29 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981
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The Telecom Digest for June 10, 2011
Volume 30 : Issue 147 : "text" Format
====== 29 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 Bill Horne and
the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other
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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.
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Date: Wed, 8 Jun 2011 16:59:51 -0700 (PDT)
From: Wes Leatherock <wleathus@yahoo.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Plumbers and other artisans
Message-ID: <116052.78959.qm@web111707.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
On Tue, 07 Jun 2011 19:06:38 -0400, John Mayson <john@mayson.us> wrote:
> ... in 1995 BellSouth installed phone service
> to my house. The static was horrendous. They came out, claimed to
> have fixed it, but didn't. Finally I went out, fixed it myself, and
> then called them offering to let their techs know how to fix a
> static-filled line.
I did not know that Bell South ever served or tried to serve Austin.
It was Southwestern Bell since, I believe, 1917.
Wes Leatherock
wleathus@yahoo.com
wesrock@aol.com
Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2011 21:51:52 -0700
From: John David Galt <jdg@diogenes.sacramento.ca.us>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Plumbers and other artisans
Message-ID: <ispjh8$20o$1@blue-new.rahul.net>
> On Tue, 07 Jun 2011 19:06:38 -0400, John Mayson <john@mayson.us> wrote:
>> ... in 1995 BellSouth installed phone service
>> to my house. The static was horrendous. They came out, claimed to
>> have fixed it, but didn't. Finally I went out, fixed it myself, and
>> then called them offering to let their techs know how to fix a
>> static-filled line.
On 2011-06-08 11:37, tlvp wrote:
> You mean you actually spliced in a replacement for the part of the line
> that the squirrels had chewed half-way through? That's what makes for
> static on my line, anyway, roughly once every 3-5 years.
And I thought I was the only one! Why wouldn't the telco agree to my
offer to provide an armored cable as a replacement, anyway?
Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2011 01:10:48 -0700
From: Sam Spade <sam@coldmail.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: The Old Days
Message-ID: <PbWdneILN7WVHW3QnZ2dnUVZ_gidnZ2d@giganews.com>
A bit of phone humor:
http://tinyurl.com/3jcckyr
Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2011 07:04:03 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Police: Mac technician installed spyware to photograph women
Message-ID: <p06240836ca16572489d6@[192.168.182.16]>
Police: Mac technician installed spyware to photograph women
By Robert McMillan
June 8, 2011 09:02 PM ET
IDG News Service - He was hired to fix their computers, but police
say that Trevor Harwell instead installed spyware software that took
candid photos of his clients in various states of undress.
Harwell had been a Macintosh specialist with a Los Angeles-area home
computer repair company called Rezitech. That's how he allegedly had
the opportunity to install the spy software, called Camcapture, on
computers.
While working on repair assignments, the 20-year-old technician
secretly set up a complex system that could notify him whenever it
was ready to snap a shot using the computer's webcam, according to
Sergeant Andrew Goodrich, a spokesman with the Fullerton Police
Department in California. "It would let his server know that the
victim's machine was on. The server would then notify his
smartphone... and then the images were recorded on his home
computer," he said.
...
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9217461/Police_Mac_technician_installed_spyware_to_photograph_women
Computer repairman accused of taking nude pictures of women remotely
June 8, 2011
A computer repairman was arrested Wednesday for allegedly planting
spyware on dozens of computers he fixed and remotely taking hundreds
of photos of women in their homes partially clothed or naked.
...
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/06/computer-repairman-arrested-for-allegedly-taking-hundreds-of-nude-pictures-of-women-remotely.html
Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2011 07:17:02 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Spyware, the FBI, and The Failure of ISPs
Message-ID: <p0624083bca165b8a920c@[192.168.182.16]>
Spyware, the FBI, and The Failure of ISPs
Why can't ISPs routinely look at network activity and use deep-packet
sniffing to find infected machines and tell the customer in the first
place?
John C. Dvorak
June 1, 2011
Operation Adeona, it was called. It involved the FBI. Spyware.
Intrigue. Controversy. The FBI took it upon itself to attack one of
the miserable botnets that plagues the Internet to figure out how to
intercept its "calling home function." And essentially it ended up
giving it new and less destructive instructions. Let me try to
explain.
Botnets generally consist of thousands of infected computers that
have some specific piece of malware installed. Your computer at home
may be one of them. The malicious code is usually in the form of a
Trojan Horse that was planted by a Web site or some code you
mistakenly clicked on. Once installed on your computer it doesn't
really do much until called into action.
The idea nowadays is to inhabit your machine for nefarious purposes
including mailing spam from your account, pinging a target computer
to harass someone, or even to do odd sorts of market research. Most
of the time these infected machines do their dirty work after hours
and seldom during the day when an observant owner might spot the
dubious activity.
It is a public nuisance. I cannot emphasize enough how people should
run some good scanners to ferret out these programs. Millions of
machines are infected.
Anyway, so the FBI decided to counterattack one of the major botnets
called Coreflood, which is used to loot bank accounts. The FBI was to
replace the servers communicating with infected Coreflood machines
with its own servers, and also to disable the Coreflood malware on
the infected machines. This process seems to have gone well and the
botnet was mostly silenced and had no way of getting any more
nefarious instructions, rendering it useless. The problem is that the
code is still on the machines. Now it gets dicey.
...
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385959,00.asp
Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2011 18:39:51 -0400
From: Some Guy <Some@Guy.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: New telephone area-code 431 in Winnipeg area?
Message-ID: <4DEFFA37.67ECCF9E@Guy.com>
Strange. We got a blank voicemail on our Google Voice phone-line today:
New voicemail from (431) 536-63xx at 8:49 AM
When I search for info about that area code, I get this:
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/Area-code-431-being-added-in-2012-99469374.html
The CRTC also confirmed that a new area code, 431, will be introduced as
of Nov. 3, 2012.
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
So, is the 431 area-code active now (contrary to the above article) ?
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