I tried one of these when tracking down some dial-in system abuse being perpetrated by an ex-employee. It occurred to me that with the right hardware, a simple perl script could launch a cruise-missle strike in response to a dial-in to a phone number ... ;) (for a good time, call 1-555-2nukeme) food for thought for the paranoids and/or x-files fans. On Wed, 25 Feb 1998, Ross Wright wrote:
From:
T a s t y B i t s f r o m t h e T e c h n o l o g y F r o n t This issue: < http://www.tbtf.com/archive/02-23-98.html > ________________________________________________________________________
..AnyWho puts a reverse phone book on the Net
And personal privacy slips a bit more
If you live in the US and your phone number is listed, visit this site [25] and type in your number. AT&T's AnyWho will return your name and address. Is your street name linked? If so, click to see names and numbers for all of your neighbors. Want a map to your house? It's one click away. (Like most such maps, however, the correspondence of street address with map location can be wildly wrong.) The street proximity search will not show unlisted numbers, 800- or 888- numbers, or "distinctive ring" alternate numbers.
AnyWho is not the first reverse phone book on the Net -- 555-1212 has that distinction [26] -- but it is the most feature-rich. It has a "sounds like" match for last name lookups. It lets you edit or delete your entry, and requires confirmation by a telephone call from the phone number in question. And it combines white and yellow pages -- 90M and 10M listings respectively -- though their output remains separate. When you ask for a street proximity listing for a business listing, you see only other businesses.
[25] http://www.anywho.com:81/telq.html [26] http://www.555-1212.com/whte_us.htm
=-=-=-=-=-=- Ross Wright King Media: Bulk Sales of Software Media and Duplication Services http://ross.adnetsol.com Voice: (408) 259-2795