The Telecom Digest for November 18, 2010
Volume 29 : Issue 311 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
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Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:29:51 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Should You Be Snuggling With Your Cellphone?
Message-ID: <p0624088bc908fc4b99bd@[10.0.1.3]>
Should You Be Snuggling With Your Cellphone?
By RANDALL STROSS
The New York Times
November 13, 2010
WARNING: Holding a cellphone against your ear may be hazardous to
your health. So may stuffing it in a pocket against your body.
I'm paraphrasing here. But the legal departments of cellphone
manufacturers slip a warning about holding the phone against your
head or body into the fine print of the little slip that you toss
aside when unpacking your phone. Apple, for example, doesn't want
iPhones to come closer than 5/8 of an inch; Research In Motion,
BlackBerry's manufacturer, is still more cautious: keep a distance of
about an inch.
The warnings may be missed by an awful lot of customers. The United
States has 292 million wireless numbers in use, approaching one for
every adult and child, according to C.T.I.A.-The Wireless
Association, the cellphone industry's primary trade group. It says
that as of June, about a quarter of domestic households were
wireless-only.
If health issues arise from ordinary use of this hardware, it would
affect not just many customers but also a huge industry. Our voice
calls - we chat on our cellphones 2.26 trillion minutes annually,
according to the C.T.I.A. - generate $109 billion for the wireless
carriers.
The cellphone instructions-cum-warnings were brought to my attention
by Devra Davis, an epidemiologist who has worked for the University
of Pittsburgh and has published a book about cellphone radiation,
"Disconnect." I had assumed that radiation specialists had long ago
established that worries about low-energy radiation were unfounded.
Her book, however, surveys the scientific investigations and
concludes that the question is not yet settled.
Brain cancer is a concern that Ms. Davis takes up. Over all, there
has not been a general increase in its incidence since cellphones
arrived. But the average masks an increase in brain cancer in the
20-to-29 age group and a drop for the older population.
...
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/business/14digi.html
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 15:37:45 +0000 (UTC)
From: danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Should You Be Snuggling With Your Cellphone?
Message-ID: <ic0ss9$cm6$1@reader1.panix.com>
In <p0624088bc908fc4b99bd@[10.0.1.3]> Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> writes:
>Should You Be Snuggling With Your Cellphone?
[snip]
Not much room to hide things in most cellphones these days. Unless
you're actually smuggling the phones themselves.
Oh, "snuggling".
Never mind.
--
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dannyb@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
***** Moderator's Note *****
I've just remembered a TV show where Paul Lynde was asked what a
retired Lady of the Evening could do as a new career.
He answered "Smuggling".
Bill Horne
Moderator
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 23:06:36 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: The Great Cyberheist
Message-ID: <p0624088fc90904f4a162@[10.0.1.3]>
The Great Cyberheist
By JAMES VERINI
The New York Times
November 10, 2010
One night in July 2003, a little before midnight, a plainclothes
N.Y.P.D. detective, investigating a series of car thefts in upper
Manhattan, followed a suspicious-looking young man with long, stringy
hair and a nose ring into the A.T.M. lobby of a bank. Pretending to
use one of the machines, the detective watched as the man pulled a
debit card from his pocket and withdrew hundreds of dollars in cash.
Then he pulled out another card and did the same thing. Then another,
and another. The guy wasn't stealing cars, but the detective figured
he was stealing something.
Indeed, the young man was in the act of "cashing out," as he would
later admit. He had programmed a stack of blank debit cards with
stolen card numbers and was withdrawing as much cash as he could from
each account. He was doing this just before 12 a.m., because that's
when daily withdrawal limits end, and a "casher" can double his take
with another withdrawal a few minutes later. To throw off anyone who
might later look at surveillance footage, the young man was wearing a
woman's wig and a costume-jewelry nose ring. The detective asked his
name, and though the man went by many aliases on the Internet -
sometimes he was cumbajohny, sometimes segvec, but his favorite was
soupnazi - he politely told the truth. "Albert Gonzalez," he said.
