Tuesday, April 06, 2004

A reminder of what started the trouble in Fallujah: Iraqis in deadly clash with U.S. troops. At least 15 Iraqi civilians were killed and 53 injured during a clash with U.S. troops in the town of Fallujah, Red Cross officials said Tuesday. The clash began at around 10 p.m. Monday when up to 250 demonstrators approached members of the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division, based at an elementary school, demanding they leave so classes could resume, an Iraqi telecommunications engineer said. [CNN] 6:23:48 PM    comment () Skype Jumps to Cellular. Now it is not just the old land-line phone system under seige from voice over Internet protocol providers. With Skype's announcement that it will offer voice service via handheld devices like pocket PCs good old cell phones could get some comp. And of the comments on how VoIP would work with Wi-Fi nets, Skype's chief executive and founder Niklas Zennstršm seems to know what he is talking about. The current bottleneck for mobile VoIP is processing power and audio hardware. Analysts claiming that Wi-Fi needs to be "optimized" for voice need to explain what they mean as the whole point of VoIP is that packets are packets once they hit the Net. [Hit & Run] More on the Skype announcement. It occurs to me that this is also a long-term threat to Handspring, which has become dependent on rather unimpressive cell-phone/PDA hybrids. 5:34:35 PM    comment () Chaos among the Shi'a. Sunday was very bad. Death and destruction across Iraq. I'm starting to question the wisdom of all of this... [Back to Iraq 3.0] Various updates on the situation. 9:51:43 AM    comment () Skype CE. A stripped down version of Skype for Windows CE handhelds (needs a PDA with a wireless connection) is now available according to their news blog.  FAQ.  Download.  It also supports conference calls (not available for the CE version) for up to 5 callers and call holding for up to 16 calls.  It's free, secure (encrypted), high-fidelity, and P2P.  Finally a reason to own a CE wireless handheld. [John Robb's Weblog] It sounds interesting, but on closer investigation I find that it's closed-source--which means that nobody can review whether it really is secure. This pretty much eliminates it as an option for secure communication, but it is still (as far as I know) the only VoIP option available for a PDA, so it would be useful for unsecure calls. 8:53:42 AM    comment ()

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