Telecom-Request%usc-eclc@brl-bmd.UUCP (Telecom-Request@usc-eclc) (09/28/83)
TELECOM Digest Wednesday, 28 Sep 1983 Volume 3 : Issue 63
Today's Topics:
Missed V3 #61
phone hookup query
Longdistance services for telecom
Re: long-distance carriers (in Telecom V3 #59)
Telecommunications Security and Privacy.
Spin back the years...
long-distance D.A. charges?!?
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Date: 27-Sep-83 00:42 PDT
From: RICH.GVT@OFFICE-3
Subject: Missed V3 #61
Did I miss receiving Volume 3, Issue 61 of the Telecom Digest, or was
a number skipped? I got #60 dated 23 Sep and #62 dated 26 Sep, but no
#61.
-Rich
[Yes, shoot me again, I goofed once again and misnumbered the digest,
forgetting issue 61. There was no issue 61. Things should be
straightened out enough now so that this won't occur again. --JSol]
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Date: 25 September 1983 14:59 EDT
From: Hal Abelson <HAL @ MIT-MC>
Subject: phone hookup query
How should one hook up a six-wire phone set (red, yellow, green,
black, blue, white) to a 4-wire connector (red, yellow, green, black)?
It doesn't seem to work to simply ignore the blue and white.
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Date: Sun, 25 Sep 83 15:40:10 PDT
From: Theodore N. Vail <vail@UCLA-CS>
Subject: Longdistance services for telecom
I have been using the "residential" Sprint service for some time.
There is a $5.00 per month charge and (since it is residential) I
cannot use Sprint between 9:00 am and 11:00 am, Monday through Friday.
This has not been a problem. To obtain service for those 10 hours I
would have to obtain "business" service at $25.00 per month.
The service may be used from most cities within the United States at
no extra charge (you are given a list of numbers to call in a sheet,
indexed by City and State). It is not as comprehensive as MCI (e.g.
Monterrey, CA is not yet served), however the service is reliable and
the quality is good, though not quite up to AT&T "Long-Lines" service.
I have not tried using modems with it.
It may even be used for calls within a local area which are "toll
calls", as so many in the Los Angeles area are. This service turns
out to be more useful than one might expect -- I was recently a
patient in the UCLA Hospital and the new UCLA telephone system allows
a patient to make unlimited "toll-free" local calls. All others must
be operator- assisted, and are charged at that rate. So a call to say,
Malibu, which is normally a few cents, would be over $1.25. Sprint
has a number in Beverly Hills, which is local to UCLA, and I was able
to use it to avoid the operator charges for these types of calls.
The billing is comprehensive and much more readable than that provided
by the local operating companies. I have not yet had any billing
discrepancies and I have had the service for over two years. An
obvious advantage is that, in case of such a dispute, Sprint, MCI and
the similar services can't disconnect your basic telephone service if
you don't deposit the amount they claim you owe with the local Public
Utilities Commission (PUC). This can be, and is, done by the local
operating companies, sometimes forcing a subscriber to deposit
thousands of dollars with the PUC.
It is not clear what effect the acquisition of Sprint by GT&E will
have. Sprint bills have carried inserts stating that soon new
services, such as abbreviated dialing, will be available.
However, AT&T has recently announced that it is planning to
substantially lower its long distance rates at the beginning of the
year. One can expect substantial rate-changes from the competing
companies in response. One can also expect special rate-offerings to
large organizations who might otherwise operate their own micro-wave
and satellite links. In addition, the local operating companies will
be required to provide "4-wire" service to the competing companies (as
it currently does for AT&T "Long-Lines"), and this should lead to a
substantial improvement in the quality of their service.
Perhaps the chaotic price structure of the airline industry, since it
was deregulated, should give us an idea of what to expect from the
telephone company. One can imagine bargains such as a 55% discount if
one calls Dubuque, Iowa between 5:00 am and 7:00 am during the Month
of June, 1984 (excluding Mothers' day when which there will be a 50%
surcharge).
