Category: VoIP
-
/
Ranting about how very wrong ComputerWorld.au is about enterprises avoiding IP telephony for teleworkers
Continue Reading: Ranting about how very wrong ComputerWorld.au is about enterprises avoiding IP telephony for teleworkersComputerWorld in Australia came out with an article today headlined “Enterprises must avoid IP telephony for teleworkers or face attack“. Given that I use a secure teleworker phone on a daily basis, I was immediately struck by the headline and felt compelled to write a response over on Voice of VOIPSA: “Why Computerworld.au is dead wrong about… “. I think you can gather my opinion from the title. It will be interesting to see if there is any response from ComputerWorld (I’ve emailed them the link).
The sad thing is that outside of the headline, the rest of the article was more or less okay. Just a bad headline…
Technorati tags: Voip security, voip, ip telephony, teleworker, security, computerworld -
/
ETEL – Black Bag Security Presentation, 243 slides, Lessig connection, errata… slides available
Continue Reading: ETEL – Black Bag Security Presentation, 243 slides, Lessig connection, errata… slides availableSo “the talk” finished around 11:15am this morning… I’ve just been straight out and unable to blog until now. The “Black Bag Security Review” was fun to do and I’ve been receiving a great amount of positive feedback and kind words from folks here. As you’ll see below, I’m going to include the slides here in Flash (I finally get a reason to experiment with SlideShare!). I’ll put a PDF up here as well once I get back to Vermont. It seems that after my laptop was reformatted, I never re-installed Acrobat to do PDF exports.
However, the slides aren’t really that much use without the audio, but I’ll be putting the audio up on Blue Box sometime in the next week or so and will post an update here with a link.
Had a couple of interesting questions and points of feedback about the talk (and things I noticed):
- Yes, there were actually 243 slides and yet it came in a hair under 15 minutes. This is a very different way of presenting than a “traditional” deadly PowerPoint presentation. More slides… minimal text… fast transitions. The point is to accent your story and leave the focus on you and what you are…
-
/
ETel – Too many great conversations to blog…
Continue Reading: ETel – Too many great conversations to blog…Too many conversations… that’s the struggle here. Just really great folks. Very much enjoying the sessions so far. Currently listening to the 5-minute lightening talks… tonight there is a “VoIP Blogger Dinner” organized by Andy Abramson… somehow I don’t think I’ll really be blogging about much of this until the plane trip home. (I am finding that I am doing some “micro-blogging” about web sites over on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/danyork/ )
Conference has been well organized. Only issue I’ve really had is that the WiFi network has been of varying quality. Sometimes it is working fantastically… sometimes it works for 20 minutes and then it dies… sometimes I just can’t connect, even though I’m sitting in the exact same spot I was an hour earlier. I realize it’s really tough to do WiFi for a conference… the demands on the network are a bit unnatural… especially with a heavily laptop-enabled crowd like this one.
Technorati tags: etel2007, etel, voip -
/
ETel: FreeSWITCH Boot Camp…
Continue Reading: ETel: FreeSWITCH Boot Camp…I admit to really only very peripherally followed the growth of FreeSWITCH, so I was intrigued to attend the “FreeSWITCH Boot Camp” session this morning here at ETel. It was a tough call given that Stowe Boyd was also speaking, but I wanted to understand what FreeSwitch was all about. It was an interesting talk, although I’m left with the following observations:
- I’m still struggling to fully understand what problem the FreeSwitch community is trying to specifically solve versus what Asterisk, sipX, OpenSER, etc. are solving.
- The answer from the FreeSwitch developers was that it is really complementary to those other projects and focus on scalability and stability. It is NOT focused on the PBX space but really at the carrier space and looking at large-scale implementations. Several people also mentioned using it as a Session Border Controller (SBC).
- So is it an open source SBC?
- One carrier representative involved with the project indicated that in their testing they are getting 2,000 to 3,000 simultaneous calls up with media streaming… and at least 10,000 simultaneous calls with point-to-point media.
- Perhaps that is the focus… but I would say that the FreeSwitch folks need to refine that message…
-
/
And so ETel begins…
Continue Reading: And so ETel begins…Today starts the first day of ETel, a.k.a. O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony conference. ETel is not one of the giant conferences… unlike one of the VONs, Internet Telephony or VoiceCon there will probably only be 500-1000 people here. But that is part of the charm, really (and this is only the second year)… it’s a place for the VoIP alpha-geeks to network, promote their visions, combine their visions, socialize and otherwise just learn a heck of a lot from each other. The schedule is packed with great info… the speaker roster is a veritable “Who’s Who” of people playing in the “Voice 2.0” or “Telephony 2.0” (or <pick your cliche term>) space. All in all, it’s one conference I’ve been very much looking forward to. Just in town last night, I’ve already run into Alec Saunders, Brad Templeton, Bruce Stewart, Surj Patel… had dinner with Blue Box podcast co-host Jonathan Zar and security researcher Shawn Merdinger… I know Ken Camp is around, Andy Abramson, Om Malik and so many others… it should be a great and fun conference.
