Slashdot Mirror

I'm sure any calls between Google VOIP customers will be VOIP on the backend. I'm sure they'll integrate it into Google Talk as well, and then your end could be totally VOIP, and if the other party uses Google Talk it would be VOIP end-to-end. Further, if they're smart, they'll let you use your SIP-based "hard" phones with the service as well.

Second, ENUM is already standard that allows you to use DNS to direct your calls wherever you want (voice or fax - see fax could just go direct from mail server to mail server over SMTP, and if not available use the traditional number). However, guess who has to implement ENUM? The local telco providers who have been assigned numbers have to implement it - and guess what, none of the traditional Bell companies have done that or will do that anytime soon because it allows you to bypass their services and control how your number is called. I could see Google changing all this (at least between VOIP-enabled providers). TPC has tried to make this happen, but really it needs to be done at your service-provider level so you don't have to manage DNS: http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/archived_issues/ipj_5-2/enum.html.

Regarding revenue, I'm sure it'll be the same as Google Apps. Free for certain features, pay for other. Perhaps Google will make it free for all at first, get folks hooked, and then pay.

Competing in the corporate world will be hard, however. All of these features I've heard of, you can do with a Cisco CallManager/Unity platform. One-reach number forwarding, listening to calls as the caller leaves the message (plus telling the system to take the call, which prompts the person calling with, "Your party can take your call now, please stand by," and then two-way voice goes through), per-number-filtering (profiles, etc.), initiating calls from your cell's smart-app (this is really SIP, and what occurs is Google would place a call out to your cell and the party you wish to call at the same time, presenting you with the caller's number on your callerid, and presenting them with your Google number on their callerid, thus "masking" the phone you calling from), text to speed (read your email to you), speech to text (convert speech to text), fax to email, email to fax, SIP VOIP to your telco so no need for a PRI or analog trunks. All that, and you don't have to worry about Google turning "evil."

However, I, as a small business owner, I cannot afford the hardware and licensing to do this. I'd love to pay Google for such a feature without a huge capital investment. I'm sure others would too.

Further, if Google's smart-app running on the phones do this right, you'll be able to seamlessly transfer a call that you answered on you cell on your desk (plus all the other features). In the Cisco world, you just hang up the cell call and it's still there for 2 seconds and you can pick it up on your desk. Or, if you were on your desk and needed to step away, you just press "Mobile" and the system dials your cell (but the desk call isn't affected at all) and as soon as you hang up your desk phone the two-way audio cuts through on your cell. While on a traditional phone system you could just transfer your call to your cell, the advantage is you can drop back to your desk phone (or any other office phone that you log into) without having to transfer it from your cell (thus tying up two voice paths and running up your cell minutes).

Anyway, it is cool tech, and I'm glad to see Google bringing it to the masses.

Send a fax over the web for free, powered by the open-source HylaFax faxing program.

TCP.INT has been at it since at least 1994. In '94 it was an email-to-fax gateway.

HylaFax dates back to the '90s at least.

I just sent the Canadian d-link offce a fax quoting the open letter.
The Canadian office fax number is reachable with the http://www.tpc.int/ e-mail to fax gateway.

A listing of d-link fax numbers is available here: http://www.dlink.ca/corporate/international.php

You can use www.tpc.int allows you to send faxes for free.

Don't know about the US, but in the UK I'm pretty sure it's illegal to provide transit/termination for third party calls unless you have a telecommunications operator licence.

Most people want a phone that will reliably connect them to any number they dial - similar reasons explain why http://www.tpc.int/ is never going to be the average person's choice of fax service.

Yeah, it was handy.

Other than the problem with obscene calls originated from one's POTS line, I wonder what one could do if one already had a pay VoIP service, like Vonage. I can make free calls to anywhere in Canada and the U.S. for a nominal fixed monthly charge. I don't think that Vonage would like the idea of me patching out going calls from Bellster and offering U.S./Canada calling, even if I don't explicitly charge for them (reselling, and all that).

This is an obvious power-grab by New York state officials probably because Verizon is pissed and wants something done about this destructive upstart competitor who has the NERVE to do an end-run around carefully bought and paid-for state regulators and offer local service in a way that completely cuts Verizon out of the loop.

There is a big difference between a wireline telephone company and a data service provider who allows you to connect voice traffic to the PSTN. By this reasoning, the people who implement tpc.int to allow people to send faxes by e-mail could also be (regulated and) taxed. And what about efax which will provide you with an incoming fax number to receive faxes, I suppose they are next.

