Hijackers use voice mail to ring up bills
By Compiled from Times wires
© St. Petersburg Times
published April 28, 2003
Voice mail hijacking is leaving a small but growing number of consumers with ringing ears.
Hearing you're on the hook for a $12,000 phone bill like K.C. Hatcher, a graphic artist in San Francisco, will do that.
Hackers, thought to be manipulating automated dialing technology widely used by telemarketers, are cracking security codes to gain access to voice mail accounts. Once inside, they change their victim's outgoing message to accept third-party, collect and direct-dial calls. By recording the word, "Yes," at perfectly timed intervals, they're able to fool the mechanized operators used by many long-distance companies.
With permission to place calls, thieves can keep the lines open for days at a time. Hatcher's voice mail was rigged to accept third-party calls billed to the Philippines and Saudi Arabia. One call lasted for 39 hours.
AT&T started warning consumers in November to be on the lookout for the growing scam, which has been reported in California, Ohio and Texas. Most of the cases affected users of SBC voice mail service, and at least one was reported by a Verizon customer.
AT&T and MCI say they work with customers on a case-by-case basis but require them to pay at least a portion of the outstanding bill.
The company recommends that consumers regularly change their pass codes, using at least six digits; check their outgoing messages to ensure they haven't been changed; and disable auto-attendant, call-forwarding and out-paging features that aren't used.
New Palm taps into Wi-Fi networks
Bringing wireless computing to an ever-smaller package, Palm Inc. has unveiled its first personal digital assistant capable of tapping into the increasingly popular Wi-Fi wireless networks.
Palm has trailed Toshiba Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. in developing handheld computers with the Wi-Fi, or wireless fidelity, standard. It allows users to connect to the Internet at "hot spots" in a growing number of airports, hotels, businesses, schools and restaurants.
The addition of Wi-Fi capability - combined with more memory, a longer battery life and a higher-resolution screen - will make Palm's Tungsten C device a competitive alternative to the Toshiba and HP offerings, analysts say. The Tungsten C, which goes on sale May 5 for $499, could even grab market share from laptop computers.
Palm previously has sold PDAs that can dial into cell phone networks, allowing users to send and receive e-mail and surf the Internet. Those models, including the Tungsten W and the I705, offer wireless access wherever a cellular network has a signal, but the connection fees can be expensive.
Connections via Wi-Fi, also known as 802.11, are cheaper, generally costing users about $30 to $40 a month for unlimited access.
Video recorder fits in your pocket
As a video recorder, the Panasonic e-wear SV-AV30 has a limited number of features and less-than-award-winning image quality. But it has one feature that can't be matched by a TiVo: Once it has finished capturing a television show, the entire device, including its liquid crystal display, can be slipped into a pocket.
The user makes some compromises when viewing, say, the previous evening's installment of West Wing.
The gadget's swiveling 2-inch display replays TV shows using the MPEG-4 video format, which has a slower frame rate and lower overall quality than broadcast TV signals. What's more, the SV-AV30's battery and the 64-megabyte Secure Digital memory card supplied with the unit limit users to watching for one hour.
Yet the SV-AV30, which has a suggested price of $400 and will soon be available at www.panasonic.com comes with a dock that can be used to link it to a full-size television or Windows computer. And those who tire of watching TV shows on the palm-size gadget can use it as a digital sound recorder, a relatively low-resolution digital still or video camera (with a 2x digital zoom) or an MP3 music player.
Ask Jeeves slims down, speeds up
A slimmer and slicker Ask Jeeves is on the Web after a yearlong make over.
The search service with the smiling butler mascot (www.ask.com) is launching new software to present more content, such as news headlines and pictures, directly in search results, saving users from having to click through to the Web sites with the original data.
Most search engines are moving toward giving users the answers they want instead of requiring them to leave the site; Yahoo rolled out similar functions this month. Each search engine, however, has its own notions about what content belongs at the top of the digital haystack.
At the new Jeeves, for example, if you type in "photos of Dalmatians" or "What does a Dalmatian look like?" it will present images of spotted dogs, rather than just a list of Web sites containing pictures. Similarly, type "George W. Bush" into the box and Jeeves will display news headlines about the president along with related Web sites.
Ask Jeeves opened for business six years ago, hiring editors to assemble a database of questions and Web pages with answers for them. But as the Google search engine took over the market in recent years, Jeeves bought several technology companies and switched its emphasis to automated search software instead of a human-compiled Web index. It still lags Google in market share, but the company is a player in business search and reported its first profit a few months ago.
Penn State cracks down on file-sharing
Penn State deprived 220 students of high-speed Internet connections in their dorms after it found they were sharing copyrighted material, the university said last week.
"Basically, we received a complaint," said Penn State spokesman Tysen Kendig, who said he could not reveal who registered the complaint.
"Upon investigation, we found that the students had publicly listed copyright-infringing materials on their systems to other members of this network," he said.
Music and movie industry groups have urged universities to curb the sharing of copyrighted files and penalize violators.
Students, who often have fast Internet connections and little cash, are seen as the vanguard in a wave of downloading that the entertainment industry claims is cutting into its profits.
The sanctioned students all live in campus residence halls. They can still access their campus accounts from other computers. The connections to their dorm rooms will be restored once the copyrighted materials have been removed, Kendig said.
Earlier this month, 85 students at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., were disciplined for using the school's network to trade copyrighted music and movies.
- Compiled from Times wires
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