Day: March 7, 2005

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Bring an Aterisk PBX Home!

Kerry Garrison – Building your own PBX
“What would it mean to you to have your own full-featured PBX system at your home or small office? What would it mean to you if you could build an entire PBX system (minus the phones) on hardware you probably have laying around, AND that it can probably also save you money on your phone bill? Sounds too hard to believe doesn’t it, but using old hardware and some open source software, you really can build a commercial quality phone system that would normally cost thousands of dollars.“

Very rah-rah and very true, but this article skirts some of the serious config and setup issues that go with building an Asterisk PBX. Using Asterisk in your house requires a bit more to it than the article states.

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Phishers Using DNS Wildcards to Fake URLs

Netcraft: Phishers Use Wildcard DNS to Build Convincing Bait URLs
“The phishers use a wildcard DNS setting at a third-party redirection service (kickme.to) to construct the URLS. The wildcard allows the display of URLs beginning with “barclays.co.uk,” which is followed by a portion of the URL which is encoded to obscure the actual destination domain.

The redirector at kickme.to/has.it forwards to a Barclays spoof site hosted at Pochta.ru in Moscow. The spoof loads a page from the actual Barclays site, and then launches a data collection form in a pop-up window from the Russian server.“

This is bad and I’m sure we’ll see more of this in the weeks to come. The downside here is that phishers may drive legitimate business from the web.

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Google Desktop Search Exits Beta

InfoWorld: Google updates desktop search tool: March 07, 2005: By : APPLICATIONS : DATA_MANAGEMENT
“Google is set to launch on Monday an updated version of its desktop search tool whose enhancements include the ability to search the full text of Adobe Systems PDF files and the metadata of multimedia files, a Google executive said…

Other improvements in the Google desktop tool, which is free, are support for the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail application and for America Online’s Netscape browser and e-mail application. Previously, the product supported only Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser and Outlook and Outlook Express e-mail applications.“

The addition of Mozilla and Netscape mail and web cache are great. It also picks up metadata from images, music and video and the content of PDFs. You can grab your copy here.