Nokia has a serious problem with software piracy, but at least they are trying to solve it. Some days ago the company announced SEEK, a new search function for Nokia's file sharing platform MOSH which had been launched in August. MOSH exists as a small website for mobile phones and in a bigger version for computers. Every subscribed user can upload files and downloads even work without subscription.

Although new users have to give their personal mobile phone numbers to subscribe, MOSH is full of pirated software. For instance the program VirtualRadio for Nokia s60 3rd edition costs US $20.50 when you buy it from the company's website. At MOSH you just have to look up its name in the internal search engine. Within seconds you find the program and then you can send a free SMS on Nokia's cost with a direct download link to your cell phone. After the installation the software works without any restriction, although the MOSH user paid nothing.

Pirated software now much easier to find?

This search for pirated software, and of course also for legal contents, could now become much easier: SEEK allows MOSH users to make requests for content they crave and the community can then respond with suggestions or custom created content. "SEEK allows the rapidly growing, and global, MOSH community to connect with one another and to obtain content not yet available", says the press release. Instead of "content not yet available" they could also have written "in others places only available for cash".

Yet five weeks ago Jan Rezab, CEO of Redboss (one of the top distributors and developers of mobile games in the Czech Republic), told in his blog told that "the only problem is, that people are sharing free, illegal mobile games on the site. Games from EA, THQ, Fishlabs, and many companies are available on MOSH". I tried to verify that and found for instance the VirtualRadio software and many games. Of course Nokia doesn't encourage this kind of use. Instead they imagine that users share self created contents like a personal "video of a specific dive in the Maldives".

"MOSH has a strong focus on responding to the needs of its community of users and feedback from the community is the motivation for SEEK", says Lee Epting, Vice President, Forum Nokia. "We have always focused on MOSH being a service created for, and shaped by, users. Seeing users request content from one another, as well as the desire for community discussion, forms the foundation of SEEK." His words sound a little bit sarcastic to me, taking into account that many users take MOSH as a free one stop shop for pirated software.

Officially launching on December 14, an exclusive demo of SEEK could be seen at CTIA Wireless in San Francisco October 23rd through October 25th. MOSH, short for mobilize and share, has seen more than 6 million downloads since its beta launch on 9th August. Hopefully these weren't all pirated software downloads.

Hunt for piracy with fingerprints

After I wrote a short article about SEEK and the illegal content on MOSH for Areamobile, I soon got a phone call from Finland. On the phone was James Waterworth, Communications Manager Technology at Nokia. He said that the piracy problem is high on MOSH's agenda and should be solved soon.

For copyright protected music and movies they already have an automatic solution: MOSH checks the digital fingerprint of the file and prevents the upload if it's copyright protected. For that Nokia could use existing filter software that already had been used in similar ways at Youtube or Flickr. "Try to upload a song by Madonna!", Waterworth told me. But I didn't do so because I don't want to get in trouble. That's also the reason why I don't post any direct link to illegal MOSH contents in this blog post. Look for yourself, dear reader! Yet I wonder why still I can find Madonna's song "Hung up" at MOSH.

Much more difficult is it for Nokia to filter illegal software. There was no existing solution for cell phone programs, so Nokia now has to develop their own. In some weeks, Waterworth says, pirated software will be detected automatically at MOSH. Nokia will check against a blacklist from software companies which contains every piece of software they don't want to see for a free download at MOSH.

Until then Nokia asks users to report copyright infringements and illegal contents to the moderators who monitor MOSH day and night. They will delete them by hand. The responsible for the illegal upload will be warned and if he does it again his account will be canceled.

Labels: MOSH, Nokia, P2P, Piracy, Software, Web_2.0

                                      

The blogosphere has criticized Ooma for various reasons, while traditional media have praised it to the skies for Ooma's unlimited free calls to the US, probably not knowing that this is part of most VoIP offers today. Now Ooma's co-founder Dennis Peng took the time for some explaining words comments section of GigaOM:

There are three pillars to our core value proposition that are unique to ooma:
* unlimited calling to any number in the US - with no monthly fees
* the Instant Second Line - the easiest second line you’ll ever use
* the Broadband Answering Machine - the best voicemail experience ever

His insightful comment is quite interesting to read. Especially for sentences like: "Both the Instant Second Line and Broadband Answering Machine are unprecedented features. To do them requires a unique combination of assets (processors, lights, buttons, speakers, inter-device networking, etc.) and architecture (star vs bus) that no ATA or other embedded device has ever had". Or: "What they will see, however, is a continual set of new services and the trained-eye will realize that we’ve designed this platform so that new services don’t all need to be “in-the-cloud”, but rather a unique blend of client/server intelligence and interactions".

