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Gadget Virus Complaints

It is enough to make you cry. That shiny new gadget you crave, went out and purchased and carried home with the utmost care could be home to a virus living snugly in your device's memory waiting for someone unsuspecting to plug it in.

It seems, more and more people are getting an extra surprise when they plug gadgets into their computers and it seems that even if you don't use the internet you aren't safe from malicious code. It is a really scary world out there.

[AP]

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FCC gets Investigated

I just get the feeling that the FCC Chairman in the united States has a job description that entails taking endless abuse from the rest of the government. Now Kevin Martin is getting slammed because the FCC is a massive bureaucracy that can't handle customer complaints.

Even worse, the bureau has just been investigated.

My question is, when did parts of our government get mad at other parts of our government for being a bureaucracy? Is this a new trend? For a few hundred years it seemed that our government felt it was best if things didn't work.

Has anyone looked at our tax code? This voluminous document is proof that the government likes to make things as complicated as possible and apparently hates trees more than Al Qaeda.

I just get the feeling the democrats are trying to push Martin out as he is close to the Bush administration. After all, The investigation was sought by Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce telecommunications and the Internet subcommittee.

The Government Accountability Office said the agency "needs to improve how it collects and analyzes data on complaints received, investigations conducted and enforcement actions taken to better manage its enforcement program."

In response, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said "the GAO put forward valuable recommendations" and Martin also said that since he became chairman, the commission has been responding to 100 percent of consumer complaints and has collected a record amount of fines, forfeitures and consent decree payments.

The GAO analysis examined data encompassing 454,000 complaints between 2003 and 2006.

The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, said the FCC processed about 95 percent of the complaints it received, opened about 46,000 investigations and closed 39,000.

About 9 percent of the closed investigations resulted in an enforcement action, while 83 percent resulted in no enforcement. The GAO said it could not determine why the investigations were closed without action because "FCC does not systematically collect these data."

The agency did its own analysis and said the vast majority of closures were due to a lack of information or a determination that no violation had occurred.

The report criticized the agency for failing to set performance goals which prevent it from "assuring Congress and other stakeholders that it is meeting its enforcement mission."

Things are not looking for Kevin Martin but the good news is, I hear there is an opening in the New York Governor's office.

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Google's Application Upgrade Feed

Google applications have been upgraded these past years and many times these updates are done quietly as they are software as a service SaaS applications and as such it wasn't obvious that people needed to know about these upgrades.

At least that is how many SaaS vendors start out. Then over time, they confuse users to tears as they can't figure out if the reason their programs look different in the morning is because of an upgrade the prior evening or a result of the major hangover from the prior night's holiday party.

Like many things in life, we can now keep track of all of the happenings in Google applications from a single RSS feed. As Google gets into more and more areas we can expect this feed to become massive... And it should be very interesting to see how many new features Google is able to add and how quickly they advance.

The first person of course to subscribe to these feeds was Steve Ballmer. ;)

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E-Mail Server Channel

So you are looking for a place to learn more about e-mail servers... You aren't content not knowing all of the news, opinion and analysis on the space. As you might imagine, as always -- I try come up with creative solutions to my readers' problems.

In this case, TMC has just launched an e-mail server channel on TMCnet and I invite you to bookmark it and return over and over.

This article about Dell and Ipswitch will give you some idea of what sort of content you can expect from this channel.

Finally, here is a link to a complete news alert on e-mail servers and some related topics.

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Snap Internet Communicator

So you think you have seen everything in the communications market? Well you haven't as there is yet a new product which kind of fits into a new category and kind of doesn't. The product is the Snap Communicator from Toucan Global.

The Communicator is basically a device which sits on a desk and allows you to use VoIP to communicate with other Snap Communicators. The company is focusing on the simplicity angle as a sales tool. You basically press a button to speak with another Snap user and and press another button have a conference with yet more people.

The gadgets do have presence built in and act pretty much like a unified communications application which merges IM and VoIP calling but without the benefit of IM.

The product also accepts voicemail and e-mails the voicemail as an attachment. In addition, the nifty gadget can conference up to four people.

The devices function a lot like Nextel walkie-talkies but only with no monthly fee and no wireless functionality.

If there is a downside it is that there is a cost to get around enterprise firewalls. Still, if this device helps you in your business, the $25 annual fee which is waived in year one is likely worth it.

