TELECOM Digest     Thu, 16 Jun 2005 23:33:00 EDT    Volume 24 : Issue 272

Inside This Issue:                             Editor: Patrick A. Townson

    Project Seeks to Bring Rural India Online (Telecom dailyLead from USTA)
    Send Text Message to a Russian Cell Phone (cronept)
    Broadvoice (Gary)
    XO Communications (Steven Lichter)
    Re: AOL Users Most Likely to Make Zombie of Your Computer (Scott Dorsey)
    Re: AOL Users Most Likely to Make Zombie of Your Computer (Sean Weintz)
    Re: Companies Subvert Search Results to Squelch Criticism (Lisa Hancock)
    Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites (Scott Dorsey)
    Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon (R Herber)
    Re: Email to Former AT&T Phones Now Cingular (Isaiah Beard)
    Re: Bell Divesture (was Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail) (Tim)
    Re: Bell Divesture (Fred Goldstein)

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               ===========================

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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, 16 Jun 2005 13:32:05 EDT
From: Telecom dailyLead from USTA <usta@dailylead.com>
Subject: Project Seeks to Bring Rural India Online


Telecom dailyLead from USTA
June 16, 2005
http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22399&l=2017006

		TODAY'S HEADLINES
	
NEWS OF THE DAY
* Project seeks to bring rural India online
BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH
* Motorola antes up in China
* Carnival Cruise lures business travelers with Wi-Fi
* AOL is "not for sale"
* Comcast close to deal for branded wireless services
USTA SPOTLIGHT 
* Telecom Crash Course -- The must-have book for telecom professionals
EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
* Akimbo hurt by bad reviews
REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE
* New York regulators reject petition to stop Verizon's FTTH rollout
* Will new rules require ISPs to track users?
* Virginia city taxes mobile phone users
* Airline passengers, workers against lifting cell phone ban

Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others.
http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22399&l=2017006

Legal and Privacy information at
http://www.dailylead.com/about/privacy_legal.jsp

SmartBrief, Inc.
1100 H ST NW, Suite 1000
Washington, DC 20005

------------------------------

From: cronept <placentia@gmail.com>
Subject: Send Text Message to a Russian Cell Phone
Date: 16 Jun 2005 13:56:06 -0700


Hi,

I have a friend who is in Russia. I am in the states. She is using a
GSM cell phone. I am wondering if I can send text message to her from
the Internet? I tried AIM but I do not know how to send to a cellphone
outside the US. Does anybody know any websites or any software can do
that? Thanks alot. I appciate it. 

Jim

------------------------------

From: Gary <sun365@gmail.com>
Subject: Broadvoice
Date: 16 Jun 2005 14:11:54 -0700


Before being lured by some good prices, you should check out
www.broadvoicesucks.com and read about their quality.

------------------------------

From: Steven Lichter <shlichter@diespammers.com>
Organization: I Kill Spammers, Inc.  (c) 2005 A Rot in Hell Co.
Subject: XO Communications
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 19:00:00 CDT


We had an outage today involving them and Verizon in San Bernardino,
California.  Anyone know anything about this.  The only thing I could get
out of them was that 3 DS3's were lost. I would think that there would
have been backups and they would have been able to reroute within a
few minutes.

The only good spammer is a dead one!!  Have you hunted one down today?
(c) 2005  I Kill Spammers, Inc.  A Rot in Hell Co.

------------------------------

From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey)
Subject: Re: AOL Users Most Likely to Make Zombie of Your Computer
Date: 16 Jun 2005 15:36:15 -0400
Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000)


> Pat wrote:

> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Ooops, I was thinking of humanoid
> type Zombies. In a movie on television the other night, "Village of
> the Undead", after some damn fool went and dug up a grave at the
> local cemetery, the Zombie thus resurrected went around the town
> creating more of his kind. He would touch and kill one person; that
> person became a Zombie.  Then the two Zombies created more of their
> kind the same way, finding new people, killing them, and bringing
> them back to life as new Zombies. After about an hour of this (one
> Zombie creates another Zombie, etc) eventually the few remaining
> actual living people in this village thought it prudent to call in
> the police, or some kind of militia to do in the bunch of them,
> which is how the movie ended. It was sort of like two old movies I
> saw, 'The Zombies of Mora Tau' and 'Abbott and Costello Meet the
> Zombie'. With humanoid zombies, first someone has to dig one up,
> then that one goes around reproducing his own kind from other
> people.  I guess computers don't have to do it that way. PAT]

