Month: March 2019

In several recent posts I blogged about Afex.com, a provider of international wire transfer services.  By now we have migrated nearly all of our international wire transfer activity away from previous vendors and over to Afex.  The user documentation for Afex is, said charitably, extremely limited.  The documentation seems to assume that the reader is already an extremely experienced user of legacy wire transfer services, such that the reader only needs to learn a few things about Afex to be able to do all of the things that the reader already knew how to do with a legacy wire transfer service.  What’s more, the documentation does almost nothing to explain how you would actually use the system if you are an intellectual property firm.

If you already have service set up with some wire transfer service provider, it would be very tempting to stick with what you know and are familiar with.  But as I mentioned here and here, many of the legacy service providers really charge quite a lot, both in bank fees and in currency exchange rate fees, compared with what Afex charges.  So it might be smart to start using Afex.  The problem being that the documentation is so poor.

With this in mind, I have written a user guide that draws upon our experience using Afex.com to pay foreign IP firms and foreign IP offices (e.g. WIPO, KIPO) and using Afex.com as a way to receive bank wires from foreign IP firms.  You can see it here.  Please post comments and suggestions below.

I recently blogged (here) that one of the best VOIP service providers, VOIP.MS, recently added a beta-test feature permitting high quality encryption in the connection between your telephone equipment and the VOIP.MS equipment.  The connection is called a “SIP trunk”, which has two ends — one end is at VOIP.MS’s server and the other end is at your own equipment, which might be a PBX, a desktop telephone, an analog telephone adapter, or a VOIP app that runs on your smart phone.

It is super easy to turn on the encryption at the server end — it is a matter of one mouse click at the web page of VOIP.MS.

Turning on the encryption at your own equipment might be a bit more difficult.  The main point of today’s post is that I have written a set of knowledge base articles explaining how to do this with each of three VOIP devices, namely:

• Grandstream UCM PBX
• Cisco SPA 122 analog telephone adapter
• Grandstream HT503 analog telephone adapter

At the time of the Cold War, if you wanted to have an extremely secure communication over an insecure communications channel, the only choice was to have somehow arranged an earlier secure communication over a secure channel.  The iconic image of a diplomatic courier handcuffed to a briefcase was no mere icon.  For many years at the height of the Cold War, the State Department distributed special phonograph disks to US embassies around the world containing the audio equivalent of the “one-time pads” that were used for secure encryption of character-based messages.  The briefcase containing the phonograph disk counted as the “earlier secure communication over a secure channel” that permitted a later secure communication over an insecure channel such as an international telephone call or a radio communication.  You can read about this program, called SIGSALY, in this Wikipedia article.  By now in 2019 you can have telephone calls that are nearly as secure as the SIGSALY communications, and there is no need for any “earlier secure communication over a secure channel”. And the equipment that you will use is inexpensive when compared with the prodigiously expensive SIGSALY equipment. Continue reading “Securing your telephone calls”