Paul Robinson <Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>

Send a free fax to your Congressmen and Senators here.

http://www.tpc.int/faxbyemail.html

A few years ago I worked with an HP digital sender, which is really nice. You feed the paper, put in an e-mail address, and they get a PDF.

Of course, you're in for three grand for a $199 scanner with a bolted on $199 computer, for the convienience.

sounds like HP's usual value proposition - ouch. FYI, Carl Malamud and Marshall Rose's tpc.int has been able to bridge the fax and e-mail worlds for ten years, for free.

The tpc.int system sends the fax as a TIFF/F file (the bitmap specified by the G3 fax standard), rather than a PDF. (And Malamud and Rose are long gone from the project, which was picked up by Darren Nickerson at Oxford...) Since it starts as a bitmap scan rather than a document file anyway, there's not much difference - why bother to build a PDF of a bitmap? This is even less of a problem now that (finally!) XP can display TIFFs without extra software.

Aside: tpc.int is a rather unique domain name, btw. It prompted the UN to keep the riff-raff out by requiring later .int registerees to be recognized UN organizations - is this just another step to world tyranny by the UN? :-)

The Phone Company has been doing this for faxes for years. Their service isn't that popular, but it tends to keep the prices down on email-fax conversion services.

The most famous geek in the world was Milo Hoffman!

No, it would be the one and only Mr. Arlington Hewes of TPC, who lives on in all his virtuality at tpc.int, perhaps the last and only example of a bunch of Internet geeks getting a .int address...

I'm not a big fan of printing because it costs so much and at the end of it a tree is still dead.

Its costs £0.10 per page at the university i go to.

So when I need to print something I use a few h4x0rd accounts so save a few quid, but mostly I just email people. And for the people who don't have email theres always email2Fax or just plain SMS.

The term ``telephone facsimile machine'' means equipment which has the capacity (A) to transcribe text or images, or both, from paper into an electronic signal and to transmit that signal over a regular telephone line, or (B) to transcribe text or images (or both) from an electronic signal received over a regular telephone line onto paper.

So let's say you don't use a phone line to connect to the internet, so Mark's claims don't really work for you, but you have a regular fax machine you'd like to see get a few more junk faxes.

(Disclaimer: please don't abuse the following free service. I'm not responsible for your actions.)

The fine folks at TPC.INT have a free e-mail to fax service. So just leave the e-mail address remote-printer.yourfirstname_yourlastname@yourtele phonenumber.iddd.tpc.int somewhere where the spam robots will find it, and voila, junk faxes for you to profit off of.

Happy spam hunting.

The proposed addressing scheme seems nearly identical to that used by TPC.INT for the past 10 years or so.

One may want to check with them about similar problems they have had and how they were[n't] solved. Spam was definitely a problem, as was other "Tragedy of the Commons" problems.

I believe Marshall Rose had a lot to do with that addressing scheme.

"The Phone Company"

For those who don't know (and are too lazy to check here, this is a free service that maps fax numbers to email addresses, so, if you know a fax number, you can send a properly mime-formatted fax (or plain text, it works), to them via a .tpc.int email address: it gets routed to a local internet to fax gateway (presumably a local call away from the destination fax machine), and thence to the desired destination.

Being free, coverage is not perfect, of course, and there are limits to how much each gateway will accept (per origin, hour, day, week, etc.) but the system works surprisingly well!

Yes, fax machines are not phones, but the concept obviously extends there.

7, not 2, and it's more than just Russia:

Country Codes

I urge everyone who is upset about this to send a fax to Sci-Fi Network. I found the this link to a free online fax service from the parent article.

Free Online Fax

Sci-Fi's fax number is +1-212-413-6531.

And the TPC fax gateway Website is running now.

NOTHING.

This isn't a matter of wait and see, the bill stinks so badly that even the sponsors claim to oppose it.

The Webcaster exemption is meaningless unless legislation is passed that overrides the Library of Congress CARP decision that makes Webcasting financially impossible for any US-based operation. Don't expect the bill to have this provision added, it was not written for our benefit either as consumers or as content distributors

Unfortunately, this is a draft, so there is no bill number we can add to this to so we can tell our Congresscritters which bill we want dumped into the bitbucket. Yet.

What can we do?

When the bill we don't want becomes available, we need to contact our Congressmen and Senators and tell them that WE DO NOT WANT IT. We need to tell our Congressman and Senators to VOTE YES on Rick Boucher's Music Online Competition Act .

