Return-Path: Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.4/NSCS-1.0S) id DAA26499; Sun, 30 Mar 1997 03:05:27 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 30 Mar 1997 03:05:27 -0500 (EST) From: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu (TELECOM Digest Editor) Message-Id: <199703300805.DAA26499@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Subject: TELECOM Digest V17 #78 TELECOM Digest Sun, 30 Mar 97 03:05:00 EST Volume 17 : Issue 78 Inside This Issue: Happy Easter to All! Suicide, The Net and MCI (John Cropper) 1997 ICFC (Farhad Sabetan) Re: Double Spam: Honest Business People Hurt (Rev. Clayton Walker) Problems With Reverse Telephone Directories (Jonathan I. Kamens) Re: 911 From Cellular Phone in Chicago (Alexandre Polozoff) Re: 911 From Cellular Phone in Chicago (Hillary Gorman) Re: 911 From Cellular Phone in Chicago (Darryl Smith) Experience With Grayson's Surveyor? Please Comment (Chris Suarez) Kansas Files Suit Against MCI Over "Pushy" Telemarketing (John R. Grout) Location of Phone Box in New Construction (Michael Persons) MCI Billing Problems (Valerie Wood) Re: Answer Supervision (Alan Boritz) Re: Administration to Confirm Domestic Crypto (Linc Madison) Re: Pacific Bell Demands MCI Stop its False Advertising (Linc Madison) Can Blocked Numbers be Displayed on Caller-ID? (x@com-net.org) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of public service systems and networks including Compuserve and America On Line. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. Subscriptions are available to qualified organizations and individual readers. Write and tell us how you qualify: * ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu * The Digest is edited, published and compilation-copyrighted by Patrick Townson of Skokie, Illinois USA. You can reach us by postal mail, fax or phone at: Post Office Box 4621 Skokie, IL USA 60076 Phone: 847-329-0571 Fax: 847-329-0572 ** Article submission address: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Our archives are located at hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu. The URL is: http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives They can also be accessed using anonymous ftp: ftp hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archives (or use our mirror site: ftp ftp.epix.net/pub/telecom-archives) A third method is the Telecom Email Information Service: Send a note to tel-archives@massis.lcs.mit.edu to receive a help file for using this method or write me and ask for a copy of the help file for the Telecom Archives. ************************************************************************* * TELECOM Digest is partially funded by a grant from the * * International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva, Switzerland * * under the aegis of its Telecom Information Exchange Services (TIES) * * project. Views expressed herein should not be construed as represent-* * ing views of the ITU. * ************************************************************************* 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 twenty dollars per year per reader is considered appropriate. See our address above. 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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: John Cropper Subject: Suicide, The Net and MCI Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 17:34:55 -0500 Organization: lincs.net Reply-To: jcropper@NOSPAM.lincs.net When the story on the "Young Web Programmers who committed suicide" broke, the world was shocked ... But morbid curiousity would turn into a nightmare for the ISP who provided domain hosting for the cult, and the netowrk providing THEIR service. Forty hours after the story broke, thousands of hits per minute are STILL being recorded at their site. Worse still, the overwhelming volume slammed the Tennessee DNS provider hosting the site to the point that MCI's links in the southeast were interrupted for forty-five minutes shortly after 5PM EST Thursday evening. I personally suffered some major problems with my provider next door in Kentucky, who himself was isolated for nearly an hour. Calls to MCI revealed that they were indeed aware of the problem, and 'taking steps to correct it'. The process repeated itself again at 8PM EST when the story hit the west coast television stations, but the outage only lasted for a few minutes. Regardless ... a moderately heavy amount of volume basically stormed a small DNS provider, and affected MCI's network service in four adjacent states, proving that the internet is now pretty close to capacity, and bandwidth upgrades at ALL points are sorely needed. Big 'boats' like Sun, Microsoft, and the like can readily handle tens of thousands of hits per minute, but other sites lack even the simple infrastructure from the communications companies *themselves* to even stay afloat should everyone rush to one side of 'their ship'. An