Willy Dobbe - VOIP

Fring on iPhone rules! Hard!

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 12:43:40 +0200

Fring is a cool service, Fring on the iPhone is below zero kelvin! I just installed it -thanks to mikew41- and Fring is ral real cool. To give you an idea on what it can do

import jabber / gtalk friends and chat with them via Jabber
import friends from other Instant Messaging service and use the service. I do not use these but think MSN, Y!, ICQ etc
setup your twitter account and have a multitasking twitter client in the background (keyword: background)
Import Skype contact, sign in and USE skype over Wifi!
Setup SIP and use your iPhone to make real VOIP calls over wifi over the internet

As you can see, a switch army knife. Skype by itself would have been cool enough for me, SIP a great much needed add on. But this is an application that communicates with all services I use and acts as the information hub between my twitter, my XS4ALL VOIP, my Skype and my jabber friends. I think it it the best application available on the iPhone. Installation is a 10 seconds job once you are in "installer" (you do have a jailbroken phone I hope?). Simpley ad the repository to installer, tab on fring and you are ready! This is great.

How Skype bypasses Firewalls and NAT

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 04:32:32 +0200

Some time ago I blogged about the excellent Skype Blackhat presentation. Now you can read on Heise how Skype bypasses NAT and firewall, something that is rather trickey with open standards VOIP protocols.

How Skype get round firewalls

But anyone who has used the popular internet telephony software Skype knows that it works as smoothly behind a NAT firewall as it does if the PC is connected directly to the internet. The reason for this is that the inventors of Skype and similar software have come up with a solution.

Skype protocol hacked? Skype functionality going mobile?

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 04:31:23 +0100

Skype Hacked! Skype Made Mobile!

It’s true. The rumors have been confirmed. Skype is going mobile! But not in quite the way you might have expected it! Skype has been hacked. Officially.

See the "proof" video on the skypejournal.

Hacking Exposed, VOIP

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 01:19:19 +0200

Hacking Exposed VoIP Voice over IP Security Secrets and Solutions by David Endler and Mark Collier.

Here you can donload the security tools mentioned in the book. I have some books from this serie and think I might buy this one as well.

Though most of the reviews on Amazon are not positive. El Reg has some notes on it as well. (Yes I know that the picture isnt the right one for the cover of the book, but I could find the right one)

XS4ALL heeft nu tijdelijk gratis VOIP dial out

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 19:03:53 +0200

Nadat de beste provider van Nederland, wellicht de wereld, gratis VOIP telefoons nummers aanbood, nu gratis dialout gedurende de zomer.

Van 7 juli t/m 31 augustus kunnen alle XS4ALL abonnees via hun XS4ALL VoIP Out account gratis bellen naar populaire vakantiebestemmingen en naar alle vaste telefoonnummers binnen Nederland. Voor VoIP Out betaalt u geen extra abonnementskosten; het is gewoon inbegrepen bij uw huidige abonnement. U betaalt slechts voor de gesprekken die u voert. En nu veel gesprekken gratis zijn, kunt u flink besparen op uw telefoniekosten.

Dank je XS!

An Experimental Study of the Skype Peer-to-Peer VoIP System

Mon, 01 May 2006 09:07:42 +0200

A good read for those who would like to know more about VOIP and Skype. An Experimental Study of the Skype Peer-to-Peer VoIP System

Despite its popularity, relatively little is known about the traffic characteristics of the Skype VoIP system and how they differ from other P2P systems. We describe an experimental study of Skype VoIP traffic conducted over a five month period, where over 82 million datapoints were collected regarding the population of online clients, the number of supernodes, and their traffic characteristics. This data was collected from September 1, 2005 to January 14, 2006. Experiments on this data were done in a black-box manner, i.e., without knowing the internals or specifics of the Skype system or messages, as Skype encrypts all user traffic and signaling traffic payloads. The results indicate that although the structure of the Skype system appears to be similar to other P2P systems, particularly KaZaA, there are several significant differences in traffic. The number of active clients shows diurnal and work-week behavior, correlating with normal working hours regardless of geography. The population of supernodes in the system tends to be relatively stable; thus node churn, a significant concern in other systems, seems less problematic in Skype. The typical bandwidth load on a supernode is relatively low, even if the supernode is relaying VoIP traffic.
The paper aims to aid further understanding of a significant, successful P2P VoIP system, as well as provide experimental data that may be useful for future design and modeling of such systems. These results also imply that the nature of a VoIP P2P system like Skype differs fundamentally from earlier P2P systems that are oriented toward file-sharing, and music and video download applications, and deserves more attention from the research community.

