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Hurricane Gustav bears down on Cuba on Saturday evening local time.(Credit: NOAA)With Hurricane Gustav headed straight toward New Orleans, emergency officials and telecommunication companies are preparing for the worst. Gustav's winds had reached 150mph as of midday Saturday, making it dangerous Category 4 hurricane, according to the National Hurricane Center. The NHC predicted that Gustav could reach Category 5--the highest level possible. Gustav is pounding Cuba right now. It is expected to reach the Gulf Coast on Monday afternoon. On Saturday, the NHC began trying out Gustav updates via podcast. The NHC is also making a PDA/smartphone-friendly version of...

Starting two days ago telemarketers began to call my cell phone. They're calling from the number 909-842-9166 and 901-842-9167 They're also calling from Unknown numbers sometimes. If I answer they'll tell me I've won a free gas card or something. They're calling about ten times a day. When I ask them to stop calling (it's usually an Indian person) The woman laughed and goes "No no. Haha. We call again. Bye bye." I looked this up on the internet and it appears that a telemarketing company is paying another company to disguise it's number. I called Sprint and sprint says...

Qwest union contract expires SaturdayThe Associated Press Friday, Aug. 15, 2008 NEW YORK The labor contract with the largest union at Qwest Communications International Inc. expires Saturday, little more than a week before the company is to provide phone and Internet service for the Democratic National Convention. The Communications Workers of America has voted to authorize a strike, which could theoretically begin as soon as Sunday. The union organizes 20,000 Qwest workers in 13 states. The same union was involved in contract negotiations with Verizon Communications Inc. recently. The parties were unable to reach an agreement before the expiration of...

MIAMI (CBS) ― The days of using a cell phone to simply talk on have come and passed. Today, it's about smartphones and text messaging. More than 360 billion text messages were sent last year, but now there's a growing trend of injuries incurred while texting, a phenomenon called "Texting Trauma." "Even when I'm riding my bike on Lincoln Road, I'm holding the handle, and I'm texting on one side," said Manni Maharaj. Some people text message while driving, which is incredibly dangerous enough, but now ER physicians say texters on bicycles, roller blades, and even on their own two...

Brenda Smith and her husband became curious last winter about the workers who showed up in their neighborhood around Old Providence Road in Virginia Beach. Without any notice to her, the largely Hispanic crew began digging trenches in her front yard and shoving orange tubing into the ground. She tried to ask them questions, but they didn't speak English. Concerned about the growing number of illegal immigrants in Virginia, Smith decided to find out whether the men in her yard were here legally. She learned they were part of a $23 billion Verizon fiber-optic project intended to bring state-of-the-art television...

After a week of intense media foreplay, Obama has finally embarked on his magical mystery tour. As he boarded the plane that took him on the first leg of his anxiously awaited Middle East and European tour, a pair of uniformed Air Force officers saluted simultaneously, as they do each time President Bush boards Air Force One. As the media-anointed President in waiting, Obama is virtually guaranteed superstar non-stop media coverage as he makes his taxpayer financed 'fact finding' tour this week. Joining him on this excellent adventure are all three of the major network anchors who will cover his...

The national Internet service providers, AT&T and AOL, signed an agreement with state government to eliminate child pornography from the Internet, announced the office of state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, New York, on Thursday. As part of the agreement signed with Cuomo, the two Internet access providers agreed to work towards eliminating certain newsgroups that distribute child pornography online. A similar agreement was signed with Verizon Communications, Time Warner (News - Alert) Cable, and Sprint Nextel on June 10, 2008. The decision on making the service providers sign the agreement came after Cuomo’s office identified 88 different newsgroups that contained...

Despite ongoing government and industry efforts to improve safety, maintenance of mobile-phone and other communications towers continues to be the most hazardous work around. And because of the relatively small number of employees in the business compared to other industry sectors, tower climbing — which suffered five fatalities during a 12-day span this spring and seven deaths overall this year so far — may also be the most overlooked, deadly job in the country. The recent spike in tower fall fatalities follows a reprieve in deaths between early December and April. It was a very bad year in 2006, when...

WASHINGTON — More than two and a half years after the disclosure of President’s Bush’s domestic eavesdropping program set off a furious national debate, the Senate gave final approval on Wednesday afternoon to broadening the government’s spy powers and providing legal immunity for the phone companies that took part in the wiretapping program. The plan, approved by a vote of 69 to 28, marked one of Mr. Bush’s most hard-won legislative victories in a Democratic-led Congress where he has had little success of late. And it represented a stinging defeat for opponents on the left who had urged Democratic leaders...

