TELECOM Digest     Wed, 3 Aug 2005 04:40:00 EDT    Volume 24 : Issue 351

Inside This Issue:                            Editor: Patrick A. Townson

    Identity Theft: Big Enough to Steal Lawmaker's Attention (Adam Karlin)
    Fraud Roshambo: Paper Beats RFID (Stephen Leahy)    
    Analysts Say ATM Systems Highly Vulnerable (Brian Bergstein)
    Today's Long Distance Circuits? (Lisa Hancock)
    Re: Bell System and GTE Telephone Operator? (Lisa Hancock)
    Re: Bell System and GTE Telephone Operator? (Paul Coxwell)
    Re: Personal Opinion Telegram and Mailgram-Discontinuance (Lisa Hancock)
    Re: AUDIX Message to Two Mailboxes (Pete Romfh)

Telecom and VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) Digest for the
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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: Adam Karlin <karlin@telecom-digest.org>
Subject: Identity Theft: Big Enough to Steal Lawmakers' Attention
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 01:31:56 -0500


By Adam Karlin, Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

BOSTON - Sandra Pochapin learned a few key lessons from her ordeal
with identity theft. Among them: Check the mail early.

Had she done so, she may have gotten the replacement credit card in
her mailbox. Instead, a thief lifted the card and took it on a $1,200
shopping spree at Lord & Taylor.

Ms. Pochapin eventually recouped her money, but the incident haunted
her for months afterward, as the criminal opened other new accounts in
her name.

She recalls a Macy's representative calling to ask about a $2,400 bill
on her new store card. "I asked them, 'How could you open an account
in my name if I already have an account there?' " said Pochapin,
testifying recently in front of the Massachusetts state legislature.

Experiences of people like Pochapin, and break-ins at large databases
that hold Americans' most sensitive personal information, have grown
severe enough in recent months to prompt a new wave of protective
legislation by lawmakers at the state and federal level.

The bills are designed to address various aspects of the threat, but,
as identity thieves find new ways to ply their trade, the efforts
represent a daunting race against crime.

Credit-freeze laws growing

One rising form of legislation, the one being considered here in
Massachusetts, allows consumers to freeze third-party access to their
credit reports.

"If a security freeze [on my credit reports] had been implemented,
this couldn't have happened," said Pochapin. While she admits the
thief could have still had a field day at Lord & Taylor, "They
wouldn't have been able to open other accounts," since companies don't
give out credit cards if they can't review a potential client's credit
rating.

Ten states now have credit-freeze laws, with a New Jersey bill
awaiting the promised signature of Gov. Richard Codey.

While lauded by many consumer advocates, such measures hint at the
challenges of combatting ID theft. Opponents say such laws are
intrusive measures that clunk up business practices. Others question
if any law can protect personal information from determined hackers.

At the least, if current laws aren't deterring high-tech burglars,
neither are security measures. On June 17, MasterCard announced a
break-in to the database of payment-processor CardSystems
Solutions. The heist, by far the biggest of its kind to date,
compromised the account records for millions of Visa USA, American
Express, Discover, and MasterCard holders. But MasterCard said a much
smaller number of people faced a real risk of identity theft from the
breach.

Cardholders honored in a breach

What infuriates ID theft activists is that up until this year,
California was the only state that forced credit-card companies to
notify their customers about such a raid. There, companies must tell
their clients about breaches to electronic, unencrypted
databases. Now, 15 states have some sort of breach law, and four more
bills await a governor's signature.

"We think the California law provides a good model for other states
and the federal government to follow," says Marc Rotenberg, president
of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

In that vein, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California is pushing
Senate Bill 751, which goes beyond her state's law requiring companies
to notify consumers of unauthorized access to paper caches and
encrypted files.

"The senator has been working on ID theft for over five years. She
thought that not just California should have this right. The recent
database breaches really underscore the need for this kind of
legislation," says Scott Gerber, the senator's spokesman.

Representatives from credit-card companies disagree that such steps
are needed. J.P. Morgan Chase, for example, has stated that
cardholders will not be contacted unless the firm believes they are
victims of, or highly susceptible to, fraud.

Credit card companies say they are trying to stave off unneeded
panic. And costs are an issue as well; if a new card costs $3 to
create, 40 million cancelled cards would cost $12 billion to replace.

The next phase: prevention

For Mr. Rotenberg, bills like Feinstein's come too late to help many
ID theft victims. "We also want to focus on the question of how do you
reduce the breaches before they take place," he says.

