For those of you who may be used to reading this blog through the “Security Bloggers Network” set up originally by Alan Shimel, you need to be aware that the “SBN” is going through a transition. As Alan details on his blog, Google is in the process of shutting down the “Network” feature of Feedburner and as a result the page and feed for the SBN will be going away.

Alan is working on a new solution but in the meantime you may want to grab the OPML file for the Security Bloggers Network (you should then be able to import this into most feed readers). There are a lot of great security blogs out there.

Stay tuned for more information – once Alan has another solution in place I’ll post an update.

Blue Box listeners,

Well, it’s been a while. A long while. This summer turned out to be a bit crazier than Jonathan or I ever expected. The good news is that the renovation at my home is finally done and I’ve moved into my home office. The box of podcasting gear has come up from the basement. I’m not traveling for several weeks… so everything looks good to finally get the huge queue of back episodes out the door.

My goal this week is to get some of the older main shows out first followed by some of the excellent Special Editions that our volunteer production team has put together. If things work out the way I hope I should be getting you a show a day for the rest of the week. (We’ll see.)

Thanks for your patience and continued interest in the show. We have very definitely not “podfaded”… and we’ll be back with more shows and interviews in the weeks and months ahead! Thanks for continuing to listen.

Dan & Jonathan

My apologies for the long delay… we haven’t “podfaded”. We have several main shows recorded that I’m hoping to get out this week and I’ve got a host of volunteers ready to help with getting some of our backlog of “Special Edition” shows out… I just have to put the pieces in place so that those volunteers can help! Unfortunately, the process of buying a new home and selling our existing home has severely hit my available time and that’s the primary reason for the delays. Within the next month or so that should hopefully all wind down and I can resume the regular activity….

Thanks for your patience!

Here is our new comment line number: +1-415-830-5439.

Here’s the story…

To my immense annoyance, it seems that we have once again lost our K7.net call-in number for comments: +1-206-350-7280. That isn’t the bad part, really… what annoys me most is that the number still appears to work! You can call it up and leave a message, but if it goes anywhere, it is not going to us! In the past, when we’ve lost our K7 number, the number has been inactive to some period of time, so callers just got a message saying that the number was no longer in use. Now it appears that the number has been reallocated already – or at least is accepting calls.

So please do not call that number!

I’m going to use this failure as an opportunity to completely drop our usage of K7.net. K7.net is a “unified messaging” service that is widely used by podcasters because it provides a very simple and easy – and free – service: Callers call in to a phone number, leave a message, and then you receive an email with the comment attached as a WAV file. It is great for a podcaster. Simple. Easy. Just works.

However, there is this wee minor little detail that is shown in the terms of service at the bottom of the sign-up page:

If a K7 number is inactive for 30 days (use is determined as a voice message or fax message to that number) , we may terminate the account for non-use.

This has been the bane of many podcaster’s existence. If you don’t get a call in 30 days, you lose your number. This impacts podcasters, especially, because our shows may live on out there on the Internet for an incredibly long time. You can still download Blue Box podcast #1 from two years ago which has the wrong comment line included (in fact, it is 2 or 3 numbers ago). So losing your number is really quite bad from a community-building point-of-view. If you put out frequent shows and get frequent comments, this usually isn’t a problem. However, if you are a show like ours where we’ve been only doing maybe two shows a month it may be more of a challenge. I know that here in New England, the New England Podcasters group was instituting a “reminder day” where it was a monthly day to call your comment line to be sure you kept it. In any event, we seem to have lost our number.

Now, I can’t really complain about the service because it is free and the K7 folks have always been very up front about the termination for non-use clause. All I can really do is find another alternative.

I have now done so. My new employer, Voxeo, has a website for developers called evolution.voxeo.com where you can create voice applications in several different XML variants (VoiceXML, CCXML or Voxeo’s own CallXML). You can create a free developer account and with that you can create apps that have their own inbound phone number. For free. Anyone can do so. There is, at least currently, no expiration date or termination clause for non-use (although the terms of use do of course indicate that Voxeo can change or revoke the numbers at any time). So what’s the catch? Well, Voxeo hopes that you like to develop apps on our platform so much that ultimately you’ll need our hosting services for your applications.