No, computers for the most part do it like Bela Lugosi in WHITE
ZOMBIE, in which the Zombi Master administers zombification fluid to
corpses or living people in order to bring them under his power.
White Zombie is one of the first of the zombie films and by far the
best.

scott

"C'est un Nagra.  C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

------------------------------

From: T. Sean Weintz <strap@hanh-ct.org>
Subject: Re: AOL Users Most Likely to Make Zombie of Your Computer
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 17:17:30 -0400
Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com


TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to T. Sean Weintz:

> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Ooops, I was thinking of humanoid
> type Zombies. In a movie on television the other night, "Village of
> the Undead", after some damn fool went and dug up a grave at the
> local cemetery, the Zombie thus resurrected went around the town
> creating more of his kind. He would touch and kill one person; that
> person became a Zombie.  Then the two Zombies created more of their
> kind the same way, finding new people, killing them, and bringing
> them back to life as new Zombies. After about an hour of this (one
> Zombie creates another Zombie, etc) eventually the few remaining
> actual living people in this village thought it prudent to call in
> the police, or some kind of militia to do in the bunch of them,
> which is how the movie ended. It was sort of like two old movies I
> saw, 'The Zombies of Mora Tau' and 'Abbott and Costello Meet the
> Zombie'. With humanoid zombies, first someone has to dig one up,
> then that one goes around reproducing his own kind from other
> people.  I guess computers don't have to do it that way. PAT]

Yeah. Movie zombies do work that way.  I'm afraid I don't know any of
those movies. But 'Night of the Living Dead' illustrates the same
concept.

However not all humanoid zombies work that way -- traditional African
and Haitian voodoo folklore zombies (a tradition predating the
existence of movies) are created one at a time by voodoo priest or
"Bokor". These zombies are the supposedly used as slaves by the
bokor. They can't themselves make others into zombies -- in fact they
are completely under the control of the bokor, and do his/her bidding
only.

That is the type of zombie I think whomever coined the phrase for 
computer use had in mind.


[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, in this movie on television, a
professor was giving a lecture on the Voodoo religion, and someone
raised the point of how there in that town, a person who had been
thought to be a Witch or a Zombie or something like that had been
sacrificed and put to death by the town authorities a couple hundred
years earlier. Nothing would do but this professor had to go dig up
the corpse and examine it to look for signs of Witchcraft or
Voodoo-ism or whatever. Well ... unearthing that corpse and its casket
is what got all the trouble started. It turned out to be a Zombie, who
was quite angry at having been made to wait two hundred years to get
dug up so he could get back to his business. Although many townfolk
were victimized (turned into Zombies themselves and left for 'undead'
to continue the rampage as more and more of them got created) in the
course of the movie, of course the Professor and his female research
assistant got away unscathed, as you would expect.  PAT]

------------------------------

From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com
Subject: Re: Companies Subvert Search Results to Squelch Criticism
Date: 16 Jun 2005 11:01:34 -0700


Steve Sobol wrote:

> Yeah, and there may be no laws against it, but if it's done on a large
> enough basis you can bet they'll get sued.

On what grounds?  AFAIK, there's no grounds to sue them.  There is
nothing illegal about a company touting its own horn.

I find this particular thread interesting given the responses to my
criticism of inaccuracy on the Internet.  It seems that this thread
supports my assertion.

------------------------------

From: kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey)
Subject: Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites
Date: 16 Jun 2005 14:03:03 -0400
Organization: Former users of Netcom shell (1989-2000)


Fred Atkinson  <fatkinson@mishmash.com> wrote:

> On 13 Jun 2005 12:07:36 -0700, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:

>> 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.

> Is it really harder [to find trashy books]?  Have you ever visited a
> pornographic book store?  If not, do you deny they are out there or
> what kind of books are distributed?  Have you ever seen 'The People
> versus Larry Flynt'?

As a person who, as an adolescent, was very interested in trashy
books, I can say that it is indeed much harder for the average high
school student to find pornography than it is to go to their local
library.

On the other hand, I can also say that as an adolescent it was easier
for me to find pornography than a coherent explanation of
electromagnetic fields and how antennas really work.  My school
library was lacking in both respects.

>> 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.

> And there's a lot of stuff published by hate groups and other
> extremists, too.  Do we give up freedom of speech to keep this stuff
> from being disseminated?

I don't think it's a freedom of speech issue at all, in part because
kids are a special case.  I think that restricting stuff published by
hate groups is a bad thing in general, but restricting it to
elementary school kids is not a bad thing.

