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TELECOM Digest Mon, 13 Jun 2005 18:14:00 EDT Volume 24 : Issue 266 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Internet Boom Alters Political Process in Iran (Lisa Minter) Sony-Ericcson Unveils New Phone (Lisa Minter) Cellular Phone Spam - What is the Internet Coming to? (Lisa Minter) T-Mobile HotSpot Announces Network Expansion, Roaming (Monty Solomon) Acadamy Services Nuisance Calls 215-320-0424 (zortan@email.com) Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe (John Levine) Re: 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic? (John Levine) Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Lisa Hancock) Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the Internet. 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 are 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Lisa Minter <lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com> Subject: Internet Boom Alters Political Process in Iran Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 15:08:01 -0500 By Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY If Iran's revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, were alive today, he'd undoubtedly have his own Web site. All eight of those allowed to run for president by Iran's clerical establishment in elections this Friday have official Web sites as well as other sites run by supporters. Internet usage is growing faster in Iran than anywhere in the Muslim Middle East, according to a recent Stanford University study. Although the Internet has not altered the power structure of the government, it has transformed campaigning and laid the groundwork for political change, Iranians inside and outside of the country say. "We had our first revolution 100 years ago after the introduction of the telegraph; we got the Islamic revolution (in 1979) through the telephone and cassette tapes, and now we have the Internet," says Mohsen Sazegara, a regime official turned dissident who is organizing an Internet campaign for a referendum to replace Iran's Islamic constitution. "So you have to expect another change," says Sazegara, currently a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Personal freedom is a major issue in the presidential campaign, as are the economy and Iran's relative isolation from the West. "There's no talk of revolution or Islam. It's all about how to respond to the people's needs," says Hadi Semati, a political science professor at Tehran University and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington. Candidates often use the unofficial political sites "to spread rumors and trash other candidates," says Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian who introduced blogging in Farsi three years ago and returned to Tehran Sunday to report on the campaign for his weblog, www.hoder.com. Iranian newspapers print the information, citing the Web sites. "They are using this mix of media to influence the public. This is the first time in Iran," Derakhshan says. The Internet allows the campaigns to bypass far more restrictive state-run television and the limited number of newspapers. One example: Pictures of young people in stylish Western clothes carrying banners supporting Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who is a leading candidate, appeared on Web sites run by conservative opponents. The intention was to discredit Rafsanjani among devout voters, but the effect may have been the reverse, Derakhshan says, because of declining support for strict Islamic laws that have been in effect since the 1979 revolution. On Saturday, a story on a conservative Web site reported that Rafsanjani would do a live interview on CNN for which he had paid the network. CNN confirmed that an interview is planned, but spokeswoman Mara Gassmann denied that any money had changed hands. The object of the false claim: to show that Rafsanjani is beholden to the West. Rafsanjani, 70, a veteran of the revolution, is leading in the polls. But the gap is narrowing with Mustafa Moin, 54, a former minister of higher education who is appealing to President Mohammed Khatami's reformist supporters. The third-ranking candidate is Mohammed Bakr Qalibaf, 44, a former air force commander in the paramilitary Revolutionary Guards and national police chief. If no candidate wins 50% of the vote, there will be a runoff between the top two vote-getters. Because of the limited choice, many Iranians may boycott the vote. A campaign urging them to stay home is also being promoted on the Internet. And whoever is elected president must still defer to the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Internet explosion in late '90s Nearly 5 million of Iran's 69 million people were Internet users in 2003, according to the Geneva-based International Telecommunication Union. There may be as many as 100,000 blogs in the Farsi language, Derakhshan says. The Internet was introduced in Iran in 1992 at the Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics in Tehran. It