Free Republic

Angry about how a highly profitable corporation like Verizon is threatening hundreds of layoffs, telephone union leaders and some potentially laid off workers held an unprecedented briefing with the staffs of five members of Congress and both Massachusetts senators. The meeting was convened in Senator Kennedy's office at the Boston Federal Building and was attended by leaders of all the Massachusetts IBEW telephone workers' unions. "Despite being a very profitable corporation, Verizon announced it wants to cut 8,000 jobs nationally and as many as 500 jobs in Massachusetts," said Myles Calvey, Business Manager of Local 2222 and Chairman of the...

YAKIMA, Wash. -- One of the most remote communities in the lower 48 states is finally set to get phone service. The National Park Service is allowing a small telephone company to use public land to bring service to Stehekin, about 100 miles northeast of Seattle in the Lake Chelan National Recreation Area. Stehekin has about 80 year-round residents and is reachable only by boat, float plane or a several-day hike through the wilderness. The phone company, WeavTel, has been pursuing a chance to install telephone service there for years, despite opposition from some residents who don't want it. A...

I went to a wedding in a big church out in the Sandhills of Nebraska this morning, but before leaving on the long drive, I got all set up in the usual standard customary blue three-piece pin-striped suit, when I suddenly remembered something. There was a bonfire on Skins's island the other day, where the primitives were talking about cellular telephones, and Playboy Pedro mentioned that some time ago at a wedding party, he had gotten drunk and dunked his cellular telephone into the wedding punch. Never mind that Playboy Pedro is circa three decades too old for such nonsense;...

The celebrated openness of the Internet -- network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic -- is quietly losing powerful defenders. Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers. At risk is a principle known as network neutrality: Cable and phone companies that operate the data pipelines are supposed to treat all traffic...

Bookmaestro and I have managed to recruit few a dozen friends to make hundreds of calls for the McCain campaign. It is actually quite easy to do from your own home and does not require travel to a 'call bank' by going to: www.johnmccain.com/dashboard You can make a hugh =) difference. A short script provided by the campaign (which you can improve on over time) makes this easy. The McCain site provides the numbers to call and you provide the time. At the end of the call you can quickly note how the call went, which will no doubt help...

Ministers are considering spending up to £12 billion on a database to monitor and store the internet browsing habits, e-mail and telephone records of everyone in Britain. GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping centre, has already been given up to £1 billion to finance the first stage of the project. Hundreds of clandestine probes will be installed to monitor customers live on two of the country’s biggest internet and mobile phone providers - thought to be BT and Vodafone. BT has nearly 5m internet customers. Ministers are braced for a backlash similar to the one caused by their ID cards programme. Dominic...

LEBANON'S new telecommunications minister has accused Israel of bombarding Lebanese people with threatening phone calls, a day after a controversial prisoner swap between Israel and Hezbollah. "Hundreds of people throughout Lebanon received threatening phone calls on their landlines from Israel,'' Gibran Bassil said overnight. "The phone would ring, the person would answer and they would hear a message saying, 'This is from the state of Israel. Abandon Hezbollah or there will be another war, like there was in 2006,''' he said. Mr Bassil, a member of the Free Patriotic Movement, the main Christian party in the Syrian-backed opposition, said he...

John McCain is holding a town hall meeting tonight. Nothing unusual, right? Except that this time, he’s holding the meeting by telephone. And who’s on the line? Possibly 50,000 registered Democrats and political independents who live in Democratic-heavy Palm Beach and Broward counties. The call from the Arizona senator will go out at 6:45 p.m.

Islamic law allows telephone nuptials, which enables Muslims to sponsor loved ones to Canada Long-distance telephone marriages can be dialled up under sharia law and then used to sponsor loved ones into Canada, Muslim leaders say. Two Muslim leaders have told the Toronto Sun telephone marriages are permissible under Islamic law and require two witnesses and imams here and abroad to conduct the vows, which may have the bride in Pakistan and the groom in Toronto. Once completed, a marriage certificate is obtained abroad legitimately in Muslim countries and can be used by the groom for sponsoring his new wife...

The upcoming FL presidential preference primary cannot come soon enough. My home phone is being spammed with junk taped telephone calls on behalf of Mitt Romney. We just received the third call in the last four hours on behalf of Romney. One call featured Bay Buchanan. another was Romney himself. My wife answered the third and hung up so quickly we don't know who recorded that tape. I accept that Gov Romney believes that he is in a tight race, but this is ridiculous. And, frankly, counter-productive. I really hate being spammed with junk phone calls in this fashion. And...

