Author Archives: Dan York

Blue Box Podcast #14 – Jan 24, 2006 – VoIP Security news and comments from the Emerging Telephony Conference

Synopsis: VoIP security news, Cisco vulnerabilities, conference news comments, news, VOIPSEC review


Welcome to Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast show #14, a 27-minute podcast  from Dan York and Jonathan Zar around news and commentary in the world of VoIP security. This show was actually recorded at the San Francisco Airport Marriott where the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony conference was taking place. One interesting fact is that after working together for most of a year on VOIPSA-related activities this was the first time Dan and Jonathan had actually physically met.

Download the show here (MP3, 25MB) or subscribe to the RSS feed to download the show automatically.

(This show was, in fact, recorded on January 24th and is only now
being posted primarily due to travel and other deadlines. Our apologies
for the delay.)

Comments, suggestions and feedback are welcome either as replies to this post  or via e-mail to blueboxpodcast@gmail.com.  Audio comments sent as attached MP3 files are definitely welcome and will be played in future shows.  You may also call the listener comment line at +1-206-338-6654 to leave a comment there.

Show Content:

Comments, suggestions and feedback are welcome either as replies to this post  or via e-mail to blueboxpodcast@gmail.com.  Audio comments sent as attached MP3 files are definitely welcome and will be played in future shows.  You may also call the listener comment line at +1-206-338-6654 to leave a comment there.

Thank you for listening and please do let us know what you think of the show.

Blue Box ETel2006 Podcast #2: Brad Templeton of EFF on CALEA

Synopsis: Presentation by Brad Templeton, Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, at O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony Conference on January 26, 2006


Welcome a special edition of Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast from the floor of the Emerging Telephony Conference in San Francisco, CA. In this presentation, Brad Templeton, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), channels his "evil twin" and uses humor and sarcasm to attack the recent FCC ruling applying CALEA to VoIP Service Providers, hits the Universal Service Fund, announces a lawsuit and rips into wiretapping.  It was quite an entertaining and humorous – yet serious – session.

We thank Brad Templeton and the conference team at O’Reilly for giving us permission to make this recording available to you all.

Download the show here (MP3, 19MB) or subscribe to the RSS feed to download the show automatically.  The show runs about 21 minutes.

Comments, suggestions and feedback are welcome either as replies to this post  or via e-mail to blueboxpodcast@gmail.com.
Audio comments sent as attached MP3 files are definitely welcome and
will be played in future shows.  You may also call the listener comment
line at +1-206-338-6654 to leave a comment there.

Blue Box ETel2006 Podcast #1: Phil Zimmermann presentation

Synopsis: Presentation by Phil Zimmerman at O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony Conference on January 26, 2006


Welcome a special edition of Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast from the floor of the Emerging Telephony Conference in San Francisco, CA.  In this presentation, Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP, outlines his ideas and plans for a new way to encrypt VoIP conversations.  His new software, currently called "zFone", will be available in early March for beta testing.  Updates and information will be available from his website at http://www.philzimmermann.com/.  A quote:

I would like to do for VoIP what I did for e-mail… I’d like to make it possible for you to whisper in someone’s ear – even if their ear is thousands of miles away.

We thank Phil Zimmermann and the great team at O’Reilly for giving us permission to make this recording available to you all.

Download the show here (MP3, 22MB) or subscribe to the RSS feed to download the show automatically.  The show runs about 23 minutes.

Comments, suggestions and feedback are welcome either as replies to this post  or via e-mail to blueboxpodcast@gmail.com.
Audio comments sent as attached MP3 files are definitely welcome and
will be played in future shows.  You may also call the listener comment
line at +1-206-338-6654 to leave a comment there.

iTunes/Feedburner problem with show #13

Unfortunately, when I initally posted show #13, Feedburner grabbed Shawn’s PDF file and used that as the podcast enclosure.  I have now fixed this quickly, but for some people (including myself) your copy of iTunes has already grabbed the show and therefore does not seem to have any way to force it to reload if the podcast feed has changed.

I could post a new entry with the podcast MP3 file, but that will cause the vast majority of people to download the file a second time (since their copy of iTunes has not yet pulled down the show the first time, and now will get the corrected RSS feed).  To avoid this massive duplication, I am not going to repost it, which means that some folks whose iTunes grabbed it right away will unfortunately have to manually download it from the website.  My apologies.

The good news is that I have found out what I have to do to avoid this in the future.  (Essentially, I need to add rel="enclosure" to my first <a> tag where I reference the MP3 file.)  I’ve changed my template so that this should not happen again!  (He says hopefully…)

Many thanks to the listener who clued me in to this shortly after I posted it!  (Thank you!  While you will have to manually download the file, your prompt response has saved the vast majority from having to do so.  Thank you.)

