TELECOM Digest     Sat, 30 Jul 2005 17:22:00 EDT    Volume 24 : Issue 346

Inside This Issue:                             Editor: Patrick A. Townson

    Nextel False Advertising (TELECOM Digest Editor)
    Mergers do Not Equal Monopolies in Telecom World (Richard Wagner)
    Former CEO Faces Charges (Greg Farrell)
    E-911 Making Headway in VOIP (Wayne Rash)
    Hackers Hack Microsoft Program Validating 'Real' Software (AP News Wire)
    It's Not the Cell Phone - It's the Brain/Drivers Overloaded (M Solomon)
    BT Payphones (Andy)
    Re: Unauthorized Remote Access to Answering Machine (Choreboy)
    Re: Credit Reports, was Re: AT&T Customers Taken Over By Alltel (Sobol)
    Re: Last Laugh! Spammer, age 35, Meets "Moscow Rules" (Paul Coxwell)
    Last Laugh! Tax Solutions (Steven Lichter)

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See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details
and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest.  

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

Subject: Nextel False Advertising
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 16:36:55 EDT
From: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu (TELECOM Digest Editor)


A nephew of mine and his wife, living in Orlando, Florida were looking
for a good push-to-talk style cellular phone and they had seen the
advertisements for Nextel on various occassions and considered that
since _all incoming calls_ are always free and outgoing calls between
9 PM and about 7 AM are free they'd try Nextel, since the price was
otherwise okay. They got a phone for him, and one for his wife under
some special pricing plan.

As I have heard it, the key word at Nextel is 'worldwide'; good in any
city, any time. Am I mistaken on that?  No need for 'roaming', etc.
That's how they phrase it in the television ads they show here in our
town.

Well, both nephew and his wife were getting sort of tired of living in
the Walt Disney tourist trap of Orlando, and decided they would move
elsewhere, with their three year old daughter. They have to have money
coming in while they search elsewhere, so wife decided to stay at home
(she runs two apartment complexes in Orlando) while her husband (my
nephew) came here to Independence to look over the job market and
housing market. Then he would send for her and their child, or perhaps
return to get them and bring them here if he found a house they would
like, employment opportunities, etc. So far, so good ...  for a small
town of 8000 people in a rural area, employment and housing
opportunities are extraordinarly good (at least _I_ like it here).

They bought their Nextel phones about a month ago ... which worked
quite well in Orlando (the push to talk feature, other calls, etc).
The wife and husband had an understanding; if _she_ had any hassles
at all, all she had to do was push the button and tell him, and that
was the plan for when he came here to Independence, also. She pushes
to talk, if it is something he cannot handle by speaking to her, the
intent was he would return home _immediatly_. His itinerary was from
Orlando to Atlanta, then onward to Nashville, then to St. Louis,
over to Kansas City and then a downward 'dip' to Independence to
see 'Uncle Pat' where he was rather certain he would find _something_
employment wise and housing wise he liked if not earlier in the trip.

They did push-to-talk all the way from Orlando though Atlanta,
Nashville, St. Louis and Kansas City. He got out of Kansas City
heading south/southwest toward our town, and the phone went dead. He
got here yesterday (Friday) morning, used my house phone to check in
with his wife in Orlando who was beginning to get frantic. Not only
did 'push to talk' not work, but she tried dialing direct into his
number instead, and got nowhere with that except his voice mail. I
played with his phone, which had a big 'no service' message on the
LED; not even a digital clock message or anything else. Assuming the
tech support people would want all the details, I called his wife and
got _her_ phone number and ESN, etc before I called tech support.

I assumed it was just a question of maybe changing some parameters in
the phone to make it properly go into 'roaming mode' since his wife
had earlier called tech support and was told by them to have him
reccycle power to get service restored, etc. That did no good, so I
called tech support on 800-639-6111. I told them where we were at, and
that we do, of course, have cell towers all around here. In particular
Dobson cell towers serve Cingular Wireless, US Cingular, and (Dobson's
own) Cell One. So its not for a lack of coverage that we were getting
the 'no service' message. The tech punched in my zip code, and street
address, then came back and said 'no towers or service in your area'.