internic search of heavensgate.com revels the following info: Chris Knight HEAVENSGATE-DOM 25801 W. PCH Malibu, CA 90265 Domain Name: HEAVENSGATE.COM Administrative Contact, Billing Contact: Knight, Chris CK1370 rep@HEAVENSGATE.COM 310/829-6333 Technical Contact, Zone Contact: craig, holly HC527 holly@DNS.CNAV.COM 615/732-4816 Record last updated on 28-Feb-97. Record created on 19-Apr-96. Domain servers in listed order: DNS.CNAV.COM 206.25.206.16 NS.VALLNET.COM 206.25.206.1 It is unknown whether any of the people shown above were among those found in the aftermath of the incident. NS.VALLNET.COM is Valley Internet services in Tennessee, apparently administrated by Holly Craig (and her husband William) in Dellrose. I was unable to reach them at their contact number for comment on the incident, and/or any background info. One thing is certain: their servers, and MCI will continue to suffer from elevated (morbid) volume until this thing dies down ... John Cropper, Webmaster voice: 888.NPA.NFO2 Legacy IS, Networking & Comm. Solutions 609.637.9434 P.O. Box 277 fax: 609.637.9430 Pennington, NJ 08534-0277 Unsolicited commercial e-mail is subject mailto:jcropper@lincs.net to a fee as outlined in the agreement at http://www.lincs.net/ http://www.lincs.net/spamoff.htm [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The news came over the television here about 8:00 PM and their reference was to 'late this afternoon in California' meaning, I would guess, about 4:00 pm, a couple hours earlier by California time. Already the sick jokes are starting on this one. Every tragedy has to have a few sick jokes go along with it, and this one was making the rounds by fax machine on Friday evening: Name two major milestones in transportation technology which have occured in the past five hundred years. In 1492, Columbus sailed the blue ... In 1997, spaceship rides to Heaven ... In 1978 at the time of the Jim Jones affair, the jokes dealt with 'Kool Aid Communion'. The media certainly has messed up this latest story. When they broke in on the Wheel of Fortune game on ABC with the first report, it was 'in excess of thirty young men ages 18-24, all computer web site programmers ...' Later they decided the count was 39 (which is, admittedly in excess of thirty) but they kept on saying the ages were 18-24 and all of them were male and that all were 'internet programmers on the web'. Finally on Saturday here, they decided that actually 21 were female and 18 were male and that the ages were middle twenties through (in one case) 72! Well, I guess they could not have picked a better weekend for it, this being Easter. Maybe they planned it that way. My wishes for a happy holiday to those of you who celebrate it. PAT] ------------------------------ From: BDACXGR@NJCORP3.BELL-ATL.COM Subject: 1997 ICFC Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 14:55:06 -0500 15TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL COMMUNICATIONS FORECASTING CONFERENCE HOSTED BY PACIFIC BELL "Dynamic Market Structures & Evolving Customer Needs: The Role of Demand Analysis & Forecasting" June 24-27, 1997 Sir Francis Drake Hotel San Francisco, CA The International Communications Forecasting Conference is a professional forum for telecommunications forecasters, demand analysts and planners. The ICFC provides opportunity for discussion, presentation, and review of emerging issues as they pertain to telecommunications forecasting and planning, demand analysis, business research and cost analysis. Visit our homepage for up to date Conference information and program material. The 1996 agenda and paper abstracts are also available on our homepage. http://www.econ.ilstu.edu/icfc/home.htm Internationally Known Speakers Peter A. Darbee, Chief Financial Officer and Controller, Pacific Bell, will speak on "Telecommunications: A Wall Street Perspective". Dr. William E. Taylor, Senior Vice President, National Economic Research Associates, Inc., will speak on "Issues Relating to Local Competition" Free Conference Tutorials Dr. John Colias of the M/A/R/C Group on "Telecommunications Forecasting Survey Design and Analysis". Dr. Richard Hoptroff of Right Information Systems on "Neural Networks and Demand Forecasting" Town Meetings "MERGER MANIA" This Town Meeting will be moderated by Robert E. Stoffels and consist of a panel representing several major telecommunications companies who have recently experienced significant mergers. Mr. Stoffels is the former editor of "America's Network" the industry's leading technology-focused trade publication. "INTERNET ECONOMICS" This Town Meeting will be moderated by Padmanabhan Srinagesh, Principal, Charles River Associates Incorporated. Panelists include: Professor Hal Varian, Dean, School of Information Management and Systems, UC Berkeley Professor Lester Taylor, Professor of Economics and Professor of Agriculture and Natural Resource Economics, University of Arizona