Here’s a question:  Where do you host your email?

Gersham and I are rather well-known for a business we started in 2002 called Geekmail.  By 2003, we were on the cutting-edge of IMAP-based email hosting and ran thousands of mail accounts on a cluster of 9 servers hosted at Peer1 Network in Vancouver.  We pushed the envelope in anti-spam technologies: combining advanced whitelisting techniques with behavioural, bayesian and heuristic anti-spam technologies and using our own common-sense approaches to deliver very high anti-spam effectiveness with a too-low-to-track false positive rate.

What we achieved, in essence, was a sort of email nirvana.  In those days, giving someone 1GB to store their email on your server was unheard of… but we did it.  Hosting catch-all email accounts was a novel concept … but we did it.  Hosting custom email domains was tough stuff too, even, but we did it.  We also had a hell of a launch party. 

A couple of things conspired to force us to close Geekmail… a situation which I will always regret:  1)  We were taken to court by a fool fellow whom we’d (our mistake) taken on as a business partner, and whose sole objective was to kill the company; and 2)  Google launched Gmail.  The latter was far more significant since it was A)  Free and B)  From the web’s hottest property.

Now, this all is the long way of explaining that I am perhaps something of an email geek.  I’ve used one form of computer-based electronic mail or another since 1985.  I co-founded Geekmail, of course, and also did a considerable amount of strategic work for FrontBridge — the world’s #2 message management service provider before its acquisition by Microsoft in 2005.  BuzMe and RingCentral, two Unified Communications services I helped bring to market, were among the first to deliver voicemail to their users via email (believe me, a novel concept in 1999/2000).

Be that as it may, it rather surprises me that even today GMail (which has been in Beta for 5 years) still pales in a number of key features (including anti-spam) to the technologies and quality of services we provided with Geekmail.  While we didn’t have nearly the scaling issues that Gmail has to deal with (except for in our very early days) we never experienced the kind of multi-hour outages that Gmail regularly hands to its users.  We also focused the users’ experience on Secure IMAP, not a web-based interface (though we had one of those too) and offered lots and lots of storage to go with it.  And in our later version of Geekmail, the anti-spam functions were tweakable: if you didn’t like the default settings, you could turn on and off different techniques that were used to combat spam on your inbox.

When we were forced to let Geekmail die a rapid death, we scrambled around to find a company who could take our subscribers and whose service closely mirrored our own.  The short answer was:  there weren’t any.

It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I began talking with John Capo; founder and operator of Tuffmail.  In addition to being a pretty nice guy, John runs a service that is the closest analog to Geekmail that I can find anywhere.  In my view this ranks Tuffmail as the very best email service provider for email geeks anywhere.  And so it has been for about 4 years that I have blissfully run my personal email address at ianbell.com on this service — and am now at a point where it is so critical to how I do my daily business and live my life that I would be miserable without it.

As these screen shots should reveal, Tuffmail is literally like having your own mail server cluster up in the sky somewhere.  By that I mean practically every aspect of its functioning is customizable to your whims and needs.  I can change how it responds to spam, I can block certain servers from sending me mail, I can blacklist any email sender from connecting to the server, and so much more.  I can also have a catch-all, which many email hosts hate to do because it creates spam honeypots, but which has become a critical means for managing my accounts online.

I don’t do any filtering or routing of email at the client level.  This would be impossible, since I access email from four different devices on a day-to-day basis.  Instead, I have input a complex set of rules into Tuffmail’s extremely robust email rules interface (sorry I can’t show you this — classified!) and all incoming mail is stored in the appropriate folder when I check it from my MacBook Pro, my iPhone, my Mac Pro, or whatever.  Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, yahOo! Mail, your ISP’s Mail Server — they all wither by comparison because they don’t allow this sort of granularity — and because they don’t fully embrace standards-based IMAP email messaging.

I keep all my mail, as well, nearly 5GB at the moment.  So if you said something in 2005, it’s pretty easy for me to find that message in my email clients (this could be the reason why mail.app sucks up most of the free memory on my MacBook Pro) and regurgitate it.  This is extremely handy and it reaffirms email’s rightful place at the fulcrum of my life (sad but true).  This is only possible because I have an enlightened email hosting provider who A) embraces large mailboxes and B) embraces large message sizes, which means I can send around presentations and big graphics files without fear of them bouncing back (unless the receiver’s mail server is a dunce, of course).

