It could be that the next line was going to be that the person was going to offer to extend my subscription for a ridiculously low rate, and (my lucky day!) he could do it right over the phone.

I've said too much.

I hear Bill Cosby as Noah in that question.

I didn't but I do now! Hysterical.

I think Fuzzy was wondering if they had actual information about you. Since it wasn't Reader's Digest, it could have been someone calling to confirm their information via deception as Clifton @ 4 suggested.

Level-3 is a major player (right up there with AT&T) in providing backbone network services. They are strong into the VoIP arena, and provide neraly all the e911 service nationwide.

Having the number come back to Level-3 means that it was a VoIP call (.99 probability) and nothing more.

Level-3 is a major player (right up there with AT&T) in providing backbone network services. They are strong into the VoIP arena, and provide neraly all the e911 service nationwide.

Having the number come back to Level-3 means that it was a VoIP call (.99 probability) and nothing more.

Serendipity.

Singularity.

Schadenfreude.

That double-post _was_ weird.

Which works out to fifty copies (or less) per author. That puts him right there in PublishAmerica territory.

Ring ring ring

Me: Hello?

Caller: Mr. Macdonald?

Me: Yeah?

Caller: Candygram!

Lon #26: From that article: "According to Fletcher, his company has published more than 1,000 authors and sold 50,000 books...."

Which works out to fifty copies (or less) per author. That puts him right there in PublishAmerica territory.

Not that that's not the same territory: down in the double digits, with almost all the copies sold to the author or to the author's friends and relations.

Telemarketers for Reader's Digest or the like almost always show up on sites complaining about them; this one doesn't. It does show up on a list of "suspicious" numbers.

Interesting.

It sounds to me like it should be illegal to do that. Deceptive trade practices.

Ah, here we go: DMA Statement Caller-ID Falsification

I just ran the number through RefUSA here at work. It doesn't come up in the residential or business databases, which could mean:

a) it's a brand new number
b) it's a cell phone number
c) it's not a main\registered number on a phone system
d) it's unlisted
e)RefUSA missed it

I use reverse directories all the time---usually for historic research--but modern tech has rendered the most current ones hit-or-miss for phone numbers.

I was working in the lab once, and one of them rang. I thought it was possible that the local emergency folks were calling to alert us to something, so I picked it up. Robocall. I hadn't even known that the phone had a *number*.

You be careful in there!

And one time, one of them rang, too. I didn't answer it, because opening the little cupboard door in front of the phone would set off the local elevator alarm (like hitting the emergency stop button), but I would bet it was a robocall.

I suspect at the time these elevators were installed, there was no such thing as a phone with no number.

Or Laurence Fishburne.

I guess Piglet hasn't tried to publish through PA; 72 copies would never have been enough.

Given the nature of trunk telephony, it's hard to see how you could engineer this property out.

A few jobs ago, back before the tech crunch, we had a "product" that gave away free long distance calls. (You can give away any amount of long distance ... but the business model's not too obvious.) This used PRI trunking. We set up the first leg calling the "originator" - needed to put something in the caller-id, so we used the "originator" number. Your phone showed that you were calling yourself. Then we used the same caller-id to set up the other leg, and the recipient had a normal experience.

I think SIP/VoIP gateways are similarly trusting, for the same reasons, that validating the purported originating number is very hard to do even when it is legitimate; so the door is left wide open.

There is another layer of the system where it is possible to get more real identity - this is the one used for charging. It's called ANI - Automatic Number Identification. But it's specifically for the telco charging model, so it identifies the trunk, and only the trunk.

There's an analogy to email spam, in that the protocol was designed in an entirely different model than the one it's deployed in today. PRI makes perfect sense for a world of interlocking monopoly PTTs (Post, Telegraph, Telephone) - but by the time it was widely deployed, there were few PTTs and more and more commercial competitors.

Rats, you're right. Now why was I thinking of Piglet? Odd chain of association just prior to writing that comment: Joan Baez -> Mimi Baez -> Richard Fariña -> "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me" -> Piglet. Just call me Scatterbrain.

Magazine subscription sales are one notch above Nigerian 419 scammers, except the former are legal for some reason. They rely on people being too dim or too intimidated by the scary letters to throw them away. I picture some old guy or lady with Alzheimer's expiring under the weight of 1000 pounds of multiple copies of the same magazine.

That might have been my grandmother. She's a crazy bitch.