Disruptive Telephony

VoIP News yesterday posted an article "Hacking Skype: 25 Tips to Improve Your Skype Experience" that definitely makes for interesting reading (using "hacking" in the original sense of the word not the criminal one).  It's a good list of the kind of innovative things people are doing with Skype.  Many of them I'm already using... some were new to me and some I don't ever see myself doing (sorry, I don't want a lip-syncing avatar).  Are you using any of these?  What other hacks for Skype have you found useful?

In just a few minutes I'll be getting in today's rental car and heading up to Ottawa for the remainder of the work week for some meetings at the corporate office.

One of the nice things about being up there today is that I'll get to drop in on an OCLUG meeting tonight.  In the most of five years we lived in Ottawa, OCLUG was a wonderful place to meet some really incredible people.  I very much enjoyed the time spent there and the friendships that were formed... and I look forward to seeing many of those folks again tonight.   Not quite sure where the "Beer SIG" will be since the meeting is now out on Woodroffe, but I'm sure there's an appropriate spot somewhere around.

The meeting will be doubly interesting because tonight's topic will be Asterisk, which of course is of great interest to me.  Should be interesting to see what is being discussed. (Not quite sure what Randal will be doing with "Fractal Poetry", but hey, it sounds intriguing, anyway.)

If any of you reading are going, I'll see you at the meeting.

(As I now get in my white rental car to drive up to Ottawa with snow all around... whoever thought up creating white cars obviously missed the fact that in the winter those cars are almost invisible.  Ugh.)

Received a nice email from ISC2 this morning confirming that my Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification is all set for another three years. Having been involved with creating a certification, I find ISC2's process quite interesting.  First, obviously, there is the barrier of obtaining the CISSP credential.  The 6-hour exam is certainly not an easy one as it encompasses an extremely wide area in the 10 domains of the Common Body of Knowledge.  Then there is the professional experience requirement and then the requirement to be endorsed by another CISSP.  Add to that the fact that the exams are not computer-based but rather proctored... and are therefore only scheduled an infrequent intervals.  All in all, it winds up not being terribly easy to obtain the CISSP credential.  Which is part of the point, really.  There have been too many certification mills out there.

Anyway, once you obtain the CISSP, the next part is to maintain the credential.   There's an Annual Maintainence Fee to pay, but that's <$100 and not really a big deal.  Much harder is the Continuing Professional Education (CPE) requirement which is that over three years you have to obtain 120 CPEs.  If you fail to do so after 3 years, you lose your CISSP and have to retake the exam!  Now, it's not overly difficult to obtain CPEs.  You can get them for attending conferences, webcasts, training courses... even, once per year, for reading a security book.  You can also get more for providing training or serving on the board of a local security association.  Really, it's nothing for the normal security professional who is keeping up on the current state of the profession.  And that's the point, really.  ISC2 wants to ensure that someone representing themself as a CISSP does in fact have relatively current security knowledge.  The main issue, I find, is remembering to record CPEs with ISC2!  If I attend a conference or webinar or something like that, I try to remember to go and record that soon thereafter.

In any event... I've blown past the required CPEs... now the counter gets reset and I'll have to start again to have them in place before 2010!  :-)

P.S. Wikipedia, of course, also has more info on the CISSP.

Wow!  Some big changes down in Alabama... per the news release yesterday (hat tip to Alec Saunders), Mark Spencer is changing roles within Digium and stepping aside as CEO to bring in ADTRAN's Danny Windham as the new CEO.  Mark will remain as Chairman and CTO of Digium.  They also announced a new worldwide VP of Sales.  Tom Keating has a good writeup of the announcement and also has a link to a podcast of the conference call announcing the changes.  It makes for good listening.

As noted, ADTRAN has had a long relationship with Digium... if I recall correctly, Mark started out as an intern there at ADTRAN and when he went on to launch Linux Support Services and needed a phone system, it was his background at ADTRAN that made him think that if he could just get telephony onto a PC, he could manipulate it.  Thus was born Asterisk.  (And then later Digium, the company, to support Asterisk.)

