The Telecom Digest
Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Copyright © 2022 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.
Volume 41 Table of Contents Issue 216
BREAKING: Supreme Court To Review Broad Immunity For Big Tech
Prison Calls and California
Re: The U.S. Is Behind on Mobile Payments, But We're Catching Up
Re: Callcentric service still blocked
Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.2210031429060.29931@panix1.panix.com> Date: 3 Oct 2022 14:29:46 +0000 From: "danny burstein" <dannyb@panix.com> Subject: BREAKING: Supreme Court To Review Broad Immunity For Big Tech Subject: BREAKING: Supreme Court To Review Broad Immunity For Big Tech The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to reconsider the broad legal immunity afforded to internet companies under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, taking up a request to revive a suit against Google over its Youtube unit's alleged aiding of the 2015 Paris terror attacks. Law360
Message-ID: <9d2366e5-0fdc-74b4-f7f0-82db1e91ccf8@panix.com> Date: 4 Oct 2022 12:18:05 -0400 From: "David" <wb8foz@panix.com> Subject: Prison Calls and California On Thursday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill that makes phone calls from California's prisons free of charge. The new law places the cost of calls not on incarcerated people - or the people receiving calls from them - but on the state's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. California is the second state after Connecticut and the biggest state by far to institute such a law, which is a direct shot at the $1.4 billion prison telecom industry. For years prison telecom companies have maintained rates that “can be unjustly and unreasonably high, thereby impeding the ability of inmates and their loved ones to maintain vital connections,” the FCC said in 2020. ... https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/california-free-prison-calls Long overdue, in my view. The courts & FCC just exposed a massive scam by GTL, a big player in the field. They had assimilated $121 million from inactive accounts. The CT/CA approach cuts the head off the monster. Every study has shown that isolating inmates from their family and friends increases the recidivism rate, and THAT costs us all. ************************** Moderator's Note ************************** "Every study" is a bit too broad for my comfort, but I'll agree that GTL should not be taking money that doesn't belong to it. I've written before about the extraordinary costs of doing work in prisons, and those costs still remain, but GTL has crossed a line if these allegations are true. Bill Horne Full Disclosure: GTL owns the company I used to work for.
Message-ID: <thhpfr$8cm$1@usenet.csail.mit.edu> Date: 4 Oct 2022 17:11:23 -0000 From: "Garrett Wollman" <wollman@bimajority.org> Subject: Re: The U.S. Is Behind on Mobile Payments, But We're Catching Up In article <Esr_K.532286$Ny99.380632@fx16.iad>, Michael Trew <michael.trew@att.net> wrote: > I believe that is also related to your region. I've heard from > west-coast friends that mobile-payments are more common out their way. > In the mid-west (eastern Ohio), I very rarely see such a thing. "Mobile payments" use the same EMV ("Europay, Mastercard, Visa"[1]) near-field communications technology as tap-to-pay credit cards, which nearly all banks are issuing now. It's probably possible for a merchant to buy a payment terminal that doesn't support NFC but any new point-of-sale installation is going to include it. That doesn't mean that the banks don't put barriers in the way of enabling mobile "wallets" like Apple/google/Samsung Pay. For example, my credit union contracts out its credit card business to a bank called Elan, and while they're perfectly happy to issue me a contactless credit card, they make it a hassle to enroll that card in Google Pay -- you can't use the on-device enrollment flow, you have to speak to a customer-service representative on the phone and get an authorization code. Many people presumably just give up at this point. -GAWollman [1] Europay merged with Mastercard about 20 years ago, but at the time the standard for "chip and pin" payments was being promulgated in Europe, those three companies were the major card networks in Europe, and name has stuck even though the company no longer exists. --
Garrett A. Wollman
wollman@bimajority.org
Opinions not shared by
my employers.
"Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can,
act to remove constraint from the future. This is
a thing you can do, are able to do, to do together."
- Graydon Saunders, A Succession of Bad Days (2015)

Message-ID: <bIydnVwVUPoaV6b-nZ2dnZfqn_th4p2d@giganews.com> Date: 4 Oct 2022 05:54:15 +0000 From: "Doug McIntyre" <merlyn@dork.geeks.org> Subject: Re: Callcentric service still blocked Bill Horne <malassimilaQRMtion@gmail.com> writes: > I had never heard of "Cee-Gee-NAT" until Zito Media took over the > local Cable TV & Internet provider: I was surprised that anyone would > want to implement any more "NAT" solutions, especially with IPv4 IP > addresses going for princely sums while IPv6 addresses are practically > free. But thats exactly why ISPs implement Carrier Grade NAT, because the new guard that has formed (after the old guard let everything drop and rot) don't have the IPv4 resources needed to serve every customer, and they've done that math that buying a big box to do CGNAT and hide everybody behind the tiny pool of IPv4 addresses they have is cheaper than buying enough IPv4 addresses to handle their customer needs in the traditional sense (well, at least since the rise of NAT and hiding all onprem networks behind the single IP NAT gateway came about, not the original intent of the internet of pure peer-to-peer network from any node to any node, because only IPv6 can make that model work again. If they can provide "good enough" service to 99% of the customers, thats all they are going to do. They aren't trying to serve all customers with all services that they expect, or at least they may fool themselves that nobody needs all services, just the limited set that their big CGNAT box can do. -- Doug McIntyre doug@themcintyres.us
End of The Telecom Digest for Wed, 05 Oct 2022
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