Packetizer News

The University of Wisconsin-Madison will offer its very popular course Understanding and Troubleshooting Videoconferencing Networks on November 2-3, 2010. The course will be held on the University campus in Madison, WI and will also be available via live videoconferencing.

By attending this course, you will master the H.323 standard and embedded protocols and then extend this understanding to SIP based and proprietary systems. Topics include:

• H.323 standard: components and functions
• Call signal processing and audio/video data flow
• QOS: options, implementation issues
• How ITU H.323 relates to IETF SIP and MGCP/Megaco
• Options for handling firewalls in the network
• Addressing and directory services
• Performance characteristics of various audio and video codecs
• Network security and other advanced features
• High definition videoconferencing options and content display
• Troubleshooting and analysis tools and techniques
• Understanding audio and video compression technology

Your course instructor, Gary Thom, is President of Delta Information Systems, a recognized expert in the field of videoconferencing, and the author of versions 1 & 2 of the H.323 standard.

Reserve your space today!
Call toll-free 1-800-462-0876
Or online at http://epdweb.engr.wisc.edu/courseL800

ITU-T SG16 initiated work on the study of Telepresence systems with the creation of a new experts group (or, "Question") focused on the topic. For more information, you might wish to subscribe to the itu-sg16 mailing list (see http://lists.packetizer.com/) and review the complete text of the new Question.

We have reported several times about our email server being blocked by spam-fighting organizations. While most organizations are quick to respond, some refuse to address the issue and others refuse to even talk to us about the issue. What's most frustrating is that our mail server does not send spam.

We are still blocked by SORBS, who told us without hesitation that, until Amazon pays them money, they're not going to unblock our address. The way they phrased their demands, it sounded like extortion to us. Apparently, they block all Amazon IP addresses and, since our mail server operates in the Amazon EC2 cloud, customers of SORBS are unable to participate on mailing lists we operate on Packetizer, specifically lists.packetizer.com.

More recently, Symantec has become a problem. Sadly, this is an organization that we could generally consider more reputable than others. Unfortunately, the company decided to block our mail server by assigning it a 'bad' reputation. This has affected Ericsson and perhaps other companies that would normally participate in ITU-T SG16 activities.

We tried contacting Symantec and they told us that they will not correct the problem, since we are not their customer. We've tried to explain that their customers are entirely unaware of the fact that they are being blocked, but they did not care. We alerted Ericsson once we became aware of this issue, but we do not have any way of knowing if other companies are blocked due to use of Symantec's Brightmail or other spam blocking services or products offered by Symantec.

If you attempt to join a mailing list on Packetizer and never get a response indicating that you successfully joined and your company uses Symantec products or services, then Symantec may be to blame.

OpenID is a web technology that allows a user have a single user identity and password that may be used to access any number of web sites, thus removing the age-old problem of having to maintain separate login and passwords for all of the various accounts on has on the Internet.

It is now supported by many web sites, including Google, Slashdot, Blogger, Flickr, Yahoo, Orange, MySpace, WordPress, AOL, and Facebook. Some of those organizations are 'identity providers', while some are end-user sites that rely on the identity providers to allow users to gain access to site content.

We produced an OpenID identity server software package for anybody who might be interested in running their own identity server. Perhaps equally important, though, is that we also added support to Packetizer Forums so that one may use OpenID to login, post questions, or reply to questions.

We hope OpenID support proves to be a popular and valuable service to the Packetizer Community.

At the most recent meeting of ITU-T SG16, the H.325 experts decided to initiate a series of electronic meetings in order to help progress the work. For those interested in participating in the creation of this exciting new multimedia system, see the meeting notice posted on the h325-design mailing list.