On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, Sean Donelan wrote: > > On Sat, 10 Apr 2004, Scott Call wrote: > > While both the Telco and ISP are communications services, they are > > completely different beasts in the abuse department (as well as support, > > provisioning, billing, etc) > > http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/dailystar/17393.php > Overseas scam artists have hijacked a telephone relay system for deaf > people and turned phone operators in Tucson and nationwide into > full-time facilitators of fraud.
This is an interesting abuse of government mandated resources, but again the scale and rapidity of it are nothing compared to the scale and rapidity of spam/scam/zombie/virus stuff we have to deal with. My point was that my $20 GE telephone cannot be made into a liability for my telephone provider without my explicit participation, whereas a $20 a month dialup (or $50 a month DSL, etc) customer can be a liability for me just by being turned on. Can people abuse the phone system? yes, of course it can, but the criteria for response are much higher, and in general the nature of the network (low concurrent session limit, point to point, voice only) as it is exposed to most people limits the damage that can be casually incurred. -S -S
