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Michael Robertson Talks VoIP With Voxilla 107

Vick writes "Two 'Bad Boys' of internet audio, MP3.com's Michael Robertson and Kazaa's Niklas Zenstrom, are done taking on the recording industry. Now their big fight is with the telephone companies and, apparently, one another. In one corner is Zenstrom's Skype, a software-only VoIP product that uses its own protocol and is banking on the huge popularity of Kazaa for its success. In the other corner is Robertson's SIPPhone.com, trying to simplify VoIP, and using the standard SIP protocol, to try to bring internet telephony to the masses. In this Voxilla.com interview, Robertson talks about the future of VoIP and minces no words in explaining why Zenstrom and the Kazaa boys have got it all wrong." (Last month, we posted about Skype.)
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Michael Robertson Talks VoIP With Voxilla

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  • VoIP using P2P technology is a great idea, byt Skype looks like a proprietary solution (correct me if I'm wrong).

    Would someone care to enlighten me on VoIP/P2P solutions using open standards?
    • Re:Open standard? (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      SIP is a P2P standard. It pretty much follows the IETF party line of "Lobotomized Core, Smart Edge" in design -- all the intelligence in SIP call handling is supposed to be at the end points, handled by the peers. It tries very hard to make the network itself brain dead.

      It gets fuzzy around the REGISTER/location servers -- until every ISP has a SIP REGISTER/location server per domain name and/or hostname, SIP users are going to need some place to go where they can look up and find each others' network in
    • Re:Open standard? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mcrbids ( 148650 )
      VoIP using P2P technology is a great idea, byt Skype looks like a proprietary solution (correct me if I'm wrong)

      Try this one:

      Filesharing using P2P technology is a great idea, byt Kazaa looks like a proprietary solution (correct me if I'm wrong).


      Proprietary does not mean bad or unsuccessful.
      • Re:Open standard? (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Kazaa has spyware. So it is bad. You can't trust proprietary software.
      • Well, until Sharman starts locking out 'lite' clients, and charging for the network [it was a good way to see how a large system would work :)]
      • Proprietary does not mean bad or unsuccessful.

        In the context of communications it is bad.

        What about the damage Microsoft Word has done to information interchange? How about those early proprietary TCP/IP alternatives? Pretty much any example of a proprietary data exchange protocol is an example of how proprietary is bad.

        This is one area where Sun Micro actually gets it with J2EE and their Sun ONE stuff. They aren't interested in information lock-in as a way to keep customers.
    • Re:Open standard? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well, if you'd read the article (Or, probably, more likely, if you could actually get to the article, which seems to currently slashdotted) you'd know that Skype is totally propeitary and the mp3.com guy's product is based around an open standard (SIP). The mp3.com guy spends a decent portion of the interview explaining that he thinks Skype will eventually lose out for just that reason, that it is propeitary.
    • VoIP using P2P technology is a great idea

      You mean IP (i.e. the protocol)? Yeah, it's a great P2P technology.

      I haven't read the article, or even more than skimmed the summary, but seeing "P2P" and "Kazaa" remotely near "VoIP" had the "wrong!" buttons going off in my head: Is someone shoehorning onto a technology to get proximity credibility ("ooh, that Kazaa is great, so that VoIP solution must be awesome!"). Peer-to-Peer file transfer solutions seem to have perilously little in common with voice-over-IP,
      • Skype is VoIP using a P2P network for optimizing transmissions (IIRC), as well as "online" status, as Skype uses a contact list format. Probably for a few other things as well. Either way, it's not JUST a buzz word here.

        Also, as Skype is from the guy originally responsible for Kazaa, "P2P", "Kazaa" and "VoIP" all apply to Skype.

        See, I see "I haven't read the article" and bells start going off in my head, saying that this person probably has no clue what they're talking about. You know what? This time
        • Skype is VoIP using a P2P network for optimizing transmissions

          Read and parroting the ad copy [skype.com] are we? Here's the thing, though

          a) P2P "optimization" techniques are inappropriate to attempt to apply to VoIP (except for perhaps conference calls) - No one else can fill in parts of your source stream, so any "advanced" routing is trying to rebuild IP. I see a lot of nonsense intended for the uninformed on their page (reads like a miracle cure), but it just doesn't sound right. So to conclude, VoIP has a non-s

          • Skype uses a P2P network (in the popular sense of the word, not in the technical sense in which case all end to end VoIP is P2P) to achieve two things:

            1) The directory service.

