I’ve said before that I’m a big (not a fat reference) fan of Michael Graves’ blog. Continuing his promotion of the wicked cool and useful†, Mr. Graves recently wrote about Schmooze Communications’ PBXact system.

It’s a GREAT read and I leave you with this: Magic Button. (read the article)

Related links:

• e4 Technologies
• Michael Graves on SOHO VoIP

†Yes… Wicked cool and useful. If it doesn’t meet the criteria for both, it doesn’t make his blog.

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.

Recently, my wife’s netbook gave an error on boot that had something to do with a missing windows file (system32\ntoskrnl.exe). Apparently, she’s not the only one with this issue… it seems to be quite common. Of course, as the techie/geek/nerd of the castle, it was my job to slay this dragon and I came across the only problem I have had with this magical mini machine. Not so much a problem… more like open questions to Acer.

1. To access the hard drive, you have to remove 17 screws (maybe more, I think I lost some extras), you have to remove the keyboard, you have to remove the top, you have to remove this little card on top of the mother board, this side circuit board, the motherboard. Then you slide the hard drive out, reverse. Why not put a panel on the bottom to access the hard drive directly?
2. Why can I find nothing in your documentation about Alt-F10? This is a handy mode that lets you recover the operating system to factory defaults, but I don’t see it in my Acer manual.
3. In line with question 2, Why is the only recovery option to completely reset to factory? Since this is basically a stripped version of the OS, why not offer an explorer window so I can copy files to an SD or USB drive before formatting, or just backup the user files to another partition?
4. What degree in sadism lead to the design of the three little clips that hold the keyboard in place?

All told, from error to recovered could have been done in < 30 minutes, and I HIGHLY recommend Acer products to everyone I know. From their higher-end Ferrari laptop to the humble netbook (go with XP home, Windows 7 netbook edition is crippleware garbage), I have never had a problem with their hardware or software that made me lose respect for the brand, which is saying a lot.

For More Information:

• Acer: Acer Aspire One Website
• Skype: Free PC to PC Video Calls

Last year, the Senate passed the Truth in Caller ID Act of 2009 (S. 30 passed unanimously) and this year, the House moved forward on their own version. Of course, moving at the speed of government, the House passed the Truth in Caller ID Act of 2010.

Truth in Caller ID Act of 2009 – Amends the Communications Act of 1934 to make it unlawful for any person in the United States, in connection with any telecommunication service or VOIP (voice over Internet protocol) service, to cause any caller identification service to transmit misleading or inaccurate caller identification information (“spoofing”) with the intent to defraud or cause harm. Prohibits construing these provisions to prevent blocking caller identification or to authorize or prohibit law enforcement or U.S. intelligence agency activities.

Interestingly, the bill provides the FCC authority to “to collect fees from the telecommunications industry sufficient to offset the cost of its regulatory program” — a cost which is estimated at $1 million dollars per year. The only exception to the proposed law appears to be for Law Enforcement purposes, however even the CBO points out that domestic violence shelters (attempting to protect the identity of spouses) may be affected by the new regulation.

Of course, as Schoolhouse Rock taught us, the next step is for the House and Senate to resolve any differences. After that, it’s up to the President to decide if this bill becomes law. After all,  it’s a long, long journey to the capital city. Today, it’s just a bill.

Additional Reading / Links of Interest

• Schoolhouse Rock: I’m Just a Bill (Schoolhouse Rock)
• S. 30:Truth in Caller ID Act of 2009 (govtrack.us)
• HR 1258, Truth in Caller ID Act of 2010 (Congressional Budget Office)
• HR 1258, Truth in Caller ID Act (Library of Congress)
• Grammar Girl: Affect Versus Effect (Grammar Girl)

Santa??

Wow… 2 podcasts in a single month??? Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.

As always, VoIP Tech Chat can be accessed from:

• VoIP Tech Chat (download mp3)
• iTunes
• And, thanks to popular request, you can also stream the chat by pressing the play button below
  Download audio file (23MAR2010VTC.mp3)

Links of “Interest:”

• Follow Fred on Twitter
• Follow Patrick on Twitter (Yay!)
• FiveRR
• Inventions of the 20′s

VoicePulse, a VoIP Service Provider, announced today the addition of a new “regulatory” fee for it’s customers. In an email sent to account holders, VoicePulse advised that effective on the next billing cycle (in one example this was effective in less than 48 hours), users will be charged an additional fee to offset compliance and regulation costs assessed to the provider. This is the second new fee announced by the carrier this week.

As  of this posting (3/10/2010), the provider has not posted these announcements on their website’s press releases, press, or newsletters page. And, although the email indicates the terms of service had been updated, the public version did not include the “regulatory fee” as of this posting.