This makes me hungry for more details, because the public still doesn't know how Ooma manages its Peer-to-Peer network, and whether it can survive if the company breaks down. Vinay has some interesting thoughts under the overpromising title "Ooma VOIP to offer Worldwide Free Calls?":

Some people reportedly said, Ooma won't work if they got closed down without understanding how they exactly work? No one really knows whether they use a Hydrid P2P or pure P2P. If they use hybrid P2P, then they have a central server that keeps information on peers and responds to requests for that information. I guess this could be required since regulation might require companies to know about their customers and some quality/security issues related to it. If they use pure P2P, they could have serious legal issues but ooma will continue to run irrespective of the company, coz the peers are responsible for data transfer and there is no central server.

Unfortunately Vinay's text doesn't mention how to use an Ooma device for worldwide free calls, although the title promised. Technically this should be possible, since there are many countries with free local calls or cheap nationwide phone flat rates, such as Germany. Jeff Pulver tries to build a worldwide free communication network around this with his fwdOUT service for Asterisk, yet for more than two years.

As I see it most ATAs run Linux and have been hacked for other purposes than the intended.

So will be Ooma.

Labels: Asterisk, ATA, free phone calls, FWD, Linux, Ooma, P2P, VoIP

                                      

Now finally it's out what Ooma is:

With one fell swoop, it hopes to let people share their phone lines with each other in order to disrupt the business of major telecommunications companies.

Here’s how it works: You install an Ooma “hub” device, costing a $399 one-time fee, in your home that routes phone calls through your computer or your land-line. Ooma’s device also sends and receives calls for other people in your geographic area (local land lines that Ooma takes advantage of).

A P2P calling application? That's pretty dangerous and has failed before! I think it will not work, especially in the USA where people are so afraid of terrorists. Would you borrow your phone to Al Qaeda for their next announcement? No? But you might be doing it with Ooma, without even notice.

Out of the same reason Jeff Pulver's "fwdOUT™ Phone Sharing Network" (former Bellster) never made it big: People cannot control who is talking under their number. When someone uses Ooma or fwdOUT, his call will appear on someone else's phone bill or call record. This poor person would then have to prove that it was an unknown criminal who made the latest phone call. Quite difficult.

Jeff Pulvers fwdOUT idea sounds quite similar:

The fwdOUT™ Network is a system that matches callers with other users that can complete the call for them at no charge. The only catch is that to make some calls, you have to let others use your phone. fwdOUT™is free and not to be used for commercial purposes.

For Instance, Erik lives in New York City, and he gets free local phone service, his family is in Holland. Joe is an expatriate from New York living in Holland that calls New York on a regular basis. Using the Free World Dialup Phone Sharing Service, Erik shares his number. Joe also shares his number. When Joe calls New York, he uses Erik’s line and Erik uses Joe’s Line. The sharing is not done on a one-on-one basis, members share with the entire community and accumulate credits when their line is used. These credits can be used to place calls through other member’s phones. Free World Dialup maintains the tallies so that no line is used more than the owner has permitted.

Only that fwdOUT doesn't connect slick Ooma boxes over the internet but private Asterisk PBXes worldwide. It doesn't work too good because there are to few people providing their phone lines and the project has to face legal problems. Some Russians use it, but that's not enough. Boingboing wrote already two years ago about Bellster/fwdOUT:

The Bellster challenge for 2005 is to find out whether or not there are still people in the world who would let total strangers place non-commercial phone calls for free in exchange for the ability to do the same thing themselves. At the moment we have a handful of active nodes around the world, and as the word of Bellster spreads, my hope is that our network will be able to deliver calls to the PSTN all around the world.

Now Ooma wants to do the same. Good luck! As far as I know Jeff Pulver's project did not fail from technical difficulties, but from lack of acceptance. Jeff downsized his support when he realized what a difficult issue it is. Here you can read the fwdOUT risks, collected by voip-info.org. Many of them apply to Ooma as well:

Possible Risks:

• Potentially a criminal offence in some countries to provide this service, and you could face jail time, while there you would end up meeting a big guy named bubba who wants to be really good friends.


