Libraries are places of information storage and exchange, promoting free (well taxpayer funded) exchange of ideas being through any media (books, CDs, videos, etc.) By inhibiting the free exchange of ideas you are practically eliminating the whole point of the library.
First of all holding a librarian responsible for what patrons are viewing on computers is just dumb. Patrons should have the freedom to select any materials that are available at the time, by saying that librarians should be monitoring internet access like saying they should remove all the "bad words" from books or not having books that have any explicit material in them (ever look at the romance novel section?)
Additionally I know many libraries both public and university that have pornography in their collection, usually if you go into the periodicals section you'll find Playboy magazine.
I did IT support for a while and every once in a while we'd get some patrons (of age) coming in and looking at pornographic material. At the time I believe that there was some sort of rule in place that prohibited us from stopping him. I believe it came from the state library (this was in NJ.) I'm not sure if the rules have changed at all, but usually you're not allowed to censor material or put censoring software on computers (except of course for the children's area.)
I'm not sure if I'd go as far as saying it's censoring free speech, granted I don't think it's right (and maybe I'd consider it anti competitive) but I wouldn't call it supressing free speech.
Vonage is strange, they're not a telephone company (despite what ever they say) they are an unregulated information service. They fought with the FCC over that, now they want to go cry wolf and say that their calls can't be completed and are being blocked. Hmm interesting, perhaps the FCC should look over their 911 service again.
The product that they provide is an addition, not a substitiution to a landline (right now at least), there's 911 service, but its not the best (and in some places it routes to call centers not designed for emergency calls, not to mention that it has to be setup see this.) If the broadband connection goes down so does your phone line, not to mention the sporadic outages that occur (like the one that I had with it two days ago, could make calls, would ring, once RTP opened up ATA would go busy... interesting.) Regardless, it's a cool service, not meant for prime time, but great for offloading calls that otherwise you'd have to pay for, or using with cell phones (call follow me/auto call forwarding), etc. Not something that I'd give to a 90 year old grandmother and say "good luck."
Is it right, no, does it impeade on free speech, no. As an ISP they can do whatever they want, ISP's can filter whatever they want maybe not ethically but they can still do it. My advice for those with the offending ISP, hit them where it hurts, and switch (if possible.)
Although funny, I guess their was some truth to it. But the real question comes to whether this is good for the telecom industry or not. I guess so in ways, but I think that only time will tell. It is kind of sad to see what used to be the biggest names in telecom bought out, and possibly destroyed, especailly stuff like this.
Has there really ever been fair competition in the local markets though? Long distance sure, AT&T was riding on their good name (to this day a lot of people still think the phone company is AT&T). Local service is usually provided by the damn ILEC (Verizon, SBC) traveling on their copper. So no matter what company you choose to provide your dial tone, your ILEC is still getting a cut of the fee. Also you might get worse service, since the ILEC really doesn't want you to use some one else, your line might "accidentally have its cross connect removed". Don't say it doesn't happen.
Re:Need 1 More Purchase: Lucent (& Bell Labs)
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SBC Might Buy AT&T
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· Score: 1
I think that a lot of the research that the 'Labs has done in the past is sort of forgotten about (oh lets just say a lot of modern electronics). It will be interesting to see if anyone does buy out Bell Labs at some point, it's worth a lot, and is in shambles because of budget constraints at Lucent. Maybe Lucent will turn around and buy AT&T, now that would be something to see...
Where's the good old days?
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SBC Might Buy AT&T
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This would be one interesting acquisition if it did happen, if for nothing else reuniting AT&T with one of its spinoff companies. AT&T has a lot of assets (well those that it hasn't sold off) mostly tons of fiber in the ground, not just in the U.S. but internationally as well.
AT&T is sort of caught in the middle of things, they have a failed local business, long distance is dieing (if it's not dead already), and a highly competitive market place for IP services. What else does AT&T have that everyone else doesn't? They don't have their research labs any more (Lucent - another company in a downward spiral, hopefully coming back soon) or their computer division (NCR) and anything manufactured today isn't made by good old Western Electric, it's just rebranded (or someone bought the rights to the name.)
