Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id UAA00286; Tue, 11 May 1999 20:38:22 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 20:38:22 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199905120038.UAA00286@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #79 TELECOM Digest Tue, 11 May 99 20:38:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 79 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Where in the World is joey@lindstrom.com?? (Joey Lindstrom) Re: Where in the World is joey@lindstrom.com?? (Adrian McElligott) Re: Where in the World is joey@lindstrom.com?? (Joey Lindstrom) Mystery Test Number (Paul Kenyon) Apparent Impact of GPS Y2K _Testing_ on Some Telco Receivers (R.J. Herber) Re: Internet Pioneers (James Wyatt) Email and Newsgroup Similarities (TELECOM Digest Editor) Re: Last Laugh! FCC Goes Ooops (Paul MacArthur) 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 networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed 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 Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. 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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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Joey Lindstrom Date: Mon, 10 May 1999 22:37:32 -0600 Reply-To: "Joey Lindstrom" Subject: Where in the World is joey@lindstrom.com?? [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: This message and the two following it are an email exchange between Joey Lindstrom and a person he alleges is a spammer. He presents the text he received, the person he says is a spammer replies, then Joey rebuts the reply. I must say this is new to me also. I'll let Joey explain it. PAT] ========================== I dunno if this is a new one on any of you, but it was certainly for me. Luckily, thanks to TELECOM Digest, I've become so paranoid about spam and whatnot that I instantly recognized this for the email- address-gathering scam that it is, instead of actually replying to the message. :-) ==================BEGIN FORWARDED MESSAGE================== >Return-Path: >Resent-Date: Mon, 10 May 1999 22:30:05 -0600 (Mountain Daylight Time) >Resent-From: adrian@ezymail.com >From: adrian@ezymail.com >Resent-Message-Id: <199905110430.WAA00245@sinclair.garynumanfan.nu> >Received: from www.adsonline.com.au ([203.61.203.1]) > by mb3.mailbank.com (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id VAA05201 > for ; Mon, 10 May 1999 21:30:18 -0700 >Received: from WWW.EZYMAIL.COM ([203.61.203.40]) by www.adsonline.com.au > (Post.Office MTA v3.1.2 release (PO205-101c) ID# 1-666L) > with SMTP id AAA250 for ; > Tue, 11 May 1999 14:27:56 +1000 >Received: from dev ([203.30.195.9]) by ezymail.ezymail.com (Post.Office MTA v3.1.2 release (PO205-101c) ID# 1-666L) with SMTP id AAA119 for ; Mon, 26 Apr 1999 17:58:31 +1000 >Reply-To: "adrian@ezymail.com" >To: joey@lindstrom.com >Subject: Where in the world is joey@lindstrom.com?? >Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 14:29:00 +1000 >Message-ID: <005701be8fba$a09e4ad0$09c31ecb@dev.ezymail.com> >MIME-Version: 1.0 >Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" >Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit >X-Priority: 3 (Normal) >X-MSMail-Priority: Normal >X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook 8.5, Build 4.71.2173.0 >Importance: Normal >X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 >Status: > Hi joey@lindstrom.com, I am writing to you in relation to a project that I am working on - to build a geographical map of the Internet, and I was wondering if you might help me by entering the name of your nearest city on my web page at: http://www.ezymail.com/~s9813984/geolocate/default.htm. My web page then maps your virtual location to your geographical location, there by generating the data that I need for my project. It would help my project along greatly if you could spare a moment to enter the name of your nearest city, but if not, then thanks anyway for considering my request. I don't want to waste your time any further, but if you would like to know how I came to get your e-mail address, and why I am asking 'you', then here is a brief explanation. I got your mail address from http://www.interocitor.net/worldwidewebb/, or if not on that page, it was on a page who's link appeared on that page. I was trying to find e-mail addresses that had been around for a while, and so I got hold of a list of URLs that were a few years old, and then I set a robot up to find any e-mail addresses that might be associated with those pages. Yours - joey@lindstrom.com was picked up by the robot, but I am not sure if it was on http://www.interocitor.net/worldwidewebb/, or