them, and a supposed leader in the web has a policy that turns away linkers? ***Why I link to InfoWorld Every week InfoWorld runs a couple of stories that I think my readers should see. Occasionally I link to them because they mention my product or some cause I support. But the links always come with an implicit endorsement: "Read this because I think you will find it interesting." ***Why they should revise their policy If InfoWorld's management pauses to think about this seriously,I think they will realize that the web makes them stronger, allows their point of view to be more widely disseminated. Linking builds the value of their brand, and thereby builds value for their advertisers. Further, I believe this policy puts InfoWorld at a competitive disadvantage with publications that don't have such a policy. And probably even more serious, such a policy puts them at odds with the entire web, which is something I don't think they can afford to do. I read InfoWorld, and I understand that their readers care about the web. You can see it in the stories they write. And in this area, InfoWorld, as a leader in the application of technology, is setting a bad example. The web is uncontrollable in this way. I won't apply for permission to link, instead I will simply stop reading them. Given that choice, would you choose to have an overly restricted linking policy or have an open one? Bottom-line, could the web get by without InfoWorld? Yes. Could InfoWorld exist without support from the web? I think not. ***Other policies? To the rest of the web -- are there similar linking policy pages we can examine? Send me email, I'll post them on http://news.userland.com/. Please post comments at http://discuss.userland.com/. Dave Winer Scripting News: [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Again I thank Dave Winer for his input on this, but once again I am compelled to point out that regardless of what Infoworld may prefer take place, linking is a perfectly legal and acceptable activity on the web. If they do not agree with the way the web was established and its purposes then they should not be on the web. If a site which is non-commercial, non-privacy invading and operated for the purpose of benefitting the web as a whole requests that entry be through their front page, I would be inclined to honor that request. There are good, creative and hardworking webmasters who sincerely accept the basic premise here, which is 'share what you know and learn what you don't know ...' There are many sites offering what I would call an 'entire presentation' which is best viewed starting at the beginning as defined by the webmaster or person(s) who built the pages. But if you got on the net for the purpose of selling advertising (I do not mean a few low-key sponsors who help you keep above water financially while you devote your time to your site) clicking and double-clicking your visitors to aquire all sorts of statistics, and like being on the net because of the relative inexpense of being here as opposed to a traditional storefront or mailorder operation, then you came to the wrong place. There are a lot of sites on the net who are not here for the intention of sharing what they know and learning what they do not know. They are here for one reason only: to get you to share your credit card number with them and supply them with a lot of demographics so they can build up a database which is worth some money to someone. They could care less where the net came from, its history, the intentions of the people who put it together or anything else. For them, it is a cheap place to squat with a bunch of merchandise for a sidewalk sale. For them, email is a lot cheaper than a 33 cent stamp or a page of advertising in the newspaper, especially since your admin/ISP and mine help pay for the bandwidth and the email processing. Don't allow them to turn the rules on their head. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 18:15:09 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Don't Link or I'll Sue! salon.com > Technology August 12, 1999 Don't link or I'll sue! "Deep linking" lawsuits threaten everything that makes the Web work right. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Scott Rosenberg Links are the Web's essence and its genius. Every public Web page's URL, its address, is available to all; we can point any Web page to any other. That's why the Web keeps growing -- and everyone from Yahoo to you can slice new paths through its vastness and recombine its pieces in new ways. http://www.salon.com/tech/col/rose/1999/08/12/deep_links [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Precisely. Scott describes exactly how it was built and the intentions of the people who developed it and the thousands of admins/ISPs who installed the software (i.e. a web server) and maintain it. I have said more than once in recent times that I think we are coming very close to losing this medium for the people on account of the way so many large corporations are trying to take it over and bully the rest of us to get out of the way. Unfortunatly, a few very l----o-----n-----g ! time netizens whose names I won't mention right now, just to show I am a good sport about it (with a wink to a reader in California and a wink to another reader in New York State, both of whom I have exchanged correspondence with on this topic) actually support the move to make the internet a business network. When the government or a big business interest has some question about the net, they go to see these half-dozen or so 'pioneers of the net' -- who claim to be our spokespersons -- and find out what to do next. These folks receive government support yet keep their meetings with business interests secret. Instead of taking my word for it, ask Ronda Hauben what happened when *she* tried to sit in and take notes at one of their meetings, to file reports with this and other newsgroups. They bounced her out of the meeting. You all probably remember her report here about it several months ago. So whatever you do, don't let some lawyer screaming about litigation bully or scare you into dropping your links, deep or otherwise. If you wish to be nice, answer the lawyer once explaining the procedures in place on the web, and that you will continue to exercise your right of free speech by pointing to any spectacle -- and some of them really are spectacles! -- on public display as you wish. You may have no legal right to copy the file to your computer, and you certainly have no right to resell the information (i.e. with advertising around it) or claim it to be your own work. But you do have the right to point at it, discuss it or critique it. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Barry Margolin Subject: Re: Deep Linking Proposal Organization: GTE Internetworking, Cambridge, MA Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 20:29:44 GMT In article , Linc Madison wrote: > In order for the "deeplink.txt" file to work, it would have to be > implemented by the web server software on the host. In other words, if > I have a page deep in my site that someone has linked directly to, but > I want to make visitors come in through the front door, I would > configure my "deeplink.txt" file to disallow access to anything but the > main page. If someone then clicked on an external direct link to the > deep page, my server would automatically redirect the request to the > main page. > Thus, you can put a deep link to my site anywhere you please, but it > won't work if my server software is configured to block it. If this is what you're after, you don't need to define a standard file. Just ask the developers of web servers to add this feature to their servers. The whole point of robots.txt is that it's something that clients need to look at. But there's no reason why deeplink.txt needs to be a standard, any more than there needs to be a standard for implementing per-directory passwords. Barry Margolin, barmar@bbnplanet.com GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA *** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups. Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group. ------------------------------ From: Jim Tobias Subject: Accessible Telecommunications Course - Section 255 Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 21:43:51 -0400 Organization: Monmouth Internet You may be aware that Section 255 of the Telecom Act requires that "a manufacturer of telecommunications equipment or customer premises equipment shall ensure that the equipment is designed, developed, and fabricated to be accessible to and usable by individuals with disabilities, if readily achievable." and that "A provider of telecommunications services shall ensure that the service is accessible to and usable by individuals with disabilities, if readily achievable." The Access Board has developed Guidelines for this section, and the FCC is preparing complance regulations for it, to be released later this month. What remains is that the telecom industry as a whole improve its understanding of this issue: where it comes from and how to address it. Designing for Usability, Flexibility, and Compliance is a unique two-part course, structured to provide practical information as well as opportunities for hands-on application and networking with people involved in different aspects of the field. The course is presented at the Trace Research & Development Center, where you'll have the opportunity to see and try out some of the latest access and design techniques. Part One is offered September 12-14, 1999, in Madison, Wisconsin. Part Two of the course will be offered October 27-29, 1999. It will provide more technical depth, building on the concepts and techniques presented in Part One. Enrollment in the course is limited to 27 participants, and this initial offering of the course is being targeted to key individuals in telecommunications, as well as consultants and regulatory specialists involved in improving the usability of telecommunications products. Some of the Key Questions Addressed How do we create practical, accessible (and profitable) products while still addressing regulatory requirements? Where do access features add functionality for all users? What is the "low-hanging fruit"? Why was Section 255 of the Telecom Act created, and what does it really mean to a telecommunications company? What are the market justifications for making products more accessible? What are cost-effective ways of implementing accessible telecommunica- tions products? How can features for different disabilities not interfere with each other, or with the standard product features? Can they be reinforcing? You can get more information about this course, including how to register at: http://trace.wisc.edu/ufcdesign or contact Kate Vanderheiden at 608.265.4621, email mailto:vanderk@trace.wisc.edu Jim Tobias Inclusive Technologies 732.441.0831 v/tty 732.441.0832 fax www.inclusive.com ------------------------------ From: Ed Ellers Subject: Who the Heck Makes AT&T Phones Now? Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 21:14:28 -0400 Someone wrote: "Am I the only one who's found the URL: http://www.telephones.att.com/?" I did too, but either my post didn't get through or Pat skipped it. Daryl Gibson (drgibson@vegas.infi.net) wrote: > I've got several Lucent/AT&T phones, bought recently, and they are > pretty good phones, with the exception of the newest one, which seems > be able to pick up a hum on the line. Anybody know how to ground a > demarc? If your demarc isn't grounded, time to call the telco. (And pray, if you're on BellSouth. :-) I don't know if grounding will help much on newer phones, since the phones themselves aren't grounded (only tip and ring are used). I have two Lucent/AT&T Trimline 210s, which are IMHO one of the best single-line corded phones on the market today -- the handset has the same shape, feel and approximate weight of the original Trimline, the buttons are lighted (from telco battery, not an AC adapter as on the first Trimlines) and have a good feel, and the phone is generally of much better construction than most of its competition though still not up to the old 20-year Bell System standard. (The Trimline 230 is the same phone with speed dial added; frankly I never use speed dial because it's easier for me to remember and dial a person's actual number than to remember both the speed dial code -- for use in one place -- and the actual number for use elsewhere.) I also have a recent, cheap 25-channel Lucent cordless phone and a Lucent single-cassette answering machine, both of which get the job done without much ado. ------------------------------ From: nospam.tonypo1@nospam.home.com (Tony Pelliccio) Subject: Re: Real Competition in the Local Loop? Organization: Providence Network Partners Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 01:59:12 GMT In article , LincMad001@telecom- digest.zzn.com says: > In article , Kevin DeMartino > wrote: >> Linc Madison followed up with: >>> Personally, I think we need a federal law prohibiting landlords >>> (whether commercial or residential or mixed-use) from engaging in any >>> exclusive contract for telecommunications services, period. Only the >>> end user (the person paying for the service) should have the right to >>> select the supplier. >> There may be some justification in terms of economy of scale for >> allowing landlords to choose certain telecommunication services for >> the entire building, just like they can choose other utilities. For >> example, a landlord may want to install a satcom system to provide TV >> for the entire building. For a large complex, it may be desirable to >> negotiate for an ISP point of presence (POP). Clearly, we don't want >> to give landlords the absolute right to select telecommunication >> services for their tenants. Some restrictions, preferably locally >> imposed, are in order. However, I wouldn't want to see a federal law >> prohibiting landlords from contracting for services on behalf of their >> tenants. > I didn't propose any such law. I proposed a federal law prohibiting > the landlord from entering into an EXCLUSIVE contract for services on > behalf of the tenants. > Certainly there are occasions where there may be an economy of scale > and an advantage to having the landlord make a NON-EXCLUSIVE contract > for some such services. However, just because my landlord got a great > deal on XYZ phone service doesn't mean I shouldn't be able to get a > phone from ZYX. If I don't like the service provided on the satellite, > I should be free to ask the cable company if they will string a wire to > my unit, or to put up my own DSS mini-dish. As for the ISP, I might > have some strong reason for wanting to have someone else's DSL, and I > should have that freedom. > There is no benefit to the tenant from the landlord's EXCLUSIVE > arrangement for any of those services. > I also vehemently disagree with your statement that the restrictions > should be locally imposed. I believe that they should be uniform > across the nation, which means they must be federally imposed. The > patchwork of local regulation would be a nightmare to manage, both for > the landlords and tenants and for the telecomms companies. Here in Providence, RI it's already been said that Providence Place Mall will have it's telephone service supplied by Cox Communications. They don't have any choice in the matter. If my landlord ever decided to pull a stunt like that I'd be cutting cable on a regular basis. == Tony Pelliccio, KD1S formerly KD1NR == Trustee WE1RD ------------------------------ From: tls@panix.com (Thor Lancelot Simon) Subject: Re: Real Competition in the Local Loop Date: 12 Aug 1999 23:30:14 -0400 Organization: PANIX -- Public Access Networks Corp. Reply-To: tls@rek.tjls.com In article , Roy Smith wrote: >> RCN has evidently negotiated a long-term contract with the landlord >> under which the landlord may not allow any other telecommunications >> carrier into the building to install cable of any type. > There is another issue here, and it's (literally) a messy one. > As the past president of a co-op board in an apartment building, I > (unfortunately) have some taste of what things look like from the > landlord side of the fence. > Cabling in a typical residential building is a nightmare. The only > places to run the wires are usually surface-mount raceway in the > hallways or exterior drops to each apartment. We supervised one > cabling project (rooftop antenna/distribution-amp system before cable > was available in our area). We used the exterior drop method. It was > a real effort to end up with an installation which was neat and clean, > unobtrusive, weathertight, didn't have workmen destroying the roof of > the building, etc. The thought of going through that several times > over for each of N competing operators who wanted to install their own > cable plants is mind-numbing. > Hard to blame a landlord for wanting a single-carrier contract. That's one way to look at it. On the other hand, this building just had a complete gut-and-rebuild, and were it in, say, Chicago, where it's illegal to do something like rent the entire house wiring system to a LEC, the six pairs installed from the basement cable closet to every unit would likely prove quite sufficient for the needs of both those tenants who wished to use Bell Atlantic or other carrier and those who wished to use the current monopoly carrier RCN. As of the demise of the Bell System, the telco doesn't own the house wiring any more, and it that was *precisely* to avoid nonsense like this. You either have enough house pairs for the number of units, or you don't. Pretending that you'd need that number multiplied by the number of carriers is disingenious in the extreme -- tenants aren't going to have (number of carriers * real demand) demand for pairs, after all, just because there's more than one choice of carrier available to them. Thor Lancelot Simon tls@rek.tjls.com "And where do all these highways go, now that we are free?" ------------------------------ From: Bruce Kille Subject: Re: Universal ANI Number Wanted Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 22:11:16 -0400 Organization: MindSpring Enterprises 10-10-732-1-770-988-9664 is a number that should work. T. White wrote in message: > Does anyone know of a universal ANI number? Sprint had one a while > ago but it does not work now. Appreciate any help. ------------------------------ Subject: Re: VP on Steps to Address Unlawful Conduct on the Internet From: caf@agora.rdrop.com (Chuck Forsberg) Date: 12 Aug 1999 19:02:19 -0500 Organization: Newsfeeds.com http://www.newsfeeds.com This worries me. Why attack the Internet instead of the illegal behaviour itself?? Is this perhaps an end run to nuzzle the one major source of information that is not dominated by liberals? Why else would Gore stick his head out with the patently foolish assertion he invented the Internet, if there weren't an unstated agenda?? > THE WHITE HOUSE > > Office of the Vice President >________________________________________________________________________ >For Immediate Release August 6, 1999 > > > VICE PRESIDENT GORE ANNOUNCES NEW STEPS > TO ADDRESS UNLAWFUL CONDUCT ON THE INTERNET Chuck Forsberg WA7KGX PP-ASEL/HP Skylane N2469R caf@omen.COM Omen Technology Inc The High Reliability Software www.omen.com Author of YMODEM, ZMODEM, RZ, SZ, Pro-YAM, ZCOMM, GSZ, and DSZ TeleGodzilla BBS: 503-617-1698 FTP: ftp.cs.pdx.edu pub/zmodem POB 4681 Portland OR 97208 503-614-0430 FAX:503-629-0665 ------------------------------ From: dannyb@panix.com (danny burstein) Subject: Prison Rules, (was Re: Families of Michigan Prisoners) Date: 12 Aug 1999 18:49:24 -0400 In Jack Decker writes: > Collect calls > Some family and friends of Michigan prisoners are refusing to accept > collect calls from loved ones behind bars. For the month of August, > they're boycotting what they say are the high prices of collect > calls. That's the only way an inmate can call home. [snip] > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Jack, you are missing the point. The > attitude of the corrections industry (is that prisoners are scum)... [snip] > and part of this includes making contact with outsiders who might > otherwise help them as difficult as possible or preferably non-existent. I thought my experience, not as a prisoner, but as someone corresponding with one, might be of interest to TELECOM Digest readers. About five years ago a "computer hacker" (not Kevin) was convicted and imprisoned. I thought hard as to what I could send him, and concluded that a set of blank, pre-stamped, official US Postal Service postcards would be helpful. I figured that these would be acceptable to the prison authorities since anything he wrote on them could, of course, be easily read by the authorities. A couple of weeks later I got them back with a note from the gendarmes saying that these were _not_ acceptable and were being returned to me. However, they were nice enough to allow my cover letter to go through. _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] ------------------------------ From: BV124@aol.com Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 21:40:35 EDT Subject: RE: Families of Michigan Prisoners Refusing Collect Calls May I suggest that it would seem appropriate to keep the conversation(s) in postings "on point" which I believe is not the case here. If the Editor wants to make what could be called political statement(s), I believe those statements should be posted, as a separate, unique, item, by the editor. Much as newspapers have editorial pages where opinions are placed, and noted as such, the same would seem in order here. Certainly, it appears that the charges for calls from Michigan prisons are excessive, This is an appropriate issue for discussion here and in the political system in Michigan to address. To suggest that the police routinely arrest people, in some role as sales (referral?) agents for the corrections industry, is a little far-fetched and implies that we are now in the arena of personal complaint and hyperbole. Any other thoughts? ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 18:22:37 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Starium Promises Phone Privacy by Declan McCullagh 3:00 a.m. 12.Aug.99.PDT MONTEREY, California -- The sleepy coastal town of Monterey, California, is not the kind of place where vision-fired entrepreneurs come to change the world. Monterey Bay is better known for sea lions than silicon, and for Cannery Row -- made famous half a century ago in John Steinbeck's gritty, eponymous novel. Today, the third floor of a converted sardine factory on Cannery Row is home to a startup company developing what could become a new world standard in privacy protection. By early 2000, Starium Inc. plans to begin selling sub-US$100 telephone scrambling devices so powerful that even the US government's most muscular supercomputers can't eavesdrop on wiretapped conversations. http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/21236.html ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 18:01:07 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Last Laugh! A Very Wrong Number One Book Yellow Pages distributed a new phone book in Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio with an insert which lists the White House's web address as http://www.whitehouse.com/ instead of http://www.whitehouse.gov/. The unfortunate problem is that whitehouse.com is a porn site. Full story at http://www.thestandard.com/articles/display/0,1449,5874,00.html Monty ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #302 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Aug 13 02:37:24 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id CAA24974; Fri, 13 Aug 1999 02:37:24 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 02:37:24 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908130637.CAA24974@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #303 TELECOM Digest Fri, 13 Aug 99 02:37:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 303 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson It's Official: Iridium Can't Pay (Monty Solomon) FCC Steers Clear of Broadband (Monty Solomon) Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings (Jack Decker) Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings (James Bellaire) Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings (Daryl R. Gibson) Basic Math (was Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings) (Dave O'Shea) Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings (Linc Madison) Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings (Michael G. Koerner) Re: Network Solutions: SPAMMERS and Corporate Morons (Peter Corlett) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 17:41:33 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: It's Official: Iridium Can't Pay It's Official: Iridium Can't Pay By Douglas F. Gray Iridium yesterday defaulted on an $800 million loan, as well as another $750 million guaranteed bank loan. http://www.thestandard.com/articles/display/0,1449,5882,00.html Satellite Telco Crashing 3:00 a.m. 12.Aug.99.PDT Iridium World Communications said Wednesday it had defaulted on loans totaling more than US$1.5 billion, pushing the struggling operator of a $5 billion global satellite telecommunications network another step closer to insolvency. http://www.wired.com/news/news/business/story/21233.html ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 18:16:34 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: FCC Steers Clear of Broadband Reuters 3:00 a.m. 12.Aug.99.PDT Federal Communications Commission chairman William Kennard Wednesday rejected a request from state and local regulators to conduct an investigation into the nascent market for high-speed Internet services. http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/21227.html ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 02:17:51 -0400 From: Jack Decker Subject: Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings It seems to me that I recall about a decade ago when some nut case went into a McDonalds somewhere in the southwest (Texas, I think) and shot a bunch of people. I also recall that they tore down that McDonalds and made the property into a public park. But nowadays, we just patch up the bullet holes and go on pretty much as though nothing had happened. I heard a report the other day that said that the kids will be returning to Columbine High School this fall. They have spent quite a large sum of money to repair the damage (and I think the library will remain closed) but the kids will be going back to the same school where the tragedy occurred. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the Los Angeles day care center was going to reopen today or tomorrow. So I think that as a nation we have to some extent lost the ability to feel a deep sense of sorrow and outrage when these things happen. And frankly, I wonder how much our modern communications infrastructure is responsible for that. In the days before radio and TV, something like that would really only have an impact on you if it happened in your home town. If a gang of bank robbers shot up Dodge City and you lived in Chicago, it was probably pretty much irrelevant to you. And even when Al Capone was terrorizing Chicago, that was like a world away to the folks in L.A. But now, a couple of teenagers shoot up a school in Colorado and we see it live, in living color, all over the country. In many ways, it has the same impact as if it happened a mile or two away. What unfortunately happens is that after a while, people become "inoculated" to it all and begin to (on some level) accept it as a normal part of life. Worse yet, those who are so inclined see others doing it and after enough repetitions, may feel the urge to "copycat" the crime, in order to get the same attention by the mass media. The other problem is that with all our televisions and telephones and computers, many of us just don't feel the same connections to our community as people once did. It is now quite possible to live one's life without having much social interaction at all with one's neighbors (in fact some see neighbors primarily as nuisances, the people who play their stereo so loud that it interferes with your TV viewing). It wasn't that long ago that people built houses with front porches, and in the evening they might sit out on the porch and converse with neighbors who happened to be out for a stroll. Now we build houses with "security doors" and air conditioning, and lock ourselves inside with our TV's and computers and stereos and other technological toys. So now we are able to keep in close contact with our small circle of friends, no matter where they may move. With the right equipment, you can chat with them using voice and video over the Internet. But at the same time, we hardly know anyone in our own immediate neighborhoods, unless they are someone we perceive as a potential source of trouble. So someone can live in a community of thousands of people and still feel totally alone and alienated. If they have no close friends, and in addition don't like where they are working or where they go to school or the way they think the government is treating them, and are perhaps just a little mentally unbalanced to boot, watch out. And no, I'm not going to add "and can get guns" to that list because guns aren't a necessary ingredient in the mix - if anyone doubts that, think back to what happened in Oklahoma City (I think that it is really despicable that whenever something like this happens, the media immediately sees yet another opportunity to throw the gun control debate in our faces, usually with the same spokespersons saying the same things they did at the last tragedy). In addition to everything else, I also believe that if you look back at the historical records, the rise of this "brave new world" started about the time that God (specifically, the Ten Commandments and school prayer and Bible reading) was expelled from the classroom. Unfortunately, a lot of folks still don't see the connection there, but I will simply say that there is very good chance that if kids really understood that they were placed on this earth for a purpose, and not just by some cosmic accident, they would not be so inclined to do acts that are destructive of themselves and others. And more to the point, if even a relatives small percentage of people would hear (and follow) the words of Jesus and "love their neighbor as themselves", maybe some of the "neighbors" wouldn't feel so disenfranchised from the rest of society that they wanted to take revenge with an Uzi. The Bible also tells us that "as you sow, so shall you reap". If you look at history, we have often done things that have come back to bite us, even generations later. I think that for many modern people, one of their unstated goals in life has been to make themselves as independent of others as they possibly can. Oh, sure, they may choose to go out bowling on Friday nights, but they don't want to have to depend on their bowling buddies for anything important. You find more and more people who have few friends, or no real deep friendships. Unfortunately, when we isolate ourselves in that way, the people that *we might have been friends with* also suffer - and they just may not tolerate the isolation as easily was we do. None of this is offered as an excuse for the individuals who commit the reprehensible acts that have taken place. But when you ask why these things happen, I really sometimes wonder if the technology that we have created isn't partly to blame. Yes, it has its positive aspects, such as life-saving medical equipment and techniques, and certainly the educational value of computers connected to the Internet cannot be ruled out. But I sometimes wonder if the people who lived maybe 75 or 100 years ago weren't for the most part happier than we are today. Back then, I believe that people were more honest and more concerned about their neighbors and their community. The stores closed by 6:00 on Saturday evening and many more people went to church on Sunday morning. And you could actually find time to relax, to be with your family, to converse with the neighbors. If you had a small business, you didn't have to fill out several hundred pounds of paperwork just to keep Uncle Sugar in Washington happy - you could actually concentrate on running your business during the week, and providing for your family, and maybe even give back a little to your community. Sure, you could find exceptions to all of this, but for the most part I think people were in many ways better off back then. Jack ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 09:32:08 -0500 From: James Bellaire Subject: Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings In Telecom Digest #299, Pat wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: In fairness to BBC, they got the news > about 30 minutes or so after it happened, when it was all still very > unclear as to the extent of the situation. Their later reports were > more detailed and accurate. The politics came first -- mass shooting = mass killing because guns always kill, right? Well guns don't always kill. Sometimes they maim, sometimes they leave only superficial wounds and memories. The proper 'first report' would be "a shooting at a community center, casualties unknown at this time". That was the truth at the time of the report. Making a 'mass killing' out of a shooting before anyone is known dead is very poor journalism. > It was the tone of voice and phrasing implying 'well here is another > one of those things they are always having over in the USA these > days' which disturbed me the most. > And the trouble is, they were right! No, they are not. Poor BBC journalism should not be supported. It is *not* always happening. Take a look at the murder rate for the good old USA. DOWN 8% in 1998. Violent crime DOWN 7%. Aggravated assault DOWN 5%. Property crimes DOWN 7%. Robbery DOWN 11%. Every category tracked by the FBI in their 1998 preliminary "Uniform Crime Report" released May 16th, 99 is DOWN. What makes the occasional rampage *news* is that they do not happen that often. Look at the space program - Apollo 13 and the Challenger. Both incidents happened at times when space travel was becoming routine. Had nothing gone wrong those would have been just another mission. Even though space flight is still a rare event, it barely gets covered. But the occasional rampage is shocking. The American public is outraged. Outraged enough that congress is beginning to reverse the impact of Ms. O'Hare and her fellow atheists. If these were just "ho hum murder spree of the month" stories there would be no action to stop the next one. > We are no longer able to speak of these things as being isolated > situations. They are happening with too much regularity; once every > month or two? Wait until it gets to the point of every week or two, > then maybe every few days. I wonder what the first few years of the > two-thousands will be like? The rampages are getting a fair amount of attention, but the murder rate is still dropping. In order to get to the point of 'every few days' the rate will have to go up. That is not the trend. > You want to talk telecom? Fine, let's keep on talking telecom. We will > just keep on talking telecom until the day comes, as it will, when it > all becomes so trivial relative to our survival as the human race that > we will wonder how we ever got sidetracked into talking about our > choice of cellular and long distance service. How about the most rugged cellular phone for use in a riot? Or cellular tracking devices to locate kidnapped people? How about putting cell technology tracers on every gun. When it is fired it sends a picture of the target and the fingerprint of the shooter? (OK - I'm getting carried away.) > I am being very sincere when I say IMO this is all becoming quite > trivial. Focus on the good. There are 273,230,029 people in the US, most of who were not a victim of gun violence. James Bellaire ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 10:34:59 -0600 From: Daryl R. Gibson Subject: Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings >> I first heard the news on the audio feed from BBC Online which is >> available at http://telecom-digest.org/news ... and after hearing the >> twenty second report, almost in a nonchalant way by the BBC announcer, >> who merely noted in a 'what else is new' tone of voice, >> "There has been another mass killing in the United States today ... >> This time it was a man who walked into a day care school for tiny >> children in Los Angeles, which is in California, on the west coast >> of the USA. The man produced a Uzi, fired several times hitting >> various children, then fled before police could capture him." > I watched a BBC news report on the day of the Atlanta shootings. > Heavy on anti-gun politics, light on facts. As much as I like "The > Beeb", it was very poor reporting, just like the above. I pause to point out here that you would get a different report from a U.S. news source than you would from the BBC, or Radio Moscow, or anywhere else in the world. As I've pointed out to my journalism students in the past, one of the elements of news coverage is proximity. A train crash in India is reported differently and with more intensity in India than it is in California. The U.S. shootings have more news value to people in the U.S. than they do to people in Great Britian ... and even though the BBC has a world service, it's still based with a British audience in mind. We, however, are here in the United States, so we still look at their coverage from an American Point of View. As an example in point, Salt Lake City's TV stations were on the air continually yesterday afternoon with tornado reporting; but did WGN in Chicago interrupt its normal programming to report it? Nope. To Chicago folks, it was just interesting video. But to those of us here in Utah, it was mesmerizing, particularly as I looked out of my office window here 50 miles to the south, and saw thunderstorms coming my way. (They actually missed us). News is news only when it impacts your life in some way. The farther away from the event you get, the less it impacts your life, and the less it becomes news. This changes as the nature of the news event changes... the more people involved, or the amount of destruction or pain it causes increases the news element, because it increases the number of people who become interested in it ... so a soccer riot in Spain that injures 65,000 people is more of a news event to people in the U.S. than is a riot that injures 5 people, and either event is of more interest to people who actually watch soccer than it is to me who ignores the sport. Daryl "As you ramble through life, brother, no matter what your goal, keep your eye upon the doughnut, and not upon the hole" --Dr. Murray Banks, quoting a menu ------------------------------ From: Dave O'Shea Subject: Basic Math (was Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings) Organization: snaip.net Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 19:15:01 GMT James Bellaire wrote in message news:telecom19. 299.13@telecom-digest.org: > At 02:19 AM 8/11/99 -0400, Pat wrote: >> I first heard the news on the audio feed from BBC Online which is >> available at http://telecom-digest.org/news ... and after hearing the >> twenty second report, almost in a nonchalant way by the BBC announcer, >> who merely noted in a 'what else is new' tone of voice, >> "There has been another mass killing in the United States today ... >> This time it was a man who walked into a day care school for tiny >> children in Los Angeles, which is in California, on the west coast >> of the USA. The man produced a Uzi, fired several times hitting >> various children, then fled before police could capture him." > I watched a BBC news report on the day of the Atlanta shootings. > Heavy on anti-gun politics, light on facts. As much as I like "The > Beeb", it was very poor reporting, just like the above. > Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't a mass killing require deaths? Not if it suits your political purposes. > The most critically wounded in the current shooting is expected to > fully recover. Fortunately the BBC is wrong about this one. Well, not completely. I believe the postal worker died. Out of respect, I'll skip the obvious puns involving COD and the like. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: In fairness to BBC, they got the news [Pat's comment's deleted...] > And the trouble is, they were right! It is a regular occurrence now > here in the USA; a situation that should cause all of us to be ashamed > of how rotten things have become in this country. Pat, We've got 265+ million people in this country. A one-in-ten-million sociopath will occur 26+ times, just by the numbers. It sounds like this guy was both mentally ill and a vile individual. I read the story, then moved on. On the same day that occurred, - Group of oncologists published a study with new ways to attack pancreatic cancer, which currently has a near 100% fatality rate. - NEJM publishes study showing radiotherapy of brain tissue increases survival rate in lung cancer patients. - United Way announced that donations of $3.4 billion surpassed all records, even accounting for inflation. - Dow Chemical donated four new patents to RPI, to help fund college growth. - ABC news ran a story on the surprising number of young philantrophists in Silicon Valley. - Rates of mother-to-child HIV infection fell due to better treatment. - My son had his first day of Kindergarten. PB&J was the lunch, and several excellent crayon renditions of houses, as well as self-portraits, were produced after nap time. Wallowing in self-pity (or species-pity) doesn't do anyone a bit of good. There are bad people out there. There always have been. There always will be. With the advent of multiple 24-hour news channels, you can expect hours of coverage each time one of them commits some atrocity. Here's a simple bit of advice: TURN IT OFF. I haven't watched TV news for a couple of years. Between the local paper, the WSJ, and online news sources, there's just no reason to waste my time watching detergent ads interspersed with the latest video of someone blowing their (or someone else's) brains out. My time is too valuable. Despite my CNN-free lifestyle, I manage to keep current, perhaps because I use that extra hour or so a day to learn about news that matters to *me*, not the program director at the 24-hour-nonstop-gore- news-network. Yesterday, I learned how to set up an encrypted VPN between linux servers in the time that some people sat slack-jawed in front of the boob tube. > We are no longer > able to speak of these things as being isolated situations. They are > happening with too much regularity; once every month or two? By my count, that means that perhaps 1 in 2,700,000 people will be present at an event like that in any given year. A small fraction of that number will be killed or injured. A person is 350 times more likely to hit a jackpot in the lottery, 600 times more likely to be killed in an auto accident, and 2,400 times more likely to be seriously injured in an auto accident. If you're not convinced that these events are "background noise" yet, then this should help. You're 3,600 times more likely to die of heart disease. That's for ALL ages. For middle-aged desk jockeys, that number is more like 21,000 times more likely. The numbers for cancer are similar. If everyone who read this message got off their duff and walked for an hour tonight, instead of sitting on their butts leering at some talking head yakking about the end of the world on CNBC, the resulting reduction in heart disease would offset *every* one of these small but notable tragedies. If they wore seatbelts and skipped drinking, the numbers would double. If they quit smoking, quadruple. > Wait until it gets to the point of every week or two, then maybe > every few days. At one per day, it would still end up in the "all other causes" catch-bin. If it got up to one per hour, it would begin to show up near the bottom of the "cause of death" charts. If we had one mass shooting every minute of every hour of every day, it would make it into the "top ten", leaving cancer and heart disease only 15 times as deadly. If it was only during working hours, it would have to duke it out with diabetes. That's assuming that every one of those mass shootings is a "perfect setup": Trapped, unarmed victims. > I wonder what the first few years of the two-thousands will be > like? Next year will be a lot like this year, only better. The one after it will probably be the same. People will live better, longer lives. Lots of good people will do good things. A few bad people will do bad things. As usual, the news camera crews will compete for who can get the best view of a car crashing into a group of pedestrians, while you'll have to look to the newspaper to find a picture of the space shuttle going up -- for the second time in a month. > And for those of you trying to raise kids of your own these days, > I have to wonder, given the horrible conditions in the United States, > and the 'legacy' they are inheriting as they mature, if you had to do > it over, would you? I certainly would not want to bring any children > into the world in the condition it is in today. Speak for yourself. At the orientation for my kid's school, they had to grab additional chairs -- apparently, while these used to be moms-only events, both moms and dads are coming to them more and more. The 15-year-old babysitter we get to watch our kids when we go out on an occasional Saturday knows more about Tchaikovsky than I do. The neatly-groomed high-school kids who whipped up my lunch at McDonalds today moved so fast and with such organization that my lunch was served before I could find four one-dollar bills in my pocket. Our kids are brighter than us, faster than us, and in a lot of ways, more sensitive than we were at the same age. I can only wonder what my grandkids will be like. I'm sorry, Pat. That rumbling noise isn't the Four Horsemen, it's just people's stomachs reminding them that they should have eaten a decent lunch instead of Fritos and Coke in front of the TV. > You want to talk telecom? Fine, let's keep on talking telecom. We will > just keep on talking telecom until the day comes, as it will, when it > all becomes so trivial relative to our survival as the human race that > we will wonder how we ever got sidetracked into talking about our > choice of cellular and long distance service. People have been predicting the imminent end of the world since man first grasped the concept of his own mortality. Sorry, but I suspect the world's going to be a very *different* place, but one that is better still than what we have now, when it's time for me to go. > I am being very sincere > when I say IMO this is all becoming quite trivial. The guy who flipped his car over and landed in a ditch off highway 290 last Friday didn't seem to think the cellular phone I used to call an ambulance and police with was trivial. Wy wife's grandmother, who can afford the long-distance rates to call from Cincinnati to tell us that the (newly developed) medicine she was put on after a mild stroke is helping a lot, doesn't think that 10-cents-a-minute is trivial. The cheap blood-sugar testing equipment my brother-in-law uses to keep his diabetes in check doesn't seem too trivial to him. The telecom industry that provides an enjoyable place where I earn a good income that keeps us in a nice house doesn't seem at all trivial to me. The "good old days" are a myth. Like any story, they improve with each telling. We remember "Leave it to Beaver", but forget about Klan lynchings. We remember cheap medical care, but forget that "died of natural causes" meant you died of a now-trivial heart ailment at age 66. We remember the 8-cent stamp, but forget it was the only way to communicate. We remember operator-assisted calls, but forget that it cost a day's wages for a scratchy, 3-minute call overseas that took half a day to set up. We remember cheap and friendly dentists, but forget that having teeth past age 50 was pretty rare. Amputation is a lot cheaper than microsurgery, but if I get mashed up in a car wreck, I'd rather walk out of the hospital poor, and work a second job to pay the bills. This is a pretty damn good time to be alive. Enjoy it while you can, and try to leave the world a little better than you found it -- such as by allowing people to share valuable insights into the field that has given people today abilities that our parents never dreamed of -- telecommunications. ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 12:35:27 -0700 From: Linc Madison Subject: Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings In article , Gregory Ashley wrote: > Don't let that spineless maggot wreck your day, Pat. It's just too > bad that some proud advocate of the 2nd Amendment wasn't there to > whack the miscreant. I'm actually surprised more this stuff isn't > happening considering our limp legal system. > After they finally catch the bastard some liberal moron will blame his > problem on a bad childhood or Hostess Twinkies. I can't let this mal-informed clap-trap pass unchallenged. The "Twinkie" defense was successfully used by a CONSERVATIVE who murdered two LIBERAL politicians. Specifically, former San Francisco City/County Supervisor Dan White (no relation to the football player of the same name) killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, and claimed that it was the Twinkies that made him do it, never mind that he was carrying a loaded gun, snuck into the building to evade the metal detectors, and stopped to reload between killings. He was sentenced to seven years in prison for manslaughter, even though it was unquestionably premeditated murder. (Shortly after his release from prison, White committed suicide.) The primary reason that White's sentence was so lenient is that he murdered the first openly gay supervisor in San Francisco history. Had he only murdered the mayor, his sentence would probably have been much more severe. So don't go blaming the problems with the justice system on the "liberals," or you'll end up looking like the uninformed ass you are. ------------------------------ From: Michael G. Koerner Subject: Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 00:25:42 -0500 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Gregory Ashley wrote: > Don't let that spineless maggot wreck your day, Pat. It's just too > bad that some proud advocate of the 2nd Amendment wasn't there to > whack the miscreant. I'm actually surprised more this stuff isn't > happening considering our limp legal system. > After they finally catch the bastard some liberal moron will blame his > problem on a bad childhood or Hostess Twinkies. Whatever happened to the malcontent who purposely drove his car through a southern California day-care center yard a few months ago, KILLING several children??? It was a 'below the fold' headline the first day, a couple of short 'back page' paragraphs the next day, and NOTHING since. Could the total lack of news on this case be because he used an AUTOMOBILE and *NOT* a FIREARM in his dispicable act????? Compared with the case yesterday where NONE of the children died (he did knock off a USPS guy later, though), the lack of news on the other case SMELLS and SMELLS BADLY!!! Regards, Michael G. Koerner Appleton, WI [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Thanks to everyone who sent in a reply to my comments from earlier in the week on this topic. Obviously I cannot let the thread run too much longer. PAT] ------------------------------ From: abuse@verrine.demon.co.uk (Peter Corlett) Subject: Re: Network Solutions: SPAMMERS and Corporate Morons Date: 12 Aug 1999 19:35:16 GMT Organization: B13 Cabal Steve Winter wrote: > netizen@nospam.com spake thusly and wrote: >> Obviously, they have no intention of actually responding in a meaningful >> way to my inquiry (note that in their form-letter they never actually say >> they will answer my question): > If you are that concerned, why not simply call them on the phone? Excuse me whilst I roll around laughing on the floor. > They do publish their phone number. It's pretty much unlisted AFAICS. > I have had occasion to call them in the past (mundane routine business but > I don't remember the details). I found the people I spoke to were quite > competent and reasonably concerned and sympathetic with whatever it was > that I was whining about and took care of it. Yes, but now they've got the US Government on their back trying to remove their monopoly, so they're ignoring everybody. My employers have some domains registered on behalf of clients to make things easy for them. We've ended up as the admin contact for some reason. We're quite happy to change DNS records for them, no problem, but some clients want the whois data to list them, so they hassle us. The first time I tried to change the name, I figured it would be easy. Then I saw the forms. I don't think there's such a thing as a Notary Public in the UK, nor in many parts of the world. Nevertheless, one is needed to make any changes. Thus, the UK seems to be excluded from changing a domain once registered. Figuring that they weren't going to check the signature, we just forged one to keep things going smoothly. It's not as if we were up to anything dodgy. Send to client, get them to forward it to the USA. It bounced back several *months* later: "You're not a company officer." So? I'm the designated hostmaster, it's my job (amongst many things.) What's the problem? We just want rid of the domain. I suspect company policy is now to point clients at NSI's web site directly, and tell them that we'll sign anything. Otherwise it just eats up my valuable time. Usually the client makes a few phone calls and faxes, and then decides that perhaps they didn't need the whois data changing that urgently. Through that farce, we tend to stick to .co.uk and .org.uk now. Nominet do a lot better job. Perhaps they should bid to be the new Internic. ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #303 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Aug 13 16:22:05 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id QAA19765; Fri, 13 Aug 1999 16:22:05 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 16:22:05 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908132022.QAA19765@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #304 TELECOM Digest Fri, 13 Aug 99 16:22:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 304 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Directv Sues Satellite Watch News; Forces Site to Close (E. Cummings) Re: Two Letter State (etc) Codes (Adam H. Kerman) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Steve Winter) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Charles Gray) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Andrew) Help With Unique Switch Requirement (Wes Spears) Phoning Network Solutions Inc. (Bob Goudreau) Re: Any Good Way to Cut Long Distance Costs to Specific Number (Tim Smith) Re: Who the Heck Makes AT&T Phones Now? (Art Kamlet) What to Do With a Used AMPS Cell Phone (Peter Simpson) Differences Between SDH-ATM-HDLC (dpsfun@hotmail.com) International Long Distance: Top Countries Called From U.S. (D. Lunceford) Suche Telefonbuch CD ... (Benny Schilling) Re: Real Competition in the Local Loop (Kevin DeMartino) Re: Last Laugh! A Very Wrong Number (Heywood Jaiblomi) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 14:42:07 -0400 From: E Cummings Subject: Directv Sues Satellite Watch News; Forces Site to Close Pat, this is an item for TELECOM Digest. This guy publishes an informative and objective newsletter http://www.oscoda.net/dmorgand/ that coveres the satellite TV industry. One topic of the many he covers is the ongoing battle between satellite TV pirates and the companies whose signals they try to receive. General Instruments sued him for this and was just awarded $300,000. (Dan runs his newsletter on a shoestring and has no such assets.) With this legal precedent even TELECOM Digest is at risk. We'll be broadcasting a live interview with Dan Morgan at 8pm ET on 7415kHz during Off The Hook. http://www.oscoda.net/dmorgand/freedom.htm To: "Bernie S." Subject: satellite watch news shut down I just got off the phone with Dan Morgan -- he lost the civil suit filed against him by Directv. They're demanding $300,000 and forbidding him from publishing, doing his radio show, or talking about their technology. This is completely insane. What's amazing is that almost nobody seems to know about this. I'm going to have him on my show this Tuesday and I think you should be on as well. This is one show that really needs to go out on shortwave too. ======================= [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I encourage readers to tune to 7415 Khz for the program, and if anyone will supply me with a .ram file of the whole thing I will be glad to see that it gets netcast, and a permanent place in the archives here. I do not know if Dan plans on continuing to publish and speak in defiance of the court order or during an appeal of the order if he plans to make one, and of course it is a very personal decision for him alone to make in any case as to how far he wishes to continue the battle. If Dan chooses to accept the imposed silence I hope he will make his complete files available to other web sites and netcasters so that his work can be continued by others. In the past dozen years or so, when a mailing list, newsgroup or similar was challenged in this way, other sites have immediatly offered to begin mirroring the banned or censored content from their own locations. I hope offers like that will come forward this time as well, ideally from outside the United States, and thus, the reach of the court; but if no one else will do it, I'll establish a directory for it here. That of course means they would have to start all over again with their litigation and attempt to silence yet another site. I wish the best of luck to Dan whichever direction he chooses to go with this, and please keep us all informed. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Adam H. Kerman Subject: Re: Two-Letter State (etc) Codes Organization: Chinet - Public Access since 1982 Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 19:07:09 GMT Geoff Dyer wrote: > Well, for starters, the western two-thirds of Australia uses > two-letter state/territory codes, *all* three of which (WA, SA and NT) > are also used in NANPA. It would be helpful if they adopted two-letter codes for Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and Canberra (Australian Capital Territory) too. Not to mention Tasmania. > Then there's the two-letter country codes used for internet domains! Unfortunately, the ITU ignored obvious conflicts between these codes and long-standing two-letter US domestic postal codes for states and territories. The most notorious conflict was il for Israel versus IL for Illinois. il.* was also used for the News hierarchy for Israel, but they got so fed up with the number of articles they got concerning Illinois that they changed it to israel.* almost four years ago. Of course, lots of news servers have neglected to rmgroup the old groups in il.*. CLLI made an effort not to have conflicting codes, but the ITU couldn't be bothered. I choose to blame the French. ------------------------------ From: steve@sellcom.com (Steve Winter) Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 15:25:39 GMT Organization: WWW.SELLCOM.COM Reply-To: steve@sellcom.com Bob Banks spake thusly and wrote: > I hope you can help me. > I'm a student and our Telecom teacher was asked why a 66 block is > called that. He did not know and told us for extra credit find out > what the 66 means. > I called AT&T and Ameritech yesterday and no one there could help me. > If you could help I would really appreciate it, I hope you don't mind > I've book marked your page; it looks like a great source of information. When you find out, ask that same person why a 110 punchdown is called a "110". "An inquiring mind is a terrible thing ..." Steve http://www.sellcom.com Cyclades Siemens EnGenius Zoom at discount prices. SSL Secure VISA/MC/AMEX Online ordering Listed at http://www.thepubliceye.com as SELLCOM New Brick Wall "non-MOV" surge protection ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 10:47:42 -0600 From: Charles Gray Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? This is anecdotal evidence ONLY, and I will gladly defer to a more learned opinion. I went to school for a year with AT&T in 1970 while I was in the Army. We asked the same question about the numerical nomenclature of a number of systems. There are 1ESS, 2ESS, 3ESS, 4ESS, and 5ESS electronic switching systems. Cable/coax carrier systems were numbered L1, L3, L4, L5. Crossbar systems were 1, 4A, and 5. Channel banks are D1A, D1B, D1C, D1D, D2, D3, and D4. Etc, etc. The AT&T response was that all of these things were developed and named by Bell Labs. They just started with "number 1" on whatever system they were working on. TD1 radio, TD2 radio, etc. Whenever there was a "hole" in the sequence, that meant that the labs had worked on something, but it didn't pan out for some reason (technology overcame it, or no economic business case), and they never brought to market. At any rate, when they actually introduced the equipment into the Bell system (remember when it was all one??), it kept the same number the Labs had used during its development. Thus, the terminal block with four screws that was mounted on millions of residential baseboards was a "C block". What happened to "A blocks", and "B blocks" I will never know. I can see a situation where the outside-plant guys at Bell Labs developed all kinds of "apparatus" as they call(ed) it, and they just started with "number 1" and went up from there. Whenever they invented a new kind of thing-a-majig, they just pulled out the next sequential number. This is PURE SPECULATION on my part, but it would fit the model supposedly used for numbering switching and transmission systems. Regards, Charles G. Gray, Director International Telecoms Regulatory Issues Phone (918) 828-6305 Fax (918) 828-6202 e-mail: charles_gray@sabre.com ------------------------------ From: andrew@3.1415926.org (Andrew) Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: 13 Aug 1999 17:01:45 GMT Organization: MaTech I heard it was because each contact is .66" apart. Andrew ------------------------------ From: Wes Spears Subject: Help With Unique Switch Requirement Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 09:38:46 -0500 Organization: Verio I am looking for something that will serve the following need. We have a number of clients who need to be able to call one number. I would then like for that call to automatically trigger a conference call to several other numbers. So if I am client Bob, I call 8675309 and then whatever device is at the end of this, calls Person A on their cell phone, person B on a land line, and Person C on a local (to the switch) line, all at the same time. It would then be nice for the device to stop the other two calls when the first person picks up. If you know of any such beast, please let me know. Thank you in advance. Wes Spears jspears@weston.com ------------------------------ From: Bob Goudreau Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 10:44 EDT Subject: Phoning Network Solutions Inc. Peter Corlett (abuse@verrine.demon.co.uk) wrote: >> If you are that concerned, why not simply call them on the phone? >> They do publish their phone number. > It's pretty much unlisted AFAICS. 1) Point your browser to www.nsi.com. 2) Click on the "About Us" link near the top of the page. 3) Click on the "NSI Corporate Profile" link. 4) Read the following: Headquarters 505 Huntmar Park Drive Herndon, VA 20170 (703) 742-0400 www.networksolutions.com Nasdaq: NSOL Bob Goudreau Data General Corporation goudreau@rtp.dg.com 62 Alexander Drive +1 919 248 6231 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA ------------------------------ From: tzs@halcyon.com (Tim Smith) Subject: Re: Any Good Way to Cut Long Distance Costs to a Specific Number? Date: 12 Aug 1999 23:07:04 -0700 Organization: Institute of Lawsonomy Thanks to all who offered suggestions. Recap: I've got about 100 hours/month of long distance within state to a specific number, and wanted ways to cut the cost. Several people suggested carries that would do better than the 9 cents a minute USWest charges, but none of those were as cheap as I'd like (e.g., 10-20% savings ... a significant amount, but that would still leave a painfully large phone bill). The best deal seems to be USWest's "Foreign Central Office" service. With that, I can get a second phone at my end that is connected to a CO in an area that is a local call to/from the person I'm spending all that time talking with. The FCO service is billed based on distance, not time, and will cost around $100/month in my particular case. As long as we are using more than ~25 hours/month of long distance, the FCO line will be cheaper. (I'm sure there are a lot of people who could cut their costs with an FCO line. I wonder why this service isn't more widely known and used?) --Tim Smith ------------------------------ From: kamlet@infinet.com (Art Kamlet) Subject: Re: Who the Heck Makes AT&T Phones Now? Date: 13 Aug 1999 02:09:14 -0400 Organization: InfiNet Reply-To: kamlet@infinet.com In article , Ed Ellers wrote: > I have two Lucent/AT&T Trimline 210s, which are IMHO one of the best > single-line corded phones on the market today -- the handset has the > same shape, feel and approximate weight of the original Trimline, the > buttons are lighted (from telco battery, not an AC adapter as on the > first Trimlines) .... I thought the Trimlines were always telco powered. The Princess, big, bulky, heavy-set Princess, doorstop that it was, was plugged into the wall. Or else my memory is going? Art Kamlet Columbus, Ohio kamlet@infinet.com ------------------------------ From: Peter_Simpson@ne.3com.com (Peter Simpson) Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 06:27:47 -0400 Subject: Re: What to Do With a Used AMPS Cell Phone Well, you could send them to me :-) There are loads of UHF goodies inside them (duplexers, filters, receiver chips and the like) for hams to play with. Find a local radio ham or ham club and give them a present. Let your kid take it apart or, better yet, take it apart with them, and try to name all the parts and their functions. Reprogram the microprocessor and turn it into a scanner with everything *but* cell blocked! I have a box with a couple of old TV PCBs, some cordless phones and a VCR board or two (should have taken the whole VCR, they have motors and gears!) that I use whenever I need a part that I can't find at Radio Shack. Pieces of wire and pre-connectorized cables, too. "You may be a cheap Yankee if ... you see trash day as an opportunity to re-stock" :-) Peter, KA1AXY [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: For that matter, someone please send me a cell phone. From time to time, my phone walks away to go live at someone else's house, and I need to get a new one, such as is the case right now. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Markus Subject: Differences Between SDH-ATM-HDLC Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 13:14:06 +0200 Organization: Ericsson AXE Research and Development, Stockholm, Sweden Hello! Well, I have been searching for the answer to the following question, but there seem to be a very limited amount of people who are knowledgable about this, in fact, I haven't found anyone yet. Anyways, here is the question: What is the difference between the three standards SDH-ATM-HDLC? Where are they preferably used? Why is ATM embedded in SDH? etc. Cheers, Markus ------------------------------ From: Doug Lunceford Subject: International Long Distance: Top Countries Called From U.S.? Date: 12 Aug 1999 23:32:25 PDT Organization: Concentric Internet Services Reply-To: Doug Does anyone have a list of the countries most often called from the U.S. by residential customers? A ranked list would be nice, but not critical. ------------------------------ From: Benny Schilling Subject: Suche Telefonbuch CD... Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 10:51:11 +0200 Organization: T-Online [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This arrived in the mail Friday. Will someone kindly read it to me. Whatever it is he wants, if you are knowledgeable, please respond to him. The numbers in parens were originally right-slashed escapes for the eight-bit character shown by the number. Thanks. PAT] ...die auch die Suche (374)ber die Telefonnummer unterst(374)tzt. Also einfach Nummer eingeben und dazugeh(366)rigen Teilnehmer ausfindig machen. MfG, B. Schilling. ------------------------------ From: Kevin DeMartino Subject: Re: Real Competition in the Local Loop Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 13:15:30 -0400 Back toward the beginning of this thread, Linc Madison wrote: >>> Personally, I think we need a federal law prohibiting landlords >>> (whether commercial or residential or mixed-use) from engaging in any >>> exclusive contract for telecommunications services, period. Only the >>> end user (the person paying for the service) should have the right to >>> select the supplier. I replied with: >> There may be some justification in terms of economy of scale for >> allowing landlords to choose certain telecommunication services for >> the entire building, just like they can choose other utilities. For >> example, a landlord may want to install a satcom system to provide TV >> for the entire building....I wouldn't want to see a federal law >> prohibiting landlords from contracting for services on behalf of their >> tenants. Linc then countered with: > I didn't propose any such law. I proposed a federal law prohibiting > the landlord from entering into an EXCLUSIVE contract for services on > behalf of their tenants. OK, "exclusive" is the operative word. But wouldn't these types of contracts usually be exclusive. In many cases an exclusive contract makes sense. For example in the case of satellite TV, there may not be room on the roof for multiple antennas. It certainly would be possible in many cases to install a distribution system that would be provide tenants with a certain amount of choice with respect to both services and suppliers. However, this choice may come with a price tag. Linc also said: > I also vehemently disagree with your statement that the restrictions > should be locally imposed. I believe that they should be uniform > across the nation, which means they must be federally imposed. The > patchwork of local regulation would be a nightmare to manage, both for > the landlords and tenants and for the telecomms companies. This issue of tenant choice vs landlord property rights is more of an issue of political philosophy than a telecom issue. As a watered-down Libertarian, I favor minimal government interference in the dealings between landlords and tenants. As a practical matter, there must be some restrictions placed on landlords. I don't have any confidence that our federal government will come up with sensible regulations in this area (or in most other areas for that matter). I don't trust local governments either, but at least the damage they can do is localized. Sure we can have national standards for distributing telecom signals within buildings, but applying and enforcing these standards should be a local matter, just like the case with building codes. Kevin DeMartino Dynamics Research Corporation ------------------------------ From: heywood@gloucester.com (Heywood Jaiblomi) Subject: Re: Last Laugh! A Very Wrong Number Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 17:12:17 GMT Organization: Redundancy and more of it In article , Monty Solomon wrote: > The unfortunate problem is that whitehouse.com is a porn site. > http://www.thestandard.com/articles/display/0,1449,5874,00.html The major difference is that we really don't know if the guy running whitehouse.com received oral sex. If you meet more than two complete arseholes in a day -- it's you! ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #304 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sat Aug 14 12:01:32 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id MAA18655; Sat, 14 Aug 1999 12:01:32 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 12:01:32 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908141601.MAA18655@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #305 TELECOM Digest Sat, 14 Aug 99 12:01:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 305 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson SprintPCS Text Messaging Woes (Craig Milo Rogers) Re: Real Competition in the Local Loop (Leonard Erickson) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Heywood Jaiblomi) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Al Stangenberger) Re: InfoWorld and Deep Linking (J.F. Mezei) Nortel Rotary Payphone (Keelan Lightfoot) Sanford Wallace Troubles (Kris Henderson) Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings (Lisa Hancock) Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings (Steven Lichter) Re: Who the Heck Makes AT&T Phones Now? (Tony Pelliccio) Re: Who the Heck Makes AT&T Phones Now? (L. Winson) Trimlines (was Re: Who the Heck Makes AT&T Phones Now?) (Danny Burstein) Dial Lights (was Re: Who the Heck Makes AT&T Phones Now?) (Joseph Singer) FCC Getting a Net Makeover (Monty Solomon) Tennessee BellSouth Customers to Lose Free DA (Stanley Cline) Re: Network Solutions: SPAMMERS and Corporate Morons (netizen@nospam.com) Re: Mexican Service/Access Codes (Adam Sampson) Re: Deep Linking (Adam Sampson) Addition to News Service (TELECOM Digest Editor) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: rogers@ISI.EDU (Craig Milo Rogers) Subject: SprintPCS Text Messaging Woes Date: 13 Aug 1999 20:23:20 GMT Organization: Information Sciences Institute Hello. I've been having a grand time playing with the SprintPCS text messaging service, which was recently activated in Southern California. I use it to send summaries of selected work email messages to my SprintPCS cellphone. Unfortunately, it stopped operating last night, with "messaging.sprintpcs.com" (the SprintPCS text messaging mailbox gateway) an unknown domain. A little sleuthing revealed that sprintpcs.com uses blairlake.com to provide DNS service. One of blairlake.com's listed DNS servers has not been responding at all, and the other one rejects messaging.sprintpcs.com. For a time even www.sprintpcs.com was refused, although that might have been a transient. I'm using both dig and nslookup on Linux for testing. SprintPCS.com is an "irresponsible" DNS domain, which is a short way of saying that the phone numbers and email addresses shown for the domain's responsible parties (contacts) in WhoIS are invalid. The SPrintPCS.com responsible party email addresses used SprintSpectrum. com, but that's an irresponsible domain, too. I tried sending a message to ; it was rejected, too, which is (or, at least, was) a violation of SMTP technical standards. Their CustomerCare telephone number is quite backlogged. I suppose that service will be restored soon, but in any case: does anyone have a good phone number or email address for sending technical complaints to SprintPCS? Craig Milo Rogers ------------------------------ From: shadow@krypton.rain.com (Leonard Erickson) Subject: Re: Real Competition in the Local Loop Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 10:33:38 PST Organization: Shadownet roy@endeavor.med.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes: >> RCN has evidently negotiated a long-term contract with the landlord >> under which the landlord may not allow any other telecommunications >> carrier into the building to install cable of any type. > There is another issue here, and it's (literally) a messy one. > As the past president of a co-op board in an apartment building, I > (unfortunately) have some taste of what things look like from the > landlord side of the fence. > Cabling in a typical residential building is a nightmare. The only > places to run the wires are usually surface-mount raceway in the > hallways or exterior drops to each apartment. We supervised one > cabling project (rooftop antenna/distribution-amp system before cable > was available in our area). We used the exterior drop method. It was > a real effort to end up with an installation which was neat and clean, > unobtrusive, weathertight, didn't have workmen destroying the roof of > the building, etc. The thought of going through that several times > over for each of N competing operators who wanted to install their own > cable plants is mind-numbing. > Hard to blame a landlord for wanting a single-carrier contract. Not really. The "trick" is that done *right* there should be one set of telephone wiring, and one set of "coax". All owned by the *building owner*. They should terminate in a place where multiple vendors can connect to the internal wiring. For phone wiring, the "house" wiring should follow the industry "standard" for "new" wiring. Each apartment should have it's *own* run of 4-pair cable. This allows for both multiple phones in the same apartment, and for wire pairs getting damaged. Another alternative would be "sharing" a run of 25 pair between 6 apartments. (or more if you want to gamble. I'd not share it between more than 12). As long as you have things clearly labeled in the wiring closet that will act as the demarc, installers would only have to ID a free pair in the closet, and then attach to that pair in the apartment. No need for them to mess with anything else. All a new vendor would need to install is on or more punchdown blocks that "terminate" his trunks coming into the building (which is why you want the wiring closet to have an outside wall!). And they'd have to string wire between their blocks and the "in house" blocks to connect customers. That could be a nightmare unless you have someone keep an eye on things. Anybody know if a "patch panel" type setup would be a good idea for this sort of thing? I can think of one *big* drawback. It makes it *way* too easy for anybody with access to the wiring closet to change things. Leonard Erickson (aka Shadow) shadow@krypton.rain.com <--preferred leonard@qiclab.scn.rain.com <--last resort ------------------------------ From: heywood@gloucester.com (Heywood Jaiblomi) Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 21:22:21 GMT Organization: Redundancy and more of it Charles Gray wrote: > The AT&T response was that all of these things were developed and > named by Bell Labs. They just started with "number 1" on whatever > system they were working on. TD1 radio, TD2 radio, etc. Whenever > there was a "hole" in the sequence, that meant that the labs had > worked on something, but it didn't pan out for some reason. I wonder if that is what happened to 1 thru 6 up, and Preparations A thru G? Incontinence Hotline, can you hold please? ------------------------------ From: forags@nature.berkeley.edu (Al Stangenberger) Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 03:56:17 GMT Organization: University of California at Berkeley On Fri, 13 Aug 1999 10:47:42 -0600, Charles Gray wrote: > Thus, the terminal block with four screws that was mounted on millions of > residential baseboards was a "C block". What happened to "A blocks", > and "B blocks" I will never know. I always thought that was a Western Electric 42A. ------------------------------ From: J.F. Mezei Subject: Re: InfoWorld and Deep Linking Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 22:21:17 -0400 > The title of the page is "Using copyrighted material from InfoWorld". I find it very interesting that a "newspaper" would not want as many links. For instance, someone finds an interesting article and posts a link to that article in a newgroup related to that article. This will attract many readers who may follow up the reading of that direct page with browsing through the site. That link attracted many who would have otherwise never gone to that site. If Infoworld has proper web design direct entry into a page should still provide some of the infoworld "flair" and "advertising"). > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: If they do not agree with the way the > web was established and its purposes then they should not be on the > web. I wholeheartedly agree. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 16:49:13 -0700 Subject: Nortel Rotary Payphone From: Keelan Lightfoot I'm thinking of buying a Northern Telecom rotary payphone. All I know about it is that it's part number is QSD400A. Could anyone point me to a place where I could see a picture of this phone? I am also looking for pictures of the QSD2400A and QSD401A. Any help is grealty appreciated! Keelan Lightfoot ------------------------------ From: Kris Henderson Subject: Sanford Wallace Troubles ... Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 19:33:56 -0700 Organization: AT&T WorldNet Services It seems that when I decided to use SmartBot for replying to applicants searching for jobs, I inadvertantly was placed on every spam list imaginable. The site, however, makes certain to declare that spamming will not be tolerated by Sanford Wallace. I was under the impression that there were specific uses for autoresponders, and that they were meant to do just that ... respond! But it seems as though it is just a medium for every network marketer to lock up my mail flow from Prodigy. I then have to go to another website just to retrieve my mail! I get 5000-10,000 e-mails monthly ... less than half of which actually pertain to my business. But the remove link states that to remove my name from that list, I forfeit the right to use the autoresponder. Does anyone have any suggestions for me? -And, if I ub-checked the box that says "Please include me on your mailing list", shouldn't that mean that I prefer not to receive all the junk? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Kris Henderson President - Elite Sales www.elitesales.org ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings Date: 13 Aug 1999 19:07:37 GMT Organization: Net Access BBS Society needs to take a hard and HONEST look at two things: 1) What circumstances made the mass killers so angry? What really upset the Columbine, Jonesboro, and other kids to kill their friends? Did the guy in LA believe that Jews were the root of all evil? Extreme prejudice seems to be growing in the country. Why? By "honest" I mean not to get "politically correct" and merely dismiss as ignorant bigotry the feelings of some people. There is a growing sense of frustration and anger and bitterness out there and it needs be learned what is motivating those people to be so bitter. 2) Ok, so they're angry. But what motivated them to kill? What about other more legitimate outlets for their anger? (I wonder if Columbine was actually a copycat act to get media attention for themselves. It certainly worked!) ------------------------------ From: stevenl11@aol.comstuffit (Steven Lichter) Date: 14 Aug 1999 01:29:03 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Subject: Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings A point of order and I'm sure others from the San Fernando Valley will agree, it is not LA it is the Valley, though that is part of LA, at least until the area breaks away as it should have 30 years ago. Apple Elite II 909-359-5338. Home of GBBS/LLUCE, support for the Apple II and Macintosh 24 hours 2400/14.4. OggNet Server. The only good spammer is a dead one, have you hunted one down today? ------------------------------ From: nospam.tonypo1@nospam.home.com (Tony Pelliccio) Subject: Re: Who the Heck Makes AT&T Phones Now? Organization: Providence Network Partners Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 00:01:33 GMT In article , kamlet@infinet.com says: > In article , Ed Ellers > wrote: >> I have two Lucent/AT&T Trimline 210s, which are IMHO one of the best >> single-line corded phones on the market today -- the handset has the >> same shape, feel and approximate weight of the original Trimline, the >> buttons are lighted (from telco battery, not an AC adapter as on the >> first Trimlines) .... > I thought the Trimlines were always telco powered. The Princess, > big, bulky, heavy-set Princess, doorstop that it was, was plugged > into the wall. The first generation Trimlines used a line transformer and an incandescent bulb to provide the dial light. Later models (From the late 70's on to 1984) used green LED's to provide the lighting from line power. == Tony Pelliccio, KD1S formerly KD1NR == Trustee WE1RD ------------------------------ From: lwinson@bbs.cpcn.com (L. Winson) Subject: Re: Who the Heck Makes AT&T Phones Now? Date: 14 Aug 1999 02:26:05 GMT Organization: The PACSIBM SIG BBS > I thought the Trimlines were always telco powered. The Princess, > big, bulky, heavy-set Princess, doorstop that it was, was plugged > into the wall. The original Trimlines required AC current from a transformer, just like a Princess. For phones that had several, they would plug in a transformer in the basement and run the lamp current through the yellow/black pair. Later they were able to power the light (somewhat more softly) from the central office, eliminating the transformer needs. IIRC, when the Trimline went modular, the handset cord became the same as other modular phones; previously IIRC it was 5 conductor. ------------------------------ From: dannyb@panix.com (Danny Burstein) Subject: Trimlines (was Re: Who the Heck Makes AT&T Phones Now?) Date: 13 Aug 1999 17:51:44 -0400 In kamlet@infinet.com (Art Kamlet) writes: > In article , Ed Ellers > wrote: >> I have two Lucent/AT&T Trimline 210s, which are IMHO one of the best >> single-line corded phones on the market today -- the handset has the >> same shape, feel and approximate weight of the original Trimline, the >> buttons are lighted (from telco battery, not an AC adapter as on the >> first Trimlines) .... > I thought the Trimlines were always telco powered. The Princess, > big, bulky, heavy-set Princess, doorstop that it was, was plugged > into the wall. Or else my memory is going? It depends on how far back your memory starts ... the first batch of genuine AT&T/Western Electric Trimline phones (which came out in the mid/late 1960s) used the plug-in wall transformer deal, as well as some very wierd early versions of "modular plugs". I first started to see some telco-line-powered LED Trimlines, mixed in with the AC powered ones, in the NY Telephone area in 1977. Presumably this switchover was a gradual phase-in based on the local Bell's relationship with Ma herself, inventory, geography, and manufacturing requirements. danny 'take a Trimline, add some resistors and a capacitor or two...' burstein _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 19:02:43 -0700 From: Joseph Singer Subject: Dial Lights (was Re: Who the Heck Makes AT&T Phones Now?) kamlet@infinet.com (Art Kamlet)13 Aug 1999 02:09:14 -0400 wrote: >> I have two Lucent/AT&T Trimline 210s, which are IMHO one of the best >> single-line corded phones on the market today -- the handset has the >> same shape, feel and approximate weight of the original Trimline, the >> buttons are lighted (from telco battery, not an AC adapter as on the >> first Trimlines) .... > I thought the Trimlines were always telco powered. The Princess, > big, bulky, heavy-set Princess, doorstop that it was, was plugged > into the wall. In a single word no. The original Princess had the separate power supply (transformer) to power the dial/keypad light. For a brief while WECO/AT&T manufactured what I think was called the Princess "signature" phone which had LEDs that were phone line powered. As for the Trimline the Trimline (the first one with the miniature dial with the moveable finger stop) had its light powered by a separate power supply (I assume the same one that powered the Princess.) To my knowledge all the pushbutton Trimlines with the round keys on the keypad had power supply powered a power supply. When they made the "second generation" Trimline with the squared keys they were lit by phone line powered LEDs. Of course this dial in handset "Trimline" style phone is made by many many companies now (most of it really junk.) Most have the lit keypad using LEDs to light though I had another knockoff many years ago that used low voltage incandescent bulb. BTW, I believe Trimline is a trademark of AT&T. As a side note "Touch Tone" is also tradmarked but I'm not sure who has the right to use it AT&T or the ILECs. In some areas it's called "Touch Calling." It may be a generic term now for all I know! Joseph Singer Seattle, Washington USA [ICQ pgr] +1 206 405 2052 [msg] +1 206 493 0706 [FAX] Seattle, Washington USA ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 00:04:07 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: FCC Getting a Net Makeover By Elizabeth Wasserman The Federal Communications Commission today issued a five-year restructuring proposal to Congress that seeks to bring the regulatory bureaucracy into the Internet age. The agency says it wants to be a "one-stop digital shop" for quick and easy form-filing, decision-making and automated access to information. http://www.thestandard.com/articles/display/0,1449,5893,00.html ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 09:31:05 -0400 From: Stanley Cline Subject: Tennessee BellSouth Customers to Lose Free DA For years Tennessee customers of BellSouth have had totally free, unlimited directory assistance for numbers within TN [and the small parts of GA and NC where Tennessee rates are charged.] Not anymore ... BellSouth will now be charging 29c/call after six calls per month per line. (Waivers of the DA charges will still be available to the disabled *as well as to anyone 65 and over*.) (Most payphones in TN have been charging for DA since payphone deregulation/the "license to gouge" took effect.) (This is far better than the 85c/call after one call that [most] GA customers have to pay. It's now actually cheaper to call DA from a non-BellSouth Mobility cell phone than from a landline in Atlanta! Most Atlanta area cell carriers use third-party DA companies, though. I have found that Sprint PCS' is OK but Powertel's is unreliable.]) http://cpr.bst.bellsouth.com/pdf/tn/notice/TN1999-158.pdf Stanley Cline -- sc1 at roamer1 dot org -- http://www.roamer1.org/ ------------------------------ From: netizen@nospam.com Subject: Re: Network Solutions: SPAMMERS and Corporate Morons Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 07:38:54 GMT steve@sellcom.com (Steve Winter) wrote: > netizen@nospam.com spake thusly and wrote: >> Obviously, they have no intention of actually responding in a >> meaningful way to my inquiry (note that in their form-letter they >> never actually say they will answer my question): > If you are that concerned, why not simply call them on the phone? Why should I? They are a web-based company and I'm on the web. Plus, it's a long-distance call. It's been two weeks now. The ONLY response to my single, simple question asking them what their SPAM policy was is ANOTHER THREE idiotic non-answers, as follows: > This is an automatic reply from Network Solutions to acknowledge that > your message has been received. This acknowledgement is NOT a > confirmation that your request has been processed. > If you need to correspond with us regarding this request, please be > sure to reference the tracking number [[NIC-xxxxxxx.xxxx]] in the subject > of your message. > Regards, > Network Solutions (Same as above, repeated two more times.) ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 00:24:57 +0100 From: Adam Sampson Subject: Re: Mexican Service/Access Codes Reply-To: azz@gnu.org > The generic list of special codes since the 1997/98 numbering/dialing > expansion shows '060' for Emergencies and '080' for the Police. Maybe > different towns prefer one to call one rather than the other, similar to > 911 (more or less standard throughout the NANP) vs. the newer 311 used in > some parts of the US for "non-emergency" access to the police or other > government/ health services. The situation in the UK is similar; we have 999 as our "normal" emergency number (the one schoolkids get taught), but because of EU regulations, 112 also works. Which one will win will simply be a matter of time. Adam Sampson azz@gnu.org ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 00:19:21 +0100 From: Adam Sampson Subject: Re: Deep Linking Reply-To: azz@gnu.org >> I propose a file called deepLinks.txt. It says whether or not links >> are permitted into the website, and further, if linking is >> permitted, it says which sub-directories may be linked to. > In order for the "deeplink.txt" file to work, it would have to be > implemented by the web server software on the host. This is already being done, albeit by a convoluted and ineffective mechanism. Modern browsers send a Referer: (sic) header in the HTTP request which says what URL referred the browser to the URL requested. This appears to serve no purpose apart from allowing companies to profile where they are being linked from (and to implement the process below). Sites such as xoom.com are now using this to block access to their webserver (or in xoom's case, replace images with the Xoom logo) if your Referer: header doesn't say you came from their site. Fortunately, there's a way around this. Older browsers don't support Referer:, so if you block out the header, most sites won't complain. One tool that can do this is Internet Junkbuster (www.junkbusters.com), which can also trim out banner ads and cookies. What I'd prefer to see would be an option to send the URL you are requesting as the Referer: header, which would probably be enough to fool most servers. However, this is an ethical issue, not a technical one. Hypertext systems (like HTTP/HTML) are valueless unless random linking is permitted. It makes no sense to block out sites from "deep linking". Why don't the companies who are worried by "deep linking" simply put banner ads on their "deep" pages? (I don't care, IJB blocks banner ads for me anyway.) Adam Sampson azz@gnu.org ------------------------------ From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Addition to News Service Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 11:30:00 EDT A recent addition to the multimedia offerings available as part of http://telecom-digest.org/news includes a new feature from Cable News Network for the net called 'Videoselect' which is intended to complement their long-standing 'Audioselect' service. Where the audio service offers Headline News or the regular CNN programming on a continuous audio feed as well as 'on demand' short features in their archives, the purpose of Videoselect is to provide not only 'on demand' archives files from recent news events but to supply a short (nine or ten minute) video newscast just for the internet which is updated every thirty minutes around the clock. The version I have online at http://telecom-digest.org/news/CNNTV.html updates every thirty minutes with the three or four major stories currently in progress plus a national weather forecast. That page functions like the others in the http://telecom-digest.org/news group of pages with links to my 'best of the internet' feature stories and other online publications but instead of just an optional audio background, it also has a little viewer if you want to watch the current news presentation. Remember that the default audio in the news feature is BBC World News Online, but you can use the drop-down menu provided to change audio sources or just go direct to the one of your choice such as /CNNTV.html /AP.html NPR.html reality.html or others. Please let me know if you have any problems with the little viewer I have provided for http://telecom-digest.org/news/CNNTV.html PAT ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #305 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sun Aug 15 03:30:19 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id DAA15538; Sun, 15 Aug 1999 03:30:19 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 03:30:19 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908150730.DAA15538@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #306 TELECOM Digest Sun, 15 Aug 99 03:30:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 306 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Defcon Video Highlights on Line (TELECOM Digest Editor) Poll Question: How Are Your Phones Answered? (TELECOM Digest Editor) Early Modular (was Re: Who the Heck Makes AT&T Phones Now?) (Ed Ellers) Re: Basic Math (was Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings) (Colin Sutton) A Correction to Original Posting (Craig Milo Rogers) Puppet Masters: Who Controls the Net (Monty Solomon) Re: Network Solutions: Not the SPAMMERS and Who's the Moron? (John Levine) Re: Network Solutions: SPAMMERS and Corporate Morons (Lars Poulsen) Re: Suche Telefonbuch CD ... (Adam Sampson) Re: Real Competition in the Local Loop (Roy Smith) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Brent Boyko) Re: Two-Letter State (etc) Codes (Garrett Wollman) Re: Starium Promises Phone Privacy (Paul Rubin) Re: Families of Michigan Prisoners Refusing Collect Calls (Steven) Re: Deep Linking Proposal (steven@primacomputer.com) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 01:35:07 EDT From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Defcon Video Highlights on Line I was directed today to some short video highlights which were made at Defcon in Las Vegas during July 9-11 this year. One of the videos is a demonstration of Back Orifice; others deal with miscellaneous events which went on. I am sorry to report the videos are not of very good quality :( sound- or video-wise ... but I thought I would put them on display for at least a few days for interested persons. My thanks for these videos to a hack/phreak group called 'Parse' which puts on a weekly netcast video show via http://pseudo.com and I offer them to you with standard disclaimers, etc. Direct your browsers to http://telecom-digest.org/defcon-videos.html PAT ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 13:36:28 EDT From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Poll Question: How Are Your Phones Answered? The new poll question asks how your phones are answered when you are away. The possible answers are that it is always answered live by someone, that calls are forwarded to you or someone else, that you use an answering machine or voicemail, or that you do not bother, and let it ring unanswered. To participate in the current poll question, please go to http://telecom-digest.org/vote.html where you can vote and see how others have voted. Your browser needs to have java enabled in order to vote, and a cookie is passed to you to insure that you vote only one time in each poll. You are free to disgard the cookie at any time. No other name or registration required. In the last poll question, we asked what percentage of your total telecom expense each month is for directory assistance charges. 94.5 percent of the voters said they spend less than five percent on directory assistance charges. 2 percent said they spend about five percent of their telecom budget on directory assistance. 2.5 said six or seven percent was their estimate. No one in the poll spends more than seven percent on this service offered by telco. Thanks for participating in http://telecom-digest.org/vote.html PAT ------------------------------ From: Ed Ellers Subject: Early Modular (was: Who the Heck Makes AT&T Phones Now?) Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 13:52:38 -0400 L. Winson (lwinson@bbs.cpcn.com) wrote: > IIRC, when the Trimline went modular, the handset cord became the > same as other modular phones; previously IIRC it was 5 conductor. I seem to recall that the handset cord had 4 conductors. The mounting (base)cord did have five conductors -- red, green, yellow, black and *white* -- so that the installer could configure the phone for different party line configurations without the usual hassle of opening the base and changing the wiring. (Incidentally, Western Electric did use Trimline-type modular handset cords on a limited basis on some key telephone sets, before the decision was made to go to the "mini-modular" system used today.) ------------------------------ Reply-To: Colin Sutton From: Colin Sutton Subject: Re: Basic Math (was Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings) Organization: Siemens Building Technologies Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 08:59:32 +1000 Dave O'Shea wrote in message ... Thanks Dave, for saying it so well. The more time is spent on fruitful (or even harmless) interests, the less time available for destructive and malicious activities. So, whether it's drug research or exercise or telecom history or religion, encourage it. Colin Sutton ------------------------------ Subject: A Correction to Original Article Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 10:16:38 -0700 From: Craig Milo Rogers I am greatly embarassed. I made a technical blunder, and my conclusions are invalid (details below). It got out to the net before I caught it, and my retraction follows. Craig Milo Rogers with egg on his face Details: Email resolution uses special "MX" records in DNS before falling back to "A" records. The command I gave to nslookup examined only "A" records. I think I used to have a .nslookuprc file that changed nslookup's default behavior (and something similar for dig), but didn't carry that forward with me when I migrated from Solaris to Linux. I know for certain that a SpringPCS text messaging request was rejected due to DNS errors, and I know for certain that only one DNS server responded when I probed, but I don't know when SprintPCS text messaging service was resumed, and I don't know whether the interruption was a DNS server problem or a network connectivity problem. --CMR ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 14:44:41 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Puppet Masters: Who Controls the Net http://www.news.com/SpecialFeatures/0,5,39907,00.html By News.com staff August 6, 1999, 4 a.m. PT Is Gates pulling the Net's strings? Like the browser wars, the fight over instant messaging is part of a larger struggle for control of the Web by industry titans. And Microsoft may raise the stakes by taking on AOL with low- or no-cost Net access. http://www.news.com/SpecialFeatures/0,5,39911,00.html Where the Web will be won: As computing moves even further onto the Net, identifying the next key technological battlefront is more important than ever for America Online, Microsoft, and a cast of smaller hopefuls. http://www.news.com/SpecialFeatures/0,5,39914,00.html How AOL rose from the ashes: How did AOL go from a digital whipping post to an Internet superpower? The answer lies in a combination of marketing hubris and an obsession with the Internet novice. http://www.news.com/SpecialFeatures/0,5,39917,00.html Microsoft: Resistance is futile Borland's plight at the hands of the Redmond empire shows how Microsoft's perseverance can spell disaster for its competitors even when it's lagging or completely absent from a particular market. http://www.news.com/SpecialFeatures/0,5,39916,00.html Why open standards are a myth: The rhetoric behind the technological control over instant messaging is beginning to resemble campaign speeches on family values in an election year -- and is inspiring similar cynicism. http://www.news.com/SpecialFeatures/0,5,39915,00.html ------------------------------ From: johnl@iecc.com (John R Levine) Subject: Re: Network Solutions: not the SPAMMERS and who's the moron? Date: 14 Aug 1999 15:25:37 -0400 Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > [ re "spam" complaint to Network Solutions from "netizen@nospam.com" ] >>> Obviously, they have no intention of actually responding in a >>> meaningful way to my inquiry (note that in their form-letter they >>> never actually say they will answer my question): Pat, this is really pitiful. This clown is too much of a coward to use his own e-mail address, and too inept to figure out where a web site is hosted, but he sure knows how to spew venom against people who have nothing whatsoever to do with his complaint. The original complaint was about a web site called sportsmatchonline. com. A whois lookup makes it clear that it's hosted by INTERLAND.NET in Atlanta, and Network Solutions has no more connection to them than they have to any of the million other COM, ORG, and NET they've registered. I'm no fan of NSI, but there's plenty of real issues to take them to task for, not nonsense like this. If I were getting obnoxious mail like this guy were sending, particularly if it had a forged return address like he uses, and it was complaining about something I clearly didn't do, I wouldn't try to respond either. John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Then too, John, I don't think the guy begins to realize how much mail goes to 'abuse' in a given day and the futility of even trying to answer it all personally especially before any investigation is conducted. Millions of netters, each one thinking they are the only one to report it. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 19:21:12 -0700 From: Lars Poulsen Subject: Re: Network Solutions: SPAMMERS and Corporate Morons Patrick commented on a note from someone who felt ignored when complaining to Network Solutions about SPAM from one of their web-hosting customers: > Now in recent days, we are hearing that NSI is not doing a very good > job where spam is concerned, ... Realistically, if you write to the > 'abuse@' address of any site these days, you are going to get an auto- > reply. No one even tries to keep up with it on a personal basis any > longer. PAT] "No one even tries" is an unfair blanket condemnation of an entire industry. Most of the smaller service providers do an excellent job of keeping their users in line and proactively get rid of spammers. But some of the large providers make a living out of being hosts to con-artists and other spammers. Network Solutions does a fair bit of spamming of their own. Under the co-operative agreement with the US government that made them the monopoly registrar for the .COM, .NET, and .ORG domains, they have collected extensive databases of businesses with network connections, including names, mail addresses, telephone numbers, fax numbers and e-mail addresses of those managing the technology end of those businesses, and they are selling CD-ROMs with extracts of this database to telemarketers at the same time that they are refuing to turn the complete database over to the government and to the non-profit group to whom the government has passed the authority to implement the new registry with multiple registrars. Over the last several years, they have performed poorly, and their customer "service" has always been a joke. I have personally had my domain turned off several times due to errors in their billing department. Last year, they billed me in November for a registration that expired in early March. I paid them, and then in March, they turned me off for non-payment, so I had to pay again. I have had no response to repeated e-mails and telephone calls to ascertain what happened to the first payment (except that it was drawn from my VISA-conencted checking account), and I finally gave up. As to the people who asked to be taken off, but can't say exactly which address to take off: My domain -- which is sort of a personal micro-ISP serving me and a couple of friends -- is similar to the domain name of a cable-TV company with an ISP operation. I am CMC.COM, they are CMC.NET, and it seems that many of their customers don't know the difference. I receive about 3 MegaBytes of e-mail PER DAY addressed to unknown accounts. I have now set up an auto-responder which replies to each of these messages with an explanation of why I don't want their mail, and asking them to remove any address ending in CMC.COM from all mailing lists under their control. Half of those responses cannot be delivered because the sending address is invalid, the user's mailbox is overflowing or the account has been terminated. When I receive the messages, it takes quite a bit of research to find the name from the SMTP envelope; the "To:" address is usually just a dummy, but the web hosting site where the auto-responder is installed does put the SMTP address in one of the "Received:" (tracing) headers in the message. Much of this junk is spam sent via a mailing list generated by picking e-mail addresses out of browsers visiting a web site, and managed by morons who cannot or will not prune their lists of useless addresses. When I set up the autoresponder, I was hoping to get all of this junk cleaned up, but I am ready to send it to the bit bucket ... the effort to clean it up is too large for the amount of good it does. Lars Poulsen - http://www.cmc.com/lars - lars@cmc.com 125 South Ontare Road, Santa Barbara, CA 93105 - +1-805-569-5277 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When I said 'no one even tries' I was referring to providing a manually prepared letter to someone who writes to complain about spam. Hey, back in the middle 1980's when someone would send an article here to telecom I would personally answer and thank them for it and discuss with them when and if I was going to print it. But then I started getting 90-100 articles per day a great many of which took -- and still take today -- some time to edit, clean up and prepare for use. Personal answers most of the time are impossible. I did not mean people were not trying to work on eliminating spam, only that they, so far as I know, have mostly given up trying to answer individual user complaints about it, concentrating instead on zapping the spammers however they can. Letters to 'abuse' *do* get read and considered, I am sure. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 00:08:08 +0100 From: Adam Sampson Subject: Re: Suche Telefonbuch CD... Reply-To: azz@gnu.org On Fri, Aug 13, 1999 at 04:22:05PM -0400, editor@telecom-digest.org asked someone to translate this: > Subject: Suche Telefonbuch CD... > ...die auch die Suche (374)ber die Telefonnummer > unterst(374)tzt. Also einfach Nummer eingeben und dazugeh(366)rigen > Teilnehmer ausfindig machen. > MfG, B. Schilling. In English it says: > I'm looking for a telephone book CD that also understands searching > by telephone number. So you simply put in the number and it finds > appropriate subscribers. With friendly greetings, B. Schilling." Germany's thriving telephone-CD business has recently been turned into a monopoly -- and the worst interface won, according to what I've heard. I suspect that there's probably a premium "business" version of the D-Info CD that would do reverse searching, although I don't live in Germany so it's a bit difficult to do research. Adam Sampson azz@gnu.org ------------------------------ From: roy@endeavor.med.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) Subject: Re: Real Competition in the Local Loop Organization: New York University School of Medicine Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 16:37:10 -0400 shadow@krypton.rain.com (Leonard Erickson) wrote: > The "trick" is that done *right* there should be one set of > telephone wiring, and one set of "coax". All owned by the *building > owner*. They should terminate in a place where multiple vendors can > connect to the internal wiring. In our case, we even approached the cable vendor who would likely be in the area, but not for a couple more years. We asked about things like that. We were told, in no uncertain terms, that when the finally came around, they would not touch our wiring, but would install their own cable plant. Hard to blame them for thinking that way, either. Sure cuts down on finger-pointing if the end customer is getting a bad signal. ------------------------------ From: bboyko@brent.llu.edu (Brent Boyko) Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: 14 Aug 1999 21:09:23 GMT Organization: Loma Linda University In article , Charles Gray wrote: > Thus, the terminal block with four screws that was mounted on millions of > residential baseboards was a "C block". What happened to "A blocks", > and "B blocks" I will never know. The "A" block was in the CO, and the "B" block was on the pole outside the residence. Residential area terminal boxes are still referred to as "B boxes" by some. Brent E. Boyko Telecom Engineer Loma Linda University Medical Center bboyko@brent.llu.edu ------------------------------ From: wollman@lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman) Subject: Re: Two-Letter State (etc) Codes Date: 14 Aug 1999 21:21:31 GMT Organization: MIT Laboratory for Computer Science In article , Adam H. Kerman wrote: > Unfortunately, the ITU ignored obvious conflicts between these codes > and long-standing two-letter US domestic postal codes for states and > territories. The ITU has no involvement in the maintenance ISO 3166. The agency responsible for maintaining it is DIN, the German equivalent of ANSI. The selection of territories to include is by the United Nations, and it is the UN which is responsible for the three-digit 'territory code' which is usually found in conjunction with ISO 3166 tables. There are a series of three-letter 3166 codes. The inventors of the Domain Name System chose to use the two-letter codes because three-letter codes might clash with the non-country-specific domains (and indeed COM does). Unfortunately, there were still conflicts: the people in the UK wanted to use the code 'UK', and so they did, even though the official ISO 3166 two-letter code for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is 'GB'. This caused problems when the Ukraine got on-line. You will remember that, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, that country had gotten three seats in the UN by insisting that Ukraine and Byelorussia (now Belarus) were separate countries. What 'country' do you suppose got assigned the code 'UK'? (Since that time, Ukraine has been reassigned to `UA', to avoid confusion with the UK.) All this is really about ISO 3166-1. ISO 3166-2 gives standard indications for the sub-national territories of those countries which have them and have bothered to register. Garrett A. Wollman | O Siem / We are all family / O Siem / We're all the same wollman@lcs.mit.edu | O Siem / The fires of freedom Opinions not those of| Dance in the burning flame MIT, LCS, CRS, or NSA| - Susan Aglukark and Chad Irschick ------------------------------ From: Paul Rubin Subject: Re: Starium Promises Phone Privacy Date: 14 Aug 1999 15:08:11 -0700 Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services Monty Solomon writes: > Today, the third floor of a converted sardine factory on Cannery Row > is home to a startup company developing what could become a new world > standard in privacy protection. By early 2000, Starium Inc. plans to > begin selling sub-US$100 telephone scrambling devices so powerful > that even the US government's most muscular supercomputers can't > eavesdrop on wiretapped conversations. This is cool. For those here who don't follow these things, Starium is the cost-reduced successor to the Comsec secure phones that were sold for $1000 or so apiece and shown at various cryptography and security conferences over the past couple years. I'm personally acquainted with the designer and while I haven't seen the Starium stuff, I can tell you from having played with it that the Comsec stuff was absolutely first class. In case you care, the crypto algorithms were 1024 (or maybe it was 2048) bit Diffie-Hellman key exchange and Triple-DES. The Comsecs were too expensive for me to really want some of my very own, but if Stariums are really $100 then I'll definitely get a couple. Meanwhile, I'll also plug something that I worked on: a software-only secure phone program, source code included, at http://www.lila.com/nautilus/ (make sure to include the trailing slash). It uses the sound card and modem (or Internet connection) in your PC, is half duplex (hit a key to switch between talking and listening), and generally is much less convenient than a hardware approach like Starium; but its security should be very good, and you can download it for free. It also uses DH key exchange and your choice of various symmetric ciphers including 3DES. I see just now that Starium now has some good stuff on its own page (www.starium.com). For a long time it just said something like "watch this space". Great stuff!!! ------------------------------ From: steven@primacomputer.com (Steven) Subject: Re: Families of Michigan Prisoners Refusing Collect Calls Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 14:38:00 +0800 Organization: Prima Computer While the editor's statment of fact may have been a bit flowery it addressed the issue and offered an explanation as to why this petty form of extortion exits. I'm curious if anyone has looked into how this might conflict with regulations on public phones, equal access, etc. One might be able to effect a change by exploiting this kind of greed. With a sizeable percentage of the US population currently incarcerated, the phone companies might be persuaded to pursue access to this ever growing market. With many of the potential customers cut off from all other forms of communication, the US TelecoN market could be worth billions. New value added services could be offered, such as interactive translation from English to Lawyer, Online Cigarette trading, or information services announcing arrivals, departures, or the number of years you will be held before charges are to be filed. Interactive dating services for Men Seeking Men could very well be the first "Killer App" of the TelecoN industry. Steven ------------------------------ From: steven@primacomputer.com (Steven) Subject: Re: Deep Linking Proposal Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 14:39:16 +0800 Organization: Prima Computer The whole concept of robots.txt, or deeplink.txt is that it doesn't require modifying servers. It is up to the browser/linker to check for the file and decide if they should not be where they are. I don't see what the debate is about though. The internet is a public forum. If you put something up expect it to be linked to. If you only want something accessible from your site then reject requests that have the wrong referer. The mechanism is already there. Otherwise its like putting your cookie into the cookie jar and then complaining when someone eats it. Steven In article , LincMad001@telecom- digest.zzn.com says: > In order for the "deeplink.txt" file to work, it would have to be > implemented by the web server software on the host. In other words, if > I have a page deep in my site that someone has linked directly to, but > I want to make visitors come in through the front door, I would > configure my "deeplink.txt" file to disallow access to anything but the > main page. If someone then clicked on an external direct link to the > deep page, my server would automatically redirect the request to the > main page. > Thus, you can put a deep link to my site anywhere you please, but it > won't work if my server software is configured to block it. > This structure would basically streamline what is already available to > web programmers by checking the referrer for each access. ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #306 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Sun Aug 15 16:22:09 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id QAA05169; Sun, 15 Aug 1999 16:22:09 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 16:22:09 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908152022.QAA05169@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #307 TELECOM Digest Sun, 15 Aug 99 16:22:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 307 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: Network Solutions: SPAMMERS and Corporate Morons (Joey Lindstrom) Re: Sanford Wallace Troubles (Robert Horan) Re: Sanford Wallace Troubles (Tom Betz) Re: MCI Five Cents Everyday (Herb Stein) Re: Two-Letter State (etc) Codes (Adam H. Kerman) Re: SprintPCS Text Messaging Woes (Afshin David Youssefyeh) Re: Telco Truck Fleet Presentation (Alan Boritz) Re: What to Do With a Used AMPS Cell Phone? (jw.nyc@iname.com) Followup on Third Voice (Fred Atkinson) Re: Poll Question: How Are Your Phones Answered? (Adam H. Kerman) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Arthur Ross) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Joey Lindstrom Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 06:57:09 -0600 Reply-To: Joey Lindstrom Subject: Re: Network Solutions: SPAMMERS and Corporate Morons On Sun, 15 Aug 1999 03:30:19 -0400 (EDT), Lars Poulsen wrote: > Network Solutions does a fair bit of spamming of their own. Under > the co-operative agreement with the US government that made them > the monopoly registrar for the .COM, .NET, and .ORG domains, they > have collected extensive databases of businesses with network > connections, including names, mail addresses, telephone numbers, > fax numbers and e-mail addresses of those managing the technology > end of those businesses, and they are selling CD-ROMs with extracts > of this database to telemarketers at the same time that they are > refusing to turn the complete database over to the government and > to the non-profit group to whom the government has passed the > authority to implement the new registry with multiple registrars. The other day, I got a pair of catalogs in the mail from a company called "MISCO", which apparently is a retailer of computer equipment based in Toronto. Lots of hard drives, mice, cleaning kits, even full-blown computers available ... but I think I'd be more inclined to trust them if there were any reference whatsoever to shipping charges - I hate getting that nasty surprise when the package arrives. Anyways, point is, I got two of 'em. One was addressed to myself personally, while the other was addressed to "Martin Purvis" at the same address. Martin is a netter who lives in Australia, and I host his website for him. I also did him the favour of registering his domain name for him with NSI. When I filled in his contact information, I included his Australian address, but my address also shows up when you look up his domain name. The only possible way that I could have gotten onto the mailing list which produced these catalogs in my mailbox is that somebody had access to NSI's database. And frankly, I'm absolutely appalled by this turn of events. They are, or were, a freakin' monopoly - aren't there supposed to be safeguards to prevent officially-sanctioned monopolies (not including Microsoft) from abusing such monopoly positions? When it comes time to register new domains, or renew my existing ones, I plan on using anybody but NSI. This is crap, man. (BTW, if anyone is looking for domain registration on the cheap, I suggest you check out http://nic.nu - $25/year. I've got no connection to 'em other than as a satisfied customer, as you can see by my return email address.) From the messy desktop of Joey Lindstrom Email: Joey@GaryNumanFan.NU or joey@lindstrom.com Phone: +1 403 313-JOEY FAX: +1 413 643-0354 (yes, 413 not 403) Visit The NuServer! http://www.GaryNumanFan.NU Visit The Webb! http://webb.GaryNumanFan.NU The sky already fell. Now what? --Steven Wright ------------------------------ From: Robert Horan Subject: Re: Sanford Wallace Troubles Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 15:30:37 +0200 Kris Henderson wrote: > It seems that when I decided to use SmartBot for replying to > applicants searching for jobs, I inadvertantly was placed on every > spam list imaginable. The site, however, makes certain to declare > that spamming will not be tolerated by Sanford Wallace. My first question is, don't you know who Sanford Wallace is? Taken from this URL, http://www.annonline.com/interviews/970522/biography.html "Wallace originally began in the bulk e-mail business under the name of Promo Enterprises (promo-ent.com). Not long thereafter he started business under the corporate identity of Cyber Promotions, which he has operated under ever since. Recently he started a sister bulk e-mailing company, Cyberout Email Services, an autoresponder service, and an internet service provider, ISPam." > I was under the impression that there were specific uses for > autoresponders, and that they were meant to do just that ... respond! > But it seems as though it is just a medium for every network marketer > to lock up my mail flow from Prodigy. I then have to go to another > website just to retrieve my mail! I get 5000-10,000 e-mails monthly > ... less than half of which actually pertain to my business. But the > remove link states that to remove my name from that list, I forfeit > the right to use the autoresponder. Autoresponders have their place in e-communication, but you are using a "service" from a man renowned to abuse the Net. By clicking on "remove your name from the list", it is possible that you will be removed from *his* list. Maybe, maybe not. But that link will definitely not remove you from all the *other* lists. The damage has already been done. > Does anyone have any suggestions for me? -And, if I ub-checked the > box that says "Please include me on your mailing list", shouldn't that > mean that I prefer not to receive all the junk? Any advice would be > greatly appreciated. If you have the ability to filter your mail as it arrives on the server, or even through your email client, that is the easiest solution, if the SPAM is easily separatable. In most cases, though, it's not. My advice, get rid of this address. Open a new address at an email provider that will allow you to have an autoresponder attached to your email address, BUT also will allow you to filter on the server, and already has spam filters in place. If this spammed email address is linked to your ISP, contact the ISP and ask for a new address. If you put your email address on web pages, put something into your email address that will require human effort to remove it, thus thwarting (for now) the spambots: for example: robert.horan@removethistomailme.cyberdude.com . This will produce a nondelivery report to the spammer, but will only arrive into your email box when someone *purposely* removes the junk in the address. Just be sure to include an explanation in your signature for your correspondents that need an explanation. A good book to read on this subject is the "pig" book, _Stopping_Spam_ from O'Reilly Press. Hope this helps, Robert Horan robert.horan@removethistomailme.cyberdude.com ------------------------------ From: tbetz@panix.com (Tom Betz) Subject: Re: Sanford Wallace Troubles Date: 15 Aug 1999 11:02:18 -0400 Organization: Society for the Elimination of Junk Unsolicited Bulk Email Reply-To: tbetz@pobox.com Quoth Kris Henderson in : > Does anyone have any suggestions for me? Remember Rule #1 -- Spammers Lie. My advice? Don't trust thieves like Sanford Wallace. I always wanted to be someone,| Tom Betz, Generalist but now I think I should have | Want to send me email? FIRST, READ THIS PAGE: been a wee bit more specific. | | YO! MY EMAIL ADDRESS IS HEAVILY SPAM-ARMORED! ------------------------------ From: herb@herbstein.com (Herb Stein) Subject: Re: MCI Five Cents Everyday Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 16:16:31 GMT When I recover from the time and expense of their frame relay problems culminating in its complete domestic shutdown Saturday (see http://www.mci.com) I MAY consider trusting them with my telephone service. Yeah, right :-) In article , Monty Solomon wrote: > No. 2 long-distance carrier angles for AT&T's dominant 60% market share > NEW YORK (CNNfn) - MCI WorldCom Inc. announced Monday it will cut > long-distance rates to as low as 5 cents a minute during off-peak > hours, a move likely to intensify price-jockeying in the intensely > competitive market. > In a shot across the bow of AT&T Corp., the nation's top > long-distance carrier, No. 2 MCI said weekday calls between 7 p.m. and > 7 a.m. and all weekend calls will fall to 5 cents per minute. The > service, to be called "MCI Five Cents Everyday," carries a fee of > $1.95 a month and covers state-to-state calls for 108 hours per week. > Jackson, Miss.-based MCI WorldCom (WCOM) also will offer > peak-hour service for 10 cents per minute, for a monthly service > charge of $4.95. Callers sticking to the off-peak deal "Five Cents > Everyday" plan will have to pay 25 cents per minute for peak-hour > long-distance calls. > The move, the first by MCI in the residential, long-distance > market in two years, signals the company is serious about increasing > its share of that business segment. Herb Stein The Herb Stein Group www.herbstein.com herb@herbstein.com 314 215-3584 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: MCI/Worldcom's outage was in its eighth day as of Friday afternoon. See the CNET display boxes for detailed reports on this at http://telecom-digest.org/news (although by Monday other stories may have taken over the CNET space in our e-news area). I guess a lot of corporate datacom managers are feeling very annoyed by it at this point. Quite a few have had little or no service for the past week; a few others have limped along at half-speed. As to be expected, MCI/Worldcom is in complete denial about the whole thing. They admit there 'might be some network congestion'. When they were asked point blank by CNET how many times last week they had to rebuild their virtual network, at first they claimed they did not do that; then they were shown evidence to the contrary and finally admitted they had 'tried two or three times' to correct what was wrong. The customer service reps have been told to deny there are any problems if questioned by users, and instead of answering any questions about the network raised by users to if possible turn the discussion around and ask the users if they understand the procedures to login, etc, making it appear that the user is at fault. Some lawyers are already preparing litigation on behalf of their corporate clients, asking for their money back plus more money to cover the damages incurred during the last week in places like Chicago where the opening of one of the financial trading centers has been delayed indefinitly because of MCI/Worldcom's problems. So now they want to take over your home telephone service as well? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Adam H. Kerman Subject: Re: Two-Letter State (etc) Codes Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 09:50:49 -0500 Organization: EnterAct L.L.C. Turbo-Elite News Server > Adam H. Kerman wrote: >> Unfortunately, the ITU ignored obvious conflicts between these >> codes and long-standing two-letter US domestic postal codes for states >> and territories. The most notorious conflict was il for Israel versus >> IL for Illinois. il.* was also used for the News hierarchy for Israel, >> but they got so fed up with the number of articles they got concerning >> Illinois that they changed it to israel.* almost four years ago. Of >> course, lots of news servers have neglected to rmgroup the old groups >> in il.*. > Tell that to the Californians who are tired of seeing Canadian political > discussions showing up in CA.POLITICS Heh. At least the Canadians are posting to real newsgroups. In the case of il.*, Illinoisans and Israelis aren't. But I'll admit that would affect more people. ------------------------------ From: Afshin David Youssefyeh Subject: Re: SprintPCS Text Messaging Woes Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 02:09:21 -0700 Try contacting Marquette Nelson assistant to regional vp Rod Egdorf at 310-228-2311. ------------------------------ From: aboritz@cybernex.net (Alan Boritz) Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 08:32:22 Subject: Re: Telco Truck Fleet Presentation On Sun, 8 Aug 1999 07:18:25, Joseph Olshefski wrote: > Hi, my name is Jay Olshefski and I am the Area Operation Manager > currently supervising the Fleet Service Operations in the New England > for the Bell Atlantic Corporation. I will be giving a presentation at > the end of this year to 140+ mechanics and managers who maintenance the > 7,000+ vehicles in New England region. I would like to do a presentation > titled "An Illustrated History of the Telephone Line Truck" and any > pictures, web sites or information would be greatly appreciated. The folks from 2600 Magazine bring one every year to the Trenton Computer Festival. It has a bell logo, and usually it's in better physical shape than the real thing. ------------------------------ From: jw.nyc@NoSpam.iname.com (j w) Subject: Re: What to Do With a Used AMPS Cell Phone? Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 12:58:23 GMT Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com On Sun, 8 Aug 1999 10:57:06 EDT, Wlevant@aol.com (Bill Levant) wrote: >> query about what to do with used AMPS cell phone << How about give it to a worthy cause? In New York City SprintPCS is sponsoring a program called "Cab Watch" where they are giving 911 only phones to cab drivers. There was an article in Sunday 15 "The City" section of the {New York Times}. I think you can just drop it off at a Sprint PCS store. jw ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 09:53 -0400 (EDT) From: Fred Atkinson Organization: Personal Copy Subject: Followup on Third Voice I was just checking out the 'Third Voice' site. Was curious to see what was becoming of them. They only appear to have beta clients for 'Internet Explorer' but not for Netscape or anything for the MacIntosh. In this day and time, I would think that not supporting the other browsers with your service would be an invitation to go out of business. I hope that is the case with these folks. I can't say I approve of giving just anyone the right to post anything on anyone else's Web site. Fred [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Apparently not that many netizens have become that enthusiastic about their 'service'. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 12:48:52 -0500 From: Adam H. Kerman Subject: Re: Poll Question: How Are Your Phones Answered? Organization: Chinet - Public Access since 1982 In article TELECOM Digest Editor wrote: > To participate in the current poll question, please go to > http://telecom-digest.org/vote.html where you can vote and > see how others have voted. Your browser needs to have java > enabled in order to vote, and a cookie is passed to you to > insure that you vote only one time in each poll. You are free > to disgard the cookie at any time. No other name or registration required. Arghhh. Several recent versions of Lynx have accepted cookies. So what's with the Java? I haven't had PPP for a few weeks; my modem finked out in a storm. I'm back on a 14.4 internal in a 386 with an amber monitor. The Pentium workstation (even that's several years old!) is what I'd normally use; I should get around to getting another modem. I run the X version of Netscape, missing lots of bells and whistles. I always hit a site with Lynx first. It's so damn much faster. Unless I know I'll need to look at the pretty pictures I avoid launching Netscape. There are days when I don't even run X! And there are days when I run X for nothing more than simultaneous xterms. All right; I do admit to enabling color on Lynx when using it from the console. I'm in my mid 30s. Randy Suess calls me a luddite. I'm just happier when I do text processing on the 386 with the amber monitor. In the mid-80's, I figured out to insert typesetting codes with PC-Write! Today, I have trouble pointing and clicking to make a highlighted passage boldface. It takes longer to find the mouse and clear space on the desk. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Since you mention Randy Suess, I will tell about him to readers here who may not know of his role in the history of networking. Randy started the very first computer BBS in the world, in Chicago, in 1977. It was called "Ward and Randy's BBS" and the Ward-person named therein was Ward Christianson who about the same time developed an important protocol for file transfers between computers. Is Ward and Randy's BBS still operating? It was at the last time I happened to be at Randy's home, which was a number of years ago on the northwest side of Chicago. The computer doing the BBS was sitting there on the work bench right next to the computer handling Chinet. I think the first half dozen or so BBSs were all in Chicago; in addition to Ward and Randy, a guy in my neighborhood had an Apple BBS; a guy on the southwest side was running a BBS on a Tandy Model 1 computer. By about 1980, there were BBSs running in other cities as well on a limited basis, but there were no interconnections between them. For awhile I managed a BBS for the Chicago Public Library on a volunteer basis; we used People's Message System software written by a guy named Bill Blue, and I had my own Apple ][+ BBS for about three years at the same time in the early 1980's. The first interconnection between BBSs came around 1982 or so when the FIDOnet people got their thing going, and I believe -- am not certain -- that Randy Suess was the first FIDO site in Chicago with his Chinet service, which today is probably the oldest ISP around anywhere. So anyway, go to http://telecom-digest.org/vote.html and participate in this week's poll question on how your phones get answered when you are not there to answer them personally. Then if you feel like it after you vote, stop in at http://telecom-digest.org/defcon-videos.html and look at some of the events in Las Vegas in July. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 10:58:41 -0700 From: Arthur Ross Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? heywood@gloucester.com (Heywood Jaiblomi) wrote: > Charles Gray wrote: >> The AT&T response was that all of these things were developed and >> named by Bell Labs. They just started with "number 1" on whatever >> system they were working on. TD1 radio, TD2 radio, etc. Whenever >> there was a "hole" in the sequence, that meant that the labs had >> worked on something, but it didn't pan out for some reason. > I wonder if that is what happened to 1 thru 6 up, and Preparations A > thru G? Can't stifle myself any longer ... heard, long ago, that this *is* how the "C" programming language came to be, i.e. earlier attempts at the ultimate programming language "A" and "B" didn't work out. C was the creation of Bell Labs folks - Kernighan & Ritchie - circa late 60's. I can't personally attest to the veracity of this, but if it isn't true, it should be! -- Dr. Arthur Ross 2325 East Orangewood Avenue Phoenix, AZ 85020-4730 Phone: 602-371-9708 Fax : 602-336-7074 ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #307 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Aug 16 12:23:29 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id MAA09283; Mon, 16 Aug 1999 12:23:29 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 12:23:29 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908161623.MAA09283@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #308 TELECOM Digest Mon, 16 Aug 99 12:23:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 308 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Telecom Update (Canada) #195, August 16, 1999 (Angus TeleManagement) An Institutional Form For IANA Rather Than ICANN (Ronda Hauben) MCI Frame Outage (Tom Alewine) GPS Time Roll-Over (John Eichler) MCI WorldCom Works To Finish Data Network Repairs (Monty Solomon) Internic Selling Mailing Lists (was Re: Network Solutions) (Danny Burstein) Network Solutions: SPAMMERS and Corporate Morons (Dave Garland) Advice on Telephone Cabling Needed? (Alan Wong) eBay Spoof (Joey Lindstrom) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 11:38:48 -0400 From: Angus TeleManagement Subject: Telecom Update (Canada) #195, August 16, 1999 ************************************************************ * * * TELECOM UPDATE * * Angus TeleManagement's Weekly Telecom Newsbulletin * * http://www.angustel.ca * * Number 195: August 16, 1999 * * * * Publication of Telecom Update is made possible by * * generous financial support from: * * * * AT&T Canada ............... http://www.attcanada.com/ * * Bell Canada ............... http://www.bell.ca/ * * Lucent Technologies ....... http://www.lucent.ca/ * * MetroNet Communications ... http://www.metronet.ca/ * * Sprint Canada ............. http://www.sprintcanada.ca/ * * Telus Communications....... http://www.telus.com/ * * TigerTel Services ......... http://www.citydial.com/ * * * ************************************************************ IN THIS ISSUE: ** Sirois to Focus Full-Time on Teleglobe ** Call-Net Fiber Connects 24 Cities ** Spectrum Auction Applications Closed ** Lucent Buys Integrator, Router-Maker ** Iridium Files for Bankruptcy Protection ** CTI to Sell Bell Nexxia Services ** AT&T, Videotron Want DS-3 Reports to Be Confidential ** Digital PCS to Reach Newfoundland ** Telus Tops One Million Wireless Subscribers ** Ottawa and Washington at Odds Over Satellite ** Review of IXC Line-Side Termination Fees ** BC Tel Restructures Centrex Rates ** Rural Schools Get Satellite Link to Internet ** Hydro, O.N.Tel Join for North Bay Network ** Com Dev Cutting Work Force ** Telus Adopts Internet Call Director ** Executive Appointments Excel Communications Inmarsat ** Financial Reports Clearnet Microcell ** Correction: Internet Kiosks ** Telecom Seminars in Your Office ============================================================ SIROIS TO FOCUS FULL-TIME ON TELEGLOBE: Charles Sirois says he will step down for six months as Chairman of Microcell, TIW, and Coscient Group in order to focus his attention on Teleglobe Inc, of which he is Chairman and CEO. On his announcement, Teleglobe's share price, which had fallen 40% since July, rebounded 9%. (See Telecom Update #193) CALL-NET FIBER CONNECTS 24 CITIES: Call-Net Enterprises has activated three SONET fiber rings in Central and Western Canada, completing a 24-city network reaching from Quebec City to Vancouver. ** Call-Net subsidiary Sprint Canada has begun preselling local service to customers in Toronto and will begin connecting them this fall. SPECTRUM AUCTION APPLICATIONS CLOSED: August 6 was the deadline for applications to participate in this fall's auction of wireless spectrum in the 24/38 GHz band (see Telecom Update #185). Industry Canada will publish a list of qualified bidders in late August. Call-Net has already announced that it has applied. LUCENT BUYS INTEGRATOR, ROUTER-MAKER: Lucent Technologies is acquiring International Network Services, an eight-year-old network systems integrator based in Sunnyvale, California, in return for stock valued at US$3.7 Billion. INS's 2,200 employees will become part of Lucent's NetCare division. ** Lucent has also purchased Xedia Corporation, a Massachusetts-based developer of Internet access routers for wide area networks, for stock valued at US$246 million. IRIDIUM FILES FOR BANKRUPTCY PROTECTION: Iridium World Communications, which operates a satellite phone network, has defaulted on loans totaling US$1.5 Billion and filed for bankruptcy protection. (See Telecom Update #193) CTI TO SELL BELL NEXXIA SERVICES: Bell Nexxia says it has formed a "strategic business partnership" with Combined Telecom Inc, a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier based in Toronto. CTI will offer Bell Nexxia services to its customers. Nexxia says this is "the first of many such partnerships" it will form. AT&T, VIDEOTRON WANT DS-3 REPORTS TO BE CONFIDENTIAL: In May, the CRTC ordered IX carriers to report by August 10 (and semi-annually thereafter) all routes on which they offer DS-3 links, since the Commission intends to deregulate competitively served routes. AT&T and Videotron have submitted the information, but ask that all such reports be kept confidential. The CRTC requests comments by August 23. http://www.crtc.gc.ca:80/eng/proc_rep/telecom/1999/8662/v2-01.htm DIGITAL PCS TO REACH NEWFOUNDLAND: NewTel, an Aliant subsidiary, says it will bring digital wireless service to the St. John's region in Newfoundland by year end. TELUS TOPS ONE MILLION WIRELESS SUBSCRIBERS: At the end of June, BCT.Telus had 1.02 million wireless phone subscribers in Alberta and British Columbia, a 15.1% increase from last year. Monthly subscriber turnover ("churn") stayed level at 1.3%; average monthly revenue per subscriber fell to $59 from $71. (See Telecom Update #193) OTTAWA AND WASHINGTON AT ODDS OVER SATELLITE: Despite receiving an interim technology license, the Canadian Space Agency continues to look for a European company to take over work on the $305 Million Radarsat-2 satellite from U.S.-based Orbital Sciences, and it may use a European company for the launch in 2002. The project has been delayed by new U.S. export controls on defense-related technology. REVIEW OF IXC LINE-SIDE TERMINATION FEES: On June 2, Call-Net asked the CRTC to reverse Telecom Order 99-340, which rules that incumbent telcos can charge long distance competitors rates for line-side connections different than those retail customers pay (see Telecom Update #187). The Commission says it will examine this question separately from any wider review of interconnection charges, and requests comments by September 3. http://www.crtc.gc.ca:80/eng/proc_rep/telecom/1999/8662/c25-02.htm BC TEL RESTRUCTURES CENTREX RATES: CRTC Telecom Order 99-790 approves an application by BC Tel to make several changes in Regional Centrex rates and contract terms, including restructuring rates from rate groups to rate bands and reducing the number of volume bands. http://www.crtc.gc.ca/internet/1999/8045/04/o99-0790.htm RURAL SCHOOLS GET SATELLITE LINK TO INTERNET: When school opens, 20 schools in rural Ontario and Newfoundland will receive Internet content by satellite. Telesat, Canarie, Rebel.com, and International Datacasting have joined to build the new system. ** Twenty satellite earth stations are being built to bring Internet access to remote BC schools with funding from Industry Canada's Community Access Program. HYDRO, O.N.TEL JOIN FOR NORTH BAY NETWORK: O.N.Tel, a division of Ontario Northland Transportation, is building a 20-km fiber network for North Bay Hydro, which will operate the network and lease capacity to customers. COM DEV CUTTING WORK FORCE: Com Dev International, which makes wireless and satellite equipment, says it will lay off 200 of its 1,300 employees and close a U.S. equipment plant. Losses for the quarter ended July 30 are three times higher than anticipated. TELUS ADOPTS INTERNET CALL DIRECTOR: Telus customers in most of Alberta can now use InfoInterActive's Internet Call Director (also marketed as Internet Call Manager), which notifies Internet users when there is a call waiting on the line. (See Telecom Update #132) EXECUTIVE APPOINTMENTS: ** Excel Communications: Teleglobe's Dallas-based subsidiary has appointed Cynthia Worthman (formerly with KMC Telecom Holdings) as CFO and Malcolm Aylett (formerly with Mary Kay) as COO, International Operations. ** Inmarsat: Michael Storey is leaving MCI WorldCom to become President and CEO of Toronto-based Inmarsat, which provides mobile satellite services. He replaces Warren Grace. FINANCIAL REPORTS: The following results are for the second quarter. (See Telecom Update #191) ** Clearnet: Revenue was $79.9 Million, 42% more than last year. Losses before interest, taxes, and amortization decreased 23% to $52 Million. Total losses were $154 Million. ** Microcell: Revenue almost doubled from last year to $62 Million. Losses before depreciation and amortization were $34.8 Million, down 46% from last year. Total losses were $98 Million. CORRECTION -- INTERNET KIOSKS: Users of Bell Canada Internet kiosks being installed at Toronto's Pearson Airport pay $2.50 for the first five minutes, not $2.50 a minute, as incorrectly reported in Telecom Update #194. Extra minutes cost 30 cents. TELECOM SEMINARS IN YOUR OFFICE: Participants have lauded Angus Dortmans' private seminars as "enlightening," "meaningful," "well-organized," and "fun." Workshops are available on many topics of telecom management, including: ** Fundamentals of Successful End-User Telecom Management ** Recent Telecom Regulatory Decisions and Key Industry Trends ** How to Develop and Present Telecom Business Cases to Senior Management ** Getting More for Less: How to Improve Telecom Supplier Relations ** Cutting Costs Without Cutting Service For further information on Angus Dortmans seminars, go to http://www.angustel.ca/angdort/adseminar.html. To discuss your workshop needs, call Henry Dortmans at 1-800-263-4415, ext 300. ============================================================ HOW TO SUBMIT ITEMS FOR TELECOM UPDATE E-MAIL: editors@angustel.ca FAX: 905-686-2655 MAIL: TELECOM UPDATE Angus TeleManagement Group 8 Old Kingston Road Ajax, Ontario Canada L1T 2Z7 =========================================================== HOW TO SUBSCRIBE (OR UNSUBSCRIBE) TELECOM UPDATE is provided in electronic form only. There are two formats available: 1. The fully-formatted edition is posted on the World Wide Web on the first business day of the week at http://www.angustel.ca/update/up.html 2. The e-mail edition is distributed free of charge. To subscribe, send an e-mail message to majordomo@angustel.ca. The text of the message should contain only the two words: subscribe update To stop receiving the e-mail edition, send an e-mail message to majordomo@angustel.ca. The text of the message should say only: unsubscribe update [Your e-mail address] =========================================================== COPYRIGHT AND DISCLAIMER: All contents copyright 1999 Angus TeleManagement Group Inc. All rights reserved. For further information, including permission to reprint or reproduce, please e-mail rosita@angustel.ca or phone 905-686-5050 ext 225. The information and data included has been obtained from sources which we believe to be reliable, but Angus TeleManagement makes no warranties or representations whatsoever regarding accuracy, completeness, or adequacy. Opinions expressed are based on interpretation of available information, and are subject to change. If expert advice on the subject matter is required, the services of a competent professional should be obtained. ------------------------------ From: rh120@columbia.edu (Ronda Hauben) Subject: An Institutional Form For IANA Rather Than ICANN Date: 16 Aug 1999 14:05:19 GMT Organization: Columbia University Reply-To: rh120@columbia.edu What institutional form was needed for IANA was a real question that ICANN's creation didn't solve but only complicated. There is a need to have a serious discussion and *not* allow something so important as the IETF protocol process, the IP system, the DNS and root server system to be put into an inappropriate organizational form that cannot reponsibly be administered or controlled. A change as serious as what is being projected with regard to ICANN's creation needs a broad and serious online discussion. That hasn't happened yet and it is important both to understand why it hasn't happened and to figure out how to have it begin. The Internet is too important to let such a substantial change happen without broad ranging and serious discussion. The Internet has been built on the basis of people taking on to figure out the important issues and make their contribution. The U.S. Dept of Commerce has tried to stop this from happening. And the U.S. press tries to pass the significant change being made off as a conflict between NSI and ICANN. But the continued scaling and future of the Internet is involved and the issues concern all to whom the Internet is important. See in Telepolis: What Institutional Form is Needed to Replace ICANN? URL: http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/te/5183/1.html See also proposal originally submitted to the NTIA to create a solution to the problem rather than ICANN http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/other/dns_proposal.txt Ronda Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook also in print edition ISBN 0-8186-7706-6 ------------------------------ From: alewine@austin.rr.com (Tom Alewine) Subject: MCI Frame Outage Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 14:44:15 GMT Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com I'm still looking for detailed information as to the cause of the major MCI outage this last week. I understand they are using (upgrading) to Ascend/Cascade platform for their frame network and that they have been quoted in the press saying that the software caused the outage. Anyone have any information as to the validity of this or any other detailed information of this problem. I'm wondering how this might affect a similar Ascend configuration as a potential buyer. Thanks, Tom ------------------------------ From: John Eichler Subject: GPS Time Roll-Over Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 10:08:44 -0500 Pat, I just heard about this and thought some of your readers might be interested, especially if they were to be traveling this coming weekend. "GPS System Time will roll over at midnight 21-22 August 1999, 132 days before the Year 2000. On 22 August 1999, unless repaired, many GPS receivers will claim that it is 6 January 1980, 23 August will become 7 January, and so on. Accuracy of navigation may also be severely affected. Although it appears that GPS broadcasts do contain sufficient data to ensure that navigation need not be affected by rollover in 1999, it is not proven that the firmware in all receivers will handle the rollovers in stride; some receivers may claim wrong locations in addition to incorrect dates. ..." I got the above from the U.S. Coast Guard Navigation Center at the following URL: http://www.navcen.uscg.mil/gps/geninfo/y2K/gpsweek.htm John Eichler ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 21:32:26 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: MCI WorldCom Works To Finish Data Network Repairs WASHINGTON (Reuters) - MCI WorldCom sought Sunday to complete repairs to a high speed data network that has experienced problems for ten days, idling the Chicago Board of Trade's electronic trading system and disrupting service to thousands of businesses. The long distance phone company said it took a frame relay network platform out of service Saturday for 24 hours in an effort to restore stability to the system. Work on the platform, which disrupted service for some Internet customers, was due to be completed Sunday. http://news.lycos.com/stories/Technology/19990815RTTECH-TELECOMS-MCIWORLDCOM.asp ------------------------------ From: dannyb@panix.com (Danny Burstein) Subject: Internic Selling Mailing Lists (was Re: Network Solutions) Date: 15 Aug 1999 20:26:31 -0400 [Internic is the common name used for Network Solutions, Inc., the orignal and still primary maintainer of the 'com, org, net, edu, gov, (and) mil' domain registrations.) In Joey Lindstrom writes: > The other day, I got a pair of catalogs in the mail from a company > called "MISCO", which apparently is a retailer of computer equipment > based in Toronto. [snip] > Anyways, point is, I got two of 'em. One was addressed to myself > personally, while the other was addressed to "Martin Purvis" at the > same address. Martin is a netter who lives in Australia, and I host > his website for him. I also did him the favour of registering his > domain name for him with NSI. When I filled in his contact > information, I included his Australian address, but my address also > shows up when you look up his domain name. > The only possible way that I could have gotten onto the mailing list > which produced these catalogs in my mailbox is that somebody had access > to NSI's database. And frankly, I'm absolutely appalled by this turn > of events. They are, or were, a freakin' monopoly - aren't there > supposed to be safeguards to prevent officially-sanctioned monopolies I can most assuredly confirm getting both paper-mail (US Postal Service) and getting e-mail based on my Internic registration. The way I can tell, btw, is that I add in unique middle names/initials or other individual variations to my name when registering. (I also do the same when subscribing to magazines, or when putting my name on anything else likely to get mailing list-ified. It actually gets quite interesting to see who sells what to whom ...) The former tend to be catalogs of computer goods. The latter tend to be web hosting offers and other spam. The question though, is whether these folk are purchasing lists from Internic, or whether they're getting them on their own. Keep in mind that Internic's database is publically accessable, and there _have_ been _numerous_ cases of folk setting up automated scripts that basically query Internic for every possible name. (i.e. they'll do a "whois aaaaa", get the response, then do "whois aaaab", etc.). Some of these have gotten public attention because the huge volume of requests they generated amounted to a de-facto 'denial of service' attack. _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] ------------------------------ From: dave.garland@wizinfo.com (Dave Garland) Date: 16 Aug 99 01:13:44 -0600 Subject: Network Solutions: SPAMMERS and Corporate Morons Organization: Wizard Information Joey Lindstrom wrote: > The only possible way that I could have gotten onto the > mailing list which produced these catalogs in my mailbox is > that somebody had access to NSI's database. Sure. Which is to say, anyone who's capable of doing a WHOIS command. I occasionally get junkmail (e.g. AmEx credit card offers) addressed to Wayne Stenson, who is the (ISP) technical contact for wizinfo.com in the NSI database, a name that is nowhere else associated with that address. (I haven't seen a MISCO catalog addressed to him, though.) As long as WHOIS is publicly accessible, how can one tell whether NSI is selling mailing lists, or not? Dave dave.garland@wizinfo.com ------------------------------ From: sammy@skip-the-spam.newsguy.com (Alan Wong) Subject: Advice on Telephone Cabling Needed? Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 01:55:42 GMT Organization: MindSpring Enterprises Hello, I'm currently revonovating my house and would like to "centralize" my telephone. Basically, instead of the daisy chaining that I have now I would like to have it come out of some centralized distribution box. I know the basics, and I belive the solution to me needs is a 110 distribution block. However, if I'm correct it's not as simple as puncing in the telephone wire and for each run, just punch them in the coressonding section because the unit is not bridge. Aside from this, that's all I know on this topic but would like to use this solution. What would and I need in order to do this correctly and what steps are needed.....electrican told me over the phone you need to jumper the unit, terminate the block, etc ... it seemed really complex. Any and ALL info on this topic is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Alan please remove the "skip-the-spam" from my email address ------------------------------ From: Joey Lindstrom Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 18:58:34 -0600 Reply-To: Joey Lindstrom Subject: eBay Spoof Given the eBay conversations recently, you might wanna grab yourself a chuckle and visit: http://www.wtfman.com/mcd/dick2.htm From the messy desktop of Joey Lindstrom Email: Joey@GaryNumanFan.NU or joey@lindstrom.com Phone: +1 403 313-JOEY FAX: +1 413 643-0354 (yes, 413 not 403) Visit The NuServer! http://www.GaryNumanFan.NU Visit The Webb! http://webb.GaryNumanFan.NU Mr. Jones, has it ever occurred to you, the world being what it is, that women sometimes prefer not to appear too bright? -- Ellie, "Starman Jones" (Robert Heinlein) ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #308 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Aug 16 13:28:20 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id NAA12637; Mon, 16 Aug 1999 13:28:20 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 13:28:20 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908161728.NAA12637@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #309 TELECOM Digest Mon, 16 Aug 99 13:28:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 309 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (domiller@ualr.edu) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Michael David Jones) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Roy Smith) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (John R Levine) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (satch@concentric.net) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Art Kamlet) Re: Any Good Way to Cut Long Distance Costs to Specific Number? (T Kitzky) Re: Network Solutions: SPAMMERS and Corporate Morons (John R. Levine) Re: Sanford Wallace Troubles (Tim Smith) Re: Telco Truck Fleet Presentation (satch@concentric.net) Re: Two-Letter State (etc) Codes (Tony Toews) Re: Two-Letter State (etc) Codes (Bob Goudreau) Re: Starium Promises Phone Privacy (John Nagle) Re: Connecting a Digital StarTac To a Laptop (Dan Lanciani) Another Long Time BBS in Operation (Steven Lichter) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: domiller@ualr.edu Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: 15 Aug 99 16:44:05 CST Organization: University of Arkansas at Little Rock In article , Arthur Ross writes: > heywood@gloucester.com (Heywood Jaiblomi) wrote: > Can't stifle myself any longer ... heard, long ago, that this *is* how > the "C" programming language came to be, i.e. earlier attempts at the > ultimate programming language "A" and "B" didn't work out. C was the > creation of Bell Labs folks - Kernighan & Ritchie - circa late 60's. I can't claim to have seen "A", but I have written programs in "B" on a Honeywell 6060 (and later DPS 8/44) running GCOS in the late 70's. Dale - domiller@ualr.edu - http://www.aristotle.net/~domiller/ ------------------------------ From: jonesm2@rpi.edu (Michael David Jones) Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: 15 Aug 1999 19:07:24 -0400 Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY, USA Arthur Ross writes: > heywood@gloucester.com (Heywood Jaiblomi) wrote: >> Charles Gray wrote: >>> The AT&T response was that all of these things were developed and >>> named by Bell Labs. They just started with "number 1" on whatever >>> system they were working on. TD1 radio, TD2 radio, etc. Whenever >>> there was a "hole" in the sequence, that meant that the labs had >>> worked on something, but it didn't pan out for some reason. >> I wonder if that is what happened to 1 thru 6 up, and Preparations A >> thru G? > Can't stifle myself any longer ... heard, long ago, that this *is* how > the "C" programming language came to be, i.e. earlier attempts at the > ultimate programming language "A" and "B" didn't work out. C was the > creation of Bell Labs folks - Kernighan & Ritchie - circa late 60's. > I can't personally attest to the veracity of this, but if it isn't > true, it should be! Perhaps. :-) "C" is the conceptual (if not literal) offspring of "BCPL". One can only presume the Bcpl->C linkage, though it seems entirely within the grasp of people who would make UNIX a pun on Multics. Mike Jones | jonesm2@rpi.edu Wash a pig as much as you like, it'll go right back into the mud puddle. - Russian proverb ------------------------------ From: roy@endeavor.med.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Organization: New York University School of Medicine Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 20:44:28 -0400 Arthur Ross wrote: > Can't stifle myself any longer ... heard, long ago, that this *is* how > the "C" programming language came to be, i.e. earlier attempts at the > ultimate programming language "A" and "B" didn't work out. The predecessor to C was indeed B, and the predecessor to B was BCPL (never was sure what the acronym stood for). This caused rampant speculation about whether the successor to C would be D or P. Personally, I was blown away when it turned out to be C++. Never heard of a language called A. ------------------------------ From: johnl@iecc.com (John R Levine) Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: 15 Aug 1999 21:03:37 -0400 Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > Can't stifle myself any longer ... heard, long ago, that this *is* how > the "C" programming language came to be, i.e. earlier attempts at the > ultimate programming language "A" and "B" didn't work out. C was the > creation of Bell Labs folks - Kernighan & Ritchie - circa late 60's. Nope. C was based on a language called B, which was a simplified version of a popular 1960s language from England called BCPL, Basic Computer Programming Language or something like that. There was no language A. I gather that Dennis wasn't sure whether he'd call a followon language D or P. John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? From: satch@concentric.net (Satch) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 02:00:33 GMT Organization: SBC Internet Services a.ross@ieee.org (Arthur Ross) wrote in : > Can't stifle myself any longer ... heard, long ago, that this *is* how > the "C" programming language came to be, i.e. earlier attempts at the > ultimate programming language "A" and "B" didn't work out. C was the > creation of Bell Labs folks - Kernighan & Ritchie - circa late 60's. The story goes like this: the first incarnation of the language we know today as "C" started out as the "B" language -- for Bell. This was the language created to create the Unix operating system on a PDP-7 computer that was found, literally, in a closet at Bell Labs. Some of the constructs of expermental languages such as an Algol derivitive that I saw used at University of Illinois in 1970 were incorporated in the language. One such extension was the "implied subject" so useful for state change, as in compressing the statement i := i + 1; to i := * + 1; This makes more sense when you realize that "i" could in fact be a complex access term or even (in Algol 68) a function reference that returns an indirect reference to an instance of a variable. Remember, too, that the original B language was a "high level assembler" for the PDP 7 codeset, which is how the auto-increment and auto-decrement operators came into being. Like all good first efforts, there were significant flaws in the B language. Just like the darling of the 60s, PL/I, there were some knotty problems with parsing the language unambigiously. Many of those parsing problems stemed from those interesting special operators =+, =-, =*, and so forth -- did the programmer REALLY mean the implied subject, or did he just mistype? The C language (a post-increment of B, of course) fixed the problems. Because the language changed so dramatically, the nice skunk-works people thought it advisable to change the name of the language to ensure people didn't get confused. This, I think, was a good move. During the several decades that followed, and more importantly during the ANSI process of standardization, the language came out surprisingly intact. The only major changes were in the definition and specification of strong typing, a cleanup of the parameter definition syntax (which, frankly, was a much-needed improvement, IMHO), and the invention of function prototypes. As for the library, the less said the better. _____ _/satch\_______________________________ |Computationally addicted since 1970. | |Advertisement on request. | |_______________________________________| ------------------------------ From: kamlet@infinet.com (Art Kamlet) Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: 15 Aug 1999 17:16:43 -0400 Organization: InfiNet Reply-To: kamlet@infinet.com In article , Arthur Ross wrote: > Can't stifle myself any longer ... heard, long ago, that this *is* how > the "C" programming language came to be, i.e. earlier attempts at the > ultimate programming language "A" and "B" didn't work out. C was the > creation of Bell Labs folks - Kernighan & Ritchie - circa late 60's. The way I heard it, there was no A. B was named for one of their wives. C, as you said, followed B. Bjorn told us that C++ was originally and for many months ++C but he was overruled, and so ++C became C++. Art Kamlet Columbus, Ohio kamlet@infinet.com ------------------------------ From: tkitzky@nospam-hotmail.com (Tony Kitzky) Subject: Re: Any Good Way to Cut Long Distance Costs to a Specific Number? Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 14:26:20 -0600 Organization: EarthLink Network, Inc. In article , tzs@halcyon.com says: > I'm spending a fair amount of time on the phone with a friend (about > 100 hours a month). It's long distance (one end is in Seattle, WA, > and the other is in Silverdale, WA, if that is relevant) (206 and 360 > area codes) (USWest and Sprint as the local phone companies). > What's the best way to minimize costs in a situation like this? I > don't care about any other long distance numbers -- only that one. I > already know about voice over IP, so no need to bring that up. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think Sprint as one example has a > program which allows calls to a certain number to be priced at a good > rate. I believe the program is called 'Friends and Family'. PAT] www.aplio.com You might give VoIP another try. Aplio makes stand-alone boxes that connect to your ISP and then establish a call over the internet ... completely independent of your PC. I use one (on each end) to make calls to Canada. The voice quality can be compared to digital cellular. The devices are a bit pricey... about $200 each. ------------------------------ Date: 15 Aug 1999 21:05:16 -0400 From: johnl@iecc.com (John R. Levine) Subject: Re: Network Solutions: SPAMMERS and Corporate Morons Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > The only possible way that I could have gotten onto the mailing list > which produced these catalogs in my mailbox is that somebody had access > to NSI's database. Everyone does, via NSI's WHOIS server, and lots of companies go scraping new entries from it. I get plenty of postal junk mail from Verio offering various overpriced web services whenever I register a new domain. John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail ------------------------------ From: tzs@halcyon.com (Tim Smith) Subject: Re: Sanford Wallace Troubles Date: 15 Aug 1999 18:24:51 -0700 Organization: Institute of Lawsonomy Robert Horan wrote: > My first question is, don't you know who Sanford Wallace is? > Taken from URL, http://www.annonline.com/interviews/970522/biography.html That information is very misleading. Yes, Sanford Wallace a few years ago was one of the biggest spammers around. He's apparently had a change of heart, and now is very anti-spam. This turnaround has been accepted as genuine by most of the regular anti-spam posters on net.admin.net-abuse.email. --Tim Smith ------------------------------ Subject: Re: Telco Truck Fleet Presentation From: satch@concentric.net (Satch) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 02:03:09 GMT Organization: SBC Internet Services aboritz@cybernex.net (Alan Boritz) wrote in : > On Sun, 8 Aug 1999 07:18:25, Joseph Olshefski > wrote: >> Hi, my name is Jay Olshefski and I am the Area Operation Manager >> currently supervising the Fleet Service Operations in the New England >> for the Bell Atlantic Corporation. I will be giving a presentation at >> the end of this year to 140+ mechanics and managers who maintenance >> the 7,000+ vehicles in New England region. I would like to do a >> presentation titled "An Illustrated History of the Telephone Line >> Truck" and any pictures, web sites or information would be greatly >> appreciated. > The folks from 2600 Magazine bring one every year to the Trenton > Computer Festival. It has a bell logo, and usually it's in better > physical shape than the real thing. Another suggestion: get Dodge to provide some stuff for your presentation. If memory serves, the telephone company originally had Dodge design what has become the mini-van. Another fallout of Ma Bell ... _____ _/satch\_______________________________ |Computationally addicted since 1970. | |Advertisement on request. | |_______________________________________| ------------------------------ From: ttoews@telusplanet.net (Tony Toews) Subject: Re: Two-Letter State (etc) Codes Organization: Me, organized? Not a chance. Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 02:33:12 GMT Adam H. Kerman wrote: >> Tell that to the Californians who are tired of seeing Canadian political >> discussions showing up in CA.POLITICS And maybe the US should've put us. in front of all their newsgroups. And, btw, I think can. should've been put in the front of the ab. (Alberta), bc. (British Columbia) and other Canadian newsgroups. Tony Toews, Independent Computer Consultant Microsoft Access Links, Hints, Tips & Accounting Systems at http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm VolStar http://www.volstar.com Manage hundreds or thousands of volunteers for special events. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 10:04:14 EDT From: Bob Goudreau Subject: Re: Two-Letter State (etc) Codes Adam H. Kerman wrote: >> Then there's the two-letter country codes used for internet domains! > Unfortunately, the ITU ignored obvious conflicts between these codes > and long-standing two-letter US domestic postal codes for states and > territories. The most notorious conflict was il for Israel versus IL > for Illinois. I think your Illinois-centric view is showing :-). By far the most obvious conflict between US postal state abbreviations and two-letter internet top-level domains is CA, which stands for both California and for Canada. The two CAs far outweigh Illinois and Israel, respectively, in the number of internet hosts they contain (and probably in most other metrics of world importance as well). > CLLI made an effort not to have conflicting codes, but the ITU > couldn't be bothered. I choose to blame the French. Your blame seems unreasonably placed. For starters, it's not obvious that the ITU even had any role in the growth of the de-facto Internet top-level domain namespace, or for the choice of the ISO-3166 list of two-letter country abbreviations for this purpose (with a tiny number of exceptions, notably "uk" instead of "gb"). If you must blame somebody, it should probably be the late Jon Postel, who wrote the following in RFC 1591 ("Domain Name System Structure and Delegation") over five years ago: The IANA is not in the business of deciding what is and what is not a country. The selection of the ISO 3166 list as a basis for country code top-level domain names was made with the knowledge that ISO has a procedure for determining which entities should be and should not be on that list. (Source: http://info.internet.isi.edu:80/in-notes/rfc/files/rfc1591.txt) Bob Goudreau Data General Corporation goudreau@rtp.dg.com 62 Alexander Drive +1 919 248 6231 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA ------------------------------ From: nagle@netcom.com (John Nagle) Subject: Re: Starium Promises Phone Privacy Date: 16 Aug 1999 04:46:12 GMT Organization: Netcom Paul Rubin writes: > Monty Solomon writes: >> Today, the third floor of a converted sardine factory on Cannery Row >> is home to a startup company developing what could become a new world >> standard in privacy protection. By early 2000, Starium Inc. plans to >> begin selling sub-US$100 telephone scrambling devices so powerful >> that even the US government's most muscular supercomputers can't >> eavesdrop on wiretapped conversations. > This is cool. For those here who don't follow these things, Starium > is the cost-reduced successor to the Comsec secure phones that were > sold for $1000 or so apiece and shown at various cryptography and > security conferences over the past couple years. You need an open reference implementation available that will interoperate with this thing before you can trust it. That reference implementation needs to be looked at hard, by qualified people. Otherwise, you don't know what it's really doing. > Meanwhile, I'll also plug something that I worked on: a software-only > secure phone program, source code included, at > http://www.lila.com/nautilus/ (make sure to include the trailing slash). A software-only secure phone program for Internet voice calls is Speak Freely, from "www.fourmilab.ch". The Swiss government encourages the use of encryption, and there are no export controls on crypto there. Full source code is available. I have nothing to do with this, although I do know the developer. John Nagle ------------------------------ From: Dan Lanciani Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 00:47:13 EDT Subject: Re: Connecting a Digital StarTac To a Laptop kelly.breit@netalliance.net (Kelly Breit) wrote: > Sorry to throw water on your fire, but we ran into the same problem. > We purchased Apple Macintosh PowerBook G3's and Motorola StarTac dual > band phones for three of our staff with the assurance that they would > work fine with three different PC Card modems (TDK, Farallon & ???) > that had been announced and were to be released about three months > after we purchased the laptops and phones. After getting our hands on > each of the PC Card modems, cables and Macintosh software we found out > the hard way that they are NOT compatible. I've read stories like this several times and I'm puzzled about why one would ever expect such a configuration to work in the first place. Digital cellular uses compression on the voice channel to squeeze more calls into the same spectrum. (That's why carriers like digital, in spite of what they may say about improving quality. :() Even if the phone had an audio port compatible with the modem, transfer speed over such a compressed connection would be unacceptable. (And it seems that phone manufacturers don't usually support such a port so you can't even _try_ to make a "normal" modem connection. Even Motorola's RJ11 interface, when used with dual-mode phones, requires that you force the phone to analog-only mode. Or so the instructions claim.) Typically, the only useful way to have a "modem" connection over digital cellular is to use an interface that isn't a modem at all but rather a serial translator that knows how to talk directly to the phone's digital bus. Some digital phones even include this functionality and have what is essentially an RS232 serial port. The catch in either case is that you have no choice but to use the carrier's modem pool to complete your call. This is another reason that carriers like digital cellular: they can prevent you from making data calls unless you specifically pay for the privilege. Moreover, from the rates I've read, they usually make you pay a monthly fee for this service. This makes it highly unattractive to use your normally-voice digital phone for occasional data conversations. > As an ISP we really wanted to see this solution work, as the laptop > and phone combination is extremely popular with the dealers and > consultants in our marketplace. Unfortunately no one was willing to > revert to analog phone service just to establish a cellular modem > connection. I've deliberately avoided moving to digital just so I could maintain the flexibility to make occasional data calls. Ironic, isn't it? I expect that the carrier will keep increasing analog rates in an effort to drive us to digital. :( > Furthermore, no one was willing to carry two phones, one analog, one > digital. I'd be perfectly happy to carry two phones (again noting the irony of needing an analog phone for data service), but I don't want to pay two bills. Even better would be a phone and an integrated cellular phone+modem PCMCIA card. But again this would require two monthly service fees (or at the very least a "companion" fee on the first account to have the two on the same number -- and in this area that fee is greater than the cost of a second independent phone!). Actually, I think that one of the reasons such cellular PCMCIA cards haven't really caught on is this insistence on charging monthly fees per device rather than per number. Unfortunately, this model is now enshrined in federal legislation in the name of fraud prevention. Imagine if Carterphone had never happened and you had to pay monthly for each instrument (phone, modem, etc.) on your hard-wired line. Hmm, we may be headed for that situation since SPIDs allow at least the *number* of ISDN devices per line to be restricted/billed and possibly inhibit the dynamic substitution of devices if parameter profiles are different. Ah, progress. Dan Lanciani ddl@harvard.edu ------------------------------ From: stevenl11@aol.comstuffit (Steven Lichter) Date: 15 Aug 1999 20:59:57 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Subject: Another Long Time BBS in Operation In article , TELECOM Digest Editor noted: > BBS was sitting there on the work bench right next to the computer > handling Chinet. I think the first half dozen or so BBSs were all in > Chicago; in addition to Ward and Randy, a guy in my neighborhood had > an Apple BBS; a guy on the southwest side was running a BBS on a > Tandy Model 1 computer. > By about 1980, there were BBSs running in other cities as well on a > limited basis, but there were no interconnections between them. For > awhile I managed a BBS for the Chicago Public Library on a volunteer > basis; we used People's Message System software written by a guy named > Bill Blue, and I had my own Apple ][+ BBS for about three years at the > same time in the early 1980's. The first interconnection between BBSs > came around 1982 or so when the FIDOnet people got their thing going, > and I believe -- am not certain -- that Randy Suess was the first FIDO > site in Chicago with his Chinet service, which today is probably the > oldest ISP around anywhere. My BBS is still up and has been online since February 1987 and though it does not get a lot of calls these days it remains online for all to use and play the games, plus support GBBS which is the program it runs under, and it still is running on its 1987 Apple II which it started on, but I do have several IIgs's for support plus Macs that I'm forced to use to communicate to the world since there is no PPP support for them, just text and that is getting to be hard to find. If you wish to reply, please do so at: applelite1@aol.com, I don't get mail at the posting address and my other real E-mail address is not used for posting and has not been for 5 years so I guess the fresh new addresses these spamming services use include that one, must consider one that is 5 years old NEW. My signature says it all!!!! Apple Elite II 909-359-5338. Home of GBBS/LLUCE, support for the Apple II and Macintosh 24 hours 2400/14.4. OggNet Server. The only good spammer is a dead one, have you hunted one down today? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When I was discussing the earliest days of BBS networking yesterday, one I forgot to mention was Ripco, and another was Karl Denninger, both of Chicago. I do not really know what Karl is up to these days, but I do know that Ripco, which started out as a small BBS with a reputation in the early 1980's of being mostly a phreak board has been one of the major ISPs in Chicago for a number of years. Almost all of the localized, Chicago area ISPs had their beginning as a BBS going back ten to fifteen years ago. Also worth a memory was a small BBS operation in California named Portal, which about 1987 was the first, or one of the first private companies to hook up to what had previously been an all EDUcational and MILitary/GOVernment internet. Portal's entry into the net was a source of much controversy at the time; many were the debates in Usenet at the time centering on the topic, 'Are we going to begin allowing just anyone at all to get net access who wants it?', and many folks strongly resisted making the net 'open' to general users. I wonder what has happened to Portal? Are they still around and in business? For five or six years in the 1987-93 period, several other sites like Portal began gaining entry to the net; they were known for the most part as 'public access Unix sites' and a directory of them was available on the net showing people how/where to go in order to sign up and get on line. By 1993 there were quite a few such public access Unix sites, and we began gradually referring to them as ISPs instead. But Portal was really one of the Pioneers in this net where public access was concerned with direct connectivity as opposed, for example, to UUCP access for mail and news. PAT] ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #309 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Aug 16 15:22:05 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id PAA17948; Mon, 16 Aug 1999 15:22:05 -0400 (EDT) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 15:22:05 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908161922.PAA17948@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #310 TELECOM Digest Mon, 16 Aug 99 15:22:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 310 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson An Audio Bookmark For This Site (TELECOM Digest Editor) How You Answer Your Phone (TELECOM Digest Editor) My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! (wolfdog1@pacbell.net) Cost Effective New York/London Synchronous Bandwidth (Ed M) Re: Free ISPs in UK - Background (Marek Zielinski) VF-PCM TEST SET P2001 SIEMENS Manuals Wanted (Joseph Goldburg) Re: Directv Sues Satellite Watch News; Forces Site to Close (Darren Ingram) Re: Families of Michigan Prisoners Refusing Collect Calls (John Nagle) GTE Service in Oklahoma (Jimbo Borders) Phone Fee for School Internet Service Too Popular to Overturn (M Solomon) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Daniel Ganek) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 14:23:07 EDT From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: An Audio Bookmark For This Site Over the weekend I worked on something you might like, then again, maybe you won't like it. I have developed an internet-only 'news radio' service which I am offering for your consideration, if you like all-day, 24 hour audio news feeds. This is similar to the internet service offered by Cable News Network called 'audioselect' (and more recently, 'videoselect') both of which are available to web sites which want to distribute their feeds. CNN places advertising in their feeds, but the one I am recommending now is totally advertising free. If sites wish to do so, they can place their own advertising in the feed at selected intervals, but I have chosen to omit that part of it, leaving silence in that part. This continuous audio news feed places Associated Press headlines at 0 and 30 minutes of the hour; then there are weather, sports and business stories at regular intervals throughout the hour otherwise. At 29 and 59 minutes, there is a one minute period of silence in the feed so that sites wishing to do so can insert their own messages. I decided for now that 'silence is golden' and have left it blank. The audio is otherwise generic, no reference as to producer of the service. When occassionally a reference on a public service message is made to the producer of the message, it is given as 'this station' rather than a specific name for the station. References are to 'your news' and 'your weather' and 'your business report', etc. Time of day announcements are included in the feed every few minutes in the form of 'it is X minutes past the hour' with no reference to the actual hour itself. Overall, a rather professional production and useful service for the net, if I do say so myself. How to get it: http://telecom-digest.org/news/radio.html ... this will open a *tiny* (one inch by one inch) window which you can place wherever you want on your desktop; or you can minimize it to the task bar if desired. Use the controls in the tiny window to turn the feed on or off, or temporarily silence it. As part of it, a hyperlink brings you back to telecom-digest.org on request, however you can leave it in the background and surf elsewhere as desired. You can also bookmark http://telecom-digest.org/radio.html if you wish and automatically turn the audio news service on automatically, and click on the link to open the site itself if you want. So if you like listening to news radio occassionally, I would appreciate you checking out the one I now offer. Once you have first opened the page with the audio feed and bookmarked it, you should be able in the future to simply click on your bookmark to turn on the TELECOM Digest radio news service. Thanks, and please provide some feedback to me on this. PAT ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 14:24:33 EDT From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: How You Answer Your Phone This week's poll question asks how you handle phone calls that come in when you are away from the phone. Please participate at http://telecom-digest.org/vote.html PAT ------------------------------ From: bugsy Reply-To: wolfdog1@pacbell.net Organization: Pacific Bell Internet Services Subject: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 00:27:17 -0700 OK, telecom experts can you please help me out here? I truly believe this is a telcom problem. I'm a Pacific Bell customer. I have two lines coming into my home; one for personal use and the other for business. I have a computer with a modem but the computer is turned off when not in use. I don't have a cordless phone and I don't have a fax machine. I have a security alarm that is monitored. I have cable tv that is somehow linked to my phone line. My phones are wired to the wall. I have gotten three 911 calls reported by the police department. They said that they get the call and then it hangs up. They try calling back and if no answer, they dispatch a car. Well, the first time this happened, nobody was home. The second time it happened, I was home and nobody was using the phone. I didn't answer the police callback because it was around 6:00pm when most solicitors call. Well, the police don't leave messages on your answering machine so they dispatch a car. I had to explain to the police that I've gotten two false calls report to my address, etc; they recommended that I call PacBell. I called them to check out the circuit and they said it was ok. Well, I called PacBell the next day and they tested the circuit again and said there might be a problem with the circuit. They sent a person out to check it and the exterior wiring was ok. Four days later it happend again. I called PacBell and they said that they want to check the wiring inside the house. I said ok, let's eliminate every possiblity and schedule an appointment. I fail to see how the wiring in the house would trigger a 911 call but what the heck. I also mentioned that once in a while the line just goes dead. This is for every phone in the house. I talked to their customer service to find out whether or not a 911 call was placed from my residence but they told me that it was confidential and could not release the information. When the wire leaves my house and goes under the ground, who knows where it goes, how many switches, trunks, etc; anyone have any ideas? Is there a way that a line can get crossed or some type of 'cross-talk' is occurring on the wire? Could there be a bad board somewhere? I know what is going to happen when the check my internal wiring, 'everything looks ok'. Well, what are my options for solving this intermittent problem? I have three concerns: 1) If someone is calling 911 and they are really in trouble, they are not getting thru and something bad can happen. 2) If it keeps up, the police may not respond a quickly in a real 911 call from my house because, 'its that house again that gets the false alarms'. 3) It must be bugging the heck out of the police and I'm afraid that someday they will kick down my door. Please e-mail me at: wolfdog1@pacbell.net ------------------------------ From: Ed M Subject: Cost Effective New York/London Synchronous Bandwidth Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 13:38:44 -0400 Organization: UUNET A New York based telecomm company has offered to resell us a very competitively priced E1 (32 DSO's, total of 2 megabits) between their POP at 60 Hudson Street in NYC to Telehouse London. Since we can get fairly cost effective local loops into both of these locations we would like to link our New York and London offices together this way. The problem is that they can only buy wholesale bandwidth in increments of E1. We currently only need 256kbps (4 DS0's) and can't swing the cost of a full E1. They could cross connect DS0's to other company's local loops. Please contact me if your company is interested in teaming up on this. Note: this is not a commercial advertisement as we have no affiliation with this reseller and we wouldn't directly profit from entering into such an arrangement other than getting access to a very cost effective London/New York synchronous pipe (this is NOT frame relay, NOT a VPN.) ------------------------------ From: Marek Zielinski Subject: Re: Free ISPs in UK - Background Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 13:36:11 -0400 Steve Hayes wrote: > Anyway, it turns out that, even at local rates and after BT get their > cut and Energis have covered their costs, there is enough left over to > pay for the operation of Freeserve as well. Says something about our > local call charges. That is very interesting. Does anybody have an idea where to find the local rates (in $/min, or local currency/min) for European countries? in the US it is usually a flat fee - either zero, or more (in New York 10.7 cents for connection at max rate), 25 cents in Canada. I guess such rates are not easily available. If not, perhaps we could assemble a quick list from your responses? Thanks, Marek Zielinski ------------------------------ From: joseph@omnitel.com.au (Joseph Goldburg) Subject: VF-PCM TEST SET P2001 SIEMENS Manuals Wanted Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 09:51:13 GMT Organization: AT&T EasyLink Services, Australia (news.att.net.au) Hi all, VF-PCM TEST SET P2001 SIEMENS Manuals Wanted Any pointers to where I might find the operators manuals in English would be appreciated. Regards, Joseph ------------------------------ From: Darren P. Ingram Subject: Re: Directv Sues Satellite Watch News; Forces Site to Close Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 09:17:21 +0100 > http://www.oscoda.net/dmorgand/freedom.htm The trouble is that this guy's web site tends to make him look like a case-less geek who has just got a new paintbox - what with the stupid graphics and slogans. A more 'reserved' advocacy site would have made more sense. Fighting through the silly graphics and emotions makes the story less credible. I make no comment on the actual claims made, merely on the presentation of it. Just a few $0.02's from a grumpy Brit. Darren Ingram [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Regardless of how well or how poorly one feels the site was put together, the fact remains that when a large corporation is able to force a small web site to shut down based on what the corporation does not like about it, we have some real problems here. In the past few months now we have seen two such incidents: AOL putting a site off line when it decided it needed the network address the site was using, and now this guy with his newsletter and audio presentation forced to shut it down when Directv felt its security was threatened by things he was saying and printing in his newsletter. Whose site gets to go off line next? Have I mentioned recently that the net is undergoing some radical changes that do not bode well at all for small web sites and private netizens who like to surf? Stay tuned. PAT] ------------------------------ From: nagle@netcom.com (John Nagle) Subject: Re: Families of Michigan Prisoners Refusing Collect Calls Date: 16 Aug 1999 04:35:25 GMT Organization: Netcom steven@primacomputer.com (Steven) writes: > With many of the potential customers cut off from all other forms of > communication, the US TelecoN market could be worth billions. It is. Go to "www.corrections.com" and check out all the services offering telecom services to prisons. This is a very profitable industry. Systems for prisons now include such features as digital recording of all calls with elaborate indexing systems, including word recognition, phone number logging, and calling pattern recognition. John Nagle [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Many state governments freely admit that they have greatly enriched their own coffers as a result of kickbacks from 'the corrections industry' for things like phone service. Either it does not occur to them or they are not interested in finding out that there are some ethics involved here. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Jimbo Borders Subject: GTE Service in Oklahoma Date: 15 Aug 1999 23:01:04 -0500 Organization: Newscene Public Access Usenet News Service I was at a local computer flea market yesterday and ran into someone that I used to work with at GTE. He said that GTE was selling out of Oklahoma. Is this news to anyone, or just another GTE rumor? ------------------------------ Reply-To: Monty Solomon From: Monty Solomon Subject: Phone Fee For School Internet Service Too Popular to Overturn Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 14:24:39 -0400 By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM WASHINGTON -- Two years ago, when the Government imposed a new fee on long-distance telephone companies to raise money for Internet connections at schools and libraries, the reaction from some quarters was ferocious. http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/08/biztech/articles/15rate.html [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When referencing a {New York Times} link I have been told we are supposed to advise readers that registra- tion at the site is required. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Daniel Ganek Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 15:04:21 -0400 Organization: Radionics, Inc. domiller@ualr.edu wrote: > In article , Arthur Ross > writes: >> heywood@gloucester.com (Heywood Jaiblomi) wrote: >> Can't stifle myself any longer ... heard, long ago, that this *is* how >> the "C" programming language came to be, i.e. earlier attempts at the >> ultimate programming language "A" and "B" didn't work out. C was the >> creation of Bell Labs folks - Kernighan & Ritchie - circa late 60's. > I can't claim to have seen "A", but I have written programs in "B" on a > Honeywell 6060 (and later DPS 8/44) running GCOS in the late 70's. I believe "B" came out of Cambridge in the 50's; maybe "A" did too. /dan ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #310 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Aug 17 00:19:06 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id AAA11088; Tue, 17 Aug 1999 00:19:06 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 00:19:06 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908170419.AAA11088@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #311 TELECOM Digest Tue, 17 Aug 99 00:19:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 311 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! (jupiter) Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! (Bill Levant) Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! (Scott Wilkerson) Re: GTE Service in Oklahoma (Joel B. Levin) Re: GTE Service in Oklahoma (Steve Uhrig) Re: Differences Between SDH-ATM-HDLC (Kevin DeMartino) Re: Sanford Wallace Troubles ... (Sanford Wallace) More BBS Memories (David B. Horvath) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Roy Smith) Re: Free ISPs in UK - Background (Withheld Adrian) Finding Hidden Conduit (Gary D. Shapiro) Phone Systems: Lucent or Intertel? (Alejandro Levins) GPS Time Roll-Over (David Perrussel) Re: Help With Unique Switch Requirement (Steven P. Bills) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: jupiter@mastnet.net (Jupiter) Subject: Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 23:39:52 GMT Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Reply-To: jupiter@mastnet.net Do you have a phone with speed-dial buttons on it, with one of those buttons programmed to dial 911? Maybe it's got a short. Do you have a cat? Maybe the cat is stepping on your phone and pressing speed-dial buttons. bugsy wrote: > I have gotten three 911 calls reported by the police department. > They said that they get the call and then it hangs up. Greg jupiter@mastnet.net http://www.mastnet.net/~jupiter ------------------------------ From: Wlevant@aol.com (Bill Levant) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 21:25:06 EDT Subject: Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls Well. A few guesses. (And I admit it, that's all they are). 1) Your alarm system is doing it. You say the alarm is "monitored". By whom ? How ? I have friends with an alarm system that -- once a day, at approximately the same time -- seizes their line and calls in to the alarm company to say "hi". At that time, all the other phones in the house go dead. Is it possible that your alarm system is programmed (wrongly, I'd bet) to call 911? 2) In some places, your phone can be configured to call a specified number if it's left off the hook until the dial tone times out. This is intended as a protective measure for the elderly and infirm, who need only knock the phone off the hook to call for help. Is your line perhaps so configured (from a previous owner), which gets activated (perhaps) when the modem doesn't release the line after you shut down your computer? Do you have cats who knock phones off the hook? 3) It's possible, I guess, that PAC Bell's ANI is screwed up, and that someone else's line is sending your number. Unlikely, I'd say. Keep me in mind even if these are all hogwash ... I'm dying to know the answer. Bill ------------------------------ From: w9vhe@earthlink.net (Scott Wilkerson) Subject: Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 20:32:19 GMT Organization: not in this lifetime If your answering machine is on, perhaps the tone of your voice is approximately the same tone as 911 being dialed. If someone gets your answering machine, then does a hookflash that does a three-way call, it could cause this to happen. Had it happen in one of our offices once. On Mon, 16 Aug 1999 00:27:17 -0700, bugsy wrote: > I have gotten three 911 calls reported by the police department. > They said that they get the call and then it hangs up. They try > calling back and if no answer, they dispatch a car. ------------------------------ From: levinjb@gte.net (Joel B Levin) Subject: Re: GTE Service in Oklahoma Organization: On the desert Reply-To: levinjb@gte.net Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 21:52:31 GMT In , Jimbo Borders wrote: > I was at a local computer flea market yesterday and ran into someone > that I used to work with at GTE. He said that GTE was selling out of > Oklahoma. Is this news to anyone, or just another GTE rumor? GTE has sold off a number of its local exchanges. For instance, they recently announced the sale of a number of exchanges in Missouri. The press release which describes that action also goes into some of the other facilities GTE has sold and the reasons behind it; see for instance. http://www.gte.com/AboutGTE/NewsCenter/News/Releases/RepoMissouri.html and other releases available on that web site. They did not sell everything they had in Missouri. I don't know if selling off their Oklahoma facilities is part of their planning, but in light of the above it's not impossible. /JBL ------------------------------ From: Steve Uhrig Subject: Re: GTE Service in Oklahoma Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 18:30:41 -0400 Organization: bright.net Ohio GTE is selling off several state operations that they do not consider profitable. Sorry I don't have the list anymore. I believe there are 12 or 13 entire state operations for sale and several exchanges in other states. Jimbo Borders wrote: > I was at a local computer flea market yesterday and ran into someone > that I used to work with at GTE. He said that GTE was selling out of > Oklahoma. Is this news to anyone, or just another GTE rumor? ------------------------------ From: Kevin DeMartino Subject: Re: Differences Between SDH-ATM-HDLC Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 17:55:45 -0400 In V19 #304 Marcus asked: > What is the difference between the three standards SDH-ATM-HDLC? Where > are they preferably used? Why is ATM embedded in SDH? etc. The Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) is a set of standardized data rates that are multiples of 155 Mb/s (approximately). The SDH rates are three times the Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) rates. Associated with each SDH rate is a Synchronous Transport Module (STM) frame structure. STM frames have durations of 125 microseconds, just like the T1 and T3 frames, and the frames associated with the narrowband ISDN (N-ISDN) basic rate interface (BRI) and primary rate interface (PRI). Multiple T1/T3/BRI/PRI signals can be multiplexed within an SDH/STM frame. The physical layer (layer 1) standards for broadband ISDN (B-ISDN) are based on the SDH rates and the STM frame structures. Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) can be viewed as a layer 2 (data link layer) protocol, even though it has some features normally associated with layer 3 (network layer). ATM has been adopted as the layer 2 standard for B-ISDN with the intent that ATM cells would carried within SDH/STM physical layer frames. However, ATM can also operate over other physical layer protocols. High Level Data Link Control (HDLC) refers to a family of layer 2 protocols that includes the X.25 layer 2 protocol, the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), the Frame Relay protocol, and the N-ISDN layer 2 protocol. On wide area networks, IP packets usually are carried within some type of HDLC frame. For example, an IP packet (layer 3) can be carried within a PPP frame (layer 2), which in turn can be carried within an N-ISDN BRI frame (layer 1). As I understand it, part of the ISDN grand plan was to move from HDLC over BRI/PRI to ATM over SDH/SONET. ATM can carry IP packets as well as voice and video. However, some people are pushing IP over SDH/SONET as an alternative, which probably really means IP over some HDLC variant over SDH/SONET. Kevin DeMartino Dynamics Research Corporation ------------------------------ From: lwrules2@my-deja.com (Sanford Wallace) Subject: Re: Sanford Wallace Troubles ... Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 00:03:54 GMT Organization: Deja.com - Share what you know. Learn what you don't. > Does anyone have any suggestions for me? -And, if I un-checked the > box that says "Please include me on your mailing list", shouldn't that > mean that I prefer not to receive all the junk? Any advice would be > greatly appreciated. You couldn't have unchecked that box, because the box doesn't exist. You are clearly told at signup that your free use of our autoresponder system entitles us to send you commercial emails. It's not spam. There are paid autoresponders out there but our service is ad subsidized, as per our sales materials. -Sanford Wallace CEO SmartBot.NET, Inc. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Mr. Wallace, I want to thank you for taking the time to make a personal response to my correspondent. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 20:05:08 EDT From: dhorvath@cobs.com (David B. Horvath, CCP) Subject: More BBS Memories > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When I was discussing the earliest days > of BBS networking yesterday, one I forgot to mention was Ripco, and > another was Karl Denninger, both of Chicago. I do not really know what > Karl is up to these days, but I do know that Ripco, which started out > as a small BBS with a reputation in the early 1980's of being mostly > a phreak board has been one of the major ISPs in Chicago for a number > of years. Almost all of the localized, Chicago area ISPs had their > beginning as a BBS going back ten to fifteen years ago. Ahhh back in the old days with the hack/phreak (it was hard to draw a line back then) BBS'. Anyone remember 8BBS in the 408 (SoCal) area code? It had the distinction as the largest (physical structure) personally operated BBS. It was run on a PDP-8. Of course, this was back in 1980/81 (and probably before that) when 300 baud modems were "great" and 1200 baud modems were beyond the reach of all but the big companies. For some reason, there were a lot of fraudulent calls (i.e., using stolen SPC aka Sprint phone card codes and Watts extenders) made to that modem. It drove Bell Security nuts -- a common tactic with fraudulent calls was for BellSec to call the phone and ask whoever answered: "who were you on the phone with ?" and use that information to track the caller. If the callee was reluctant to provide the information they were threatened with the bill (a lame threat at best). Of course, a modem would answer and the BBS operator was not very helpful with knowing who was on the phone when. A group of hackers/phreaks/crooks out of the Philadelphia Area (primarily the Drexel University campus) "found" a 1200 baud modem (True-Mother Bell 212A). They liked 8BBS so much that they sent it out to the Sysop. That really improved things! Eventually the Drexel group got caught (I won't go into all the activities -- I have a nice pile of newspaper clippings and 8BBS printouts). Someone mentioned the modem being in California. The Sysop got visited and his boss informed. He worked for Digital Equipment Corp (aka DEC aka D|i|g|i|t|a|l) who did not take kindly to his external activies (and probably wondered where the PDP-8 came from). Too bad because it *was* a fun place to hang out and exchange "information". Of course, I can say "I knew him when" -- Kevin Mitnik and a few others. David B. Horvath, CCP dhorvath@cobs.com Consultant, Author, International Lecturer, Adjunct Professor (also: dhorvath@arcnow.com, dhorvath@dca.net, davidh@decus.ca, and many other places) ------------------------------ From: roy@endeavor.med.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Organization: NYU School of Medicine, Educational Computing Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 15:33:29 -0400 [This is getting a bit far afield from telecom, but hopefully your readers will indulge a bit of historical rambling.] satch@concentric.net (Satch) wrote: > Just like the darling of the 60s, PL/I, there were some > knotty problems with parsing the language unambigiously. Many of > those parsing problems stemmed from those interesting special operators > =+, =-, =*, and so forth -- did the programmer REALLY mean the implied > subject, or did he just mistype? > The C language (a post-increment of B, of course) fixed the problems. Actually, early C compiliers had the same problems. I'm not sure exactly when the change was made, but on the v6 complier, either "i =- 1" or "i -= 1" was legal syntax, with the same meaning. The former, of course, being ambigious. The early (i.e. v6) compilers didn't have longs. The first complier I saw which supported longs was the PWB compiler. I remember bootstrapping the PWB compiler onto a v6 machine in several stages. The PWB compiler wouldn't compile under the v6 compiler because it contained long constants. Turns out the code to support long variables didn't require long support in the host compiler, but the code to support long constants did. So we commented out the offending parts, compiled that, and used the intermediate compiler to compile the original (I'm reasonably sure the source tape we got was legit, and if not, I assume the statute of limitations has run out by now!) There was also some stuff in the PWB compiler for language syntax which never made it into the finished language (long before the ANSI standardization). There was commented-out code to parse (and generate code for) /\ as a two-operand "max" function, and \/ as "min". The v6 complier also didn't allow structure assignments (or passing structures as function arguments or returning them as function results), and I also remember some funkyness with cross referencing pointers. For example: struct foo {struct bar *barp}; struct bar {struct foo *foop}; wasn't legal in the early compliers, since bar hadn't yet been defined when it was used. You used to have to kludge it with char pointers. Roy Smith New York University School of Medicine ------------------------------ From: 141@wilkinsonsmith.com (Withheld Adrian) Subject: Re: Free ISPs in UK - Background Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 19:54:40 GMT Organization: www.wilkinsonsmith.com Limited Reply-To: 141@wilkinsonsmith.com On Mon, 16 Aug 1999 13:36:11 -0400, Marek Zielinski wrote: > Steve Hayes wrote: >> Anyway, it turns out that, even at local rates and after BT get their >> cut and Energis have covered their costs, there is enough left over to >> pay for the operation of Freeserve as well. Says something about our >> local call charges. > That is very interesting. Does anybody have an idea where to find the > local rates (in $/min, or local currency/min) for European countries? > in the US it is usually a flat fee - either zero, or more (in New York > 10.7 cents for connection at max rate), 25 cents in Canada. > I guess such rates are not easily available. If not, perhaps we could > assemble a quick list from your responses? You could start in the UK at bt.com and work back from that. BT's rates are shown before discount but the discounts available are published for all to see. The other carriers all try to better BT by between 20 and 40% less than the gross price -- in practice this can make them marginally cheaper at best. ------------------------------ From: Gary D. Shapiro Subject: Finding Hidden Conduit Organization: Zuuma Graphics Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 21:15:14 GMT O great sages of TELECOM Digest: I have a vacant 3/4" PVC conduit in the wall leading up to the attic, but there is no opening in the wall for it (yet). Is there a standard technique for locating it so I don't make extra cuts in the drywall? Here's what I've come up with so far: a) Make exact measurements in the attic of where the conduit is relative to, say, the corner of the room. This is difficult given the small clearances in that part of the attic, and assumes the conduit is perfectly vertical. b) dangle a tiny speaker by its wires into the conduit and feed a sound to it. c) dangle a magnet. d) arthroscopic surgery tools (don't have any). Your comments or other ideas are welcome. garyes iname com Remove the "NO" that follows the "@" sign for email replies. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 14:00:16 -0700 From: Alejandro Levins Subject: Phone Systems: Lucent or Intertel? Patrick: I couldn't find what I was looking for on your Web site, but I am hoping you can point me in the right direction. I am about to buy a new phone system for my business. It is a big ticket decision for me. I am looking for a forum to hear from customers of Lucent and Intertel about the quality of their phones and, more importantly, their service. Any ideas where I can look for that? Thanks in advance, Alejandro Levins Founder SF Interactive [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Perhaps readers will respond to you with their suggestions and recommendations. PAT] ------------------------------ From: David Perrussel Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 20:47:50 -0400 Reply-To: David Perrussel Subject: GPS Time Roll-Over > "GPS System Time will roll over at midnight 21-22 August 1999, 132 > days before the Year 2000. On 22 August 1999, unless repaired, many > GPS receivers will claim that it is 6 January 1980, 23 August will > become 7 January, and so on. Accuracy of navigation may also be > severely affected. Although it appears that GPS broadcasts do contain > sufficient data to ensure that navigation need not be affected by > rollover in 1999, it is not proven that the firmware in all receivers > will handle the rollovers in stride; some receivers may claim wrong > locations in addition to incorrect dates. ..." This is true -- and not all GPS receivers are ready for the epoch rollover. The problem lies in the data field for the GPS Week number. The information is in a 8-bit field in the GPS data stream. With 8 bits, the data range is from 0 to 1023. The week ending this week is -- you guesed it -- 1023! Next week is 1024 -- and will be transmitted as if it were week ZERO! Where I work we use Datum brand GPS receivers, made from 1992 through 1997. We discovered the rollover problem over two years ago. Datum acknoledged the problem and issued firmware upgrades for all their receivers (at a premium cost I may add!) Datum's fix is to count the number of leap seconds issued since GPS satellites were put into service. From 7 January 1980 (day one as far as GPS receivers are concerned), there have been 13 leap seconds issued. The system is set so if there are more than 12 leap seconds issued (the amount when the new firmware was written), the GPS receiver thinks it is in the first epoch (0 to 1023). 12 or more and it will know it is in the second epoch (1024 to 2047). We tested these receivers at a facility with a GPS constellation simulator (a machine designed to test a receiver so it thinks it is receiving data from GPS satellites). The firmware upgrade worked as expected. Without the upgrade - the GPS receivers displayed invalid time (using high-ASCII and Greek symbols!) and issued invalid IRIG time code! This roll over is only first of "Year 2000" style rollovers. I know our system is safe but how about all the other commercial and military GPS systems? If a large number of older GPS receivers fail, it will be a wake up call for all those people who think we are immune to the Y2K bug! Dave Perussel Webmaster - Telephone World http://members.xoom.com/phworld ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 10:09:39 -0800 Subject: Re: Help With Unique Switch Requirement From: Steven P Bills What you are looking for is a Nortel switch feature called preset conference. I believe there is also external equipment that will do this, manufactured by WECO. Many aircraft crash nets are based on this feature. ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #311 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Aug 17 13:46:23 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id NAA04571; Tue, 17 Aug 1999 13:46:23 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 13:46:23 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908171746.NAA04571@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #312 TELECOM Digest Tue, 17 Aug 99 13:46:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 312 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson LEC Ownership/Merging/Swapping/etc (Re: GTE Service in OK) (Mark Cuccia) Re: GTE Service in Oklahoma (Steven Lichter) Re: Starium Promises Phone Privacy (Paul Rubin) Re: Connecting a Digital StarTac To a Laptop (Paul Rubin) Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! (John David Galt) Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! (J.F. Mezei) Cisco Voice Over IP (DTM37) How the C Language Got its Bame (Bob Goudreau) Re: Telco Recordings Tie Up Answering Machines (Bill Newkirk) *Incoming* Connection to Serial Devices via Internet? (Larry Rachman) Invisible Web Surfing With 'Privada' (Monty Solomon) Re: Sanford Wallace Troubles ... (Al Iverson) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Fred Goldstein) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Bill Newkirk) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 10:54:26 -0500 From: Mark J. Cuccia Subject: LEC Ownership/Merging/Swapping/etc. (Re: GTE Service in OK) A few years back, when GTE and Contel (Continental Telephone) merged, several service areas previously handled by _BOTH_ Contel _AND_ GTE were spun-off. A good number of them were taken over by Alltel and also Citizens' Telecom/Utilities. Some spin-offs to other independent groups at that time also included all GTE or Contel service areas in entire states. GTE is probably spinning-off several smaller/rural (read nprofitable) service areas more recently because of the possible merger of GTE with Bell Atlantic. But some of GTE's sell-offs of exchange areas might be to comply with the FCC/DOJ/FTC/etc. with its merger with Contel and possible merger with Bell Atlantic. I think that this time, GTE is trying to (if it hasn't already) sold off all of their local exchange areas in Alaska. Some of the exchanges might previously have been Contel exchange areas and others might have been GTE prior to the GTE-Contel merger. Both GTE and Contel did have some local exchange areas in Alaska. However, GTE never did any toll in Alaska. Just about all of the "traditional/DDD" toll within Alaska has always been the domain of Alascom (back in the 1970's was part of RCA, in the 1980's and early 90's was part of PTI, now is part of AT&T) or PTI itself - and prior to the 1970's the toll network in Alaska was run by the U.S.Military. Incidently, when PTI (Pacific Telecom Inc), not to be confused with Pacific (Bell) Telesis (which is now merged with Southwestern Bell Corporation), was taken over by another independent group owner Century Telephone (about two years ago), it wasn't long before the now larger CenturyTel sold off the Alaska operations previously run by PTI back to former executives of PTI. I don't think that GTE is going to spin-off its Hawaiian Telephone Company operations. The Mutual Telephone Company in Hawaii had telephone service for most if not all of Hawaii when GT&E took them over in the mid-1960's. Except for wireless and now competitive LECs, as well as the capability to make inTRA-LATA/State toll calls via "other" carriers, GTE is still the "traditional" telco for _ALL_ of Hawaii. At the time GTE took over Mutual Telephone in Hawaii, they also sold off their operations in the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company. I don't know for sure, but I'd suspect that GT&E sold PLDT when it took over Mutual Telephone in hawaii to comply with, or to "appease" some of the various US Federal Government (alphabet soup) regulatory agencies. GTE still has ownership in other areas outside of the continental US. Through their "Anglo-Canadian" subsidiary, they have held about 50% of both B.C.Tel (Stentor member LEC) in British Columbia (Canada) and QuebecTel (Stentor _ASSOCIATE_ member LEC) in the eastern parts of Quebec. With the merger of Telus (Alberta) and BCTel, temporarily known as BCTel.Telus or BC.Telus - to be known just as "Telus", GTE will have about 25% of the combined operation. I know that there are some various legal/stock aspects of GTE's position in the new "Telus" such as how much is ownership stock vs. how much is _voting_ stock. I don't have the specifics at hand. Also, there are various Canadian federal laws regulating how much a non-Canadian entity can hold of a Canadian operation. And, GTE also still owns Codetel in the Dominican Republic. I mentioned Contel (Continental Telephone) earlier in this post. Contel _USED_ to have operations in the non-US NANP-Caribbean. Begininning in the late 1960's, they invested in some Cable & Wireless telcos or regions down there, including Jamaica, Grenada, Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago, and part of the Bahamas. In the early 1970's, the socialist governments in Grenada and Trinidad & Tobago "kicked out" Contel. Contel still had part ownership in the other three areas. By the early to mid 1980's, Contel had sold out its Caribbean operations. However, some of Contel's areas in the Caribbean were more advanced in switching technology than other areas. Jamaica was beginning to use Crossbar switching and had many of its numbering/dialing formats more in line with the rest of the NANP than did other parts of the NANP-Caribbean. So too did GTE-Codetel in the Dominican Republic. And, Contel's part of the Bahamas was on Grand Bahama Island and some other nearby islands of the Bahamas. Again, Contel's Grand Bahama Island Telephone Company exchanges were using crossbar and had more standard NANP dialing/numbering than did the other islands of the Bahamas run by (C&W's and the Bahama government's) Batelco. Also, I remember reading that the independent group-owner Contel used to have operations in Canada, at least back in the 1960's or 70's. I had never seen any telephone directories or Bell System network routing/billing documents indicating Contel exchange areas in Canada, which would most likely have been in Ontario or Quebec. But the routing/billing documents indicating the local telco areas/names were from 1981-onwards. Recently, I learned that Telebec (an entity owned by BCE, Bell Canada Enterprises Inc, the holding company of Bell Canada in Quebec/Ontario, and also holding parts of other provincial/ regional telcos in eastern and northern Canada) - Telebec purchased the operations of several exchange areas in Quebec, from Contel, circa 1980. In the 1970's and 80's, Telebec (or other names that parts of it used to go by) bought out many small independent (non Bell Canada) exchange areas scattered all over Quebec. In most cases Bell Canada was not to directly purchase-and-run these formerly "independent" exchange areas which were selling-out, so instead these were actually taken over by "Bell" through Telebec. Basically, the "independent" telcos have for DECADES been buying up each other, selling off exchange areas, merging with each other, changing their names, etc. The "Bell" companies for the most part had stopped their take-overs or trading of exchange areas with the independents back around WW-I or the 1920's, except under certain conditions, such as to "streamline" geographic areas of operation as being all a monopoly independent or all a monopoly Bell. However, more recently, some Bells are selling off exchange areas in rural areas to independents (US West for instance), but also many Bells are now entering independent exchange areas as CLECs - or sometimes just installing "Bell" payphones (in many cases these "Bell" payphones in "traditionally independent" exchange areas are _NOT_ central office switch controlled payphones but are rather "COCOT-like" in their interface with the rest of the network) - since the payphone market has become even more de-regulated - or is it really more regulated? :) The telephone industry and network has ALWAYS been in an evolutionary situation, but these days, some things are happening that never would have been thought of twenty years ago, as well as "expected" changes happening at an even faster, more maddening pace. MARK_J._CUCCIA__PHONE/WRITE/WIRE/CABLE:__HOME:__(USA)__Tel:_CHestnut-1-2497 WORK:__mcuccia@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu|4710-Wright-Road|__(+1-504-241-2497) Tel:UNiversity-5-5954(+1-504-865-5954)|New-Orleans-28__|fwds-on-no-answr-to Fax:UNiversity-5-5917(+1-504-865-5917)|Louisiana(70128)|cellular/voicemail- [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: You speak of toll in Alaska being run by the Air Force prior to 1970, which reminded me of how in the 1960's when I had occassion to call directory assistance for Alaska (is it 907?) that you could ask for listings in a particular town but you could also ask directory assistance for 'Air Force information' and you would be connected directory to a military locator service for the several air force facilities in the state. That particular DA bureau also handled a couple places that were technically in British Columbia but exactly on the boundary line and dialable as either 604 or 907. There surely were some odd arrangements in those days. PAT] ------------------------------ From: stevenl11@aol.comstuffit (Steven Lichter) Date: 17 Aug 1999 04:07:28 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Subject: Re: GTE Service in Oklahoma In article , Jimbo wrote: > I was at a local computer flea market yesterday and ran into someone > that I used to work with at GTE. He said that GTE was selling out of > Oklahoma. Is this news to anyone, or just another GTE rumor? GTE is selling a lot of little exchanges that are in or near other LECs which might have an interest in them, they have sold or are selling in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Arizona, parts of California, a lot in the Mid west and the north East. This has been going on since they bought out Contel. Apple Elite II 909-359-5338. Home of GBBS/LLUCE, support for the Apple II and Macintosh 24 hours 2400/14.4. OggNet Server. The only good spammer is a dead one, have you hunted one down today? ------------------------------ From: Paul Rubin Subject: Re: Starium Promises Phone Privacy Date: 16 Aug 1999 22:20:09 -0700 Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services nagle@netcom.com (John Nagle) writes: >> This is cool. For those here who don't follow these things, Starium >> is the cost-reduced successor to the Comsec secure phones that were >> sold for $1000 or so apiece and shown at various cryptography and >> security conferences over the past couple years. > You need an open reference implementation available that will > interoperate with this thing before you can trust it. That reference > implementation needs to be looked at hard, by qualified people. > Otherwise, you don't know what it's really doing. The protocols for the Comsec device were published a while back. I don't know if Starium is compatible. However, an interoperating reference implementation won't be of any help if you don't know whether to trust the hardware implementation. The hardware implementation might be selecting keys with only a few bits of entropy, or doing any number of other evil things. Because of Starium's cipherpunk provenance and because of the long discussions I've had with the designer, I trust Starium to generally be doing things right (ymmv). However, without either independent certification (such as FIPS 140-1) or personally inspecting the actual source code that runs in the actual hardware, there's no assurance beyond the designer's say-so that their device doesn't have awful implementation flaws, even if you know their intentions and their protocols are good. >> Meanwhile, I'll also plug something that I worked on: a software-only >> secure phone program, source code included, at >> http://www.lila.com/nautilus/ (make sure to include the trailing slash). > A software-only secure phone program for Internet voice calls is > Speak Freely, from "www.fourmilab.ch". The Swiss government > encourages the use of encryption, and there are no export controls on > crypto there. Full source code is available. I have nothing to do > with this, although I do know the developer. Nautilus also works over the internet. I've heard of Speak Freely and it also might be ok, but I haven't looked at it or tried it. ------------------------------ From: Paul Rubin Subject: Re: Connecting a Digital StarTac To a Laptop Date: 16 Aug 1999 22:21:26 -0700 Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services Dan Lanciani writes: >> We purchased Apple Macintosh PowerBook G3's and Motorola StarTac dual >> band phones for three of our staff with the assurance that they would >> work fine with three different PC Card modems (TDK, Farallon & ???)... > I've read stories like this several times and I'm puzzled about why > one would ever expect such a configuration to work in the first > place ... Even Motorola's RJ11 interface, when used with dual-mode > phones, requires that you force the phone to analog-only mode. Or > so the instructions claim.) The instructions for my dual mode Startac 7790 say to switch the phone to analog mode when you use a modem. ------------------------------ From: John_David_Galt@acm.org (John David Galt) Organization: Diogenes the Cynic Hot-Tubbing Society Subject: Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 03:12:50 GMT > I also mentioned that once in a while the line just goes dead. I can think of two possible causes that would cover this and the 911 calls. 1) A prankster is plugging into your demarc (Network Interface box). 2) Damage to the drop from the pole into your home. (Where I grew up there were squirrels that liked to chew on the cable.) If this is so, I would expect both problems (especially the disconnect) to occur more often when it's raining. John David Galt ------------------------------ From: J.F. Mezei Subject: Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 02:03:21 -0400 Bill Levant wrote: > 3) It's possible, I guess, that PAC Bell's ANI is screwed up, and that > someone else's line is sending your number. Unlikely, I'd say. Happened to me once a few year ago in Bell Canada (Quebec) territory. I was alone in house. Police rings bell and tells me someone in the house has dialed 911. I said no, I was alone, and I didn't dial it. They explained that they had to search the house. (Never though about asking for search warrant). They didn't find anything. (Not much of a search though). I pressed "redial" on all phones and none put me in 911. The cops did say that if there is a cordless phone, it could be pranksters who go around neighbourhoods with a phone and constantly dial 911 hoping they get dial-tone from a compatible phone nearby. ------------------------------ From: dtm37@aol.com (DTM37) Date: 17 Aug 1999 03:45:18 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Subject: Cisco Voice Over IP Cisco just announced the purchase of Calista (see www.calista.com) which will allow owners of Lucent, Nortel, Mitel, Siemens & Ericsson legacy PBX systems to use their embedded handsets with the Cisco Selsius Voice over IP system. For further information contact CCSC at 847-934-0580 or visit www.ccscnet.com. ------------------------------ From: Bob Goudreau Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 16:31 EDT Subject: How the C Language Got Its Name During the past few days, the Digest has been flooded with a number of stories about the origin of the programming language known as "C". Unfortunately, although some articles have correctly traced the language's parentage, there has also been a lot of misinformed speculation or outright errors. To set the record straight, I refer everyone to the Introduction section of *the* canonical reference work about C, Kernighan and Ritchie's _The_C_Programming_Language_ (ISBN 0-13-110362-8): Many of the important ideas of C stem from the language BCPL, developed by Martin Richards. The influence of BCPL on C proceeded indirectly through the language B, which was written by Ken Thompson in 1970 for the first UNIX system on the DEC PDP-7. Bob Goudreau Data General Corporation goudreau@rtp.dg.com 62 Alexander Drive +1 919 248 6231 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA ------------------------------ From: Bill Newkirk Subject: Re: Telco Recordings Tie Up Answering Machines Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 23:38:47 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Put on a longer outbound message such that the far end will hang up and the line will have time to supervise before you start recording. LGRL of Texas wrote: > Phone answering machines are designed to not record silence, dial > tones or the off hook warning. For many years, Southwestern Bell, when > a caller hangs up on an answering machine, sends 20 seconds of dial > tone, which is about the length of the outgoing message. THEN sneds a > phony ringing signal which "answers" with a recording "If you'd like > to make a call, please hang up and try again" ... all of which is > RECORDED by answering machines. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 09:28:20 PDT From: Larry Rachman <_lr_@yahoo.com> Subject: *Incoming* Connection to Serial Devices via Internet? I'm looking for a way to remotely access several serial devices via the internet. What I want to do is be able to telnet to a remotely-located 'device' of some kind, pass through some sort of password protection, and then select which of several serial output to talk through. This 'device' should be able to support multiple telnet sessions, one to each serial port (a total of four, for the moment, but I'd like room to grow). Any thoughts as to how to do this, for a guy who's strong on telecom and weak on Unix? I'd rather spend a few dollars for a off-the-shelf solution than spend weeks trying to cobble a custom application together. Replies by email; I'll summarize to the group if Pat's so-inclined. Larry Rachman _lr_@yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 06:38:13 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Invisible Web Surfing With 'Privada' By Martin Stone, Newsbytes SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., 16 Aug 1999, 3:29 PM CST A small San Jose-based software company rolled out a free service today designed to keep Web-surfers from getting their toes bitten by collectors of private Internet information. Privada Inc. believes its Web Incognito system will soar once consumers become fully aware of how vulnerable they are to invasions of privacy on the Net. http://newsbytes.com/pubNews/99/134908.html ------------------------------ From: radparker@radparker.com (Al Iverson) Subject: Re: Sanford Wallace Troubles ... Organization: See sig before replying Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 02:16:21 -0500 In article , lwrules2@my-deja.com (Sanford Wallace) wrote: >> Does anyone have any suggestions for me? -And, if I un-checked the >> box that says "Please include me on your mailing list", shouldn't that >> mean that I prefer not to receive all the junk? Any advice would be >> greatly appreciated. > You couldn't have unchecked that box, because the box doesn't exist. > You are clearly told at signup that your free use of our autoresponder > system entitles us to send you commercial emails. It's not spam. > There are paid autoresponders out there but our service is ad > subsidized, as per our sales materials. > -Sanford Wallace > CEO > SmartBot.NET, Inc. FYI, just quick follow up, I'm a rabid anti-spammer myself. See http://relays.radparker.com for more information about the blacklist I run. Having dealt with Sanford in the long dead past (and cursing him), and having dealt with Sanford now, I can say for certain that he's not a spammer any more. I'm not apologizing for his past behavior. I just feel it necessary to point out that he's not doing anything dirty, sneaky, or unethical with SmartBot/SmartBotPro. Al Iverson -- Web: http://al.radparker.com/ -- Home: Minneapolis, USA Visit the Radparker Relay Spam Stopper at http://relays.radparker.com. STOP! Include SWANKY99 in email replies or they may be tagged as spam. Send me no unsolicited advertising, as I will always return it to you. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have to wonder how often Sanford Wallace gets spammed at his personal email address. I bet he gets a lot of it, the same as everyone else, and much of it from people he taught how to do it in years past. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 15 Aug 1999 22:52:06 -0400 From: Fred Goldstein Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Arthur Ross writes, > Can't stifle myself any longer ... heard, long ago, that this *is* how > the "C" programming language came to be, i.e. earlier attempts at the > ultimate programming language "A" and "B" didn't work out. C was the > creation of Bell Labs folks - Kernighan & Ritchie - circa late 60's. Close, but not the way I heard it (probably read it someplace years ago). Once upon a time (early 1960s) there were three computer languages that counted. COBOL was used for business, FORTRAN for math and science, and ALGOL introduced structured programming. While ALGOL didn't get huge usage per se, many languages were derived from it. One of them was BCPL. (I was at BBN in the late 1970s when this was widely used; I think TENEX/TOPS-20 was sourced in it.) BCPL was somewhat structured and totally untyped, such that you could divide a float by a string without warning. (Compare it to, say, Pascal, another ALGOL derivative that was very strongly typed, such that you couldn't divide a float by an integer without conversion.) Unix Version 1 was written in 1969 for an 18-bit DEC mini (PDP-7 or 9 or such) in the language "B", which was itself derived from BCPL (not "A", which might have been too easiliy confused with APL, which stood for "A Programming Language"). Shortly thereafter, "C" was created as the successor to B. Alas, rather than call it "D", the sequel was named "C++". ------------------------------ From: Bill Newkirk Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 23:58:13 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com The ones we had in the old engineering building (new place has 66 blocks ... go figure), were called that because that was the model of the panel. Steve Winter wrote in message ... > Bob Banks spake thusly and wrote: >> I hope you can help me. >> I'm a student and our Telecom teacher was asked why a 66 block is >> called that. He did not know and told us for extra credit find out >> what the 66 means. >> I called AT&T and Ameritech yesterday and no one there could help me. >> If you could help I would really appreciate it, I hope you don't mind >> I've book marked your page; it looks like a great source of information. > When you find out, ask that same person why a 110 punchdown is called > a "110". "An inquiring mind is a terrible thing ..." ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #312 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Tue Aug 17 16:52:04 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id QAA13158; Tue, 17 Aug 1999 16:52:04 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 16:52:04 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908172052.QAA13158@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #313 TELECOM Digest Tue, 17 Aug 99 16:52:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 313 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Automated Web Page FAXing (Followup) (Robert G. Schaffrath) Re: Phone Fee For School Internet Service Too Popular to Overturn (Colbert) Re: Phone Fee For School Internet Service Too Popular to Overturn (J Nagle) Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! (Pete Weiss) Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! (Gerry Wheeler) Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! (Ben Bass) Re: MCI Frame Outage (The Old Bear) Re: Finding Hidden Conduit (David Koltermann) Re: Finding Hidden Conduit (Gordon S. Hlavenka) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (David Charles) Re: Connecting a Digital StarTac To a Laptop (Eric Morson) Re: GTE Service in Oklahoma (David Ashbaugh) Re: Two-Letter State (etc) Codes (Robert Shaw) Re: Free ISPs in UK - Background (Spyros Bartsocas) Last Laugh! (was Re: Deep Linking Proposal) (Bill Newkirk) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Robert G. Schaffrath Subject: Automated Web Page FAXing (Followup) Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 13:11:36 -0400 Organization: Totally Disorganized Hello, Back in early June I had posted a request for information on how to automate the FAXing of an arbitrary URL via an E-Mail request. I received several responses with some suggestions but essentially telling me that no such product exists and that I might want to 'roll my own'. In the course of working on the project that required this capability, I was told that AT&T Easylink has a service available which can FAX an HTML document. It cannot accept a URL and render it for you but, apparently, can take HTML 3.0 standard documents, format them and send them to a given phone number. It also understands GIF and JPEG images. Well, due to responsiveness issues (human) with AT&T Easylink and people being on vacation, I never did get an answer as to how to do this. We wound up trying to solve plain text connectivity issues. They may still have a viable option if someone wanted to investigate it but I never went any further. During the time I was trying to work out the details with AT&T, I had mentioned to the project manager that I thought I could design a Visual Basic program to do what we wanted. I was told that I should not bother since there was no money in the budget to cover this (I am a consultant) and that I should focus on the AT&T solution. So I decided, for my own education, to try writing such an application. Turns out that it is possible and I wanted to share some of the details of what I did: The client I am working for uses Microsoft Outlook 97 connected to Exchange. This allowed me to use an Inbox monitoring tool from Microsoft which is available at: http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q173/9/15.asp. This tool calls my Visual Basic program when a new message arrives in the Inbox. When my program is started, it receives a MAPI message ID from the Inbox monitoring tool. It retrieves the message and parses out the required information such as the URL and FAX phone number as well as some other cover page information. If the message does not have this information, it is ignored. and the program waits for another message. If the message has the required information, it establishes a link to the Internet Explorer object (SHDocVw.InternetExplorer) and tells Internet Explorer to navigate to the requested URL. When Internet Explorer finishes rendering the document, it fires an event called 'DocumentComplete'. At this point, I needed a FAXing solution that would allow me to send this rendered web page to the FAX number provided in the E-Mail message. A search of http://www.deja.com turned up two possibilities; TAPI or Symantec's WinFAX PRO 9.0. Choosing the easier route, I found that WinFAX PRO 9.0 has an unsupported SDK available for download from the Symantec web site. Digging through it I found that they have a library which is available to Visual Basic programmers. So after studying the documentation, I found that I could pass all of the information required to send the FAX to WinFAX PRO and then tell Internet Explorer to print the web page to the WinFAX printer device. The only two problems I came up with are; 1) the WinFAX printer device must be the default printer for the system on which the program is running. It is not possible to pass arguments to the Internet Explorer object telling it to print to a specific device 2) the WinFAX SDK documentation has errors and omissions. It is not officially supported but there is a disussion group on the Symantec web site for asking questions. One problem I was having was that the FAX software was dying before the FAX was being sent. It turned out to be a race condition with my program shutting down and the rendering of the FAX image that required me to add some synchronization code and a 'suicide timer' to prevent the program from possibly hanging. Unfortunately this was not documented and I only figured it out because something in the documentation did not make any sense to me and I decided to experiment. So the net result was that when the AT&T FAX option went boom, I suddenly had a solution to the problem. There still isn't any money to pay me for the program outright so I have wound up renting it on a month-by-month basis for the same cost as AT&T Easylink was going charge for access. The project this program was designed for is now being rolled out in four test markets. If it is successful, you may eventually see an ad somewhere for this 1-877 information service. That's my baby (including the FAX option) ... P.S. One side benefit of the project: I was able to add my own undocumented ANI readback routine to the menu. I punch in a three digit code and I get my phone number read back to me using my voice. Robert G. Schaffrath, N2JTX +1.516.759.4314 mailto:rschaffrath@acm.org http://www.schaffrath.net ------------------------------ From: Jeff Colbert Subject: Re: Phone Fee For School Internet Service Too Popular to Overturn Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 15:47:26 GMT I guess that I am too much of a curmudgeon, but when ever there is a link to a {New York Times} article, I won't do it. Sure it might be great information, but anything that puts a roadblock up when they don't have to is not worth my effort. I wonder how many other folks avoid it as well? Jeff > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When referencing a {New York Times} > link I have been told we are supposed to advise readers that registra- > tion at the site is required. PAT] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Quite a few folks avoid links to NYT for the same reason you mention which is the same reason I avoid them. There simply are too many other news sources which do not try to get personal data on netizens. PAT] ------------------------------ From: nagle@netcom.com (John Nagle) Subject: Re: Phone Fee For School Internet Service Too Popular to Overturn Date: 17 Aug 1999 17:46:56 GMT Organization: Netcom > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When referencing a {New York Times} > link I have been told we are supposed to advise readers that registra- > tion at the site is required. PAT] Yes. Also be very careful about signing the {New York Times} registration agreement, which has an indemnification clause. People accessing that site from work should obtain clearance from their company attornies before binding the company. John Nagle [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: One of the reasons I started the http://telecom-digest.org/news section at this site was because I felt there was a need to make available in one central location various sources of news (written, audio and video) where netizens are invited to participate 'just as you are' without privacy- invading questions, legal agreements, etc. If you have not visited http://telecom-digest.org/news or one of its components yet, you might be surprised at how many sources are covered there. In addition to the optional audio programs offered specifically to the net as online audio from Associated Press, BBC World News, National Public Radio, Cable News Network (both audio and video), CNET and others, users get a choice of a 'quick news summary' covering a half-dozen major events or a much more detailed collection of about one hundred feature stories each day from a dozen online publications. In addition, on the main 'front page' of the news section, you may click on direct links to several other news and feature services including csmonitor.com, 'Atlantic Unbound' which is the internet edition of {Atlantic Monthly}, the CNET feature stories of the day, an interesting little publication called 'Earth Alert' which comes to us from discovery.com, the current issue of 'CNET Shopper' which is a comparative-pricing buyer's guide to computer-related stuff, 'This Day in History', 'Todays Astronomy Picture', 'Todays Comic Cartoon', the local weather in your community and/or a national weather news summary, a 'TV Guide'-like listing of the current day's audio/video netcasts presented by Real Guide ... what else am I overlooking here? You can listen only, listen while you read, or read in silence; your choice. If you want a continuous news feed throughout the day while surfing elsewhere, then consider either http://telecom-digest.org/news/CNN.html or the newly established http://telecom-digest.org/news/radio.html. This latter one collapses into a tiny box on your screen and stays out of the way, but allows you to return to this site at any time with a click. If all that above, offered free and without privacy invasion (although some of the participants in the syndicate do place unobtrusive ads on their pages) is of no interest to you, then feel free to go visit the {New York Times} and register with them instead. PAT] ------------------------------ From: pete-weiss@psu.edu (Pete Weiss) Subject: Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 13:35:58 -0400 Organization: Penn State University -- Office of Administrative Systems Are there any off-prem extensions? Is the E-911 system correct (don't have any idea how one could verify that except somebody at the PSAP doing a GREP)? /Pete Weiss Penn State ------------------------------ From: gwheeler@vmguys.com (Gerry Wheeler) Subject: Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 13:24:04 GMT Organization: Deja.com - Share what you know. Learn what you don't. In article , Wlevant@aol.com (Bill Levant) wrote: > Well. A few guesses. (And I admit it, that's all they are). > 1) Your alarm system is doing it. > 2) In some places, your phone can be configured to call a specified > number if it's left off the hook > 3) PAC Bell's ANI is screwed up I prefer the explanation about the cat. My in-laws have a speed dial set for my number, which is 591-1xxx (x's are there to protect the innocent). If you press the speed dial button while onhook, there is not sufficient time to get dial tone before it starts dialing, so the first digit is missed. And the next three digits are ... So, when the cat would step on the phone while walking around the counter, guess who would show up at the door. Gerry Wheeler [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Bad Kitty!! Is there a way to either put the phone where the cat is unlikely to get near it or leave it where it is but do something to discourage the cat from being around it? PAT] ------------------------------ From: bbass@bluemoon.net (Ben Bass) Subject: Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 13:42:49 GMT > I also mentioned that once in a while the line just goes dead. This is > for every phone in the house. This could be the answer. Are you sure your alarm system only dials the monitoring station? Could it also be programmed (or malfunctioning) to dial 911? Alarm systems are supposed to be wired ahead of any other phone equipment on the line. When the alarm needs to dial, it siezes the phone line and excludes (disconnects) anything else on the line. This might be the dead line you speak of. You might want to have your alarm checked. Ben Bass, N2YDM ben@broadcast.net ------------------------------ From: oldbear@arctos.com (The Old Bear) Subject: Re: MCI Frame Outage Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 10:29:48 -0400 Organization: The Arctos Group - http://www.arctos.com/arctos In telecom-digest, Tom Alewine wrote: > I'm still looking for detailed information as to the cause of the > major MCI outage this last week. I understand they are using > (upgrading) to Ascend/Cascade platform for their frame network and > that they have been quoted in the press saying that the software > caused the outage. Anyone have any information as to the validity of > this or any other detailed information of this problem. I'm wondering > how this might affect a similar Ascend configuration as a potential > buyer. As reported by Bloomberg: MCI WorldCom to Lose Revenue, Maybe Customers, From Breakdown ------------------------------------------------------------- Clinton, Mississippi: MCI WorldCom Inc. said it will lose revenue because of a 10-day breakdown of its high-speed data network caused by software from Lucent Technologies Inc. "We will see a very slight downtick in revenue," said Bernard Ebbers, chief executive of MCI Worldcom, the No. 2 U.S. long-distance phone company. "Lucent has acknowledged full responsibility" for the outage, he said. He declined to say what compensation MCI WorldCom may seek. Ebbers said his company will give the Chicago Board of Trade, America Online Inc. and some 3,000 other corporate customers up to 20 free days of service to compensate for the failure. The network, a nationwide system of software and phone lines, is used by companies, municipalities and organizations to transmit data and e-mail and provide Internet access. The network began to fail Aug. 5, when MCI WorldCom added new Lucent software. Many of its corporate customers had network outages over the next nine days, and the CBOT Friday had to suspend electronic trading. The exchange said it is considering legal action and may switch to another data network company. It will be interesting to read about all this in the trade journals ... it must have been one hell of a squirrelly problem to have continued for so many days. ------------------------------ From: kol@netcom.ca (David Koltermann) Subject: Re: Finding Hidden Conduit Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 07:06:31 GMT Organization: Netcom Canada As long as you can dangle things down the conduit from the attic end, why not drop a wire pair as far down the conduit as it will go with a tone generator applying an audio signal on the pair (pair is left open, not shorted). Then hunt for the audio tone signal along the wall using an inductive probe. The tone generator and the inductive probe are standard tools of cable installers, and really invaluable in situations like this. It might be a little difficult to determine exactly where the end point is. The inductive probe will pick up the signal all along the wire pair. However, typically all outlets (phone, power, cable tv) are placed at the same height off the floor. Try poking into the drywall at that height (if this makes sense in your situation). > O great sages of TELECOM Digest: > I have a vacant 3/4" PVC conduit in the wall leading up to the attic, > but there is no opening in the wall for it (yet). > Is there a standard technique for locating it so I don't make extra > cuts in the drywall? Here's what I've come up with so far: ------------------------------ From: Gordon S. Hlavenka Reply-To: nospam@crashelex.com Organization: Crash Electronics, Inc. Subject: Re: Finding Hidden Conduit Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 10:35:00 -0500 Gary D. Shapiro wrote: > I have a vacant 3/4" PVC conduit in the wall leading up to the attic, > but there is no opening in the wall for it (yet). > Is there a standard technique for locating it so I don't make extra > cuts in the drywall? Here's what I've come up with so far: Put a piece of cable onto your fish tape, and push it all the way until it hits the end. Then hook a toner onto the free end of the cable. Go into the room and find the cable with the toner... If the conduit enters the _back_ of the box, you might even be able to punch the fishtape right through the drywall -- couldn't get much more accurate than that! If you're installing the conduit yourself (into an existing wall), drive a long nail through the end, push the conduit into position, then "peck" through the drywall with the nail. Or cut the hole for the box, drop a string (or push a fishtape) down, and _pull_ the conduit up. Gordon S. Hlavenka www.crashelex.com nospam@crashelex.com Grammar and spelling flames welcome. Yes, that's really my email address. Don't change it. ------------------------------ From: d_c_h@my-deja.com (David Charles) Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 13:17:10 GMT Organization: Deja.com - Share what you know. Learn what you don't. In article , johnl@iecc.com (John R Levine) wrote: >> Can't stifle myself any longer ... heard, long ago, that this *is* how >> the "C" programming language came to be, i.e. earlier attempts at the >> ultimate programming language "A" and "B" didn't work out. C was the >> creation of Bell Labs folks - Kernighan & Ritchie - circa late 60's. > Nope. C was based on a language called B, which was a simplified > version of a popular 1960s language from England called BCPL, Basic > Computer Programming Language or something like that. There was no > language A. > I gather that Dennis wasn't sure whether he'd call a followon language > D or P. As I understand it the sequence was: CPL -> BCPL -> B -> C -> C++ CPL stood for Combined Programming Language. This was developed in the early 1960s (I think it was at the University of London). I believe that the intention was that it would be suitable for most applications - scientific, business and systems (unlike FORTRAN and COBOL which were intended for distinct uses). Apparently it was rather unwieldy and was little used. I have never encountered CPL in practice or seen any examples of CPL programs. BCPL was Basic Combined Programming Language and was a considerably simplified version of CPL developed at the University of Cambridge in the late 1960s. By contrast it was a very simple language and had a number of unusual features. I do not think that it was used widely but it was still one of the main languages used at Cambridge in the late 1980s (in 1988 there was a BCPL compiler but no official C compiler on the main MVS system there). Some of the features of BCPL