Aidoc Medical is an Israeli technology company that develops computer-aided simple triage and notification systems. Aidoc has obtained U.S. Food and Drug Administration and CE mark approval for its stroke, pulmonary embolism, cervical fracture, intracranial hemorrhage, intra-abdominal free gas, and incidental pulmonary embolism algorithms. Aidoc algorithms are in use in more than 900 hospitals and imaging centers, including Montefiore Nyack Hospital, LifeBridge Health, LucidHealth, Yale New Haven Hospital, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, University of Rochester Medical Center, and Sheba Medical Center. == History == Aidoc was founded in 2016 by Elad Walach as the CEO, Michael Braginsky as the CTO and Guy Reiner as the VP. In April 2017, the company raised $7M, led by TLV Partners, and in April 2019, the company raised another $27M, led by Square Peg capital. There have been several additional rounds of funding as well, bringing Aidoc's total investment to $370M as of July 2025. In August 2018, Aidoc gained FDA clearance for its intracranial hemorrhage system, and in May 2019 it received clearance for the pulmonary embolism system. In January 2020, the system for detecting large-vessel occlusions (LVOs) in head CTA examinations obtained FDA clearance. In October 2024, it was reported that Aidoc is working with NVIDIA to develop a framework for deployment and integration of artificial intelligence tools in healthcare. The Blueprint for Resilient Integration and Deployment of Guided Excellence (BRIDGE) is a guideline to facilitate AI adoption in the healthcare industry. == Products and market == Aidoc has developed a suite of artificial intelligence products that flag both time-sensitive and time-consuming (for the radiologist) abnormalities across the body. The algorithms are developed with large quantities of data to provide diagnostic aid for a broad set of pathologies. The company offers an array of algorithms that span across the body, including for intracranial hemorrhage, spine fractures (C, T & L), free air in the abdomen, pulmonary embolism, and more. It developed "Always-on AI", a term coined by Elad Walach that refers to a type of artificial intelligence that is "Always-on—constantly running in the background and automatically analyzing medical imaging data, identifying urgent findings, and sparing radiologists from "drowning" in vast amounts of irrelevant data. Aidoc's solutions cover medical conditions prevalent in all settings (ED/inpatient/outpatient), including level 1 trauma centers, outpatient imaging centers, teleradiology groups and, are set up in over 200 medical centers worldwide. Notable customers include the University of Rochester Medical Center and Global Diagnostics Australia. Aidoc announced in 2024 that its new Clinical AI Reasoning Engine (CARE1) had been submitted for FDA approval. In September 2025 Aidoc received a "Breakthrough Device Designation" from the FDA for a new multi-triage solution that spans numerous acute findings in CT scans. Aidoc's CARE1 foundation model was the basis of the workflow on which the designation was made, enabling simultaneous coverage of multiple pathologies. This new designation allows parallel FDA review of multiple indications under a single submission. In April 2026, Aidoc raised million in a Series E funding round led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, with participation from General Catalyst and NVentures. The financing brought the company's total funding to over million. == Clinical Research == A clinical study on Aidoc’ accuracy of deep convolutional neural networks for the detection of pulmonary embolism (PE) on CT pulmonary angiograms (CTPAs) was performed by the University Hospital of Basel and presented at the European Congress of Radiology, showing that the Aidoc algorithm reached 93% sensitivity and 95% specificity. Clinical research has also been performed to test the diagnostic performance of Aidoc's deep learning-based triage system for the flagging of acute findings in abdominal computed tomography (CT) examinations. Overall, the algorithm achieved 93% sensitivity (91/98, 7 false negatives) and 97% specificity (93/96, 3 false-positive) in the detection of acute abdominal findings. Additional clinical research on Aidoc's Intracranial hemorrhage algorithm accuracy was presented at the European Congress of Radiology by Antwerp University Hospital, evaluating the use of its deep learning algorithm for the detection of intracranial hemorrhage on non-contrast enhanced CT of the brain. The University of Washington completed a study on the accuracy of Aidoc's intracranial hemorrhage algorithm.
Physical access
Physical access is a term in computer security that refers to the ability of people to physically gain access to a computer system. According to Gregory White, "Given physical access to an office, the knowledgeable attacker will quickly be able to find the information needed to gain access to the organization's computer systems and network." == Attacks and countermeasures == === Attacks === Physical access opens up a variety of avenues for hacking. Michael Meyers notes that "the best network software security measures can be rendered useless if you fail to physically protect your systems," since an intruder could simply walk off with a server and crack the password at his leisure. Physical access also allows hardware keyloggers to be installed. An intruder may be able to boot from a CD or other external media and then read unencrypted data on the hard drive. They may also exploit a lack of access control in the boot loader; for instance, pressing F8 while certain versions of Microsoft Windows are booting, specifying 'init=/bin/sh' as a boot parameter to Linux (usually done by editing the command line in GRUB), etc. One could also use a rogue device to access a poorly secured wireless network; if the signal were sufficiently strong, one might not even need to breach the perimeter. === Countermeasures === IT security standards in the United States typically call for physical access to be limited by locked server rooms, sign-in sheets, etc. Physical access systems and IT security systems have historically been administered by separate departments of organizations, but are increasingly being seen as having interdependent functions needing a single, converged security policy. An IT department could, for instance, check security log entries for suspicious logons occurring after business hours, and then use keycard swipe records from a building access control system to narrow down the list of suspects to those who were in the building at that time. Surveillance cameras might also be used to deter or detect unauthorized access.
Story (social media)
In social media, a story is a function in which the user tells a narrative or provides status messages and information in the form of short, time-limited clips in an automatically running sequence. == Definition == A story is a short sequence of images, videos, or other social media content, which can be accompanied by backgrounds, music, text, stickers, animations, filters or emojis. Social media platforms typically advance through the sequence automatically when presenting a story to a viewer. Although the sequential nature of stories can be used to tell a narrative, the pieces of a story can also be unrelated. Social media platforms that offer stories will typically have a primary story for each user which consists of everything the user posted to their story over a certain period of time, usually the most recent 24 hours. Most stories cannot be changed afterwards and are only available for a short time. Stories are almost exclusively created on a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet computer and are usually displayed vertically. == History == In October 2013, Snapchat first introduced the story function as a series of Snaps that can together tell a narrative through a chronological order, with each Snap being viewable by all of the poster's friends and deleted after 24 hours. Stories soon surpassed private Snaps to become Snapchat's most-viewed type of post. After 2015, Snapchat introduced a feature allowing users to post private stories viewable by a chosen subset of their friends. Later other apps would copy this feature. In August 2016, Instagram introduced a stories function that deletes the content after 24 hours. Various commenters have accused the site of copying Snapchat. In February 2017, the instant messenger WhatsApp introduced the Now Status stories function in beta, which was later renamed Status. In March 2017, a story function was introduced in Facebook Messenger. In February 2018, Google launched AMP Stories, bringing a story-style format to certain Google search results on mobile devices. In August 2018, YouTube introduced a stories function that initially was limited to pictures, but was later expanded to support short video clips. The feature was shut down in June 2023. In August 2018, the GIF website Giphy introduced a story function. In March 2022, TikTok added a story feature which allowed users to create 15 second long videos that delete after 24 hours. In June 2023, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced stories for Telegram would be released in July 2023. In July 2023, the feature was released for premium users, and in August 2023 it was rolled out for all users. == User motivations == In 2022, a study performed by Jia-Dai (Evelyn) Lu and Jhih-Syuan (Elaine) Lin examined the various motivations for updating stories on Instagram. The researchers found a new configuration of motivations for using Instagram Stories: exploration, self-enhancement, perceived functionality, entertainment, social sharing, relationship building, novelty, and surveillance. The findings also highlighted that contribution and creation activities are likely to result in positive emotions, while creation alone predicts negative emotions while updating stories on Instagram. == Usage statistics == In 2019, around 1.5 billion people worldwide every day on average used the stories function in a social network or messenger. Younger people in particular use this function. More than 20% of people aged 18 to 24 use Instagram stories, while it is just under 2% of those over 55. In a Facebook survey of 18,000 participants from 12 countries, 68% said they used the stories function at least once a month. Stories in the areas of fashion and tourism are particularly popular. The website Fanpage Karma analyzed several Instagram accounts and determined the average reach of posts and stories per follower, concluding that posts have a higher reach than stories, which often have less than half the reach.
Server-Gated Cryptography
Server-Gated Cryptography (SGC), also known as International Step-Up by Netscape, is a defunct mechanism that was used to step up from 40-bit or 56-bit to 128-bit cipher suites with SSL. It was created in response to United States federal legislation on the export of strong cryptography in the 1990s. The legislation had limited encryption to weak algorithms and shorter key lengths in software exported outside of the United States of America. When the legislation added an exception for financial transactions, SGC was created as an extension to SSL with the certificates being restricted to financial organisations. In 1999, this list was expanded to include online merchants, healthcare organizations, and insurance companies. This legislation changed in January 2000, resulting in vendors no longer shipping export-grade browsers and SGC certificates becoming available without restriction. Internet Explorer supported SGC starting with patched versions of Internet Explorer 3. SGC became obsolete when Internet Explorer 5.01 SP1 and Internet Explorer 5.5 started supporting strong encryption without the need for a separate high encryption pack (except on Windows 2000, which needs its own high encryption pack that was included in Service Pack 2 and later). "Export-grade" browsers are unusable on the modern Web due to many servers disabling export cipher suites. Additionally, these browsers are incapable of using SHA-2 family signature hash algorithms like SHA-256. Certification authorities are trying to phase out the new issuance of certificates with the older SHA-1 signature hash algorithm. The continuing use of SGC facilitates the use of obsolete, insecure Web browsers with HTTPS. However, while certificates that use the SHA-1 signature hash algorithm remain available, some certificate authorities continue to issue SGC certificates (often charging a premium for them) although they are obsolete. The reason certificate authorities can charge a premium for SGC certificates is that browsers only allowed a limited number of roots to support SGC. When an SSL handshake takes place, the software (e.g. a web browser) would list the ciphers that it supports. Although the weaker exported browsers would only include weaker ciphers in its initial SSL handshake, the browser also contained stronger cryptography algorithms. There are two protocols involved to activate them. Netscape Communicator 4 used International Step-Up, which used the now obsolete insecure renegotiation to change to a stronger cipher suite. Microsoft used SGC, which sends a new Client Hello message listing the stronger cipher suites on the same connection after the certificate is determined to be SGC capable, and also supported Netscape Step-Up for compatibility (though this support in the NT 4.0 SP6 and IE 5.01 version had a bug where changing MAC algorithms during Step-Up did not work properly).
Data recovery
In computing, data recovery is a process of retrieving deleted, inaccessible, lost, corrupted, damaged, or overwritten data from secondary storage, removable media or files, when the data stored in them cannot be accessed in a usual way. The data is most often salvaged from storage media such as internal or external hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), USB flash drives, magnetic tapes, CDs, DVDs, RAID subsystems, and other electronic devices. Recovery may be required due to physical damage to the storage devices or logical damage to the file system that prevents it from being mounted by the host operating system (OS). Logical failures occur when the hard drive devices are functional but the user or automated-OS cannot retrieve or access data stored on them. Logical failures can occur due to corruption of the engineering chip, lost partitions, firmware failure, or failures during formatting/re-installation. Data recovery can be a very simple or technical challenge. This is why there are specific software companies specialized in this field that help to get back data on your system. == About == The most common data recovery scenarios involve an operating system failure, malfunction of a storage device, logical failure of storage devices, accidental damage or deletion, etc. (typically, on a single-drive, single-partition, single-OS system), in which case the ultimate goal is simply to copy all important files from the damaged media to another new drive. This can be accomplished using a Live CD, or DVD by booting directly from a ROM or a USB drive instead of the corrupted drive in question. Many Live CDs or DVDs provide a means to mount the system drive and backup drives or removable media, and to move the files from the system drive to the backup media with a file manager or optical disc authoring software. Such cases can often be mitigated by disk partitioning and consistently storing valuable data files (or copies of them) on a different partition from the replaceable OS system files. Another scenario involves a drive-level failure, such as a compromised file system or drive partition, or a hard disk drive failure. In any of these cases, the data is not easily read from the media devices. Depending on the situation, solutions involve repairing the logical file system, partition table, or master boot record, or updating the firmware or drive recovery techniques ranging from software-based recovery of corrupted data, to hardware- and software-based recovery of damaged service areas (also known as the hard disk drive's "firmware"), to hardware replacement on a physically damaged drive which allows for the extraction of data to a new drive. If a drive recovery is necessary, the drive itself has typically failed permanently, and the focus is rather on a one-time recovery, salvaging whatever data can be read. In a third scenario, files have been accidentally "deleted" from a storage medium by the users. Typically, the contents of deleted files are not removed immediately from the physical drive; instead, references to them in the directory structure are removed, and thereafter space the deleted data occupy is made available for later data overwriting. In the mind of end users, deleted files cannot be discoverable through a standard file manager, but the deleted data still technically exists on the physical drive. In the meantime, the original file contents remain, often several disconnected fragments, and may be recoverable if not overwritten by other data files. The term "data recovery" is also used in the context of forensic applications or espionage, where data which have been encrypted, hidden, or deleted, rather than damaged, are recovered. Sometimes data present in the computer gets encrypted or hidden due to reasons like virus attacks which can only be recovered by some computer forensic experts. == Physical damage == A wide variety of failures can cause physical damage to storage media, which may result from human errors and natural disasters. CD-ROMs can have their metallic substrate or dye layer scratched off; hard disks can suffer from a multitude of mechanical failures, such as head crashes, PCB failure, and failed motors; tapes can simply break. Physical damage to a hard drive, even in cases where a head crash has occurred, does not necessarily mean permanent data loss. However, in extreme cases, such as prolonged exposure to moisture and corrosion —like the lost Bitcoin hard drive of James Howells, buried in the Newport landfill for over a decade — recovery is usually impossible. In rare cases, forensic techniques such as magnetic force microscopy (MFM) have been explored to detect residual magnetic traces when data holds exceptional value. Other techniques employed by many professional data recovery companies can typically salvage most, if not all, of the data that had been lost when the failure occurred. Of course, there are exceptions to this, such as cases where severe damage to the hard drive platters may have occurred. However, if the hard drive can be repaired and a full image or clone created, then the logical file structure can be rebuilt in most instances. Most physical damage cannot be repaired by end users. For example, opening a hard disk drive in a normal environment can allow airborne dust to settle on the platter and become caught between the platter and the read/write head. During normal operation, read/write heads float 3 to 6 nanometers above the platter surface, and the average dust particles found in a normal environment are typically around 30,000 nanometers in diameter. When these dust particles get caught between the read/write heads and the platter, they can cause new head crashes that further damage the platter and thus compromise the recovery process. Furthermore, end users generally do not have the hardware or technical expertise required to make these repairs. Consequently, data recovery companies are often employed to salvage important data with the more reputable ones using class 100 dust- and static-free cleanrooms. === Recovery techniques === Recovering data from physically damaged hardware can involve multiple techniques. Some damage can be repaired by replacing parts in the hard disk. This alone may make the disk usable, but there may still be logical damage. A specialized disk-imaging procedure is used to recover every readable bit from the surface. Once this image is acquired and saved on a reliable medium, the image can be safely analyzed for logical damage and will possibly allow much of the original file system to be reconstructed. ==== Hardware repair ==== A common misconception is that a damaged printed circuit board (PCB) may be simply replaced during recovery procedures by an identical PCB from a healthy drive. While this may work in rare circumstances on hard disk drives manufactured before 2003, it will not work on newer drives. Electronics boards of modern drives usually contain drive-specific adaptation data (generally a map of bad sectors and tuning parameters) and other information required to properly access data on the drive. Replacement boards often need this information to effectively recover all of the data. The replacement board may need to be reprogrammed. Some manufacturers (Seagate, for example) store this information on a serial EEPROM chip, which can be removed and transferred to the replacement board. Each hard disk drive has what is called a system area or service area; this portion of the drive, which is not directly accessible to the end user, usually contains drive's firmware and adaptive data that helps the drive operate within normal parameters. One function of the system area is to log defective sectors within the drive; essentially telling the drive where it can and cannot write data. The sector lists are also stored on various chips attached to the PCB, and they are unique to each hard disk drive. If the data on the PCB do not match what is stored on the platter, then the drive will not calibrate properly. In most cases the drive heads will click because they are unable to find the data matching what is stored on the PCB. == Logical damage == The term "logical damage" refers to situations in which the error is not a problem in the hardware and requires software-level solutions. === Corrupt partitions and file systems, media errors === In some cases, data on a hard disk drive can be unreadable due to damage to the partition table or file system, or to (intermittent) media errors. In the majority of these cases, at least a portion of the original data can be recovered by repairing the damaged partition table or file system using specialized data recovery software such as TestDisk; software like ddrescue can image media despite intermittent errors, and image raw data when there is partition table or file system damage. This type of data recovery can be performed by people without expertise in drive hardware as it requires no special physica
Racter
Racter is an artificial intelligence program that generates English language prose at random. It was published by Mindscape for IBM PC compatibles in 1984, then for the Apple II, Mac, and Amiga. An expanded version of the software, not the one released through Mindscape, was used to generate the text for the published book The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed. == History == Racter, short for raconteur, was written by William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter. Racter's initial creation was the short story Soft Ions, which appeared in the October 1981 issue of Omni (magazine). The publication's editors bought the story in January 1980, before it had even been written. In exchange for the rights, the editors offered financial support to Chamberlain and Etter so the two could refine Racter. In 1983, Racter produced a book called The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed (ISBN 0-446-38051-2). The program originally was written for an OSI which only supported file names at most six characters long, causing the name to be shorted to Racter and it was later adapted to run on a CP/M machine where it was written in "compiled ASIC on a Z80 microcomputer with 64K of RAM." This version, the program that allegedly wrote the book, was not released to the general public. The sophistication claimed for the program was likely exaggerated, as could be seen by investigation of the template system of text generation. In 1984, Mindscape released an interactive version of Racter, developed by Inrac Corporation, for IBM PC compatibles, and it was ported to the Apple II, Mac, and Amiga. The published Racter was similar to a chatterbot. The BASIC program that was released by Mindscape was far less sophisticated than anything that could have written the fairly sophisticated prose of The Policeman's Beard. The commercial version of Racter could be likened to a computerized version of Mad Libs, the game in which you fill in the blanks in advance and then plug them into a text template to produce a surrealistic tale. The commercial program attempted to parse text inputs, identifying significant nouns and verbs, which it would then regurgitate to create "conversations", plugging the input from the user into phrase templates which it then combined, along with modules that conjugated English verbs. By contrast, the text in The Policeman's Beard, apart from being edited from a large amount of output, would have been the product of Chamberlain's own specialized templates and modules, which were not included in the commercial release of the program. == Reception == The Boston Phoenix called the story Soft Ions "schematic nonsense. But the scheme is obvious enough and the nonsense accessible enough to an attentive reader that one can almost believe Chamberlain when he predicts that before long Racter will be ready to write for the pulp-reading public." PC Magazine described some of Policeman's Beard's scenes as "surprising for their frankness" and "reflective". It concluded that the book was "whimsical and wise and sometimes fun". Computer Gaming World described Racter as "a diversion into another dimension that might best be seen before paying the price of a ticket. (Try before you buy!)" A 1985 review of the program in The New York Times notes that, "As computers move ever closer to artificial intelligence, Racter is on the edge of artificial insanity." It also states that Racter's "always-changing sentences are grammatically correct, often funny and, for a computer, sometimes profound." The article includes examples showing interaction with Racter, most often Racter asking the user questions. == Reviews == Jeux & Stratégie #47
Telenet
Telenet was an American commercial packet-switched network which went into service in August 16, 1975. It was the first FCC-licensed public data network in the United States. Various commercial and government interests paid monthly fees for dedicated lines connecting their computers and local networks to this backbone network. Free public dialup access to Telenet, for those who wished to access these systems, was provided in hundreds of cities throughout the United States. == History == After establishing that commercial operation of "value added carriers" was legal in the U.S., Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), who were the private contractors for constructing packet switching nodes (Interface Message Processor) for the ARPANET, set out to create a private sector version. The original founding company, Telenet Inc., was established by BBN. In January 1975, Telenet Communications Corporation announced that they had acquired the necessary venture capital after a two-year quest. Initially, Bob Kahn was the first President of Telenet; he then moved to ARPA as Larry Roberts left to become President of the company. Barry Wessler also joined from ARPA. On August 16 of the same year they began operating the first public data network. The network offered an email service called Telemail. Telenet had its first offices in downtown Washington, D.C., then moved to McLean, Virginia. It was acquired by GTE in 1979, and then moved to offices in Reston, Virginia. It was later acquired by Sprint and called "Sprintnet". Sprint migrated customers from Telenet to the modern-day Sprintlink IP network, one of many networks composing today's Internet. == Coverage == Originally, the public network had switching nodes in seven US cities: Washington, D.C. (network operations center as well as switching) Boston, Massachusetts New York, New York Chicago, Illinois Dallas, Texas San Francisco, California Los Angeles, California The switching nodes were fed by Telenet Access Controller (TAC) terminal concentrators both colocated and remote from the switches. By 1980, there were over 1000 switches in the public network. At that time, the next largest network using Telenet switches was that of Southern Bell, which had approximately 250 switches. In 1977, Telenet added a London node and a Network Control Centre in a London building of Britain's Post Office Telecommunications. == Internal network technology == Telenet initially used a proprietary virtual connection host interface. The network used statically defined hop-by-hop routing, using Prime commercial minicomputers as switches, but then migrated to a purpose-built multiprocessing switch based on 6502 microprocessors. Among the innovations of this second-generation switch was a patented arbitrated bus interface that created a switched fabric among the microprocessors. By contrast, a typical microprocessor-based system of the time used a bus; switched fabrics did not become common until about twenty years later, with the advent of PCI Express and HyperTransport. Most interswitch lines ran at 56 kbit/s, with a few, such as New York-Washington, at T1 (i.e., 1.544 Mbit/s). Originally, the switching tables could not be altered separately from the main executable code, and topology updates had to be made by deliberately crashing the switch code and forcing a reboot from the network management center. Improvements in the software allowed new tables to be loaded, but the network never used dynamic routing protocols. Multiple static routes, on a switch-by-switch basis, could be defined for fault tolerance. Network management functions continued to run on Prime minicomputers. Roberts and Barry Wessler joined the international effort to standardize the a protocol for packet-switched data communication based on virtual circuits shortly before it was finalized. The CCITT proposal for X.25 was being prepared by Rémi Després and other international experts. A few minor changes, which complemented the proposed specification, were accommodated to enable Telenet to join the agreement. Telenet adopted X.25 shortly after the protocol was published in March 1976. Its X.25 host interface was the first in the industry. The main internal protocol was a proprietary variant on X.75; Telenet also ran standard X.75 gateways to other packet switching networks. == Accessing the network == === Basic asynchronous access === Users could use modems on the Public Switched Telephone Network to dial TAC ports, calling either from "dumb" terminals or from computers emulating such terminals. Organizations with a large number of local terminals could install a TAC on their own site, which used a dedicated line, at up to 56 kbit/s, to connect to a switch at the nearest Telenet location. Dialup modems supported had a maximum speed of 1200 bit/s, and later 4800 bit/s. For example, a customer in NYC could dial into the local number, then type in a command similar to: which would connect (that "c") them to a computer system designated as number "555" located in the same vicinity as the standard telephone "area code" 301. One significant customer was an early (what would now be called) internet service provider The Source which had their equipment in Mclean, Va. Telenet offered a much lower nighttime rate when there were few corporate customers, and this let The Source set up a modestly priced offering to tens of thousands of customers. Another prominent customer in the 1980s was Quantum Link (now AOL). === Other access protocols === Telenet supported remote concentrators for IBM 3270 family intelligent terminals, which communicated, via X.25 to Telenet-written software that ran in IBM 370x series front-end processors. Telenet also supported Block Mode Terminal Interfaces (BMTI) for IBM Remote Job Entry terminals supporting the 2780/3780 and HASP Bisync protocols. === PC Pursuit === In the late 1980s, Telenet offered a service called PC Pursuit. For a flat monthly fee, customers could dial into the Telenet network in one city, then dial out on the modems in another city to access bulletin board systems and other services. PC Pursuit was popular among computer hobbyists because it sidestepped long-distance charges. In this sense, PC Pursuit was similar to the Internet, allowing any user to call any system as if it were local. On connection to the network, the user entered a 5-letter code for the target city they wished to call. This consisted of a 2-letter state code and a 3-letter acronym for the city. For instance, to call a system in Cleveland, Ohio, the user would enter the code OHCLV, for "OHio", "CLeVeland". Once connected, the user could dial out to any local number, and the system simulated a direct connection between the two endpoints.