About a year ago, I registered a Swiss (.ch) domain for a server that I intended to set up (but had to put off for a while).
During the year, I have received quite a bit of mail for product evaluation registrations and other things with various addresses inside the registered domain). Now vendors email me with mail, that from their viepoint is legitimate (basically, it is from mine, too - as the info mails were asked for during registration of the software downloaded). Nevertheless, I get about 3 or 4 product registration emails per week from some lunatics who apparently think its funny to put in an email address of a domain they are not connected with (in this case, the domain is @here.ch -- with lots of people using "surfer@here.ch", "enteryouremail@here.ch", "jo@here.ch", "oskar@here.ch", "not@here.ch" and the like).
Currently, I am in contact with the Swiss data protection commisioner getting his support for bringing charges against those people, since as stupid as it may sound, it is the only chance I have to make these people stop (under the data protection act, the providers here are forbidden to give out details about who entered the false data). The same goes for most of the companies that the false registrations were done through.
In some way I am sorry, that this is the only way for me to make people stop (as I don't have another chance of finding them except by bringing up charges for supplying false identities).
What saddens me even more, is that this sort of thing would be easy to get around on the software manufacturers site (if someone registers for product evaluation, require an existing email address, and then mail a URL to that email address with the site information where to download the software). That way people would have no choice but to enter a valid email address if they wanted to get the software.
And, yes, I am sure, that we're not talking normal spams - among those companies from which I got news after "registering" evaluation software include companies like McAfee, Realaudio, and others.
The lack of XFree4 packages (as far as I understand it) is mostly the lack of manpower, than the stability of the server.
The X maintainer has postponed the release of XF4 packages, so that he doesn't get "overloaded" with work maintaining both 'woody' XF4 and 'potato' XF3 packages until potato will finally be released. I would guess, that XF4 will be among the first new packages once potato has been released.
education for everyone? (was: Re:Rose-Hulman)
on
Laptop Exams?
·
· Score: 1
Requiring students to buy notebooks is great, if everyone even remotely interested in the course had the money to do so.
What about those, who just can't afford a good notebook (note: when I say good notebook, I mean something post 486-notebook, because a much older notebook will be sooo slooooow, that the student will waste a good deal of time waiting for his/her notebook to respond)?
I am currently studying for a CS degree in an evening class. Most students of these classes buy a notebook before the end of their 4-year courses, since they make life in the courses so much easier, but hardly any of the students buy one within the first year (since most start the study course without much CS background, and some simply cannot afford to go to a normal university). The evening classes university requires students to have employment according to their CS skills acquired at school. Working in the CS field then allows students more easily to buy some notebook on their own, since your work pay usually gets better during the course.
Hmmm, but - how do they...?
on
Laptop Exams?
·
· Score: 1
How do they check, that you don't exchange answers with someone else in your class?
This is about the main problem that keeps schools here from doing such exams - How can you grade a student, if you can't be 100% certain whether the answers given by the student are truly his or not.
Also, they won't do exams on the school PCs, because it'd be too much work preparing the machines so that they have what you need but nothing, that could aid you more than intended by the teacher.
I don't think Unix is going to "die". Face it, in ten years, maybe we won't have Unix anymore, maybe we'll have XYZ-OS, but I guess, that even that one will still contain many features originating in the Unix age.
Before you lament about the coming of distributed systems, think about - what IS a distributed system?
In a sense, a Unix box alone can already do distributed computing: jobs distributed over multiple processes:
This little "excercise" will extract the first 4 letters of every word in/usr/share/dict/words and then count how often those 4 letters are the beginning of a word (e.g. my/usr/share/dict/words [default Debian] shows, that there are 260 words in there starting with "inte".
The principle used, combining multiple programs into performing a function for the user is something that was done very early in Unix. "Modern" GUI-Boxes (Win, Mac,...) don't allow this, as you can hardly combine GUIs interacting via pipes.
If you think, that distributed computing is something different, and will only work with multiple machines, then you could still have the same principle working this way over multiple machines (if you want to try this, change the host names for ssh accordingly; and if necessary replace ssh by rsh/remsh):
OK, it's not very useful to distribute this example over multiple machines, but it shows that the principle of distributed computing is something, that is not far from what could be done on Unix several years ago - ever since Unix features remsh. And all that from the comfort of your own shell scripts.
