Let's put an end to the fraud and lies once and for all.

In 1847 someone who's name is world known for being the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell was born.

In 1849 voice was transmitted over a wire for the first time in history, and in 1956 the first electromagnetic telephone was born.

But wait... if  AGB was only 9 years old in 1956, and he is not credited with inventing the telephone until 1876 then what is going on here? I will tell you what is going on, the greatest fraud ever perpetrated. Alexander Graham Bell did NOT invent the telephone. That honor goes to Antonio Meucci, an Italian american inventor, in Staten Island, NY.

If Meucci invented the phone, then why is he not credited with it in history? Well that is an excellent question. First off he only filed a patent caveat, and not a patent application. He did not see much commercial demand for such an invention, and had limited funds so he allowed the caveat to lapse.

Once the patent caveat lapsed TWO gentlemen filed for a telephone patent on the SAME DAY of 1876, one Alexander Graham Bell and one Elisha Gray. Mr. Gray's patent application as presented was technically sound, however Mr. Bell's application would not have worked as originally filed. The patent clerk who received both applications allowed Mr. Bell's attorney to review Mr. Gray's application and make amendments to Mr. Bells application.

What followed was a long drawn out lawsuit involving Gray, Meucci, and several others against Mr.Bell's claim to the patent. Eventually Bell won the rights to the patent, however this does not equate to him being the rightful "inventor" of the telephone, because it had been invented and demonstrated many times prior to him even attempting to perpetrate this fraud.

Although it does not sit on the same land when it was occupied by him, Antonio Meucci's home is now a museum located in Staten Island NY. I recommend that if you are able to, stop by and check out the REAL history of the telephone. http://pub1.andyswebtools.com/cgi-bin/p/awtp-home.cgi?d=garibaldi-meucci-museum

Virgin mobile screwed me out of at least $40 balance that was on my phone.

I activated a Virgin Mobile phone with fictional information several months ago. I added over $100 in credit to the phone, so the credit on the phone should have remained active for 365 days, per the terms and conditions at the time that the money was added into the account. 

Today I attempted to use this phone after not using it for several months. About a week or two I checked the balance on the phone and it showed that there was still $40+ credit on the phone. I was using the 20c per minute plan, as I did not buy any minute packs, because this is a back up phone for when I do not want people knowing my main cell phone or google voice number, for when my blackberry battery is dead, or for when i need to make a second call while on the other line. 

I was considering upgrading my secondary phone to a more expensive model and changing plans to one of the monthly service plans that Virgin Mobile is now promoting - however with this information coming to light about how they just STOLE my money from my account, and the fact that AT&T has dropped the price of their prepaid offerings it appears that I will be looking elsewhere for my anonymous secondary phone.  

AT&T prepaid/Go Phone now $50 unlimited

AT&T has just launched a new rate plan for unlimited talk, text and web for their prepaid brand Go Phone for $50.

This brings them in line with other prepaid carriers, such as Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile, Net10 and some of the other carriers, such as Metro Pretty Crappy Service that we do not mention on this site. 

Lets see if that forces Verizon's prepaid rates to follow suit.

  

Piracy in a digital world.

As long as content has been available for sale and there has been a means to reproduce that content cheaply piracy has existed. When audio cassettes became popular, people began dubbing music and passing it along to their friends, and then bootleggers began selling copies like these on the streets. When VCRs became readily available the same thing happened with movies.

Now that computers and the internet make copying and distributing content practically free, and quickly the threat of piracy to industries that rely on the income from the sale of content have even more to lose than ever before.

The music industry was the first industry to feel the pressure of the evolving technology, beginning with Napster and the invention of file sharing programs. When these technologies arrived on the scene bandwidth and storage space was still fairly limited, so the only thing that most people were pirating and sharing freely were music files and entire albums. The music industry fought back, and eventually embraced this new form of distribution which eventually led to companies such as iTunes, and Amazon to sell music in digital format making it easy for consumers to access the content that they were seeking in the format that they wanted to consume this media on.

