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April 07, 2020

• Digium Wi-Fi 6 and Why It’s Important

  There’s a lot going on now, and for this week at least, I didn’t want to write another remote work or WFH type of blog.   So I figured I’d take a look at some new technology that we’d all be using someday soon in your house or your enterprise.  So I zeroed in on Wi-Fi 6 as a good thing to write about.

  If you haven’t already, you’re going to start hearing about Wi-Fi 6. Wi-Fi previously had naming schemes like 802.11 and some letters. It was pretty techy. But the Wi-Fi alliance decided to make it simpler so the new version announced last year is called Wi-Fi 6 (would have been 802.11ax), and the next one will be Wi-Fi 7, etc.

  To use it, you need a Wi-Fi 6 device (like an Apple iPhone 11 or a Samsung Galaxy Note 10) and you’ll need a Wi-Fi 6 capable router.

  But why use it in first place? Faster speed obviously is a key thing. But with more and more households having multiple Wi-Fi devices (right now, a US household has an average of 11 connected devices) with no end in sight for the increase, slower internet could occur if all of these devices are on at one time.  Probably a lot of readers have noticed this – I certainly have when all my kids are home at the same time.  And you may have noticed this is you have a lot of people working at home right now.  A Wi-Fi 6 router is designed to help data flow to each of the devices, effectively keeping the speed going.

  And if it can do that at home, and at a public venue (an issue I’m sure we’ve all experienced!), it can certainly help at work, with many of us now simply connected via Wi-Fi instead of an ethernet cable.

  There are also improvements to battery life and security.

  So we’ll start to see this coming into work.  You may get questions about it or may be wondering about it.  First, we need to be on devices that support it.  And then the infrastructure the devices connect to need to support it.   And then we’ll be using it.

  The post Wi-Fi 6 and Why It’s Important appeared first on Sangoma.

April 04, 2020

• Jitsi Jitsi Meet Security & Privacy

  Jitsi Meet Security & Privacy

  For us Fellow Jitsters, developing a platform our users can rely on is the most important thing. That means, amongst other things, we are very mindful of the security and privacy aspects that affect our users.

  Security and privacy are very broad topics so we are going to try and go through some practical use cases to demonstrate what’s at play.

  Fully secure you say… What does this mean exactly?

  In many respects Jitsi meetings are simply private by design. To begin with, all meeting rooms are ephemeral: they only exist while the meeting is actually taking place. They get created when the first participant joins and they are destroyed when the last one leaves. If someone joins the same room again, a brand new meeting is created with the same name and there is no connection to any previous meeting that might have been held with the same name. 

  This is all very important. Some of the systems that let people “pre-create� rooms, have subtle indications that let a potential attacker distinguish reserved from unreserved meetings which then makes the reserved meetings easier to identify and target.

  That said, since a name is all that one needs to actually access a room, we have to be really careful about how we choose them. We don’t want others accidentally stumbling into our meetings, just as we want to keep pranksters and snoopers away.

  This is generally not much of a problem for small size deployments (remember you can host your own Jitsi Meet) but it may be a problem if you are using a large and public deployment such as meet.jit.si .

  If you start a meeting with the name “Test�, “Yoga� or “FamilyMeeting� for example, chances of having some random uninvited people joining are very, very high. How does one pick a good room name then? Our random meeting name generator is a great start. It offers names that are easy to remember and read out loud on a phone call, and come from a set of over a trillion possible combinations. Picking out one of the auto-generated names is therefore quite safe.

  If you don’t like the funky way the auto-generated names sound and you don’t want to use a long and uninviting UUID (which you totally could), then go ahead and pick a name by yourself but make sure it is long enough. For example, next time you’d like to have a coffee with someone over video, rather than going for meet.jit.si/coffee, try something with more of a twist.

  

  We are also working on a “bad meeting name detector�. You’ll see a warning if your meeting name has a high chance of collision, so stay tuned!

  We also give people the option to set a meeting password. A few important things to keep in mind: if you do set a password, it is your responsibility to communicate it to your peers.

  

  More importantly, keep in mind that your password, just as chat and speaker stats, will be reset once the last person leaves the room. So you have to make sure that you set the password again, if you find yourself ending the meeting and then rejoining. 

  A similar approach you might consider would be to append a random character sequence at the end of your room name.

  Anyone can mute or kick me out of my meeting, what’s up with that?

  Jitsi models its meetings after in-person gatherings. Take the case of 10 people having a discussion in a room. You wouldn’t expect one person to have exclusive  “kick� and “mute� privileges in an in-person meeting and yet, those meetings usually go fine.

  In the vast majority of cases, moderation controls in online meetings serve a different purpose: they help address tech related issues, such as people not realizing their microphones are introducing noise, or people forgetting to leave. Moderation controls help you solve those, so that people can continue their conversation. And now, with that in mind, why wouldn’t you want to enable anyone in the meeting to help solve these kinds of issues? 

  For that reason our moderation controls are soft, and for everyone.

  This is specifically the case on meet.jit.si, since all users are moderators.  

  If you really, really, really need moderation controls to be limited then consider deploying your own Jitsi Meet instance and configuring it in a way that suits your needs. Once you do, you can configure strong authentication, so only authorised users will be moderators.

  We understand the settings in meet.jit.si are not for everyone, so if you’d rather have your own private setup (which we encourage you to do!) you can get started quickly with our Docker setup or the quick-install guide. We’ll be happy to help you in our community.

  Are my meetings encrypted? Is encryption end-to-end?

  This is something we get asked a lot, so let’s dive into the details:

  Jitsi meetings can operate in 2 ways: peer-to-peer (P2P) or via the Jitsi Videobridge (JVB). This is transparent to the user. P2P mode is only used for 1-to-1 meetings. In this case, audio and video are encrypted using DTLS-SRTP all the way from the sender to the receiver, even if they traverse network components like TURN servers. 

  In the case of multiparty meetings all audio and video traffic is still encrypted on the network (again, using DTLS-SRTP). Packets are decrypted while traversing Jitsi Videobridge; however they are never stored to any persistent storage and only live in memory while being routed to other participants in the meeting.

  Note: Since Jitsi is built on top of WebRTC, a deeper look into its security architecture is very important when evaluating Jitsi’s security aspects.

  So, why is the media decrypted in Jitsi Videobridge? Currently there is no way to do without this in WebRTC.  

  Some services try to achieve this by establishing a full mesh of peer-to-peer connections between participants but that presents significant issues.

  From a scalability perspective, this is a very limited approach as utilization of CPU and bandwidth grows quadratically to the number of participants thus quickly resulting in a very degraded user experience. This is the very reason why services like Jitsi Meet resort to using video routers (a.k.a., Selective Forwarding Units (SFUs)) like Jitsi Videobridge. With SFUs, clients establish a single connection with the video router and all data goes there. That saves a ton from a resource utilization point of view, but it complicates the encryption situation. At the moment WebRTC has no way to negotiate multi-party encryption over a single connection. Every client sets up a separate crypto context with the video router, which then has to trans-crypt the data as it relays it from one client to another. 

  
  Not all hope is lost though! The folks from the WebRTC team are working on providing the necessary APIs in the browser so applications can add an additional layer of encryption that would allow apps to add an end-to-end encryption layer while still allowing SFUs to function. You can bet we will be all over this as soon as possible.

  What do you do with my data?

  To begin with, by default Jitsi Meet does not require users to create accounts. Any information they choose to enter, such as their name or email address is purely optional and is only shared with other meeting participants.  We do not retain this information after the meeting. 

  Other pieces of data such as the chat, or speaker stats, for example, are stored for the duration of the meeting and then destroyed when it ends. 

  Obviously many of these things can be customized by the configuration of the actual deployment that you are using so we are going to talk about the one we maintain: meet.jit.si 

  We preserve all of the above defaults but you should absolutely also check out the meet.jit.si Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

  Recordings are a bit of an interesting case. They are kept on our servers until we can upload them to the place you indicated (currently Dropbox). If we haven’t managed to do that in 24 hours we still delete them and they are gone forever (so make sure you have enough space in your Dropbox folders )

  Do you use analytics?

  Jitsi Meet does not come with any preconfigured analytics engines. 

  We do use analytics on meet.jit.si, so let’s talk about it.

  We are very committed to privacy and security and we are extremely careful about what information reaches the analytics engines we use. That said we also want to provide our users with a great product experience, so we need some visibility into what’s actually going on. We are currently using Amplitude, Datadog and Crashlytics to cover various aspects of the apps and the infrastructure on meet.jit.si. Things that we track in analytics include, an anonymous identifier (you can run in “incognito� mode if this bothers you), bitrate, available bandwidth, SDP offers and answers, product utilization events, mobile app crash dumps  (how much various product features are used overall).

  Most importantly, once your meeting is over we do not retain any  names, e-mail addresses or profile pictures (as we mentioned above, those are only transmitted to the other participants in the meeting).

  While we hope that the meet.jit.si configuration will be satisfactory to most users, we completely understand that it will be incompatible with what some others are looking for. If, for any reason, this is the case for you please remember that you could be running your private Jitsi Meet instance in as little 15 minutes!

  The post Jitsi Meet Security & Privacy appeared first on Jitsi.

April 03, 2020

• Digium Keeping Your Workforce Safe and Connected During the COVID-19 Pandemic

  Introducing our guest contributor:

  Ben has been doing Linux based IT support and networking for over 25 years, and has been doing VoIP sense asterisk 1.2.

  His company VOICE1, provides Managed Switchvox Support and custom product integrations for small and large customers across the US and Canada as well as SIP trunking services.

  When he’s not tinkering with technology and automations, he can be found enjoying the Pacific Northwest and being surrounded by animals.

  ---

   

  As US business and the world is taking preventative measures for the coronavirus pandemic it is important for many businesses to remain accessible to their customer base.

  If you have a Switchvox and are considering sending/allowing staff to work from home the following information will be helpful to you.

  Allow Staff to Bring Deskphones Home

  

  If you already have desk phones and your system is configured to allow external access you may want to allow your staff to take their desk phones home with them. This has the advantage of:

  • Assuring no one else uses their equipment and reducing the chance of spreading infection.

  • Allows your staff to work with existing setup and not have to ‘learn’ something new at a time where everyone is on high alert and already stressed.

  • IT staff can focus on a centralized solution vs individual users, allowing rapid setup.

  How to Enable Remote Users

  Assure that you have adjusted your firewall to allow remote SIP access and HTTP/s access. Click here for a detailed listing of firewall ports.

  Make sure that you authorize only allowed SIP services by IP.

  

  Adjust the ACLs on your Switchvox to match your requirements.

  Best practice is to create a new network rule for each of your remote users.

  However many of you may need a faster simpler approach. You can enable SIP and optionally Web and API access for “All Networks”.

  This should only be done if you have your Switchvox behind a firewall and have the proper ACL permissions on your firewall. If you have not properly secured your firewall you will be exposing your phone system to public access.

  We do not recommend turning on “Never Block IP’s” at all. We also recommend setting per work IP restrictions, as soon as possible.

  

  Update the “Phone Networks” to be sure that you have a DNS name pointing to your PBX that can be reached from the public internet and properly forward to your Switchvox.  You can use just an IP, however you will have a warning about not having a proper SSL certificate. If you have properly set up your Switchvox you should have a valid SSL certificate already in place.

  Switchvox Desktop Softphone

  

  Setting up your Switchvox for use with the free Desktop Softphone is a little easier.

  You first need to assure that port 443 is forwarded to your Switchvox.

  Make sure to limit your firewall to only allow access from authorized sources to avoid exposing your system to the public internet.

  

  Next to each extension you will have 4 icons to the left. The third one allows you to manage phone assignments.

  

  Clicking the Manage Phone icon will let you edit or assign new phones.

  You have 2 options.

  1. Add an additional phone extension with phone-type “Switchvox Desktop Softphone”

  2. Edit a phone extension to set phone-type to “Switchvox Desktop Softphone”

  If you choose to add an additional phone you will need to adjust the users individual call rules so that the new additional phone will ring with incoming calls.  For many the simple process is to just re-assign the to only a softphone.

  ---

  Click here to learn more about Switchvox!

  The post Keeping Your Workforce Safe and Connected During the COVID-19 Pandemic appeared first on Sangoma.

• WebRTC Hacks Accelerated Computer Vision inside a WebRTC Media Server with Intel OWT

  WebRTC has made getting and sending real time video streams (mostly) easy. The next step is doing something with them, and machine learning lets us have some fun with those streams. Last month I showed how to run Computer Vision (CV) locally in the browser. As I mentioned there, local is nice, but sometimes more performance […]

  The post Accelerated Computer Vision inside a WebRTC Media Server with Intel OWT appeared first on webrtcHacks.

April 01, 2020

• WebRTC Hacks Does your video call have End-to-End Encryption? Probably not..

  Time for another opinionated post. This time on… end-to-end encryption (e2ee). Zoom apparently claims it supports e2ee while it can not satisfy that promise. Is WebRTC any better? Zoom does not have End to End Encryption Let’s get to the bottom of things fast: Boo Zoom! I reviewed how Zoom’s implements their web client last […]

  The post Does your video call have End-to-End Encryption? Probably not.. appeared first on webrtcHacks.

March 31, 2020

• FreeSWITCH Telemedicine: Telecom in the Age of Coronavirus

  Telecom has produced countless technologies that keep us all connected - especially tools allowing employees to work remotely by video conferencing. In the age of coronavirus, these same tools are now vital for people to connect to medical professionals. Telemedicine isn’t really a new thing, of course. Doctors have been connected to patients by radio [...]

  The post Telemedicine: Telecom in the Age of Coronavirus appeared first on FreeSWITCH.

• Digium UC is all the Rage, but Voice Minutes are Hot Again…

  Unified Communications (UC), for knowledge workers, is all the rage right now. UC enables these folks to work from home relatively easily because this type of phone system enables the ability to offer softphones with your business number, conferencing, collaboration, presence, and mobile phones that also utilize your business phone number. So you can set up at home just as if you are in your office. The internet, whether home WiFi and/or LTE connectivity, is key for this to work well however.

  Sometimes a Plain Ol’ Voice Call is what the World Needs

  Not everyone is a knowledge worker with access to a UC system or even good internet connectivity, for that matter. And because of what’s going on today, the whole world wants to communicate more than ever. So that means the good old PSTN is there for the using. Certainly for subscriber-to-subscriber, but even for those that have businesses, you are probably taking more regular phone calls. Yes, just a plain, old-school voice call.

  

  Even a regular voice call can do wonders. And, really, even though many of us live in video and have great internet and Unified Communications, we all still just do plain voice calls, probably more than we even realize. And in this new reality out there, many people need to just place phone calls and talk.

  So what does this mean?

  I do not have the voice minutes data yet, but I do know that for the part of our business that services carriers, we are seeing an uptick in demand for our carrier gateways. That means these customers are seeing an increase in voice minutes and are gearing their networks up to deal with the increased demand.

  Sangoma offers IMG gateways, which are the leading lower density service provider gateways on the market. Its small footprint combined with a highly equipped feature set makes it ideal for quickly adding voice capacity to your networks.

  The post UC is all the Rage, but Voice Minutes are Hot Again… appeared first on Sangoma.

March 26, 2020

• FreeSWITCH How COVID-19 will impact ClueCon

  Like the rest of the world, ClueCon is keeping both eyes on how the COVID-19 virus will unfold. We are hopeful that the virus will wane by August but we also want to be prepared and lookout for the safety of the entire ClueCon family. We are planning on holding ClueCon in Chicago, August 3-6th, [...]

  The post How COVID-19 will impact ClueCon appeared first on FreeSWITCH.

