Jay Knight » voip

Gizmo’s Jabber server

Jay K — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 19:41:30 +0000

Gizmoproject now has instant messaging using jabber. You can log in to your gizmo account with the jabber client of your choice, and they have server-to-server enabled, so you can talk to the rest of the jabber world. So, I logged in with psi and had a look arround. Here’s what I found.

First, I logged on. It seems that they do not support SSL connections, hopefully they will soon. Other than that, everything was very normal. I then sent a message to my main JID and received it with that account (although it’s kinda slow). I then popped open service discovery. The first node is conference, and it appears to be a functioning groupchat node. I can create/join a room, but can’t find any that have other members. The best I could tell, the official client doesn’t support it yet, let’s hope that comes soon as well. The next node looks like an irc gateway, but I was unable to really join an irc channel, so not sure if/how that one works. Then there’s pubsub and a user search. The search seems to work, but I could only find myself. I entered my vcard info with psi, so I’m probably one of the only entries there.

I was able to register with a transport on another jabber server, but haven’t tried to see if that works with the official client yet. I’m assuming that it would work fine by entering the full JID of the user through the transport.

So, this is good. I really hope that continue to add features and keep everything open so that their lack of a decent linux client doesn’t keep me from using their service.

Google Talk

jk3us — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 04:18:36 +0000

Google is my hero.

Jabber with Gizmo

Jay K — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 19:29:29 +0000

Reading through the Gizmo Forum, I found a post from one of the admins saying that they are in the process of adding Jabber to the Gizmo client. That’s great news! I’m on the way to becoming a big fan (the next step would be to release the linux client). I doubt I’ll stop using Psi for my jabbering, but it’s great that I’ll be able to chat with Gizmo users directly, sans tranports. Good job gizmo.

Update: Forgot to include the URL to the forum post I cited. Here is is: http://forum.gizmoproject.com/viewtopic.php?t=211

Encrypted Voip

Jay K — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 19:44:32 +0000

Wired news has a story about Phil Zimmermann’s plans to develop a program for encrypting Voip calls. I definitely agree that there is a need for encrypted voip, but this is not so revolutionary. All of Skype’s calls are already encrypted and apparently Gizmo now has the capability built into the software. I am not sure whether there is much consumer voip hardware that supports encrypted SIP, but it can’t be far off. Is there still a need for Zimmerman to write (and sell) such a technology?