The papers have been announcing recently that SAIC is buying Bellcore for ~$700M. SAIC is the spook-connected beltway bandit firm that recently bought the Network Solutions folks who run the Internet NIC. Bellcore is the Bell Labs spinoff that the RBOCs have jointly owned since the breakup of the Bell System a decade ago. One of the interesting things that Bellcore does is own and administer the North American Numbering Plan, which is the telephone numbering space for Country Code 1, including the US, Canada, and much of the Caribbean. (Mexico used to have a kluged subset of 1, but a few years ago decided to join with Latin America instead, gaining 5- prefixes.) So you want an Internet domain name? Ask SAIC. You want a phone number? Ask SAIC. It's nothing to get all paranoid about, probably, but it would be interesting to speculate what they can do with it, besides finding a post-Cold-War income stream. I wonder if the Ethernet address space or IPv4 or maybe IPv6 addresses are their next acquisition? # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk # (If this is posted to cypherpunks, I'm currently lurking from fcpunx, # so please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)