How The Hell Happened To NuFone?

Welcome to the first installment of my series entitled “How Not To Do Business.” This is an editorial look into exactly how I discovered Asterisk, started NuFone and then was forced to walk away from everything.
I discovered Asterisk shortly after Mark Spencer released it back in 1999. My first thoughts were “This might be something [...]

Cleanin’ Out My Closet

I am here to inform you, the reader, of a few facts that you are either unaware of or have been surreptitiously misled to believe otherwise.
Firstly, I feel I have wasted the past 8 years of my life.
After all of my blood, sweat and tears I have nothing legitimate to show for it. Sure, I [...]

February 17th: Digital Televison Conversion

I have been traveling and having a lot of down time lately. This means I have been watching quite a few different television stations.
I have noticed quite a few stations taking air time to inform their viewers that they had not budgeted for the additional power (and other) expenses, thus they were forced to shut [...]

H.323v7 Scheduled For October 2009

Progress has been made on the H.323 front.   Experts from the ITU-T recently met in Geneva to continue development on the newest version of H.323 specification.
From the announcement:
…there are new enhancements that are being introduced to H.323 that require changes to the base specification.  As examples, H.323v7 will allow a calling or called party to [...]

Avoid VPSLand At All Cost

My server from VPSLand.com has been down and now unusable for 4 days and counting.
As only some may know, I have an addiction to buying domain names. I am always thinking up cool or possibly useful domain names for so-called internet marketing purposes.  Since I have so many domain names, I need various places to [...]

Digium|Asterisk and Skype Collaborate

Announced during the keynote speech at Astricon today, Digum|Asterisk and Skype have collaborated to create an official Skype channel driver for Asterisk.
From the article:
Digium(R), creator and primary developer of Asterisk(R), the leading open source telephony platform, and Skype(TM), the leading global Internet communications company, today announced the beta version of Skype For Asterisk, which [...]

Asterisk Remote Denial of Service - IAX Control New

Here we go again…  There is now exploit code circulating for yet another remote Denial of Service attack against Asterisk.
The asterisk resource exhaustion attack is against the IAX2 VoIP signaling protocol using the IAX Control New packet.  The exploit affects all versions of Asterisk.
Digium was notified of this discovery on August 17th, 2008 and again [...]

NuFone Website / Members Portal Outage

Upon the request of NuFone Inc. Legal Council, this post has been removed.   I am being told an official press release will be issued Real Soon Now™

Voiceover Legend, Don LaFontaine Dies at 68

The voice we all recognize from thousands of movie trailers, Don LaFontaine, died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
LaFontaine, who did voiceover work in more than 5,000 trailers during his 33-year career, turned the “In a world where …” opening line into an industry standard for studios promoting movies and TV shows.

NuFone is Down

I can confirm that NuFone is down.  I have no further information at this point.  http://nufone.blogspot.com/ has been created, which will contain any further communication regarding NuFone.

FTC Bans Pre-Recorded Telemarketer Calls

The Federal Trade Commission has banned most pre-recorded calls from telemarketers.
In finalizing two amendments to the Telemarketing Sales Rule, the FTC telemarketing calls that deliver prerecorded messages, unless a consumer previously has agreed to accept such calls from the seller. The other related technical amendment modifies the TSR’s method of calculating the maximum permissible level [...]

IAX Poke Resource Exhaustion

While preparing for The Last HOPE, Blake Cornell discovered the fact that given a flood of IAX ‘POKE’ requests one could affect the operation of Asterisk.
The moment Blake informed me and I was able to replicate the sitaution, I promptly informed Digium via a quick IRC-based private discussion with multiple Digium employees. However my non-standard [...]

The Last HOPE

I am one of many speakers at The Last HOPE conference starting Friday July 18th at the historic Pennsylvania Hotel in New York City.
Blake Cornell and I will be discussing how many foreign governments and ISPs are blocking VoIP services in attempt to protect their monopoly and/or to censor information. We intend to release [...]

Critical Bug Fix: Asterisk 1.4.21.1 Released

It was just announced that Asterisk 1.4.21.1 has been released.
This release contains a fix that solves lockup issues discovered in the 1.4.21 release of Asterisk. All users running Asterisk 1.4.21 should upgrade to avoid deadlock issues.

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