There are a lot of materials that kids shouldn't have access to
without some outside assistance to show them what is valid and what
isn't, and therefore I think giving kids unrestricted network access
in school is a bad thing.

The thing is that the network _is_ a place of complete free speech,
where anyone can say anything without regard to truth, and this is a
bad thing for kids who haven't yet learned how to filter what is true
and what is not.  (On the other hand, with proper supervision, it can
be an excellent way for them to learn about how to filter).

You could make the argument to block the sites about the Cross-Field
Antenna, since the explanation of E-field behaviour on them is
incorrect too.  There are a lot of incorrect things on the net and
kids (and adults) need to learn to distinguish them.  But until they
have learned, I can understand the need to restrict things somewhat.

> And it goes back to not believing everything you read or hear.  Kids
> have to learn to balance it sometime.  Depriving them of that
> information robs them of the chance to learn to decide for themselves.

This is true, but they _need_ supervision to learn to decide this.
And sadly that is the thing that is most missing in school situations
today.

> When my mother taught English, she was called into the principal's
> office one day and asked if 'The Scarlet Letter' was actually on her
> approved reading list.  She said that it was.  The principal was
> shocked.  Then she asked him if he'd ever read 'The Scarlet Letter'.
> His reply was that he had not.  Hmm.  And he believed that kids
> shouldn't be reading it?  Based upon having never read it himself?

> And what about schools that took books like that off the library
> shelves?  What about Huckleberry Finn?  Tom Sawyer?  And the list goes
> on and on?  With Mark Twain's writing style as it was, it would be be
> considered quite racist by today's standards.  Do we censor it?  Of
> course not.

No, but we explain it when we teach it, and we don't just hand it out
to kids without explanation.  (Well, hopefully ... I have seen some 
English classes that weren't much better than that).

But then, I got in big trouble for refusing to read James Fenimore
Cooper in school, and for citing Twain as a source for my belief that
he was no good as a writer.

> Are we really protecting the kids when we deprive them of the
> opportunity to learn to decide for themselves?  Or are we going to
> have to protect them from it all their lives?  And if they don't
> learn, who's going to protect *their* kids?  And what about when we
> pass on and leave them to their own judgement?

You can't completely protect kids, and I agree that current society
goes quite out of control in an attempt to protect kids.  But unless
kids have supervision, they aren't going to learn to decide anyway.

> If the kids don't learn about radio theory, how could they learn to
> tell that this information is wrong?  These people obviously never
> had.  So depriving them of access to information about ham radio on
> QSL Net (most of which is written by people who have been examined by
> the FCC and found to have a reasonable understanding of radio theory)
> is a 'good thing'?  I don't think so.

Certainly depriving them of access to QSL.NET is a bad thing, and an
example of terrible misuse of filtering.

But depriving them of access to sites talking about the danger of
electromagnetic radiation damaging your psychic aura is probably a
reasonable use of filtering.

scott

"C'est un Nagra.  C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

------------------------------

Subject: Re: Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon
Organization: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (DoE, URA)
From: herber@ncdf107.fnal.gov (Randolph J. Herber)
Date: 16 Jun 2005 11:35:08 -0700


In article <telecom24.259.3@telecom-digest.org>,
Monty Solomon  <monty@roscom.com> wrote:

>      Verizon's Voice Mailboxes Now Give 'Shout Out' to Verizon
>      Wireless Phones When New Messages Arrive

> Home and Business Customers in N.Y.C. and New England Can Receive TXT
> Alerts on Their Verizon Wireless Phones

> NEW YORK, June 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Verizon home and business voice
> mailboxes now can alert customers on their Verizon Wireless phone that
> someone has left a message.

> Starting today, Verizon voice-messaging customers in New York City and
> New England can add a feature that sends a text message to any Verizon
> Wireless short text messaging-capable phone with an alert that a new
> voice message has been left on the customer's landline phone.

>      - http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=49739949

> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What is supposed to make that so
> exceptional? Cingular Wireless has always had an icon on the display
> screen indicating voice message waiting, and I have always had my
> phone set to make three chirps when that icon is turned on.   PAT]

I opine that what makes it exceptional is the tie between _Verizon
home and business voice mailboxes_ and _Verizon Wireless short text
messaging-capable phone[s]_.  This is not the same as the icon that a
cellphone may display after _its_ service receives a voice message.

Randolph J. Herber, herber@fnal.gov, +1 630 840 2966, CD/CDFTF PK-149F,
Mail Stop 318 Fermilab Kirk & Pine Rds., PO Box 500, Batavia, IL 60510-0500,
USA.  (Speaking for myself and not for US, US DOE, FNAL nor URA.)  (Product,
trade, or service marks herein belong to their respective owners.)