My next question was 'what about roaming?' If you do not have your own
cell tower, you must have access to someone else's tower in the area ...
(and Dobson came to mind). No, he said, Nextel does _not_ roam. Either
you get our service or you don't get service. 

How odd ... I told him I heard many commercials on television saying
Nextel was either (take your pick) 'Worldwide' or 'Nationwide' and
the last I heard Kansas was part of the world and part of the nation. 
His response was that to Nextel, the phrase 'x-wide' referred to
wherever they had towers, not elsewhere. About that same time there
came another Nextel commercial on _our_ television. Now don't you
think that is fraudulent to make those claims if they are not true?

I fixed up Justin with my old AT&T Free2Go phone with twenty or
thirty minutes of talk time, and put him on Yahoo Messenger with a
camera of mine so at least he and wife and their child can chat as
needed. I had thought about trying Nextel at one point, I am sure
glad I did not fall for that 'nationwide coverage' lie.  


Patrick Townson

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

From: Richard E. Wagner <app@telecom-digest.org>
Subject: Mergers do not Equal Monopolies in Telecom World
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 20:28:47 -0500


BY RICHARD E. WAGNER

Two major telecom mergers are now under way. SBC is seeking to
acquire AT&T, while Verizon is seeking to acquire MCI.

These proposed mergers have provoked a good deal of opposition, on the
ground that they would restore regional versions of the nationwide
monopoly AT&T possessed prior to its being broken up in 1984.

SBC and Verizon each hold more than 80 percent of the wire-based
connections in their regions. Facing a regional monopoly is no
different from facing a nationwide monopoly. In both cases, if you
want to place a call using a conventional land-line telephone, you
have no choice but to use the monopolists' wire.

Should we therefore oppose these mergers? No. Even if SBC and Verizon
were to hold 100 percent of the wire-based connections in their
regions after the mergers (which they wouldn't), they would hold
nothing resembling the old AT&T monopoly. Sweeping changes in the
telecom marketplace in the past 20 years make such a monopoly
impossible these days.

Prior to AT&T's breakup in 1984, if you wanted to speak with someone
without having to visit her, you could do so only over wire owned by
AT&T. That was a pretty strong monopoly position for a company to
hold, but it's no longer the case.

Various forms of wireless service have emerged to compete with
land-line service. The number of wireless connections now exceeds the
number of wire-based connections in the United States. The majority of
long-distance calls travel through air and not over wire. A full
one-third of local calls now travel over air as well.

The emergence of cable television is another technological development
that is changing the telecom marketplace. Thanks to billions of
dollars of private investment, cable wire is nearly as prevalent as
phone wire. Where cable began simply by offering better TV reception,
it now offers Internet access and a growing range of other video and
data services.

Cable companies generally outperformed phone companies in offering
high-speed Internet access. More recently, cable TV companies have
been offering phone service through the new VoIP (Voice over Internet
Protocol) technology.

So cable companies are becoming phone companies, thanks to the advance
of technology. At the same time, phone companies have found ways to
offer television programming over telephone lines. This summer, for
instance, Verizon has received permission to offer television service
in Herndon, Va.

The standard distinctions among phone, cable and computer companies
are crumbling away. Sprint, a traditional phone company; Motorola, a
traditional TV company, and Intel, a traditional computer company, are
engaged in a cooperative endeavor to pursue wireless technologies and
services. To which industry does this new hybrid belong?

The static notion of competition would have us think SBC and Verizon
are competing only against the likes of Qwest, Sprint and Level 3, all
traditional phone companies. While they are clearly doing this, they
also are competing against the likes of Comcast, Time Warner, Intel
and Microsoft.