I don’t ever receive spam in my InBox anymore, because I have the settings and filters perfectly tweaked to my needs on Tuffmail.  But blocking spam is easy these days.  The real problem is blocking it without also blocking legitimate messages — this is much much harder.  And this is where GMail, which uses the Postini service (which is not directly integrated to GMail), tends to fall over.

Have you ever heard the excuse “Oh, I sent you the email, but maybe it got caught in your spam filter….” before?  Sure you have.  That doesn’t happen to me.  The benefit of the Realtime Reports (screen shot above) is that I can go in to the server logs  and actually see when a message flew through or was rejected by the Tuffmail server hierarchy.  I just view the page, do a Firefox search for the person’s email address, and if they sent a message it’ll be there.  I’ve caught anyone who’s ever made that excuse to me in a white lie… not that I hold it against them.  🙂

There is one downside to all of this, of course… with Tuffmail, I have created a monster.  I have so many settings and tweaks, and I have the spam filters so well-trained, that the pain of moving to another provider would be excruciating.  Most likely, I never will.

I don’t endorse products very frequently (and I never do it for any sort of remuneration) — but Tuffmail is one of those rare birds that truly deserves the kudos.  Email hosting is a tough business and in many ways I’m glad I’m no longer in it.  On the other hand, when I use Tuffmail I get pangs of jealousy and nostalgia.  Ah, what could have been!

Now, because I have all this crap.. er.. stuff hooked up to my Panasonic TH37PWD8UK TV I needed to buy a receiver not too long ago that would switch between all of the devices. Enter the SONY STR-DG800 which switches but doesn’t upconvert HDMI and Component inputs. I had set it all up with the old DCT6412 without much difficulty, and utilized the glorious HDMI output from the DCT6412 to the Plasma via the Sony Receiver. Worked great. Right?

So, after the 6412 kicked, I went to SHAW and got a 6416. I should note at this point that the 6412 I had was first-generation, and probably did not include the dreaded HDCP, one of the worst consumer technologies ever invented. HDCP’s sole purpose in life is render the benefits of HDMI (simple cabling, easy connections, maximum quality) completely ineffectual. HDCP has a Handshaking protocol which includes whitelists and blacklists of devices which it should and should not send a signal to. Read the WikiPedia entry to see how it works, and to derive the opinion as I did that, like other DMCA-inspired technologies, it is complete bullshit.

Anyway, now that I’ve adequately foreshadowed, when I hooked up the devices I was greeted by a text display saying:

“The HD Content Protection of your display has been compromised. Please use the YPbPr outlets for your HD content.”

… and then a green screen where I would otherwise have expected to see Rescue Me.

Because I was talking to Shaw Support anyway to activate the new box, my customer support representative and I worked through a number of options for the next hour, including upgrading the firmware, resetting the box from the network and locally, and connecting the 6416 directly to the television using HDMI. None of these worked… all resulted only in a brief TV video signal accompanied by the dreaded GREEN SCREEN. We knew the box was working, because the audio was fine. We new the connection was good, because every time we restarted it I got the TV signal briefly followed by green.

So, we gave up… I disconnected the HDMI cable and tried Component which, of course, worked because it’s analog. I had to unplug another device but I figured it was short-term. I then did what any self-respecting geek would do… I GoOgled.

My search revealed a discussion where it was evident that for a time, Motorola’s implementation of HDCP was incomplete, and made no accommodation for intermediating devices like A/V receivers (including my SONY). To make a long story short, only a firmware upgrade to version 12.35 (released in mid-2006) resolves the problem. I checked my firmware version on the DCT6416 and it’s an older version. No problem, right?

I called Shaw Cable Customer Support, asked whether they could update the firmware on my DCT6416, and got the following response: “The HDMI connection on the DCT6416 is unsupported.” Shaw has forked the Firmware from Motorola by adding a number of customizations, and has fallen a number of months behind updating for key code. The Rep even admitted that he was aware that many customers have had the problem and a number of problems related to HDCP handshaking.

While it’s tempting to blame Shaw for this, the real culprits are Motorola, who failed to exercise proper diligence in testing their implementation, Intel and their subsidiary Digital Content Protection, who obviously have little interest in ensuring the quality of HDCP, and of course US Lawmakers who enacted the DMCA in the first place and subsequently approved HDCP.

