Bleeding Edge

Gold medal VoIP savings

2008-08-08T00:03:06Z

We elite athletes in the Savings Olympics know that gold medals are not won purely by individual ability. Success requires the sustained efforts of a team of dedicated experts and supporters.
That's particularly true for the David and Goliath event of our Olympiad, which pits competitors against the might of telecommunications giants like Telstra. We've won silver and bronze medals in this event with the deployment of a Linksys SPA3102 analogue telephone adapter, which we wrote about last year, and with a basic installation of an Asterisk open source PBX solution at the Bleeding Edge cave a few months ago.
But to have a chance at gold, we knew we'd have to install an Asterisk system in the spouse's business, which handles many more calls on several extensions and requires sophisticated facilities like interactive voice response.

]]> In the establishment phase of the business, we'd used a hosted PBX plan offered by Melbourne-based Mytel, which is essentially an Asterisk service hosted in a data centre. For a $49 set-up fee, and $12.95 per month per extension, it allowed us to make cheaper VoIP calls over the internet, with voice, mail, IVR and other facilities that are normally available only to larger companies with much bigger budgets.
Our arrangements allowed us to trim our office and home phone bills from $359 per month in mid-2007 to less than a third of that, despite a dramatic increase in the number of calls. But while mobile calls over Mytel are considerably cheaper than Telstra's rates, they were becoming an ever-larger component of the bill.
As the business grew, we would also have to introduce some more handsets. At $12.95 per month apiece, we knew it was time to have our own Asterisk box on-site, despite the hardware costs and the prospect of having to provide our own tech support if something went wrong. Even with our reduced call costs, the savings would pay for the equipment in less than a year, and it would be easier to add features like call filtering and call monitoring.
For that we'd have to have an expert team that could navigate a system that is beyond the capabilities of even quite experienced computer users. We could have paid a couple of thousand dollars to a professional team to do the job, but fortunately the world of Asterisk seems to attract enthusiasts who are prepared to offer the benefit of their experience, either for free, or for very competitive rates.
Our first indication of that was Ben Sharif, a retired systems analyst who lives in Penrith, NSW, from where he has maintained an active presence on the Whirlpool VoIP forum and more recently in elastixconnection.com.
A phone call to his home gives you an indication of the power of Asterisk. The call is picked up by Asterisk's inbuilt IVR system. His wife Rohani's recorded voice first informs the caller that they do not accept calls from direct marketers or political parties, then allocates numbers 1 to 5 to each member of the family. We pressed 1 for Ben.
If we'd called from a number without caller identification, we'd have been met with another menu that requires identification and a brief description of the purpose of the call. That gives the Sharifs the option of rejecting the call, without the knowledge of the caller. The IVR acts as an automated white lie generator, simply informing the caller that "The party is not available". Somehow, we feel those automatic counter measures should be available in every home, in an era where companies are using advanced technology to pester prospective customers.
Ben has entered the numbers of direct diallers into the Asterisk filters, so the system automatically blocks a good proportion of unwelcome callers.
He's written a series of free guides to Asterisk-based systems: Trixbox Without Tears, Elastix without Tears and PiAF (PBX In A Flash) Without Tears, which prospective Asterisk users can download as PDF files. The detailed explanation contained in TrixBox 2 Without Tears allowed us to get an understanding of the Asterisk distribution we eventually decided on, and would have allowed us — albeit with a good deal of tinkering — to put together our own box.
Fortunately, however, we had an even better source of assistance: Nathan Pinskier, director of a company called Medi 7 (voip@medi7.com.au) which has five medical clinics in inner and south-east Melbourne. The Asterisk servers rolled out by Nathan and his 19-year-old son Samuel — an aerospace engineering student who has become an Asterisk expert — has trimmed the company's phone bill from $5000 under Telstra in 2005, to around $2000, which includes the cost of about 10 broadband services.
They guided us through the process of selecting all the components for the PC that would run our Asterisk solution; pointed us towards a couple of investments to avoid potential problems; helped up choose handsets and VoIP providers and eventually packaged up the TrixBox application.