whether it was just on a page that appeared as a link on that page. (The idea was to find people like yourself, that had been around the net for a while, and would not be terrified by the thought of someone knowing what their nearest city was.) I hope that you don't mind me asking, but as you can imagine, to build a reasonably good map of the net, I need an awful lot of people to tell me 'where' their part of the net is. Oh, and if you would like to know what I plan to do with the data, well I can see all kinds of uses for it, from analysing web traffic to geographically targeted web advertising. I would also be very interested in hearing from anyone who may be interested in assisting, investing, or otherwise in the development of any of these possible uses. Even if you would just like to use the data yourself, then I would like to hear from you. Anyway, I have taken up enough of your time, but once again, if you would like to help me build a map of the Internet, then all that you have to do is just enter the name of your nearest city in the single text box at http://www.ezymail.com/~s9813984/geolocate/default.htm Thanks heaps for your help in advance, and even if you don't help, then thanks anyway for considering my request. Kind Regards Adrian McElligott aem@ezymail.com ===================END FORWARDED MESSAGE=================== Too bad Adrian didn't leave me a 1-800 number to dial.... ------------------------------ Reply-To: From: Adrian McElligott Subject: Re: Where in the World is joey@lindstrom.com?? Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 16:11:36 +1000 Hi Joey, Actually I am not collecting e-mail addresses. I am as I said in my original message building a geographical map of the Internet. Why don't you check out my web page and see for yourself. It you want to know anything more about my project, then I am more than willing to provide you with the information. Here is the url that takes you directly to my FAQ http://www.ezymail.com/~s9813984/geolocate/faq.htm I hope that you don't mind me providing you with this additional information, I just feel that you have taken me the wrong way. Kind regards Adrian -----Original Message----- From: Joey Lindstrom [mailto:Joey@GaryNumanFan.NU] Sent: Tuesday, 11 May 1999 14:38 PM To: editor@telecom-digest.org Cc: webmaster@tradingpostonthe.net Subject: Where in the world is joey@lindstrom.com?? > Too bad Adrian didn't leave me a 1-800 number to dial.... ------------------------------ From: Joey Lindstrom Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 07:43:52 -0600 Reply-To: Joey Lindstrom Subject: Re: Where in the World is joey@lindstrom.com?? On Tue, 11 May 1999 16:11:36 +1000, Adrian McElligott wrote: > Actually I am not collecting e-mail address. I am as I said in my original > message building a geographical map of the Internet. Why don't you check > out my web page and see for your self. It you want to know anything more > about my project, then I am more than willing to provide you with the > information. Here is the url that takes you directly to my FAQ > http://www.ezymail.com/~s9813984/geolocate/faq.htm > I hope that you don't mind me providing you with this additional > information, I just feel that you have taken me the wrong way. Further investigation of InterNIC's records shows that the domains "tradingpostonthe.net" and "ezymail.com" are registered and owned by the same person. Your name personally appears as the registered user of both domain names. You used a form letter to contact me, which substituted personal information such as the URL of my website, my own email address, etc., but didn't include my real name. The following quoted paragraph from your original message is quite telling: > "I got your mail address from http://www.interocitor.net/worldwidewebb/, > or if not on that page, it was on a page who's link appeared on that > page. I was trying to find e-mail addresses that had been around for a > while, and so I got hold of a list of URLs that were a few years old, > and then I set a robot up to find any e-mail addresses that might be > associated with those pages. Yours - joey@lindstrom.com was picked up > by the robot, but I am not sure if it was on > http://www.interocitor.net/worldwidewebb/, or whether it was just on a > page that appeared as a link on that page. (The idea was to find people > like yourself, that had been around the net for a while, and would not > be terrified by the thought of someone knowing what their nearest city > was.)" Let's have a look at this phrase: "... people like yourself, that had been around the net for a while ..." What a load of bafflegab. How on earth does your robot know how long I've been on the internet? Tell us more