"To be clear," Sen. Barack Obama. D-Illinois, spox Bill Burton told Talking Points Memo last October about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, "Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies." Reaffirmed Obama's Senate office in December: “Senator Obama unequivocally opposes giving retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies and has cosponsored Senator Dodd's efforts to remove that provision from the FISA bill. Granting such immunity undermines the constitutional protections Americans trust the Congress to protect. Senator Obama supports a filibuster of this bill, and strongly urges others to do the same...Senator Obama will...

Getting FISA Wrong . . . Again By Andrew C. McCarthy National Review Online July 5, 2008 Originally published at web site: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NWFmYTZmNzYyNDhlN2ZjMDVlZGFjODdlYzRiOWZjNzY= A federal court in California has dismissed a civil lawsuit that alleged surveillance violations against a Muslim charity the government has formally designated as supporter of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Nevertheless, in his ill-conceived 56-page opinion, Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker, of the district court in San Francisco, gets to the right result only after concluding that Congress has the power to preempt the president’s constitutional authority. Judge Walker found that the 1978 FISA statute (the...

WASHINGTON — Senator Barack Obama’s decision to support legislation granting legal immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants has led to an intense backlash among some of his most ardent supporters. Thousands of them are now using the same grass-roots organizing tools previously mastered by the Obama campaign to organize a protest against his decision. In recent days, more than 7,000 Obama supporters have organized on a social networking site on Mr. Obama’s own campaign Web site. They are calling on Mr. Obama to reverse his decision to endorse legislation supported by...

In an interview with The Financial Times yesterday, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg had this to say when asked about the competition posed by Apple’s iPhone: “It’s very cool. And Steve Jobs eventually will get old… I like our chances.” That’s got to be one of the most indelicate utterances by one CEO regarding another. Mr. Seidenberg is about a decade older than Mr. Jobs, so he can’t possibly be referring to his age with the most unfortunate “Steve Jobs eventually will get old” phrase. He must be referring to Mr. Job’s frail appearance at the Apple WWDC in June. Apple...

It's official: Thanks to overwhelming grassroots action, and the heroic efforts of Senators Dodd and Feingold, the Senate's vote on whether to grant phone companies immunity from the law for assisting in the President's illegal wiretapping program has been delayed until after July 4th Recess! This is an unexpected reprieve for civil liberties and the rule of law. As recently as last night, the mainstream press was reporting that the immunity bill would see swift and uncontested approval. Senate Leaders emphasized that passing an immunity bill this week was one of their highest priorities. And yet, in the end, the...

A White House-backed spy bill to protect telecommunication companies from billions of dollars in possible privacy lawsuits passed a Senate test vote on Wednesday and headed toward final congressional approval. Supporters of the bipartisan measure, which would also implement the most sweeping overhaul of U.S. spy laws in decades, mustered the needed 60 votes in the 100-member Senate to clear a procedural roadblock.

It's official: Obama will back a filibuster of any Senate FISA legislation containing telecom immunity, his campaign has just told Election Central. The Obama campaign has just sent over the following statement from spokesman Bill Burton: "To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies."

(CBS/AP) - Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., issued a statement in support of the House's update of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but said he would try to strip a provision granting immunity to telecommunication companies when the bill comes to a vote in the Senate next week. The House approved a compromise bill Friday that would set new electronic surveillance rules that would also shield telecoms from lawsuits arising from their participation in the government's warrantless eavesdropping on telephone and computer lines in the United States. The government eavesdropped on American phone and computer lines for almost six years after...

A Good Deal On Surveillance Reform By Andrew C. McCarthy National Review Online June 20, 2008 Original Web site: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZTM1MjU4NjI0M2JiMjg2YmYxNGYwN2FiODg4NmZiOTg= Politics, it is often said, is the art of the possible. By that measure, national security has been served by the compromise finally struck Thursday to overhaul our outdated surveillance laws. The measure should be approved by both houses of Congress in the coming days. President Bush will sign it. Here is the bottom line: Our intelligence agencies will once again have authority to conduct aggressive monitoring of foreign powers, including terrorist organizations, which threaten the United States. In particular,...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill on Friday that could shield phone companies from billions of dollars in lawsuits for their participation in the warrantless surveillance program begun by President George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks. The White House-backed, compromise measure -- which triggered a firestorm of opposition from civil liberties groups -- would also overhaul U.S. spy powers and replace a temporary surveillance law that expired in February. Democrats faced election-year pressure to pass the bill, fearing failure to do so would let Republicans paint them as weak on security and...