that differ significantly from C are: BCPL is very weakly typed -- variables do not have a type and are all the same length (32 bits on the compiler I used). Different operators are used for floating point arithmetic from those used for integer arithmetic to avoid ambiguity. The handling of arrays (known as vectors in BCPL) differs significantly from most other languages, this is closely linked to the handling of pointers. There is a single vector holding all global items. In order to define a global variable it is necessary to assign a name to a specific element of this global vector (taking care to avoid those used by the library). The calling and linking conventions are unusual. In order to use library functions a file "LIBHDR" is loaded at compile time which assigns the names of library functions to items in the global vector. The compiler will generate indirect calls to these items. At link or run time (I am not sure which) these items are filled with the addresses of the library routines to be used. In addition there are many lexical and syntactical differences even where the semantics are similar. As well as its influence on C, BCPL had a significant influence on computers made by Acorn (including the BBC micro) in the 1980s. These would have been the first computers used by many people in the UK at that time and were very widely used in schools. The versions of BASIC supplied by Acorn often had BCPL features (e.g. BCPL vectors were supported instead of or as well as normal BASIC arrays) and for some time BCPL and Forth were the only compilers available for some Acorn machines. David Charles ------------------------------ From: Eric@AreaCode-Info.com (Eric Morson) Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 09:38:11 -0400 Subject: Re: Connecting a Digital StarTac To a Laptop Thanks for all your replies! In response to Dan Lanciani's posting, I know you cannot do the data connection in digital mode. The StarTac is analog as well ... My question was why, even in analog mode, will the phone not connect and work? Eric B. Morson Co-Webmaster AreaCode-Info.com EMail: Eric@AreaCode-Info.com ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 9:08:49 -0500 From: David Ashbaugh Reply-To: Subject: Re: GTE Service in Oklahoma Jimbo Borders wrote: > I was at a local computer flea market yesterday and ran into someone > that I used to work with at GTE. He said that GTE was selling out of > Oklahoma. Is this news to anyone, or just another GTE rumor? IRVING, TX (Nov. 5, 1998) -- More than 200 prospective bidders will be mailed a letter this week in which GTE identifies 13 states where it is willing to trade or sell local telephone properties. This is part of a previously announced initiative in which bidders will have the opportunity to purchase or trade for up to 1.6 million of GTE's domestic switched access lines. The properties include all exchanges in the states of Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, and some of the exchanges in California, Illinois, Missouri, Texas, and Wisconsin. "From a strategic business standpoint, we believe marketing these properties for sale or trade is the right thing to do," said John Appel, president-GTE Network Services (GTENS). "However, this is not a 'fire sale.' If interested purchasers cannot meet all of our requirements, then we'll retain the properties, the valuable customer base, and the employees who serve them." David Ashbaugh GTE Federal Access Pricing david.ashbaugh@telops.gte.com MCMXCIX - One year before [the year before] the new millenium. ------------------------------ From: Robert Shaw Subject: Re: Two-Letter State (etc) Codes Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 13:33:50 +0200 Garrett Wollman wrote: > In article , Adam H. Kerman > wrote: >> Unfortunately, the ITU ignored obvious conflicts between these codes >> and long-standing two-letter US domestic postal codes for states and >> territories. > The ITU has no involvement in the maintenance ISO 3166. The agency > responsible for maintaining it is DIN, the German equivalent of ANSI. > The selection of territories to include is by the United Nations, and > it is the UN which is responsible for the three-digit 'territory code' > which is usually found in conjunction with ISO 3166 tables. Sorry this is not correct. The ISO 3166 Standard ("Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions") is maintained by the ISO 3166 Maintenance Agency (MA). The ITU is a member of the MA. The Secretariat of the MA is at DIN. DIN is also one of 10 members of the MA - see http://www.din.de/gremien/nas/nabd/iso3166ma/. The MA maintains both the 2 (Alpha-2) and 3 (Alpha-3) letter and numeric codes. See http://www.itu.int/net/cctlds/ to better understand the relationship between Internet top level domains and the ISO 3166 standard. Robert Shaw ITU Internet Strategy and Policy Advisor International Telecommunication Union Place des Nations, 1211 Geneva, Switzerland ------------------------------ From: Spyros Bartsocas Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 18:05:46 +0300 Subject: Re: Free ISPs in UK - Background Marek Zielinksi wrote: > Does anybody have an idea where to find the > local rates (in $/min, or local currency/min) for European countries? > in the US it is usually a flat fee - either zero, or more (in New York > 10.7 cents for connection at max rate), 25 cents in Canada. > I guess such rates are not easily available. If not, perhaps we could > assemble a quick list from your responses? In Greece the local rates are: [TEL Ed Note: Sorry, some things here were in a character script I was unable to reproduce; as sendmail likes to say, 'no eight bit characters to seven bit sites please ... especially not when sent out in a two-bit newsletter' PAT] 1 Unit=6 GRD (about 306 GRD/USD) Most ISPs have implemented national access numbers (special area code 965) that carry reduced rates. The above information was taken from http://www.ote-shop.gr/price.htm Spyros Bartsocas ------------------------------ From: Bill Newkirk Subject: Last Laugh! (was Re: Deep Linking Proposal) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 23:26:21 -0400 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com This business of lots of ads is why sometimes I think of the web as 'Prodigy Perfected' ... [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I never really followed prodigy.com that much; do they have a lot of offensive ads and privacy invasions on that site also? PAT] ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #313 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Aug 18 13:06:04 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id NAA22134; Wed, 18 Aug 1999 13:06:04 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 13:06:04 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908181706.NAA22134@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #314 TELECOM Digest Wed, 18 Aug 99 13:06:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 314 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Mark Brader) Re: Two-Letter State (etc) Codes (Col. G.L. Sicherman) Re: Finding Hidden Conduit (Tony Harminc) Re: Finding Hidden Conduit (Julian Thomas) Re: How the C Language Got Its Name (John R. Levine) Why Do C'ers See C (was 66 Blocks) (Scot E. Wilcoxon) Re: How the C Language Got Its Name (Adam Sampson) Mexico Termination Agreements (Leo McCulloch) ATT vs Intertel (Don Ammann) MCI WorldCom Issues Its Own Brand of Apology (Monty Solomon) Re: *Incoming* Connection to Serial Devices via Internet? (Steven Botnick) Re: *Incoming* Connection to Serial Devices via Internet? (John Nagle) FCC, Excite@Home Take Cable Fight to Court (Monty Solomon) WTD: VF-PCM TEST SET P2011 SIEMENS Manuals (Joseph Goldburg) Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings (Martin McCormick) Re: Families of Michigan Prisoners Refusing Collect Calls (Dana Paxson) Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! (Joey Lindstrom) Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! (Daniel Ganek) Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! (Greg Andrews) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Dennis Ritchie) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: msbrader@interlog.com (Mark Brader) Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: 17 Aug 1999 15:36:40 -0400 Organization: - Roy Smith writes: > The predecessor to C was indeed B, and the predecessor to B was BCPL > (never was sure what the acronym stood for). This caused rampant > speculation about whether the successor to C would be D or P. Personally, > I was blown away when it turned out to be C++. Right. And the final step backwards is that BCPL was itself a simpli- fication of a never-implemented language called CPL. > Never heard of a language called A. Indeed there wasn't one. However, in the late 1970s when I was at the University of Waterloo, Canada, someone there developed a language (I don't remember what it was for) *from* C and called it ... "Eh". And Eh was in turn followed by "Zed". Mark Brader |"On a word boundary, Luke, don't just hack at it... Toronto | The bytesaber is the ceremonial weapon of the Red-Eye msbrader@interlog.com| Knight. It is used to trim offensive lines of code. | Handwaving won't get you anywhere. Attune yourself | with the Source." -- Tarr / Hastings / Raymond My text in this article is in the public domain. ------------------------------ From: sicherman@lucent.com (Col. G.L. Sicherman) Subject: Re: Two-Letter State (etc) Codes Date: 17 Aug 1999 19:21:03 GMT Organization: Save the Dodoes Foundation In , mcuccia@mailhost.tcs.tulane. edu wrote: > I know I saw the "unique" two-letter codes for various Caribbean > Islands, but sometimes, they used a more "obvious" 'CI' for the Cayman > Islands as well as the TELCO "official" but less obvious 'CQ'. . . . I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the Mexican two-letter state codes: AGUASCALIENTES AS MORELOS MS BAJA CALIFORNIA BC NAYARIT NT BAJA CALIFORNIA SUR BS NUEVO LEON NL CAMPECHE CC OAXACA OC CHIAPAS CS PUEBLA PL CHIHUAHUA CH QUERETARO QT COAHUILA CL QUINTANA ROO QR COLIMA CM SAN LUIS POTOSI SP DISTRITO FEDERAL DF SINALOA SL DURANGO DG SONORA SR GUANAJUATO GT TABASCO TC GUERRERO GR TAMAULIPAS TS HIDALGO HG TLAXCALA TL JALISCO JC VERACRUZ VZ MEXICO MC YUCATAN YN MICHOACAN MN ZACATECAS ZS I see two conflicts with the U.S. and two with Canada. Also the name "Quintana Roo" sounds like a conflict with Australia.... Col. G. L. Sicherman work: sicherman@lucent.com home: colonel@mail.monmouth.com ------------------------------ From: tzha0@ibm.net (Tony Harminc) Subject: Re: Finding Hidden Conduit Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 19:41:59 GMT On Mon, 16 Aug 1999 21:15:14 GMT Gary D. Shapiro wrote: > I have a vacant 3/4" PVC conduit in the wall leading up to the attic, > but there is no opening in the wall for it (yet). > Is there a standard technique for locating it so I don't make extra > cuts in the drywall? You might be able to use a stud sensor to find the thing, but I doubt it. Probably what you need to do is dangle/fish a wire into it (it sounds as though you have access to only one end). If you have an electrician's fish tape, that is the best. Then you need a signal generator and a matching receiver. These can be bought at some significant cost, but for one-shot home use, you can fake it. You need a doorbell buzzer or bell - the traditional kind with a moving armature and a small gap that sparks as the bell rings. If the one you have won't run on a DC power source, it's no good for this purpose (though you don't have to run it on DC). Muffle/remove the bell to avoid driving yourself and others nuts. Connect the accessible end of the fish tape (or wire you fished down the conduit) to one terminal of the bell/buzzer, and set it buzzing. Now you need a portable AM radio. Set it between stations, and as you wave it around near the buzzer or the attached wire you'll hear a rushing/screeching/buzzing noise -- congratulations: you are now running your very own spark gap transmitter. Use the radio to search for the conduit in the wall. Do it quickly and then turn the buzzer off; your neighbours' radios are probably buzzing too. Tony H. ------------------------------ From: jt5555@epix.net (Julian Thomas) Subject: Re: Finding Hidden Conduit Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 22:50:12 GMT In , on 08/16/99 at 09:15 PM, Gary D. Shapiro said: > c) dangle a magnet. With a compass, probably the best bet (altho measurement should also be part of the plan). Julian Thomas: jt 5555 at epix dot net http://home.epix.net/~jt remove numerics for email Boardmember of POSSI.org - Phoenix OS/2 Society, Inc http://www.possi.org In the beautiful Finger Lakes Wine Country of New York State! In toto . . . does NOT mean "Dorothy's dog ate it!" ------------------------------ Date: 17 Aug 1999 16:01:47 -0400 From: johnl@iecc.com (John R. Levine) Subject: Re: How the C Language Got Its Name Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > Many of the important ideas of C stem from the language > BCPL, developed by Martin Richards. The influence of > BCPL on C proceeded indirectly through the language B, > which was written by Ken Thompson in 1970 for the first > UNIX system on the DEC PDP-7. Right. For more details, see Ritchie's paper on the history of C: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html It confirms that B was probably named after BCPL but possibly after Thompson's wife Bonnie. C came after B. By the way, what does this have to do with telephony? John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail ------------------------------ From: Scot E. Wilcoxon Organization: self Subject: Re: Why Do C'ers See C (was 66 Blocks) Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 19:56:51 -0500 Perhaps those who wish to see the history behind the C language would prefer to simply see the view given by Ritchie himself at http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html He has a related paper on the evolution of Unix at http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 22:51:46 +0100 From: Adam Sampson Subject: Re: How the C Language Got its Name Reply-To: azz@gnu.org > Can't stifle myself any longer ... heard, long ago, that this *is* how > the "C" programming language came to be, i.e. earlier attempts at the > ultimate programming language "A" and "B" didn't work out. [...] > I can't personally attest to the veracity of this, but if it isn't > true, it should be! It's not quite true. C was developed from a similar language called B, which itself was a simplified version of an earlier language called BCPL. It is a matter of debate (even among C's authors) whether it was called C because it was the next letter in the alphabet, or because it was the next letter of BCPL. This is why C++ is called C++, of course; ++ is the increment operator in C, so the author used this to avoid having to call it either "D" or "P". (Although "C++" would evaluate to "C" in a C expression, so perhaps "++C" would have been a better name.) You can find the whole sordid story on the homepage of Dennis Ritchie (the R in K&R) at . Adam Sampson azz@gnu.org ------------------------------ From: Leo McCulloch Subject: Mexico Termination Agreements Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 13:19:27 -0500 Organization: AT&T WorldNet Services Telemex is now technically capable to start closing the door on international grey traffic. We can provide up to the minute "legal" traffic with some "back-haul" at very competitive rates. All contracts COFETEL permitted, without the threat of termination by Telemex. It's cheaper to do it right than be caught. Some minimums apply. Regards, Lic. Leo Arthur McCulloch Jr. McCulloch & Associates, Attorneys at Law, Dallas, Texas, is an international law firm specializing in the creation of strategic joint ventures, investments, financing and commercial transactions in Mexico exclusively. We have offices in Mexico, D.F.; Acapulco; Reynosa; and Morelia. Professional Profiles and information upon request. We may be reached at e-mail lamcculloch@worldnet.att.net, tel 817-329- 7445, fax 817-421-5439. ------------------------------ From: Don Ammann Subject: ATT vs Intertel Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 14:02:49 -0400 Read your post and thought I would drop you a line. I have had both switches sized to about 100 stations, both in the last year. The main difference is the user interface, ATT's is screen based using word commands and Intertel is windows based point and click, which I think is much easier to use. The Intertel is about half the size but requires two PC's one for the switch and one for voice mail ( this was my configs) the phone sets and functions were very close to the same when it comes down to it. The real difference was the support people, ATT's guys were hard to get to work well with my other vendors ( It must be their problem) were Intertel's techs worked and played well with others. The price of the Intertel was about 20% less than the Lucent. The Lucent was leased and is gone and I will be getting my second Intertel in October. Well that it for me, hope I helped a bit. Best Regards, don.ammann@mail.ccur.com ------------------------------ Reply-To: Monty Solomon From: Monty Solomon Subject: MCI WorldCom Issues Its Own Brand of Apology Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 14:21:33 -0400 Anyone wondering how chief execs get to be chief execs should look no further than MCI WorldCom's CEO Bernard Ebbers. http://www.thestandard.com/articles/mediagrok_display/0,1185,5945,00.html ------------------------------ From: Steven Botnick Subject: Re: *Incoming* Connection to Serial Devices via Internet? Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 14:00:43 -0400 Organization: Epoch Internet I'm not exactly sure what you want to do and what they have available, but you can try Lantronix. ------------------------------ From: nagle@netcom.com (John Nagle) Subject: Re: *Incoming* Connection to Serial Devices via Internet? Date: 18 Aug 1999 16:08:05 GMT Organization: Netcom Larry Rachman <_lr_@yahoo.com> writes: > I'm looking for a way to remotely access several serial devices via > the internet. What I want to do is be able to telnet to a > remotely-located 'device' of some kind, pass through some sort of > password protection, and then select which of several serial output to > talk through. This 'device' should be able to support multiple telnet > sessions, one to each serial port (a total of four, for the moment, > but I'd like room to grow). > Any thoughts as to how to do this, for a guy who's strong on telecom > and weak on Unix? I'd rather spend a few dollars for a off-the-shelf > solution than spend weeks trying to cobble a custom application > together. If you're thinking of using this to remote-control anything non-trivial, stronger security than a plaintext password is indicated. That connection should be encrypted. John Nagle ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 06:46:21 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: FCC, Excite@Home Take Cable Fight to Court By Corey Grice Staff Writer, CNET News.com August 16, 1999, 10:40 p.m. PT SAN FRANCISCO--Opposition to "open access" cable regulations is mounting as the Federal Communications Commission and Excite@Home today filed court documents asking federal judges to overturn an earlier ruling that could help open cable networks to competitors. http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,40570,00.html ------------------------------ From: joseph@omnitel.com.au (Joseph Goldburg) Subject: WTD: VF-PCM TEST SET P2011 SIEMENS Manuals Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 09:56:26 GMT Organization: AT&T EasyLink Services, Australia (news.att.net.au) [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This is a second request. PAT] Hi all, VF-PCM TEST SET P2011 SIEMENS Manuals wanted. Any pointers to where I might find the operators manuals in English would be appreciated. Regards, Joseph ------------------------------ From: wb5agz@dc.cis.okstate.edu (Martin McCormick) Subject: Re: The Los Angeles Day Care Shootings Date: 17 Aug 1999 20:56:11 GMT Organization: Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma It is telecommunications that brings the true horror of these crimes of depravity to each of us. There always have been deranged people who believed that their religious or political convictions provided a rationale for spreading terror, pain, and suffering to innocents, but modern communications have allowed us to see and hear the events as they happened or within minutes of their occurrence. It makes human grief and suffering almost seem next door even if it is half way around the world. If anything positive is to come of this immediacy, it is the realization that in humanity looks and sounds the same whether it is a pompous ass who has gouged and cheated his way to the top of the food chain in his country and now wants to practice ethnic cleansing or a man who nobody ever heard of before who decides he has the right to practice his own version of ethnic cleansing or racial purity. Maybe it is somebody who was getting even for real or imagined slights or perhaps, just somebody who wanted somebody else's wallet. The loss, sadness and tears are all the same with the only difference being sheer numbers of people involved. What if CNN had been there to cover the Trail of Tears in the 1830's, the US Civil War, or the forced removal of Japanese/Americans during the hysteria at the beginning of World War II? It is impossible to answer these questions, but surely, telecommunications and their e ubiquity will send the message that the world is always watching and listening and the chances of getting away with gross in humanity are getting slimmer by the day. This same immediacy and the raw nature of news as it happens is also the sort of thing that unbalanced people love. Accounts of shootings and other crimes serve as cook books to those who want to temporarily seize the stage, so to speak, and gain notoriety for their cause or just to have their name on the air and in print for a time. This is not a technical problem, but technology makes it easier for all of us to be there, to hear the 911 tape, see the film or tape from the security camera, or to get some other vicarious experience. No country on Earth is free of shameful episodes in its history. At best, e ubiquitous telecommunications will make us all more aware of our duty to make the world a better place. At worst, they will harden us to the point where we will become like the witnesses one sometimes reads about who see a person being stabbed or otherwise savaged and who do nothing but watch and listen. Martin McCormick WB5AGZ Stillwater, OK OSU Center for Computing and Information Services Data Communications Group ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 10:50:03 -0400 From: Dana Paxson Reply-To: dwpaxson@acm.org Organization: Dana Paxson Studio Subject: Re: Families of Michigan Prisoners Refusing Collect Calls Pat, You might mention to your readers the book "The Celling Of America", edited by Daniel Burton-Rose, published by Common Courage Press. It's subtitled "An Inside Look At The U.S. Prison Industry." Disheartening, and important. Thanks, as always, for the Digest. Dana W. Paxson dwpaxson@acm.org 716 224-9356 Reality boggles everything. That's why we've got denial. ------------------------------ From: Joey Lindstrom Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 05:11:43 -0600 Reply-To: Joey Lindstrom Subject: Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls On Tue, 17 Aug 1999 16:52:04 -0400 (EDT), Gerry Wheeler wrote: > I prefer the explanation about the cat. My in-laws have a speed dial > set for my number, which is 591-1xxx (x's are there to protect the > innocent). If you press the speed dial button while onhook, there is > not sufficient time to get dial tone before it starts dialing, so the > first digit is missed. And the next three digits are ... So, when the > cat would step on the phone while walking around the counter, guess > who would show up at the door. I don't bother with any speed-dialing yet I still got bitten by this. My parents recently moved to Airdrie, Alberta, and when Telus ran out of numbers beginning with 948, they assigned a new prefix. 912. Anyways, one of my old phones has a slightly-wonky keypad, and sometimes when you press a button it activates, deactivates, and activates again very rapidly. Once, I inadvertently called 911 by mistake because the "1" key registered twice instead of once. On a second occasion, the "2" key didn't register at all and the following digit was, you guessed it, a "1" (ie: 912-1xxx) Once you dial 911, they seize your line and won't let it go until they're satisfied with the response. The first time, they were very good about it - I explained exactly what happened, the operator chuckled and said no problem. The next time, I got this jerkoff who wouldn't believe my explanation. He then froze out my line so that I couldn't call my mother (or anybody), and sent a squad car with two police officers to my door. And as someone else here mentioned (sorry, I missed your name), they wouldn't leave until they'd had a look around inside, including all the bedrooms. My room-mate was sleeping and they shone a flashlight right in his face -- needless to say, we weren't impressed. I wonder about the legality of this (under Canadian law). Is a warrant actually required (ie: can I legally refuse entry?) or does this amount to probable cause, thus no warrant is needed? From the messy desktop of Joey Lindstrom Email: Joey@GaryNumanFan.NU or joey@lindstrom.com Phone: +1 403 313-JOEY FAX: +1 413 643-0354 (yes, 413 not 403) Visit The NuServer! http://www.GaryNumanFan.NU Visit The Webb! http://webb.GaryNumanFan.NU I took a course in speed reading. Then I got Reader's Digest on microfilm. By the time I got the machine set up, I was done. --Steven Wright [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: In the USA at least, one exception to the requirement that a search warrant be obtained to enter your premises is when the police officer, acting in good faith, believes that a crime is presently going on and that the delay required to obtain a warrant would allow the crime to have completed and evidence of same to have been destroyed. A 911 call abnormally terminated could suggest that an intruder in your home caught you attempting to call police and cut your wire or took the phone from you. A person who comes to the door and informs police that 'the call was in error and there is nothing wrong here' may in fact be an intruder who has just broken into your house, caught you calling the police on him, cut the phone wire and tied you up. Usually the lack of a search warrant only affects the evidence found, if any. If no warrant, then any evidence there cannot be used. If you go to court and complain that police entered without a warrant, based on a situation that you created and caused to happen, i.e. the Bad Kitty jumped on the telephone buttons, the judge is going to ask you what harm was done as a result. No harm was done, and it was your fault that any of it happened to start with. The judge may say he is sorry your roomate got awakened. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Daniel Ganek Subject: Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 10:16:53 -0400 Organization: Radionics, Inc. J.F. Mezei wrote: > Bill Levant wrote: >> 3) It's possible, I guess, that PAC Bell's ANI is screwed up, and that >> someone else's line is sending your number. Unlikely, I'd say. > Happened to me once a few year ago in Bell Canada (Quebec) territory. > I was alone in house. Police rings bell and tells me someone in the > house has dialed 911. I said no, I was alone, and I didn't dial > it. They explained that they had to search the house. (Never though > about asking for search warrant). They didn't find anything. (Not much > of a search though). If someone were holding you hostage would you want the police to get a search warrant first? Happened to me once at a Post Office. I was buying stamps and three officers walk in with shotguns poised. Said the silent alarm went off and asked if they could search the premises. /dan [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The thing with a warrant is police cannot just show up on a 'fishing expedition' and decide to look around. If they force their way in and do so anyway, they are wasting their time because the court will not admit anything they found as 'evidence' as a result. If they have reason to believe a crime is in progress that is a different situation. Of course they may claim you 'invited' them to come in or 'allowed' them to come in of your own free will. Then all bets are off, since an officer who is invited to be somewhere is perfectly free like anyone else to observe the place where he is, and file a complaint about something he saw there. Be careful who you 'invite' into your home! (LOL) It is assumed if you are being held hostage that you would willingly 'invite' the police to enter and inspect things. You can always tell them you want the Bad Kitty arrested and taken to the local animal shelter. (LOL) PAT] ------------------------------ From: gerg@netcom.com (Greg Andrews) Subject: Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! Date: 17 Aug 1999 23:13:23 GMT Organization: WGASA.ORG: wolfdog1@pacbell.net writes: > OK, telecom experts can you please help me out here? > I truly believe this is a telcom problem. I'm a Pacific Bell customer. > I have two lines coming into my home; one for personal use and the other > for business. I have a computer with a modem but the computer is turned > off when not in use. I don't have a cordless phone and I don't have a > fax machine. I have a security alarm that is monitored. I have cable > tv that is somehow linked to my phone line. Somehow linked to your phone line? Sounds like it's time to find out *exactly* how. There was a story in my local paper (silicon valley, California) about an apartment dweller who started receiving strange long distance charges on his phone bill. The phone company tested everything and there were no crossed lines, no malfunctioning telephone or fax machines, computers were shut off, and there were no exposed junction boxes where someone could be clipping onto his phone line and making calls. Still the calls persisted. Finally, late one night, the man was going to the bathroom when he heard the faint sound of a dial tone and pulse dialing. He noticed a red LED in his living room was flickering in sync with the pulse dialing noises. What was the box? It was the phone attachment for his new digital cable TV box. The cable box required a connection to a phone line, but there wasn't a phone jack near the TV. So the installers plugged in a couple of little boxes that sent the phone signals through his 120 VAC power wiring. One box plugged into an outlet near the TV, another near the phone jack. He wasn't the only person in the apartment building with digital (or pay- per-view) cable boxes that used the little telephone-to-power adapter boxes. His box was probably receiving garbled transmissions from other boxes in the building, and dialing garbled telephone numbers. When he replaced the little boxes with a real phone cord, the mysterious phone calls stopped. Perhaps you should investigate the connection between your cable tv and your phone line for similar problems. ::::::::::::::::::: Greg Andrews gerg@netcom.com ::::::::::::::::::: Fortune Cookie: Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives. ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: ------------------------------ From: Dennis Ritchie Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 07:10:17 +0100 Organization: Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies Reply-To: dmr@bell-labs.com Roy Smith wrote (correctly): > The predecessor to C was indeed B, and the predecessor to B was BCPL > (never was sure what the acronym stood for). This caused rampant > speculation about whether the successor to C would be D or P. Personally, > I was blown away when it turned out to be C++. Not sure what this thread has to do with telecom really, unless I think about where I've worked throughout my career. If you care, check out http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/~dmr/chist.html but the name-succession is attributable more to our own inventiveness or lack thereof than to Bell System nameology. > Never heard of a language called A. Various folk at U Waterloo (Ontario) developed B successors named Eh and Zed. Clever, I think. Dennis ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #314 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Aug 18 14:20:34 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id OAA24876; Wed, 18 Aug 1999 14:20:34 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 14:20:34 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908181820.OAA24876@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #315 TELECOM Digest Wed, 18 Aug 99 14:20:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 315 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Sprint PCS Customer Service Enhancements (John Willkie) Help Needed: Is Phone Being Bugged? (Randy Fine) Re: Finding Hidden Conduit (Tom Thiel) Re: Finding Hidden Conduit (Daniel Ganek) Re: Connecting a Digital StarTac To a Laptop (Jason Lindquist) Re: *Incoming* Connection to Serial Devices via Internet? (Peter Corlett) Re: *Incoming* Connection to Serial Devices via Internet? (Satch) Re: *Incoming* Connection to Serial Devices via Internet? (Derek Balling) Re: GPS Time Roll-Over (Dave Moore) Re: GPS Time Roll-Over (Leonard Erickson) Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls (Aunt Lilybet) Regulatory Requirements for LEC TCSI Response? (Heidi S. Whitaker) Re: Free ISPs in UK - Background (Peter Corlett) Re: NYT Site Requires Registration (llambda@gmx.net) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: John Willkie Subject: Sprint PCS Customer Service Enhancements Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 19:37:31 PDT Dear Pat, I am a Sprint PCS customer and have been for the better part of a year. On several occaisons, I have neglected to be timely in paying my bill and had the service suspended. Each time this happened, I would spend several hours (each way) traveling on transit to the nearest San Diego county Sprint PCS office. Upon paying the bill (in cash) the service would be immediately restored. Last Friday (Aug 13) I repeated the process. When I got there, I was informed that they were charging me $3.00 for the privilege of receiving my payment. If I did not want to pay the three bucks, I could use their "free" drop box, in which case I would not walk out with a receipt. By a notice, this "feature" went into effect on August 12, 1999, on orders of "Kansas City." The clerk explained that the manager was usually pretty good about emptying out the box every twenty-four hours. I have never heard of an organization, particularly one with at least partially regulated rates, charging for accepting cash, let alone having the gall to call acceptance of funds a customer service. As it was, I did not pay enough that day to reactivate the service. Several days later I made sufficient payment to reactivate the service and was charged another $3.00 for the acceptance of my payment. I was told by the clerk at the second office (much closer to home) that my phone would be working in about four hours. When I mentioned that previously the phone had always worked before I left the office after paying cash, he told me that they had a new system that would only activate the phone within four hours. "So the new system takes longer to activate the phone?" He said that it was not his decision to do things that way. Before I left the service area about an hour later, I checked and the phone still would not connect me to the dialed number, redirecting me to Sprint PCS customer service. I've been pretty busy (talking on the phone, among other activities) for the past couple of days, but I plan to pursue this matter with federal and state authorities and to review applicable sections of federal and state statutory and case law. My gut feeling is that what Sprint PCS is doing with the fee is unlawful and is a material change in the terms of my service agreement. I told the clerk that I believe it to be a surrogate "reconnect fee." John Willkie Fax: +1 707 885-1635 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 22:02:42 EDT From: Randy Fine Subject: HELP NEEDED: Is Phone Being Bugged? I work in a government office in a complex of buildings served by a quasi governmental telephone company with its own switching equipment, and tens of thousands of instruments and subscibers. Yesterday, my boss was on the phone (digital multi line) when he heard a shadow conversation. This would normally not be unnerving except that he recognized the voices of the shadow conversation as those of employees in another office of which he is also the head administrator. Both agencies deal with extremely confidential and controversial information. The phone systems in these offices are not connected in any way other than the ability to dial five digits to call them, as you would do to call any other of thousands of phones in this system. The offices are buildings away from each other. The odds of this being coincidental have to be millions to one. What can we do to determine if his phone or the phone in the other agency is being bugged. What would any other reasonable explanation be? Any suggestions or advice in this manner would be extremely appreciated. Randy Fine comppart@mail.albany.net ------------------------------ From: tthiel@slonet.org (Tom Thiel) Subject: Re: Finding Hidden Conduit Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 04:52:20 GMT Organization: http://extra.newsguy.com On Tue, 17 Aug 1999 10:35:00 -0500, Gordon S. Hlavenka wrote: > Put a piece of cable onto your fish tape, and push it all the way until > it hits the end. Then hook a toner onto the free end of the cable. Go > into the room and find the cable with the toner...[actually, tracer] For a louder and easier to locate tone signal, attach one of your toner leads to Ground, and the other to ONE conductor of the cable. Tone can be heard through drywall muck easier. Also, since you described the conduit as PVC, you can just send your metal fishtape down and clip the toner lead to IT. Set the switch to cont. first, to make sure the tape is not touching simething grounded, and if it is, back the tape up a bit until the cont. lite goes out. Then set to tone and go looking. Tom Thiel tthiel@slonet.org "Remember, it don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi" - Peter Schickele (PDQ Bach) ------------------------------ From: Daniel Ganek Subject: Re: Finding Hidden Conduit Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 10:10:07 -0400 Organization: Radionics, Inc. Gary D. Shapiro wrote: > O great sages of TELECOM Digest: > I have a vacant 3/4" PVC conduit in the wall leading up to the attic, > but there is no opening in the wall for it (yet). > Is there a standard technique for locating it so I don't make extra > cuts in the drywall? Here's what I've come up with so far: > a) Make exact measurements in the attic of where the conduit is > relative to, say, the corner of the room. This is difficult given the > small clearances in that part of the attic, and assumes the conduit is > perfectly vertical. > b) dangle a tiny speaker by its wires into the conduit and feed a sound > to it. > c) dangle a magnet. > d) arthroscopic surgery tools (don't have any). > Your comments or other ideas are welcome. > garyes iname com > Remove the "NO" that follows the "@" sign for email replies. First, find the studs in the wall -- you don't want to end up on the wrong side of a stud when searching. 1) Using an acoustic (ultrasonic?) stud finder look between the studs for an anomoly. May not work if the conduit is not close to the drywall. 2) Poke small holes in the wall with a wire such as a coat hanger. These can be easily patched. 3) A modification to (2). Poke a hole in the wall with a coat hanger and then bend the hanger into an "L" shape with about 3" leg. Stick it into the hole and twist. This will let you search a 6" wide space. In theory :-) you'd only have to punch three holes /dan ------------------------------ From: linky+antimeat@see.figure1.net (Jason Lindquist) Subject: Re: Connecting a Digital StarTac To a Laptop Date: 18 Aug 1999 05:37:54 GMT Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Paul Rubin writes: > Dan Lanciani writes: >> I've read stories like this several times and I'm puzzled about why >> one would ever expect such a configuration to work in the first >> place ... Even Motorola's RJ11 interface, when used with dual-mode >> phones, requires that you force the phone to analog-only mode. Or >> so the instructions claim.) > The instructions for my dual mode Startac 7790 say to switch the phone > to analog mode when you use a modem. The voice coders used in the digital cellular systems are specifically designed to compress speech. Modem carriers have substantially different signal characteristics from human speech, so they're trashed by the vocoders. (Music's pretty different too. Have you ever noticed how badly hold music sounds over a digital cell phone?) Since these are digital systems, it doesn't take a great stretch of logic to transmit your computer's data, instead of vocoded speech, over that air channel. Both CDMA and GSM technologies provide for this. I'm pretty sure this is ubiquitous amongst GSM carriers in Europe, though I don't know how widely it's deployed in North America. As for CDMA, both Airtouch Cellular and SprintPCS have announced they'll be offering data services Real Soon Now. Other carriers will probably follow suit. Once that's done, all you'll need is a special serial cable to connect your phone (assuming it has data-capable firmware) to your notebook (or PDA, :-) ) and sign up for service. Jason Lindquist <*> "Mostly though, I think it gave us hope, That there can always be a new beginning. Even for people like us." -- Gen. Susan Ivanova, B5, "Sleeping In Light" ------------------------------ From: abuse@verrine.demon.co.uk (Peter Corlett) Subject: Re: *Incoming* Connection to Serial Devices via Internet? Date: 17 Aug 1999 21:18:24 GMT Organization: B13 Cabal Larry Rachman <_lr_@yahoo.com> wrote: > [...] What I want to do is be able to telnet to a remotely-located > 'device' of some kind, pass through some sort of password protection, and > then select which of several serial output to talk through. How about a Linux box with a copy of Kermit or Minicom on it? You'd then just telnet into the box from outside, and run the program from the shell. If you want it to be a bit more advanced, make Kermit or Minicom your shell, then it will be run automatically upon login. If you have a potentially expensive device attached, like a modem, then I'd recommend the use of ssh rather than telnet to avoid packet sniffers getting your login details and giving you a bad day. I actually use such an arrangement to bulk-SMS colleagues at work if I'm at home. I'll dial into my ISP and ssh to the server box. I then run a special program which dials the respective mobile phone companies and sends the messages directly. This way, the company pays the majority of the cost instead of me having to pick up the tab. ------------------------------ Subject: Re: *Incoming* Connection to Serial Devices via Internet? From: satch@concentric.net (Satch) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 00:19:49 GMT Organization: SBC Internet Services _lr_@yahoo.com (Larry Rachman) wrote in : > I'm looking for a way to remotely access several serial devices via > the internet. What I want to do is be able to telnet to a > remotely-located 'device' of some kind, pass through some sort of > password protection, and then select which of several serial output to > talk through. This 'device' should be able to support multiple telnet > sessions, one to each serial port (a total of four, for the moment, > but I'd like room to grow). > Any thoughts as to how to do this, for a guy who's strong on telecom > and weak on Unix? I'd rather spend a few dollars for a off-the-shelf > solution than spend weeks trying to cobble a custom application > together. No special programming of Linux would be required: you just define a shell script as the "shell" that checks for port in use (so that two people don't try to use the same port at the same time) and then use any number of available programs to bridge a TCP/IP link to the serial port. My choice, available in the standard Slackware distributions, would be the netpipes() suite. The faucet() utility should do the trick. Step by step: 1) Create a script that performs a semaphore check on the desired serial port. It's easiest if you have a script per port, so that each script would check a lock file before allowing access. Note that rlogin(8) would have already authenticated the user. (But watch out for crackers that try to expliot some of the known problems with rlogin.) 2) The script would then launch faucet() to perform the bridge. 3) The connection can be broken by the remote user disconnecting. _____ _/satch\_______________________________ |Computationally addicted since 1970. | |Advertisement on request. | |_______________________________________| ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 17:25:16 -0700 From: Derek Balling Subject: Re: *Incoming* Connections to Serial Devices via Internet > I'm looking for a way to remotely access several serial devices via > the internet. What I want to do is be able to telnet to a > remotely-located 'device' of some kind, pass through some sort of > password protection, and then select which of several serial output to > talk through. This 'device' should be able to support multiple telnet > sessions, one to each serial port (a total of four, for the moment, > but I'd like room to grow). > Any thoughts as to how to do this, for a guy who's strong on telecom > and weak on Unix? I'd rather spend a few dollars for a off-the-shelf > solution than spend weeks trying to cobble a custom application > together. Most terminal servers (multiple serial to ethernet) allow you to, instead of having many serial connections (e.g., modems) dialing in to connect to ether, to allow you to do something like : # telnet term_svr.mycompany.com 5001 Connected to term_svr.mycompany.com port 5001 # telnet term_svr.mycompany.com 5002 Connected to term_svr.mycompany.com port 5002 etc. This works great for serial consoles on headless machines in data centers. You can have a rack of twenty servers, with one terminal server's serial ports allowing an admin to remotely connect to any of the consoles (but obviously a particular console can only be accessed by one person at a time). HTH, D ------------------------------ From: moore-cain@erols.com (Dave Moore) Subject: Re: GPS Time Roll-Over Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 23:22:11 GMT On Mon, 16 Aug 1999 20:47:50 -0400, David Perrussel wrote: > The problem lies in the data field for the GPS Week number. The > information is in a 8-bit field in the GPS data stream. With 8 bits, > the data range is from 0 to 1023. It's a 10-bit field. PGP key available from "http://users.erols.com/moore-cain/" Dave Moore ------------------------------ From: shadow@krypton.rain.com (Leonard Erickson) Subject: Re: GPS Time Roll-Over Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 08:25:29 PST Organization: Shadownet David Perrussel writes: > This is true -- and not all GPS receivers are ready for the epoch > rollover. > The problem lies in the data field for the GPS Week number. The > information is in a 8-bit field in the GPS data stream. With 8 bits, > the data range is from 0 to 1023. The week ending this week is -- you > guesed it -- 1023! Next week is 1024 -- and will be transmitted as if > it were week ZERO! Actually it's *ten* bits. 8-bits only hold 0-255. :-) > Where I work we use Datum brand GPS receivers, made from 1992 through > 1997. We discovered the rollover problem over two years ago. Datum > acknoledged the problem and issued firmware upgrades for all their > receivers (at a premium cost I may add!) > Datum's fix is to count the number of leap seconds issued since GPS > satellites were put into service. From 7 January 1980 (day one as far > as GPS receivers are concerned), there have been 13 leap seconds > issued. The system is set so if there are more than 12 leap seconds > issued (the amount when the new firmware was written), the GPS > receiver thinks it is in the first epoch (0 to 1023). 12 or more and > it will know it is in the second epoch (1024 to 2047). And what will they do when the *next* rollover occurs (2047 by your figures above)? Leonard Erickson (aka Shadow) shadow@krypton.rain.com <--preferred leonard@qiclab.scn.rain.com <--last resort ------------------------------ From: Aunt Lilybet Subject: Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls!!! Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 16:11:35 GMT Organization: Deja.com - Share what you know. Learn what you don't. In article , J.F. Mezei wrote: > Bill Levant wrote: >> 3) It's possible, I guess, that PAC Bell's ANI is screwed up, and that >> someone else's line is sending your number. Unlikely, I'd say. > Happened to me once a few year ago in Bell Canada (Quebec) territory. > I was alone in house. Police rings bell and tells me someone in the > house has dialed 911. I said no, I was alone, and I didn't dial > it. They explained that they had to search the house. (Never though > about asking for search warrant). They didn't find anything. (Not much > of a search though). > I pressed "redial" on all phones and none put me in 911. The cops did > say that if there is a cordless phone, it could be pranksters who go > around neighbourhoods with a phone and constantly dial 911 hoping they > get dial-tone from a compatible phone nearby. It is also possible that a cordless phone dails 911 when the battery dies. I supervise a 911 center and we get this all the time people leave their phones off the charge. This was told to me by a telephone company official. Not all cordless phones have this feature and I was not given a list of the ones that do dial out. This was suppose to be some type of safety feature for the elderly. "When in Danger or in Doubt, Run in Circles, Scream and Shout."RAH's TCWWTW ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 18:59:39 -0500 From: Heidi S. Whitaker Subject: Regulatory Requirements for LEC TCSI Response? Pat - It's been a long time since I've routinely read the Digest. Thanks for having the answers when I need them. I am hoping that someone out there can speed up my research. Is there a regulatory requirement for the LEC's to respond to a TCSI (particularly a PIC request) by an IXC within a specific period of time? I would think the FCC has some sort of metric on this process. Many thanks in advance - Heidi Whitaker ------------------------------ From: abuse@verrine.demon.co.uk (Peter Corlett) Subject: Re: Free ISPs in UK - Background Date: 17 Aug 1999 21:28:09 GMT Organization: B13 Cabal Marek Zielinski wrote: > That is very interesting. Does anybody have an idea where to find the > local rates (in $/min, or local currency/min) for European countries? in > the US it is usually a flat fee - either zero, or more (in New York 10.7 > cents for connection at max rate), 25 cents in Canada. British Telecom is obliged by law to publish their tariff, which they do on their web site, and advertise in their literature. The headline rate is 4p/min in the daytime (8am to 6pm Monday to Friday), 1.5p/min in the evening (6pm to 8am Monday to Friday), and 1p/min on weekends. There's a minimum charge of 5p per call. These include VAT at 17.5%, but exclude any discount schemes. Heavy users generally optimize their discounts to get the full 35% discount. Taken 31=$1.60, we get per-minute rates of approximately 3.5, 1.3 and .88 cents/min in the daytime/evening/weekend respectively, the min charge is 4.4c. I'm curious what the typical charges in contintental Europe are, and whether they are cheaper or more expensive than the UK. The Netherlands are of particular interest to me. ------------------------------ From: llambda@gmx.net Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 05:28:06 +0200 Subject: Re: NYT Site Requires Registration In TELECOM Digest V19 #313: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Quite a few folks avoid links to NYT > for the same reason you mention which is the same reason I avoid them. > There simply are too many other news sources which do not try to get > personal data on netizens. PAT] I have noticed that someone has been registering at web sites with a user name of "cypherpunks" and a password of either "writecode" or "cypherpunks". This interferes with the proper purpose of the web: targetted advertising. Like the web's version of "foo was here", this vandalism pops up in all manner of unlikely places. Even the NYT site has a user "cypherpunks" with password "cypherpunks". I urge your readers to verify for themselves just how widespread this practice is. Where will it end? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have noticed myself that it is quite common for users at sites which require registration or other personal data to simply put down whatever they think of at the time to fill in the blanks. A lot of what they fill in is total nonsense, and I think the reason for this is to demonstrate to the site that not only are they refusing to participate on the site's terms, but they are going to mess up the statistical/demographic reporting however they can as well. I cannot encourage people to go to a site and deliberatly give false information to gain access, but what I can do is suggest that in recent times, sites that want to snoop like that are no longer needed by netizens. You can for example use http://telecom-digest.org/news and get all sorts of audio, video and textual presentations of the news for the day at no charge, and with no obligation at all, which is how the net used to be structured totally. One could quite literally spend several hours at http://telecom-digest.org/news each day and not read it all. PAT] ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #315 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Aug 18 18:24:07 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id SAA06689; Wed, 18 Aug 1999 18:24:07 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 18:24:07 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908182224.SAA06689@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #316 TELECOM Digest Wed, 18 Aug 99 18:24:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 316 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Escrow Service Protects Buyers and Sellers on Net (TELECOM Digest Editor) Credit Cards Now Accepted Here (TELECOM Digest Editor) Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls (Daniel Ganek) Re: More BBS Memories (Matt Ackeret) Re: More BBS Memories (Javier Henderson) Re: MCI Frame Outage (Adam Gaffin) AC 500 - Follow Me Service (M.D. Parker) Re: Phone Fee For School Internet Service Too Popular (Derek Balling) Re: Sanford Wallace Troubles ... (Jim Rusling) Re: US West In Court Over ISDN Net Service Speeds (Tim Smith) Re: Crazy Proposals For 310 Area Code (Robert Lee Harris) Re: Telco Recordings Tie Up Answering Machines (Tom Thiel) Connecticut Overlays To Be Finalized In September (Eric Morson) LA Shootings: 1999 v. 1968 (Lisa Hancock) Dialing "Blocked" US 1-800, 888, 877 Numbers From Canada (navage@interlog) NANP Administration (Arthur Ross) Extending Voice Signal From a Channelized CSU/DSU (Gerald Latter) Re: Last Laugh! (was Re: Deep Linking Proposal) (John David Galt) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. 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Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 15:52:49 EDT From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Escrow Service Protects Buyers and Sellers on Net Since the beginning days of e-commerce, merchants have been suspicious of netizens, and netizens suspicious of merchants. Many are the horror stories we've heard from netizens who attempted to make purchases on the net only to find their checkbook cleaned out either because of dishonesty by the merchant or a lack of security in his network conn- ection. By now, everyone knows the problems amazon.com had with this a couple months ago. There are guys who set up bogus storefronts with their only intention being to collect credit card numbers, passwords and personal identities. There are honest merchants on the net who have an 'all sales final' policy and while they do ship out the merch- andise ordered, it may take a long time to arrive and not be of very good quality. The netizen of course is then stuck with it. Let's flip the coin over: merchants on the net have plenty of horror stories also. Credit card fraud on the net is a familiar story. A merchant accepts a card, sends the merchandise then gets a chargeback a month or two months later with no way to collect from his customer. Some netizens cheat and claim they never got the merchandise. Merchants rightfully are scared to send out merchandise 'on approval' since so many folks -- netizens and others -- would just never get around to paying. But in the defense of netizens, they also want to be able to see, examine, touch and use the merchandise before buying it, to make sure it is as advertised and will meet their needs. So what is the solution? I have found something I think might work and I recommend its review by merchants and netizens: an inexpensive, licensed, reputable *escrow service* for the net. An escrow service is a service which holds money in trust pending actions by the various parties involved. One that operates on the net is called i-Escrow, and it is a *bonded*, *licensed* (in the state of California) agency registered with the Department of Corporations. Its purpose is to act as intermediary between buyer and seller on the internet for persons or companies which wish to use its reasonably-priced, inexpensive services. Let's say you have something for sale. You describe the item on your website, and include with it a 'Buy It' .gif which is linked to your file at i-Escrow.com ... a buyer clicks that link and is taken to the i-Escrow.com site. If they have previously used the service they will simply login and identify the purchase they wish to make. If they have not used i-Escrow.com before, they will need to register and give satisfactory identification about themselves, their credit card, etc. Likewise, a first time seller needs to identify him/herself to the satisfaction of i-Escrow.com and the escrow agency reserves the right to periodically audit, using their own internal procedures, any site offering things for sale via escrow to be sure all is honest. The escrow agency will not accept sites that offer illegal services, memberships in 'adult' web sites, etc. They will not accept any merchant who has an 'all sales final' policy or a merchant who refuses to allow his merchandise to be examined by a netizen in his own residence or office for at least two days. So let's say you as seller have registered the item(s) with i-Escrow and have links on your site for each item pointing to your file at the agency. A buyer clicks on the link. As noted above, the netizen registers, which can be done on line, by fax, or telephone as desired, providing credit card number, submitting a wire transfer or whatever. *The merchant never sees this credit card information at all*. Once the buyer has registered, and tendered payment to be held in escrow, the agency sends email to the seller advising that satisfactory payment has been received, and giving a 'ship to' address. The agency does address verification on credit cards, and works with the netizen regards alternative shipping addresses, etc. The merchant does not know how it was paid for, and has no reason to care. Based on the agency's 'sales authorization' or approval to complete the sale, the merchant ships the merchandise. i-Escrow.com has specific guidelines the merchant must follow: The shipment must go out promptly (it is hoped the netizen will have what he purchased the very next business day via a courier service); it must be very secure in its packaging; it must be fully insured against damages, however the escrow service pays the insurance costs as part of the deal. The best part: *on receipt of the merchandise, the netizen has two complete days -- starting with the day after the merchandise is receieved -- to examine the stuff*. After two days, assuming no complaints, the agency sends payment in the form of its own trust account check to the merchant, less its fees, which are about the same as what the merchant would pay for credit card service anyway. The netizen can, if he wishes, and he must do so to protect his rights, login to the escrow service and *cancel the payment* if he intends to return the merchandise. He has the aforementioned two days to do this. If the netizen cancels the transaction within two days he need give no reason for doing so, but he does have the obligation to return the merchandise in the same condition in which it was received and by the same manner of delivery; i.e. prompt return within a day or two, fully insured, carefully packaged, etc. Just as the merchant is paid two days after delivery lacking any orders to the contrary from the buyer, the netizen gets a refund two or three days after the merchandise has been returned and the seller gets a chance to inspect it. This does not have to a 'merchant' or 'internet storefront' versus 'customer' kind of situation. It works perfectly well for any buyer and seller on the net. Seller registers with escrow, links buyer to escrow; escrow collects payment in a method satisfactory to itself; advises seller to ship; later remits proceeds to seller. Buyer never has to worry about: 1) Seller got my credit card/checking account info. Seller never sees it. He is paid by escrow's client trust fund. 2) Seller has nothing for sale, just wants my money. Seller will not get your money until you authorize its release or default on saying anything for two days after receipt. If he ships nothing, he gets nothing. It all times out and you get money refunded. Ditto the seller and his concerns: if I send it to them to look at, will I ever get my money? What if this is a fraud credit card? Its not his concern any longer. He gets paid in cash. I strongly suggest buyers and sellers on the net look at the services of i-Escrow.com and see how it might benefit them. For sales up to about $50, the fee charged is $2.95 and from there up to a few hundred dollars, the rate is six percent, which is deducted from the sales proceeds remitted to the seller. Considering the fee includes full insurance on the shipment, credit card approval services and negotiations between seller and buyer as needed, its not a bad deal. The peace of mind given to both seller and buyer via the internet is worth the few extra dollars. Both sides realize they will get what they want from the deal. Since there is no monthly fee, no setup charge, nothing due except the fee taken on each transaction, merchants may want to add i-Escrow on their site to show their honest intentions. Netizens would do well when making a purchase from someone on the net to insist, 'lets handle the sale through an escrow for the protection of us both.' And imagine an internet merchant who says, 'yes, you can examine this merchandise in your home for two days before I get paid'. How very revolutionary, eh! Yours for better internet e-commerce, and do look at http://i-Escrow.com to see if it can help you. It might help me, more on that in the next message. PAT ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 16:09:29 EDT From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Credit Cards Now Accepted Here If you feel inclined to help alleviate my financial distress from time to time with the publication of this Digest and maintainence of the telecom-digest.org web site, you can now do so with credit cards if that is more convenient. Many readers in other countries have said it is difficult for them to get US Dollars or money orders for any reasonable fee. Some people here in the US prefer to use cards instead of writing checks. Whatever ... See the message above this regards i-Escrow.com, which I believe is the only bonded and licensed escrow agency in business to serve the net community, but I could be mistaken on that. I am going to be using their services. If you go to http://telecom-digest.org/donations.html you will see a link to 'make a donation using a credit card'. If you click there, you will get a page with several 'Buy It' buttons for various values. By selecting the button you feel is most appropriate, you will be taken to i-Escrow.com where you can register with them in one of various ways you are comfortable with. That registration will carry over to any subsequent dealings you may have with them elsewhere on the net. After you have made your decision, escrow sends me email which I must acknowledge. You then have two days in which to review your decision and cancel it if you wish to do so. Thanks very much! PAT ------------------------------ From: Daniel Ganek Subject: Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 15:56:32 -0400 Organization: Radionics, Inc. Daniel Ganek wrote: > J.F. Mezei wrote: >> Bill Levant wrote: >>> 3) It's possible, I guess, that PAC Bell's ANI is screwed up, and that >>> someone else's line is sending your number. Unlikely, I'd say. >> Happened to me once a few year ago in Bell Canada (Quebec) territory. >> I was alone in house. Police rings bell and tells me someone in the >> house has dialed 911. I said no, I was alone, and I didn't dial >> it. They explained that they had to search the house. (Never though >> about asking for search warrant). They didn't find anything. (Not much >> of a search though). > If someone were holding you hostage would you want the police to get > a search warrant first? > Happened to me once at a Post Office. I was buying stamps and three > officers walk in with shotguns poised. Said the silent alarm went off > and asked if they could search the premises. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The thing with a warrant is police > cannot just show up on a 'fishing expedition' and decide to look > around. If they force their way in and do so anyway, they are wasting > their time because the court will not admit anything they found as > 'evidence' as a result. If they have reason to believe a crime is > in progress that is a different situation. Seems to me that a 911 call would be enough reason to believe a crime was in progress. This is really a no-brainer since 911 calls are recorded and logged. /dan ------------------------------ From: mattack@area.com (Matt Ackeret) Subject: Re: More BBS Memories Date: 17 Aug 1999 17:29:16 -0700 Organization: Area Systems in Mountain View, CA - http://www.area.com In article , David B. Horvath, CCP wrote: >> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: When I was discussing the earliest days >> of BBS networking yesterday, one I forgot to mention was Ripco, and >> another was Karl Denninger, both of Chicago. I do not really know what >> Karl is up to these days, but I do know that Ripco, which started out >> as a small BBS with a reputation in the early 1980's of being mostly >> a phreak board has been one of the major ISPs in Chicago for a number >> of years. Almost all of the localized, Chicago area ISPs had their >> beginning as a BBS going back ten to fifteen years ago. > Ahhh back in the old days with the hack/phreak (it was hard to draw a > line back then) BBS'. Anyone remember 8BBS in the 408 (SoCal) area 408 is Northern California.. Sunnyvale, Cupertino, San Jose... mattack@area.com ------------------------------ From: Javier Henderson Subject: Re: More BBS Memories Date: 18 Aug 1999 07:51:03 -0700 Organization: Completely Disorganized dhorvath@cobs.com (David B. Horvath, CCP) writes: > Ahhh back in the old days with the hack/phreak (it was hard to draw a > line back then) BBS'. Anyone remember 8BBS in the 408 (SoCal) area > code? For the sake of accuracy, 408 is actually in Northern California. -jav ------------------------------ From: agaffin@nww.com (Adam Gaffin) Subject: Re: MCI Frame Outage Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 11:58:00 GMT Organization: Network World Fusion Reply-To: agaffin@nww.com On Tue, 17 Aug 1999 10:29:48 -0400, oldbear@arctos.com (The Old Bear) wrote: > It will be interesting to read about all this in the trade journals > ... it must have been one hell of a squirrelly problem to have > continued for so many days. David Rohde, one of our telecom reporters, has been following this closely. Some of his articles: Update: MCI WorldCom CEO offers credits in wake of frame relay net problem http://www.nwfusion.com/news/1999/0816mciupdate.html Another MCI WorldCom frame victim: Network integration Even as MCI WorldCom picks up the pieces of its recent frame relay crisis, another key victim has emerged: the company's plan to integrate all its networks. http://www.nwfusion.com/news/1999/0817mciworldcom3.html You'll have to register to read them, but it's free, at least. ------------------------------ From: mdpc@netcom.com (M.D. Parker) Subject: AC 500 - Follow Me Service Date: 18 Aug 1999 18:01:05 GMT Organization: NETCOM / MindSpring Enterprises, Inc. Anybody know who offers 500 follow me service these days. Both MCI and ATT and discontinued this service. Thanks, Mike mdpc@netcom.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Instead of 500 Follow Me as such you may want to look into something like Call America's 'My Line' service which does the same things on a toll free 800 number. The 'My Line' service is identical in all respects to the old 500 service, but it is greatly enhanced with voicemail, immediate re-routing of your 800 number to wherever you want it to ring, the ability to use it for outgoing calls without a calling card/payphone surcharge added, etc. They are located in San Luis Obispo, CA. You can contact GST/Call America at 800-541-6316 and speak with Ernie Strong. I have used them for several years with complete satisfaction. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 17 Aug 1999 18:07:01 -0700 From: Derek Balling Subject: Re: Phone Fee For School Internet Service Too Popular > I guess that I am too much of a curmudgeon, but when ever there is a > link to a {New York Times} article, I won't do it. Sure it might be > great information, but anything that puts a roadblock up when they > don't have to is not worth my effort. I wonder how many other folks > avoid it as well? > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Quite a few folks avoid links to NYT > for the same reason you mention which is the same reason I avoid them. > There simply are too many other news sources which do not try to get > personal data on netizens. PAT] It is for just this reason that EFF? 2600? set up the cyberpunk/cyberpunk" login/password combo a long time ago and gleefully gives it out to everyone. That way anyone can browse NYTimes without having to worry about them being "tracked" in particular. :) D ------------------------------ From: jim.rusling@usa.net (Jim Rusling) Subject: Re: Sanford Wallace Troubles ... Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 02:23:09 GMT Organization: Mustang Information Systems, Mustang, OK Reply-To: jim.rusling@usa.net radparker@radparker.com (Al Iverson) wrote: > In article , lwrules2@my-deja.com > (Sanford Wallace) wrote: >> You couldn't have unchecked that box, because the box doesn't exist. >> You are clearly told at signup that your free use of our autoresponder >> system entitles us to send you commercial emails. It's not spam. >> There are paid autoresponders out there but our service is ad >> subsidized, as per our sales materials. > FYI, just quick follow up, I'm a rabid anti-spammer myself. See > http://relays.radparker.com for more information about the blacklist I > run. Having dealt with Sanford in the long dead past (and cursing > him), and having dealt with Sanford now, I can say for certain that > he's not a spammer any more. Also as a rabid anti-spammer, I agree. Jim Rusling Mustang Information Services Mustang, OK http://jrusling.home.mindspring.com ------------------------------ From: tzs@halcyon.com (Tim Smith) Subject: Re: US West In Court Over ISDN Net Service Speeds Date: 17 Aug 1999 19:59:28 -0700 Organization: Institute of Lawsonomy > The original poster's DSL line is 256 kilobit, making it impossible to > reach speeds of 100 Kilobytes per seconds. We'd be safe to assume he > meant 100 Kilobits per second. Probably right, because he said 100k. If he had said 75k, though, it turns out it would be possible he meant bytes, even though that is way faster than you'd think possible for a 256 kbit/second line. That's because USWest's 256 kbit/second DSL is actually currently 640 kbit/second down. Similarly, I've got the 1 megabit/second up/down service, and it is actually 1280 kbit/second down, and something like 1070 kbit/second up. Keep this in mind whenever a USWest customer is describing rates. Rumor is that USWest is putting in new equipment that will let them actually limit the 256 kbit (and the 512 kbit) customers to the rated speed. Tim Smith ------------------------------ From: rlhrrs@aol.comrmv.com (Robert Lee Harris) Date: 18 Aug 1999 04:11:07 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Subject: Re: Crazy Proposals For 310 Area Code > (B) Preserve the local calling area as it currently exists. Any point > that is currently local to any of the 17 rate centers would be local to > the new consolidated rate center. However, the LECs would now demand a > rate increase to make up for the lost toll revenues. It seems like the best way to overlay numbers would be to apply the new area codes to cellular phones and pagers. Since wireless numbers are billed per minute anyway, there would be no temptation to increase rates for calling a wireless phone from a regular phone line. ------------------------------ From: tthiel@slonet.org (Tom Thiel) Subject: Re: Telco Recordings Tie Up Answering Machines Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 04:52:27 GMT Organization: http://extra.newsguy.com Call 611 and ask if your CO switch supports a feature called "cutoff-on-disconnect", or COD (like the fish). Here, in my local CO, default is not activated. Also, the COD does not aways travel through pair-gain equipment, and they may have to track that down. I had a customer with a Auto-Attendant used in night mode only. All of a sudden they would come in in the morning and find all 24 lines on the key system in use. The A.A. would disconnect if it received COD, but the telco had switched theie service to pair gain without telling them. The newer boards at the remote site would not pass the COD from the CO, so the A.A. never hung-up. A friendly call to the CO switchman found the problem, and they solved it when they could find some earlier release boards. On Mon, 16 Aug 1999 23:38:47 -0400, Bill Newkirk wrote: > Put on a longer outbound message such that the far end will hang up > and the line will have time to supervise before you start recording. > LGRL of Texas wrote: >> Phone answering machines are designed to not record silence, dial >> tones or the off hook warning. For many years, Southwestern Bell, when >> a caller hangs up on an answering machine, sends 20 seconds of dial >> tone, which is about the length of the outgoing message. THEN sneds a >> phony ringing signal which "answers" with a recording "If you'd like >> to make a call, please hang up and try again" ... all of which is >> RECORDED by answering machines. Tom Thiel tthiel@slonet.org "Remember, it don't mean a thing, if it ain't got that certain je ne sais quoi" - Peter Schickele (PDQ Bach) ------------------------------ From: Eric@AreaCode-Info.com (Eric Morson) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 09:21:52 -0400 Subject: Connecticut Overlays To Be Finalized In September Connecticut state utility regulators chose overlays to relieve the crunch in both 203 and 860 area codes. A final decision is expected in September. See the articles at: http://AreaCode-Info.com in the August 1999 Headlines section. Eric B. Morson Co-Webmaster AreaCode-Info.com EMail: Eric@AreaCode-Info.com ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com (Lisa Hancock) Subject: LA Shootings: 1999 v.1968 Date: 18 Aug 1999 03:20:37 GMT Organization: Net Access BBS The spate of anger shootings in the US -- from the Oklahoma City bombing to the Los Angeles anti-semitic day care center assault troubled me. Sadly, IMHO, most of the news media focus on the sensational aspects (e.g. release of 911 tapes playing the terror-stricken people calling for help). We don't get much of a substantive look. The following is a stab to try to make sense of things. Anyway, I came across a book, written in 1970, about Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign. Written before Watergate, before Vietnam ended, but during turbulent times, it raised some questions of: where we were, and where are we now? 1968 was not a happy year whatsoever. We had the assasinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. We had serious race and peace riots. The violence at the Chicago Convention. All of this deeply worried the country: where was it headed? The "movement" was vague and undefined, yet it did have a lot of influence. A great many of society's mores and traditions were thrown by the wayside. Some deservedly, but many regretfully. Getting back to 1999: In 1968 people despaired of the violence of the time. Has society learned anything? Are we better off? Crime, while slightly decreasing recently, is still way up over the mid 1960s. The inner cities are worse now than before. In 1968, society was troubled. Fear over the Vietnam war and domestic issues. The Communists. But in 1999, supposedly we're in the best of all worlds. The economy is booming, skilled or unskilled, there are jobs available, and yet inflation is very low. There's no war, no draft. Technology has lowered the cost of many luxuries. We have our computers, cable TV, multiple home phones, mobile phones. What's going on? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: 1968 was a particularly troubling year for me also. I lived in Chicago at the time; the riots in April that year following King's assasination were just awful. I do not know how many times that year I got tear-gassed, caught up in street corner protests, etc. Everywhere you walked around in downtown Chicago that year it seems there was a police officer swinging a club at you and telling you to move faster, to go somewhere else, etc. At various times in that year, there were National Guard and/or Army troops on duty in Chicago on street corners, etc. On a Sunday night in August, about the middle of the month like now, but 31 years ago in 1968 I was sitting with some friends in Lincoln Park on the north side of the city. Police flew overhead in a heli- copter and tossed out tear gas bombs at the people sitting in the park. And then when everyone started running off to avoid the noxious fumes, there were police waiting at all the entrances of the park to beat you over the head with a club on your way out. That is the way the rodent control officers work also. To get rid of rats, they stick a hose in the burrow and shoot gas in there. As the rats run out the other end of the tunnel to safety, the rodent control people stand there and club them to death. It all makes perfect sense for the police to do the same thing I guess, since as most of them would be quick to point out, the people they deal with are little more than just scum or about equal to rodents. As if that were not enough in one week, a few days later I was downtown having dinner with some friends in the bar at the Conrad Hilton Hotel. This was during the 1968 Democratic convention. There were several hundred military troops lined up marching along on Michigan Avenue downtown which was not an unusual sight at all that year, and quite a few protestors as well. For some reason, the police got angry about something that happened; they came storming into the Hilton Hotel and into the dining room area where we were seated. They proceeded to totally trash the whole bar, break all the glasses and bottles at the bar, and then went to the buffet table where all the food was sitting, overturned the table, dumping all the food on the floor. Two of the plate glass windows looking out into Grant Park were smashed. On the television set that was playing, Walter Cronkite was asking why the police were being that outrageous. Mayor Daley pointed his finger at Senator Rubicoff and said (I quote) 'it is Jew Bastards like him who have made all the trouble'. When someone in the dining room said the police were the ones making the trouble and humorously noted, 'they do not look like Jews to me, but they seem to be bastards, alright ...' a couple of police officers responded by smashing the picture tube on the television set there in the bar and then four or five of them just literally beat the hell out the guy who made the comment. Everyone else who had been sitting there eating dinner or drinking at the bar was sort of shocked at all this. The police made everyone leave at that point. At the time, my office was in the McCormick Building, right across the street, and when I came to work the next morning, everything at ground level was a total shambles. Litter and trash everywhere, broken glass all over the street. The Hilton Hotel had boarded up all its broken windows. 1968 was just a dreadful year in Chicago. Everywhere you went the police and/or the National Guard troops were beating people up they did not like, first gassing them then clubbing them when they tried to escape, just like is done to get rid of rodents. It started the middle of April and went on like that into September at least. Chicago was a bit more brutal than some other cities, but things were like this all over the USA that year. And even to this day Chicago Police insist they did not start any trouble. PAT] ------------------------------ From: navage@interlog.com Subject: Dialing "Blocked" US 1-800, 888, 877 Numbers from Canada Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 18:32:44 GMT Organization: Deja.com - Share what you know. Learn what you don't. Many US 1-800, 888, and 877 toll free numbers appear to be "blocked" from being accessed from within Canada. Does anyone know of a (legal) way to access such 1-800, 888, and 877 "US only" toll free numbers from Canada? Is there a free or fee based service which one can use to access a US telephone network from within Canada and be able to dial such "blocked" toll free numbers, as if they were being called from within the US? Problem is ... some companies only have 1-800, 888, or 877 numbers, making it impossible to reach them by phone from Canada. Any help finding a work around to this problem would be appreciated. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 11:34:15 -0700 From: Arthur Ross Subject: NANP Administration Pat - FYI - Looks like Lockheed is spinning off the NANP administration. This is from the FCC Daily Digest today. -- Best -- Arthur Daily Digest Vol. 18 No. 158 August 18, 1999 Information described within this Daily Digest may be viewed at the FCC World Wide Web site (http://www.fcc.gov) under the subdirectory '/Daily_Releases/Daily_Digest/1999/dd990818.html' [snip] Released: August 17, 1999. COMMON CARRIER BUREAU SEEKS COMMENT ON LOCKHEED MARTIN IMS CORPORATION AND WARBURG, PINCUS & COMPANY AMENDED REQUEST FOR EXPEDITIOUS REVIEW OF THE TRANSFER OF THE LOCKHEED MARTIN COMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY SERVICES BUSINESS (CC DOCKET 92-237).On August 16, Lockheed Martin IMS Corporation filed an Amended Request for Expeditious Review of the transfer of the Lockheed Martin Communications Industry Services business to newly formed newStar, Inc., formerly known as CIS Acquisition Corporation, to ensure the continue neutrality of the North American Numbering Plan Administrator. Comments due September 7; replies September 17. (DA No. 99-1647). -- Dr. Arthur Ross 2325 East Orangewood Avenue Phoenix, AZ 85020-4730 Phone: 602-371-9708 Fax : 602-336-7074 ------------------------------ From: Gerald Latter Subject: Extending Voice Signal From a Channelized CSU/DSU Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 15:16:45 -0400 We are using a channelized CSU/DSU (Kentrox Datasmart 658) to separate voice and data. The PBX which we want to utilize for voice is located in a separate building 2000 feet from the location of our routers and the CSU/DSU. It is our understanding that there is a signal limitation of 600+ feet on running a copper wire between the DB15 terminal connector on the CSU/DSU and the DB15 connector on the PBX. We have fiber available (single mode and multi mode) between the buildings, but I have not found anything that will allow us to utilize the fiber to carry this signal (The only fiber loop converters I have found work with full T1's only). Does anyone know of a way to extend this signal 2,000 feet preferably over fiber (for lightning protection). Thanks in advance, Jerry Latter ------------------------------ From: John_David_Galt@acm.org (John David Galt) Organization: Diogenes the Cynic Hot-Tubbing Society Subject: Re: Last Laugh! (was Re: Deep Linking Proposal) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 07:32:47 GMT Bill Newkirk wrote: > This business of lots of ads is why sometimes I think of the web as > 'Prodigy Perfected' ... > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I never really followed prodigy.com > that much; do they have a lot of offensive ads and privacy invasions > on that site also? PAT] You might want to dig out the press release that announced the initial creation of Prodigy (I remember it in the Digest when it happened, so it ought to be in the archives). Prodigy was (or claimed to be) the first online service that made viewing advertisements a condition of using the service. You were only allowed to access their service using their software, which used part of the screen to continuously display ads; and you were not allowed to add filters or the like that would defeat either the ads or their primitive built-in censorware. To enforce these conditions, the contract you had to sign when subscribing gave Prodigy part-ownership of the computer you used to log on. I have no idea whether any or all of this is still true; I have never used Prodigy. John David Galt [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Wow, that sounds like a really great idea. I think I will make it a condition for using the telecom-digest.org web site. I will have advertising messages pop up in your face now and then which you must read as a condition for using the site; you will give me ownership of your computer; and anything creative you do at any time with your computer while you are on line at this site becomes my property. You have to sign over your copyright, etc. I wonder how in the world Yahoo managed to pull that off on all the Geocities people? As you may know, Yahoo made that demand on all the netizens there, that they had to turn over all their intellectual property rights, etc as a condition of being allowed to put up pages at their crummy advertising-in-your-face-all-the-time site. I am glad I was able to assist David Massey in getting his 'Tribute to the Telephone' out of there before he got all mixed up in that mess. If you have not visited yet (or recently) http://telecom-digest.org/tribute you might like to check it out. Its a great little online telephone museum with lots of pictures and files of interest. But seriously, I did *not* know that Prodigy.com went so far as to claim ownership of your computer as part of the terms of usage at their site. They must have really thought they were hot stuff. Ah, if only I had the resources, I would love to make a *totally* free-net kind of resource for netters, with web pages, etc and a total ban on any and all advertising, data-collecting, etc. I guess it is not to be ... I can barely keep myself and this Digest afloat sometimes, let alone start anything else. PAT] ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #316 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Aug 19 16:20:04 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id QAA19992; Thu, 19 Aug 1999 16:20:04 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 16:20:04 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908192020.QAA19992@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #317 TELECOM Digest Thu, 19 Aug 99 16:20:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 317 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Art Kamlet) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Tony Toews) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Paul Wills) Re: How the C Language Got its Name (Art Kamlet) Re: Dialing "Blocked" US 1-800 888 877 Numbers From Canada (J Oppenheimer) Re: MCI WorldCom Works To Finish Data Network Repairs (Jeffrey Carpenter) Re: MCI Frame OutageRe: MCI Frame Outage (User 6) Re: AC 500 - Follow Me Service (Scott Gordon) Re: AC 500 - Follow Me Service (Eric Morson) Yahoo / Geocities Terms (Derek Balling) Re: GPS Time Roll-Over (Christopher J. Pilkington) Re: VISA Authorizations (Christopher J. Pilkington) Re: Watch Out for Forever Paging (Christopher J. Pilkington) Re: Extending Voice Signal From a Channelized CSU/DSU (W.D.A. Geary) Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls (Julian Thomas) Re: Extending Voice Signal From a Channelized CSU/DSU (Joseph Wineburgh) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) Email <==> FTP: telecom-archives@telecom-digest.org Send a simple, one line note to that automated address for a help file on how to use the automatic retrieval system for archives files. You can get desired files in email. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: kamlet@infinet.com (Art Kamlet) Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: 15 Aug 1999 01:13:19 -0400 Organization: InfiNet Reply-To: kamlet@infinet.com In article , Charles Gray wrote: > Thus, the terminal block with four screws that was mounted on millions of > residential baseboards was a "C block". What happened to "A blocks", > and "B blocks" I will never know. Not really related, but ... We have all handled D batteries, and C batteries and many of us even handled B cells once upon a time. And while there are AA and AAA batteries, does anyone remember ever handling A batteries? Art Kamlet Columbus, Ohio kamlet@infinet.com ------------------------------ From: ttoews@telusplanet.net (Tony Toews) Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Organization: Me, organized? Not a chance. Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 01:45:37 GMT msbrader@interlog.com (Mark Brader) wrote: > However, in the late 1970s when I was at the University of Waterloo, > Canada, someone there developed a language (I don't remember what it > was for) *from* C and called it ... "Eh". And Eh was in turn followed > by "Zed". And of course one of the other humorous naming sequences is the University of Waterloo creating a student version of Fortran named Watfor. When they decided to improve on it they called it Watfiv. The structured version was, however, Watfiv S. Guess they didn't want all those wierd computer science students making fun of Watsix I guess. Tony Toews, Independent Computer Consultant Microsoft Access Links, Hints, Tips & Accounting Systems at http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm VolStar http://www.volstar.com Manage hundreds or thousands of volunteers for special events. ------------------------------ From: Paul Wills Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 08:56:31 -0400 Seeing how far this discussion of Bell System nomenclature has come (Dennis Ritchie himself!) I figured it's time to bring it back to terminal blocks. I can't say anything about 66 blocks either but as one who collects various mundane objects of telephony, I must say that the Bell System numbering schemes can be a bit strange. For example, there is a small outdoor terminal block that was used to terminate a drop wire at a pole. The first type I have is called a 101A. This consists of a porcelain block mounted on a metal bracket with a flip up galvanized lid. The next improvement I have is an aluminum box shaped enclosure in which the porcelain block is mounted on the back. The lid slips down over the front and is attached with a chain so it can hang loose when the box is open. This is called a 101B. OK, I'll go with that. The last Bell System improvement is a plastic surface mounted plate in which the two terminal posts are embedded. The cover consists of a molded rubber "cup" that stretches over the plate. The nomenclature: 101B2. Go figure! Paul Wills ------------------------------ From: kamlet@infinet.com (Art Kamlet) Subject: Re: How the C Language Got its Name Date: 18 Aug 1999 22:17:19 -0400 Organization: InfiNet Reply-To: kamlet@infinet.com In article , Adam Sampson wrote: > This is why C++ is called C++, of course; ++ is the increment > operator in C, so the author used this to avoid having to call it > either "D" or "P". (Although "C++" would evaluate to "C" in a C > expression, so perhaps "++C" would have been a better name.) Which is why Bjorn Strousroup will tell you he tried to call it ++C but was overruled. > You can find the whole sordid story on the homepage of Dennis Ritchie > (the R in K&R) at . Art Kamlet Columbus, Ohio kamlet@infinet.com ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 22:40:00 -0400 From: Judith Oppenheimer Organization: ICB Toll Free News / WhoSells800.com Subject: Dialing "Blocked" US 1-800, 888, 877 Numbers from Canada Toll free numbers can be designated U.S. & Canada accessible, U.S. only, or accessible by only one (or more) area code, depending on the wishes (generally based on the marketing area) of the subscriber. However, these companies do have local numbers as well, without which there'd be no 'ring-to' number to designate pointing the toll free number to. ICB offers an 800/888/877 number trace service, though its not inexpensive. Feel free to email me privately at mailto:joppenheimer@icbtollfree.com for more information. Judith Oppenheimer, Publisher & Pres joppenheimer@icbtollfree.com ICB Toll Free News http://icbtollfree.com WhoSells800.com http://whosells800.com ICB Consulting http://800consulting.com 1 800 The Expert, 212 684-7210 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Judith, I am wondering if there are any longer the type of 800 number which was on a dedicated wire pair of its own with no 'ring to' number attached. Do you recall the kind I mean? Years ago, you could go into an office and see a phone that was the actual 800 line termination itself. It would be a one-way incoming line (battery, but no dial tone if you lifted the receiver when no call was present). The number plate on the phone would even identify it as 800-xxx-xxxx. Usually there was no dial or touch-tone pad on the phone; it looked like a manual instrument. Next question: is there such a thing as 'banded in-Wats' any longer, as far as pricing is concerned? Finally, is there such a thing as outgoing wats service any longer, or has the price for long distance calls in general been reduced to the point that no one cares about purchasing X hours of time per month as could be done in the old days? Judith or anyone else is welcome to answer. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 23:04:14 -0400 From: Jeffrey J. Carpenter Subject: Re: MCI WorldCom Works To Finish Data Network Repairs > The long distance phone company said it took a frame relay network > platform out of service Saturday for 24 hours in an effort to restore > stability to the system. Work on the platform, which disrupted service > for some Internet customers, was due to be completed Sunday. The question that needs to be asked is why did it take them ten days to back the changes out? Why didn't they do that soon after the problem started? Their handling of this outage seems to be much worse than AT&T's handling of their prior outage. Jeffrey J. Carpenter P.O. Box 471 Glenshaw, PA 15116-0471 Phone: +1 500 488-4800 Fax: +1 500 488-4802 Email: jjc@pobox.com Web: http://pobox.com/~jjc/ ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 23:51:31 -0500 From: User 6 Subject: Re: MCI Frame Outage > Update: MCI WorldCom CEO offers credits in wake of frame relay net > problem http://www.nwfusion.com/news/1999/0816mciupdate.html > Another MCI WorldCom frame victim: Network integration > Even as MCI WorldCom picks up the pieces of its recent frame relay > crisis, another key victim has emerged: the company's plan to > integrate all its networks. > http://www.nwfusion.com/news/1999/0817mciworldcom3.html > You'll have to register to read them, but it's free, at least. The bottom line is that they didn't adequately test this patch. Saying Lucent provided bogus code does not relieve them of the responsibility to test the software in the lab before rolling it out. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: It is good that they explained the problem, but as you point out, their first obligation is to their own customers, some of whom had some serious problems as a result of the outage. Never put something like on line without *extensive* testing, even if it has to be delayed. PAT] ------------------------------ From: sgordon@sbbs.net (Scott Gordon) Subject: Re:AC 500 - Follow Me Service Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 02:14:56 -0500 Organization: Deja.com - Share what you know. Learn what you don't. Might you be interested in an 800 number follow me? That we have to offer. Actually has follow me, faxing, and voice mail all built in. - Scott ** Current Promotions - Expire 8/31/99 Or While Supplies Last ** - Buy 1 Phone, Get 1 Free - Visit http://www.sprintdealer.com - Motorola StarTac W/FREE PAGER - $169.99 (After Rebates) - Samsung 2000 W/CLA & EarBud For $99.99 - Sanyo 3000 Dual Mode For $109.99 - Motorola Extra Express Pager W/1 Year Airtime For $99.99 ** Visit http://www.sbbs.com For Complete Details! ** [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well Scott, I printed your message not so much because all the readers and myself needed a little more spam today, but because of your opening line on Follow Me 800. Suppose you tell us about *your* version of the same service, and how it compares. Features, pricing, etc. Should I begin referring people to you instead? If so, why? And please, no commercial advertising with your response, just the facts on your Follow Me 800. Thanks. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Eric@AreaCode-Info.com (Eric Morson) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 10:34:33 -0400 Subject: Re: AC 500 - Follow Me Service I called Ernie Strong about the My Line Service. His company charges $8.50/month plus $0.25/minute for use. MCI Personal 800 service, if you are an MCI customer, is free of monthly fees, costs $0.30/minute, and has nearly all of the same "virtual office features" including voice mail, terminating number redirection, the ability to turn the number on and off, fax service, etc. Just thought I'd let you know! Eric B. Morson Co-Webmaster AreaCode-Info.com EMail: Eric@AreaCode-Info.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: If you are *not* a subscriber to MCI otherwise, how much is the charge or is it available at all? PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 20:55:09 -0700 From: Derek Balling Subject: Yahoo / Geocities Terms > I wonder how in the world Yahoo managed to pull that off on all the > Geocities people? As you may know, Yahoo made that demand on all the > netizens there, that they had to turn over all their intellectual > property rights, etc as a condition of being allowed to put up pages > at their crummy advertising-in-your-face-all-the-time site. No! No! No! That is what everyone who was incapable of actually READING the T&C believed. What Yahoo did was grant themselves a non-terminating, sublicensable right to use, disseminate, copy, and distribute the data people had uploaded to their web pages. Yahoo never claimed ownership of the property, nor did the original owners waive their own rights to the property away. All they did was grant Yahoo the right to use it indefinitely. The only substantial changes Yahoo made to its terms and conditions was that it limited it in scope, such that if a user drops the Geocities service and removes the data from Yahoo's server, Yahoo no longer has any rights to the data. It just took forever, it seemed, to get that worded properly and put into the T&C. Derek, who is not an official spokesperson for Yahoo, does not work in the legal department, and had no official part in the Y!/Geo merger, but who does REALLY hate seeing misinformation consistently reprinted as fact. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Let me ask you this Derek -- what right does Geocities/Yahoo have to grant themselves *any rights whatsoever* regards the work of someone else without that person's permission? I am not talking about *linking* to it; that is a right that everyone has; I am talking about copying it or disseminating it, and/or dis- tributing it. You might say that the right is given as a condition for being allowed to take a 'homestead' there; a homestead whose address on the system is becoming increasingly long and complex as the space fills up. You cannot just get a simple xxxx/xxxx type address there any longer it seems. I would think the 'homesteader' was essentially paying his own way there by virtue of (a) the advertising constantly splashed at him and his visitors that cannot be removed and (b) the requirement that the homesteader provide a link back to Geocities as a way of advertising for Geocities itself. Add to that perhaps (c), that if an occupant there is at all creative and presents a very nice, very well presented page, it adds to the overall attractiveness of the site. So now (a) and (b) are not enough of a trade-off for the 'free' space being given and you want distribution rights as well to the content? Its not like free web space on the net was in short supply you know ... I would like to hope that in the merger of the two, Geocities would begin to be a better place, and get lifted up to the higher standards it seems to me have always applied at Yahoo rather than Yahoo getting lured and seduced into operating in the way Geocities has done since its beginning. Yahoo has a number of very excellent services; its 'My Yahoo' news page and its news ticker are wonderful features (when they work right, snicker!) and I trust I won't see an advertising popup on my screen from them anytime soon. PAT] ------------------------------ From: cpilkingt@aol.com.trash (Christopher J. Pilkington) Date: 18 Aug 1999 21:00:18 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Subject: Re: GPS Time Roll-Over What was the designed way of doing an epoch rollover in the GPS? Or did DOD expect it to only run for 1024 weeks? Christopher J. Pilkington To reply, you know what to do. ------------------------------ From: cpilkingt@aol.com.trash (Christopher J. Pilkington) Date: 18 Aug 1999 21:00:18 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Subject: Re: VISA Authorizations Why is the practice of credit holds still used today? Most merchants have on-line or dial-up terminals. Why can't the transaction post at point-of-sale, similar to the NYCE, Cirrus, Pulse and Most ATM networks. The credit holds method wrecks havoc on users of the VISA "debit" or "check" cards. Imagine a consumer has $500 in their checking account. They make a purchase for $400 with their "check" card. They can then go to an ATM and overdraw their account, withdrawing $300. When their purcahse posts, their account will be -$200. Christopher J. Pilkington To reply, you know what to do. ------------------------------ From: cpilkingt@aol.com.trash (Christopher J. Pilkington) Date: 18 Aug 1999 21:42:55 GMT Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Subject: Re: Watch Out for Forever Paging Is my thinking correct that this company obtains your BTN from ANI? If so, how do they bill to someone calling from a PRI circuit that doesn't send ANI? I.e. the office only sends the NPA and NXX. Christopher J. Pilkington To reply, you know what to do. ------------------------------ From: wdag@my-deja.com (W.D.A. Geary) Subject: Re: Extending Voice Signal From a Channelized CSU/DSU Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 14:51:43 GMT Organization: Deja.com - Share what you know. Learn what you don't. _Exactly what_ is the PBX interface to the CSU/DSU? AFAIK, a "channelized" (split-off) signal is still T1 format (with the timeslots either rearranged or just the non-desired ones "idle") and a T1 extender should work just fine. In article , Gerald Latter wrote: > We are using a channelized CSU/DSU (Kentrox Datasmart 658) to separate > voice and data. The PBX which we want to utilize for voice is located > in a separate building 2000 feet from the location of our routers and > the CSU/DSU. It is our understanding that there is a signal > limitation of 600+ feet on running a copper wire between the DB15 > terminal connector on the CSU/DSU and the DB15 connector on the PBX. > We have fiber available (single mode and multi mode) between the > buildings, but I have not found anything that will allow us to utilize > the fiber to carry this signal (The only fiber loop converters I have > found work with full T1's only). W.D.A.Geary Wardenclyffe Microtechnology Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Share what you know. Learn what you don't. ------------------------------ From: jt5555@epix.net (Julian Thomas) Subject: Re: My Phone Makes False 911 Calls Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 15:20:51 GMT In , on 08/17/99 at 01:24 PM, gwheeler@vmguys.com (Gerry Wheeler) said: > I prefer the explanation about the cat. My in-laws have a speed dial set > for my number, which is 591-1xxx (x's are there to protect the innocent). > If you press the speed dial button while onhook, there is not sufficient > time to get dial tone before it starts dialing, so the first digit is > missed. And the next three digits are ... So, when the cat would step on > the phone while walking around the counter, guess who would show up at > the door. If there's a way to program a pause in the speed dial, then the cat would just get the in-laws and not the law. Julian Thomas: jt 5555 at epix dot net http://home.epix.net/~jt remove numerics for email Boardmember of POSSI.org - Phoenix OS/2 Society, Inc http://www.possi.org In the beautiful Finger Lakes Wine Country of New York State! All wiyht. Rho sritched mg kegtops awound? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: If he programmed a pause in there, he would reach the in-laws instead of the outlaws ... that was a joke, you can laugh now if you wish. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Joseph Wineburgh Reply-To: Subject: Extending Voice Signal From a Channelized CSU/DSU Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 08:50:09 -0400 FWIW The visual networks CSU's we use can go up to 654 feet, so it sounds like that spec is accurate. Is there any way to put the CSU/DSU in the vicinity of the PBX and backhaul the data to where you need it? Maybe have the router in the PBX room, then send the data layer back to where you need it. A lot of the routers/switches support fibre these days. One other thought -- you say the FLC's you've seen support 'full' T1's? That's basically what's riding on our DSX (DB15) ports between the VN CSU's and the PBX. We just use channels 13-24 or whatever. Maybe it's just the DSX/DB15 connector they don't support. #JOE ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #317 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Aug 19 17:40:06 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id RAA23163; Thu, 19 Aug 1999 17:40:06 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 17:40:06 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908192140.RAA23163@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #318 TELECOM Digest Thu, 19 Aug 99 17:40:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 318 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Re: Sprint PCS Customer Service Enhancements (Dave O'Shea) Re: Extending Voice Signal From a Channelized CSU/DSU (Ed M) Re: Dialing "Blocked" US 1-800, 888, 877 Numbers from Canada (K Lightfoot) Re: Dialing "Blocked" US 1-800, 888, 877 Numbers from Canada (Robert) Re: Dialing "Blocked" US 1-800, 888, 877 Numbers from Canada (L. Raphael) Re: Dialing "Blocked" US 1-800, 888, 877 Numbers from Canada (Steve Winter) Toll-Free Service Physical/Logical Terminations (Mark J. Cuccia) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Art Kamlet) Re: Yahoo / Geocities Terms (Garrett Wollman) AT&T's Planned MediaOne Deal Poses Test For US Cable Policy (Monty Solomon) For Sale: FORCE 6U VME Sparc 2, 10 and 20 (John Bodo) Re: Last Laugh! (was Re: Deep Linking Proposal) (Geoff Dyer) Centurion - Upper Key Question (Keelan Lightfoot) Those Internet Bill Paying Services, Why? (Robert Casey) Error in AT+cmgs (citycom@cyberia.net.lb) Re: Dial Lights (was Re: Who Makes AT&T Phones Now) (Jeffrey Carpenter) Re: MCI Frame Outage (steven@primacomputer.com) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! 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Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Dave O'Shea Subject: Re: Sprint PCS Customer Service Enhancements Organization: snaip.net Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 18:00:00 GMT John Willkie wrote in message news:telecom19. 315.1@telecom-digest.org: > I am a Sprint PCS customer and have been for the better part of a > year. On several occaisons, I have neglected to be timely in paying > my bill and had the service suspended. Each time this happened, I > would spend several hours (each way) traveling on transit to the > nearest San Diego county Sprint PCS office. Upon paying the bill (in > cash) the service would be immediately restored. I'm a Sprint PCS customer too, and while I have an occasional gripe about coverage gaps or dropped calls, they've always been good about processing my payments, even when we got out of sync and were one month overdue, straightened out with a single call to clear up the payment history. I've also run several small businesses, and one of my major problems is *always* collections. Customers seem to feel there's nothing at all wrong with going 60 and 90 days past due. They always had time to call up and ask questions or make service requests, but never enough to get around to writing a check. Put yourself in Sprint's shoes: Your boss is three months behind in paying your salary. Do you smile and thank him for his gracious payment, or do you rip him a new one, sue for damages, then work for someone who's more responsible? > Last Friday (Aug 13) I repeated the process. When I got there, I was > informed that they were charging me $3.00 for the privilege of > receiving my payment. If I did not want to pay the three bucks, I > could use their "free" drop box, in which case I would not walk out > with a receipt. By a notice, this "feature" went into effect on > August 12, 1999, on orders of "Kansas City." I used the same method on my customers. 2% per month late fees, plus cancelling any "early payment" discounts. The customers who are mildly irresponsible paid up and kept on time afterwards. The deadbeats found someone else to sponge off. > The clerk explained that the manager was usually pretty good about > emptying out the box every twenty-four hours. Pretty kind of him, processing payments by hand instead of the batched system that they are supposed to be processed with. > I have never heard of an organization, particularly one with at least > partially regulated rates, charging for accepting cash, let alone > having the gall to call acceptance of funds a customer service. I think they're being polite and using a nice euphemism. Would you rather they tried honesty? > As it was, I did not pay enough that day to reactivate the service. > Several days later I made sufficient payment to reactivate the service > and was charged another $3.00 for the acceptance of my payment. The amount of time you seem to spend driving to and from Sprint's various offices would be free to lounge around if you'd stick a stamp on an envelope and just mail the thing in. > I was told by the clerk at the second office (much closer to home) > that my phone would be working in about four hours. When I mentioned > that previously the phone had always worked before I left the office > after paying cash, he told me that they had a new system that would > only activate the phone within four hours. "So the new system takes > longer to activate the phone?" He said that it was not his decision > to do things that way. When given a choice between servicing a customer who always pays on time, and another who never pays until put into collections, guess who takes priority? > I've been pretty busy (talking on the phone, among other activities) > for the past couple of days, but I plan to pursue this matter with > federal and state authorities and to review applicable sections of > federal and state statutory and case law. Go for it! The rest of us who are subsidizing those who are permanent delinquent accounts would just be thrilled at knowing that our usage fees are being used on such wonderful things such as this, rather than useless activities like increasing coverage areas or adding data features to PCS. > My gut feeling is that what Sprint PCS is doing with the fee is > unlawful and is a material change in the terms of my service > agreement. I told the clerk that I believe it to be a surrogate > "reconnect fee." You *might* want to read it again. If it's a standard agreement, you have promised to pay "reasonable and customary" collection costs, legal fees, and penalties for non-payment. Most companies really don't want to take those steps except for the absolute worst offenders. I think you should simply take your business to a more deserving company. ------------------------------ From: Ed M Subject: Re: Extending Voice Signal From a Channelized CSU/DSU Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 15:05:26 -0400 Organization: UUNET Assuming that you're using a drop and insert CSU/DSU that DB15 is a full T1 (even if you're only using it to pass a few of the channels on to the PBX.) One pair on it is the transmit and the other is the receive. I'm sure someone on this list can provide you with which pins are which. All you need to do is run the transmit and receive pairs to fiber line drivers which often have screw terminals. We've had good luck with these and I think they are the cheapest you'll find: http://www.tccomm.com/TC1620,TC1620R.htm Gerald Latter wrote: > We are using a channelized CSU/DSU (Kentrox Datasmart 658) to separate > voice and data. The PBX which we want to utilize for voice is located in > a separate building 2000 feet from the location of our routers and the > CSU/DSU. It is our understanding that there is a signal limitation of > 600+ feet on running a copper wire between the DB15 terminal connector > on the CSU/DSU and the DB15 connector on the PBX. > We have fiber available (single mode and multi mode) between the > buildings, but I have not found anything that will allow us to utilize > the fiber to carry this signal (The only fiber loop converters I have > found work with full T1's only). > Does anyone know of a way to extend this signal 2,000 feet preferably > over fiber (for lightning protection). ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 14:06:31 -0700 Subject: Re: Dialing "Blocked" US 1-800, 888, 877 Numbers From Canada From: Keelan Lightfoot > Does anyone know of a (legal) way to access such 1-800, 888, and 877 > "US only" toll free numbers from Canada? > Is there a free or fee based service which one can use to access a US > telephone network from within Canada and be able to dial such "blocked" > toll free numbers, as if they were being called from within the US? Dialing 1-880-xxx-xxxx instead of 1-800-xxx-xxxx works for 800 numbers. There is a charge, though, (For me -- a BC Tel customer -- I believe it was a 16 cent connection charge.) I have encountered the numbers to use for 888 and 877 before, but do not remember what they were. Try looking through back issues of the TELECOM Digest -- there was a thread (as I remember) about 800 numbers, and the 888 and 877 numbers were mentioned somewhere in there. Keelanm Lightfoot ------------------------------ From: Robert Subject: Re: Dialing "Blocked" US 1-800, 888, 877 Numbers From Canada Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 17:32:20 +0200 > Many US 1-800, 888, and 877 toll free numbers appear to be "blocked" > from being accessed from within Canada. > Does anyone know of a (legal) way to access such 1-800, 888, and 877 > "US only" toll free numbers from Canada? I live in Germany and use a "Call Back" service to access US-Based 800 numbers. You dial a normal phone number in the States and let it ring once or twice. You then hang up, and the number that you called calls you back since it is attended by an automated system. This computer then asks you which number you would like to dial. The service I use is called World Wide Telecom: http://www.wwtelecom.com You can travel all over the world and this service will always call back the correct number. It is very easy to use and is much cheaper than most international carriers (for normal numbers) and allows you access to numbers that would normally be blocked from you. Sincerely, Robert Horan zxmqm28@remove.this.to.mail.me.usa.net ------------------------------ From: raphael@lisa.cs.mcgill.ca (Louis Raphael) Subject: Re: Dialing "Blocked" US 1-800, 888, 877 Numbers from Canada Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 11:13:22 GMT Some of the long-distance companies (I forget which, but call around -- you'll probably get the most luck with the medium-size outfits / resellers) offer a service whereby you pay a fee per minute "to the border" and they allow you to call US 800 numbers. Totally legal, although not necessarily cheap. Louis ------------------------------ From: steve@sellcom.com (Steve Winter) Subject: Re: Dialing "Blocked" US 1-800, 888, 877 Numbers from Canada Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 04:32:36 GMT Organization: WWW.SELLCOM.COM Reply-To: steve@sellcom.com navage@interlog.com spake thusly and wrote: > Many US 1-800, 888, and 877 toll free numbers appear to be "blocked" > from being accessed from within Canada. It is not so much that they are "blocked" as that they are international calls and the per minute rate makes it forbiddingly expensive. You are talking international 800 rates here. Steve http://www.sellcom.com Cyclades Siemens EnGenius Zoom at discount prices. SSL Secure VISA/MC/AMEX Online ordering Listed at http://www.thepubliceye.com as SELLCOM New Brick Wall "non-MOV" surge protection ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 15:59:32 -0500 From: Mark J. Cuccia Subject: Toll-Free Service Physical/Logical Terminations In TELECOM Digest article "Dialing 'Blocked' US 1-800, 888, 877 Numbers from Canada", Judith (joppenheimer@icbtollfree.com) wrote: > Toll free numbers can be designated U.S. & Canada accessible, > U.S. only, or accessible by only one (or more) area code, > depending on the wishes (generally based on the marketing area) > of the subscriber. > However, these companies do have local numbers as well, without > which there'd be no 'ring-to' number to designate pointing the > toll free number to. and our moderator, PAT, replied with: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Judith, I am wondering if there > are any longer the type of 800 number which was on a dedicated > wire pair of its own with no 'ring to' number attached. Do you > recall the kind I mean? Years ago, you could go into an office > and see a phone that was the actual 800 line termination itself. > It would be a one-way incoming line (battery, but no dial tone > if you lifted the receiver when no call was present). The number > plate on the phone would even identify it as 800-xxx-xxxx. > Usually there was no dial or touch-tone pad on the phone; it > looked like a manual instrument. I don't know how many "old" 800 terminations might still exist these days, but I assume that a similar situation exists for some of the largest nationwide "call centers" with toll free numbers. Particularly if a particular 800/888/877 number can be answered in multiple locations depending on the time-of-day / day-of-week, and/or location of the calling party, and/or traffic volume within the long-distance carrier or volume of calls to that company - and all on the SAME toll-free number. It is possible that the 800/888/877 number is ultimately translated to one of several possible "geographic/POTS" numbers - the particular number translated to is determined to by the situations indicated above. But I assume that there are _STILL_ 800/888/877 numbers that do _NOT_ translate to "geographic/POTS" numbers but rather to "non-customer-dialable" routing-strings, probably with some 0XX or 1XX pseudo-NPA / pseudo-central-office codes (just like they did many years ago). Many times when calling an 800/888/877 number, the long-distance carrier handling that toll-free number inserts a voice-menu of touchtone choices _FOR_ the customer. Pressing a particular DTMF digit will then route the call to that particular department which may be in New York. Pressing a different digit could route the call to a different department which might be in Chicago. etc. The Long Distance carrier then completes the call using "internal" routing codes and _NOT_ geographic/POTS numbers of NPA-NXX-xxxx. Even the actual termination location of particular 800/888/877 numbers could be handled "directly" by the Long Distance carrier, right into the called customer's PBX or ACD, without ever seeing the local switching network of a Bell or Independent LEC (or for that matter, CLEC). Such situations existed back in the 1960's and 70's, and still exist today. If the physical termination of such toll-free numbers _never_ enter the distant-end LEC's _switching_ network (although _dedicated-lease-line_ copper/microwave/fiber/etc from a distant-end LEC might still be utilized), then there is no need for a "geographic/POTS" NPA-NXX-xxxx number from a LEC/CLEC in that called customer's location for the 800/888/877 number to "point" to. As for banded-WATS for "pricing" or rates, much of this appears to have disappeared. Most of the differences in rates for the called 800/888/877 customer is intra vs. inter state, US vs. Canada origination, etc. It might "appear" to be like the rate/price "banding" of the 1960's/70's/80's, but I don't think that there is much the old multiple differing price/rate bands _WITHIN_ the US or Canada anymore. On another matter regarding the original issues in this thread, NANPA and the INC had set aside 880, 881 and 882 for "caller-pays" on international calling to US/Canada based 800/888/877 numbers. I don't know exactly how widespread this has been implemented _between_different_ countries _within_ the NANP, nor how much works on calls to +1-800/888/877 from _outside_ the NANP, but the stated use of such "replace" codes is still "on the books". One from outside of the country who wishes to dial an 800 number would dial the call replacing the 800 with 880. For 888, replace it with 881. And for 877, replace it with 882. NANPA and the INC are supposed to be eventually "reclaiming" these "replace" codes for "international caller pays" (880, 881, 882) from such use, but there are objections to some of the reclaiming. Also, even if such codes do work in some cases/places, they might not necessarily work on calling each and every possible NANP-based 800/888/877 number, due to different situations of internal NANP routings/destinations/etc, such as the ones I'd mentioned earlier in this posting. MARK_J._CUCCIA__PHONE/WRITE/WIRE/CABLE:__HOME:__(USA)__Tel:_CHestnut-1-2497 WORK:__mcuccia@mailhost.tcs.tulane.edu|4710-Wright-Road|__(+1-504-241-2497) Tel:UNiversity-5-5954(+1-504-865-5954)|New-Orleans-28__|fwds-on-no-answr-to Fax:UNiversity-5-5917(+1-504-865-5917)|Louisiana(70128)|cellular/voicemail- ------------------------------ From: kamlet@infinet.com (Art Kamlet) Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: 19 Aug 1999 16:58:16 -0400 Organization: InfiNet Reply-To: kamlet@infinet.com In article , Tony Toews wrote: > msbrader@interlog.com (Mark Brader) wrote: >> However, in the late 1970s when I was at the University of Waterloo, >> Canada, someone there developed a language (I don't remember what it >> was for) *from* C and called it ... "Eh". And Eh was in turn followed >> by "Zed". > And of course one of the other humorous naming sequences is the > University of Waterloo creating a student version of Fortran named > Watfor. When they decided to improve on it they called it Watfiv. One of the languages I used was supposed to be an improvement on Algol 58 or one of its predecessors: MAD. (Michigan Algorithmic Decoder, but I suspect it was named first, and the acronym filled in later.) Instead of if ... then it used Whenever .... Otherwise abbreviated as W\R O\E It was Fortran-like but for reasons I can't remember now, I liked it much better than Fortran. It ran initially on an IBM 704, then a 709 and by the time I moved out of that area, it was moving to a really new, fast 7090. Any MAD folks left? Art Kamlet Columbus, Ohio kamlet@infinet.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Is that where {MAD Magazine} got its name also? What about MAD Cow Desease? LOL ... PAT] ------------------------------ From: wollman@lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman) Subject: Re: Yahoo / Geocities Terms Date: 19 Aug 1999 21:05:24 GMT Organization: MIT Laboratory for Computer Science In article , TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to Derek Balling : > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Let me ask you this Derek -- what right > does Geocities/Yahoo have to grant themselves *any rights whatsoever* > regards the work of someone else without that person's permission? They don't, and can't, grant themselves anything -- the person providing uploading the Web pages grants them permission. The agreement is a legal CYA which allows them to actually perform the service they are being asked to perform. (If the user does not grant permission to disseminate, then it makes no sense to upload it to a service whose sole purpose is to disseminate.) Garrett A. Wollman | O Siem / We are all family / O Siem / We're all the same wollman@lcs.mit.edu | O Siem / The fires of freedom Opinions not those of| Dance in the burning flame MIT, LCS, CRS, or NSA| - Susan Aglukark and Chad Irschick [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Obviously no one is going to object to whatever technical requirements are present regarding uploading and downloading of files, or moving them around from one server to another as needed. And it should go without saying that if someone puts a web page there they want it to be seen. Maybe they should have phrased things differently, and instead, talked about the processes involved and how they do it, and made it easier for their users to understand. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 23:33:53 -0400 From: Monty Solomon Subject: AT&T's Planned Mediaone Deal Poses Test for U.S. Cable Policy By STEPHEN LABATON WASHINGTON -- As two federal agencies review AT&T Corp.'s $58 billion bid to buy Mediaone Group, they face the central question of whether the combination is, in essence, too large to block. http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/financial/att-mediaone.html Coalition Opposes AT&T Deal By Shu Shin Luh Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, August 18, 1999; Page E3 A consumer coalition criticized AT&T Corp.'s proposed $58 billion acquisition of MediaOne Group Inc. yesterday, contending that the merger would give the number one long-distance company too much control over the cable and high-speed Internet markets. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/daily/aug99/consumer18.htm Published Wednesday, August 18, 1999, in the Miami Herald Consumer groups lambaste cable deal AT&T's MediaOne bid comes under fire From Herald Staff and Wire Reports WASHINGTON -- In a move that could have significant ramifications in South Florida, consumer groups are asking federal regulators to block AT&T's bid to buy MediaOne, saying the deal would give the company too much control over cable TV and high-speed cable Internet service. http://www.herald.com/content/today/business/docs/067731.htm ------------------------------ From: John Bodo Subject: For Sale: FORCE 6U VME Sparc 2, 10 and 20 Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 11:25:11 -0700 Organization: SBC Internet Services I have some more FORCE VME Sparc's for sale. I have one model 10 (Single processor, 64MB RAM) and one SPARC 20 (Dual processor, 512MB RAM). I also have an assortment of VME Chasis, Power PC and Sparc 2's. If you need 6U standard VME, drop me an email and I'll send over an inventory. John ------------------------------ From: gldyer-nospam@geocities.com (Geoff Dyer) Subject: Re: Last Laugh! (was Re: Deep Linking Proposal) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 14:37:08 GMT On Wed, 18 Aug 1999 07:32:47 GMT, Pat wrote: > wonder how in the world Yahoo managed to pull that off on all the > Geocities people? As you may know, Yahoo made that demand on all the > netizens there, that they had to turn over all their intellectual > property rights, etc as a condition of being allowed to put up pages > at their crummy advertising-in-your-face-all-the-time site. I am AFAIK, they backed off in quite a hurry. As I read the current Terms of Service, you have to grant them (non-exclusive) rights which are basically enough for them to serve (and mirror) the pages etc, and which last only as long as the pages are hosted there. (That last point could cause problems related to timing and implementation of removal, I suppose.) I get the impression they just didn't think through the wording until the backlash hit them. Geoff (to e-mail me, remove any instances of "-nospam" from my address) ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 23:42:39 -0700 Subject: Centurion - Upper Key Question From: Keelan Lightfoot I just bought an older rotary Centurion payphone (QSD-400A, I mentioned it in an earlier message -- Northern Telecom's ugly brown plastic block phone.) Anyway, I got two keys with this phone, but they are both for the lower lock (Coinage). My question is, are the upper locks (Electronics box) keyed the same for many Centurions? The lower lock (coinage) is different for each phone, I have heard, and the lower lock key does not work in the upper lock (The milled grooves running the length of the key are inverted.) Where could I get this lock unlocked? Would the telephone company that originally owned this phone be able to help me with this problem? Who makes the locks for these phones? Can I buy replacements? Also, what kind of signalling would a payphone such as this use to communicate with the CO? Thanks, Keelan Lightfoot ------------------------------ From: wa2ise@netcom.com (Robert Casey) Subject: Those Internet Bill Paying Services, Why? Date: 19 Aug 1999 04:56:27 GMT Organization: NETCOM / MindSpring Enterprises, Inc. I've been hearing radio commercials for internet web based bill paying services lately. Idea is to get rid of the hassle of writing checks and licking stamps. And that you can have this service take care of it for you. They email the fact you have this bill, and you authorize them to pay it. Maybe I don't get that many bills (3, the electric bill, phone bill, credit card bill, and rent check) per month, and it takes a few minutes at most to do them (I pay them when I get them, that way they don't get forgotten). And I don't have to entrust a service with open access to my money (checking account). And they must be making money at this somehow to pay for the commercials and etc. So, what's the point? I'm just a wrong number from the phone company! ------------------------------ From: citycom Subject: Error in AT+cmgs Organization: Ye 'Ol Disorganized NNTPCache groupie Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 19:36:02 GMT Hi all, I am using hyper terminal Win95 to send an sms message through a Nokia 2210. The problem is that the sms commands are returning error although the other commands like Dial command and Hang up call ... are working well. Can any one help me. Thank you. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 22:51:37 -0400 From: Jeffrey J. Carpenter Subject: Re: Dial Lights (was Re: Who the Heck Makes AT&T Phones Now?) > To my knowledge all the pushbutton Trimlines with the round keys on > the keypad had power supply powered a power supply. When they made > the "second generation" Trimline with the squared keys they were lit > by phone line powered LEDs. In addition to the LED version with square buttons, there was also a rotary version which used green LEDs. Jeffrey J. Carpenter P.O. Box 471 Glenshaw, PA 15116-0471 Phone: +1 500 488-4800 Fax: +1 500 488-4802 Email: jjc@pobox.com Web: http://pobox.com/~jjc/ ------------------------------ From: steven@primacomputer.com (Steven) Subject: Re: MCI Frame Outage Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 11:25:58 +0800 Organization: Prima Computer The people at MCI-Worldcom here in Hong Kong have told us that the problems we are experiencing are due to a broken undersea cable. Is their whole network going to hell or what? Steven >> I'm still looking for detailed information as to the cause of the >> major MCI outage this last week. I understand they are using >> (upgrading) to Ascend/Cascade platform for their frame network and >> that they have been quoted in the press saying that the software >> caused the outage. Anyone have any information as to the validity of >> this or any other detailed information of this problem. I'm wondering >> how this might affect a similar Ascend configuration as a potential >> buyer. ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #318 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Thu Aug 19 21:13:06 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id VAA01019; Thu, 19 Aug 1999 21:13:06 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 21:13:06 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908200113.VAA01019@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #319 TELECOM Digest Thu, 19 Aug 99 21:13:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 319 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson No Credit Cards After All (TELECOM Digest Editor) My Second Disappointment of the Day (TELECOM Digest Editor) MyLine Service Discontinued (M. D. Parker) Arizona's New Telemarketing Law (Philip Tait) Phone to Send and Recieve Email, Any Ideas? (anyone) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Coredump) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (The Bakers) Re: Dialing "Blocked" 800, 888, 877 Numbers (Bill Levant) Re: Dialing "Blocked" 800, 888, 877 Numbers (John McHarry) Re: Those Internet Bill Paying Services, Why? (John Stafford) Determining PIC (Dave Close) Re: Yahoo / Geocities Terms (Sean Donelan) Information Needed on United Vista Telecommunication (figue20@aol.com) Re: Escrow Service Protects Buyers and Sellers on Net (plasticbill) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the second oldest e-zine/ mailing list on the internet in any category! 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Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* In addition, a gift from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert has enabled me to replace some obsolete computer equipment and enter the 21st century sort of on schedule. His mail order telephone parts/supplies service based in the Chicago area has been widely recognized by Digest readers as a reliable and very inexpensive source of telecom-related equipment. Please request a free catalog today at http://www.sandman.com --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 19:31:12 EDT From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: No Credit Cards After All Well, it appears i-escrow.com is not quite up to the task ... at least at this point. Regretably, the fact that they are unwilling to handle what they term 'intangibles', i.e. web site membership fees, and similar information services, is not very well spelled out in the introductory material sent out by their partner beseen.com ... yes, it is stated -- way down deep in their terms of service -- that they will not do it, but none of the introductory material that I read said anything about it. After a few of you tested it out yesterday and today to see how it would work, i-escrow.com contacted me and said they would not handle the transactions; they are quite concerned about the rate of fraud on the net. With tangible goods, a specific delivery address and return receipt provides them with protection they find adequate; there is no delivery receipt or delivery address where information services or web-site 'memberships' are concerned. Although it was not actually stated in the two conversations I had with them, I also get the impression they are not that interested in very small accounts such as this site either. Obviously for them, a large sale of several hundred or several thousand dollars where a signed delivery receipt is available is going to be a lot more profitable than two or three 'sales' of twenty dollars each in a month's time where there is no signature on file. I cannot blame them really, and I do believe their service to the net is very useful assuming you actually have tangible merchandise to sell, and are not merely trading as I do, on my good looks, charm and intelligence. (You may laugh now, although I am not laughing ... ) If it takes no more work or effort (and possibly less) to process an escrow for a thousand dollars than one for twenty dollars, which would you take? The very small, almost non-existent profit on twenty dollar transactions, combined with the notorious amount of fraud on the net does not make an appealing combination. I was told they 'may be able to do it in a few months'; I don't plan to sit here holding my breath while my face turns blue waiting to see if it happens. For those of you who tested the system -- that is, placed an 'order', got it set up in the i-escrow.com system and then cancelled it to see if they were good on their word and how it would work, I hope you found it to work as I said it would. I do think it is a reputable service, being bonded, licensed and supervised by the state of California and something that will benefit the buyers and sellers of the net. Well, so much for my bright idea of the week; I am sorry it did not work out and apologize to those of you who were intending to use it. Look Smart/beseen.com did not leave me looking very smart this time. PAT ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 19:41:30 EDT From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: My Second Disappointment of the Day Now comes word that the MyLine people are going out of business. All existing accounts, including my own, are killed as of September 1. I have to wonder what is wrong with those people? They have a perfectly fine product which they have refused to market with any degree of effort since it was first started. I know it is going to be a real pain for me to find something that works as well for the same money. Maybe that guy who spammed me yesterday with all the stuff for sale who said he also offers follow-me style 800 numbers will answer as I invited him to do so he can explain his plan. PAT ------------------------------ From: mdpc@netcom.com (M. D. Parker) Subject: MyLine Service Discontinued Date: 19 Aug 1999 23:02:26 GMT Organization: NETCOM / MindSpring Enterprises, Inc. FYI... I called Ernie Strong and he related that the MyLine service is being sold to the original developers. During this ownership transfer neither Call America nor the new owners are taking orders for new service. From what I understand the official transfer date is 1 September 1999 ... but taking new orders will follow that date by some period. Mike mdpc@netcom.com > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Instead of 500 Follow Me as such you > may want to look into something like Call America's 'My Line' service > which does the same things on a toll free 800 number. The 'My Line' > service is identical in all respects to the old 500 service, but it > is greatly enhanced with voicemail, immediate re-routing of your 800 > number to wherever you want it to ring, the ability to use it for > outgoing calls without a calling card/payphone surcharge added, etc. > They are located in San Luis Obispo, CA. You can contact GST/Call > America at 800-541-6316 and speak with Ernie Strong. I have used > them for several years with complete satisfaction. PAT] [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: It is not a question of 'taking any new orders'; the entire thing is being shut down according to the voicemail I got today from someone at their office. As of September 1 it is dead. I certainly am pleased with the two week notice I got. This really is not a surprise. They've made little or no effort to market it for quite a long time, despite what a good service it is. I don't know right now where I will get the same kind of service. I may not even bother with it any longer to be honest. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Philip Tait Subject: Arizona's New Telemarketing Law Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 14:19:33 -0700 Organization: AlliedSignal Engines & Systems - Phoenix, AZ Good news from telemarketing sufferers in Az: http://www.ag.state.az.us/pr/081799.html (Phoenix, AZ) - Secretary of State Betsey Bayless and Attorney General Janet Napolitano today announced that a new State law, SB 1326, passed by the Legislature and signed into law by Governor Jane Hull this year, will help pprotect consumers from unwanted telemarketing calls. Their joint effort to educate the public about the law, which took effect August 6, includes a new brochure, phone cards for consumers to place by their telephones and television public service announcements. The law mandates that most telephone sellers register with the Secretary of State's Office. Registration forms are available on the Secretary of State's website at www.sosaz.com. Consumers may now search for telephone solicitors' registration online. Telemarketers who qualify to file a limited registration under the new law may for the first time register online. The information will immediately be available to the public on the website. Arizona's "do not call" statute is similar to a federal law requiring most telephone sellers to maintain a "do not call" list. Consumers can have their names placed on individual companies' lists by simply telling telephone salespeople that they do not want to be called. In addition, the law prohibits sellers from: intentionally dialing cellular phones or pagers; using automated random dialing to access unlisted or unpublished telephone numbers; using call blocking; dialing telephone numbers with prerecorded messages without the consumer's prior consent. Violators could face civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation. Information on telemarketing is available by calling the Attorney General's Office at (602) 542-5763 or 1-800-352-8431 and on the Secretary of State's Office website. Information on individual companies is available from the Better Business Bureau at (602) 264-1721. Philip J. Tait.....AlliedSignal Engines, Phoenix, Az.....pjt@phxase.allied.com ------------------------------ From: anyone@anywhere.com (anyone) Subject: Phone to Send and Recieve Email, Any Ideas? Date: 19 Aug 1999 15:46:43 PDT Organization: Concentric Internet Services I am looking for a regular POTS line phone that will enable me to send and recieve emails from the phone, without having to use a computer. I am willing to get an ISP for a mail account, but don't want to use a computer. I have seen the phone in "Hello Direct", but it only receives. I want to send as well. TIA ... jmg [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Dear JMG, whoever you are, was this such a controversial topic that you felt you had to send it anonymously to be published here? Anyone at anywhere, indeed ... how is anyone supposed to reply to you if they wish to do so, or don't you care if they do or not? PAT] ------------------------------ From: coredump@NOxSPAM.enteract.com (Coredump) Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 23:21:54 GMT Organization: Cores' Internet and Storm Door Company On 15 Aug 1999 01:13:19 -0400, kamlet@infinet.com (Art Kamlet) wrote: > In article , Charles Gray > wrote: >> Thus, the terminal block with four screws that was mounted on millions of >> residential baseboards was a "C block". What happened to "A blocks", >> and "B blocks" I will never know. > Not really related, but ... > We have all handled D batteries, and C batteries and many of us > even handled B cells once upon a time. And while there are AA and AAA > batteries, does anyone remember ever handling A batteries? Sure, they are/were about 8" tall and 2" dia. 1.5 Volts. They used to be used in rural telco subscriber equipment, for talk battery among other things. I don't think they're made any longer. John coredump@NOSPAM.enteract.com http://www.enteract.com/~coredump Lost and bewildered on the Information Superhighway [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: You can still get them in Radio Shack. They are also used to operate Western Union clocks. PAT] ------------------------------ From: The Bakers Subject: Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 20:58:00 -0400 Organization: AT&T WorldNet Services Art Kamlet wrote: > We have all handled D batteries, and C batteries and many of us > even handled B cells once upon a time. And while there are AA and AAA > batteries, does anyone remember ever handling A batteries? Yes, they were large dry cells used to power the filaments in battery operated vacuum tube radios. ------------------------------ From: Wlevant@aol.com (Bill Levant) Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 19:24:04 EDT Subject: Re : Dialing "Blocked" 800/888/877 Numbers > the type of 800 number which was on a dedicated wire pair of its own > with no 'ring to' number attached. Even back when 800 numbers worked like this, they had "plant test numbers" associated with them, that worked (for INCOMING calls) just like most 800 numbers work today. You could even get dial tone on them (at least where I worked, in NJ) but you couldn't dial anywhere ... not even operator ... everything went to an intercept. The outbound WATS trunks had numbers like 609-175-1111; I don't know if they had PTN's. Bill ------------------------------ From: mcharry@erols.com (John McHarry) Subject: Re: Dialing "Blocked" US 1-800, 888, 877 Numbers from Canada Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 00:41:27 GMT On Wed, 18 Aug 1999 22:40:00 -0400, Judith Oppenheimer wrote: > However, these companies do have local numbers as well, without which > there'd be no 'ring-to' number to designate pointing the toll free > number to. 800 numbers with significant volume are generally connected directly to the long distance carrier. They have no NANPA number. Of course the companies do, but those numbers don't generally go to the same places as the 800 numbers, which can have time of day and point of origin routing. Smaller volume 800 numbers tend to behave as you describe. > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Judith, I am wondering if there are > any longer the type of 800 number which was on a dedicated wire > pair of its own with no 'ring to' number attached. Do you recall > the kind I mean? Years ago, you could go into an office and see a > phone that was the actual 800 line termination itself. It would be > a one-way incoming line (battery, but no dial tone if you lifted > the receiver when no call was present). The number plate on the > phone would even identify it as 800-xxx-xxxx. Usually there was no > dial or touch-tone pad on the phone; it looked like a manual > instrument. Next question: is there such a thing as 'banded in-Wats' > any longer, as far as pricing is concerned? For significant volume, rates are pretty negotiable. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some sort of banded pricing in effect, but I am not aware of any. > Finally, is there such a thing as outgoing wats service any longer, > or has the price for long distance calls in general been reduced to > the point that no one cares about purchasing X hours of time per month > as could be done in the old days? Judith or anyone else is welcome to > answer. PAT] Again, for enough volume, everything is negotiable. I seem to recall that in Canada there is even an unmetered evening service for consumers. This is about the same as outwats. It would surprise me if nobody was offering businesses flat rate calling in the US for dedicated access. It isn't too hard to calculate how many minutes this amounts to. ------------------------------ From: John Stafford Subject: Re: Those Internet Bill Paying Services, Why? Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 20:21:32 -0400 Organization: Global Network Services - Remote Access Mail & News Services (To the writer who had three bills per month to pay): You're probably not the target market. I have a couple more bills than yourself (say seven/month phone, cable, electricity, water, rent, car insurance, credit card) which cost a minimum of $2.31 to process (stamp cost). While writing a check isn't hard by any means, they cost about 5 cents a piece (.35) and are a slight pain (a few minutes each to write check, find stamp, assemble envelope, and mail). Probably 45 minutes/month. I can cut that to 15 with online bill paying. A half hour of my time is probably worth a few dollars. Just input the amount and go (or not even that with the new bill receipt ones which will automatically pay). Now the cost would be around $5-8 for my level of usage depending on provider (I use statusfactory.com) so I am still spending a small amount for convenience. Also consider the float (up to $1500 for two weeks or more) I can easily get by having my payment go out on a date closer to the due date. Worth $1-2. Unfortunately, you could get the same effect by setting up direct withdrawal for all of your bills, which I can do (and actually have done) for every bill except for my credit card and rent. But this way it would all be integrated at one place and I wouldn't have to change my information (and give my information) at seven different merchants for electronic payment. So why do I do it? Because I travel out of the country a lot. I can set up my bills to be paid months in advance (or automatically upon receipt). And that is worth a heck of a lot more than $7/month. One missed payment on a credit card is $29 these days which pays for several months right there. And being evicted while gone would be unpleasant. My only other option is massive upfront payments which make people suspicious and lead to bad incentives on their part. Or make a large (and possibly dangerous) imposition on a friend or relative. Other people I know who use these services are people who have the money to pay their bills but are "bad" at doing it. While I find that somewhat sad (after all, its really not that hard), it's a luxury item. Really it's a small amount (restaurant meal for one person) to make something hated much easier. But with three checks/month that you're always home to process it'd be pretty dumb. John Robert Casey wrote in message news:telecom19. 318.14@telecom-digest.org: > I've been hearing radio commercials for internet web based bill paying > services lately. Idea is to get rid of the hassle of writing checks ------------------------------ From: dave@compata.com (Dave Close) Subject: Determining PIC Organization: Compata, Costa Mesa, California Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 23:00:47 GMT I know that I can call 700 554 4141 to determine the current PIC on most phone lines. However, I have PRI circuits provisioned for data access only. They have no audio. Is there some way to determine the PIC on such lines, other than calling the local carrier? Dave Close, Compata, Costa Mesa CA "Politics is the business of getting dave@compata.com, +1 714 434 7359 power and privilege without dhclose@alumni.caltech.edu possessing merit." - P. J. O'Rourke ------------------------------ From: sean@sdg.dra.com (Sean Donelan) Subject: Re: Yahoo / Geocities Terms Date: 19 Aug 99 16:28:14 CDT Organization: Data Research Associates, St. Louis MO > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Let me ask you this Derek -- what right > does Geocities/Yahoo have to grant themselves *any rights whatsoever* > regards the work of someone else without that person's permission? The basic theory is two parties can enter into any legal agreement they want. In consideration for Geocities service, you agree to license use of your web content to them. Two parties freely entering a contract. For example, by buying/using a major league baseball ticket and entering the stadium, you have indicated your agreement for Major League Baseball to broadcast use your image at the baseball park as a happy/drunk/ stupid fan essentially forever. If you don't want MLB to use your face, don't enter the ballpark. Pretty much the same thing goes for Geocities/Yahoo, if you don't want to license the use to them, don't put use their servers for your web pages. Obviously, there are caveats, and you should always consult a lawyer about your particular situation. In particular, what happens when Geocities/Yahoo unilaterally changes their agreement. Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I understand how legal agreements work, thank you. What I guess I do not understand is why anyone would want to go along with such a lame-brained, one-sided deal. Is there a shortage of sites where one can establish a web page these days? PAT] ------------------------------ From: FIGUE20@aol.com Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 18:34:30 EDT Subject: Information Needed on United Vista Telecommunication Do you have info or do you know the home page for United Vista Telecommunication? ------------------------------ From: plasticbill@my-deja.com Subject: Re: Escrow Service Protects Buyers and Sellers on Net Date: Thu, 19 Aug 1999 21:31:20 GMT Organization: Deja.com - Share what you know. Learn what you don't. Hey PAT, I went to iEscrow and checked it out but couldn't find the link. I tried again later and realized that the link to BuyIt was actually an ad. BuyIt is actually a joint service from Beseen and iEscrow. You can't sign up on the iEscrow site for the button -- you've actually should go straight to: http://buyit.beseen.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Thanks for the clarification on this, but it is all sort of a moot point from my point of view. PAT] ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #319 ****************************** From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Aug 20 03:40:20 1999 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id DAA14416; Fri, 20 Aug 1999 03:40:20 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 1999 03:40:20 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199908200740.DAA14416@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #320 TELECOM Digest Fri, 20 Aug 99 03:40:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 320 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Administrivia: Issues 317 and 318 (TELECOM Digest Editor) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Bruce F. Roberts) Re: Why Do 66 Blocks Have That Name? (Hud