After Gonzalez was arrested, word quickly made its way to the New
Jersey U.S. attorney's office in Newark, which, along with agents
from the Secret Service's Electronic Crimes Task Force, had been
investigating credit- and debit-card fraud involving cashers in the
area, without much luck. Gonzalez was debriefed and soon found to be
a rare catch. Not only did he have data on millions of card accounts
stored on the computer back in his New Jersey apartment, but he also
had a knack for patiently explaining his expertise in online card
fraud. As one former Secret Service agent told me, Gonzalez was
extremely intelligent. "He knew computers. He knew fraud. He was
good."
Gonzalez, law-enforcement officials would discover, was more than
just a casher. He was a moderator and rising star on Shadowcrew.com,
an archetypal criminal cyberbazaar that sprang up during the
Internet-commerce boom in the early 2000s. Its users trafficked in
databases of stolen card accounts and devices like magnetic
strip-encoders and card-embossers; they posted tips on vulnerable
banks and stores and effective e-mail scams. Created by a part-time
student in Arizona and a former mortgage broker in New Jersey,
Shadowcrew had hundreds of members across the United States, Europe
and Asia. It was, as one federal prosecutor put it to me, "an eBay,
Monster.com and MySpace for cybercrime."
After a couple of interviews, Gonzalez agreed to help the government
so he could avoid prosecution. "I was 22 years old and scared," he'd
tell me later. "When you have a Secret Service agent in your
apartment telling you you'll go away for 20 years, you'll do
anything."
He was also good-natured and helpful. "He was very respectable, very
nice, very calm, very well spoken," says the Secret Service agent who
would come to know Gonzalez best, Agent Michael (a nickname derived
from his real name). "In the beginning, he was quiet and reserved,
but then he started opening up. He started to trust us."
The agents won his trust in part by paying for his living expenses
while they brought him to their side and by waiting for Gonzalez to
work through his withdrawal. An intermittent drug addict, Gonzalez
had been taking cocaine and modafinil, an antinarcoleptic, to keep
awake during his long hours at the computer. To decompress, he liked
Ecstasy and ketamine. At first, a different agent told me, "he was
extremely thin; he smoked a lot, his clothes were disheveled. Over
time, he gained weight, started cutting his hair shorter and shaving
every day. It was having a good effect on his health." The agent went
on to say: "He could be very disarming, if you let your guard down. I
was well aware that I was dealing with a master of social engineering
and deception. But I never got the impression he was trying to
deceive us."
Gonzalez's gift for deception, however, is precisely what made him
one of the most valuable cybercrime informants the government has
ever had. After his help enabled officials to indict more than a
dozen members of Shadowcrew, Gonzalez's minders at the Secret Service
urged him to move back to his hometown, Miami, for his own safety.
(It was not hard for Shadowcrew users to figure out that the one
significant figure among their ranks who hadn't been arrested was
probably the unnamed informant in court documents.) After aiding
another investigation, he became a paid informant in the Secret
Service field office in Miami in early 2006. Agent Michael was
transferred to Miami, and he worked with Gonzalez on a series of
investigations on which Gonzalez did such a good job that the agency
asked him to speak at seminars and conferences. "I shook the hand of
the head of the Secret Service," Gonzalez told me. "I gave a
presentation to him." As far as the agency knew, that's all he was
doing. "It seemed he was trying to do the right thing," Agent Michael
said.
He wasn't. Over the course of several years, during much of which he
worked for the government, Gonzalez and his crew of hackers and other
affiliates gained access to roughly 180 million payment-card accounts
from the customer databases of some of the most well known
corporations in America: OfficeMax, BJ's Wholesale Club, Dave &
Buster's restaurants, the T. J. Maxx and Marshalls clothing chains.
They hacked into Target, Barnes & Noble, JCPenney, Sports Authority,
Boston Market and 7-Eleven's bank-machine network. In the words of
the chief prosecutor in Gonzalez's case, "The sheer extent of the
human victimization caused by Gonzalez and his organization is
unparalleled."
