From editor@telecom-digest.org Fri Feb 13 14:57:54 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p2/8.11.3) id i1DJvrH23521; Fri, 13 Feb 2004 14:57:54 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 14:57:54 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200402131957.i1DJvrH23521@massis.lcs.mit.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: massis.lcs.mit.edu: ptownson set sender to editor@telecom-digest.org using -f To: ptownson Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V23 #71 TELECOM Digest Fri, 13 Feb 2004 14:58:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 71 Inside This Issue: Happy Valentines Day, Guys! Intel Scientists Make World's Fastest Silicon Photonics Device (Solomon) FCC: 'Pure' VoIP Not a Phone Service (Monty Solomon) Lycos U.S. Changes ... Everything (Monty Solomon) Re: NetZero Commercials on Television (Phil Earnhardt) Re: NetZero Commercials on Television (Hudson Leighton) Re: The Virus Underground (Barry Margolin) Re: Hands Free Use With Motorola V60C Closed (Joseph) Re: Building a Voice-Driven Application (dnhunt) Advice Needed For Modem Disconnecting Problem (L. Hao) Re: Norvergence Still at it ... (Henry Cabot Henhouse III) Using Account Codes on a Mitel SX2000L Running LW3.0 (Chris) Blame General Electric for Blackout Says First Enercy (Daeron) Universal Email/SMS Cell Phone Gateway Beta Test (John Bartley) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk is definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 15:41:05 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Intel Scientists Create World's Fastest Silicon Photonics Device Silicon Could Bring High-bandwidth Fiber Optic Connections to PCs SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 12, 2004 -- Scientists from Intel Corporation have achieved a major advance using silicon manufacturing processes to create a novel "transistor-like" device that can encode data onto a light beam. The ability to build a fast photonic (fiber optic) modulator from standard silicon could lead to very low-cost, high-bandwidth fiber optic connections among PCs, servers and other electronic devices, and eventually inside computers as well. As reported in today's issue of the journal Nature, Intel researchers split a beam of light into two separate beams as it passed through silicon, and then used a novel transistor-like device to hit one beam with an electric charge, inducing a "phase shift." When the two beams of light are re-combined the phase shift induced between the two arms makes the light exiting the chip go on and off at over one gigahertz (one billion bits of data per second), 50 times faster than previously produced on silicon. This on and off pattern of light can be translated into the 1's and 0's needed to transmit data. http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20040212tech.htm ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 16:48:26 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: FCC: 'Pure' VoIP Not a Phone Service By Declan McCullagh and Ben Charny Staff Writer, CNET News.com Handing a partial victory to Internet phone providers, federal regulators said Thursday that voice communications flowing entirely over the Internet are not subject to traditional government regulations. The Federal Communications Commission, in a split decision, approved a request from voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider Pulver.com to be immune from the hefty stack of government rules, taxes and requirements that applied to 20th-century telephone networks. http://news.com.com/2100-7352-5158105.html ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 23:00:28 -0500 From: Monty Solomon Subject: Lycos U.S. Changes ... Everything By Rebecca Lieb In two dramatic announcements this week, Lycos U.S. said it will shed its portal strategy to become a vast social network; the company also inked a 5-year deal with 24/7 Real Media to outsource display ad sales, ad serving and analytics for its Internet properties. http://www.internetnews.com/IAR/article.php/3311971 Lycos to Drop Search Image, Goes Social Networking Lycos has decided to throw in the Search Engine/Portal towell and dip into the realm of Social Networking, according to sources. Instead of trying to play catchup with Google, MSN, and Yahoo while trying to carve out a unique identity for the Lycos.com site, they've decided to go the way of Friendster, Meetup.com and Google's Orkut (been invited yet? if not email me). http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=274 Lycos Restructures, Cuts U.S. Staff By Stefanie Olsen Staff Writer, CNET News.com Web portal Lycos laid off about 20 percent of its U.S. staff Wednesday, as it restructured its business. As previously reported, the company began advertising space for lease at its Mountain View, Calif., office last week, a sign of imminent