The announcement follows:

As most of our customers are aware, Voice over IP technology has been the subject of scrutiny by federal, state and municipal bodies for the past several years. During this time, VoicePulse has remained fully compliant on all levels of regulation while providing our customers with high quality, low cost phone service.

Unfortunately, costs incurred by compliance on these inquiries and corresponding legal obligations continue to grow. Each instance of regulation requires more resources on the part of our telecommunications company resulting in increased legal and compliance related expenses.

CHANGES TO YOUR ACCOUNT

Beginning on your next monthly bill cycle (3/12/2010 12:00:00 AM), we will be including a Regulatory Compliance Fee of $2.95 on your VoicePulse for Business and Wholesale account. Our Terms of Service has been updated to reflect above mentioned changes and we advise all customers to review the updated Terms of Service available within your account center. The fee will appear on your invoice as follows:

ITEM/ACCOUNT/REGULATORYCOMPLIANCEFEE
Qty: 1 at $2.95/ea = $2.95

We appreciate your continued support and we look forward to serving you in the years to come. As always, our representatives are available by phone at +1-732-339-5100 M-F 9am-5pm ET and email at contact@voicepulse.com.

The VoIP Users Conference celebrates it’s 3rd anniversary on March 26th with a good ol’ fashioned sleep over. Ok, well it’s not really a sleep over, but it’s just as cool. That’s right, starting on March 26th, 2010 at 3am EST,  get ready for the 24 Hour Live Voipathon Podcast and Phone In.

24 Hour Voipathon

Use the Internet to bring voices together

Voipathon is a simple idea: To unite people from as many parts of the world (and time zones) in a 24 hour long discussion about the Internet, voice over the Internet and how communities can and do use these tools.

We will talk about

• Content creators, their rights and how important they are to the Internet
• ways to connect your voices together (including free phone calls)
• ways to get around obstacles to voice connections put in place in some countries
• communities that use the Internet to make the world a better place
• keeping the Internet free of censorship by spreading understanding of the principles of freedom
• piracy, copyright, takedown notices etc

We will hear from

• People from all corners of the planet sharing their experiences
• Experienced telephony users who can help you make a connection, free
• Members of communities who are helping improve lives everywhere

Join us on March 26th, 2010

For more information, please visit:

• voipathon.org
• VoIP Users Conference

Can you believe that we haven’t posted a true VoIP Tech Chat in over a year? Although many of you are thankful for the break, we have decided to invade your favorite audio player once more (with feeling) with the first of (what we hope) will be many podcasts for 2010. This week we discuss Verizon Wireless, Vonage, Customer Service, and well, just a good ol’ fashioned VoIP Tech Chat.

As always, VoIP Tech Chat can be accessed from:

• VoIP Tech Chat (download mp3)
• iTunes
• And, thanks to popular request, you can also stream the chat by pressing the play button below
  Download audio file (09MAR2010VTC.mp3)

Links of “Interest:”

• Follow Fred on Twitter
• Follow Patrick on Twitter (Yay!)
• Past Post from Patrick regarding a positive experience with Verizon

VoicePulse announced today in an email that Business and Wholesale accounts will be required to meet a minimum usage of $10/month. They also advised that their Terms of Service had been updated to reflect the change. The company targeting users utilizing the service as a backup provider encouraged account holders to contact a representative to discuss becoming the “Primary” provider.

The email follows:

Beginning on your next monthly bill cycle (3/27/2010 12:00:00 AM), your VoicePulse for Business and Wholesale account will be required to meet a minimum usage of $10 per month. The minimum usage requirement can be met by any combination of phone numbers, channels, features, outbound minutes, inbound toll-free minutes, etc.  Our Terms of Service has been updated to reflect above mentioned changes and we advise all customers to review the updated Terms of Service available within your account center.

Make VoicePulse Your Primary Provider

If you are using VoicePulse service as a backup provider and do not meet this minimum usage each month, our customer service representatives are ready to work with you on pricing so that we can become your primary provider.

Inactive Accounts

If you are not using your VoicePulse service and have no intention of doing so in the future, our customer service representatives will be responsive, courteous and expeditious in canceling your account, at your request.  However, if you are using another provider for your VoIP services and have had a good experience with VoicePulse in the past, we are ready to take whatever steps necessary to win back your business and offer you savings that exceed or eliminate this fee altogether

We appreciate your continued support and we look forward to serving you in the years to come. As always, our representatives are available by phone at +1-732-339-5100 M-F 9am-5pm ET and email at contact@voicepulse.com.