At his sentencing hearing in March, where he received two concurrent
20-year terms, the longest sentence ever handed down to an American
for computer crimes, the judge said, "What I found most devastating
was the fact that you two-timed the government agency that you were
cooperating with, and you were essentially like a double agent."
...
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/magazine/14Hacker-t.html
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:26:34 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: 16 Months Later, Say Hello To Google Voice For The iPhone. It Was Worth The Wait.
Message-ID: <p06240893c909a3fe0aa2@[10.0.1.3]>
16 Months Later, Say Hello To Google Voice For The iPhone. It Was
Worth The Wait.
MG Siegler
Over the past few years, there has been no shortage of developers
complaining about how long Apple has taken to approve their iPhone
applications. But few have waited as long as Google for the Google
Voice application. But today brings great news: the wait is over.
Yes, the app is real, it's approved, and it should be live at this
link. The official Google Voice for the iPhone is here. And it's
wonderful. Yes, it was even worth that insane wait.
As you're probably well aware, this app has had quite the contentious
history. Google originally submitted it to the App Store about a year
and a half ago. But 16 months ago, Apple decided they weren't going
to accept it. Not only that, other third-party apps with Google Voice
functionality were pulled from the App Store as well.
While Apple and Google were both silent on the issue at first, the
government got involved and both sides were made to disclose at least
part of their stance on the app, their relationships with carriers,
and the relationship with each other.
...
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/16/google-voice-for-the-iphone/
Google Voice
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-voice/id318698524
Google Voice for iPhone
http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/google-voice-for-iphone.html
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 21:20:46 -0800 (PST)
From: Lisa or Jeff <hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: History--computer based information operator terminal system
Message-ID: <0598f2d9-0343-4236-bcbc-8cd304218e9f@y37g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>
On Nov 16, 7:40 pm, Wes Leatherock <wesr...@aol.com> wrote:
> > Initial "1" wasn't used because of the possibility of dialing a
> > false "1" when removing the receiver from the switchhook, and
> > initial "0" was reserved for Operator.
>
> Bells Labs made a study, I believe in the 1950s or so, to see how many
> false "1s" actually occurred at the start of a csll. After amassing
> several million examples of dialing, they found not a single case of
> the false "1".
According to the Bell Labs history, the false '1' was on candle stick
phones. With the demise of that type of unit in service it was no
longer a problem, though some candle sticks remained in service in the
1950s.
When the 202 handset phone came out it was a premium option. Would
anyone know when the stopped charging extra for handset units?
I know they gave extra life to candle stick units by retrofiting 302
"F" transmitters and receivers to them, which gave them much better
sound quality than the original elements.
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 19:47:14 EST
From: Wes Leatherock <wesrock@aol.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: History--computer based information operator terminal system
Message-ID: <a06e7.11519f60.3a15d192@aol.com>
In a message dated 11/17/2010 9:39:40 AM Central Standard Time,
hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com writes:
> When the 202 handset phone came out it was a premium option. Would
> anyone know when the stopped charging extra for handset units?
It was up to the individual company and their regulatory agency.
Multi-state companies it may have been at different times in each
state. Things like this showed the Bell System was not entirely the
monolith it was often thought to be.
Wes Leatherock
wesrock@aol.com
wleathus@yahoo.com
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 21:26:57 -0800 (PST)
From: Lisa or Jeff <hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: History--computer based information operator terminal system
Message-ID: <0c9ce086-83b5-4133-8c08-cf8508a2f493@g7g2000vbl.googlegroups.com>
On Nov 15, 11:22 pm, Richard <r...@richbonnie.com> wrote:
> The old rule was: Area codes had a 1 or 0 as the second digit, and
> office codes did not. This was particularly important in places like
> New Jersey in 1970, where you did not have to dial 1 before a long
> distance call. The switch looked at the second digit to see how many
> digits to expect.
