Return-Path: Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.4/NSCS-1.0S) id IAA23923; Fri, 20 Dec 1996 08:58:24 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 20 Dec 1996 08:58:24 -0500 (EST) From: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu (TELECOM Digest Editor) Message-Id: <199612201358.IAA23923@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson@massis.lcs.mit.edu Subject: TELECOM Digest V16 #671 TELECOM Digest Fri, 20 Dec 96 08:58:00 EST Volume 16 : Issue 671 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson 510/925 Split: My Reaction (Linc Madison) Calling US 800 From UK: Answer Supervision on Recorded Message (L Madison) GTE Sues PUC Over Discounts (Tad Cook) Fourth Area Code for Colorado (Tad Cook) Re: Parollees and the Net (Jack Decker) Re: www.webcom.com Site Down Most of Weekend (Judith Oppenheimer) Re: www.webcom.com Site Down Most of Weekend (Van Hefner) Re: How Business Almost Derailed the Net (Henry Baker) Re: How Business Almost Derailed the Net (Craig Nordin) 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. 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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: Telecom@Eureka.vip.best.com (Linc Madison) Subject: 510/925 Split: My Reaction Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 23:44:16 -0800 Well, I've seen the various public announcements about the new area code for the East Bay area of northern California, and I have a few thoughts. We got a bit spoiled the last time we had an area code split in this area, the original 415/510 split back in 1991. You could hardly imagine a more perfect split, even for a textbook example. The dividing line between 415 and 510 was simple, straightforward, and geographically meaningful. It was easy to explain to both locals and non-locals, with no ambiguity about which side of the line a given community landed on. What's more, the split in terms of prefixes was almost exactly 50/50, a point reflected in the fact that the two offspring of that split are both splitting within a few months of each other. The new split for 510 does pretty well on the geographic side of things, but not nearly so well on the prefix level. Only about 1/3 of the prefixes are being shifted, even though the new area code has the majority of the land area by about the same 2:1 margin. The "north/south" proposal, to follow the Alameda/Contra Costa county line, received little public support, and was wisely abandoned. Indeed, I think the county line should be redrawn to reflect the lines now being used for the area code split, but of course, that will never happen. The line as it is now constituted divides along a major natural geographic boundary, the East Bay Hills. The hills don't form quite as dramatic a boundary as the Bay itself, but it's as natural a line as you can draw in 510. It's reasonably straightforward and easy to explain to both locals and non-locals. As for the prefix imbalance, which results in estimates of 2004 for 510 to exhaust again and 2012 or so for 925 to exhaust, by the time either of those dates rolls around, we'll just add overlay area codes. The existing geographic boundary lines will make that pretty sensible. My only other quibble regards the timing of some of these splits in California. The projected exhaust date for 510 is in mid-1998, but the split doesn't even go into permissive dialing until mid-March 1998. We will very likely see prefix rationing before the mandatory cutover in September. It seems to me that, in view of all the talk about 510 being the hottest spot in California for number growth, we could advance the timetable a bit. Most especially, if 510 is the one that is most critical, why is 415 splitting first? Linc Madison * San Francisco, Calif. * Telecom@Eureka.vip.best.com ------------------------------ From: Telecom@Eureka.vip.best.com (Linc Madison) Subject: Calling US 800 From UK: Answer Supervision on Recorded Message? Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 23:55:20 -0800 There has been some talk recently in uk.telecom about various ways of dialing (or dialling, if you prefer ;->) a U.S. 800 or 888 number. Apparently, on the two largest carriers, British Telecom (BT) and Mercury (Hg), you can simply dial 00-1-800-nxx-xxxx or what have you. A recording, with an American accent, then informs you that the call will be completed, but not for free -- you will pay the normal rate for the international call. A couple of posters have insisted that the intercept is provided on the U.S. side, and that it returns answer supervision at the beginning of the recorded intercept, rather than at the point where the called number actually answers. They have bills to prove that they were charged for calls to non-working U.S. 