The Telecom Digest for October 07, 2010
Volume 29 : Issue 269 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
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Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2010 00:38:46 -0700
From: Thad Floryan <thad@thadlabs.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Help needed differentiating email, texting and SMS
Message-ID: <4CAC2786.90109@thadlabs.com>
On 10/5/2010 4:25 PM, tlvp wrote:
> On Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:48:37 -0400, Thad Floryan <thad@thadlabs.com> wrote:
>
>> ... I know for a fact my phone receives email sent to the
>> "cellphone#@txt.att.net" address, but what is this method termed?
>> Is it SMS or simply email? ...
>
> As ever, "that depends" -- does it come through with all characters
> that were beyond the first 150 or so truncated away?
>
> If so, that was SMS.
>
> Does it come through in its entirety (except perhaps missing some
> graphics components)? If so, that was probably either MMS or real
> email.
Amazing. I just sent a 5-line email to it alternating between
"Now is the time ..." and "The quick brown fox ..." (each line
is 69 characters long) and all 350 characters arrived albeit
split into "pages". I thought there was a limit, perhaps not.
Maybe it was my Nokia 6162i that had a limit with its "text
messages" (no "SMS" is its manual and no way to test (today)).
'Sfunny, I posted URLs to pictures of all my cellphones since
1992 in a Yahoo photo group earlier today since we were discussing
equipment lifetime re: Motorola MicroTAC Lite, Nokia 6162i, RAZR V3:
http://thadlabs.com/PIX/Thad_cellphones_1.jpg top views
http://thadlabs.com/PIX/Thad_cellphones_2.jpg side views
http://thadlabs.com/PIX/Thad_V3_charger+batts.jpg bought last month
The Nokia was dual mode TDMA and AMPS and the RAZR V3 is GSM, and
my cellphone carrier account is grandfathered all the way from the
original Cellular One through Cingular to today's AT&T Mobility.
> [...]
> My own handsets segregate inbound messages into separate IN-boxes,
> one for SMS items, one for MMS items. (They don't "do" email.)
>
> (MMS = "MultimediaMessageService", SMS = "ShortMessageService".)
Interesting. The RAZR V3 manual is poorly written and extremely
lacking examples and definitions. Since I only need a PHONE it
works fine for me and the fact it can receive email is a plus but
I'm not sure it's working with the AlertSCC service since I never
received a "test message" from them last year. Perhaps I should
ask them to do so for me and for the several friends in Palo Alto
I'm helping to assure all is setup correctly.
> [...]
> In T-Mobile's service, I have yet to come up with any reliable criterion
> for determining whether an email addressed to my "cellphone#@tmomail.net"
> gets delivered to me as an SMS or an MMS at the handset -- I've received
> emails either way, at different times, with neither rhyme nor reason
> (nor even T-Mo CS) able to provide any clue as to why :-) .
Hah hah! You should try dealing with AT&T Mobility. Though their
service works fine for me, their support people (even in the local
store) are about as clueless as a rock.
Thanks for your reply! Since 2004 I've been assuming my RAZR could
only receive up to 140 or so chars via email and now, after testing
per your implied suggestion, I now know different.
I still don't know if the RAZR can do SMS or not, and what's really
odd is that after the email test the "GPRS" icon went away; it appeared
for the first time ever about a month ago and I have no idea why, the
manual isn't clear about GPRS, and there are no explicit commands on
the RAZR to enable/disable GPRS.
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2010 08:26:09 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: System to Trace Call Paths Across Multiple Networks
Message-ID: <p0624086fc8d219cb472e@[192.168.180.244]>
GEORGIA TECH RESEARCHERS DESIGN SYSTEM TO TRACE CALL PATHS ACROSS
MULTIPLE NETWORKS
Posted October 5, 2010 Atlanta, GA
ATLANTA - October 5, 2010 - Phishing scams are making the leap from
email to the world's voice systems, and a team of researchers in the
Georgia Tech College of Computing has found a way to tag fraudulent
calls with a digital "fingerprint" that will help separate legitimate
calls from phone scams.