Hey Steve. Stay off our cloud

2008-08-06T14:22:01Z

It must have been the Papal visit that misled us. All those spiritually-minded youths descending on the place; all those gratuitous blessings being bestowed on us Australians by the Holy Father … well … it was bound to go to our head.
We'd spent an entire week bathed in some form of ethereal calm, completely unperturbed by the petty irritations that have so often had us indulging in unseemly displays of ill temper, criticism and associated negativity.
And then, just as we were starting to think that we'd become a more highly evolved person, Steve Jobs updated iTunes again, and we found ourselves, yet again, thinking uncharitable thoughts, and failing once more to love our brothers and/or sisters in Silicon Valley.
Still, we think we should be granted some form of dispensation, on the grounds of provocation. This time the sneaky devil installed an icon for Apple's MobileMe service, without our knowledge and permission, in our Windows Control Panel. Having resisted buying an iPhone, it was useless to Bleeding Edge, so we were forced to go searching through the Add/Remove Programs section and uninstall something called "Apple Mobile Device Support". That brought back the memory of just a few months ago, when Jobs tried to sneak in an installation of his Safari Web browser, under the guise of "updating" iTunes.
We've been meditating on the possible motivations for this, and we've come up with an explanation. While it may seem a touch fanciful, we're pretty sure we are on the right track: Jobs is trying to climb onto our cloud.

]]> This didn't dawn on us until quite recently, due to the fact that we weren't aware of the existence of this cloud, or our personal proximity to it. We discovered it only when we started to explore further the concept of the network as computer which we mentioned last week.
We thought we were embarked on a purely personal journey, but it seems we're just one more participant in a movement that has been dubbed "Working in the Cloud".
In our case, we probably started levitating towards this condition quite innocently, a few years ago, when we began using the IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) email services of Fastmail.fm. Because IMAP email is stored on the server, rather than being immediately forwarded to an email client under the more common POP (Post Office Protocol), users can access it from any internet-connected device.
We experimented with several IMAP-enabled email clients to access our Inbox, but we've always reverted to the web interface, which we access through the Firefox browser. In cloud computing, it's the browser that becomes the focus of activity, which is no doubt why Steve Jobs tried to spirit Safari on to Windows PCs.
Despite the subterfuge, Jobs and for that matter Bill Gates' Microsoft have found themselves playing second or third fiddle to the browser of choice for us denizens of cloud computer land — Firefox, which has become even more attractive for these sorts of activities with the release of version 3 (recently updated to version 3.0.1). We particularly enjoy using keyboard shortcuts like Alt-D to jump directly to the address bar, or typing in a word then hitting Ctrl+Enter to turn it into a www.something.com address. You might be interested in some useful Firefox shortcuts.
The other winner is Google, with its own IMAP-capable service Gmail becoming the spearhead for powerful browser-based applications. While we still rate FastMail as a superior email service, we've also got a couple of Gmail accounts. They're free, powerful and a useful backup, but they also serve as the gateway to invaluable cloudish services including Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Google Maps and iGoogle, the personalised home page and "gadget" centre, which we've found compelling. You can learn how to get the most from them with these iGoogle tips.
If you use Gmail, you'll probably be interested in several Greasemonkey scripts that enhance its utility, and have been packaged as Better Gmail, available from
Google's focus on cloud-dwelling workers is being continually updated and improved, requiring one to track its developments at, say, the Google Systems blog.. Last week, for instance, there was the public release of Google Knol — a Wikipedia-like knowledge sharing tool which allows authors to write, share and potentially "monetise" articles
Many cloud workers use Google Docs (docs.google.com) to create and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Others use Campfire to create online collaboration spaces for group chats and document sharing. We went looking for some ideas for a typical cloud-based collaboration system.
We'd be interested in readers' suggestions for other useful cloud-based applications.
Recently we've started using Penzu. It's a free Web-based journaling service that works with Firefox or Opera (but not Windows Explorer). One of our first entries, which we've decided to share with Steve Jobs, explores our feelings about people who board our little cloud without permission.

Throwing out the baby with the bath water

2008-08-06T11:25:03Z

There are two schools of thought about what to do when you think Windows gets dirty. Some people clean it with a vengeance. Some people don't. The Pro Cleaners often outnumber the Abstainers. Because cleaning seems to be logical and a way to a higher plane of existence. LifeHacker has an abstaining article for the non believers.

del.icio.us Tags: Windows,Tips

A good time to be paranoid

2008-08-05T23:03:12Z

In the rushes around the Bleeding Edge pond one of our favourite ways to pass the time is to relax with a good book by the terrific science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle. Jerry was kind enough today to send us a warning about a fake "Flash Player Update" which seems to be doing a particularly good job of getting unsuspecting users to install a particularly nasty piece of malware. The fake update is being spread by sites that are linked in an email titled "CNN Daily Top 10".

What's slightly depressing about this is that it isn't even newsworthy - it's just one of three malware threats appearing today. Just another day on the Internet...

