PBXPrompts no longer offering custom prompts

We went to order some more prompts from PBXPrompts, and noticed that the online ordering form for Custom PBX Prompts was offline. Uh oh!.

Off went a quick email to our rep, and we found out that they are no longer accepting new customers and orders for customized prompts.

This leaves people with the custom voices in a little bit of a pickle. Not to worry though, they are honouring any old clients that are "locked in" to the voices they already ordered, and will still be selling the prompt replacement packages as well.

We'd suggest any clients that require voices get them done now rather than later incase they stop accepting orders all together.

We'd like to also point out that our representative was very helpful and helped along every step of the way.

XMPP Organization set to offer Free (yes, free!) SSL Certificates for XMPP services

This is really cool,

BTW, I think I forgot to mention that we're working to simplify the process of obtaining a free digital certificate from the XMPP Intermediate Certificate Authority (e.g., the process is now "self-service"). As part of that work, the URL is now:

http://xmpp.org/ca/

Let me know if you have any questions about the XMPP ICA.

Peter

--
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/

Nagios Administrator Change Language Default to English instead of German

For any of you using Nagios Administrator, and you're native English speakers, the fact that it always defaults to German may irk you.

Here's how to do it. Thanks to h-w on the Nagios Portal Forums.

# cd /var/www/nagiosadmin

# cd apps/backend/config/

# nano i18n.yml

and change the

default_culture: de

to

default_culture: en

# cd /var/www/nagiosadmin

# ./symfony clear-cache

Now you should be good to go and it will load up in english. Cool huh?

No Jitter and Eastern Management release Opensource PBX Survey

Found this on the list today, posted by Dean Collins. No Jitter has announced a new survey pertaining to the market's use of Opensource PBX solutions. Fill it out and let the world know you love Asterisk.

Here's a very cool thing: Eastern Management Group is conducting a survey to try and size the market for Open Source IP-PBXs. As far as I can tell, no such quantification exists for this market, so it will be really great to see what John Malone and his team at Eastern Management come up with. You can take the survey by going here.

Free, North American Echo Testing for Asterisk Made Easy

Dear friends,

Create sip applications that are jabber aware with PortSip SDK

This may be old, but we just found it on the -users list today as somone posted a link to it. This Asterisk SIP SDK looks pretty boss, it's got video, audio and even jabber capability built right in.

The SDK's that PortSIP offers allow developers, service providers, OEM/Enterprise to create fully customized, branded and feature specific soft-phones for their use. The SDK is built using non-MFC, C and C++. Of course, commercial licenses are available and according to their site come with 2 years of support.

Check out the PortSIP SIP Softphone SDK here. They also have a PortSIP Free Softphone available for download too.

Just like the rest of us, craigs list finally announces it’s tired of spammers, voip abusers and prepaid cellular abusers.. right on!

Found this over on the voipsupply blog, it's a little old, but probably new to some of you. Read on.

 

 

Not sure how I missed this, I like to think of myself as being on top of the industry but I just came across this over the weekend.

Craigslist.org, the popular free classified ad site, has been at war with spammers for some time. According to some reports, 90+% of ads in some categories are generated by spambots. Craigslist has deployed countermeasures including CAPTCHA and other techniques, but spammers have quickly evolved their techniques to sidestep them.

A few months back, Craiglist instituted a telephone verification process that places an automated outbound call to a user placing a classified ad in certain categories. The call delivers a unique code using text to speech, which is then used by the poster to authenticate the ad they are placing.

This is an effective measure for dealing with spam, and a great thing for legitimizing the Craigslist user experience….but not so great if you are a Craigslist user and you also happen to be a VoIP or prepaid cellular user.

The problem is that Craigslist is categorically blocking legitimate VoIP and Pre-paid cellular users from authenticating themselves.

The phone verification process is fairly straight forward. When you place an ad in many categories on Craigslist, you are presented with the form below.

Craigslist blocks most VoIP phone numbers, including those from services like Grand Central and Tossable Digits. This is an apparent broad stroke to counter the use of such services by spammers to game Craigslist’s voice verification.

Craig’s uses a 3rd party service, ReduceFraud.com to screen out VoIP and Pre-paid cellular numbers, and will not deliver an automated verification call to a number that is determined to be such. (Since only SPAMMERS use VoIP and Pre-Paid Cellular!!!) What sophisticated algorithm does ReduceFraud.com use to identify VoIP numbers, you ask? They check the DID number to see who owns the NPA NXX X number block, and if the DID number is owned by Level 3 Communications, they classify it as VoIP of course. Whizbang!

Coincidentally, ReduceFraud.com is owned and operated by a CA firm called Telecentrex, who offers their own hosted VoIP service.

Amazingly, this has created a business opportunity for resourceful entrepreneurs. Literally dozens of services have popped up offering everything from VoIP DID Numbers that Craigslist classifies as Fixed Lines, to pre-authenticated Craigslist user accounts, to full-blown Craigslist Super Spammer Software Packages.

I even found programming requsts on e-Lance, Rentacoder and GetaFreeLanceer.com
offering to pay for workarounds.

I would love to find out which service provider Craigslist is using to delivery their automated outbound verification calls. It would be cost-prohibitive to incure circuit-switched LD charges to deliver all those millions of calls…..VoIPMonitor estimated nearly 24 million VoIP users by 2008 (i.e 24 Million frustrated, would-be Craigslist users)…..I would not be surprised to learn that the provider was leveraging VoIP to send these very same outbound verification calls. Now wouldn’t that be ironic?

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