I am trying to hook a phone line into my DirecTV TIVO box. I have no phone plug in that room or the two adjoining rooms. I don't want to run a wire open from the back rooms to the TIVO box.Is there such a thing as a wireless phone plug. Anyone recommend a fix?

In late October I switched my VOIP phone service from Vonage to Verizon's Voice Wing. The reason was a few features not offered by Vonage and the price was the same as with Vonage. It took over a month and several phone calls to Vonage customer service before they would release my phone number to Verizon. They then put a block on my phone number, without telling me, so that my phone cannot be accessed by any Vonage customer. It took me several weeks and help from friends with Vonage service to figure out what Vonage had done. I called...

A new book claims to have definitive evidence of a long-suspected technological crime — that Alexander Graham Bell stole ideas for the telephone from a rival, Elisha Gray. In "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret," journalist Seth Shulman argues that Bell — aided by aggressive lawyers and a corrupt patent examiner — got an improper peek at patent documents Gray had filed, and that Bell was erroneously credited with filing first. Shulman believes the smoking gun is Bell's lab notebook, which was restricted by Bell's family until 1976, then digitized and made widely available in 1999. The notebook...

"A new book claims to have definitive evidence of a long-suspected technological crime — that Alexander Graham Bell stole ideas for the telephone from a rival, Elisha Gray. In "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret," journalist Seth Shulman argues that Bell — aided by aggressive lawyers and a corrupt patent examiner — got an improper peek at patent documents Gray had filed, and that Bell was erroneously credited with filing first."

Anyone else using Vonage? I hooked mine up yesterday in 5 minutes. The quality is outstanding. So far so good. A good month and Bellsouth and MCI can kiss my arse..

Big Brother Britain: Government and councils to spy on ALL our phonesBy JASON LEWIS - More by this author » Last updated at 23:31pm on 29th September 2007  Officials from the top of Government to lowly council officers will be given unprecedented powers to access details of every phone call in Britain under laws coming into force tomorrow.  The new rules compel phone companies to retain information, however private, about all landline and mobile calls, and make them available to some 795 public bodies and quangos. The move, enacted by the personal decree of Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, will...

We are customers of McLeodUSA Communications. They serve businesses and customers in several states. Our phones went down two hours ago and there is no answer from customer service. I did finally get through to someone in sales who told me that it was a "nationwide, catastrophic failure" and that all of the their techs are working on it. Is anyone else a McLeodUSA customer or is any other network having issues?

Jenny, they've got your number in a legal battle ASSOCIATED PRESS May 20, 2007 LINCOLN, R.I. – One-hit wonder Tommy Tutone made the phone number 867-5309 famous in the band's 1982 hit single, which uses the digits over and over in its catchy refrain. Now, a Rhode Island company and a national firm are battling over the right to use the number, which doesn't reach the “Jenny” that Tutone sings about but could find callers a decent plumber. Two years ago, Gem Plumbing & Heating of Lincoln, R.I., trademarked the phone number from the song, which reached No. 4 on...

     Too weird to be coincidence. This afternoon while listening to the radio, the broadcast was interrupted by a trasmission of someone speaking a foreign language. My thought, 'I don't think that's quite Spanish. Is that Arabic?' Went back to work around the house and forgot about it.      This evening, an acquaintence called to tell me about something odd that happened to them. They made a phone call, and when the other party picked up and said hello, the call was interrupted by someone speaking in a foreign language. "I didn't think it quite sounded like Spanish. I don't know if...

NEW YORK - Vonage tanked after its IPO. It's not entirely clear anymore why eBay paid $2.6 billion for Skype. And the long-awaited rollout of advanced TV services based on Internet technologies has resembled the drip of a faucet. It wasn't a banner year for some of the biggest names in Internet Protocol, the technical standard that makes the Web hum. But the technology itself continued to blossom, with newer innovations picking away at every corner of the telecommunications business, from voice to video to wireless. No doubt the main event for 2007 will be the impending smack-down between the...

Communications: The phone has had a splendid 130-year history. What will it look like in future? Will it even be called a phone? AT THE 1964 World's Fair in New York AT&T unveiled the Picturephone. In the future, the world's biggest telecoms firm pronounced, people would communicate via round, black-and-white screens that plugged into the wall. That prediction, like so many others about the future of communications, was wrong. The majority of today's phones are mobile handsets, not fixed-line ones, and although the technology for video-calling is widely deployed, hardly anyone uses it. And yet speculation about the future of...

