Telephones

Security researchers Nick DePetrillo and Don Bailey have discovered a seven-digit numerical code that can unlock all kinds of secrets about you. It's your phone number. Using relatively simple techniques, this duo can use your cellphone number to figure out your name, where you live and work, where you travel and when you sleep. They could even listen to your voice messages and personal phone calls — if they wanted to. "It's really interesting to watch a phone number turn into a person's life," DePetrillo said.

A phone company whose equipment on a top-heavy pole was partly to blame for the 2007 Malibu Canyon fire has agreed to pay $14.5 million under a proposed settlement, according to legal documents. NextG Networks of California Inc., now owned by Crown Castle NG West Inc., will pay $8.5 million into California's general fund and $6 million to hire independent engineers to inspect each of the company's attachments on tens of thousands of poles in California. Any pole found to be overloaded or decayed would be replaced, with co-owners sharing the cost.

Passengers on Eastern Airlines jets will soon be able to reach out and touch someone from any row on a plane, under an agreement between the struggling carrier and GTE Airfone. GTE Airfone of Oak Brook, Ill., will install telephones in each seat row aboard Eastern's fleet of 150 or so jetliners, the companies said. Eastern said first-class fliers will each have their own phone. In coach, travelers will have to share one phone per row. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The longtime Brentwood residence of comic Phyllis Diller has sold for $9.35 million. It came on the market in late September at $12.9 million. The Country English-style house, built in 1914, sits on 1.23 acres. Features include an organ room, a salon with a stage and a telephone room. Diller bought the 9,266-square-foot house in 1965 and entertained such Hollywood elite there as comedian Bob Hope, costume designer Edith Head and late-night show host Johnny Carson. There are eight bedrooms and five bathrooms.

Inmates at Buena Park City Jail will now be able to place collect calls from inside their cells. The City Council on Monday gave approval to enter into a one-year contract with Pay-Tel of America Inc. to install telephones in four jail cells. "It saves time and money," said Police Chief Richard M. Tefank. "The main benefit to us is the jailers don't have to take inmates out of the cell to make a phone call," Tefank said. "The main emphasis to do it was the time savings for our jail staff."

For nearly 30 years, residents of the rugged eastern Mojave Desert have fought to obtain something just about everybody else takes for granted--basic telephone service. On Friday, they moved a big step closer to their goal. After a hearing in San Francisco, an administrative law judge for the state Public Utilities Commission concluded that the desert dwellers desperately need telephones and that a Fresno County company's plan to provide the service appears economically viable.

Motorola Inc. likely will enter the consumer cordless telephone business by year's end as a prelude to advancing into the market for a new--and more lucrative--generation of mobile phones, analysts said Monday. The move would put Motorola in direct competition with industry leader American Telephone & Telegraph Co., and would make it the first firm to make cordless phones in the United States. Sue Schmidt, a Motorola spokeswoman at the company's headquarters in suburban Schaumburg, Ill.

Cal State Northridge will test touch-tone telephone voting this week, Associated Students President Fabio Escobar said Monday. Starting at 6 a.m. Tuesday and continuing until 9 p.m. Wednesday, CSUN students will be able to call in their votes for school senate seats, homecoming queen and her court and two referendums. To vote, students must call (818) 885-3000 and first enter their student identification number, birth date and a four-digit personal identification code, Escobar said.

Beware the telephone. TV ads may tease and promise adventure at the fingertips. But it is call now, pay later, when the monthly bill shows where late night loneliness and the pursuit of romance dug into the wallet. That once-friendly instrument, masquerading in the colors of the rainbow and shapes that range from computer clever to Space Age gothic, is at your service with services you never dreamed you would want. Everything from pay-as-you-talk to Santa to pay-as-you-dream about sex.

Cordless telephones became hot sellers in the 1980s even though it is easy for snoopy neighbors to listen in on conversations. So the Supreme Court's refusal this week to make eavesdropping on them illegal is not expected to diminish their popularity. "There are a lot of people who really don't give a damn about the security (issue)," said Steve Sazegari, a research analyst with Dataquest in San Jose. "It's more of a toy to them."

