TELECOM Digest     Tue, 13 Dec 2005 23:35:00 EST    Volume 24 : Issue 562

Inside This Issue:                             Editor: Patrick A. Townson

    Spamming the Wrong Message (Adam L. Penenerg)
    New Place For Spam's Same Old Pitches (Nuki Yoguchi)
    Spam Scam Invokes Princess Diana (Jeremy Kirk)
    Spam's Latest Spoilage (hampton roads.com)
    MASD Warns of Fake Stocktips Using Cellphones (Reuters News Wire)
    AT&T Rolls Out Speedier Broadband Service (USTelecom dailyLead)
    HSI and Diverted 1-800-CALL-ATT? (Carl Moore)
    Re: FTC Do Not Call List (Steven Lichter)
    Re: FTC Do Not Call List (jmeissen@aracnet.com)
    Re: FTC Do Not Call List (Mark Crispin)
    Re: FTC Do Not Call List (Wesrock@aol.com)
    Re: Parental Electronic Supervision of Teens - Good or Bad? (Lisa Hancock)
    Re: Hypothetical SxS Question (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: Adam L. Penenberg <wired-news@telecom-digest.org>
Subject: Spamming the Wrong Message
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 18:46:08 -0600


By Adam L. Penenberg
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,67213,00.html

Last week, many netizens cheered when Jeremy Jaynes, the eighth-ranked
spammer in the world, was sentenced to nine years in prison.

Jaynes, who also went by the name Gaven Stubberfield, was famous for
pushing "zoo" porn and operating various spam scams. He fired off
millions of e-mail messages, clogging ISP servers and inboxes with
various come-ons while amassing a fortune estimated at about $24
million. But that's not why he's going to jail. A Loudoun County,
Virginia, jury found him guilty of three counts of forging e-mail
headers.

Media Hack Like Martha Stewart, he wasn't convicted of a crime as much
as he was nailed for trying to cover his tracks. Unlike Martha and
other white-collar criminals, he may serve as much time in prison as a
bank robber, rapist or someone who committed manslaughter.

What this tells us is that in the spam game, e-mail isn't the only way
to send a message.

Graham Cluley of Sophos, an antispam and antivirus peddler, said,
"This sentence sends out a strong message to other spammers that their
activities are not going to be tolerated by the U.S. authorities ...
It's likely that Jeremy Jaynes' nine-year sentence will keep a few
spammers awake at night wondering if the rewards are really worth it."

Steve Linford of The Spamhaus Project crowed, "We are very pleased the
Virginia jury recommended nine years. It sends the right message to
the rest of the U.S.-based spammers that jail time is waiting for
them."

And not to be outdone, an Associated Press headline read: "Judge sends
a message: nine years for spammer."

Imagine my surprise when I awoke the next morning and checked one of
my many throwaway webmail accounts, which I keep under various noms de
plume (my favorite is "media_wh0re"). I found the same pile of spam I
always get -- for penile enhancements, Viagra, hot girl-on-girl porn
and lower mortgage rates.

I guess not everyone got the message. And why should they? Jaynes was
prosecuted under a Virginia statute, while many spammers detonate
their spam bombs from other countries. I applaud prosecutors for going
after spammers, but I don't expect that it will have much impact.

"The problem is, we're getting into a war-on-drugs type of situation,"
said Brian McWilliams, author of Spam Kings: The Real Story Behind the
High-Rolling Hucksters Pushing Porn, Pills and %*@)#
Enlargements. "Knocking a guy like Jeremy Jaynes out of business
doesn't solve the demand side of the spam problem. There's still a
significant number of people who respond favorably to spam, and as
long as that's true, spammers will keep trying to reach them."

Indeed. Recently, DoubleClick reported that clickthrough rates on
e-mail were still at about 8 percent. With hundreds of millions of
spam messages shooting through cyberspace every year, you do the
math. Unless we can convince people not to click through on these
(often) bawdy ads, perhaps we need to look at things differently.