Is there a need for such a product? Definitely... If there is a need for Nextel then there is a need for this device. Just like a walkie-talkie, you press a button on a device and are directly connected to others on the "network." In addition, there is an ease of use factor that some executives will like and branch office locations will really enjoy.

The units cost $99 retail and resellers are wanted.

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Bebo Bought

Boy was I glad I blogged about Bebo being purchased a few months back. The rumored acquirer was supposed to be Google or MySpace but it seems like AOL is getting serious about being a web player once again and came up with a not too shabby $850 to seal the deal.

The rumors said the price tag on this deal was to be as high as $1.5 billion and one wonders if the closing price includes some haircut attributable to the broader economy.

What this shows me is that media sites need more and more eyeballs to show their ads on. In addition it doesn't hurt to have hot properties that the younger crowd thinks is hot.

The wave or Internet roll ups continues onward with a special focus these past years on social networking. Where it ends, nobody knows.

[AP]

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Virus Fights Brain Cancer

Check out this great article on how a virus can be altered to cure brain cancer. While this is not something we can use to cure humans as of yet, the potential for this breakthrough is great.

"The brain cancers we look at are very nasty," said Anthony Van den Pol, a scientist at Yale University and a study author. "This virus is pretty good at killing all of the tumor cells."

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SMash: Secure Mashups

IBM has potentially opened the door to enterprise mashups, allowing for the first time these web services which rely on multiple data and/or programming sources to have security built-in. SMash which is short for secure mashup is what the new technology is called and IBM will be donating the technology to the OpenAjax Alliance.

What will secure mashups allow? In theory they unlock data and services so they can inter-work in a fashion which allows data to be used in a more synergistic format. For example, allowing data from disparate sources comes together in a single or multiple interfaces.

In reality, mashups themselves haven't changed as a result of this announcement but the data and APIs available to the mashup community has. For the first time, corporations will feel comfortable experimenting with mashups in their organization and they will likely expose more data and APIs to others as a result.

If you have heard me wax poetic about VoIP peering in the past and you get what the potential of peering voice between companies and providers can do, imagine what secure application and data peering can do for us.

In a way that is how I think of mashups -- as the ultimate application, service and data peering relationship... Where everything works together in a seamless fashion. As Zippy Grigonis points out in this article, IBM researchers use terms like "autonomic computing" to describe the intelligent systems that work behind the scenes to bring you what you want, how and when you want it. He equates this to how the body digests food and maintains blood pressure.

I don't expect this news to alter the mashup landscape overnight but I can imagine some really interesting systems integrator projects which can tie mashups into a company's core business processes. I am looking forward to seeing how the enterprise mashup market evolves as a result of this news.

The concept of secure mashups reminds me of my secure SIP blog from earlier this morning. Mashups and SIP were both invented to solve similar problems... Interoperability between communications equipment and data/services. And now as both of these markets have matured, we need to deal with the security issues that are inherently present in open communications systems.

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Voiceless Conversations

The above video shows an example of how Audeo from Ambient Corporation allows you to communicate by moving your mouth while not producing any sound

Just when you thought you needed to use your voice to speak, along comes Audeo, a neckband which uses the signals between your brain and vocal cords to translate your mouth movement into information a computer can understand. From there, "speech recognition" can be used to convert these signals into words.

This works whether you speak or not. People could converse with one another using text to speech and not making any sound themselves. In other words you could instant message others by just moving your mouth and not making any noise or using a keyboard.

It will be interesting to see how this technology progresses. Initially it targets people who have diseases impairing their speech and I would imagine the business market would be next.

The companies behind this breakthrough are TI and Ambient Corporation.

[Wireless News, TechCrunch, New Scientist]

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SIP Security Webinar

While SIP is an excellent protocol which has made the IP communications market a much better place, there are security challenges with this protocol as it is very open and not inherently secure. It is ironic that the openness of the protocol itself is exactly what makes it a challenge to secure.

To aid people looking for more information on securing SIP, in areas such as SIP trunking and enterprise SIP deployment, TMC has a free webinar taking place on April 10, 2008. You can also view an archived version of the webinar if you can't make this date.

Here is an article on the webinar titled The Basics of Secure SIP Trunking and a link to the registration page of the webinar.

I hope you enjoy the presentation.

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