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To: extremelabsinc who wrote (10939)	8/8/2005 3:38:35 PM
From: fred g	Respond to of 46821

Tom, if you define a tail as a leg, then there are a lot of five-legged dogs running around, but that doesn't make a tail a leg. I define the PSTN based on industry norms, where common carrier points of demarcation meet subscribers. Within that wall, things are pretty tight. Not perfect, but pretty tight. No real carrier lets PSTN voice traffic touch the Internet. Sure, they may use IP encapsulation, but that's not the public Internet. So sure, there's lots of security trouble in the phone world, but it's at the edges, where any old idiot can hook anything up to a subscriber line, and do it wrong. By this definition, Vonage is not a PSTN player either. It has gone to great lengths to avoid being a common carrier, and to portray itself as a gatewayed voice-over-Internet provider. They depend on PSTN carriers such as Focal/Broadwing and Paetec. I frankly don't care how end users see it. A bank can be horribly, awfully insecure if some bozo sets up a money changing stand in front of a bank, gets a pile of mixed currency there, and leaves bills lying around unguarded while he goes to take a pee. Does that make the bank insecure? Of course not -- the bank had a dumb customer. VM systems are not techically part of the PSTN. The FCC is quite clear that they are "information services" too, even if offered by an ILEC. > One of the covers of 2600 Magazine recently was a drawing of a Chinese Soldier with the old Bell logo above him... with the Forbidden CIty in the background. The caption: We Unite Again. I have no clue what you're talking about there. PSTN providers themselves, and their careful customers, are far more secure than Internet service providers, and the security efforts that Internet users should take are more elaborate than those needed for phones.