A lot has changed since angry consumers sought revenge on mass marketers by taping postage-paid return envelopes to bricks and putting them in mailboxes. A new generation uses online mobs to launch swarm-style attacks aimed at shutting down Web sites or at disrupting business in ways that an individual never could. Sites such as whocalled.us collect data about certain marketers to warn other consumers.

Ever received such a call? We have. Its a mere annoyance. And their repeated calling makes for problems for many hence the tactics above. But that is not all –

Michael Silveira decided to strike back. The 22-year-old laboratory technician, who doesn’t own a car, says he was getting unsolicited sales pitches as often as twice a day on his cellphone.

So last week, Mr. Silveira began calling back an auto-warranty company that has become the focus of an Internet crusade. He left it voice-mail messages that contained nothing but a recording of Rick Astley’s 1987 hit song “Never Gonna Give You Up.”

Using phone numbers for Auto One Warranty Specialists Inc. that users posted to a Web site called Reddit.com, Mr. Silveira joined dozens of activists who have peppered the warranty company with messages including elevator music, threats and offers of rude services.

“I thought, if you get a bunch of people together, you could blow up their voice-mail boxes,” says Mr. Silveira.

The recipient of their efforts is David Tabb, the 42-year-old president of Auto One, an Irvine, Calif., warranty company with 60 employees. He says Reddit users overloaded his phone lines with computerized calls, changed voice-mail greetings on his company’s system, and even threatened arson. People have been conspicuously honking outside his home, he says. To cope, he redirected some of the numbers that activists had been calling.

Now being obscene or making threats is a tad over the top. At least in our view. So don’t do it. You could land in hot water legally. And don’t assume you can’t be tracked down if you do. With the assistance of the phone company(s) it is highly likely you will be if it is accompanied by a criminal investigation.

But that is not the whole story of course. As it is right now, 1st Amendment stands tall in saying you can’t stop them from calling. But there is a far cry from that standard. If I am walking down the street and and some guy is on a soapbox bellowing out some missive I can politely ignore him and keep walking. Neither party was harmed in the fact that I chose to ignore him. The speaker still retained his right to bellow his missive.

However the phone is not a manifestation of the fellow in the soapbox. By design phones are not multithreaded like the environment of the fellow on the soapbox. They only allow a single conversation at a time. By rote they block all other callers. When a robocall comes through I am effectively blocked from receiving the conversations I wish to hear. It would be equivalent to, once having reached within 50′ of the fellow on the soapbox, required to stop and listen for 1 minute. No one would stand for that actually or legally. So why do we persist in this fiction via the phone?

So a little bit of advise for those who want to swarm the robocallers –

• No obscene comments or threats. The idea of the music was a nice touch. Might I suggest the winning tune toward the end of the movie Mars Attacks?
• Make sure evey phone you have is on the federal do not call list. If your state has a registry also add your phone numbers there too.
• Look at your phone bill and make sure the number is listed there. Keep a copy. Its evidence they called you. If you end up in court it will be requested anyhow so be prepared.
• Assess whether it is worth your time. Acquiring personal satisfaction can be a time consuming business.

Welcome to the world of the Wild West of Telephony.

Linky.

Well it is if you start reading some forums and web sites. Some are saying that VoIP traffic will be affected. Generally false. Others are saying that the efficiency of the internet will drop as a consequence. False. First the announcement off the Torrent website for the new UDP based client –

New alpha! The main change is that uTP (UDP torrenting) is added and enabled by default. It also has real-time transfer rate control and latency minimization.
This build will probably download slower than 1.8.1, particularly if the entire swarm is 1.8.1.

This whole thing has been a boil for about 2 years now between Torrent users and network ISP’s in their use of network capacity. We have had FCC endorsed round tables on the situation. Its finally come to head with Bell Canada impacting P2P traffic altogether. The result is that the Torrent developers have built a UDP based client to get around it. What the ISP’s don’t understand is that they are on the short end of the stick here from a technology perspective. The developers have the upper hand in any tech war. Example? Well how would ISP handle a Torrent client that did the following –

• Stored the existing client protocols table.
• Randomly remapped that table for its own purposes.
• Started a faux spread spectrum-like bounce across the breadth of the protocols table between the seeders and the receivers
• Upon competition restores the saved protocols table back to the system

Its not fool proof. But it is sufficiently involved that it fiscally escalates the costs on the ISP’s side that they just cry uncle. It is not a road we as a global society should go down. Its like restricting free speech.

