It looks like blogger Russell Bryant is starting a series of tutorials on “How-to: Write an Asterisk Module.” Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 are now online. For those of you who may have wanted to write an Asterisk module but didn’t have the first clue about how to get started, you might want to follow this series.
Archive for June, 2008
Fourwinds10.com: Corporations are getting rich using federal prisoners as captive labor pools
Oh, and in case you think this is a good idea, consider that they may be taking your job. You think that your job has gone to Mexico or China? Maybe not… maybe it’s still being done by Americans, who would by almost any definition be living in slave conditions. Of course, federal prisoners lose most of their civil rights. Ever wonder why there’s such a pervasive push to make more and more common activities illegal?
Just a few excerpts here, but you really should read the entire article:
Just across the street from the hospital complex is a camp for minimum-security women prisoners who are not ill. They get most of the hot, hard jobs — cleaning boilers, welding, mowing. The pay is a lousy 12 cents an hour with no raises. That’s why a job that many on the outside would take only as a last resort is the most coveted in the compound: Ernestine the telephone operator.
So when you call directory assistance using, say, Excel Telecommunications, chances are good your inquiry might be answered by a federal prisoner. At Carswell, a fifth of the prison workforce — most from the camp but a few from the hospital as well — get to sit in cubicles in an air-conditioned building, start at almost double the pay of the regular prison jobs, and, if they behave and don’t make mistakes, get regular raises until they reach the maximum pay of — hold onto your hat — $1.45 an hour. Of course, they have to work seven and a half years to reach that maximum. And since this center hasn’t been open long enough for anyone to make the maximum, the highest pay at Carswell is $1.15 an hour.
With toothpaste at $5.95 in the prison commissary, inmates who take those calls for Excel have to work between five and 25 hours to earn enough for one tube. But by comparison, they’re lucky: Women who work at other prison jobs have to sweat out 49 hours for the luxury of brushing their teeth.
The math on the other end is even simpler, if grander in scale: Excel, a $2.5 billion global company, comes out the clear winner. If the 19-year-old Irving-based long-distance carrier had to pay no more than minimum wage to non-prison U.S. workers to field calls from its worldwide network, it would cost the company $900 a month per worker, plus benefits and payments to Social Security. The 370 prison workers in Excel’s call center at Carswell make $180 a month at most, with no benefits.
Remember, were it not for the use of forced labor, these corporations would have to pay at least minimum wage. And now the Michigan connection:
….. In 2000, Rep. [Pete] Hoekstra [from Holland, Michigan], chairman of the House subcommittee on education and the workforce, opened an investigation into the “racket” that Corum had witnessed, albeit a small part of it. The FPI “has been taking tens of thousands of items in excess federal government equipment, especially computer equipment, and using them to fuel an entry of unknown scope into the commercial marketplace,” he said at the opening of the subsequent hearing. In other words, they were selling used government equipment, improperly and in huge quantities.
According to Hoekstra’s office and transcripts of the hearings, Unicor acquired the computers through a process that allows federal agencies that are replacing equipment to pass along outdated but still operable items for use by other agencies. If other federal agencies don’t need the hand-me-downs, the equipment is supposed to be dispersed, free, to nonprofit groups, schools, or state governments. It is never supposed to be sold.
In this case the computers were destined to be sent to poor school districts under a presidential order of Bill Clinton. Somehow, FPI got to them first, hauled them out of the warehouses, and began a huge, illegal, garage sale, Hoekstra said. He noted that at the time the U.S. Department of Justice was conducting a criminal investigation of Unicor. “It is high time,” he said. “FPI has been out of control for years, exceeding its statutory authority and running wild through the marketplace without any Congressional … authority.”
The above small excerpts are really just to whet your appetite and hopefully induce you to go read the entire article. The basic idea of training prisoners so that they will have a marketable skill once released is not necessarily a bad one, but there is a not-so-fine line between job training and exploitation, and I would hope that after reading this article, most people would agree that line has been crossed. It’s all the more noxious when you realize that criminals from wealthy backgrounds, that can afford good lawyers, often get treated much differently (ever hear of “Club Fed”?). But I know that some readers will not be moved by any appeal that even prisoners should have humane treatment, so I will again note that this scheme may be taking away real jobs that are badly needed in these hard economic times.
