Josh Gentry

VoIP has many economical and functional benefits. VoIP also brings with it its own set of vulnerabilities. Companies who are willing to adopt the new technology must be aware of the inherent risks involved in implementing it. This document assumes that the reader has some understanding of the basics of VoIP

Data security and assurance is a hot topic in Corporate America’s IT departments. Companies are being held liable by customers and the government for their protection of private data. Non-compliance with government standards noticeable security breaches can result in costly fines from the Federal Trade Commission. The loss of private customer data can result in the severing of relationships between customers and corporations . Many large corporations in America have had data stolen in the last two years. Seisint, the Lexis-Nexis research company, had a security breach that allows the intruders to gain names, addresses and social security numbers of some 300,000 people. Bank of America reportedly lost magnetic tapes that contained information on around 1.2 million government employees’ credit cards .

VoIP is no different when it comes to data security and theft. In June of 2006, an owner of a VoIP company in Miami was arrested for a theft of service scam that allowed him to gain nearly $1 million. Edwin Pena hacked into a competitor’s VoIP system and routed his customers’ calls through the hacked network. This allowed Pena to collect subscription fees without having to pay for overhead costs . In January of 2003 it was reported that some companies fell victim to the Slammer worm. The worm infected data networks and quickly spread to wreak havoc on VoIP systems.

Spam is a huge problem for consumers and in the corporate environment today. Corporations spend millions of dollars on appliances that prevent spam from flooding the inboxes of their employees. In the telephony world a similar problem is telemarketing. Thousands of call centers worldwide dial consumers and sometimes businesses asking the called party to buy something. This annoyance has yielded many legislation bills to stop these unwanted calls. VoIP unfortunately experiences the marriage of these two annoyances, called spam over Internet telephony (SPIT). SPIT allows spammers to create audio files and send them to millions of voicemail boxes at a time.

While phishing is still a big problem that plagues consumers, a new type of phishing has emerged that uses VoIP technology instead of URLs and the web, called vishing for “voice phishing”. Vishing attacks can take many forms but in the most common case a person receives an e-mail stating that their credit card or financial information has been compromised. The victim is given a fake 800 number to call in order to regain access to their account. When the victim dials the number, an Interactive Voice Response system asks the victim to verify his or her bank account or credit card numbers by pressing the appropriate numbers on the keypad . The phone system on the other end records this information and relays it to the vishing thieves.

Porter, T. (2006). Practical VoIP Security. Rockland, MA: Syngress Publishing.

Kuhn, R. (2006). Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) Security [Power Point Presentation].

Kay, R. (2004). Phishing [Electronic Version]. ComputerWorld. Retrieved November 5, 2006 from http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/security/story/0,10801,89096,00.html.

Posted by Josh Gentry at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Human communication is one of the greatest feats of all mankind that is used each and every day of our existence. The phenomenon of human communication is so common that many do not realize their frequent involvement in it. The ultimate goal of human communication is to ascertain understanding.

Human communication is an extremely vast science that encompasses the theories and works of many scholars. Human communication takes place in almost every facet of life. As a result many people take it for granted, or do not realize how often they do it. Defining human communication can be a daunting task because of its many forms. The definition can never really be completed, but is a process.

Human communications can be defined as the process of passing, receiving, or exchanging information from at least one person to one or more person by means of verbal and non-verbal communication techniques. The information to be communicated comes from the source, which is the sending person. The sending person must then encode the information. The code is just a set of symbols or characters that represent the information. The code can include writing, voice, or the use of signs and symbols. A simple example of this could be two colleagues discussing the weather verbally.

The information to be communicated must use some sort of code. The coding is usually a language that the two communications have in common. Language itself is a type of code. Ferdinand de Saussure believed that all a person knows of the world is determined by language (Littlejohn, 2005, p. 103). There are many different languages throughout the world that are capable of communicating similar yet different concepts.