So do some lawmakers. This year, Sens. Charles Schumer (D) of New York
and Bill Nelson (D) of Florida introduced the Comprehensive Identity
Theft Prevention Act. Among that bills' provisions: the establishment
of an Office of Identity Theft within the Federal Trade Commission,
and provisions that "data merchants" establish authentication,
tracking, and safeguarding processes for third parties that want to
access personal information.

The bill also has language on notifying consumers of database
break-ins. All put together, the legislation could create a nightmare
for credit-card companies: In a case like CardSystems, fines are
slapped down by the federal government and customers across the nation
ask for credit report freezes, which keeps consumers from opening new
credit accounts.

Critics warn that such laws could hold unintended consequences for
consumers.

"This should be about meeting consumer expectations," said Eric
Ellman, director of government relations for the Consumer Data
Industry Association, testifying against credit-report freezes in
Massachusetts. In emergency situations where credit is crucial, frozen
reports would slow access to funds, he says. In addition, obstacles to
credit would deter companies from pushing promotional deals, like 10
percent discount cards.

But state lawmakers were skeptical. "It seems there's a very
paternalistic theme to those comments, which is 'We know what's best
for consumers,'" said Massachusetts state Rep William M. Straus.

He said the issue should be turned over to the victims of ID theft:
"Would they trade a 10 percent discount from Sears for everything
they've been through?"

Copyright 2005 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.

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

From: Stephen Leahy <wired@telecom-digest.org> 
Subject: Fraud Roshambo: Paper Beats RFID
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 01:28:12 -0500


By Stephen Leahy

Fingerprints aren't just for fingers anymore. Now, they could be an
important new tool for fighting document forgery.

All paper, as well as plastic credit and debit cards, bears a unique
"fingerprint" of microscopic surface imperfections. According to
Russell Cowburn, professor of nanotechnology at Imperial College
London, detecting these unique patterns is easy to do with a portable
laser scanner.  

And it's cheap, too: "Our field scanners could be
manufactured for $1,000 or less (when made) in volume," said Cowburn.

The detection process makes use of the optical phenomenon known as
laser speckle. Light coming from a focused laser is coherent, or in
phase, but when it strikes a microscopically rough surface like a
piece of paper, the light is scattered, producing a pattern of light
and dark "speckles." The scanner's photodetectors digitize and record
this pattern.

According to Cowburn's research, as published July 28 in the journal
Nature, the unique speckle pattern of a sheet of paper remains
recognizable even after crunching the paper into a ball, soaking it in
water, baking it at 180 degrees Celsius (350 degrees Fahrenheit) for
30 minutes, scrubbing it with an abrasive cleaning pad or scribbling
over it with a big black marker.

A cross-correlation algorithm that assesses the degree of similarity
between the base-line scan and the new scan allows the paper's
identity to be verified. The odds of two pieces of paper having
similar patterns are greater than 1,000 to one.

These fingerprints raise the possibility of securing documents without
resorting to controversial solutions like RFID tags. In the future,
every passport, driver's license and birth certificate could be
scanned for its unique speckle pattern by the issuing agency. Portable
scanners at border crossings or police stations would read the pattern
on the document in question and match it to the baseline database. A
standard desktop PC could check 10 million entries per second.

This could put document forgers around the world out of business. 
"There is no known manufacturing process for copying surface
imperfections at the necessary level of precision," said Cowburn.

"The beauty of this system is that there is no need to modify the item
being protected in any way with tags, chips or inks," he said.

But it's still not foolproof. This sort of security would not have
prevented the 9/11 terrorists from obtaining their legal Virginia
driver's licenses with false information, said Nick Fadziewicz, an
expert on security at Comter Systems. Eleven of the terrorists
successfully obtained those licenses using false information. Many
states, including Virginia, now have much tougher requirements.

"There is no one solution for security," said Fadziewicz. "The goal is
to put in enough strong security measures to minimize the (potential)
to create fake documents."

It's also important to balance a security system's benefits with its
costs and any resulting inconvenience to the general public, he said.

Other attempts to secure documents like passports have met with
controversy. Many have likened the State Department's plan to embed
RFID chips in all new passports this year to installing homing devices
for high-tech muggers, identity thieves and even terrorists. Unauthor-
ized persons could read or "skim" the information from the RFID chip
and obtain personal data.

In late June, the State Department announced that new passports will 
have a metallic lining to prevent unauthorized reading of the tags.

Bill Scannell, a publicist and civil liberties activist, strongly
opposes RFID technology on privacy and other grounds. He said document
identification using speckle patterns has the advantage of not
collecting or broadcasting personal information. But there may be
issues regarding on-the-ground implementation and overall cost.

