Aswath Weblog

An “App” Enabled by WebRTC

This is cross posted from EnThinnai Blog. Please post your comment at the original location. Thanks.

Some of us strongly believe that WebRTC will usher in a wide variety of innovative services, features and capabilities. At the same time, there are many skeptics dampen the (irrational?) exuberance. I am sure both sides will present their view points during this week’s WebRTC Conference & Expo. In this post, I would like to commemorate that conference by outlining one possible application.

Integrating POTS line, Google Voice account and Obi110

In this blogpost, I note down my experiences as I integrate POTS line, Google Voice account and Obi110 and finish it off with some ideas on enhancing products like Obi110. But I want to clarify upfront that this is not a review of Obi110. It has a tone of features and my interest is very narrow and focused. So this will not do justice.

To Cap or Not to Cap?

Evidently I seem to hold a contrarian position on whether Broadband access bandwidth consumption should be capped or not. My position is that ISPs are in the business of offering service at the Network Layer and they should be free to charge based on the consumption. My rationale is simple: with the freedom to charge at the Network Layer, ISPs will not be in a position to dictate usage policy or to play favoritism to one provider over another. Please note that I also contend that freedom to charge at the Network Layer includes offering differentiated service (at the Network Layer) as long as differentiation is requested by the users and are charged to them. Today I read something from an unexpected source that reinforces my position.

A Possible Fix for Location Tracking Attack on Skype

A couple of days back, my Twitter stream saw a few mentions about a story that suggested potential privacy issue due to a flaw in Skype. A quick tracing of the origin of the story pointed to a research paper published by a few associated with NYU-Poly, which is about six weeks old. It is not clear why it surfaced this late. Nonetheless it is instructive to study the paper and understand the root cause of the flaw.

The paper is clearly written and is based on a well designed experiment. Apparently, the authors have alerted Skype of the problem and the authors lament that Skype has not taken any steps to address the issues. But it looks, on the surface at least, it is simple to thwart the attack.

NaDa and EnThinnai

This is cross posted from EnThinnai Blog. Please post your comment at the original location. Thanks.

A couple of days back, New York Times had a story on a recent research paper that was presented at Usenix Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing. The idea is to spin a cloud using servers placed inside the homes and use the heat generated by these servers to heat the homes. In the paper, the authors point out an earlier study that suggested the use of home routers as Nano Data Centers (NaDa) for content caching.

On the Need for a Crowd in Social Software

This is cross posted from EnThinnai Blog. Please post your comment at the original location. Thanks.

As part of his "5 Myths of Social Software", Jon Mell dispels a myth that one needs "lots of people for social tools to be a success." He points to this famous diagram by Chris Rasmussen and his own positive personal experience at a three person startup to conclude that "placing social tools in the context of their existing workflows (like email) and targeting identified business problems (even if they initially involve small groups) is far more successful than trying to get large numbers of young people using Facebook-like tools for the sake of it."

On Disambiguating Identity

Yesterday during D9 interview, Eric Schmidt is quoted to have stated, “It’s the first generally available way of disambiguating identity. Historically, on the Internet such a fundamental service wouldn’t be owned by a single company. I think the industry would benefit from an alternative to that….Identity is incredibly useful because in the online world you need to know who you are dealing with.” There have been academic research done on disambiguating identity through social circles and social data. This may help us to move away from a service owned by a single company, but I am afraid that this will still beholden us to a handful of companies. In my opinion OpenID is a more apporpriate user-centric solution.

Evolution of SIP Trunking

Recently, the market segment that interconnects PBX to PSTN using SIP/VoIP technology, called SIP Trunking has seen dramatic growth. It is generally agreed that low costs associated with SIP Trunks and increased deployments of IP-PBX have contributed to this success. The question is how will this market evolve in the coming months.

Another Vector in post-PC Era

This is cross posted from EnThinnai Blog. Please post your comment at the original location. Thanks.

Smartphones and tablets have thus far dominated the discussion on the topic of post-PC devices. These devices are expensive, mobility focused and mainly facilitates users with consuming information. But I would like to consider another set of devices which are inexpensive to own and operate, stationary and distributes information.

Much Ado about SIP URI Dialing

A few days back there was a heightened level of excitement among VoIPers as news spread that Google Voice accepted calls on a SIP interface. This meant that SIP end points can originate SIP-based sessions by identifying the Google Voice users by their SIP URIs. But the excitement was a “delta function” as Google Voice disabled that interface subsequently. As if to tease us all Google Voice played this peekaboo game a couple of more times. It was all great fun because nothing meaningful is to be gained with SIP URI dialing and so nothing was lost. But I would like to take this opportunity to point out some fundamental things VoIP providers have to do in addition to carrying SIP URI in the signaling messages before we enjoy the benefits of “SIP URI dialing”.