Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: 06 Jun 91 10:33:51 EDT From: "76012,300 Brad Hicks" <76012.300@compuserve.com> Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Pet Peeve About Newer Modems (was Telephone Keypads) Message-ID: Organization: TELECOM Digest Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 432, Message 2 of 7 Lines: 92 > Also, I have heard of, but never heard officially, of a telco > tariff which requires that autodialers not retry the same number > more than ten times in a row automatically. Doubtless some legal type will look this up for us and cite the exact ruling, but it's not a tariff, it's a law. It was passed by Congress in the aftermath of that guy who got hacked off at one of the televangelists (I can't remember if it was Falwell, Roberts, or Robertson) and set up his modem to dial their fund-raising 800 number every minute or so for several weeks. Since they got charged $1 for every "completed" call, this guy ran up a bill on their nickle that reached into the tens of thousands of dollars. Since the guy left it going for a LONG time, it was trivial to trace the calls back to him. The "ministry" in question tried to bring phone harrassment charges against him, but due to a quirk in the law of the time, phone harrassment couldn't be brought in a case where the person charged never spoke into the phone, or some such triviality. That's when Congress got involved. (Televangelists + Congresscritters = Danger.) Some Congresscritter held hearings on the matter, which concluded that (a) what this guy had done was Bad and should be stopped, and (b) lots of other people were complaining about getting repeated redials from modems when BBS listings were wrong or out of date. Result was new legislation making it illegal to dial the same number more than ten times in a row. This may well be the most worthless piece of legislation short of National Rutabaga Day, since (a) the telcos don't enforce it in any way, so most modem users ignore it, and (b) it doesn't achieve the stated goal, since there's nothing that requires you to actually DO anything to confirm the phone number ... just dial "time and temp" once after every tenth try, and you're in the clear. So I guess it's just in there to have something to throw at guys like Perpetrator "A" above. Of course, this didn't rescue the televangelists, either. Did you hear about the 800 Club? In the aftermath of all of the above, a Minneapolitan (active in both gay rights and Pagan rights, among other political causes, and a member of the Minnesota Democratic Farm Labor Party) came up with the bright idea of putting together a single sheet with a list of the 800 numbers of all of the televangelists that she perceived were using tax-exempt donations to attack the civil rights of gays or Pagans, with instructions that all you had to do "join" the "800 Club" was to dial one of the phone numbers every day; preferably a different number each day. Minimum "compliance" was to get the person on the other end to answer; "bonus points" were allotted if you could draw them out into a conversation. (My favorite: Caller: "Excuse me, but what time is it?" Operator, startled, usually answers. Caller hangs up. Drove several operators crazy enough to quit, we heard.) At its peak three years ago or so, I heard an estimate that there were literally thousands of "members" of this club. The activist who started it claimed that during her calls, almost all of the ministries told her that because of those "awful gays and satanists" tying up the lines and adding so much to the phone bills, most of the ministries were going to have to give up fund-raising in this manner. And all as legal as church on Sunday -- to turn a phrase. - J. Brad Hicks [Please send direct responses to jbhicks@mcimail.com, not to the address above. Thank you!] [Moderators Note: All quite legal? Maybe ... all quite petty? A definite ten-four, good buddies ... People who hide behind a phone line to harass and play games do NOT get any sympathy from me, regardless of the validity of their cause otherwise. I have to wonder how (for example) {The Advocate} -- which advocated harassing Falwell in this way -- or the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force or other gay rights organizations would like seeing *their* 800 numbers polluted like this, giving them a multi-thousand dollar phone bill and forcing them to disconnect the number and preventing people who need to call them on that line from doing so? Actually, the guy in Georgia who did that to Falwell ran the bill up more than 'several thousand dollars'. It was about a hundred-thousand dollars, and Falwell's only loss was the time spemt by a dozen operators answering bogus calls once a minute and the time spent during one month by the Director of Telecom Services for Falwell's organization and the local telco in tracking down the problem. (At first they thought it was a failure in their own equipment (they take incoming calls through an ACD behind a centrex). AT&T (his 800 carrier) took a goodwill charge-off for the whole thing, and I think the originating telco agreed to accept a chargeback for some of what AT&T wrote off. So who lost money? Only us ratepayers, that's all. PAT]