House approves spy bill protecting phone firms Fri Jun 20, 2008 12:52pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill on Friday that could shield phone companies that participated in President George W. Bush's warrantless surveillance program begun after the September 11 attacks from billions of dollars in privacy lawsuits.

What it all means According to the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA), specific absorption rate, or SAR, is "a way of measuring the quantity of radiofrequency (RF) energy that is absorbed by the body." For a phone to pass FCC certification, that phone's maximum SAR level must be less than 1.6W/kg (watts per kilogram). In Europe, the level is capped at 2W/kg while Canada allows a maximum of 1.6W/kg. The SAR level listed in our charts represents the highest SAR level with the phone next to the ear as tested by the FCC. Keep in mind that it is possible...

SUN CITY CENTER - The first lightning bolt cracked in the dark clouds a few hundred yards above John Jacob's head as he worked atop a 200-foot cellular phone tower in south Hillsborough County. With wind swirling and sheets of rain pouring over him, Jacobs kept bolting together thin steel beams while long, white cellular transmitters for AT&T, T-Mobile and Metro PCS buzzed around his head, relaying calls, text messages and Blackberry e-mails in a six-mile zone along Interstate 75. Then a second lighting bolt crashed closer, then a third even closer. That persuaded the 14-year tower veteran to tie...

Excerpt - Well, this should be interesting. Because of scheduling issues, Kevin Martin and Lowell McAdam will be interviewed at the same time. Will the two hit it off on issues of ‘Net neutrality, early termination fees, Open Access or none of the above? ~ snip ~ Pulling up a chart that showcases the lousy broadband situation in the states, Walt kicks the conversation off with a hardball question for Martin: “You’re the chairman of the FCC,” says Walt. “How did you allow this to happen?” Big applause. Martin tries to dodge a bit, suggesting that the chart shows penetration....

NEW YORK (AP) - Cox Communications appears to be interfering with file-sharing by its Internet subscribers in the same manner that has landed Comcast Corp. (CMCSA) in hot water with regulators, according to research obtained by The Associated Press. A study based on the participation of 8,175 Internet users around the world found conclusive signs of blocked file-sharing connections only at three Internet service providers: Comcast and Cox in the U.S. and StarHub in Singapore. Of the 788 Comcast subscribers who participated in the study, 491, or 62 percent, had their connections blocked. At Cox, 82 out of 151 subscribers,...

I'd like to see NEXTEL return to its roots. Maybe Sprint sells off NEXTEL and its originator buys the system back, along with the rf spectrum and the iDEN technology Make it into a NO FRILLS system for jobsites and RedNecks Keep the 2-way, text messaging, and phone patch; ditch all the junk: fancy ring tones, internet, graphics, -- all that stuff that is only for geeks offer only high performance, MIL-spec phones like the i305 and guarantee restricted access to keep advertising thugs out

The technological and economical development of Scandinavia (including Finland) is today more groundbreking than anywhere else in the world. The investments being made in relation to population size is mind-boggling. Despite a mere population of 25 million inhabitants, the combined GDP of the Scandinavian countries today ridicules that of a Russia often viewed to be a "reborn" super power "on the go" (combined Scandinavian GDP is actually 125% that of of Russia - and the gap is widening!!) But, let's focus on telecommunications here; Five bidders have paid €226 million ($346 million) for fourth generation (4G), super-fast mobile telephony licences,...

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - The head of the top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc (T.N) said on Wednesday it was having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India. "We're having trouble finding the numbers that we need with the skills that are required to do these jobs," AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson told a business group in San Antonio, where the company's headquarters is located.

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - The head of the top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc (T.N) said on Wednesday it was having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India. "We're having trouble finding the numbers that we need with the skills that are required to do these jobs," AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson told a business group in San Antonio, where the company's headquarters is located. So far, only around 1,400 jobs have been returned to the United States of 5,000, a target it...

Mumpower Misunderstands FISA Issues, Misquotes Ben Franklin Carl Mumpower, Republican candidate for Congress from the 11th District, has put out a press release saying that the efforts in the US House to extend the FISA Act “demonstrate sharp differences between him and the other candidates.” He is right, but has the wrong conclusion, based on a gross misunderstanding of the subject. FISA stands for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The ACLU (the American Civil Liberties Union) is using American civil courts in an effort to gut-shoot the government’s efforts to stay ahead of the terrorists seeking to kill Americans in America....