After all, "people go to jail for mail fraud all the time, but it
doesn't make me less likely to send a letter," pointed out Jeff Rohrs,
president of Optiem, an interactive-marketing agency specializing in
permission-based e-mail marketing. "E-mail is just a bit ahead of the
curve when compared to other digital media because its cost of entry
is so low. What other medium lets you send to millions of people for
pennies? That's why it remains so attractive to spammers."

Citing a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project study, Rohrs
believes that consumers are getting used to the nuisance of
spam. Witness the drop in people who say that they are spending less
time with e-mail, from 29 percent last year to 22 percent this year;
and the drop in people who trust e-mail less because of spam, from 62
percent to 53 percent. He would like to see these numbers compared to
traditional media like TV, radio and direct mail.

He asks: "Do people trust TV less because of infomercials? Or mail
less because of annoying mortgage offers that disguise themselves as
bills? My guess is that these things annoy people, but they have
learned to compartmentalize their impact -- the mediums still deliver
value, so consumers are willing to put up with some annoyances for the
real benefits."

Think about that the next time you return from vacation and have to
spend an hour deleting spam.


Adam L. Penenberg is an assistant professor at New York University and the
assistant director of the business and economic reporting program in the
department of journalism.

Copyright 2005 Wired News.

Copyright 2005, Lycos, Inc. Lycos is a registered
trademark of Carnegie Mellon University.

http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,67213,00.html

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

From: Yuki Noguchi <washpost@telecom-digest.org>
Subject: A New Place For Spam's Same Old Pitches
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 18:38:28 -0600


By Yuki Noguchi, Washington Post Staff Writer

Now that Web logs -- blogs, for short -- are a popular online pastime
for millions of people, scammers are finding new ways to exploit them
as vehicles for junk advertisements.

The Internet has even coined a term -- splog, a combination of spam
and blog -- for a phenomenon that follows in the footsteps of rogue
advertising such as spam e-mail, junk mail, junk faxes and adware. The
new forms of spam can show up on blogs as fake comments posted by
readers that actually have nothing to do with the subject at
hand. Instead they are advertising pitches or attempts to get you to
click on an unrelated Web site.

They also can be set up as bogus blogs; go looking for a blogger
talking about, say, bathroom renovations, and you could wind up on a
Web site that has a few random renovation-related words but that
mainly tries to get you to click on links to advertisements.

For the most part, the ads are new pitches for old schemes -- gambling,
porn -- and are posing enough of a customer nuisance that Internet giants
such as Google and Yahoo are developing tools to clamp down on them.

Blogs are free and easy to set up, and until now, they have mostly
been earnest forums for political and personal discourse. But their
blogs, the greater the potential audience for spammers. Some bloggers
and search-engine users are calling on companies that help set up
blogs to better police their systems.

"Yahoo and Google are the common carriers of the information age, and
they have a reasonable responsibility ... to prevent the illegal and
inappropriate use of their services," said Scott Allen, an
Austin-based online editor for About.com who also maintains a blog.

Last month, Blogger, a free blog service, identified a "spamalanche"
that hit its system, and the company had to dismantle 13,000
spam-filled blogs created in the course of a single weekend.

"The readership of blogs has exploded in the last 18 months," and with
it the popularity of splogs, said Jason Goldman, product manager for
Blogger, which is owned by Google Inc. "The challenge is one of
balance: to make it difficult for people to post bad script but not
make it hard for our users."

Unauthorized advertisers are blighting the blogosphere by hijacking
legitimate discussions of topics with a flurry of phony comments.

"We would get surges of it -- as many as 200 to 300 within two hours;
we couldn't blacklist the [spammers' online] addresses fast enough,"
Allen said. "It hampers the open conversation that is the very nature
of blogs."

Advertisers are also setting up bogus blogs -- what Goldman and others
refer to as splogs -- and linking them to numerous other sites to
inflate their popularity on search engines. When searchers click on
what they think is a relevant site, they end up on imitation blogs
full of gibberish and links to ads. Advertisers will pay the spammers
every time someone clicks on one of those links.

Ben Popken, keeper of a blog called TheSpunker, recently searched the
Internet for Swiss army knives and found himself stymied by
splogs. Every time he typed in the topic on a blog search engine, he
kept pulling up a site that appeared to be a legitimate blog but was
filled with links to other Web sites.