            By keeping the directory service in a P2P network, they don't need a centralized directory server and can save money (consider if ICQ had done this - Mirabilis wouldn't have had to sell out to AOL). Technically, this is interesting exactly how they are pulling this off, since searching in such a directory is harder than P2P (Kazaa s
    • VoIP using P2P technology is a great idea, byt Skype looks like a proprietary solution (correct me if I'm wrong).

      Would someone care to enlighten me on VoIP/P2P solutions using open standards?

      You are correct about Skype being a proprietary solution, but the interviewee in the article (RTFA, btw) is Michael Robertson who is currently pushing SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and his SIPPhone.

      SIP appears to be an open standard and enjoys wide support. Upon brief googling, I found:

    • by billstewart ( 78916 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @03:09AM (#7198053) Journal
      There are two and a half main standards for VOIP. All of the standards use the same codecs - the big differences are in how you set up connections and calls.
      • H.323 is the old standard, which almost everybody supports. It's a bit complex and ugly, and looks a lot like the ISDN telco standards. Microsoft Netmeeting supports it for video as well as audio. If you just want to connect two things together, H.323 will work fine, but if you want to build any sort of complex system, it's pretty clumsy. If you want to connect two new fancy systems together, and they're not really compatible, they'll often fall back to H.323.
      • SIP is the main new standard, and everybody says they're going to use it Real Soon Now (particularly the VOIP router and PBX folks), though many of them don't actually have it implemented on all of their products yet because they've got too much embedded base. SIP is a much simpler and cleaner protocol, which looks like something written by Internet Unix developers who weren't worried about their embedded base of ISDN telco code.
      • The extra half is "Skinny", Cisco's proprietary protocol that most of their IP PBXs and IP phones use, developed before SIP was sufficiently standardized. H.323 was too much baggage, though most of that equipment can fall back to it, and most of it will handle SIP Real Soon Now.
      • Yes, Skype is proprietary and closed. Too bad, because it seems to be trying some interesting approaches to user interaction and directory service.
      • Speak Freely is one of the best open-but-non-standard systems out there - it was an early attempt to do a crypto phone. Unfortunately, its originator and main developer has decided that there's too much NAT in the world to make it worth continuing to develop it; getting around that takes a major redesign.
      • A lot of Instant Messaging systems of various sorts have added VOIP capability.

      There's a LOT of open standards VOIP work - see openh323.org [openh323.org] and other usual suspects. It turns out that many of the VOIP hardware makers are really happy to fund open standards development so there's something for their equipment to talk to, whether they make voice cards for PCs (either single-user or small PBX cards), or IP PBXs that want more features to make them interesting to users, or boxes that provide some glue function, or whatever, and even Cisco is funding some of them, and some of the little software companies are happy to do open standards work as part of consulting to the hardware people.

      New PBXs are pretty much all migrating to IP-based; it's much easier to reuse low-cost PC hardware platforms and build good tools that way. The big PBX makers are generally taking their old PBXs and adding IP features on the side (as opposed to the big router makers adding VOIP boards to connect to old PBXs and telcos), and the real question for most of their customers is when to rip out the old stuff and replace it (for new buildings that need PBXs, it's obvious that IP PBXs are the way to go), because you really start to get operational benefits when you can interconnect multiple locations that way. The PBX industry could have gone to quasi-open standards with ISDN in the late 80s, to take advantage of the reduced development costs and simplicity, but it mostly didn't happen.

      The real complexities are the interactions with existing public switched phone companies. There's a huge amount of economic and regulatory baggage built around who pays who how much money when a phone call gets handed off between parties. In the US, there's the originating local telco, the long distance telco (if it's long distance), the delivering telco (if it's not the originating telco), and the Gore Tax folks, all of whom want their cut of the money, and the settlements and pricing aren't really appropriate to the much lower costs of IP telephony, and the prices and regulators are different for intra-state vs. inter-state calls. In the international calling market, this

      • What are some of the 911 workarounds?? I am currently in the process of purchasing a voice PRI and reselling it ot a number of businesses in town and this is one of my concerns. I was thinking maybe being able to set CID on outgoing and registering the various DIDs with the proper addresses but I'm not sure how well it works.