OK, writing a distributed system via Corba or any other mechanism is "a little" different, but these differences don't change too much in terms of what is or isn't distributed computing.
The question that I would REALLY ask, is - will the future bring "distributed SYSTEMS" or "distributed OPERATING SYTEMS"? Distributed systems are implemented on various systems nowadays. Distributed OSs are rare, and I wouldn't really see, whether these are really something required for future applications. A distributed OS will also cause problems -- distributed applications are already hard to code and even harder to debug. A distributed OS might help a little, but it will also cost us in the sense, that debugging what exactly is going on in the system might become a lot harder, since the distribution process would be a "black box" from the perspective of the programmer.
I find, that proper movie soundtracks actually help productivity, if you know the movie, as you can use the music to get in the mood of the film (e.g. Schindler's List soundtrack is rather bad for programming, while the music for The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill is rather upbeat - especially if you actually KNOW the films and know what kind of moods they have during the current part of the soundtrack).
I also find that instrumental pieces are a lot better for coding, as the don't have any words that might actually distract. I guess, classical music might be nice, but someone I personally can't really relate to it.
While I strongly agree with the comment that avery.net shouldn't be granted to this company on the basis, that they are not really network related, this doesn't keep NSI from granting "wrong" names.
While it says, that.org domains should be used by non-profit organizations only, they don't enforce that rule (e.g. I once pointed out to them that some domain broker was using zh.org for his business, clearly showing that zh.org is anything but NON-profit, they said, the final use is up to the customer, and that this rule would merely be a recommendation, nothing more nothing less).
The same problem exists in other countries as well, e.g. here in Switzerland (>130.000 registered domains in a country with ~7.5 million people) there are lots of registered domains that are either kept inactive or used in a misleading way. Contacting SWITCH (Swiss NIC) gave the answer, that they don't care too much about that after the domain has been paid up for.
Personally, I'd vote for a change to force domain registrars to be non-profit organisations. Maybe then they'll start answering to reason instead of money.
Well, no matter which model we choose, 10^x or 2^x there is this little problem with computers being binary machines -- do you think, it's less confusing to tell the user: "Well, you can upgrade your machine to a whopping 4-dot-294 Gigabytes!"?
I'd like to see the puzzled faces during that moment, thinking "Which nutter ever came up with this screwy figure?" There will be a sort of exception at one level, either we have the "screwy" number of bytes in one kb, the "strange" figure of 1024 kb in one mb, but we'll have a useful figure for address space "4GB flat"; or - we'll have the "cool" 1000 MiBs in 1 GiB, but on the other hand, system address spaces have 'weird' limits like 4.294GB of main memory.
Personally, I'd vote for the SI honouring the computer science business and officially declaring, that with regards to computing the prefixes are based on powers of 2, thereby forcing companies like Maxtor and the like to change to this way.
Unless the basic architecture of CPUs doesn't change to something base-10, we're "screwed" anyway.
>first off this jerk is the reason that there are >three paragraphs of tiny text everywhere now
Well. I don't see how HE is responsible for that. Did it ever occur to you, that this lawsuit was caused by exactly that behaviour of other people before him? This guy certainly did not invent this kind of lawsuit, but seeing someone getting more than US$100.000.000 because there was a scratch in his brand new BMW... Don't you think, that it was the judges making these ludicrous judgements are actually the cause of more and more of these lawsuits?
In many countries the nations military sells old surplus items - guns, jeeps, even tanks and planes. These items are made disfunctional weaponswise (e.g. the bolt from storm rifles is removed, so it can't shoot anymore). But apart from that they're fully functional.
Why shouldn't Pepsi acquire an old military plane for this guy? Why does this seem sooo unreasonable?
Somewhere here in canton Bern (Switzerland) there's a guy that has a disfunctional F14 (or was it F16) standing around in his garden. I saw a report once about Brits who spend weekends driving through the wilderness with ex-military tanks. And I don't think that either one of them spent a million US$ for these.
Personally, I'd continue the lawsuit to the next higher court (maybe collecting some data about other countries military habits when getting rid of their old equipment).
But, I'm curious, since I haven't seen the commercial in question. But did the jet fly in this commercial, or was it just standing on the ground. Standing on the ground should be somewhat easy to achieve, as I guess, even the military people will charge more than US$1.000.000 if the thing can still fly. If it was standing on the ground, than it should be possible to get a real but no longer functional (i.e. no longer able to fly) jet...