So, it appears that now is not a good time to make a long-term
judgement about these services.
good luck
vail
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Date: 21 Sep 1983 9:02-EDT
From: chris
Subject: Re: long-distance carriers (in Telecom V3 #59)
Sprint has recently announced that their service is now availabe from
anywhere in the United States to anywhere in the United States. This
is a dramatic improvement from their earlier service in which you had
to call from one of about 50 Metropolitan areas to one of about 100
Metropolitan areas (as I recall the old service.) Unfortunately,
since I've stopped using Sprint, I threw away the announcement, and
can't give more details.
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Date: 26 Sep 1983 20:08-PDT
Subject: Telecommunications Security and Privacy.
From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow
Reply-to: Geoff@SRI-CSL
On Monday, September 26th, I appeared before and presented invited
testimony at the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on
Transportation, Aviation and Materials on the subject of
Telecommunications Security and Privacy.
Due to the activities of the Milwaukee 414s and the subsequent hoopla
that has been generated in the media, HACKING has been getting a bad
name. I therefore decided to address my testimony to the TRUE nature
of computer hackers and hacking (in an attempt to put the entire
situation in some type of perspective). I also addressed what can and
should be done to help abate the 'unsavory' hacking problem. And
lastly, how low tech the current hackings have been and what we might
be seeing more of in the future.
I'm told the hearings went out live over CNN -- there were at least 16
video cameras that I could count and the rest of the room was jammed
to standing room only with reporters and other media.
Individuals who presented testimony were: Neal Patrick (of the 414s);
Jimmy McClary (Los Alamos Division leader for Security); Donn Parker
and myself (from SRI); and Steve Walker (formerly of DARPA/Pentagon).
Those interested in what I had to say about hacking and such are
invited to FTP a copy of my prepared testimony from
[SRI-CSL]<GEOFF>HOUSE.DOC; There is also a .LPT version with
line-printer overstriking, should you want that. If you cannot FTP a
copy for whatever reason, I'll be able to send one by netmail if you
mail a request to Geoff@SRI-CSL.
Geoff
------------------------------
Date: 27 Sep 83 00:03:46 EDT
From: Hobbit <AWalker@RUTGERS.ARPA>
Subject: Spin back the years...
I'm going to pull a small time warp and reference some messages from
last July or so, when I started building a small list of ''things to
flame about on Telecom'' which has been slowly growing till now. I
hope these aren't so late that the context is forgotten by now.
Okay, first the Telstar: For the same $299.95 do you get the RK06 to
plug into it??? It takes one helluva lot of bits to record 30 msgs
worth of digital speech. The rest of it sounds like a fun toy.
Re: Radio Shack modular cord kits: Our shop got their first one
recently. One of the grunts tried to put a plug on the end of a cord,
and promptly shattered the plastic hinge at the end of the crimper. I
eventually found out how to get the thing to perform [experimenting
with somewhere around Version 4]. What you have to do is load the
plug and cord, squeeze *gently* to get it started, and then put the
lower die of the crimper down on the table and beat on the top part
with your fist. The hinge then [you hope] won't have to bear any
strain. I still prefer finding a Genuine Bell cord and cutting one
end off. I trust my own soldered splices ahead of any crimped
connection from Radio Shack! The Bell plugs are actually heat-sealed
into the plastic blocks, I think.
I've had a gander at Central Office batteries on occasion. They are
somewhat awesome. They are a rack full of 2.5 foot high glass battery
jars, through which you can see the plates and everything else.
Emerging from each one are two large rods which connect to overhead
copper slabs so massive you could swing beef on them. These, routed
upstairs on a mess of porcelain insulators, provide the entire office
with power during outages, including for lights! [There is such a
thing as a 48-volt bulb]. The office on a typical day, one ESS
exchange, draws about 1 kiloamp [Or was that crossbar, I forget??]
anyway, it's a lot. Those batteries can't last forever but I would
imagine they have a very large amp-hour capacity.
