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

Add this Digest to your personal   or  

The Telecom Digest for July 6, 2013
Volume 32 : Issue 147 : "text" Format
Messages in this Issue:
F.C.C. Is Told Verizon Underpaid Data Refunds (Monty Solomon)
140 Characters Spell Charges and Jail (Monty Solomon)

====== 31 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: Thu, 4 Jul 2013 00:04:49 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: F.C.C. Is Told Verizon Underpaid Data Refunds Message-ID: <p06240839cdfaa4c29b06@[10.0.1.12]> F.C.C. Is Told Verizon Underpaid Data Refunds By EDWARD WYATT July 2, 2013 WASHINGTON - An independent telecommunications lawyer filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday, claiming that Verizon Wireless had vastly understated the amount it collected from false data charges on customer bills when it agreed to refund the levies in 2010. The lawyer, Arthur V. Belendiuk, of Washington, said in a petition for investigation that Verizon and F.C.C. documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request contained evidence indicating that the company might have taken $240 million or more from the false charges, more than four times the almost $53 million it agreed to refund. A Verizon spokesman, Torod B. Neptune, said that the allegations were without merit, and declined to comment further. F.C.C. officials and the Office of the Inspector General declined to comment. The Verizon charges came to light in 2009 in articles in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer and The New York Times. Thousands of Verizon Wireless customers had been complaining about mysterious $1.99 data charges on their cellphone bills. The customers said they had not used the Internet connection function on their phones; some demonstrated to Verizon employees that the charges had occurred randomly, often when the phone was turned off or the battery removed, and at times on accounts that did not have a phone capable of connecting to the Internet. The F.C.C.'s enforcement bureau investigated and in October 2010 reached a consent decree with Verizon. The company agreed to pay $52.8 million in refunds to customers and a payment of $25 million to the United States Treasury to end the investigation. At the time, it was the largest such payment in F.C.C. history, the agency said. The F.C.C. found that about 15 million pay-as-you-go customers could have been affected by the false charges over a period of about 30 months. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/03/business/fcc-is-told-verizon-underpaid-data-refunds.html
Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2013 00:05:43 -0400 From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com> To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: 140 Characters Spell Charges and Jail Message-ID: <p0624083acdfaa4f7a75b@[10.0.1.12]> 140 Characters Spell Charges and Jail By ROBBIE BROWN July 2, 2013 One night last summer, Jarvis Britton of Birmingham, Ala., sent out a series of Twitter messages that he later described as "stupid" jokes. Prosecutors did not think they were funny. "Let's Go Kill the President," wrote Mr. Britton, who is 26 and unemployed. "I think we could get the president with cyanide! #MakeItSlow." When Secret Service agents showed up at his house to question him, Mr. Britton said he had been drunk and apologized. But in September, he posted another round of death threats against President Obama and was arrested. Last month, he was sentenced to a year in federal prison. "Because of the repeated threats on Twitter, we took him seriously," said Joyce White Vance, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, who prosecuted the case. Mr. Britton was the latest in a recent series of social media users to overstep the boundary of legal free speech and face jail time for threatening the president's life. Last month, a Twitter user in Charlotte, N.C., Donte Jamar Sims, was sentenced to six months for posting "Ima assassinate president Obama this evening!" among other threats. And Daniel Temple of Columbus, Ohio, is awaiting sentencing for saying on Twitter that he was "coming to kill" the president and "killing you soon." A Secret Service spokesman, Brian Leary, said social media are increasingly useful for finding and tracking threats. In 2011, the agency created the @SecretService account, to let users report suspicious tweets. And a group of agents, called the Internet Threat Desk, focuses specifically on threats posted online. ... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/03/us/felony-counts-and-jail-in-140-characters.html ***** Moderator's Note ***** This makes me very uncomfortable. There is a very fine line between "I'm going to kill Obama" and "I'm going to kill Obama at the polls", and Uncle Sam has shown that he is sometimes unable to discern just where that line is. Bill Horne Moderator
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
339-364-8487
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) 2013 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)

Return to Archives ** Older Issues