From the little I know about this court, this lawsuits outcome seems to fit well into what we here about US lawsuits in Europe...:)
Of course - using a free and open OS doesn't mean that one should not use proprietary software.
But - the point earlier was about monopolies. You can't really build a monopoly on GPL'd software, because everyone else has all the same freedoms that you do. By releasing all their stuff under "good" licenses, RedHat sells their distribution, but can't really make a monopoly out of that.
Of course - SuSEs installer is nicer, but the point is, by making this thing proprietary, SuSE is already trying to monopolize their distribution by giving the user more and more "comfort" in using the distribution without letting other distributions have that.
And behaviour like that will ultimately hurt Linux at one time or another.
Noone can do anything about SuSE or some other company doing what they are doing by making more and more proprietary tools, but I would think it would be nice if at least the distributions would keep all configuration tools completely free, so that they can be used in/adapted for all distributions.
If you're trying to protect what you're saying, there are a few points to consider:
a) If you send your key over the Internet (or phone lines), then it's completely compromised (in case of symmetrical encryption), because Echelon will get a copy of the key as well... In case of PGP, if you transmit one half of the key, this might also give them something to work on to find out the other half. Remember: It's also no use to send a new key encrypted with an old one (that was transmitted electronically before).
b) You won't get around having your email snooped by them, but we could all make their lives a hell of a lot more difficult if everyone were to encrypt everything they send over the Internet. Even if they have the keys, or if they can crack it easily - they will have to decrypt your message to be sure, that you don't do anything forbidden. And if everyone would do that, they would certainly spend a good deal of CPU time just trying to decrypt rubbish.
c) If you want a good protection for your data, use a good encryption program, and then do something with the data, that isn't covered by any program, e.g. put a certain amount of random junk into your message (at places and using blocksizes that the recipient knows, like: add 1937 bytes of random junk at the beginning of the file, and then another 7 bytes of random junk after every 234 bytes of encrypted data plus 1234 bytes of random junk at the end. Using that info, the recipient can easily restore the encrypted file and then decrypt it. Another way would be to swap blocks in the received file, e.g. swap the first two bytes then the next 2*2 bytes, then the next 2*4 bytes of encrypted data. As long you tell the recipient in person, what to do with the file, you should be fairly safe (again, if you transmit the information on how to descramble the files, everything might very well be in vain, since that mail/phone call/fax/... is as likely intercepted, that your precious (or useless but still encrypted) data is.
Let's put it this way, the worst part of the NSA is, that they either
- in spite of having an undoubtedly HUGE budget, couldn't prevent China from getting the USs' nuclear secrets, or (even worse)
- might even have China let them have knowingly (willingly even?)...
It's rather simple - you see, by getting headlines, like "Apache is better" the article about Ballmers little speech made it to news.com and slashdot. I guess, that quite a few people in the US will know about that speech.
Trust me, Microsoft will make these statements be heard in front of the court.
Well, personally I see a big difference between what the Australian government tries to do, and what the UDP against AOL tries to reach.
In Australia, the goverment wants to limit certain content - the UDP doesn't. For the UDP, if you would like to receive spam, we don't care - but since so many (I use 'so many' very loosely here; so far I haven't heard a single person who LIKES spam) people complain about spam and AOL doesn't do anything about it, the UDP is one way to make them think about it again. Once they change their policy the UDP restrictions will be lifted.
From then on, nobody will care about the AOL users email content as long as they aren't spammed with it; e.g. if some guy on AOL sends out a commercial mass mailing to people who explicitly requested it, noone will mind. But if they allow people to spam the whole community with free online accounts, then something is IMHO very wrong.
What I would suggest as a possible policy change, that would be if AOL would change the status of their CDs in a way, that the new user can surf and read news, but as long as he doesn't pay (and with that fully disclose who he really is), the user should be barred from posting articles and sending email via this account (AOL is certainly big enough to build a second dial-in system which is firewall protected to barr those test users dialling in through this number from accessing the outside world via NNTP/NNRP/SMTP. Everything else could stay open... And once the user pays, his login will be transferred to another dial-in number, that doesn't have these services blocked.