Technology is revolutionizing the telecom landscape, and all kinds of
companies are competing to offer services that customers value.
Mergers allow companies to respond quickly to these rapidly changing
commercial opportunities created by new technologies.

In the preface to his epochal "General Theory of Employment, Interest
and Money" in 1936, British economist John Maynard Keynes lamented the
difficulty of "escaping from habitual modes of thought and
expression."  This difficulty is exhibited in spades when people refer
to telecom mergers as diminishing competition.

To the contrary, these mergers are signs of vigorous competition. 
Competition is fundamentally about seizing future commercial
opportunities. Much of the regulation advocated and passed in the name
of encouraging or protecting competition protects competitors
instead. Little surprise, then, that most of the complaints against
the telecom mergers have been filed by competitors to SBC and
Verizon. They realize the market would become more competitive, not
less, as a result of these mergers.

To claim these mergers would promote monopoly is a claim that could be
made only by someone who has been sleepwalking through the past 20
years. They need to wake up and see how the telecom landscape has
changed.

Richard E. Wagner is a professor of economics at George Mason
University, Fairfax, Va.

Copyright 2005 Asbury Park Press. This column represents his opinion
only and not that of TELECOM Digest.

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

From: Greg Farell <usatoday@telecom-digest.org> 
Subject: Former CEO of Qwest May Soon Face Charges
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 20:30:18 -0500


by Greg Farrell  USA Today

Federal prosecutors in Colorado have filed court papers that indicate
they could be close to bringing criminal charges against Joe Nacchio,
the hard-charging former CEO of Qwest.

In a motion filed late Wednesday in federal court in Denver, acting
U.S. Attorney William Leone asked a judge to stay a civil lawsuit that
the Securities and Exchange Commission filed earlier this year against
Nacchio and other former Qwest executives. The judge granted the
request.

The motion comes just two weeks after prosecutors secured a guilty
plea from Robin Szeliga, Qwest's former CFO. Szeliga pleaded guilty to
one count of illegal inside trading and agreed to cooperate with the
ongoing criminal investigation.

The most likely reason for the prosecutors' request, experts say, is
that Nacchio is in the U.S. attorney's crosshairs.

"The only time the Department of Justice asks for a stay is because it
is going down the road of returning an indictment," said Jacob
Frenkel, a former federal prosecutor now with Shulman Rogers.

Jack Coffee, an expert on securities law at Columbia University, says
prosecutors often use the cooperation of CFOs to prepare charges
against CEOs.

"If this follows standard operating procedure, she stands in relation
to Nacchio as Scott Sullivan stood to Bernie Ebbers," he said,
referring to WorldCom's former CFO and CEO.

Nacchio's attorney, Charles Stillman, and the U.S. Attorney's Office
in Denver did not return calls. In March, a Nacchio spokeswoman said
he would fight the SEC charges vigorously.

Like other telecommunications companies, Qwest's stock was a highflier
during the Internet bubble. But after the bubble burst, Qwest
sustained huge losses. It also admitted to some overly aggressive
accounting maneuvers, and eventually restated its earnings downward by
some $3 billion.

The disclosure of accounting irregularities drew the interest of the
SEC as well as the U.S. attorney in Denver. The SEC accused Nacchio
and six other executives of orchestrating a "massive fraud" by booking
phony revenues and relying on other accounting machinations. The SEC
accused Nacchio of reaping $176 million in illegal inside-trading
profits.

NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the
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believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material
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------------------------------

From: Wayne Rash <rash@telecom-digest.org>
Subject: E-911 Making Headway in VOIP
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 20:33:25 -0500


By Wayne Rash

Opinion: While many hurdles remain with trying to pinpoint the
caller's location, Enhanced 911 services are starting to become
available for VOIP users.

