Disruptive Telephony

Want to learn more about what I'm doing these days? Both with my work with the Internet Society Deploy360 Programme as well as other various projects? And what any of that has to do with VoIP and real-time communications these days?

If so, join us tomorrow, Friday, March 1, at 12 noon US Eastern on the "VoIP Users Conference (VUC)". You can join a Google+ Hangout, or call in via:

• sip:[email protected]
• +1 (646) 475-2098
• Skype:vuc.me

There's also an IRC backchannel where links are shared, questions are answered and other comments occur.

As long time readers know, I've been a huge fan of - and participant in, when I've been able to - the VUC calls and community that Randy Resnick has been spearheading since March 2007.

I don't remember when precisely I first started joining in... maybe sometime in 2007 or 2008. In those early days (and still today) it was a great place to discuss open source telephony solutions like Asterisk, Freeswitch and others. The VUC became a place where many of us gathered weekly to learn about the latest technologies from various projects or vendors... and just to chat about various topics relating to VoIP, Unified Communications, SIP and whatever else. We'd get down in the weeds in really geeky discussions about wideband audio... and then get into higher level discussions about trends in VoIP and UC.

When I was at Voxeo for four years, the VUC calls were a way to connect with the telephony developer community - and in fact there were several VUC sessions related to various Voxeo Labs products and services. There were also a couple of VUC sessions relating to IPv6 and several relating to security in which I was a participant (including discussion of my UC security book at one point). It's been a great community and several good friendships have evolved out of meeting people within the VUC world.

When I joined the Internet Society back in September 2011, my attention shifted rather dramatically away from VoIP as I focused more on IPv6, DNSSEC and now routing resiliency/security (and the drop-off in posts here at Disruptive Telephony was also apparent), but VoIP has always been a strong interest and I continued to dip into VUC episodes now and then.

For the last, oh, 6 or 7 months (or maybe 9 or 10!) Randy's been repeatedly asking me if I would be the guest on a VUC episode to talk about all the various stuff I've been up to. His persistence finally wore me down and I agreed to a date... hence the show tomorrow. :-)

Given the conversational nature of the VUC shows, I suspect we'll probably travel all over various topics. There's an abstract up that says this:

Dan York has been a member of the VUC community for many years now but he’s been away for a bit and in this episode we’ll learn about what he’s doing now and how it relates to VoIP and UC. We’ll talk about his work with the Internet Society Deploy360 Programme related to IPv6, DNSSEC and routing resiliency (and touch on what exactly the Internet Society is all about) as well as his views on WebRTC and some of the other standards relating to real-time communications being developed within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). We’ll also cover Dan’s favorite topic of VoIP security and some of the changes that are being seen there. We’ll probably also talk about some of Dan’s other activities and interests related to podcasting and social media.

How much of that we actually discuss will be an open question.

You're welcome to join us... we always do take questions from people calling in to the show and also via the IRC channel. This time there will also be a Google+ Hangout so people will get to see my smiling face! ;-)

And yes, for better or worse it will be archived for posterity for later listening/viewing...

P.S. If you'd like to join the VUC "community" yourself, a great way beyond attending the calls is to join the "IP Communications & VoIP" Community on Google+, as a lot of good interaction happens there.

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Today at noon US Eastern on the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) Call for Friday, April 27th, the group will discuss the brand new "FreeSWITCH Cookbook"[1] published by PACKT Publishing. The four authors of the book, who are also leaders of the FreeSWITCH project, will apparently be joining the call.

While Asterisk generally gets most of the "open source VoIP" buzz, the folks at the FreeSWITCH project have been working away on their own solution. As they will say, FreeSWITCH performs a different role than Asterisk and is used in different contexts.

FreeSWITCH has become quite a powerful platform and I'm looking forward to learning more about what is going on with the project right now.

You can join the live call via SIP, Skype or the regular old PSTN. There is also an IRC backchannel that gets heavy usage during the call. It will be recorded so you can always listen later.

As noted on the VUC page for today's call, the show will also be simulcast in video using Google+ video and YouTube. If you are interested in joining the video side of the call, please follow the instructions on the page.

[1] In full disclosure, this is an affiliate link with Amazon and if you actually purchase the book I receive a tiny amount of money. If you think this influences what I write here, you clearly haven't been reading my site. :-)

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Want to learn about how voice and video calls will take place right in your web browser? WITHOUT a Flash or Java plugin?

The "WebRTC" initiative is making this a reality through efforts of the major browser vendors, VoIP industry companies and standards working groups within both the IETF and W3C. On the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) Call on Friday, April 13th, the group will have a discussion of what exactly is happening with WebRTC... and then some live demos from the Voxeo Labs and Phono teams who have been working on this topic for some time now.

This is, to me, an incredibly important area of work as we have the opportunity to really bake real-time communications (RTC) into the fabric of the tools we use every day to work with the Internet.

I'm looking forward to the VUC call ("tomorrow" as I write this, but probably "today" when most of you read it) and would encourage you to join in to listen and/or participate in the conversation.

You can join the live call via SIP, Skype or the regular old PSTN. There is also an IRC backchannel that gets heavy usage during the call. It will be recorded so you can always listen later.

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For those interested in telecommunications security, today's (Dec 2, 2011) VoIP Users Conference (VUC) call at 12 noon US Eastern will cover the recent arrests of 4 Philippine men who defrauded AT&T of close to $2 million and were employed by an alleged terrorist organization who was using the proceeds of the scam to fund their activities.

Eric Klein of Humbug Labs will be the guest on the VUC call discussing this and other fraud issues. It should be an interesting discussion.