• Digium Resources for Working Remotely with Switchvox

  COVID-19 is impacting how so many of us go about our workday. It’s no longer ‘business as usual’. At Sangoma, we’re doing everything we can to support our employees, partners, and customers. From working remotely to travel restrictions, we’ve taken many internal measures to ensure our employees are safe, yet well-equipped to continue serving you in the same dedicated way we always have. You can read more about those initiatives here.

  We’ve also received a high number of inquiries about how our Unified Communications (UC) systems can potentially help. As such, we would like to provide some additional information and address any concerns you may have about your business communications.

  At Sangoma, we have a complete portfolio of products and services that can help. This information is tailored to registered Switchvox users specifically. As such, you have access to the UC features you need to work from home and still accomplish just as much as if you were in the office.

  Here is an overview of the specific capabilities available to you to help you work remotely. Please see our Guide to Setting Up Remote Employees for detailed information about these features and how to use them.

  Switchvox Desktop Softphone

  Take your extension on the go with the Switchvox desktop softphone. You can easily make/receive calls on your Windows or macOS laptop, see the statuses of other remote workers, and have full access to your contacts list. You can further enhance collaboration with group chat and SMS (via SIPStation) features. Additional information about the softphone is available here. Pair the Desktop Softphone with the Switchboard, so your calls and other Switchvox tools are right on your computer. (Please Note: the Desktop Softphone and Switchboard do not offer 3-way calling, but you can use the Meet Me Conference feature.)

  

  Using Your Existing Desk Phone to Work at Home

  If you use a Sangoma desk phone in the office, you can bring your phone home with you. In many cases, when attached to a properly-configured Switchvox system, you can plug in at home immediately. Please keep in mind that you will likely need a wall plug adapter to power your phone, as most home users do not have Power-over-Ethernet (PoE). Prior to doing this, please work with your Switchvox administrator to ensure that your Switchvox is set up to support remote employees.

  

  Switchvox Switchboard

  If you are already working remotely due to quarantine recommendations, our browser-based Switchboard is your window into all of your colleagues’ communication – no matter where they are located. A call control panel with the ability to manage calls and instant message with co-workers, this tool is especially valuable to receptionists as well as sales, service, and support teams. The Switchboard is also a great tool for call queue managers, offering a full set of queue management tools accessible from anywhere.

  

  Conference Rooms and Audio Conferences

  As the need for virtual meetings increases, you can take advantage of the conference features available with Switchvox. With the Meet Me Conference Center, your phone extension can have its own conference room. The extension-owner can even control the audio conferencing experience with announcement options, as well as specify who can talk in the conference. Conference Apps for the D80 desk phone and the Switchboard let the admin mute others on the call, or even remove others from the call.

  Sending Work Calls to your Mobile or Home Phone

  If you’re working from home and you can’t use the Switchvox softphone, or you only have a home phone, you can easily configure Switchvox to send all of your calls to your personal mobile or home phone. This can be configured by logging into your Switchvox user web tool and navigating to Features > Call Rules and setting up a Call Cascade to your mobile or home phone.

  Coming Soon! Video Meetings

  Lastly, we are excited to introduce a new product offering for a video meeting solution that will be available to you soon! While this offering was already on our product roadmap, we have recently accelerated our efforts to bring you this solution as quickly as possible.

  The post Resources for Working Remotely with Switchvox appeared first on Sangoma.

• Digium Resources for Working Remotely with PBXact & FreePBX

  COVID-19 is impacting how so many of us go about our workday. It’s no longer ‘business as usual’. At Sangoma, we’re doing everything we can to support our employees, partners, and customers. From working remotely to travel restrictions, we’ve taken many internal measures to ensure our employees are safe, yet well-equipped to continue serving you in the same dedicated way we always have. You can read more about those initiatives here.

  We’ve also received a high number of inquiries about how our Unified Communications (UC) systems can potentially help. As such, we would like to provide some additional information and address any concerns you may have about your business communications.

  You’re getting this note because we have you registered as a PBXact or FreePBX customer, and this information is tailored to you specifically.

  Here is an overview of the specific work from home (WFH) capabilities available to you:

  Zulu UC Desktop Softphone

  Sangoma’s Zulu UC delivers productivity and collaboration tools (chat, SMS, click-to-call, file sharing) through a single application which can be installed locally or used in a browser. Zulu brings all of your tools together in one place, letting you take your work environment with you, wherever you are.

  Through the Zulu interface on your desktop computer, you can:

  • Chat with coworkers 1:1 and in a group setting
  • Initiate group conference calling and merge calls together for ad-hoc collaboration
  • Create rooms for team collaboration sessions and transfer files
  • Send/receive SMS with clients using your work extension (via SIPstation)
  • Control presence and view the status of other colleagues
  • Open voicemail directly from the visual voicemail feature
  • Contact any of your co-workers from the corporate contact integration

  Administrators, please be aware that Zulu and VPN clients connecting directly to the PBX use significantly more system resources than a simple SIP registration. Be careful when deploying these solutions at scale on an existing system.

  

  Zulu is included for all PBXact customers and available as an add-on module for FreePBX users. We offer a 1-year, 2-user free trial of Zulu for FreePBX users. Visit our Sangoma Portal to access your free trial. Once logged in, navigate to Store > Products > FreePBX Systems and Software > Zulu UC and select the 2-User 1-Year free license.

  User Control Panel

  The User Control Panel (UCP) is a browser-based, customizable dashboard available to every individual user, giving you call control options including:

  • Call forwarding, presence, conference calling, and more
  • Visibility into your colleagues’ presence/status, even when you’re not in the same location
  • The ability to access voicemail remotely
  • The option to redirect numbers to your mobile devices – scheduled or manual

  Use Your Existing Desk Phone to Work at Home

  If you use a Sangoma desk phone in the office, you can bring your phone home with you. In many cases, when attached to a properly-configured system, you can plug in at home immediately. Please keep in mind that you will likely need a wall plug adapter to power your phone, as most home users do not have Power-over-Ethernet (PoE). Prior to doing this, please work with your system administrator to ensure that your PBXact or FreePBX system is set up to support remote employees.

  

  Administrator Options for Connecting Remote Workers

  System administrators have the following options for connecting remote employees:

  Connect to the workplace VPN infrastructure.
  With this option, admins can extend the existing VPN infrastructure from the workplace to the home and not rely on the PBX at all to use the PBX resources remotely.

  Connect directly to the PBX using your S-Series phone from a remote location.
  Sangoma phones natively support connecting a VPN from the phone directly to the PBX. You will need to set up your PBX VPN server first, and then use EndPoint Manager to tell the phone to use the VPN on a per-extension basis. More information on this technique is available here.

  Connect directly to the PBX using the built-in VPN server from your desktop.
  A desktop VPN connection to PBXact can only be used with the Zulu Desktop Softphone or desktop softphone of your choice. It does not offer access to other company resources. Additional configuration information is available here.

  Deploy a second PBX in the Cloud for remote employees and enable a peer trunk to the main workplace system.
  Deploy PBXact in a hosted environment for WFH users and bridge the premise PBXact system via IAX2 or Chan_pjsip trunk for minimal exposure to the company network. When a rapid deployment of remote staff is required, this method is arguably the fastest, most cost-effective, and feature rich when direct VPN support just isn’t an option.

  Allow remote extensions to register directly to the PBX over the Internet.
  Administrators should only implement this method provided they are comfortable with the security implications.

  Send extension calls to a user’s mobile or home phone.
  Simply add a personal mobile number to Find Me / Follow Me for an extension. Calls through the PBX can be transferred to other extensions or queues.

  Built-in Contact Center Features

  PBXact and FreePBX also offer built-in contact center features for users like receptionists or service and support teams who handle a high volume of calls.

  • Calls that go to the company IVR can be easily redirected to specific users.
  • Businesses can create custom announcements so that callers can hear about valuable information before being connected to an agent.
  • Agents can prioritize calls with Caller ID prefixing and VIP caller options.
  • In the event of a spike in the number of calls, additional team members can be assigned a ‘stand-by’ option so they can easily start taking calls.
  • The XactView Operator Panel add-on module provides a command center view to control inbound calls, transfer, and more.
  • Hot Desking lets employees use their remote Sangoma IP phone as if it was in the office, allowing their individually customized settings to seamlessly transfer to a remote phone.

  Coming Soon! Video Meetings

  Lastly, we are excited to introduce a new product offering for a video meeting solution that will be available to you soon! While this offering was already on our product roadmap, we have recently accelerated our efforts to bring you this solution as quickly as possible.

  The post Resources for Working Remotely with PBXact & FreePBX appeared first on Sangoma.

March 24, 2020

• Digium Updating Your ILEC, CLEC, or Coop Telecom Network Infrastructure

  If you are one of the multiple hundreds of telecom coops, ILECs (Independent Local Exchange Carriers), or small CLECs (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers), it may be time to think about updating your voice network infrastructure. 

  Due to a variety of factors, you may be thinking about cutting costs, especially on the voice side of the business. Why pay those expensive yearly maintenance fees on that softswitch? Or maybe your expensive high-end softswitch solution is getting old, and you want to replace it. Or maybe that same softswitch solution is just overpowered for your voice network needs today, and you want to right-size your voice platform.

  No matter what the reason, a good solution could be looking at an enterprise switch that has been used in carrier environments. Someone who has an on-prem solution that you can put in your data center but that also has its own cloud solution based on that same technology, that you know can handle the traffic load on your network.

  Sangoma is such a company. We have 1.5 million paid-for UC endpoints, with many of them on our own cloud.  

  Sangoma Switchvox is present in many hundreds of enterprises of all sizes. The same product can and is currently being used in MSP environments, hosted on the MSP cloud. Switchvox is a great option to be the switch behind your voice network, if you are looking to change switches.

  Let’s take a look at the architecture diagram below. Running your voice network is your voice switch and applications, such as voice mail, IVR, and even contact center applications. This is connected to different networks, such as different mobile networks or the PSTN through gateways and SBCs which help transcode different media codecs and also translate protocols such as from the SS7 network to and from the switch. This enables your network to connect to those outside your network.

  

  You also need wholesale SIP trunking so that you can resell SIP Trunking to your subscriber base. The ability to obtain DIDs, provision those numbers for SMS/MMS, offer fraud protection, and manage e911 services is critical to your customer base.

  But you also need to connect the network to your subscribers, whether they are a home, a small or medium business, or a small or medium enterprise. These subscribers all have different kinds of endpoints, whether they are phones, computers, tablets, etc. Most likely, at this point in time, the subscriber (even a home) will not have a PSTN connection anymore. So the voice network will come into the subscriber through a SIP trunk. 

  If it’s a large business doing a lot of minutes, then wholesale SIP trunking will be the preferred option to use. Retail SIP trunking will be the preferred option for smaller businesses or the home. Either way, the subscriber will want to buy a connection service that works for them.

  How Sangoma Can Help

  Sangoma can help in a variety of ways. Let’s take a look at the network diagram again. As discussed above, Switchvox is Sangoma’s scalable PBX/Unified Communications system that can be your network voice switch. While it can be on-premise in an enterprise, or accessed through the Sangoma Cloud, we also have numerous installations in MSP environments, in the MSP data center and run on the MSP cloud.

  Switchvox also comes with call reporting tools, IVR, voice mail, desktop faxing, and many contact center features in an all-inclusive, easy-to-understand affordable pricing model.

  

  Sangoma offers our own Vega and IMG gateways and SBCs that have been tested to work with Switchvox. The gateways can support up to 2250 SIP sessions and 2016 channels of SS7 signaling and will make connection to other networks as simple as possible.

  Sangoma also offers our own phones and desktop and mobile clients that auto-provision within minutes to and with Switchvox. We offer a range of phones to suit your different subscriber needs. Our softphone clients enable chat, presence, and remote access to your business phone number and are included in the standard price of Switchvox. No hidden costs here.

  Sangoma also offers both retail and wholesale SIP Trunking. Our wholesale SIP Trunking solution (SIPDepot) is designed for you to offer retail SIP trunking to your customers. Or if you want to resell wholesale SIP Trunking to your larger enterprises where appropriate, you can do that too. And if you want to use our retail SIP trunking, we have SIPStation as well. Whatever SIP trunking solution makes sense for you, we can discuss that.

  As you can see, Sangoma offers a full range of potential ways we can help you both upgrade your existing telecom infrastructure and, at the same time, reduce your costs.

  The post Updating Your ILEC, CLEC, or Coop Telecom Network Infrastructure appeared first on Sangoma.

• FreeSWITCH Telemedicine: Telecom in the Age of Coronavirus

  By Danielle Plicka   Telecom has produced countless technologies that keep us all connected - especially tools allowing employees to work remotely by video conferencing. In the age of COVID-19, these same tools are now vital for people to connect to medical professionals. Telemedicine isn’t really a new thing, of course. Doctors have been connected to [...]

  The post Telemedicine: Telecom in the Age of Coronavirus appeared first on FreeSWITCH.

March 23, 2020

• Jitsi Make it live with video!

  You can help! Deploy your own Jitsi Meet instance now. 

  The majority of plans we schedule each day are made with the assumption that we will be able to meet with people, face to face, and work out whatever we need to, with the appropriate level of privacy. 

  The same goes for products. Many of the tools we use come with the same assumption: the activity that the product supports would sooner or later lead to an actual gathering of people: discuss a ticket, a customer request, ask a teacher plenty of clarifying questions.

  Well quite unfortunately, at least for the time being, this is no longer possible.

  We are all hoping that this won’t last too long but right now we urgently need to provide ways for people to substitute their face-to-face meetings without compromising on security or fidelity. 

  Here are two options to get started quickly and easily:

  Run your own service on your own servers.

  So let’s start with this: running a Jitsi Meet rig is simply the easiest way on the planet to set up meetings that you can absolutely trust. Open Source, encrypted and on infrastructure you own. What’s more, you can get all of this in less than an hour of work!

  Have a look at our installation instructions or our docker containers. You might also be interested in Amazon’s Jitsi tutorial for AWS

  In many cases you should be able to get through all this and end up with a fully working video service in less than an hour. Questions? Ask the Jitsi community.

  Add video to your product.

  Once you have your own Jitsi Meet service, it is only a matter of minutes to integrate it into a product. The easiest way to do this is to simply generate random links and present them to the users of your application. Jitsi Meet does not require any sort of pre-meeting setup so all you need to worry about is picking up URLs that are unique enough. Here are a few examples:

  https://meet.jit.si/classroom-185a690e-6ca9-11ea-bc55-0242ac130003

  https://meet.jit.si/AppointmentSarahAndJohn-xfgha 

  https://meet.jit.si/session-202009121718687-afg 

  If you’d rather embed Jitsi within your own product experience, then please consider using Jitsi Meet’s iFrame API.

  In case all of this sounds overwhelming…

  If for some reason you don’t have the time to go through with a custom deployment, you can always start kicking the tires of the whole thing by using https://meet.jit.si.

  The post Make it live with video!  appeared first on Jitsi.

March 19, 2020

• WebRTC Hacks Stop touching your face using a browser and TensorFlow.js

  Don’t touch your face! To prevent the spread of disease, health bodies recommend not touching your face with unwashed hands. This is easier said than done if you are sitting in front of a computer for hours.  I wondered, is this a problem that can be solved with a browser? We have a number of […]

  The post Stop touching your face using a browser and TensorFlow.js appeared first on webrtcHacks.