------------------------------

From: Isaiah Beard <sacredpoet@sacredpoet.com>
Subject: Re: Email to Former AT&T Phones Now Cingular
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 15:45:44 -0400
Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com


Joseph wrote:

> Also, what works for all North American mobile numbers is
> 10digits@teleflip.com e.g. 3115552368@teleflip.com  

If you value your friendship or business relationship with the person
you are messaging, then you would probably want to avoid teleflip.
Neatly tucked into the recesses of their user agreement is a provision
which permits them to "send messages through the service to any and
all users" about "new or existing products or services to be offered
by Teleflip."  In other words, they receive the right SMSpam people.


E-mail fudged to thwart spammers.
Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply.

------------------------------

From: Tim@Backhome.org
Subject: Re: Bell Divesture (was Re: Schools Prohibit Personal E-mail Sites)
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 13:30:21 -0700
Organization: Cox Communications


> The reality is that the Bell System was continually improving its
> switchgear, transmission media, customer service, and subscriber
> equipment right up until divesture.  Long distance rates were falling.

The No. 1ESS was basically a No 5XBAR with stored program control
(SPC).  The real motivator was to cut labor cost and secondarily to be
able to market special calling features.

Not knocking that nice forward step in switching, but it was good for
Ma Bell first, and the customer could (would) ride along for whatever
benefits it gave to the subscribers.


[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have said more or less the same thing
for several years. Please recall that through the 1960's, fraud
against the telephone company had reached scandalous levels. Everyone, 
or nearly everyone 'who mattered' knew how 'the system' worked. No one
paid for anything from telco they could avoid. For example, consider
the old style 'calling cards' with the numbers and 'key letter'
combination. Calling cards _used to_ consist of the RAO (Regional
Accounting Office) code, ten digits (a/c plus phone number) and a
'key letter' (such as 'A' though 'J') . As their little secret, telco
took one of the ten digits [normally the fourth, fifth or sixth
digit] of the phone number, and tied it into the 'key letter'. For
example, if the fifth digit in your phone number was a '7' then the
key letter for that year was 'B'. Bell would announce in internal
memos each year what (positioned) digit would be used, and what letter
would be associated. No one was supposed to know how it worked,
except for telephone operators, so that if you said to the operator
that you wanted to make a calling card call she could at least tell if
you got the logistics correct (by the key letter and number thing)
even if you were full of malarkey about the number to be charged,
which she could _not_ tell if you were using a pay station. Illinois
Bell wrote off _millions of dollars_ in calling card fraud each
year, as did New York Telephone.

Things had gotten to be so bad that not only did people rip off phone
calls like crazy (most phreaks never paid for phone calls) but far too
many people otherwise were 'too smart for their own good' in Bell
System's opinion on things such as how calls were traced as needed. A
phreak once said to me, "pay no attention to all that stuff in the
movies where someone calls the operator and says 'trace that call I
just recieved'; I can tell you that _if_ an _attempt_ is made to trace
the call, they will send some guy back to the frames, he is going to
look and look and look and look some more then he will discover the
origin of the call is some other central office so he has to call over
there, and someone there has to go in the frames and look and look and
look and look some more. And just about the time he thinks he has the
call traced, he hears a sickening crash as the tandem (call connection
circuitry) collapses because the call was disconnected, and it was a
wasted effort. So if I am 'on a call' and some old bitch tells me she
is going to 'have the call traced' and get me in trouble I just her
'go ahead and do that' ... I figure I can chat with her for another
20-30 minutes at least before it gets to the point that it is going to
matter."

In Chicago, there was an 'elite society' of phreaks who always had
a meeting once a year in January: after first making solemn oaths to
_not_ abuse each other's personal calling cards, everyone laid their
calling card out on a table for everyone else to see. The idea was to
by process of elimination detirmine the formula for the key letters
and which positioned digit was chosen for that year. The more people
present, the wider variety of examples to use in seeing how it worked
for that year. Once they were reasonably certain how things would
work, they put in a couple of 'test calls', to verify their hypothesis
(this year it is the digit in the nth position, and the associated
letters are [etc]). 

