Level1 News August 10 2020: Patron Edition

Howdy everyone, I hope Ryan and/or Wendell see this sometime before this upcoming Sunday. I'm not entirely sure why it didn't click for me when I first watched this, but Wendell, you're so wrong when it comes to the jail phone calls. While it's true that each individual SIP session is unlikely to be particularly expensive, it's far from dirt cheap for the service providers. My memory's a bit hazy on some of the details, as I haven't worked there in a bit over a year now, but I was a network engineer for one such service and keeping those phones working correctly was a MASSIVE PAIN. Here's a high-ish level overview: Even for the smaller county or even precinct jails, each phone installation had at least 20k in networking gear, which then of course had dedicated circuits attached from whatever ISP was available, then we also needed public IP4 space because either the codebase we were using or the providers we partnered with couldn't properly handle IP6 or NAT reliably. We also had to provide our own phones, so the physical phones, and most if not all associated wiring was an up-front cost (and ongoing because inmates loved to break those phones). Then we had to handle all the authentication and accounting for inmates, some locations requiring biometrics like the inmate's voiceprint to allow them to make calls. Others being as simple as entering their inmate ID and their own chosen PIN. So we maintained a database and application to handle the banking for their phone time and tracking their enrollment status in biometric auth, as well as things like fraud detection, three way call detection, and a voicemail system. Then as if that weren't enough things to keep track of, we had our own call management stack that had tons of delightful bugs to troubleshoot. And some sites required integration with another software suite called "the Investigator" sold by JLG (great people btw, always helpful and friendly in troubleshooting. You should be able to find their site online to get more info on the software), not to mention all the other terrible services we had to integrate with, it was a common occurance to have to manually parse an Excel file into an appropriate CSV to be processed by some other system to then update the database tracking inmate bank accounts (used sometimes for buying things from the canteen store as well as phone calls). So in order for the calls to be possible while complying with applicable regulations, we had to maintain all of that, so the calls are very much not simply price gouging. I'm sure there's some room for improvement, but I worked at one of the smaller companies doing this, I'd bet that Securus and the other major competitor I don't remember at the moment were gouging people due to the horrible design they appeared to have in comparison. It's a pretty fascinating business full of intricacies that don't appear at all obvious at first, but most of the things like rates and rules are determined with a given facility and simply enforced by the providing company. Most jails, for instance didn't allow calls for more than 15 minutes at a time, and several only allowed up to 2 calls per day. Other's, like mental institutions that used our software, would allow patients to make free calls quite frequently. A good portion of my work before I left was writing tooling leveraging Go and Expect to perform health checks, back up configurations, and allow deployment of new configurations to all ~1600 deployed media gateways (only responsible for actually handling the SIP calls) in an automated fashion. That was one of the most fun side projects I've been able to work on yet. Hope that provided a bit of insight as to what all goes into making those prices higher than seems reasonable considering every cell phone plan has unlimited minutes now.

So uh... that you advertise Floatplane heavily is cool and all, and I would totally do that buuuuttt.... I can't find any link to your channel there? Do I have to register to that first or how does that work? It's not in the L1 Website Footer, it's not on the support page, it's not on your patreon, it's not in your video endings, it's not on your twitter, I even checked the teampgp twitch channel, and nothing. So... for someone who had nothing to do with Floatplane so far, do I have to join first to see any channels?

...huh? I don't listen closely, I admit, but I didn't catch any mention of the Varus.

'If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.'

Staatlicher Nagetierfunktionär

Man I love you guys, but it really surprises me how much you're drinking the kool-aid on the coronavirus. A bit depressing tbh.

2:45:51 Total Trump+Russia reference right here...

Umm... Wendell, could you ask the editor you mention if said extension is "Dark Reader"? Cause i use that one, and now i'm paranoid about what it may be doing

NekoiNemo

of mice and men

MMO INKS

Lots of milk

MMO INKS