Human rights activists have complained, probably with justification, that the Chinese government incarcerates people and then uses them as slave labor. So, it’s quite shocking to read a story like this coming out of the U.S.A. So much for the “Land of the Free” and that pesky old Constitution.
Recordings show anemic response to tragic situation by Allegan County 911
From the Muskegon Chronicle’s web site (probably originally from the Grand Rapids Press, a sister newspaper to the Chronicle):
ALLEGAN COUNTY — Nearly 11 minutes into a 911 call, a frustrated Larry Huff — believing that his mother-in-law and her nephew were swept into raging waters — hung up and returned to a stretch of Lakeshore Drive that collapsed in Sunday’s drenching storms.
“Well, you are taking forever, so we’re going to be at … 2817 Lakeshore. … OK, we’re going down there, bye,” Huff told the dispatcher on the recorded 911 call obtained by The Press.
The Chronicle has posted the 911 call recordings of a call by a relative of the two victims that drowned in a road washout in Allegan County. For several minutes the caller describes in detail why he believes that his mother-in-law and her nephew have been swept away in the road collapse. The Allegan County 911 dispatcher seems to react as if she were taking a pizza order, and was afraid the customer was going to stiff the driver, so she needed to keep questioning the caller. She keeps asking the same questions, makes the caller repeat the information several times, and all the while makes no apparent effort to dispatch help of any kind. In the end, it took her approximately fifteen minutes to decide to dispatch a state police officer, and another fifteen minutes for that officer to arrive on the scene.
In the end, the delay in the response probably would not have changed the outcome (although we will never know), but the insensitivity of the dispatcher is hard to fathom. As one commenter on the story wrote:
First and foremost we send our prayers and condolences to Larry and his family. My spouse and I were both appalled by this entire scenario. The dispatcher handled this so routinely it is oblivious that she is in the wrong job! Staying calm and focused is important but what was it about they might be in a life-threatening situation that she was incapable of comprehending? And the repeated questions about drove me crazy. Our compliments to Larry in the way he handled himself with the dispatcher. I wanted to crawl through the phone and draw her a picture. The term absolute incompetence comes to mind. If this dispatchers drawn out conversation was all a “stall” because she had no one to send, we are all in very serious trouble!
After listening to the recordings, I would agree. There was simply no excuse for the way the dispatcher dragged out the call. We need people working the phones at 911 centers who can understand the meaning of the word “emergency.”
I’m not saying the dispatcher is a bad person, and there are probably some telephone-related jobs she’d be perfect for – such as taking telephone orders, or any other type of low-key situation, where it doesn’t matter so much if the call is dragged out a bit. But in an emergency, we expect our 911 dispatchers to “get it” the first time around, because seconds can mean the difference between life and death. My only thought is that maybe with this particular operator, the caller may have received a better response if he’d acted a bit more frantic and/or hysterical – but then again, maybe the operator would have taken even more time with a hysterical caller (we hope that is never put to the test).
My thought is that the recording of this particular call ought to be part of the training for 911 operators, both as an example of how NOT to handle an emergency call, and to demonstrate that just because a caller isn’t yelling and screaming into the phone, that does not mean that there isn’t a very real emergency!
Experimenting with Twitter
Twitter has to be one of the most frustrating Internet services ever – some days it seems like it’s down more often than it’s up, and they limit you to 15 characters for a user name and 140 characters for a message. Still, it happens that on the old MI-Telecom mailing list (now defunct) and in this blog, much of what I have done is simply posting links of interest, often with a bit of extraneous commentary that few people seemed to appreciate. Well, with Twitter I can post the links and skip the commentary – in fact they don’t give you enough space to do any commentary! Which does not mean that I’m posting copious amounts of links, but every so often when I see something interesting I throw it in there. The other day I discovered a small Twitter client for the Mac (see this post in the CrabApple Forest blog for more info), which makes it a lot easier to post a quick tweet. So for those of you into Twitter, you can follow our Tweets.
This isn’t necessarily going to be a permanent thing (of course, nothing ever is) so it’s probably not worth setting up a Twitter account just to follow us, but if you are already using that infernal service, we’d invite you to add us, if you are so inclined. We promise NOT to tweet when we are eating lunch, or going to the bathroom, our some other aspect of our lives that you probably couldn’t care less about.
Hey Lucy! Get the Phone!