800 numbers, where clearly the call couldn't complete. I'm a bit skeptical, since, first of all, this recorded intercept should be provided on the originating side of the Atlantic, and, even if it is a U.S. intercept, we supposedly know how to do that without returning answer supervision. By the way, these calls are being dialed with 00-1-800, not using the "replace" code of +1 880 for "caller pays" 800. I haven't seen any reports about 888 numbers. Does anyone know the technical particulars of how an international call to a U.S. 800 number is handled? What U.S. carrier does the call first land on? Does that carrier play this intercept message and wrongly return answer supervision? Does the U.K. carrier perhaps ignore the absence of answer supervision and begin billing simply because of the presence of a voice without SITs? Also, what happens if the 800 number you're calling from the U.K. happens to be, for example, Canada-only? Linc Madison * San Francisco, Calif. * Telecom@Eureka.vip.best.com ------------------------------ Subject: GTE Sues PUC Over Discounts Date: Fri, 20 Dec 1996 00:22:34 PST From: tad@ssc.com (Tad Cook) GTE Sues Virginia Corporation Commission over Discount Phone Rates By Otesa Middleton, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va. Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News Dec. 20--GTE Corp. is suing the State Corporation Commission over the discount rates the regulatory panel set earlier this month. The fight revolves around a Telecommunications Act of 1996 provision that said new competitors can offer local telephone service by using an existing company's equipment at a discounted, or wholesale, rate. The SCC decided that long-distance giant AT&T Corp. will have to pay 20.6 percent less to use GTE's equipment than GTE customers pay for its services, if the company uses GTE's operators. The discount is 23.4 percent if the company uses its own operator services. GTE thinks the discount is too steep, so the commonwealth's secondlargest local telephone company filed suit against the SCC yesterday in U.S. District Court. "The SCC's decision directs GTE to underwrite the cost of entry into local markets for some of the largest companies in the world," said Stephen Spencer, a GTE spokesman. Robert M. Gillespie, an SCC lawyer, said the suit is premature. GTE and AT&T have two months to work out a contract based on the rates. The SCC said that the rates are temporary and permanent rates will be decided later. "The federal courts will probably be reluctant to review something that is temporary," Gillespie said. AT&T's vice president of law and government affairs, Wilma McCarey, said GTE is anti-competition. "Giving consumers choice in local telephone markets will be a long, complicated process that will only really succeed if all parties cooperate and try to comply with the law," McCarey said. Spencer, at GTE in Richmond, said GTE suggested a 7 percent discount rate because the company's costs are high due to the fact it serves rural areas where it is more costly to supply telephone service. The discount rate the SCC set for Bell Atlantic-Virginia was 18.5 percent if companies use Bell Atlantic's operators and 21.3 percent if the companies use their own operators. ------------------------------ Subject: Fourth Area Code for Colorado Date: Fri, 20 Dec 1996 00:24:38 PST From: tad@ssc.com (Tad Cook) U S West Requests Fourth Area Code for Colorado By John Branch, Gazette Telegraph, Colorado Springs, Colo. Knight-Ridder/Tribune Business News COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.--Dec. 19--One year after a large part of Colorado was given the 970 area code, U S West Communications Corp. has requested a fourth calling area. The proposed fourth code won't change numbers in the Pikes Peak region, but may cause dialing and technological headaches. Colorado's original area code, 303, will be splintered again, pending approval from the Colorado Public Utilities Commission. Serving the Denver metropolitan area, from Castle Rock to Longmont, area code 303 will be out of available numbers by late 1998, U S West said. But this time, the split may not be geographic. If the utilities commission determines a new area code is needed, it will consider an overlay approach. That means that a second area code will be added to the 303 area, giving the Denver area two codes. An overlay approach would keep phone numbers programmed into computer systems from changing; cellular service providers would not have to recall all cellular telephones in order to reprogram the internally programmed area code. Thus, some of the high-tech confusion that took place earlier this year when the 970 code was added to northern and western Colorado might be avoided. The bad news is