So, why are so many people spending so much time creating fake web sites, virus laden emails, trojan downloaders, and other goodies? Money, of course! The days when viruses destroyed the contents of your hard drive are now long gone. Today, viruses generally do most of the following:

Make your machine part of a spam-sending network
Send virus-laden emails using your email account
Log your keystrokes when visiting online banking and other sensitive sites, and send the usernames and passwords to a central location
Install "hooks" on your PC to allow the virus writer to install new updates to their malware later

It's big business, and with the majority of Australians now online, it's a big threat. It's a good time to be paranoid.

No shame

2008-08-05T13:09:38Z

Just one day after our article about consumers being apparently ripped off by beijingticketing.com, they've now mysteriously disappeared from the Internet. But they're not gone - they're just hiding elsewhere. To be more precise, they're hiding over at www.theonlineticketshop.com - yup, that's the same gang, just with a different address.

Apparently a worldwide media storm and two lawsuits isn't enough to stop these guys from trying to make a quick buck from unwary online consumers.

Australian streets go Google

2008-08-05T00:15:35Z

The official release of the local version of Google Streetview allowed us to inspect the passing traffic's view of the Bleeding Edge cave. It's somewhat greener than the current view - what with having a couple of trees die off as a result of the brilliant management of Melbourne's water resources - but it was quite exciting, none the less.

The Bleeding Edge spouse was amused by our delight, in much the same way as she's amused by grand-daughter Indigo's fascination for the contents of the toy box. Her immediate reaction was a sense of invasion. The dialogue went like this:

"I don't want everyone knowing where I live."

"But everyone doesn't know where you live."

"Well, if they knew where I lived they could check it out."

"Yes, but they could just drive past and see it, couldn't they?"

"But they wouldn't."

Maybe people will case the joint from their desktops.. Maybe this will become the new national pastime ... checking out where people live without having to fill the petrol tank. If we'd known Google was taking pictures, we could have popped outside and waved from the porch. Or possibly held up a "Do Not Disturb" sign.

The press release suggests it could be the basis for a new form of virtual tourism.

Andrew Foster, Product Manager at Google Australia, commented: "Google Maps has its origins as an Australian invention so we're thrilled to bring Street View here as one of the first countries in the world. A lot of remote and regional Australia is now available to explore virtually - Tom Price, Gundagai, Longreach, Esperance, and so much more. Street View will allow people to visit places in Australia they may not have had a chance to experience before." "Google Maps and Google Earth are incredibly popular with Australians and are used by Governments, businesses and individuals as essential and informative tools every day of the week. Street View provides an added experience by enabling users to see street-level panoramas of Australia's public roads, including dusty outback highways, tropical northern beach roads and major city arteries".

What do you think about it. Delight? Or fright? And are you happy with the picture of your place? Did you make it into the shot?

Beijing olympics ticketing fraud

2008-08-04T05:55:22Z

The news is all over the media about the Beijing Olympics ticketing fraud. I was interviewed on ABC news today about this issue - I'll post a link to the video as soon as I have it available. It's a big story, and a tough reminder of how easy it is to get scammed online.

The allegedly fraudulent site is still up and still taking orders. It's hosted by Servepath, with domain hosting by Enom. If they are legally ordered to take the domain or site down, then they'll have to do that - but in the meantime it's their responsibility to fulfil the terms of their contract with their customer. We can't ask them to play "judge and jury".

On the other hand, the fact that the fake sites made they way up towards the top of Google's rankings is all due to sloppy reporting - Forbes Traveller (hosted on MSNBC) linked to fake sites for 3 of their 5 listed "official ticketing Web sites" (in fact, the fake 3 were all listed first!) One would think that before such an august publication created such a list that they might call the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to ask, but apparently just a Google search is all that's required to be considered a journalist nowadays...

Also in the firing line should be Google, which is running an advertisement for a scam site as their first link for the search term "Beijing Tickets".

But the real question is this - how can it have taken so long for Aussie consumers to get notified that they need to cancel their holidays because they don't have tickets? The Washington Post run an article on this scam site way back in February, and it was 2 weeks ago that the IOC and USOC filed suit against the companies involved. If the Australian authorities had at least taken action then, those caught up in this would have had time to make other plans - but now it's too little, too late for Australian consumers.