The other trend I am seeing is the lack of understanding by many in the press on this issue. As a data transmission layer, UDP is MORE efficient than TCP. UDP institutes a full data stream with no framing checks. It just streams till EOF. But there is no checking for data integrity of the file. TCP on the other hand checks blocks of packets for receipt till the whole file sent. In some cases it adds up to 20% overhead to the transmission. So if you were doing a torrent you would WANT them using UDP.

The other falsehood is that VoIP traffic would be impacted. Hate to say it, probably not true. Two protocols dominate the VoIP world — SIP and SSCP. Well SIP uses TCP for build up and tear down of the connection and either TCP or UDP for the transport. The split being about 50/50. If its a problem, providers can switch to a pure TCP transport. SSCP uses TCP for build up and tear down of the connection and only UDP for the transport. But SSCP is generally associated with Cisco CallManager installs. So most of the UDP traffic is intrabuilding, like in call centers. The outbound traffic being wrapped in TCP or TCP-VPNd traffic, building to building.

The solution? How about some profit? The P2P client providers should cooperate with the ISP’s and provide a means to a) strip the traffic easily and b) forward store the traffic on end nodes like Akamai. The ISP’s cooperate by providing a premium data channel that P2P traffic can ride on. The users pay for the privilege. Profits are split by all concerned.

I prefer this solution over data caps.

Linky.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has a piece over at ComputerWorld. His shot? That in 2009 there will be more Linux based computers deployed than a Windows based device. Personally I won’t take bets, but best guess is it would be a 50/50 shot of it happening. –

Of course, while most of the vendors would like to give their customers Windows, they can’t. Windows is no more capable than booting fast than John McCain is of winning the Olympic gold in the 100-meter dash. That’s where Linux comes in.

You see you can boot Linux up in a hurry if you do it from the hardware and thanks to a company called deviceVM and its fast-booting Linux, SplashTop. PC OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) like ASUS, Dell, HP and Lenovo, are all including SplashTop on their lines.

That’s his take. Well I have another one. I have been noting that ‘thin is in’ on device sizes and have a couple of posts discussing it. My contention is one wants compute on the go which is why the NetTops have been wildly successful this year. So my observation is go the other direction, literally.

If you the consumer is going to tote around the NetTop, all 2lbs of it. Why not use THAT as the comm device. It already fits the bill as your compute device on the go, into and out of the cloud as you please. So if the device had bluetooth enabled to interface with a bluetooth earpiece and SplashTop could support a always on VoIP connection in a low wattage standby mode. Combine that with 3G or Wimax for the data transport. Then you have essentially arrived at the combined portable system I have alluded to. All this with some near term technologies. No leap of faith on some future development; just need to add a little always on VoIP to the NetTop.

I don’t know if it will happen, but as far as I am concerned the hardware for the Apple Dynabook concept is here.

We know how the specialty retailer CircuitCity is closing 150 stores. Bankrupty avoidance. But you ever wondered why? –

Box #3 -
Upon opening the box, he saw a blue SATA cable with an extra little dongle that Western Digital likes to put on their cables - he thought that it was a completely different type of cable… he hands me the cable and says, “sorry sir, your box was missing this cable, you should be all set now.”

I exploded. “THIS IS THE SAME F$$^@&^N’ CABLE! Why don’t you show me where THIS cable connects to the drive?!?!” He actually started to reexamine the drive, blue cable in hand… I shouted “look at the other damn drive!!! Look at that - it’s got a damn PCB!!! And look - SATA connectors!!! Whodathunkit?!?!”

Head down, he finally gave in, gave me the third and final box, and I was on my way. My 1TB drive only cost me $150… and about 4 hours of my life, about 30 minutes of which consisted of shouting, my heart hammering in rage.

No, I’m not going to be wandering back any time soon.

Folks that is only a third of the post. The whole thing is here. But this is what you get when management follows a ‘formula’ to the least common denominator. Essentially failure. What is instructive about the missive above is that the FireDog dude is supposed to know his stuff and he can’t even see that there is a cable header mismatch with the drive? Wouldn’t let him near my computers with a 10′ pole!

Entertaining? Yes. But it is par for the course for what goes as ’superior executive management’ in the executive suites. This kind of setup starts at the top folks not from HR or schools or other. Sigh….