Rumor has it that NYC ran out of numbers largely due to those dialup
pagers. Splitting the area code sounds like it's going to be a real
kludge. I wonder how many floors in the same building are going to be
a long-distance call from other ones?? It would have made much better
sense for a pager service to have a *small* hunt group of dialins, and
a machine [maybe even with voice recog for rotary folk] to parse
further dial pulses/numbers and page the right guy. There are enough
touchtone phones in the field to make such a setup practical, and with
voice rec getting better you could accommodate everybody. Surely such
a system would be immensely more cost-effective over time if they
invested in such a machine, instead of paying the rent on all those
lines for n years!!
Has anyone tried NY Tel's latest ''service''? I'm not sure what it's
officially called but ''Dial-an-orgasm'' is descriptive enough. You
get to hear someone [usually female] ''talk dirty'' for 30 sec or so.
The trick is that they never use any *profane* terms; simply
suggestive ones. If I remember right, the number's 212 976 2x2x where
X varies between unknown limits. There seem to be a lot of different
ones. Naturally there is some group that is trying to have it taken
down, like that old similar thing set up by Hustler [?].
Central office tone detection [a slight aside from the modem-detection
issue]: I've heard that in some ESS office, the hardware is capable
of hearing and logging any touchtone dialing after the call is
completed. This means that someone has access to all your
long-distance service passwords, your bank-by-fone account, and
anything else you called and punched numbers at. It sounds highly
illegal under most circumstances. Anyone know the real story on
this?? Do they/can they enable ''subsequent tone listening'', and
why? How far can we trust these guys, anyways?! Remember, not
everyone in TPC walks around with a halo on his head.
Ah yes, mobile telephones. I recently purchased a programmable
scanner, which can hear all the local repeaters. It is amazing how
people throw their personal life out all over the airwaves like no one
could hear them. After listening to it for a while, trying to figure
out how it all works, I called and asked about them. I was given
something like the following. Rent per month is about $250. You pay
an initial $330 or so installation fee, and a $1000 deposit. You can
only access certain repeaters in your area, and since there are a
limited number of repeaters and only one person can use one at a time,
you often luse when you try to make a call. However, they are
shipping out the current ''antiquated'' system soon, and putting in
some kind of cellular system. In *Morristown*?! Seems that the
implementation of cellular is farther along than I thought. At any
rate, I can determine a few things about the current setup that you
may find interesting. What happens right when someone picks up is
unknown, but I would assume that some sort of billing code is
transmitted. Often there is a 2kHz ''standby'' tone from the
repeater, and when someone has accessed the thing, the tone
disappears. You then sometimes hear a tape loop ''Foo-town mobile!''
followed [in any case] by a dial tone. Dial pulses [!] proceed and
seem to be tone-modulated somehow. I assume that the customer turns
on the car phone, sends on the frequency that the repeater listens to,
and then listens for the repeater to acknowledge him. It is the
repeater only that one hears on the scanner; in most cases the car is
too faint to be picked up. Following the dial tone, the rest sounds
like a normal phone conversation, until the mobile party hangs up.
The car unit sends a sort of warble which is the EOT signal, and then
dies. The repeater drops the call and goes to idle mode.
Have they gotten cellular to the point where if your unit missed the
fact that your local repeater told it to swap frequencies and then did
so, the mobile unit will know it? I suspect that the first versions
will have lots of annoying bugs when put into actual use. Do they use
analog, or digitally transmitted voice?
Well, that about empties my crock for the moment. Enjoy...
_H*
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Date: Tue, 27 Sep 83 9:31:22 EDT
From: Carl Moore (VLD/VMB) <cmoore@brl-vld>
Subject: long-distance D.A. charges?!?
News item Sept. 23: AT&T is considering charging 75 cents per call to
long-distance directory assistance. (New fallout from breakup of
AT&T.) It's an unexpected (and very annoying) surprise for me, and
I'm sure it is for a lot of others. (Just last night, I wanted to
call Elkton, Md. from Newark, Del., and had to call Md. directory
assistance because Elkton, although just over the state line from
Newark, is not in the Wilmington directory, which includes Newark.)
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End of TELECOM Digest
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