"We're spending billions on new, ever-more-complex security technology
 ... At what point does this become stupid?"

Copyright 2005, Lycos, Inc.  Lycos is a registered trademark of
Carnegie Mellon University.

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: Brian Bergstein <ap@telecom-digest.org> 
Subject: Analysts Say ATM Systems Highly Vulnerable 
Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 01:25:44 -0500


By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer

By failing to scan security codes in the magnetic strips on ATM and
debit cards, many banks are letting thieves get away with an
increasingly common fraud at a cost of several billion dollars a year.

A report Tuesday from Gartner Inc., a technology analyst firm,
estimates that 3 million U.S. consumers were victims of ATM and
debit-card fraud in the past year.

The fraud most commonly begins when a criminal engages in "phishing" --
sending a legitimate-seeming e-mail with a link to a phony Web site that
appears to belong to a consumer's bank, Gartner analyst Avivah Litan
believes. The e-mail recipients are asked to give their account
information, including PIN numbers.

With that information "harvested," fraudsters can make their own cards
for automated teller machines and withdraw huge sums.

This should be easily preventable, because the magnetic strips on
cards contain multiple tracks. One track has data such as the user's
name and account number. A second track contains special security
codes that card users don't know. That means the information can't be
squeezed out of them in a phishing attack.

Duplicating the codes would require inside knowledge of a bank's
security procedures, Litan said. (The inclusion of another kind of
security codes in records held by a credit and debit card processor,
CardSystems Solutions Inc., made that company's massive data breach
disclosed this spring especially dangerous.)

Surprisingly, Litan said, perhaps half of U.S. financial institutions
have not programmed their ATM systems to check the security codes. Con
artists specifically seek out customers of banks that do not validate
the second track on the strip, she said.

Litan believes many banks simply didn't know about the vulnerability.
Others may have once scanned the codes but stopped because using the
codes requires that customers go to a bank and have an ATM card
rewritten whenever they want to change their PINs.

That was a costly step that many banks figured they could avoid in
pre-phishing days when ATM fraud was rare.

"It's not negligence," Litan said. "It's just kind of being asleep at
the wheel when business is running smoothly, and then you get hit."

Gartner estimates that annual losses from ATM fraud total $2.75
billion, or $900 per incident. Most of that is covered by the
financial institutions that issued the hacked cards, but consumers
sometimes have to struggle with bounced checks and other
inconveniences when a criminal raids a bank account.

Although fixing the security hole is straightforward, it might not
solve everything.

One of the codes is only three digits, meaning hackers can use
brute-force attacks -- trying every possible combination -- over some
online systems. Litan advises banks to lengthen the codes on newly
issued cards.

A separate report Tuesday by the corporate services unit at
International Business Machines Corp. noted a surge in Internet
attacks that facilitate bank fraud, including phishing and the
surreptitious installation of keystroke-logging programs that copy
what a computer user types.

Network monitoring by IBM and other organizations led IBM to determine
that, in the first half of this year, criminals sent 35 million
e-mails designed to steal financial data.

Criminals are increasingly engaging in "spear phishing," a targeted
attack at a specific person or organization known to be vulnerable,
IBM security analyst Jeremy Kelley said. That makes the phishers
harder to detect and shut down.

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press.


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.



[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Phishing has indeed gotten much, much
worse in the past year or so. There have been some days I have
received a hundred phish things on PayPal in a single day. At one time
I was batching them up (five, ten or twenty at a time in the day's 
incoming email) and sending them off to 'spoof@paypal.com'. I would
specifically read through the 'source' on an HTML message looking for
the real sender. 

For example, the source code will often times do a pretty good
imitation of PayPal, and give a URL to go to for doing the 'required'
updates in order to have your account 'unrestricted' once again, which
looks something like 
http://somewhere.com/cgi-bin/something/www.paypal.com "Security Team"
or some such nonsense. I was taking several of these incoming mails
all at one time, putting them in a larger cover letter and sending
them on to 'spoof@paypal.com'. PayPal kept asking me to please forward
'any I recieved'; so if I got fifty in a day, which was typical, I
would send all fifty. 

All I would ever get back from PayPal was an auto-ack saying "thanks
for passing it along; our review shows it is not a bonafide PayPal
page, we will deal with it. If you gave any personal information to 
that site, you may get trouble." I had a stack of those auto-acks from
Paypal almost as large as the collection of spoofs I would mail them
each day; I do not see where it ever did any good; the 'spoofs' just
contine, unabated, so I finally quit sending them in, as I have better
things to do also. They _claim_ they shut those sites down but I do
not see any progress at it. Maybe they are like many netters, and
'horrified' at the prospect of shutting down an offensive web site. 
Maybe they figure like a lot of netters that if they shut down those
jackals they 'may get sued', etc. Who knows, maybe PayPal bought into
that line of malarkey also.   PAT]

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

From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com
Subject: Today's Long Distance Circuits?
Date: 2 Aug 2005 14:10:34 -0700


This came up before but perhaps things changed.

