Saudi Arabia Starts Clamping Down On Encrypted VoIP Services; US And UK Strangely Silent On The Moves

Earlier this month, the messaging service Viber was blocked in Saudi Arabia. This was not entirely unexpected, since the authorities had been trying to come to grips with the service and its ability to encrypt messages for a while according to Viber's founder, as a BBC News report explains: 

On Techdirt. 

South Korea Gives Mobile Operators Permission To Ignore Net Neutrality By Surcharging Or Blocking VOIP Services

Net neutrality arguments are often couched in rather theoretical terms, and many people can't really see what all the fuss is about. A recent decision in South Korea gives a handy example of what the loss of net neutrality means in practice: 

On Techdirt.

Google and Microsoft Agree: This is Serious

You know things are bad when a coalition includes Google and Microsoft agreeing on something...

On Open Enterprise blog.

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Madness Begets Madness

This is where the madness of authoritarianism leads:

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.

This is another reason why the super-duper snooper database is madness: to make it even vaguely workable, the government must try to plug all these loopholes. But plugging one - pay-as-you-go mobiles - only highlights the next. In this case, it's pay-as-you-go mobiles from *abroad*. The logic of the super-duper snooper database means that people will be forced to register every mobile as they come into the UK. But this will simply create a black market for used mobile phones, so then the UK government will have to make *those* illegal. And then people will turn to encrypted VoiP, so that will be made illegal, and so on, and so forth.

Why don't they just implant chips in us at birth at be done with it?

Cock-a-Hoop Over Open Source VoIP

On Open Enterprise blog.

AsteriskNOW Now

On Open Enterprise blog.

Wengo's Wideo Widget

Wengo, the people behind OpenWengo, an open source VOIP project, are offering a free video widget (to the first 10,000 applicants, at least) that consists of just a few lines of HTML code (but uses Flash). (Via Quoi9.)

Another Boring Open Source Success. Yawn.

So the open IP telephony company Digium scores $13.8 million in VC dosh. Yawn.

What's most amazing about this announcement is how extraordinarily boring it is. Digium was obviously well placed to get VC money, because it's already a huge success. Investing in it is a complete no-brainer (lucky Matrix that somehow convinced it to accept). And all this sheer and utter boringness is yet another measure of how successful open source has become. Of course it gets VC money, of course it's profitable, of course it will wipe out the opposition.

Next question?

If Not Net Neutrality - What?

That old contrarian curmudgeon, Andrew Orlowski, has found a soul-mate in Richard Bennett: "[t]he veteran engineer played a role in the design of the internet we use today, and helped shaped Wi-Fi" as Orlowski explains before an interview. In addition,

Bennett argues that the measures proposed to 'save' the internet, which in many cases are sincerely held, could hasten its demise. Network congestion is familiar to anyone's whose left a BitTorrent client running at home, and it's the popularity of such new applications that makes better network management an imperative if we expect VoIP to work well. The problem, he says, is that many of the drafts proposed to ensure 'Net Neutrality' would prohibit such network management, and leave VoIP and video struggling.

The conversation that follows is extremely interesting, and certainly hits home. But I have big problems with this part:

They all seem to be worried that ISPs have secret plan to sell top rank - to pick a search engine that loads faster than anyone else's. But it's not clear that a), anyone has done that; b), that it's technically achievable; or c) that it is necessarily abusive; or d) that their customers would stand for it.

These all seems very weak arguments in against net neutrality; I'd rather err on the side of hippy edge-to-edge goodness.

Boingo Goes Open Source

Wow.

Here's Boingo, which

provides software technology and roaming services that help bring the wireless Internet to the masses. The company has assembled a large and rapidly growing roaming system with tens of thousands of hot spot locations under contract around the world. Boingo also invented the world's most powerful software for discovering and connecting to hot spots and 3G wireless networks.

And here's Boingo going open source:

Boingo Wireless today announced the Boingo Embedded Wi-Fi Toolkit, an open source software package that enables developers to integrate Wi-Fi connection management to any Wi-Fi hot spot – including the more than 45,000 public hot spots that are part of the Boingo Roaming System – into small form factor devices such as dual-mode phones, VoIP handsets, mobile gaming consoles and other portable devices.

There's a great analysis at Wi-Fi Networking News on what this all means:

This open-source effort for detection and connection coupled with Devicescape’s similarly focused open-source release of its Wi-Fi authentication and encryption package could produce enormously better hotspot support in completely open projects with no connection to for-fee hotspots and in commercial projects that currently lack the finesse, exhaustiveness, or ease of either Boingo or Devicescape’s packages.

What's happening is that all the pieces are starting to fall into place for true, open wireless connectivity, as the open mantra takes over yet another conceptual domain. But more of that anon....

For now, let's just say "wow".

Why VOIP Needs Crypto

The ever-wise Bruce Schneier (whom I had the pleasure of interviewing a couple of years ago) spells out in words of one syllable why the hot Voice over IP digital 'phone systems absolutely need encryption. He also links to the perfect solution: Phil Zimmermann's latest wheeze, Zfone - an open source VOIP encryption program.