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ENUM Protocol in Australia?
Master Kai writes "Looks like Australia's thinking about implementing ENUM, an internet protocol that will convert a simple phone number into a URI. The benefits are obvious, use one number to contact you on any communications medium. Your website, fixed phone, fax, mobile (cell) and email address. But at what cost to our privacy? I know that personally I prefer to give out my email address, because I can change it at the click of a button. And what about spam? Not only would spamers have your email address, but your contact numbers too. Eeeep!
Anyway. It looks good nonetheless. Check out the news article , and for the Australian Communications Authority Discussion Paper. "
I don't see why there's any difficulty in changing your number? They change telephone numbers all the time when people move.
get phone calls from spammers anyway.
I think we can ALL agree that any form of "wonder number" is a bad thing.
Any number/ID that ties YOU into everything that you ever sign up for and every communication device you own is never a good thing. Some things you just want to keep private.
I can see where this would be good in a business world, where instead of saying "my fax is: ###-####, my phone is ###-#### my email is..." etc. they can just give out one number.
The threat of spam will keep this from ever becoming a reality. However this will probaly not increase telemarketing "spam" too much because there is already a public listing where they can get your number, its called a phonebook. The reason email spam will be a problem with this is simply because email is practically no cost to spammers.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
I think it'd be okay if it was an opt-in decision (like unlisted numbers).
Assuming Telstra doesn't mess it up (like they did this year, printing some unlisted numbers in the phone book).
I'm sure it'll just become another "feature" they try and charge people for.
-- Shaun "Blessed are the geeks, for they shall Internet the earth"
"Sure you can. It's www.555-6789.com"
*Later*
"Yowzer, that mama was hot,hot,hot... Hang on... 555 (dawning on him) GODDAMMIT!!!"
A little inconvenience to try and maintain my privacy is a small price to pay.
;)
I'd rather not be spammed on every device I own.
Fears of it being a single ID number are pointless anyway. We already have that.
We defaeated the "Australia Card" by referendum, but the government of the day (Labour I believe) snuck in the Tax File Number, which is in effect the exact same thing.
We've all got a bar code already.
Well, You have a domain: http://kaimarna.com/
You're privacy isn't that great anyway if you have a way to contact you via a domain... Just do a whois...
Gmanske.
Did I miss something in the article?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
This is an obvious use of the Hegelian dialectic to crack down on liberty.
Though it might sound useful to the uninformed, this will be a disaster for the average citizen as they are deluged with pornographic spam from every single method of communication, and the public will be outraged and will call for revenge.
However, the only way to stop such spam is to enforce outright draconian laws, much like you would have to do to combat piracy effectively. Like with MP3s, spam can be produced and distributed on a massive scale for almost no cost, and it's a force that cannot be stopped without a terrible price on liberties.
Australia's politicians are notorious for trying to crack down on Online Rights, and this is a plot to do so.
I used to put my work phone number in my emails until a stupid guy from a mail list started to call me to discuss some topic that he disagreed... what a pain in the neck!!!
URI = = URL
There is a hierarchy of communications media, each one with it's role, and the idea of merging them all into some super number is a bad idea. It reminds me of the car Homer Simpson designed with all the bells and whistles; on paper it looked good but when he put it all together it BANKRUPTED HIS BROTHER. OK maybe that wasn't the best analogy but you get the picture.
Universal Resource Inibitor?
;-)
Thanks.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
RFC2396 goes into great detail about URI's and URL's. It covers the (minor for most of us) differences between them.
In Australia there is one overwhelmingly dominant phone carrier - Telstra.
If you have a single number to dial to also send someone e-mail, then they will no doubt try to charge people for a phone call, whereas you can currently send as many e-mails as you want once you have an internet connection. This will mean that get more revenue. After all, their last profits were down to a few hundred million.
Do the aussies have a national Do Not Call list? If they did I wouldn't see a problem in using your phone number for your website url.
And hey, you can always become a hermit if the spam ever gets to you.