March 18, 2020

• Digium Working from Home Now and Its Impact on the Future of Work

  Two weeks ago, I wrote a blog about how UC can positively impact the ability to work from home. In fact, it’s almost mandatory to have a UC system to effectively work from home. That’s because you can have the same work phone number, you can access the same applications, you can be part of collaboration teams, your colleagues can dial you on a 3 or 4 digit extension, you can have instant messaging, etc. You’re basically at your desk at work, except the desk is now in your home.

  As companies come to grips with how to handle the Coronavirus issue, more and more companies are instituting work from home policies of some sort. Companies are going to see how it works for them, whether they were prepared or not. Obviously, some workers are not able to work from home just because of the job they do. But if you are a knowledge worker and your company utilizes a UC system, it will likely work out OK, certainly better than a company without a UC system. 

  And with these companies that institute some kind of work from home, or for employees who self quarantine, etc., whether the company intended it or not, this current work from home environment will be like a trial run for working from home, and its impact on operations.   So what is going on now will impact the future of working from home, most likely in a positive manner.

  Many companies who utilize a UC system will probably see that employees working from home had less impact than they thought it might. Or it will bring up some vulnerabilities they didn’t think about before, such as VPN load. I’m guessing this will also spur some employees to get faster internet connections if they are not getting the “response” they desired. Either way, something positive about the work from home company experience will come out.   

  And from that, there could likely be some employee-friendly policies about working from home instituted from the employer, to help retain and/or recruit employees. This even helps companies get to their “green” goals given working from home can help reduce a company’s carbon footprint simply because employees aren’t driving to work.

  Some companies will also see that they “needed” a UC system because it didn’t quite go that well. In 2008/2009 during the recession, many companies had been experimenting with VoIP. The recession, and the need to reduce as much cost as possible, was a key tipping point for companies to go all in on VoIP systems. This work from home time we are in now likely will further expand cloud and UC footprints.

  If you are thinking of installing a business phone system to help your employees work better from home, then Switchvox Cloud can help you.

  The post Working from Home Now and Its Impact on the Future of Work appeared first on Sangoma.

March 15, 2020

• Daniel Pocock Handling attacks on volunteers and their families

  Over the years, volunteers have done a lot to promote and contribute to free and open source software and the organizations/communities in this space. The leaders are not the only ones doing this work. Many people are quietly doing far more work than the leaders of some free software organizations.

  In 2017, the now defunct FSFE Fellowship, which consisted of approximately 1,500 Fellows, voted for me to be their community representative. Not only did I have to represent those who voted for me, but also those who voted for other candidates. I also discovered that I was representing a Fellow who died leaving a EUR 150,000 bequest. Although I was only a volunteer, I took all those responsibilities seriously.

  I didn't realize this at the beginning but representing the interests of donors and volunteers put me in opposition to some people who had not previously had to deal with the same level of committment from a community representative. The type of people who paid themselves salaries and took long periods of paternity leave after receiving that gargantuan EUR 150k bequest.

  Around that time, I was also dealing with some incredibly tragic circumstances in my family life. I resigned from some of my roles, for example, resigning as a Google Summer of Code admin in Debian in August 2018. Thanks to the never-ending creativity of open source politics, people immediately started rather offensive lies trying to connect me to trolling or even suggesting that I was expelled. It isn't coincidence when people say things like that about somebody elected by the volunteers. My only mistake was joining the FSFE in the first place.

  In September 2018, Debian's leader (DPL) Chris Lamb had the Debian Account Managers move my key from the DD keyring to the inferior DM keyring.

  They wanted me to feel humiliated.

  They wanted me to continue contributing to Debian, but under their coercive control. You can see the entry on 20 September 2018 when I was moved from the DD to the DM keyring, not expelled.

  The thing is, my responsibility is to my employer and clients. By exercising this control over me, those co-conspirators aspired to have the power of an employer without actually paying me.

  In other words, they wanted me to be their slave and their puppet.

  

  People tried to give me orders about what I can and can't tell the community who elected me to represent them.

  I couldn't perform my role as a community representative under such coercive influence so I resigned. I resigned from the representative role and also completely resigned from FSFE on the same day that Debian started blackmailing me, 20 September 2018.

  That date wasn't coincidence: that is the impact of blackmail.

  Now we get to the bizarre part: 12 October 2018, the Debian Project Leader, Chris Lamb, wrote that he had me "demoted" but the current leader, Sam Hartman, is telling people I was expelled. These words mean very different things. That is an incredibly vindictive way to re-write history. Hartman has made far-fetched claims about trolling but since doing so, not one piece of evidence has appeared. Any evidence produced retrospectively is no more trustworthy than anything else that has been said in the meantime. Debian has a history of making up evidence retrospectively to justify political assassinations.

  If you have any doubts about this, you can check the DM keyring log, why would they move me to the DM keyring if I had done anything that would remotely justify an expulsion? Anybody on the DM keyring can still upload all of their packages.

  In what kind of organization do you expel or fire somebody and still keep asking them to do stuff for you like that?

  They behave like the men who extort women with revenge porn: the relationship is over but they want to maintain control over the woman, having her on call. They threaten to humiliate the woman by releasing some videos if she doesn't volunteer for things.

  In the case of Debian Developers, they humiliate one of us every couple of years to keep everybody else under their thumb.

  The demotion was a veiled threat, a form of blackmail: follow orders and do work for us or we tell people we expelled you. Sam Hartman's outburst is nothing more than a bunch of gangsters following through on a threat.

  In my case, they wanted to benefit from my technical work making packages but they didn't want me to have a voice representing the 1,500 Fellows. Why can't the people who do the work have a voice?

  Given the challenges my family faced over that last couple of years, this was a particularly nasty case of harassment and abuse from Debian's leadership.

  Other Debian Developers continued to work with me on various things. None were aware that I had been moved to a different keyring. It quickly became obvious that this was a conspiracy operated by a very small group of people, including the leader and the three Debian Account Managers, a silent act of abuse hidden from the community at large.

  Nonetheless, I didn't say a lot about what was going on. Then something changed: I saw them starting to subject another volunteer to the same coercion. I realized that, like serial rapists, these people were going to keep doing this. The vast majority are unaware that some leadership figures in Debian behave like this: if people knew, they wouldn't join Debian.

  On a number of occasions now, I've been a witness to other volunteers in a range of organizations being subject to harassment, abuse and coercion in various ways.

  When I've tried to defend other volunteers, there is a nasty overreaction. In a brazen case of victim-offender reversal, when bullies like that are challenged, they will claim the entire community that is being defended is under attack. In my mind, there is no community without the grass roots developers. There is nobody else to defend the Fellow who died and left a EUR 150k bequest. Women and other groups that are at a disadvantage. Defending those people or defending the privacy and dignity of my own family is not an attack, it is just the right thing to do.

  Could that be the difference between Lamb's demotion and Hartman's expulsion/ban/revenge attack, my effort to stand up for a fellow volunteer? I owe so much to the people who did the real work creating free software that its an honour for me to risk my own reputation to defend them against the menace of these blackmailers.

  

March 10, 2020

• Digium What is Sangoma About?

  When I go to shows where we are exhibiting, I like to work the booth when I have some free time. I like talking to our customers and prospective customers. This year, at ITEXPO, I got a few questions about what Sangoma is all about. Some of the folks knew us from the old days as a board and gateway vendor. And yes, we do that. And some of the folks knew us from Open Source comms, such as FreePBX and Asterisk. And yes, we do that. And some knew us from our cloud offerings, such as SIPStation and Switchvox Cloud. And yes, we do that.

  We do all of that.

  

  But then the question becomes what are we really about, and how does all of what I wrote above all tie together?

  Sangoma today is an industry leader in delivering value-based Communications as a Service (CaaS) solutions for businesses of all sizes. We want to offer solutions that maximize customers’ return on investment. We deliver value. Our CaaS solutions include Unified Communications (UCaaS), Contact Center (CCaaS), Communications Platform (CPaaS), Wholesale and Retail SIP Trunking (TaaS), and Device (DaaS). And these CaaS solutions are augmented by a wide range of Sangoma’s own VoIP infrastructure products, such as on-premise UC PBX systems, fax services, networking interconnection products, and telephony hardware.   

  And our open source offerings enable different ways to get to a communications solution – a different way to value and a different way to communications innovation.   

  That’s how it all ties together.

  The post What is Sangoma About? appeared first on Sangoma.

• Daniel Pocock Debian, Harassment, Abuse and Expulsions

  In February 2019, the world woke up to the news that Cardinal George Pell, treasurer of the Vatican, had been convicted of abuse in my home town, Melbourne, Australia.

  I grew up in Victoria, Australia, when Cardinal Pell was our Arch-Bishop. I matriculated from a Catholic boy's school just around the corner from St Kevin's, the school that supplied boys for the cathedral choir. We rowed past St Kevin's every morning. What would I know about the case?

  The newspapers displayed pictures of the choir, faces of the boys obscured. If you know one or more of these people, the photoshopping does little to obscure the horror.

  

  At the same time that Pell was mulling over his new status as a convict, false accusations of abuse were being distributed to hundreds of developers through the debian-private mailing list. The people behind that were Enrico Zini, Joerg Jaspert and Jonathan Wiltshire, the Debian Account Managers (DAMs). On Christmas Eve 2018, they stole the word abuse from boys like those at St Kevin's and used it for some internal politics. In this distorted reality, a volunteer who asks Why? can now be accused of harassment and abuse.

  Of course this is not real abuse. These are tone police.

  When another organization received a bequest of €150,000, the most senior staff went on long periods of paternity leave. When volunteers asked questions, the organization did not give direct answers: they also referred the questions to the tone police. I chose to resign from my voluntary role in that organization.

  Back to Debian: it is not a great way to treat a volunteer at Christmas.

  When I read the misleading things written by Zini, Jaspert and Wiltshire, knowing them to be completely untrue and out of touch with society's normal understanding of abuse, it was particularly painful.

  It is not surprising that volunteers confront them, demanding that they withdraw or justify using words like that. Yet when people ask those questions in Debian, they are banned from mailing lists and they become the next target of gossip and unpleasant accusations from tone police.

  What is worse: the organization that misappropriates words like abuse? Or the organization that messes with people's heads, pushing people, questioning their competence, making them feel they need to work more and telling them they are being demoted or expelled when they lose a family member?

  Rogue elements of the Debian community have done all of the above. Any victims expelled from such a group with such distorted values, at a time of acute personal tragedy, would be entitled to use the word harassment.

  But for the tone police, their quest to have a safe space where everybody is submissive justifies these violations of human dignity just as it seems to justify their misappropriation of words like abuse.

  On Sunday night, a message was circulated airing the gossip from DebConf18 and DebConf19. As one of Debian's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) admins and Outreachy mentors in 2018, I had heard things about this, yet I wasn't at DebConf18 (Taiwan) or DebConf19 (Brazil). I resigned from my role immediately after DebConf18 and wasn't planning to say any more. Given my formal role in the program, it wouldn't be appropriate for me to confirm anything in the leaked emails. It is obvious that somebody has impersonated Mark Shuttleworth to forward the message but making accusations about who forged the headers is rather vindictive. With the Debian Project Leader (DPL), Sam Hartman, now telling me that he'll ban me from commenting, I feel compelled to comment: I feel Debian and DebConf presents unique challenges for the safety of interns. During six years mentoring in Debian, I've received at least one personal report of harassment from a participant and they had identified somebody in the Debian leadership. This could happen in any organization, but as Debian is run as a hobbyist organization and given the conditions of the internships, it doesn't have the same culture as an office or company. This is not necessarily wrong, it is simply incompatible. Yet if the culture changed, it would not be Debian any more. I simply resigned without saying anything about this but other people have sustained hostility and forced it into the spotlight.

  People can only wonder: why is Debian's leader making this an issue about personalities and egos? Is it to distract attention from the issues leaked in the controversial email? The email was sent on International Women's Day, when many women were marching in the streets. In jumping to conclusions about its origin, Hartman doesn't appear to consider the possibility that a woman could have written it.

  My family and I asked for privacy at a very difficult time: could there be any more hideous example of harassment than the way in which these vendettas are still being pushed in private and in public, more than 18 months after I resigned?

  As a Debian Developer, I've always made myself available to listen to peoples' experiences of abuse. One of them even wrote to the Debian Project Leader to express her gratitude for my efforts. I felt her words were lost on deaf ears and that is another reason I resigned from the GSoC admin role.

  Thank you very much for being so supportive.
  
  I read the comments on the thread and to be honest I am really sad that [REDACTED] said that. It is not true at all.
  
  They ([REDACTED] & [REDACTED]) pretend to support women but on the other hand their behavior towards many of us shows the opposite.
  
  Daniel I feel bad because you have encouraged and helped not only me, but so many other people, no matter if they are [REDACTED] members or not, and also all the attendees from [REDACTED] to learn new things, to work and improve their skills and knowledge. They are doubting your good intentions just to remove the attention from the shady things that they are doing.
  
  The [REDACTED] comment is really offensive to me and i feel it should be offensive to every woman who is part of the community.
  I have been contributing and supporting [REDACTED] since its early days, and I have put a lot of effort and time, I do this because I believe in what it is meant to stand for and without waiting something in exchange, but the situation lately has been not very positive. Daniel has been present by chance in few cases where situations have been very hard to go through.
  
  I would definitely like to talk to any of you and tell you more about everything that is happening here, its fine to me whether it is a video call, call or just emails.
  Please tell me what would be more convenient to you.
  

March 08, 2020

• Daniel Pocock Is there a Debian Campaign of Harassment?

  Harassment is a serious topic and in many civilized places, it is also a crime.

  Sam Hartman, Debian Project Leader (DPL), has recently referred to a Campaign of Harassment, suggesting that one mysterious person is driving him mad.

  This looks suspiciously like a case of victim-offender reversal.

  There is prima-facie evidence of harassment from Debian's top brass directed downwards at volunteers:

  • The Debian Account Managers (DAM), Enrico Zini, Joerg Jaspert and Jonathan Wiltshire, violating the normally restful Christmas period to impose an arbitrary punishment on a volunteer in December 2018. As this was done without warning, without due process and it had a detrimental impact on the Christmas experience of many volunteers and their families, including their target, Dr Preining, it would be safe to call this harassment. Hartman himself admits Things ended up being a lot more public and painful than DAM intended. In other words, DAM humiliated somebody, what the UN now calls cybertorture.
  • When a volunteer had surgery and six weeks off work, Margarita Manterola, who is now chair of Debian's Technical Committee, one of the most senior roles in the Debian constitution, told them they would be sanctioned. Given that medical leave is a legal right in most civilized countries, Manterola's heavy-handed communication would have been abusive and illegal if it happened in an employment relationship.
  • The Debian Project Leader spreading a malicious email about a volunteer, myself, after the death of my father. This violation of my family's privacy is horrendous.

  These are concrete examples of harassment. The impact of abuse like this is amplified by the seniority of the person who inflicts it upon a volunteer.

  What Hartman now describes as a Campaign of Harassment appears to comprise two things: firstly, any questions he wants to avoid are now classified as harassment. This is a redefinition of the word. Example: due to the work we all contribute to Debian, there are a lot of donations coming in. If we ask where that money goes, that is now harassment. Asking about any office holders with romantic conflicts of interest is also harassment. Anything the leadership doesn't want to answer is harassment. If you dare to ask the same question twice, of if you dare to ask why?, you might be suspected of running a Campaign of Harassment™. These are the reflexes of a monoculture, not the words of a leader who is accountable.

  What Hartman regards as a Campaign is simply the world outside his comfort zone.

  It doesn't occur spontaneously. It may simply be a reflection of the arrogance in the aristocracy. It may be a social experiment that has gone on too long.

