We are Family

[curt]

We don't need another / a new discussion to prove it.

It is as it is.

Let this "fred" (discussion thread) live under the theme .......

long live this family

brothers, sisters, brethern, dogs, cats and birds, ants and flees, water and air and gas and Clare and Jim and him and the window Simm (??) and you and me and he and she and we and them and us and puss (???) and fish and the dish (it's on) and paper and pen.

Yip.

[curt]

Sounds to me as if you have VoIP. That would also explani the crappy crackling and sometimes clicking in the line.

[Mouse]

The clicking and echoes had stopped, there was a lot of that for a short while, a couple of weeks, after I phoned someone in the UK who is very active in debating our crises of confidence.

I've talked to the people I rent my landline from and my ISP, all is well they say, and I've been told this could only happen if I had set up such a diversion myself, via the landline provider.

These are 3 separate companies, BT (landline lease), Supanet (broadband and phonecall billing) and Orange (the mysterious 3rd party mobile phone). I've tried ringing the number but there's no answer except the usual voicemail message service. Yes, my daughter left a message for them, but I have only managed to sigh so far.

[curt]

Okay, thanks, Mouse. This narrows the troubleshooting down a bit.

BT Landline, clean as they come, analog PSTN.

Supanet...."broadband and phonecall billing" ? Why phonecall billing ? I strongly suspect you have a VoIP line via Supanet, using the BT PSTN which is needed at any rate, otherwise no connection to the world at all.

Orange? WTF? Who knows.....TelCos can't live, work or play without one another. Neither has a full reach to all services everywhere at all times so the end user usually, unknowingly is in all reality using multiple carriers to place one single call or data transfer. This may explain the Orange effect.

Still and allthewhile, clicks, echoes AND unexpected rerouting via unknown mobile numbers / channels all point to VoIP.

yours truly,

curtis

[curt]

I need to elaborate on that............

Orange may have been selected by Supanet for that particular time period due to sophisticated, Inter-Carrier VoIP Call Routing (IVCR). Carriers will revert to this method to save costs. There is no requirement for the carrier to inform their Customer about it. As Customer, you enjoy the lower rates with Supanet. In turn, Supanet performs all kinds of tricks to continue to operate low cost. Thus Orange. Perhaps. I'm guessing.

PSTN = Public switched telephone network . An interesting read, especially this part;
UK Telephone Switch Hierarchy
The forerunner of British Telecom, the General Post Office, also organized its intercity trunk network along similar hierarchical lines to that of North America. However, because of the significantly smaller geographic area involved, fewer levels of connection were required, and no formal numbering of class offices was made.

There were a few special exceptions to the following description, notably those involving Northern Ireland, some of the Channel Dependencies, and the few locations in England which were served by non-GPO companies, such as Hull (Kcom) and Portsmouth.[citation needed]

VoIP = Voice over Internet Protocol ....and here is the part that will interest you the most ;

Quality of Service
Because the underlying IP network is inherently unreliable, in contrast to the circuit-switched public telephone network, and does not inherently provide a mechanism to ensure that data packets are delivered in sequential order, or provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees, VoIP implementations face problems mitigating latency and jitter.

Voice travels over IP networks in packets in the same manner as data, so when you talk over an IP network your conversation is broken up into small packets. These voice and data packets travel over the same network with a fixed bandwidth. This system is more prone to congestion[citation needed] and DoS attacks[28] than traditional circuit switched systems.

Fixed delays cannot be controlled (as they are caused by the physical distance the packets travel), however some delays can be minimized by marking voice packets as being delay-sensitive (see, for example, DiffServ). Fixed delays are especially problematic when satellite circuits are involved, due to long round-trip propagation delay (400–600 milliseconds for links through geostationary satellites).

A cause of packet loss and delay is congestion, which can be avoided by means of teletraffic engineering.

The receiving node must restructure IP packets that may be out of order, delayed or missing, while ensuring that the audio stream maintains a proper time consistency. Variation in delay is called jitter. The effects of jitter can be mitigated by storing voice packets in a jitter buffer upon arrival and before producing analog audio, although this further increases delay. This avoids a condition known as buffer underrun, in which the voice engine is missing audio since the next voice packet has not yet arrived. When IP packets are lost or delayed at any point in the network between VoIP users there will be a momentary dropout of voice if all packet delay and loss mechanisms cannot compensate.

It has been suggested to rely on the packetized nature of media in VoIP communications and transmit the stream of packets from the source phone to the destination phone simultaneously across different routes (multi-path routing)[29]. In such a way, temporary failures have less impact on the communication quality. In capillary routing it has been suggested to use at the packet level Fountain codes or particularly raptor codes for transmitting extra redundant packets making the communication more reliable[citation needed].

....well, not all of that, but the part about echoes and clicking et al, fer sher.

Have no fear, VoIP is not bad. It's just not as good as landlines are. Both can be tapped without the spy even having to enter your home (done nowadays on the transport Switch at the TelCo....usually by remote connection to somewhere entirely elsewhere....anywhere, worldwide btw). With VoIP, you pay less but you also have to put up with the crap you initially mentioned. Had you tried telepathy?

