VoIP Tech Chat

Sick of obtaining low numbers of useless visitors for your website?

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Atlas heard about this venture and shrugged...(cause he had the whooooole world....)

I was introduced to a fun little “tool” today: Find the shortest route between two Wikipedia articles.

The first thing I tried was an analysis of the path from Death to VoIP, and I discovered Read the rest of this entry »

I r muzikal n delishus

1spam n. \ˈspam\  unsolicited usually commercial e-mail sent to a large number of addresses

Millions of dollars are spent every year by companies and individuals combating spam. Spam filters, email systems with integrated spam management, reviewing spam emails for real emails that got inappropriately flagged, storing spam, deleting spam, reporting spam, it all adds up.

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Dear Comcast,

Comcast...Cares?

I am leaving you this note on the fridge because I can’t bear to face you.  I can’t bear seeing the look in your eyes when I tell you that it’s over. This off again, on again blamefest has come to an end. I was always there to support you financially, but you never reciprocated with the kind of love, the kind of consistency I needed in my life.

This isn’t easy for me. As I close this chapter in the book that is yet to be finished, I know I will look back on our times together with some hints of fondness. I am sure we will cross paths again, someday. I hope that we can smile, exchange greetings, show each other a base level of respect and courtesy.

I have taken the liberty of leaving all of your things at your office, so, aside from this note, this is goodbye.

Or is it…

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Our Hero

Early humans found hollowed out rocks to turn into homes, originating the term “Cave men”. ¹ This constraint made community difficult, so humans advanced to creating homes from natural materials, such as wood. Primitive homes were modeled on the cave, with nothing but some closed walls and an uncovered opening. Thousands of years of evolution lead us to create doors that open, close, and lock, and windows that allow us to see out and in, then glass to keep what’s out out and what’s in in, then curtains to cover what’s both out and in. In the end, we have the same caves we had before, with our darkness and privacy. Read the rest of this entry »

Or cleverly disguised secret agent for the video phone revolution?

I R Eatz U R Dataz!

I love my netbook. I love my netbook so much, I have two of them (okay, one is the wife’s). Surprisingly, I managed to survive months on nothing but my netbook doing fairly intensive SQL / VoIP / Web work. The hard drive is a little slow, but the overall performance is outstanding.

When I travel, I can use Skype to video chat with the built in webcam and get great quality (both ways) for both picture and sound. It’s like a giant smart phone. It reminds me of the $1000+ “video phones” that were supposed to be the future of talking on the phone… then people realized they really didn’t want to “get pretty” to use the phone. Now, for around $250 a unit, you can have that and so much more.

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Time for the negotiator

A recent incident (ok 2 recent incidents) shows how scary dependence on DNS can be. Hosted VoIP solutions are particularly prone to hijacking attacks / errors.

From BGPmon.net:

This morning many BGPmon.net users received an alert regarding a possible prefix hijack by AS23724. Normally AS23724 CHINANET-IDC-BJ-AP IDC, China Telecommunications Corporation only originates about 40 prefixes, however today for about 15 minutes they originated about ~37,000 unique prefixes that are not assigned to them. This is what we typically call a prefix hijack. This incident follows another concerning incident from China 2 weeks ago.

Although it seems they have leaked a whole table, only about 10% of these prefixes propagated outside of the Chinese network. These include prefixes for popular websites such as dell.com, cnn.com, www.amazon.de, www.rapidshare.com and www.geocities.jp.

A large number of networks impacted this morning were actually Chinese networks. These include some popular Chinese website such as www.joy.cn , www.pconline.com.cn , www.huanqiu.com, www.tianya.cn and www.chinaz.com. A list of all prefixes that were announced/hijacked can be found here

Read the full article at BGPmon.net.

This year marks the second decennial census since widespread use of the internet began in the 1990′s. The bulk of census activity takes place during the time when people are traditionally preparing taxes and vying for an infusion of cash  from their tax return.  The evil peoples of the interwebs will be out in force to take advantage of  the under-informed.

Keep these simple rules in mind:
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When my little girl went from being a benign, unmoving lump of sleeping, drooling baby to a terroristic unplugging, biting, chewing, eating, swallowing, gagging, breaking, pulling, tugging beast of a toddler, my home decor changed. When we moved into our excessive 4 bed / 2.5 bath home in 2007, we had dreams. We had a guest room, and a Disney room, and my home office taking up about 25% of the under A/C space. When the beast began terrorizing our home, we retreated into a fallback position and isolated her to the safest room in the house, my former office. I was relegated to Read the rest of this entry »

Note: You can play or download the MP3 audio of the “Telemarketer Torture” calls towards the end of the article.

When I first started working with VoIP, I began to hate telephony, and any and all things telephone related. This bothered me on many levels. You see, as a kid, I loved telephones. Growing up in the “big city,” pay phones seemed to be on every corner. Family stories talk about walking several blocks extra, just to avoid me seeing and wanting to play with a phone. But, as usual, I digress…

When I worked with an unnamed switch (let’s just say it rhymed with Broadmoft), I hated working with VoIP. I knew there had to be a better way and started playing with Asterisk. Soon, my memories of playing with phones started coming back and my love rekindled. Now, I look forward to working with phone systems, only because I truly feel that the use of a phone can only be limited by your imagination. And with companies like Twilio, Adhearsion, and Digium, the community of telephone developers seems only to grow.

With that long winded introduction, let’s discuss today’s topic — telemarketer torture. Read the rest of this entry »