TELECOM Digest     Wed, 22 Jun 2005 12:15:00 EDT    Volume 24 : Issue 284

Inside This Issue:                             Editor: Patrick A. Townson

    ID Theft: 40 Million Served (Lisa Minter)
    Google Developing Online Payment System (Lisa Minter)
    T-Online Cuts DSL Rate in Half (Lisa Minter)
    Breakup Revisited (D. Dude)
    Is This Kind of Machine Made? (wizard_chef)
    Re: Worst Phishing/Fraud Attack Ever; 40 Million Cards (Ed Clarke) 
    Re: XO Communications (Tony P.)
    Re: Which Video Plug-in For Skype? Video4Skype/vSkype? (Stanley Ulbrych)
    Re: Power Strips for Home Networks (Dan Lanciani)
    Re: NFL in Talks With Sprint, Others for Wireless Video (jmeissen)
    Re: Bell Divestiture (Tony P.)
    Re: Bell Divestiture (Robert Bonomi)

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Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be
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We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we
are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because
we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands
against crime.   Geoffrey Welsh

               ===========================

See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details
and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest.  

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: Lisa Minter <lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com>
Subject: ID Theft: 40 Million Served
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 08:08:23 -050


by Steve Wexler

Identity theft is a huge and growing problem, and the confession that
up to 40 million MasterCard, Visa and American Express cardholders
have been jeopardized in a theft at third-party credit card processor,
CardSystems Solutions Inc., is just the latest cyber crime to be
reported. The breach compromised account holder names, banks and
account numbers.

It seems robbing banks is back in vogue and Jim Stickley, with over
100 successful heists to his credit, is laughing all the way to the
... bank. Unlike traditional bank robbers, he steals personally
identifiable information such as names, addresses, Social Security
numbers, credit card numbers and passwords. Most bank robbers only get
away with a few thousand dollars. Stickley gets away with information
worth millions of dollars.

Luckily, Stickley isn't a criminal in the common sense of the word;
he's a social engineer.  Financial institutions hire Stickley's
company, TraceSecurity, a security compliance software firm based in
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to perform vulnerability audits of their
banks. His firm has been getting a lot of calls lately as banks begin
beefing up their information privacy practices, motivated by the
recent spate of high-profile identity thefts as well as by an
increasing number of information privacy and disclosure regulations.

Social engineering is a concept that has been around the computer
security industry for many years. Social engineers prey on human
weaknesses to gain the trust of their victims, and then they trick
their victims into unknowingly becoming the co-conspirators in the
social engineer's grand plan, which usually involves stealing
something.

"Most banks are surprisingly vulnerable to identity theft," said
Stickley. "They spend millions of dollars a year on high-tech computer
security defenses, but often fail to address the simplest, most
critical aspect of information security: the human element. A bank can
have the strongest doors on their vaults, but if they invite me in and
allow me to _wander their office_, I can steal much more than their
money."

Stickley and his team successfully complete their heists 90 per cent
of the time. The other 10 per cent of the time, vigilant bank staffers
thwart their heist. It's not at all unusual for a single TraceSecurity
social engineering team to rob three or four bank branches in a single
day.  And it's surprisingly easy.

Stickley and his team start their social engineering adventures by
_impersonating someone of trust or authority_, such as an air
conditioning technician, a pest exterminator or a fire marshal. The
team's planning for their heists begins weeks in advance, often by
mailing a letter to a bank branch on forged stationery, informing them
of a planned "inspection." By the time they show up in their _fake
uniforms_ with fake badges and fake identification cards, the front
receptionist often welcomes them with coffee. Within minutes, they
have free range of the bank as they crawl under desks, steal backup
tapes, and install spyware on the computers.

In the evening, the TraceSecurity team returns to dumpster dive, an
activity that often yields a surprising amount of sensitive customer
account information.