        In my case, anyway, all the termination points are unmoving so I might be able to get away with 911 by setting the CID on outgoing. Hopefully, anyway. :-)
      • Between H.323, SIP, and skinny:

        which ones are designed to explicitly forward ANI information for caller identification? Or is that controlled by whomever provides the service at the junction between the public telco network and the Internet?

        You sounded like the guy who might know. :-)
    • At the moment skype is in beta. I'm thinking they're unsure what to do with it. If they were to open the standard they could be giving away the goose with the golden eggs.

      The technology is awesome. I was on the phone from Europe with a colleague in the US, he called me because I wasn't on Skype. Then I booted into windows, started up skype and while still on the regular phone talked over skype as well. The skype signal arrives much faster and is of a much higher quality. Naturally it has everything to do

  • The problem is, that it is a proprietary solution, and like kazaa, it will probably only have a windows version, while the rest of us Mac OS X and Linux users will have to reverse engineer a poorer client.

    Does anyone know of any cross-platform VoIP/P2P apps?
  • Note: I've not used the SIPPhone, nor do I know much about the protocol.

    That being said, back the standard that is open to scrutiny, can be updated and improved, and that others can build on.

    P2P sounds nice, but if it's proprietary, one company holds all the cards, and if they fold...

    Hey, I made a punny!
    • by Anonymous Coward
      ... not so open your brain falls out.

      The flip side is that sometimes a standard can be *too* open, too easily built upon, and it fragments because no one can agree on exactly what it is any more.

      User_A has a SIP phone that supports session-timer, OPTIONS, REFER, and NOTIFY. User_B has a SIP phone that supports rel-100, PRACK, SUBSCRIBE, and NOTIFY. User_C has a SIP phone that supports MESSAGE, session-timer, and OPTIONS. All of these are SIP phones, and you could probably make a phone call between all
      • Good point.

        However the standards make it easy for other people that want to join the bandwagon and support as many RFCs as possible (not your friendly neighbourhood monopoly/big guy but just a couple of guys slapping together some Perl/Python etc). It evens the play field. And with the Open Source implementations (VOCAL/OSIP etc), it makes the barrier to entry almost invisible.
  • OSH (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hear ye hear ye

    WELCOME TO OPEN SOURCE HELL

    It's a well known fact that open source is like Hell. Besides the obvious uselessness of open source (open source is more like open sauce- if sauce is left open, it spoils. It's also like open sores, where sores left open fester) and the total niggerfication of Linux, it's obvious that using open source is like going to Hell, only thousands of times worse.

    When Bill Gates sent his only begotten son to die on the cross for your sins, he didn't plan for all of us t
  • Open standards are the best solutions for standing the test of time. Proprietary solutions are at the mercy of the owner. The birth of the moden internet is usually marked as the time the protocol was switched to TCP/IP. Imagine something as wide reaching as the internet being able to function at the level it does if more than one concurrent standard would be in use. Every day people find use for the internet. THe internet is the modern swiss knife. With one tool you can research papers, buy anything, get p
  • Would 'taking on the recording industry' include illegaly and stupidly ripping thousands of CDs and making them available for download from your website?

    I'm willing to say that Kazaa and MP3.com have done more to harm legal P2P and legal MP3 usage/distribution than anything else. I'd rather they had never existed.
    • legal p2p and legal mp3 distribution?

      I'm sorry, this argument is brought up a lot, but doesn't hold water.. stinks of the pedophile that claims "It's not about fucking nine year olds, it's about enjoying the natural beauty of children".

      What do you think gets shared on p2p? Do-it yourself standup comedy routines? Independent music?

      The amount of independent music on p2p networks is vanishingly small. Sure, it may go up in the future, but let's not blink innocently and talk about how p2p is an "independe
    • What harm did mp3.com do?
  • The writer of the article seems to have drunken (grammer? [sp?]) the Kool-Aid. The giveaway is

    In a way, Robertson is trying to do with SIP what he did for MP3 and later with Linux with his still-kicking Lindows operating system: Take a technology that works well but is understood only by the geekiest of computer users, simplify it to its most basic form, and market it to typical consumers directly.

