The move against WhatsApp comes as Brazilian phone companies have urged the government to restrict the use of free voice-over-internet services offered through WhatsApp.
The phone companies argue that the rise of WhatsApp has damaged their businesses.
Source: Brazil court orders WhatsApp messaging to be suspended – BBC News
A single sentence buried in a dense “privacy policy” for Samsung’s Internet-connected SmartTV advises users that its nifty voice command feature might capture more than just your request to play the latest episode of Downton Abbey.
“Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party,” the policy reads.
via Your Samsung SmartTV Is Spying on You, Basically – The Daily Beast.
Skype Translator results from decades of work by the industry, years of work by our researchers, and now is being developed jointly by the Skype and Microsoft Translator teams. The demo showed near real-time audio translation from English to German and vice versa, combining Skype voice and IM technologies with Microsoft Translator, and neural network-based speech recognition.
The Federal Communications Commission unanimously voted in favor of trials, in which telecommunications companies would test switching telephone services from existing circuit-switch technology to an alternative Internet protocol-based one to see how the change may affect consumers.
via U.S. seeks trials to test transition to digital phone networks | Reuters.
Opus 1.1 includes:
- new analysis code and tuning that significantly improves encoding quality, especially for variable-bitrate (VBR),
- automatic detection of speech or music to decide which encoding mode to use,
- surround with good quality at 128 kbps for 5.1 and usable down to 48 kbps, and
- speed improvements on all architectures, especially ARM, where decoding uses around 40% less CPU and encoding uses around 30% less CPU.
These improvements are explained in more details in Monty’s demo (updated from the 1.1 beta demo).
- Source code: opus-1.1.tar.gz
via Opus Codec.
From the Xiph.org developers
Opus is a codec designed for interactive usages, such as VoIP, telepresence, and remote jamming, that require very low latency. In this test Opus is running with 22.5ms of total latency but the codec can go as low as 5ms. Making a codec for low latency requires serious tradeoffs which reduce efficiency, so it might seem a bit strange to test it against a collection of state-of-the-art codecs which are completely unsuitable for these low-latency applications.
But in joining the OTT VoIP crowd, mobile operators are quickly discovering that being popular doesn’t make mobile VoIP profitable — far from it. Infonetics’ estimation of the revenue per mobile VoIP subscriber is a mere US$7.13 annually.
For the OTT VoIP crowd, that reality means looking for other ways to make money — possibly through ad insertions or by providing the voice segment of a mashup that pulls in other third-party apps for which people will pay, such as presence or gaming, or by charging extra for video-conference or multi-party video.
Encrypted calls for Android
RedPhone provides end-to-end encryption for your calls, securing your conversations so that nobody can listen in.
With the help of independent privacy and security researcher Ashkan Soltani, Ars used Skype to send four Web links that were created solely for purposes of this article. Two of them were never clicked on, but the other two—one beginning in HTTP link and the other HTTPS—were accessed by a machine at 65.52.100.214, an IP address belonging to Microsoft.
via Think your Skype messages get end-to-end encryption? Think again | Ars Technica.
How does it work? A Verizon technician installs a small box with an antenna in your home. It plugs into an electrical socket and a telephone jack, which powers all the telephone jacks in the house. The device also accepts AA batteries or has a rechargeable battery pack if there is a power outage. Three AA batteries provide 36 hours of standby time.
VoIP-to-PSTN termination providers and SIP vendors will be watching their inboxes for a lawyer’s letter from BT, which has kicked off a taxing licensing program levying a fee on the industry, based on a list of 99 patents.
via BT unleashes SIP licensing troll army • The Register.
A useful comment from slashdot.
The IETF MMUSIC (Multiparty Multimedia Session Control) Working Group started working on Session Protocols [ietf.org] in 1993.
Initial Internet drafts for a Session Invitation Protocol and a Simple Conference Invitation Protocol were prepared in 1996, and merged to a single first draft of SIP by December 1996 (slide 10 [columbia.edu]), with further drafts (2-12) leading up to the publication of RFC 2543 in March of 1999 (slides 11-13, ibid.).
I don’t see anything that says BT had a hand in anything to do with SIP up to 1996. More than half the patents BT claims (Exhibit C [btplc.com]) were filed after RFC 2543 was published.
I hope this information is a useful starting point for some SIP vendor.