Voice phishing (or "vishing") has become much more prevalent with the
advent of cellular and voice IP (VoIP) networks, which enable
criminals both to route calls through multiple networks to avoid
detection and to fake caller ID information. However each network
through which a call is routed leaves its own telltale imprint on the
call itself, and individual phones have their own unique signatures,
as well.
Funded in part by the National Science Foundation, the Georgia Tech
team created a system called "PinDr0p" that can analyze and assemble
those call artifacts to create a fingerprint-the first step in
determining "call provenance," a term the researchers coined. The
work, described in the paper, "PinDr0p: Using Single-Ended Audio
Features to Determine Call Provenance," was presented at the
Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Computers and
Communications Security, Oct. 5 in Chicago.
...
http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?nid=61428
Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2010 15:08:08 +1100
From: David Clayton <dcstar@myrealbox.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: A Simple Swipe on a Phone, and You're Paid
Message-ID: <pan.2010.10.06.04.08.05.793141@myrealbox.com>
On Tue, 05 Oct 2010 20:05:27 +0000, John Levine wrote:
>>In Australia Mastercard are introducing the "Swipe and go" system where
>>you just wave your card at a terminal for transactions under under a
>>certain amount - no signing, not PIN to enter, just grab your receipt and
>>go (TV ads are running now promoting it).
>
> That's called Paypass. My Mastercard debit card here in the US has it,
> but I've never used it. If my credit card had it, I would use it.
>
The thing with any unauthenticated transaction system is that is assumes
the person with the card (token of authority) is the owner of the card -
what happens if your card is lost/stolen and someone goes on a spending
spree of multiple transactions for potentially days before you realise and
get the card blocked?
Whether the actual token is an actual card or a phone display may still
open up a whole can o' worms if it falls into the wrong hands in this
increasingly "trade off security for convenience" path we seem to be on.
--
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: Wed, 06 Oct 2010 17:04:16 -0500
From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi)
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: A Simple Swipe on a Phone, and You're Paid
Message-ID: <mLSdnVuqSqj9bzHRnZ2dnUVZ_jKdnZ2d@posted.nuvoxcommunications>
In article <s71ka65gloda1smf8hs2tmiqlh1dre533b@4ax.com>,
Richard <rng@richbonnie.com> wrote:
>On Sun, 3 Oct 2010 11:12:22 EDT, Wes Leatherock <Wesrock@aol.com>
>wrote:
>
>>
>>They actually pay the card company 1 to 3% of the amount charged, not
>>10-20%. (For American Express it's higher. The largest convenience
>>store chain in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area does not accept
>>American Express cards for that reason. There is a local supermarket
>>chain in the area that doesn't take Amex either, and for the same
>>reason.)
>
>About 30 years ago, I was staying at a mom-and-pop owned motel in
>Amarillo. At checkout, I offered the choice of 2 credit cards, Visa
>and AmEx. He chose Visa. I asked if it was because their fee was
>lower. He answered "Not the main reason. With Visa I get reimbursed
>faster. I can take the Visa charge to my local bank today and get
>reimbursed, but I mail AmEx charges to New York once a month."
>
Today, American Express does cost merchants more than most other cards,
the difference is around 0.5% -- funds reach the merchant with about the
same latency as other cards. It's all electrionic clearing these days.
AMEX fees have to be higher, since they make far less money off interest
charges than the other cards do. (Amex -really- wants you to pay off the
entire outstanding balance each month.)
Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2010 18:52:02 -0400
From: danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Iranians discover that finding a needle in a Haystack ain't hard...
Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.1010061851420.16340@panix5.panix.com>
[VOA]
What Went Wrong With Haystack?
It seemed too good to be true, and perhaps that should have been
the first warning. "Haystack" was said to be just the needed tool
for Iranian democracy activists to break through governmental
firewalls and hide their identity. In the end, it may have put
them at risk. How did the promise of Haystack go so wrong?
--------
rest (basically that too many people wanted to believe in
the Emperor's new clothes, and almost no one checked first...):
http://www.voanews.com/english/news/science-technology/What-Went-Wrong-With-Haystack-103708474.html
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dannyb@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
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