via CNet

These results alone should be enough to convince us that we’re approaching the end of e-mail as we know it. The schemes are critical pieces of the technology that should be adopted by any site or company that depends on the reliable delivery of their outbound e-mail or the protection of their brand and domain name. They should also be used by other receivers that wish to be able to prove the identity of mail senders, as well as provide a safer and more reliable way to accept inbound messages beyond traditional mail content filtering.

While I still believe email is dying, I also think it is a bad idea for CEO of Sendmail to say it, don’t you? I mean, you don’t see John Chamber coming out to say “the end of IP as we know it”.

Okay, it is cool he realized it tho – the question is hows is Email 2.0 (if any) going to look like.

I been using feedster to montior keyword voip and I notice a there are more and more job postings on voip like this.

I am very happy to see jobs created by voip (hey “voip engineer” could be the new job position in your company) and I am equally impressed that people are using blog to do recuritment ;-)

Advanced IP Pipeline said “Cinderella Story Is Over For VoIP“.

For starters, there’s the revelation from AT&T (reported here by the Newark Star-Ledger) that its massive Olympic promotion of its promotion of its CallVantage VoIP service netted just 53,000 customers — a flop off the balance beam.

Woosh, hold on – CallAdvantage actually targets business, not home consumers. 53k isn’t a lot but not too bad consider their target market segment. Beside, I don’t think they aren’t too far behind their internal projections.

[Incidently, I heard a “story” that most of the users on Vonage are really small businesses rather then home consumers and they are now facing difficulties adding a second line. Anyone knows if this is true?]

Vonage, as our readers well know, seems to find foes in every nook and cranny of the networksphere these days. And the looming decision on Level 3’s forbearance petition (a great explanation of the topic can be found here) may mean more lawsuits, charges and fees sneaking into those all-you-can dial VoIP plans.

Wait, hold on. Vonage has 300k users and you don’t mention it? Instead, you pull the Level 3 forberance petition and the pull out of it on the last minute as a story to tell? Level3 petition is important but perhaps only really within US due to the access charges issues looming within US. The VoIP movements goes on pretty happily in the rest of the world.

Beside, pulling the petition is a smart move: Live to fight another day.

via CIO

Amoroso of AT&T believes that the fundamental security problem is that during the past decade, and quite unintentionally, the network’s intelligence has migrated to the edge…He thinks AT&T can make a ton of money off this idea: Return control to the network providers (like his own company’s phone system in the 1970s, he says, a time when Ma Bell controlled everything, including the technology’s interface), and let the providers charge you for doing all of the filtering, traffic analytics, worm detection and incident response.

…

Guns are dangerous; therefore, we license them. We give them unique serial numbers and control their distribution. James Whittaker says programmable PCs are dangerous, so why not treat them like guns?

Amazing! Who let these self-declared savior-of-the-net out of in the open?

Finally back in Singapore after two weeks in US. Arrived back early in the morning at 5:30am and have to get back to office at 9:30am :P And gosh, I am not looking forward clearing up the 3000+ emails in my inbox :-(

Anyway, it has been a great trip. On certain days, I feel my brain exploded from all the information – sometimes I lost track who I met.

Like this guy who excitedly told me how he used to work in Mindef when I mentioned I am from Singapore . Didn’t registered in my brain until few days later – Duh, Chris Anderson!

Or this guy called Bob who spend one hour talking to me about some crazy idea to reinvent the Internet Protocol (IP) – I figure he is either lunatic or pure genius. Later, when my brain managed to make a connection again, duh, Bob Frankston of Visicalc fame.

Everybody is a Somebody (at least in the geek world) at ETech.

I mean when is the last time you sit beside the guy in charge of Thunderbird by picking a random seat at lunch break?

ps: Incidently, my previous post regarding 仙剑奇侠传 attracted quite few emails asking me where they can buy the VCD in Singapore. (My wife calls it the pretty-girl-effect :-) I really haven’t seen it in Singapore.

However, I might be wrong about not ever coming to Singapore. There is one (minor) character 刘晋元 which is acted by a Channel U artist 王禄江. Watch out for it :-)

I don’t believe in Quality-of-Service (QoS). I don’t buy all the vendors FUDs about “oh..you need QoS or else the world is going to end so buy my this special QoS-enabled box! now!”.

It is not that I don’t believe in quality for voice – I do – but I don’t think we need special QoS technology – 802.11e or whatever – to get there.

So when I pointed this out in the Wifi SIP Summit, someone from the audience quickly debunk me – and later pointed out the “QoS study” by ClearVoice. Nevermind I actually did it at APRICOT with roaring reviews – “no no no, you need QoS!” Ha!
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I notice a trend lately : I seldom watch movies or TV. I get my dose of mass media movies from my longhaul flight (SingaporeAir has great collection on their movies-on-demand). I dont watch TV because I lost interest in Mediacorp programming and more importantly, I found something that suit my need – Internet.

I can find lots of exotics shows which I can’t find in Singapore at all. The latest show I got from the Internet is a series called 仙剑奇侠传, a China-made show which as far as I know, not sold in any stores in Singapore. Neither do I have very high hopes Mediacorp will show this over the air. But you can buy it here.

It was adapted from a Taiwanese game which I love in the early 90s. And of course, the main actress 刘亦菲 is incredibly beautiful. Last I heard, she is filming 神雕侠侣, oh boy!

The problem is most thinks china-made show are lousy. Ha!¹ But there is a demand for such show outside China too but they are tiny, really tiny until you aggregate them together.

This is preciesly the Long Tail phenomenal Chris Anderson talks about today. Before Internet, there is almost no way I can get these shows at all. It would be interesting to see how people going to make money out of all these long tails.

And almost every industry have a long tail – What’s your long tail?

¹ Okay, I agree there are rooms for improvement but heck, who watch 流星花园 because of F4 acting skills?

Footnote: I remember arguing with a friend in 2000 that Korean shows is going to be big (after seeing what they have in Korea from my frequent trip there). No one believe me then because the rage back then is Japanese shows. Today, I say, watch out for China made shows.

Few more things I picked up at ETech Day 2

a) James Larsson, power hacker, showed some amazing hacks he done. Some stuff he did is amazing (and pretty dangerous!) Like turning his old CRT into a mouse trap (8Mb AVI :-) He delivered the whole thing in such a funny manner that everyone was laughing throughout the session!

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From Peter Payne:

My son just finished with his final tests, his last of the third grade. He did really well in his science final, only missing one question, which was about the
shadow cast by a stick in the ground. Over the course of several hours, the position of the shadow moves — why? My son, who is no fool, wrote that the Earth is moving, but he was disappointed to find this marked wrong, however — “the sun moves in the sky” was what was in the textbook, and that’s what he was expected to write. We took the teacher to task on this, which surprised him, since questioning educators is seldom done in Japan. In the end, I think we taught our son an important lesson about not automatically accepting what he hears.

Guilllaume Rischard setup a parody on verisign.com using the IDN spoofing trick. He managed to get one registrar to register verisign.com with a cyrillic S (U+0405) (ie xn--veriign-mog.com :-)

Also check out Neustar website, the competitor to Verisign.

This actually started in #joiito a couple of weeks ago after the Eric published the spoofing attack paper. A joke was made that it would be funny if someone did it to verisign.com and so he did.

I suppose I could rant why Verisign should adopt the JET Guideline (or ICANN Guidelines) but this parody would send a louder message.

Nevertheless, I am sure the folks in Verisign will react to this quickly.

The first would obviously fixing their own registration rules – if a student in UK can do this, this isn’t a good sign for them. Hopefully the fix will be consistent with the ICANN Guidelines :-) [btw, despite my rants against Verisign, I actually like the people work for Verisign – I still have friends (i hope) working there who is doing their best to do good things]

The second is how to deal with the parody site – Verisign isn’t know to have a great sense of humor so I fear for my friend – I taken the liberty to speak to Wendy from EFF just in case. IANAL but the only thing I could see Verisign has a case on is the domain name itself (verisign.com) which is their trademark. The rest of the site have been made clear it is a parody – adapted from Neustar, who apparently have a great time laughing at the parody – or modified from Verisign in such a way no one would be ‘reasonably’ confused.

I suppose they could initiate a takedown notice under DMCA. But that would be interesting – how do you initiate a takedown notice on yourself :-)

They could get their army of lawyers to send threatening letters to Rischard to take it down – but that would only be PR disaster for them and would further attract more attention to the site.

Or alternatively, they could just send a polite email to Rischard to ask him to take it down – Rischard is doing this for a laugh, not looking for a fight so he might afterall.