The BFC Computing Weblog

Have a read here and boggle in disbelief.

I used to run Trixbox on my PBX; I started when it wasn’t a commercial product, and Tim did a great prezo on it for SLUG. When they required registration to run the software I became very uncomfortable. When I couldn’t administer my PBX one day because their server was down, I switched to Elastix, and I couldn’t be happier - I should have done it sooner; it’s a superior product.

If you’re still sitting on the fence, this behavior from Fonality is likely to knock you square off it. That Fonality relies so heavily on FreePBX only makes it so much more inconceivable. Assuming this is true, only the dismissal of the individual involved could regain any trust the community once had in Fonality.

Oh, and BTW, a FreePBX backup and restore makes it fairly simple to switch from Trixbox to Elastix.

After reading about Barracuda moving to invalidate a bogus patent Trend Micro filed for on virus-scanning at an e-mail gateway (many of my clients depend on this technology) in January, I sent Barracuda the following note:

          -----Original Message-----
          From: Bill McGonigle [mailto:bill@bfccomputing.com] 
          Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 12:24 PM
          To: legal@barracuda.com
          Subject: possible SMTP prior art - TFS
          
          From:
          
          http://groups.google.com/group/comp.mail.sendmail/
          browse_frm/thread/3cee3dc93ea81690/a8cd75d669fbd6b7?lnk=st&q=smtp+virus+scan#a8cd75d669fbd6b7
          
          Its pretty functional - gateways between any/all MS/MAIL,
          WP-OFFICE, CC:MAIL, SMTP, UUCP, MCI-MAIL. It does uuencode
          and MIME attachments (configurable per address or domain
          wildcard) and international characters. It can also virus
          scan attachments on the way through the gateway, and access
          can be controlled on a user by user basis!
          
          (message dated July 25th, 1995).
          
          It looks like it's still around in some form from foxT:
             http://www.tfstech.com/
          
          Good luck,
          -Bill
          

I never heard back more than a quick “thanks!” from Dean Drako, CEO of Barracuda, but today, I read they’ve moved ahead with this strategy and Goran Fransson, developer on TFS, is a new open source ally.

Dean writes of Goran, “We greatly appreciate the time that Goran Fransson took in coming forward to share this very important piece of prior art,” Drako says. “We believe that his testimony is instrumental in our case against what we believe is an unjust patent claim by Trend Micro against Barracuda Networks and the open source ClamAV project. In our view, Goran is an open source hero.”

Full disclosure: I’ve sold completely open solutions, based on postfix/MailScanner/clamav/sqlgrey against Barracuda’a blackbox appliances, but I’m glad they’re fighting against Trend Micro’s abuse of the system.

I went to a SwANH seminar a few weeks back which was quite good. One thing I didn’t realize was that SwANH was going to give my e-mail address to the event sponsor as part of the deal. I just found this out as I received a product advertisement from them to the address I provided to SwANH.

I understand the need for sponsors, and perhaps ‘to sweeten the pot’, but I might have provided a better address had I known. File under ‘for future reference’.

There’s some grumbling about that Google is going to start targeting media ads to people based on their search preferences.

There’s only one thing to say about that: bring it on!

Having just sat through a Clairol hair coloring commercial to view a short news clip, I can’t think of any less efficient use of anybody’s resources. I don’t have enough hair to even think about coloring, CNN’s paying for the bandwidth, Clairol is paying per impression - everybody’s time and money just got wasted, and some would say the planet just got a bit warmer.

At least if it were an ad for Just for Men I’d at least be in the target market, but they’d do much better to try to sell me a Netflix Roku box, because I don’t think I can hold out much longer.