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Volume 28 : Issue 82 : "text" Format

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  Re: Western Union public fax services, 1960 
  WIRED lists "Top Internet Threats" 


====== 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: 23 Mar 2009 10:38:20 -0000 From: John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu Subject: Re: Western Union public fax services, 1960 Message-ID: <20090323103820.22746.qmail@simone.iecc.com> > Remember, WU's original telegram service was successful since they > used railroad stations as small town agents, and had branch offices > in larger cities. The reason it was successful was that there was no competition to telegrams if you needed a message delivered quickly. Until about 1960 a long distance phone call was more expensive than a telegram, and a lot of people still didn't have phones so you couldn't call them even if you wanted to. When long distance rates dropped below telegram rates and residential phones became cheap enough that everyone had them, WU was doomed. > Again, FedEx was not a new idea, but a revival of a long existing > service provided by carriers. Nobody before FedEx offered guaranteed overnight delivery to distant places. The model of flying everything to Memphis and sorting it in the middle of the night was rather different from anything Railway Express or the PO offered. Apparently it was sort of inspired by the way the French post office works. ObTelecom: By the way, Fred Smith said the reason that ZapMail, their fax network, failed was that it depended on a large satellite that was never launched due to the Challenger explosion. The plan was to put tiny satellite dishes at customer sites and bypass the telco. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_38/b3900032_mz072.htm R's, John ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 23 Mar 2009 09:43:40 -0400 From: Will Roberts <oldbear@arctos.com> To: redacted@invalid.telecom.csail.mit.edu Subject: WIRED lists "Top Internet Threats" Message-ID: <0MKpCa-1LlkUY2EB9-000d95@mrelay.perfora.net> WIRED BLOG March 20, 2009 Top Internet Threats: Censorship to Warrantless Surveillance ------------------------------------------------------------ By David Kravets The internet is filled with threats real and imagined, from malicious hackers to government censors. Beyond the hacks and cracks -- and in celebration of Sunshine Week -- we've compiled a brief list of some of the biggest public and private threats facing the internet. >>Warrantless Government Monitoring: Following the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the practice of wiretapping all internet traffic began in the United States with the Bush administration, and is now being defended in court by the Obama administration. All of the nation's major internet service providers are accused of funneling Americans' online traffic to the National Security Agency without warrants. >>Private Censorship: From the mundane to the frightening, the examples run rampant. Wikipedia, the world's most trafficked online reference tool, is subject to shameful spin from trusted names of news organizations to the not so trustworthy engines of commerce. Among the examples, The Boston Globe enhanced the biography of a columnist while deleting information about his alleged plagiarism. Diebold excised an entire section critical of the company's voting machines. >>Government Censorship: Reporters Without Borders reported last week that 12 nations -- China, Burma, North Korea, Vietnam, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Cuba and Tunisia -- restrict internet access and often prosecute users for what they post online. Even in democratic countries, censorship rears its ugly head. On Thursday, a secret blacklist surfaced detailing 2,395 webpages the Australian government is planning to filter from the internet. While about half of them dealt with illegal pornography, the remainder did not. Some of the sites were about gambling, dentists and even dog kennels. In December, Wikipedia couldn't be edited by users in Britain. The entire site was put on a blacklist because it linked to the 1976 album cover of Virgin Killer by the Scorpions, which featured a nude young girl. In the United States, a federal judge last year blocked WikiLeaks from operating in the country for a week after the renegade site posted allegedly stolen documents detailing individuals' Swiss bank accounts. >>Deep Packet Inspection: Several U.S. internet service providers, including giants like Comcast and Cox Communications, have started inspecting the contents of internet packets, a practice allowing them to monitor, filter and ultimately control the traffic that passes through their pipes. In addition, online advertising services like NebuAd are paying ISPs to let it eavesdrop on web users via DPI. >>ISP Tiered Pricing: Major ISPs, including AT&T, Time Warner and Comcast have moved or are gravitating toward pricing services based on the amount of bandwidth individuals use. Theoretically, the plans could unlock the internet door to low-income users. But we suspect the plans are designed to increase profits for ISPs as bandwidth use skyrockets -- all of which may have a chilling effect on internet usage. >>RIAA Proposes "Three-Strikes" Policy: The Recording Industry Association of America is pushing for ISPs to ban service to customers the RIAA claims are file-sharing copyrighted music. Overseas, industry groups like the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry are pursuing similar efforts. >>Digital Millennium Copyright Act Abuses: Unwarranted YouTube takedown notices by misguided copyright holders comes immediately to mind -- including assertions by Universal Music that it need not consider whether a video, under the DMCA, makes a "fair use" of the copyrighted works in question. Google says 57 percent of takedown notices it received were sent by business targeting competitors and 37 percent were not valid copyright claims. source: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/03/wireds-top-inte.html see original source article for important links to related material ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly to telecom- munications 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: 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 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 (2 messages) ******************************

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