On Fri, January 13, 2006 2:08 pm, Jim Cheetham said: > On Fri, Jan 13, 2006 at 01:37:35PM +1300, Andrew Errington wrote: >> admittedly small, traffic. Multiply this up by several attempts per day >> I >> end up with a measureable amount of network traffic eaten by hacking >> attempts. I'm paying for this! > > It's a feature of capitalism ... :-) The ISP can get away with charging > you for traffic that is, essentially, unanswered ... Telecom would love > to charge you for every incoming call, even if it's not answered. Same > thing.
Hence one of the first "addon" services they offered was the now ubiquitous answer service. Once upon a time if you weren't home the phone just rang and rang and the caller tried back later. Now 95 % of the time telecom call minder answers and the caller gets charged for a minimum of one minute. And then the caller gets the cell phone number from the answer machine and calls that, and gets charged again, or the callee uses their cellphone to check their messages...