that a single home could have one area code for its telephone and a separate one for its fax machine. Or making a call to a next door neighbor might mean calling a different area code. "There's no indication on which way the PUC is leaning now," said Terry Bote, a spokesman for the commission. "It would depend on which solution would cause the least amount of disruption for people." The commission will gather information from now until the end of January to determine whether a fourth area code is necessary and the best approach to adding one. Abel Chavez, southern Colorado manager for U S West, said his company hopes to give customers from 18 to 24 months to prepare for changes if the company's request is approved. An advertising campaign would then begin, especially warning those with complex computer systems to prepare for the reprogramming process. Chavez said that the 719 code, which covers Colorado Springs, Pueblo and the rest of southeastern Colorado, is not in danger of running out of numbers. "We are well-positioned to meet the needs for some time," Chavez said. He didn't pinpoint when that date may arrive. The proposal for a fourth area code was prompted by the soaring amount of cellular phones, pagers, fax machines and computer modems that each require a separate phone number. ------------------------------ From: jack@novagate.com (Jack Decker) Subject: Re: Parollees and the Net Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 14:40:21 GMT On Tue, 17 Dec 1996 14:33:12 PST, in comp.dcom.telecom is written: > Rising computer crime prompts parole rules > WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. Parole Commission has approved > restrictions on the use of computers by certain high-risk parolees. > The Justice Department announced Monday that the panel voted this > month to authorize such restrictions as requiring certain parolees to > get prior written approval from the commission before using an > Internet service provider, computerized bulletin board system or any > public or private computer network. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I can see that it's certainly desirable to keep pornography away from known sex offenders. However, one might ask the question, if someone is still dangerous to society then why are they out on parole? Computers are becoming such a part of our everyday lives that I suspect it would be nearly impossible to enforce such a parole restriction (unless you tell a parolee that he can never visit computer-owning friends in their homes without a chaperone). Sooner or later it will be like telling a parolee that they could never view a television set, when there are TV's everywhere you go. The thing that troubles me a little bit about this is that it opens the door for the government to restrict how a particular group of U.S. citizens are using computers. Granted, this is a group that isn't likely to elicit much sympathy from the general public, and there is precedent for restricting the activities of those on parole. But consider this: Suppose that someone were arrested in connection with political activities. It is entirely conceivable that because the government wanted to silence that person's views, they would stipulate that the person stay off of computers (and certainly off of the Internet) during their parole. In that way, the parolee would be inhibited from expressing their political views to the 'net audience. I am all for keeping known sex offenders away from the sexually explicit materials on the internet (if that is possible), but I do think that we have to be careful that the government does not attempt to use the authority to regulate the activities of parolees as a way to stifle the free speech of those who may disagree with those currently in power in the government. Otherwise, you may start seeing people arrested for relatively minor infractions, given a light sentence, and then placed on a parole that includes the computer restrictions, just to keep their writings off the Internet. Jack ------------------------------ From: icb@juno.com (Judith Oppenheimer) Subject: Re: www.webcom.com Site Down Most of Weekend Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 19:10:33 EST In reporting on Webcom being down last weekend, Mark Cuccia noted, "I was wondering why I couldn't access Judith Oppenheimer's ICB/Callbrand page nor Long Distance Digest this past Saturday. Both are at the Webcom site." Luckily, Van Hefner, Long Distance Digest's publisher and our host, moved our page to his new domain, thedigest.com, just in time. ICB Toll Free News is now located at www.thedigest.com/icb/. Long as I'm here, I'll take this opportunity to wish everyone a wonderful holiday, and a Happy New Year. Judith Oppenheimer, ICB Toll Free