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Australia Trials Phone To IP Service
daria42 writes "Australia is doing trial runs with a technology which could connect conventional phone numbers with Web pages, Internet fax services and other online resources. Subscribers to an ENUM service register their other contact details, then set up rules that control how and when calls to their phone are routed. For example, calls from anybody but close family could be routed straight to voicemail between 6pm and 11pm. Because it connects to any IP service, incoming callers could also use phone numbers to access Web sites, the Skype VoIP application, faxes and other applications."
Thailand did this 6 months ago!
For example, calls from anybody but close family could be routed straight to voicemail between 6pm and 11pm.
That way, when a family member has been arrested for sharing too many files on the Internet and they make their one phone call from jail to you, they'll get your voice mail.
But seriously... I know most people do it but I've never gotten screening one's phone calls. My experience with the federal and state "do not call lists" has been very positive so I literally get no sales calls any more. The only thing I have to watch out for now is the occasional annoying friend that calls, but even that's not bad enough for me to screen.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Will this mean my phone number is as available to spammers as my email adress is?
Linux is not Windows
I wouldn't have to look at excessive flash animated banners anymore...
"Trial" is not a verb, you illiterate simp.
Hey! I tease Australia! I love ya guys! Hope to come back to Sydney soon! Hugs!
Sure, go ahead and laugh at me. You think that VoIP is going to take over the world and put the phone company out of business, and I am some clueless nutcase. Right?
...'. Script Kiddie says; 'Har har, I r0xorz!!!'
The fact is that the popularity and ubiquity of VoIP is going to increase because of all the hype. But hype won't be able to overcome the fact that quality isn't as good as the PSTN. Hype won't be able to hide that 911 loaction can't work without seriously impairing theusefullness of VoIP. And, most important of all, hype won't be able to hide the security problems with VoIP.
How long are you going to continue using VoIP when some script kiddie that you pissed off on IRC DDoSes your phone? Who's going to keep on using VoIP when the latest Outlook worm prevents them form making phone calls for the next two days? Who's going to keep VoIP when they realize that I, or anyone else can listen in on their calls right this minute?
VoIP is great. I use it right now. But, I haven't cut the PSTN cord and I won't cut the PSTN cord for VoIP. It's just too dangerous and it'll only be another 6 months before disaster strikes and everyone realizes how dangerous it is.
Think about it; 'Hello? Police? this is
6 Months
Every day I get closer to building a secret bunker somewhere.
calling Google. Due to unusually heavy call volume your search will not be executed for approximately .31 seconds. We appreciate your call, please stay online for the next available operator.
.31 seconds. Anime Pics. drink my piss hentai pokemon free asian videos. Rikku hentai anime demons inuyasha hentai, hardcore nude anime boobs free shit eating pics. .... html - 10k - May 4, 2005 - Cached - Similar pages" ... I don't get it. Wouldn't be easier just to browse to a website?
"Thank you for calling Google, how can I help you?"
"ummm... hi... I'd like to search for anime boobs"
"Alright, lets see here is the first result out of 807,000 in
humman-traffic.erospace.pl/hentai/anime-pics
man, I feel like mold.
pick up the phone, hit 0 and say "Operator! Connect me to SlashDot.com! I've got a tin foil hat warning!" -Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
"BOOOOOP. You have 19,347,802,206,103 new messages. You have 3 old messages. Press 7 to delete."
That's it. Enum is a mapping from your phone number to your other addresses. What people do with that information is up to them. You could have your phone line temporarily redirected to some other service (VoIP, voicemail, whatever), but the only thing you would want ENUM for in that scenario is to avoid entering your other addresses. So instead of telling your phone company (or your PBX) that you want to reroute calls to your.address@vonage.com you would direct calls to "VoIP" and they would look up VoIP=your.address@vonage.com. Hardly a milestone of modern communication.
The much more interesting examples are where your contacts choose the optimal way of contacting you. So instead of redirecting calls to voicemail, you would proclaim that you prefer to be contacted by email after hours. You would also list your VoIP address. When I try to call you, I could use that information to automatically connect by the most efficient means. I could send an email at night, call your VoIP address when I'm using VoIP too (free call..), use POTS when I'm calling from a normal landline or call you on the cellphone when I'm on the same network and it's cheaper. For this, I need to associate all your contact details with a simple key: a phone number.
