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Message Digest Volume 28 : Issue 5 : "text" Format Messages in this Issue: Aussie telco steals country's phone numbers to keep porn trade going Re: Sex Offenders in Georgia Stripped of Privacy, Must Hand Over Passwords Re: Sex Offenders in Georgia Stripped of Privacy, Must Hand Over Passwords Sex Offenders in Georgia Stripped of Privacy, Must Hand Over Passwords Re: Any user reviews of the Magic Jack? How to find out mobile carrier's web-to-sms gateway address? The True Story of the Telephone ====== 27 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ====== 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, and other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 05 Jan 2009 21:25:25 GMT From: David Clayton <dcstar@myrealbox.com> To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu Subject: Aussie telco steals country's phone numbers to keep porn trade going Message-ID: <49627ac4$0$28510$5a62ac22@per-qv1-newsreader-01.iinet.net.au> http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/articles/2009/01/05/1231003882552.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1 Dial S-E-X for Optus Vanda Carson | January 5, 2009 - 6:43AM The Optus "facilities maintenance centre" on the corner of Epsom Road and Dalmery Avenue in Rosebery looks like any other large glass-fronted commercial office building in the Sydney industrial hub. Unlike its former flagship headquarters in North Sydney topped with a neon sign proclaiming its residence, the Rosebery building is barely noticeable. Passers-by would never have suspected it was the base for the nation's second biggest telco's lucrative sideline as the middleman in the international porn video and phone-sex trade. It is a business a NSW Supreme Court judge described as a "commercial goldmine", bringing in $45 million in profit over three years until the middle of 2001. One Optus staffer boasted in 2000 that the company was generating $100 million in revenues from faceless phone sex operations. It was a handy earner for Optus, which prefers to portray itself as a family friendly telco and uses cuddly cartoon animals in its advertising. Naturally it wanted this shady side of its business to remain behind closed doors. But its part in the billion-dollar phone sex industry has been laid bare in the courts in a series of legal wrangles over the past eight years over Optus's behaviour in Sydney, where Optus's Australian business is based, and in Vanuatu. Only now can the full story of Optus's involvement be told, with the last of the legal cases finalised. The lawsuits were triggered by a falling out between Optus and its pornography partners and other telcos that teamed up to profit from a loophole in international telecommunications rules. The scheme allowed the telcos to bill customers premium rates for sexually explicit calls or X-rated downloads when they dialled the country codes of small, often impoverished and far-away places. Optus was part of the partnership of telcos which acted as gatekeepers in the porn trade between the US and Europe and small Pacific islands. Pacific nations were chosen because of their high call rates and because US laws restrict obscene phone messages. Optus profited because the call charge paid by customers was divided between it and its telco partners and the porn-broker. The most recent legal case, decided on November 27, also forced Optus to concede it had stolen 100 numbers from a tiny telecommunications carrier in Vanuatu and then allowed a pair of its pornographer partners, Global Internet Billing in Britain and MDC in Europe, to use the stolen numbers for their business. Optus then kept the proceeds of these calls, money which would have normally been payable to the Vanuatu carrier. The theft of the numbers from Telecom Vanuatu came after the Vanuatu Government tried to shut another of its porn partners, the Gibraltar- based Gilsan, out of the dial-up industry in 1999, ostensibly because it endangered the morals and reputation of the island nation. Gilsan's exclusion from the Vanuatu market was the trigger for a lawsuit in Vanuatu and three other cases in Sydney. They exposed the cut-throat competition in this lucrative but little- known part of the global telecommunications industry between 1998 and 2001. John Bragg, who headed the Optus division responsible for dial-up porn, described the division's role as identifying "new and innovative non- traditional business opportunities on an international level". It went to great lengths to keep hold of the business, deciding the risk to its reputation of allowing Gilsan and its rival Global Internet Billing to keep their videos and voice recordings in Optus centres was worth it for the comfort of knowing it would make it harder for them to take their money to a rival telecommunications carrier. It even had the nous to charge Gilsan and Global Internet Billing a 2-3c surcharge on each minute of their $US6 ($8.45) a minute X-rated calls - or about $800,000 in rent - for housing their porn-filled computer servers in the Rosebery building. The legal challenges exposed the commercial practices of the Optus