So, here’s the upshot: HDCP is so riddled with versioning issues that it’s made it difficult for hardware manufacturers to integrate into their components properly and impossible for cable companies to support their customers who try to use HDMI, resulting in so many usability and connectivity problems that it’s made HDMI completely useless to all but the most basic users who, by the way, probably don’t care about the differences between and benefits of HDMI vs. Component Video.

Congratulations… yet another example of the DMCA screwing up progress in the consumer electronics industry. In the meantime, fix your firmware, Shaw!

WASHINGTON – Regulators adopted rules Wednesday to make cable television and new television sets more compatible, with the goal of promoting the rollout of digital and high-definition televisions.

The Federal Communications Commission ( news -web sites ) voted 5-0 to approve the new technical and labeling standards, which seek to allow digital cable signals to flow seamlessly into TV sets without the need for a set-top box. Companies want high-definition sets with this “plug-and-play” technology available next year.

To watch cable on a plug-and-play TV, consumers would insert into the set a security card provided by their cable service.

“This is a great result for consumers,” FCC ( news -web sites ) Chairman Michael Powell said at the commission’s monthly meeting. “Consumers who want digital television sets will have an easier time connecting them to their cable service and having them work with high-definition and other digital programming.”

The cable and electronics industries agreed in December to make their equipment work together. The plan needed federal approval.

“The FCC action could be an important tipping point in the U.S. transition to digital television,” the Consumer Electronics Association said in a statement.

Unlike traditional analog television, digital TV signals use the on-and-off language of computers, which allows for sharper pictures and potential features, including Internet access, video games and multiple programs on one channel. Digital signals can be sent with satellites, by cable or as over-the-air broadcasts.

High-definition television, or HDTV, is another feature made possible by digital TV. Sets designed for HDTV signals offer more lifelike pictures and sound. HDTV sets cost from about $800 to many thousands of dollars, but prices are dropping.

Cable providers now offer high-definition service to 60 million U.S. households, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association said.

Uncertainty over whether various digital devices would be compatible has made it confusing for consumers considering buying an HDTV set.

Under the rules approved Wednesday, consumers would still need set-top boxes to use two-way services such as video on demand, some pay-per-view programming and customized electronic programming guides. Cable and electronics companies are working on an agreement to simplify two-way services.

Digital tuners, either inside a TV or a set-top box, will be needed to receive broadcasts over the airwaves after the nation switches from analog to digital signals. Congress has set a goal of December 2006 for the switch over.

Separately, the FCC began reviews of policies governing wireless ( news -web sites ) services in rural areas and pricing rules involving the leasing of telephone networks.

___

-Ian.

——– http://www.asteriskpbx.com/

What is Asterisk?

Asterisk is a complete PBX in software. It runs on Linux and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX and more. Asterisk does voice over IP in three protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using comparitively inexpensive hardware.

Asterisk provides Voicemail services with Directory, Call Conferencing, Interactive Voice Response, Call Queing. It has support for three-way calling, caller ID services, ADSI, SIP and H.323 (as both client and gateway). Check the ‘Features section for a more complete list.

Asterisk needs no additional hardware for Voice over IP. For interconnection with digital and analog telephony equipment, Asterisk supports a number of hardware devices, most notably all of the hardware manufactured by Asterisk’s sponsors, Digium. Digium has single and quad span T1 and E1 interfaces for interconnection to PRI lines and channel banks. In addition, an analog FXO card is available, and more analog interfaces are in the works.

Also supported are the Internet Line Jack and Internet Phone Jack products from Quicknet.

Asterisk supports a wide range of TDM protocols for the handling and transmission of voice over traditional telephony interfaces. Asterisk supports US and European standard signalling types used in standard business phone systems, allowing it to bridge between next generation voice-data integrated networks and existing infrastucture. Asterisk not only supports traditional phone equipment, it enhances them with additional capabilities.

Using the IAX Voice over IP protocol, Asterisk merges voice and data traffic seemlessly across disparate networks. While using Packet Voice, it is possible to send data such as URL information and images in-line with voice traffic, allowing advanced integration of information.

Asterisk provides a central switching core, with four APIs for modular loading of telephony applications, hardware interfaces, file format handling, and codecs. It allows for transparent switching between between all supported interfaces, allowing it to tie together a diverse mixture of telephony systems into a single switching network.

