Telephony vs. Cacophony

In my last post, I wrote about overhearing some folks talking about how voice telecom has become passé. Their basic point…why bother to dial someone in your company when you can IM them? So I started thinking about how much of a pain in the neck IM and SMS really are when I have contacts scattered about on Yahoo, Skype, AIM, Windows Live, etc. I run IM IDs on my box almost all the time to accommodate my friends, colleagues and customers. I’ve managed to keep some of them the same across networks, and Trillian certainly helps. But we have “standards” at work and I have a “persona” I maintain outside the office. So in the heat of the moment and the rush of the day, things can get very interesting when you accidentally click on the wrong contact, type something a little too quickly or that email auto-fills the incorrect address. And who isn’t thrilled to get that IM or Tweet to remind you to check a recently deposited voicemail or email?

I’ve been in telecom a long, long time. This train of thought led to memories of those ads in Telephony Magazine circa 1975 that showed the masses of phone lines & wires that appeared a couple of decades after Alexander made that first call to Mr. Watson. As you old timers will no doubt remember, there were separate dial-tone providers and networks and no mechanism to go between them. So they each strung their own wires, and if you really wanted to speak with your Aunt Bertha, on Scott Rice Telecom, and you had already installed Frontier, you had to put in a second phone and a new connection to your home!

So here we are again – multiple networks, multiple IDs, multiple devices, multiple personalities. Something of a zoo methinks. Better? Sure! But I have to believe that what happened 100 years ago is bound to repeat. Google’s on the path with its Google Voice service. Perhaps SIP is the mechanism that will make it all possible. What can be done for chat? Who knows.

Mike Burke



http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

#1 - Dial tone came from God…

Heard at an InAAU session in Orlando a couple of weeks ago (that’s the Avaya User Group meeting)…

An Avaya distributor was talking about a client he’d been courting for a few years – a big one – 4,500 to 5,000 desktops. They’d done the Y2K thing last round, so they’re ripe for a new switch, right? All that new technology out there, IP’s mature now, lots of new features, UC, OCS, etc. Guess again! What they heard was “Why bother? No one calls anyone internally anymore. We’re all IM now & we’ve got what we need. That old box will be fine.”

Whoa! Can you imagine how that hit the Account Exec? How many other clients are thinking the same thing these days?

Clearly the industry’s changing, but would you have thought it could go that way? Why bother with voice? A client you thought you knew? Wow!

So what’s ahead for voice?

During a discussion with a voice veteran about communication modalities the other day we took the standard trip down memory lane – he’d learned, just like I did, that dial tone came from God. But, he pointed out, those days are long gone & we just better get over it. Thirty years ago there were no other options for real-time communications. You could send a letter or a telegram, but if you had a real-time need, it was telecom. So it had to work.

Today there’s IM, email, mobile phones, web conferencing – a whole host of new modalities, all with real-time components. And with everyone trying to do 3 things at once (if you still have a job), email is often more real-time than a voice call because you can answer an email while you’re in a conference call. Same goes for IM of course.

So voice telecom now has backup, which means it doesn’t have to always work because there are so many other ways to communicate right now -- even if us fogies haven’t caught on yet. Telecom really is just another app. Make that a modality.

Get the message?

How ‘bout I IM you the next time we need to chat... I’m on yahoo, AOL, MSN, skype… hmmmm.

Mike Burke

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Starbucks and Network Security

Mike Burke likes to share the spotlight with his co-workers so Tom Ring - IQ Services' Information Security Manager - is stepping in to let you know what he is thinking about these days.

You’re in your local coffee shop, and they are nice enough to provide free WiFi for the use of their patrons. You fire up the laptop and see that there are multiple access points available there. You pick one and connect. You just connected to a poisoned hotspot being run from a parked car. You’ve got network access through their cell provider, and they are sniffing every packet. Just because an access point says it is Joe’s Coffee Shop doesn’t mean that it really is.

You’re in another coffee shop that uses authentication and encryption and you only see one access point to connect to, which you then do. Everything is just fine and you get down to work. The problem is that within just a few minutes every packet you send and receive is being logged by the guy 2 tables down. Your company email account is now wide open to him. What happened? The encryption that the shop uses is just a little out of date. In fact, current wireless encryption methods have probably all been cracked. WEP was cracked in 2005 and currently takes less than 60 seconds, WPA v1 can be broken using aircrack-ng, WPA TKIP (currently the best method commonly available) was demonstrated in November of 2008 to be crackable in as little as 12 minutes regardless of the password or key length. Current WiFi encryption is not to be trusted.

So what are you to do? There is a solution, and your IT department probably already provides it – it’s a VPN tunnel. A VPN tunnel is a virtual private network connection back to your network at work. This is an authenticated encrypted tunnel that securely transports data to and from the internal network at your office. It can be used regardless of how insecure the coffee shop is, and it has another advantage – it gives you access to all the resources that you have when in the office. Files servers, wikis, chat server, everything, assuming that no limitations have been put into place by IT for VPN users.

Please note that you still need to have your laptop protected against incoming attacks. So no open shares, have a firewall in place, no services available on any ports, etc. Again, look to your IT department for assistance in making sure that everything else, as well as your VPN, is ready for the road.

Tom Ring

IQ Services
6601 Lyndale Ave South Suite 330
Minneapolis MN 55423
612-243-5114
http://www.iq-services.com/