For my part, I am doing two sessions. First, today at 1:30pm Pacific, Jonathan, Shawn and I will be doing a 90-minute workshop…
-
/
Tom Keating reviews "pbxnsip", an inexpensive IP-PBX based on Windows with a focus on security
Continue Reading: Tom Keating reviews "pbxnsip", an inexpensive IP-PBX based on Windows with a focus on securityNoticed today that Tom Keating has a review up on “pbxnsip“, which has the interesting twist of being a low-cost PBX solution running on Microsoft Windows. Most other inexpensive or open-source software-only PBX solutions tend to run on Linux, and indeed, pbxnsip does have Linux versions (and apparently NetBSD although they are not listed… perhaps they just run the Linux version). I first actually learned of pbxnsip some time ago at one of the various VoIP tradeshows when I was struck by the fact that they were advertising security as the main point in big letters on the background to their booth. In fact, security is #2 on their list of “reasons to buy”:
It addresses security. The pbxnsip PBX uses https, sips, SRTP and sdes to make the communication to your PBX secure. Using sdes-capable devices, your voice calls will stay as secure as your https traffic.
Well, gee, given my background, it’s not hard to imagine that any vendor that basically leads with security gets some extra points in my book. (Especially since doing so has the potential to paint a big red target on your back to all the attackers out there who like to debunk claims…
-
/
Skype takes on Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in local business listings with new "SkypeFind" – and ratings/reviews
Continue Reading: Skype takes on Google, Microsoft and Yahoo in local business listings with new "SkypeFind" – and ratings/reviewsSkype today released a new “3.1” beta for Windows (you can get it here) with a number of minor tweaks – and a brand new component called “SkypeFind”. As you can see in the picture to the right, there’s a new tab added… and is the entrance of Skype into the game already being played by GoogleMaps, Yahoo!Local and Microsoft’s Windows Live Local… namely… providing an easily searchable directory of businesses.
It’s not stated, but it’s pretty clear the ultimate goal is to control the directory you use to initiate calls. Think about it, Google is aiming to do this with their “click-to-call” in Google Maps. Find an entry (in the US, anyway) and simply click “call” and your regular phone rings. It’s simple and easy. Google controls the directory and the initiation of calls. It’s even more logical for Skype to do this. Find a business in the directory, click the phone number and you’re dialling away using Skype/SkypeOut…
Of course, Skype aims to be more than simply yet another business directory. As the Skype blog entry states:
SkypeFind is one of the most interesting features that we’ve done in quite a while now. We call it “Local…
-
/
Dean Elwood: "Why SIP Doesn’t Need OpenID"
Continue Reading: Dean Elwood: "Why SIP Doesn’t Need OpenID"Dean Elwood over at VoIPuser.org has taken up the question about Open ID with his post “Why SIP Doesn’t Need OpenID“. Dean suggests that the problem really lies between servers:
The problem of identity authentication actually resides in the server to server realm in a peered environment. How does sip.fwd.com know for sure that a peered call request is really coming from sip.voipuser.org?
Good question… and one that Dean believes can be solved through the use of the already-standardized Open Settlement Protocol (OSP).
The conversation continues…
Technorati tags: identity, openid, SIP, VoIP, OSP -
/
Rich Tehrani hops on the Mitel "Presence" tour bus… at least for a day…
Continue Reading: Rich Tehrani hops on the Mitel "Presence" tour bus… at least for a day…Scanning RSS feeds early this morning, I was pleased to see that Rich Tehrani will be speaking at our “Presence 2007” event in Costa Mesa, CA, today. I’ve known the tour was going on, but wasn’t tracking who was speaking at the various stops. Glad to see Rich there… I’m sure he’ll give a great talk for whoever attends. The good news for Rich, too, is that at least he was flying out of the New York area yesterday instead of the day before when the glorious storm played havoc with air travel all over the northeast.
Technorati tags: mitel, presence, rich tehrani, sip, unified communications -
/
Doing a "deep dive" on OpenID…
Continue Reading: Doing a "deep dive" on OpenID…I have to blame Aswath. Back in December, he posted a short piece wondering about the use of OpenID in SIP authentication. He contacted Jonathan and I in regard to Blue Box and asked for our comments. We discussed it on Blue Box #48 (at 15:50 in the show) and basically said “well, it’s interesting, but there’s no trust model so we can’t see how it would really work”. I had some further brief email exchange with Aswath, and then somewhere in there he came out with his proposal for extending OpenID use into communication systems. Again he dropped us a note, and again, even with posts like that of phoneboy, I still hadn’t gotten over my concern about trust – and we discussed it again in the soon-to-be-issued Blue Box #51, along with a comment from a listener.
But there was something there that kept nagging at the back of my brain… and then as Microsoft announced support for OpenID out at RSA… and then as AOL is talking about their plans… along with a hundred other smaller indicators… all of it has made me realize that I’ve needed to “go deeper” on what OpenID is all about and how…