I'm glad for Mark to see the change.  I've come to know him a bit over the years through conferences/trade shows and the interviews we've done with him for Blue Box...  and he's definitely a hard-core techie and developer... he's done the CEO role because it's needed to be done, but his talents really are in the technology and I'm sure this role change will let him get more back into the technical stuff that is his passion.  Congrats, Mark!  You've certainly deserved it and I do wish you all the best.

I've long enjoyed Richard Zhao's posts at "Telecom, Security and P2P" because, living in Beijing and working for Lenovo, he brings a distinctly different view into the global conversation.  For instance, earlier this year he posted about Chinese security standards, something that few of us outside the country would probably have noticed or commented on.  However, as he mentions over on his Chinese language blog (in English), access to Wordpress.com, where he previously had the blog, is apparently being blocked or degraded in China.  So he has now moved his blog to:

http://sbin.cn/blog/

As the title states, he covers primarily telecom and security.  Do check him out...

Over on one of Google's blogs, there is a post "New life for network equipment" about how the Network Startup Resource Center helps take networking equipment that is "old" by Western standards and give it new life in other parts of the world where equipment such as routers and switches may be too expensive to easily purchase.  First off, kudos to Google for supporting such an organization with their own donations.  As they say in the blog entry, it's very easy for those of us in the always-on part of the world to take that connectivity for granted.  And yet for a very large portion of the world, there is no such guarantee for connectivity.

This post, though, did make me think... what happens to all the "old" VoIP gear when it is replaced?  We are at the stage now in the evolution of VoIP where people are replacing IP-PBXs with newer models (from the same or different vendors).  SIP phones have been out long enough that they, too, are being swapped out for newer models.

Where are they going?  Landfills?  Probably. 

But yet some of those pieces of equipment may work perfectly fine in other parts of the world where people can't afford newer systems (keeping in mind that PSTN gateways might not, of course, because of the sheer number of different telecom standards).  Is the NSRC already dealing with VoIP systems?  Are they interested?  Are they even the appropriate organization?  I don't know... and obviously I can contact them... and perhaps I will when I have a chance at some point.  But it's an interesting question to me.

Where does old VoIP equipment go when it's been replaced?

Well, I had intended that video #2 was going to be Alec Saunders demonstrating iotum's new Talk-Now application.  However, as he explains, Alec took the video down! Bummer, as it was a fun demo of what that technology iotum has can offer.  Ah, well, you'll just have to read about "Talk-Now" or even sign up to give it a spin (if you have the right Blackberry).  Of course, you can read MobileCrunch, Jon Arnold or ZDNet first.  It's definitely an interesting take on how to extend presence out to mobile devices. 

And Alec, do come back with a video again - I liked the first one!

It's a Friday afternoon... and so I thought I'd end the week with two videos I've been meaning to write about.  First up, Mark Spencer shows off their new AsteriskNow distribution:

So if you've never seen Mark Spencer, there he is.  AsteriskNow seems to be Digium's answer to Trixbox, now that Fonality purchased Trixbox and has been very actively promoting it.  (Trixbox, you may recall, was originally called "Asterisk@home".)  The idea is similar... package Asterisk and all other necessary components with a Linux distribution and provide a very simple GUI with wizards to install the whole thing.  Looks simple from the video... I'll have to try it out once I get vmware or something else running on one of my systems again.

I have to admit that I laughed a good bit when reading Om Malik's post about "ShadowNumber" last week, which actually turns out to be an alter-ego for VoIP startup TalkPlus.   The point appears to be that you can preserve a degree of anonymity through giving out essentially a disposable phone number.  It's just interesting to see what companies will do to differentiate themselves.  And I completely agree with Om's statement:

Many new technologies — like VHS and DVDs, and more recently Video over the Internet — owe no small part of their early success to adult entertainment, which spurred people to jump through technological hoops they might not have otherwise.

Adult "entertainment" and gaming are two areas that have pushed technology in many areas and yet have not always been credited with doing so.

As to ShadowNumber, their pitch doesn't appeal to me at all (I'm with Om in finding it a bit distasteful), but it's at least something a bit novel.  It will be interesting to see if it works out for them.