It's sad to see one of the leaders in telecommunications and research in such a poor state of business. I miss the good old days. Many people forget that AT&T (well Bell Labs) invented just a few things like the transistor, laser, TV transmission, etc. not to mention built automatic mechanical exchanges (think crossbar switches!) in days when all there were was vacuum tubes.
I remember getting tours of the 'Labs back a decade or so ago, it was still impressive what they were doing with technology back then. A lot of wireless stuff that's coming out now was created by them. Supposedly during their peak they'd churn out 2-3 patents a day, every day of the year. They had people that would do just hypothetical research, sitting around dreaming about nothing but the big bang theory and getting paid for it. Now that's research.
It seems that they have a great selection of metrics that they use in this article for measuring voice quality to call logs, which is great, but they forgot one major thing: service. All the call logs in the world won't help you when your ATA breaks (like mine did on my Vonage account) and you end up talking to some script reading tech in another country that you can't understand (after holding for 30 minutes or more of course.) It took me forever to get this tech to realize that the ATA was broken (I knew this from the start of course, I think the lack of dial tone, ping or access to the dial menus gave it away). Finally I got someone in the states that listened to me and said, yep it's broken we're sending one out.
To me service is one of the biggest things, because at some point it's going to break. Some things that would be considered would be hold time, knowledge of techs, etc. which would be useful to mention in this article.
So hold on a second here, basically what they have is a bunch of cellphones from various providers (with free in network calling of course) hooked into a VoIP system to place phone calls? It seems that way from what they state on their website:
"In our office there are hundreds of Pantheon products that are connected to the wireless service providers. These Pantheon units are also connected to the Internet and to the public telephone landline network. When you place a call using our service you are making a mobile to mobile call, which is free, however our technology allows that call to be routed over the Internet or landline telephone network."
and--
"Most wireless carriers including offer unlimited free Mobile-to-Mobile calls when you call another cellular phone on the same network. This feature is normally included in their wireless calling plans. Depending on your calling plan, you may have to pay an additional fee to add this feature to your account."
I'm sure when some cell providers find out about this, they'll put an end to it. They are after all loosing money on the deal. It's a great idea for unlimited international long distance though, as from most cell phones you can't place international calls (well sometimes at decent rates.)
Hmm interesting.
If it gets really bad (which it seems to be at points) you can always do 1 of 2 (or both I guess) things:
1. Call your local public utility comission - It's usually located on your states website, there you can file a complaint against Verizon, and make them track that call for you. I guess due to the frequency and time of the calls, it could be considered harassing.
2. File a complaint with the FCC right here
In my dealings with the PUC (at least in NJ), they seem to get stuff done.
No one's mentioned that Caller ID isn't really used for that much authentication. Let me give you a little bit of background on caller ID.
There is actually two types of calling number identification one being the popular Caller ID which as we know can be manipulated and blocked and the other being ANI or Automatic Number Identification which the user has no (or minimal) control over. Caller ID is used for the little displays on your phone and can have a flag set to block it, as well as define what number displays usually on outbound or two way trunks for use with DID (Direct Inward Dialing).
The reason the phone companies allow you to set your outbound caller ID is so when you are using DID, you can have people reach you back directly instead of thru the companies generic number. Now a little bit of background on DID: Mid and large sized companies use DID for everything, it's how everyone has a seperate phone number or fax number on their desk. It would be uneconomical for the businesses to bring in a seperate phone line for everone in the office, so they share them. So say for example a company with 100 employees would have a block of 100 phone numbers, but only 23 incoming phone lines, any number can come in on any one of those phone lines and the company's PBX determines which desk to route the call to. Pretty simple. So when an employee wants to make a call, again he can use any phone line, and the PBX sets the outbound caller ID to his real number so it's easy for people to call him back. Some phone companies limit you to what Caller ID data you can send them, (which makes sense that you can only have outbound Caller ID on numbers that are in your block.)