Mumpower Accuses Shuler, Armor, and Campbell of Pandering on FISA 11th District Republican Congressional candidate Carl Mumpower has taken the offensive in challenging candidates Heath Shuler, John Armor, and Spence Campbell for their shared position in support of FISA immunity and the warrantless wiretapping of American Citizens. "The speed with which my colleagues bunched together speaks either to a clear disregard for the United States Constitution or the need to pander to voters' fears," said Mumpower. "In either case, we have a trio of strange bedfellows - unified behind a bill that dodges the real problems, supports big-government, and tramples...

Carl Mumpower, a Republican candidate for Congress, has broken ranks with his party and opposes legislation to protect telecommunications companies that helped in the government's warrantless spying program. "Bad things grow in the dark and government at all levels is trying to turn out the lights," he said. Congress passed the Protect America Act, which was signed by President Bush, expanding the ability of the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation to get wiretaps without the approval of the courts. The law expired and Congress and Bush have battled over a new version of the bill, called the...

Company's plan for Iran trade brings guilty plea Mar. 18, 2008 Allied Telesis Labs, a telecommunications research company with offices on NC State's Centennial Campus, entered a guilty plea today to conspiring to trade illegally with Iran. According to a federal court press release, the company conspired to land and carry out a $95 million contract to rebuild telecommunications systems in Iranian cities including Teheran. The guilty plea followed a written plea agreement and required the defendant to pay a fine of $500,000. The plea came in federal court in Raleigh to charges of conspiracy to violate the International Emergency...

You might call it a friends, family and ID thieves plan. Last year, identity thieves wormed their way into Michael Carner’s Sprint account, tacked on 14 new cell phones and began ringing up phone charges. Even though he reported the intrusion, things only got worse. For nearly a year, the real estate agent was hit with late fees, frequent automated collections calls, service interruptions, and a $5,000 bill. When Carner finally gave up and tried to cancel his account, Sprint had one more piece of bad news: The imposters had extended his service contract for two years, meaning he'd have...

Barack Obama has resolutely opposed giving American telecommunications companies immunity from lawsuits for their work with the NSA, under Department of Justice assurances of legality, to assist in surveillance. He voted against the bipartisan Senate FISA reform bill that Democratic House leadership has stalled. Now Obama’s national-security advisor has gone public in opposing Obama on the key national security issue: In a new interview with National Journal magazine, an intelligence adviser to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign broke with his candidate’s position opposing retroactive legal protection for telecommunications companies being sued for cooperating with a dubious U.S. government domestic surveillance program.“I...

Apple today previewed its iPhone 2.0 software, scheduled for release this June, and announced the immediate availability of a beta release of the software to selected developers and enterprise customers. The iPhone 2.0 beta release includes both the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) as well as new enterprise features such as support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync to provide secure, over-the-air push email, contacts and calendars as well as remote wipe, and the addition of Cisco IPsec VPN for encrypted access to private corporate networks. "We're excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community with potentially thousands of native applications...

Listen Up: Should the Telecoms be Punished for Helping Protect You from Terrorists? By Clifford D. May Scripps Howard News Service March 6, 2008 Listen Up: Should the Telecoms be Punished for Helping Protect You from Terrorists? Are you outraged? You’re supposed to be. According to Peter Eliasberg, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11/01 attacks, “everybody in the country” may have had their phone calls “combed through” for terrorist connections and, if that happened, he told the Washington Post, “lots of people will be outraged.” Would you be among them?...

KANDAHAR: Taliban militants destroyed a telecom tower in southern Afghanistan, the second such assault in two days, after warning phone companies to shut down their towers or face attacks. Militants burned the base station of a Roshan mobile phone company tower in Kandahar city late Saturday, said Qarim Agha, a police officer in the area. He said authorities tightened security around other telecom towers in the city. Last week, a Taliban spokesman said militants would blow up towers across Afghanistan if mobile phone companies did not switch off their signals overnight. The militants fear US and other foreign troops are...

According to a report floating around Capitol Hill, the Democratic House leadership may have made a deal with Republicans to get the FISA reform bill passed — with telecom immunity intact. Instead of bringing the bipartisan Senate deal to the floor in one piece, Nancy Pelosi will schedule votes on its component parts. Both will pass, but it will allow some members to cast nays against the immunity to protect themselves from the netroots activists opposed to the immunity: To break an impasse over legislation overhauling the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, House Democratic leaders are considering the option of taking...

Sprint Nextel yesterday reported a $29.45 billion fourth-quarter loss and said legions of subscribers continue to abandon its service, many because they can't pay their bills. The nation's third-largest wireless carrier last year courted people with poor credit to boost its number of subscribers. Now the company is feeling the pain disproportionately as the economy weakens and consumers default on their debts. Sprint said it expects 1.2 million wireless subscribers to drop their service in the current quarter, roughly the same number that left in all of 2007. The company offset losses by signing up new customers, but it has...