The Bell Labs history (published in 1975) says they already forsaw the
need to do away with that old rule and were converting switches. But
it obviously wasn't a rush thing, I think NJ didn't require a 1 prefix
until the mid 1980s. (Today NJ has plenty of area code splits but
still only 7 digit dialing for within the area code).
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:17:27 -0800 (PST)
From: Neal McLain <nmclain@annsgarden.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: History--computer based information operator terminal system
Message-ID: <e31f5900-e83c-4606-8839-a6262b7bddbb@v19g2000yqa.googlegroups.com>
On Nov 16, 11:26 pm, Lisa or Jeff <hanco...@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:
> On Nov 15, 11:22 pm, Richard <r...@richbonnie.com> wrote:
>
> > The old rule was: Area codes had a 1 or 0 as the second digit, and
> > office codes did not. This was particularly important in places like
> > New Jersey in 1970, where you did not have to dial 1 before a long
> > distance call. The switch looked at the second digit to see how many
> > digits to expect.
>
> The Bell Labs history (published in 1975) says they already forsaw the
> need to do away with that old rule and were converting switches. But
> it obviously wasn't a rush thing, I think NJ didn't require a 1 prefix
> until the mid 1980s. (Today NJ has plenty of area code splits but
> still only 7 digit dialing for within the area code).
> (Today NJ has plenty of area code splits but
> still only 7 digit dialing for within the area code).
Are you sure? NJ has three overlays, and FCC rules require 10D (or
1+10D) dialing for all calls within an overlay.
BTW, which is it, 10D or 1+1D?
Neal McLain
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 06:58:58 -0800 (PST)
From: Lisa or Jeff <hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Varying rates at a pay phone
Message-ID: <45851c89-46d7-41d2-8692-f862e2239345@i17g2000vbq.googlegroups.com>
On Nov 11, 11:35 pm, Lisa or Jeff <hanco...@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:
> I happened to be at a train station and I was curious how much it
> would cost to call a place ten miles away. I found it had two
> different rates.
Followup:
I was at another location and checked out the pay phone for a rate.
It was 95c for the first minute for a call to 30 miles away,
regardless how it was dialed. (Same LATA).
Also, I had previously reported that a turnpike interchange had phone
booths. I passed the location and checked more closely. Yes, the
booths are there, but the phones are gone. Also, the "Verizon" in the
upper pane is painted out. Plus, expansion of the interchange made
the booths, located at the side of the road, not easy to get to or
leave from.
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 00:33:40 -0600
From: Neal McLain <nmclain@annsgarden.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: History--computer based information operator terminal system
Message-ID: <4CE37744.7020403@annsgarden.com>
Wes Leatherock <wesr...@aol.com> wrote:
> nmcl...@annsgarden.com writes:
>> Initial "1" wasn't used because of the possibility of dialing a
>> false "1" when removing the receiver from the switchhook, and
>> initial "0" was reserved for Operator.
>
> Bells Labs made a study, I believe in the 1950s or so, to see
> how many false "1s" actually occurred at the start of a call.
> After amassing several million examples of dialing, they found
> not a single case of the false "1".
I've heard that before. Nevertheless, that's the reason Miller cited
for the no-initial-1 prohibition. Some switches in non-toll-alerting
states (Illinois comes to mind) were programmed to simply ignore
(absorb) an initial 1. Dialing a 1 didn't even break dialtone.
Folks over on the TCI and Strowger lists have noted that false "1s" were
a particular problem with candlestick phones. I guess that makes sense,
since it's sometimes difficult to get the receiver out of a candlestick
switchhook without bouncing it a time or two. But I suspect that by
"the 1950s or so" there weren't any candlesticks in service anyway.