Now that broadband speeds have increased, and are only going to increase, and the cost of storage space (hard drives, optical media, etc) has dropped and will continue to drop much of the piracy going on now is targeted towards the movie industry.

An entire generation has grown up on Youtube, and other similar sites where piracy is a way of life. Many of the younger generation growing up today have been conditioned to expect content for free, and many people cry censorship when an industry, or law enforcement tries to enforce the rights of the copy-write holder and protect their intellectual property. Most of the people who use this argument that they are being censored feel that it is their right to consume this media with out compensating the content creators.

The movie industry is fighting a huge uphill battle. They continue to work with law enforcement to attempt to get pirated content distribution sources shut down, such as seizing domain registrations, and going after consumers who share their media on file sharing or torrent sites. Yet I can only see the piracy problems worsening as time goes on unless something is done that will benefit both the consumer and the industry.

If the movie industry continues to lose this battle, many jobs and peoples incomes will be in jeopardy. People only tend to put their focus on the movie company executives, and high salary actors, but the entertainment industry goes far beyond just these people. Unlike the music industry which can recoup some losses from file sharing by offsetting some of these loses with increased concert ticket sales and merchandise, the movie industry does not have a similar ability to increase revenue from elsewhere. Many people work behind the scenes to produce the content that we have come accustom to from Hollywood. If piracy continues unchecked eventually producing major Hollywood blockbusters will become unsustainable and the quality of the content will eventually suffer, then we are all losers.

The movie industry needs to work quickly on coming up with a viable solution to this problem. The current methods of villainizing and criminally prosecuting consumers of pirated content makes the public view them as the evil big bad corporations. And when the government steps in to enforce the anti-piracy laws they appear to many people in the public to be censoring free speech. Some sort of compromise needs to be met. People want to view content on their terms. What the movie industry needs to do is work on coming up with some form of digital content distribution hub, similar to what iTunes has done for the music industry.

Sure there is Hulu and Netflix, and these are great starts, BUT the fact of the matter is both of these content distribution sources are extremely lacking.

The introduction of Bluray is only a temporary fix to this problem. Many people do not care for, nor want another physical medium. Also, there is really no sense in paying full price for a movie that you are likely only going to view once or just a handful of times.

I do not have all of the answers to resolve this problem, but I would start with either working with existing digital content distribution sources, such as Netflix, Hulu and iTunes to get more content available in high quality digital content. Hulu's business model is great from a consumer standpoint, many people do not mind to have to sit thru commercial advertisements to view content for free. Netflix business model is also good for consumers, providing a monthly fee for unlimited access.

Until a decent solution has been made available to the public to view content on their terms piracy is only going to continue to be a growing problem.

Domain name

I finally got around to updating the name servers with the domain name.

As you can see in the address bar, the actual address of this blog is now blog.nyphonejacks.com 
currently nyphonejacks.com and www.nyphonejacks.com are being forwarded to this address.
not to fear, you can still access this site from nyphonejacks.blogspot.com

I have also updated the name servers so that the train phones blog now can be accessed at trainphones.nyphonejacks.com as well as trainphones.blogspot.com where it was originally located at.

Rural carriers finally catch on to Magicjack failing to terminate calls to certain exchanges.

As I predicted on a post on Friday, July 23, 2010 at 7:55pm on this forum:
http://www.magicjacksupport.com/all-calls-terminate-in-a-fast-busy-t9322.html

my personal opinion about this problem, that came to my attention on yahoo answers a few days ago is that MJ/Ymax is not paying interconnect fees, or termination fees to the company handling the call routing, so those companies have refused to terminate MJ calls to there subscribers, as it appears that people can call some local number (on certain carriers) but not others 

i sense the end of magic jack coming soon...

It now appears that the rural carriers are not the ones preventing these calls from completing, but rather Magicjack denying these calls the ability to be terminated.