Slashdot Mirror
About a year ago, I registered a Swiss (.ch) domain for a server that I intended to set up (but had to put off for a while).
During the year, I have received quite a bit of mail
for product evaluation registrations and other things with various addresses inside the registered domain). Now vendors email me with mail, that from their viepoint is legitimate (basically, it is from mine, too - as the info mails were asked for during registration of the software downloaded). Nevertheless, I get about 3 or 4 product registration emails per week from some lunatics who apparently think its funny to put in an email address of a domain they are not connected with (in this case, the domain is @here.ch -- with lots of people using "surfer@here.ch", "enteryouremail@here.ch", "jo@here.ch", "oskar@here.ch", "not@here.ch" and the like).
Currently, I am in contact with the Swiss data protection commisioner getting his support for bringing charges against those people, since as stupid as it may sound, it is the only chance I have to make these people stop (under the data protection act, the providers here are forbidden to give out details about who entered the false data). The same goes for most of the companies that the false registrations were done through.
In some way I am sorry, that this is the only way for me to make people stop (as I don't have another chance of finding them except by bringing up charges for supplying false identities).
What saddens me even more, is that this sort of thing would be easy to get around on the software manufacturers site (if someone registers for product evaluation, require an existing email address, and then mail a URL to that email address with the site information where to download the software). That way people would have no choice but to enter a valid email address if they wanted to get the software.
And, yes, I am sure, that we're not talking normal spams - among those companies from which I got news after "registering" evaluation software include companies like McAfee, Realaudio, and others.
The lack of XFree4 packages (as far as I understand it) is mostly the lack of manpower, than the stability of the server.
The X maintainer has postponed the release of XF4 packages, so that he doesn't get "overloaded" with work maintaining both 'woody' XF4 and 'potato' XF3 packages until potato will finally be released. I would guess, that XF4 will be among the first new packages once potato has been released.
Requiring students to buy notebooks is great, if everyone even remotely interested in the course had the money to do so.
What about those, who just can't afford a good notebook (note: when I say good notebook, I mean something post 486-notebook, because a much older notebook will be sooo slooooow, that the student will waste a good deal of time waiting for his/her notebook to respond)?
I am currently studying for a CS degree in an evening class. Most students of these classes buy a notebook before the end of their 4-year courses, since they make life in the courses so much easier, but hardly any of the students buy one within the first year (since most start the study course without much CS background, and some simply cannot afford to go to a normal university). The evening classes university requires students to have employment according to their CS skills acquired at school. Working in the CS field then allows students more easily to buy some notebook on their own, since your work pay usually gets better during the course.
How do they check, that you don't exchange answers
with someone else in your class?
This is about the main problem that keeps schools here from doing such exams - How can you grade a student, if you can't be 100% certain whether the answers given by the student are truly his or not.
Also, they won't do exams on the school PCs, because it'd be too much work preparing the machines so that they have what you need but nothing, that could aid you more than intended by the teacher.
I don't think Unix is going to "die". Face it,
in ten years, maybe we won't have Unix anymore,
maybe we'll have XYZ-OS, but I guess, that even that one will still contain many features originating in the Unix age.
Before you lament about the coming of distributed systems, think about - what IS a distributed system?
In a sense, a Unix box alone can already do distributed computing: jobs distributed over multiple processes:
cat
cut -c-4 | \
tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' | \
sort | \
uniq -c | \
sort -n
This little "excercise" will extract the first 4 letters of every word in
The principle used, combining multiple programs into performing a function for the user is something that was done very early in Unix. "Modern" GUI-Boxes (Win, Mac,
If you think, that distributed computing is something different, and will only work with multiple machines, then you could still have the same principle working this way over multiple machines (if you want to try this, change the host names for ssh accordingly; and if necessary replace ssh by rsh/remsh):
cat
ssh fenun.icemark.ch cut -c-4 | \
tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' | \
ssh varuleon.icemark.ch sort | \
ssh varenorn.icemark.ch uniq -c | \
sort -n
OK, it's not very useful to distribute this example over multiple machines, but it shows that the principle of distributed computing is something, that is not far from what could be done on Unix several years ago - ever since Unix features remsh.
And all that from the comfort of your own shell scripts.
OK, writing a distributed system via Corba or any other mechanism is "a little" different, but these differences don't change too much in terms of what is or isn't distributed computing.