Consultancy Publisher, ICB Toll Free News - www.thedigest.com/icb/ 1 800 THE EXPERT, (ph) 212 684-7210, (fx) 212 684-2714 icb@juno.com, j.oppenheimer@worldnet.att.net ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 00:52:43 -0800 From: VANTEK COMMUNICATIONS Subject: Re: www.webcom.com Site Down Most of Weekend On Tues, 17 Dec 1996, Mark J. Cuccia said: > I heard on the 8:00 am (Eastern Time) hourly Westwood/Mutual/NBC-Radio > news this morning that www.webcom.com was down for about forty hours > this past weekend, due to computer hackers. The news report mentioned > that many commercial and business customers are users of Webcom, and > their pages couldn't be accessed this weekend. The report did mention > that email was able to be sent and received without many problems, > however. > I was wondering why I couldn't access Judith Oppenheimer's > ICB/Callbrand page nor Long Distance Digest this past Saturday. Both > are at the Webcom site. I had thought that either the 'routers' on my > end (or in transit) were having trouble accessing the site, or the > site was brought down temporarily for maintenance. But then I heard > the news report on the radio this morning. > The news report also mentioned that it will be 'virtually impossible' > to determine who 'hacked' into the site and took it out of service. I > would hope that some additional security and tracking measures will be > able to prevent or reduce such activities in the future. Webcom was indeed down for over 40 hours this weekend. In fact, Pac Bell connectivity problems shut-down Webcom's server for several additional hours on Monday. The cause for the weekend fiasco was a Denial of Service (DOS), or syn-flood attack. Such attacks take advantage of a security "loophole" in the internet's TCP/IP protocol. Directions on how to generate such an attack were recently printed in hacker pubs 2600 and Phrack. These attacks are incredibly difficult to stop, and almost impossible to trace (from a practical standpoint). Webcom's server was flooded with bogus "requests" for webpages from a non-existent IP address. The "hacker" spoofed an address of a server that did not exist, sneding thousands of bogus requests to the server every second. The server became overloaded trying to respond to the bogus access requests (like attempting a "handshake"), and eventually the server's queque was filled, denying access to legitimate requests from real users trying to access Webcom's pages. A New York based internet provider PANIX suffered a similar attack a couple of months ago. It's server was flooded for nearly an entire WEEK before the originating IP address was found, and the attack shut-off. I spent nearly 20 solid hours this weekend moving files from our Website at www.webcom.com to our new location on another server. Luckily, I had secured the services of a new provider only a few weeks earlier, and had someplace else to go. Most of the other 3,000+ customers on Webcom who have webpages were not so lucky. We still have most of the back issues of our newsletter at Webcom, and I will probably spend an additional 100+ hours moving those over to our new server as well. I apologize to those of you who have tried accessing our "old" Homepage since last Friday. The problem was obviously a bit beyond our control. Even now, Webcom's server is still "recovering", and access is really difficult at times. For those of you who haven't been able to reach us, please try us at our new Web address. You shouldn't have any problem accessing us there. Discount Long Distance Digest: http://www.thedigest.com Judith Oppenheimer's Toll-Free News: http://www.thedigest.com/icb/ Van Hefner - Editor Discount Long Distance Digest The Internet Journal of the Long Distance Industry Our OLD Homepage: www.webcom.com/longdist/ VANTEK COMMUNICATIONS + 3144 Broadway, Suite 3 + Eureka, CA 95501 1-707-444-6686 PHONE + 1-707-445-4123 FAX + e-mail: postmaster@thedigest.com ------------------------------ From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry Baker) Subject: Re: How Business Almost Derailed the Net Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 18:42:01 GMT In article , monty@roscom.COM wrote: > From: Nathan Newman > Subject: [ENODE] How Business Almost Rerailed the Net [snip] > The Internet is in many ways the product of central planning in > its rawest form: planning over decades, large government subsidies > directed from a national headquarters, and experts designing and > overseeing the project's development. [snip] > Ironically, as networks spread in the 1980s, it was the > government experts at ARPA and universities who backed the flexible, > tested TCP/IP protocol, while big private companies like MCI, IBM and > Hewlett Packard adopted an untested, bureaucratically