It Continues...Sprint Is played the fool...

Tue Jan 14 09:42:19 UTC 1997

[replies set to com-priv at psi.com]

From: Sean Donelan <SEAN at SDG.DRA.COM>
>This is a strawman argument.  Barry didn't asked Sprint to block all
>outgoing communication, or calls to emergency services, only calls to
>his network number.  A different division of Sprint will block calls between
>certain telephone numbers at the request of the subscriber.  They advertise
>the blocking as a 'feature.'  So this isn't a company-wide policy, but rather
>a division-level business decision.  Unless your mother is in the habit of
>calling Software Tool & Die for ambulances, I don't see the relevance.

For the record: As of 4AM EST 1/14/97 the mail looping continues,
that's going into the 13th day. I'll admit it's slowed a little, down
to mere hundreds of msgs per day.

I called Sprint around 7PM Monday (1/13/97) evening, a few hours ago,
and got this load of bull about common carriage forbidding them from
doing anything about it, and (having been away the past few days)
found email from another Sprint employee from the same office who
believed it should have stopped by now (that was from Wednesday or
Thursday last.)

Someone should really do an online FAQ / intro to common carriage, and
the universal service mandate agreed to by AT&T in the Communications
Act of 1934 which people often glibly confuse with common
carriage. Two different things, but clearly conflated in a lot of
technical peoples' minds.

It's embarrassing and somewhat insulting to have employees of
companies such as Sprint making up stuff about their "policies" over
the phone, and at a level of competence which wouldn't pass muster on
alt.flame.

I don't even believe there's any Sprint company policy involved here
anymore, there are just too many contradictions and lies being flung
about (I could go on, the same person who complained to me in email
about all my requests to the spammer to stop all being copied to his
dept's mailbox last week, tonight asked me if I'd ever actually asked
the spammer to stop! Short memory I guess.)

At this point I feel like the deckhands are telling us that the
Titanic is just going through its mandatory iceberg preparedness drill
and hoping we'll buy it...

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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