Return-Path: Received: by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.7.4/NSCS-1.0S) id VAA01964; Sat, 22 Nov 1997 21:04:05 -0500 (EST) Date: Sat, 22 Nov 1997 21:04:05 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199711230204.VAA01964@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V17 #322 TELECOM Digest Sat, 22 Nov 97 21:03:00 EST Volume 17 : Issue 322 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson "Spambone" Spam Backbone Press Release From Sanford Wallace (B Pennypacker) Tidbits From my Phone Bill (Linc Madison) New Diphone Database and TTS-System for German (ATIP.GbR@t-online.de) Book Review: "Halting the Hacker" by Pipkin (Rob Slade) Southwestern Bell offers ADSL in Austin, Texas (spider@aol.com ) GSM/Net (was Re: Video Conferencing to a GSM) (Rishab Aiyer Ghosh) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. 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Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 21 Nov 1997 19:31:02 GMT From: Bruce Pennypacker Subject: "Spambone" Spam Backbone Press Release From Sanford Wallace Organization: Applied Language Technologies Well folks, here it is, straight from the mouths of Scamfraud & Picklejar themselves. There's been a lot of discussion about this on news.admin.net-abuse.email, including a lot of speculation as to who the "undisclosed third party is". Stop by nan-ae to catch all the latest. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Cyber Promotions/Quantum Communications Press Release Spam Backbone Formed The "Spam King," Sanford Wallace, and Walt Rines Have incorporated their new bulk-email friendly backbone network For Immediate Release: Philadelphia 11/20/97-- Sanford Wallace, Walt Rines and an undisclosed third party have formed Global Technology Marketing, Inc. (GTMI). The new corporation will offer direct, high speed T-1 And T-3 Internet connections to companies that engage in mass commercial email. Currently, there are no other backbone providers that allow customers to send spam. GTMI will be offering connectivity contracts by the beginning of the next week. Sanford Wallace commented: "We are very excited about this new project. For the first time ever, Internet marketers will be encouraged to engage in direct advertising, a practice which is already accepted in the postal world." Walt Rines stated: "Finally, bulk emailers will have an opportunity to legitimize this new industry. We are going to prove that this explosive new market can be self-regulated." Technical Details: GTMI has established a national backbone which operates as a fully-meshed network operating at DS-3 speeds, and interconnecting, or "peering" with several other networks at undisclosed private peering points. Multiple Lucent 5E12 switches, capable of processing data using multiple protocols including Internet (IP) Protocol, will route the traffic through the network. Dr. Robert Elliot, Chief Technology Officer, was quoted as saying, "We are excited about employing the Lucent 5E12 switches in the new network architecture. It just proves that IP telephony is becoming a reality." More detailed information will follow within the week. CONTACT INFO: Sanford Wallace: 215-628-9705 Walter Rines: 603-772-4096 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ There's an article on this at http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,16682,00.html which included the following statement from Scamfraud himself: "If this doesn't work, nothing will. If it doesn't go, then that's it for me -- I'm done." In related news, due to the name of the "spambone" (GTMI), a lot of people have started speculating as to who will be providing the network connections. One of the more popular suggestions is a provider in Rhode Island called LOA (Log On America) since a lot of searching various records for GTMI.COM, GTMI.NET, etc. seem to all point in that direction. In response to all the speculation, LOA has put a press release on their web site that emphatically denies they will have anything to do with Scamfraud. Just go to http://www.loa.com and you can't miss it. Bruce Pennypacker Applied Language Technologies Remove .noagis from my address to reply 695 Atlantic Ave. http://www.altech.com Boston, MA 02111 [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I got another rather lengthy article sent to me yesterday on this very same topic, and within a short time later the person named as the author of the article wrote to me in response to my autoreply saying: "I did not write the article attributed to me; I have checked some of the details and they are false. If possible, please pull the article from the queue and kill it." My response to that would be hmmmm ... I killed the article as he requested and then a few minutes later found the above article from