There's a probably apocryphal story that floats around the VOIP
community when the subject of emergency phone calls comes up. In that
story, an office worker, some say a Cisco engineer, has a heart attack
and dials 911. Paramedics arrive, but no one has any idea where the
victim is. He dies before he's found.

It's a scary story about the problems of providing location
information to emergency service providers when callers are using VOIP
(voice over IP) telephones, especially in a corporate environment. And
in fact, there is just such a risk. With a number of telephone
technologies, location information is not readily apparent. Wireless
phones, for example, suffered exactly the same problem until the
federal government mandated the ability to locate callers in an
emergency.

Wired phone users haven't usually had this problem because the phone
company keeps track of the address where each phone is located, as
long as the phone is theirs and is attached to their phone lines.

When a user of a wired phone calls 911, their phone number is included
with the call, and that in turn provides the address through a
database maintained by the phone company. This system works fairly
well, despite the occasional delays in database updates when people
add a phone or move to a new address.

Things change when you're not connected to the phone company's
lines. Cell phone users, for example, are connected to their wireless
provider. Until recently, the best the wireless company could do was
to have a general idea of the area of the caller, accurate perhaps to
several square miles. Now, with more accurate location being mandated,
phones can be located using other means, including GPS (Global
Positioning System) receivers embedded in many phones.

But when you get to private phone systems, there's a problem.  Even if
your phone delivers a phone number, there's no reason to believe it's
tied to a location. Even with analog PBX (Private Branch Exchange)
phones, it's not uncommon for the phone number that's reported to the
receiving party to be either an invented number or the main number for
the entire company or agency.

This problem is not restricted to IP phones, and it's not really
related to phone technology at all, but rather to choices made by
phone system owners. In many cases, phones don't even have actual
phone numbers-simply extensions from the company PBX.

Since most corporate VOIP systems are based on IP PBX equipment, it's
no surprise that getting location information is a challenge. But as
it happens, that challenge is being met.

According to Tim Lorello, vice president at Annapolis, Md.-based
TeleCommunication Systems, the company that provides the vast majority
of E911 service in the United States, help is already on the way.

Lorello said network service providers are already making it possible
for users with fixed locations to enter their location manually into
the database that provides information to emergency services. He said
the next step will be to equip VOIP phones with the GPS receivers
already in use in cell phones. He said that when this happens, the
E911 systems will be able to use that information immediately.

The other challenges Lorello pointed out are knowing which emergency
service provider needs to be called, and then delivering the call to
the right place. "Today, that call routing occurs to administrative
line," Lorello said. This can delay emergency response and can cause
confusion. Having location information included with the call will
make sure that the call goes to the right place the first time, he
said.

Lisa Pierce, a vice president at Forrester Research, says the current
efforts to make VOIP phones compatible with E911 may make them work
better for emergency calls than today's analog phones do. However, she
worries that expectations will rise faster than the technology.

"There will be false expectations while this is being built," Pierce
said. "This will give the technology a bad name for a period of time
while things are getting coordinated."

Pierce said a major factor will be how well network providers and
emergency service providers work together during that time to minimize
problems.

In the meantime, Pierce noted that one cell phone manufacturer,
Motorola, has also announced a wireless VOIP phone. I hope that one
will include the GPS receiver that the company already builds into its
other wireless phones.

Copyright 1996-2005 Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc. 
NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the
daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at
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articles daily.

*** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the
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understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic
issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I
believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material
as provided for in section 107 of the U.S.  Copyright Law. If you wish
to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go
beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright
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For more information go to:
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------------------------------

From: AP News Wire <ap@telecom-digest.org>
Subject: Hackers Tinker With Microsoft Program
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 23:41:19 -0500


Days after Microsoft Corp. launched a new anti-piracy program, hackers
have found a way to get around it. The software company's new program,
called Windows Genuine Advantage, requires computer users to go
through a process validating that they're running a legitimate copy of
the Windows operating system before downloading any software updates
except for security patches.