Blue Box Podcast #13 – Jan 19, 2006 – Interview with Shawn Merdinger on WiFi security

Synopsis: Interview with Shawn Merdinger about WiFi phone vulnerabilities, VoIP security, comments, news, VOIPSEC review


Welcome to Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast show #13, a 35-minute podcast  from Dan York and Jonathan Zar around news and commentary in the world of VoIP security. This show primarily features an 29-minute interview with Shawn Merdinger, an independent security researcher focused on the security of WiFi SIP handsets.

Download the show here (MP3, 33MB) or subscribe to the RSS feed to download the show automatically.

Comments, suggestions and feedback are welcome either as replies to this post  or via e-mail to blueboxpodcast@gmail.com.  Audio comments sent as attached MP3 files are definitely welcome and will be played in future shows.  You may also call the listener comment line at +1-206-338-6654 to leave a comment there.

Show Content:

Comments, suggestions and feedback are welcome either as replies to this post  or via e-mail to blueboxpodcast@gmail.com.  Audio comments sent as attached MP3 files are definitely welcome and will be played in future shows.  You may also call the listener comment line at +1-206-338-6654 to leave a comment there.

Download the show here (MP3, 33MB) or subscribe to the RSS feed to download the show automatically.

Thank you for listening and please do let us know what you think of the show.

Blue Box Podcast #12 – January 17, 2006

Synopsis: VoIP security news, WiFi phone vulnerabilities, comments, news, VOIPSEC review


Welcome to Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast show #12, a 55-minute podcast  from Dan York and Jonathan Zar around news and commentary in the world of VoIP security. This show also features an 15-minute interview with Bogdan Materna, CTO and co-founder of VoIPShield Systems

Download the show here (MP3, 50MB) or subscribe to the RSS feed to download the show automatically.

Comments, suggestions and feedback are welcome either as replies to this post  or via e-mail to blueboxpodcast@gmail.com.  Audio comments sent as attached MP3 files are definitely welcome and will be played in future shows.  You may also call the listener comment line at +1-206-338-6654 to leave a comment there.

Show Content:

Comments, suggestions and feedback are welcome either as replies to this post  or via e-mail to blueboxpodcast@gmail.com.  Audio comments sent as attached MP3 files are definitely welcome and will be played in future shows.  You may also call the listener comment line at +1-206-338-6654 to leave a comment there.

Download the show here (MP3, 50MB) or subscribe to the RSS feed to download the show automatically.

Thank you for listening and please do let us know what you think of the show.

Blue Box Podcast #11 – January 9, 2006

Synopsis: VoIP security news, WiFi phone vulnerabilities, comments, news, VOIPSEC review


Welcome to Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast show #11, a 39-minute podcast  from Dan York and Jonathan Zar around news and commentary in the world of VoIP security. This show also features an 18-minute interview with Steve Mank, COO of Qovia.

Download the show here (MP3, 39MB) or subscribe to the RSS feed to download the show automatically.

Comments, suggestions and feedback are welcome either as replies to this post  or via e-mail to blueboxpodcast@gmail.com.  Audio comments sent as attached MP3 files are definitely welcome and will be played in future shows.  You may also call the listener comment line at +1-206-338-6654 to leave a comment there.

Note: Audio quality was a bit lower than previous shows and there was some echo.  We know – and more importantly we know how to fix it.  Future shows will be bettter.

Show Content:

Comments, suggestions and feedback are welcome either as replies to this post  or via e-mail to blueboxpodcast@gmail.com.  Audio comments sent as attached MP3 files are definitely welcome and will be played in future shows.  You may also call the listener comment line at +1-206-338-6654 to leave a comment there.

Download the show here (MP3, 38MB) or subscribe to the RSS feed to download the show automatically.

Thank you for listening and please do let us know what you think of the show.

Sigh… there are nights you just can’t win…

As many of you may have noticed, iTunes or iPodder seems to be downloading something called "Problem with iTunes download of podcast #10".  This is, in fact, podcast #10.  That was also the original name for the article that is now "Blue Box Podcast #10 – Second Posting"… because I saw that iPodder and iTunes were downloading it with that name, I tried renaming the article, but that seems not to have worked.

Probably if I had deleted the "Problem with…" article and posted a new article it might have worked, but given that some small segment of you might then have wound up downloading show #10 a third time, I decided to not cause that hassle.  Fun, fun, fun…

(P.S. You won’t here mention of this problem in show #11 as that show is in the bag… I was sitting down to do post-production tonight when I got Craig’s e-mail that pointed me to these problems.)