Once the heist is completed, the TraceSecurity team returns the stolen
information to the bank's executives who hired them, and provides
recommendations on how to prevent actual criminals from perpetuating
the same crime. And if by some chance Stickley's team gets caught, he
always carries with him his "get-out-of-jail-free" paperwork which
confirms the bank hired him, and provides the bank's executives' cell
phone numbers to confirm Jim's story.

"The secret to an effective information security strategy," said
Stickley, "is to balance security technology investments with better
employee training, and better policy and procedure enforcement."

Copyright 2005 Integratedmar.com Corporation

NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the
daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at
http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new
articles daily.

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[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think I have been saying for awhile
now that the best phisher people are not the ones who sit at their
computer pecking out letters to a jillion people; now and then getting
lucky with a sucker who responds. The smart guys know to get the
data they want on a _wholesale_ basis. And where Stickley in this
story always returns what he took, what about the dozens of UPS
and FedEx 'delivery men' out there who go calling each day at
all the banks and other business places?  They are in and out with
the wink of an eye, and what receptionist bothers to question or
challenge them?  This is an old, old trick, actually. In the mid-
1970's, guys posing as 'postal employees' attempted to hijack several
thousand new credit cards just being issued at Amoco Standard Oil,
at the credit card office. They just walked in, as was the daily
custom, and said they were there to get the outgoing registered
mail. (In those days, all new, outgoing plastics were sent registered
mail to 'insure their safety'). These guys, with pseudo-postal worker
uniforms walked right in and started gathering up the tubs and trays
and boxes of outgoing mail that day. 

Considering what a hell-hole (at least to work at) the credit card
office had become by the mid 1970's, it was not surprising no one
questioned them about what they were doing. But Amoco security
officers had been tipped off a day or two before, and caught the guys
going down on the freight elevator with a dolly cart full of boxes of
outgoing mail. It turns out it was an 'inside job'. The credit card
office 'cleaned house' that day; they got rid of twenty or thirty
employees they suspected knew too much about the _overall operation_
of the system and a few months later the entire operation was moved
to Des Moines, Iowa where the managers thought they would find a lot
of farmer's wives and daughters (a smaller ratio of racially diverse
people) to work for them than they had in Chicago, plus smaller
salaries and much less corruption at the city government level.  PAT]

------------------------------

From: Lisa Minter <lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com>
Subject: Google Developing Online Payment System 
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 08:29:03 -0500


By Lisa Baertlein

Web search leader Google Inc. is developing an online payment system
but not a direct rival to eBay Inc.'s PayPal, Google Chief Executive
Eric Schmidt said on Tuesday.

Schmidt spoke after several days of heated speculation over reports
that Google was working on a potential rival to PayPal, eBay's popular
online payment system.

Schmidt said Google does not intend to offer a "person-to-person
stored-value payments system" like PayPal's, in which money briefly
resides in PayPal's control during the transaction, but he did not
give details of how the Google system would differ.

"The payment services we are working on are a natural evolution of
Google's existing online products and advertising programs, which
today connect millions of consumers and advertisers," Schmidt told
Reuters in a brief telephone interview in which he declined to
elaborate.

"We believe that e-commerce can be improved and we are working on ways
to improve the user experience," Schmidt said.

The company declined to say when a product would be available.

By avoiding PayPal's model, Google may also bypass a replay of the
regulatory battles that were among the thorniest obstacles PayPal
faced in its early days as an independent company. The biggest issue
was PayPal's plan to briefly hold money on account, generally a bank
function, and the saga was chronicled in a book called "The PayPal
Wars."

Google currently accepts payments from advertisers and sends money to
participants in its AdSense program, which pays Web publishers when
Google ads are displayed on their sites.

Google advertisers pay each time a Web surfer clicks on an ad that is
generated through the company's AdWords program.

In March, Google said it began testing a third-party electronic funds
transfer service to send payments to Web sites that carry Google ads.

The Web search darling recently launched a video search service, which
will sell content. The company also operates a price-comparison
shopping engine called Froogle, which analysts think could one day
become the heart of a full-fledged e-commerce system.