"In one way, it's a tribute to the openness of the blog system. It's
kind of ingenious in this diabolical way," Popken said in an
interview. "But something like this happening undermines the trust
that blogs are based on."

Spammers often use automated software to set up splogs, so since
February Google has stepped up its efforts to stop the trashing before
it begins, Blogger's Goldman said. Blogger requires a user to enter a
code word before setting up a blog and has developed a way of flagging
suspected spammers and requiring a similar verification process before
they can post comments, he said. Google is further trying to improve
its mechanism for identifying junk blogs from legit ones, he said, and
only a few bloggers have complained of problems maintaining their
blogs.

Yahoo has instituted controls on its free Yahoo 360 blogging software
that allow users to limit viewership and comments on their blogs, said
company spokeswoman Meagan Busath. "Obviously, Yahoo has had a lot of
experience combating spam," because it had to combat a similar problem
with exploitation of its free e-mail accounts, Busath said.

Still, some bloggers say the efforts are not keeping up with incoming
spam.

John R. Levine, co-author of "The Internet for Dummies," said spam
attacks have gotten steadily worse on his blog in the past six months.

"I get more fake comments from gambling sites than all other comments
put together," he said. He has had to start requiring e-mail address
verification before letting people post comments on his site,
http://weblog.taugh.com/ . "It makes you look like a doofus. I have
this nice blog about e-mail policy, and comments about poker and naked
ladies [do] not improve that conversation."

Identifying responsible parties can be difficult, because free blog
software programs -- like free e-mail accounts -- do not require
identity verification. The culprits tend to be fast-moving, and their
handiwork so far is not as debilitating as other forms of online
fraud.

"It's rarely worth the resources and time it takes to find them," said
Anne P. Mitchell, president and chief executive of the Institute for
Spam and Internet Public Policy and a law professor at the Lincoln Law
School of San Jose. But Internet companies that helped create the blog
phenomenon can also help keep it clean, she said. "From an ethical,
moral, good Internet neighbor perspective ... if they have the
ability to do so, they should do so."

Copyright 2005 The Washington Post Company

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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[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: On my Blogger account 
http://ptownson.blogspot.com I have it set to require moderation on
all comments added by anyone. Doing it that way allows me to erase it
before the offensive stuff sees the light of day. Lisa Minter does the
very same thing on her (reprint of this) Digest each day; when I first
got her set up with Yahoo Groups she tried to run it openly, but it is
virtually impossible to run an open-ended discussion group either here 
on Usenet or somewhere like Yahoo. Sad, but true. Start any sort of 
open-ended virtual discussion group, and it will soon be ruined by the
spammers.   PAT]

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

From: Jeremy Kirk <idg@telecom-digest.org>
Subject: Spam Scam Invokes Princess Diana
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 18:40:57 -0600


Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service

LONDON- Antivirus experts have warned users to beware of a spam e-mail
campaign that promises a sizable grant from The Diana, Princess of Wales
Memorial Fund.

The fraudulent e-mail messages say the recipient has been selected to
receive a grant of 2.6 million British pounds (about $4.5 million in
U.S.  funds) grant and should contact the organization. However, the
e-mail messages do not come from the memorial fund, which was founded
in September 1997 soon after Diana's death.

The spam is unusual in the sense that it uses the name of a real
charitable fund, plus the name of an actual employee there, according
to a warning from security vendor Sophos.

"This is not one that will look phishy," said Carole Theriault, a
security consultant with Sophos. "They've obviously done their
research before they put it out."

The memorial fund has also issued a warning on its Web site.

Limited Success

Some of the messages contain links to Web sites asking for bank
account details, and in some messages recipients are directed to wire
funds by Western Union to certain people, the warning said.

The fund has received almost daily calls asking about the legitimacy
of the e-mail, and some people are known to have gone through the
first few stages of trying to collect a claim before stopping, said
Therese Lyras, press and communications coordinator for the fund.

"No one has contacted us to say they have actually sent money," she
said.


