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Digium Gamechanger! Launches D40, D50, & D70 IP Phones

February 1, 2012


Today, at ITEXPO, the premiere communications event, Digium launched a line of IP phones that work in conjunction with their Asterisk and Switchvox solutions. This truly could be a gamechanger, since Asterisk is a popular IP-PBX solution that popular 3rd party phone vendors such as Aastra, snom, and Polycom offer products for. This move by Digium and the impact on these phone vendors could be quite interesting. This reminds me of 2008 when Aastra, a traditional IP phone manufacturer decided to offer a full-fledged IP-PBX based on Asterisk, called AastraLink. As I said during the AastraLink 2008 product launch:
Aastra Telecom has entered the IP-PBX game with the AastraLink Pro 160.

Zultys MX Release 7.0 Unified Communications Release Adds Android Support

January 31, 2012


At ITEXPO in Miami, Zultys today announced their latest UC software offering mobility features for Android, call center enhancements, and third-party CRM integrations. The latest major firmware release for the MX platform, MX Release 7.0 Unified Communications Software is a secure, all-in-one SIP-based IP phone system that is highly scalable and highly customizable. This version also includes enhancements to SIP security. 

Zultys introduced Zultys Mobile Communicator for iPhone and Blackberry users in MX Release 6.0.


Symantec - Disable pcAnywhere Now! Who the Heck Still uses it?

January 27, 2012

Symantec suspected in 2006 that its network had been breached, but when Anonymous started talking publicly about Symantec source code it confirmed their suspicions. According to Wired:
The company surprised the public last week when it disclosed that hackers had obtained source code for its pcAnywhere software and other products, and that the code had likely been stolen in a six-year-old breach that Symantec had never disclosed.

Symantec said in its announcement that users should disable pcAnywhere until the company had time to update the software to ensure that hackers are unable to exploit holes they might find in the code.

Disable pcAnywhere?

Spirit Airlines Claims Government Forcing them to Hide Taxes in Fares

January 24, 2012


Check out this email I got from Spirit Airlines discussing how our U.S. government wants to HIDE government taxes from the American people. Most transparent Administration ever! NOT! Seriously? How can we as a republic support or oppose a particular political party or candidate if we cannot see the policies they've enacted?

Pumped for StartupCamp5's Fast-paced Startup Pitches

January 24, 2012

I'm headed out to ITEXPO East, taking place next week from January 31 through February 3, at the Miami Beach Convention Center, in Miami, Florida. One of the the items of my must-see list is StartupCamp5 Comm Edition, collocated with ITEXPO East. I'm pretty pumped to see this, especially since at StartupCamp4, Internet / Ethernet legend Bob Metcalfe gave a phenomenal keynote, which was very well received. You can see his keynote here:

During the keynote Bob had some kind words to say about Apple's Steve Jobs, before Steve Jobs passed. It was obvious from Bob's emotions that he knew his friend Steve had limited time left.

Localphone Rings in Chinese New Year with Free Calls

January 18, 2012


Localphone is offering free calls to China to the celebrate the Chinese New Year, which is the Year of the Water Dragon in case you were wondering. They have made calls to China completely free for four days. They offered a similar 4-day free calling promotion for the American Thanksgiving holiday. Now if only they add in Christmas, New Years (Western), U.S.

Begun the Search War Has! Google+ Social Search Results in Bing Defections

January 13, 2012



Could Google's recent change "Search, Plus Your World" be a "Netflix" faux pas causing a similar mass exodus of users from Google to Microsoft's Bing search engine? Well, at least one high-profile website, Gizmodo has one of its columnists jumping ship.  The new search integrates Google+ (Google's Facebook competitor) content directly into search results. It includes "personal results" which include Google+ status updates, Picasa photos, blog posts, etc.

Hacked Asterisk PBX Update

January 12, 2012


I wanted to give an update to my Asterisk Hack Post-mortem article. By the way, I love this image of a hacker sporting a fedora in case you're wondering why I used it in both articles!

I found this interesting error in the logs:
zdump[27161]: error: Bind to port 10001 on 0.0.0.0 failed: Address already in use.

I knew zdump was a Linux command related to timezone stuff, but it shouldn't be taking a port. I found the zdump command:
[root]/var/log/bak2>ll /usr/bin/zdump
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 240512 Jan  6 13:36 /usr/bin/zdump

The date and time were roughly around the time of the hack.









Asterisk Hack Post-mortem

January 10, 2012


Having your production Asterisk-based phone system hacked is no fun, as I have learned from first-hand experience over the past few days. Even the best of IT administrators taking ever security precaution in the book dreads the day their critical server gets hacked. You hope you've done everything possible to stop your servers from being hacked, but you are never 100% sure. There is always some hacker smarter than you, but more importantly, smarter than the best security practices you put in place.
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