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The Telecom Digest for July 22, 2013
Volume 32 : Issue 158 : "text" Format
====== 31 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
|
Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the
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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: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 00:00:30 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: New Jersey Supreme Court Restricts Police Searches of Phone Data
Message-ID: <p0624080bce0e6a455da3@[10.0.1.9]>
New Jersey Supreme Court Restricts Police Searches of Phone Data
By KATE ZERNIKE
July 18, 2013
Staking out new ground in the noisy debate about technology and
privacy in law enforcement, the New Jersey Supreme Court on Thursday
ordered that the police will now have to get a search warrant before
obtaining tracking information from cellphone providers.
The ruling puts the state at the forefront of efforts to define the
boundaries around a law enforcement practice that a national survey
last year showed was routine, and typically done without court
oversight or public awareness. With lower courts divided on the use
of cellphone tracking data, legal experts say, the issue is likely to
end up before the United States Supreme Court.
The New Jersey decision also underscores the extent of the battles
over government intrusion into personal data in a quickly advancing
digital age, from small town police departments to the National
Security Agency's surveillance of e-mail and cellphone conversations.
Several states and Congress are considering legislation to require
that warrants based on probable cause be obtained before
investigators can get cellphone data. Montana recently became the
first state to pass such a measure into law. The California
Legislature approved a similar bill in 2012, but Gov. Jerry Brown
vetoed it, saying it did not "strike the right balance" between the
needs of law enforcement and the rights of citizens.
The Florida Supreme Court ruled in May that the police could seize a
cellphone without a warrant, but needed a warrant to search it. And a
case before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth
Circuit, in Richmond, Va., is weighing whether investigators acted
legally when they got a court order, but not a warrant, to obtain 221
days of cellphone location data for suspects in an armed robbery case
in Maryland.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/19/nyregion/new-jersey-supreme-court-restricts-police-searches-of-phone-data.html
Date: Wed, 17 Jul 2013 01:16:40 -0400
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Hulu Owners Call Off Sale, Instead Pledging to Invest to Take On Rivals
Message-ID: <p06240831ce0bd91199d3@[10.0.1.9]>
Hulu Owners Call Off Sale, Instead Pledging to Invest to Take On Rivals
By BRIAN STELTER
July 12, 2013
The owners of Hulu, having plotted a breakup twice now, have decided
again to stay together - and as in many relationships of this sort,
they are putting on a happy face and promising to work harder this
time.
The three companies that mutually own Hulu - 21st Century Fox, the
Walt Disney Company and NBCUniversal - said Friday that instead of
selling the pioneering streaming video Web site, they would make a
new investment of $750 million and use Hulu's technology to compete
against other online distributors like Netflix. The announcement
represented an anticlimactic end to months of sale speculation and
disappointed bidders like DirecTV, that were prepared to pay about $1
billion for the site.
The Web site's owners concluded, according to a person with close
ties to the negotiation process, that the "equity value in the long
run outstrips the sale value."
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/13/business/media/owners-of-hulu-call-off-sale-and-plan-to-invest-750-million.html
Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 01:31:12 -0400
From: danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Police need warrants to track cell-phone data, N.J. Supreme Court rules
Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.1307190130560.16059@panix5.panix.com>
[NJ news]
Police need warrants to track cell-phone data, N.J. Supreme Court rules
In a trailblazing decision that expands electronic privacy rights in New
Jersey, the state Supreme Court ruled today that law enforcement agencies must
get warrants if they want to track crime suspects by tracing the signals from
their cell phones.
"Cell phones are not meant to serve as tracking devices to locate their owners
wherever they may be," Chief Justice Stuart Rabner wrote in the 7-0 decision.
=========
rest:
http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/07/police_need_warrants_to_track_cell-phone_data_nj_supreme_court_rules.html
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dannyb@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
Date: 20 Jul 2013 19:05:29 -0000
From: "John Levine" <johnl@iecc.com>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Google Said to Weigh Supplying TV Channels
Message-ID: <20130720190529.6205.qmail@joyce.lan>
>> If Google has its way, you might someday get cable television the
>> same way you get Gmail: through any ordinary Internet connection.
>
>Er - how many of us get our internet connection from our cable company? IIRC
>naked internet isn't a very attractive buy.
Remember that Google is building its own fiber to the home network in
Kansas City and other cities. That makes it a lot more interesting
than it is here in T-W land.
At least we can get IPv6.