[Mouse]

Thank you Curtis, that's sinking in slowly.
So, there's probably no-one listening at all but it serves the interests of those at the top that all dissenters should desist and fear the little clicks, so my immediate throwing up of hands (after an hour or so of being cool, my daughter was impressed for a change) is only really appropriate to mild and justified paranoia, and perfectly natural. I shouldn't really be ashamed of myself for being silly should I?
Perhaps.

Does this mean I can get Skype, despite my macmini not having a microphone?

This is mesmerising:
Daniel Ellsberg speaks about Iran Part II. Gulf of Tonkin

[curt]

will view the video clip @home, once I get there.

Skype without a microphone? No way. But Skype is a great alternative, and free of charge too. Mark & I used it a lot, a few years ago. Never was billed, as it is free, well, almost;

"Calls to other users of the service and to free-of-charge numbers are free, while calls to other landlines and mobile phones can be made for a fee."

But beware os Skype; "Security researchers Biondi and Desclaux have speculated that Skype may have a backdoor since Skype sends traffic even when it is turned off and because Skype has taken extreme measures to obfuscate their traffic and functioning of their program."

And btw, "Skype uses a proprietary Internet telephony (VoIP) network, called the Skype protocol. The protocol has not been made publicly available by Skype and official applications using the protocol are proprietary and closed-source. The main difference between Skype and standard VoIP clients is that Skype operates on a peer-to-peer model (originally based on the Kazaa software[65]) rather than the more usual client-server model."

++

"Skype provides an uncontrolled registration system for users with absolutely no proof of identity. This permits users to use the system without revealing their identity to other users. It is trivial, of course, for anybody to set up an account using any name; the displayed caller's name is no guarantee of authenticity. A third party paper analyzing the security and methodology of Skype was presented at Black Hat Europe 2006. It analyzed Skype and found a number of security issues with the current security model.[70]

Versions exist for Linux (32-bit x86 only), Linux-based Maemo, Mac OS X (Intel and PPC), Microsoft Windows (2000, XP, Vista, Windows Mobile), and even Sony's PSP[71]"

++

"Minimum System Requirements for Skype

In order to use Skype for Windows software, your computer must meet the following minimum system requirements:

* PC running Windows 2000 or XP
* 400 MHz processor
* 128 MB RAM
* 15 MB free disk space on your hard drive
* Sound Card, speakers and microphone
* Internet Connection (either dial-up: minimum 33.6 Kbps modem, or any broadband: cable, DSL, etc.)"

Sound Card, speakers and microphone. Yip. Er, nope.

A healthy dose of paranoia is ...healthy. Too much of it and you become socially disfunctional. Try to keep the dosages low but don't ya ever leave the house without it.

[Cal]

What you say makes sense Curt.

It's VoIP we've got at work ... and sometimes it's perfect & at other times it's like talking over a radio.

[littleoldme]

My phone used to do really weird things, once it did this odd ring, and the number on the screen was 000-000-0000. You can bet your butt I was sure the FEDS were coming to get me. Nothing happened though.lol

[curt]

That brings up a fond memory. My grandparents, maternal side lived on L Street. I forget the name but an elderly widow lived two house down. The two household shared a party line. That way, they could call each other up and relay messages without generating any costs. One would pick the phone up and just turn the dial once, no particular number. The phone at the other house would clanker a little bit without really ringing. "Get the phone willya Curtis my boy. It's Bessie (that's the name) and she's wantin' to tell us somethin'. "Hello!" "Hi Bessie, this is Curt." "Hello!" "How can I help ya Bessie, this is Curtis Arden." "HELLO!!" "Grandma, it's for you." Bessie was hard of hearing but she also wanted to speak with Mildred, not with Curtis Arden. They would chatter on, fighting to keep their false teeth from flying out and I would sit there wondering what kind of chore I would have to do this time. "Diggumtator (that's what my Nanny (that's what we sometimes called our Grandma) would call me)....Bessie needs four fresh eggs. Scedaddle now, she's bakin' a cake for your birthday and she just now found out she doesn't have any eggs." Off I went, first to the back room to see if any eggs were on the window sill, then out back to the chicken coup to rob them chickens of their babies....and then off to see Bessie who would always try to give me a stanky old kiss on the cheek. Sure baked a good cake though.

P.S. I hate phones.

[Mouse]

What treats to read this evening, teeth flying across the room and even more fascinating facts about the wild things our voices do, travelling through space in the dark like nerve impulses.

Just finished two paintings! (one for the third or fourth time). Another one close, oh God will it happen? Perhaps tonight, still at it, stopped for a break. Tra la. A handful of almonds.
(Morricone setting the pace Cal.)

[littleoldme]

Oh Curt, I had forgotten about the party line. We had a party line when I was little. I remember my brother and sister listening in on the line to other people on the phone and giggling their butts off, at least till mom caught 'em.
That's one of those little things you totally forget about until someone mentions it.Thanks for the trip down memory lane.

[curt]

Dear Tribe,

today, I come to you in search of advice. I plan on attending a VL (Very Large) demo this saturday and would like to make my own banner or sign to take along and display. At first, I thought the message "TV Lies" would make an impact but then I heard something on AFN last night. The voice clearly said ...........

radioINTELevision

Waddya thank? Is this a good idea for a sign/banner? People here can read English, of this I'm certain but the trick is, this may be the only sign/banner in English this time and I want it to make a real psychological impact.

radioINTELevision

?? gut ? nix gut ?