Buying Spinach

2008-08-02T09:01:37Z

Recently, I've been participating in computer forums and photography forums. It's a wonder to us who've been playing with these gadgets for years now, what we take for granted and what other people don't. Over the past 20 years, more and more high tech has been packaged into retail, off the shelf gadgets for the typical consumer. It is a good thing, to actualise, in your hand or otherwise, the work that our researchers and producers have laboured to produce. You may need a University degree or higher to carry out the research, development and design but you certainly don't need a degree to use this stuff. The mobile phone is one example - as long as you can dial a number, you're already using the third generation of wireless communication.

But what about the products where the consumer wants to choose? What criteria and what knowledge does the consumer need? Well, for the mobile phone, a choice of colour (pink, anyone?), size, bling value and yeah, it's gotta turn on and receive your provider's wireless signal. For a car, well, it's gotta have your personality match, not drink like the blazes and again, what colour please?

In some cultures, the choice is easy. Most of the buyer's are followers - "I want the one that my bro-in-law bought please". Someone buys one, shows it off to kin and a whole bunch of sales eventuates.

In Internet cultures though, we have the exact opposite - forums. You've never seen so much pixel peeping in your life. They compare Image Quality, Sensor Dynamic Range, Image Noise for digital cameras, they compare the 3D gaming performance in frames per sec for 3D video cards, the angle of view for LCD screens. As long as some lab makes a test, you have a lot of armchair evaluators giving their opinion. Everyone's an expert - courtesy of the internet where the most passionate essays are written and archived. Sometimes, you think you can see some crazys in the assessment but other times, you're not quite sure - the fellow could have 30 years in the industry and a Ph.D in something or other.

Where does this leave the "normal" person who doesn't want to just follow the herd, but wants to make a decision between competing models? Well, in my opinion, with a splitting headache, long hours of argument, research. And the possibility that, at the end of the day, after purchase, they still get buyer's remorse. Maybe that's what feeds eBay - lots of buyers remorse searching for a balm.

So, what or how do you make up your mind when you make a high tech, electronic purchase? Do you:

ask the salesperson for advice?
write the names on slips of paper and throw them into a barrel to pick?
do extensive research, spend hours and brainpower grokking or trying to grok the tech, then draw a purchasing matrix of features vs product?
come and ask at the Bleeding Edge Forum?
buy the most expensive because if you throw money at a purchase, you will have bling power?
buy the meanest cheapest product and then upgrade in a year?

del.icio.us Tags: Shopping,Choices,Gadgets

iPhone 3g Data Plans

2008-07-31T07:59:15Z

Following on from CW's 'Are we being heard?' post it appears Telstra are at least ~~listening~~ watching Optus and may rejig some of it's iPhone Plans and with '3' launching iPhone Support the iPhone plan comparison spreadsheet which will hopefully get an update should ease some iPhone plan pain choices.

Technorati Tags: iPhone,Australia,Telstra

TXTing can hurt ya

2008-07-31T02:40:43Z

Further to Charle's article on the dangers of using TXT abbreviations in professional communications, THE RAW FEED spotted this MSNBC article: Oblivious texters hurt as they walk, even skate.

Thx, but no thanks

2008-07-30T03:50:11Z

On the one hand, the brevity of text language could be seen as just one more step in the evolution of English, and even, possibly, a form of resource-management. Why waste four letters, or even a couple of words, when you can get the point across with two letters? On the other hand, it could cost you that new job.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the casual communications style of today's school-leaves and graduates could be turning off recruiters. They're not amused by emoticons, "thanx" emails and "hiya" communications, viewing them as evidence of immaturity and questionable judgment. Even whipping off a quick response from your mobile phone or Blackberry is considered by some as suggesting an "on-the-fly mentality".

According to Wendi Friedman Tush, president of Lexicomm Group - a boutique communications firm in New York - that "From my Blackberry" tag suggests convenience, rather than any deep reflection. Candidates "should sit down at their computer in a thoughtful way and do it, not while they're on their way somewhere".

eBay buyers looking for protection

2008-07-29T04:35:37Z

It looks like the seventh largest eBay Australia store has gone bust and the owner has done a runner to China. Ashes Moses from The Age reports "Over 450 eBay users who bought items from the seller - often at a price seemingly below cost - have left the company negative feedback on the website in the last 30 days."

"Those who paid for items using PayPal, which is owned by eBay, will be entitled to refunds through a new fund set up specifically to deal with this incident, PayPal managing director Andrew Pipolo said."

When added in contrast with the recent eBay, PayPal & ACCC issues the July 3rd statement from eBay will need to reassure the Australian eBay community that they are in fact:-

"eBay’s goal has always been to provide members with a safer experience. Under the current circumstances, we will continue to look for ways to do that while still offering a variety of payment choices."