For its part, eBay has been working to expand PayPal's reach beyond
its online marketplace and has signed up a variety of retailers
including Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes service that sells individual
songs for 99 cents each.

Analysts on Monday said the biggest and most immediate risk to PayPal
from a Google payment system would be a cap on growth in PayPal's
off-eBay business, prompting a 2 percent drop in eBay shares.

Google's stock on Tuesday closed up $1.14, or 0.4 percent, to $287.84.
Shares of eBay finished down 34 cents, or 0.9 percent, to $36.90 prior
to Schmidt's comments. Both stocks trade on the Nasdaq.

Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. 

NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the
daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at
http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new
articles daily.

------------------------------

From: Lisa Minter <lisa_minter2001@yahoo.com>
Subject: T-Online Cuts DSL Rate in Half 
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 08:50:25 -0500


By Boris Groendahl

Deutsche Telekom's Internet unit is cutting prices for DSL high-speed
Internet access in half to stop rivals, including Vodafone's German
fixed-line arm, eating away its market share.

T-Online International Chief Executive Rainer Beaujean told Reuters in
an interview on Tuesday he would cut rates from July to protect its
and Deutsche Telekom's grip on the lucrative broadband Internet
market.

Vodafone's Arcor unit stepped up an already fierce price war earlier
this month, undercutting T-Online's prices by as much as 80
percent. Rivals freenet.de and United Internet had cut rates and
increased marketing since March.

T-Online will reduce the monthly rate for its best-selling DSL
flat-rate tariff to 14.95 euros per month, from 29.95 euros for the
current best-selling flat-rate tariff.

"If we notice that our competitors would like to end the price war
they've started themselves, that's the right moment for us to say,
'Here we are,"' Beaujean said.

Germans flocked to sign up for DSL (digital subscriber line) after the
price cuts, and T-Online could not keep up with the pace with its old,
high fees in the second quarter.

"We observe a similar development of our customer base as in last
year's second quarter," Beaujean said. T-Online added 181,000 new DSL
subscribers in the second quarter of 2004, fewer than in the first
quarter of this year, when it added 295,000.

"But the key issue is that the market is expanding faster," unlike
last year, Beaujean said.

"As we're not only active in Germany, but in Spain and France as well,
we also know the trends abroad. We have learned in France that (market
leader France Telecom's) Wanadoo waited for too long. We learned from
that and act faster."

SHARES FALL

The move by Germany's market leader sent shares in Deutsche Telekom as
well as other Internet stocks into negative territory. Deutsche
Telekom fell 0.2 percent, United Internet fell 2.4 percent, and
freenet dropped 1.4 percent.

Internet providers are keen on broadband customers as DSL is cheaper
to provide and its users are more likely to download music or movies
over the Internet and use it for phone calls or other services the
providers can charge for.

To better compete for broadband customers, Deutsche Telekom is
currently fully taking over and re-integrating T-Online.

Not all rivals, however, are equally bad news for Deutsche
Telekom. United and freenet rent and resell DSL lines from the
country's dominant phone operator, so if T-Online loses customers to
them, they still bring in revenue at Deutsche Telekom.

But if customers defect to operators who own their own network, such
as Arcor and Telecom Italia's HanseNet, they are lost completely for
T-Online's parent.

Beaujean said that is where things are headed: "More and more, our
competitors are the network operators."

T-Online will cut and streamline less popular tariffs, too, by up to
60 percent.

The new rates are available for existing as well as new customers,
leading overall to a revenue shortfall of 400 million euros this year,
Beaujean said.

He had previously forecast 2.5 billion euros in revenues this year, up
from 2 billion euros in 2004.

He said his goal was still to reach his forecast for core earnings of
300 million euros, down from 472 million in 2004.

Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited.

NOTE: For more telecom/internet/networking/computer news from the
daily media, check out our feature 'Telecom Digest Extra' each day at
http://telecom-digest.org/td-extra/more-news.html . Hundreds of new
articles daily.