Request for Comments doc:
This document updates and merges "Uniform Resource Locators"
[RFC1738] and "Relative Uniform Resource Locators" [RFC1808] in order
to define a single, generic syntax for all URI.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Great.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
At it's heart this is a product of the Telstra cultural malignancy whereby they actually believe that eight plus digit numbers define the pinnacle of usability.
I really should write a book on the sad quarter century of Telstra struggling and failing to turn online information into an income stream without ever coming to terms with the fundamental dynamics of the information age, so I shouldn't try to squeeze too many details into a SlashDot post before I run the facts past a libel lawyer.
As Australia's public telecomms carrier, Telstra's world view continues to blinker policy debate, even more so since our reactionary federal governement installed the even more reactionary Senator Richard Alston on top of the information and communications policy bureacracy, basically as an offshoot of his dabblings with the arts.
How amusing that Telstra has been thrown a lifeline by the rise of mobile (cellular) phone usage. They still don't have a clue that the biggest plus for mobile phones is that they enable you to stop addressing people by their numbers.
But it's still far and away the best place to live, even if the numbers don't always add up.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
at last the stupid cycle of people changing their mobile number and email address every year may stop.
It is really irritating trying to contact someone to find out that you have an old email address or phone number. (landlines aren't as bad as mobiles)
Personally, I think they should match it to your license plate number. That way, you can call people who are driving horribly and then email them about how badly they were driving via your PDA. We could turn road rage into its own medium.
So if you don't have a phone number because you're one of the few people on the planet that doesn't have a phone, would you be unknown to the Australian government?
This space for rent.
I would simply stop checking my regular e-mail. I would have a personel website. To contact me, you would have to visit the website and fill out the online form. This would be used to stop clutter from any mass mailing. Those wishing a personal contact would have to do a personal vist to the site. My home phone would get an automated voicemail system. I would not be in easy reach of the mass marketers.
The truth shall set you free!
Why is this modded funny? It's not, URI is the correct term.
http://www.foo.com/ is a URL
mailto:bob@smith.com.au is a URI
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Hang up on them and get an email from them later. Same thing if you ignore their emails.
"Sorry we couldn't contact you via email, sir, but if I could just have 45 minutes of your time to explain our unwanted product to you..."
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
I want to type in an e-mail address to make a phone call, not the other way around!
Then it is trivial to change the e-mail address if need be.
Probably better not to, if you have a weak heart.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If I wanted to pick a single identifier (which, like many others who have commented, I don't), I wouldn't want it to be a 10 digit number. Maybe I should start giving out my IP address instead of my named web site address, too. You don't see people rushing out to register domain names like 2139812309.com because they suck compared to even a ridiculous name like slashdot.org. I thought we were past using meaningless numbers for electronic addresses. Am I the only one who thinks they are doing this backwards? - Russ
So now Australians can look forward to everyoone's "friend" goatse on X device. So what happens when mom and pop get that startling image in their e-mail?
.noitacidem deen uoy siht daer nac uoy fI
I don't see the problem--if you don't want it, just don't use it.
The Raven
The Raven
They have their numbers on stationery, business cards, they advertise on the radio (where a URL is quite difficult to communicate) .. so for businesses Enum is a bonus is it not?
Internet Number http://www.internetnumberusa.com/ has been providing this service for quite some time in Japan (where more users connect to the internet via mobile phone than PC) and the US to the delight of both business and users.
It's like a name if you think about it, if all names were unique. I think it's a good (and very old) idea.
actually, numbers are great. they are terse, they work on any keyboard in the world (including telephone keyboards), and they are language-independent. and when you think about it, phone numbers really aren't much less mnemonic than the local-part of a typical big-ISP email address.
of course, nobody's suggesting that we use numbers instead of email addresses or URLs, but addresses that consist of nothing but digits are in fact quite useful.
and anyway, enum is only half of the picture - there's also a proposal for mapping URLs to other information from the rescap working group. The basic idea is that an identifier should not be inherently tied to one single kind of resource - given either a phone number or a URL (and the latter includes email addresses), you should be able to find out additional information about that resource if the owner of that number/URL wants to provide it. phone number to web page? easy.
email address to phone number? sure, if I want to provide it. or maybe you have my voice # and want to send me email. again, no problem.
