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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. "
YAY FP!
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.
first post
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"
Nigger
Example: Wipe that food off your face and take a bath! You smell like a Nigger.
"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!!!
Once again, thank you to all of you who take the time to read my stories,
and especially to those of you who are kind enough to share your
enthusiasm. I welcome comments and suggestions.
All of the standard disclaimers apply. If you are too young (based upon age
or moralistic restriction in your community), too easily offended (you are
uncomfortable with older man/young boy sex), or are painfully illiterate
(which means you can't read this, anyway), then you need to be elsewhere.
But, if you decide that this is where you want to be, then by all means,
let's do it again...
-Donny
I never have been one for camping. But, when you're only 13 years old, and
it's considered to be "important family time", you don't usually get a
choice in whether or not you get dragged along.
Such was the case this weekend. Mom and dad had decided that they'd pick me
up from school and we'd head straight off to go camping. We were headed up
into the El Dorado hills along the Cosumnes River, "we" meaning my parents
my sister, her friend Patti, and me. Riding in the camper isn't necessarily
bad, and in the absence of my sister would have been the best part of the
trip for giving me ample time to jerk off a time or two during the ride to
the campgrounds. But, this time I had to deal with my sister and her
friend chatting incessantly in the cabover area of the camper while I sat
at the table and tried to read comic books as the truck and its load softly
rocked along the gently twisting highway.
We finally arrived at the campground and found our spot near the
river. Dusk would be settling pretty soon. Mom did the campsite arranging
while dad leveled the camper. When finished with that, he then set up the
small tent that would have normally housed me for the weekend. Adding to my
frustration of not having enough privacy to satisfy my adolescent sexual
urges during the trip, I now had to give up my tent to my sister and her
friend so their constant girlish chatter wouldn't keep dad awake all
night. That meant that I had to sleep in the camper with mom and dad, which
in turn meant that there would be no late-night masturbation since I didn't
need to attract the attention of my light-sleeping father by shaking the
camper.
It was looking like it was going to be a long weekend.
Dinner was uneventful, my sister and her friend were annoying, and I
quickly had gone through most of my collection of Superman and Captain
America comics to the light of the Coleman lantern. I made a brief trip to
the public restroom (no privacy there, either... dammit) and upon my return
to our site I excused myself to the camper and settled myself into my
cabover bed for the weekend. Well, after dusting out the crumbs of animal
crackers left from my sister and Patti...
Mom came in for the night a few minutes later, followed by my dad once he
had the girls safely tucked in. With memories of the many times that I had
shared this spot in the camper with friends and the sexual explorations we
had enjoyed, I tried to ignore the hard-on in my shorts as I fitfully fell
asleep.
**********
The next morning, I awoke to find that mom and dad had gotten up before me,
and had been replaced by the two girls in their bed. Still no privacy. Oh,
well. I slipped on a tee-shirt, shorts, and my waffle-stompers, ran a brush
through my hair, and stepped out to try to find something good in the day.
Dad was off fishing; fine with me since I hate fishing. When mom saw me,
she put aside her Harlequin romance novel and fired up the gas stove to
cook me breakfast. The weather was pleasantly warm, and a splattering of
clouds overhead kept the sun from looking like it was going to get too
hot. Once done with breakfast, I helped clean up, threw some fruits and
snacks into a paper bag, kissed mom and told her I was going to do some
hiking.
I headed for the river. Knowing that dad tended to fish the deeper water
near the earthen dam just west of the camping area, I headed easterly along
the riverbank. I was hoping to find a secluded area somewhere up-river,
maybe a place where I could feel confident that I wouldn't be discovered so
I could shed the few clothes I had and enjoy some skinny-dipping and a good
wanking.
I like being naked, especially outdoors. My problem at the moment was
getting far enough away from folks that I didn't have to fear discovery.
Just the thought of being naked out here and jacking off in natural
surroundings made my dick stir in anticipation. Only a sense of propriety
and a minor dose of caution kept me from going for it right here.
While there weren't really any people out where I was, there still wasn't
really anyplace secluded or safe. Safe meaning that my younger sister and
her friend, or anyone else, wouldn't somehow chance upon me and make a
scene. I was about 20 minutes from camp and wasn't having much luck finding
such a place, and my hopes for sexual release seem to be fading. I wished
that I were on the other side of the river, which I understood to be
government property, and pretty much void of people. There really was no
getting there from here, though, since I knew the current to be too strong
to try swimming much farther than a dozen feet or so from the shoreline.