Once the information is encoded, it must pass through a medium in order to reach the intended destination. The medium can include air waves to receive voice signals, a type of paper to receive written signals, and electronic media can have a multitude of forms. The receiving person can receive the encoded information and decode it in order to find meaning. Meaning is our response to symbols and a metal recognition of what is described or represented (Williams, 1984, p. 6).

In the business world is it important to be effective communicators. Peters relates human communication to the business world by noting that listening must become everyone’s business. The race between competitors will be decided by those who listen and respond most intently (Peters, 1987, p. 177).

Human communication has slowly evolved into what it is today, yet the methods of transmitting it have evolved quite rapidly because of technology. The human voice can now be encoded in electrical impulses, a series of binary numbers, pulses of light, or radio frequencies.

Human communication is a complicated process, whose definition can never be fully completed. The process itself has a multitude of interpretations, yet most follow the basic path of a sender and a receiver trying to gain understanding through verbal and non-verbal communication techniques. Understanding of this vast concept can however be achieved by the use of models and theories.

Littlejohn, S. W. (2005). Theories of Human Communication (8 ed.). Belmont, California: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.

Peters, T. (1987). Thriving on Chaos. New York: Harper and Row.

Williams, F. (1984). The New Communications. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Inc.

Posted by Josh Gentry at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rather than taking the 20,000 foot view of the entire renaissance of Europe, I decided to drill down a little more in depth into the renaissance period of a specific country, Spain. Some of the best writings from Spain came from the renaissance period, such as Jorge Manrique's Coplas a la muerte de su padre

This lyrical work is considered an elegy of Manrique's father. The work is choc full of metaphors and symbolism. Manrique depicts the interaction of mind, body, and spirit. Some of the important themes are life and death, but there are also themes of history. http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/poesia/coplaspo.htm

It was during this historical movement that Spain had conquered Grenada and the Jews were expelled from the country. It was during this time that the Spanish Inquisition took place. Those who were not Christian, or who did not pretend to be Christian were expelled from the country. Since this was a period of "rebirth" for Christians and converts, poets like Garcilaso de la Vega flourished. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garcilaso_de_la_Vega

The renaissance period experienced new movements not only in literature, but also in math, science, religion, and architecture. One of the first examples of this architecture was the Palace of Dukes. http://www.arteguias.com/arquitecturarenacimiento.htm

Posted by Josh Gentry at 12:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wuz up b? OMG, I rofl @ u b/c u had 2 many [_]3 las nite. IMHO, TGIF cuz I need 2 get ZZZZZs. Idk hoas, OMG, I got BSOD. I h8 ppl who r n00bs. TTYL GTG L8R

I don’t even know what I just typed, I just found a bunch of internet slang terms on some website.

As generation X, we are known as the kids who were born with computers. We send e-mails, text messages, or instant messages to everyone. I remember the first time I used instant messenger and chat rooms back in 199? I thought to myself, “Wow, I can talk to people all over the world, and I have no clue who they are. And they have no clue who I am”. That is really impersonal.

The fact of the matter is our generation has been given the stigma of the people who don’t care about communication. When someone tells us to get in contact with someone, we shoot them an e-mail in 3 seconds. You sit down, pound on those keys as fast as you can, don’t check the spelling and hit the send button. Whew, a new record for shortest amount of time spent on communicating with someone. What is the status of the problem you sent in the e-mail? It doesn’t matter, it’s no longer our problem because we sent them an e-mail. We’re still waiting for a response. It is now someone else’s problem because the e-mail is in their box. Who knows if they got it, whether they read it, or if they’ll even respond to it.

But is communication really important to us? I would surely hope so since we are candidates for the Master of Science in Information and Communication Sciences degree. I think its fair to say that the amount of time you put into something tells how much you care about it. If you spend 5 or 10 seconds on an e-mail, you must not care about the person who gets it, or whether they respond. The message probably has no significance either. If what you have to say is important, the last resort of communication should be e-mail. I received 21 pieces of e-mail yesterday. I think I read half of them. Some of it was junk, some of it I didn’t feel like reading, and some of it I eagerly read.

