On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 13:51 -0400, Matthew Rubenstein wrote: > Some people are discussing whether Skype's "free calls" gets them out > of these requirements: > http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060612/1722232.shtml .
My opinion generally is no, becuase the law doesnt say if you charge for it, only if you provide it. Further calls to the US are not free if you are outside the US (or at least mexico where a friend currently is and based on what appears to be IP verification he is told he has to pay). So that seems to counter the 'quacks like a duck' argument since they are indeed selling calls to the US for some people, and skype/ebay/paypal/everything_else state that its only until dec 31 2006, ie a promotional thing. As such it would be a hard argument indeed to say that becuase they are running a promo they arent really providing phone service. This means that trxtel "the voip provider that pays you" must also provide CALEA support, however trxtel has a harder time since we currently do not have any accounts. No usernames or logins, no way to tell one customer from another. It is something we are reviewing to see if we can still operate the way that we want to and comply. Accounts will be created when the DID beta finishes (should be within a month or so) and we start paying people for inbound DIDs calls as well. Accounts must be enabled for inbound only traffic since we have to know who to route the DID to. We truely have an argument that we are different in that we dont charge our customers, we pay them, but our lawyers tell us that its not worth it even if that were a valid argument, but assure us they dont believe it to be a valid argument. We shall see, I am sure that they will go after the bigger people first for any infractions, however CALEA generally doesnt allow them to inspect your switch to ensure complaince, its only when they get a warrant and you tell them you cant tap because you have no facilities to do that that you get into trouble. Tapping isnt that hard depending on what you want to do, ranch networks makes an asterisk plugin that works with their stuff (basically port replication that sends the RTP stream to two points, the sniffer box and the real destination. On smaller setups you can use the monitor command (however that will cripple busy servers). Some people have set up asterisk boxes where 1 is the 'tap box' and it records any call that gets sent to it, then by adjusting their sip proxies on a per customer basis they can tap everything from that customer without too much trouble. Inbound can be a bit trickier since you may have pris scattered over a few machines and they all need to be able to record without dropping packets all over the floor where they make a mess. -- Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com Bret McDanel Belfast IE +44 28 9099 6461 DE +49 801 777 555 3402 Utrecht NL +31 306 553058 US WA +1 360 207 0479 US NY +1 516 687 5200 FreeWorldDialup: 635378 http://www.trxtel.com the VoIP provider that pays you!
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