about this list of URL's "that were a few years old", and tell me why my friend Eldon, whose site has been online THREE MONTHS, also got one of your mailings? Your own URL (under the ezymail.com domain) looks and feels like a sub-page on an ISP's web server. Simply surfing to www.ezymail.com by itself shows the lie of that - it's a standard Microsoft IIS4 installation that nobody has bothered to configure. You are both the owner and operator of "ezymail.com" and "tradingpostonthe.net", and probably "adsonline.com.au" too (which processed your original email message), since it shares the same IP address as "tradingpostonthe.net". You try to pass yourself off as a lowly user of somebody else's system. Admit it. The real purpose of your mailing was to get people to respond to confirm that the email address was valid and working, thus making it more valuable when you sell it to spammers or use it yourself for spam. Since your connection is directly to Telstra, I think I'll have a word with them as well ... / From the messy desktop of Joey Lindstrom / Email: Joey@GaryNumanFan.NU or joey@lindstrom.com / Phone: +1 403 313-JOEY / FAX: +1 413 643-0354 (yes, 413 not 403) / Visit The NuServer! http://www.GaryNumanFan.NU / Visit The Webb! http://webb.GaryNumanFan.NU / / Rush Limbaugh's Updated 35 UNDENIABLE TRUTHS / / NUMBER 32 / / The Los Angeles riots were not caused by the Rodney King verdict. The / Los Angeles riots were caused by rioters. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Bravo, touche! and all that ... thanks very much for turning over yet another rock where they hide, Joey. As I said three messages ago, this was a new technique I had not yet seen. I hope other readers will now be aware of it also. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 14:23:05 -0500 From: Paul Kenyon Organization: Location Technologies Subject: Mystery Test Number Hello all, I'll keep this short. There's a test number in my area (Kansas City, MO - 816) whose purpose is unknown to me. I have known this number (999) since I was in grade school, and it still works today. When you dial 999, there will be (usually) one ringback, followed by (usually) 3 'chirps.' The Chirps are 1 cycle per second, with about a 25% on/75% silent duty cycle. I don't know what frequency(s) and rates make up the chirp; I don't know how to analyze that. Feel free to listen to a small recording on my homepage: http://www.swbt.net/~rixon/telecom/telco.html Or just the chirp call itself: http://www.swbt.net/~rixon/telecom/frog.wav (we call it the "electronic frog") Your answers/ideas are welcomed! Paul Kenyon pkenyon@loctech.com Programming, Systems Engineering Location Technologies http://www.loctech.com (816)741-3169 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 09:24:03 CDT From: Randolph J. Herber Subject: Apparent Impact of GPS Y2K _Testing_ on Some Telco Owned Receivers Reply-To: "Randolph J. Herber" I quoted the entire article as it was short. From: Bob Gross <75013.1420@CompuServe.COM> Subject: U.S. Space Command conducting Y2K compliance testing till mid May Organization: 75013.1420@compuserve.com Date: Mon May 10 22:25:51 CDT 1999 News-group: sci.geo.satellite-nav Sam, your news is very interesting, but it appeared on May 10. It is my information that they did do the test to SVN27. There is one particular model of GPS receiver that saw a date conflict between SVN27 and all the others, so that special-purpose receiver (which shall go unnamed) WENT TO HELL. Apparently, they dropped out of GPS lock and had to be manually reset to bring them back up. The reason that I say "they" is because there was a large number of these installed and providing Stratum 1 timing to large portions of Ma Bell. They all went into the toilet. If anybody knows anymore about this, let me know. [It was not my receiver.] ---Bob Gross--- Randolph J. Herber, herber@dcdrjh.fnal.gov, +1 630 840 2966, CD/CDFTF PK-149F, Mail Stop 318, Fermilab, Kirk & Pine Rds., PO Box 500, Batavia, IL 60510-0500, USA. (Speaking for myself and not for US, US DOE, FNAL nor URA.) (Product, trade, or service marks herein belong to their respective owners.) ------------------------------ From: James Wyatt Subject: Re: Internet Pioneers Date: Mon, 10 May 1999 19:45:03 -0500 Organization: Fastlane Communications (using Airnews.net!) On Sun, 2 May 1999, Robert Eden wrote: > To further discussions ... > How many networks made up the "Internet" in the 80's? The term 'internet' was (or I thought) only applied to machines that were directly IP connected to 'The Net'. Machines on UUCP/FidoNet/AX.25 had to send mail to an internet SMTP gateway (which also usually MX'd for them) to get to the internet - anyone else remember grinding all