But the check can be bypassed by entering a simple JavaScript command
in the Web browser's address bar and hitting the "Enter" key. When
that's done, the validation does not run and the user is taken
directly to the download.

Microsoft said it was investigating and that the glitch was not a
security vulnerability.

The hack appears only to work when a computer user is trying to
download software through the Windows Update service. Some software,
such as Microsoft's AntiSpyware beta, isn't available there but can be
found elsewhere on microsoft.com.

Such downloads also require validation, but the hack does not appear
to work. On Friday, attempts to download the antispyware program
resulted in a server error, with a message that read, "It appears that
our activation servers are not functioning properly."

All Windows users, even those with pirated copies, can still download
security patches. For any other software updates, Microsoft now
requires computer users to validate that their computers aren't
running counterfeit copies of Windows.


On the Net:

Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/genuine/about.mspx


Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.

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.

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

Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 11:33:35 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: It's Not the Cell Phone - It's the Brain / Drivers Overloaded


It's not the cell phone - it's the brain Drivers overloaded,
researchers warn

By Mariana Minaya
Sun Staff
Originally published July 22, 2005

Think twice about answering your cell phone while you're behind the 
wheel -- even if it's a hands-free model. Scientists now say there's 
evidence our brains can't concentrate on a phone conversation and 
driving at the same time.

A groundbreaking study published last week in the British Journal of
Medicine shows that drivers who talk on a cell phone are four times as
likely as nonusers to have an accident that sends them to the hospital
 -- regardless of the type of phone they use.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/health/bal-hs.cellphone22jul22,1,3970325.story?coll=bal-health-headlines&ctrack=1&cset=true

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

From: Andy <classicphones@btinternet.com>
Subject: BT Payphones
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 09:33:48 +0100


Hi, if you still require info on these types of phones I would
recommend telephonelines.net. The 70's type phones did indeed rely on
pulse metering to operate them, which is still an option from BT at
about 34~ per month.  Let me know if you have found any more info or I
can help further.

Best Regards,

Andy

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

From: Choreboy <choreboyREMOVE@localnet.com>
Subject: Re: Unauthorized Remote Access to Answering Machine
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 00:52:00 -0400
Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com


Choreboy wrote:

> Choreboy wrote:

>> I've been doing chores for a vacationing relative.  Tuesday, I
>> answered his phone at 9 AM and got a series of beeps, perhaps half a
>> second long and three seconds apart.  I waited and hung up.  It
>> happened again two minutes later.

>> Two minutes later it rang a third time.  I didn't get to it in time.
>> When I walked past the answering machine, the display said it was
>> being remotely accessed.

>> If my relative had called to check his answering machine, I didn't
>> understand why he had kept beeping me instead of replying when I said
>> hello.  None of the messages had been erased.  I'd never known him to
>> leave messages on the machine after checking.

>> Was it somebody fooling around?  I asked another relative to phone and
>> try the machine manufacturer's default remote-access code, which was
>> incorrect.  With the wrong code, the display said only for a second
>> that it was being remotely accessed.  It had stayed on longer the
>> first time, as if the first caller really had checked the messages.

>> At 9 AM Wednesday morning it happened again.  I listened a minute or
>> so, until the other end hung up.  I realized the beeps were a pure
>> tone and not the sounds of a touchtone phone, so it wasn't my relative
>> trying to access his messages.  When they called two minutes alter,
>> the answering machine got it. There was no third call.

>> Call Return gave me a number.  It's not listed, but travel sites on
>> the web say it's the fax line of a fancy hotel hundreds of miles from
>> here.  My relatives have never had occasion to stay in that city.

>> I don't know anything about fax protocol.  When somebody answers, will
>> a fax machine emit a beep every three seconds or so for a minute or
>> so?  Will it keep calling if a human answers but stop calling if an
>> answering machine answers?  Can an answering machine mistake a fax
>> machine for a human with the access code?