Copyright 2005 PC World Communications, Inc.

NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the
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------------------------------

From: Hamton Roads.com 
Subject: Spam's Latest Spoilage
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 18:42:56 -0600


The Virginian-Pilot

Score another one for the spammers.

Their floods of e-mail pitches for Viagra, luscious lips and lottery
schemes have blocked genuine electronic messages warning of real
storms.

In an effort to reach large numbers of people quickly, emergency
managers in Florida's hurricane-hit Indian River County began to send
electronic alerts to their citizens. Some 4,200 folks signed up to be
pinged by authorities when hurricanes, twisters and other severe
incidents threaten.

But thanks to non-stop solicitations, Internet service providers
everywhere have had to throw up spam-blocking walls to keep their
systems from being overloaded and their customers from becoming irate.

So Indian River County's emergency-alert e-mails, while legitimate,
looked suspicious.

And to Internet providers, like AOL, mass mailings equal spam. That
means messages warning citizens of impending doom never made it to the
inboxes of folks who needed the information.

This particular problem appears to be solved, thanks to a
reconfiguration of the agency's e-mail server.

For those who rely on such information, that's about as comforting as
knowing that while our dependence on e-mail grows, more important
stuff will get lost in the electronic shuffle.


Copyright 2005 HamptonRoads.com/PilotOnline.com

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[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Independence, KS tried the same thing
without success, for the same reason. For a long time now, the
franchise agreement with CableOne (and prior, with Time Warner)
requires the cable provider to not only allow a couple of channels on
television to the community (cable channel 10 for general community
purposes; channel 14 for Independence High School and the college;
Channel 22 for City Hall and county government) but they also had an
arrangement where, if the police department or sheriff had some
emergency announcement, they could 'flip a switch' and make their
announcment over _all channels_ (for example, weather emergency; other
police announcements for the entire community; i.e. two years
ago when the little eight year old girl was kidnapped outside Lincoln
Elementary School). So watch whatever you wanted on television, when
police or city authorities had an emergency announcement, they could
cut in and make the announcement. They rarely have to use it, but they
still test it once a week or so, with a thirty-second announcement.
(Steady tone for a few seconds, then a voice states, "This is
Independence, Kansas Emergency Responders with a test message. This is
just a test, had there been an actual emergency, Independence or Mont-
gomery County emergency responders would have instructed you, etc."

Then a tone again and back to whatever program in progress you were
watching. Just as sure as they test the emergency sirens on Saturday
at 12 noon. _Never_ routine stuff; that is for channel 14 or channel
10 (which few people watch anyway).

Someone said "what about people with their faces buried in their
computer screens?"  So the response was "since _most_ people use
Windows and Windows has that 'messenger' function where a screen can
be flashed at you (it was not intended exactly that way, but most
Windows users know how it can be done, and keep it turned off)
Independence authorities arranged with Cable One and TerraWorld (our
two primary internet suppliers to do something like that; but only for
emergencies. If there was a weather emergency, a tornado for example,
authorities would notify cableone.net and terraworld.net and gain
control of many -- but not all -- computers in the community. The kids
who manage the two ISPs here in town could easily make it happen, but
what they did not count on was that there are more AOL ISP users here
in town than cableone and terraworld combined. So the big spam-enablers
MCI and AOL kept blocking police announcements, _thinking_ they were
doing us a favor; some users got the warnings but most computer users
did not. The result was much confusion; police eventually quit trying
to notify people in that way, although they still continue to use
cable television to do so.  PAT]

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

From: Reuters News Wire <reuters@telecom-digest.org>
Subject: NASD Warns of Fake Stock Tips in CellPhone Scam
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 18:32:23 -0600


Brokerage regulator NASD on Tuesday warned investors against reacting
to stock tips sent in unsolicited mobile phone text messages, as spam
schemes aimed at hyping share prices move beyond e-mail and onto
cellphones.

The so-called "pump and dump" schemes involve spam messages with false
recommendations of a company's stock that lead the share price to
rise.  Fraudsters can then sell their shares, leaving investors with
worthless stock, the regulator said.

