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- THE SYNDICATE REPORT
- Bell Information Transmittal No. 8
-
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- Released November 24, 1986
- Featuring:
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- Electronic Fraudulent Crackdowns (olt ccm 11\5)
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- ISDN: A Primer Part III (eet 11\11)
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- PicTel's 56-kbps 'PicturePhones' / Nynex (eet 11\11)
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- by The Sensei
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- ELECTRONIC FRAUDULENT CRACKDOWNS:
-
- In this article; brought forth will be assorted bits of electronic
- computer crime crackdowns, and other misc. fraudulent proceedings. Actual
- identification of the criminal people will not be presented; initials will
- instead be used. This is for sole protection of The Syndicate Report and
- the prosecuted people. (I definitely don't need to be charged for some
- newly processed law.)
-
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- DP, 22 year old man, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., stands accused of American
- Express and MCI. Authorities say the man is charged with theft, possession of
- stolen property, avoiding payment of telephone property, "offenses against
- intellectual property and offenses against computer users." This is the
- second run-in with the law for the man from Fla. Last October he was accused
- of using his home computer to break into confidential computer files of
- Southern Bell Telephone Co., police said.
-
- ----------------------------------------
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- RW, A Silicon Valley businessman, has been sentenced to pay a 40,000$ fine
- and serve a five-year suspended prison sentence for his part in diverting a
- shipment of computer equipment to the Soviet bloc in 1985. RW, and associate
- of a brokerage firm, pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate U.S. export laws
- by shipping a 196,000$ Digital Equipment Corp. computer and components from
- Haiti to Czechoslovakia in February 1985.
-
- ----------------------------------------
-
- JS, 43, of Encino, Calif., has told local polic he's received numerous
- death threats from alleged extortionists visiting his computer bulliten board.
- Forum administrator JS told LA authorities he received threats and demands for
- money in electronic messages posted posted on his BBS throughout August and
- early September. "We can still make you life unfit for living," said one of
- the messages, according to a report by United Press International.
-
- ----------------------------------------
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- Police have arrested seven youths in the South Plainfield, N.J., area on
- charges they used their home computer to exchange stolen credit card numbers,
- swap information on how to make free long distance phone calls, and call coded
- phone numbers at the Pentagon. Middlex County Prosecutor AR also said the
- seven, all under the age of 18, had codes that would cause communications
- satellites to "change position," possibly interupting intercontinental
- communications, An AT&T spokesmans, however disputed that claim. The arrest
- of the seven represented the seventh major presecution under a one-year-old
- state computer crime law in New Jersey.
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- ----------------------------------------
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- KG, a 19-year-old New Jersey pre-law student who said he was "addicted"
- to online computer games, was placed on probation and ordered to make
- restitution to CompuServe after pleading guilty to stealingcredit to continue
- playing. Court officials said KG played MegaWars for free for about three
- months on illegally obtained credit card account numbers. KG got the numbers
- from carbon copies of receipts he retrieved from trash bins at a local
- shopping center.
-
- ----------------------------------------
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- Three teen-agers have been arrested in Jacksonville, Fla., on charges they
- used credit card information stolen during an invasion of a TRW Corp. system
- in Cleveland. Eighteen-year-olds AP and MS (initials) could each face up to
- five years in prison and a 5,000$ fine if convicted. They are alleged to
- have used credit information stolen online from TRW to buy atleast 800$ in
- computer equipment.
- Florida State Sen. Edgar Dunn, in response to the events detailed in the
- previous story, has introduced a bill that would make credit card fraud via
- computer in that state subject to anti-racketeering laws. The measure would
- also tighten Florida's existing 1984 computer crime law to allow victems to
- recover three times their loss from computer crime as well as punitive damages,
- reports The Associated Press.
-
- ----------------------------------------
-
- Transcall America, an Atlanta-based discount long-distance telephone
- service, has uncovered crackers who ran up at least 12,000$ in illegal calls
- in five months. According to company officials, no one has been charged, but
- the FBI is investigating the case and could bring state and federal charges.
- The crackers were caught when investigators allowed a stolen access code,
- which was posted on a CoCoa Beach bulletin board, to remain valid. To bogus
- calls were traced to several homes in Brevard County, Fla.
-
- ----------------------------------------
-
- Crackers in at least three major cities have been blamed for a 60,000$
- phone bill that was sent to a California man whose stolen credit card number
- was apparently posted on an underground network of computer bulletin boards.