Universal Resource Inhibitor. My bad. Sorry folks. Glad some of you got the joke anyhow.
Great! This makes life much simpler.
According to the ENUM spec my new easy-to-remember all-purpose address will be:
7.2.4.8.7.5.3.2.2.6.8.8.e164.arpa
No longer will I have to use that impossible to remember email address (1st name)@(surname).org
- hotmail email
- work email
- work email 2
- mobile
- home number
- work number
Naturally I give these out to different people for different contexts. There is no way I'd want everyone to know all of them!My question is, What problem are they trying to solve?
here in Melbourne it seems as though there exists a national Do Call list. in fact I wouldn't be surprised if my government were using their extensive wiretaps to ensure that telemarketing quotas were being met!
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
Just out of curiousity, do you really think the slashdot crowd is going to want to "get paid to read bulk email"?
That's like going into the Vatican and asking if anyone wants to come sacrifice some goats to Baal.
--
pants ahoy
The Australia Card was renamed to MediCare.
Why stop here?
Ultimately you should have your own personalized, geneticly generated barcode (no need to tatoo) on your front head.
Slightly elevated it would not only be scannable and obsolete any face recognition systems, but imagine people banging their heads to the public counters instead of signing their checks.
"Sorry Sir. You were speeding. Could you please bang you head against mine for counter-signiture.
Now that's what I call an URL.
landlines aren't as bad as mobiles
How's that? Whenever somebody moves between local districts here they change their landlines. My friends with cells have generally kept their numbers, so long as they're in the general area.
Cells here tend to have a greater spectrum than land-lines and can often encompass 2-3 cities. The only time a local cellular should really change is if the person switches carriers.
On a semi-related topic, I've often wondered why the post office doesn't implement some sort of mapping from IDs to addresses. Just think of how inefficient it is for a person to notify everyone s/he knows each time s/he moves. Multiply that by the number of people that move each day. I'm surprised the USPS has any time left to deliver the real mail.
:-)
Now imagine how easy it would be to update one central database with your new address, and your mail would automatically find you. USPS, are you listening?
-Pez
In Japan all the mobiles had a mail address based in the telephone number, like :
0901234678@telcom.ne.jp
But they had change it because the indiscriminate mail spam. You only need to send the spam from
09000000001 to 0909999999999 @telecom.ne.jp
and everybody gets your spam!.
Shouldn't this be in hexadecimal, the geeks radix? If the time comes to switch, why not use a better radix?
The reverse of this would be even more useful to me - a mapping from DNS to phone number.
That way I could give out my stable, unchanging domain name, instead of my phone number - which changes depending on where I am and who I'm buying phone service from.
Maybe you could store a phone number in a special type of DNS record. Then you'd pay a small fee to a company that provides a toll-free number. People who want to get in touch with me call the toll-free number, type in the domain name, and the call connects. Computer-based phones or future stand-alone phones could let you type the DNS name instead of the phone number.
ENUM is a simple protocol.
Your first phone number maps to 0.
Your second maps to 1.
Object-oriented implementations are in the works, soon you will be able to iterate over your entire phone history!
they are laughing AT him, not BECAUSE of him...
Who is this Karma guy and why is he bad ??
Why not go the whole hog.
... There's no such thing as privacy ... They're watching you ... They're watching us all ...
Link this ENUM contact information to you banking details so that every online market researcher who scans the web for email addresses can sell your contact details to firms who offer goods that you might find useful based on your spending patterns. It may only propogate the spam thing, but hey, at least it would be useful spam. And that would be something very new in an age where there is nothing new under the sun.
I mean, the Orwellians out there should know that big brother has been out there for the last 18 years
See http://www.ripe.net/ripencc/about/presentations/ri pencc-ietf-ec/ for a presentation about ENUM. The interesting part is that it lets you take a phone number and map it to one or more URLs of the form mailto:foo@example.com, sip:foo@example.com (for VoIP and conferencing), http://blah, etc.
Since the phone number space is relatively constrained in many countries and cities (e.g. London in the UK has changed its number space twice in the last decade), phone numbers are not an ideal solution to 'throwaway' numbers to give to potential telemarketers, but ENUM could help in theory.
