Michael Graves

This author has written 1376 articles

Counterpath’s Bria For Android On A T-Mobile G2

A few weeks ago Counterpath released a version of their Bria SIP soft phone specifically for the Android platform. This was one of the factors that influenced my purchase of a T-Mobile G2. I’ve had the G2 for a few weeks and have been mostly very pleased with the device. My twitter stream has reflected various experiments using it during recent travels.

Counterpath was good enough to provide a licence for their Bria SIP soft phone which dovetails nicely with my employers OnSIP hosted PBX. As I have been travelling a bit these past few weeks I’ve not made much use of Bria until very recently.

For an in depth look at Bria on Android you should look at the OnSIP site as the staff over there have posted a nicely detailed review. They report some crashing of the application, which has not been my experience but I expect that the user experience varies with hardware platform.

Around my home office, and on my local Wifi, I find that Bria Android Edition is stable and reliable. It seems to handle calling extensions local and remote without any NAT issues.

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VUC 2010 Holiday Gigaset Giveaway

As we approach the US Thanksgiving holiday we are given pause to reflect upon our many blessings. While many of us exist in a wideband realm where clarity of voice leads to universal understanding, there remain a great many who…

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My First Telepresence Experience…kinda

The paradox of my demo this past week was funny, and kind of sad. It was a presentation to a sports network in LA. I was in an uplink facility in Atlanta with some HD graphics gear and a couple of people from the network. The rest of the audience was the creative team in LA. They took the 1080i HD output of my device and a camera (also 1080) pointed at me, running both over a fiber link to the group in LA.

The theory was simple enough; the group in LA had some specific concerns. I could demonstrate conclusively our approach to their issues. They see me operating the equipment as well as the output in real-time, in glorious full-resolution HD. The fact that the uplink facility was involved made the fiber link available. This was a first in my long history in this business.

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Comparing Hotel Wifi, 3G & 4G Net Access in Marietta GA

This week I find myself in the Atlanta area for a couple of days. To be specific, tonight I’m at the Crowne Plaza in Marietta GA. This hotel was booked by a co-worker on the basis of its proximity to my work site. He booked it at a discount through Priceline.com. It was good choice. It’s a nice hotel.

Like most of the upper-end hotel brands this facility was wired for internet access in the days when wifi was not ubiquitous. As such, there remains a wired internet connection in the rooms.

Reflecting more current trends there’s pervasive wifi as well. In a remarkable twist, both are offered free of charge. It has been my experience that many of the more up-market hotel brands still charge a nightly fee for internet access.

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Life In The Time Of FireSheep

A couple of weeks ago at Toorcon security researcher Eric Butler released a curious new plug-in for the the popular Firefox web browser. Known as FireSheep this plug-in allows even an unskilled person to monitor traffic on an open wifi network. It further allows its users to capture the login data exposed as web browsers of other people on that WLAN perform logins to sites like Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, etc.

I won’t go into how it works since others had done a nice job of that already. Suffice it to say that this is scary stuff given how common it is for people to use open wifi networks at public places, usually without giving it a second thought..

FireSheep was not intended as a tool for criminal or malicious activity. It’s release was intended to expose a security issue in the way web browsers handle cookies arising from login. While the login process itself is secure, the handling of the resulting cookies usually is not.

Whatever the intent, it’s certain that some less scrupulous people will use it or the lessons learned from it for illicit purposes such as identity theft.

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