Bjorne ..

You are dead wrong about this one here in the USA where I live:

 B > I think that the most important job for you, for now, is to make
 B > everyone in your zone aware about the 'fidonet.net' variant. Every
 B > BinkP mailer, out of the box, can connect to every fidonet.net
 B > registered mailer. Whatever you then put in the phone field doesn't
 B > matter, so the 000 variant will probably do as well as any other
 B > kludge.

For security and phone system attack defense purposes here in our part of
the world now, any phone number dialed multiple times now to a bogus phone
number or to the phoneco more than a couple times in a row in error, gets
you into the repair ticket mode!  I guess you could call this the legacy of
Kevin Mitnick?  Wry grin.

Recall that, for example, dialers when confronted with a 'no-connect'
simply try this again for say, ten times?

Hence any modem which tries to dial 000 or any other bogus number that
doesn't exist in the known frame matrix of 'good' exchange or area code
combinations will automagically get you into the process of having your
phone connection yanked until you clear up the'problem'.  A couple of
rounds of this get your phone service terminated.

It is critical that only properly formed actually valid phone area code and
country code numbers exist in the telephone number field at least in some
areas of the USA.  Or at least numbers or characters are placed in it which
do not place a sysop at risk of generating bogus repetitive dialing
attempts from a modem.  That or face real scrutiny here from the
authorities now.

That actually presents a more curious problem for some modems I suspect,
but haven't seen in practice (yet?).  Some modems actually can translate
the letters of the key pad into numeric dial outs!  For example, telling
the modem to 'dial' the string 'w11' would, in fact produce a dial call to
the numeric number 911 of all things.  And a repeated call to a telco
operator in your "000" scenario would in short order get the
offending number reported to the 911 crew here .. generating fine and legal
problems for the Fido SysOp that spawned the tenfold try at this for
dialing the BBS with such a number in the tel number field in the nodelist.

Mike Luther

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