I remember the Panopticon from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. (Disclosure: I read it for a philosophy course.) Foulcault believed that the effect of the Panopticon — if not the precise design — was pervasive throughout modern culture.

From Wikipedia:
The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the “sentiment of an invisible omniscience.”

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Bentham himself described the Panopticon as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” … Many modern prisons built today are built in a “podular” design influenced by the Panopticon design, in intent and basic organization if not in exact form. As compared to traditional “cellblock” designs, in which rectangular buildings contain tiers of cells one atop the other in front of a walkway along which correctional officers patrol, modern prisons are often decentralized and contain triangular or trapezoidal-shaped housing units known as “pods” or “modules” designed to hold between sixteen and fifty prisoners each. In these designs, cells are laid out in three or fewer tiers arrayed around either a central control station or a desk which affords a single correctional officer full view of all cells within either a 270° or 180° field of view (180° is considered a closer level of supervision). Control of cell doors, CCTV monitors, and communications are all conducted from the control station.

Skype celebrated its fifth year of operation over the summer and now has more than 370 million registered users. The company brags that its peer-to-peer VoIP/IM/video client software is in use in nearly every country on the planet and that people have made more than 100 billion minutes worth of free Skype-to-Skype calls.

Further on in the post, Mohney mentions that Skype’s Chinese parter was discovered to be eavesdropping on customers and in this post, Mohney speculates about the possiblity that Skype has a built-in back door for precisely that purpose:

Rumors have been floating around on Skype selling a special listening device to interested governments and there has long been speculation about a back door to the program. Because Skype’s code and protocols are both proprietary and closed, security experts have long wondered what Skype is capable of and what risks may arise in deploying the software in an enterprise environment.

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This video from Skype demonstrates using the service for business: 

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FrugalTech discusses more ways to save money using Skype for business:

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Kid Guru explains how to record calls for podcasting and other purposes:

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I’m always extremely impressed when marketing people actually demystify terms, instead of spinning hype and building the “baffle ‘em with BS” model to new levels. In this article, Joel Maloff, VP of Marketing for BandTel, explains SIP trunking. Here’s an excerpt:

In a survey commissioned by my company earlier this year, we discovered that even so-called industry experts — analysts, reporters, and others — could not agree on a definition for SIP trunking, nor could they consistently identify the leaders in delivery of SIP trunking services. However, it is not hard to understand the confusion in the general marketplace. For example, a February 2008 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) draft document entitled “What is aSession Initiation Protocol ( News – Alert) (SIP) Trunk Anyway?” provided the following definition:

A SIP trunk is a virtual sip entity on a server constrained by a predefined set of polices and rules that determine how to process requests. (J. Rosenberg, 2008, http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-rosenberg-sipping-siptrunk-00.txt)

No wonder there is confusion!

The same draft also describes SIP trunking in more mainstream circles as a service for enterprises that allows connection to the PSTN as a displacement for circuit-based connections, and as a replacement for costly leased lines connecting distributed telephone systems within an enterprise.

So let’s cut through the mystery and confusion. SIP trunking, simply put, is a way for organizations to accomplish something that they already do, but for less money, with equal or better quality, and with greater functionality. It is also a way for enterprises that were too small and could not afford leased line services to achieve comparable benefits as the big boys but for much more attractive fees than previously. All of this is now achievable because of the underlying packet-switched technology of the Internet as opposed to circuit-switched architecture from the past. SIP is simply the framework that vendors and service providers have agreed to use to accomplish the completion of telephone calls and much more.

Another challenge is that SIP trunking providers differ from one another, and can roughly be grouped in the following three categories: SIP trunks via dedicated lines, SIP trunks in conjunction with hosted services, and pure SIP trunking providers.

Read the rest of the article.

Should our spam definition now be extended to unsolicited bulk electronic communication of any kind? Probably not — there’s an active market in creating new terms to describe this kind of solicitation in each medium. In fact, we recorded a podcast last year, “What are Spam, Spim, Sping, Splog and Spit?,” that addressed exactly this expansion.

If we start with WhatIs.com’s definition of spam, unsolicited bulk email (UBE) sent on the Internet, it’s easy to make the extension, though it’s necessary to make UBE more generel, extending it to unsolicited commercial electronic communication (UCEC). Spim is UCEC using instant messenging (IM) software.

SPIT, sometimes known as “vam” for voice spam, UCEC sent over IP telephony. SPIT may be broadcast over VoIP, which I suppose would be “SPoIP,” though we haven’t heard that much.

There’s good news for enterprise VoIP users, however, according to Zeus Kerravala: “Spam and eavesdropping, which is what a lot of them are worried about, is mostly based on consumer voice. That has nothing to do with what goes on behind the firewall, where the main concern is managing performance.” Kerravala is an analyst for the Yankee Group in Boston who wrote a guide to the realities of VoIP security for SearchVoIP.com, so we’re inclined to trust him on this count.

Back to Bluespamming. Using the same formulation from above, Bluspamming is defined as unsolicited commercial electronic solicitations sent over a Bluetooth connection. Is it really spam? TechDirt certainly thinks so:

While there are plenty of people who like to think that marketing is an evil profession, that’s not true at all. Real marketing has tremendous value in figuring out what people want and how to deliver it to them. It’s just that so many people do it so badly (and assume that marketing is more about telling people they want something they don’t) that it has a terrible reputation. That’s why you just have to cringe when some marketers do things so obviously bad that you just know it’s going to continue the downward spiral of the view of what marketing really is about. A few weeks ago, we wrote about a test of a system in the UK called “Bluecasting” which was more accurately described as “Bluespamming”, where terminals were set up to send commercial messages over Bluetooth to unsuspecting people passing by with Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones. The companies behind this plan insist it’s fine because rather than just sending you the commercial message, they first spam you to ask you if it’s okay if they send you a commercial message. For some reason, these folks then thought it was terrific that they only wasted the time of 85% of the people they spammed. Sure, compared to direct mail, that’s a high return, but it’s quite a different situation. Buzzing someone on their phone as they’re walking through a train station is likely to really interrupt them as they’re on their way somewhere. Yet, due to blind marketing-think, the folks behind it still are insisting it’s wonderful and are expanding the program to bug even more people — pretty much guaranteeing that most folks are going to start turning Bluetooth off on their phones. The people behind it are in denial about how annoying this really is. According to the manager of some airport lounges where this will be used: “I think it’s done very well because it enables the customers [to choose]. It doesn’t force it on them.” But, it does force it on users — by pinging them without permission to see if they want the ad. That’s the spam. Being interrupted as they’re trying to do something else. If it was really completely up to the user, they would just put up signs telling people they could request info or content on their phones using Bluetooth. But actively sending them messages via Bluetooth is intrusive and, to many, many people, clearly seen as spam.”

For more context, make sure to review our definitions for Bluejacking and Bluesnarfing and our glossary of ‘casts, which we’ve updated to include “Bluecasting”. For more information about Bluetooth, listen in to our podcast, “What is Bluetooth?,” over at Bitpipe.com (Free registration is required).