You can join the live call via SIP, Skype or the regular old PSTN. There is also an IRC backchannel that gets heavy usage during the call. It will be recorded so you can always listen later.

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Want to discuss the Skype outage? What happened? What we know about it? Supernodes? Mega-supernodes? Skype's architecture? and more?

On this Friday, January 7, 2011, I'll be joining the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) gang to talk about Skype's outage. As host Randy Resnick writes:

Mr. Dan York, CNN VoIP celebrity, will be with us for a more geeky explanation of what happened and hopefully what the full ramifications of this will be.

Skype has had a “monopoly” in this space for a long time. Can it continue? Are there contenders, and if so, who are they? Is the free model the key to Skype’s success? Will it always be free? Will it be passed up in quality by something different (like FaceTime (or a cross platform version of it) or Google Voice?

We'll be talking about my post about Skype supernodes and much more. It should be an enjoyable time.

If you'd like to listen live, there are regular, SIP and Skype contact phone numbers to dial into the VUC. You can also jump on #vuc on IRC to join in the text backchannel.

If you can't join live, a recording of the call will be posted to the episode's web page sometime in the next few days.

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Earlier this week I had a fun moment joining a cast of characters to help the Telecom Junkies podcast celebrate crossing over 100 episodes. In the 101st episode, now available for listening, host Jessica Gdowski invited 7 of her previous guests back to give brief updates. So I joined Martha Buyer, Mark Fletcher, Hank Levine, John Lyon, Dave Spofford, and Allan Sulkin for the ~20 minute show.

In my case, I've been a guest on the show three times previously, most notably in August 2007 with "Interview with a VoIP Hacker" where we interviewed Robert Moore shortly before he was heading to prison.

Moore was part of the VoIP fraud case masterminded by Edwin Pena and discussed on another Telecom Junkies episode back in July 2006. I was also on another Junkies episode in November 2007 about VLAN Hopping.

In this 101st episode recorded this week I gave a brief update on the Pena/Moore case (Pena recently pled guilty) and then talked about VoIP and Unified Communication security issues. It was literally just a few minutes, but I was glad to join briefly and help Telecom Junkies celebrate. 100 podcast episodes is indeed a milestone to celebrate! Congrats!

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As Alec says, he "missed from the microphone" and so he's brought back the Squawk Box podcast with a show today (also via Facebook) about the new Windows 7 beta and a show next Tuesday (also via Facebook) that will be an interview with Lee Dryburgh, coordinator of the eComm conference.

The Squawk Box calls have been a great amount of fun over the past year or two. We've learned a lot together and shared some great discussions. I enjoyed guest-hosting and wrote here on this site about a number of the calls. I'm glad Alec is bringing them back in at least a limited form.

The conference call today (and most Squawk Box days) is at 11am US Eastern time and is open to anyone who wants to participate. They are made available later as a podcast from Alec's blog at www.saunderslog.com. Being a "Mac"-guy these days, I don't expect to have a whole lot to add to the Windows 7 conversation, but I'll be interested to hear the experiences of those like Alec who are already playing with Windows 7. Next Tuesday, I do expect to be on the call with Lee...

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Technorati Tags: squawkbox, podcasts, windows7, windows, microsoft

Given that I've written here a good bit about Voxeo since joining the company 11 months ago, I thought I'd point to an excellent interview that Voxeo's CEO, Jonathan Taylor, did with host Alec Saunders on Alec's Squawk Box podcast. You can listen to it by either using the audio player on the show web page or alternatively you can download the MP3 file directly and listen to it in iTunes, Windows Media Player or whatever MP3 player you wish.

It was an enjoyable call (I was listening) that went for about 45 minutes. Jonathan spoke about how and why he started the company, about the new release of Prophecy 9, the acquisition of Micromethod, our recent financial results and much more. I think you all will find it a great introduction to what Voxeo is all about.

11 months later, I'm still extremely glad I made the choice to join the company...

Technorati Tags: squawkbox, voxeo, voice, voice applications, voip

I was rather surprised but pleased to see that my "Black Back Security Review" was on the list of the "Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for March 2008". My "surprise" was mostly because that particular talk is over a year old and was given at the ETel 2007 show back at the end of February 2007.

To be honest, I was not actually aware (or didn't remember, anyway) that the IT Conversations Network had distributed my talk but I'm guessing they did so with a number of the ETel sessions.

Unfortunately, they don't include the slides, which I put up in the Blue Box posting and also just generally made available on SlideShare. Without the slides, I suppose it works perfectly fine.. I've just never listened to it that way. It was still one of the most fun presentations I've ever given. Also took a ton of time to prepare. 243 slides in 14 minutes... :-) (I did write up some notes about the presentation and the style, etc.)

Anyway, it's cool to see people discovering that session again. Nice surprise!

Technorati Tags: voip, voip security, dan york, etel

What are you doing at 10am Eastern time tomorrow morning? (Friday, February 15th) How about joining us for a "Squawk Box" conference call to discuss the upcoming eComm 2008 conference?

The call will take place using Iotums Facebook app called "FREE Conference Calls". You can just visit the show web page and RSVP (and add the Facebook app if you need to). I'll be hosting the show tomorrow while Alec Saunders is flying back from Barcelona and Thomas Howe and I will be interviewing Lee Dryburgh about the upcoming eComm 2008 conference... what it is, who is speaking and why people should attend. It should be a lively conversation with a great group of folks.

Bring your questions and join us!

P.S. The show will be posted later in Alec's blog and I'll provide a link here.

Technorati Tags: alec saunders, applications, etel, ecomm, ecomm2008, lee dryburgh, dan york, thomas howe, squawk box