Last week I was supposed to be in Spain for the Free Software World Conference. I was invited there to give a short speech, but due to some last minute changes I had to stay in Finland. Just as well, because then I caught a really bad flu, so I wouldn't have enjoyed air planes and hot weather that much.

Anyway, my paper was published at the conference, just without the speech then. I couldn't find it on the conference website yet, so I'll attach the PDF to this post if you're interested. The article is about the SIP protocol and other VoIP things:

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and other Voice over IP (VoIP) protocols and applications

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
standard used in Voice over IP (VoIP). The Real-Time Protocol (RTP) is used for the real-time
transportation of data such as voice and video. The SIP protocol has its problems, in particular with
traversing firewalls and NAT (Native Address Translation). Also encrypted connections is still a
developing area. Some historical and current alternatives to SIP are also discussed.

As with other Internet technologies, Free Software has been at the forefront of
innovation. Asterisk is a popular IP-PBX server for use in companies and institutions but there are
popular proprietary competitors. OpenSER is a strong SIP Proxy in telecom companies.

There are several good Free Software client applications, Ekiga (former
GnomeMeeting), KPhone, OpenWengo and minisip are mentioned here. Many have however not
become mainstream because of initially only supporting the Linux operating system. Sometimes
applications have omitted codecs due to fear of software patents. The ease of its use, especially its
peer-to-peer inspired circumventing of firewall and NAT obstacles, has made proprietary Skype the
most popular VoIP application so far, but it is argued that alternatives based on open standards will
prevail in the end.

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I noticed some spam had creeped in on this site as posted comments and as new pages in the collaborative edition part of the book. This is despite the fact that you have to register before posting any comments and that a CAPTCHA is included in the registration process. Interesting. This means there actually is some human being involved posting spam on my site (though I guess the actual generation of spam is still automated).

As a countermeasure, I now had to change the registration of new users such that I personally approve new users. Sorry for the delays this may cause.