MetaFilter posts tagged with voip

The Year of Net Neutrality

spiderwire — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:29:52 -0800

We're only two weeks into the year, but net neutrality issues hit the ground running. The FCC already has three different inquiries open. (also) (previously) The 700 Mhz auction threatens to disrupt an already converging telecom industry. AT&T's post-merger commitment to net neutrality ends this year, and they plan to test the filtering waters, despite recently opposing the practice. And today, a leaked memo revealed that Time Warner will test tiered internet services soon. The Internet as we know it, and communications in general, might be headed for some major changes in 2008.

Some Digital Doritos for a lazy Thursday afternoon.

Effigy2000 — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 00:14:36 -0800

IM IN UR MANGER KILLING UR SAVIOR. And for those who finish watching that video thinking "A lawful evil Paladin? WTF?", here's a video response. And, just because it's too good not to share... honor! All three videos [via].

The Globe Tglo

riotgrrl69 — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 15:43:45 -0800

Use the badly named Tglo to call any phone in the USA for free, and to SMS anyone in the world (maybe) for free.

1. Place lots of yellow gnomes in public places. 2. ??? 3. Metafilter post!

goodnewsfortheinsane — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 07:04:28 -0800

"For years people laughed at me. But my dream reoccured so often that I was sure that one day the yellow gnomes would visit our planet with a very special message for us. Now I am not alone anymore." These yellow gnomes have apparently appeared all over NW Europe. Today a fresh batch was discovered in Abcoude, Netherlands (in Dutch). And yes, of course there is a forum. Art or crazy?

This is alpha, baby!

runkelfinker — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 14:54:17 -0800

Slawesome calls itself "e-mail for your voice" - it's a new web-based service which combines elements of audio blogging and webmail. Messages can be private or public - at least one bleeding-edge blogger is already using it to make voice posts. And it's been built using Ruby on Rails - so it's got to be good, right?

An earlier generation of VoIP.

eschatfische — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 08:38:11 -0800

An early VoIP casualty. Think VoIP is a new phenomenon, and talking to people with Skype or Free World Dialup is incredible? Ten years ago, Onlive! put the Onlive! Traveler -- a collaborative VoIP product that's amazing even today -- into beta. With Traveler, a Windows95 (!) PC, a decent graphics card, a SoundBlaster and a dial-up Internet connection, you could not only chat with a friend, but participate in collaborative chats with the avatars of multiple friends in various 3-D rendered worlds. The avatars' lips even moved with your voice (.mpg movie). You could talk worldwide, for free. But even though Onlive! was around well before the boom, they were an unfortunate dot-com casualty, as Traveler never quite took off. Perhaps Traveler was doomed by the limited connectivity available in the mid 90's, or perhaps it was doomed by its occasionally creepy, fantastic 3-D designs -- but due to a number of collaborators, the Traveler still lives on today on a series of servers, and the (free) software still works on modern Windows PCs.

eBay buys Skype

mkultra — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 07:24:40 -0800

The bizarro dot-com deals of the 90's are back, baby! eBay, the company whose business model is to monetize what people otherwise throw out or give away, is buying Skype, who gives away what everyone otherwise pays for.

If I don't do it, someone else will

angry modem — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 21:21:08 -0800

Google Talk Connect with their client, or yours. It runs on the first Jabber network with more than two users!

...but not in the way you might think.

dash_slot- — Tue, 05 Oct 2004 10:09:13 -0800

1968: The Year That Changed The Future. The roots of the VoIP insurrection trace back to four synchronistic events in 1968. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled MCI could compete with AT&T using microwave transport on the Chicago to St. Louis route. The same year, the FCC's Carterfone decision forced AT&T to allow customers to attach non-Western Electric equipment, such as new telephones, and modems, to the telephone network. The Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency issued a contract to Bolt Beranek and Newman for a precursor to the Internet. And in July 1968, Andrew Grove and Gordon Moore founded Intel. Innovation in the communication sector remained the proprietary right of AT&T for most the 20th century, but events in 1968 breached the barriers that kept the telecom and information technology industries apart. For the first two-thirds of the 20th century, AT&T had manned Berlin Wall separating telecommunications and computing, but eventually, these two enormous technology tracks would be unified. Absolutely fascinating - and admittedly long! - article, by Daniel Berninger on VoIP, on Om Malik's blog. Read the whole thing, as they say.

Your call is important to us

digaman — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 08:51:04 -0800

The DOJ wants to tap your IMs, your email, your VOIP calls, and your Web browsing -- and they want you to pay for it. The Justice Department is seeking to expand its ability to monitor online traffic by forcing broadband providers to make their services "wiretap-friendly," and a petition filed with the FCC this week says you will foot the bill. Get ready for CALEA 2.0. "As a means of espionage, writs of assistance and general warrants are but puny instruments of tyranny and oppression when compared with wire tapping," the prescient Justice Brandeis observed in 1928.

P2P Telephony

davehat — Tue, 23 Sep 2003 06:08:38 -0800

Skype, a new P2P Telephony service from the people who created KaZaA. [more inside]

donkeymon — Tue, 08 May 2001 07:03:26 -0800

HR 1542, the so-called Internet Freedom and Broadband Deployment Act, will do exactly the opposite of what its name implies, reducing Internet freedom and broadband deployment by eliminating many regulations designed to force the Bells into being more competitive, and also by outlawing voice over IP.

From the article: "This bill ... does nothing more than strip-mine the remaining competitive safeguards of the current law, green-lighting the Bells to bludgeon any remaining competitors into oblivion."