Craig Partridge, Senior Scientist, BBN Corporation and Adjunct Faculty, Computer Science, Stanford University Milo Medin, Vice President, Networks Systems, @Home Co-Sponsored Seminars offered at special discount prices. Register directly with the Seminar sponsor and indicate you will be attending the ICFC. "Customer Choice: Empirical Methods for Analysis & Forecasting" UC-Berkeley June 23-24, 1997, 510 642-6649 http://elsa.berkeley.edu/eml/icfc.html "Technology Forecasting For Telecom Industry" Technology Futures, Inc. June 22-24, 1997, 800 TEK-FUTR http://www.tfi.com "Business Forecasting on the IBM PC" Business Forecasting Systems, Inc. June 22-24, 1997, 617 484-5050 http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/forecastpro Registration The early registration fee is $745 in US dollars before May 23, 1997. After May 23rd the registration fee will be $795 in US dollars. For attendance at both the 1997 ICFC and one of the preconference training seminars the fee is $695 in US dollars if registering before May 23, 1997, and $745 in US dollars after May 23, 1997. Contact Don Gorman for registration and hotel information at: ICFC 1997 Attn: Don Gorman 204 Murray School Road Pottstown, PA 19465 e-mail: don.gorman@worldnet.att.net Telephone: 610-469-0515 Fax: 610-469-6626 If you have questions regarding the Conference contact: Farhad Sabetan e-mail: fxsabet@popper.pactel.com Telephone: 510 823-3547 Fax: 510 866-0957 ------------------------------ From: spinal@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu Subject: Re: Double Spam: Honest Business People Hurt Date: 29 Mar 1997 00:58:15 GMT Organization: The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas TELECOM Digest Editor responded to Martin McCormick (martin@osuunx.ucc. okstate.edu): > Speaking of bad tastes in the mouth: Did anyone else get as infuriated > as I about the media's (still ongoing at this hour) treatment and > coverage of the San Diego mass suicide affair? Every other sentence > by the commentators has been on 'the internet and the web page' which > those people operated. As one phrased it on ABC News, 'they believed > that by committing suicide they would go to live on another planet > and this is all explained on their Web Page ...' Yeah right. This > is always followed of course by the local internet expert showing how > to log in and read the page those fools put together. Now we come to find out that the leader, Do, was formerly institutionalized, and his mate, Ti, was a nurse at his place of confinement. In my efforts as a volunteer internet trainer with Austin FreeNet (www.austinfree.net), I've found that a large majority of people think a) all internet address are in the form http://www.xxxx.com. Anything else (for example, gopher://, ftp://, *.edu, and god forbid, *.jp or even *.us) brings "Should I add an http://" or "Should I add a www to the beginning?" My brother has gotten into muds, and I was called upon to explain to one of his friends how to access it. His father called me, asking what I was doing giving them access codes to a teacher's computer network. He had never heard of telnet, and thought instead I was referring to TENET, the Texas Educators NETwork. What I'm trying to get at in all that is that while the public is being forcefed the web, they're not getting the whole story, of which the media can quite often be guilty. What makes me angry is MSNBC, claiming they "unite television and the Internet". That's something that I for one certainly don't want. The TV-x ratings have proven to be a failure, because of the governmental involvement. And their web pages use ‘ for quotation marks, making me, a lynx user, not too happy. > blocking software company puts out anyway on account of the word > 'sex' being in a message they saw. The Austin Public Library, along with Austin Freenet (which provides computers to APL and which I do volunteer internet training for), is going through the battle which many libraries have been going through, most notably Boston, recently installing Cyber Patrol at all its terminals. Apparantly they had been getting many angry parents complaining that their children could be accessing "that smut they read about", and then what took the cake was that someone printed out kiddie porn at several of the stations (I didn't see it, but it was described by one of the librarians as "quite raunchy"), and left it sitting ont he printer. The library staff was worried about liability on their part, due to a Texas law that prohibits facilitating access of pornography to anyone under 17. Then there's the humorous anecdote I'm sure everyone in any way involved with blocking software has heard, where a major software company had a slew of telephone calls from people who couldn't rea their web page, all of whom were using . The culprit was a chili pepper graphic, named hot.gif. The Reverend Clayton Walker spinal@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu [TELECOM Digest Editor's Sick, Neurotic Note: Another of the jokes going around as a result of this spectacle asks, "Ti and Do had five children. Do you know their names?" (Answer: Ray, Me, Fa, So, and La). And there were other jokes which, if I may be charitable about it, were too, umm, involved for publication in this family-oriented Digest I publish. The least offensive of these had the cult members going as a group to the hospital for the surgical removal of their Secret Parts. The doctors protested that this was a highly unusual request and the cultists insisted with equal vigor that it was mandated by their Scriptures. Finally the doctors agree to perform the operation on each of the men there. Later they go back to their cult headquarters and meet with their leader Do. He asks them if they have followed the scriptural mandate to be circumcised. The men all look at one another incredulously and finally one speaks up saying, "Dammit, I knew we were telling the doctors the wrong word!" .... Enough already. The next conversation about Do should be how much dough you are going to send the Digest for your subscription for this year if you have not done so already. I keep this little ezine going because some readers have made it their business to help me financially. I appreciate receiving letters from readers at my post office box (POB 4621 Skokie, IL 60077) and encourage all of you to stay in touch as often as you can. PAT] ------------------------------ From: jik@cam.ov.com (Jonathan I. Kamens) Subject: Problems With Reverse Telephone Directories Date: 28 Mar 1997 14:30:50 GMT Organization: OpenVision Technologies, Inc. In article , reynolds@ece.vill.edu (Jim Reynolds) writes: > www.whowhere.com used to have a reverse look up as well, but dropped > it due to pressue about privacy concerns. Personally, I don't see the > problem. No new or previously unpublished data is now available, it's > just organized differently (i.e. sorted by phone number instead of > name). Organizing data differently *can* be functionally equivalent to making new data available. If you're a stalker calling random phone numbers and seeing if young-sounding women answer the phone, in the old days you'd have no way of finding out the address associated with the phone number of such an answeree. Now, you can look up their phone number, get their address, and head right on over. Similarly, if you meet someone in a bar and he/she gives you his/her phone number, in the old days, you'd have to call him/her to meet again. Now, if you're a not-so-upright kind of person, you can look up the phone number and just show up. I think you get the idea. There are *serious* privacy and safety concerns with making it possible for anyone to look up a phone number and get the name and address of the person using that number. Perhaps further discussion of this would be more appropriate in the PRIVACY or RISKS digest, both of which have discussed it extensively in the past. Jonathan Kamens | OpenVision Technologies, Inc. | jik@cam.ov.com [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But using your line of reasoning, if someone just gives out their full name they run the 'risk' of having it looked up in a phone book. Why can't I see a person I wish to harass walking down the street, notice which house they enter, later see the name which appears on the mailbox there, and look up that name and address in a 'regular' phone book? A person with the type of privacy concerns you state does have an option or two: they can be entirely non-pub and they will not appear in a criss-cross. They can be listed under a different name. They can be listed with their name but 'address not listed at customer request ...' and in those cases the criss-cross book usually has a category just under the name of the town with all those listed. For example, check the Haines book or the Donnelly book for Chicago. Mixed in with all the street names listed in alphabetical order is one called 'Chicago, IL' and a few dozen names and phone numbers. In the phone number section of the cross-reference book the numbers have the names but then just a blank where the street address would go. Criss-cross directories serve as a valuable resource for delivery services like UPS and Fed- eral Express. They are good anytime you have a legitimate reason to locate the telephone numbers at a given address. Punish database abusers rather than abolishing the databases. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 06:28:32 -0600 From: Alexandre POLOZOFF Reply-To: alexandre_polozoff@ibm.net Organization: Genius at Work Subject: Re: 911 From Cellular Phone in Chicago > How is this handled in other places, and how precisely is the caller's > location known to the police? PAT] I drove by a brush fire on the interstate in NC a few months back. I called 911 on my cell phone and was connected to a 911 operator that then patched me through to the State Police. With both of them on the line the State PO wanted to know which county I was in. Unfamiliar with the territory all I could give them was a mile marker and a town I had recently passed. He seemed to determine which county it was and terminated the call at that point. As for not dialing 911 for non-emergencies... When living in Austin Texas there was a horrendous noise outside. Looking out there was a tow truck with a car on the hook that stopped infront of my house. The men were trying to get the doors open to let the emergency brake go which was the cause of the noise. I dialed the 7 digit number for the police and he told me to call 911 instead!! This wasn't an emergency because it could've been a legitimate repossession of the vehicle, but it could've been a clever way to steal cars. It seems central dispatching must be moving to 911 centers making it impossible for local precincts to send out officers. Alexandre POLOZOFF http://www.exoweb.com/polozoff/ [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: The Chicago Police are horrible about that. They always say call 911, no matter what it is you want to say to them. Then of course the 911 people are always griping and com- plaining about how the public abuses 911 with non-essential stuff. They'll say call the local station, only when you do so to have the local station personnel tell you to call 911 again. PAT] ------------------------------ From: hillary@hillary.net (Hillary Gorman) Subject: Re: 911 From Cellular Phone in Chicago Date: 28 Mar 1997 17:24:44 GMT Organization: Packet Shredders Anonymous > The reason we have not had 911 for cell phones here is the same reason > it took *years* to get 911 installed in general across northern Illinois > outside the city of Chicago: none of the municipalities could agree > on who would take whose calls when telephone exchange lines did not > agree with municipal boundary lines. Most of them were afraid that > if something went right, the other guy would get the credit while if > something went wrong, they'd be the ones to catch hell. In other words, > politics as usual. > How is this handled in other places, and how precisely is the caller's > location known to the police? PAT] Interesting that this should come up right now. I was just talking about this with some friends. There is a city just outside of Philadelphia, PA, called Wyndmoor. There's a cellular tower there that covers parts of Wyndmoor, and parts of Chestnut Hill ... but Chestnut Hill is within Philadelphia city limits, and Wyndmoor is not. My friend Erik worked for Comcast Metrophone last year, and was responsible for figuring out how the 911 calls would be handled. He assigned it so that the Wyndmoor tower routed to the Wyndmoor 911. Then, a former mayor of Philadelphia called 911 from his cell phone in his car in his driveway in Chestnut Hill, and was apparently very angry that his call didn't route to the Philadelphia 911. So they changed it. hillary gorman......................................hillary@netaxs.com If you need help, contact ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 15:05:42 +1000 From: Darryl Smith Subject: Re: 911 From Cellular Phone in Chicago Here in Australia things are a bit different. We have a 000 service which is somewhat easier to dial if you need to do it in the dark etc. Anyway here in New South Wales (with Sydney as the capital) we have a better system than appears in the USA. We do not have county (or council) police forces. We have federal police who are rarely seen and state police. Thus the New South Wales police force is one of the largest in the country. The Ambulance service is the same throughout the state and are paid for by the state government. Fire departments are paid for by insurance companies in association with the state government. Thus the local councils have no interest in the 000 emergency service. When you ring the 000 service you are asked normally what service you want (Police, fire, Ambulance) and then talk to a dispatcher for the appropriate service. With mobile calls you are firstly asked where you are and then connected to the appropriate service. I think the perople asking about the location work for the phone company. Recently I needed to call 000 from my mobile, told them I needed the police and my location and they connected me to the local police station. It appears that they don't take note of any cell information even though GSM could tell I was 400 meters from the base station. And to make things even better I really like the fact that all three mobile companies cover the majority of the population. Darryl VK2TDS ------------------------------ From: Chris Suarez Subject: Experience With Grayson's Surveyor? Please Comment Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 22:01:10 -0600 Organization: W.I.S. Reply-To: w.i.solutions@worldnet.att.net I've been working with the