------------------------------

From: D. Dude <xzzyxREMOVE@THIShotmail.com>
Subject: Breakup Revisited
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 12:54:18 GMT
Organization: Global Dial Pty Ltd


Readers other than Australians may not be aware that Sol Trujillo
one-time CEO of US West and formerly an executive with Orange Europe.
has recently been appointed as CEO of Telstra, Australia's largest
telecommunications provider and former monopoly provider.

One of the major issues concerning the full privatisation of Telstra
(currently 51% government owned) is whether and how retail and
wholesale functions of Telstra should be separated to prevent unfair
competition from Telstra.

In an interview published in the /Sunday Telegraph/ (an Australian
Murdoch tabloid) on June 19, 2005, by Jim Dickens, Trujillo is quoted
as saying, referring to "similar" moves overseas:

"It didn't work well, didn't work well for the customer, didn't work
well for the shareowners and ultimately it didn't work well for the
marketplace."

Of course, I expect him to say that. I'm prepared to accept that he
may be largely correct in regard to share owners of incumbent
carriers, but I see little truth that (assuming he is referring to the
US) customers and the marketplace aren't better off overall.

I'd be interested to know whether you disagree and whether a true
retail/wholesale style separation is a better proposition than what
has occurred in the US.

With both my consumer hat and share holder hat's on, I'm in favour of
maximum separation with the wholesale arm being able to offer any
product currently offered by the retail arm and the retail arm being
free to choose obtain product from any wholesaler.

However, it's unlikely to come to that: with the government seeking to
maximise the price of the offering for the remainder of shares and
with a majority in both houses of parliment, it's likely the outcome
will be an internal separation only aimed at providing transparent
pricing.

------------------------------

From: wizard_chef <stokely@uab.edu>
Subject: Is This Kind of Machine Made?
Date: 21 Jun 2005 18:21:25 -0700


I need an answering machine that:

a) answers on double rings instead of single rings;

b) allows the caller to select among several prerecorded messages.

Is such a machine made??

wizard_chef

------------------------------

From: Ed Clarke <clarke@cilia.org>
Subject: Re: Worst Phishing Fraud Attack Ever! 40 Million Cards Affected
Date: 22 Jun 2005 14:32:07 GMT
Organization: Ciliophora Associates, Inc.


On 2005-06-21, TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to mc
<mc_no_spam@uga.edu>:

>> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Not: They are, and yes it is. Customer incon-
>> venience is not a big issue with them when they are threatened with the
>> possible loss of a few dollars in fraud. PAT]

> Ah, the noose around their own necks!  Between loan-shark practices of
> raising interest rates sharply on little notice, and this new practice
> of cancelling cards at the drop of a hat, they're quickly losing our
> confidence.  Maybe we *will* learn to live without credit cards.

I went through our credit card bills yesterday.  LLBean Visa 27% APR.
Delta Skymiles AmEx 25%.  I paid them both off in full and won't be
using them again.  AmEx charges $15 for an over-the-phone eCheck but
the INTEREST on the damn card was several dollars per day.  By the
time the physical check would arrive and clear, I would have that much
in interest.

And this is sort of telecom related too.  I'm in New York, ConEd
country.  With a Cisco 7206VXR for a router, and highly reliable but
older servers and SCSI raid arrays I discovered that I am paying about
$500 per month for electricity ( this includes home usage as well ).

I'm about to dump all my Cisco switches (2900 Catalyst series, 5000
series) and the RAID stuff onto eBay.  Simply shutting them down and
replacing them with a 100 watt ReadyNAS 600 will save me hundreds of
dollars per month even if I just threw them out.

Cost of ownership seems to be more than cost to buy plus cost of
maintenance.  Ah well, the education of a new small business owner
continues ...


This signature left blank.

