RE: How to Stop Telemarketers...
Adam Stenseth wrote: Just for my own edification, does this apply to landline service as well(or other government-sanctioned monopolies)? For example, are your calling habits and landline number assets of your phone company? Many of them seem to think so. Yes, they are. Just as the details of your credit card transactions are the property of the credit card company. Which is why your detailed transaction records, including your name, are available for sale from your credit company to anybody that wants to buy thousands of them. --Lucky
Re: How to Stop Telemarketers...
Technological solutions are preferable over statist solutions (which don't usually even work, as the statists write the rules and exempt themselves and their friends). Ya know Tim May, you say a lotta crazy shit but every now and then you say something that really makes some sense. (Suspiciously like Choate...) _ Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail
Re: If this be terrorism make the most of it!
On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 10:56:14AM -0800, Morlock Elloi wrote: But we will always have phone booths and acoustic couplers. Not around Boston. I got attacked by a script kiddie with the kloged trojan on Thanksgiving morning at 5 AM and had occasion to need to make a couple of out of state calls related to cleaning up the mess.. So I tried the nearest phone booth. Put the money in and dialed the number - got a reorder. So I tried 12 more phone booths (mostly in a cluster of 8) and got we are unable to complete your call as dialed - please check the number and try again or ask your operator for assistance. The phones that did not provide this message all gave reorders or no ringback (silence). So out of 12-14 payphones I tried at 5 locations including the fancy public library in the wealthiest town in Mass I was able to find none that would connect an out of state coin call (versus credit card or prepaid card calls). Several would connect local coin calls - I checked. I did verify that this was not related to the numbers I was dialling, trying various random out of state (and out of LATA) numbers gave the same exact results. Thus it seems that at least around the wealthy Boston suburbs they have already made it impossible to make a long distance coin call, and one presumes this is for obvious reasons... We are closer to the police state that everyone fears than we know -- Dave Emery N1PRE, [EMAIL PROTECTED] DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass. PGP fingerprint = 2047/4D7B08D1 DE 6E E1 CC 1F 1D 96 E2 5D 27 BD B0 24 88 C3 18
RE: Build It Rolling Your Own Tivo (fwd)
Jamie Lawrence wrote: Jim, you post enough crap from Slashdot to know differently. People are doing it. I have a whitebox machine (AMD, 256M ram, cheap TV card, 20G disk, $300 a year ago) that does it. It isn't a big deal. Speaking of posting crap...and don't send me private email. Don't worry about me sending private email in the future... You're not only a complete idiot, but you're rude as fuck as well. It never ceases to amaze me that there are subscribers to this list that don't have Choate filtered. This must be some weird list to read without a Choate procmail filter... --Lucky, who probably should go back to filtering on Choate in the body text of emails, not just in the headers. I didn't even need to see that email.
Re: Build It Rolling Your Own Tivo (fwd)
At 11:38 PM 12/06/2002 -0600, Jim Choate wrote: You should have tried this back in the late 80's with a single frame VHS recorder and an Amiga Video Toaster...one frame at a time, thank god for AREXX ;) If you were actually using the Video Toaster, and not just the Amiga's CPU, you had what passed for a really hefty amount of CPU-equivalent back then, because the video crunching happened in the Toaster card, not in the Amiga itself. The Amiga had enough work to do just storing the compressed video onto a disk...
Re: How to Stop Telemarketers...
On Saturday, December 7, 2002, at 06:20 PM, Lucky Green wrote: Harmon Seaver wrote: Tim mentioned cell phones and the lack of telemarketing calls on his, but really that's only because, at this point at least, the cellphone number lists haven't been sold. This might change in the near future, as several wireless providers have been considering selling their subscriber lists. It's hard to see how they could do this, however, since, unlike landline calls -- annoying enough -- spam calls to your cellphone would cost *you* money. Given this fact, one wonders why the cell phone providers have not yet made the list available for download by anybody. Well, they'll figure it out in due time. Someone will, but as an act of vengeance against their bosses. Or a rival cellphone company that doesn't charge for incoming calls (airtime) and hence have no incentive to promote incoming calls. Why this counterintuitive effect? The golden goose effect. If customers of Sprint or Verizon, etc., are being bombarded by incoming spam calls, some of them will switch off their phones completely, will switch to services with no incoming call fees, or, in some cases, will stop using cellphones altogether. (And some fraction will call their cellphone companies and demand their number be changed, make threats, cause PR hassles, etc.) This makes it unwise for anyone to leak the numbers...unless they wish to embarass the companies or drive business to no-incoming-fees providers. --Tim May Ben Franklin warned us that those who would trade liberty for a little bit of temporary security deserve neither. This is the path we are now racing down, with American flags fluttering.-- Tim May, on events following 9/11/2001
Re: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures Of Vice President'S Hotel
On Sat, 7 Dec 2002, Tim May wrote: Frankly, millions of these fascists need a simple solution: a tree, a horse, and a rope. There aren't enough horses :-) Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike
Re: How to Stop Telemarketers...