There have been relatively few cases of illegal spamming to
U.S. cellphones and investor-focused spam schemes have been more
common in e-mail to date.

But the number of texts urging recipients to invest immediately in a
particular stock has recently increased to the point that there were
enough for NASD to take notice, said John Gannon, its vice president
of investor education.

"We determined there were sufficient messages coming in that it needed
to be brought to investors' attention," said Gannon, who did not
reveal the quantity of spam messages or say which stocks had been
involved.

Gannon said these schemes do not generally involve brokers, but NASD
would refer any fraudulent text messaging cases it identified to the
U.S.  Securities and Exchange Commission.


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. And, discuss this and other topics in our forum at
http://telecom-digest.org/forum (or) http://telecom-digest.org/chat/index.html

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

Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 12:22:50 EST
From: USTelecom dailyLead <ustelecom@dailylead.com>
Subject: AT&T Rolls Out Speedier Broadband Service


USTelecom dailyLead
December 13, 2005
http://r.smartbrief.com/resp/zWyAatagCAsKttiLtw

		TODAY'S HEADLINES
	
NEWS OF THE DAY
* AT&T rolls out speedier broadband service
BUSINESS & INDUSTRY WATCH
* Microsoft, MCI join forces on Internet phone service
* EarthLink snaps up New Edge
* Nortel wins big deal with Comcast
* Motorola flying high on RAZR sales
* Thomson makes offer for Thales Broadcast & Multimedia
* Reliance Infocomm, China Telecom to provide telecommunications link
* Vodafone wins Turkey's Telsim with $4.55B offer
USTELECOM SPOTLIGHT
* Stifel Nicolaus to Host Financial Conference at TelecomNEXT
TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
* Alltel launches wireless broadband in N.C. city
* Vonage debuts Wi-Fi phone
REGULATORY & LEGISLATIVE
* European lawmakers expected to pass controversial telecom legislation
* Verizon expands FiOS TV in Texas
* Possibility of NYC Wi-Fi network raises questions

Follow the link below to read quick summaries of these stories and others.
http://r.smartbrief.com/resp/zWyAatagCAsKttiLtw

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

Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 16:16:57 EST
From: Carl Moore <cmoore@ARL.ARMY.MIL>
Subject: HSI and Diverted 1-800-CALL-ATT?


 From memory, I saw "HSI" on a pay phone outside a convenience store
last Sunday (it was at a Turkey Hill store on Lampter Road north of
 -- NOT LOCATED RIGHT AT -- Pennsylvania route 741).  I apparently
punched in 1-800-2255-288 (1-800-CALL-ATT) okay, but got sent to
a collect-call menu of some sort.  This is conjuring up some memory
of "I HATE COCOTS" in this digest many years ago.  Has this ever
happened before where a telephone number was "intercepted" in this
manner?  Fortunately, there was nothing urgent about my attempted
call; more of an effort to get that telephone's number onto my bill
(failed!).

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

From: Steven Lichter <shlichter@diespammers.com>
Reply-To: Die@spammers.com
Organization: I Kill Spammers, Inc.  (c) 2005 A Rot in Hell Co.
Subject: Re: FTC Do Not Call List
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 14:19:28 GMT


Lena wrote:

> Lena wrote:

>> I'm trying to dictate what people can call me on MY phone...
>> telemarketers ... are rude.  They won't leave a message on the answeing
>> machine, but will hang up, and then call over and over again.

>> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I quite agree with your assessment, but
>> my point was what makes _your_ telephone any more sancrosanct than _my_
>> computer. ...And let's face it, spam-scam
>> and phishing is far worse than telemarketers ever have been.

> The difference between telemarketing and spam, IMHO, is that
> telemarketers make my phone ring, and that is something that demands
> immediate attention.  That bothers me a lot. Much more than spam that
> might happen to be in the inbox when I check for it at my leisure.  (I
> don't have automated email retrieval).  I guess I have been fortunate
> that I am not innundated with spam.  As some of my ISP provided email
> accounts that I guarded meticulously, and only sent to friends, leaked
> to (or were guessed by) spammers, I switched to gmail, which seems to
> have wonderful spam protection and spam reporting ease.  Click a
> button and it's gone.  Telemarketers, OTOH, are difficult to get rid
> of.