------------------------------

From: Tony P. <kd1s@nospamplease.cox.reallynospam.net>
Subject: Re: XO Communications
Organization: ATCC
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 21:46:51 -0400


In article <telecom24.283.11@telecom-digest.org>, kludge@panix.com 
says:

> Tony P.  <kd1s@nospamplease.cox.reallynospam.net> wrote:

>> In article <telecom24.278.15@telecom-digest.org>, alg@aracnet.com 
>> says:

>>> Well Steven, an outage involving three DS-3s would likely be related
>>> to an OC-3 failure (an OC-3 at ~155 megabits/second will carry three
>>> DS-3s or just over 2,000 voice channels).  I'd guess one of two
>>> failure types caused your emotional trauma: Traditional "back hoe
>>> fade" or an OC-3 to DS-3 mux went on "time out" for a while.

>> A backhoe undoubtedly being operated by Backhoe Bob. Apparently at a
>> recent gathering of IT folks involved with the Help America Vote Act
>> this was a common refrain.

> We call this "BIPL" or "Backhoe-Induced Packet Loss."

This gives me a queasy feeling. We're moving one of our offices to an
area that's former industrial property, industrial in the sense of
early 20th century.

And we've chosen to use a fiber based network. Come to think of it,
both the carriers in the building now (Verizon and Cox) come in on
fiber, not copper.

So it's very likely I'll suffer from BIPL at some point. But power
won't be an issue -- nice little 30KW diesel generator will be used
for the computer room which will house 3 server racks with 4 servers
in each, a Definity Prologix, and assorted networking gear, and HVAC
for the computer room.

------------------------------

From: Stanley Ulbrych <stanri@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: Which Video Plug-in For Skype? Video4Skype.com or vSkype.com?
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 22:50:42 -0400
Organization: Cox Communications


On 21 Jun 2005 04:38:35 -0700, totojepast <totojepast@atlas.cz> wrote:

> Would you recommend me Video4Skype.com or vSkype.com for Skype video
> calls?

While vskype is stll beta and needs work, I like it over vidio4skype.
Vskype has a better picture. I like the ability to hold a video
conference with two or more people.  And once installed, you can
activate the program while in Skype

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 23:05:53 EDT
From: Dan Lanciani <ddl@danlan.com>
Subject: Re: Power Strips for Home Networks


> One thing you can do is run several devices off of one power supply,
> if you have enough of them with the same voltage demands.

You have to be very careful when attempting this with devices that
have external connections to other systems.  Some wall-wart-powered
gadgets rely on the isolation provided by the power supply to
implement various regulation and voltage-splitting tricks.  That is,
the negative side of the power input may not be at the same level as
common of any i/o port.  If you try to power two devices that disagree
about common from the same supply and they share some other common
path you will at best cause failure and possibly cause damage.

I have an IR i/o box whose power-input, IR-in/out, and RS232 commons
are all different.  Of course, this kind of problem can bite you even
without sharing power supplies.  I have a text-to-speech box whose
audio-out "ground" is really the bottom leg of a push-pull driver of
some sort.  If I plugged this output into a grounded amplifier without
an isolation transformer the driver would be shorted through my
computer's ground connection to the box's RS232 port.


Dan Lanciani
ddl@danlan.*com

------------------------------

From: jmeissen@aracnet.com
Subject: Re: NFL in Talks With Sprint, Others for Wireless Video
Date: 22 Jun 2005 00:35:58 GMT
Organization: http://extra.newsguy.com


In article <telecom24.283.2@telecom-digest.org>,
Telecom dailyLead from USTA  <usta@dailylead.com> wrote:

> Telecom dailyLead from USTA
> June 21, 2005
> http://www.dailylead.com/latestIssue.jsp?i=22505&l=2017006

>		TODAY'S HEADLINES

> NEWS OF THE DAY
> * NFL in talks with Sprint, others for wireless video deals

> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What exactly is supposed to be
> 'wireless video'?  Isn't that just a wireless cam (such as I 
> have a couple of) one for the back yard birds and one for my
> weather station http://weatherforecast.us.tf or is it something
> a bit more elegant and fancy?  

In this context I believe they are referring to delivery of live
streaming video content to an appropriately capable cell phone (or
similar device).


