As you may know we had a good size snow storm here in the mountains of western North Carolina. It’s not unusual, but we will many times go a few years between these big storms. This one brought a tree down on the phone line just before it branches to our house and one other. I called Verizon the first night (Saturday) and got a (!$!$!$!) robot attendant that told me many outages were reported in our area and it should be fixed by Monday at 9 something AM. Not wanting to waste the time then with holding for a person I resolved to call a second line. At this point I could see the line hanging to the ground from the pole and knew they were not aware of it though. I called from a cell phone (of course…)
Tag: pots
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Connectivity issues
Our ISP here was out this afternoon. (Cable and internet) for a bit before I had to run to an appointment, so I got a bit behind in entries. It’s interesting though, Charter has been really pushing their new telephone service lately. Which is all well and good, but I’ve thought many times, if I were to get phone service from Charter how many times a year I’d be without phone service? How would I have called to report the outage today? (Carrier pigeon) – cell phone is the expected answer I’m sure, but….
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Federal Government funding research into VOIP wiretapping
I can’t say I’m surprised, it makes sense. Plain old telephone service (POTS) can be tapped, and now that VOIP is coming into it’s own, the FBI and others need new ways of tapping the conversations. CNET is reporting on one such initiative that seems to be proving successful at the first step towards tapping a conversation taking place over Skype. Even one that uses an anonymizing proxy server.