Party Vibe

I’m half tempted to ask for mine (in spite of having a CDR on the telephone system in my roofspace) simply to make Cheltenham do a bit of work.

Calls from here can be routed via any of 3 circuits leading to different sites on different ISPs; via Canada, Germany, London or a local GSM network via a terminal adapter (the route they take depends usually on what is the cheapest route).

Until too many people started misusing this facility for genuinely bad purposes like fraud I had one VOIP trunk that could present any valid caller ID into the Openreach core network (I did have an agreement with the provider and Ofcom I would only use numbers I owned or had permission to use

I can send CLID / CLIP into the Canada VOIP trunk but it always gets prefixed with a 1 or +1 (presumably to keep FCC and IC happy); making it useless to send European numbers through.

Also WTF is this with Americans having to pay for incoming calls? I’ve seen this on more than one US provider. Fair enough you may to pay for the channel bandwidth and the number(s) as they are usually allocated via the Communications Ministry in any country (the big phone companies are charged for this) but in Europe incoming calls are free.

I did have a free USA number with a Miami area code but the providers setup was so insecure I ceased it (to use SIP you have to let a big hole into your firewall and their “secrets” were 4 digit numbers in plaintext. As telephone calls are now dirt cheap I did call it a few times from one of my own other trunks and play a recording of a Dutch cat meowing down the line to confuse and annoy the NSA (as there is no law stopping the “socialist Europeans” allowing cats to telephone the USA) :laugh_at:

TBH the European ones at least have by now learned to put up with what I (and others of my generation) get up to; they probably think “well at least he isn’t involved the Provos or jihad / hacking for fraud/ransomware or worse, encouraging younger people to do so as there are a lot of chaps my age (and some older) who are..”

I expect the American ones aren’t so happy as I do stuff like block out all their tech companies ads, and download the bulk of the youtube videos I do watch via some site in Germany.

I recently downloaded two Soviet Victory Parades (about 5 gigabytes); one from 1985 and the other from this year which must have caned a shit ton of Googles European bandwidth.

I do watch them in stages (as they are very long and all in Russian); by connecting a USB device to a “smart” TV I refuse to link to the network because it can’t (yet) be adblocked (it is otherwise used for devices which only have HDMI outputs like Raspberry PI).

Usually this is before bed; at least in the UK if I fall asleep during the parade I won’t get in trouble from Mr Putin (I would in Moscow; more so as I’d most likely have to be one of those doing the marching…)