John Meissen                                 jmeissen@aracnet.com


------------------------------

From: Tony P. <kd1s@nospamplease.cox.reallynospam.net>
Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture
Organization: ATCC
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 21:38:50 -0400


In article <telecom24.283.7@telecom-digest.org>, Wesrock@aol.com says:

> In a message dated Tue, 21 Jun 2005 01:07:05 -0000, 
> bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi) writes:

>> Repeating for the illiterate:

>>    'native' touch-tone operation was substantially cheaper for the telco
>>    than was 'native' pulse dialing.

>>    They retrofitted dial-to-pulse conversion on SxS switches so that they
>>    could 'pre-convert' customers to touch-tone before the switch was 
>>    converted to native touch-tone dialing.


>> This was a "short-term" expenditure of money now, to maximize
>> "long-term" benefits.  By having a significant "installed base" of
>> touch-tone users *already*in*place* when the C.O. was converted to
>> _native_touch-tone_ handling, they could get by with far fewer sets of
>> digit decoders (dial or pulse).  With 'pulse' tieing up the decoders
>> for average more than five times as long as touch-tone, there _was_
>> significant benefit to be obtained.  getting even 20% of the calls on
>> touch-tone, meant a _halving_ of the number of decoder elements
>> required.

> What was the cost of the touch-tone oscillator for a telephone set,
> vs.  the cost of a rotary dial?  There were millions of telephone sets
> out there, and at the time that was introduced the phones were
> installed, owned and maintained by the telco.  The cost of the
> oscillators (key pads) would be considerable expense, particularly if
> the cost was significantly higher than a rotary dial.

Considering that a rotary dial was nothing but springs and gears,
while a DTMF pad had coils (Bell loved those ferrous cup cores!),
resistors, transistors, specially plated contacts, etc.

But the basics of the phone were just a 500 set with updated housing.
All that really changed was the dial.

But then I stop and think how much effort went into making reliable
rotary dials. They were probably roughly equal in cost using adjusted
dollar amounts.

------------------------------

From: bonomi@host122.r-bonomi.com (Robert Bonomi)
Subject: Re: Bell Divestiture
Date: Wed, 22 Jun 2005 06:44:17 -0000
Organization: Widgets, Inc.


In article <telecom24.283.9@telecom-digest.org>,
<hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:

> Robert Bonomi wrote:

>> You apparently know more about DTSS than _Dartmouth_ does.  I checked
>> the Dartmouth history before posting that. Yes, Dartmouth invented
>> time-sharing, I acknowledged that.  Development _started_ in 1963, but
>> it wasn't operational until May of 1964. (It supported an entire *TWO*
>> terminals in its original form.)

> Thank you for being ever so precise.  We'll come back to this later.

You "corrected" me, remember?

>> Putting a bigger engine in a Corvette will let it "go faster"; it is
>> utterly irrelevant, however, to increasing the number of passengers
>> that that car can carry.

> Yes, it does.  For one, the car could make multiple trips.  The
> passengers might spend the same amount of time doing their shopping or
> whatever, but a faster car will cut down the travel down.

How many more people can you fit into the Corvette at one time as a
result of that?

The bigger engine _may_ allow the car to travel faster, and thus make
more trips.  This is, however, totally unrelated to how many
passengers it can carry per trip.

AND, if the travel speed is limited by things other than engine
capacity -- e.g. speed limits, out-of-sync traffic lights, congestion,
etc. then the car is _unable_ to make use of the larger engine, and
there is no increase in speed possible.

> Further, if roads are blocked, a fast car can make more choices to get
> around the blockade, perhaps go way out of its way to get through.

Again, how many more people fit into it at one time as a result of
that?

I've seen *one* occasion when the capabilities of a car gave extra
choices for getting around a blockade.  Northbound traffic is backed
up -- nearly stationary -- for a couple of miles on a road with
essentially *no* alternatives. there was a place a ways back, where
you could turn left, and go six miles before you found another road
going North.  Or you could go back another half-mile, turn right, and
go only 4 miles to find a chance to go North.