The question that I would REALLY ask, is - will the future bring "distributed SYSTEMS" or "distributed OPERATING SYTEMS"? Distributed systems are implemented on various systems nowadays. Distributed OSs are rare, and I wouldn't really see, whether these are really something required for future applications. A distributed OS will also cause problems -- distributed applications are already hard to code and even harder to debug. A distributed OS might help a little, but it will also cost us in the sense, that debugging what exactly is going on in the system might become a lot harder, since the distribution process would be a "black box" from the perspective of the programmer.
I find, that proper movie soundtracks actually help productivity, if you know the movie, as you can use the music to get in the mood of the film (e.g. Schindler's List soundtrack is rather bad for programming, while the music for The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill is rather upbeat - especially if you actually KNOW the films and know what kind of moods they have during the current part of the soundtrack).
I also find that instrumental pieces are a lot better for coding, as the don't have any words that might actually distract. I guess, classical music might be nice, but someone I personally can't really relate to it.
While I strongly agree with the comment that avery.net shouldn't be granted to this company on the basis, that they are not really network related, this doesn't keep NSI from granting "wrong" names.
.org domains should be used by non-profit organizations only, they don't enforce that rule (e.g. I once pointed out to them that some domain broker was using zh.org for his business, clearly showing that zh.org is anything but NON-profit, they said, the final use is up to the customer, and that this rule would merely be a recommendation, nothing more nothing less).
While it says, that
The same problem exists in other countries as well, e.g. here in Switzerland (>130.000 registered domains in a country with ~7.5 million people) there are lots of registered domains that are either kept inactive or used in a misleading way. Contacting SWITCH (Swiss NIC) gave the answer, that they don't care too much about that after the domain has been paid up for.
Personally, I'd vote for a change to force domain registrars to be non-profit organisations. Maybe then they'll start answering to reason instead of money.
Well, no matter which model we choose, 10^x or 2^x
there is this little problem with computers being binary machines -- do you think, it's less confusing to tell the user: "Well, you can upgrade your machine to a whopping 4-dot-294 Gigabytes!"?
I'd like to see the puzzled faces during that moment, thinking "Which nutter ever came up with this screwy figure?" There will be a sort of exception at one level, either we have the "screwy" number of bytes in one kb, the "strange" figure of 1024 kb in one mb, but we'll have a useful figure for address space "4GB flat"; or - we'll have the "cool" 1000 MiBs in 1 GiB, but on the other hand, system address spaces have 'weird' limits like 4.294GB of main memory.
Personally, I'd vote for the SI honouring the computer science business and officially declaring, that with regards to computing the prefixes are based on powers of 2, thereby forcing companies like Maxtor and the like to change to this way.
Unless the basic architecture of CPUs doesn't change to something base-10, we're "screwed" anyway.
>first off this jerk is the reason that there are
>three paragraphs of tiny text everywhere now
Well. I don't see how HE is responsible for that. Did it ever occur to you, that this lawsuit was caused by exactly that behaviour of other people before him? This guy certainly did not invent this kind of lawsuit, but seeing someone getting more than US$100.000.000 because there was a scratch in his brand new BMW... Don't you think, that it was the judges making these ludicrous judgements are actually the cause of more and more of these lawsuits?
In many countries the nations military sells old surplus items - guns, jeeps, even tanks and planes. These items are made disfunctional weaponswise (e.g. the bolt from storm rifles is removed, so it can't shoot anymore). But apart from that they're fully functional.
Why shouldn't Pepsi acquire an old military plane for this guy? Why does this seem sooo unreasonable?
Somewhere here in canton Bern (Switzerland) there's a guy that has a disfunctional F14 (or was it F16) standing around in his garden. I saw a report once about Brits who spend weekends driving through the wilderness with ex-military tanks.
And I don't think that either one of them spent a million US$ for these.
Personally, I'd continue the lawsuit to the next higher court (maybe collecting some data about other countries military habits when getting rid of their old equipment).
But, I'm curious, since I haven't seen the commercial in question. But did the jet fly in this commercial, or was it just standing on the ground. Standing on the ground should be somewhat easy to achieve, as I guess, even the military people will charge more than US$1.000.000 if the thing can still fly. If it was standing on the ground, than it should be possible to get a real but no longer functional (i.e. no longer able to fly) jet...