  

  When the US President was recently impeached, like Hartman, he pretended to be a victim. President Trump quickly went on to sack US officials who told the truth, including Lt Col Vindman, who had previously been awarded the Purple Heart for the sacrifices made for his country.

  It is particularly hard for the public to know the truth because the most abusive messages are circulated in private mailing lists, such as the debian-private mailing list.

  In my own work as a volunteer for Debian, I've observed many cases of genuine harassment. Here is the correspondence one woman sent to both the Debian Project Leader and I describing my own efforts to support women who are genuinely being harassed and a similar pattern of victim-offender reversal that immediately appeared:

  Thank you very much for being so supportive.
  
  I read the comments on the thread and to be honest I am really sad that [REDACTED] said that. It is not true at all.
  
  They ([REDACTED] & [REDACTED]) pretend to support women but on the other hand their behavior towards many of us shows the opposite.
  
  Daniel I feel bad because you have encouraged and helped not only me, but so many other people, no matter if they are [REDACTED] members or not, and also all the attendees from [REDACTED] to learn new things, to work and improve their skills and knowledge. They are doubting your good intentions just to remove the attention from the shady things that they are doing.
  
  The [REDACTED] comment is really offensive to me and i feel it should be offensive to every woman who is part of the community.
  I have been contributing and supporting [REDACTED] since its early days, and I have put a lot of effort and time, I do this because I believe in what it is meant to stand for and without waiting something in exchange, but the situation lately has been not very positive. Daniel has been present by chance in few cases where situations have been very hard to go through.
  
  I would definitely like to talk to any of you and tell you more about everything that is happening here, its fine to me whether it is a video call, call or just emails.
  Please tell me what would be more convenient to you.
  

  This type of voluntary work is particularly challenging but it is also rewarding when I receive positive feedback like this from people who I've been able to help.

  On the other hand, when the Debian Project Leader received news of this incident, he tried to invalidate the concerns of these women and my own efforts to support them:

  DPL: [REDACTED], please feel to drop Daniel from any replies you wish to make, if you even wish to do so

  That's what it looks like when somebody in authority covers up abuse.

  On International Women's Day, it is an interesting time to reflect on the lack of women in Debian. Barely one percent of Debian Developers are female. When I see condescending comments like that from the leadership, discouraging a woman from speaking up, it leaves me with no doubt where the problem originates.

  Worried that this blog doesn't appear on Planet Debian? Follow it on Planet Debian Uncensored. (RSS 2.0 feed, Atom feed)

March 06, 2020

• FreeSWITCH Working Remote: from experiment to trend

  What we've learned from 15 years of experience in working from anywhere. The world is complicated. It always has been. Our lives don’t fit into the classic 9-5 narrative and people are starting to catch on to the “work from anywhere” model in a big way. Some people want to prioritize family, others want to [...]

  The post Working Remote: from experiment to trend appeared first on FreeSWITCH.

• François Marier SIP Encryption on VoIP.ms

  My VoIP provider recently added support for TLS/SRTP-based call encryption. Here's what I did to enable this feature on my Asterisk server.

  First of all, I changed the registration line in /etc/asterisk/sip.conf to use the "tls" scheme:

  [general]
  register => tls://mydid:mypassword@servername.voip.ms
  

  then I enabled incoming TCP connections:

  tcpenable=yes
  

  and TLS:

  tlsenable=yes
  tlscapath=/etc/ssl/certs/
  

  Finally, I changed my provider entry in the same file to:

  [voipms]
  type=friend
  host=servername.voip.ms
  secret=mypassword
  username=mydid
  context=from-voipms
  allow=ulaw
  allow=g729
  insecure=port,invite
  transport=tls
  encryption=yes
  

  (Note the last two lines.)

  The dialplan didn't change and so I still have the following in /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf:

  [pstn-voipms]
  exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551234567>)
  exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,n,Dial(SIP/voipms/${EXTEN})
  exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,n,Hangup()
  exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551234567>)
  exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,n,Dial(SIP/voipms/1${EXTEN})
  exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,n,Hangup()
  exten => _011X.,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5551234567>)
  exten => _011X.,n,Authenticate(1234) ; require password for international calls
  exten => _011X.,n,Dial(SIP/voipms/${EXTEN})
  exten => _011X.,n,Hangup(16)
  

  Server certificate

  The only thing I still need to fix is to make this error message go away in my logs:

  asterisk[8691]: ERROR[8691]: tcptls.c:966 in __ssl_setup: TLS/SSL error loading cert file. <asterisk.pem>
  

  It appears to be related to the fact that I didn't set tlscertfile in /etc/asterisk/sip.conf and that it's using its default value of asterisk.pem, a non-existent file.

  Since my Asterisk server is only acting as a TLS client, and not a TLS server, there's probably no harm in not having a certificate. That said, it looks pretty easy to use a Let's Encrypt cert with Asterisk.

• François Marier Making SIP calls to VoIP.ms subscribers without using the PSTN

  If you want to reach a VoIP.ms subscriber from Asterisk without using the PSTN, there is a way to do so via SIP URIs.

  Here's what I added to my /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf:

  exten => 1234,1,Set(CALLERID(all)=Francois Marier <5555551234>)
  exten => 1234,n,Dial(SIP/sip.voip.ms/5555556789)
  

March 05, 2020

• Digium 10 Conference Call Etiquette Tips to Make Your Remote Meetings More Productive

  Ah, conference calls. They have the ability to make meetings so much more convenient, but like any technology, remote collaboration can come with a certain amount of “learning pains.” After all, it takes a while to adjust to new ways of doing things – especially when technology is involved. But, ultimately, conference calls and other forms of remote collaboration can improve productivity and elevate the efficiency of an organization’s business processes.

  Just like in-person meetings, however, remote collaboration can quickly become a waste of time for those involved if it just becomes a way to fill calendars with no defined purpose. If you want to respect the time of all parties involved and keep your business productive, a little conference call etiquette can go a long way.

  So here are 10 conference call etiquette tips to keep your conference calls smooth and productive.

  1. Watch the clock and make good use of everyone’s time

  When you schedule a conference call, set strict time limits and stick to them. That’s not to say calls can’t ever or won’t occasionally go over, but it’s important to make a sincere effort to respect everyone’s time. Not only do people lose focus when conference calls drag on, but they also have to adjust the rest of their schedule accordingly, potentially throwing off their agenda. Be respectful and watch the clock.

  2. Define “To-Dos” with deadlines and who owns them

  Conference calls have a tendency to be slightly less formal and structured than in-person meetings. As a result, it’s easy to drift into an hour-long conversation about a particular topic and come out of it with little to no action items. If you want to really improve productivity and the overall effectiveness of your conference calls, make defining action items a priority. Be sure to give them specific assignees, deadlines, and deliverables.

  3. Have an agenda, clear objectives, and role expectations

  Agendas are important for meetings in general, but they’re an absolute must for conference calls. Knowing who’s leading the meeting, what needs to be accomplished by the end of the call, and who else is contributing are all key factors to making sure your conference call doesn’t turn into an obscure brainstorming session. That leads to the next point.

  4. Stay on topic

  We’ve all been in meetings or on calls where you come to talk about one thing, then an interesting point comes up that the group wants to explore further. A half-hour later, the group has gone down a long rabbit hole and the original purpose of the meeting has yet to be discussed.

  Elaboration is necessary. Debates are bound to happen. These are natural and conducive elements of good meetings, as long as they aren’t taken too far.

  Don’t let your meetings get hijacked by off-topic discussions. Dive deeper on points when necessary, but always keep the underlying goal of the meeting in mind and make a point to schedule discussions around other topics that come up along the way.

  5. Always introduce all participants

  One awkward aspect of conference calls is the inability to see participants. Without introducing everyone on the call before the meeting starts, it can be difficult to keep up with who’s on the line and who isn’t. This gets even more awkward during sales calls and others that involve several parties that may or may not be formally introduced.

  Eliminate the possibility of referring to someone in third person when they’re actually in the meeting and the awkwardness of being on a call with people you don’t know by making introductions and properly identifying everyone on the call before it begins.

  6. Use a screen sharing application

  When you’re referencing a document, it’s best to use a screen sharing application so everyone can see exactly what you’re referring to.

  Cloud applications like Google Drive and Dropbox make it tempting to simply let everyone in a conference call access the document themselves, but that only adds unnecessary confusion. When you go that route, you have to make sure everyone’s looking at the same document, is on the same page, and can find particular aspects of the document you’re referencing.

  In the end, file sharing in a real-time setting such as a conference call ultimately cause more confusion than it’s worth. Avoid the friction and use a screen sharing application.

  7. Use visual aids

  People retain much more information from a visual and oral presentation than they do from what they heard from an oral presentation alone.

  When you use visual aids, be sure to number and clarify all slides used in your presentation. This helps when either you or someone else on the call references one of your slides. It can get confusing to explain which slide you’re looking at, and sometimes the confusion can throw off the momentum of a meeting.

  So use visual aids in your conference calls to keep everyone engaged, but be sure to organize and label your visual aids in a way that makes them easy to reference during a discussion.

  8. Pay attention

  No one likes talking to someone who is preoccupied or only halfway paying attention. Plus, it’s embarrassing to be called on in a meeting when you don’t know what’s going on. Everyone’s busy, but it’s important to make sure that when you’re on a conference call, you take steps to eliminate distractions.

  Put your phone on “do not disturb” mode or simply turn it off during the meeting. Don’t fall into the trap of checking your email. No matter how casual it may seem, you’ll be tempted to respond to something you see, and just like that, your mind checks out.

  If the topic of the conference call requires you being at your computer (as it most often does), try closing out all apps that may send distracting notifications.

  Most importantly, practice exercising some good old fashioned self-control during meetings. You and the other people on the conference call will appreciate your full attention (and you won’t get embarrassed for not knowing what’s going on).

  9. If leaving during a conference call, state you are leaving

  It’s extremely frustrating to be on a conference call and pose a question to someone you think is on the line, only to be met with silence. You don’t know how long they’ve been gone or if they missed the entire conversation. Now you have to fill them in on what’s going on before you can even get their input on the topic.

  Announcing when you’re leaving gives everyone on the call the opportunity to ask any final questions or make any final comments before you leave. It also prevents them from feeling the frustration of talking to someone who is no longer on the line.

  10. Use Unified Communications solutions to your advantage

  Unified Communications solutions are business phone systems that integrate business tools onto a single communications platform with advanced applications for things like chat, conferencing, presence indicators, and much, much more. These Unified Communications (UC) solutions have made inter-office communication much easier, and they can help tremendously with conference calls.

  Aside from the actual conference call capabilities of UC solutions (which they make extremely easy), UC solutions also give you the ability to set your phone and chat status to “In a Meeting,” minimizing distractions and improving communication with co-workers. This tells everyone what you’re doing and signals that you’re not to be disturbed unless it’s absolutely necessary.

  ---

  Next Steps

  Want to see what how a Unified Communications solution could improve your business? See the benefits businesses are enjoying after making the switch to UC. Download the free eBook now!

  The post 10 Conference Call Etiquette Tips to Make Your Remote Meetings More Productive appeared first on Sangoma.

March 03, 2020

• Digium Working from Home, the Future of Work, and How UC Fits In

  

  Many people today are thinking more about working from home, especially in the coming months. We’ll see how it all plays out, but it certainly is possible to work from home quite easily.  

  But even before this Coronavirus scare, there has been a lot of hype recently about the “future of work” with respect to what an “office” would look like in the future. As seen in the chart above from “The IWG Global Workplace Survey,” 75% of respondents believed flexible working represented the new norm.  Employees basically expect flexibility in the work environment in terms of being able to work remote at least part of the time and being able to work some different hours. Of course, this is all millennial driven!

  Don’t blame them! This whole topic has been evolving over the past many years. The advances in communication networks have made these conversations possible. Mobile phones. Internet capabilities and speeds. Applications on these networks.   

  When I first came out of school and started working, there was no real concept of working from home. You just couldn’t do it since there weren’t even laptops or servers readily available yet. I remember going on trips and not having to work the whole time, because all you had to do was retrieve your voice mail and return calls. Because that’s all you could do. So as I travelled around the country, I ended up going to quite a few baseball games!

  Anyway, that was a long time ago. Today, we can work from home, and people wouldn’t even necessarily know. You have the same work phone number, you can access the same applications, you can be part of collaboration teams, etc. All because the networks are better, and the applications you use at work everyday can run on those networks. So no one really even knows where you are.

  Unified Communications (UC) plays a huge role in this “future of work” movement, which as I said, isn’t really new. As I write this, I am on my laptop now in an airport. I’m connected via WiFi. I’m on the Sangoma Cloud UC system. Via our Zulu collaboration client, my phone just rang with my Sangoma number, and I talked just like I was at work or at home. A few people said, “Where are you? I can hear xxxxxx.” 

  And that’s the future of work. It’s not possible without UC. And it was made possible because of UC.

  If you are thinking of installing a business phone system to help your employees work better from home, then Switchvox Cloud can help you.

  The post Working from Home, the Future of Work, and How UC Fits In appeared first on Sangoma.

February 28, 2020

• Digium Increase Your Revenue with New E911 Call Monitoring Services

  Have you been searching for an innovative new service that can increase your revenue? Good news! We offer exact service you’re looking for. It’s called E911 Call Monitoring, and your end users are going to love it.  

  How It Works

  With our new E911 Call Monitoring service, you’re able to add emergency contact names and numbers to your existing 911 enabled locations. If 911 is called from that location, an SMS is sent to all contacts alerting them that an emergency call is in progress. That SMS alert includes the dial-in details that allows the contacts to listen in on the active 911 call. While they are only able to listen to the call, they do have the option of replying to the SMS alert. This creates a group chat between all contacts linked to that location.

  Use Cases

  This service would benefit all types of end users from schools to large office buildings to hotels. Additionally, E911 Call Monitoring is great for end users with elderly or ailing friends or family members. However your end users choose to use the service, they’ll have the piece of mind knowing that when a 911 call is made, the right people people will be notified and able to take action quickly.

  Testing

  We always encourage testing your 911 calls to ensure quality and completion. To do this, you simply dial 933 instead of 911. If you’re testing the service with a number that you’ve enabled with location monitoring, you’ll receive a test SMS showing the call-in details for the fake active emergency call. You’ll also be able to test the group chat functionality by responding to the alert and chatting with other contacts assigned to that location. 

  FCC Compliance

  In addition to creating a new revenue stream for your business, our E911 Call Monitoring service can help you work towards becoming compliant with Kari’s Law and Ray Baum’s Act. These are two new FCC regulations that impact providers of multi-line telephone systems (MLTS).

  • Kari’s Law requires MLTS providers to remove all prefixes, such as 8, when dialing 911. It also requires alerts to be sent to a designated person when a 911 call has taken place. The law will go into effect on February 16, 2020. 
  • Ray Baum’s Act requires providers to share specific location information (building, floor, suite, etc.) for the person making the 911 call. Fixed MLTS providers must be compliant by January 2021 and Non-Fixed MLTS providers by January 2022.

  For more information on Kari’s Law or Ray Baum’s Act, please visit the FCC 911 requirements page or their implementation fact sheet. We also recommend seeking legal counsel to ensure you are taking all the right precautions to become compliant.

  Pricing

  The E911 Call Monitoring services are easily accessible within the 911 services section in the VoIP Innovations BackOffice. As far as pricing, you are charged a flat monthly fee per location. There is no limit on the amount of locations or contacts within each location that you can add for your end users. 

  ---

  If you’re an existing Sangoma SIPDepot carrier services (VoIP Innovations) customer who’s ready to explore this new service, you can view the full documentation here and then access the service here.

