At 11:20 AM -0700 12/20/97, Charlie Comsec wrote:
Why would a pager company want to block calls from pay phones? Haven't you seen that commercial (for MCI?) where the kids crowd into that phone booth and page someone to pick them up from school before the big storm hits? Imagine if they had gotten a recording saying "I'm sorry. You can't page this number from a pay phone." Really bad PR!
The general pressure to treat pay phones as things to be regulated away, to be forcefully shut down (as in Chicago, if I recall correctly), and to be treated as a Tool of the Devil has to do with the War on Some Drugs, of course. Because dealers use pay phones, they must be bad. In a free society, companies would be free to offer various kinds of blocking services. I surmise, though, that the pager companies are under pressure from their friends in government to block pay phones more so than they normally would. (Even the _ability_ to block a pay phone, qua pay phone, must imply that pay phones send out some kind of signal announcing themselves as pay phones, which I had not heard of before. I assumed a pay phone was Just Another Phone Number.) The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."