I am a long time telephone company COT (central office tech). I have some insight into our government's Homeland Security call "tapping" and I am getting more and more frustrated at people throughout the political spectrum who have stong opinions about it, yet they are uninformed. The equipment used to "tap" phones resides in telephone central offices and within the last few years I have seen equipment labelled CALEA. I knew from the location of the equipment that it is associated with the SS7 network and was told that it was Homeland's spy gear. This information was already enough for...

Alexander Graham Bell’s granddaughter dies at 101 The Chronicle Herald (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada) October 31, 2006 By JOCELYN BETHUNE BADDECK — Mabel Grosvenor, a granddaughter of famed telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell and likely the last person who had personal memories of him, died Monday at Baddeck. She was 101. Born at Beinn Bhreagh, the Bells’ Cape Breton summer home, on July 28, 1905, she was the third child of Elsie Bell Grosvenor and Gilbert Grosvenor, longtime editor of National Geographic magazine. While her parents travelled, writing and photographing faraway places for the publication, Mabel spent many summers...

DOJ Approves AT&T-BellSouth Merger Plan; FCC Members Copps and Adelstein Criticize Move WASHINGTON (AP) -- AT&T's $78.5 billion buyout of BellSouth Corp. won Justice Department approval Wednesday, a decision that sets the stage for further reuniting modernized parts of the old Ma Bell phone monopoly broken up by the government in 1984. The Justice Department approved the deal without conditions, which leaves the Federal Communications Commission as the final hurdle to the merger creating the nation's biggest provider of phone, wireless and broadband Internet services. The decision was immediately criticized by the FCC's two Democratic members -- Jonathan S. Adelstein...

WASHINGTON (Aug. 31) - Consumers can claim a standard $30 to $60 refund next year for a tax on long-distance telephone calls that the government declared invalid, the Internal Revenue Service announced Thursday. Telephone customers had been paying the 3 percent federal excise tax on local and long-distance service. The government this month stopped collecting the tax on long-distance calls after businesses repeatedly fought the tax in court and won. Next year, consumers can use their 2006 tax returns to claim a refund on long-distance telephone taxes paid since March 2003. The standard refund starts at $30 and increases by...

Senior Israel Defense Forces officers expressed dissatisfaction yesterday with the announcement by Chief of Staff Dan Halutz that he had recently instructed the Field Security Directorate at the General Staff to keep track of their telephone conversations. According to a report in Haaretz yesterday, Halutz instructed the Field Security Directorate to provide him with the telephone logs of the generals, their department heads and their secretaries, in order to crosscheck whether they have had contacts with journalists. [ . . . ] According to the disgruntled officers , the chief of staff's action "stinks of McCarthyism" . . .

VATICAN CITY – Even though it receives almost 2,000 calls a day, the Vatican is not about to outsource its small team of switchboard operators to answering machines or the labyrinth of automated phone menus.When callers dial the Vatican switchboard anytime of day or night, a recorded voice will not ask them to press the pound key or hold; instead, they will talk to a human being who will tactfully and efficiently handle every call. "There are people who are a little crazy and call at 2 a.m. to do nothing but rant and rave, and there are others who...

LOS ANGELES – Starting Wednesday, seven-digit dialing will be a thing of the past for a broad swath of coastal Los Angeles County. Residents of such posh enclaves as Santa Monica, Malibu and Brentwood will be among the first Californians to be required to dial 11 digits each time they pick up the phone, even if they are calling a next-door neighbor. The change comes as part of the state's first-ever area code overlay, in which future phone numbers within a region receive a new area code while existing numbers keep the old one. It contrasts with the more common...

Russia is growing, and so are the shadows that are cast over the business proceedings there. The bureaucracy is still extremely burdensome and growing. And laws are a matter of convenience and seemingly circumvented at will -- or at least when you have the right connections. Corruption and middlemen are a matter of course, and bribes are expected and given. Confiscation of private goods -- i.e., Motorola's ongoing fiasco -- and resale for profit is old news. Legitimate dealings are called smuggling. And smuggling is called smuggling. Russian law allows confiscated material in criminal investigations to be sold or destroyed...