It was then that I came to an ancient-looking barbed-wire fence, rusted and
barely hanging on to rough-hewn posts driven into the ground, all the way
to the waterline. The weathered sign that threatened to fall from a post at
any moment indicated that I was about to stumble on Private Property.
Well, I had never hiked this far up the riverbank, but I figured now was as
good a time as any to see what was on the other side of the fence. I
carefully stepped over the sagging wire and let myself over, careful not to
snag my shorts or cut my legs. Not sure what rules I may have just broken,
I started working out a series of possible excuses and explanations I might
have to come up with as I continued my journey up the riverside.
As I walked, I was getting encouraged over the apparent privacy of the
area. Maybe I finally would get that chance to shed my clothes and go for a
swim, followed by a pleasant jack-off. Or, maybe the other way around. Most
likely, if I found the right spot, I'd beat my meat before and after my
swim.
I came around a small hill to an almost cove-like setting. Looking around
and then facing the water, with a small grove of trees to the right and
behind me, and the hill I had just come around to my left, I could see that
I had found my spot! I immediately untied my waffle-stompers and shed those
from my feet, followed by my shorts and briefs in one swift move. I had
been eating an apple that I had thrown into my bag, and after I had taken
my last bite of it, I threw it in a high arc towards the opposite bank,
then yanked off my tee-shirt over my head and tossed it aside before the
apple core landed. The splash of the core into the water seemed to
punctuate my sudden nakedness.
I headed to the water, but as soon as I got my feet in, I yelped and turned
right back to dry land. Damn, that was colder than it should be this time
of year! There would be no skinny-dipping this weekend, unless I wanted my
balls to shrink in somewhere near my throat!
Oh, well... at least I now had privacy to masturbate. I laid on my back on
the sandy cove and let the sun warm me all over. Then I reached down to my
dick, feeling it stir in response to my chance for some pent-up release. I
closed my eyes and hardened in no time as I started to pump my dick out in
the open.
"What in Hell are ya doin' here?"
I looked up to find a man of about 60 years old staring down at me.
I scrambled to my feet as I stammered. "I--I..."
"You're on private property, young man!"
The man was about 5'6", lean built, with thin gray hair. All over. See, the
man standing about two feet from me was wearing one of those sleeveless
undershirts like my grandpa would wear.
And nothing else.
"I--I--"
"You're not doin' real well in the speech department, either," he growled.
"How old are you?"
"I'm... uh..." My throat was dry. "I'm thirteen."
He looked me from top to bottom, then looked around.
"Anyone else with you?" he asked.
"Back at the campsites."
He looked me all over again, with particular attention to my dick. He took
a deep breath as if to say something, then seemed to stop in mid thought
and shake his head.
"Well, then, you better be getting' back, hadn't you?"
I think it was obvious how deflated I was. "Yeah, I guess."
I bent down to pick up my tee-shirt. As I bent over, I got a good look at
the man's cock. I must have stared at it for a long moment without
realizing it.
"Never seen one?"
"Excuse me?" I said, snapping from my reverie.
"Never seen an uncut dick?"
I shook my head.
"No. It looks... different."
"Only when it's soft," said the man. "When it gets stiff like that nice
looking hard-on you were just playing with, it looks about the same."
"Really?" I said, excitedly.
I was still staring at the man's cock. I guess the interest in my voice
must have triggered something in him, because there was an obvious
twitching to his hooded dick.
"What?" said the man, with a slightly shaky tone to his voice. "You want
to... see for yourself?"
He closed his line with the same kind of uneasy laugh I use when I'm
nervous. I answered in the same kind of gigglish voice.
"Yeah."
Without thinking further, I reached out and touched his sheathed cock. The
man's stomach convulsed in surprise, then he gently pushed my hand away.
"You sure you want to be doing that?"
I finally looked up into his gentle eyes and nodded.
"Can I?"
The man looked nervously about, then smiled at me and took my hand. He led
me away from the open water to an area behind the trees where he had a
large tent. He directed me inside, then followed me and zipped the tent
closed. He turned back to me, then slipped off his tank top shirt.
I figured the man to be about halfway between my dad's age, and my
grandpa's. He was only a couple inches taller than me, with soft brown eyes
and a friendly smile. Seeing him fully naked, I thought he had a nice
build; soft, but not fat. His legs were nicely muscled, and tanned like the
rest of him. His chest and pubic hair were gray and medium-thick. He lay
onto a spread-open sleeping bag and took my hand to draw me down beside
him. I complied with no resistance.
