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Microsoft and Cisco think ICE is cool stuff!

November 10, 2005



Microsoft and Cisco Think ICE Is Cool Stuff!

By ROBERT LIU and TOM KEATING
TMCnet Editors

One of the biggest technological challenges confronting the voice over IP (VoIP) industry has always been the firewall. That’s because stray voice signaling and media packets originating from outside of the firewall or Network Address Translation (NAT) routers are exactly the type of thing they were designed to terminate.

Session border controllers (SBC) help to reduce the potential of lost or misdirected IP packets by establishing a proxy to send and receive incoming calls – essentially like creating a post office box to get your mail.

But Microsoft and Cisco Systems have come up with their own solution for NAT Traversal, as it is often referred to in the networking realm. On Thursday, the two technology giants plan to announce their endorsement of Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) – a draft standard under consideration by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to enable media traversal of NAT /firewalls. Both Cisco and Microsoft claim that this move is aimed at making universal Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and integrated communications more accessible for more customers, Starting next year, Microsoft will ship ICE as a client feature in its products like the flagship Microsoft Office 12.

ICE isn’t a new protocol.












Windows Defender

November 8, 2005

In case you hadn't heard the news, Microsoft changed the name of their anti-spyware software from Microsoft AntiSpyware to Windows Defender. Windows Defender will come included with Windows Vista.

According to a Microsoft blogger which broke the news, "As part of this engineering milestone, we've also started to prime the Windows Update software distribution channels with signatures for Windows Defender. This is important so the signatures are available when we ship the next beta. So, for enterprise and corporate customers that are using Windows Server Update Services, you will start seeing "Windows Defender" in the product category dialog as well as a new classification called "Definition Updates".

Xbox 360 has a camera?

November 7, 2005

Microsoft's XBox 360 has a camera? According to this article the Xbox 360 does indeed come with a camera. I wonder if it will feature the ability to display the video of the person speaking in an unobtrustive window in the lower-right hand corner? This would help with multi-player gaming and specifically multi-player "team" type games such as Halo2 or the impending Halo3.

If you can see the face of the person speaking it could help identify who is talking.

Microsoft's Singularity

November 7, 2005

Microsoft announced their Singularity operating system this week. Call me a geek, but I can't help think of several Star Trek episodes where a quantum singularity played a role in the plotline. If I recall my Star Trek, a quantum singularity could distort time. In fact, a singularity lies at the center of a black hole, where matter is crushed to infinite density and the pull of gravity is infinitely strong.

Microsoft's Bill Gates take on Google

November 4, 2005

I received my Entireweb Newsletter this morning and it had a couple of interesting quotes from Bill Gates taken from a Computing article.

First, check out this jab Bill Gates throws at Google:

"Which Google products are you talking about? Seriously? Other than search, which are you talking about? Google Talk?

Damn you Kernel Mode Caching!

October 17, 2005

Microsoft's IIS 6.0 comes with kernel mode caching for helping to speed up web page load times. Unfortunately, the kernel mode caching seems to have some side effects that are affecting my index.xml RSS feed that many of my blog readers subscribe to. You may have noticed that my blog web pages had blog entries that didn't show up in my index.xml feed until hours� later. The kernel mode cache was designed to take heavily accessed files and stick them in the kernel for faster retrieval.

According to Microsoft:
"The IIS 6.0 kernel-mode cache is designed speed up static file performance significantly by bypassing the need to do a kernel-to-usermode transition to generate and serve the response," says Eric Deilly, IIS 6.0 program manager with Microsoft.


Windows Vista update

October 17, 2005

Microsoft released an update to the test version of Windows Vista, the next edition of its flagship operating system.

The Windows Vista release is is the first in a series of monthly updates to the Community Technology Preview (CTP). Unlike previous betas, Microsoft is releasing more releases on a monthly basis to garner more feedback from those partiipating in the CTP. The update includes a number of new features, including changes in Internet Explorer 7.

It will also include:
• a "Network Center," a central place for managing network connections, replacing the "My Network Places" and "Network Neighborhood" from Windows XP
•� early version of Windows Media Player 11

I think I'll get my Windows Vista beta copy from BitTorrent since it'll probably download a heck of a lot faster than Microsoft's FTP servers, which are sure to be overloaded.







Vonage uses Covergence for e911

October 17, 2005

I had a conference call last week with Covergence, about their pending announcment with Vonage that explains that Covergence is the company that powers Vonage's e911 service. Covergence is an interesting company that has been stealthily flying under the VoIP radar screen, including my radar.

Basically, Covergence is similar to a Session Border Controller (SBC) but much more advanced offering unified security and management of network applications. For example, it is application aware, including SIP-aware and can route e911 PSAP information to the appropriate 911 emergency services gateway.

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