Category: VoIP
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New site promoting the integration of the Ruby language and telephony…
Continue Reading: New site promoting the integration of the Ruby language and telephony…By way of a Twitter post today, I learned that Dave Troy has unveiled “Talking Ruby“, a new site promoting information about the integration of the Ruby language with telephony, collaboration and messaging. I’ve always been intrigued by Ruby (and also Ruby on Rails, which has been one of the most visible uses of Ruby), but have yet to really have had a reason to plunge in and play with it. Perhaps this will provide an excuse. Dave indicates on his site the following reasons for using Ruby with telephony:
- Ruby’s DSL (Domain Specific Language) Capabilities are ideal for expressively encapsulating diverse telephony and collaboration technologies
- Inherits the momentum of Rails, so web integration is baked-in
- Cross-platform support (Linux, OS X, BSD, Windows ) unifies application development efforts
- Ruby integration libraries can be easily developed and shared
- DRb (Distributed Ruby) allows for persistent state storage and scaling across servers
I wish him all the best with the new site and do look forward to seeing what people come up with. The site is a wiki, so if you’re interested and Ruby-literate, you can easily jump in and participate (there’s also a mailing list).
Technorati tags: voip,… -
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VoIP/IP telephony in Estonia… disrupted by botnets?
Continue Reading: VoIP/IP telephony in Estonia… disrupted by botnets?With my post earlier this month about the possibility of SIP botnets, I’ve had a number of people asking about more information and wondering about the possible impacts. And while I will write more on botnets in general, as far as the potential impact of “botnets” in general, one need only look over at the current situation in Estonia:
- Washington Post: “Cyber Assaults on Estonia Typify a New Battle Tactic“
- CNN: “Estonia suspects Kremlin in Web attacks“
- BBC: “Estonia hit by ‘Moscow cyber war’“
Now, perhaps Russia is behind the attack… perhaps not. There are obviously much larger political issues going on between the two states. In the end it doesn’t really matter on one level who exactly is behind it… the net of it is that Estonian entities are being attacked in a massive Distributed DoS (DDoS) brought about in part by botnets. For anyone doubting the potential threat, you need only to read through those news articles to understand what can happen.
In fact, I found it interesting that the UK’s Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) issued an advisory today about the DDoS attacks against Estonia, mostly to reassure people in the UK that…
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Heading out to Arizona for US DoD/JITC conference on telecommunications
Continue Reading: Heading out to Arizona for US DoD/JITC conference on telecommunicationsIn a few short hours, I will be catching a plane heading out to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, to swim in an alphabet soup of very different acronyms and jargon than my normal work – the “OSD-Sponsored, JITC-Hosted DOD Telecommunications Services Information Conference“. As noted on the page:
The purpose of the conference is to provide an open forum where DOD and vendor representatives can discuss issues related to interoperability of systems providing DOD Telecommunications Switched Services.
The conference will present the current program and discuss ongoing developments to the interoperability certification and information assurance procedures and test documentation. Other topics for discussion include emerging technologies, standards and their integration into the systems providing DOD Telecommunications Services.
I attended last year as well and it’s definitely an interesting experience. The US DoD is really doing some intriguing things with how they make use of VoIP / IP Telephony. Obviously security is rather important. They are also driving IPv6 adoption into their infrastructure and so, with the June 2008 mandate only a year away, it will be quite interesting to hear where they are with regard to IPv6 adoption. Obviously, their huge size and buying power is of strong…
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Cute move – Skype and Intel team up for Mother’s Day "Global Free Calling Day" (if you are in the US or Canada)
Continue Reading: Cute move – Skype and Intel team up for Mother’s Day "Global Free Calling Day" (if you are in the US or Canada)I do have to hand it to the Skype marketing folks… it’s certainly a cute move on their part to offer Skype users in the US and Canada a full day of free calls to landlines and cell phones around the world. With Mother’s Day being one of the highest days of phone usage, it’s a natural day to pick for a gimmick.
There are limits, though, and the terms and conditions were interesting to read. I’m not sure how to read #9 where users are limited to 200 minutes per call:
Skype asks that you enjoy this offer fairly and sensibly, for your personal and non-commercial purposes. Calls are limited to 200 minutes per computer during the offer period. If you make excessive, systematic or intentional misuse of the offer, Skype reserves the right to terminate your access to your account immediately.
So is that 200 minutes, total? Or is that per call? i.e., if you’ve been talking to someone for over 3 hours on the same call you have to hang up and initiate a new call? Either way, it’s a good amount of time to spend on the “phone”.
