Mumbai Terrorists Relied On Tech

The Terrorists that laid siege to a Jewish Center and several Luxury hotels in India last month navigated across the Arabian Sea to Mumbai from Karachi, Pakistan, using a global positioning system (gps), communicating with corroborators via satellite phone and apparently studied satellite photos from Google Earth in preparation for their attacks. Their Pakistani-based handlers apparently communicated with them using Internet phones that complicate efforts to trace and intercept calls. The handlers reportedly relayed what they were seeing on television, via a voice over Internet Protocol service, to the terrorists providing them with intel and encouragement as the siege played out. Seems as though the level of suffistication is growing within these organizations.

NYTimes.com

Plenty of buzz about Ribbit

The RSS feeds are full of stories touting the release of details of Ribbit this morning. The start-up has developed a telephony switch that can connect Web-based phone calls to a variety of phone networks, including VoIP services like Skype. According to CNet's News.com "developers can access those voice services through Flex-based application programming interfaces (APIs) and with Adobe Systems' Flash browser plug-in." The company has recently scored a round B venture capital financing deal worth a reported $10 million, this on top of a $3 million injection in 2006. The Flash based interface is very interesting as many mobile devices support Flash.

Skype pointing finger at Microsoft and me?

While the folks at Skype do admit to finding a previously unknown bug in their software as the result of last weeks outage, the bulk of the blame seems to be pointed directly at Microsoft and Windows users. In their Skype blog post, What happened on August 16, the company states "On Thursday, 16th August 2007, the Skype peer-to-peer network became unstable and suffered a critical disruption. The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update." Shame on us all for wanting to apply those critical updates!

That thumb drive speaks volumes!

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider Vonage has introduced the V-phone, a bright orange 256 MB thumb drive complete with Vonage Talk Software pre-loaded, a detachable stereo earpiece/microphone, and your own Vonage phone number. The beauty of this little device is that there is no need to install the software on your PC, or restart your machine to use it. Just plug the device into any available USB port, assuming the PC being plugged into has a high speed connection, and start calling! Considering I paid $99 as an upgrade to my Dell PC a couple of years ago for my 64 MB USB drive, the $29.99 (ca) price tag seems reasonable. There is of course a requirement to subscribe to a Vonage service plan, which start at $19.99 (ca). You can compare that to your current phone service and make your own decision whether or not it's worth the expense, and of course there are other VoIP services such as Skype to consider but this little device does have it's merits. If nothing else, there are 250 MB's of free space to store your MP3's on...

Sounds like a great solution for road warriors and students wanting to stay in touch with home, at $20 a month for 500 minutes the return on investment should be decent..."Dad, my marks are good. Can you send money?"