LONDON: Up to a third of telephone users in the Britain make calls in the nude, with men more prone to do it without clothes than women. Research commissioned by Britain's Post Office, which offers a fledgling home phone service, revealed that 40 percent of men admitted to nattering naked compared with 27 percent of women. The results were based on a survey of 1,500 telephone users. The research also showed that people were so busy that one in 10 people admitted to wandering off and leaving the caller talking to themselves.

I have a question. Can camera phone photos and videos be admissable in court proceedings? Does anyone know of any cases where this has been used?

COSHOCTON, Ohio -- Authorities arrested a man accused of making thousands of harassing and obscene calls to random cell phone numbers in at least eight counties. James R. Hood, 43, was charged with one count of compelling prostitution, or offering money for sex. He posted bond and was released from the Coshocton County jail, the sheriff's office said Wednesday. Hood was arrested earlier this week following a joint investigation by sheriff's deputies in Coshocton and Licking counties. Hood lives in the Licking County town of Granville, about 25 miles east of Columbus. Hood's phone records show he made 2,623 calls...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- AT&T Inc. announced Sunday that it will buy regional-phone company BellSouth Corp. for $67 billion in stock, consummating a long-rumored deal that would create a gigantic communications provider with tentacles extending deep into the phone, wireless, Internet and even pay-TV markets. The acquisition would also give AT&T sole control of Cingular Wireless, the biggest U.S. wireless operator with more than 54 million customers. AT&T owns 60%, with BellSouth controlling the rest. Under the agreement, AT&T (T : AT&T Inc. News , chart, profile, more Last: 27.99-0.29-1.03%4:00pm 03/03/2006Add to portfolioAnalyst Create alert InsiderDiscussFinancials Sponsored by: T27.99, -0.29,...

New paint blocks out cell phone signals ROCHESTER, N.Y., March 1 (UPI) -- A Rochester, N.Y., company has developed paint that can switch between blocking cell phone signals and allowing them through. "You could use this in a concert hall, allowing cell phones to work before the concert and during breaks, but shutting them down during the performance," said Michael Riedlinger, president of NaturalNano. Using nanotechnology, particles of copper are inserted into nanotubes, which are ultra-tiny tubes that occur naturally in halloysite clay mined in Utah. Combined with a radio-filtering device that collects phone signals from outside a shielded space,...

Excerpt - WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 (UPI) -- Three major U.S. telephone companies cooperated with the National Security Agency's wiretapping program without court warrants, USA Today reports. Executives who asked not to be named told the newspaper AT&T, MCI and Sprint granted access to their systems without warrants or court orders, and acted on the basis of oral requests from senior government officials. [snip]

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23, 2005 – At Camp Fallujah, Iraq, today, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld passed a box to the camp's sergeant major. The sergeant major then distributed the contents - handfuls of pre-paid calling cards -- to Marines serving there. Marine Lance Cpl. Nicholas Lutz, Cpl. Byron Smith and Cpl.Justin Glass hold up phone cards they had just received following a town hall meeting with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld at Camp Fallujah, Iraq, Dec. 23. The Wal-Mart Corporation sent more than $125,000 worth of pre-paid telephone calling cards along with the secretary. Senior noncommissioned officers have distributed them...

I created the IVR Cheat Sheet to help you quickly get to a human when you are trying to call a company for service. (The term "IVR" stands for Interactive Voice Response, the fancy name for those annoying computers who answer most phones these days.)

Americans may soon be able to use the telephone to vote in local elections, and could someday dial in their decision in national races, the WALL STREET JOURNAL reports on Thursday. The 2002 Help America Vote Act, which was created to simplify the voting process following the debacle in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, helped fund the development of new voting systems.

eBay has agreed to buy the fast-growing Internet start-up Skype in a move to add free Web telephone calls to its online auctions and fuel growth, the companies confirmed Monday. The auctioneer said it plans to pay $1.3 billion in cash and $1.3 billion in stock for the Web communications company. It would make a further payout of up to $1.5 billion by 2008 or 2009 if financial targets are met, giving the deal a total value of up to $4.1 billion, executives of the two companies said. eBay is renowned for an Internet business model linking millions of buyers...

Overview of the USF Program The federal universal service program embodies the national policy goal of affordable telephone service for all Americans. A regulatory "universal service fund" was first established in 1983 to help keep telephone rates affordable in high cost areas of the United States. Between 1983 and 1996, the fund, administered by the FCC, subsidized basic telephone service provided by incumbent local exchange carriers to low income consumers and high-cost areas. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (1996 Act) greatly expanded the scope of the federal universal service program to include subsidies for new services and new classes of...

