Net2Phone were using the PC as a phone some time before 2000 - http://web.net2phone.com/about/company/timeline.as p. PC to US freephone numbers were free, with US/Canada landline calls charged to pre-paid credit. It was a bit on the choppy side (on a 28.8K connection) when I tried it around '97/'98, but the interface matched that described in the patent abstract pretty well.
I also recently had my TWiki-based wiki farm broken into, for the 3rd time in 4 years, despite trying to stay up to date at least with Debian releases. Fortunately, I had each wiki set up to run suexec as an individual user, so the damage was reasonably well contained.
I'm running the TWiki Debian packages (from Unstable) but follow the security mailing list and fortunately have patched (just) in time (so far). The first of the two recent vulnerabilities brought an attempted attack on my server around 12 hours after getting the initial email warning.
Since TWiki's security problems seem intractable (giant Perl codebase that's very difficult to audit and doesn't seem to have been designed to handle security) I decided that enough is enough and followed freedesktop.org's lead in moving the whole farm to MoinMoin
It's probably not much consolation, but the upcoming Dakar release features a much revised code base with security in mind.
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Net2Phone were using the PC as a phone some time before 2000 - http://web.net2phone.com/about/company/timeline.as p. PC to US freephone numbers were free, with US/Canada landline calls charged to pre-paid credit. It was a bit on the choppy side (on a 28.8K connection) when I tried it around '97/'98, but the interface matched that described in the patent abstract pretty well.
I also recently had my TWiki-based wiki farm broken into, for the 3rd time in 4 years, despite trying to stay up to date at least with Debian releases. Fortunately, I had each wiki set up to run suexec as an individual user, so the damage was reasonably well contained.
I'm running the TWiki Debian packages (from Unstable) but follow the security mailing list and fortunately have patched (just) in time (so far). The first of the two recent vulnerabilities brought an attempted attack on my server around 12 hours after getting the initial email warning.
Since TWiki's security problems seem intractable (giant Perl codebase that's very difficult to audit and doesn't seem to have been designed to handle security) I decided that enough is enough and followed freedesktop.org's lead in moving the whole farm to MoinMoin
It's probably not much consolation, but the upcoming Dakar release features a much revised code base with security in mind.