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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 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.
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"
I'm pretty sure theres a cost involved with doing that. Also, a phone number is a lot more personal and long term than an e-mail address. The reason people change numbers when they move is because they want to keep that number, as it is closely associated with them. You can always just ignore a certain e-mail address by just not checking it. Its a lot more difficult to ignore your phone ringing off the hook.
I.O.U One Sig.
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.
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.
Reguardless of whether there is a system like this one in place, the spammers (phone and email) will be able to get your info if they want, we just need to invent the technological means of denying their ability to use it.
Also, the ENUM thing is stupid. For those I want to deal with, the single ID I want is my name, not some randomly assigned number.
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!
Saddly, phone numbers are not always more long term than an email address. For the few of us who move around constantly, it would be nice to be able to have a phone number follow you around like an email address. I've had 16 phone numbers in 2.5 years and only 7 email addresses. I even tried to avoid changing phone numbers by carrying a cell phone with nationwide coverage. It worked for a while until I moved into an area where my particular cell provider didn't have coverage.
in all seriousness, try sending the 902 number(s) to the FTC, indicating that it costs $5/minute to receive such messages. They may have laws regarding SMS Spamming (it's analagous to telemarketers and cell phones). Even if there are no laws, having the statistics of people filing SMS Spam complaints would positively help efforts to create them.
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.
I already do that - more or less. I have my email filter out everyone who isn't in my address list, on my work email account (with which I used to participate a great deal in usenet, therefore got dozens of spam emails a day). It is not easy to change my work email address. But you still get those miscellaneous emails that are important, so you can't just trash the whole lot of emails not from people in your address book. Helped to filter out the junk, though, I'd be able to quickly go through the junk folder and pick out the legitimate emails, usually there was no valid emails there anyway.
But I finally changed my work address because I was sick of 100 spams every day, even if they were filtered out.
As far as the phone goes, we used to have a service called privacy director - if the caller ID number was private, or "out of area", the person calling would have to identify themselves before my phone would even ring. Then you didn't have to talk to them, even if they identified themselves, because it was like accepting or rejecting a collect call, you'd just hang up, or press 0 to send a message "we don't accept those kinds of calls". So the only time the phone rang, we actually had a legitimate ID - if you hook that up to your computer, you could put a list of numbers that can ring your phone, and the rest get redirected to voice mail.
Unfortunately, Privacy Director cost money, and I resent the fact that I have to pay for peace and quiet. It's a plus for switching to cell phone only - automatically violates the consumer protection act to solicit you on your cell phone.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.
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.