Be sure to checkout some other skype and voip related articles on this site as well and be sure to checkout this good article I posted some time ago.

Asterisk VOIP howto movie

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 13:31:01 +0200

If you are into geekness or just want to know what will be mainstream in a year or two, checkout Asterisk, an Open Source VOIP PABX. And yes, it is a Drupal Site. And if you just want to smell the future without getting your hands dirty, download this torrent which has some good Asterisk background information.

Kevin Rose is joined by John Todd, a well known, leading Asterisk expert, to introduce you to the amazing VoIP (Voice over IP) world of Asterisk, the open source voip telephony toolkit. In this episode, Kevin and John take you through the installation and configuration of this powerful tool, and show how it can be used to give anyone complete control over their phone experiences.

XS4ALL heeft VOIP dial out

Sat, 08 Apr 2006 19:59:13 +0200

Ik ben vandaag flink bezig geweest om de configuratie van mijn MythTV PVR af te maken, nog veel losse eindjes. De SNES emulator kan ik helaas niet gebruiken onder mijn videokaart omdat DGA niet gesupport wordt. NES games wel aan de gang maar dat is wel heeeel erg retro. En net toen ik dacht, kom laat ik dan eens de VOIP client aan de gang brengen met mijn XS4ALL VOIP telefoonnummer, zie ik:
XS4ALL | Overzicht Nieuws | xs4all introduceert voip out

XS4ALL maakt het mogelijk om via internet te bellen naar vaste en mobiele nummers. Alle abonnees van XS4ALL kunnen van VoIP Out gebruik maken, zij hoeven hiervoor geen extra abonnementskosten te betalen. Voor het bellen naar nummers buiten het XS4ALL-netwerk wordt een helder gesprekstarief in rekening gebracht, vrij van piek- en daltarieven en roamingkosten. XS4ALL abonnees konden al kosteloos met elkaar bellen en gebeld worden op hun persoonlijke VoIP-nummer.

Yeah! Skype is leuk, maar non SIP. Dus nog even wat settings hacken en je kan me bellen op mijn telefoon^Wtelevisie.

silver needle in the skype

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 09:23:10 +0200

One of the best researches I have seen on Skype, the disadvantages and how to block it. Great Stuff and must read if you are into routing, security or VOIP in general.

skype needle.

Personal Business Services Group

Wed, 05 Apr 2006 01:02:21 +0200

A true story | Zacker.org

April 2008 in Bangalore India, amongst the sparkling new out-sourced call center office parks, a unassuming new company is formed; "Personal Business Services Group". Their business? outsourced personal assistant services for American / European Fortune 1000's. For a reasonable rate of $200 a month* per employee their highly fluent and capable staff will time-shift their internal clocks and diligintly perform the following duties:
Call screening: simply route your SIP phone through their severs and they will pre-screen all of your calls.
Scheduling: Simply cc them on all your scheduling email threads and they will massage meetings into your calendar without you having to even think.
Note taking: Call them up over Skype during meetings and they will listen in and take notes that will later be posted on your companies wiki.
Proof reading: Send over any documents and they will sanity check, proof fread, and even edit your writing.
Within a year they have forged an entire new industry. New hire C level managers now think of personal assitant services a standard job benifit. Competing firms sprout up and tackle entirely new verticals such as stressed out soccer moms and small business owners.

Odd, but might become true.

Asterisk at home

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 09:49:48 +0100

NewsForge has an article about Asterisk on OpenWrt

Asterisk is free software that lets you create a fully functional, easily customizable, private branch exchange (PBX). Businesses like Asterisk because they can save money by using it, and because it is open source, they can add functionality to it easily and inexpensively. Asterisk is also becoming popular with home office users -- so much so that it spawned a new project called Asterisk@Home, which released its 1.0 version last year. Now there's even a version of Asterisk that runs on OpenWrt, a Linux distribution designed to run on your wireless router (see "OpenWrt nears prime time"). I found it to be worthwhile, but I wouldn't depend on it for my home office.