Many broadband customers will pay new universal service taxes akin to those on their telephone bills if Congress bows to suggestions from rural legislators... The USF currently collects a fixed percentage of revenues from long-distance, wireless, pay phone and telephone companies so that it can pass on subsidies to low-income customers, high-cost areas, and rural health care providers, schools and libraries. Most companies come up with their share, set for this quarter at 10.2 percent, by charging their customers a fee. The USF should continue to be "industry funded," but the base of contributors should be expanded to "all providers...

<p>The most important vote in Congress this session will be coming up soon. The Senate will vote to both abide by the Constitution and require a simple majority to end a filibuster, or to require 60 votes to end a filibuster as liberals desire.</p>

People who feel the need to talk to their near and dear even after they have passed away can now do so quite literally, thanks to a special mobile phone invented by a German who wanted to keep in touch with his late mother. The system, patented by Juergen Broether and on sale since last December, consists of a one-way phone and loudspeaker device that can be buried close to the person's coffin, and will transmit a voice message into the tomb for a period of up to one year. Broether's said that his "telephonic angel" as he has dubbed...

NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) -- A man who shares the name of Arkansas' most famous native son has endured many pranks, but none as scary as this one. Bill Clinton of North Little Rock, who is not related to the former president and Arkansas governor of the same name, was the victim of a dangerous prank late last month when another person used a computer to hack into a caller-ID system and hijack Clinton's home number. After hacking into a computer system in a process called "caller-ID spoofing," the as-yet unidentified caller made several calls to Clinton's home...

09:52 PM CST on Sunday, January 30, 2005 Associated Press There's a fish fry today to celebrate the big news in Mink, La., a hamlet of 15 households: phone service. Gov. Kathleen Blanco plans to call 83-year-old Alma Louise Bolton from Baton Rouge today to celebrate the end of isolation for one of the nation's last areas without regular phone service. Long-distance charge: BellSouth Corp. spent $700,000 – or about $47,000 per phone – to extend about 30 miles of cable through thick forests to Mink, in the Kisatchie National Forest. The rest of the state's phone bills will cover...

SBC Communications, the second-largest regional phone company in the nation, is in talks to buy AT&T for more than $16 billion, according to executives close to the negotiations. A deal, if reached, would be the final chapter in the 120-year history of AT&T, the first technological giant of the modern age and the original model for telecommunications companies worldwide. A deal would be a reunion of sorts, putting back together some of the largest pieces of the Ma Bell telephone monopoly, which was broken up in 1984. The talks, which the executives described as "fluid" and "very, very sensitive"...

The Kerry folks are having a press conference right now via teleconference responding to Bush's speech in NJ this afternoon about terrorism/foreign policy. To join the conference dial 800-471-6718, then enter the passcode: 1016- 4018 On the conference call will be Joe Lockhart (campaign advisor), Susan Rice (kerry fopo advisor), Tad Devine (campaign advisor) and Karen Breitweiser (9/11 widow working with Kerry campaign)

It was my first time to actually call C-Span yesterday, but that's not important. What is is that I want this to be a record somewhere before no one hears or knows about it, a la the Kennedy files or Hoffa's location. A young girl called in to C-Span later on after I had spoken. She was young and idealistic, and said she had just returned from Baghdad, Iraq, having gone over there for a Christian NGO to see what was really going on for herself. She said that all over the hotel where foreign reporters stay in Baghdad a...

Cell phone cameras are useful for the unusual moment that demands a picture, like when a congressional aide pulled one out of a pocket to get a snapshot of Michael Jackson strolling the halls of Congress. Some people, however, are using them for nefarious purposes, such as taking pictures beneath women's skirts and posting them on the Internet. Lawmakers want to make taking such surreptitious photos and other illicit uses of video technology a federal crime punishable by up to a year in jail. "No one should have to go through the embarrassment of being secretly taped by an electronic...

WASHINGTON - More Americans are refusing to participate in telephone polls these days, but carefully conducted surveys still can get accurate samples of public opinion — according to a new poll. The study by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found the percentage of people reached for interviews in a typical five-day Pew survey dropped from 36 percent in 1997 to 27 percent in 2003. Many speculate that changes in technology such as cell phones, answering machines and call blocking are causing the decline in responses. But the Pew survey found the decline was caused more...