Bruce Pennypacker saying about the same thing, and naming the same LOA outfit as Spamford's confederate. They deny any involvement which is possibly why the other writer (who asked me to kill the thing he 'did not write') asked for it to not be published. I am now wondering if LOA was never involved at all as they claim, or if they were involved originally and now as they see the natives becoming restless, banging their drums, sharpening their knives and preparing for another sacrifice have decided to sing it to different tune. After all it would not be the first time Spamford tried to seduce and lure other legimate businesses into handling his traffic would it ... Word is that LOA is not doing very well financially in their stated business venture, so it would be easy for some weasel like Spamford to get in and endear himself to them with a few Make Money Fast schemes, directly from the prime source of same. Let's hope if this venture fails and/or LOA was not/or now refuses to become involved that the weasel takes his own advice 'that is it for me, I am done.' Ah, we should be so lucky. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 21 Nov 1997 19:02:13 -0800 From: Telecom@LincMad.NOSPAM (Linc Madison) Subject: Tidbits From my Phone Bill Organization: LincMad Consulting; change NOSPAM to COM Effective January 20, 1998, Pacific Bell is terminating its "pay by phone" arrangement, offering only the automatic debit option. On the "pay by phone" system, you were prompted to enter the amount and date of the payment you wished to make through the system. That made it very easy to withhold payment on a disputed charge. I expect it would be much more difficult to withhold part of the bill on the auto-debit system. There were, in fact, two calls on this month's bill that didn't belong there. The first was a Pacific Bell "local toll" call to Palo Alto. I dialed *82 1-617-xxx-xxxx, but I didn't quite pause long enough, so the stutter dialtone ate the leading 1, causing me to connect to 617-xxxx, a toll call. I put in a trouble ticket this afternoon; ever since we upgraded to the Northern Telecom DMS switch, we can no longer dial through the stutter. My understanding from several people who've posted here and in CDTT is that it's nothing more than a configuration option in the switch generic, to allow or disallow dialing through the stutter. There is absolutely no benefit to disallowing; personally, I don't think it should even be an option. What I particularly don't understand is why anyone would make disallowing the default. I may have to escalate that one to PacBell corporate, though, although the fault lies primarily in a brain-dead design decision by Northern Telecom: "Hey, why don't we design the switch so that users are forced to pause for an arbitrary interval that's just slightly longer than the pause a modem generates with a comma, just so that we can screw up all sorts of auto-dialers and increase wrong-number traffic!" If anyone can give me the details on how to configure a DMS switch to allow dialing through stutter dialtone (after a star code, not just the continuous stutter to indicate voicemail waiting), please e-mail me at Telecom at LincMad dot com. The other number that showed up on this month's bill was a call to the test number for the new 867 area code. Test numbers aren't supposed to supervise or bill, at least within the civilized parts of the NANP (i.e., U.S. and Canada), but this one did, at a whopping $1.00 for one minute, courtesy of the Dime Lady. The customer service rep refused to take the charge off, but said he would refer it to someone or other. I notified Pacific Bell that I am contesting $1.03 of my Sprint bill. Incidentally, the number showed up correctly as 867-669-5448, but the place name shows as YELLOWKNIF AB. Yellowknife is not in Alberta, folks. Surprisingly enough, there were no new area codes in California to announce in an insert. I guess it's been a slow month ... ** Do not send me unsolicited commercial e-mail spam of any kind ** Linc Madison * San Francisco, California * Telecom@LincMad-com URL:< http://www.lincmad.com > * North American Area Codes & Splits >> NOTE: if you autoreply, you must change "NOSPAM" to "com" << ------------------------------ Date: 21 Nov 1997 20:50:46 GMT From: ATIP.GbR@t-online.de Subject: New Diphone Database and TTS-System for German Organization: T-Online ATIP offers a German male diphone database. The version of this database named DE2 is prepared for the use with the MBROLA speech synthesizer. License agreement provided, DE2 and the MBROLA speech can be downloaded freely from http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/ PROSER, a front-end for German speech synthesizers, was recently developped by ATIP. PROSER transforms an arbitrary German ASCII-text into a phonetic string with prosodic elements. Further details available at http://home.t-online.de/home/ATIP.GbR To test the performance of PROSER you can send your German text (use Umlauts!) to ATIP.GbR@t-online.de In return you will receive an input file for speech synthesis with the MBROLA synthesizer and the German diphone database. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 21 Nov 1997 11:21:37 EST From: Rob Slade Subject: Book Review: "Halting the Hacker" by Pipkin Organization: TELECOM Digest BKHLTHCK.RVW 970706 "Halting the Hacker", Donald L. Pipkin, 1997, 0-13-243718-X, U$44.95/C$62.95 %A Donald L. Pipkin %C One Lake St., Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458 %D 1997 %G 0-13-243718-X %I Prentice Hall %O U$44.95/C$62.95 201-236-7139 fax: 201-236-7131 betsy_carey@prenhall.com %P 193 %T "Halting the Hacker: A Practical Guide to Computer Security" This book is a compilation of observations on computer security, particularly on network connected computers, and particularly in regard to outside intruders. What specific system information is included relates to UNIX. Most of the advice is generic. The information is "practical" in that it relates to common, rather than theoretical, attacks. However, the text does not provide practical answers: the defenses are left as an exercise to the reader. There is nothing really wrong with the information provided in the book. (I wasn't too thrilled with the section on viruses, but we'll let that go.) It has all, though, been said before, notably by works such as Spafford and Garfinkel's "Practical UNIX and Internet Security" (cf. BKPRUISC.RVW). In fact, there were passages that I'm quite sure I could have traced as to origin and author. Normally, I don't comment on CD-ROMs unless something unique is available. As with most such disks, this one provides information that is available elsewhere, mostly from COAST. Overall, though, in this case I think the CD-ROM does add some value, holding information such as the "Rainbow series" of security standards, and a list of machine address codes for Internet addressing as assigned to vendors. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1997 BKHLTHCK.RVW 970706 roberts@decus.ca rslade@vcn.bc.ca rslade@vanisl.decus.ca ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 20 Nov 1997 20:58:33 -0500 From: spider@aol.com Subject: Southwestern Bell offers ADSL in Austin, Texas Organization: AOL http://www.aol.com Southwestern Bell Unveils DSL Services In Austin FasTrak DSL Service Marks Next Step In High-Speed Data Communications Austin, Texas, November 13, 1997 To supplement its existing line of broadband services, Southwestern Bell today announced it is introducing high-speed Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) services this month with a limited commercial offering in Austin. FasTrak DSL offers home and business users a dedicated link to their Internet service provider (ISP) or corporate local area network (LAN). At transmission speeds of up to 1.5 megabits per second (mbps) - 50 times faster than an analog modem running at speeds of 28.8 kilobits per second (kbps) - FasTrak DSL presents work-at-home professionals, telecommuters and Internet enthusiasts consistently faster access to graphic, audio/video and data files. It also features an exponential increase in the capacity of computer transmissions and provides an "always-on" connection to the host network. "DSL technology complements our already robust line of broadband services in the Southwest region," said Ron Owens, area manager of marketing, Southwestern Bell. "Our data strategy is to continue to develop a host of transport and access services that give customers a range of choices that best suit their application needs." FasTrak DSL supports two primary applications: dedicated access to a remote corporate network (LAN) and to the Internet. Because FasTrak DSL gives customers a dedicated connection to their corporate LAN or ISP, users receive consistently high access speeds and do not have to wait through long set-up delays associated with dial-up Internet or network access. Southwestern Bell will offer two different service options for this limited commercial offering of FasTrak DSL. The first will feature a downstream speed - from the host site to the user - of up to 384 kilobits-per-second (kbps), and the same speed upstream from the user to the host site. The second offering will feature a downstream speed of up to 1.5 mbps and an upstream speed of up to 384 kbps. Prices for FasTrak DSL fall between the price of ISDN and frame relay connections, and range from $150 per month to $250 per month for unlimited usage. FasTrak DSL is a digital technology that transmits information at high speeds over regular twisted-copper phone wires. The service