"We really shouldn't be doing this..." sighed the man, nervously.
I didn't pay his concern any mind. I sat cross-legged next to him and
started to fondle his uncut dick. Gently playing with it in my hands, I
could feel it start to thicken slightly to my touch. The man let one of his
hands rest in my lap, where he started to play with my dick and balls, too.
I watched in fascination as the head of the man's cock started to slowly
creep out of the large opening in his tubular skin to my touch. I thought
it was like watching a turtle poking his head out of his shell. The more it
poked out, the more I stroked it, until it was finally thick and hard
enough to pump in my fist.
I grinned excitedly, "That is so cool!"
The man chuckled at my reaction while his hand deftly worked my own dick to
hardness. He might have been contented to just remain like that, but I bent
over and took his cock into my mouth and started to suck on it, slowly
moving my head up and down over his moderately-sized meat. I thought he
tasted rather good, and his sighs told me he was enjoying it.
"Oh, wow..." croaked the man. "Where'd you learn to do that?"
I took my mouth off his cock for a brief moment.
"Is that okay?" I asked.
"Hell, yes! But, you said you're only thirteen, and-"
"I like to suck dicks." I said, matter-of-factly, and went back to sucking
his.
"I guess so!" he said in a heavy sigh. "You're good at it."
I liked hearing that, and bobbed my head a little faster while trying to
take more of his very nice cock deeper into my throat, all while he was
doing a pleasant job of toying with my own stiff member. Then:
"You better slow down. I don't want to cum yet."
I stopped and turned back to him.
"It's okay. I've had men shoot into my mouth before."
"I can see why!" He tugged on my dick. "Here... let me try yours."
I was not about to turn that down. I got onto my knees and scooted near his
head, until my erection was near his face.
"Here. Straddle my face," he said, guiding my left leg over his chest until
I was nearly sitting on his chest. The head of my cock bobbed just
millimeters from his lips.
"You have a very nice penis," said the man as he stroked it gently. "Hardly
any hair. But, I can see that you're going to make your partners very
happy. Now, fuck my mouth, please."
Wow! I hadn't heard someone talk like that to please me! I leaned forward
while he opened his mouth, and my thin, but long dick slipped easily into
his warm and wet mouth. He closed his lips about me, and I could feel his
tongue on the underside of my cock.. Both of his hands took the cheeks of
my butt, and started to gently encourage me to pump back and forth into his
sucking mouth.
After a dozen strokes, he let me slip out of his mouth, then hoisted my ass
over his face. He spread my butt cheeks wide with his hands while his
tongue started to work its way all over my anus, licking and probing me
while my saliva-slickened dick rested on the man's forehead. I found myself
squirming in pleasure as he stiffened his tongue to push harder into my ass
hole, until I could feel it give a little more with each wonderful
probe. It was like he was filling my butt with his saliva with each push of
his tongue.
Then my friend eased me off his face, and with a firm grip on my hips,
encouraged me to slide down his torso, my still stiff dick trailing through
the hair on his chest, until my thighs were over his hips. My ass cheeks
were still spread wide by the pull of his fingers.
And then it was there.
I could feel the head of his cock touching my ass hole, then nestling
there. I sensed what was about to happen, and grabbed the man's biceps in
fear. Sensing my caution, the man gently rocked his hips upward gently and
repeatedly until I could feel the head of his cock work its way into my
ass.
"Relax," my friend whispered, keeping up the gentle rocking. "Just relax
until you're ready."
I bit my lip slightly, then found myself starting to rock in rhythm with my
friend's hips. With each move together, I could sense his beautiful cock
going a little deeper inside of me. Before I knew it, I was fully impaled
on his stiff rod. I thought my eyes were going to pop out of my head. After
another moment, the pain subsided, replaced by a strange itch.
"Gawd, you've got a great ass, kid."
"Donny." I said.
"What?"
I started to slide up and down on that pole, feeling it work through my
intestines like a red-hot poker, trying to satisfy the growing itch within
me.
"My name's Donny." I repeated huskily.
"Well, Donny," said the man with words that sounded like they were being
pushed from him, and I was doing the pushing, "I am VERY glad to meet you!"
He reached his hand down and took my throbbing cock into his grasp, and
began pumping my meat in time with my bouncing thrusts on his wonderful
member. I rocked on my knees, looking down at my nameless friend, and
watched as he closed his eyes and grinned broadly while I increased my
speed. It felt as if my ass was about to split wide open, but I was along
for this ride to the end.