Anyone under the age of 40 may not remember the name, but at one time Crosley was one of the big names in radio receivers and early black-and-white televisions. Even though the original Crosley Corporation no longer exists, the brand name was purchased and is now used by Crosley Radio, a company that makes reproductions of products that are stuck in our collective memories – perhaps from finding them in our grandparents’ attics, or seeing them in old movies and TV shows.
Of course, these are only reproductions, and often not exact reproductions due to advances in technology. Such is the case with their line of telephone reproductions. No matter how much you might desire a perfect reproduction of an older model, the fact is that nowadays it’s not really practical to have a phone without touch tone dialing. But that doesn’t mean you can’t come awfully close.
The phones come in a small choice of colors that varies depending on the model – for example, you might want basic black in a wall or desk phone…
… but, it would hardly make sense to offer a black Princess phone.
I’m sure these reproductions aren’t perfect. For example, a real model 354 wall phone as made by Western Electric (in the USA) or Northern Electric (in Canada) has slots on the sides so that the ringer could be heard a bit more clearly. No slots on the phone in the above photo, but since it probably doesn’t contain a real mechanical ringer anyway, those slots would not serve any purpose and would just catch dust. Also, the phones come with an earpiece volume control, something the originals usually did not have.
I don’t know how well these actually work as phones (I’ve never actually used one, just happened across their web site), but I’d assume they work as well as other modern phones, and they sure look nice, especially that red 302 desk set reproduction. Crosley Radio (the new company) also makes reproductions of other nostalgic items, such as cathedral style radios and jukeboxes (which play CD’s, not “stacks of wax”), so you may want to download a catalog. So if you are stuck for a Father’s Day gift, and if Dad is into old stuff, set him up with a VoIP service and then plug one of these beauties into it. Of course, you can still find the real thing on fleabay, but unfortunately those old mechanical dials (besides having a tendency to lock up after all these years) won’t work with modern VoIP service.
Speaking of which, I wonder why no one sells a dial conversion separately – something that would replace the mechanical dials in those old Western/Northern Electric 300 series phones, and similar phones that used the same size dial (and there were many such back in the day). If they can do it in these reproduction phones, why can’t you purchase the dials separately and put them in the genuine item? Or would that be something no one (except me) would consider doing to one of those old phones? I somehow doubt that – for a while, people were making table lamps out of old candlestick phones, so I don’t think that replacing the old rotary dial with a touch tone unit would be that big a deal, unless you were looking for a museum piece. But, that’s just me.
WTF?? DSLreports editorializes in favor of broadband caps!
At first I checked the calendar – nope, it’s not April Fools Day. Then I read the article to see if the title, “Editorial: Caps are welcome” was really a bit of headline sarcasm, and that the body of the article would complete the sentence in some way that would make sense (as in “Caps are welcome – in retirement homes”, though even that would make the unwarranted assumption that no senior citizen would actually want to use the bandwidth they are paying for).
I did discover that the author on this particular editorial actually lives in Australia, where apparently the broadband service is horrible, like it will be in the United States if the phone and cable companies get their way.
Anyway, without responding to the editorial point by point, I just want to mention what I think is the underlying fallacy behind the editorial, at least insofar as we in North America are concerned, and that is that the caps will only affect a small percentage of “broadband hogs” – these are supposedly the “heavy downloaders.”
Now, let me point out that the satellite broadband providers have actually come up with a method of dealing with broadband over-usage that makes some degree sense, even though users tend to hate it. The way it generally works is, you are allowed to download so much per day. If you come close to reaching the limit, your download speed is severely reduced, for example to somewhere around 256K. The next day, you again receive full bandwidth (at least until you use up that day’s allotment). The point is, this makes sense for a lot of reasons – it accomplishes the goal of keeping anyone from using far too much bandwidth (to the point that it degrades service for other customers) but it still lets the customer access basic services like e-mail and web pages (although pages that contain embedded video will load rather slowly). And no customer ever gets hit with an unexpected bill for overage charges.
But, that’s not what some cable and phone companies want to do. Instead of actually limiting the bandwidth of those whose usage they consider excessive, their plan is to let them keep using bandwidth to their heart’s delight, then send a huge bill at the end of the month. If anyone can’t see the problem with this plan, you’re probably either not a U.S.A. resident or you are still in Junior High school using your parents’ Internet service.
Let’s think about this for just a moment. Do we think that, in the future, new Internet-based applications are going to use MORE or LESS bandwidth? Looking at past trends, my guess is MORE.
