Networking

Our Favorite All-You-Can-Eat Deals in Cyberspace

Our Favorite All-You-Can-Eat Deals in Cyberspace

Monday, May 15, 2023

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Let’s begin with a mea culpa. We’ve been wrong on a few all-you-can-eat deals over the years including the CloudAtCost switcheroo, the Google Voice fiasco, and a few other cloud provider implosions. But our overall track record has been pretty good over the past decade, and today we have some fresh deals that are worth a careful look. We, of course, would encourage everyone to perform their own due diligence and at least acknowledge the cautionary note: "If a deal… Read More ›

An Electronics Home Makeover for the 21st Century

An Electronics Home Makeover for the 21st Century

Saturday, October 23, 2021

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It was a sad day when we finally sold our Bozak Concert Grand speakers this year after enjoying them for over half a century. They were a graduation present from "Papa Gene" Newsom of Newsom’s Music Center when I graduated from law school in 1971. The sale got me thinking that I really needed to write about what has changed in home entertainment now that we’ve turned the page to another century. Back then, there was no Internet or Spotify,… Read More ›

Is SIP Trunking Safe & Reliable in the DDoS World?

Is SIP Trunking Safe & Reliable in the DDoS World?

Monday, September 20, 2021

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Since last Thursday when VoIP.ms suffered (and continues to suffer) one of the worst Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks in the VoIP era, we’ve been asked a thousand times whether any SIP trunking provider can provide a safe and reliable platform under circumstances similar to the VoIP.ms outage. We obviously cannot vouch for every trunking provider but, based upon our discussions with two of the major carriers that support Incredible PBX, we are confident that either of them could… Read More ›

Review: The 2021 Cadillac Escalade – Everything a Tesla Isn’t

Review: The 2021 Cadillac Escalade – Everything a Tesla Isn’t

Sunday, February 14, 2021

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Happy Valentine’s Day. We’re on our fifth year of our love-hate relationship with Elon and Tesla. After a second purchase of a Tesla with Full Self-Driving (FSD) and no cigar, it’s beginning to smell more like vaporware. Tesla now is morphing FSD into a "feature set" that includes Automatic Lane Changes, Summon from across the garage, AutoPark (maybe and sometimes), Traffic and Stop Sign Alerts, and AutoSteer on City Streets (coming soon). You’ll note that AutoSteer on the highways and… Read More ›

Meet Acer Spin 713: A Phenomenal Computer for All Seasons

Meet Acer Spin 713: A Phenomenal Computer for All Seasons

Monday, December 7, 2020

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It’s a portable office. It’s a movie theater. It’s a LAMP server. It’s a desktop PC. It’s a tablet computer. It’s a Chrome browser. It’s an Android platform. It’s a Linux server. And it gets almost 8 years of free software and firmware updates. Meet the $629 Acer Chromebook Spin 713. And, if you hurry, it’s $80 off at Best Buy today. The checklist of superlatives is almost too lengthy to mention: a touchscreen of unrivaled quality, a 12-hour battery,… Read More ›

Frozen in Time: Sangoma at a Crossroads or the Cliff

Frozen in Time: Sangoma at a Crossroads or the Cliff

Tuesday, September 8, 2020

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We are fast approaching the 18 month anniversary since the mass exodus of talent from Sangoma and Digium. During that time, Asterisk® and FreePBX® have languished in limbo with FreePBX commercial modules mired in discontinued encryption methods and the Asterisk and FreePBX feature set frozen. Sangoma’s acquisition of Digium gave the company a well-respected business phone system in Switchvox® while relegating FreePBX deployments with commercial modules to second-class citizen status. Now Sangoma has a difficult and expensive decision to make.… Read More ›

Coping with Coronavirus: Working from Home with Asterisk

Coping with Coronavirus: Working from Home with Asterisk

Monday, March 16, 2020

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If one can only claim to be an expert in one subject matter, ours would be working from home building and deploying Asterisk®-based VoIP servers. We’ve been doing it for more than a decade. And, as the need for social distancing becomes imperative with the spread of COVID-19, working from home is by far the best antidote. For those with jobs in an actual office, you still need your computer and you still need transparent office phone call access. With… Read More ›

Travelin’ Man 3: A Plug-and-Play Firewall for Incredible PBX

Travelin’ Man 3: A Plug-and-Play Firewall for Incredible PBX

Monday, March 9, 2020

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Seven years ago we introduced Travelin’ Man 3 to simplify the task of securing the Incredible PBX® VoIP platforms. Today we want to reexamine the Travelin’ Man 3 firewall design for the benefit of those that are new to Asterisk® and FreePBX®. In the old days, FreePBX-based VoIP servers were notoriously vulnerable because of numerous bugs in the original FreePBX code which was developed by dozens of developers around the world with very different skill sets. Not only did you… Read More ›

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