BGP (in)security makes the AP wire

Larry Sheldon LarrySheldon at cox.net
Sun May 9 17:50:56 UTC 2010


[The wonderful New And Improved Thunderbird deleted a response and the
message I was responding to--I don't know how or why--seems to have to
do with the arrival of new messages.]

The message I was responding-to seemed to be a rant that the reason Area
Code changes are (were) a hassle was due to the reluctance of the Evil
Powers to permit overlays and portable numbers.

I was saying that the Evil Powers thing is always a lot of fun, but the
facts are that until fairly recent times, that is the way the technology
worked.  (As a point of interest--overlays have indeed been around since
the 1960's.)

When you dialed a number, a class 5 office received the digits dialed
and decided what to do with the call.  If the number dialed was one it
served, it connected the call.

If not it would (using engineering decisions encoded in the machine[1])
hand the call off to a higher class office, maybe all the way up to a
class 1 which might hand it off to another class 1 and thence back down
the hierarchy to the class 5 that served the number.

There just was no way to keep track, second by second, to keep track of
where a given number had wandered off to.  No Evil Powers (not Bush, not
Halliburton, not Cheney, not Tea Partiers, not ....).  It was just the
way things worked--and it was a pretty elegant design, all things
considered.

[1] Things that accounted for traffic patterns in a particular machine.
 For example, an office worked in had a class 5 machine in the 214 Area
Code) which had an office that served 805-area numbers so they did go
anywhere.  It had high usage to 714 numbers so there were trunk right
straight to the right class 5 office.

-- 
Somebody should have said:
A democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.

Freedom under a constitutional republic is a well armed lamb contesting
the vote.

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Ex turpi causa non oritur actio
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