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Even easier with an Asterisk phone system. I already have whitelists, blacklists, and greylists setup. Quite easy really.

I don't get ANY telemarketing calls anymore and I'm not even on the DoNotCall list.

GnuPhone. Sister project to Asterisk.

Already here, well, you need some speciality hardware, but it's already here.

I'll stick with my POTS tho, pls nod thanx. It never has any problems, I've yet to see a VoIP service that can match it on anything other than price in my area.

* hey, it's slashdot anyway, euh, sorry, its slashdot any way.

Perfectly Possible. You could use GNU Bayonne or asterisk. Not exactly out of the box yet, and I don't know if either support standard modems either.

Interesting. This thing died off a couple years ago, but it looks like they relaunched it with a few changes. Originally, they handed out Cisco ATA182 devices to us (the beta testers), and you hooked it up to your phone line, a broadband connection, and a phone. When you made a long distance call, the unit would search for another device in the area code you were calling, and then tell the remote device to dial the number and then connect you. This way, you avoided long distance charges. It actually worked very well, I talked with a guy on a satellite link in Austrailia with it, and it didn't sound worse than my land line.

There were some glaring problems with this setup though. Say I decided I wanted to go on a prank phone call binge, the owner of the remote phone line could be blamed for my rampage of personal insults and threats. Plus, there were some serious security issues with the original version of the software running on the ATA device, like being able to connect directly to it with a SIP client and get dialtone, which allowed you to dial anything you wanted unfiltered (911, 900 numbers, etc).

It looks the the reincarnation of this is simply a removal of the PSTN capabilities. You can make calls to other people on the FWD network, but that's it. No land line access.

Kind of odd this story would come up today... I just took out the old ATA to try to upgrade the software on it and get it to work with Asterisk. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to reset it to defaults as it won't let you do anything at all until it finds the Gatekeeper that is programmed into it.

How does FWD plan to make money to stay afloat? Obviously, if this catches on, they will need to invest money in hardware and bandwidth. Where will the cash come from? The calls are not routed through them, but the directory services are run by them.

Also, unencrypted SIP traffic can be sniffed, and there are SIP reassemblers out there that will allow you to listen to the conversations you capture. Bored tech monkeys at ISP's are going to have fun with this. :)

Of course certain organizations would have the power to overide your list when necesary.

Sez you.

1. Nobody but the government and the phone company has any business overriding my phone preferences under any circumstances.
2. The government can fucking well knock on my door.
3. The phone company can fucking well send me a letter (or shut off my service if it's lack of payment they're calling about).

That's about why I leave my phone unplugged and set my cell phone not to ring except in response to a whitelist. I'm much happier that way.

If I wanted to implement a whitelist on my landline, I would buy a telephony card and run Asterisk.

Yes, Unfortunately it has to be a dedicated machine, I was trying to use it as an Asterisk PBX simultaneously,
but whenever I got a phone call the divx recording would become noticablably choppy.
But It is (merely) a PIII 1Ghz w/512MB RAM not very powerful by todays standards.

Anyone know where I can get some 802.11 cordless phones? The only ones I can find are made by Symbol, but I know there has to be more out there.

I plan on using them with Asterisk and my 802.11 access point. Yeah, I know 802.11 isn't 100% reliable, but I have wired phones for that. I need some VoIP cordless phones.

Great suggestions adolf. I started with the modems because I have them in hand. I thought I could hook them up with some conferencing software like asterisk or Bayonne(It looks like they support mostly high-end hardware). Using a telephone interface to a mixer would be much easier. The computer is important because eventually I want to hook this thing up to our local wireless network so we can put transmitters at various points around the city (like a repeater system). Also, it would allow callers to upload sound bites (via a web interface) to the system. I could play MP3s or other audio when no one else was on. Now that you mention Yahoo, I guess I could hook up to that too.

It sounds like a silly idea but there doesn't seem to be a forum for discussing local topics in my town. Besides, a local gossip channel on the radio seems at least as much fun as watching crossfire :)

Asterisk

VOCAL

You may want to check out the Asterisk PBX system, as it has an application API so you can make it do pretty much whatever you want.

I have yet to find a good voice mail system for linux and have kept all my voice mail functions on a windows system.

This sounds like a job for Asterisk PBX. A very cool Linux, software based PBX. A local (to me) Linux company has developed/is developing this. I've been at some demonstrations for it and it works great as a PBX. Check it out. I wouldn't be suprised if it would work for your voice mail system.

Asterisk Open Source Private Branch Exchange (PBX) and general telephony toolkit
linuxtelephony.org
Freshmeat search

Good luck, and please report your findings to Slashdot!

It's been here for a while. A fully opensource PBX.

Maybe rename this category from 'Ask Slashdot' to 'Ask Google' would be a good idea ;)
The answer to lots of post may be found using google and 'I fell lucky'.

For example, a search on 'open source pbx' give the following answer :
Asterisk PBX

Isn't that what you're looking for ? Other interesting site :
http://www.linuxtelephony.org/

Neat stuff.