Asterisk is primarily developed on GNU/Linux for x/86. It is known to compile and run on GNU/Linux for PPC. Other platforms and standards based UNIX-like operating systems should be reasonably easy to port for anyone with the time and requisite skill to do so. Asterisk is available in the testing and unstable debian archives, maintained thanks to Mark Purcell.

Who made this?

Asterisk was originally written by Mark Spencer of Linux Support Services, Inc. Code has been contributed from Open Source coders around the world, and testing and bug-patches from the community have provided invaluable aid to the development of this software.

Customer-owned Networks: ZapMail and the Telecommunications Industry First published January 7, 2003 on the ‘Networks, Economics, and Culture’ mailing list. By Clay Shirky

To understand what’s going to happen to the telephone companies this year thanks to WiFi (otherwise known as 802.11b) and Voice over IP (VoIP) you only need to know one story: ZapMail.

The story goes like this. In 1984, flush from the success of their overnight delivery business, Federal Express announced a new service called ZapMail, which guaranteed document delivery in 2 hours. They built this service not by replacing their planes with rockets, but with fax machines.

This was CEO Fred Smith’s next big idea after the original delivery business. Putting a fax machine in every FedEx office would radically reconfigure the center of their network, thus slashing costs: toner would replace jet fuel, bike messenger’s hourly rates would replace pilot’s salaries, and so on. With a much less expensive network, FedEx could attract customers with a discount on regular delivery rates, but with the dramatically lower costs, profit margins would be huge compared to actually moving packages point to point. Lower prices, higher margins, and to top it all off, the customer would get their documents in 2 hours instead of 24. What’s not to love?

Abject failure was not to love, as it turned out. Two years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, FedEx pulled the plug on ZapMail, allowing it to vanish without a trace. And the story of ZapMail’s collapse holds a crucial lesson for the telephone companies today.

The Customer is the Competitor

ZapMail had three fatal weaknesses.

First of all, Federal Express didn’t get that faxing was a product, not a service. FedEx understood that faxing would be cheaper than physical delivery. What they missed, however, was that their customers understood this too. The important business decision wasn’t when to pay for individual faxes, as the ZapMail model assumed, but rather when to buy a fax machine. The service was enabled by the device, and the business opportunity was in selling the devices.

Second, because FedEx thought of faxing as a service, it failed to understand how the fax network would be built. FedEx was correct in assuming it would take hundreds of millions of dollars to create a useful network. (It has taken billions, in fact, over the last two decades.) However, instead of the single massive build out FedEx undertook, the network was constructed by individual customers buying one fax machine at a time. The capital expenditure was indeed huge, but it was paid for in tiny chunks, at the edges of the network.

Finally, because it misunderstood how the fax network would be built, FedEx misunderstood who its competition was. Seeing itself in the delivery business, it thought it had only UPS and DHL to worry about. What FedEx didn’t see was that its customers were its competition. ZapMail offered two hour delivery for slightly reduced prices, charged each time a message was sent. A business with a fax machine, on the other hand, could send and receive an unlimited number of messages almost instantaneously and at little cost, for a one-time hardware fee of a few hundred dollars.

There was simply no competition. ZapMail looked good next to FedEx’s physical delivery option, but compared to the advantages enjoyed by the owners of fax machines, it was laughable. If the phone network offered cheap service, it was better to buy a device to tap directly into that than to allow FedEx to overcharge for an interface to that network that created no additional value. The competitive force that killed ZapMail was the common sense of its putative users.

ZapPhone

The business Fred Smith imagined being in — build a network that’s cheap to run but charge customers as it if were expensive — is the business the telephone companies are in today. They are selling us a kind of ZapPhone service, where they’ve digitized their entire network up to the last mile, but are still charging the high and confusing rates established when the network was analog.

The original design of the circuit-switched telephone network required the customers to lease a real circuit of copper wire for the duration of their call. Those days are long over, as copper wires have been largely replaced by fiber optic cable. Every long distance phone call and virtually every local call is now digitized for at least some part of its journey.

As FedEx was about faxes, the telephone companies are in deep denial about the change from analog to digital. A particularly clueless report written for the telephone companies offers this choice bit of advice: Telcos gain billions in service fees from […] services like Call Forwarding and Call Waiting […]. Hence, capex programs that shift a telco, say, from TDM to IP, as in a softswitch approach that might have less capital intensity, must absolutely preserve the revenue stream. [ http://www.proberesearch.com/alerts/refocusing.htm] You don’t need to know telephone company jargon to see that this is the ZapMail strategy.

Step #1: Scrap the existing network, which relies on pricey hardware switches and voice-specific protocols like Time Division Multiplexing (TDM). Step #2: Replace it with a network that runs on inexpensive software switches and Internet Protocol (IP). This new network will cost less to build and be much cheaper to run. Step #3: “Preserve the revenue stream” by continuing to charge the prices from the old, expensive network.

This will not work, because the customers don’t need to wait for the telephone companies to offer services based on IP. The customers already have access to an IP network — it’s called the internet. And like the fax machine, they are going to buy devices that enable the services they want on top of this network, without additional involvement by the telephone companies.

Two cheap consumer devices loom large on this front, devices that create enormous value for the owners while generating little revenue for the phone companies. The first is WiFi access points, which allow the effortless sharing of broadband connections, and the second is VoIP converters, which provide the ability to route phone calls over the internet from a regular phone.

WiFi — Wireless local networks

In classic ZapMail fashion, the telephone companies misunderstand the WiFi business. WiFi is a product, not a service, and they assume their competition is limited to other service companies. There are now half a dozen companies selling wireless access points; at the low end, Linksys sells a hundred dollar device for the home that connects to DSL or cable modems, provides wireless access, and has a built-in ethernet hub to boot. The industry has visions of the “2nd phone line” effect coming to data networking, where multi-computer households will have multiple accounts, but if customers can share a high-speed connection among several devices with a single product, the service business will never materialize.

The wireless ISPs are likely to fare no better. Most people do their computing at home or at work, and deploying WiFi to those two areas will cost at worst a couple hundred dollars, assuming no one to split the cost with. There may be a small business in wiring “third places” — coffee shops, hotels, and meeting rooms — but that will be a marginal business at best. WiFi is the new fax machine, a huge value for consumers that generates little new revenue for the phone companies. And, like the fax network, the WiFi extension to the internet will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but it will not be built by a few companies with deep pockets. It will be built by millions of individual customers, a hundred bucks at a time.

VoIP — Phone calls at internet prices

Voice over IP is another area where a service is becoming a product. Cisco now manufactures an analog telephone adapter (ATA) with a phone jack in the front and an ethernet jack in the back. The box couldn’t be simpler, and does exactly what you’d expect a box with a phone jack in the front and an ethernet jack in the back to do. The big advantage is that unlike the earlier generation of VoIP products — “Now you can use your computer as a phone!” — the ATA lets you use your phone as a phone, allowing new competitors to offer voice service over any high-speed internet connection.

Vonage.com, for example, is giving away ATAs and offering phone service for $40 a month. Unlike the complex billing structures of the existing telephone companies, Vonage prices the phone like an ISP subscription. A Vonage customer can make an unlimited number of unlimited-length domestic long distance calls for their forty bucks, with call waiting, call forwarding, call transfer, web-accessible voicemail and caller ID thrown in free. Vonage can do this because, like the telephone companies, they are offering voice as an application on a digital network, but unlike the phone companies, they are not committed to charging the old prices by pretending that they are running an analog network.

Voice quality is just one feature among many

True to form, the telephone companies also misunderstand the threat from VoIP (though here it is in part because people have been predicting VoIPs rise since 1996.) The core of the misunderstanding is the MP3 mistake: believing that users care about audio quality above all else. Audiophiles confidently predicted that MP3s would be no big deal, because the sound quality was less than perfect. Listeners, however, turned out to be interested in a mix of things, including accessibility, convenience, and price. The average music lover was willing, even eager, to give up driving to the mall to buy high quality but expensive CDs, once Napster made it possible to download lower quality but free music.

Phone calls are like that. Voice over IP doesn’t sound as good as a regular phone call, and everyone knows it. But like music, people don’t want the best voice quality they can get no matter what the cost, they want a minimum threshold of quality, after which they will choose phone service based on an overall mix of features. And now that VoIP has reached that minimum quality, VoIP offers one feature the phone companies can’t touch: price.

