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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 -
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Are you enslaved or liberated by your crack^H^H^H^H^HBlackBerry?
Continue Reading: Are you enslaved or liberated by your crack^H^H^H^H^HBlackBerry?That’s the question that both Alec Saunders and Ars Technica ask in regard to a news release out of “Digital Life America” entitled “BlackBerry Backlash? Americans Split on ‘Always On’ Culture” (PDF). The release, timed to coincide with the 3GSM event in Barcelona last week, covers some of the group’s research and includes this:
- 33% agreed with the statement “devices like BlackBerry chain you to work more than they liberate you.” 34% were neutral and the balance, 34%, disagreed.
- Surprisingly, among those who own a BlackBerry or a similar device, the results were not all that different: 34% agreed with the statement, 37% disagreed and 29% were neutral.
The news release went on to highlight other stats that BlackBerry owners do in fact work longer hours and have higher incomes… but both of these are kind of “duh!” statements to me. Look at who are typically the ones with BB devices in any company (i.e. management, executives). When was the last time any of us in those job roles (at most North American companies) worked a 40-hour week? (I think I actually might have in January, but that was because we had a vacation day.)
As a BlackBerry…
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Using your own website/URL for OpenID to keep control of your identity
Continue Reading: Using your own website/URL for OpenID to keep control of your identityAs I continue to explore OpenID, one of my immediate concerns was… how do I choose an identity provider? And if I do use an identity provider, what happens if they stop providing OpenID services? Or what if they are bought by someone and I don’t like the new owner?
Essentially – how do I create an “abstraction layer” that allows me to maintain control of my identity and not be beholden to the whims or policies (or circumstances) of a provider?
The answer is amazingly easy… just use your own domain name! As explained by Simon Willison, the process merely involves inserting two lines of code into the header of the HTML page at the URL you want to use. So, for instance, I updated the page for www.danyork.com (which actually gets pointed to a page in a larger website) to have these two added lines:
<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml”>
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://dyork.livejournal.com/”>That’s it. Now on any website that allows OpenID logins, I simply use the OpenID of “http://www.danyork.com/” and I am briefly redirected to LiveJournal to approve the granting of access to my identity credentials. Simple and easy.
The beautiful part about this is that I can switch…
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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 -
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AOL & OpenID – 63 million AIM users are now OpenID-enabled! And perhaps a slight security problem…
Continue Reading: AOL & OpenID – 63 million AIM users are now OpenID-enabled! And perhaps a slight security problem…UPDATE: O’Reilly now points over to the post from AOL’s John Panzer about this with more details. It’s funny… I read that post yesterday from John, but I don’t think the enormity of it sank in until about 5am this morning when I read the post from Fred Stutzman that I reference below.
Wow! Talk about a major boost for OpenID… continuing my OpenID research, I learned from reading Fred Stutzman (also here) that all 63 million users of AOL Instant Messenger can now use their AIM account for OpenID! Now, I don’t actually use my AIM account all that much these days (my IMs of preference are Skype, Jabber and MSN/WLM)[1], but I had to try it out, so I headed over to stickis.com and logged in using my AIM screen name – as shown in the image to the right. Simple. Easy.
Okay, that’s fairly cool. My OpenID is simply:
http://openid.aol.com/dyorkottawa
Now the only peculiar thing was that I never saw this screen to grant or deny the access to the site. The only reason I have this screen capture is because I pressed the Back arrow on my browser because I wanted a screen capture of the…
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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…
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Blue Box Podcast #50 finally hits the feed…
Continue Reading: Blue Box Podcast #50 finally hits the feed…Fans of Blue Box have to be aware that I’m a wee bit behind in posting episodes… so I was delighted to finally get Blue Box #50 uploaded yesterday. I still need to finish putting the show notes up there, but at least the show is out so that people can listen to it. Given that we recorded it January 17th, it has already aged a bit. Tonight or tomorrow I’m hoping to get #51 up… and then #52 has already been recorded as well… I’d like to get caught up before going out to ETel where I’m undoubtedly going to get more recordings for special editions.
Technorati tags: voip security, voip, security, bluebox, voipsa -
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"Telephony mashups" will be shown at ETel through the "mashup contest"
Continue Reading: "Telephony mashups" will be shown at ETel through the "mashup contest"Have you ever created a “mashup” of telephony applications? Per Surj Patel writing on the O’Reilly Radar weblog, we’re going to see some “telephony mashups” out at ETel in just a couple of weeks. As Surj says:
The competition website is here and we encourage you to enter no matter how silly or brilliant the idea may be. The idea is to spread the word outside of the phone hackers community as to how easy and fun it is to build these hacks. Everything you need to get started you can get from the website. Your phone account (VXML) is free and you have free API’s and Toolkits from the sponsors.
If you can write a CGI script then you can hack a commercial style service together in a few hours. Go take a look and investigate. Step outside your daily zone. Let your imagination run riot. Have some fun.
Per the ETel Mashup Contest website, the top 3 mashups will be presented out at ETel. As the page says:
A telephony mashup is a voice, Web or mobile application (PBX, IVR, VOIP, SMS, Text Messaging, etc.) that combines content from more than one source to create a new user…
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Almost 100 WiFi phones certified, per the WiFi Alliance…
Continue Reading: Almost 100 WiFi phones certified, per the WiFi Alliance…The news today out of the WiFi Alliance was that almost 100 phones have become “Wi-Fi Certified” in their testing from 2004 to the present. What’s interesting to me is that most of those phones seem to be “dual mode” sets designed for the cellular market. The news release indicates that there are 82 dual-mode phones and 10 single-mode phones… which is a bit puzzling because the list of Wi-Fi Certified handsets shows only 89 handsets, leaving 3 unaccounted for. Browsing down the list, I can immediately see a WiFi handset for Skype and the wireless Skype/VoIP phones from Cisco/Linksys and D-Link. One annoying detail – all of the listed models take you to the main home page of the vendor, so you then have to dig to find the phone… would be MUCH better if the link took you directly to the product page of the specific product. I have no idea what some of these phones are (nor do I really have the time/interest to dig for them).
I don’t see the Netgear and Belkin 802.11 Skype phones, nor do I see many of the zillion wireless SIP phones that are out there. So either: 1) those phones are still…
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Jeff Pulver wants to buy at the Apple Store… but can’t find someone to take his money!
Continue Reading: Jeff Pulver wants to buy at the Apple Store… but can’t find someone to take his money!Jeff Pulver was in Los Angeles and visited the Apple Store there… and couldn’t find someone to pay! Ever the social media guy, he seized the moment to make this video and share the experience with all of us:
Just a note to anyone in retail… you, too, (or your absence) might wind up on YouTube someday… the shoppers are watching – and recording!
Technorati tags: apple, apple store, jeff pulver, video
Disruptive Telephony
Dan York on how Voice over IP is rewriting (almost) everything you thought you understood about telephony…