  For those who are not yet a customer, contact us today and we’ll get you in touch with one of our telecom experts.

  The post Increase Your Revenue with New E911 Call Monitoring Services appeared first on Sangoma.

• Jitsi Google Summer of Code 2020

  Last week our friends at Google announced the list of organizations selected for the 2020 edition ot their GSoC 2020.  We have been privileged to partake in GSoC on multiple occasions, but there are many awesome organizations applying and there is only so much room, so this year we’ll take the bench.

  We had a very good list of ideas for GSoC this year, so what happens to those? Those ideas represent things we want to implement on the different Jitsi projects, so we’ll get to them, sooner or later.

  If you like any of the ideas and are looking to contribute to a thriving Open Source project feel free to get in touch with us via our commuinity!

  The post Google Summer of Code 2020 appeared first on Jitsi.

February 27, 2020

• Digium Meet Tina Caudle, Sangoma’s new Director of Channel Sales for North America

  It is our pleasure to announce the promotion of Tina Caudle to the position of Director of Channel Sales for North America. In her new role, Tina will report directly to the Vice President of North America Sales, David Hardy. She will be responsible for generating new revenue through the team of Channel Account Managers selling Sangoma’s products for businesses through Sangoma’s Authorized Channel Partners. Tina will be an integral piece of Sangoma’s strategy to support continued growth.

  Tina brings extensive sales, marketing, and sales operational experience to the team. Prior to her promotion, she was a Channel Account Manager for the Southeastern region of the United States, where she was successful in recruiting new partners and growing the business. She has also excelled in other inside sales positions within the company.

  Prior to joining Sangoma (formerly Digium), Tina was a Major Account Manager at BellSouth (now AT&T). She studied at Auburn University and is a graduate of the University of Alabama in Huntsville with a degree in Business Administration.

  Please join us in congratulating Tina in her new role!

  ---

   

  Current Sangoma Channel Partners: If you have any questions, reach out to your CAM/ICAM or directly to Tina Caudle.

  Interested in Sangoma’s Channel Partner program? Visit us at Sangoma.com/partners for more information!

  The post Meet Tina Caudle, Sangoma’s new Director of Channel Sales for North America appeared first on Sangoma.

• Daniel Pocock How Kosovo won DebConf21

  On 20 February, the DebConf team announced that Kosovo will host DebConf21 in the summer of 2021. DebConf is an annual, week-long conference of Debian Developers, typically attracting between 300 and 600 people to a different host city each year.

  The DebConf21 win is a strong endorsement of the work done by local groups including FLOSSK, CoderGals Kosovo and Toastmasters.

  FLOSSK operate the amazing Prishtina Hackerspace and they have been running an annual event, Software Freedom Kosovo (SFK) for ten years now. The CFP deadline for SFK 2020 is imminent, please submit your proposal before 1 March.

  

  CoderGals Kosovo ran their first Hackathon for Girls in Prizren, 2017.

  As a Debian Developer, I've visited and helped organize a number of events in the region covering Albania, Montenegro and Kosovo. At the Digital-born Media Carnival in Kotor, 2017, I was fortunate to meet four students from Kosovo, including Albiona and Qendresa Hoti, who told me about their plans to run a hackathon in Prizren. They invited me to attend as an advisor to their event and this was a great opportunity to see the possibilities in Kosovo.

  During the hackathon, I could see that the two main strengths of their group were their commitment to team work and the quality of the presentations on the final day.

  We collaborated on a number of events together:

  • CoderGals Hackathon in Prizren, 2017
  • Prishtina's first Mini DebConf and Fedora Women's Day in 2017
  • MiniDebConf Tirana
  • Debian booth at OSCAL
  • joint meeting of the Prishtina Hackerspace and SHRAK, Kosovo's amateur radio society
  • SFK 2019

  

  Three of the young women from Kosovo were successful in being selected for Google Summer of Code in 2018 and a number of women from the region also received diversity bursaries to attend DebConf18 (Taiwan) and DebConf19 (Brazil). After their success in GSoC, I went down there personally to welcome them to the program.

  Based on my observations from that first event in Kosovo, the hackathon, I felt that many of the students would immediately be able to apply their teamwork and presentation skills with regular Toastmasters meetings. We couldn't find any official group in Kosovo or Albania through the Toastmasters club search so I suggested starting a new one in the Innovation Centre Kosovo (ICK). The ICK has been an indispensable partner in this activity. Among other things, their publicity unit helped us bring Toastmasters to Kosovan TV:

  After a number of Toastmasters meetings in ICK, it was Albiona Hoti and Enkelena Haxhiu who jumped up at DebConf19 in Brazil to launch a surprise bid for DebConf21 at the last minute. Here is their presentation (fast forward 19:30):

  Enkelena has been particularly attentive in following through on the relations with the DebConf team over the last six months, engaging FLOSSK in the bid, documenting the bid on Debian's wiki and establishing Kosovo's strengths to host the event. Albiona has been a key part of the team that is bootstrapping the new Toastmasters group.

  It has been a privilege for me to mentor and collaborate with a number of these young leaders on this journey.

February 26, 2020

• FreeSWITCH Sponsoring ClueCon 2020: What you need to know

  Do you need to get your name or new idea out there? Have you been searching for the perfect opportunity to get brand recognition from a global audience? Maybe you want to do some networking with brilliant telecom professionals, or you want to support and shape the future of communications technology. If any of these [...]

  The post Sponsoring ClueCon 2020: What you need to know appeared first on FreeSWITCH.

• Kamailio Siremis v5.3.0 Released

  Siremis v5.3.0 is out – the open source web management interface for Kamailio SIP Server.

  This version comes with major changes and many new features, among them the removal of legacy flash charts (now uses pure JS), make the code compatible with PHP 7.x and web views to manage many new modules added up to Kamailio v5.3.x, including the replacement of MI control interface with JSONRPC. This is the first full release in 5.x series of Siremis.

  Step by step installation tutorial, screenshots and changelog are available on the web at:

  • Installation Tutorial
  • Screenshots
  • ChangeLog

  The deployment of Siremis can be also done using Docker, see the guidelines at:

  • https://github.com/asipto/siremis/tree/master/misc/docker

  Siremis project is hosted on Github at:

  • https://github.com/asipto/siremis/

  Do not forget about the next Kamailio World Conference, April 27-29, 2020, in Berlin, Germany! The first group of speakers has been announced, the schedule in under work, news about the event agenda to be released very soon! See you there!

  Thanks for flying Kamailio!

February 25, 2020

• TADHack TADHack-mini Orlando, 28-29 March, + TADHack Global Prep

  We’re back in Orlando for TADHack-mini Orlando #4, the weekend before Enterprise Connect 2020! You can see what we got up to at TADHack-mini Orlando 2019, as well as 2018, and 2017.

  What? It’s a hackathon about using the Apidaze, Asterisk, Inference Solutions, Intelepeer, and Simwood resources to solve problems that matter to you in your work, home and community life. A focus for this year is intelligent assistants / bots.

  Who? Anyone who’s interested, web dev skills will help.

  Why? To showcase the power of sponsors’ resources, network with great people, and possibly win some of the $5k in prizes + other goodies (free access to Enterprise Connect 2020 – previous winners can tell you about all the fun stuff).

  But I’m going to Code Camp! We’re stretching the TADHack agenda so you can still attend Code Camp, then come over to TADHack on Saturday late afternoon / evening, and have more time on Sunday. We’re going to help you have a jam-packed and very successful weekend!

  But what about COVID-19? We’ve always accepted remote entries. So whether you’re not able to make it to Orlando in-person, or you’re avoiding crowds because of COVID-19, you can still take part. I’ll be in Orlando looking forward to all your entries.

  Go to the TADHack Orlando site to learn more about the excellent resources from Apidaze, Asterisk, Inference Solutions, Intelepeer, and Simwood.

  TADHack Global Prep, 10th / 11th October, Call for Locations

  We have TADHack Global planned for the weekend of October 10th / 11th (Saturday and Sunday). Website is coming soon.

  TADHack Global is the largest global hackathon for 6 years straight, since the first TADHack in 2014, and 2020 will make it 7 years. You can see some of what we’ve achieved here: http://blog.tadhack.com/2018/11/09/reviewing-5-years-of-tadhack/.  The TADHack YouTube channel has had over 2.5k hours of viewing from 70k views.

  Given COVID-19 one or two locations may run online this year rather than in-person, we’ll ensure TADHack Global happens in the safest way for everyone involved. We have always accepted remote entries at TADHack, ever since our first TADHack in 2014.

  In September we’ll finalize the exact plans location by location. Regardless, we’ll be hacking together both in-person and over the internet on the 10th and 11th October. A great demonstration of how communications enables us to JFDI regardless of the situation.

  If you’re interested in running a TADHack Global location whether its in-person or online please let me know.

  Join us at TADHack!
  Follow us on twitter @TADHack

  The post TADHack-mini Orlando, 28-29 March, + TADHack Global Prep appeared first on Blog @ TADHack - Telecom Application Developer Hackathon.

• Digium Putting Some Numbers Behind the Unified Communications Value Proposition

  Last week, I wrote a bit about the Unified Communications value proposition and the panel I was on at IT Expo. When preparing for that panel, I went back to a report we commissioned over a year ago to try and quantify the UC gains. And I also saw this blog I wrote about a year ago on the topic. This got a decent amount of traffic, and many found the information useful. So I decided to repost it for those who may not have seen this last year. And at the bottom, you’ll see a link to the report.

  Unified Communications Value Proposition

  Businesses buy new phone systems for a variety of reasons. There could be a new location. The old phone system might have been outgrown or may just be too old and about to fall over dead. The business could be looking for new features beyond just voice or may be replacing a plain old phone system that ended up costing too much (because of PSTN trunks for high maintenance fees). These are all good reasons. Today, most new phone systems are of the Unified Communications (UC) type – offering features beyond just basic voice.

  

  The drivers for buying UC phone systems that you typically hear are:

  • Efficiency Improvement
  • Productivity Gains

  These are typical since, with UC, there can be other forms of communication, such as instant messaging, that can be utilized while occupied with some other communication activity, such as during a conference call. Or you remain connected with your smartphone outside of the actual business environment so you can “expand” your office hours.  Or because all the calls are on IP, the business can save mobile phone and PSTN trunks charges. Add this all up, and the business scores efficiency and productivity gains.

  But can these gains really be quantified? Yes, they can.

  Sangoma partnered with the Eastern Management Group to undertake a wide-ranging survey aimed at providing some quantified data on value improvements in different areas to help explain the Unified Communications value proposition. The report can be obtained here.

  The post Putting Some Numbers Behind the Unified Communications Value Proposition appeared first on Sangoma.

• WebRTC Hacks Private Home Surveillance with the WebRTC DataChannel (Ivelin Ivanov)

  When most people think of WebRTC they think of video communications. Similarly, home surveillance is usually associated with video streaming. That’s why I was surprised to hear about a home security project that leverages WebRTC not for video streaming, but for the DataChannel. WebRTC’s DataChannel might not demo as well as a video call, but […]

  The post Private Home Surveillance with the WebRTC DataChannel (Ivelin Ivanov) appeared first on webrtcHacks.

February 24, 2020

• Kamailio SecSIPId – New Module For STIR And SHAKEN

  Recently a new module has been imported in Kamailio git master branch – secsipid:

  • https://www.kamailio.org/docs/modules/devel/modules/secsipid.html

  It implements the IETF extensions for Secure Telephone Identity (RFC8224, RFC 8588), known as STIR and SHAKEN. Their scope is to detect and prevent SPIT (SIP/Telephony spam calls) and robo-calling, allowing the SIP/VoIP providers and carriers to assert and validate the identity of callers. Currently the authorities in USA are pushing for implementation of those extensions, in the first phase by the major telecom companies.

  The module relies on a library made available by Asipto at:

  • https://github.com/asipto/secsipidx

  The secsipidx project offers also a CLI tool and an HTTP API server for checking or building SIP identity.

  You can learn more about this module, or STIR and SHAKEN in general, at SimCon3  (March 5-6, 2020, in Bristol, UK) and the next Kamailio World Conference (April 27-29, 2020, in Berlin, Germany) where Daniel, the author of the module, will participate.

  Thanks for flying Kamailio!

February 20, 2020

• Digium [Infographic] Mitigating Common VoIP Security Threats

  

  Common VoIP Security Threats

   

  Toll Fraud

  A common attack against business phone systems where the malicious agent attempts to gain access to your long-distance, toll-bearing trunks. If the attacker is able to make calls using your long-distance account, they can make calls for free, while you are left liable for the fees.

  Phone System Exploitation

  Hackers can gain access to a phone system via endpoints by either exploiting vulnerabilities in the unprotected system or using software to crack the system administrator’s credentials. These credentials give unlimited access to system functionality and stored information.

  Denial of Service (DoS)

  An attack which compromises your system in such a way that it is inaccessible to users. DoS attacks can target specific services such as access to remote UC features and the ability to dial out trunks – or even bring down your entire system.

  Social Engineering

  A social engineering attack occurs when a malicious agent is able to gain access to your system by fraudulently networking with your staff. For example, an attacker may pretend to be a member of your IT department in order to obtain network or endpoint access.

  Man in the Middle

  This attack occurs when your encrypted traffic is intercepted. While your services appear to be working normally, if the attacker can intercept authentication credentials, they can use this information to perform a DoS or Toll Fraud attack or gain access to privileged information.

   

  ---

  The Solution: Session Border Controllers (SBCs)

   

  SBCs are designed to understand SIP traffic at the application layer, automatically detecting VoIP threats and taking action. You should use an SBC to protect against malicious attacks, to connect remote workers without opening up ports in your firewall, and with cloud services or hosted phone systems.

  Click here to explore Sangoma’s line of SBCs, considered both the easiest to use and among the most secure on the market!

   

  The post [Infographic] Mitigating Common VoIP Security Threats appeared first on Sangoma.

February 18, 2020

• FreeSWITCH Half Way There!

  ClueCon Sale! ClueCon is having a half way there sale! We're only 6 months away from the developers conference of the year, so make sure you take advantage of this special discount before February 24! ClueCon.com ClueCon is a conference for developers by developers: an annual technology conference held every summer hosted by the team [...]

  The post Half Way There! appeared first on FreeSWITCH.

• Digium [ITEXPO Panel] Using Unified Communications to Convert Wasted Time to Productive Work

  Last Thursday, I was on a UC panel at ITEXPO. This was an interesting panel because it was about us as employees being bombarded by all kinds of communication tools and whether these tools are really helping us, or whether are we just robotically utilizing these tools all day.  Like, are you really able to get anything done? By the way, this is not really a new topic. When email first came into business, these very kind of panels were formed to discuss the use of email and whether they were useful or not. At that time, some companies were turning off email for an hour a day. What goes around comes around!

  Anyway, as readers of this blog know, the topic of quantifying UC productiveness has been top of mind for me. Sangoma sponsored two different studies into this in the last couple of years (one with Eastern Management Group, one with Frost and Sullivan).

  Part of the panel, though, also delved into whether an organization has “too many” tools of the same ilk. Like marketing uses a different one from engineering who uses different UC tools from support and then it’s an issue to “talk” to that one group in their “language.” And that can be a problem in larger companies.

  However, launching new products and services is also important. To me, this is about the entire UC value prop. There are many elements of UC, and it’s doubtful a user, during the initial deployment, utilizes all of them from the get-go. We frequently see customers who like 1 or 2 elements of UC and that’s why they buy it, yet over time they really like other functions that weren’t part of the purchasing decision. And these other functions enable new services that they hadn’t thought of before. For instance, with mobility, your office phone number can ring on your smartphone. And since your smartphone is with you at all times, maybe you can offer expanded service support times and charge more for that. 