My idea was that you would have a number of email and SIP addresses, some only given to friends/family, some published on websites, and some given to companies that may resell these addresses without your permission. This last set of addresses can be dropped rapidly as and when spammers get hold of them, exactly as some people do today with email addresses.
ENUM comes in as a way of mapping phone numbers to these more flexible email/SIP addresses - you have a 'private' ENUMed phone number, ideally ex directory, that maps to the friends/family address, and another for companies, and so on. You can change this mapping quite rapidly.
Where ENUM is weak is that it discloses the actual SIP and email addresses used (as it has to). So anybody who caches the old addresses can continue to spam you, which is why you need to have more then one ENUM phone number.
Overall, ENUM makes it easier to spam people (no surprise), but I thought I would at least explore if it could be used for anti-spam purposes... The weakness is that the number-to-address translation is made available to the client - this is the virtually unavoidable result of using a directory service to implement this mapping. Something like a forwarding service for SIP and email would be much more useful - i.e. it gateways from a public SIP/email address into a secret address, meaning that when the mapping changes the spammer is left with a useless address.
Overall, I think ENUM is primarily useful for legacy reasons, since so many people know about phone numbers (ditto for equipment). What would be more useful is to enable phones to understand SIP URLs and email addresses (latter is already happening with mobile phones, and SIP will arrive in later versions of UMTS 3G mobile phones in Europe/Asia), and have a forwarding service as mentioned.
According to the Australian Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk E-Mail, Australia currently has mild opt-out spamming provisions, most of which are based on a voluntary code of conduct rather than legislation. Perhaps you were thinking of Europe, where there are opt-in rules which could be considered a sufficient deterrent to spammers.
Even so, would Australian laws apply if the spam originated from outside of Australia?
Nowadays most offices run some kind of FAX-server, which enables people to "print to FAX-number" from their PC (instead of printing a document and then put that paper in a conventional FAX-machine) and receive FAX as tiff-attachments in Email.
Usually, these FAX-servers are 24x7 online on the internet as well.
With ENUM, one could implement the following: When the local FAX-server is asked to send some pages to +43662123456, it will look into the ENUM dns tree to check if the destination has registered an Internet-based method of transfering FAXes (e.g. FAX-G3/4 over TCP, or RFC822/MIME/SMTP). If yes, it uses its Internet-connection to transfer the document. If not, it falls back to G3 over PSTN.
While this does not affect the work-habits of end-users (e.g officedroids), it has the potential to save businesses a fortune in long distance phone-charges.
Or: Consider two companies who switched to VoIP for their intra-office phones and both use a gateway to call "normal" PSTN numbers. For calls between these companies, VoIP might work if the users use the right SIP urls when initiating the connection. With ENUM, users don't have to know whether the other side is VoIP-enabled and if yes, what their SIP-addresses look like. The caller will dial the number as usual; it's his phone (or gateway) which can query ENUM and then decide whether to route the call via VoIP to the other side, or to route the call through the PSTN.
_Please_ don't speak for the rest of us. Just direct all calls to someone who can actually engage others in a meaningful conversation. We can actually articulate a concept, and by doing so, win the war. You can just ride on the dividends.Go look at that bondage pr0n some more. There, all better, yes?
I forget what 8 was for.
Personally, I think they should match it to your license plate number. That way, you can call people who are driving horribly and then email them about how badly they were driving via your PDA. We could turn road rage into its own medium.
:(
You know, I've often wondered what the effect of communication between cars would be.
It might well _reduce_ road rage, since it would turn "cars" into "people".
OTOH, it's probably not enough to offset the armor-and-muscles arrogance that tinted windows and 200HP supplies.
Put simply:
URLs are a (proper) subset of URIs
URIs are the union of URLs and URNs
URLs are names for resources whose name is sufficient to resolve the resource. Eg nntp:<some server>/<message id>. To resolve it look at the URL. You have the protocol, server, and message id so you can just ask that server for the message named by the URL.
URNs aren't URLs. Eg news:<message id>. Resolving this requires knowing, say, a news server and its protocol.