> Lena

I'm on the FTC's Do Not Call List and it works pretty good.  I get a few 
800 handups, but once in a while I will answer the phone on one of these 
when I'm home, when it is a telemarketer, I let them have a blast of 
miliwatt tone, that gets their attention and no more calls, I'm sure 
they have hearing problems for a while also.

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: jmeissen@aracnet.com
Subject: Re: FTC Do Not Call List
Date: 13 Dec 2005 17:38:52 GMT
Organization: http://extra.newsguy.com


In article <telecom24.558.9@telecom-digest.org>,
Lena  <lenagainster@gmail.com> wrote:

> Fred Atkinson wrote:

>> Lena wrote:

>>> I think an amendment to the Telemarketing Laws is in order, to
>>> prohibit any telemarketer, calling on behalf of any charity or
>>> political organization, from calling any number more than once a year.

> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But Lena, when you limit those people
> to 'one call per year', wouldn't that be like saying spammers and
> scammers and phishermen should be limited to one spam, scam or phish
> per year? 

No one here has ever said spammers, scammers and phishers should be
free to do what they do. All we've done is point out the futility in
the approaches suggested here.

> Are you trying to dictate what people can talk about on their phone?
> PAT]

No, she and we are trying to dictate what people can talk about on OUR
phones. Big difference. My paying for a phone does not give someone
else license to unlimited use of it for THEIR purposes.


John Meissen                                   jmeissen@aracnet.com


[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: That would also be true regarding
_your_ computer accounts would it not?  But finding the _legitimate,
bonadide_ guilty party and chopping off his fingers would not be so
futile, would it? But I have many readers here who consider me to be
an imbicile and unable to correctly idenfity spammers; apparently they
do not know how to geographically locate and match up IP numbers, and no,
you do _NOT_ rely upon what the "From:" has to say; you begin much
further up in the envelope. Start with the "from " at the very top and
carefully examine the first two or three lines as well as paying close
attention to the path lines showing how the message got to you. Some
of that stuff up there is much harder (but not impossible!) to forge.
Now, 'tis true that dial-up IPs tend to be quite dynamic and almost
useless, but really serious spammers have a solid line all the time
don't they?  Please go look at http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/AP.html
to see an example of something I am working on in cooperation with the
geobytes.com database. Testing the accuracy of my 'welcome to visitors'
line has thus far shown a high degree of positive results. Just go
look at those lines on that page. I don't care if you bother to listen
to the audio or read the AP newswire. Some of you are probably too
smart to bother with that anyway. If the 'welcome to visitors from'
line produces really gross inaccuracies in your instance, I would like
to know about it. In a day or three, I am going to present here an
HTML 'form' in which you can cut and paste the top half dozen or so
lines from your favorite spam. I hope you will give it an honest
review, and report your results to the Tin Hat imbicile.   PAT]

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

From: Mark Crispin <MRC@CAC.Washington.EDU>
Subject:  Re: FTC Do Not Call List
Date:  Tue, 13 Dec 2005 12:03:49 -0800
Organization:  Networks & Distributed Computing


On Mon, 12 Dec 2005, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:

> I don't understand at all why there's no "no-spam" law passed.

There are "no-spam" laws.  They are, at best, modest successes.  For
those of us who receive hundreds of spams daily, and/or have manage
mailers which receive many more, the laws are miserable failures.

The general problem is the considerable cost in going after spammers.
It is almost impossible to recover more than a fraction of these
costs, even when there is complete success in prosecution and seizure
of the spammer's ill-gotten gains.

Don't forget that when spammers get money, it goes straight through
their nose (or in other non-recoverable means).  For every big time
spammer with a million dollar house there are lots of small fry living
in his mother's basement.

> I don't understand Internet message addressing, but it seems to me any
> initiated message should have a secured sender's address address.
> There should be some technical way that something like that is
> reasonably tamper proof so it works reliably.  Such an address would
> cut down "phising" and other fraudulent and abusive activity now going
> on.