remained an academic tool until 1997. Then the election of Khatami, a moderate cleric, as president led to a quick expansion. By 1999, there were 1,200 Internet cafes in Tehran, according to Benham Tabrizi and Lily Sarafan, an associate professor and graduate student, respectively, in management and engineering at Stanford University. They delivered a paper at Stanford's Hoover Institution last year that said the number of Internet users could be at 15 million by the end of 2005. "Three-fourths of Internet users are between the ages of 21 and 32, and 14% use the Internet 38 hours or more per week," Tabrizi and Sarafan wrote. "Iran's young population is more likely to turn to Google than Qom (Iran's main Shiite Muslim theological center) for the answers to their questions." The campaign has dominated the Internet in Iran, including thousands of weblogs, known as blogs. Derakhshan started the trend. A Web designer who wrote tech columns for Iranian newspapers, Derakhshan, 30, immigrated to Canada in 2000 after the hard-line Iranian judiciary closed his paper, Asr-e-Azadegan, along with other reform-minded publications. In 2002, he devised a way to use Farsi with free software and provided instructions on his site. Soon, Iranian writers shut out of the newspapers, young people looking for dates and others hungry for independent information moved into the blogosphere. Farsi is now the third most common language of blogs, according to Tabrizi and Sarafan, after English and French. Iranians reuniting over Web Unlike China, which has devised a way of blocking dissident sites, the Iranian government either does not have the means or has chosen not to filter out all political sites, Derakhshan says. Last fall, the government arrested a few dozen bloggers whose sites were overtly political. Most have been released. About a third of Farsi-language blogs originate in Iran and the rest in a sizable Iranian diaspora of about 3 million, 2 million in the USA, Derakhshan says. Among the most popular sites within Iran are Gooya.com, which originates in Belgium, and the Farsi service of the British Broadcasting Corp. Others include the weblogs of the reformist candidate Moin and Mohammed Abtahi, a former vice president. An encouraging aspect of the Internet boom, says Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford, is that it has reunited Iranians in Iran with those who fled the Islamic revolution, a dynamic that could dramatically accelerate democratic change. "We in the diaspora can seriously participate in Iranian politics as vibrantly as those inside," Milani says." "allowing democratic forces to keep in touch." "Those guys (in the Iranian leadership) don't know what has hit them yet," he says. Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. To read USA Today on line each day with no registration or login requirements, go to http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/othernews.html ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter <lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com> Subject: Sony Ericsson Unveils New Phones Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 15:04:16 -0500 Mobile phone group Sony Ericsson, a venture of Sony Corp and Ericsson, on Monday introduced five new phones that it hopes will boost its presence in the low and mid-segment market. The group, the world's fifth largest mobile phone maker, unveiled the W600, a version of its Walkman brand music phone aimed at North American consumers; the S600, aimed at the youth market; and a clamshell-shaped phone, the Z520. It also presented the J210, for those who want mainly simple functions like making calls and writing messages; and a new third-generation (3G) high-speed data phone, the K608i. "We are widening our range in the low cost and medium segment," Per Alksten, product market chief, told Reuters. The announcements were made on the same day that Sony Ericsson's biggest rival, Nokia, launched seven new phones, including a 3G phone and three other high-end camera phones. Sony Ericsson, which used to focus on advanced, more expensive models, has said that it wants to expand its low-end range to become a top-three player. The company did not reveal precise prices for the new phones but Alksten said the J210 is expected to cost less than 2,000 crowns ($362). Urban Gillstrom, president of the company's U.S. unit, said he expects the W600 digital music phone to go on sale in the fourth quarter for less than $300. Ohman analyst Helena Nordman-Knutson said she was positive about the launch of the new Sony Ericsson phones for expanding the market segments where the group was already present. "But I still expect them to release a basic telephone for under 50 euros," she added. She said Nokia sold a fifth of its phones in the first quarter of the year for less than that price. (Additional reporting by Sinead Carew in New York) ($1=5.525 Crown) Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new articles daily. ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter <lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com> Subject: Cellular Phone Spam Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 13:26:53 -0500 WesSalmon.com The personal ramblings of Wes Salmon What is the Internet coming to? What is the Internet coming to when I have to be more concerned with spam in my inbox than "l33t h4x0rs" or viruses bringing my system down? Case in point, last night before bed my phone beeps, I have an SMS waiting. This is odd in itself since I rarely get an SMS unless I'm at a trade show or other event where people are trying to catch up with me. I check the message, and low and behold ... it's spam, and not even well targeted spam since it's a message offering me a back-to-school loan. What made this one especially annoying is that SMS messages aren't free for the most part, I buy 'em in blocks and this SMS spam just directly cost me up to a dime! Sure a dime is chump change, but I'm a chump who doesn't like being advertised to at my own expense. To compound my frustration, this morning before venturing out into the unbelievably crazy morning rush hour here in Seattle, (5 miles in 30 minutes, but that's another story entirely) I check my newly created Hotmail account that I plan to use for IM'ing at my new job. Guess what, more spam. Already I'm a marketing target and the email address is not even 12 hours old. I guess I'm partly to blame for using my name as the email, but what kind of crazy, mixed up Internet world are we living in where we have to disguise our own names just so we can have an email account void of "See Britney Spears nude!!!" messages in our inbox? I can't even USE my old hotmail account (4+ years old) due to all the porn spam I get since I'm sure even the subject lines would get me fired. *sigh* Posted by: Kalel on July 9, 2002 10:36 AM you get 50 SMS for $5?! I get 100 per month with Cingular for $2.99 What service provider do you use for your phone? Posted by: Kalel on July 9, 2002 10:38 AM also with Cingular I could bump up my SMS messages to where I could get 250 per month for $5.99 or 500 for $9.99 Posted by: ronb on July 9, 2002 10:52 AM We pay 2 cents per, no minimum charge. Posted by: ronb on July 9, 2002 10:54 AM Sorry, that's on my wife's phone. Mine are no cost to receive, but don't tell your spammer friend. Posted by: ronb on July 9, 2002 11:19 AM But to comment on the main point here ... I had a similar situation when buying a new PC a year or so ago. Free MSN for a year at Best Buy. Picked a user name at the register. Get home, set up PC, log on and there is porn spam waiting for me. What's it coming to? I really think this is going to be the death of the Internet as we have known it. I've read plenty of ideas on how spam might be dealt with. Most of the ideas plain aren't going to work. Can't legislate something if you can't enforce it from overseas. Can't charge for email unless EVERYONE, including overseas, charges. Anything that might work is going to split us off onto a separated sub-internet or require significant maintainence on the part of the user. It's too bad, really. The only thing I can think of is if you use a private domain name, spammers will be less apt to find it. But that costs you extra and you make your email address that much harder for people to remember. As for SMS, the network is a lot more under control, and with fewer players. The providers will have to deal with it or people will churn. Posted by: Wes on July 9, 2002 11:55 AM Thanks for the comments guys, I'll have to check my bill to see what I'm currently paying for my SMS package. I'm with Cingular and when I signed up earlier this year, the deal included a $4.99 messaging package. It's possible I've been moved to a newer, cheaper SMS plan or that I'm still paying a premium because I haven't bothered to look. :) On another note, did anyone who is subscribed to get notifications when I post an article (sign up on the front page if you missed it) get two copies of the notification email? I got two myself and I want to make sure the system isn't doubling up for some reason. Posted by: Steve on July 9, 2002 12:48 PM Re: Spam. Don't feel bad. I work for IBM and one of the hot items on the company intranet is how to deal with spam. Apparently some wise person listed the entire company directory on the IBM website a few years ago, thinking it would facilitate communications between potential customers and IBMers. What it did is open the entire company e-mail system to spam. They're able to filter a lot, but employees still get the occasional porn or commercial spam. Some folks are getting overloaded by it ... Sigh... Posted by: PDA Gerbil on July 9, 2002 01:00 PM You guys PAY to recieve SMS????? Weird. Here is the UK it's sender pays - a much better system. You phone, you pay, you SMS, you pay, fair really. RE: 10 cents per SMS Looking at Cingular's messaging pricing here: http://www.cingular.com/beyond_voice/im_pricing it would seem I'm getting the short end of the stick if I'm still paying $5 for 50 messages. Reminds me of