Starbucks Deal Brewed with AT&T

At 5:48 PM -0800 2/12/08, David Lyles wrote:
>I don't like it. AT&T is one of the telecoms that spied (is spying?
>How can we know?) on us illegally. And, as of today, successfully
>lobbying Congress to grant them immunity.
>
>For this reason, selecting AT&T for the iPhone was not one of Apple's
>stellar moves, IMO. What was Jobs thinking? A slap in the face to all
>the good folks at Electronic Frontier Foundation . . .

I'm confident (well, as confident that I can be w/o direct evidence)
that the EFF was never a factor in Apple's decision to choose AT&T.

I think that money and freedom (i.e, no AT&T veto on iPhone features)
were the decisive factors.
--
-- Marshall

On 02/12/2008 19:48 PM, "David Lyles" <oregondavehevanet.com> wrote:

> I don't like it. AT&T is one of the telecoms that spied (is spying?
> How can we know?) on us illegally. And, as of today, successfully
> lobbying Congress to grant them immunity.
>
> For this reason, selecting AT&T for the iPhone was not one of Apple's
> stellar moves, IMO. What was Jobs thinking? A slap in the face to all
> the good folks at Electronic Frontier Foundation . . .

Um, there weren't a lot of telecoms that said "no" even a little. IIRC,
eventually all of them rolled over and played dead.

--
John C. Welch

On 2/12/08 8:48 PM, "David Lyles" <oregondavehevanet.com> wrote:

> For this reason, selecting AT&T for the iPhone was not one of Apple's
> stellar moves, IMO. What was Jobs thinking? A slap in the face to all
> the good folks at Electronic Frontier Foundation . . .

I can guarantee Apple wasn't thinking about, nor do they care about
"slapping the EFF in the face".
--
Shawn King

On 02/13/2008 06:37 AM, "Shawn King" <shawnyourmaclifeshow.com> wrote:

>> For this reason, selecting AT&T for the iPhone was not one of Apple's
>> stellar moves, IMO. What was Jobs thinking? A slap in the face to all
>> the good folks at Electronic Frontier Foundation . . .
>
> I can guarantee Apple wasn't thinking about, nor do they care about
> "slapping the EFF in the face".

Yep. I know some folks will be shocked by this, but most corporations could
really care less about what the EFF thinks. They care about making money and
shareholder value. Jobs is FAR more concerned with Apple's stock price than
the EFF's (dis)approval.

--
John C. Welch

On Feb 12, 2008, at 8:48 PM, David Lyles wrote:

> I don't like it. AT&T is one of the telecoms that spied (is spying?
> How can we know?) on us illegally. And, as of today, successfully
> lobbying Congress to grant them immunity.
>
> For this reason, selecting AT&T for the iPhone was not one of Apple's
> stellar moves, IMO. What was Jobs thinking? A slap in the face to all
> the good folks at Electronic Frontier Foundation . . .

It appears that Qwest was the lone holdout in the NSA's warrantless
wiretapping program. So, if we apply this carrier selection criteria
to the iPhone, we would not have an iPhone since Qwest does not
operate its own cell service (as I understand it, they just resell
Sprint).

T McCormick wrote:
> On 2/12/08, David Lyles <oregondavehevanet.com
> <mailto:oregondavehevanet.com>> wrote:
>
> For this reason, selecting AT&T for the iPhone was not one of Apple's
> stellar moves, IMO. What was Jobs thinking? A slap in the face to
> all the good folks at Electronic Frontier Foundation . . .
>
> I think one of the reasons that AT&T was chosen was because Cingular
> was the company Apple was doing business with before. Cingular and
> AT&T are one company so the relationship continues.

Actually it's even more complicated. Cingular was who Apple was working with and did the deal with for the iPhone. Before that went "live" AT&T bought Cingular. Actually SBC bought the AT&T name, switched using it as their name, merged with / bought (depending on your point of view) with Bellsouth, then dropped the Cingular name as SBC (err AT&T) and Bellsouth were the two owners of Cingular and at that point they figured the separate identity wasn't worth it.

Now even if you agree with the premise of the OP, was Cingular at fault?

And if you really feel that way, you should not use a phone outside of the Quest system which limits you to what, 5% of the US population?

Here's a nice take on some of the naming issues:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FycR0BG5Ug

David Ross

--On February 14, 2008 4:50:20 AM -0800 Tomoharu Nishino
<tomoharunishino.us> wrote:

> It appears that Qwest was the lone holdout in the NSA's warrantless
> wiretapping program. So, if we apply this carrier selection criteria
> to the iPhone, we would not have an iPhone since Qwest does not
> operate its own cell service (as I understand it, they just resell
> Sprint).

Selecting a provider that didn't go with the NSA isn't a guarantee of
anything anyway. Data on the internet crosses providers with great
frequency.

Even though I live less than 10 blocks from work, my traffic to there goes
across speakeasy.net lines in KC to Chicago, across qwest lines, then
across alter.net lines.