True. Prostitution/slavery is a major international problem. Only a few countries, like my Canada and Saudi Arabia seem to have been able to stop this horrible practice. The US essentially enourages female slavery for some reason. And there is not a single monument in France to the prostitutes of the French underground that were essentially responsible to the intelligence that the Americans needed for D-Day.
You: *picks up phone* Hello?
SPAMMER: Hey Buddy, your woman wants a big one.
You: What?! Who is this? Remove me from your... *beeping* Oh wait a sec, I've got a another call. *click* Hello?
SPAMMER 2: Hi, this is Charles Taylor from Liberia, I need to use your bank account...
You: WTF!? STOP..*beep beep* Hold on. *click*
SPAMMER 3: Hi, thanks for the advice. Could you open this file immediately?
IGB: More fun than eating oatmeal!
(I'm not gonna pretend that I understood all the answers ...)
--- Attorneys Assisting Citizen-Soldiers & Families -
I want the opposite: I want my phone number to be arbitrary text of my choosing. I want the whole phone system to use good voice recognition, so that any time I want to call anyone, if I can remember their phone-moniker, all I have to do is say it into the phone. A DNS-like system will go reference this to their actual phone number, IP address, or whatever address and protocol they choose to use for voice communications, and connect me.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Not sure what you are referring to when you say "the US essentially encourages" it. According to the World Sex Guide entry on the United States: In 99.9% of the United States it is illegal, and a huge proportion of the public would be completely against any attempt to change that.
People don't seem to realize that the phone companies have been using VoIP for years! That's right, Verizon was using VoIP in large scale production more than five years ago and so were many other phone companies. But, they were using it over their own private lines, not the Wild Wild West internet.
VoiP cannot be reliable over a shared medium where there is no control. The phone companies know this already and the consumer and Vonages of the world are about to find out too. At that point, everyone will come running back to the phone companies and they will find that the phone company is either gone or is ready to REALLY stick it to them.
People expect 5 nines(99.999%) reliability because that is what the phone company has provided for the past 40 or more years. They will be shocked to find out that their internet connection is only about 95% reliable. That's one and a half nines. There is no way that people will put up with a phone that is less reliable than a cell phone, even if it is dirt cheap!
It may be illegal, but it is everywhere in the US. If it wasn't popular then it would be gone, as in Canada.
Australia Trials Phone To IP Service
Instead of assuming that "trials" was meant to be the verb, try assuming that "phone" is the verb. Now what does it say?
Regardless, you're a Dink!
Didn't they use to call that dialup?
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
Also relevant: http://www.dundi.com/
"DUNDi is a peer-to-peer system for locating Internet gateways to telephony services. Unlike traditional centralized services (such as the remarkably simple and concise ENUM standard), DUNDi is fully-distributed with no centralized authority whatsoever."
It's not normally Australia lagging behind, but the UK have already done this and produced a report. Particularly of note is the assertion that there needs to be a process put in place to identify who actually owns each number. The telcos cannot be relied upon because they are either lazy, or simply do not want to lose a revenue stream.
So the plan is to take nice human-readable strings (like 'slashdot.org') and replace them with utterly incomprehensible 10 to 14 digit numbers?
Mmmm'K.
How about using a URL to dial phones? Wouldn't that make more sense?
'phone.sjbaker.org' and 'fax.sjbaker.org' as well as 'www.sjbaker.org' ?
www.sjbaker.org
Not according to the Canadian Women's Health Network, which has this to say:
..because then my DSL would stop working.
Update Watch - Automatic software update notification
"Martha! Martha! Help!
"The technologists have got the phone system too, now! We're completely surrounded!
"We just can't escape the Internet!"
The important thing to remember when switching from PTSN to VoIP is to not rely on VoIP as your main means of communication to the outside world. Always have a backup (at least a pre-paid cell phone) in case of emergency. The reliability compared to PTSN isn't there, and I have no problem accepting that. I try to explain to everyone to be aware of the risks, that VoIP is not regulated the same way (if at all) as PTSN, and to think of VoIP as a cell phone; you're not always going to be able to use it.
I can see where 911 calling could be an issue, though. VoIP will grow and change as needed. When security becomes an issue, it will change one way or another.
This seems like a complete waste to me. All I want is a phone number that rings my cell phone. That's it. I can see the ability to route certain numbers to voicemail at certain times might be handy, or permanently block certain numbers, but it seems like that could be handled by the phone itself.
I think this is going to be one more thing that takes more effort to use than the benefits it will provide.