I call, say Wilmington Delaware to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  How and who
is the call physically routed and connected between the two cities?
What about a shorter call, say Harrisburg PA to Erie PA (a few hundred
miles)?

By how, I mean what physical medium is chosen and how is it routed.
Do they use satellite, microwave, fibre optic, coax, plain wire?  Are
there direct routes or must it go to intermediate switching centers
and transferred there?  What happens if the primary circuits are busy
 -- do they go to a lot of trouble to reroute or just cut me off?  Does
AT&T still have a big network control center in Bedminster?  Does
anyone even have such control centers or are they not needed anymore?

By whom I mean does my designated long distance carrier actually
physically carry the call or do they merely sublet to someone else who
actually owns the wires to where I'm going.  Who manages the switching
centers?  I suspect a heck of a lot of long distance traffic is
carried by someone other than the designated carrier.

Thanks!

[public replies please]

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

From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com
Subject: Re: Bell System and GTE Telephone Operator?
Date: 2 Aug 2005 13:54:25 -0700


> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I do know that in Chicago in years
> past, Illinois Bell's largest customer was the City of Chicago itself,

Would you know if years ago the city's telephone system, such as
street callboxes that cops once used, phones in police and fire
stations, and phones in any city owned utilities were Bell Telephones
or a private city network?

When CTA took over the L lines after the war, were the L lines under
one owner or still under individual owners?  I'd dare say they had
private telephone networks.  (Your Skokie Swift L stop was unique in
that it was relatively new, built after the old North Shore Line closed
down.)


[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I think the call boxes were city owned;
police and fire stations had Bell telephone lines and PAX type
(privately owned) phones as well. Eventually the PAX phone system in
the various police stations disappeared along with all the Bell System
_phone numbers_ in each location as they all got converted over to
the 312-PIG centrex system. 

The Chicago Transit Atrocity -- oops, I mean 'Authority' was formed by 
an act of the Illinois Legislature in 1947 as a independent government
in its own right (_not a government agency, but an actual government_)
when the Chicago City Council in an extraordinary act of greed decided
to 'municipalize' (a nice sounding word which means government
sanctioned theft) the four existing elevated (and the time, one)
subway lines. The subway _tunnel_ remains under city ownership, while
the trains belong to the 'government' known as CTA. The four owners
of the elevated trains were 'Lake Street Elevated Company', the
'Jackson Park Elevated Railway Company', the Union Loop Company, and
the Chicago Rapid Transit Company. In the 1930's, two other elevated
train companies ('Commercial' and one whose name I have forgotten but
which ran east and west from 40th and Indiana Street to about 40th and
Halstead Streets (maybe the 'Stock Yards Transit Company') were merged
into the old Milwaukee Avenue elevated train. Eventually the
southermost part of 'Commercial' was renamed the Douglas Park branch
and the northernmost part of 'Commercial' was abandoned, but they 
still maintain those tracks; it is the only way for trains to get
transferred for service from the north/south line and the Ravenwoood/
Ohare lines; send them over the old 'Commercial' tracks. 'Stock Yards'
on the other hand was totally abandoned after the second war. I am
sure all those companies had private phone service via Illinois Bell. 
PAT]

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

Date: Wed, 03 Aug 2005 01:33:46 +0100
From: Paul Coxwell <paulcoxwell@tiscali.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Bell System and GTE Telephone Operator?


> Historically, there wasn't much of a career path for a telephone
> operator.  Often young women took the job for a few years until they
> got married or had kids, and then they quit.  Some returned after the
> kids were grown.  A few would get promoted to be supervisors.  Others
> would leave and get jobs as PBX operators -- almost all large PBX
> installations required an operator to be "Bell trained" and have Bell
> Telephone experience to get hired.

That's pretty much how it was in the days of the old state-run GPO
Telephones in Britain too.  As I understand it (I wasn't born until
1966), it was pretty much just expected that any younger girl who got
married would leave.

In a similar way to "Bell trained,", an operator who was "GPO trained"
was often regarded as the best available for a large PBX.