Bell got hit so bad for a few years, they finally decided they had
to rebuild the entire phone system from the ground up, and the answer
to that was ESS. So as you stated, Bell did not develop ESS in order
to make a few dollars selling 'custom calling features' to users; ESS
was developed so the telephone company could regain control of a
network which was rapidly getting out of control. When Bell was able
to give users a free (or nearly free) ride on the new technology, 
they did so. They didn't develop 'caller ID' or 'call waiting' or
'three way calling' for _your_ benefit; everything Bell did was for
its own benefit first and foremost.   PAT]

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 22:26:57 -0400
From: Fred Goldstein <SeeSigForEmail@wn6.wn.net>
Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture 


At 6/14/2005 03:16 PM, Pat wrote:

> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Here is a question for the collected
> readership: _If_ Bell had not gotten divested, and was still in
> charge of most everything relating to telecommunications, what would
> the internet be like today?  Would it all be run by 'the telephone
> company'? Would we be getting all our attachments and peripherals from
> the telephone company? I suggest that might be the case. What do the
> rest of you think?  PAT]

This is an interesting question, and like any "what if", one can only
speculate.  Here's my take.

Divestiture was one stage in the evolution of the PSTN.  It was AT&T's
choice, since they were being sued to divest themselves of WECo (now
Lucent), and chose to give up the BOCs instead.  Vertical integration
was causing all sorts of problems, like slow progress, accounting
questions, and cross-subsidization of competitive goods by
monopoly-BOC goods.  If the BOCs hadn't been spun off, would WECo have
been?  It took over a decade before AT&T figured out on their own that
it should be.

Terminal equipment competition (Carterfone) was firmly in place before
Divestiture.  So was Computer II, which deregulated and detariffed
terminal equipment.  That latter decision, which took effect in 1983
after Divestiture was announced (and thus was often confused with it),
was arguably more important for the future Internet!  Besides its
impact on equipment, it also drew a bright line between BOC regulated
common carrier activities and (non-BOC-owned) "information" services.
Divestiture changed who owned the BOCs, and did a lot for the
independent long distance industry by keeping the RBOCs out for a
while, but it alone wasn't nearly as important as people make it out
to be.

Here's my core thesis: Major regulatory changes tend to lag, rather
than lead, technical changes.  Regulation changes when old regimes
cause too much friction.  Carterfone came long after it was due.  Long
distance competition came when it was obviously practical.  Local
competition (TA96) came about because it was long overdue; the old
monopoly system was not working.  Yes, the RBOCs are now taking
advantage of political clout to kill off many competitors, but that
doesn't mean that de jure monopolies are the right way.

So there are multiple scenarios we could be talking about.  No
Carterfone?  Perish the thought.  Monopolies in LD transmission?  That
would have held up the price of data transmission, slowing down all
sorts of datacomm.  Ma Bell viewed leased lines, so necessary for
data, as a substitute for profitable long distance minutes of use, so
they overpriced them.  The RBOCs still do the same thing with their
Special Access tariffs!

Now the Internet happened to some extent independent of the phone
companies.  Had AT&T owned essentially *all* transmission, as it did
in 1970, it could have held the price so high that the Internet could
only be afforded by Uncle Sam and big corporations.  A low-bandwidth
BBS/Usenet culture might have persisted, though.

Let's say digital leased line rates were, instead, regulated at
cost-based levels.  Thanks to fiber optics, which would have been
gradually installed (more slowly than they were), the Internet would
have had its backbone bandwidth.  Divestiture did not technically lead
to the Access Charge system that replaced Separations (the FCC's
earlier MTS and WATS Orders did), but I doubt AT&T would have had the
balls to claim that ISP-bound calls were all Long Distance, as the
RBOCs tried in their 1987 Modem Tax escapade.

But without local competition in 1996, and with the Internet going
public when it did in 1992, I suggest that the BOC networks would have
collapsed in 1996!  The RBOC networks came within months of doing so.
Dial-up Internet traffic was exploding.  Bell System culture bought
switches on a 5-year planning schedule, so they could not react
quickly.  CLECs were authorized in February, 1996, and by the end of
the year they were carrying substantial dial-up ISP traffic.  Remember
"America On Hold"?  AOL did not use CLECs in 1996, and the RBOCs could
not provide circuits fast enough (I know; I was working on AOLnet at
the time).  Other ISPs did, and that prevented more RBOC switches from
melting down under the load.

All told I think Divestiture was a very good thing, and the pending
acquisitions of AT&T and MCI by RBOCs is a national tragedy which
should not be allowed, but will be.  America will, as a result, fall
even farther behind the rest of the world in most matters of telecom.


  Fred Goldstein    k1io  fgoldstein "at" ionary.com
  ionary Consulting       http://www.ionary.com/ 

------------------------------


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The MSTM degree draws on the expertise of the OSU's College
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End of TELECOM Digest V24 #272
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