Aswath Weblog

EnThinnai at LaunchPad

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Comments on ecomm2008

Last month, a week before VON there was another conference - ecomm2008. Last week the slides used by the speakers were putup on slideshare.net. I tweeted my thoughts as I reviewed the presentations. The following is a compendium of those tweets.

Now Tweeting as @aswath

For the past few days I have been tweeting as @aswath. Given its nature, I am finding that I am able to share more thoughts and listen to more people. I hope you will follow me there. But I will continue to post here at my historic rate.

What Comes After AORTA

This morning Alec Saunders talked about the effects of pricing plans in wireless data market. His point was aggressive pricing will induce increased use. In that context he mentioned a term introduced by Mark Anderson. Mark claimed that the chief benefit of broadband internet is Always On Real Time Access (AORTA). Alec elaborates: “Not the fact that broadband is fast, but that it's always up, which means that you can have access to the 'net instantaneously.” But having an access to the net is only half the battle.

Replacing IVR Systems

I am certain that each one of us have horror stories relating to IVR maze. To ease this, many IVR systems allow look-ahead dialing. But then many administrators ask us to listen to all the choices before selecting one because thy have changed recently. Of course they do not say how recently the menu choices have been changed. All in all, IVR is a necessary evil because the user has limited way to signal the far-end. Recently Fonolo has come up with a crazy like a fox scheme to overcome this tedious interaction.

Distributed Social Directory is the Real Trouble

I posted the following entry at EnThinnai blog. Please visit there to post your comments.

OpenID Providers that Don’t Consume are not Evil

I posted the following at EnThinnai blog. Please post your comments there.

Legal Interception and IP Communications

Periodically this topic of should we extend legal intercept capability to IP Communications is raised and more often than not the slant of the argument is that IP Communications should be free of any regulatory requirement. Invariably one of the supportive point is that the participants could encode the data exchange thereby thwarting the objective of interception. It is widely held that Skype’s encryption is the most difficult to break and so Skype is the poster child. Phil Wolff reports in Skype Journal that a German company is suggesting that they have developed a capability to infect a target’s PC so that the communication is intercepted in the PC itself and that too before the transmission is encrypted. At least in my reading it looks like Phil is suggesting that the German authorities have signed onto this. But I have my own reservations. First it is not clear whether they can infect stand alone devices. If not, won’t the targets who are professional miscreants use Skype devices, rather than a PC? Second, the infected PC has to transmit the intercepted communication to the LEA at some point. Since the targets can easily monitor the traffic flowing across their router, they can easily infer that they are targets. Once of the CALEA requirement is that the targets shouldn’t be able to discern that they are indeed targets.

In certain cases, the LEAs may not need access such an elaborate setup. It so happened that in a recent case, the Italian authorities needed to locate one of the suspects. “Soon after the murder, Guede (the suspect) left Perugia, but he kept checking Facebook for messages from friends. The Communications Police arranged for one of those to contact Guede using Skype from their office, and as the two chatted, the cops traced Guede to a computer in Dusseldorf.”

Poetic Justice

"I think that the vision of the early SIP founders has been largely unreal in the SIP world. SIP is typically just used for this mundane trunkling application like the one we have or sending calls between two networks and it is just calls. The vision of multi-modal communications and rich end points has largely failed within the same and I think that a big part of this is that they did not pragmatically just solve basic problems like NAT traversal for example and they also evolved the specification to the point that it is no longer had its light weight appeal." Jonathan Christensen, General Manager of audio and video, Skype.

From one Jonathan to another: Remember H.323 remarks? What goes around comes around.

By the way, is Skype is really P2P or CS in disguise? Isn’t their NAT traversal derived from the same source as STUN – UDP hole punching? (Read the History section at the bottom of the page.) Is Skype call model different than SIP, which is no different than H.323? Why do I get the feeling that I am listening to politicians promising "change"?

"Very Good!", so said the white man

In today's Washington Post, there is a story that ostensibly describes Indians' obsession with fair skin. But a telling quote is from Riya Ray, 23, a dark-skinned Indian model: "My pictures are routinely Photoshopped to make me look a bit lighter -- a lot lighter, actually. But when I work in Britain and France, my color is praised as exotic. It is a two-way trend: Indian models are going abroad, and foreign models are coming here."

Another notable quote in that story is from Lokesh Mishra, general manager of marketing at Woodland Worldwide: "And we are also playing on the typical Indian mind-set that thinks if the white people are wearing our brand, then it must be good."