    OK, Robertson may have capitalized on these trends as they were becoming mainstream, but he's really been


    • Wonder what this means for Lindows. Can MR run a SIP phone business as well as Lindows? The story I heard about the funding of MP3.com was classic dot-com mythology, though it is evidently true:

      Monday: Sequoia Capital: Hello Michael, we are interested in seeing your business plan. Can you send it to us? We would like to review it and fly down to talk to you on Wednesday.

      MR: Oh, OK, I'll send it to you. (Feverishly writes up 2 page plan.)

      Sequoia calls back later in the afternoon: Michael, you don't have to

      • Why would Lindows need a VC? Their founder has >$370m (from the sale of mp3.com) himself, something that surely wasn't the case when he started mp3.com...

        • MR didn't get anywhere near that kind of money. That's the selling price of the company, not the net to him. How much he made has not been made public, though I'm sure it was a decent piece of change. Who knows, maybe Lindows is profitable and they don't need VC. Seems hard to imagine, however.

          That's why I'm speculating he may be more interested in the SIP phone. It seems MR cares about OSS only to the extent it can make money for him. If Lindows isn't going to get the return for him MP3.com did, it's on to

      • Lindows is not competing with IBM. IBM has shown very little interest in Linux on the desktop. The truth is IBM lost the desktop market to Dell years ago (although they do sell some nice laptops).

        Who Lindows is competeing with head-on is Microsoft. Try telling that to a VC:) I don't think he was planning on getting too many investors. He had his own money to invest in the Lindow distro, and development costs were not exorbient because the vast majority of his product was free.
  • One version is just software on individual computers connected to the internet allowing 'Voice over IP' to other computers connected to the net.

    The second version is the one that allows someone on the internet to actually connect to the phone company's system and make someone's actual phone ring.

    The first version is nothing special.

    The second version was big on the net until most free version went bankrupt because ad revenue wasn't there. I could make a long distance call across the USA for free which wa
    • The story does make it clear that both SIPPhone and Skype offer IP-to-IP VoIP connections.

      Since Voxilla.com is mostly about VoIP, the distinction between this kind of service (which you say is "nothing special") and IP-to-Phone service (your "second version") is pretty much evident throughout all the site's pages.

      As for IP-to-IP VoIP not being "special," I think a lot of people (including the 60,000 or so who have signed up around the world with Free World Dialup, the 1.2 million who have signed up with S
  • VOXILLA.COM Staff Report

    It says a lot about the future of internet telephony [voxilla.com] that two of the most successful bad boys of the internet - Kazaas Niklas Zenstrom and MP3.coms Michael Robertson - have turned their attention to promoting the growth of Voice over IP.

    Both Zenstrom and Robertson incurred the ire of the music industry and the Recording Institute Association of America because the technologies they helped establish made it much easier to download copyrighted music over the net. Robertson came fi

  • I am interested in the technical aspecs of these protocols.

    Whats the main differences between SIP and Skype ?
    What are the advantages of each ?
    • Easy one: 1) Differences: The SIP-based solution provided by Robertsons SIPPhones is hardware, ie. you get an actual telephone, but you plug it into your LAN instead of the phone line. On the other hand, Zenstroms Skype is a neat little Windows program that has the nice feature of being able to connect through almost any firewall or network furball. I for one can vouch for that -- I've spent tens of hours trying to get Netmeeting to connect between Denmark and Germany. Skype is free (so far), but only av
    • SIP is an open protocol and Skype is using existing VoIP protocols (SIP, H.323?) and then "embracing and extending" them with extra functionality (read: proprietary extensions). Sound familiar? I'd back the provider using the open, documented protocols....
  • 2 Things (Score:4, Insightful)

    by eenglish_ca ( 662371 ) <.eenglish. .at. .gmail.com.> on Monday October 13, 2003 @12:53AM (#7197884) Homepage
    VoIP will not make it unless two things are satisfied:

    1. That a standard protocol is established. 2. It is packaged in a convenient form so that minimal effort will be required of people switching from land lines.

