October 15, 2008
Asterisk Business Edition Continues to Evolve
Digium continues to do the right things to make open source software attractive to small business. Today's news story is courtesy of VoIP Planet, Skype Meets Asterisk.
Skype, of course, is a proprietary and sometimes controversial system but there's no denying that it's popular.
Cost conscious business users who lack VoIP expertise and are unwilling to pay their ISP for help (they should) may be able to achieve one of the great oft promised cost benefits of VoIP: free interoffice calls.
Posted by agoldman at 4:40 PM | Add Comment
October 2, 2008
It's October, Do You Know Where Your Data Is?
Pedro reminds us all that October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month.
It may seem cheesy, but it's actually a good reminder that now is the time to sell security. In his article, Pedro notes that this is the start of the e-commerce season. Many online vendors make a significant amount of their annual revenue over the next few weeks, and may be receptive to the idea of purchasing redundancy, DDoS prevention, or any other service you may be offering.
Put it in your sales pitch, add it to your marketing, and you may see results.
Posted by agoldman at 4:17 PM | Add Comment
September 30, 2008
Motorola's AirDefense Acquisition Complete
Just a quick note to point out this article on Wi-Fi Planet.
The acquisition shows that Motorola continues to work on positioning its fixed wireless offering as a unique product for demanding customers.
Posted by agoldman at 2:51 PM | Add Comment
September 29, 2008
USDA Has $342 Million to Dish Out
The .pdf file is dated September 17th, the press release is dated September 24th, and we heard about it today.
The USDA announced that it has awarded $342 Million 18 companies.
WISPs are small. If the USDA were serious about supporting local firms, it would dish out the money in smaller amounts. The myriad obstacles to obtaining this money, and the incentive within the government bureaucracy to hand out cash only to big firms, mean that the money helps rural communities far less than it should.
Posted by agoldman at 9:48 AM | Add Comment
Know Your Filters: ISPs Block W3C.org
This happens. Today, we learn that some ISPs in Finland thought that W3C.org, which makes the web accessible to those with disabilities, was a child porn site.
Previously:
In The Name of Blocking Child Porn, Another Barrier To Entry
Know Your Filters -- Denver Airport Adheres to Sudan Standards
Posted by agoldman at 9:26 AM | Add Comment
September 26, 2008
.ORG the Most Secure Domain?
Just a quick post to point out this excellent article on internetnews.com. It's great to see that at least one TLD is adopting DNSSEC, something that, we recently pointed out (see The DNS Vulnerability and the ISP), everyone should do. It will be a long, slow process but the TLDs, I believe, should take the lead.
Posted by agoldman at 10:05 AM | Add Comment
September 24, 2008
ISPs Like This Deserve to be Shut Down
Nobody is willing to name names to me on the record, but I do hear complaints from some ISPs about other ISPs. Most ISPs run legitimate businesses, but some host spammers or worse (actually, it's hard to tell the difference between spam and malware these days, as most trojans are used by spammers or phishers).
So I read the article Bad seed ISP Atrivo cut off from rest of the Internet with interest.
Once a paper was published showing that majority of this ISPs customers were purveyors of malware, the backbone community refused to peer with it, and the ISP lost its connection to the internet. When a friend of the founder of Atrivo allowed the ISP to use his company's backbone, the Pacific Internet Exchange (PIE), that backbone was quickly listed on the Spamhaus RBL.
The article says the ISP is up again under new management. If it's no better than it was before, the community will act quickly and the ISP will lose its connection to the internet. That's how it should be.
Of course, if you're one of the top 100 ISPs in the world, you can get away with bad behavior with impunity, but at least this vigilante system is stopping bad behavior of the worst of the smaller ISPs.
Posted by agoldman at 1:36 PM | Add Comment
September 19, 2008
Bus Company vs. The Internet in Canada
This has happened before. Clay Shirky told the Freedom to Connect Conference earlier this year about a bus company in France that sued cleaning women who were sharing rides for running a bus company.
Now BoingBoing notes that the same thing is happening in Canada, where "Government subsidized private bus companies in Ontario are feeling threatened by ride-sharing services like Ridester.com and PickupPal.com, so they're getting the government to shut them down under some strange loophole."
The internet is disrupting businesses and once again, the government is all too willing to fight the market in order to enforce the pre-internet way of doing things.
Posted by agoldman at 10:51 AM | Add Comment
September 18, 2008
Suing the President
You can read about this all over the internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing Bush, Cheney, and the National Security Agency (NSA) over warrantless wiretapping. Here are the stories on:
Cory Doctorow is thrilled, writing at BoingBoing, "YEEEEEE-HAW! Ride 'em cowboys! I could not be prouder of EFF at this moment -- I'm bursting with joy. I made a five-figure donation to EFF this year, and they've just earned every penny. If you want to see them take this administration to the mat, kick in a buck or two yourself."
I find my own opinion is closer to that of Karl Bode at BBR, who writes, "So not only is the EFF now fighting the nation's largest and most powerful phone company, they're taking on the world's most powerful intelligence community and the President of the United States. Good luck?"
And if you're interested in details, go to the wired blog and click through to its coverage of related stories, such as the Specter bill.
Posted by agoldman at 3:51 PM | Add Comment
September 16, 2008
This Would Help Small Business
On his blog, Brad Templeton's thinking about how often the law that protects consumers doesn't ever apply, in a post called What to do when the default law is only for suckers.
He's making the right suggestion. Rather than create new rules for the lobbyists to build loopholes into, let's collect data on how companies eliminate legal protections for their own customers.
If there were a rule, I'd suggest only this: force companies to declare what laws they're not allowing their customers to use.
That would make small businesses, which don't stifle those laws, more competitive.
Posted by agoldman at 11:21 AM | Add Comment