Last of the Odds and Ends
SIM Card for your VoIP Phone: Luca thinks it might be a good idea to have a SIM card on VoIP phones. He might be onto something here. I recently got into the nitty-gritty of UMA and I can tell you that SIM-based authentication is definitely a part of the process. If you look at the IKEv2 specifications, it is designed to handle EAP-SIM, which is the SIM-based authentication used in UMA. Certainly EAP-SIM could be integrated into SIP somehow. Unfortunately, it won’t deal with the myriad of NAT traversal issues that crop up.
Taxing Virtual Worlds: GigaOm is reporting that the Australian government is going to tax earnings from Second Life. I wouldn’t be surprised if other governments followed suit. I’m actually for this on the condition that the earnings are taxed once they are converted from Linden dollars to your local currency. Real money should be taxed. If they are taxing Linden dollars that never cross over into real life, then that’s just crazy. How in the hell would you account for the money? Would there be virtual accountants in Second Life to help sort this out? I wonder if any real accountants are using Second Life to have a second work life?
PhoneGnome Support: Pat Phelan over at Roam4Free relayed some personal experiences he had with PhoneGnome Support and getting his PhoneGnome working. PhoneGnome support suggests that some routers are better than others, namely some work under certain conditions, some don’t. This is certainly true of many ATAs that I’ve used, particularly when they are configured to be controlled by the service provider. Unfortunately, these issues are difficult to troubleshoot, even for someone who knows how. An end user cannot easily troubleshoot these issues, either. If you know how and have the right equipment, you might be able to troubleshoot this problem and get to the bottom of it. However, the “get a different router” advice is a lot easier for most people to follow, and certainly easier for the PhoneGnome people to say.
