Slashdot Mirror
Google Voice Discovered Allowing Pure VoIP Calls
From the article "Google Voice users learned late Monday that the service now has a way of making purely Internet-based phone calls. Making a SIP call with a 'sip:' prefix, the Google Voice phone number and @sip.voice.google.com skips the conventional phone network entirely, saving users cellphone minutes. Disruptive Telephony tested it and found that a call worked 'great.'"
Because they provide useful services to most of us, and unless you're storing gigabytes of child porn they probably don't have anything interesting to say about you anyway.
My (faint) suspicion is some VoIP telespammers/tele fraudsters saw the Slashdot article/blog and immediately started abusing the feature...
As nice as 'free SIP access' to the POTS network through Google voice might sound, it's not sane.
Even less sane than having offering open SMTP relays, anyways; since the telephone network is so poorly equipped to deal with any type of abuse (other than it actually being a crime if the perp happens to live in a 'civilized' country, and happens to be traceable).
I use an Obi110 device to make and receive calls on my home phone using Google Voice. It was the best $50 I've spent on a VoIP solution. It will remain free until at least the end of the year while GV is still free. Before that I used a Linksys PAP2 connected to an Asterisk server to do the same thing.
Newsflash, we have smartphones so we can leave the basement and travel out into the world without being computerless. Your solution would restrict us once again to the basement.