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Victim describes the sins of IT Professionals

Clickford, Steven M.

 

Sick story, and according to the MISAG’s office, nearly 100 domestic violent complaints in the last 3 calendar years, result in men working in Information Technology (IT). And you wonder why I refuse to be in an abusive industry? Because I am tired myself of emotionally abused. This minifigure was raped and her situation was caught on camera intentionally!

Vulgar language is used in this raw video from BCOP-TV in Copenhagen

Peer to Peer SIP Telephony, Will It Work? Part three

Clickford, Steven M.1 Comment

In a previous post, I kinda lost my luster with SIP and WebRTC is just another technology riped with more failures if compared to dial tone.

In the original experiment, I had tested if I could have SIP telephones work peer to peer without much intervention at say an IP PBX or what. In reality, SIP doesn’t work that well in that form, despite Avaya and Aastra selling similar systems over a decade ago.

The test subjects were

  • A Cisco 2801 Router, using Cisco Call Manager Express 8.5 (functioning more for the Voice Register service)_
  • An Avaya 9650 (intended to be a collection to The Museum)
  • Several Mitel IP phones from a friend of mine in Montana (5330s and 5224 self purchased over 5 years ago. Set to SIP from MiNet because I don’t have a functioning ICP phone system)
  • Aastra 480i IP phones (purchased in 2016 to replace some Cisco phones that was a lost cause)

I finally got the Voice Register (for the purposes of this post, these phones act like POTS phones that plug into an Ethernet switch). I also was able to get FXO to finally work with my consumer Xfinity 1FH trunk.

On the Cisco side, the number goes into the voice port and connects to the Private Line Automatic Ringdown to a hunt-group number of 400, set in the voice-register hunt prompt. Members are SIP extensions as set up in voice-register-dn and voice-register-pool (hardware or phone) tags. Inbound calls work fine, as well as outbound calls as well. This never worked previously. Caller ID works fine and all sets can interpret it. Continue reading →

Peer to Peer SIP Telephony, Will It Work? Part two

Clickford, Steven M.2 Comments

Well over a year later, there is a follow up to an earlier focus on Session Initiation Protocol and can it work just having some SIP phones tied together without the expense of time and resources of having a phone system?

In short, if your router is calling you, that call may be a hopeless outcome.

Basically SIP is the modern-day landline with an IP stack, with a functionality similar to the web. You use Safari or Chrome to go onto say Facebook or The Museum. In the SIP context, the phone is the browser, and the telephone number is the Web address.

Search results in the past say you can use SIP without any proxy, gateway, etc. by zero-ing out the said addresses. Therefore these devices can work by dialing the latter portion of the IP address, so if your IP address are in the 192.168.1.0 range, you could call an IP address of one phone of 192.168.1.13 by dialing 13. This is called “Direct IP Calling”, and should remain for this single use case.

If you have some knowledge on this subject, you may ask, well “what’s wrong with that? Isn’t this part of VoIP?” If you want to have SIP be part of the greater cyber world, it has to be done in the form of Uniform Resource Locators or URLs much like melanie at clickford dot net. or steven dot clickford at clickford dot private. SIP requires a bunch of other Internet protocols to be set up simultaneously. SIP was to allegedly be more of an “open standard” to the already open standard of H323, that was a bit more opaque but SIP is just as guilty.

What does this all mean? Some of the major vendors wanted to put some additional features to work more like an office telephone, since SIP is basically a landline with all the standard 19 features you can currently get from your broadband provider, and if you’re a 90s kid, you had the Baby Bell service when Call Waiting alone was $3 x/month. Essentially to have PBX-like features, the vendors had to get creative and make SIP an open standard to troubleshoot and monitor the quality by keeping the logs easy to read. A lot of the forwarding, ACD, and Camp On like features would be done discretely through making a button called Features, that basically opens up to what appears to be web page with scripts to go back to the phone system to activate some feature.

By theory, Mitel, Avaya (Nortel and legacy Lucent), Cisco can operate phones off their native PBX or Key system, but it’s again it becomes a landline with an IP stack. They can work like a home phone, with a couple more “appearances” that acts like a visual call-waiting, and be able to do basic telephone calls.

Another issue is “ghost calls”. This is often referred to be malicious and cause toll fraud, but for isolated, LAN based SIP telephony, this means if a rogue telephone that doesn’t comply to SIP standards, a phone will ring off the hook for hours, maybe days only because the ringing telephone didn’t get a proper SIP signal or because you are calling it by an IP address, or part of one, this can also cause issues.

In the age of wireless, and the erosion of landlines, SIP has matured to be basically a Landline telephone service to modernize that dial tone for sites with office telephones. It’s great for trunking, in fact the only Internet telephony standard that supports Caller ID systematically. When it comes to phones, if you expect it to do a lot of what you have expected in legacy Nortel, Avaya or heck even Cisco, it’s just as functional as a phone you would’ve bought at Radio Shack, if only they were still around to sell disposable IP phones. But this “open” protocol has it’s downsides, it’s open to 1,001 different issues, quirks and if one phone has an older firmware and has a bug and another phone of the same type with newer ones, this would cause even more headaches, as other centralized VOIP systems, the bugs live in the router, brain or server, and not on the end device.

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Are VOIP Phones other than SIP Worth It on Asterisk Systems?

Clickford, Steven M.

I’ve played with Asterisk over the years, and it’s somewhat to write home about (you know the phone system-like snapin to any Unix or Linux operating systems?)

One of the things that caught my attention from almost the early days was it’s “support” for some proprietary IP phone drivers and protocols. Particularly Cisco’s SCCP and Nortel’s UniSTIM. Session Initiation Protocol or SIP is an “open” standard, meaning that the way the phone communicates to the phone system (that’s now a server) is supposed to use a uniform specifications outlined in Request for Comment in the Holy Grail of Internet Standards. That RFC is rather interesting, because while these phones could work on any system that supports SIP, basically, it’s almost like having a house phone with an IP stack instead.

I have focused on SIP in other posts, and I don’t really support this idea on phones, because it’s almost like having a landline just that it communicates over the Internet. I personally feel that SIP is way too religious in the way a vendor must follow. In fact, there is a movement to obsolete that with WebRTC. With that aside, SIP is going to be withheld for the rest of this story.

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Vocal Minority Against Kari’s Law: Editorial

Clickford, Steven M.

Freelanced for Techicenter where the FCC is regulating in businesses they wouldn’t touched before. Published in April 2018. The last post, that happened to be on the subject of Kari’s Law, has had some unusual activity in the last couple of weeks with no way to capture where that audience from.

A MONTH INTO KARI’S LAW – GOVERNMENT OVERREACH OR KILLING PHONE SYSTEM VENDORS?

A phone system killed a mother, not the actual man behind it or bad admin who misconfigured it. Or says the media.

In 2013, a Texas mother named Kari Hunt died from being murdered by her estranged husband in a motel. The daughter tried to call “9-1-1” but the number didn’t work because it was tied to a Multi Line Telephone System, where one has to dial a trunk access code to get to the outside world. MLTS can be a private branch exchange or a key telephone system (PBX and KTS respectively.) The mainstream media immediately jumped on the bandwagon that the PBX killed the mother, not some grossly incompetent PBX administrator, and not the murderer.

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The Vocal Minority of Opposition Kari’s Law

Clickford, Steven M.

Your same Federal Communications Commission that decided to do a Friday news dump around Thanksgiving to eliminate franchise fees to communities to mostly fund First Amendment access content by municipalities for local cable TV subscribers is the start of a new F.C.C. that for an American should be extremely concerned. Not just a lack of democracy; or an agency  that isn’t worried about use of s-Bombs at midday TV programming; or even concerned about potential “white noise” of wireless devices as they continue to deregulate.

From 2014 to 2017, in various platforms, mostly at The Museum of Telephony, I wrote strong opposition against Kari’s Law, a law mandating at gunpoint to private businesses of how their private branch exchange can be used to call emergency services (e.g. 9-1-1.) Kari’s Law became a name in Texas by a then 29 year old woman who was slayed by an apparent creep and the daughter desperately “9-1-1” as she was taught against a hotel phone system, that often requires a trunk access code or TAC to get out.

Because Kari’s father, Hank Hunt was so bothered, and couldn’t learn that life sucks and some people perish in the most perverted way, he and an Avaya VP (vis a vis the Nortel Enterprise Unit) decided  to fantasy that the PBX was the murderer and as a result as of 2018, Kari’s Law is now enforced by the F.C.C.

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