From the little I know about this court, this lawsuits outcome seems to fit well into what we here about US lawsuits in Europe...
Of course - using a free and open OS doesn't mean
that one should not use proprietary software.
But - the point earlier was about monopolies. You can't really build a monopoly on GPL'd software, because everyone else has all the same freedoms that you do. By releasing all their stuff under
"good" licenses, RedHat sells their distribution,
but can't really make a monopoly out of that.
Of course - SuSEs installer is nicer, but the point is, by making this thing proprietary, SuSE is already trying to monopolize their distribution by giving the user more and more "comfort" in using the distribution without letting other distributions have that.
And behaviour like that will ultimately hurt Linux at one time or another.
Noone can do anything about SuSE or some other company doing what they are doing by making more and more proprietary tools, but I would think it would be nice if at least the distributions would keep all configuration tools completely free, so that they can be used in/adapted for all distributions.
If you're trying to protect what you're saying, there are a few points to consider:
a) If you send your key over the Internet (or
phone lines), then it's completely
compromised (in case of symmetrical
encryption), because Echelon will get a copy
of the key as well... In case of PGP, if
you transmit one half of the key, this might
also give them something to work on to find
out the other half.
Remember: It's also no use to send a new
key encrypted with an old one (that was
transmitted electronically before).
b) You won't get around having your email
snooped by them, but we could all make
their lives a hell of a lot more difficult
if everyone were to encrypt everything they
send over the Internet. Even if they have
the keys, or if they can crack it easily -
they will have to decrypt your message to
be sure, that you don't do anything
forbidden. And if everyone would do that,
they would certainly spend a good deal of
CPU time just trying to decrypt rubbish.
c) If you want a good protection for your data,
use a good encryption program, and then do
something with the data, that isn't covered
by any program, e.g. put a certain amount
of random junk into your message (at places
and using blocksizes that the recipient
knows, like: add 1937 bytes of random junk
at the beginning of the file, and then
another 7 bytes of random junk after every
234 bytes of encrypted data plus 1234 bytes
of random junk at the end.
Using that info, the recipient can easily
restore the encrypted file and then decrypt
it.
Another way would be to swap blocks in the
received file, e.g. swap the first two bytes
then the next 2*2 bytes, then the next 2*4
bytes of encrypted data.
As long you tell the recipient in person,
what to do with the file, you should be
fairly safe (again, if you transmit the
information on how to descramble the files,
everything might very well be in vain, since
that mail/phone call/fax/... is as likely
intercepted, that your precious (or useless
but still encrypted) data is.
Let's put it this way, the worst part of the NSA is, that they either
- in spite of having an undoubtedly HUGE budget,
couldn't prevent China from getting the USs'
nuclear secrets, or (even worse)
- might even have China let them have
knowingly (willingly even?)...
It's rather simple - you see, by getting headlines, like "Apache is better" the article about Ballmers little speech made it to news.com and slashdot. I guess, that quite a few people in the US will know about that speech.
Trust me, Microsoft will make these statements be heard in front of the court.
Well, personally I see a big difference between what the Australian government tries to do, and what the UDP against AOL tries to reach.
In Australia, the goverment wants to limit certain content - the UDP doesn't. For the UDP, if you would like to receive spam, we don't care - but since so many (I use 'so many' very loosely here; so far I haven't heard a single person who LIKES spam) people complain about spam and AOL doesn't do anything about it, the UDP is one way to make them think about it again. Once they change their policy the UDP restrictions will be lifted.
From then on, nobody will care about the AOL users email content as long as they aren't spammed with it; e.g. if some guy on AOL sends out a commercial mass mailing to people who explicitly requested it, noone will mind. But if they allow people to spam the whole community with free online accounts, then something is IMHO very wrong.
What I would suggest as a possible policy change, that would be if AOL would change the status of their CDs in a way, that the new user can surf and read news, but as long as he doesn't pay (and with that fully disclose who he really is), the user should be barred from posting articles and sending email via this account (AOL is certainly big enough to build a second dial-in system which is firewall protected to barr those test users dialling in through this number from accessing the outside world via NNTP/NNRP/SMTP. Everything else could stay open... And once the user pays, his login will be transferred to another dial-in number, that doesn't have these services blocked.