>> Another possibility is that the Caller ID was faked and somebody is
>> using a machine to spy on my relative's telephone messages.  Is there
>> such a device?

>> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: It could be a spy machine, but I think
>> it more likely that you/relatives are being terrorized by an incorrectly
>> programmed fax machine at the First National Bank of Chicago. That
>> very fax machine, or one of its ancestors has a long history (25 years
>> or more) of auto-dialing the wrong numbers, and continuing to do so
>> until Illinois Bell has to threaten FNB with disconnection of the
>> phone line to get it to stop. 25 years ago, circa 1979-80 First
>> National Bank of Chicago's fax machine was programmed to call around
>> to various branches of the bank during early evening hours to 'poll'
>> for documents or deliver documents issued by the bank. Trouble was,
>> the humanoids in charge of the machine misprogrammed the dialing
>> string. They got an extra '01' in the string somewhere, so the machine
>> was calling _Germany_ during what would be the overnight hours in that
>> country. Religiously, several times per night, five nights per week,
>> that fax machine was calling a private family in Germany, and
>> terrorizing them. Just silence, then 'beep beep, etc', more silence
>> then more 'beep, beep'. After a week or two of this, the family, by
>> now frightened out of their wits, or really, more annoyed, ask for
>> intervention from Bundespost, and in due course Bundespost traced it
>> back to the idiotic Americans, and in turn asked AT&T to review the
>> problem. AT&T found it was coming from Illinois Bell territory, the
>> Wabash central office to be exact, and told those people to get the
>> problem cured. Like complaints made to the Illinois Commerce
>> Commission where the complaint is raised and the prissy old lady
>> secretary at the Commission makes a _single_ phone call of inquiry,
>> then folds her hands and announces self-righteously "I have called the
>> company and they _assure_ me it will be corrected" (and then it never
>> is), IB Telco tracked it down to the fax machine at the First National
>> Bank, made a phone call, said in essence to can the shit and get that
>> fax machine under control. But it was not cured, and the problems went
>> on for another month or so all night long. The German family inquired
>> further, Bundepost inquired again, and AT&T, more than a little
>> annoyed -- I guess Bundespost had really breathed on them a little
>> this time -- passed along their grief once again to Illinois Bell.

>> This time, a manager in Illinois Bell's security unit made a 'courtesy
>> call' on the bank's Vice President-Telecom  and told him unless _he_
>> would cure it, telco was going to cut off the fax machine line. The
>> VP-Telecom for the bank went downstairs with the proverbial hatchet in
>> hand, ready to do business on the spot, laid into his people and got
>> the fax machine reprogrammed on the spot. But, as Paul Harvey would
>> phrase it, 'the rest of the story is to follow'. Bank's telephone bill
>> arrived the next month, with page after page after page after page of
>> _LOTS_ of one-minute calls to the same number in Germany, one after
>> another, every couple minutes all night long. Since most employees of
>> First National Bank have the memory retention of a parrot or a tortoise,
>> bank employees in charge of reconciling the phone bill assumed, this
>> must be some screw up by the phone company, and by God, we are not
>> going to pay for a phone company mistake. Telco explained to FNB
>> (I assume with a straight face) what had happened. I do not know if
>> telco eventually wrote it off (as they used to do _everything_ that
>> a customer would not pay for) or not.

>> I wonder if the people using the hotel public fax machine wherever in
>> your account also blamed the added charges on their bill on a screw
>> up by the hotel switchboard. Probably. Did you or will you tell your
>> relatives about this incident when they get back from their vacation?
>> PAT]

> Thank you Pat!  You've given me insight.

> It didn't occur to me that a guest might send faxes over the same phone
> line by which the management receives faxes.  The number is advertised
> as the fax line for Brookstown Inn in Winston-Salem.  The building was
> erected in 1836 as a textile mill.  The inn is a sort of museum.