So (as another poster said) mailto:<blah> is a URN since resolving to the actual mailbox <blah> requires more knowledge than the URI gives. http:<blah>, by contrast, is a URL. Resolving that is trivial given this URI.
Probably not entirely correct, but you get the idea. See the RFC above for tortuous detail.
Now IRIs, well...
Slashdot looked deep within my soul and assigned
me a number based on the order in which I joined
As far as I am concerned this is all about convergence, and that is good if managed properly.
On the reverse side of the coin, we also need a smart concentrator device that you can manage more than one number and more than one service (phone, fax, email, etc..). Small form factor but varied display possibilities (vga, projection display, retinal display)... btw, I am just throwing out some cool stuff, not saying all of this is necessary in version 1.0.
Instead of having this elaborate remapping scheme, why not take a roughly 40-bit range of IPv6 adresses and have that map directly to phone numbers? I know phone numbers in the US could be represented by 10 digits beginning with 1, which would need only 31 bits. (e.g. represent 1-555-555-1212 as the binary equivalent of 15555551212, which is 1110011111001011101101111111101100). Apply standard DNS on top of that.
Of course, I know that this would require global adoption of IPv6 to work, but I can dream, can't I?
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
As the co-chair of the ENUM WG in the IETF I would like Slashdot folks to understand what we trying to accomplish is a simple mapping of a phone number to a URL
ENUM is a "good thing"tm
If you all are interested in reading more:
Internet Protocol Journal on ENUM...
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/759/ipj_5-2.pd
Communications Convergence on SIP
http://www.cconvergence.com/showIssue?coverDate
My article on SIP in Communications Convergence
http://www.cconvergence.com/article/CTM20000608
My article on ENUM in Communications Convergence
http://www.cconvergence.com/article/CTM20010618
the ultimate SIP home page...
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/sip/
sincerely
Richard Shockey
IETF ENUM co-chair
richard@shockey.us
I think you are right on target..if the result of the target is sip:122234567@carrier.foo the proxy (which you control) can be used for call and mail filter control.
Phone numbers, and other pseudo-random, difficult to remember numeric identifiers, are archaic. They were designed for the convenience of machines, not people. Nowadays, using mechanisms like the DNS system, we've taught our machines to work for our convenience, like they're supposed to. A typical email address or URL is infinitely easier to remember than a phone number. Using numeric identifiers for anything (much less everything) is a huge step backwards.
Why do the examples show IP clients (not gateways) doing ENUM lookups? If a PSTN number has NAPTR records that IP callers use but PSTN callers ignore, isn't the inconsistent behavior that results seen as a problem?
Richard, it is unfortunate your most informative post doesn't seam to have been widely noticed before this thread had slid into quiessence the way of most all Slashdot stories.
Slashdot isn't much of a place for reasoned debate, let alone conclusive debate, but it is just about the best place on the Internet to get the temperature of knowledgable people's feelings, so the most useful thing you could do is listen to what some of us have been saying with passion: E.164 (telephone) numbers provide a much less satisfactory human interface than does the DNS.
I write this sharing a flat with a colleague who is in the middle of half a year coding a voice over IP system, having myself posted above about Telstra's historic blindness to these issues, which I've been following closely for more than 20 years, and having gone looking for your "article on ENUM in Communications Convergence" only to find the article credited to "Geoff Huston, Telstra".
While Geoff has certainly proved to be politically adroit, he has never demonstrated that he has a clue as to what actually goes on in the real world where the real actions of real people ultimately determine the fate of everybody's best intentions.
I also know from first hand experience how easy it can be to get caught up with what you are sure is a great answer to the point where you can no longer ask yourself whether you are actually addressing a valid question. I think we could all happily name more than one arm of W3C, by way of familiar example, which has run off with the best of intentions in a direction the world will never follow.
So do what you must to facilitate the graceful deprecation of E.164 numbers as the IP network takes over the routing of more and more voice traffic, but please spare us the embarrassment of any more suggestions that humans might ever willingly use 8-10 digit strings in place of familiar user names and domain names.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
That's Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, Canada. When I lived there the MT&T company was not providing per-minute toll numbers in that area code. Normal long distance charges would apply, of course.