This tidbit comes from TMCNet. Two New Jersey men who ran an elaborate scam that allowed them to sell VoIP services to legitimate companies. The catch? They obtained their service through fraud. Check out the original story over on TMCNet. Also, keep an eye on your servers!
 
-Michael

Greetings from the FreeSWITCH team. We hope your Monday is going well!
 
This week we have an interesting topic in our community conference call. We will be joined by Fred Dixon, lead developer of the Big Blue Button project. Big Blue Button is open software that enables distance learning and remote education. Fred will do a live demonstration of how it works as well as discussing how FreeSWITCH fits into the picture. We invite everyone to join us Wednesday to see this cool project in action.
 
In ClueCon news, we are pleased to announce that we have two more sponsors: NACT and HarQen. NACT uses FreeSWITCH in carrier class solutions, such as pre-paid and their commercial Vinci Class 4/5 softswitch. HarQen provides innovative voice-based solutions in their line of Intelligent Voice Services products.Their flagship offering is Voice Advantage, a tool that allows creation of custom recorded interviews. Managers and recruiters can quickly review these interviews, greatly speeding up the recruiting process. We look forward to seeing representatives from NACT and HarQen at ClueCon this August.
 
As a reminder, our ClueCon PowerPlay is still in effect. Register one attendee by the end of May and you'll receive three entries in our great ClueCon prize giveaway. Register two attendees from the same company and they each will receive six entries. The more people from your company who register, the more entries each person receives. Visit the ClueCon site or call us at 877-742-2583 if you have any questions about attending, sponsoring, or speaking at this year's event.
 
See you this August!
 
-Michael

Ken Rice just announced an important step in the inexorable march toward FreeSWITCH 1.2, namely a new release candidate: freeswitch-1.2.rc2. You can download it here.
 
The most important thing you can do right now is download this latest version and make sure it works for your various scenarios. The more people who try it, the quicker we'll get to 1.2 and the fewer bugs that we'll have to deal with after branching.
 
If you have any questions please feel free to ask on the FreeSWITCH-users or FreeSWITCH-dev mailing lists.
 
-Michael

Hello all!
 
We have a topic that is important for everyone in the FreeSWITCH community: business. Over the past few weeks I've personally been asked by three different business leaders if I knew of any FreeSWITCH talent that they could hire. (This is in addition to the talent that the CudaTel team has been pursuing.) One challenge we're having is how to communicate all these needs.
 
Many in the FreeSWITCH community are not aware that we have a FreeSWITCH-biz list. It's a kind of a bazaar where you can post about pretty much anything that does not apply to the -users or -dev lists. We don't actually have very many people registered for the -biz list. We would like to change that. We are asking that everyone who is registered with -users or -dev to go sign up for -biz.
 
Some may be concerned about spam and junk mail from yet another mailing list. Fortunately for us the amount of traffic on the -biz list is minuscule. In fact, through the end of April, the total number of posts to -biz this calendar year was seven. Not much traffic at all.
 
Let's all get signed up for FreeSWITCH-biz so that we can keep in contact about business opportunities for members of our community. If you know FreeSWITCH then the future is indeed bright!
 
-Michael

Since I live in the weirdest state of the Union (that would be "California" for those of you wondering) I am always on the lookout for stories affecting me locally. Those of you who like to watch the regulatory landscape might be interested in this post from Steve Anderson over at TMCNet. It's about a move in the California State Senate to deregulate VoIP services. Nothing's happened yet but it might get interesting so stay tuned for updates.
 
-Michael

From CNET news comes a nice story that hopefully will have a happy ending. Well, happy for those of us who favor privacy. The FBI may not be so enthused, but they'll get over it.
 
If you are at all interested in the debate about online privacy then definitely read this post. It is good food for thought.
 
-Michael

I have a nice andecdote to share with everyone. I received an Ooma unit as a gift last year and procrastinated but finally hooked it up about 4 months ago. I received an exotic phone number but otherwise everything was great. The service worked, the calls were perfectly clear, and I even used the Ooma in my home FreeSWITCH/CudaTel lab. :)
 
There was, however, one enormous glitch: Mrs. C! She's old school and likes having a land line. I told her we can save US$40+ per month and stick it to AT&T. I mean, how awesome is that? She was hesitant but I finally convinced her to give it a try. We ported our home number over to Ooma and then she was forced to give Ooma a fair shake. It took me 9 months to convince her to try it and it took 9 minutes for her to love it!
 
We are now happy Ooma users. I wanted to share this anecdote as evidence that people can and do use open source tools to make great products. The FreeSWITCH developers love to see success stories about people using FS to build and sell cool products. Ooma definitely qualifies. They have done a magnificent job of implementing a solution for the mass market. My next project is to put Ooma up to its toughest challenge yet: my in-law's house!
 
-Michael

Breaking news: Travis Cross and Ken Rice have managed to coax libzrtp into a working state on Linux systems! They worked late into the wee hours of the morning in order to make it happen. If you are on a Linux install then you can immediately try ZRTP on your next build cycle. Here are some things to keep in mind:

• If you have an existing system then you will need to re-run the bootstrap.sh script again.
• You must also run the configure script with the --enable-zrtp argument
• Only Linux has been tested up to this point; BSD, OS X, Windows, etc. need to be verified

If you would like a one-liner to rebuild you could do this from your FreeSWITCH source directory:

./bootstrap.sh && ./configure -C --enable-zrtp && make install

We invite everyone to try it out. Also, if you need a soft-phone client that supports ZRTP then check out Jitsi. I've tinkered with it on Windows with a moderate amount of success and very little drama.

In related news, Travis has been working hard on making sure that ZRTP is getting propagated out to as many of the FLOSS SIP softphones as possible. He reports that he has pushed a patch up to Werner Dittman, maintainer of zrtp4pj, which is the ZRTP library for the pjsip SIP stack. Several common softphones use the pjsip stack, including CSIPSimple, SIPDroid, and Siphon. The goal is to get ZRTP in as many places as possible so that we can hit critical mass, at which time we will hopefully start to see ZRTP included in hard phones.

Again, many thanks to Travis (irc: tc) and Ken (irc: SwK) for all of their hard work, and thanks to Phil Zimmermann for helping us to be able to "whisper in someone's ear from a thousand miles away." (That's a cool trademark, by the way.) Visit the zfone site for more information on what Phil has been up to.

-Michael

Here's a nice interview with our very own Anthony Minessale and Mike Jerris. The VoIPon post has both the audio and a transcript. If you haven't had a chance to hear from Anthony or Mike then I think you'll enjoy this interview. They discuss a number of things: HT TAPI, Sangoma and FreeTDM, ClueCon, and more.
 
Enjoy the podcast and don't forget to register for ClueCon 2012!
 
-Michael

I'd like to share a nice news item that came my way today. The folks over at the Freedom Fone project have been given the Innovation Award given out by the Index organization. This is an important acheivement for Freedom Fone, which relies upon a number of open source projects: CakePHP, Spidermonkey, JQuery, PHP5, and FreeSWITCH.
 
If you'd like to help out with the Freedom Fone project then please visit the contribute page to learn more. Like most projects, there are numerous ways to help out without actually writing code.
 
Congrats to Alberto Escudero-Pascual and company for using open source software to make the world a better place!
 
-Michael