Network capacity has been increased to OC48 and OC12 capabilities and additional access points are being added as NTT expands its service area. The National Network links NTT’s local points of presence to each other and to the key national exchange points – MAE West, MAE East, NY NAP and the Digital Internet Exchange, located in Palo Alto, California. In any case, we obtained a version of the business directory in August, and put it up under Mosaic in a few hours, though visible only from our local machines. In any case, the primary business purpose is to generate more call volume for AT&T’s 800 services; in addition, some revenue is derived from bold-face listings and display advertisements. The intent was for BCS to gain some experience with providing a real Internet service (and with the Internet itself), perhaps to generate extra calls to 800 numbers, and perhaps ultimately to provide revenue through enhanced services like display advertisements. The initial Mosaic screen provides 26 single-letter buttons that lead directly to a display of all the categories whose names begin with that letter; for example, selecting D causes the display of the 103 categories from Dairy Consultants to Dyes and Dyestuffs.

There are only three categories under Z; the largest groups are under B and C, which each have 305 categories. There is only a limited amount of redundancy in this scheme: the numbers are mostly multiples of 25, but any given letter combination might apply to several categories. I should be surprised that there are any left who don’t, but I’ve also ranted enough about the common perception of Internet security, even with people who should know better, 온라인 인터넷 like financial institutions. There is little in the way of centralized governance;2 for the most part the distribution is just quietly maintained by the people who use it for the purpose of ensuring its applicability to their use-cases. We do not have any way to determine specifically which numbers have been looked up, nor of course any way to know whether more 800 calls have been made because of its existence. A 28-year-old woman might attend a march of radical feminists on Saturday, be a deferential caregiver to her ailing conservative grandfather on Sunday, teach high-school sophomores virtue ethics on Monday, perform open-mic comedy that no 15-year-old should hear on Tuesday, indulge a guilty pleasure for Disney musical numbers in the privacy of her car on the way to work on Wednesday morning, and meet up on Thursday night with the pierced, tattooed punk rocker she is dating.

The Harvest browser project at the University of Colorado retrieved a copy of the entire data base on October 27 (which we counted as a single transaction from a single IP address in the numbers above). NAS Data Recovery recovers the entire content of your broken NAS. Fortunately, most of these have been fixed in the latest version of the data. It seems likely that we have scored a very small victory over MCI by being first with a useful service, though it was a near thing. “air-gapped or isolated networks owned by utilities with relative ease by first penetrating the networks of key vendors. In fact, the very first entry (and the only one) in the first category, “Abdominal Supports” is Peel Builders, Inc., in Georgia; unless there is more to this company than meets the eye, this is a data error. AT&T first provided 800 number service in 1963; since then, 800 services have become a major source of revenue for AT&T, and, increasingly, for other long distance carriers as well. Feedback from the net has been positive; a few people have suggested that they would buy 800 service from AT&T so they could be listed in the directory, though we don’t know if anyone has actually made such a shift.

The important observation here is that when the directory is on the net it is subject to forms of inspection that would have not been possible before. It is in AT&T’s interest for many reasons to make the data as clean as possible. Other concerns include questions of the quality of information; it is important to maintain AT&T’s reputation for high-quality products. And there are some interesting political questions. Many of the sites that called most frequently are in fact gateways of large corporations, serving as a proxy for an unknown number of users within that corporation. For example, a spelling check of city names indicated a large number of problems, such as nine different spellings of Cincinnati in the original data; Coeur D’Alene was another challenge. A spelling check of company names indicated a large number of probable misspellings, particularly of long words within corporate names; Adminstrator or Commerical or Divison are popular variants of the right words. As far as we can tell from the logging information, a typical user searches for only a handful of numbers, although at this early stage, it is clear that some users are merely curious browsers.