cutbacks. Lycos, a division of Spanish Internet conglomerate Terra Lycos, will streamline its business to focus on subscription services, such as its personals site Matchmaker. The company, based in Waltham, Mass., will outsource U.S. advertising sales to 24/7 Real Media, it said. http://news.com.com/2100-1038-5157640.html ------------------------------ From: Phil Earnhardt Subject: Re: NetZero Commercials on Television Date: 12 Feb 2004 12:47:35 -0800 Organization: Newsguy News Service [http://newsguy.com] In article , TELECOM Digest Editor says: > Lately I have seen commercials on television for an ISP known as > 'NetZero'which invite me to take the 'Netzero Challenge'. According > to those people, you can 'surf the net at up to five times faster > than regular dialup', and they sell it for $14.95 per month. Does > anyone know what they are doing? I posted an article about this on 1/29 to the Telecom digest. NetZero, AOL, and Earthlink are all offering "premium" services where the client software is performing some combination of caching and data compression with the ISP to provide "high performance" service. An article comparing the services and prices is at: http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Aug/gee20030820021395.htm The article describes a benchmark AOL comissioned with VeriTest. The benchmark shows AOL with the fastest service. A copy of the report is available at: http://www.veritest.com/clients/reports/aol/aol9.pdf I really like the AOL advertisements that premiered in the Super Bowl. However, if I were to buy one of these services, I'd get NetZero's service. You could always try their regular service at $9.95 a month and then upgrade to see if the performance boost was worth it. --phil ------------------------------ From: hudsonl@skypoint.com (Hudson Leighton) Subject: Re: NetZero Commercials on Television Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 21:41:05 -0600 Organization: MRRP In article , Danny Burstein wrote: > In TELECOM Digest Editor > writes: >> Lately I have seen commercials on television for an ISP known as >> 'NetZero'which invite me to take the 'Netzero Challenge'. > a) it'll downgrade images on a web page, making > them much smaller (bytewise) and moving them > across faster. So that 250k jpg you're downloading > from NASA's Mars collection will be replaced by > a, perhaps, 50k one. Faster d/l, but lossy. > b) It also pre-caches all the secondary (and more ...) > pieces of a web page. For example, when you pull > up a story from your local newspaper's home page, > there may be five, ten, or more ... other places > it sends your browser so as to fill out the various > advertising spots. The wait time for all of these requests > is annoyingly long, and even more so if they have to get > done sequentially. And of course if you are using a pay site that charges you a per page fee you get to pay for pages you never visited. Same thing with a site that limits the number of pages you can access per day, viist the home page and bang you have used all your access for that day. -Hudson http://www.skypoint.com/~hudsonl ------------------------------ From: Barry Margolin Subject: Re: The Virus Underground Organization: Looking for work Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 16:51:54 -0500 In article , Geoffrey Welsh wrote: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Some anti-virus software -- I am > thinking specifically of Grisoft -- have a totally free version for > individual users, and their updates -- about every ten days to two > weeks are totally free also. How does that address the point that Geoffrey was making, which is that AV software won't recognize a virus that it hasn't specifically been taught about? I recall the early AV software that I used in MacOS worked very differently. Rather than looking for virus signatures in files, it intercepted system calls and recognized unusual behavior. For instance, most programs don't need to modify the "System" file (the MacOS operating system itself); if an unrecognized application tried to do this, the AV software would alert the user. He could then reject or permit the operation (perhaps he's downloading OS patches), and optionally add the program to a list of authorized applications. Unfortunately, this type of monitoring doesn't really work in the case of things like email worms. As applications have become more complex and integrated, it's common for many different applications to access the address book and/or send out mail, so these alerts would be much more common from normal activities. And there are also many more unsophisticated users, who wouldn't really know how to respond to the alerts. Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu Arlington, MA [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well I know that Grisoft addresses one of his points: You do not have subscribe (as in pay for) various modifications. Every day or three it goes off looking for any updates to what it does, comes back, installs them, etc . Also, regards system files, everytime on of my three computers is booted, Grisoft goes through those files looking also. It happens very fast, but when I boot up I see a message announcing the Grisoft copyright, and a string of file names dashes past on the screen as they examined. It may cause the bootup process an extra 10 seconds or so of time when doing it. It also examines everything coming in from the net, email and files. I also use Zone Alarm (another free software product) which is forever asking me for permission to allow some program or another to 'access the internet'. I have my copies of Zone Alarm instructed that its 'trusted zone' is 192.168.1.100 through 192.168.1.103 and that its 'trusted server' is 192.168.1.1, or in other words the Linksys router and the the four ports on the back of it. And of course the Windows 2000 AND Windows 98 machines are told to deny any/all requests they see coming through the Linksys asking for files or to install files, etc. Its not perfect by any means, but I do not leave any ports or sockets open unless absolutely required, and then just for the job at hand, and I adjust those as needed using the admin function on the Linksys firewall router. I use ssh and *ssh only* to connect here with massis. My general answer to guys who do not know how to respond to alerts (and that includes myself, sometimes) is to deny the request. PAT] ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: Hands Free Use With Motorola V60C Closed Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 17:39:31 -0800 Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.NONOcom On 10 Feb 2004 20:58:31 -0800, gsmolin@suscom.net (Greg Smolin) wrote: > Is it possible to use the Motorola V60C with the phone closed with a > hands free device -- or must the phone be open to talk? Are the send/end keys inside the flip? If yes, then it would appear that you have to keep the flip open to be able to talk. If no you probably don't need to have it open. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - remove NONO from .NONOcom to reply ------------------------------ Reply-To: From: dnhunt Subject: Re: Building a Voice-Driven Application Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 16:21:20 -0500 Organization: Mid-South Consulting Engineers, Inc. Alex, I was an advisor and later on the Board of Directors of a company that built a platform similar to what you want. It would recognize who you are and offer specific menus based on your interests, etc. Everything was voice activated using Nuance voice recognition software. We still have the application and servers working in our building with another start-up company that is using it for a different application. If you are looking for a "personal" type application, you probably shouldn't use Nuance. There are less expensive, but also less reliable, voice recognition software programs. The key to any of the systems is the database that is behind it. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing the platform and databases. With some work, it could probably be modified for other applications without reinventing the wheel. Let me know if you are interested in learning more because I only know enough about the technology to be dangerous. I would have to get you in touch with the people who designed it and have gone on to other opportunities. David N. Hunt, Executive Vice President - Business Development Mid-South Consulting Engineers, Inc. 3901 Rose Lake Drive, Charlotte, NC 28217 dnhunt@msceng.com, Tel: 704/357-0004, Fax: 704/357-0025 asmith42@hotmail.com (Alex Smith) inquired about Building a Voice-Driven Application on 7 Feb 2004 16:11:34: > Hello all, > I am venturing into the telephony world and even though I have briefly > dealt with CTI and H.323, I am still a newbie. I'd like to build an > application that would allow me to buy apples from several grocery > stores. (This is a hypothetical but representative example, please > bear with me). I want to place a telephone call to a number, enter my > pin, navigate through some voice prompts that will allow me to select > a particular grocery store, then select a variety of apples and enter > the amount of apples (weight) I'd like to buy using the phone keypad. > Finally I would also like to leave voice instructions for the grocer > on how to pack my apples (paper or plastic). The app would "look me > up" using my pin number and store the packing instructions as a > soundbyte along with the other order parameters in a database. > From a high-level architectural perspective, what hardware and > software components would make up my stack? For the sake of the > example, assume small volume (personal use). I am looking for > high-level