Verizon Wireless Buying Alltel for a Bazillion Dollars

By the end of the year, AT&T's reign as the largest wireless service provider in the United States will come to an end and Verizon will ascend to the throne: Verizon Wireless Agrees to Buy Alltel for $28.1 Billion.

Verizon connects man with dead wife

If I didn't know better I'd have thought this was from one of William Gibson's novels:

When Verizon upgraded Charles Whiting's telephone service, his wife's voice, saying, "Catherine Whiting," disappeared from his voicemail system.



She had died in 2005 and Whiting said he listened to her voice every day for comfort. He blamed Verizon for the loss, saying, "Now they took her voice away."

There's a whole novel waiting to be written based on that little story, Lost Voicemail of Man's Dead Wife Restored by Phone Company. It really is touching, and not just touching in a sci-fi and cyberpunk sort of way. That man took joy and happiness from being able to hear is dead wife's voice. Verizon accidentally took it away and they oh so nobly returned it...almost like bringing his wife back from the dead. Verizon says, "We have your dead wife on our computers. Would you like to talk to her?"

In other real-life cyberpunk tales, Wired's Threat Level blog has this cautionary tale, Industrial Control Systems Killed Once and Will Again, Experts Warn.

On June 10th, 1999 a 16-inch diameter steel pipeline operated by the now-defunct Olympic Pipeline Co. ruptured near Bellingham, Washington, flooding two local creeks with 237,000 gallons of gasoline. The gas ignited into a mile-and-a-half river of fire that claimed the lives of two 10-year-old boys and an 18-year-old man, and injured eight others.



Wednesday, computer-security experts who recently re-examined the Bellingham incident called its victims the first verified human causalities of a control-system computer incident.

Computers killed people!?

But the factor that intrigues Weiss and fellow researcher Marshall Abrams, a scientist at MITRE, is a still largely unexplained computer failure that began less than 30 minutes before the accident and paralyzed the central control room operating the pipeline, preventing workers from releasing pressure in the line before it hemorrhaged.

An unexplained computer failure? Malicious and/or stupid hackers could've done that. Perhaps hackers backed by a rival company. Perhaps hackers backed by a rival country. Perhaps they were both. Perhaps there's no difference. I'm just sayin'...

Open Your Wallet to Open Computing

It's nice to get up early.  I recommend it.  There's something right about it.

Gizmodo informed me that computer manufacturer Acer may start producing an open platform gaming console.  I imagine it's basically going to be a gaming oriented linux based desktop computer.  Good idea.  I hope Acer succeeds.  By the way, the computer above is not the one referenced in the article.  The one above is the bitchin' Acer Aspire Gemstone Blue.  What is up with that stuff beside on the left side of the keyboard?  I think it might be an alien device.

In other "open" news, Verizon is, and this is almost impossible to imagine in today's business landscape, studying ways to improve peer to peer traffic!  Verizon has once again shown that it wants to do business the way an increasing number of consumers who want to use technology the way they want to use it and are simply looking for the fastest, cheapest service provider.  While companies like Cox and Comcast are throttling users who are heavy bandwidth consumers, Verizon is looking to improve such users' experiences.  Coupled with last year's announcement that they would open up their mobile service to "any app, any device", Verizon is showing itself to be a worthwhile, progressive business.

Speaking of open phones, check out this video Google's open phone software, Android.

Verizon courts privacy advocates

I'm a customer of AT&T and while I can't really complain about my personal experience with them, I can't really say much that's positive, either. AT&T has participated in some customer surveillance shenanigans, though, and they seem to be willing to be compliant with government efforts to snoop on people.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed legal briefs and evidence against AT&T, claiming they are diverting Internet traffic to the NSA for widespread secret surveillance and possibly breaking federal wiretapping laws and the Fourth Amendment. [SecurityFocus]

It's not just AT&T, though. It seems that most companies involved with data flow are looking at ways to snoop on their customer's activities. Well, Thomas J. Tauke, executive vice president for public affairs at Verizon, is breathing some refreshing ideas into the discussion:

“We generally are reluctant to get into the business of examining content that flows across our networks and taking some action as a result of that content,” he said.

Amen, brother!

Preach on!

“We don’t want to solve any network congestion issues by restricting the flow of certain kinds of traffic,” he said.

Read the complete article from the New York Times: Verizon Rejects Hollywood’s Call to Aid Piracy Fight. [by way of Gizmodo]