The best way to do this is with a fax gateway set up specifically to enable us and anyone else who's interested to easily contact our elected representatives. When it becomes available, we then need to point, click, and make our points known.

Letters are obsolete in this context. Due to worry about anthrax, they are going through extensive decontamination and a letter might take months to get there if it shows up at all. Phone calls are good, but this works best because it's easy for someone to casually participate. What we need are hundreds of thousands of contacts between us and our elected representatives, and it's been proven that this works.

The ACLU uses this approach and it frequently works, despite the unpopularity of the ACLU itself and civil liberties in general.

Who lives in Washington,DC who is willing to dedicate a telephone line to this and is willing to maintain a fax server limited to local calls within the DC area?

The software required to run a Web-to-fax gateway already exists, check http://www.tpc.int for more information. The site seems to be down right now. If it doesn't come back up, there are other possibilities. Or start an Open Source project at Sourceforge and write one.

Given the basic gateway software, a front end is needed that does what we need to do.

The main requirement is that it allow users to submit their zip codes and automatically return a response that will direct their faxes with our canned message and anything users want to add to the fax number corresponding to their Congresscritter.

The ACLU has this kind of setup that should be easy to duplicate. To see the user interface, click here and enter your zip code. Go through with the rest of the process if you agree with what they want public support for, but the important part is to see how such a thing works.

The hardest part is gathering the list of several hundred fax numbers. While there is such a list, it's a couple of years old and needs updating before it is used. Fixing this just takes being willing to put in a few hours comparing the list against the current list of Congresscritters and going to individual web pages for new additions to the list.

Based on the previous performance of the geek community, The Register says essentially that we as a community are too stupid to mobilize to cover our own asses,preferring the practice of pure Libertarian cult dogma to any approach that can work in the real world. Maybe they're right. I'm writing this in case they aren't.

Is our freedom worth a spare server, the price of a phone line, a bit of code writing, and being willing to point and click a few times as these bills hit various points in the legislative process?

It's up to you now. If The Register is right, and we can't mobilize to protect ourselves, we don't deserve to be free and we don't deserve to be able to use our computers and the Net we will instead of as appliances whose posssiblities are limited to what Hollywood, the Feds, and Microsoft give us permission for.

I just, friendly, explain them that i was not not interested in their product, I was really sorprised to know I had an erection problem, ask them if they thought about the negative publicity and so on. Every minute they don't work is costly for them.

An other option you can try is to send them a free fax explaining the same thing. Maybe you can offer them to respond with a fortune cookie-fax (man who send spam will receive fax) every time you get spam from them.

Don't just sit there pressing the delete button, accepting the spam as part of e-mail, but fight back. Not by hiding behind spamblockers, but by getting to the spammer.

Oh. My personal offer is this: "You're today's lucky spammer. You've been selected, out of all today's spam, to get a call for each received spam today. We'll gladly tell you what was offered in every spam. This all is paer of our mail policy in which you opted in by sending me spam. You'll be hearing from us today. Thank you"

The problem isn't the voice-dialing with Sprint PCS (the recognition domain is pretty limited, so number recognition is quite good in many VoRec systems now), but rather "Claire, your electronic customer service representative".

In my experience (as recent as yesterday), Claire is both hard of hearing and pretty darn stupid. The most frustrating thing is that the entire system is designed to prevent you from ever getting to a real person, so if Claire can't help you, you're SOL. I did notice that after about a half-dozen failed attmepts to go through Claire, I got a different answer (I was dialing 611 to try to get them to do the PRL update they've been unable to do since August), this time asking for the last 4 digits of the SSN of the account holder. I'm not sure if this was programmed, or if Claire just happened to go off-line at that time.

I *really* hate companies that use IVR systems to *prevent* you from getting customer service. Sprint is probably the worst offender I've encountered at this, but then they have by far the worst customer service I've ever encountered in a service company. (Although Home Depot clearly takes the cake for worst customer service overall - they direct all complaints to "Ben Hill". Like Arlington Hewes, Mr. Hill does not exist - the phone is answered by a rotation of store assistant managers, who do not track or follow-up on complaints. It's essentially a well-desiged and deliberate bit-bucket for Home Depot's customer complaints. Once they have your money, they're not really interested in hearing if you have a problem - the height of poor customer service.)

TPC's coverage is spotty, but often it works, and ties up their line and fax machine for a little while.

I believe they stole the scheme from TPC.INT.

Look at RFC 1530 for the actual RFC.

It's dated october 93, so there's nothing new here

Meanwhile, the IETF has put on hold its work toward an internet fax standard, as Adobe and Xerox squabble over a file format.