    The obvious attraction of VoIP is not enough on itself to make it succesful, rather it will need a big push in order to get going. All I have seen so far is that it has barely advanced beyond the simple voice chatting features of an IM client such as ICQ. It needs to become more than just a fancy feature to list out. A standard protocol is without question the key as it was the creation of the 802.11 protocols that allowed WiFi to take off into what it is today. my 2 cents.
    • ...before these two signed on. Well actually Skypes is not anyhting really impressive VoIP anyways. and SIPPhone's main attractor is it is an all in one SIP device as opposed to a router that a phone gets hooked to, and that they are not operating with month to month fee's- buy the hardware and your done. Of course though they are not a telco or any for of carrier but more a directory service (411) and hardware retailer. Maybe he fully expects that he can make enough profit from each sale then bugger out at
      • I am using skype to call from malaysia (dsl) to california (dialup) and i am STUNNED at the quality and low latency in skype. This is the 1st voip app I have used that does not require headsets to cancel nanoying echo when talking to people on dialup connects.

        broadband to broadband is better than using the phone when it comes to delay, dialup is about the same or better. i am used to 1/2 second delay on calls from asia to usa.

        the product is beta, they have mentioned plans for mac, pocketpc & linux fur
    • you will be very pleased to hear that the sipphone fulfils both of your criteria

      it is using a standard protocol (the main point of the interview)

      and it is packaged in a convenient form
      1 open box
      2 plug it in
      3 use
    • Re:2 Things (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) * on Monday October 13, 2003 @03:30AM (#7198069)
      The obvious attraction of VoIP is not enough on itself to make it succesful, rather it will need a big push in order to get going. All I have seen so far is that it has barely advanced beyond the simple voice chatting features of an IM client such as ICQ.

      The interesting thing about SIP is that it is a generic protocol for starting and running conversations. It's not limited to one medium like say Jabber is limited to text IM only. You can use SIP for IM, VoIP, videoconferencing, file transfer, shared whiteboards, whatever you want. It's pretty cool. And it has loads of real-world vendors behind it. Forget about dodgy startups like Kazaa, I'm talking Nortel, Alcatel, Microsoft, et al. That's important because these are companies that ship real products (i.e. phone on your desk, the phone switch in the basement of your office, etc etc). They can simply roll SIP in and migrate customers very smoothly to it. The analogy to MP3 doesn't really hold, because the real strength of SIP from a consumer perspective is that it will be transparently embedded in everyday items - most users will never even hear about it.
  • by cyril3 ( 522783 ) on Monday October 13, 2003 @01:03AM (#7197896)
    The telcos make lots of money at the moment out of selling circuts for varying periods of time for voice calls. So every time you make a call to China you hire a circut for a short time and make your call.

    The internet comes along and suddenly lots of circuts are open for extended periods for a single fee. In Australia it took a long time for Telstra to accept that internet data calls should not be charged on a time basis. They realized at last that if you're a telco that's OK if its a marginal exercise and you can add circuts into the core network to utilize capacity (even if you have to provide additional capacity it can still be profitable at the margin).

    But now someone wants to move all traffic into the additional lines and leave your 'core' circut sales out of the equation. So before you would call China twice a day and it would cost you $1.00 for the call and 20c for the daily internet connection. Now with VOIP you get it all for 20c. The low income additional circuts have to pay for all network costs.

    Even if you think telcos overcharge they will be reasonably upset if suddenly all their long distance calls go VOIP and they get no income from them but still have the same traffic volumes.

    Does anyone think they will sit and watch it happen.

    • >Does anyone think they will sit and watch it happen.

      In Europe that's pretty much what they'll have to be doing unless they develop a large enough lobby to overthrow the current legislation. Which is unlikely because Europeans can call the US for something like 5 eurocents a minute thanks to deregulation of the long distance industry. (Whomever is in the EU and paying more should hook up with a better company) Overturning that would be fairly impopular with the electorate.

      The problem is that ex monop

      • My call charges has been reduced for almost every bill the last years, yet the bills get larger because of the telephone company raised their monthly connection cost.

        Going VoIP might finally slash that last cost, but in reality I'm using ADSL and still has to pay for the phone line even if I'm not making a single telephone call.

        Bottom line, with internet connection and cellular phone connection costs are many times higher than ever before. Though I hope that this makes everyone more open for alternatives
  • There is a real chance that Robertson's platform will take over the market for VOIP, because to date, there isn't a similar *consumer* handset marketed by the various Telco bigwigs (Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, etc), and funnily enough, Microsoft also hasn't picked up on the concept yet.