• Your phone line could be used for credit card fraud or to report bomb threats or death threats, and you will have a lot of explaining to do when the police come and confiscate your equipment and take you down to the station for a little chat. Unlike carriers who are explictly exempt from being responsible for facilitating these kinds of things occuring, home users aren't and you could end up being the one facing court over it. Even if you get off, there will be no doubt a great inconvience for some from having their machines confiscated for any arbitary length of time. Although if you decided to give smart answers to the police you could end up being the next rodney king.


• Contractually, the phone company could cut you off, or could introduce clauses in your contract to cut you off in future if they feel you are participating in this kind of service. Phone companies can and do monitor call patterns in different countries and people have reportedly been cut off when their call patterns changed legimately, they were still required to sign documents that it was their calls, the calls were valid and even had to pay a reconnection fee.


• Security, any route your call takes could easily be monitored, recorded or altered, all without your knowledge or consent, even if this is against bellsters terms and conditions you may not know it is happening until it's too late.


• You could end up with large phone bills, it's one thing to setup asterisk for home use for your own toll by pass but securing asterisk to prevent unwanted calls is a whole other thing and it's your phone bill on the line if someone works out a way round your filtering. Some 1800 numbers in the US offer to bill your phone line like a 1900 number, so this could also increase your phone bill. Some people apparently are listing themselves as +1 area code, what they don't realise is that there is 20+ countries other then just the US listed under +1 which could also give them a nasty surprise if the bellster route filtering is breached. These calls are not blocked by the fwdOUT network (but instructions for blocking them are available). There are other locations that aren't being listed that could cause similar damage to your phone bill/wallet.

Minor points:

• Only likely to benefit those in cheap call areas, in which case you can use VoIP providers which in general have MUCH better call quality and are bound by privacy regulations regarding your privacy.


• Call quality, you are relying on the fact that someone else won't suddenly flood their home line with a massive download causing your phone call to be lagged or jittered severely.


• You could end up receiving calls from people in foreign languages if you don't setup asterisk properly to block out bound caller ID (also you can't always block Caller ID apparently)


• Bellster has the potential to make it easier for telemarketers to push their sales pitches by leveraging the bellster network.
  
• Time to establish a phone call could dramatically increase if you hit a bunch of hosts that only allow calls out of hours, so while the network hunts and trys different routes you either hear local ring back or dead air depending on your local configuration of asterisk, which could potentially miss inform people about the true state of the call.


• non-geek house hold members, is it likely that most people will want to queue to use their own phone line? try explaining it to non-geeks and see how they react to it.


• high barrier to entry, as you not only need a linux box running asterisk but also hardware that's capable of interfacing with the PSTN network.

Labels: FWD, Ooma, P2P, VoIP

                                      

People are still very enthusiastic about Joost, the new P2P television platform of the Skype founders. There is very much of a hype and every new feature is being commented in the news. But maybe that's only because there are so few beta testers. To me it seems that most of the people are hailing Joost but few have really tried it.

So let me tell you a secret: Joost is boring to me.

I am one of the few beta testers. Yesterday I tried Joost again, switched through the channels and nearly nothing has changed since I tried it weeks ago. The channels are presenting only clips that already would have bored me on MTV: fun sports, Paris Hilton, mainstream music and the like.

That's not what I expected from a new form of television, which has the capability to present unlimited tv content so that there also should be something for me. I am quite amazed how smoothly Joost works on a lame DSL internet connection. So the technology behind it must be great. But the content must still be a placeholder. At least I hope so and I imagine why it is like this: They had former MTV people in their team when Joost was still in stealth mode and it's name was the Venice Project.

Nevertheless my friends are very keen on Joost and would like to try it themselves. So they ask me for invites. But sorry, I can't. They just don't let me invite you:

Invitations

We're gradually expanding our network, and we'd like you to invite new people to come and join in.

Every once in a while you will receive tokens, enabling you to send invitations to friends, family or anyone else who you think will enjoy watching internet TV. Each invitation will cost you one token, regardless of whether your invitation has been accepted or refused.

Number of invitations you can send: 0

It seems that I am not the only one who can't invite, since others are also complaining in Joost's beta tester forum. No tokens, no invites.

Labels: Joost, Media, P2P, Software