On Sat, Dec 07, 2002 at 06:20:02PM -0800, Lucky Green wrote: Harmon Seaver wrote: Tim mentioned cell phones and the lack of telemarketing calls on his, but really that's only because, at this point at least, the cellphone number lists haven't been sold. This might change in the near future, as several wireless providers have been considering selling their subscriber lists. It's hard to see how they could do this, however, since, unlike landline calls -- annoying enough -- spam calls to your cellphone would cost *you* money. Given this fact, one wonders why the cell phone providers have not yet made the list available for download by anybody. Well, they'll figure it out in due time. Why would they do that, any more than the landlines would release unpublished numbers, since that's what cell numbers are now? And I'm sure there would be tremendous demand for them to a) not charge for incoming calls, or b) start filtering for spammers. But I imagine there'd be no small number (or rather a large class action) of suits for releasing unpublished numbers if the cell company did it deliberately. And if it were leaked, they'd just be forced to change them all. I seriously doubt very many would put up with having their precious minutes wasted by spammers. Especially those who have already given up their landlines altogether to be rid of the hassles. -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com
Not as simple as it looks - Re: Build It Rolling Your Own Tivo(fwd)
An example from my day yesterday... I have two 'cheap boxes', one from nation wide chain store (who sells things other than high tech and appliances, a wall to wall mart if you will) and one from a local Austin vendor. The behavior was checked against multiple instances of boxes so we know it isn't a single bad box. Each machine has all the normal stuff, 1G of RAM, 2x80G HD. They also include an AGP video card, PCI video capture card (no tuner, commercial quality board), and a PCI 10/100M Ethernet. Running under Linux using various Open Source tools. We used different AGP and network cards to verify brand dependence. Different brand board for AGP or network made no difference. We couldn't try different video capture boards due to cost, we had a single board. One of the boxes works fine. The other drops frames if the network traffic gets too high or you really push the video board. It doesn't drop much, down to about 27fps from 30fps, but it drops. And at the same time you get digital aliasing [1], which is the real killer. Pull the AGP or network (usually the network because we like the pretty pictures) and all is fine (though w/o network it's a little annoying). Why? The interrupt controller on the slower box isn't up to it. I have a similar project under Plan 9 where I'm trying to take four of these cheap-ass television cards in a cheap-ass box and export them into a namespace so you could at least in principle watch television from just about anywhere. The video frame is limited to 320x200 (for several reasons I won't go into here). And those babies drop frames for this same reason. I will grant that video support on Plan 9 is down right pre-historic so some improvement may be gleaned from re-doing that (I hope so or else we'll drop this as infeasible at this level of tech). So, no, setting up a -quality- video capture system isn't easy or mundane on expensive systems and certainly not cheap boxes. But then again, you may not even notice the aliasing or dropped frames. That you don't notice the jitter or blocky display speaks to you, not the technology. Which is -not- to say it can't be done, I see from 3-5 of these sorts of systems a month built that work fine. But it does take time and effort, it is -not- plug and play. Also be prepared to tweak the television drivers for Linux since they are seldom optimal. [1] This is that 'blockish' effect you will see on a lot of television shows now because a lot of them are moving to non-linear video editor suites, it occurs when the conversion process stalls a bit in frame. It comes from the machine not being able to keep up and update the field completely so you'll get the even or odd field but not both. Clouds are a really good place to look for this effect. -- We don't see things as they are, [EMAIL PROTECTED] we see them as we are. www.ssz.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Anais Nin www.open-forge.org
Re: Build It Rolling Your Own Tivo (fwd)
On Sat, 7 Dec 2002, Jamie Lawrence wrote: On Sat, 07 Dec 2002, Lucky Green wrote: It never ceases to amaze me that there are subscribers to this list that don't have Choate filtered. This must be some weird list to read without a Choate procmail filter... Yes, my mistake. I've seen Choate devolve from a strange actor to a net.loon, and I should have known better. I thought an off-list hint might help, and that was my mistake. I promise never again to venture into Choate Prime. Yada yada yada...I'm still waiting for a reference where Godel equates 'undecidable' to 'incomplete' -- We don't see things as they are, [EMAIL PROTECTED] we see them as we are. www.ssz.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Anais Nin www.open-forge.org
Re: Photographer Arrested For Taking Pictures Of Vice President'S Hotel
jet wrote: At 20:48 -0500 2002/12/07, Myers W. Carpenter wrote: http://www.2600.com/news/display/display.shtml?id=1441 PHOTOGRAPHER ARRESTED FOR TAKING PICTURES OF VICE PRESIDENT'S HOTEL Posted 5 Dec 2002 06:03:48 UTC One major issue is these days, the laws have become so incredibly complicated that the average citizen isn't confident in their knowledge of the law, let alone most that enforce it. They know that the average citizen is going to want to 'do the right thing' and comply with any requests, whether or not any laws were broken. And let's face it, even if you or I know our rights to the letter it doesn't make a bit of difference until after the fact in a courtoom. Police generally won't sit and debate with you about it on the spot.