The perpetrator of this ducked over on the shoulder, went up a few
hundred feed, and turned in at the _dead_end_ city park entrance.
Somebody decided he 'knew something", and followed.  And somebody
else, And somebody else.  A solid stream of cars following him down
the _one_lane_ road.

It got really funny, when the 'leader of the pack' got to lake -- to
the boat ramp, and ... see
<http://159.218.3.3/Amphicar_restore/amphicar86.html> (Same type of
vehicle, *not* the instance I'm relating.)

There had to have been at least 75 cars following him, up to that
point.  Now, with *nowhere* to go, no place for them all to turn
around, and the road in is totally blocked with the 'me too!' crowd.

I was out in the main traffic jam, laughing my head (or other portions
of the anatomy) off.  I don't know _how_ they ever got that mess
straightened out.

>> You've never seen tracks for two competing railroads running
>> side-by-side?  Tell me, in 1950, say, who had the 'monopoly' for
>> passenger service between New York City, and Chicago?  Or for freight
>> between those locations, for that matter?

> There are certainly tracks running side by side, but NOT for the
> entire distance from origin and destination points or the route via
> intermediate points.  For your example, there were multiple railroads
> between NYC and Chicago, but all took their own routing and began and
> ended in different places.  (Some railroads used tracks or terminals
> of another).

So much for the claim that they were monopolies, then.

>> This was a "short-term" expenditure of money now, to maximize
>> "long-term" benefits.

> That's very.  But earlier you made it sound as if that practice was
> somehow 'bad' i.e., "the Bell System never did anything unless it was
> forced to".  Well, I don't see anyone forcing Bell to go Touch Tone,
> but I see a business becoming more efficient.  What's wrong with that?
> How is that different from any other business?

I merely claimed that Bell/AT&T/WEco had their own self-interest as
their primary, foremost, and over-riding consideration in running
their business, and that any 'benefit' to the consumer came about
because either it was 'incidental' to that self-interest, or because
it was mandated by governmental authorities.

It is trivial to point to things that Bell/WEco/AT&T did that were
_not_ in the best interest of the customers, but operated to Bell's
advantage.  See the 'Hushphone' lawsuit, for one of the more egregious
examples.

>>> In 1970 I guess, I do not remember for sure, they brought around
>>> terminals, sat them on the desks and told people 'Do not Touch These'
>>> until we explain what to do, which was about a month later. We were
>>> told these would be replacing some of the job functions that had been
>>> done manually before. PAT]

>> Probably '71 or '72.  After upgrade to a S/370 gave them the
>> horsepower to run 'online' CICS.  The 360 didn't have the speed/power
>> to do all the records work that SO threw at it, _and_ handle the
>> overhead of on-line processing.

> Some corrections: Do you know _exactly_ when Standard Oil upgraded
> their mainframe and operations units?  Otherwise you are making some
> incorrect assumptions:

I don't have to know when the upgrade was.  I do know that the 'idle'
CPU cycles were *not* there on the old machines to support on-line
operations.

BTW, if you're going to claim a "correction", you are required to
supply the 'correct' data to replace that which is, according to you,
"in error".

If you _don't_ know the data, *yourself*, it is arrogance, cum hubris,
to assert that someone else is 'incorrect'.

> 1) CICS was not IBM's only online terminal processing system.  There
> were and remain others*, too.  CICS evolved to be the most common.
> [*for extra large and extra small online processing.]

The CICS predecessor was IBM's first successful on-line system.
Originally developed for Virginia Electric Power, in 1968, and given
away to other users, until mid-1969, when IBM rolled it out as a 'pay
for' product, under the CICS name.

What 'others' there were, and/or are. is irrelevant, as PAT confirms
that S.O. was using CICS.

IBM's "official" in-house-developed terminal-processing system had a
"little" problem.  It took more than 10 minutes to IPL, and almost
invariably crashed less than 10 minutes after that.