- Officials with GTE-Sprint Communications Corp. told the Associated Press that
- computer vandals in Atlantic, Blatimore and New York used the Sprint number of
- RB of Campbell, Calif., to charge more than 250,000 minutes of calls in two
- months, Sprint spokesman MF said "an investigation is under way" with law
- enforcment officials in the three East Coast cities and at least seven other
- cities. RB's (owner of Sprint code) mid-July bill ran 722 pages and listed
- 17,311 calls. The total for 256,697 minutes on that bill came to 55,562.27$,
- non counting an 8,197$ "volume discount."
-
- ----------------------------------------
-
- Kaypro Inc.'s national director of sales and marketing, SE, has been
- sentenced to 30 months in prison for convictions related to a drug-smuggling
- conspiracy. Previously, the 27-year-old SE had pleaded guilty to a charge of
- conspiring to travel in interstate and foreign commerce in aid of racketeering
- and to a count of subscribing to a false tax return. Most of the things he
- has commited were done threw his personal computer.
-
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
- To summarize these crimes, The Syndicate Report would just like to
- advise computer criminals to reveiw the previous articles and make sure the
- same mistakes are not made.
-
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- ISDN: A PRIMER PART III
-
- There has been so much progress over the last couple of years on
- developing standards for the various interfaces, that the transition to an
- all-ISDN network will take about half the time originally predicted.
- ISDN cautioned about many questions about technology, costs and
- pricing has yet to be resolved. Even so, it will be the end of the century
- or later before voice, data and images can be sent at the high speeds
- standardized by the CCITT's ISDN committees.
-
- Krueger, co-founder of Stanford Telecommunications Corp., spoke to more
- that 100 executives from Japanese electronics companies. The impact of ISDN
- will be positive for certain products and the death knell for others, Data--
- Quest predict. Once telecommunications lines are all digital, the now-booming
- modem market will tail off. Statistical multiplexors may also be a thing
- of the past, and data-only BPXs probably will become extinct. For packet
- switches, central digital switches and T-1 multiplexors, the future will
- become brighter. Terminal adapters, to transform non-ISDN telephones,
- connected to Centrex systems or PBXs, will provide market opportunities,
- Krueger said.
- One product which will quickly benefit in the Group IV facsimile. The
- clarity, speed and low cost of facsimile transmissions via an all digital
- network will be a boon to the next generation of fax machines. G-IV fax
- machines are now readily available but sales are languishing because of low--
- bandwidth phone lines and non-digital central switches.
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- About 17 percent of all phone lines are serviced by digital central
- switches. Because nearly all new switches in-stalled now are digital--simply
- because that is the cheapest way to make a central switch--About half of all
- phone lines will be served by digital switches by 1990. By then, offices
- wired for digital transmissions will be able to send G-IV faxes to other
- offices with digital networks.
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- PICTEL'S 56-KBPS 'PICTUREPHONES' - NYNEX:
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- A Massachusetts startup specializing in video-compression technologies
- has scored big with its first release of "picturephones," and won a vote
- of confidence from one of the biggest network operators, Nynex Corp.
- For PicTel Corp. (Peabody, Mass.), the recent success is part of a
- pattern that began two years ago when two engineers developed a proprietary
- codec that allowed the construction of a videotelephone that didn't require
- the use of extremely high transmission speeds. For the much antivipated
- videoconferencing business, it was the microcomputer.
-
- Because of PicTel phones operate at speeds of 56 kbits per second
- (instead of traditional 1.544 Mbits per second known as T-1 speeds), the
- devices can be plugged into digital switches already installed by telephone
- companies in a growing number of offices. That's one reason why Nynex
- Business Information Systems is interested in the technology and has started
- to market PicTel phones to business customers.
- Since formally releasing the system in October, PicTel has reported
- 500,000$ in orders for the first telephone system, which costs as much as
- 100,000$. There's also a growing order backlog which could augur well for
- future company prospects.
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- With the shipment of its first products, the increasing digitalization
- of the nation's telephone offices and the expectations of the ISDN, PicTel's
- prospects should be favourable. To date, its principal competitors, such as
- General Electric Co. plc of Britian and Compression Labs Inc. (San Jose, CA)
- offer picture phones that require an expensive videoconferencing room and T-1
- lines to handle the breakdown, transmission and reconstruction of video
- images.
-
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- If there is any question to the information in this file, contact the
- author. Now can be found on the Private Sector 20 Meg, 3/1200 baud
- system at (201) 366-4431 (2600 Magazine Bulliten Board).
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- This concludes this transmittal No. 8 presented by:
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- The Sensei - The Syndicate Report
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- Released November 24, 1986
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