architecture rather than product names even though Open > Source/GNU/etc suggestions are welcome. > My limited understanding tells me I need a CTI server. Do I need a > PBX? Other components? If I want to parse the voice instructions (i.e. > speech recognition) in order to extract "paper" or "plastic", how > doable is that? > Any URLs or books that go from slow to complex with architectural > examples are appreciated. > Alex Smith > Insight LLC ------------------------------ From: L. Hao Subject: Advice Needed For Modem Disconnecting Problem Organization: Comcast Online Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 08:09:56 GMT Hi, I am in the middle of integrating a third party vendor's modem server into our product, which functions as a modem server. The server modem's codec software runs in a TI C5409 DSP. And the server runs NT4.0. We are experiencing disconnecting problems. After we connect a USR V.90 client modem to the server modem and start downloading files from internet to the client machine, we would get disconnect shortly after the starting of the downloading. And we found the reason for the disconnect was in the server side. And it was due to a DTR CLEAR IOCTL call issued from user mode level to the modem driver. The driver then turns around and disconnect the server modem in the DSP. Can anyone with experience let me know how to approach this problem? Not an expert in the modem arena, I am at lost in tracing down this DTR CLR. What I want to do is to find out why the DTR CLEAR is issued and who issues it. I have a hunch that it was triggered by something that the modem sent, but our vendor insisted that they are doing everything right. So please help me! Thanks in advance. Lee ------------------------------ From: Henry Cabot Henhouse III Subject: Re: Norvergence Still at it ... Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 05:19:19 -0800 It's a shame that a company that claims to offer such a good service has to threaten to sue to try and keep the truth from being published. My experience with Norvergence has been limited to telling the annoying Norvergence telemarketing person to place us on the do not call list, having him argue with me, then him calling back repeatedly until I finally threatened to file a complaint with the local PD for harassment. The Los Angeles Times telemarketing drones are annoying but they respect the request to not be called ... Norvergence seems to be a hundred times worse and so much more annoying ... I assume that soon, they'll be goosestepping door to door at 6am and hanging out on street corners flogging off copies of the latest issue of "Watchgence" (or Norvergtower?) magazine. Just my humble opinion and a parody boot :) And don' sue me... I'm broke. TELECOM Digest Editor wrote in message news:telecom23.69.8@telecom-digest.org: > I *thought* Norvergence was going to leave me alone. Silly me for > thinking, I know ... Now just today, I got still another letter > from an attorney (new to me) named Federico Acosta, in Tustin, CA > who purports to represent David Rodriquez, the defendant in the > Norvergence vrs. Rodriquez case. Attorney Acosta, just like attorney > Kyle Kulzer of Norvergence, is making demand that derogatory > messages about Norvergence be removed from our web site. Despite the > fact that Michael D. Sullivan in Washington, DC is representing me > in the case, attorney Acosta chose to write directly to me. I do > not know if that was his own idea, or if perhaps Norvergence and > their attorney simply chose to cut Sullivan out of the picture and > put the pressure directly on me instead. *Once again* I told this > latest attorney NO! to his demands, and suggested he take furher > demands etc to Mr. Sullivan. I faxed the latest correspondence over > to Mike Sullivan tonight. > PAT ------------------------------ From: chris.ewen@abnamro.com (Chris) Subject: Using Account Codes on a Mitel SX2000L Running LW3.0 Date: 13 Feb 2004 08:01:07 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com I'm having problems implementing account codes and hoping someone out there has used them successfully on the SX2000L. I would like to use them to allow end users to make international calls. At the moment, we are manually entering in international numbers in ARS, then removing them after the user is done. I have attempted to setup account codes using Mitel's EDOC's with no success. Doing so required everyone that wanted to dial long-distance to enter in an account code. Any help or advice would be appreciated. ------------------------------ From: doug_mentohl@yahoo.co.uk (Daeron) Subject: Blame General Electric for BlackOut says FirstEnergy Date: 13 Feb 2004 10:42:37 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com Software Bug Contributed to Blackout Kevin Poulsen Feb 11 2004 A previously-unknown software flaw in a widely-deployed General Electric energy management system contributed to the devastating scope of the August 14th northeastern U.S. blackout, industry officials revealed this week. [Unknown as it didn't exist until it was needed as a scapegoat in order to distract from the real reason. Sounds to me like FirstEnergy trying to deflect blame onto GE.] The bug in GE Energy's XA/21 system was discovered in an intensive code audit conducted by GE and a contractor in the weeks following the blackout, according to FirstEnergy Corp., the Ohio utility where investigators say the blackout began. 