The service fees charged by the average telephone company (call waiting, caller ID, dial-tone and number portability fees, etc) add enough to the cost of a phone that a two-line household that moved only its second line to VoIP could save $40 a month before making their first actual phone call. By simply paying for the costs of the related services, a VoIP customer can get all their domestic phone calls thrown in as a freebie.

As with ZapMail, the principal threat to the telephone companies’ ability to shrink costs but not revenues is their customers’ common sense. Given the choice, an increasing number of customers will simply bypass the phone company and buy the hardware necessary to acquire the service on their own.

And hardware symbiosis will further magnify the threat of WiFi and VoIP. The hardest part of setting up VoIP is simply getting a network hub in place. Once a hub is installed, adding an analog telephone adapter is literally a three-plug set-up: power, network, phone. Meanwhile, one of the side-effects of installing WiFi is getting a hub with open ethernet ports. The synergy is obvious: Installing WiFi? You’ve done most of the work towards adding VoIP. Want VoIP? Since you need to add a hub, why not get a WiFi-enabled hub? (There are obvious opportunities here for bundling, and later for integration — a single box with WiFi, Ethernet ports, and phone jacks for VoIP.)

The economic logic of customer owned networks

According to Metcalfe’s Law, the value of an internet connection rises with the number of users on the network. However, the phone companies do not get to raise their prices in return for that increase in value. This is a matter of considerable frustration to them.

The economic logic of the market suggests that capital should be invested by whoever captures the value of the investment. The telephone companies are using that argument to suggest that they should either be given monopoly pricing power over the last mile, or that they should be allowed to vertically integrate content with conduit. Either strategy would allow them to raise prices by locking out the competition, thus restoring their coercive power over the customer and helping them extract new revenues from their internet subscribers.

However, a second possibility has appeared. If the economics of internet connectivity lets the user rather than the network operator capture the residual value of the network, the economics likewise suggest that the user should be the builder and owner of the network infrastructure.

The creation of the fax network was the first time this happened, but it won’t be the last. WiFi hubs and VoIP adapters allow the users to build out the edges of the network without needing to ask the phone companies for either help or permission. Thanks to the move from analog to digital networks, the telephone companies’ most significant competition is now their customers, because if the customer can buy a simple device that makes wireless connectivity or IP phone calls possible, then anything the phone companies offer by way of competition is nothing more than the latest version of ZapMail.

———–

Some Early Mobiles Reportedly Pose Brain Tumor Risk Thu Aug 22, 1:09 PM ET

By Anna Peltola

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Long-term users of some first generation cell phones face up to 80 percent greater risk of developing brain tumors than those who did not use the phones, a new Swedish study shows.

The study, published in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention, looked at 1,617 Swedish patients diagnosed with brain tumors between 1997 and 2000, comparing them with a similar control group without brain tumors.

Researchers found that those who had used Nordic Mobile Telephone handsets had a 30 percent higher risk of developing brain tumors than people who had not used that type of phone, particularly on the side of the brain used during calls. For people using the phones for more than 10 years, the risk was 80 percent greater.

“Our present study showed an increased risk for brain tumors among users of analog cellular telephones. For digital cellular phones and cordless phones the results showed no increased risk overall within a five-year latency period,” the study said.

Two major mobile phone manufacturers disputed the findings of an increased risk of cancer.

The world’s biggest mobile producer, Finland’s Nokia ( news – web sites) Oyj, which still produces two models of phones working in the Nordic Mobile Telephone standard, said scores of other studies conducted on the health effects of cell phones showed no evidence of health hazards for users.

“There have been close to 200 studies done on different areas of mobile phones and in the light of those and the way the scientific evidence is, there is no health risk in using mobile phones,” Marianne Holmlund, communications manager at Nokia Phones, told Reuters Thursday.

Mikael Westmark, a spokesman for Sweden’s Telefon AB LM Ericsson ( news – web sites), which used to make Nordic Mobile Telephone handsets, said: “The study and the conclusions it reaches differs from at least three other studies in the past in several highly regarded scientific journals. None of these studies found a connection between mobile phones and cancer.”

DEVELOPED TO SERVE NORDIC COUNTRIES

The Nordic Mobile Telephone network was initially developed to serve the Nordic countries, starting operations in the early 1980s, but then became popular in Russia and the Baltic countries.

It is still used in more than 40 countries, but has been overtaken in several countries by the Global System for Mobile Communications, which is due to be gradually replaced by rapid third-generation mobile networks.