It's been an especially fruitful week for rueful lamentations about "kids today. " Monday marked the 20th anniversary of the text message. Along with it came the predictable chorus of bellyaching about the demise of literacy, the shortening of attention spans and the rise of abbreviations and acronyms that take longer to decipher than it would to pick up the phone and have a real conversation. SMS, or short message service, technology dates to 1984, when a Finnish engineer named Matti Makkonen brought it up at a telecommunications conference.

At the end of July, a group of disgruntled residents of Westhampton Beach, N.Y., filed a lawsuit contesting the building of an eruv in their neighborhood. In a dispute made famous by "The Daily Show" mockumentary featuring an " eruv hat," residents have expressed in their lawsuit worries that if an eruv were to be built in Westhampton Beach, it would constitute a "constant and ever-present symbol … that the secular public spaces of the village have been transformed for religious use and identity.

Decades after writer-director Nelson Lyon released the X-rated sex comedy "The Telephone Book" in 1971, the film was hailed as a neglected masterpiece. By then Lyons was a former "Saturday Night Live" writer long known for a darker connection: He went on a drug-fueled binge with John Belushi during the comedian's final days in 1982. "He was blamed for Belushi's death, and it ruined his career," said Dennis Perrin, author of "Mr. Mike," a 1999 biography of former "Saturday Night Live" head writer Michael O'Donoghue, who had been Lyon's writing partner.

SACRAMENTO — Members of the California Public Utilities Commission are criticizing a bill that would strip their agency of authority to regulate basic telephone services. Meeting Thursday in San Francisco, the five-member board expressed doubts about proposed legislation backed by AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. The measure, SB 1161, would ensure that state agencies have "no regulatory jurisdiction or control" over telephone calls that involve sending voice signals over the Internet.

Don't worry if you're one of the 100 or so Academy Award nominees who will go home empty-handed Sunday night. On Tuesday, you'll be able to buy yourself an Oscar. A record 15 Oscar statuettes will be sold to the highest bidders during an online and telephone sale conducted by a Brentwood auction house. The sale of the statuettes, which include those awarded for such classics as "Citizen Kane," "How Green Was My Valley" and "Wuthering Heights," is expected to generate as much as $4 million in bids, according to auctioneer Nate D. Sanders.

Here is a roundup of alleged cons, frauds and schemes to watch out for. Social Security — Thieves have been impersonating Social Security Administration employees in an attempt to steal seniors' personal information, the AARP said in a recent bulletin. The con artists contact seniors by telephone, claiming to be updating their records. They ask for seniors' Social Security numbers, birth dates and bank account numbers, the AARP said. Consumers should never disclose such information over the telephone to strangers, the AARP said.

Following a series of attacks on women on campus, students passed a Cal State Northridge ballot measure this week approving installation of an emergency telephone system in the fall. The system will cost each student a one-time fee of $5. The fee is expected to generate about $135,000--half the funds needed to purchase the 44 phones, a university official said. The university is expected to pay the balance, including installation and maintenance fees.

Two council members from the west San Fernando Valley are the chief obstacles to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's bid to place a $243-million telephone tax on the Feb. 5 presidential primary ballot. With the proposed measure coming before the City Council today, Councilmen Greig Smith and Dennis Zine -- two of the council's most fiscally conservative members -- still have not announced whether they will support it.

After growing up in a rough part of Bellflower, Arturo E. Rodriguez enlisted in the Army soon after high school. Later, deployed to Afghanistan, Rodriguez sometimes drew joking parallels between the conflict he witnessed there and in his hometown. During a firefight last year, he joked with a close friend, an Army buddy from a similar neighborhood in Los Angeles, saying they'd gone "from one war zone to another," the friend said later. Although he was just 19, the baby-faced soldier carried himself like a man several years older, those close to him said.

Chinese authorities Sunday blanketed volatile towns in Inner Mongolia with armed police, blocked Internet and telephone connections, and confined students to their campuses and activists to their homes in an effort to forestall protests scheduled Monday over the death of a Mongolian herder during a confrontation over land use. The killing of the herder, allegedly run over May 10 by truck drivers who were transporting coal across pastoral lands,...