senior executive in charge of its international phone calls and relationships with all foreign telecommunications carriers. Justice Patricia Bergin found Mr Bragg, who has since died, arranged the theft of the Telecom Vanuatu numbers. She found he "was adept in utilising business opportunities and loopholes to increase the profits for his employer, wherever it was possible to do so. "Indeed his candour about his rather underhand conduct was quite disarming," Justice Bergin said. In an earlier case, Justice Robert McDougall was much harsher with Bragg, saying he had no regard for the truth, except for when it suited him. In this case Optus was forced to pay millions to Gilsan after it was found to have skimmed money from Gilsan by under-reporting the number of minutes porn clients were on the phone so Optus could take home a larger share of the profits. It was almost routine for telcos to try to increase their profits by hoodwinking each other about how many minutes of traffic they had used, according to evidence presented to the court. Most of the telcos, including the US giant AT&T and Optus, were underdeclaring the number of minutes of traffic they had carried for each other. One Optus staffer said Optus standard practice was to declare only 99 per cent of its traffic. On one occasion Optus only told AT&T about 98.3 per cent of the minutes it had used, under-reporting by 396,542 minutes. It also short-changed the Greek national carrier, telling it of only 97 per cent of calls. Advertisements were placed in US and European magazines and websites urging customers to dial a number starting with the country code 678 (for Vanuatu), or that of other Pacific island nations, for phone sex. But the Pacific nations were used just like flags of convenience because the calls never reached the Pacific nations; instead AT&T in the US or Greek carrier Hellenic sent the calls to the Optus centre in Rosebery where callers either downloaded porn from computers in the Optus centre, or were transferred to an MDC (Europe)-owned centre in Kippax Street, Surry Hills, or to a call centre in New Zealand where staff simulated sex over the phone. Pornographers and telcos chose to use the dialling codes of Vanuatu and other poor small Pacific countries because it allowed them to charge customers high call rates. They were also preferable because the risky call content is less regulated than it would be if clients were dialling a number in the US, Europe or Australia. In return for the thousands of incoming international calls, each paying a high rate, the small Pacific island telcos were willing to share a portion of the call rate with the telco-porn company partners. US customers, who made up more than 90 per cent of calls, paid a hefty $US4 a minute to connect to Vanuatu. And it was profitable for each of the players because phone sex customers tend to stay on the phone longer than those making other kinds of phone calls. For each call, the Vanuatu carrier got about US10c a minute, and Optus got at least US25c a minute. Vanuatu was also preferred because it had an easy to remember international dialling code, 678. The two pornography companies involved in the legal cases - the mysterious Gilsan and Asia Pacific Telecommunications, based in Hong Kong - used country codes of at least six Pacific nations in their advertisements for phone sex. Gilsan used Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, while APT used Vanuatu, Niue, Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Cook Islands. The traffic was so great that in 1996 Niue was ranked the second biggest provider of phone sex services in the world, according to a Washington- based telco market research firm, Telegeography. And APT's business was so lucrative for the island of Tuvalu that at one stage payments reputedly made up three-quarters of its GDP. Vanuatu was happy to have the money coming in but wanted to keep the exact nature of the business quiet. The advertisements in US and European magazines and websites did not mention Vanuatu, and they asked that they be drafted to have the number read 67-87 rather than 678, which is more obviously recognised as its country code. And it was not just a business done in the Pacific. X-rated calls from the US were a boom industry in Guyana, the Caribbean, the Philippines, Moldova, Sierra Leone, Guinea-Bissau, Poland and the Dutch Antilles islands in the mid-1990s. Gilsan and APT offered slightly different products. APT was first on the scene in Vanuatu in 1996, offering "live chats" with New Zealand phone-sex operators, and Gilsan started up two years later and ultimately used the phone calls to allow customers to download graphic sex photographs and videos from material held on computers in Optus's Rosebery centre. Global Internet Billing and MDC (Europe) started in 1999 using the stolen numbers and a similar product to Gilsan. It offered its calls to customers in Italy, South Korea and the US. APT sold calls to customers in the US, Italy and the Philippines, while Gilsan sold to the US, Italy, Greece and Turkey. Ultimately Gilsan's download service became far more popular than the traditional "chat" service