Reading the news yesterday morning, I came across another reason to get me to move to Canada. (not that I would ACTUALLY move, but just another reason to do so). From January 1st, Skype look set to announce their new $29.95 subscription plan that will replaced Skypeout credits. Where previously you bought your credits, made your calls, credit runs out, you buy more etc., now, you just have to pay $29.95.

A YEAR.

For unlimited calls to mobiles and landlines.

The catch? Your call has to originate and terminate in either the US or Canada (or a combination of both).

So for Christmas this year I’m asking that they include Ireland into their list of countries for 2007. Ah go on…

The Guardian (UK) reports this morning that the Police and various intelligence agencies are still pressing hard to be allowed snoop on VOIP calls. The fact that it is hard to trace VOIP calls “poses significant threats to our democratic society” – seemingly.

Its gas. The same thing happened with mobile phones when Eircell and Esat got big years ago. That was the big fear, that Ireland’s criminal underworld were now escaping the land lines and using mobile phones and text messages to conduct their daily business.

Without these records, VoIP services will become the communication method of choice for criminals and terrorists, secure in the knowledge that their activities are untraceable by law enforcement agencies. I

There’s no real easy way for people to intercept VOIP calls since they’re not physically passing through an exchange (until you start to go offline) and this is the big worry. But requesting that agencies be allowed monitor VOIP calls and traffic? Sure why don’t we just all stick tagging devices on our laptops or just invite your local law enforcement into a conference call the next time you’re trying to organise a drug run or a weapons drop or something.

It’s another area where the technology has outstripped the legislation, the traceability and the powers that we have … You could buy a smart phone or PDA that’s wirelessly enabled that comes pre-loaded with £10 of wireless credit on it, download a program like Skype and then start making calls anonymously, and that’s got to be attractive to a criminal.

I picked myself up a HP 6515w phone earlier this year, I used a pre-paid sim card (refuse a bill for personal use) and I just happen to have a wireless network card in the phone, and a copy of Skype! That should mean I’m all set to enter the criminal underworld – and little did I know it!

With all this talk of policing the net, net neutrality, internet regulatation etc. is there no room left for privacy at all? Or is it that fact that the internet can still provide an element of privacy that scares governments and intelligence agencies? Big Brother might be watching, but he can’t see everything just yet – and I would hope it stays that way too.

The article in itself, is published on today’s Guardian by Peter Warren and while heavily UK based, makes for some great morning reading.

Whats this now? Before you go getting excited, it’s not gonna happen in Ireland – at least not in the near future anyway.

Skype have announced that they are to provide free calls to traditional landlines and mobile phones throught the US and Canada. I had made a post a few months ago stating that if it ever happened in Ireland I would happily rip out the home phone, now it looks like our American / Canadian counterparts are going to get to experience it first hand.

In a move thats likely to shake up the telecoms industry in the US, at least temporarily, Skype users will be able to make free calls via the SkypeOut service until the end of 2006, a move intended to increase Skype penetration in both regions. Could you imagine though, the amount of money lost to the main telco providers if EVERYONE jumped on board until the end of the year? Some craic…

Take a piece of software, install it on your router, and make free phone calls wherever you go.

Thats my taking on FON, a company on which Skype has recently laid down a nice chunk of cash in the hope of spreading the VOIP gospel. The core of the idea is that FON intends to become a global wifi hotspot, effectively allowing you to make VOIP calls wherever you go, increasing wifi availability.

The idea is to install the FON software on your WiFi router, place your antenna next to the window and then share your bandwidth with the rest of the world. Suddenly, you’re a FONero! This status gives you the right to use the bandwidth of any of your FON comrades.

Of course, you’ll need a FON compatible router as well… go figure. Still, if one was to lurk around the streets of Kilkenny – or any other county for that matter – in the car, driving through the new housing estates looking for houses with an unencrypted wireless broadband connection, is this not the same thing? Takes the fun out of war driving…. (not that I’ve ever participated).

Release from Skype on the same…

I had posted recently about the first wedding via a VOIP ceremony in Indonesia recently, and now comes the first suicide, certainly bringing up the darker side of VOIP. Apparently, a user gamer at the weekend took his own life while playing Metal Gear Solid online with his friends, chatting via VOIP, and broadcasting the whole thing on his webcam.

Mitchell “Mitch” Lee Stuekerjuergen, aka “Kuja105″, reportedly swallowed antifreeze and pills “after complaining about family problems and a lack of money”, forum administrator Boyan Georgiev is said to have told Bulgaria’s BGNES news agency on Wednesday. Stuekerjuergen subesquently died on 4 January in hospital in Illinois.

A certain amount of controversy surrounds the whole sorry affair, with some claiming that other forum members “thought the man was joking, even though he rambled for six hours about the effects of the substances and disappeared from view several times”, as AFP puts it. The webcam part of the story is also disputed.

Via The Register

Following on the heels of, well, a lot of other places, Tesco are now launching a VOIP service for their customers, giving them internet phone access along with a dedicated phone number which they can use regardless of where in the country they are or move to. What was once a niche market is quickly on the way to becoming overwhelmed with new competitors as the drive to increase broadband usage. Of course we know that it’ll never happen in Ireland as half the country still need to discover broadband! But its a start anyway. The story was picked up in the UK so its unknown as to whether Tesco Ireland will launch the same service here or simply do a test run in England.

I was reading a post yesterday, the link escapes me, stating that there’s approximately 450K households in the Netherlands that are VOIP active, roughly accounting for 6% of the population.

Has anyone any idea of a place to get accurate statistics on VOIP usage in Ireland?

I reckon that I’ll be a homeowner within the next year to 18 months or so thanks to the fact that my parents are leaving the family home to move to Sligo, what with both my parents establishing new businesses up the country. So I got to thinking… whats the first thing I’d change about the house?

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Boy meets girl. But he doesn’t actually meet her.
Boy exhanges photos with girl.
Boy calls girl on Skype.
Boy spends $21 on a phone call.
Boy and girl married by the end of the call.

Or so it goes, something a little like that anyway according to one of my favourite haunts over the past 2 years. The boy and girl of course were Indonesians in their 50s and exchanged wedding vows this week without ever meeting by using the Internet to make up for the oceans that separate them. Wiriadi Sutrisno works as a physiotherapist in California, and Rita Sri Mutiara Dewi is from the Indonesian city of Bandung. They met through the Internet. Sutrisno proposed that way, and they finally exchanged wedding vows in a ceremony using voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. A Muslim religious official supervised their exchange of vows, the Jakarta Post reported Friday. “We’ve exchanged photos, chat almost daily and often call each other, but we’ve never met,” Dewi was quoted as saying.

Married eh? The internet just never ceases to amaze….