inspired > standard created in international committees called OSI. [snip] > What is worth emphasizing is that the federal government did a > very good job for twenty-five years in designing and guiding the > standards and development of the Internet. I will overlook the socialist nostalgia of this message to focus upon a very large change in the business climate that has been ignored by its author -- the meteoric rise in _venture capital_. Although venture capital was present in the 1960's -- viz. Scientific Data Systems and Digital Equipment Corp. -- it played a vanishingly small part in technology development compared with the major government funding of the Defense Dept. and NASA. But fast-forward to 1996, and we find that venture capital has now transformed the landscape of high-tech development. A substantial fraction of the R&D in America is now done _within_ VC-backed companies, as large existing companies discover that it is cheaper and more efficient for them to buy the results of these companies, or the companies themselves, than to try to manage and incentivize the R&D internally. The VC industry, unlike the captive R&D of the Fortune 100-type companies, is not dedicated to preserving some monopoly, but to constantly attack any portion of the economy in which the incumbents have become too fat and complacent to offer the best prices, goods and services. More importantly, the VC industry is now large enough to attack relatively large incumbents, so that mere size is no longer such an obstacle to technical change. The nature of standards bodies has also changed dramatically, leading to much quicker development and deployment of interoperable standards. Whereas in the past, standards bodies were primarily the captives of large corporations seeking to slow or stop technical change, modern standards bodies quickly arise as loose associations of organizations dedicated to advancing the state of the art. By the time the old-line standards bodies start to work on a standard, it already has a large number of existing vendors, and it is now the job of the Fortune 100 company to adapt to the new standard rather than the other way around. The OSI standards mentioned by the author were one of the last gasps of the old guard. I strongly disagree with the author of ENODE, and contend that if the venture capital industry had been active in the 1960's, that we would have had a more thriving computer networking industry already in the 1970's. Witness the meteoric rise of the Internet, once the gnarled, arthritic hand of the federal government was removed from the throat of this industry. Most monopolies -- including govts -- pat themselves on their backs and toot their horns about their accomplishments. But the correct question is "at what cost?", and in particular, "at what opportunity cost?". A monopolist can always discount the opportunity cost, because there is no competitor to embarrass him. We have recently seen a number of instances where private innovation is far ahead of govt-sponsored research -- e.g., computer languages and compressed virtual memories. Due to the large time constants built into govt-sponsored research, I expect that the fraction of these instances will continue to increase. Govt-sponsored research is a good mechanism for developing models and theories, but it is a very poor mechanism for implementing actual languages, systems and hardware. Perhaps the severe distortions in innovation that were caused by the hot/cold wars of the previous half-century are finally being eliminated in favor of a more efficient distribution of resources. Perhaps the govt can finally get back to very _basic_ research, and leave technology development to the private sector where it can be done much quicker and more efficiently. ------------------------------ From: cnordin@vni.net (Craig Nordin) Subject: Re: How Business Almost Derailed the Net Date: 20 Dec 1996 00:51:42 -0500 Organization: Virtual Networks The point is well made: Internet is a product of the Federal Government. But go read your Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson and your Neuromancer by William Gibson. Find out what Dystopia means. It is not impossible that the Federal Government has created the method of communication that negates its need in the future. Jobs - Graphic Arts - Commercial Production -> http://studio.vni.net/jobs/ Virtual Networks Premier Internet Services cnordin@vnii.net Indianapolis Indianapolis Indianapolis Metro http://www.vnii.net/ Indiana Indiana Indiana Washington DC Washington DC Washington DC Metro http://www.vni.net/ Virtual Networks Incorporated Virtual Networks of Indiana, Incorporated ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V16 #671 ******************************