Grayson Surveyor tools (GSM/CDMA-PCS) and have mixed opinions. I would really appreciate a second opinion from someone who has experience with these products. Many thanks in advance. Chris Suarez Wireless Infrastructure Solutions Tampa, Florida ------------------------------ From: j-grout@ehsn5.cen.uiuc.edu (John R. Grout) Subject: Kansas Files Suit Against MCI Over "Pushy" Telemarketing Date: 28 Mar 1997 18:17:09 -0600 Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana Reply-To: j-grout@uiuc.edu According to press reports, the state of Kansas has filed suit against MCI's over its "pushy sales tactics" during telemarketing calls it placed in 1991. The suit alleges that MCI broke a state law requiring telemarketers to ask a customer's permission to make a sales pitch in the first 30 seconds of a call. Though the maximum penalty is only $5000, it appears (from the report) that a penalty could be assessed for each objectionable call placed within the period at issue. John R. Grout j-grout@uiuc.edu Department of Computer Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ------------------------------ From: mpp@phydeau.com (Michael Persons) Subject: Location of Phone Box in New Construction Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 06:36:47 GMT Organization: The Internet Access Company, Inc. Hi folks, I'm part of a group building a condo-style housing development with a little extra involvement with neighbors, while preserving the privacy of your own home (it's called cohousing; if you lament that you've lived somewhere for a while but don't know your neighbors, check out http://www.cohousing.org). We're not doing the building ourselves -- we've hired a contractor to do that. We hope to set up a local area network between the townhouses (34 total) in a star topology converging on the common house (cohousing term for condo clubhouse with a few extras). In order to lay the cable between the houses, we need to dig, so we thought wouldn't it be cool if we could lay the conduit in the same trench as the phone lines. I don't know much about telecom, but I do know that those boxes that sit alongside the road next to new housing contain the phone wires from the houses. We would like to have that box at our common house, which is not right next to the road but in the middle of our development. That way, when they're laying the phone cable they can lay the network conduit too. I may be totally clueless about how this works, but does anyone know if such a thing is possible? (We're in MA so this is Nynex.) What are the rules they use in placing that junction box thingie? Would they be OK with the box being not along the side of the road? Please email as I'm sure this is a pretty specialized topic. Thanks, Mike Persons Commonweal Cohousing Grafton, MA ------------------------------ From: Woodie1@ix.netcom.com (Valerie Wood) Subject: MCI Billing Problems Organization: The Interactive Telephone Company Date: Sun, 30 Mar 1997 02:00:00 EST To Resellers and Carriers, Has anyone in either of the above categories experienced MCI billing problems? Have you been overbilled by MCI for access or network services? Wrong rate plan? Incorrect rates? If so, please contact me. Thanks, Valerie Wood Phone: 1-201-997-3000 Fax: 201-997-2009 ------------------------------ From: aboritz@cybernex.net (Alan Boritz) Subject: Re: Answer Supervision Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 10:27:00 -0500 In article , Reggie.Ratcliff@ Sciatl.COM wrote: > I'm curious as how they can get away with playing a message and not > giving answer supervision. Maybe the rules have changed, or maybe they > don't apply to carriers. Several years back after the FCC's DID answer > supervision ruling, we had to start shipping separate versions of our > small CO/PBX nationally and internationally. Bill von Alven at the FCC > insisted that any part 68 products sold in the US could not give any > information other than call progress tones without returning answer > supervision, and must not allow the customer to modify them so that > they could. Mr. Von Alven was not entirely correct. If you have DID service, you MUST be able to return an "invalid number" intercept recording without answer supervision. That's configurable in the PBX and consistent with most non-FCC tariffs. I had the opportunity to research that issue when I (when working for the City of New York) reached an intercept on an unassigned extension in our own switch, and the rude payphone swallowed up my quarter. Unfortunately, I don't recall where I found it documented (we had the entire NY Tel PSC 900 in our library, so it was easy back then). ------------------------------ From: Telecom@Eureka.vip.best.NOSPAM (Linc Madison) Subject: Re: Administration to Confirm Domestic Crypto Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 16:38:11 -0800 Organization: No unsolicited commercial e-mail! In article , david@sternlight.com