Analog Nordic Mobile Telephone phones have been in operation for 20 years, making it possible to study the longer-term impact of microwave exposure to their users, but researcher Kjell Hansson Mild said it was too early to draw conclusions on the currently widely used digital Global System for Mobile Communications phones.

“Nothing can be said about GSM at this stage,” said Hansson Mild, professor at the National Institute for Working Life and co-leader of the study.

“These are tumors that develop very slowly, and GSM does not have users who have been using it for 10 years,” he told Reuters. (Additional reporting by Jan Strupczewski)

———–

http://www.americas.creative.com/products/product.asp?Product 3

This is the right price point for a VoIP <-> Analog Telephone gateway. Pity it necessarily uses the PC. The device ships with proprietary software that bills you pennies per call (when will they learn?).

BUT there are some smart hackers out there, boy!

http://www.fobbit.com/

He’s making the device compatible with Linux, NetBSD, etc. Woo woo!

-Ian.

April 14, 2002 Nanny-Cam May Leave a Home Exposed By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Thousands of people who have installed a popular wireless video camera, intending to increase the security of their homes and offices, have instead unknowingly opened a window on their activities to anyone equipped with a cheap receiver.

The wireless video camera, which is heavily advertised on the Internet, is intended to send its video signal to a nearby base station, allowing it to be viewed on a computer or a television. But its signal can be intercepted from more than a quarter-mile away by off-the-shelf electronic equipment costing less than $250.

A recent drive around the New Jersey suburbs with two security experts underscored the ease with which a digital eavesdropper can peek into homes where the cameras are put to use as video baby monitors and inexpensive security cameras.

The rangy young driver pulled his truck around a corner in the well-to-do suburban town of Chatham and stopped in front of an unpretentious house. A window on his laptop’s screen that had been flickering suddenly showed a crisp black-and-white video image: a living room, seen from somewhere near the floor. Baby toys were strewn across the floor, and a woman sat on a couch.

After showing the nanny-cam images, the man, a privacy advocate who asked that his name not be used, drove on, scanning other houses and finding a view from above a back door and of an empty crib.

In the nearby town of Madison, from the parking lot of a Staples store, workers could be observed behind the cash register. The driver walked into the store and pointed up at a corner of the room. “Take a look,” he said. Above the folded-back steel security shutters was a nubbin of technology: a barely perceptible video camera looking down on the employees.

“I can only imagine driving around the Bay Area with one of these,” said Aviel D. Rubin, a security researcher at AT&T Labs, which identified the problem.

Around San Francisco, high-technology toys like security cameras are likely to be far more common. Mr. Rubin tries to help the business world recognize security threats and address them. Although there is no evidence that video snooping is widespread, it is so easy and the opportunity to do it is so great that it is a cause for concern, said Mr. Rubin, who was along for the ride.

Such digital peeping is apparently legal, said Clifford S. Fishman, a law professor at the Catholic University of America and the author of a leading work on surveillance law, “Wiretapping and Eavesdropping.”

When told of the novel form of high-technology prying, Professor Fishman said, “That is astonishing and appalling.” But he said that wiretap laws generally applied to intercepting sound, not video. Legal prohibitions on telephone eavesdropping, he said, were passed at the urging of the telecommunications industry, which wanted to make consumers feel safe using its products. “There’s no corresponding lobby out there protecting people from digital surveillance,” he said.

Some states have passed laws that prohibit placing surreptitious cameras in places like dressing rooms, but legislatures have generally not considered the legality of intercepting those signals. Nor have they considered that the signals would be intercepted from cameras that people planted themselves. “There’s no clear law that protects us,” Professor Fishman said. “You put it all together, the implications are pretty horrifying.”

With no federal law and no consensus among the states on the legality of tapping video signals, Professor Fishman said, “The nanny who decided to take off her dress and clean up the house in her underwear would probably have no recourse” against someone tapping the signal. Police officers with search warrants could use the technology for investigative purposes, as well, he suggested.

Surveillance has been a growing part of American life, especially since Sept. 11. Video cameras have been installed on city streets, and some cities and airports have tried to tie cameras into facial recognition systems, with mixed results. Privacy advocates argue that the benefit to security is questionable and the intrusiveness is high. But the cameras continue to proliferate ‹ with many people buying them for personal use. Surveillance cameras have also sprouted at intersections to catch drivers who speed or run red lights and as a part of many voyeur-oriented pornographic Web sites.

Ads for the “Amazing X10 Camera” have been popping up all over the World Wide Web for months. The ads for the device, the XCam2, carry a taste of cheesecake ‹ usually a photo of a glamorous-looking woman in a swimming pool or on the edge of a couch. But, in fact, many people have bought the cameras for far more pedestrian purposes.

“Frankly, a lot of it is kind of dull,” and most of the women being surreptitiously observed are probably nannies, said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. He calls the X10 ads “one of the weird artifacts of the Internet age.”

The company that sells the cameras, X10 Wireless Technology Inc. of Seattle, was created in 1999 by an American subsidiary of X10 Ltd., a Hong Kong company. It is privately held and does not release sales figures. A spokesman, Jeff Denenholz, said the company had no comment for this article.

Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public stock offering that was later withdrawn provide some figures, however. X10 lost $8.1 million on revenue of $21.3 million for the nine months ended Sept. 30, 2000, and said that 52 percent of its revenue came from wireless camera kits. At the camera’s current retail price of about $80, that would translate to sales of more than 138,000 cameras in those nine months alone.

Rob Enderle, an analyst at the Giga Information Group, a technology consulting business, said he was a big fan of X10 ‹ which sells the most popular wireless cameras on the consumer market ‹ and its wares. “Theirs is the least expensive option out there, and they actually do a good job,” he said.

Mr. Enderle was surprised to hear of the cameras’ lack of security, but said he did not see a cause for great concern. “Clearly, if you are pointing that at areas like your bathroom or shower, there may be people enjoying that view with you,” he said. “But fundamentally, you shouldn’t be pointing it that way anyway.”

The vulnerability of wireless products has been well understood for decades. The radio spectrum is crowded, and broadcast is an inherently leaky medium; baby monitors would sometimes receive signals from early cordless phones (most are scrambled today to prevent monitoring). A subculture of enthusiasts grew up around inexpensive scanning equipment that could pick up signals from cordless and cellular phones, as former Speaker Newt Gingrich discovered when recordings of a 1996 conference call strategy session were released by Democrats.

More recently, with the advent of wireless computer networks based on the increasingly popular technology known as WiFi, yet another new subculture has emerged: people known as “war drivers” who enter poorly safeguarded wireless networks while driving or walking around with laptops.

In the case of the XCam2, the cameras transmit an unscrambled analog radio signal that can be picked up by receivers sold with the cameras. Replacing the receiver’s small antenna with a more powerful one and adding a signal amplifier to pick up transmissions over greater distances is a trivial task for anyone who knows his way around a RadioShack and can use a soldering iron.

Products intended for the consumer market rarely include strong security, said Gary McGraw, the chief technology officer of Cigital, a software risk-management company. That is because security costs money, and even pennies of added expense eat into profits. “When you’re talking about a cheap thing that’s consumer grade that you’re supposed to sell lots and lots of copies of, that really matters,” he said.

Refitting an X10 camera with encryption technology would be beyond the skills of most consumers. It is best for manufacturers to design security features into products from the start, because adding them afterward is far more difficult, Mr. McGraw said. The cameras are only the latest example of systems that are too insecure in their first versions, he said, and cited other examples, including Microsoft’s Windows operating system. “It’s going to take a long time for consumer goods to have any security wedged into them at all,” he said.

Another wireless camera, the DCS-1000W from D-Link Systems Inc., does offer encrypted transmission and ties into standard WiFi networks ‹ but it costs at least $350.

As a security expert, Mr. Rubin said he was concerned about the kinds of mischief that a criminal could carry out by substituting one video image for another. In one scenario, a robber or kidnapper wanting to get past a security camera at the front door could secretly record the video image of a trusted neighbor knocking. Later, the robber could force that image into the victim’s receiver with a more powerful signal. “I have my computer retransmit these images while I come by,” he said, explaining the view of a would-be robber.

Far-fetched, perhaps. That is the way security experts think. But those who use the cameras and find out about the security hole seem to grasp the implications quickly.

Back at the Staples store in Madison, employees said they did not know that they were being watched by security monitors. The manager of the store, when asked whether he knew that his cameras were broadcasting to the outside world, seemed somewhat shaken, and excused himself to go into his office, he said, to put down the small display carousel he was carrying.

He did not return.