my good 'ol days with Sprint PCS (what am I talking about, I still have two phones with them. :( ) when you'd have to call in every few months to switch to the new, cheaper pricing plan to get more hours and goodies. The catch was every time you changed your plan, you committed to another year of service from that point forward. Sneaky dogs. I'll call Cingular and get a better SMS plan if I don't already have it, besides I need to get GPRS up and running on my phone pronto. Posted by: Michael Ducker on July 9, 2002 03:52 PM I get 500 SMS messages for $2.99 extra from VoiceStream. That's on top of the 50 that are included. Plus, receiving SMS on voicestream AFAIK is always free :) Posted by: scottmag on July 9, 2002 03:55 PM I don't want to open a can of worms here, but this is one area where the U.K. "caller/sender pays" system is far superior. Spam is absolutely destoying the Internet's "killer app" - email. I just read a great article on spam and email filtering in the latest issue of TidBITS. Check it out here: http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/TidBITS-637.html I highly recommend it. (TidBITS itself is mainly Mac-focused, but I highly recommend it as well.) Scott Posted by: Wes on July 9, 2002 06:29 PM RE #2: 10 cents per SMS Ok so I've figured it out after looking at my bill and Cingular's offerings. I pay $4 a month to use my minutes as data minutes, then $2.99 for wireless messaging (100 messages apparently), with every message over my allotment costing me 10 cents. I knew I had a dime per message in there somewhere, just in the wrong place. I've updated the story a little to reflect my confusion of my Cingular bill where even the itemizations are itemized. Now I see why I simply look at the total, and if it's near what I expected to pay, I pay it. I'm just the type of sheep .. err I mean consumer the phone companies love for this very reason. So to conclude, this spam cost me 3 cents since I haven't used up my 100 messages, unless of course I get 50 free additional messages with my internet package, bringing the total cost to 2 cents. :) Posted by: Shane on July 10, 2002 11:03 AM I fixed my SMS message problem with getting spam. I'm a Voicestream customer so SNS messaging is included, but it eats into my minutes. I got a spam message once, and what I did was call the number back that was listed in the message, and told the answering service that answered that if they continue to send me messages to my phone, that it costs me money. If they did not immediately stop sending me messages I would report them to the FCC and also to the Better Business Bureau for harassment. It worked like a charm, and I never got another message. As for the Hotmail account, I've learned that you can't use your real name or any version of it. What I've found to be the biggest contributor of spam to my Hotmail mailbox is the Hotmail service itself. I hate my AOL account, because it gets so much crap from other AOL members. I've started to just report any and all objectional pieces of e-mail to AOL. Posted by: RLBorg on July 11, 2002 07:29 AM Well, MS hotmail seems to be a hot bed of spam. I don't use my name on my hotmail, but constantly get the junk anyway. My guess is that MS allows companies to spam to pay for the service. I get far more spam their than I get in any of my other email ids. Posted by: Arminius on July 11, 2002 07:41 AM You use Sprint??? HAHAHA :P Posted by: nobody on July 15, 2002 09:14 AM Wes, What would you expect from Microsoft services? I mean really, Hotmail, MSN? MSFT is like a junky and needs massive amounts of green in it's veins. Income from SPAM is probably part of their business plan for those "services". I'll bet if you read the fine print you'll see that you gave them the rights to everything that goes thru their servers. So don't write or email any articles on those accounts that you want to copyright. Netscape or Yahoo will be better about this. After all, they've not been found guilty of illegal business practices. ================================ My thanks to Wes Salmon for allowing the use of this old thread (not that old, really) on cellphone spam via Cingular. Patrick just now told me he has gone for years with his cell phone and never gotten any spam through the email function; now in the past two weeks, two blasts of it, five or ten pieces at a time. Lisa ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 13:52:39 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> Subject: T-Mobile HotSpot Announces Network Expansion, Roaming Agreements BELLEVUE, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 13, 2005--T-Mobile HotSpot, the largest carrier grade, commercial Wi-Fi network in the United States, today announced continued wireless broadband leadership with strong customer growth and usage statistics, and new roaming relationships. Since the service launch in 2002, T-Mobile HotSpot has evolved to become an expansive wireless broadband network. T-Mobile HotSpot meets the needs of mobile professionals and wireless data