night on pathalias files? In short, you weren't really on The Internet unless you could directly telnet to other machines on 'The Net'. I had a ham radio packet gateway which allowed folks to use SMTP and POP on TCP/IP encapsulated within AX.25 to UUCP gateway which could send internet mail via a UUCP MX server. It used a coordinated IP address of 44.28.1.8 but could *not* pass packets to 'The Net', only to other hams. It was 1200b half-duplex slow, but it used 145MHz radio and it actually worked some of the time. 8{) It used the KA9Q package (and later JNOS) on an 8MHz NEC V20 DOS 3v3 machine shared with my weather station. A 386/33 SCO Xenix box (running BNews with an 80MB news spool!) would do UUCP to a MX relay Sun was nice enough to let us use. Two other hams in the area had similar setups, but one was an early OS/2 zealot. He got it all working on one machine. 8{) Usenet news was also forwarded via gateways using UUCP to notes and other group messaging platforms like FidoNet. Usenet existed a *long* time before NNTP came around... Now it's impossible to carry much of a Usenet newsfeed over dialup UUCP, but we used to have a $300/mo phone bill trucking mail and news to Lawton, Olkahoma from Fort Worth, Texas! That was with 18.7Kbps Telebit modems, now I'm adding ADSL to augment my ISDN links. What will we see next? Thanks for letting me ramble. They were fun times, but I'm having even more fun now ... Technology is my toy store. Jy@ [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: A lot of people do not realize there were two things with identical names: Internet (with an upper-case 'I') was one thing, while 'the internet' (with a lower-case 'i') was something else. The 'internet' was made up of several networks connected together, one of which was 'Internet'. 'Internet' was itself a collection of networks, typically at .EDUcational insti- tutions, or .MILitary organizations. It gets a little tricky sometimes remembering exactly who officially belonged where. The term 'Usenet' was often times incorrectly interchanged with 'Internet'. The latter is/was a collection of networks which were connected together while the former is a transport mechanism for passing newsgroups around. Likewise the 'World Wide Web' is not the Internet or 'the internet'; it is a transport mechanism for sending files from one site to another, using the internet to connect the sites. All these 'in the old days' discussions should really now be sent to pioneers@internet-history.org where they can be treated in more detail. If you have not yet visited Internet Pioneers at http://internet-pioneers.org you really should do so soon. John Levine put a lot of work into getting it running. PAT] ------------------------------ From: TELECOM Digest Editor Subject: Email and Newsgroup Similarities Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 19:30:00 EDT Some people are amazed to find out that what we call newsgroups are really just big, giant, open to all mailboxes. You get your mail in your private box which no one can see but yourself. If you chose to set the read/write permissions on your mailbox so that everyone could read it and write to it, then what you did was create a newsgroup. Conversely, if I never again sent out another Digest in my life, not only would some people be quite happy (beam!) but comp.dcom.telecom would become my private mailbox. It is a bit more involved than that, but that's the basic idea. Just as you can post an item in comp.dcom. telecom using news posting software, you can do the same thing by sending email to comp-dcom-telecom@your.site (note the dashes in the name versus the dots in the newsgroup official version of the name) ... all Usenet newsgroups are the same. Just as an individual user can use a 'dot forward' (as in .forward) file to tell the system mail software 'do not leave the mail here but instead put it elsewhere') the pseudo-mailboxes which relate to newsgroups will have -- if the group is moderated -- the essence of a 'dot forward' attached to them saying to not leave the file here, forward it to ptownson@telecom-digest.org. This is the same as you sending your own mail elsewhere when out of the office, etc. In newsgroup 'mailboxes' it is not called a .forward file, it is referred to as the moderator flag being set, forcing the newly arrived thing to be sent on to whoever is designated as moderator for the group. If there is no moderator flag set, then the newly arrived file (we would call the file 'news' instead of 'mail') sits right there where it was sent. All can view it or add to it who wish to do so. Now please note carefully: if you do NOT want your mail to be piped through someone's .forward file, i.e. handled by his