The Asterisk team of Digium announced new versions of Asterisk in reference to a potential security issue. The release highlights best practices and hopes to raise awareness of some potential security issues and injection statments. The announcement follows:

The Asterisk Development Team has announced security releases for the following
versions of Asterisk:

* 1.2.40
* 1.4.29.1
* 1.6.0.24
* 1.6.1.16
* 1.6.2.4

These releases are available for immediate download at
http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/

The releases of Asterisk 1.2.40, 1.4.29.1, 1.6.0.24, 1.6.1.16, and 1.6.2.4
include documention describing a possible dialplan string injection with common
usage of the ${EXTEN} (and other expansion variables). The issue and resolution
are described in the AST-2010-002 security advisory.

If you have a channel technology which can accept characters other than numbers
and letters (such as SIP) it may be possible to craft an INVITE which sends data
such as 300&Zap/g1/4165551212 which would create an additional outgoing channel
leg that was not originally intended by the dialplan programmer.

Please note that this is not limited to an specific protocol or the Dial()
application.

The expansion of variables into programmatically-interpreted strings is a common
behavior in many script or script-like languages, Asterisk included. The ability
for a variable to directly replace components of a command is a feature, not a
bug – that is the entire point of string expansion.

However, it is often the case due to expediency or design misunderstanding that
a developer will not examine and filter string data from external sources before
passing it into potentially harmful areas of their dialplan.

With the flexibility of the design of Asterisk come these risks if the dialplan
designer is not suitably cautious as to how foreign data is allowed to enter the
system unchecked.

This security release is intended to raise awareness of how it is possible to
insert malicious strings into dialplans, and to advise developers to read the
best practices documents so that they may easily avoid these dangers.

For more information about the details of this vulnerability, please read the
security advisory AST-2010-002, which was released at the same time as this
announcement.

Asterisk 1.2.40 also contains a backported dialplan function called FILTER() in
order to allow the filtering of strings as described in the best practices
document.

It should also be noted that the 1.6.x series of Asterisk had release candidates
available as versions 1.6.0.23-rc2, 1.6.1.15-rc2, and 1.6.2.3-rc2. These will
either be released as 1.6.0.25, 1.6.1.17, and 1.6.2.5, or if another round of
RC changes is necessary, those versions numbers will be used with -rc1 appended.

For a full list of changes in the current releases, please see the ChangeLog:

http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/ChangeLog-1.2.40
http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/ChangeLog-1.4.29.1
http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/ChangeLog-1.6.0.24
http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/ChangeLog-1.6.1.16
http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/ChangeLog-1.6.2.4

Security advisory AST-2010-002 is available at:

http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/security/AST-2010-002.pdf

The README-SERIOUSLY.bestpractices.txt document is available in the top-level
directory of your Asterisk sources, or available in all Asterisk branches from
1.2 and up.

http://svn.asterisk.org/svn/asterisk/trunk/README-SERIOUSLY.bestpractices.txt

Thank you for your continued support of Asterisk!

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 the Disney room. It’s purple. Very purple.

When moving between old office and new, as is my tradition in packing, I crammed everything into boxes with the knowledge that should I come to need an item, I would go searching through the boxes piled in the “supply closet” of my new “office”. In almost two years, I have not touched these boxes. Today was a day of reckoning when I was reminded of an important rule: Don’t use old Cat 5 and other copper cables.

There are people who will disagree with me, and I accept their disagreement with the knowledge they are wrong. Cat 5 (ie. network cable)  and copper coax cable (ie. cable tv cable) costs between $0.25 and $1 per foot. On a new VoIP phone, you need anywhere from 3 to 25 ft. of Cat 5 depending on the location of your phone / adapter in relation to your router and with the assumption that you are not using a wireless solution.

Many homes, like mine, have an accumulation of old cables, and when you get a new ATA (analog telephone adapter, aka. that veyeop thingy) that inexplicably comes without one, you go to the pile, untangle the least confined cable, and hook it up. Time and time again I have gone through ten and twenty minute troubleshooting sessions with people (and, in true ‘Dr. heal thyself’ fashion, spent hours myself) only to find that a strange or intermittent problem with connectivity, registration, or voice quality was remedied by putting on a fresh Cat 5 cable.

In fifteen years of working with networking setups, one in ten intermittent or quality issues end up being plain old bad cables (remember from previous posts, 50% are unplug or partially unplugged cables). Just in my five years of VoIP experience, I can’t count the number of times voice quality issues have been wiped out completely by getting fresh cables with good connectors. Considering the cost is < $15 for almost any project, save yourself the time and hassle. Throw away the old Cat 5 and coax cables, buy fresh ones for the new install, and you are eliminating a huge point of failure for years to come.