Find coupons in Greeley
Ass is Ass, quit being so picky!
My new phone-to-ip number is 'slashdot' in the 'com' area code. Oh, but don't forget to dial 'www' to get an outside line.
Laugh all you want, but there's no way in hell I am going for SIP again.
That's right SIP sucks for all the reasons stated above; security, DDOS, Spam etc..
VoIP however doesn't need to suck. DDoSes are easily taken care of by NAT Firewalls.
Security? Try breaking 256 bits AES with your leet AMD Fx-51.
Spam? just lock out those who aren't explicity allowed.
But I here you say, SIP cannot do all these thigns. And you're right, but VoIPSIp and Skype is also VoIP
Skype takes care of all these little problems for me. Sure it's closed source and all. But it's popular and I'm sure if they decide to get all stupid removing these features or chanarging for the currently free services somebody else will move right in and do the same new thing.
Mark my words, the minute somebody comes out with a small embedded linux or other device that just plugs in the ethernet socket and allows you to SKype (no computer needed), you will see Skype's exponential growth curve steepen even more.
SIP sucks, get over it.
VoIP rocks.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
DDoSes are easily taken care of by NAT Firewalls.
Bzzt! Wrong. The only way to truly defend against a DDoS attack is to have the upstream providers drop the traffic BEFORE it gets to your pipe. Your NAT firewall, or any firewall for that matter, is of no help when your pipe is full of ping floods or whatever other data. It doesn't matter if your firewall is blocking the traffic because your pipe is full of the bogus traffic so the real traffic can't get to you. Your call fails! Even if it is Skype.
As for Skype it is a steaming load of crap, already. It suffers massive quality issues ESPECIALLY when using Skype-Out to call real phones and that's without anything nasty being thrown at it. Throw heavy traffic or a DDoS at it and it's just as useless as any other VoIP solution.
And what if the DDoS is thrown at the Sykpe or Vonage servers. Skype uses peer-to-peer which should mitigate the risk a bit, but, the authentication and PSTN termination is all handled by centralized servers that CAN be DDoSed and Vonage is at even greater risk!
VoIP of ANY kind REQUIRES end-to-end QoS guarantees in order for it to be reliable. There is no QoS on public networks! Therefore, VoIP will never be reliable on public networks however, it will continue to be used on private networks because end-to-end QoS is possible on private networks.
Oh, by the way, private means PRIVATE not "virtual private" so the first person that suggests VPN's or IP V6 should be bludgeoned with a cluebat or an Olive Loaf. If the packet traverses the internet there is NO guarantee it will ever reach the other end. Therefore, there is no guarantee that you will ever be able to make or receive a call.
Which would you rather, five nines reliability on your dial tone or no guarantee that you will even have dial tone?
Here are a few other things that have never been said on a death bed:
1) I wish I had drank fewer beers
2) I wish I had had less sex
3) I wish I had tried fewer cuisines
4) I wish I had spent less time with my friends
5) I wish I had been a better corporate pogue
You only live once, so answer your buds when they call. I pity the person whose phone stops ringing...
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/4/13/205734/619
Skype http://www.skype.com/products/skypein/ is running their Beta of this (SkypeIn).
But even 8kbps G.729a codecs, which are the most common compression, are really just fine for most people most of the time. They're better than cellphone codecs, and most desktop VOIP equipment doesn't have tinny little microphones with background road noise drowning them out. (BEEEP!!! $&$%&^%@@$!!) (sorry, what was I saying? Oh, right) Some PCs have inadequate mikes built in, and may locate them next to fans or disk drives, so you may want a headset if you're using a softphone rather than a desk phone. You're still not going to use a modem over them, of course, and many VOIP systems detect fax-modem tones and use an appropriate fax codec instead of a voice codec.
Some people also worry excessively about latency, because some article they read says that 150ms is a hard maximum and everything sounds terrible at worse than that. But the main cause of latency in wide-area networks is distance, and it's about the same whether you're on the internet or the old-fashioned phone network, because they're taking the same sets of cables across the oceans. VOIP adds a bit of latency in the codecs, but it's not that much different.
Security is a different can of worms, or more precisely a caseload of cans of worms. Eavesdropping is preventable if you use proper technology, which almost none of the commercial providers does - and even though Skype uses some good algorithms, they've got proprietary code so you can't check whether their key management is botched like so many other proprietary crypto products.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I haven't checked out DUNDi, but good for Asterisk/Digium for including it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks