Author: Corrado Mella

The End of the Landlines

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If there were anything in today’s tech that was more hyped than “the end of landlines”, the hyperbole would reach the next solar system. Every telecom provider has progressively increased the apocalyptic tone of their spiel to make you believe in the imminence and immanence of the switch-off.

Nothing is further from the truth. There is an obligation, enshrined in UK law, that secures the existence of your telephone line for the foreseeable future. What will change is the way the service is delivered: to know what benefits you will receive and to understand how this can help you or your business, keep reading.

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Rural Broadband in Scotland. Let’s do it. Together.

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Exciting times ahead, especially for those of us with that can do attitude that’s the foundation for success. Things are happening fast:

  • the Scottish Government has just announced the birth of a Scottish Investment Bank, with a £200M seed capital available shortly;
  • Local Councils are strapped for cash by an ideological austerity imposed by the same architects of the – still ongoing – financial collapse;
  • The collective demand to be connected with each other by reliable and affordable broadband is piling enormous pressure on telecoms operators, local and national governments.

This is why we have decided to take on this challenge and be the David that defeats the Goliath. But we need your help.

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Wasting time

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I already told you about the silly number of chancers trying to get uninvited access to our customers’ VoIP systems, and how uncanny is to see the same IP addresses being banned swiftly from all the systems we monitor, thanks to our intelligent network and a little help from our honeypots.

Most of these attempts come from IP addresses owned by small hosting companies, where you can rent your virtual machine for a few quid a year and do whatever you fancy with it. These small, often barely cobbled up rent-a-mob junk yards don’t care one dot about what you do with their rusty metal, anything goes. There is no control on what you can send or receive, what you host, whose data you hold, etcetera.

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The sharks are circling

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Not a happy place

In the past few days we had a few customers contacting us to ask what were our contract terms.

My gut feeling is that there’s an offensive from some very determined salesmen doing the rounds and carpet-phoning businesses in this neck of the woods to make a quick buck promising to “save you a bundle on your phone bills”.

Please do not fall for these scammers, they’re recycled salesmen from some pyramid scheme, paid on commission for every customer won, without the faintest idea of what services you have, how they work or if really you are paying too much.

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New Year, New Website

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After much fettling and a long trialling period we have finally decided to take the plunge and go live with the upgrade to our website.

The new engine behind it will enable us to introduce a number of new features, as the ability to log-in to your dedicated User Portal from this same place, or an interactive dashboard with the status of our ever expanding services.

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Computers and Cowboys

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I have spent the whole day looking after some customers’ systems, and not a single one of them was set up properly, not even remotely close.

I don’t mean that there was something wrong with them: EVERYTHING was WRONG on so many levels that I am now sad.

Sad to see that an extremely important, for some of you vital staple of your daily business is trumped by the sheer incompetence of some self-appointed “computer experts”.

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A day at the office

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You might believe that in a business sector so hyper-technological like ours, every day something amazing happens. Well, I’m sorry to shatter your dreams of glory and awe, but most of my day is filled with a basic daily grind, like many other office jobs.

The truth is that I rarely have the time to be social: either write here in this blog, post a few tweets, update our status on Facebook or even just get started with Google+. Until something happens, and I feel the need to let some steam off, or to update you about some fantastic news. I’m sorry, this time is a rant but there are some words of advice attached.

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Enough

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It’s now three months that all of our VoIP systems are logging any hacking attempt, and it’s astonishing to realize that not a day has passed that one of our systems has not been targeted with one or more attempts.

Most of these attacks come from 5cr1p7 K1dd13z trying their pot luck from “rogue” countries (China, North Korea, Russia, etc…) where ISPs are not patrolling what happens on their network, but sometimes we’ve been targeted by largest criminal organizations (ab)using powerful services like Amazon EC2.

Our systems ban instantly (less than 1 second) the IP where the attempt comes from, making any further attempt fruitless, and the data gathered by the attackers in this small amount of time almost meaningless and totally useless.

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