'It had never evidenced itself until that day," said spokesman Ralph DiNicola. "This fault was so deeply embedded, it took them weeks of poring through millions of lines of code and data to find it.' Who is this contractor ? What code are they referring to here ? How were the tests conducted ? Did they include any other systems that were involved in the BlackOut ? How many of the SCADA units running on FirstEnergy were Microsoft Windows ? "FirstEnergy was aware the alarm system was broken, said company spokesman Ralph DiNicola. A functioning backup alarm at the Midwest Independent System Operator, a nonprofit power pool that oversees the region's electrical grid, was in place," DiNicola said. http://www.nipc.gov/dailyreports/2003/August/DHS_IAIP_Daily_2003-08-18.pdf The flaw was responsible for the alarm system failure at FirstEnergy's Akron, Ohio control center that was noted in a November report from the U.S.-Canadian task force investigating the blackout. The report blamed the then-unexplained computer failure for retarding FirstEnergy's ability to respond to events that lead to the outage, when quick action might have limited the blackout's spread. Power system operators rely heavily on audible and on-screen alarms, plus alarm logs, to reveal any significant changes in their system's conditions," the report noted. FirstEnergy's operators "were working under a significant handicap without these tools. However, they were in further jeopardy because they did not know that they were operating without alarms, so that they did not realize that system conditions were changing. TRANSCRIPTS of telephone conversations ... include explicit mention of some unknown 'computer problems' at FirstEnergy, the Ohio utility thought to have triggered the regional power failures, in those preceding hours. Early on, a controller at the Midwest Independent System Operator asked his counterpart at FirstEnergy why it hadn't reacted to a transmission line outage. The utility's technician replied: "We have no clue. Our computer is giving us fits, too. We don't even know the status of some of the stuff around us." "I called you guys like 10 minutes ago, and I thought you were figuring out what was going on there." "Well, we're trying to. Our computer is not happy. It's not cooperating either." The cascading blackout eventually cut off electricity to 50 million people in eight states and Canada. The blackout occurred at a time when the Blaster computer worm was wreaking havoc across the Internet. The timing triggered some speculation that the virus may have played a role in the outage -- a theory that gained credence after SecurityFocus reported that two systems at a nuclear power plant operated by FirstEnergy had been impacted by the Slammer worm earlier in the year. "On January 25, 2003, Davis-Besse nuclear power plant was infected with the MS SQL Server 2000 worm. The infection caused data overload in the site network, resulting in the inability of the computers to communicate with each other." http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/gen-comm/info-notices/2003/in200314.pdf Instead, the XA/21 bug was triggered by a unique combination of events and alarm conditions on the equipment it was monitoring, DiNicola said. When a backup server kicked-in, it also failed, unable to handle the accumulation of unprocessed events that had queued up since the main system's failure. Because the system failed silently, FirstEnergy's operators were unaware for over an hour that they were looking at outdated information on the status of their portion of the power grid, according to the November report. What were these 'unique combination of events and alarm conditions' ? This is Poulson in an earlier article about the earlier systems crash at a Nuclear Plant. "In that article, Poulsen offers a detailed description of how another Microsoft worm, Slammer, crashed two Unix-based control systems at the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in Northern Ohio also operated by FirstEnergy. Poulsen reported that FirstEnergy engineers had bridged the nuclear plant's control network with FirstEnergy's corporate network -- a practice that is increasingly common among utility companies, according to industry and security experts." http://www.newsforge.com/software/03/09/09/1526221.shtml?tid=78 