. When I have finished my PVR (havent spend time at it for the last week), I'll be looking out for Asterisk, an opensource kickass VOIP gateway. And quess what kind of router I recently bought? Indeed! I'll be running my little VOIP * server within 12 month I hope

XS4ALL Voip nummers

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 07:40:10 +0100

Ik kon vanacht niet slapen. Dus ben ik vroeg opgestaan. Gaf me gelijk de mogelijkheid om twee VOIP telefoon nummers bij de beste ISP van de wereld (gratis) aan te vragen:
XS4ALL | Voip | Bestellen

De techniek achter VoIP is nog relatief nieuw en jong. XS4ALL kan nog niet garanderen dat de dienst, gebaseerd op VoIP, direct storingsvrij is. VoIP is een best-effort dienst. Per dag kunnen 100 abonnees twee VoIP telefoonnummers aanvragen. Hiermee houdt XS4ALL de belasting op de systemen laag en kan er direct op storingen worden gereageerd.
U kunt in het Service Centre twee VoIP telefoonnummers aanvragen. Aanmelden en het gebruik van deze basis VoIP dienst is kosteloos. De VoIP telefoonnummers beginnen altijd met 087-87. U kunt uw VoIP telefoonnummer niet zelf kiezen.

De ochtendstond heeft dus VOIP voor in de mond. Ik heb twee nummers (opeenvolgend) en nog "mooi" ook. "skype is so yesterday", "googletalk is so not hip".

Maar het echte voordeel? Het is SIP (ik weet googletalk is ook SIP, maar ik vind de UI van GOOG Talk very sucky), te koppelen aan een volgend jaar te bouwen Asteriks PABX.

De softphone die XS mee levert is enkel voor Windows beschikbaar en is een "ge-brande" versie van sjlabs ( en dus niet een eigen ontwikkelde versie zoals onze creme-de-la-creme weet te melden)

Dit betekent wel dat ik nu drie softphones op mijn windows PC's heb staan, Skype (gebruik ik veel, ook IM functionlaitiet), Googletalk (gebruik ik nauwlijks, is wel mijn Gmail notifier) en nu dus de SJLabs phone. Tijd voor een softphone consolidatie project.

Skype trouble

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 04:12:47 +0100

Technology Evangelist, Skype CAN get you in trouble...

Here's a little story about how this little smiley face Skype Me Icon can get you in trouble.

Yep, shared userid story...

As you can see, my wife interrupted my chat session with "indiana_girl" from Russia. Then she called me to get to the bottom of this. Coincidentally, seconds after my 1:04:39 chat message to indiana_girl, I undocked my laptop, walked to the other end of our boardroom table, re-docked my laptop, and started my Skype video demo. I noticed my wife was calling while setting my my demo but didn't take her call, so she had a good 30 minutes to stew about what the heck I was doing on Skype while supposedly "at work."

My G/F has an own account on my computers but she seldom uses them. And skype is logged on by default so something liek this could happen to me as well. Now I am smart enough not to fool around... ~~on skype~~anywhere so THIS wont happen to me.

Caller Line ID faked with Astrerisk

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 09:44:32 +0100

During the DrupalCON more than a month ago now, someone demostrated me the Drupal module for Asterisk, an opensource VOIP PABX. One of the things I thought was odd, is how easy it is to fake the CID. I was dialed by +55 555 555 555. For IP, there is something like ingress filtering which should make it impossible to fake your source IP address on the internet. It seems that the telo's dont have this (yet).
Do It Yourself Caller ID Spoofing

Spoofing Caller ID information is really simple these days. All you need is a few bucks and some open source software. The following steps should have you spoofing away in no time.

Tim speaks about Web 2.0 (and got a point)

Sun, 02 Oct 2005 14:38:08 +0200

Tim O'Reilly wrote a nice article on 5 pages about Web 2.0. Read it to know what is going to be the future, why Microsoft beat IBM in the '90 and Google will defeat Microsoft this decade. Buzzwords include: RSS, AJAX, OSS, GPL, TIVO, DHTLM, Firefox, VOIP and AJAX. But still, he has got a point.