  Anyway, it was fun and productive.

  The post [ITEXPO Panel] Using Unified Communications to Convert Wasted Time to Productive Work appeared first on Sangoma.

February 17, 2020

• TADHack IntelePeer Sponsors TADHack-mini Orlando

  We’re excited to announce IntelePeer as a 2020 sponsor of TADHack-mini Orlando.

  IntelePeer delivers an omni-channel communications platform as a service built for the enterprise, Atmosphere® CPaaS. They believe that business communications are meant for more than just simple interactions – they should enable businesses to deliver truly delightful experiences.

  With their voice, messaging, ready-to-use applications, open APIs, and real time analytics, companies can build and integrate communications-enabled workflows to create world-class customer experiences and improve business processes through automation. Their full-stack solution is backed by a rock-solid network and a team of experts who provide nothing but award-winning customer service.

  Building on the intelligent assistant theme of Enterprise Connect TADHack Orlando, developers can focus their hacks on a specific use case scenario that will improve a business process by implementing chat bots or virtual assistants using technologies like IBM Watson Assistant or Google Dialogflow. IntelePeer makes it quick and easy to build out comprehensive communications flows using their Atmosphere® SmartFlows (see video below), Engage, and Analytics platforms. There’s $1k in prize money available for hacks built on Intelepeer.

  For those attending Enterprise Connect 2020, make sure to mark the “Hackathon Report: Focus on Intelligent Agents/Assistants” at 2:00 PM on Monday 30th March in Room Sun D. You’ll see the power of Intelepeer’s  Atmosphere® CPaaS and the ease with which solutions (hacks) can be created within only 24 hours to solve real-world problems. It’s going to be fun!

  The post IntelePeer Sponsors TADHack-mini Orlando appeared first on Blog @ TADHack - Telecom Application Developer Hackathon.

February 14, 2020

• TADHack VoIP Innovations is back, and brings Sangoma to sponsor TADHack-mini Orlando

  We’re excited to announce VoIP Innovations are back sponsoring TADHack-mini Orlando. VoIP Innovations (through the company they bought, Apidaze) has sponsored TADHack since its founding in 2014.

  This year VoIP Innovations brings with it Sangoma, who bought them in 2019. What’s really cool is Sangoma have 2 prizes this year. One $1k pot for hacks on Apidaze, and a second $1k pot for hacks on Asterisk (the oldest, most popular, and widest used open source telecom project in the world). They’re ideally looking for hacks that mash-up both Apidaze and Asterisk.

  Sangoma has the broadest enterprise communications stack in the industry. Their stack includes open source projects like Asterisk and FreePBX, communication APIs from Apidaze, almost every type of enterprise communications platform and service (both cloud and on-premise), through to carrier services.

  With Sangoma, businesses of all sizes can find affordable cloud and on-premise enterprise communications systems with advanced functionality.

  For those attending Enterprise Connect 2020, make sure to mark the “Hackathon Report: Focus on Intelligent Agents/Assistants” at 2:00 PM on Monday 30th March in Room Sun D. You’ll see the power of Apidaze and Asterisk, and the ease with which solutions to real-world problems (hacks) can be created within only 24 hours. It’s going to be fun!

  On related note. Sangoma announced this week Astricon 2020 on the 6-8 October in Orlando. Astricon is THE Asterisk user event. TADSummit Americas <website coming soon> a sister event to TADHack, will be co-located with Astricon this year. From the first ever TADSummit in November of 2013 came the idea for TADHack. We’ll be visiting Orlando twice this year

  

  The post VoIP Innovations is back, and brings Sangoma to sponsor TADHack-mini Orlando appeared first on Blog @ TADHack - Telecom Application Developer Hackathon.

February 13, 2020

• Digium How to Break Up with your Legacy Phone System…

  …And Move to the Cloud!

  We’ve all been there. The dreaded phone call.  “It’s not you, it’s me.” “I just see us going in different directions.” Or the one we all secretly hope never happens, “There is someone else.”  Ending a relationship of any kind can be an uncomfortable situation. A relationship that is often overlooked is the one between a business and their phone system. A lot of businesses are stuck using dated analog or PRI lines with a legacy PBX or might be trapped in a hosted phone system contract that catfished you into what you thought was a deal, but ended up costing you considerably more than you originally agreed to. Here are some helpful tips on how to break up with your current phone system and move on to your dream communication solution.

  Review your Contracts

  If you are using a legacy on-premise phone system, chances are that you own the hardware, but you are probably paying for analog or PRI phone service. If you are already using a hosted VoIP phone system, you probably signed a yearly contract. Take the time to see when that service provider contract is up and if you are free to move to another provider. If you don’t, you might end up paying a fee to end the contract prematurely. 

  Check your Number Portability

  Once you’ve determined that you are free to move to another provider (or if you really don’t care and have set aside the money to pay your way out of the contract), you will need to make sure your current numbers or DIDs are portable to your new provider. This will ensure that you can keep the same number on business cards, signs, and websites. Make sure to port your numbers over to your new phone service provider before you cancel your service. Once service is cancelled, you may not be able to recover your numbers. In a few rare cases, providers may hold onto their numbers regardless and may not release them. By doing your homework ahead of time and checking your number portability, you can get ahead of this issue rather than dealing with vendor breakup regret.

  Put it in writing, as well as a phone call 

  Just like breaking up with someone via text message is a classless act, being vague with your vendor is very unprofessional. Most contracts require written notice 30/60/90 days in advance to cancel services. Having a paper trail by sending an email, as well as a phone call with the vendor will make the “break up” official and give you something to reference with the coming conversations. 

  Take time to self reflect

  By now you should have an idea of what you are looking for in a new phone system based on your experience with your old one. In order to make entering into your new phone system relationship easier, it’s good to do a self evaluation and know where you stand. What is your current bandwidth and will it support a hosted environment? (By the way, we recommend 100Kbps per concurrent call if you are going hosted). Do you have the correct cabling in place everywhere a phone will be located? Do you require standard or gig phones? Do you have the resources in your office to implement a new system or will you need assistance from a local partner? Before moving on, know your technical environment and make any improvements needed before getting tied down again.

  Vendor speed dating

  Although in actual relationships dating before the breakup is looked down upon, with vendors it’s actually respected. While you are window shopping, ask for a demo or see if there is a free trial so you can experience the service without the commitment. This is an excellent way to evaluate vendors and see which one will check off your requirement list. Remember to keep your standards high and hold vendors accountable for what they promise. Our free trial for Switchvox even includes D60 IP phones and softphones so you can really test drive everything Switchvox has to offer. 

  Since your head is probably spinning and your gut is filled with dread, let’s do a quick recap. First, review your contracts to see if you are free to move to another provider and you don’t get burned with fees. Second, check your number portability and set up the porting to the new vendor before you make the switch. Once numbers are ported, then you can break up with your legacy phone system. Next, when you do “break up” with your vendor, do so in writing and over the phone so you have evidence and an established timeline. Be sure to review your existing infrastructure and make any improvements before the new phone system moves in. Lastly, don’t be afraid to see what is out there. Test drive with free trials and ask for demos to see which vendor is right for you. 

  ---

  There is no shame in our game! Check out our Switchvox Cloud free trial and experience a real production environment, test drive our D-Series phones plus softphones, and see what it feels like to truly have all features included. Give us a call today. Don’t worry, we won’t tell your current legacy phone system provider.

  The post How to Break Up with your Legacy Phone System… appeared first on Sangoma.

February 11, 2020

• FreeSWITCH How to build an IVR that doesn’t suck

  By Abbi Minessale We’ve all been there before. We have all experienced the horrors of a bad Interactive Voice Response (IVR). You call the pharmacy with the intent of talking to a pharmacist. But to your absolute terror, you end up chatting with a robot. You called to ask a human person a question about your medication but [...]

  The post How to build an IVR that doesn’t suck appeared first on FreeSWITCH.

• Digium Sangoma Announces Definitive Agreement to Purchase .e4

  

  Sangoma today announced we have signed definitive agreements to purchase .e4, based in Traverse City, Michigan.  .e4 is Sangoma’s leading valued added distributor focused on open source offerings and a vital part of both the FreePBX and Asterisk ecosytems.  The completion of this deal is expected to occur within our quarter.

  This deal significantly strengthens Sangoma’s sales and support for both FreePBX and Asterisk, as well as further demonstrates Sangoma’s deep commitment to the open source market.  

  .e4 is led by Michael White, a pioneer in the open source communications market for almost two decades and a leader who is well known and very well respected in the community.  Mike and the talented .e4 team will take on the leading role within Sangoma spearheading FreePBX/PBXact and Asterisk sales.

  Sangoma welcomes .e4 to the team!

  The post Sangoma Announces Definitive Agreement to Purchase .e4 appeared first on Sangoma.

• WebRTC Hacks Not a Guide to SDP Munging

  SDP has been a frequent topic, both here on webrtcHacks as well as in the discussion about the standard itself. Modifying the SDP in arcane ways is referred to as SDP munging. This post gives an introduction into what SDP munging is, why its done and why it should not be done. This is not […]

  The post Not a Guide to SDP Munging appeared first on webrtcHacks.

February 10, 2020

• Kamailio Kamailio v5.1.10 Released

  Kamailio SIP Server v5.1.10 stable is out – a minor release including fixes in code and documentation since v5.1.9. The configuration file and database schema compatibility is preserved, which means you don’t have to change anything to update.

  Important note: v5.1.10 is the last planned release in the 5.1 series, marking the end of official maintenance for branch 5.1. Consider to upgrade as soon as possible to 5.2.x or 5.3.x series to ensure you are running supported releases.

  Kamailio^® v5.1.10 is based on the latest source code of GIT branch 5.1 and it represents the latest stable version. We recommend those running previous 5.1.x or older versions to upgrade. There is no change that has to be done to configuration file or database structure comparing with the previous releases of the v5.1 branch.

  Resources for Kamailio version 5.1.10

  Source tarballs are available at:

  • https://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/5.1.10/src/

  Detailed changelog:

  • https://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/5.1.10/ChangeLog

  Download via GIT:

   # git clone https://github.com/kamailio/kamailio kamailio
   # cd kamailio
   # git checkout -b 5.1 origin/5.1

  Relevant notes, binaries and packages will be uploaded at:

  • https://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/5.1.10/

  Modules’ documentation:

  • https://www.kamailio.org/docs/modules/5.1.x/

  What is new in 5.1.x release series is summarized in the announcement of v5.1.0:

  • https://www.kamailio.org/w/kamailio-v5-1-0-release-notes/

  Note: the branch 5.1 is an old stable branch. The latest stable branches are now 5.2 and 5.3, at this time with v5.3.2 being the latest stable release. Be aware that you may need to change the configuration files and database structures from 5.1.x to 5.2.x or 5.3.x. See more details about it at:

  • https://www.kamailio.org/w/kamailio-v5-2-0-release-notes/
  • https://www.kamailio.org/w/kamailio-v5-3-0-release-notes/

  Do not forget about the next Kamailio World Conference, the 8th edition, April 27-29, 2020, the event will take place again in Berlin, Germany. The first group of speakers should be announced in the near future! Stay tuned!

  Thanks for flying Kamailio!

February 07, 2020

• Digium Access Misconfiguration of Internal Legacy Customer Support Ticketing System

  Sangoma has concluded a thorough investigation into a misconfiguration of an internal, long unused customer support ticketing system historically used by Sangoma’s support and engineering departments to resolve IT and customer issues. As part of that investigation, we were obliged to comply with applicable legal requirements and procedures and have reported the incident to the appropriate legal authorities: we are now permitted to make this public.

  While the investigation found no malicious use, we want to be transparent about this incident with all customers and reassure them that we are taking it very seriously and holding ourselves accountable.

  Our investigation has determined that a permission change made to the two deprecated Jira projects, by the IT team, on Nov 12 2019 allowed public read only exposure of the data. In specific search phrases, the contents of those Jira tickets were being offered as part of search engine results. Individuals would have been able to click on the search result and enter into a specific Jira ticket offered by the search engine.

  We became aware of the issue on Dec 17, 2019 and, on the same day, Sangoma IT remediated the configuration to restrict the jira access and prevent any further unauthorized access. This issue was specific to two internal deprecated Jira projects: INFRA & SIP, that have NOT been in-use for a number of years and were only used for internal support cases by IT and Cloud Services support teams.

  Our investigation confirmed that substantially all of the records did not contain any personal or CPNI information in accordance with our standard practices. After reviewing the contents of all Sangoma INFRA & SIP Tickets that were exposed to the internet and cross referenced the tickets to the access logs, we determined that there were two cases of possible exposure. None of the data exposed was material and we informed our affected customers.

  We are committed to the privacy and security of our customers and are taking action to prevent future occurrences of this issue. We have updated our procedures to make sure that such changes do not occur in the future: alerts will be triggered on configuration changes along with scheduled period reviews of public facing systems.

  We want to sincerely apologize and reassure our customers that we are taking it seriously and working diligently to make sure that such mistakes do not happen again.

  The post Access Misconfiguration of Internal Legacy Customer Support Ticketing System appeared first on Sangoma.

February 06, 2020

• Digium Must-Have Unified Communications Features for Auto Dealerships

  The ability to capture leads and close a sale is firmly wrapped up in seamless communication through your dealership’s website, CRM, and business phone system; contact information should be prevalent. Even after a sale, customer retention and loyalty is based on the quality of customer satisfaction, which again, comes down to communications. Investing in solutions that enable seamless and effective communications is vital in this competitive industry, and the need spans beyond a traditional phone system.

  The Switchvox Unified Communications (UC) system has been used in auto dealerships for years, benefiting every department’s unique communication needs. Switchvox boasts advanced and flexible features that work well across multiple locations, so multi-site dealerships can seamlessly connect to the same solution. Implementation of Switchvox is simple and can be done with little or no IT staff. Here is a quick look at the features within Switchvox that can help your auto dealership:

  • Mobility: Switchvox Mobile enables the sales team to access every Switchvox feature and capability via their desktop or smartphone (iPhone or Android), including call controls (transfer, conference, send to voicemail), call recording, visual voicemail, and more. The customer only sees the dealership’s caller ID information, which keeps the salesperson’s personal contact information private, and also allows the brand of the dealership to be persistent in all customer communications
  • CRM Integration: The Extend API lets users build integrations with CRM applications, which triggers “screen-pops” displaying important caller information, location, and notes from previous interactions. Salesforce CRM integration is available out of the box.
  • Call Control Interface: The Switchboard allows the receptionist to have a call control interface on their desktop. This web-based application  increases worker efficiency by allowing the receptionist to see who is or is not on the phone, click-to-dial, transfer, and instant message any employee, regardless of location
  • Reporting: You can schedule call reports to be automatically emailed to track marketing campaigns or the productivity of your departments. See how long customers were on hold, with whom they spoke, and use high and low call periods to properly staff during the day
  • Call Queues: These allow you to control the call flow of the dealerships. Queues enable calls to be delivered to the correct department or employee with little or no staff interaction. Queues ensure your customers are taken care of as quickly as possible based on your staffing levels.
  • Call Recording: Managers have the ability to record calls to ensure that employees are handling situations as they were trained to do
  • Personalized Call Rules: Users have the flexibility to set which of their phones ring, in what order, and what time of day. They can set up calls to automatically ring to their desk during work hours, to their mobile phones after hours, or to go straight to voicemail when needed. You can also have your status determine how your calls get routed so you have quick and dynamic control over you calls
  • Training Tools: Switchvox provides several easy-to-use, yet powerful training tools, such as listening in on calls, being able to speak to the employee over the phone without the customer being able to hear, and helping troublesome calls by “barging in”
  • Reduced Cost: Switchvox combines the communications of all your dealership locations into one. This can allow all incoming call traffic to be handled by one receptionist, instead of paying unnecessary salaries to several. Also, due to increased visibility, more locations can be run with fewer managers. Dealerships that implement Switchvox save an average of 40-60% on their monthly communications costs

  Unified Communications is expanding and streamlining the way auto dealerships communicate- from the beginning of the sale to ongoing customer care. Access our Switchvox for Auto Dealerships guide for a detailed overview of every Switchvox feature your dealership can benefit from.

