News Items (Spring, 1998) ------------------------- New York City's new area codes are on hold until a resolution is worked out with the FCC on what appears to be a really stupid rule. This rule requires all residents of an area with an overlay code (that is, an area code that coexists with another area code in the exact same area) to dial eleven digits (1+area code+number) even when the number is in the same area code. Supposedly this has something to do with fairness although nobody we could find was able to figure out how deliberately adding an inconvenience makes anything fair. But then, we have trouble figuring out anything the FCC is involved in. Incidentally, New York's new area codes will be 646 (an overlay with 212) and 347 (an overlay with 718). ------------- It's really starting to get pretty ridiculous. The newest alternative carrier came to us in a letter from the Binary Brothers (1 and 0, don't ask) announcing the "Dime Line" - 10 cent a minute calls anytime. Of course, the call has to be a minimum of three minutes, which means a five second call will cost you 30 cents. And, of course, you have to pay them $5 a month for the privilege. And, just to add a little confusion, every other call is half price, as long as it doesn't go over 10 minutes. We have no idea what happens if it does. But the real milestone here is the carrier access code itself - it's one of the new seven digit ones. VarTec Telecom says, in all seriousness, "Just dial 1010- 811+1+area code+the number you wish to call." 18 digits to make a phone call. But the thing that is guaranteed is that if you pick up your phone just once this month and dial those 18 digits and stay on the line for a single second, it will cost you $5.30. Plus tax. ----------- The FCC, in an alliance with sheer greed, has agreed to charge 28.4 cents to owners of toll-free numbers for every call made to them from a pay phone. Now let's think about this. Toll-free numbers? Aren't they supposed to be, well, toll-free? The cost of the call is already being paid for by the person who owns the number, right? So what exactly is this extra fee for? Well, it seems some sleazoid pay phone owners are getting all pissed off because people use their phones to call toll-free numbers. They've already managed to disable incoming calls because they can't charge people for those. Now they've figured out a way to charge people for something they have no business making money from. After all, there is no wear and tear on the phone from dialing a tollfree call. The local phone company certainly doesn't charge them anything for making such a call. So the only thing they can gripe about is the fact that while someone is making a toll-free call, someone else isn't making a toll call. Great, but when was the last time you ever saw a line at a COCOT? People avoid these things because they're so overpriced! OK, not all of them, but enough to tarnish the entire industry. And this kind of a move does nothing to fix their reputation. Now companies are blocking pay phones from accessing their toll-free lines. Calling card and collect rates have gone up to cover this new charge. People are using pay phones less now. And confusion reigns. One thing that has become clearer is the fact that the FCC doesn't really care. ------------- According to the SonntagsZeitung newspaper in Switzerland, Swiss police have been secretly tracking the whereabouts of GSM phone users using a telephone company computer that records billions of movements going back more than six months. Officials at Swisscom (the government-run phone company) confirmed this but swear they only used the information in court orders. According to the paper, "Swisscom has stored data on the movements of more than a million mobile phone users. It can call up the location of all its mobile subscribers down to a few hundred meters and going back at least half a year." There are 3,000 base stations across the country that are used to track the location of mobile phones as soon as they're switched on. Many people think this only works when they're actually having conversations. In this country, we do no such thing naturally. However, by October 1, 2001, it will be mandatory for users of these phones to be trackable to within 410 feet. And on a GSM-related note, that uncrackable encryption scheme that all of the GSM companies use? Cracked in April by the Smartcard Developer Association. According to Marc Briceno, director of the organization of researcher/hackers, the scheme would have been a lot more secure if it hadn t been kept so secret. "As shown so many times in the past" he said, "a design process conducted in secret and without public review will invariably lead to an insecure system. Here we have yet another example of how security by obscurity is no security at all." In addition, evidence of possible deliberate weakening of the encryption scheme was uncovered. George Schmitt, president of Omnipoint, the New York area GSM company said, "My hat goes off to these guys, they did some great work. I'll give them credit, but we're not at any risk of fraud." The next day Omnipoint announced that it was changing its mathematical formulas for identifying phones. Here's a story we knew was coming. William McCray of East Palo Alto, California has been sentenced to 28 years to life in prison for stealing and reprogramming cellular phones. That's right, life for reprogramming cellular phones! California has this thing called the three strikes law, which enables prosecutors to get extremely stiff penalties against criminals with two prior felony convictions. While this guy had a couple of violent convictions in the past, this one wasn't. And the law doesn't say that violence is a prerequisite. It doesn't take a psychic to see where this is heading.