Blue Box Podcast #10 – Second Posting

I wondered why the downloads for show #10 were so slow in coming…

Many of you have probably noticed by now that your podcast receiving software (iTunes, iPodder, etc.) downloaded a PDF file instead of the MP3 file for podcast #10.  This turns out to be a problem with how I had the content in the show notes.  It appears that Feedburner (the service we use for our RSS feed) must simply take the last link  that points to a non-text object and packages that up as the enclosure for download.  In this case, I had a link to a PDF file somewhere later in the text and that was apparently taken.  It seems rather strange, as I’m sure we had PDF files in links before, but this is the only explanation I can think of.

In any event, I repeated the reference to the MP3 file at the bottom of the post and that seems to have fixed the feed.  Now, unfortunately, it seems the only way I can force podcast receivers to download the new episode is to re-post the MP3 file for podcast #10 as part of a new post (i.e. this one). So I have done that in this message – but it may mean that some of you will wind up downloading the episode twice. (It is all a matter of timing – if you already downloaded the PDF file, odds are you will only get one copy of #10. If you haven’t yet downloaded any, you will probably wind up with two copies.) 

My apologies to you all for the mixup (and potential duplication).  I will now know better.

Right here you can download the latest episode (podcast #10) from this website.

Thanks to listener Craig Bowser for pointing this out.

Anyone attending “Internet Telephony” or “Emerging Telephony”?

Two great VoIP conferences… same darn time… and 3,000 miles apart…

If you are attending either the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference January 24-26 in San Francisco or the TMC.net Internet Telephony show happening at the same time across the continent in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, we would definitely be interested in touching base.

Given that Mitel has others going to Internet Telephony, I’m heading out to SF to O’Reilly’s ETel conference where, if schedules permit, Jonathan and I might actually connect and do that week’s podcast face-to-face.  I’m expecting to do some interviews at the show and perhaps record a couple of the security-related sessions.  I expect to offer some of those recordings either as part of that week’s podcast or perhaps as special edition podcasts.  If you are attending the ETel conference and would like to be interviewed, please drop an e-mail so we can arrange a time.  If you are going to the show and just want to connect and say hello (i.e. you don’t want to do an interview), feel free to drop a note as well… I’m always up to meet folks who listen.

Across the continent, if folks are going to Internet Telephony, we’d love to have some "reports" about VoIP security-related announcements or sessions that happen at that conference.  What are we looking for?  Well, for instance:

  • There are a couple of VoIP security-related conference sessions. If someone were to attend those sessions and send back a brief summary of their thoughts about the sessions, that would be welcome.  Were the sessions worthwhile? Anything really interesting or new?
  • The trade show floor will have some vendors offering products or services relating to VoIP security.  If someone wanted to send back their thoughts around VoIP security offerings on the trade show floor… what’s new and exciting?  Any new security-related products/services that caught your eye?

That’s the kind of information we are looking for.  Basically anything newsworthy or interesting for listeners who can’t make it to show.  Think of it this way – if you couldn’t attend the show, what would you like to hear about what was seen/discussed at the show?

Note: We’ll see the news releases for announcements coming out of Internet Telephony, but what we can’t do is push the buttons, play with the GUI, see the demo presentations or anything else that would help form an opinion. That’s the kind of info that would be best: you saw the demo, poked at it – what do you think? Also note that we’re not expect pure cheerleading… if you see something and you are not impressed, that opinion is welcome, too.

As far as format for sending in "reports", well, here would be my preference in order:

  1. audio file(s) sent in via e-mail (in any format)
  2. call into the comment line (1-206-338-6654) and leave a voicemail there (you could do this any number of times)
  3. drop me a note and I call you and record a conversation with you
  4. send in an e-mail report (which I’ll read on the show)

Obviously since this is a podcast, audio is preferred, but e-mail is great, too.  As far as time, whatever you want to do: a minute or two… or five or 10.  Whatever.  Keep in mind that if you call the comment line, I get an audio file which I can edit, and I’ve gotten real good at post-production, so I can edit out any things you don’t want me to include (provided you tell me that) or drop out egregious "ums", etc.

Anyway, if you are attending either show and would be interested in either connecting or providing a report, please do send us an e-mail letting us know.

P.S. If someone really wants to go the extra mile and bring along a MP3 recorder to do actual interviews with vendors there at Internet Telephony, that would of course be welcome and we’d be glad to include them… but that’s way more than we’re asking for.