Now, then, do we think that new technology will make it MORE or LESS expensive to provide that bandwidth? Again, if we go by past trends, the cost of providing bandwidth should continue to drop, particularly as new technologies are developed that squeeze more bandwidth out of existing fiber circuits (that’s the nice thing about fiber, when you want more bandwidth you don’t usually have to replace the fiber, you just replace the equipment at the endpoints with something that utilizes the existing fiber more effectively).
Okay, now I want you to think really hard about this one. Even if customer bandwidth consumption stayed at current levels, and the cost of moving those bits around the world kept going down, do you think that a phone or cable company would ever reduce their prices (absent serious competition that does not now exist in most areas?). Have your phone and cable bills increased or decreased over the last several years?
Okay, so if your bandwidth usage has a tendency to go up, AND the phone and cable companies have a tendency to raise prices, do you suppose that it’s at all possible that as the bandwidth usage goes up, the “caps” before metering starts will keep getting REDUCED? I’m sure the goal at the cable company, and the wet dream of the phone company executive, is to see the day when no one pays flat rate for their Internet service anymore. Just as in the days when you paid a “flat monthly rate” for your phone service as long as you didn’t go over a certain number of calls per month, so it will be with your Internet service. And just as there were senior citizens that never made phone calls and always paid the minimum rate, there will be people who do nothing but read and send the odd piece of e-mail who, in theory, will pay the basic rate.
Why do I say, “in theory”? Well, here are a couple other things to keep in mind. First, broadband service isn’t presently regulated by any public service or public utilities commission, and is barely regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. What that means is that if your phone or cable company decides that you aren’t paying enough – that you are a “deadbeat” (to use the term that some credit card companies use about customers who always pay they balances off in time, and never incur any interest charges) – they may simply decide to tack on a few extra GB of usage. How will you contest it? Who will you complain to? They will have you by the part of the anatomy where it hurts the most (speaking as a guy here). Even if you then decide you can live without the Internet and cancel your service, they will still sic the bill collectors on you.
(I am convinced that one reason the phone companies are losing wireline customers is because so many have in the past had billing disputes and, not knowing how to complain effectively, either paid money they did not rightfully owe or had their service disconnected and/or their credit rating harmed by their refusal to pay. That sort of thing leaves a REALLY bad taste in the mouth of a customer).
And then there’s the other possibility. Let’s say that someone doesn’t like you and is out to get you. Maybe your kid is being cyber-bullied. Whatever. All someone has to do is somehow get a “trojan horse” program onto your system that does whatever it takes to suck up loads of bandwidth. Today if that happened, your broadband provider would probably notice and notify you (and maybe suspend your service until the problem was fixed), but from your point of view it would be a denial-of-service attack, nothing more. But the minute bandwidth caps go into effect, suddenly your ISP has a financial incentive to let as much traffic flow into your system as possible, since YOU will get stuck with the bill. Note we are not talking here about traffic you instigated (say, by foolishly using a torrent-type program) but rather about traffic sent to you without your knowledge and prior approval – and without even trying too hard, I could probably think of a dozen or so ways that could happen (everything from a piece of software that too aggressively “phones home”, to misdirected packets that come to you because some teenage hacker was trying to instigate a denial-of-service attack against the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and fumbled-fingered the IP address, and is sending his zillion packets to you instead).
photo credit: jetzenpolis
Now, if the past is any indication, I am urinating into the wind here. The big broadband providers, who (in case you hadn’t noticed) are quickly becoming duopolies or monopolies in their service areas, will crank up their PR machines and tell you that bandwidth caps are necessary and good and right, and that only an unpatriotic supporter of all that is evil would oppose them. AND (the Big Lie), they will only affect a very small percentage of customers. Yeah, right. That’s possibly true TODAY. And YOU, little lobster, have just been lowered into the pot of cool water, and never mind the hissing sound and that faint whiff of natural gas you smell.
Does anyone remember how people used to place calls to each other back in the days of the black-and-white movies? You picked up the phone and told Tillie the operator who you wanted to speak to, and she connected you, and (if local) it was a free call. Then along came rotary dialing, and people hated having to look up phone numbers and dial them, but they were placated by being told that they could call “Information” and get the number for free, if for some reason they could not look it up. THEN the phone company said some people were hogging the time of the Directory Assistance operators (by then it was called Directory Assistance) so they had to start charging the heaviest users, those who made more than 20 calls a month to Directory Assistance. Then the number of “free” calls went down to ten, then five, then three. THEN they started using computerized equipment so that the actual time a human operator was online with a customer dropped significantly. Did they then increase the “free” call allowance? HAH! When was the last time you got a free telephone number from a telephone company operator, or even one of their voice-recognition computers?