ANI always knows the calling trunk, and location. It's what's used for credit card verification, 911, etc. You can't block it and usually can't set it. ANI is transmitted (amongst other things) over SS7, which is basically an out of band protcol (which actually does carry caller ID too) that is used between switches. Few companies have phone systems that speak SS7, or a link into the SS7 network for that matter, it's just not useful. Phone companies would crack down pretty hard on fake SS7 info, because they could loose money on billing.
So in summary, Caller ID - not secure, ANI - A little more secure.
AT&T has been doing this for years, even back the MA Bell days, except not with cell phones, but with central offices. AT&T has an entire Network Disaster Recovery team sitting around just waiting for a disaster to strike. For September 11th, they replaced an entire central office (the one that they lost in the basement of the one tower) Pics and story here providing local phone service to authorities and civilians over satellite. They usually provide free phone service via satellite or microwave after any disaster to the general public free of charge. As far as other providers, I don't think there are any that have such a comprehensive backup strategy or fleet of vehicles.
I heard rumors that there is still a lot of the rubber covered power cable in old (AT&T | Bell | NYNEX | Verizon) C.O.s. Supposedly the covering falls off after you move it around a bit (usually during cable mining operations) and I'm sure it must put on quite a show (500 mcm cable & metal cable tray & low impedance battery string in the basement.) I remember hearing that the guys on the power systems being excited when they first came out with plastic watches since they wouldn't short out any of the exposed buss bars.
That's the absolute truth and you are correct, I have seen my fair share of locked cages and properly secured rooms (with rent-a-cops of course). I've also seen the other side of the spectrum where it's pretty much a free for all once you're in the data center, specifically one in NYC that had no personnel on site, you get a key card from building security and no locked cabinets in the data center (they lost the keys to all of the cabinets). Of course I've also seen a lot of unsecured networks, without having to step foot even in the facility.
Verizon C.O.s don't have much security once you get inside (at least from the ones that I have seen, there may be exceptions), usually the CLEC's equipment co-lo is not too far away from the Verizion equipment and that goes the other way around. Any employee in the C.O working for Verizon, or one of the CLECs could have stolen the DS-3 cards.
That's the truth. I've worked in places where the management is more concerned with the security of the accounting department (which is paperless btw) than the security of the computer room down the hall. The accounting department had key card access, restricted hours, etc. while the computer room just had a regular old lock and the keys were kept in an office managers drawer.
It all comes down to physical security in the end. You can have the most secure network, but usually anyone with physical access to the equipment can attack it in several ways. They can obviously steal it, or steal parts of it. Hot swap hard drives are great except when someone can run up to a server in an unsecured server closet and in a few seconds have all of a company's data in their hands. Obviously most hardware vendors also put password "backdoors" (think default Cisco configs) that allow you to override any passwords, or recover passwords from a serial port.
Most people spend way too much time on thinking of attacks from the Internet or employees, but usually don't look at someone who wants to sabotage the equipment. Computer rooms usually contain all of the proprietary data in a company, and most companies don't put that much effort into patrolling computer rooms for people who shouldn't be there. Executives should make sure that physical security is part of the I.T. plan from the beginning and not an afterthought.
I'm assuming in this case it was in a Verizon C.O. which are usually somewhat secure, but something like this could happen anywhere, computer sabotage I think will become more and more common in the future as businesses rely more and more on them.
I know that someone mentioned it already but there was a good paper published on it, it's a good read. There was a similar incident a few years ago with the Therac-25 machine. Supposedly the manufacturer installed a computer and removed hard wired safetys out of the system, running everything by software. They also forgot to put in some interlocks and other good stuff, the net result being that several people died. Or it seems that there is a book here although I have not read it myself. A lot of people forget that software can have devastating affects on things and even with the best of programming you can't beat a hardware safety for the "just in case."
I remember seeing one of AT&T's agents concerned about the amount of E-Mail being generated from the site and posted it on NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) which you can see here.
I don't really think that there is any "shady" tactics going on here, I think it's more for one of their in house monitoring apps, especially considering the amount of traffic that they received initially.