Contributing to those WILFing moments

2008-07-28T09:25:32Z

A past colleague with an American sense of humour calls it "Futzing Around". The Poms call it WILFing (What Was I Looking For) moments. The Reuters article is a little narrow in the definition of the phrase, but it just happened to me. I reckon, I'm pretty cluey on being productive with Windows machines but once in a while, there's a flurry of hard disk activity, molassing of the input devices and then, yes, the "what was I actually trying to do" moment.

It went like this. I was setting up a free collaborative workspace with a new client, using Microsoft Office Live. This is a free facility where you can establish partitioned workspaces, put documents and files, then assign sharing permissions to other people - they don't have to be in your organisation. I went there in my heavily customised favourite Firefox web browser.

Didn't work, lah. I easily fired up Firefox with my alternate clean profile, without hassle. I soon got in. Some FF extension had been in the way. I sent an invitation to the client, things looked good.

But I really wanted this to happen in Internet Explorer 7 and for even smoother flow, allow Office 2007 to seamlessly Open and Save files to Office.Live.

Silly me. I fired up my IE7, normally loaded with my favourite Add-Ins and....the rotating version of the classic hourglass sat there, spinning. Hmmm. Must be a Javascript error caused by interference with one of the IE7 plugins. But wait, Microsoft has kindly created a clean profile for you as well, under Start Menu > Accessories > System Tools > Internet Explorer (No Addons). How do I know? Cause I took the time to handy dandy Google search - it just jogged my memory of such a mechanism.

But it didn't work still. Ok, try running IE7 the normal way, manually disable all the Add-Ons, even those I trusted. In the meantime, just to prove that IE7 itself would not be a problem, fired up my handy dandy virtual machine - yes, got in fine. Except that once alive, the Virtual Machine advised me to carry out Windows Updates. Subsequently followed by hard disk fervernt hard disk activity.

In the meantime, IE7 on the host was in and I started to download the Office Live extensions.Well one setup.exe led to a wlogin.msi and then there was the olconnector.msi. By that time the Virtual Machine had finished hard disk activity and could be put to sleep again.

Now, what was I trying to do, remind me.....

del.icio.us Tags: Office.Live,collaboration,InternetExplorer7,Firefox

Cleaning Windows

2008-07-27T05:24:48Z

We had the car windows up and the heater on last night, driving in Melbourne. It's nice to be able to put the words "rain" and "Melbourne" in the same sentence. The car windows got wet but I'm not sure that there was enough vigour in the rain to actually clean up the film of dust and gunk.

Whilst waiting for 37 musical competitors to finish their playing I got to thinking about Charles's poke at Windows and Stephen's response about keeping Windows in Steady State.

We've come a long way since the days of The Brain - and I guess our advice to keeping our PC secure would change.

On the other hand, some classic concepts of malware requiring a vector still applies, as my alert about the Mal/Autoinf-A and the W32/SillyFDC-H explains.

So many technologies are now in the soup that rabid IT specialists drink (full and partial virtualization, denying root/admin access, Host Based Intrusion Prevention System) as opposed to the classic anti-virus scanner. Trouble is, the general PC using public isn't aware of the state of the game.

Maybe it's time for a brief Knol on the basics of computer security. Meanwhile, I'll leave you with the a reasonable but old list of links.

del.icio.us Tags: PC security,Malware,Virus,Windows,Virtualization,Protection

MSY fails Google's malware test

2008-07-25T03:07:41Z

May we suggest that you don't visit the site of the popular hardware supplier MSY without checking it first with the Google malware tool? It looks like somebody has added some poisonous links to their site, and it's taking them quite a while to wake up to the tampering:

What is the current listing status for www.msy.com.au/?

Site is listed as suspicious - visiting this web site may harm your computer.

Part of this site was listed for suspicious activity 1 time(s) over the past 90 days.

What happened when Google visited this site?

Of the 77 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 33 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 07/23/2008, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 07/16/2008.

Malicious software includes 1 scripting exploit(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 2 new processes on the target machine.

Malicious software is hosted on 8 domain(s), including gitporg.com, butdrv.com, bnsdrv.com.

2 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including butdrv.com, gitporg.com.

We suspect this will have led to quite a spike in the number of infected PCs in Melbourne. We do hope GTO_Pontiac hasn't got caught by this one. He's constantly looking at MSY to do the numbers for his monthly update to our Workhorse PC specs in the Forum.