They say that those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it. But nowadays I sometimes feel like I’m surrounded by stupid people – the history of how phone and cable companies promise the moon and stars, then do nothing but raise rates, is so recent that it would be hard to overlook, yet people continue to believe the crap that the phone and cable company PR and advertising departments crank out. If, in this day and age, you really think that phone or cable companies have your best interest at heart by imposing bandwidth caps, then you have to be among the stupidest people on this planet. If you really are in that group, and what I just said offends you, don’t let the door hit you on the way out – you don’t deserve to be a reader of this blog.
More information on FreeSwitch
FreeSwitch is starting to look like a very interesting – and powerful – alternative to Asterisk. Here is a link to a blog post by Kevin McCarthy that may give you the motivation to give it a look:
FreeSwitch – Trying on the Big Boy Pants
As we noted in another post earlier today, we’re rather hoping that the FreePBX folks will consider making a version of FreePBX that works with FreeSwitch, especially given the way that some Asterisk users give FreePBX users a hard time in various forums (If you’ve ever visited the #asterisk IRC channel, you’ve probably quickly learned that it’s not a good idea to mention that you’re a FreePBX user). We get the feeling that FreeSwitch could be very disruptive to Asterisk. We’ll definitely be keeping our eye on it.
Is a Fonality representative posting as a “sock puppet” in a FreePBX forum?
Sometimes when you follow an online forum, you see things take a decidedly weird turn. Such was the case in a thread on the FreePBX forum, which started out as as a discussion of FreeSwitch (and the possibility of getting FreePBX to work with it) but somehow morphed into another thread that touched on Fonality’s recent decision to fork FreePBX. In any case, somewhere down in the thread a brand new user with the name “GPLLaw” appeared, and attempted to defend Fonality’s recent actions, in response to a comment by user KodaK.
GPLLaw makes two posts (the first of which is here) and is almost immediately called out as possibly being a Fonality employee.
Apparently all this prompted the forum admins to examine their logs, which yielded circumstantial evidence that it was none other than Karry Garrison himself logging in under a new moniker, even though he already has an account on the system. But where it gets even stranger is that when the FreePBX forum admins posted the evidence, Mr. Garrison posted a comment basically saying, “It wasn’t me, ma! Somebody else must have gotten into the cookie jar!”…
On June 2nd, 2008 kgarrison (tadpole) said:
From what I can gather someone compromised my account at trixbox.org on Friday. Right after that a new account called GPLLaw was created using “my” ip address. Yes, I am a stupid bonehead for having a simple password that I used on both sites. Yes, I have done plenty of stupid and boneheaded things in my time. I have been working with Schmoozecom this morning to try and figure out how someone could spoof my IP address here. Rest assured we are trying to work out some issues with FreePBX such as a “powered by FreePBX logo” (Tony and I discussed this just last week) and we have a handful of patches we will be committing once we make sure they work properly. I in no way would jeopardize an already fragile relationship.
Uh huh. Basically, in our opinion, “stupid and boneheaded” might be a pretty good description of how Fonality has conducted themselves ever since they took over Asterisk@Home. But hey, that’s just our opinion. Some of you may recall the brouhaha a few months ago when it was discovered that Trixbox “phoned home” without the administrator’s knowledge or express permission.
In any case, it appears that some other forum users are raising an eyebrow at Mr. Garrison’s “it wasn’t me” defense. Honestly, we are also. It just really stretches credulity to think that right after Mr. Garrison logged off from the forum, someone else logged on from the same IP address and posted comments under the brand new GPLLaw account. Not impossible, of course, but what are the odds?
We’ve never been a big fan of Trixbox, but for a time it was the only game in town if you wanted an easy installation and setup (in other words, something that would work even for a non-Linux geek). Now, of course, there are several alternatives, such as Elastix and PBX in a Flash. If ever there appears an “all-in-one” distribution that combines FreeSwitch, FreePBX, a decent Linux distro, and it is NOT released by Fonality, we’re going to be very interested. If Fonality is behind it, then probably not so much!
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