hungry consumers, whether they're on-the-go in the United States or roaming while traveling abroad. These same customers are accessing the service more frequently, using the service for longer periods of time and are moving more data across the network. Customers typically now spend 64 minutes online per session, up from 45 minutes last year. This growth in time spent online demonstrates that T-Mobile HotSpot's premium branded locations are where people already go and want to spend their time -- in some cases these locations serve as their office away from the office. The Wi-Fi generation has embraced T-Mobile HotSpot as a category leader, and that is being further proven as T-Mobile HotSpot today serves more than 450,000 unique customers who have paid for T-Mobile HotSpot service in the past 90 days. This number is in addition to previously reported T-Mobile voice and data customers. - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49802170 ------------------------------ From: zortan@email.com Subject: Acadamy Services Nuisance Calls 215-320-0424 Date: 13 Jun 2005 13:10:55 -0700 This company has been calling and hanging up for over a month now. They are located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They apparently can not spell very well as the correct spelling is Academy. If anyone knows anything about this company please respond. ------------------------------ Date: 13 Jun 2005 18:34:17 -0000 From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> Subject: Re: Cell Phone Rental in Europe Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA > Their URL is http://www.cellhire.com/. Cellhire is perfectly legitimate, but why pay $99/mo to rent a phone that you could buy for under $50, with airtime at about $2/min? R's, John ------------------------------ Date: 13 Jun 2005 18:47:31 -0000 From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> Subject: Re: 'Phone Tapping' Modem Traffic ? Organization: I.E.C.C., Trumansburg NY USA >> How difficult is it for them to 'decode' my modem [to ISP] traffic ? On modern modems at 9600 bps and up it's fairly hard. The traffic in both directions uses the full bandwidth, and each end does echo cancellation, subtracting out a time-delayed copy of what it sent, to recover the other end's signal. If you're sniffing in the middle without a copy of what's been sent from either end, I suppose it's possible with a sufficiently sophisticated signal processor, but it's not something you could do by plugging in an off the shelf modem and tweaking settings like you could do at 1200 bps. R's, John ------------------------------ From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites Date: 13 Jun 2005 12:07:36 -0700 > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Lisa Hancock, I really do not care for > your attitude on this. If books are good (because they were very > time-consuming and costly to prepare and edit) and web pages are bad > (basically for the lack of the same reasons) then how do you explain > some of the total crap which has been published over the years, such > as the literature published by A. Hitler and others in Germany during > the 1920-30's and much also in America? I didn't say "all books are good and are web pages are bad". What I discussed was the conditions that tend to make books a more authoritative source than web pages. Certainly some very trashy books have been and continue to be published and distributed. But I dare say it is harder for one to find such trashy books in normal channels than it is for one to find trashy stuff on the Internet. Finding paper copies of hardcore material requires some effort and some material may not be available to children; but that stuff is freely available on the Internet. My concern is that there is a lot of garbage masquerading as fact on the Internet. The controls that exist on other printed matter do not exist and the unscrupulous take advtg of that. (For instance, I learned long ago that many sites pulled up by a search engine are actually porn sites loaded with common key words to trigger a hit.) People have put up health-information sites and claimed to be a doctor when after some careful reading it proved to be garbage. Sure some of the Internet garbage is merely inconvenient, not harmful. Like when someone recommended a particular restaurant and I went to it, only to find it had been closed for several years. The poster who recommended it 'thought' he had been there very recently but then maybe it was a few years after all. This was an honest error and of no great harm. But I know there are some computer users out there who are quite malicious, and some of them will go to considerable trouble to post seriously misleading advice or information just to be an SOB or satisfy their own immaturity. They thrive on the anonymity of the Internet. Presently, there is no real check or balance on such web pages. There are some posters whom I feel know nothing (and probably more than a few who feel that way about me.) > And although I am only a mere web publisher and could not begin to > meet the expenses required of having an editorial/fact-checking > staff, my attitude is that the _truth will eventually prevail_ and > any sort of ethical web publisher tries his best to make room for > _all sides_ of an issue to be aired. That's all well and good. There is certainly useful information to be found, and I hope I've contributed a bit of it from time to time. But there is no guarantee all posts include _all sides_ of an issue to begin with. Further, there is no guarantee that any one post is totally accurate. > What you have done is give a slap in the face to everyone who has > attempted to present some social issue or another using the web as > the media of choice because of its low cost and ease of use. Not > everyone can _afford_ the cost of fancy printing and binding; all > they want to do is present the facts as they know them to the > largest number of people possible. Many or most of us under those > circumstances do at least use a kind of peer-review policy. PAT] I most certainly did not give any "slap in the face". I merely pointed out the fact that not all web pages may contain reliable authoritative information, and I stand by that statement. Yes, there's not guarantee that a healthcare book from the library is 100% authoritative, but at least a published book has an audit trail of reviews where as a web page does not. Discussing social issues are more of a matter of opinion so there's less of an issue of facts being right or wrong. Often people agree on a fact but disagree beyond that. For example: it is a fact that long distance rates went down after AT&T divested. I say that was merely a continuation of technical improvements that had been going on all along. But others disagree and say it was due to competition forcing prices down. Who is right? But I will note I've seen web sites who claimed that before divesture "the phone company offered any telephone set you wanted as long as it was black", which we all know is nonsense. I've also seen newsgroups ruined because of one or two people constantly flood the group with nasty postings disagreeing and disrupting every discussion. I don't think the truth gets out in such cases. I think moderated groups -- with a reasonable moderation policy -- are better to get out the "truth", but then many complain of censorship. Is the person with the biggest bullhorn saying the truth? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That 'biggest bullhorn' effect has come close to happening even here. As you may have noticed, Lisa, some of our readers do not like to be contradicted. You respond to them with a 5 K-byte message; their more agressive response comes back with all of the previous message quoted and another 10 K-byte reply. If you respond to that, then they return with a full quote and another 20-25 K-byte response. The more the discussion continues, the 'louder' and 'longer' the blast on the bullhorn. They'd be content, I suspect, if the entire Digest overflowed with one loud, long blast on the bullhorn. And what is the truth? Often times, my only honest answer can be 'you tell me' ... And regards the 'slap on the face', here is what you _actually_ said in issue 265 earlier today: > While anyone can write a book and pay to publish it, getting it > distributed and purchased is another matter entirely. > There is a big difference between book publishing and Internet web > pages. Anyone can set up a web page at very modest cost that looks > authoritative and accurate but may be actually garbage or even a scam. > On the other hand, to get a book published and distributed takes a lot > of effort. Reputable book publishers make some effort to edit serious > non-fiction offerings (not including fad books such as diet books). > Books for libraries are reviewed and rated. It is by no means a > perfect system; but my point is that there is at least some editing > and selection process going on at various levels; on the Internet > there is none whatsoever. You've heard, I assume of 'vanity presses' or 'vanity publishers'; people who pay to have their books printed. One of the biggest of the 'vanity presses' is a company called Unity Press (?). They print anything and everything handed to them; of course you, the author, have to pay them a couple grand up front. _If_ they can sell your book, then fine; if they cannot sell it they ship you the several hundred copies which were printed, and _you_ try to sell them, along with all the footnotes on each page, and the preface and the addendum in the back, etc. Either in hard cover, cloth or paper-back; they don't care ... they print it as you requested. Some of us just regard the internet as the "poor man's vanity press system". As we 'Inform Ourselves to Death' (see the Digest #263, over last weekend), it has truly gotten to the point that information has no value any longer. But Lisa, some of us do _try_ at least. PAT] ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. 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