enables subscribers to talk on the phone and download data simultaneously on the same phone line. During the limited commercial offering, Southwestern Bell will install DSL switches in four central offices in Austin. For FasTrak DSL to perform properly, customers will have to meet certain criteria. For instance, users must be located within a three-mile radius from a DSL-equipped central office. In addition, customers' ISPs and host networks must be connected to Southwestern Bell's Cell Relay Network, an ATM-based backbone that ensures the quality and throughput of FasTrak DSL connections. FasTrak DSL is compatible with both Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Jump Point will provide Internet access for the limited commercial offering in Austin. Pacific Bell and Southwestern Bell are working with other ISPs to provide high-speed Internet connectivity via its DSL service in the future. Customer equipment for FasTrak DSL includes an Alcatel ADSL modem, a "splitter" that divides voice and data, and an Ethernet network interface card to connect the modem and PC. Southwestern Bell can provide customers with this hardware and install it on-site as part of the DSL CPE service package. For more information, Austin residents can call toll-free 1-888-SWB-DSL1. Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. is a subsidiary of SBC Communications Inc., a global leader in the telecommunications industry, with more than 32 million access lines and nearly 5 million wireless customers across the United States, as well as investments in telecommunications businesses in 10 countries. Under the Southwestern Bell, Pacific Bell, Nevada Bell and Cellular One brands, the company, through its subsidiaries, offers a wide range of innovative services, including local and long-distance telephone service, wireless communications, paging, Internet access, cable TV and messaging, as well as telecommunications equipment, and directory advertising and publishing. SBC (www.sbc.com) has more than 114,000 employees and reported 1996 revenues of $23.5 billion. SBC's equity market value of $56.5 billion (as of June 30, 1997) ranks it as one of the five largest telecommunications companies in the world ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 21 Nov 1997 02:05:04 +-5-30 From: Rishab Aiyer Ghosh Subject: GSM/Net (was Re: Video Conferencing to a GSM) Organization: TELECOM Digest Koos van den Hout writes: > According to my GSM, it is capable of receiving video conferencing > calls. Quite.. interesting :) Plain old GSM, depending on your provider and the instrument, is capable of data traffic up to about 38 kbps. New GSM products, promoted especially by Ericsson, can manage 112 kbps. At that rate you have the same bandwidth as two American ISDN lines and just under the 128k of a twin ISDN line in Europe. Videoconferencing shouldn't be difficult. The thing about data/GSM is that since the interface between your PC and the phone is digital, there's no analogue<->digital interface (except for the vocoder, useless for anything but voice). So when you use a GSM modem off your PC to call a land-line modem, your cellular provider's switch has to emulate a (say) 28.8 kbps modem to convert pure digital into digital-over-analogue-voice. The situation improves if your cellular provider is also your ISP, or has a digital high-speed link into the internet backbone. The same goes for 112kbps GSM, where your cellular provider's switch will have to have an interface for twin ISDN or whatever else you're using for videoconferencing. The cellular provider will have to enable it, and could charge for it. (In India, where the providers are giving for the moment a measly 9.6 kbps data connect for PC/data traffic through GSM handsets - presumably to save costs on their inter-cell backbone - they charge roughly US$ 20/month to interface that to the PSTN. The advantage is that you get three phone numbers for outsiders to dial, so your handset can automatically switch between voice/fax/data). The GSM standard has most of these protocol interfaces (X.??, V.?? etc) defined, and most infrastructure providers support them on their switches -- though it's finally up to the cellular service provider to decide what to give you and for how much. I don't know what the situation is with Qualcomm's CDMA. Would our American friends care to enlighten us? The Indian Techonomist - http://dxm.org/techonomist/news/ The newsletter on India's information markets Editor and Publisher - Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (rishab@techonomist.dxm.org) Mobile +91 11 98110 14574; Fax +91 11 2209608; Tel +91 11 2454717 A4/204 Ekta Apts., 9 Indraprastha Extn, New Delhi 110092 INDIA ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V17 #322 ******************************