E-mails have little or no means for expressing importance. Just because you clicked the little urgent button doesn’t mean that it’s urgent to me or someone else. E-mail has made an attempt to personify the sender by adding the little “signature” at the end. But most people use that to include their title and e-mail address.

A handwritten note or even a type written letter in the mail can have a huge impact. A simple phone call can do the same. This shows that you took the time to think about what you are communicating. This shows that you actually care. Why would someone spend money on postage and spend time on handwriting a note if it wasn’t important? The way you choose to communicate says a lot about how you value the other person and their time. Don’t send the wrong idea by taking the quickest way out. I know that e-mail is easy, but people are tired of staring at their computer monitors in order to read millions of e-mails each day. Do the right thing. Pick up the phone, or start licking envelopes.

If I had a dollar for every time I heard, “Didn’t you get my e-mail?”…

Posted by Josh Gentry at 01:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Several years ago, Stanfurd University started a distributed computing project called Folding at Home or FAH. FAH is a project designed to gain information about how proteins fold. “Proteins are biology’s workhorses” (Pande 2006). In order for proteins to carry out their biological functions, they have to fold. Sometimes those proteins can misfold, and the result can be a disease like Cystic Fibrosis, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, or Cancer. The scientists discovered that if they can model or simulate the folding process of proteins, they could understand why they misfold and possibly find a cure for some diseases.

The problem with simulating the process of a protein folding is that it takes thousands of computer hours or more to complete one fold. This can be a daunting task even with some of the largest supercomputers in the world. One interesting fact is that there is more computing power in the world in all of the desktops and notebooks of consumers worldwide than there is in all of the supercomputers in the world combined.

The distributed computing project model allows users all over the world with just about any operating system to download the software client and help the effort. Computers running the client will download a tiny work unit and start doing the calculations in the background. Users who complete a work unit will receive points for their participation. Some units have more points than others. The points have no value, but they are a great way to create a spirit of competition to help find a cure for many diseases. Users who fold have the ability join folding teams. Then each user’s folding effort is combined for a total team score

Think about your own desktop or laptop. I have a Pentium 4 2.8GHz. That is 2.8 billion cycles per second. How often do you use all of those cycles? Probably never. When you are at class, at work, or asleep your computer is sitting there idle, waiting for instructions. The beautiful thing about FAH is that the client will only use your unused computing cycles to do calculations.

To learn more about FAH, visit one of the links provided. You can find me folding as Sirknockalot on team Abit #13285

Pande, V. (2000). Folding at Home Distributed Computing. Retrieved October 26, 2006, from http://folding.stanford.edu/

Posted by Josh Gentry at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Most of us love new technologies. They make many of our everyday activities easier or even bring new functionality to the things we already do. But new technologies can also record certain information that couldn’t be recorded before. Sometimes this tracking can be thought of as an invasion of privacy.

Two weeks ago I had the chance to go to a conference at Cisco’s office in Carmel, Indiana and I learned a few things. Cisco makes a device called a Wireless Location Appliance. The 2700 and 2710 models can be integrated to a wireless network and with special software can give a picture image of the location of a wireless client. The device can also track where a wireless client has been for a particular period of time. This information can be very valuable in keeping track of valuable assets, and finding wireless clients in emergency situations. The real-life example the Cisco engineers gave was of an older gentleman on the Cisco campus who was carrying a Cisco wireless phone. The man had a heart attack and collapsed on top of the phone. When the emergency crew arrived they were able to pinpoint his location through that device.

This appliance brings a whole new perspective into wireless local area networks. Another attendee of the conference came up with the idea of putting a wireless network interface card in your car. This would enable you to track it within a particular wireless campus network. This could be very beneficial to many business applications.

But could this technology also be seen as an invasion of privacy? Do you want University Computing Services employees to know where you are when you use the network? Do you want them to know where you’ve been since you connected to the network? In metropolitan area network applications, employers can see where their employees travel during work hours. It is difficult to draw the line between the benefits of easy access to information or invasion of privacy.

Posted by Josh Gentry at 06:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)