Neal McLain
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2010 00:49:12 -0600
From: Neal McLain <nmclain@annsgarden.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: History--computer based information operator terminal system
Message-ID: <4CE37AE8.5040906@annsgarden.com>
Richard of Pahrump wrote:
> The old rule was: Area codes had a 1 or 0 as the second
> digit, and office codes did not. This was particularly
> important in places like New Jersey in 1970, where you
> did not have to dial 1 before a long distance call. The
> switch looked at the second digit to see how many
> digits to expect.
When area codes were first introduced circa 1952, that's the way it was
supposed to be across the entire NANP (which, at the time, consisted of
just United States and Canada). W.H. Nunn, writing in September 1952
BSTJ, states that approximately 90 area codes were assigned at the
outset. He cites the following rules:
-- Codes with second digit 0 were assigned to single-code states; e.g.
NJ (201), FL (305), UT (801).
-- Codes with second digit 1 were assigned to states with two or more
area codes; e.g. NY (six codes); CA, PA, IL, TX (four codes each), WI
(two codes, 414 and 715).
-- With one exception (maritime provinces), area codes did not overlap
any state or provincial boundary.
-- Initial 0 was reserved for Operator, and initial 1 was supposed to be
absorbed. [1]
The dial-1-first was a "temporary" artifact of SxS (and possibly other)
switching equipment that wasn't capable of examining a second digit to
route a call. Dialing the 1 switched the call to some other
more-capable switch. Thus, thousands of communities across the US and
Canada got used to the idea of dial-1-first. In due time, the initial 1
took on cultural significance. Unfortunately, the cultural significance
wasn't consistent from state to state.
NON-TOLL-ALERTING STATES: In come states (notably New York, parts of New
Jersey, IBT territory in the Chicago area, and much of California),
initial 1 meant "the next three digits you dial will be interpreted as
an area code." In these states:
-- Intra-NPA calls, local or toll, were dialed 7D.
-- Inter-NPA calls, local or toll, were dialed 1+10D.
As John Levine wrote in 1993:
> In most of upstate NY, calls within your area code
> are dialed with seven digits, calls outside of your area
> code are dialed with 11 digits. This has no relation to
> toll vs. local; where I am some seven digit numbers are
> local, some are intra-LATA toll, and some are inter-LATA
> toll. It happens that all 11 digits numbers I can
> call are toll, but on the other side of the lake there
> are local calls into an adjacent area code dialed with 11
> digits. [2]
TOLL-ALERTING STATES: In other states, initial 1 meant "you are about to
dial a toll call." In these states:
-- All intra-NPA local calls were "officially" dialed 7D.
-- Most intra-NPA toll calls were dialed 1+7D.
-- Inter-NPA local calls were dialed 7D (or sometimes 1+10).
-- All inter-NPA toll calls were dialed 1+10D.
There were numerous variations in local dialing plans (both intra- and
inter-NPA) due to local numbering conflicts. Even though local calls
were "officially" dialed 7D (and were printed as such in directories),
many (most?) SxS switches actually required only 4, 5, or 6 digits for
local calls. Prepended digits added to produce a 7D number were
absorbed at the first selector.
The original plan described by Nunn never happened. By the time all of
the old SxS switches had been replaced with newer equipment capable
accommodating intermixed central office and NPA codes (without
dial-1-first), some N1X and N0X central office codes were already in
service in non-toll alerting states. [3] Furthermore, the cultural
significance of dial-1-first (whatever it meant) had become so ingrained
in our minds that changing it would have been disruptive.
Artifacts of these cultural differences exist to this day. Which, I
suppose, is why all calls in overlay areas in New York, Illinois, and
California require 11D dialing. But overlay areas in toll-alerting
states have 10D local and 11D toll.
[1] W. H. Nunn. "Nationwide Numbering Plan." BSTJ, September 1952, 856.
[2] John Levine. "Re: 11-Digit Dialing Comes to NYC." TELECOM Digest
V22 #251, 23 Jan 2003.
http://tinyurl.com/vol22-iss251-300
[3] On a trip to Los Angeles in 1977, I was dumbfounded to discover
213-305 and 213-314 numbers listed in the white pages.
Neal McLain
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