    Using an open technology platform for this also makes sense, as it enables third party providers to tailor SIP-based solutions without needing to sign up for a proprietary protocol.

    In fact, it seems like its only groups such
    • Microsoft also hasn't picked up on the concept yet They have. MSN Messenger 6.0 supports SIP, can make and accept SIP calls and connect to the appropriate directories. Microsoft rarely ventures into hardware business, with mice, keyboard, and wireless stuff the only exception.
      • Yeah, Microsoft would never venture into hardware, making say a sound card (Ancient Microsoft Sound cards exist), joysticks (they've made a ton of these, the original sidewinder being one of the better ones), network equipment (I see Microsoft branded wireless equipment at CompUSA all the time), a PVR (Ultimate TV or replayTV is their stuff), or a home console (The multi-billion dollar investment into the XBox is a sign they really, really, really want into hardware). Nope, MS would have nothing to do with
    • One cool idea I have for these units would be an optional expansion slot within which you could place some sort of crypto accelerator card.

      At 64Kbps, you ought to be able to do the crypto in software. Crypto is cheap enough these days that it should be in every network product.
  • <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <prompt>
    <audio>What you talking about willis?</audio>
    </promtp>

    <fiel d name="answer">
    <noinput>
    Just because you didn't make governor...
    </noinuput>

    <help>
    <audio>
    There is no help you're too short to compete again Ahnuld
    </audio>

    ......

    Ok seriously vxml is nice and all, but its
    expensive as hell to set up a functional
    site using it. Not only do you need the
    programmers, you also need ivr, asr, tts,
    vxml interpreters, not to men
  • Can you hear me now? Darn . . . What was that IP address again? Newt-dog
  • Sell the unit, with no associated service. You can call anyone else with a similar unit for free. If you call a telco line, you get a free three minute call, but you have to listen to a commercial first. You can buy more outgoing minutes into the telco network if you want to.
  • Damnit (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Cinematique ( 167333 ) * on Monday October 13, 2003 @02:31AM (#7197999)
    Is it just me, or is it really aggravating that Michael Robertson even gets media attention in the first place? This guy makes headlines promoting his(?) new business strategy focusing on The Next Big Thing. Yet every time he's tried, he's failed. MP3.com and Lindows stick out in my mind the most, and maybe there are others.

    Really... Roberson isn't coming up with ideas that nobody's ever heard of before, and he sure as shit isn't a marketing genius. So WHY do I keep reading about him in various places? What has he ever done to deserve the media attention that he gets?
    • Yet every time he's tried, he's failed. MP3.com and Lindows stick out in my mind the most, and maybe there are others.

      MP3.com is a failure!?!?!? The guy sold it for like over a quarter billion dollars. That's probably more than I could ever make (Or spend) in a lifetime!

      I'm not sure about Lindows, though. They seem to be coming out with lots of new stuff and they have that deal with Seagate now. Are Lindows PCs still sold at Wal-Mart?
  • SIP for Linux (Score:2, Informative)

    by kirun ( 658684 )
    Linphone [linphone.org] offers SIP calling for Linux.
  • Why not just use Speak-freely? It's non-vapor, public domain code, works really well, and doesn't have for-profit sleaze-ware hooks. The UNIX client talks to the Windows client without fuss, and overseas sound quality is usually better than the real telephone. Even on 56k dial-up. It'll work just fine on a 486 too. NASA used it to communicate with the Space Shuttle on several missions.

    Maintainership is in transition, but the package is already mature so that's not too big a worry.

    old homepage:
    [fourmilab.ch]
    http://www
  • "And so, on behalf of the entire city, I thank you Professor Robertsonworth. I now present you with the Internet Telephony prize, which we confiscated from Professor Zenstrom after it became apparent that he was a jackass."

    "Yes! In your face, Zenstrom!"

    - Yes, I'm easily amused. Why do you ask?
  • telemarketers start calling your SIPPhone?

    As it is right now, when you hook up a computer on the 'net, it is less than 5 minutes before someone is trying to hack it/anonymously FTP from it/spread a virus to it.

  • The Instant Messaging Standards Race:
    Comparing XMPP/Jabber and SIP/SIMPLE

    http://www.jabber.com/pdf/The_IM_Standards_Race_ v1 .0.pdf
  • http://www.openss7.org/

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