> My relatives say they did stay there once.  They think the hotel must
> have been trying to fax them travel ads but don't understand why they
> dialed the voice number.

> That didn't sound right.  Annoying people with faxes would discourage
> repeat business.  Besides, under the law, an established business
> relationship does not justify faxing an ad without specific permission.
> And if the hotel were faxing a list of former guests, the list the
> second day would exclude those who had received their faxes the first
> day.  So one would not expect the phone to ring at exactly 9 AM both days.

> Suppose faxes submitted by hotel guests are cued until normal office
> hours.  If the fax intended for my relatives was the first in line, that
> could be why the phone rang at 9 AM both days.

> I couldn't find anyone who knew how it sounds to be called by a fax
> machine.  So I installed fax software on my computer, faxed my
> relatives' voice line, and listened on an extension.  I recognized the
> beeps.  Apparently their answering machine took the beeping for a person
> having trouble punching a touchtone code.  The machine's voice
> instructed the caller to punch the access code, and the answering
> machine waited.  That explains why for several seconds the machine's
> display said it was being remotely accessed.

> I can even explain why the voice line was dialed.  Daplus.us is an
> online phone book that seems to be updated several times a year.  For
> years, it has listed my relatives' fax number as their voice number.
> I suppose someone with a subscription to daplus could request fax
> numbers, and daplus would probably give my relatives' voice number as
> their fax number.

> I think a hotel guest who wanted to fax my relatives got the wrong
> number from daplus.  The first day, the guest got a report that the fax
> hadn't gone through, so the guest submitted it again.

> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Then they probably did it a few more
> times 'just to make sure of the number', etc. You did not say if the
> problem was still going on or not.  PAT]

My relatives were home Thursday morning and Friday morning and
reported nothing.  The guest may have left the hotel Wednesday.

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

From: Steve Sobol <sjsobol@JustThe.net>
Subject: Re: Credit Reports, was Re: AT&T Customers Taken Over By Alltel
Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 22:17:15 -0700
Organization: Glorb Internet Services, http://www.glorb.com


Charles Cryderman wrote:

> The law providing free credit reports of all credit reporting
> companies has been on the books for many year. 

Are you referring to a state law or a federal law?


Steve Sobol, Professional Geek   888-480-4638   PGP: 0xE3AE35ED
Company website: http://JustThe.net/
Personal blog, resume, portfolio: http://SteveSobol.com/
E: sjsobol@JustThe.net Snail: 22674 Motnocab Road, Apple Valley, CA 92307

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

Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 12:27:32 +0100
From: Paul Coxwell <paulcoxwell@tiscali.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Spammer, age 35, Meets "Moscow Rules"


> According to the Hasbro Web site:

> Object:

> Mr. Boddy -- apparently the victim of foul play -- is found in
> one of the rooms of his mansion. To win, you must determine
> the answers to these three questions:

> Who done it? Where? and with What Weapon?

> Equipment:

> Clue Game Board: This shows nine rooms in Mr. Boddy's mansion.

> 6 colored tokens, each representing one of the Suspects:
> Colonel Mustard -- yellow; Miss Scarlet -- red; Professor
> Plum -- purple; Mr. Green -- green; Mrs. White -- white; and
> Mrs. Peacock -- blue.

> 6 miniature weapons: Rope, Lead Pipe, Knife, Wrench, Candlestick,
> Revolver.

Found this page which outlines the game and lists the differences 
between the American and British versions:

http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Cluedo

Paul

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

From: Steven Lichter <shlichter@diespammers.com>
Reply-To: Die@spammers.com
Organization: I Kill Spammers, Inc.  (c) 2005 A Rot in Hell Co.
Subject: Tax Solutions
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 11:23:19 GMT


You should all call these guys and find out how they can help you!!

> or call 1-800-933-4947 and leave your information and we will return 
> your call promptly.
> USA Residence only.

> PO BOX 10
> RIVERSIDE TX 77367


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.

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


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