30 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981

Add this Digest to your personal   or  

The Telecom Digest for February 2, 2012
Volume 31 : Issue 33 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
Re: Teen boots banned on account of cell phone smuggling (Pete Cresswell)
The cereal box goes digital (HAncock4)
EFF assisting megaupload.com users in retrieving files (danny burstein)
Re: Cloud-based PBX service (Geoffrey Welsh)
Re: Justices Say GPS Tracker Violated Privacy Rights (Adam H. Kerman)

====== 30 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 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 that person, or email address owner.
Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without the explicit written consent of the owner of that address. 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: Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:50:21 -0500 From: Pete Cresswell <PeteCress@invalid.telecom-digest.org> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Teen boots banned on account of cell phone smuggling Message-ID: <14kii754rba8so39juehq56rmqmcjd78se@4ax.com> Per tlvp: >Heh-heh ... in my day, it wasn't cell phones but shivs or zip guns >that kids would smuggle into school, and not in "Uggs" but in their >galoshes. When I was living in Hawaii back in the sixties, I briefly shared a house with a guy from Texas who never went anywhere without his 1914 Colt .45 - and seemed to wear cowboy boots 24-7. "Dallas, how on earth did you get that thing over here?". "Ahhhh I just stuck it in my boot". -- Pete Cresswell
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2012 07:07:46 -0800 (PST) From: HAncock4 <withheld@invalid.telecom-digest.org> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: The cereal box goes digital Message-ID: <d9e7a76b-47cc-4775-bac4-d281bc67296a@y10g2000vbn.googlegroups.com> USA Today reported that General Mills, home of Cheerios, Pillsbury, Green Giant, and Betty Crocker, is looking into digital add-ons to its packaging. QR [Quick Response] codes, apps, augmented reality and all the other things smartphones can do in their digital pantry. One possible approach is to update the marketing concept of offering a surprise inside the cereal box. Instead, kids could point a smartphone at the box and "see visual surprises." for full article please see: http://goo.gl/s7fmi -or- http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/talkingtech/story/2012-01-31/general-mills-tech/52906314/1
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2012 12:26:04 -0500 From: danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: EFF assisting megaupload.com users in retrieving files Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.1202011213480.7040@panix5.panix.com> Putting aside the Big Arguments about the US gov'ts shutdown about the Megaupload.com file sharing service, one undisputed fact is that many completely "innocent" (term used very, very, loosely) subscribers were victims of collateral damage. Far too many of them didn't maintain their own local copies of their material, and now had no way to retrieve it. The kind and wise folk over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation ("EFF") have gotten handshakes from the various service providers who worked with Megaupload to refrain from deleting those files, and to establish a framework to give the original owners access to them. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/eff-requests-information-innocent-megaupload-users or: http://goo.gl/7vv54 _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2012 19:23:42 -0500 From: "Geoffrey Welsh" <gwelsh@spamcop.net> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Cloud-based PBX service Message-ID: <68ca5$4f29d768$d1b716e1$5827@PRIMUS.CA> > ***** Moderator's Note ***** > I'm uncomfortable with the idea that using a laptop for phone > calls makes it into a "soft" phone: I think it makes a very expensive > telephone instrument with a built-in analog-to-digital adapter. Well, I did say "assuming that you already have a computer with speaker and microphone." I wouldn't recommend getting a PC just to turn it into a soft client... after all, I was suggesting the soft client as a way to save money, not to spend more of it. > some VoIP services demand that users endure pop-up ads and DNS > redirections, and they don't allow users to port numbers in or out > of the "service" they have subscribed to. While that may be true it should scare you away from the provider and not all soft clients. I mentioned Bria because it doesn't do anything bad, it's not tied to any provider, it tags along with the laptop that I drag almost everywhere anyway, brings my phone service wherever my laptop has an internet conenction, and is less expensive than a physical Nortel, Cisco or an Aastra IP phone. It does seem to have an issue with connecting to my VoIP provider's proxy when I'm behind a firewall with a SIP application gateway - that seems to be a common issue with soft SIP clients - so it may be wise to try before you buy. > I'd rather price a system with dedicated devices, and then > consider what, if anything, I can save by using a PC in place of one > or more of the dedicated devices. Exactly. In my case the service was ordered with SIP phones, but we could have saved money and had an acceptable result if we ordered the same service with Bria (or any number of similar products) in stead of the phone.
Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2012 01:31:09 +0000 (UTC) From: "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: Justices Say GPS Tracker Violated Privacy Rights Message-ID: <jgcp0t$2r7$2@news.albasani.net> Garrett Wollman <wollman@bimajority.org> wrote: >Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com> wrote: >>Huh. That's a poor summary of the case. >SCOTUSblog's Tom Goldstein posted a long piece criticizing the >reporting on the story the other day. >>The Supreme Court let the reversal stand. The government tried to bring up >>an argument, disallowed as it was not raised in the lower courts, that >>there was reasonable suspicion and thus probable cause and therefore the >>search wasn't unconstitutional. >"Reasonable suspicion" and "probable cause" are two different >standards. "Probable cause" is a much stronger standard than >"reasonable suspicion". The Court didn't say which standard it >favored. Oops. That was an error. The prosecution needs probable cause to obtain a search warrant. The government's disallowed argument was that they had reasonable suspicion to conduct the search because the defendant was one of the leaders of a criminal conspiracy to distribute drugs. The defendant was being investigated for evidence of his involvement in the criminal conspiracy, so that's a circular argument. The government was not allowed to raise an issue it had not raised in a lower court. I expect the government to try to raise the issue again in future.
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 Bill Horne. 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 moderated by Bill Horne.
Contact information: Bill Horne
Telecom Digest
43 Deerfield Road
Sharon MA 02067-2301
863-455-9426
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) 2012 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 (5 messages)

Return to Archives ** Older Issues