filter- rules, etc ... then you put a backslash in front of his name. For example mail to joeblow@site is subject to whatever .forward Joe has in place. Maybe he sends the mail elsewhere, or maybe he uses it as a way to pipe the stream into filtering, etc. But \joeblow@site means the mail is to be delivered absolutely! to Mr. Blow's mailbox, bypassing or ignoring any .forward, should one be present in his directory. A backslash in front of something always means deal with it just as written, ignoring any user-created aliases locally or elsewhere which might have been put up for handling that instruction. If you do this in a script, as a spammer might do who wanted to find his way safely to millions of email addresses through the minefield of filter-rules users placed in his path, you need to remember that a backslash '\' has a special meaning to the shell, and that you have to 'escape the backslash' itself using the shell's escape character -- itself a backslash! -- as well, i.e. \\joeblow@site. In this example, the first backslash tells the shell to take literally the second backslash and use it as an 'escape' from any aliases strewn in the way, 'troublesome' filter rules waiting at the end of a .forward, etc. If you are only using a front end client such as a piece of software to hand your mail over to the 'back office' such as sendmail, then one slash is all you would use, since the front-end client would know what to do at that point. I have never tested to see if a backslash in front of a 'newsgroup mailbox name' i.e. \some-nice-newsgroup@sitename would also serve to overthrow the moderator flag, or ignore it and seat itself in the box anyway. I would never want to screw up someone's moderated news- group in that way. Even if it did, I doubt it would go any further than the local site since when other sites came there to get the latest news to carry away with them elsewhere the absence of the 'Approved-by' line would get them nervous. So just remember, when your mail is important, and needs to reach the recipient post-haste and get right to his attention, be sure to backslash him to go right to his default mailbox on the system and ignore any booby-traps he has set for you along the way, things that would cause your valuable mail to be ignored or destroyed. PAT ------------------------------ From: Rtf_PJM@shsu.edu (Paul MacArthur) Date: Tue, 11 May 1999 03:38:09 -0500 Subject: Re: Last Laugh! FCC Goes Ooops > Ah, where would we be if we had no shame regarding our sexual and > bathroom activities ... I told you it was pretty gross ... anyway, > some joker slipped it into the queue going out to a mailing list > maintained by the FCC ... (really!) ... Ummm, I think it was actually sent by the FCC person because you can clearly see in one header her name is on the To: list and then she sends it to the Daily Digest List (which she usually sends). So, either she (Stacy Mesa - of the FCC) sent it accidentally or someone was going to great lengths to make it look like she did. > this reply from someone at FCC who apparently moderates the list > as a sideline: No, Stacy Mesa usually sends out the list. > Anyone remember the night back in the early 1960's when a rock and > roll disk jockey for station WLS in Chicago made a very slightly off- > color remark over the air and the FCC cut the station off the air > five or ten minutes later for the rest of the night? And the next > day, and for about two weeks, WLS was required by the FCC to play a > pre-recorded announcement apologizing for their indiscretion and > inviting listeners to write to the FCC about any further punishment > recommended for the station? Maybe Joy Howell should be required to > do penance by publishing her apology daily for the next month. Or maybe this should be brought up every time the FCC's attempts to dictate what content is indecent. Amazing, Howard Stern gets fined because a man plays the piano with his penis - on the radio!!! - and we can't fine the FCC for spamming us with an indecent joke. I love dictatorships!!! Paul [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Most governments and civil servants consider themselves far above and superior to the people they serve. The laws and regulations of various federal agencies never apply to the agencies themselves. Does that answer your question? I've been trying to think of a way Holy Water could be used as part of Joy Howell's penance. Perhaps a bucket of it poured out on top of her computer, and that of Stacy Mesa's to cleanse them of their sins, although I am sure the computer had no idea it was saying something shameful and profane. PAT] ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #79 *****************************