protocol

Google announced Wednesday on its official blog that Google search is now available over an IPv6 connection. What?

Right now, much of the world relies on the fourth iteration of the Internet Protocol, also known as IPv4, for its Web connections. The problem is, IPv4 facilitates only about 4 billion IP addresses, not enough for every person in the world to have one.

Google and others estimate that the IPv4 capacity will be "exhausted" sometime in 2011, which means that IPv6--which will enable each individual person on Earth to have nearly 3 billion networks--will potentially take over.

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While GrandCentral may have been stealing headlines lately, there's another suffix-sharing phone call management service called RingCentral that can make small businesses look and function like larger ones with some pretty neat telephonic tomfoolery. The service has been around since early 2004, and today is introducing a slew of VoIP plans called DigitalLine that give users the option to use VoIP instead of, or on top of their existing landlines.

So what can you do with RingCentral? Small business owners will love it, since you can set up a ridiculously extensive set of rules to handle incoming calls, or reroute them on the fly with a virtual phone call manager called SoftPhone. The idea is to take a single or multiline setup and spread it out intelligently, while putting all the options online for you to manage and tweak while away from your office.

Like GrandCentral, you can set up calls to be routed to different phones or line extensions, there are also handy business-centric settings to tweak the response people get when they call at off-business hours. For fans of GrandCentral's multiphone ring system, RingCentral has also gone the extra step of letting you add three-digit passwords to an incoming phone call to keep unintended pickups from happening. This feature actually stemmed out of users wanting to keep their children from answering a business phone call when they had forgotten to turn off the home forwarding options off, or couldn't get to their own phone in time.

The new VoIP implementation is fairly straightforward. All incoming calls can be set to be received via VoIP, letting you receive and manage phone calls while away from your landline. You can also get various minute packages to use VoIP to make outgoing calls, including an all-you-can-eat plan of outgoing VoIP for around $25/month. In contrast to consumer VoIP services like Vonage, Skype, or Comcast's DigitalVoice, RingCentral isn't aiming at cheap outgoing long distance providers, as much as the multi-line business crowd who's looking for a way to handle several lines without the hardware or staffing.

For a shot of the call log interface, click the read more link below.

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VoIP and telephony service babyTEL is launching a new Facebook application this morning called Telephone that gives you access to a phone and answering machine without leaving Facebook. Instead of going the embedded route, like YackPack, babyTEL instead relies on a small Java runtime that sits in your computer's taskbar, or the dock if you're on Mac OS X. Once you fire it up, there's a simple authentication process to pull up your list of friends on the social networking service, and allow you to call them for free--assuming you have a headset or speakers and a … Read more

Aerospace giant European Aeronautic Defence and Space has introduced a "hacker-proof" encryption technology that it claims will revolutionize Internet security and bring "cryptography into the 21st century."

The system, called "Ectocryp," was developed for military and business applications by researchers and engineers at EADS' Defence and Security Systems division in Newport, South Wales. The team relied on technology developed by the U.K.'s Government Communications Headquarters, sister agency to the NSA and formerly known as Government Code and Cypher School, of German Enigma fame.

The system owes its success to the "lightning … Read more

Just before Interop in May, the OpenSEA Alliance, a new industry group focused on open software solutions for networking and security, was announced. The OpenSEA Alliance plans to develop a robust, multiplatform and widely available open 802.1X supplicant with the goal of emulating the successful Mozilla Firefox model.

Just what is an 802.1X supplicant? It's a piece of client code that authenticates an endpoint (i.e. PC or laptop) to a network and thus enhances security.

The OpenSEA Alliance is not alone in the PC space. Microsoft bundles an 802.1X supplicant in Windows XP and Vista. … Read more

Skype is set to launch a new version of its VoIP phone service for international customers in 24 countries. The new service, named Skype Pro, won't charge by the minute for its SkypeOut service, which lets computers call landlines. Instead, it will charge users a €2-per-month subscription fee and €3.9 cents-per-call connection fee.

There are some benefits to the new system over the old one: specifically, free Skype voicemail (which used to cost about $20 a year) and a large discount on a SkypeIn number at which regular phones can call you. All in all, it's a … Read more