Timothy C. May sez:

The downside is that calls _from_ or _to_ my phone during "business" hours are charged 42 cents a minute, airtime (tying up a channel and all), plus whatever other fees may be applicable at each end. Thus, every "junk call" I get trying to get me to buy aluminum siding, or to vote Democratic, or to switch my long-distance carrier (!), costs me a minimum of 42 cents,

The GSMish PCS carrier is winning points here with: No contacts to sign. 1st minute of all incoming calls is free. -- A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz@nrk.com & no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433 is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433

TCM:

Relevance to Crypto? The "junk e-mai" issue, calls for regulations (which I'm against), technological solutions (Caller ID lets users decided to accept a call or not....same idea could be used with e-mail, a la Hal Finney's "You have a message of size X from size Y entitled Z" proposal for positve acceptance of remailed messages), and the value of True Names (and True Numbers).

more and more I think the problem of "junk info" which we keep running into on this list is of key importance to future information technologies. loosely translated, I would call this the same problem that rears its head in many different information transfer formats. spam in newsgroups, junk mail in the email box, sales calls on the phone. can it be solved? caller ID is in one sense a solution to this problem. I suspect we will be seeing increasingly sophisticated solutions. in short, imagine a communication system with various entities. this could be a newsgroup, a phone system, an email system, etc. the fundamental problem is allowing the transfer of information that is "approved" by consenting parties, and rejecting the transfer of information (and preventing denial-of-service attack) for anything otherwise. a very tricky problem, because the value of information is subjective in the eyes of sender and receiver, and often people want to receive information and cannot tell whether they want it or not until they see it. for cpunks, there are additional goals. ideally pseudonymous communication or anonymous communication would be allowed. for the phone problem, one possible way of solving this is to have passwords. in addition to giving out your cell phone number, you give the person a digital password. you are free to vary this password yourself for multiple entities. they have to enter the right password for the call to go through (or for any charges to accrue). if you get junk calls, you at least know the individual password that was "compromised". you can reject that password in the future as being "dirty" and hand out a new password via your trusted channels to anyone who tells you they can't get through to you any more (and you don't necessarily want that to stay that way <g>). this system is remarkably similar to the way that intelligence agencies work, with their agents and spies. they deal with the problem of knowing which channels have been "compromised" and working with countermeasures. in fact I suspect that the intelligence community has developed very sophisticated ways of dealing with information transfer and "spoofing" (bad data so to speak) that might have major applications to the design of future cyberspace. such a system could be applied to email. I send out email passwords to my trusted associates (they might even be included in the email address itself). email that doesn't have a proper password I could either delete or put into the "low priority" bin. unfortunately this restricts email whereas one of the great aspects of email is its lack of controls and preventions in contacting people. but notice that one could still have a lot of relative freedom in this system. suppose that I gave a lecture to a large audience of people. I could then create a new password for that audience, and release it to them. if I get email under that password, I know it was somehow from someone in that audience, and it would be worth more to my attention, so to speak, than junk email. it has slightly more value than being totally "out-of-the-blue anonymous". if the address became too popular, or got into the hands of a marketer, I could hook it up to a form letter or disconnect it. in a sense this would be like something like having the ability to create or disconnect multiple phone numbers whenever you want. I suspect such systems will become more prevalent in the future. whenever you interface with other people, you will be given the opportunity to put it under your own personal "information channel" of choice. "inquiries on this subject should be addressed to [x]". a similar mechanism is used by advertisers to gauge the efficacy of their advertising. they say in the ad, "mention this ad to get [x]". this is setting up an independent information channel for identification. they also might set up a separate phone number for a given advertisement, and see how much traffic they get through that phone number independently. all this is invisible to the customer. the "junk info" problem becomes much more difficult to solve with public forums such as newsgroups, and the above approach would not seem to apply. others have proposed solutions that are related to packaging money in messages. "I will pay you 5 cents to read this message" which can be collected upon opening it. a very interesting proposal I think we will see actually put into practice. I suspect we will continue to see interesting innovations that focus on the problems of information dissemination. it's amazing how far we are into the information age without some key problems being solved yet. plenty of room for some innovative thoughts. I continue to believe there are some elegant solutions waiting to be found.

[ Telemarketer script removed, (spit :) ]

As you yourself point out, their charging you for each incoming call during business hours is unacceptable. Why don't they bill the 42c / minute to whomever is calling YOU, as they do with LD and 900 numbers?

This is why I really like the service that I have. I have a "personal number" that is my voice, fax, pager, and voice mail. If someone calls it, it asks them to wait while it locates me. It then has a list of numbers it calls to try and find me (desk at work, cell phone, home phone after 5pm or weekends). When I answer it tells me who's on the phone, and if I don't want to talk to them I just hit a key and throw them to the voice mail wolves. As for billing the caller, from what I hear at work I think it's because of problems with the way the cellular network does billing that (currently) make caller-pays cellular undoable. But that's a telephony problem and I'm just the resident UNIX weenie. :) --- Fletch __`'/| fletch@ain.bls.com "Lisa, in this house we obey the \ o.O' ______ 404 713-0414(w) Laws of Thermodynamics!" H. Simpson =(___)= -| Ack. | 404 315-7264(h) PGP Print: 8D8736A8FC59B2E6 8E675B341E378E43 U ------