About 8 or 9 years ago the BBC produced a drama show -- "The Hello
Girls" -- set in a typical telephone exchange in the late 1950s/early
1960s.  The show ran for only two very short seasons, but received
many favorable comments from those who had worked in GPO exchanges of
that era for the way it captured the atmosphere so well.  (It might be
available on tape or DVD, I'm not sure.)

> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Traditional Bell had a habit of always
> using an 'X' to mean 'e(X)change', as in PBX (P)rivate (B)ranch
> e(X)change, FX as in (F)oreign E(X)change, and PAX as (P)rivate
> (A)utomatic e(X)change.

This use of "X" was also widespread by the British GPO.  There was the
whole group of varying terms for a private branch exchange: PBX, PABX or
PAX, PMBX, etc.

There was the old UAX -- (U)nit (A)utomatic e(X)change -- series of
small Strowger step-by-step systems which were the mainstay of village
and rural telephone service at one time.

Electronic switching systems became known as TXE, for (T)elephone
e(X)change (E)lectronic.  Crossbar offices were designated TXK,
although how they got the "K" is anybody;s guess.

-Paul.

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

From: hancock4@bbs.cpcn.com
Subject: Re: Personal Opinion Telegram and Mailgram - Discontinuance?
Date: 2 Aug 2005 14:02:30 -0700


Jim Haynes wrote:

> You can still send a telegram, according to www.westernunion.com

Yes, but the Opiniongram was a discounted service, much cheaper than a
regular telegram (IIRC, 90c vs $5 years ago).

I feel a traditional letter gets more attention than an email because
(1) a letter has a physical presence instead of fleeting bits on a
screen, and (2) the recipient knows you went to the trouble of writing
and mailing it while an email is easy to knock off en masse.  However,
writing to Washington today may be bad because letters are secured
before delivery and they can be seriously delayed.

> I guess you can still send a Mailgram; somebody sent me one last year.

Yes, today's WU website does have them, but under business services.
I think you have to send them in volume and they're not available for
an individual to use as before.  Also, I wonder if there is still a
printer in a post office for fast delivery, or is this basically an
ordinary first class letter in a mailgram envelope.

WU has some interesting services, but I noticed they left the price
off most of them (a telegram is $15).  They have a deposit debit card
but the transaction fee wasn't given, as well as quick payment (but
unknown fee).  I think if I searched deeper I'd get the fee, but I
didn't want to waste time.  Some of these services can be pretty
expensive to use.

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

From: Pete Romfh <promfhTAKE@OUThal-pc.org.invalid>
Subject: Re: AUDIX Message to Two Mailboxes
Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2005 20:50:12 -0500
Organization: Not Organized


stewartmcewen@hotmail.com wrote:

> Hi Everyone,

> I wondered if anyone could let me know of a way of having
> a message delivered to two mailboxes at once on the audix
> system.

> I have a client who have a small office and they wish for
> the two directors to be able to pick up each others
> voicemail.

> I have tried to explain that you can change to a
> different mailbox my doing **7,once logged in, and then
> enter the extension details.

> But the problem is we have just migrated from call
> express where the option was straight forward (simple
> check box) and a copy of the message was saved in each
> mailbox.

> Of course as it was available before, the client wishes
> it available now ... sigh!

> Anyone out there know if this is possible? I have checked
> the Avaya documentation and done a search on the web, but
> no joy.

> Thanks a great deal in advance.

> Regards,

> Stewart

Look into Enhance List Administration. It's an add on feature from
Avaya and it adds a "store & forward" feature to a mailbox. It's
intended for distribution lists (of up to 1500 entries) but would work
for this application as well. I used it on a CEO's mailbox to send a
copy of everything he received to his secretary and a backup
mailbox. The backup was in case a message got inadvertently deleted.

Pete Romfh, Telecom Geek & Amateur Gourmet.
promfh at hal dash pc dot org

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


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Visit http://www.mstm.okstate.edu and take the next step in your
career with a Master of Science in Telecommunications Management
(MSTM) degree from Oklahoma State University (OSU). This 35
credit-hour interdisciplinary program is designed to give you the
skills necessary to manage telecommunications networks, including
data, video, and voice networks.

The MSTM degree draws on the expertise of the OSU's College
of Business Administration; the College of Arts and Sciences; and the
College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology. The program has
state-of-the-art lab facilities on the Stillwater and Tulsa campus
offering hands-on learning to enhance the program curriculum.  Classes
are available in Stillwater, Tulsa, or through distance learning.

Please contact Jay Boyington for additional information at
405-744-9000, mstm-osu@okstate.edu, or visit the MSTM web site at
http://www.mstm.okstate.edu

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End of TELECOM Digest V24 #351
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