I also enjoyed this part:
Skype reminds users…
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Skype provides more detail about the Call Transfer API
Continue Reading: Skype provides more detail about the Call Transfer APILast week Skype came out with a Developer Program newsletter that provided a bit more insight into the Call Transfer capability now available in the recently released Mac version 2.6. In the full version of the article, Skype technical project manager Morné van Dalen answers some questions about what the Call Transfer API is all about. It’s interesting to see the discussion here of Group transfer, specifically in this list:
- Skype to Skype (P2P)
- Skype to SkypeOut (P2P to SipOut)
- SkypeIn to Skype (SipIn to P2P)
- SkypeIn to SkypeOut (SipIn to SipOut)
- Skype to Group
- SkypeIn to Group
It’s quite curious, though, that transfer to SkypeIn and SkypeOut will only be available to Skype Pro customers, which of course is not available in North America! Seems a rather puzzling disconnect.
Anyway, it will continue to be interesting to watch these capabilities evolve…
Technorati tags: skype, voip, call transfer -
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Mitel announces $723 million agreement to buy Inter-Tel
Continue Reading: Mitel announces $723 million agreement to buy Inter-TelYesterday after the close of the market, my employer, Mitel, announced an agreement to acquire Inter-Tel. There’s not much I can say beyond what’s in the news release… but I can say that I am quite excited by the news!
Technorati tags: mitel, inter-tel, telcommunications, voip -
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Blue Box Podcast #56 posted, beginning a series of VoIP security tutorials
Continue Reading: Blue Box Podcast #56 posted, beginning a series of VoIP security tutorialsI posted Blue Box Podcast #56 tonight and with it Jonathan and I are beginning a series of mini-tutorials on subjects related to VoIP security. In this show, we talked about voice encryption. In the next show (already recorded) we will talk about signaling encryption. The idea is to cover some basic ground so that people not familiar with the area can have a basic understanding.
Just glad to get that one up – tomorrow I’m going to work on #57 to see if I can get it online for Wednesday. We’re trying hard to get back on a weekly schedule. (#56 was intended to go up last week.)
Technorati tags: bluebox, voip security, voipsa, blue box, voip, security -
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Asterisk running on a Roomba – "Press one to start sucking"
Continue Reading: Asterisk running on a Roomba – "Press one to start sucking"Here’s something for a Friday afternoon… yes, indeed, out at Emerging Telephony 2007 back in February, someone (David Troy) did indeed have Asterisk running on a Roomba. And yes, it was “Press one to start sucking. Press two to stop sucking.”
Pictures are now available on Flickr.
More precisely, Asterisk is running on a hacked Linksys WRT54G access point (which is Linux-based) and the controller is using a Nokia WiFi/GSM phone to connect to the Asterisk install. You could also control the direction of the Roomba using the other keys on the phone keypad.
Why would anyone do this? Well… why not?
As I mentioned in a recent post, the beautiful thing about VoIP is that it now enables people to “play” with telephony… and do wacky things like hook it up to a Roomba! 🙂
Enjoy the weekend! Perhaps next week I’ll actually get some time to upload the rest of the pictures I took out at ETel. (Hey, it was only 6 weeks ago… )
Technorati tags: asterisk, roomba, voip, play, open source, telephony -
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IETF approves RFC standard for adding dialstrings to SIP
Continue Reading: IETF approves RFC standard for adding dialstrings to SIPIn the usual (and ongoing) flurry of IETF announcements, there was one notice that caught my attention. It announces that an Internet Draft document about “dialstrings” has been approved to become a standards-track RFC. So what, you say? Well here’s a bit more info:
This document provides a way of incorporating a dial string into the SIP or SIPS URI scheme. A dial string is a cousin of a telephone number, but rather than taking the form of a fully-qualified E.164 or national-specific telephone number, it is a description of a literal set of dialed digits that would be delivered over a POTS line. As such, it may include pauses, omit prefixes like area codes, and its applicability is necessarily restricted to a particular context (an enterprise, a LATA, etc). Support for dialstrings was formerly a feature of the tel: URI scheme specification (back in RFC2806); since that functionality did not make it into the revision (RFC3966), it is provided here specifically for the SIP and SIPS case.
Think of it as extra digits you have to type when making a call… or extra keys you have to press to start a service. The challenge is that SIP proxies and…
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VoIP Now confirms that the cool kids hack telephony with their list of 74 open source VoIP / IP telephony projects
Continue Reading: VoIP Now confirms that the cool kids hack telephony with their list of 74 open source VoIP / IP telephony projectsAs I travel around giving presentations about the technologies that are disrupting telephony, one of the themes I discuss is that one of the most severe disruptions brought about by VoIP is that people now have the ability to “play” with telephony in ways that were never possible before. Pre-VoIP, you needed special (and typically costly) equipment. Yes, there have been any range of CTI cards that let you play to a degree, but buying the real equipment was just not possible for most folks who might want to “hack” in the original meaning of the word. Enter VoIP. Now all you need is an old PC and some open source software and… ta da… you’re playing with telephony.
What I also see out there is that this ability to hack on telephony is happening at the same time that hacking on networks or operating systems seems to be getting less exciting and interesting. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there’s still amazing things happening out there… but for people who want to “play” with technology, those areas aren’t as exciting or novel as they once were. So many of those early adopters have moved on to hack on other things……