There needs to be some definition of what exactly a phone company is. If I shoot VoIP across the room will I need a license for that? What about companies that use it internally, are they going to need licensing? Traditionally none of these situations required any specific licensing.
I could understand that some regulation should be in effect, especially when companies like Vonage start to introduce critical services like E911. On the other hand, I don't think the regulations should be so strict that the place an undue strain on VoIP providers. When people's lives are in hand though and every minute counts perhaps it would be a good idea for public/consumer VoIP providers to undergo some licensing. At the same time VoIP termination services shouldn't need to be licensed for that matter, since they pay significant regulatory fees and the worst that could happen is a few failed phone calls (which anyone using the service should expect with any emerging technologies.)
Traditional phone companies have extremely strict standards to maintain their uptime, not limited to NEBS and BITS (anyone that's seen what the NEBS testing procedure is will know how strict these standards are.) Public VoIP providers shouldn't be allowed to bypass these uptime requirements. Should I be a public VoIP provider if I have a AS5300 with some voice cards in it, a PRI and Asterisk running on some 486 sitting in a closet? Probably not, I wouldn't really trust that setup to a possible critical phone call that may be made from time to time.
I think what the governments should look at VoIP through the eyes of consumer. They are looking for an affordable service that may replace their POTS landlines, and hence may be required to perform under emergency circumstances (specifically E911.)
It's sad to see it go this way, but I guess it is fair. Last time I was reading my phone bill there was all sorts of charges such as the "Carrier Universal Service Charge" and the oh so classic "Universal Connectivity Fee" and of course the "Charge for Network Access" which for some reason they just can't call "renting our wire." It really does get confusing, at least Vonage will have a single line/single charge and you actually know what it's going towards.
Telcos are notorious for these charges, although most are legitimate the average joe-schmo wouldn't know what the hell his money was going towards.
An interesting story actually sprung up about these taxes, my buddy was getting a new cell phone and we were discussing the plan that he got and I'll never forget what he said. "Yeah well the plan is $34.99 a month of course they have the fuck you dickhead tax, and the rape you up the ass tax." I think that's how most of the general public feels towards these taxes. Perhaps they could use plain English to better explain these additional charges.
Well it depends. A good quality film print will beat digital hands down any day. The contrast ratio of film is just amazing (not that DLP isn't but...) Now if the theater is a little shady and they don't keep the projectors clean or the film print in good condition than digital will beat it by a great margin. Film tends to wear out after a while (this is where digital has it beat since the first time it's shown and the last are pratically the same.) Now if it was released on 70mm it would even be of better quality (since most of us are used to 35mm prints of movies in our local theaters.) In addition the light source can make a difference also. Most modern theaters use xenon arc bulbs which tend to have a slight change in color and brightness towards the end of their life. If a theater is trying to squeeze too much life out of their bulbs this can affect picture quality. There are also different process that the film can be printed in e.g. Technicolor IB, dye transfer, etc. which provide much better color depth than the adverage movie print (but cost a lot more.) So optimally you should see movies in the 70mm format that are printed using a dye transfer process and are brand new. That in theory is the highest resolution best quality picture that you can see on a movie screen (not to mention the most costly.)
Redundancy would be great in the phone infrastructure, which their is to some extent, but with circuit based switching its extremely hard to achieve since their will always be at least one point of failure (e.g. switch, copper pair, etc.) Obviously with packet based switching it will always be more redundant since the packets can just be rerouted. Like I can get a Satellite connection and a land based T-1 circuit and if one should go down theoretically the other should pick up the load. The telephone network does this to some extent using SS7, but that only works at the higher levels at not at the actual locations where the CPE (customer premise equipment) is located.
Hmmm... I don't think the telephone company usually plans for the type of traffic that was experienced on that day. Their is a limit to what you can plan for without creating a cost prohibitive network. Even if the network was all ip driven I doubt it would of handled the load placed on it when the story hit the news. Granted I'm not all pro-Verizon here either, for months I wasn't able to call my friend across town because on his switch all of the inter-c.o. trunks were full (which really sucked!) so I mean sometimes it is the infrastructures fault and other times it's not.
