Sick of being hit hard in the pocket just for chatting with your friends or family? Feeling the pinch after spending a few too many hours chatting on your mobile? Then one of these internet phones are for you.

Most of these internet phones allow you to make calls from your computer to other computers, landlines and mobiles anywhere in the world. However, we must make it clear that by ‘free’ we mean that these are free to download and any calls to landlines or mobiles are not free, whereas calls to other computers are free.

Have a look, download, try them out and find the perfect internet phone for you.

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The annual gathering of the security experts at the Caesar’s place organized a presentation where it was revealed by Sipera about the potential threats of VoIP. During the annual Black Hat conference at Las Vegas, Sipera showed a technique that permitted to take control of a weakness of the PC enabled VoIP as well as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). SIP is known as an application-layer control protocol that is applied to create, cease or modify sessions in PBXs, VoIP and other similar technologies.

It was confirmed by the company with the assistance of their own VIPER lab research unit, which took command of a PC enabled with a soft phonetaking advantage VoIP application. These have been accomplished by the injection of buffer overflow along with an executable inside it while making a SIP-initiated call. All these had been revealed by the chief marketing officer of SIP, Eric Winsborrow.

According to Winsborrow, the technique that has been discussed is capable of taking the profits and advantages from the flaws of VoIP and SIP.

From: scmagazine

Recently, VoIP technology has achieved acceptance throughout the nation and it has turned out to be one of the most important means of communication. With the increase in its popularity and usage, the potential risks of hacking are also becoming one of the prime concerns.

When VoIP initially started off, the main concerns were related to the consistency, functionality and the expenses. But the VoIP technology has lived up to all these aspects and are now almost on the verge of overwhelming the traditional telephone. This has made it one of the most inviting things to the hackers and has therefore raised major security issues.

VoIP security can be breached in a number of ways. The commonest of them are the identity and service theft. VoIP is also made vulnerable by the fact that encryption has not been made widespread in SIP and this opens the doors to the hackers to steal user credentials. Certain malware and viruses can break into VoIP systems just the same way they break into web-based applications. These viruses can attact VoIP in numerous ways: while some clog the networks and consume the bandwidth making the users lose connectivity, the others are responsible for spamming and jamming the voicemail. The hackers may even be capable of tampering with phone calls.

From: tmcnet

VoIP solutions and infrastructure provider VoIP Logic has introduced the new Cortex 2.0, which is an enhanced and convenient internet-based management platform. The middleware has been specially built to reduce the intricacy of layering for the service providers using VoIP technology in VoIP Logic’s service offerings. Not only the Cortex 2.0 enables the service providers to control and tailor its services, it also allows its end clients to administer things by themselves.

 The Cortex 2.0 features some major enhancements that include modifiable enterprise, provisioning integration with Sylantro 4.1 as well as web-portals for end users and module-based login identification that enables the easy managing of access privileges and the layers.

 The other features that add to the bundle are its full voice mail support and the auto-attendant management integration with the Iperia ActiveEdge 3.6 and the MSX reporting integration from NexTone, and a lot more. The Cortex 2.0 can be used either alone or together with outsourced VoIP infrastructure and it significantly reduces the complexity in the VoIP technology for the service providers and helps them get the most out of VoIP.

From: tmcnet

Consumers embracing VoIP services is reported to be growing at an aggressive rate by the Yankee Group on July 30. Ever since 2006, the popularity for VoIP services have been mounting at a rate of 125% and has so far reached to an outstanding number of 9 million subscribers. The cable MSOs and the broadband VoIP providers play the important role in the maintenance of the growing extensive consumer VoIP market.

The very latest Yankee Group’s US Consumer VoIP Subscriber Forecast of 2007 reveals that that the service had successfully achieved the acceptance of 9% of the US households, which have increased by 4% than the previous year. VoIP services are attaining popularity due to not only being equivalent to residential phones but also for other facilities that come with it, such as web-based advertisements, website assistance and other click-to-call solutions.

Furthermore, the demand for cheap calling connectivity all over the world by the customers has led to the requirement for mobile VoIP. It is expected that the VoIP dual-mode mobile phone subscription will increase from 2006 record of 913,000 to 22 million by the year of 2011.

From: lightreading