Category: Office Tech

Every one of us has a goal of using words correctly.  Here is an example of a word being used incorrectly.  I encountered this sign in the Denver airport while waiting in line at a TSA checkpoint.  The sign exhorts passengers to move ahead to any of several places where a TSA agent waits to check your boarding pass and ID.

The sign incorrectly calls such a place a “podium”.  This is wrong.  The person designing this sign was looking for the word “lectern”.  See for example this article and this article.  

 

 

This blog article makes two main points:

• that of the several ways of doing two-factor authentication, SMS (text messaging) is by far the most insecure, and
• if you have no choice but to use SMS two-factor authentication, there is a way to be really smart about it.

The way to be smart about SMS two-factor authentication is to create your own virtual cell phone from clever and inexpensive voice-over-IP building blocks. Continue reading “Being smart about SMS two-factor authentication”

Alert blog reader Greg McLemore tipped me off to yet another sort of IP/tech aspect of Brexit that I had not thought about — Internet domain names that end in “.EU”.

It turns out that the registry in charge of dot EU Internet domain names had some months ago set a policy that if and when the UK ceases to be part of European Union, this would start a two-month time period at the end of which any domain registrant whose contact address is not in the EU (a code phrase for any registrant whose contact address is in the UK) would lose the domain name.

Presumably most domain name owners in this situation would do whatever is needed to adopt some sort of contact address that is within the (post-Brexit) European Union.

The most recent development, which you can see here, is that these plans regarding dot EU domain names will be put on hold for the time being.

If I were a UK-domiciled registration of a dot EU domain name, I would be watching this very closely.

 

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”

This blog article is nominally an “office tech” article talking about how to encrypt your telephone traffic.  But it’s also a legal ethics article.  I suggest that the attorney’s ethical duty to preserve client confidences calls for the attorney to be continually aware of the confidentiality risks for various types of communications, and for the ways to protect those communications.  Today’s article talks about protecting your SIP telephone trunks, and it talks about how our firm’s favorite VOIP service provider has just now enhanced our options for protecting our SIP trunks. Continue reading “Encrypting your telephone trunks”

The other day I compared the cost of sending an international bank wire using Afex or using Western Union Globalpay (WUGP).  On a ten thousand dollar wire to Switzerland, I saved seven hundred dollars for the client by using Afex instead of WUGP (blog article).  Today I did a couple more bank wires, one to Canada and another to Japan.  This blog article compares the costs. Continue reading “Two more data points on international wire transfer costs”

With the fast pace of technological change, one of the biggest problems has been the “last mile” problem.  High-speed internet has little difficulty reaching a node that might be a mile away from your home or office.  But that pesky “last mile” is the challenge. (For example our Westminster office is far enough from the phone company central office that DSL is not very fast.)

It’s not only Internet connectivity that suffers from the “last mile” problem.  For package delivery, in desperation Fedex devised the misnamed Smartpost, a service in which Fedex hands off your package to the Postal Service for that last mile of delivery.  And UPS devised the equally misnamed Surepost which works the same way.

So I was fascinated to be reminded of a “last mile” solution for internet access that Google proposed a few years ago, called TiSP.  The idea was that you would drop a weighted fiber-optic cable down your sewer line and it would reach an internet node.  Continue reading “Solving the “last mile” problem”