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Libraries are places of information storage and exchange, promoting free (well taxpayer funded) exchange of ideas being through any media (books, CDs, videos, etc.) By inhibiting the free exchange of ideas you are practically eliminating the whole point of the library.
First of all holding a librarian responsible for what patrons are viewing on computers is just dumb. Patrons should have the freedom to select any materials that are available at the time, by saying that librarians should be monitoring internet access like saying they should remove all the "bad words" from books or not having books that have any explicit material in them (ever look at the romance novel section?)
Additionally I know many libraries both public and university that have pornography in their collection, usually if you go into the periodicals section you'll find Playboy magazine.
I did IT support for a while and every once in a while we'd get some patrons (of age) coming in and looking at pornographic material. At the time I believe that there was some sort of rule in place that prohibited us from stopping him. I believe it came from the state library (this was in NJ.) I'm not sure if the rules have changed at all, but usually you're not allowed to censor material or put censoring software on computers (except of course for the children's area.)
I'm not sure if I'd go as far as saying it's censoring free speech, granted I don't think it's right (and maybe I'd consider it anti competitive) but I wouldn't call it supressing free speech. Vonage is strange, they're not a telephone company (despite what ever they say) they are an unregulated information service. They fought with the FCC over that, now they want to go cry wolf and say that their calls can't be completed and are being blocked. Hmm interesting, perhaps the FCC should look over their 911 service again.
The product that they provide is an addition, not a substitiution to a landline (right now at least), there's 911 service, but its not the best (and in some places it routes to call centers not designed for emergency calls, not to mention that it has to be setup see this.) If the broadband connection goes down so does your phone line, not to mention the sporadic outages that occur (like the one that I had with it two days ago, could make calls, would ring, once RTP opened up ATA would go busy... interesting.) Regardless, it's a cool service, not meant for prime time, but great for offloading calls that otherwise you'd have to pay for, or using with cell phones (call follow me/auto call forwarding), etc. Not something that I'd give to a 90 year old grandmother and say "good luck."
Is it right, no, does it impeade on free speech, no. As an ISP they can do whatever they want, ISP's can filter whatever they want maybe not ethically but they can still do it. My advice for those with the offending ISP, hit them where it hurts, and switch (if possible.)
Is it actually coming back to this?
Although funny, I guess their was some truth to it. But the real question comes to whether this is good for the telecom industry or not. I guess so in ways, but I think that only time will tell. It is kind of sad to see what used to be the biggest names in telecom bought out, and possibly destroyed, especailly stuff like this.
Has there really ever been fair competition in the local markets though? Long distance sure, AT&T was riding on their good name (to this day a lot of people still think the phone company is AT&T). Local service is usually provided by the damn ILEC (Verizon, SBC) traveling on their copper. So no matter what company you choose to provide your dial tone, your ILEC is still getting a cut of the fee. Also you might get worse service, since the ILEC really doesn't want you to use some one else, your line might "accidentally have its cross connect removed". Don't say it doesn't happen.
I think that a lot of the research that the 'Labs has done in the past is sort of forgotten about (oh lets just say a lot of modern electronics). It will be interesting to see if anyone does buy out Bell Labs at some point, it's worth a lot, and is in shambles because of budget constraints at Lucent. Maybe Lucent will turn around and buy AT&T, now that would be something to see...
This would be one interesting acquisition if it did happen, if for nothing else reuniting AT&T with one of its spinoff companies. AT&T has a lot of assets (well those that it hasn't sold off) mostly tons of fiber in the ground, not just in the U.S. but internationally as well.
AT&T is sort of caught in the middle of things, they have a failed local business, long distance is dieing (if it's not dead already), and a highly competitive market place for IP services. What else does AT&T have that everyone else doesn't? They don't have their research labs any more (Lucent - another company in a downward spiral, hopefully coming back soon) or their computer division (NCR) and anything manufactured today isn't made by good old Western Electric, it's just rebranded (or someone bought the rights to the name.)