Technically, this is impossible with the current mechanisms used by
Internet mail.  Nothing short of a complete redesign from the ground
up will accomplish it.

Anything less is just a band-aid.  We have had such mechanisms as PGP and 
S/MIME for years.

An effort to create a new Internet email infrastructure would be
extraordinarily expensive and complex.  It would make the conversion
to TCP and SMTP in 1983 look trivial by comparison.

It would put legions of programmers and protocol engineers on the
gravy train for many years.  The people who you hear groaning about
the possibility are the vendors who *sell* the products.  The
programmers who *write* the products (and thus are *paid* by the
vendors) are salivating at the prospect of a multi-year pork-feed that
would make a lamphrey look like a piker.

The new email infrastructure will also give the world email postage 
stamps.  And this time, it won't be just governments who get a cut of the 
profits.  The biggest objection to SMTP in the SMTP vs. X.400 wars two 
decades ago was that SMTP's fundamental design made it impossible to 
impose email postage stamps.  You can bet that the new redesigned Internet 
email won't have that problem.

Guess who pays for all of this.

Be careful for what you wish.  You may get it.  And there are plenty of 
people who are quite happy to provide it to you (*ka-ching*!).

 -- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum.

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

From: Wesrock@aol.com
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 16:51:48 EST
Subject: Re: FTC Do Not Call List


In a message dated 12 Dec 2005 13:37:22 -0800, hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com writes:

> I think all of us consumers agree that we don't want any spam emails at
> all and no soliciting telephone calls at all.

This must not be a true statement, since otherwise there would be no
telemarketing calls, expecially.  It is a labor intensive business and
must provide a sufficient return to the operators of such services to
make a profit.  Otherwise they would go bankrupt.

Everyone is a consumer in one way or another, so it must not be
correct that 100% of consumers don't want any soliciting telephone
calls at all.

Spam is not nearly so expensive to originate, but it, too, has costs
and must provide a sufficient return that it is not true that ALL
consumers do not want it.

Actually, I have occasionally gotten e-mails, mostly spam, form
organizations or businesses with which I do have a legitimate business
relationship, which make offers that I have responded to favorably and
which, in at least one case, have saved me money.

Then there are some e-mails that some members of a group will consider
all spam, and which others in the group think are relevant to their
interests and appreciate the information or offers.  Defining spam in
some cases becomes very controversial.


Wes Leatherock
wesrock@aol.com
wleathus@yahoo.com

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

From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com
Subject: Re: Parental Electronic Supervision of Teens - Good or Bad?
Date: 13 Dec 2005 06:50:29 -0800
Organization: http://groups.google.com


Carl Navarro wrote:

> In today's society, I think it is fast becoming a must to know where
> your own or your child's vehicle is at all times.

You mention one reason is auto theft and hijacking which are I think
are valid concerns.  I would be curious to how well GPS (and
predecessor systems) lead to stolen car recovery.  Hijacking is pretty
gruesome but fortunately rare.

But I'm curious as to what about "today's society" you mean?

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

From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com
Subject: Re: Hypothetical SxS Question
Date: 13 Dec 2005 06:55:56 -0800
Organization: http://groups.google.com


Joe Morris wrote:

> And I'm sure you remember the little "dial lock" gizmos that were
> clamped into the "1" fingerhole and were supposed to keep people from
> making outbound calls on an unattended office telephone?  It seems
> that nobody ever thought about dialing with the switchhook -- or just
> banging away with ten or more pulses and asking the operator for
> assistance.

I think it was pretty difficult for most people to tap in accurately a
seven digit number.  If you're timing was the least bit off any part
of the way you had to start over.  You also risked discovery while
doing it.

It wasn't that hard to tap in zero and get the operator to do it,
though, but I think a lot of people didn't think of that option.

All in all I'd say the dial locks, which were inexpensive, were
reasonably effective to protect against telephone abuse.

I've only rarely seen plate locks to cover up a Touch Tone dial.

Years ago our Centrex required a PIN to make long distance calls after
hours.

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


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