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 17:37:13 -0500
From: gordonb.fs5on@burditt.org (Gordon Burditt)
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: The Apple 'Kill List': What Your iPhone Doesn't Want You to Type
Message-ID: <ErGdnecMd7uEjHbMnZ2dnUVZ_rudnZ2d@posted.internetamerica>
> Spell 'electrodialysis' wrong in a text, and Apple will correct you.
> Miss 'abortion' by one letter? You're on your own. A Daily Beast
> investigation into your iPhone's hidden taboos.
>
> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/16/the-apple-kill-list-what-your-iphone-doesn-t-want-you-to-type.html
>
This sort of thing has been going on for some time. UNIX troff is a
rather old text formatting language that originally targetted a
typesetting machine. It was supposedly used in publishing later
issues of the Bell Systems Technical Journal, and it had an add-on
with ways of formatting mathematical equations somewhat like
OpenOffice has today, but the input is strictly text and
non-interactive. One of the characters in the typesetting character
set was the Bell System logo.
My (then) employer bought an Apple LaserWriter and some software that
converted troff to Postscript for, among other things, formatting and
printing some Xenix documentation in troff from Microsoft and/or SCO
(with the documentation for the programming tools pretty much
identical to that from UNIX V7). This was about 1985. It turns out
that when you printed the troff character for the Bell System logo, it
came out as the Apple logo. I suppose that might have been because
Apple didn't have permission to use the Bell System logo in the fonts
for the LaserWriter. Also, expanding the character set would break
compatability. Since this documentation was going to be distributed
to customers who bought Xenix, it was a big deal to the marketing
department. As I recall, there was some kind of global fix that
didn't involve finding every reference to that character and fixing
it.
The autocorrect trickiness could be a lot worse: 'abortion' could be
autocorrected to 'adoption', 'war' could be autocorrected to 'peace',
'freedom' could be autocorrected to 'slavery', and 'ignorance' could
be autocorrected to 'strength'. 'Google' could be autocorrected to
'Apple' unless the word following was 's**ks', in which case 'Apple'
could be autocorrected to 'Google'.
I suppose there are some issues about suggesting sensitive words. If
I were writing a paper for NASA about conditions under which it was
necessary to abort a launch, I wouldn't want 'abortion' flashing at me
all the time, and a pregnant woman working on the same topic might
turn that into a "creating a hostile workplace" lawsuit. If I write a
paper comparing compiled code speed to hand-tweaked 'assembly
language', I don't want to type 3 letters and see a suggested
completion of 'hole', largely because it would be embarrassing if that
suggestion got into the paper. Some autocorrectors are much more
aggressive than Apple's, and they just make the change.
Date: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 17:19:58 -0400
From: T <kd1s.nospam@cox.nospam.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Big disconnect: Telcos to abandon copper phone lines
Message-ID: <MPG.2c54c90b8f7d49c9989e3a@news.eternal-september.org>
In article <ks4tt7$j9q$1@dont-email.me>, arnie.goetchius.remove-
this@and-this-too.att.net says...
[Moderator snip]
> I have FiOS and like everything about it except the need for a UPS for
> power in order to use the internet. I have a 650VA UPS with which I
> power the router and the ONT. This gives me about 90 minutes of internet
> connection. After 90 minutes I lose the router and the ONT switches to
> its internal battery backup which gives me telephone only for about 6
> hours. For short outages, this works fine but for Sandy, it sucked. I
> was without power in NJ for 11 days and moved to a motel in PA on day 3.
> Fortunately, FiOS knew when my telephone service went out and
> automatically transferred all incoming landline calls to my prepaid cell
> phone which is good for telephone calls and messages but not wifi or data.
Interesting. I have Cox phone service and the router has a battery good
for 8 hours built in, not the net, just the phone service.
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 11:48:03 -0400
From: unknown <arnie.goetchius.remove-this@and-this-too.att.net>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Telemarketers call in reinforcements as they ignore do-not-call list
Message-ID: <ksgvg0$fgj$1@dont-email.me>
Monty Solomon wrote:
===snipped==
> Regardless of having registered a phone line with the Federal Trade
> Commission as a telemarketer-free zone, a growing number of consumers
> are saying that some businesses are ignoring their stated preference
> and calling anyway.
>
I use a program (Phone Tray) and a Fax Modem which recognizes CallerID
to block telemarketer and other calls for which I have no use. I can
block individual telephone numbers or all calls from an area code. Area
code blocking was very handy during the last election when I blocked
everything from area code 202.
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