  The post Must-Have Unified Communications Features for Auto Dealerships appeared first on Sangoma.

February 05, 2020

• Daniel Pocock RIP Floe
  
• WebRTC Hacks Perfect Negotiation

  Series preface: We generally lean toward long posts here at webrtcHacks, but not all interesting topics warrant a lot of new text. Sometimes briefer is better. So to better address the many topics that fit into this category, we are starting a new Minimum Duration series. Here is our first post under this set covering […]

  The post Perfect Negotiation appeared first on webrtcHacks.

February 04, 2020

• Digium The Difference Between Retail and Wholesale SIP Trunking

  SIP trunking is growing. According to the Eastern Management Group, the global SIP trunking market was approximately valued at $14.4 billion in 2018 and projected to grow 7.6% annually through 2020. The predominant reason for this is the growth of IP phone systems, which need to be connected to SIP Trunks.

  But if you are a business, what types of SIP trunks should you buy – retail or wholesale?

  Retail SIP trunks are designed for small to mid-sized businesses and are bought from a provider in much the same manner as the business buys other forms of telephony. Pricing is typically calculated per line, per month.

  Wholesale SIP trunks are intended for service providers and large enterprises that consume large amounts of telephony service, either internally or as a provider. There is often a minimum commitment per month (in the form of usage) that you’d be required to sign up for, and after that, it would be metered.  In other words, this is for organizations that utilize a lot of minutes, or intend to resell into the retail business.

  There are many other considerations as well, including SMS, fax, and fraud protection. Please read our whitepaper for more information.

  Sangoma offers both retail SIP trunking and wholesale SIP trunking.

  The post The Difference Between Retail and Wholesale SIP Trunking appeared first on Sangoma.

February 03, 2020

• Daniel Pocock What is a Debian Developer?

  When I started doing things with Debian in 1997, it was prompted by a visit from another Debian Developer. His generosity with his time, skill and advice have left an impression on me to this day about what it means to be a Debian Developer.

  Virtual Moreland was just starting out with a $100,000 grant to get us moving. Some second-hand servers had been donated to run web sites and mail systems, thin clients to build a training lab. I had been using Slackware Linux for a number of years and anticipated using it for Virtual Moreland.

  Fortunately, I was introduced to this Developer who pointed out the benefits of the Debian packaging system over Slackware. He brought the latest Debian archive to me on his hard disk so I could get a local mirror up and running more quickly. When I introduce people to Debian today, I hope I can be equally helpful to them.

  That was before Debian had a constitution and before SPI, Inc, a US organisation which has excluded many Developers from the membership rolls, had seized a Debian trademark. It was before Debian was persuaded into accepting a Code of Conduct that doesn't have any safeguards for the community.

  Today, after more than 20 years, Debian still means much the same thing for me: technical excellence. Giving back to the community. Following the principles laid out in the Debian Social Contract.

  Yet being on the Debian keyring has become a poisoned chalice. After the events of 2018, it is clear that people are both added to the keyring and removed for reasons that are related to politics and control.

  To put it another way, rogue elements of Debian want to flex their muscles and have the power of an employer, without paying us.

  For most of us, our responsibility is to the employers and clients who do pay us, not to those who coerce us and periodically use Debian's otherwise enviable reputation to shame somebody and maintain control through fear. People who prioritize their family, their education or their health are no less Debian Developers than those who submit to control from these would-be masters.

  In 2010, the Debian Developers passed a motion allowing non-Developers to be regarded as Developers. In other words, 285 members of the project who voted made a decision that being a Debian Developer was now about status rather than Developer competence. Approximately 600 people, the majority, did not vote at all.

  This started us going down a slippery slope.

  At the bottom of that slippery slope there is a very hard landing. Developers, with over 30 years experience between them, suddenly deleted under the radar. One of the newest non-developing Developers stands up at a conference to boast about rudely displacing people who were there from the beginning. Neo-Developers who behave like this have nothing in common with the Debian Developers I first met in 1997.

  When this type of person decides to indulge herself shaming a volunteer at a time of grief, that is a step too far.

  What about those who still feel comfortable with the original and more honest and logical definition of a Developer?

  Personally, none of my employers has ever expected me to be on the Debian keyring. Some of them would see it as an unacceptable risk for any employee to be on the Debian keyring if it puts them at risk of coercion. Imagine if you are a manager and somebody outside the company spreads a rumour that one of your employees has been demoted by an external group like Debian, can you afford the damage to productivity and morale? Many other professional developers I speak to don't feel the time demanded by Debian's politics and bureaucracy justifies the benefits of participation. While other communities have grown, Debian reached approximately 1,000 members and has stayed at this level for many years.

  I really don't care which Debian keyring I'm on and either should anybody else. As long as I follow the same principles and find creative ways to make my packages available to the world, I'm entirely consistent with the principles Debian was founded on. After all, Linus Torvalds didn't ask for permission to make Linux. Ian Murdock didn't ask for permission to make Debian. If you have done the same work creating packages, why do you need permission to call yourself by the same title, Debian Developer? For that matter, why shouldn't anybody create their own Debian keyring and distribute it to their friends and clients, as long as they are using it to sign packages created in accordance with the principles we all associate with Debian? In other words, is being a Developer about egos or about principles?

  If even one person is happily using your packages, you might be a Debian Developer too. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise.

• TADHack TADHack-mini Phoenix 2020 Summary

  

  TADHack-mini Phoenix ran on the 1st and 2nd February, just before Avaya ENGAGE. This was the first time we’ve run an event in Phoenix, a big thank you to Phoenix developer and technology community for your support, including PHX DEVS, {az}devs, #yesphx, ASU, UAT, and many more.

  What?
  It’s a hackathon about using the Avaya and Google dialogflow resources to solve problems in Education, Healthcare, Energy / Environment, and St. Mary’s Food Bank (Phoenix based charity).

  Who?
  Anyone who’s interested, web dev skills will help.

  Why?
  To showcase the power of Avaya OneCloud CPaaS and Google’s Dialogflow, network with great people, and possibly win some of the $15k in prizes plus other goodies (excellent stickers from Github, t-shirts from Avaya, access to the Avaya welcome party and Avaya ENGAGE).

  We had close to 100 registrations across in-person and remote. For in-person we bust through our estimates and had to bring in  additional tables and chairs. You can see all the pitch videos in the TADHack-mini Phoenix 2020 playlist. Covered here are the winners announced today.

  The hack’s name was Goovaya, which if we had a prize category for best name would win that. The team was Vlastik Walker, John Zechlin, and David Anderson. A text-bot that folks can text if they are interested in making a difference in their community by donating or volunteering with St Mary’s Food Bank. They also built a great connector between Avaya CPaaS and Google Dialogflow. They won $4k in the St Mary’s Food Bank category.

  

  Nick Kwiatkowski created a hack names “CEBP Enabled Remote EKG.”  A cellular-connected EKG unit that provides the ability for remote healthcare workers to help diagnose, triage and escalate patient cardiovascular problems in realtime. IoT units will alarm out a mediation server and will escalate out via Avaya Cloud to triage nurses and doctors via calls, MMS and more. He won $4k in the healthcare category.

  

  Stephen Drew created Middle School Parent Line. Parent line to report absences, get student gpa and homework, and initiate conversation with teacher via SMS. Technologies used: Avaya CPaaS for voice and SMS, google dialogflow, MongoDB cloud, NiFi, Java/Tomcat. He won $4k in the Education category.

  

  The MRT B-Team was Darryl Jackman and Jambu Atchison. They created a unified Voice & SMS Cloud IVR for scheduling appointments, getting office hours and location, transferring to an agent with caller data screen pop, and self serve diagnosis. Technology used: PHP, nodejs, MySQL, Google Dialogflow, Zang CPaaS. Winning a $1.5k honorable mention.

  

  Mike Cairn’s remote entry hack was called Feed The Hungry with Food Bot.  A chatbot that matched food surplus (from food waste) to food demand using Avaya CPaaS and Google Dialogflow.  The idea is to reduce food waste from businesses and individuals by publishing a food surplus.  This will reduce the amount of food waste, reduce methane in landfills, shorten transportation of food waste and provide food to the needy for free. He won $1.5k honorable mention.

  And we finish on a group picture of the hardy souls that stayed until after the end when we remembered to take a group picture – doh!

  

   

  Below are other excellent hacks that just missed out on a prize.

  The hack ‘Health News Now’ was created by Koshin Mariano, Andrew Steinheiser, and Olu Ayandosu. A timely hack given the coronavirus is thought likely to become a pandemic. Health News Now allows you to sign up for news related to health topics in your region. You sign up and select which topics you are interested in and you will get a daily SMS message with a link to the latest news on the Health Topics you selected. Technology Used: Avaya CPaaS for SMS, Google Cloud, NextJS.

  The ‘Closed-loop communication with patients’ hack was from ‘GATE6 AGILE WARRIORS’

  Communication with patients visiting Radiology and other healthcare organizations is a cumbersome and manual process today. In addition, a missed appointment is an operational overhead for medical administrative staff resulting in an additional cost for every missed appointment. Timely communication with patients can reduce the overhead and deliver superior customer experience to consumers.

  Gate6 Agile Warriors have solved this problem by delivering two use cases –

  a) Deliver timely SMS messages to patients for appointment reminders. Gate6 has taken an existing appointment reminder product for our customers and enhanced it with SMS notification. In addition, allow patients to reschedule appointments via a closed-loop communication by calling out the patient and connecting them with admin staff.

  b) AI-based Facial recognition system alerting physician and admin staff upon patient arrival. When a patient arrives for their appointment at the healthcare clinic, our artificial intelligence system recognizes the patient via webcam and notifies the contextual information about the patient (picture, arrival time, profile) to the admin staff and physician via SMS.

  Technologies Used – All of our services are deployed on Google GCP cloud. Our invocations are made from our cloud services to Avaya CPaaS cloud SMS and Call APIs.

  Github URL – https://github.com/gate6/sdiriskportal/tree/demo

  The My Guardian hack came from Voiceflow. The project link is here.

  The team ‘IRBIDS_ I read but I don’t speak’, included Marco Castro, Carlos Daza, Marlon Acosta, and Juan Pablo Morales.

  They created a phone app that uses artificial intelligence to help improve the pronunciation of non-native speakers using the phone. There is a voice app that you can call at +1 916 860 1204. The app will ask you to repeat a given phrase and check how well you did it. Your score will be saved on a database and you will be able to see how it improves over time. The results are available on http://irbids.ingenian.com

  The whole voice flow is made using the resources provided by Avaya and available at https://cloud.zang.io This means the phone number used, and the voice routing and the voice recording are provided by Avaya.

  The information is available on https://github.com/jpmoralesingenian/irbidsapi

  Arizona Food Bank Mobile from Miko Aro, Xcel Labs.

  From the Avaya team we had a great Showcase on the power of their platform with Universal Translation.

  St Marys Food Finder Flutter App by Allan Jackson. This Flutter application provides direct access to ST MARYs Food Bank Web site and the Arizona Food Banks Websites. Application is constructed with Google Flutter and does not use Avaya or Google Cloud resources

  The post TADHack-mini Phoenix 2020 Summary appeared first on Blog @ TADHack - Telecom Application Developer Hackathon.

January 31, 2020

• Daniel Pocock Diversity at the Australian Open Tennis, Margaret Court and the FSF’s Richard Stallman

  In 2020, Tennis Australia presented a special trophy to Margaret Court, one of the greatest tennis players of all time. Court claimed all four major titles in the year 1970 and won a total of 24 grand slams: Serena Williams has only won 23 so far and Roger Federer only has 20.

  While there is no doubt as to Court's greatness as an athlete, her views on LGBT people and their rights are controversial and not consistent with the majority of people in the sport today.

  

  Despite these sensitive issues and the offense they cause to LGBT players in particular, Tennis Australia has still gone ahead with a ceremony to recognize Court's achievements as an athlete, right in the middle of the 2020 Australian Open tournament, on center court, the trophy presented to her by another legend of Australian Tennis, Rod Laver.

  While doing so, Tennis Australia has made it clear that they are distinguishing her personal views from her sporting achievements, explicitly acknowledging the pain caused by the former. Fellow athletes went further, Martina Navratilova climbing the umpire's chair and using the microphone to denounce Court.

  What does diversity mean to you? Is Tennis Australia being true to diversity, by recognising Court's sporting achievements for their athletic merit alone? Or does diversity mean we have to erase those people who don't agree with our own definition of diversity?

  Compare this to the recent lynchings in Free Software communities around the world.

  In 2014, Brendan Eich, one of the co-founders of Mozilla, was promoted to the position of CEO. A lynching-by-Twitter quickly began, hounding him to resign barely 10 days later because of his concerns about gay marriage.

  In 2019, similar tactics were used to attack Richard Stallman (RMS), founder of the Free Software Foundation. RMS has no homophobic or sexist agenda. He is a computer scientist, not a diplomat and some of his communications could have been worded more carefully. Nonetheless, the dogs were let off their leash, things he had written were used out of context to create a false depiction of him as a villain and within a few days, RMS had resigned.

  In contrast to Tennis Australia's memorialisation of Margaret Court's achievements, the FSF has set about deleting RMS's legacy, deleting his name from their history. Newspaper headlines have appeared associating RMS with Jeffrey Epstein, yet there is no evidence that they ever had any contact during Epstein's visits to RMS's former workplace, MIT. This type of press coverage is no accident: it is not only intended to hurt RMS personally, it is also intended to undermine his message of freedom. It is an attack that hurts anybody with a personality that prioritizes principles over popularity.

  In the short term, some of those behind these attacks may be giving themselves high-fives and pats on the back but in the long term, these lynchings send out a subconscious message to volunteers that we are all disposable. If the founder of the movement can be backstabbed on the cusp of his retirement, anybody can. Tennis Australia's celebration of Margaret Court, however, sends out a message that achievement will always have merit and nobody's achievements will be erased for political expedience. Which type of organization would you rather associate with in the long term?

  If you have to force people to fit your definition of diversity, you are not promoting diversity at all.

  Genuine diversity has its roots in the principles of equality and human rights. Mob justice, censorship and exclusion on political grounds violate human rights and therefore sabotage the foundation upon which diversity is built.

January 30, 2020

• Digium Ways to Improve School Safety with UC

  Educators and administrators are tasked with keeping students safe as they go through the school day. From homeroom to the car line, quick and reliable communication is of the utmost importance. Whether calling the nurse to care for a sick student or office staff connecting with a teacher on the other side of the school, all professionals in a school must be able to communicate efficiently to ensure safety.

  Unified Communications (UC) presents a way for schools to streamline all forms of communication in a single platform, including email, voicemail, instant messaging, and more. This helps keep everything centralized and accessible for school officials.

  Here are some of the best ways to improve school safety with UC:

  Mobile softphones allow teachers to communicate from anywhere in the school

  In the event of hazardous weather or other emergency, teachers are often confined to certain areas of the school, such as hallways, classrooms, or the gym. Mobile softphone applications allow office managers and administrators to contact teachers without relying on the intercom system or desk phones. 

