Voicemail. Email. Instant Messaging. SMS. Real-time. Near-real-time.
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Wednesday, 14 May 2008 |
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Despite the expectation that the emergence and adoption of unified communications will kill the need for voicemail and unified messaging products, AVST continues to experience mid 20% year over year growth, proving the expectation premature or just plain wrong. With the continued aging of large standalone enterprise-wide voicemail systems from the 1980s and 1990s, in particular Octel systems (now a part of Avaya), many customers are reaching out to AVST to deliver the next generation solution, or at least to implement a replacement that is current and supported. The larger systems in place in universities, government agencies and manufacturing companies for example, have been discontinued and are losing support which creates the opportunity for AVST.
The CallXpress 7.9.1 release offers several network improvements for disparate units to act as one service with easy message forwarding, backup, administrative control and call flow management services. Keeping pace with its role as an enterprise-wide application, the CallXpress offers SOAP-XML support for Web Services integration and rapid application development and deployment options using the Service-oriented architecture (SOA).
The integratable capabilities have been available for some time through various well-developed APIs, but are now gaining traction as more IP PBX vendors tout their SOA-orientation (notably Nortel, NEC, Avaya). Voicemail services including auto attendant, messaging, notification, scheduling and the like are not necessarily readily available from the base SOA PBX platforms, or are not available in enterprise-wide packaging.
Tom Minifie, the VP of Product Management at AVST also discussed the whole notification service requirements for enterprise-scale environments. These are important to enable the public safety application in university or local government settings (also large consumers of enterprise-wide, PBX-independent messaging systems). CallXpress allows for outbound SMTP, IVR and SMS communications, but aren't typically designed to support rapid notifications of thousands of users.
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Sunday, 04 May 2008 |
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A lot of bloggers and web properties are making hay of the 30th anniversary of Gary Thurek's unpopular email sent to all the users on the ARPAnet.
However unpleasant Gary's message was, it doesn't meet the standard test for spam.
The standard test for spam relates to four critieria:
- Anonymous - no. Gary did not hide that he sent the email in question
- Bulk - yes. Gary did send the message to many users.
- Irrelevant - no. Gary did send the email to people who were obviously users of PDP computers and would therefore likely be in a position to appreciate the improvement at DEC that he was promoting.
- Inappropriate - no. The message is quite appropriate.
So on these four counts, Gary's action is only 25% of the spam definition. Here's a picture of me with Gary at last year's Interop (I was in the Sendio booth).
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Tuesday, 15 April 2008 |
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Not good. Arstechnica.com writes about how spambots have cracked Windows Live Hotmail and Gmail's CAPTCHA disciplines. These services use CAPTCHA to prevent automated systems from signing up to their web email services. From there, the accounts can be manipulated into sending spam. Some ISPs have cut Gmail and Hotmail domains off, placing them on their block lists.
Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) is used to slow down automated web-entry techniques in every service type from blogs (avoiding blog spam), URL spam on search engines to email account initiation services.
Here on Brockmann.com, the blog spammers were such a nuisance, we turned off the comment option.
Maybe the only way Microsoft and Google can stop this nonsense, is to change the price for the email service to say $5/year. Maybe even giving the $5 to World Vision or the Cancer Society would make it easy for customers and more expensive than spammers.
Some of the anti-spam challenge-response services I've seen use CHAPTCHA. This is overkill. That's because CHAPTCHA isn't a realistic value add since spammers don't care about reply messages.
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Monday, 10 March 2008 |
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My first exposure to public key infrastructure was while working in Richardson TX at Nortel. About 1996, the Entrust organization reported into my boss' boss. As sister organizations it was appropriate to check out how we could use their technology and discuss how they could use our technologies. As part of that discussion, I began to study PKI technology - Nortel had secured years before a license to the RSA patents, and were attempting to commercialize the algorithm within an environment of message and file encryption and other services.
The big services of PKI were privacy via encryption, non-repudiation - evidence that only you could have sent the message, authorization - only folks with the appropriate credentials could have access to the engine, integrity - in that there were solid methods for assuring that the message received was the message sent and authentication - validating that only the authentic sender and addressees would be able to read the message. At the time there was a plugin for Microsoft Outlook so that a message could be secured or checked from within the email application. It also had a standalone application that could bulk encrypt files and folders for storage or transport.
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Sunday, 02 March 2008 |
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Jeremy Jaynes made $750,000 a month in 2003. Now, he'll be making license plates until 2017.
A notorious and convicted spammer, Jaynes lost his argument before the Virginia Supreme Court. He used aliases and 10 broadband connections. Apparently it was the aliases that showed he was more into trickery than promoting ideas. It is estimated that he sent 10 million messages/day. Here's A Thinking Man's take on the topic as a user of SpamArrest , a challenge-response spam filtering technology. Sendio is my solution and is extremely flexible and even minimizes the number of challenges through its use of graylisting.
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Wednesday, 13 February 2008 |
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DKIM DomainKeys Identified Mail is an emerging IETF authentication standard that cryptographically signs outgoing email to verify the legitimate sender of the email. NetworkWorld writes about it here. Here are three reasons why DKIM will be as unsuccessful as IPv6 has been.
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Thursday, 07 February 2008 |
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Linux.com reported that Trend Micros has been working to extract a patent license from Barracude Networks for a number of years and more recently brought the complaint to the International Trade Commission since the key software in question is written in international locations as part of the ClamAV open source project.
A couple of key facts to consider:
Trend Micro has a patent issued in 1997 on the use of SMTP and FTP services in a proxy device for anti-virus.
The patent has been licensed by Symantec, McAfee and Fortinet.
Barracuda's implementation, in an interesting twist involves Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) which is not a party to the lawsuit although it is the critical technology allegedly infringing on the patent.
Why would Trend Micro sue Barracuda and not the ClamAV project?
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The Value of Video Communications