It's sad to see one of the leaders in telecommunications and research in such a poor state of business. I miss the good old days. Many people forget that AT&T (well Bell Labs) invented just a few things like the transistor, laser, TV transmission, etc. not to mention built automatic mechanical exchanges (think crossbar switches!) in days when all there were was vacuum tubes.
I remember getting tours of the 'Labs back a decade or so ago, it was still impressive what they were doing with technology back then. A lot of wireless stuff that's coming out now was created by them. Supposedly during their peak they'd churn out 2-3 patents a day, every day of the year. They had people that would do just hypothetical research, sitting around dreaming about nothing but the big bang theory and getting paid for it. Now that's research.
It seems that they have a great selection of metrics that they use in this article for measuring voice quality to call logs, which is great, but they forgot one major thing: service. All the call logs in the world won't help you when your ATA breaks (like mine did on my Vonage account) and you end up talking to some script reading tech in another country that you can't understand (after holding for 30 minutes or more of course.) It took me forever to get this tech to realize that the ATA was broken (I knew this from the start of course, I think the lack of dial tone, ping or access to the dial menus gave it away). Finally I got someone in the states that listened to me and said, yep it's broken we're sending one out.
To me service is one of the biggest things, because at some point it's going to break. Some things that would be considered would be hold time, knowledge of techs, etc. which would be useful to mention in this article.
So hold on a second here, basically what they have is a bunch of cellphones from various providers (with free in network calling of course) hooked into a VoIP system to place phone calls? It seems that way from what they state on their website:
"In our office there are hundreds of Pantheon products that are connected to the wireless service providers. These Pantheon units are also connected to the Internet and to the public telephone landline network. When you place a call using our service you are making a mobile to mobile call, which is free, however our technology allows that call to be routed over the Internet or landline telephone network."
and--
"Most wireless carriers including offer unlimited free Mobile-to-Mobile calls when you call another cellular phone on the same network. This feature is normally included in their wireless calling plans. Depending on your calling plan, you may have to pay an additional fee to add this feature to your account."
I'm sure when some cell providers find out about this, they'll put an end to it. They are after all loosing money on the deal. It's a great idea for unlimited international long distance though, as from most cell phones you can't place international calls (well sometimes at decent rates.)
Hmm interesting. If it gets really bad (which it seems to be at points) you can always do 1 of 2 (or both I guess) things: 1. Call your local public utility comission - It's usually located on your states website, there you can file a complaint against Verizon, and make them track that call for you. I guess due to the frequency and time of the calls, it could be considered harassing. 2. File a complaint with the FCC right here In my dealings with the PUC (at least in NJ), they seem to get stuff done.
No one's mentioned that Caller ID isn't really used for that much authentication. Let me give you a little bit of background on caller ID.
There is actually two types of calling number identification one being the popular Caller ID which as we know can be manipulated and blocked and the other being ANI or Automatic Number Identification which the user has no (or minimal) control over. Caller ID is used for the little displays on your phone and can have a flag set to block it, as well as define what number displays usually on outbound or two way trunks for use with DID (Direct Inward Dialing).
The reason the phone companies allow you to set your outbound caller ID is so when you are using DID, you can have people reach you back directly instead of thru the companies generic number. Now a little bit of background on DID: Mid and large sized companies use DID for everything, it's how everyone has a seperate phone number or fax number on their desk. It would be uneconomical for the businesses to bring in a seperate phone line for everone in the office, so they share them. So say for example a company with 100 employees would have a block of 100 phone numbers, but only 23 incoming phone lines, any number can come in on any one of those phone lines and the company's PBX determines which desk to route the call to. Pretty simple. So when an employee wants to make a call, again he can use any phone line, and the PBX sets the outbound caller ID to his real number so it's easy for people to call him back. Some phone companies limit you to what Caller ID data you can send them, (which makes sense that you can only have outbound Caller ID on numbers that are in your block.)
ANI always knows the calling trunk, and location. It's what's used for credit card verification, 911, etc. You can't block it and usually can't set it. ANI is transmitted (amongst other things) over SS7, which is basically an out of band protcol (which actually does carry caller ID too) that is used between switches. Few companies have phone systems that speak SS7, or a link into the SS7 network for that matter, it's just not useful. Phone companies would crack down pretty hard on fake SS7 info, because they could loose money on billing.
So in summary, Caller ID - not secure, ANI - A little more secure.
AT&T has been doing this for years, even back the MA Bell days, except not with cell phones, but with central offices. AT&T has an entire Network Disaster Recovery team sitting around just waiting for a disaster to strike. For September 11th, they replaced an entire central office (the one that they lost in the basement of the one tower) Pics and story here providing local phone service to authorities and civilians over satellite. They usually provide free phone service via satellite or microwave after any disaster to the general public free of charge. As far as other providers, I don't think there are any that have such a comprehensive backup strategy or fleet of vehicles.
I heard rumors that there is still a lot of the rubber covered power cable in old (AT&T | Bell | NYNEX | Verizon) C.O.s. Supposedly the covering falls off after you move it around a bit (usually during cable mining operations) and I'm sure it must put on quite a show (500 mcm cable & metal cable tray & low impedance battery string in the basement.) I remember hearing that the guys on the power systems being excited when they first came out with plastic watches since they wouldn't short out any of the exposed buss bars.
That's the absolute truth and you are correct, I have seen my fair share of locked cages and properly secured rooms (with rent-a-cops of course). I've also seen the other side of the spectrum where it's pretty much a free for all once you're in the data center, specifically one in NYC that had no personnel on site, you get a key card from building security and no locked cabinets in the data center (they lost the keys to all of the cabinets). Of course I've also seen a lot of unsecured networks, without having to step foot even in the facility.
Verizon C.O.s don't have much security once you get inside (at least from the ones that I have seen, there may be exceptions), usually the CLEC's equipment co-lo is not too far away from the Verizion equipment and that goes the other way around. Any employee in the C.O working for Verizon, or one of the CLECs could have stolen the DS-3 cards.
That's the truth. I've worked in places where the management is more concerned with the security of the accounting department (which is paperless btw) than the security of the computer room down the hall. The accounting department had key card access, restricted hours, etc. while the computer room just had a regular old lock and the keys were kept in an office managers drawer.
It all comes down to physical security in the end. You can have the most secure network, but usually anyone with physical access to the equipment can attack it in several ways. They can obviously steal it, or steal parts of it. Hot swap hard drives are great except when someone can run up to a server in an unsecured server closet and in a few seconds have all of a company's data in their hands. Obviously most hardware vendors also put password "backdoors" (think default Cisco configs) that allow you to override any passwords, or recover passwords from a serial port.
Most people spend way too much time on thinking of attacks from the Internet or employees, but usually don't look at someone who wants to sabotage the equipment. Computer rooms usually contain all of the proprietary data in a company, and most companies don't put that much effort into patrolling computer rooms for people who shouldn't be there. Executives should make sure that physical security is part of the I.T. plan from the beginning and not an afterthought.
I'm assuming in this case it was in a Verizon C.O. which are usually somewhat secure, but something like this could happen anywhere, computer sabotage I think will become more and more common in the future as businesses rely more and more on them.
I know that someone mentioned it already but there was a good paper published on it, it's a good read. There was a similar incident a few years ago with the Therac-25 machine. Supposedly the manufacturer installed a computer and removed hard wired safetys out of the system, running everything by software. They also forgot to put in some interlocks and other good stuff, the net result being that several people died. Or it seems that there is a book here although I have not read it myself.
A lot of people forget that software can have devastating affects on things and even with the best of programming you can't beat a hardware safety for the "just in case."
I remember seeing one of AT&T's agents concerned about the amount of E-Mail being generated from the site and posted it on NANOG (North American Network Operators Group) which you can see here. I don't really think that there is any "shady" tactics going on here, I think it's more for one of their in house monitoring apps, especially considering the amount of traffic that they received initially.
There needs to be some definition of what exactly a phone company is. If I shoot VoIP across the room will I need a license for that? What about companies that use it internally, are they going to need licensing? Traditionally none of these situations required any specific licensing.
I could understand that some regulation should be in effect, especially when companies like Vonage start to introduce critical services like E911. On the other hand, I don't think the regulations should be so strict that the place an undue strain on VoIP providers. When people's lives are in hand though and every minute counts perhaps it would be a good idea for public/consumer VoIP providers to undergo some licensing. At the same time VoIP termination services shouldn't need to be licensed for that matter, since they pay significant regulatory fees and the worst that could happen is a few failed phone calls (which anyone using the service should expect with any emerging technologies.)
Traditional phone companies have extremely strict standards to maintain their uptime, not limited to NEBS and BITS (anyone that's seen what the NEBS testing procedure is will know how strict these standards are.) Public VoIP providers shouldn't be allowed to bypass these uptime requirements. Should I be a public VoIP provider if I have a AS5300 with some voice cards in it, a PRI and Asterisk running on some 486 sitting in a closet? Probably not, I wouldn't really trust that setup to a possible critical phone call that may be made from time to time.
I think what the governments should look at VoIP through the eyes of consumer. They are looking for an affordable service that may replace their POTS landlines, and hence may be required to perform under emergency circumstances (specifically E911.)
It's sad to see it go this way, but I guess it is fair. Last time I was reading my phone bill there was all sorts of charges such as the "Carrier Universal Service Charge" and the oh so classic "Universal Connectivity Fee" and of course the "Charge for Network Access" which for some reason they just can't call "renting our wire." It really does get confusing, at least Vonage will have a single line/single charge and you actually know what it's going towards.
Telcos are notorious for these charges, although most are legitimate the average joe-schmo wouldn't know what the hell his money was going towards.
An interesting story actually sprung up about these taxes, my buddy was getting a new cell phone and we were discussing the plan that he got and I'll never forget what he said. "Yeah well the plan is $34.99 a month of course they have the fuck you dickhead tax, and the rape you up the ass tax." I think that's how most of the general public feels towards these taxes. Perhaps they could use plain English to better explain these additional charges.
Well it depends. A good quality film print will beat digital hands down any day. The contrast ratio of film is just amazing (not that DLP isn't but...) Now if the theater is a little shady and they don't keep the projectors clean or the film print in good condition than digital will beat it by a great margin. Film tends to wear out after a while (this is where digital has it beat since the first time it's shown and the last are pratically the same.) Now if it was released on 70mm it would even be of better quality (since most of us are used to 35mm prints of movies in our local theaters.) In addition the light source can make a difference also. Most modern theaters use xenon arc bulbs which tend to have a slight change in color and brightness towards the end of their life. If a theater is trying to squeeze too much life out of their bulbs this can affect picture quality. There are also different process that the film can be printed in e.g. Technicolor IB, dye transfer, etc. which provide much better color depth than the adverage movie print (but cost a lot more.) So optimally you should see movies in the 70mm format that are printed using a dye transfer process and are brand new. That in theory is the highest resolution best quality picture that you can see on a movie screen (not to mention the most costly.)
Redundancy would be great in the phone infrastructure, which their is to some extent, but with circuit based switching its extremely hard to achieve since their will always be at least one point of failure (e.g. switch, copper pair, etc.) Obviously with packet based switching it will always be more redundant since the packets can just be rerouted. Like I can get a Satellite connection and a land based T-1 circuit and if one should go down theoretically the other should pick up the load. The telephone network does this to some extent using SS7, but that only works at the higher levels at not at the actual locations where the CPE (customer premise equipment) is located.
Hmmm... I don't think the telephone company usually plans for the type of traffic that was experienced on that day. Their is a limit to what you can plan for without creating a cost prohibitive network. Even if the network was all ip driven I doubt it would of handled the load placed on it when the story hit the news. Granted I'm not all pro-Verizon here either, for months I wasn't able to call my friend across town because on his switch all of the inter-c.o. trunks were full (which really sucked!) so I mean sometimes it is the infrastructures fault and other times it's not.