offered by APT. Between January 1999 and February 2001 Optus carried nearly 23 million minutes of traffic for Gilsan, worth about $US5 million. Its smaller rival MDC (Europe) carried 226,000 minutes of traffic in 2000-01. Optus made about $US6 million in profit from Gilsan and about $US6 million from APT between 1998 and 2001, as well as about $US3 million a year from a smaller contract with MDC/Global Internet Billing, helping increase its total profits to about $US45 million. An Optus staffer, Samantha Bicknell, said Optus was so keen to keep the pornography business and reduce the risk of the pornographers defecting to another telco that it decided to allow them to install their video and audio material in Optus's centre. "We have encouraged our customer [sic] to install all of their network facilities in Australia in the Optus [centre]," Ms Bicknell emailed a colleague in August 2000. "This allows Optus to hold the customer at 'ransom' so to speak so that all their infrastructure is in our control and therefore [sic] [they] must use us as their transit point". "Encouraging the installation of customer equipment is a win-win situation for both Optus and the customer," she said. "My team look after . . . premium rate/sex lines etc, and we collect a transit fee for our services. The team attributes over $100 million of revenue to the company." The business flourished because customers preferred to be billed by telephone rather than credit card, both because it is easier to claim a large international phone bill as a work expense or to explain it to a suspicious partner than it is to justify a suspicious item on a credit card bill. The business thrived between 1998 and 2001, but halted almost overnight in 2001 when the American Federal Communications Commission changed the law so it was not nearly as lucrative. Instead of dividing $US4 a minute between the telco and its porn partners, they were now left with just US48c a minute to divide between them. Given that more than 90 per cent of the traffic was from the US, it was no longer commercially viable. After three extensive legal cases and a lengthy appeal, it now appears the end of the road of this messy episode for Optus, although Telecom Vanuatu may yet appeal against Justice Bergin's decision handed down in November. Telecom Vanuatu's Sydney law firm, Marque Lawyers, said it was unable to comment on the case because litigation was continuing and the findings might yet be appealed against. An Optus spokeswoman declined to answer questions about the theft of phone numbers from Telecom Vanuatu. In a statement, Optus said Telecom Vanuatu had failed to have the court order that Optus pay for the money earned from using the stolen numbers. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 4 Jan 2009 23:45:55 -0500 From: "MC" <for.address.look@www.ai.uga.edu.slash.mc> To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu Subject: Re: Sex Offenders in Georgia Stripped of Privacy, Must Hand Over Passwords Message-ID: <lag8l.2791$gE4.747@bignews5.bellsouth.net> "Gordon Burditt" <gordon@hammy.burditt.org> wrote in message news:r-ydnYFIYaES3fzUnZ2dnUVZ_gkAAAAA@posted.internetamerica... >>The latest scuffle over online privacy is brewing up in Georgia. An >>aggressive new law is set to take effect today which will force sex >>offenders to hand over their internet passwords, screen names, and >>e-mail addresses to the government for monitoring purposes. Several > > Online providers need to strictly enforce their terms of service on > this matter: you're not allowed to give out your password to someone > else, and if you do, [they are supposed to] turn off the account. Worse than that. Georgia has a law against computer password disclosure. So we have a genuine conflict of laws. ------------------------------ Date: 05 Jan 2009 06:00:15 GMT From: David Clayton <dcstar@NOSPAM.myrealbox.com> To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu Subject: Re: Sex Offenders in Georgia Stripped of Privacy, Must Hand Over Passwords Message-ID: <4961a1ef$0$28520$5a62ac22@per-qv1-newsreader-01.iinet.net.au> On Sun, 04 Jan 2009 23:14:10 -0500, Gordon Burditt wrote: >>Privacy advocates concerned about a strict new law in Georgia which >>removes sex offender's online privacy >> >>The latest scuffle over online privacy is brewing up in Georgia. An >>aggressive new law is set to take effect today which will force sex >>offenders to hand over their internet passwords, screen names, and >>e-mail addresses to the government for monitoring purposes. Several > > Online providers need to strictly enforce their terms of service on this > matter: you're not allowed to give out your password to someone else, > and if you do, [they are supposed to] turn off the account. And of course it is ultimately self-defeating. Expecting anyone who is supposed to be (potentially) breaking one serious law to somehow obey another law like this is ludicrous. Does anybody seriously expect this to do anything but give the public (yet another) undeserved sense of security? Why don't they just pass another law to outlaw all crime in general, that'll send a message to the crims and make us safe........ -- Regards, David. David Clayton Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a measure of how many questions you have. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 4 Jan 2009 22:47:40 -0600 (CST) From: John Mayson <john@mayson.us> To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu Subject: Sex Offenders in Georgia Stripped of Privacy, Must Hand Over Passwords Message-ID: <alpine.OSX.2.00.0901042246270.411@Calculus.local> On Sat, Jan 3, 2009 at 11:51 PM, Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> wrote: > > Privacy advocates concerned about a strict new law in Georgia which > removes sex offender's online privacy Another law that's "for the children" and will make people feel safer, but does absolutely nothing. > The latest scuffle over online privacy is brewing up in Georgia. An > aggressive new law is set to take effect today which will force sex > offenders to hand over their internet passwords, screen names, and > e-mail addresses to the government for monitoring purposes. Several And this won't work at all since it'd mindlessly simple to create new email addresses, screen names, etc. Let's face it. Sex offenders who play by the rules will comply with this law. Those who are still a menace to society won't and there's not a whole lot the state can do about it. I really wonder if state legislators even understand the laws they pass. > ***** Moderator's Note ***** > > Hold on to your hats: this is the start of a wild ride up and down the > roller coaster of public-opinion. It is a classic case of a Camel's > nose under the edge of the shelter that covers our all-important civil > right to keep our papers and effects free from unreasonable search and > seizure. > > Sex offenders? No problem: most voters will say "f*&^ 'em, who cares?". > Convicted fellons of all stripes? Rerun previous tape. > Persons charged with crimes but not yet convicted? Hmmm. Normally I try to stay on topic, but since you started it. :-) There are two terms that are guaranteed to generate a knee-jerk reaction: "sex offender" and "child pornography". The masses think we should just burn these people at the stake without any further investigation or even proof of guilt. And no one is interested in what these people did in the first place. > Once the apparatus needed to monitor someone who <insert your least > palatable, most loathsome, and repulsive action here>, IT WILL BE USED > FOR OTHER PURPOSES. Be careful what you wish for: security and freedom > both have a price. I'm reminded of the famous poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller "First They Came..." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came... Granted, a sex offender is hardly on par with a trade unionist. But we have broadly applied labels to people and demonized them. In some jurisdictions public urination can lead to sex offender status. http://www.eagletribune.com/punewsnh/local_story_031093859 This is absolutely wrong and draconian. But few are willing to speak up. We have a friend who is a sex offender. What happened was he was young. And drunk. She was barely underage and didn't disclose this. He ended up spending seven years in prison and his life today is a living hell. The girl is considered a "victim" even though had she just been a few months older it would've been completely legal. How was society protected by locking this guy up? His neighbors avoid him. He can't attend functions at his child's school. He can't even pick her up from school when she's sick. I can't say this happens a lot. But too many times I see plastered across the front page of the newspaper about an Internet kiddie porn ring being broken up or someone arrested for molesting a child and then months later on page B17 there's a blurb that all the charges were dropped. Does this happen 10% of the time? 90%? I don't know. But in either case the accused is ruined. Were the charges dropped on a technicality? Or was it your average person sitting at his computer and next thing he knows he's in jail? I get really worried when the state starts to demonize groups of people. John -- John Mayson <john@mayson.us> Austin, Texas, USA ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 06:59:52 -0700 From: "Fred Atkinson" <fatkinson@mishmash.com> To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu Subject: Re: Any user reviews of the Magic Jack? Message-ID: <00c001c96f3d$e1daf080$0200650a@mishmash> > Magic Jack is [a] good product: we have now had ours for 1 year. It sounds good. However, I don't like the idea of having a device that ties up my computer when it could be a separate device on my home network. Has Magic Jack thought of selling a stand-alone device that would take an IP address from your home/office router and do the same thing [without tying up the resources on your home/office computer]? It could use their network and achieve the same end. I'd gladly pay a bit more for the device up front to get the twenty dollar per year rate for service. Regards, Fred ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 12:06:15 -0800 (PST) From: steven acer <dudesterr@gmail.com> To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu Subject: How to find out mobile carrier's web-to-sms gateway address? Message-ID: <52546778-52d4-4ddf-a38c-0d95cd564c99@e18g2000yqo.googlegroups.com> Is there anyway to find the e-mail to SMS gateway a mobile carrier uses to route email as SMS messages? I am talking about any carrier: I found some lists on the internet, but they don't cover all the countries. (http://www.mutube.com/projects/open-email-to-sms/gateway-list/) If I can send sms messages from a web interface my carrier provides this means that this carrier has a gateway of the ones I am talking about. I need a way to find these addresses regardless of the carrier and the country. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 15:19:58 -0800 (PST) From: Joseph Singer <joeofseattle@yahoo.com> To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu Subject: The True Story of the Telephone Message-ID: <420993.48692.qm@web52708.mail.re2.yahoo.com> I grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, just down the street from where the telephone was invented. I now live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just down the street from where it was allegedly stolen. Seth Shulman's recent book The Telephone Gambit lays out the clearest case yet of how it all happened. Here's the summary: Alexander Graham Bell (or Aleck Bell, as he was then called) was the son of Alexander Melville Bell, the inventor of a system of phonic notation called Visible Speech. The elder Bell would use Aleck as an assistant in his demonstrations: After sending Aleck to wait in another room, Mr. Bell would ask the audience for a word or strange noise then write it in Visible Speech. Aleck would return and reproduce the sound from the writing alone. Voila. As a child growing up like this, he played at inventing machines that could talk and telegraphs that could listen. But he found his career in tutoring the deaf -- by teaching them to pronounce the phonemes of Visible Speech, he eventually succeeded in teaching them to talk and read lips. One of his students was Mabel Hubbard, daughter of prominent Boston lawyer Gardiner Greene Hubbard. Son of a Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice, Hubbard established water and gas and trolley utilities for Cambridge, Mass. -- some of the first in the nation. He also fervently lobbied Congress to replace Western Union's monopoly on the telegraph with a new corporation, the US Postal Telegraph Company, that would contract with the government Post Office. At the time, telegraph wires blanketed the skies of Boston, hanging in a dense web above the buildings. Many desperately wished for someone to develop a telegraph that could send multiple messages over the same wire, so that many wires could be replaced with just one. The theory was that if one could transmit the messages using different tones, they would "harmonize" instead of interfere, leading the idea to be called the "harmonic telegraph". Naturally, Alexander Graham Bell turned his tinkering to this problem and persuaded Hubbard (as well as Thomas Sanders, another father of a Bell student) to finance his research in exchange for a share of any future US profits. Further complicating matters, Bell had fallen in love with his student, Mabel Hubbard. Mr. Hubbard made it clear he did not approve of such a marriage unless Bell made a profitable discovery. The rest here: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/truetelephone ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly to telecomm- unications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to Usenet, where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occasional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. The Telecom Digest is currently being moderated by Bill Horne while Pat Townson recovers from a stroke. Contact information: Bill Horne Telecom Digest 43 Deerfield Road Sharon MA 02067-2301 781-784-7287 bill at horne dot net Subscribe: telecom-request@telecom-digest.org?body=subscribe telecom Unsubscribe: mailto:telecom-request@telecom-digest.org?body=unsubscribe telecom This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal about telecomm- unications on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. We believe we are the oldest e-zine/mailing list on the internet in any category! URL information: http://telecom-digest.org Anonymous FTP: mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives/ (or use our mirror site: ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) RSS Syndication of TELECOM Digest: http://telecom-digest.org/rss.html For syndication examples see http://feeds.feedburner.com/telecomDigest Copyright (C) 2008 TELECOM Digest. All rights reserved. Our attorney is Bill Levant, of Blue Bell, PA. ************************ --------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the Digest is funded by gifts from generous readers such as yourself who provide funding in amounts deemed appropriate. Your help is important and appreciated. A suggested donation of fifty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. End of The Telecom digest (7 messages) ******************************