Re: OT? www.donotcall.gov problem
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 05:17:58AM -0600, Paul E Condon wrote:
> Yesterday, I attempted to use the new federal (USA) web site for
> registering my telephone numbers in the 'do not call' database. I did
> not succeed, and I am wondering what is wrong. Let me describe my
> experience:
The easy answer is ditch your landline in favor of a cell-phone. It's
illegal to make unsolicted commercial phone calls to cell-phones in
the US, and telemarketers do respect this.
> When I did this, the hardware of the telephone system was able to
> verify that I was calling from the telephone instrument that I
> was registering. But I have a question about this process:
> I was required to enter the telephone # manually, and then my
> manual entry was checked against what the hardware said. Why?
> Why not just have the hardware grab the telephone # and put it
> into the database?
Caller ID works infrequently between area codes. This is truly
annoying for me, the Portland metro area has four area codes in two
states: 971 Portland is entirely contained and overlays 503 Northwest
Oregon and all calls between the two are local, then across town in
Vancouver, Washington we have 260 Southwest Washginton and 564
Vancouver and calls between the two are local. I'm in 503.
Occasionally, but very rarely someone with one of the other area codes
appears on my caller ID, the rest of the time it doesn't appear. My
buddy's got his cell phone in 971. 971 and 564 are both fairly rare,
but almost nobody shows up on his caller ID.
> (Yes, I use ppp to my ISP, but surely they can't query the ISP server
> to find out which telephone I'm using to call the ISP, and surely it
> should be possible to register if ones internet connection is entirely
> independent of ones telephone service. ???)
Even if your ISP keeps track of this, I doubt they're going to go
through the effort of facilitating this without being served a search
warrant. This is a Good Thing(tm).
- --
.''`. Paul Johnson <baloo@ursine.ca>
: :' : proud Debian admin and user
`. `'`
`- Debian - when you have better things to do than fix a system
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux)
iD8DBQE/A/pUJ5vLSqVpK2kRAvLfAJsE+STKADkrnPBY8zgGTGrmLY3ydwCfVucN
H4yhabgEwsuh3770MZASNqE=
=A8yw
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Reply to: