The FTC’s Do Not Call list has to be one of the silliest exercises that I’ve seen in a long time. This feel good service allows you to register all of your phone numbers (both landlines and cell phones) that you want removed from the telemarketing call lists. I registered the five phone numbers that I possess and walked away with several observations.

First, there’s no security on the process. Anyone can conceivably register a phone number on the list, whether it’s yours or not. You are asked for an e-mail address for confirmation, but there’s no correlation between e-mail addresses and phone numbers anywhere. Where’s the harm here, you ask? After all, we’re talking about the most evil of problems — telemarketing. Well, it turns out that anyone can just unregister a phone number also. It’s trivial to obtain an anonymous e-mail address through Yahoo or HotMail. If I want you back on my list, I’ll just unregister you and then call you. There’s no protection. It would be trivial to write a program that registered every phone number and equally trivial to unregister them.

Second, this list of exclusions is equally silly. The following companies are exempt from the program —

• long-distance phone companies 
• airlines
• banks and credit unions; and
• the business of insurance, to the extent that it is regulated by state law.

Frankly I get more calls from long distance companies and banks offering credit cards than I do from anyone else. I feel bad for the local carpet cleaner who calls once a year because that’s who’s going to have to check the list, not the big banks who call incessently.

I think there’ll be a small, offshore company with a couple of hackers that undoes all of this for the banks. They can afford it and it’d be hard to beat until the phone companies themselves actually get involved in the verification process. Of course, they won’t because they are exempt and this is a huge source of revenue for them.

Honestly, if you want to beat the telemarketers you really have two options — telezapping and call intercepting. I used a telezapper for about two years and it significantly cut down the number of telemarketing calls I got. I still had to answer the phone, but most of the time the caller had already disconnected. I just recently got call intercept, which was offered through my Verizon service. That turned out to be a great option — no one gets through without a valid caller id. If you don’t have a valid caller ID, you need to announce yourself, which the telemarketers don’t do. Even if they do, you have the option of pressing a button telling them not to call again. This works.

At a dinner function last night, the discussion of what happens with Sun and BEA came up. Sun is clearly the odd man out in the operating system war between Microsoft and Linux. BEA seems to also be in trouble given the fact that IBM’s WebSphere and Microsoft’s .NET are now poised to battle it out for web application services. So what happens with these two major players?

Here’s my prediction, posted here and dated for a future “I told you so”. IBM and Sun would be a natural fit as Sun begins to figure out what to do with Linux. Sun has developed some terrific hardware and has excellent operating system development capability. This fits naturally with IBM, who is putting Linux on every CPU they can find. IBM’s AIX business has to be trash right now given the SCO lawsuit. IBM’s hardware platforms don’t get the acclaim that Sun’s do. Thus my prediction of a merger between the two. WebSphere and Linux on Sparc could be hot for all parties involved. The hangups? First, Scott McNealy — he has to want to do this. Second, IBM’s anti-trust restrictions — there may be some holdovers from yesteryear that could cause this to be a problem.

What about BEA? I think they need to merge into HP just as soon as HP finishes digesting Compaq. HP acquired Bluestone to be their application server platform but frankly there’s no cache there. With the continued excellent hardware development at HP, more Linux systems on Itanium, they need platform software to really compete and provide an alternative with Microsoft and IBM. BEA should do that for them. For me this is similar to the Sun/Netscape merger years ago — Sun had hardware and needed software to complete the picture — Netscape had software and needed steady market channels. I think BEA could do the same thing for HP.

Remember, if either of these things happen, you heard it here first.

Verizon has waved the white flag on cellular number portability and seems to be making the necessary changes to support it by November 24th. I think this is a big win for them. AT&T used to be the leader in the market by having the most comprehensive cellular coverage along with coast-to-coast service without roaming, but Verizon seems to have picked up while AT&T is flailing by trying to switch over to GSM and GPRS service. Personally, I’m very tired of dropped calls and poor quality AT&T service that the switch for me to something else is almost a given.

Many folks like me won’t change service providers because our cell phones are an important unit of stability (along with our e-mail addresses) and thus I’ve been stuck for several years now. The FCC ruling here will increase the competitive nature of the cellular service providers and really force them to offer great service. It’s about time.

More on this story is on CNet.