So I’ve created my own little experiment in the form of a new comment line: +1-415-830-5439.

Right now it’s just a computer-generated voice but I’ll add in my own prompts soon. Interestingly, this number is also reachable via some other phone numbers:

• Skype: +99000936 9992002622
• FWD: **86919992002622
• SIP: sip:9992002622@sip.voxeo.net

And while we are NOT going to switch from using our SIP “bluebox@voipuser.org” address, it’s nice to know that it is available.

Since I know many of our listeners like to know the code underneath things, here is the full text of my “application” that does this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

<callxml version=”2.0″>

<block>

<text> Thank you for the calling the comment line for Blue Box, The Voice over IP Security Podcast.  Please leave your comment after the tone.  Thank you.</text>

<recordaudio maxtime=”3m” value=”mailto:blueboxpodcast@gmail.com?subject=

Voicemail message – listener comment&fromname=

Voxeo Messaging&fromaddress=

dyork@lodestar2.com&body=

Voicemail message&filename=comments.wav”/>

</block>

</callxml>

It uses Voxeo’s own CallXML language which was developed before VoiceXML and CCXML (Call Control XML) were standardized. Why did I use CallXML versus VoiceXML and CCXML? Primarily because I wanted to learn CallXML – and also, frankly, because it seemed to have the easiest commands to do what I was trying to do. It basically says a piece of text and then records up to 3 minutes of audio and emails it to our standard comment line. Ta da… same thing as I was doing with K7.net, but without the annoying termination after 30 days of non-use.

Anyway, that’s the new number and the story behind it. Hopefully I won’t be changing it again anytime soon!

Technorati Tags: blue box, bluebox, k7.net, voxeo

We’ve pretty much ignored our Frappr map for probably most of the last year after Frappr went from AJAX-based Google maps to Flash-based Yahoo!Maps that took forever to load (and didn’t show the world outside of North America). Today I randomly happened to look at it and found that Frappr’s back to using Google Maps and that our map had grown to over 315 members! Very cool to see! If you haven’t joined the map but are open to doing so, you can go to the map or click on the embedded map here:

NOTE: One of our listeners commented in the Blue Box Skype group chat that you do need to be careful about how you are signing into Frappr as it sometimes will add you with your email address versus your Frappr ID.

Technorati Tags: bluebox, frappr, blue box

Unfortunately, the comment line for the podcast has had to be changed. The new number is:

+1-206-350-7280

We use a free service from K7.net and unfortunately if no one calls the service for 30 days, they terminate your user account. You have no way to get back the phone number that you previously had (which, okay, it’s a free service, so I can’t complain!) and you have to register a new one. I keep using it primarily because it’s simple… people call and leave a voicemail – and a WAV file shows up in our inbox. Simple. Easy.

But it does have this 30-day rule. Given that we’ve had a stretch between shows, there haven’t been people calling in. Usually I call it once a month just to make sure that we keep the number… but I’ve been a bit distracted lately and forgot to do so. So we lost the number, which is too bad because the old one spelled out “blue” with the last 4 digits.

Somewhere in here I’m going to set up a local Asterisk server with an inbound phone number and at that point I’ll move the comment line over to it and stop using K7.net. However, until that time, we’ve just got to make sure that someone leaves an audio comment at least once a month!

(Disappointing that this happened just as I announced the call-in contest for the book for our anniversary show…)

Blue Box listeners – I’m on vacation this coming week and Jonathan has been travelling, so we’re taking a brief break. We’ll be back the week of June 25th with a regular show. We’ve also got some great Special Editions in the queue:

• Martin Davies has put together a great interview show about Session Border Controllers (SBCs). I think you’ll definitely enjoy this one!
• New contributor Frank Leonhardt has an interview with some of the folks involved with Facetime about their new firewall that includes Skype management.
• Martyn Davies also received permission to run the audio of the panel on VoIP security that he moderated at VON Europe last week in Stockholm.

I think you should enjoy them all and I’m looking forward to making them available once I’m back from vacation.

Talk to you soon…