wrote: > [pointer to ClariNews article about a proposed federal law clarifying > that citizens can use "strong encryption" technologies] > Comment: > I must say that if the assertion [that the industry used weaker encryption > at NSA request] is correct, I can no longer support any government policy > that would make law enforcement's job easier at the expense of the entire > population. This is not a police state, and it is high time the FBI, > NSA, and CIA faced up to the fact that when the rights of the rest of > us are concerned, they must do their job the old fashioned way, and > not by seeking shortcuts at the expense of the public's security. I have an idea: why don't we require everyone in the country to give copies of their house keys to the government -- with proper assurances that they will only be used by authorized agents with proper judicial clearance -- since criminals often operate behind locked doors, and it is an impediment to law enforcement to have to physically break down the door. With strong deadbolt technologies, lock-picking may not be practical in real time. For that matter, since automobiles are often used in the commission of serious crimes, let's require everyone to file copies of their car keys under the same terms, and require that every car be designed with a built-in remote ignition shut-off, so that a police officer can simply turn off the car of a fleeing suspect. ** Do not spam e-mail me! ** Linc Madison * San Francisco, Calif. * Telecom@Eureka.vip.best.com >> NOTE: if you autoreply, you must change "NOSPAM" to "com" << ------------------------------ From: Telecom@Eureka.vip.best.NOSPAM (Linc Madison) Subject: Re: Pacific Bell Demands MCI Stop its False Advertising Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 17:09:17 -0800 Organization: No unsolicited commercial e-mail! In article , PAT added: > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Lying and distorting reality is > nothing new for MCI. [...story about MCI ads "neglecting to mention" the > local call charges when using MCI in the early days...] Another prime example is the "Save up to 44%" ads for 1-800-COLLECT. It turns out that MCI's 1-800-COLLECT rates are up to 44% lower than the rates that AT&T charges IF YOU PAY THE SURCHARGE FOR HAVING THE OPERATOR DIAL THE NUMBER FOR YOU. In other words, they are comparing: (a) 1-800-265-5328 NPA-NXX-XXXX (b) 10288-0# "Operator, I'd like to call NPA-NXX-XXXX, collect" Oh, but if they compared their subscriber-dialed collect rates against AT&T's subscriber-dialed collect rates, it wouldn't sound nearly as impressive. I don't know -- maybe MCI doesn't charge extra for having the operator key the number if you just enter "0" for assistance instead of entering the destination number -- but I still say it's intentionally deceptive advertising, particularly since all of their ads give the example of "dial 1-800-COLLECT, then the area code and number you're calling," or words to that effect. ** Do not spam e-mail me! ** Linc Madison * San Francisco, Calif. * Telecom@Eureka.vip.best.com >> NOTE: if you autoreply, you must change "NOSPAM" to "com" << ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 29 Mar 1997 21:10:37 -0500 From: X@com.net.org Reply-To: heaven!Data@uunet.uu.net Organization: Spammers Create Unwanted Mail (SCUM) Subject: Can Blocked Numbers be Displayed on Caller-ID? I've searched everywhere I can think of and can't find any info on whether or not there exist caller-id units, or PC software that will display caller-id numbers even if they've been blocked with something like *67. Does anyone know where I can get this kind of hardware or software? Thanks. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Dear X ... you seem like a person who is unclear on the concept. There is no caller-id box or PC software which will do what you want simply because you cannot get something out of nothing. It is not your display box or PC software which is responding in obedience to the *67 privacy flag sent by the caller; it is the telco central office. You can have any box or software you want; the central office will send it only the word 'private'. There is no way to 'reach back' from your end to the central office and get it to release the calling party's number. If there were, that would defeat the entire purpose of using *67 would it not; and I daresay if you found a way to do this you would have a lot of *very angry* subscribers banging on telco's door demanding a fix to the problem. Your only real recourse is to refuse to accept phone calls from 'private' callers. Answer the phone with a terse announcement that you do not accept such calls (this can be a recorded message if desired) then hang up. A great many of the private callers will in fact dial back a second time transmitting their number in the clear. PAT] ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V17 #78 *****************************