> 2) A System/360 could and did handle online transactions.  It wasn't
> as fancy as the S/370 CICS 3270 system, but it did so.  The high end
> S/360s units were quite powerful.  We had a low-end S/360 that handled
> both online and batch processing.  It's possible SO may have had
> multiple computers for different tasks.

At the time the 370 came out, it was five times the processing
power/speed if the high end of the 360 line, according to the IBM
announcement, that is, But, like with Dartmouth, you may have better
information.

Yes, a S/360 could run CICS. but you lost a 'non-trivial' amount of
the CPU to the 'overhead' of doing so.  If the machine did not have
the 'spare' capacity to absorb that overhead, you could not run CICS
and still get all the necessary work done.  The machine was 'too
small', and/or 'too heavily loaded', depending on your viewpoint ...

S.O was running close enough to hardware capacity, with the batch only
operations, on the 360 that "available horsepower" to allow running CICS 
just "wasn't there".

> 3) It would seem strange to post the credit card transaction clips
> Pat mentioned via CICS data entry when the slips were already
> machine readable.

"Strange" to you, maybe.  In the real world, however, according to PAT....

> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: They used CICS data entry because they
> did not have equipment to read them directly in the early years, and
> some of the cards were readable by a human eye (using some imagination
> and thought) but were not readable by a machine eye with any degree
> of accuracy. You know, like make your digit '2' just like so, and only
> in the little box allocated for it, and use a certain kind of pencil
> or marking pen. It was hard to train the dealers properly.   PAT]

>> Is Judge Greene, or the FCC, enough of an authority?

> What exactly did he say?  What exactly did the FCC say and when did
> they say it?  Was this a long established intentionally established
> policy or did it sort of evolve?

You can find, and read Greene's decrees, for yourself.  

The FCC rule-makings are a matter of public record, and available for
your perusal as well.

The initial fund flow back to the ILECs was part-and-parcel of the
divestiture, and the related equal access for competing IXCs.

> As to Judge Greene, not everbody agreed with him.  The history of
> Mountain Bell clearly demonstrates the incredible waste of splitting
> up a tightly integrated infrastructure and I'm sure that went on in
> other Bell units as well.  Oslin, the author of the Western Union
> history, noted many deficiencies of Greene's decisions from a
> telecommunications point of view.

Your point being?  You asked for an "official" source.  It's hard to
get more "official" than the Judge who issued the court orders.
(Note: I personally, would rather have seen IBM broken up, and the
Bell System left alone, but that is _entirely_ irrelevant).

> For us everyday consumers (who no one obviously cares about), we saw
> our short-distance toll charges GO UP.  We found ourselves paying 25c
> a minute for a cross LATA phone call that AT&T previously charged us
> 5c a minute.  We found ourselves paying $25 a minute unsuspectingly at
> pay phones.  The few people who called cross country often came out
> ahead.  Of course our local rates went up, too.

Yup.  As another poster stated, the telephone charge structure was
"irrational" for a _long_ time.  When the various components had to be
priced based on costs for _that_ components, there was a "rude
awakening".  for a lot of people.

I, personally, _never_ understood those exorbitant 'in-state'
inter-LATA rates, either.  It was incomprehensible to me, how a 2000
mile call to the west coast could be 1/4(!!) the cost of a 100-mile
in-state call.  What I saw was that inter-state rates plummeted, while
inter-LATA intra-state rates declined "a bit", and intra-LATA calls
got a lot more expensive.

> Then there were the scams of cheap rates but under a $5 monthly "fee".
> Well, if you weren't even making $5 worth a toll calls, they the new
> plan would cost you MORE money.

Yup.  complete agreement. Which is why I *don't* have any
long-distance carrier or 'plan' today.  It's cheaper to pay the
'single call' rates, when I make maybe 2-3 L.D. calls, with a total of
under 5 minutes per month.  The salescritters hawking those 'plans'
get really upset when I suggest that their rates work out to over
$1/minute, for my calling pattern.

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