Perhaps Chuck Goolsbee can comment on this more but I believe even in just
that there is a pretty good chance that it crossed other companies networks
but doesn't show up in a traceroute because of virtual networking.

At 3:55 AM -0800 2/15/08, Kevin van Haaren wrote:
>Selecting a provider that didn't go with the NSA isn't a guarantee of
>anything anyway. Data on the internet crosses providers with great
>frequency.

While I'm not 100% sure of this, phone companies also do the same
thing with their voice traffic. (Whatever isn't yet carried by VoIP)
every carrier leases lines from every other carrier. The only true
way to prevent eavesdropping is using strong encryption. This of
course assumes that the NSA can't crack whichever encryption method
you're using.

~Nick
http://www.inmff.net

Nicholas Barnard wrote:
> At 3:55 AM -0800 2/15/08, Kevin van Haaren wrote:
>> Selecting a provider that didn't go with the NSA isn't a guarantee of
>> anything anyway. Data on the internet crosses providers with great
>> frequency.
>
> While I'm not 100% sure of this, phone companies also do the same
> thing with their voice traffic. (Whatever isn't yet carried by VoIP)
> every carrier leases lines from every other carrier. The only true
> way to prevent eavesdropping is using strong encryption. This of
> course assumes that the NSA can't crack whichever encryption method
> you're using.

They can. It's just a mater of how much they want it as to how long it will take. And for most people or situations the tediousness of the encryption process limits how far they will go to hide information.

To be honest this is true for most anyone. All encryption is breakable. It's just that the NSA has people who specialize in algorithms to break them and the equipment to do it faster than most mortals.

David

On 16-Feb-2008, at 17:31, David Ross wrote:
>> This of course assumes that the NSA can't crack whichever
>> encryption method you're using.
>
> They can. It's just a mater of how much they want it as to how long
> it will take. And for most people or situations the tediousness of
> the encryption process limits how far they will go to hide
> information.

While this is technically true, it is not, in fact, true. PGP
encryption using public key exchange would take anyone, even the NSA,
at least decades, if not centuries, on current hardware.

RSA-129 (129 digits, or 429 bits) took 5,000 mips-years to crack,
using a vast distributed network. PGP's baseline is 1024/2048 bits.

A mips-year is a million operations per second for a year, and every
10 bits DOUBLES the complexity of the encryption.

--On February 17, 2008 5:15:53 AM -0800 "LewisGmail" <gkremegmail.com>
wrote:

> On 16-Feb-2008, at 17:31, David Ross wrote:
>>> This of course assumes that the NSA can't crack whichever
>>> encryption method you're using.
>>
>> They can. It's just a mater of how much they want it as to how long
>> it will take. And for most people or situations the tediousness of
>> the encryption process limits how far they will go to hide
>> information.
>
> While this is technically true, it is not, in fact, true. PGP
> encryption using public key exchange would take anyone, even the NSA,
> at least decades, if not centuries, on current hardware.

This assumes a proper implementation of encryption requiring a brute force
attack as the only method of decryption. If the implementation was poor,
say like a bad random number generator, then there may be other methods of
attack that greatly reduce the amount of time to break the encryption.

<http://www.schneier.com/essay-198.html>

While I'm intrigued by the media possibilities and business
implications of Starbucks's switch from T-Mobile Hotspot to AT&T's
wireless service is what will happen with the roughly eight thousand
hotspots that T-Mobile owns. I assume these are few components, a
high speed networking connection, perhaps a small server, and a
wireless hub.

So T-Mobile will shortly find themselves with about eight thousand
excess hotspot equipment combinations, whereas AT&T will be needing
about eight thousand hotspot equipment combinations.

In an instance like this would T-Mobile sell the equipment to AT&T to
be reconfigured? Of course AT&T might eventually replace the
equipment with 802.11n systems, and perhaps a faster backhaul, but
even so, AT&T purchasing T-Mobile's equipment would be a win-win.
T-Mobile gets a descent price on their equipment without having to
send techs out to rip it out, and AT&T gets functioning equipment
fast without having to make a large purchase.

So is this plausible, or not?

~Nick
http://www.inmff.net

It's (no surprise) more complicated than T-Mobile selling its gear at a depreciated price to AT&T. If that were the case, they could switch over in a matter of weeks. Instead, the schedule is 8 months.

T-Mobile has its own hardware platform using, I believe, Cisco hardware for all its hotspots. AT&T contracts its Wi-Fi network to Wayport, a Texas firm I've spoken with many times, and visited them on-site in Austin once. They have their own flavor of gear that they manufacture into special enclosures. I'm not sure who the supplier is.

Wayport will certainly be installing its equipment, most likely side by side with the T-Mobile gear and a new high-speed line. Then, when stuff works, T-Mobile's gear will be removed and their broadband link turned off.

In AT&T markets, AT&T may already be supplying the broadband as a leased line to T-Mobile.