What number of SCADA units on this system were running Windows ? What effect on the total monitoring system would a Windows SCADA system being contaminated with a virus. "The root cause of the outage was linked to .. trees .. FirstEnergy says .. its role in the outage is overstated in the interim report" [shuffle .. shuffle] from http://www.securityfocus.com/news/8016 Retrospective ass covering is all. I guess General Electric can't afford as much protection on Capitol Hill as MICROS~1. Get those cheque books out guys. It's election year!!! "Specifically, key personnel may not have been aware of the need to take preventive measures at critical times, because an alarm system was malfunctioning." "The existence of both internal and external links from SCADA systems to other systems introduced vulnerabilities." https://reports.energy.gov/BlackoutReport-5.pdf Reliable, Field-Proven & Adaptable The XA/21 transmission management system controls generation and the high voltage transmission network for optimal generation and transmission of power. One of the industry's most advanced EMS/SCADA systems, the XA/21 system combines advanced open systems architecture with full graphics, power system application, historical information storage and retrieval and relational database technology. With well over one million hours of online operation, the XA/21 system has improved utilities' bottom lines by helping to: Enhance operational efficiency http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/scada_software/en/xa21.htm note: 'Enhance operational efficiency'. That's management speak for it takes less people to operate. What is SCADA: http://www.hackfaq.org/data_networks-23.shtml quote from Bill Gates, Feb 14 1998 " ... It would help me immensely to have a survey showing that 90 percent of developers believe that putting the browser into the OS makes sense. ... Ideally, we would have a survey like this done before I appear at the Senate on March 3rd." http://www.internetwk.com/news0199/news011599-3.htm Bill Gates Feb 2004 ... what he might have said :-D 'It would help me immensely to have a survey showing that the blackout was caused by Unix ... Ideally, we would have a survey like this done before I appear at the RSA Conference in Feb' ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 10:45:44 PST From: John Bartley or K7AAY@ARRL.NET Subject: Universal Email-to-SMS Gateway for NANP Cellular Systems, Beta Test Email a short message to NpaNnxXxxx@teleflip.com and it appears as an SMS on user's cellphone. Npa = Area Code NnxXxxx = phone number One test today took five minutes to get a message through. Only 188 characters in test message received, including sending e-mail address and subject line. Remainder of message was discarded en route and did not arrive as a subsequent SMS message. Said to work for any cellphone on North Amewrican Numbering Plan (US, Canada, Carribbean, Guam). Again, it's Beta, but possibly useful. http://www.teleflip.com/teleflip/index.jsp John Bartley K7AAY http://celdata.cjb.net Handheld's Cellular Data FAQ "Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit." - P. J. O'Rourke ------------------------------ 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, Yahoo Groups, 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-copyrighted. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occasional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 50 Independence, KS 67301 Phone: 620-330-6774 Fax 1: 775-255-9970 Fax 2: 530-309-7234 Fax 3: 208-692-5145 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe: telecom-subscribe@telecom-digest.org Unsubscribe:telecom-unsubscribe@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: mirror.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 * * Judith Oppenheimer, President of ICB Inc. and purveyor of accurate * * 800 & Dot Com News, Intelligence, Analysis, and Consulting. * * http://ICBTollFree.com, http://1800TheExpert.com * * Views expressed herein should not be construed as representing * * views of Judith Oppenheimer or ICB Inc. * ************************************************************************* ICB Toll Free News. Contact information is not sold, rented or leased. One click a day feeds a person a meal. Go to http://www.thehungersite.com Copyright 2003 ICB, Inc. and TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. In addition, gifts from Mike Sandman, Chicago's Telecom Expert have 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 fifty 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. If you donate at least fifty dollars per year we will send you our two-CD set of the entire Telecom Archives; this is every word published in this Digest since our beginning in 1981. 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. End of TELECOM Digest V23 #71 *****************************