Connected Planet has just published an article about the rural carriers filing a complaint, specifically naming Magicjack for not terminating calls to certain destinations with higher termination fees. The article can be read here: http://connectedplanetonline.com/independent/news/Rural-carrier-groups-ask-FCC-to-intervene-in-call-blocking-disputes-0616/

As an exhibit filed with a letter to the FCC from several rural carrier associations reveals, VoIP provider VocalTec, operator of the low-cost magicJack VoIP service, is simply refusing to complete calls to some carriers—and the evidence suggests that those incomplete calls are to rural carriers. 

  

Edited a few posts

Unblocking with google voice no longer seems to work - let me know if you discover otherwise.
http://nyphonejacks.blogspot.com/2011/05/unblock-private-callers-with-google.html

Added additional information towards the bottom of the page concerning LNP (local number portability)
http://nyphonejacks.blogspot.com/2010/08/lnp-local-number-portability.html

Linked the Gizmo + Google voice post
http://nyphonejacks.blogspot.com/2010/07/free-phone-service-with-gizmo-google.html
to the newer article about the ATA that you can use Google Voice with
http://nyphonejacks.blogspot.com/2011/05/use-your-google-voice-number-with-ata.html

Added important information about call forwarding, especially important for businesses porting their numbers.
http://nyphonejacks.blogspot.com/2009/12/how-to-set-up-call-forwarding.html

homephoneservice.org

So I got an email recently with the link to this site, requesting that I share it with my readers.
http://www.homephoneservice.org/blog/2011/10-groups-of-people-that-hate-caller-id/

While the people over there still seem to think that AGB invented the telephone, I figured that I would add a link to them here. They seem to enjoy top 10 list type of posts. Check them out.

some stuff i am looking to get rid of

I have a bunch of power supplies, cd/DVD drives, floppy drives, video cards,game controller cards,  network cards, dial up modems, SCSI cards, motherboards (2 w/CPU+heat sync, 1 with a CPU no heat sync and one with no CPU) and even a 2 port KVM switch, a TV tuner, a wireless network card, a zip drive and a digium card (i might keep that one)

I will try to inventory what I have that I am trying to get rid as soon as possible. In the mean time, if there is something you see, that you want, or if you do not see something and are looking for something I might still have it.

email me at nyphonejacks at yahoo dot com or message me on twitter to inquire about anything specific.

Updated post

Added image to http://nyphonejacks.blogspot.com/2010/01/quick-and-easy-verizon-dsl-installation.html to help with the instructions how to activate a DSL modem with out needing to install the bloatware CD or set up a user name and password.

Port forwarding with a Verizon DSL modem

These instructions have been created with a Westell 7500 modem, but most of the firmware on Verizon modems are identical so this should work for all other versions of Verizon DSL modems.

I really recommend that you use a "real" router if you need to set up port forwarding. But I understand the need to set up port forwarding for certain circumstances where you do not have a router at the location.

Remember Verizon generally will block port 80, so if you are trying to set up port forwarding for HTTP then you should consider using a different port.

Click images for larger version.

First click on FIREWALL SETTINGS on the top bar

Then click on PORT FORWARDING on the left side bar.

Click YES to proceed. 

Click NEW, ADD or the icon on the right to add a new port forward rule.  

Choose a service from the pull down menu OR click CREATE. 

Pull down menu choices. 

1. Enter the name of your custom service
2. Select port forwarding or port triggering
3. Choose Protocol, Ports and direction.

Choose HOST or DYNAMIC.

You can choose from PCs that have been discovered on your network, or specify the IP address of the destination. 

When enabling port forwarding it is recommended that the PC or networked device that you are port forwarding to should have a static IP on your LAN

Qwest providing emergency call forwarding for their customers affected by flooding

Qwest is providing emergency call forwarding for customers who are affected by flooding. Just call them at 1-800-573-1311