DOHA (AFP) - Damage to several undersea telecom cables that caused outages across the Middle East and Asia could have been an act of sabotage, the International Telecommunication Union said on Monday. "We do not want to preempt the results of ongoing investigations, but we do not rule out that a deliberate act of sabotage caused the damage to the undersea cables over two weeks ago," the UN agency's head of development, Sami al-Murshed, told AFP.

I have three computers and need more than one hooked to the net but with blocking for the kids. I also need a line to a computer in a different room. I am spending over 200 per month on various telecom and am not sure I need it. I need to figure out what is needed where. Who or what should I call and how much should I expect to spend? I thought of calling a Best Buy guy who lives in our town. Is this a good idea?

Now and then sanity prevails, even in Washington. So it did yesterday as the Senate passed a warrantless wiretap bill for overseas terrorists while killing most of the Lilliputian attempts to tie down our war fighters. "We lost every single battle we had on this bill," conceded Chris Dodd, which ought to tell the Connecticut Senator something about the logic of what he was proposing. His own amendment -- to deny immunity from lawsuits to telecom companies that cooperated with the government after 9/11 -- didn't even get a third of the Senate. It lost 67-31, though notably among the...

Senate OKs immunity for telecoms By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer 11 minutes ago The Senate voted Tuesday to shield from lawsuits telecommunications companies that helped the government eavesdrop on their customers without court permission after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. After nearly two months of stops and starts, the Senate rejected by a vote of 31 to 67 an amendment that would have stripped a grant of retroactive immunity to the companies. President Bush has promised to veto any new surveillance bill that does not protect the companies that helped the government in its warrantless wiretapping program. About 40...

NEW YORK (AP) -- An outage has disconnected BlackBerry smart phones across North America. AT&T Inc. says the disruption Monday is affecting all wireless carriers. AT&T first learned about the problem at about 3:30 p.m. EST. There's no word on the cause or when the problem might be fixed. BlackBerry maker Research in Motion did not immediately return a phone call.

MUMBAI, Feb 10 (Reuters) - Services on two of three broken undersea cables providing Internet services to parts of the Middle East and Asia have been restored after both cables were repaired, an Indian-owned cable operator said on Sunday. FLAG Telecom, a subsidiary of India's No. 2 mobile operator Reliance Communications (RLCM.BO: Quote, Profile, Research), said in a statement the breaks in its FLAG Europe-Asia (FEA) and FALCON cables had been repaired and services routed back through these cables. Web access in south Asia and parts of the Middle East was disrupted after breaks occurred in segments of two cables...

DUBAI — An estimated 1.7 million Internet users in the UAE have been affected by the recent undersea cable damage, an expert said yesterday, quoting recent figures published by TeleGeography, an international research Web site. Internet data was majorly affected as it is the biggest capacity carried by the undersea cables. However, all voice calls, corporate data and video traffic were also affected. Two du experts yesterday briefed the media on the current methods being undertaken by the telecom provider to re-route the Internet traffic to provide normalcy to the users. Quoting TeleGeography and describing the effect the cuts had...

CNN) -- A telecommunications company on Friday blamed a ship anchor for cutting one of three severed undersea cables that snarled Internet traffic throughout the Middle East last week. FLAG Telecom's FALCON cable spanning Dubai and Oman was snapped February 1 by an abandoned six-ton ship anchor, the company said, and will be repaired by Sunday.< >Another target of the Internet sabotage speculation is Islamic terrorists. "It was a six-ton anchor that took out that cable in the Persian Gulf. Unless al Qaeda has extremely strong frogmen or submarines, I'm not sure how they did it," laughed Beckert.< >

You may have noticed a number of stories recently about undersea cables getting cut around the world. Apparently the total is now up to 5, but the scariest part of this is that Iran is now offline. You can also read Schneier's comments on this coincidence.

From our "eyes open" and be ready for the ME to go hot, not only are sources in Israel reporting that unofficially folks are being told to ready their safe rooms, but we now see that telecommunications cable breaks servicing that part of the world are now up to 5! "A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each. These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also...

NEW DELHI (AFP) - - Another Middle East undersea Internet cable has been damaged, adding to disruption in Indian online services caused when several lines were cut earlier this week, a cable operating firm said Saturday. The Falcon cable was cut 56 kilometres (35 miles) from Dubai, between Oman and the United Arab Emirates, according to its owner FLAG Telecom, part of India's Reliance Communications. The company said on its website that a repair ship had been notified and was expected to arrive at the site in the next few days. The cause of the latest cable damage was not...