Then the man took a deep breath, and let out a groan that sounded like it
was coming from deep in the earth as his hips lifted to meet my bouncing
ass. My own guts began to turn themselves inside-out and let out a moan as
I could feel him bury himself into me while an incredible warmth quickly
filled my ass, and my own young dick spewed forth from his stroking,
splattering thin droplets of cum all over his furry tummy.
I fell forward onto his chest, our sweating bodies heaving for air. When I
finally caught my breath, he gently rolled me off of him.
"You better be getting back before you're missed," he said softly.
"I guess," I said, my pounded ass leaking my friend's juices. "You didn't
seem to want to do anything with me earlier. What changed your mind?"
"Oh," he grinned, "the fish weren't biting. Then I happened to see that all
I needed to do was use the right worm." He kissed my face. "I'm glad I
didn't let this one get away!"
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.
Posting here, Auction will be over by the time the story hits the front page IF IT EVER DOES.
t em =2058978645
Ebay Item # 2058978645
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&i
This is the Toshiba Satellite 4400SX, 486 laptop computer seized by the Secret Service and Seattle Police Department on October 28, 1994, in Seattle, WA. The laptop was seized during a raid of Kevin Mitnick's, world's most celebrated computer hacker, (aka Brian Merrill's) apartment. The laptop is a 486SX25 with a color LCD, power adapter and documentation in FBI evidence bags. The laptop has been signed on the bottom by Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer. It is also signed by Mitnick himself, and was autographed on air by Wozniak and by Mitnick. The system was shown on the September 27, 2002 episode of The Screen Savers on TechTV. A tape of the show will also be included.
This is one of the two laptops allegedly used to hack into networks of major corporations, such as Nokia, Motorola and Pacific Bell's top secret telephone monitoring system known as SAS. A letter of authenticity shall be provided with the unit.
The item was listed by Kevin Mitnick's girlfriend, as he is not allowed to use the Internet.
This is really Kevin Mitnick's laptop. It was recently returned by the FBI, as it was his private property. A copy of the FBI inventory list will be included, showing the laptop's serial number.
This laptop still has a fine layer of fingerprint dust. Mouse is still in FBI evidence bag with layer of fingerprint dust. Red X's denote where partial or full prints were lifted, and initialed by agents. Pictures can be viewed here at Free Kevin.
The proceeds are going towards legal bills incurred by Kevin Mitnick.
Kevin Mitnick acquired this laptop in June 1992, and it was seized by the Secret Service and Seattle Police Department on October 28, 1994.
Added Bonus: Kevin Mitnick will personally deliver the laptop anywhere in the United States, providing that Buyer pays for all travel expenses, and the U.S. Probation Department grants permission to travel.
Currently at US $7,600.00
A.C.R.B.
RFC2396 goes into great detail about URI's and URL's. It covers the (minor for most of us) differences between them.
In Australia there is one overwhelmingly dominant phone carrier - Telstra.
If you have a single number to dial to also send someone e-mail, then they will no doubt try to charge people for a phone call, whereas you can currently send as many e-mails as you want once you have an internet connection. This will mean that get more revenue. After all, their last profits were down to a few hundred million.
Do the aussies have a national Do Not Call list? If they did I wouldn't see a problem in using your phone number for your website url.
And hey, you can always become a hermit if the spam ever gets to you.
Request for Comments doc:
This document updates and merges "Uniform Resource Locators"
[RFC1738] and "Relative Uniform Resource Locators" [RFC1808] in order
to define a single, generic syntax for all URI.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
there are more people than phone numbers.
Great.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/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
Telstra doesn't own the whitepages or the yellow pages. It was another company that fucked up.
- 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.
"Mike Tyson!? Man, my dead Gramma can hit harder than Mike Tyson!! Sheeeeit, I could knock that choir-boy's ass DOWN wit' a pimp slap from my left hand!! Bring it on Mikey, you 'bout set fo' yo' tree suit brotha-man!"
"Hey Shirley, shutcho face! We don't need to be hearin' yo' Tyson shit again. Don't letcho mouth be writin' no checks yo' chunky ass can't cash, you hear!?"
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!
Those wacky Japanese! Let's nuke 'em again, I say!
-- The_Messenger , banned for spreading the clear white light of truth and freedom.
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
Ok, I'll call you and we can discuss it.
-P. Faltstrom
Cisco Systems Inc.
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 guess your fortunate in being the only David Yule!
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.