  Instead, teachers can make and receive calls via a mobile phone – all through their office extension.

  Integrations with programs like Quicklert help administrators keep parents informed

  Today, many administrators use a variety of communications avenues to connect with parents and staff during an urgent situation. This might include using robocalls to inform parents of inclement weather or a delayed start to the school day, or notifying staff of an unauthorized visitor on campus.

  A UC solution like Switchvox allows school officials to integrate with programs like Quicklert, which simplifies responses by detecting emergency situations and notifying the correct parties. Check out this article if you’d like to learn more about Quicklert.

  Call forwarding rules ensure nurses and resource officers are easy to reach

  Within a school, there are plenty of staff members who are on the go, such as nurses, paraprofessionals, and resource officers. These officials must be able to look after students around the campus without losing contact with staff.

  Call forwarding rules allow users to have calls sent to softphones or other extensions after a certain number of rings. So, if someone is not at their desk, the call rules set in place can automatically direct the call to the office, a softphone, or another potential responder, helping officials maintain communication during urgent events.

   

  ---

   

  Switchvox offers a complete UC solution for schools looking to implement an affordable, reliable communications system. If you’d like to learn more about the features your school can implement with Switchvox, download our free Switchvox for Education guide.

  The post Ways to Improve School Safety with UC appeared first on Sangoma.

January 29, 2020

• Kamailio Upcoming Events In First Quarter 2020

  The first month of 2020 is almost gone and besides very high activity in the new year on development side (e.g., release of 5.3.2 and 5.2.6, support for structured json logging, two new modules mqtt and secsipid (STIR/SHAKEN), …), Kamailio developers and community members are preparing to attend many events around the world in the first quarter, among them:

  • Fosdem, February 1-2, 2020, in Brussels, Belgium
  • Open SourceWorld and ITExpo East, February 11-12, in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, USA
  • Mobile World Congress, February 24-27, 2020, in Barcelona, Spain
  • Call Center World, March 2-5, in Berlin, Germany
  • SimCon3, March 5-6, 2020 in Bristol, UK
  • Kamailio Advanced Training, March 9-11, 2020, in Berlin, Germany
  • IETF 107, March 21-27, 2020, in Vancouver, Canada
  • Kamailio World Conference, April 27-29, 2020, in Berlin, Germany

  Should you be aware of other events where you plan to participate and meet Kamailio folks, let us know via sr-users mailing list and we will add to this list.

  Looking forward to meeting many enthusiastic Kamailians along 2020!

  Thanks for flying Kamailio!

January 28, 2020

• Daniel Pocock Are Smart radiator valves worthwhile?
  

  In a previous blog, I wrote about how to get started with Smart Home technology.

  One topic that comes up frequently in discussions with people is the use of smart radiator valves (TRVs). Will the energy savings outweigh the costs?

  In colder locations, like Ireland, the savings can be more significant than in a similar house in the south of England and it is far more important to investigate these solutions.

  The first thing to realize about this issue is that it is not just a cost issue. If you have a room that is always too hot then a smart TRV may be more effective than a regular TRV. On the other hand, if there are heating pipes under the floor of that room and they are not insulated, neither type of TRV will be able to completely limit the heat.

  With that in mind, you could start with a single smart TRV in the room where temperature control is most difficult before deciding whether to buy more of them.

  Integrated with a centralized control system, as described in my previous blog, the boiler can be switched on and off on demand. Yet this functionality isn't essential: many of the smart TRVs can run standalone, without activating their wireless connectivity. Each TRV has a built-in thermometer so it can monitor the temperature of the room and control the valve. At times when the boiler is running, the TRV will control that room on a standalone basis and when the boiler is off, the TRV does nothing.

  Modern boilers may operate with lower fuel consumption at times when many of the radiators are shut down. Older boilers may continue to burn gas at the same rate whether all the radiators are in use or just one. Before buying smart TRVs, you can simply measure gas consumption for an hour with all radiators on and then measure gas consumption for a further hour with all but one radiator switched off.

  Instead of buying these TRVs, you may find other algorithms for controlling the boiler are more effective at saving money, even on old boilers. For example, if your smart home system can detect those nights when nobody is home, it can choose not to start the boiler in the morning. This logic could be achieved with motion sensors and door sensors.

January 27, 2020

• Digium Sangoma Products’ Support for Kari’s Law / Ray Baum’s Act and How We Can Help You (and your Customers) Comply

  On Feb 16, 2020, the federal version of Kari’s law goes into effect. It’s a complex but important topic, and justifies a comprehensive treatment in this update, something Sangoma is uniquely qualified to offer. But it is indeed complicated, so after reading this, if you have any questions whatsoever, please do not hesitate to contact us!

  The new law applies to business phone systems manufactured, imported, offered for sale or lease, first sold or leased, or installed after February 16, 2020. A key requirement of Kari’s law is to ensure that persons in distress can reach a PSAP by dialing 911, even from a multi-line telephone system (such as exists in a typical business or hotel) that might normally need to dial a prefix such as a 1 or a 9 to get to an outside line.

  The purpose of the regulation is to prevent a tragedies like the 2013 death of Kari Hunt that ultimately led to the federal version of Kari’s Law.

  Moving forward, regardless of their location in the U.S. or where they are dialing from, persons will be able to immediately connect with emergency responders by dialing 911, with no need to dial a prefix such as 1 or 9. Just dialing 911 from a business phone system, like you would from a house phone or a mobile phone, would get the caller to a PSAP.

  An additional requirement of Kari’s Law is that a notification of any E911 calls being made, be sent to a central location at the facility in which the phone system is installed. Ray Baum’s Act is meant to ensure location improvement beyond what currently exists in Kari’s Law by defining “dispatchable location” as “the street address of the calling party, and additional information such as room number, floor number, or other similar information necessary to adequately identify the location of the calling party.” This is because identifying the exact location of the emergency for first responders is critical when dialing 911.

  With VoIP, however, location isn’t at the heart of the call. There is no physical location per se such as when using a copper landline. As such, over time, laws were enacted to ensure VoIP landlines had physical locations and a PSAP could understand where a VoIP call was coming from.  This law takes it one step further.  The business phone system is associated with an address, but what if the system is installed in a large building?  Where in the building is the phone where the 911 call is being made? What floor and what room for example? Notifications such as emails, text, or phone calls need to occur to more accurately pinpoint location, and this is at the heart of this law as well.

  All of this means if you are a business purchasing a new phone system (or a Sangoma business partner implementing one for your ‘end-user’ customers), you need to ensure this new phone system supports these federal laws. And we’re here to help you every step of the way!

  At Sangoma, we have a few lines of business phone systems such as FreePBX, PBXact, and Switchvox.

  Sangoma’s on-premise phone systems (Switchvox, FreePBX, and PBXact) are all compliant with the location portions of the Ray Baum Act and Kari’s Law by supporting/requiring that the customer provide their location during initial set up of the phone system. With these systems, the system admin/user will need to configure the dial plan to allow for direct 911 dial. These systems shall also be compliant to the location notification requirements by the February 16, 2020 deadline. If these systems also use Sangoma’s SIPStation SIP trunking solution, they can also provide a quick method of updating their location (by completing an efficient online form).

  Our Cloud (or hosted) PBX systems (FreePBX, PBXact, and Switchvox) also operate as a multi-line telephony business system. And these cloud systems are already compliant to the 911 dial directive and the main office address directive. As with our premise systems, we support/require customers to provide their location during the initial setup of the phone system and even for updating location via the online form (see below). Regarding the new ‘notification’ requirements, by February 16^th, all new installations of Switchvox Cloud will comply. PBXact Cloud will also comply, but will do so via the end-user admin (or the Sangoma business partner) configuring the system to provide notification of these 911 calls to other onsite staff (as determined by our customers).

  For additional information on Sangoma products and Kari’s Law/Ray Baum compliance, please visit  https://wiki.freepbx.org/display/ST/E911+Service#E911Service-InitialSetupoftheMasterE911DID,  https://support.digium.com/community/s/article/How-do-I-Set-Up-Switchvox-for-Emergency-Dialing, and here for the online location form.

  Additionally, individual states may have more stringent timelines and requirements, so please consult with your legal counsel.

  For “non-fixed multi-line telephony system” phones or devices which are off-premises, such as a remote-office deskphone connected to the company PBX, businesses have two years to fulfill the regulatory obligations. Another example of this would be the Sangoma UC client softphone called Zulu (installed on your computeror mobile phone). Businesses also have two years in this case.

  Beyond the PBX itself, another implication of this law is on SIP trunking because the additional information needs to be carried on the SIP Trunk. It’s critical for your trunking provider to offer 911 services, either as a bundled package or on a standalone basis. The key is to find a service provider whose SIP trunks enable managing E911 effectively and offer the tools you need to be compliant. Sangoma has two SIP trunking solutions that do exactly that:  SIPStation and our trunking service from VoIP Innovations, a Sangoma Company (VI).

  First, for SIPStation, the trunk needs to know the location, and this is done via the online form as described above. Additionally, when using SIPStation, a user can dial 933 to find the location on record, and then, if required, change the location on record via filling out the form.

  And second for our VI trunking service, we have the ability to automate new registrations, edit existing registrations, and remove outdated registrations on any number on any network without having to move your number either through an online portal or via API.

  In addition to making sure your phone system is compliant, VI offers several additional solutions that can help achieve compliance for a comprehensive solution that not only takes the new law into account, but the reasons for the law in the first place: safety and the need for immediate coordinated response to assist in an emergency situation. VI’s new Location Monitoring solution provides immediate notification of any 911 call placed by triggering a text message to a group of contacts that allows them to communicate over text but more importantly provides the ability to listen to the 911 in progress. Once on the call, you can talk with the other members of the alert group to coordinate an immediate response.

  At Sangoma, as stated above, we offer multiple business phone systems (both premise and cloud) and two SIP trunking services. The good news is Kari’s Law and Ray Baum compliance is possible with all of them. We would also be pleased to work with you to upgrade an existing phone system (if necessary) to ensure compliance. And as mentioned at the outset, this is a lot! So, if you have any questions whatsoever, just reach out to us by going here.

  The post Sangoma Products’ Support for Kari’s Law / Ray Baum’s Act and How We Can Help You (and your Customers) Comply appeared first on Sangoma.

January 24, 2020

• Kamailio Kamailio v5.2.6 Released

  Kamailio SIP Server v5.2.6 stable is out – a minor release including fixes in code and documentation since v5.2.5. The configuration file and database schema compatibility is preserved, which means you don’t have to change anything to update.

  Kamailio^® v5.2.6 is based on the latest source code of GIT branch 5.2 and it represents the latest stable version of this branch. We recommend those running previous 5.2.x versions to upgrade. There is no change that has to be done to configuration file or database structure comparing with the previous releases of the v5.2 branch.

  Resources for Kamailio version 5.2.6

  Source tarballs are available at:

  • https://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/5.2.6/src/

  Detailed changelog:

  • https://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/5.2.6/ChangeLog

  Download via GIT:

   # git clone https://github.com/kamailio/kamailio kamailio
   # cd kamailio
   # git checkout -b 5.2 origin/5.2

  Relevant notes, binaries and packages will be uploaded at:

  • https://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/5.2.6/

  Modules’ documentation:

  • https://www.kamailio.org/docs/modules/5.2.x/

  Thanks for flying Kamailio!

  Note that this is a release from the previous stable branch. Currently the latest stable branch is 5.3, with v5.3.2 released out of it.

  Do not forget to make the plans for the next Kamailio World Conference, in Berlin, Germany, during April 27-29, 2020! Three days of knowledge sharing and networking with renowned RTC experts.

January 22, 2020

• Daniel Pocock Australia’s newest territory

  When Lausanne 2020 Youth Winter Olympics began on 9 January, Australia had six states and ten territories.

  Thanks to the efforts of Josie Baff, winning a gold medal in the women's snowboard cross, we now add a new territory to that tally: Villars-sur-Ollon in the Canton of Vaud, Switzerland. (Please, please don't try to add it to the list of Australian territories in Wikipedia).

  Acquiring Swiss citizenship requires ten years of residence and a serious effort to learn at least one of the national languages (French, German, Italian and Romansh). Ten years? Baff had a margin of just 0.05 seconds when she staked her claim to that gold medal, leaving our amazing hosts to take bronze.

  Baff appeared live on an Olympic Channel broadcast the next day, where they selected her race for a replay and Baff herself demonstrates she is not just a winner but also a capable leader, a tremendous ambassador for this niche area of Australian sport that now keeps the Swiss and Canadians from sleeping at night.

  (The full broadcast is available from Olympic Channel)

  To put Baff's achievement in perspective, in the entire history of the winter Olympics, Australia has only won five gold medals.

  Whenever I speak to my Swiss friends now, the first thing they mention is Australia winning medals in winter sports. It doesn't stop there. On my travels in the region, speaking to Olympic volunteers and representatives of other teams, they see Baff's victory as more than a gold medal: this is evidence of Australia transposing a universally respected excellence in summer sports into the world of winter sports. People don't ask if Australia can repeat this victory: they ask which event will Australia target next.

  The Lausanne 2020 mascot is Yodli, seen here acknowledging Australia's claim on Swiss alpine territory.

  

  Footnote: the Australian Antarctic Territory is the largest territory of Antarctica and at almost six million square kilometers, it is 142 times the size of Switzerland.

January 21, 2020

• Kamailio apiban.org – A Service To Share IP Addresses Of Bad SIP Traffic

  Fred Posner has recently launched a new project with LOD called APIBAN:

  • https://apiban.org

  The site provides an API to share IP addresses of bad SIP traffic; allowing you to block the traffic before it reaches your RTC platform.

  Examples are provided for integration with Kamailio (via http_client, jansson and htable modules) as well as an open source iptables client in Go.

  The service is free, provided as a public Beta and an API key can be requested from the site itself.

  

  Thanks for flying Kamailio!

  Should you be aware of similar services or articles that you think worth sharing with the Kamailio community, let us know and we will gladly publish news about them.

  Looking forward to meeting many of you at the 8th edition of Kamailio World Conference, April 27-29, 2020, in Berlin, Germany!

• Digium Still Selling Dialogic Boards and Gateways

  I was walking through an airport towards the end of 2019 with my Sangoma backpack, and someone approached me and asked if I worked there. I said, “yes,” and the person then asked me if we still sold the Dialogic boards (since he knew Sangoma bought the Dialogic board and gateway business two years ago).

  We got to talking a bit, and he said that he still needed a few boards for a call center solution he needed to upgrade. And we reminisced about him coming to the NJ HQ years ago.

  I told him he could buy the boards he needed through the same distribution channels he always had used or to find a distributor from our website. And I told him we continue to provide operating system updates and other sorts of firmware upgrades where possible and are also in fact working on a new gateway. And I told him we still had an office in NJ.

  So YES, we still sell them, and we still use a contract manufacturer based in North America to manufacture them. And we’ll continue to make them while we can and while there is still demand.

  So why are they still required? Well, the whole world is not yet on VoIP (even though a lot of the people in the communications industry act like that). Some solutions are still connected to the PSTN and require these boards for that purpose. Some solutions are connected to a VoIP network through a gateway, but the solution does not need to be re-architected because of the existence of that VoIP gateway. So the boards are still used in the solution. That scenario was the case of the guy I met in the airport.

  So, if you need Dialogic boards or gateways and don’t know where to go, visit our website or give us a call.

  The post Still Selling Dialogic Boards and Gateways appeared first on Sangoma.