Internet Fax standards have already existed for years : Check out www.tpc.int for more info. You'll note that the entire TPC.INT system is based on several RFCs that were released years ago: see RFCs 1528, 1529, and 1530. (And 1703, which extended tpc.int to radio paging....)

TIFF works.

Why bother with Color? Only graphic artists and print shops use color faxing. And then, the documents are usually printed on a Postscript printer, then faxed. In that case, if you have a PostScript printer and internet, why not send the plain PS file?

have a go - it opens up your communication methods. sure i wish everyone used email, but they don't yet.

i was angry:1 with:2 my:4 friend - i told:3 4 wrath:5, 4 5 did end.

• Phone numbers are heirarchical by country code, then by area code or city code in larger countries, then by phone number. The number of digits in a phone number aren't ever the same from country to country. The domain name system reverses heirarchy (right to left). Given these constraints, they came up with the convention of COVER_PAGE_INFO@PHONE_NUMBER_REVERSED.tpc.int. If I take a typical US phone number like
• +1-212-555-6789, the host name mapping for it would be: 9.8.7.6.5.5.5.2.1.2.1.tpc.int .

/dev/earth is 98% full, please remove people immediately

While it's not the scale of the discussion it's certainly out there & working.

• General principles and policy: RFC 1530
• Administrative policies: RFC 1529
• Technical procedures: RFC 1528

• real no : +44 20 7555 1234
• reversed : 4.3.2.1.5.5.5.7.0.2.4.4.tpc.int
• direct fial : 442075551234.idd.tpc.int

• real no : +44 20 7555 1234
• reversed : 4.3.2.1.5.5.5.7.0.2.4.4.tpc.int
• direct fial : 442075551234.idd.tpc.int

Actually, so far as I know, the very first time this was done was in about 1993, when Marshall Rose and Carl Malamud introduced a really interesting free fax gateway network at Interop, back when it was the *only* Internet show. Their setup is documented in RFCs 1528, 1529, and 1530, which precede 2916 by a fair amount. :-)

The system, called tpc.int (which was only about the fifth or sixth .int registered) was designed to let the then-new MIME deliver a TIFF/F format file via e-mail to a fax machine accessible to a remote fax server.

Shortly after it was launched using the awkward backwards phone number with every digit separated by a dot syntax, someone (and his name escapes me for the moment) hacked up a special DNS zone to eliminate the extraneous dots and reverse the number. This system is still in use today at tpc.int, where you can already address tpc.int servers by phone number the same way you have for over seven years.

If you've got some spare cycles and a lightly used phone line lying around, and unmetered local access, you should consider setting up a tpc.int server for your area. It's fun, and you'll learn a lot about MIME, mail processing, and neat DNS tricks in the process...

tpc.int is one I have been using for a long time, dunno how they got the domain though, apparently you have to to exchange your soul for unmarked US$ low denomination notes.

You mean an audio version of tpc.int? It does what you want, for faxes. (with an e-mail interface, too!)

The document says that local loop ADSL competition and radio spectrum broadband access will start in 2001, NOT be rolled out nationwide by 2001.

In fact, it's even worse than that. Paragraph 5.2 says that Oftel will rely on competition to drive high bandwidth services into rural areas. Whilst this worked very nicely for GSM digital mobile phones, just see what happened to cable TV- virtually unknown outside towns (just try doing TCP/IP on a satellite dish- very expensive and useless for uploading- and that's presuming you don't live in an area when dishes are banned, as they are in so many rural areas!).

Plus, there is no recommendation that BT should be mandated to supply even their existing medium bandwidth services such as Home Highway ISDN to rural users (not available more than 2 miles from the exchange- I live only 500 metres from the exchange but the copper wire takes a 3 mile detour!)

In short, rural areas have yet again been sold down the river. What annoys me is that it is rural residents that need this bandwidth the most. Oftel is a regulatory body and should be looking after needs, not profit. Why would townsfolk want cable TV, teleshopping, multi-user chatlines and home offices when the video shop, supermarket, pub and place of work are on their doorstep? These amenities are often not available to rural users where not only remote location, but sheer lack of numbers, make even subsidised facilities uneconomic.

The official consultation period has ended, but once you have read the document you can still send your opinions to:

Ms Sally Trebble,
Consultation on Access to Bandwidth,
OFTEL,
50, Ludgate Hill,
London.
EC4M 7JJ
or email netcomp.oftel@gtnet.gov.uk
or fax 0171 634 8924

--