Thread by @gravislizard

I wonder how disappointed the people in 1994 who thought we'd be able to make phone calls to domain names by now are

like, this isn't in any way a bit. VoIP was just like most other pre-2000s internet tech, it was supposed to usher in a golden era that even ISDN didn't promise. It was supposed to be beautiful. And it depended on trust, and communism.

the people developing SIP (idk about H323) in the 90s (maybe earlier?) had this idea that you'd sit down to make a call to Progressive, so you'd just type "progressive.com" into your phone. No lie. And the framework is literally all there waiting to be used. Today.

Go to ebay. Buy a Grandstream phone, buy a Cisco SPA303, buy a Polycom VVX500. Buy a Yealink. Buy a Snom. Take whatever you got out of the box, power it up, factory reset it, and let it come to a rest. Now start pressing keys on the dial pad.

You'll be surprised to discover that you can enter as many as you like, and if you press the same key a couple times, you'll get letters. Go ahead, punch in a domain name. google dot corn. Press "Send". If you pcap that phone, you'll see it do a Goddamn DNS lookup.

See - if you don't know - a domain name is not just a pointer to a website. They can contain volumes. The DNS is a *massive* library of information, which the bulk of the internet refuses to use because of capitalism.

There are endless dimensions of DNS records. So one of the things you can do with DNS is ask "For google.com, are there any SIP records?" You can do this, today, right now. It won't work because google didn't register any. Probably, anyway.

But the framework is there. Google is able to publish a domain record that anyone, anywhere can request, that will tell *specifically a VoIP phone* which address and port to send a session invite to, and all they have to do is park a PBX at that IP. Presto, you're talking.

There were FURTHER ideas. ENUM was supposed to let you map it the OTHER WAY. You put in a phone number, your phone does a DNS lookup and comes back with
- an IP address
- an *email* address
- a website
- a SIP URI

so, without changing ANYTHING about their existing system or divorcing from the public phone network at all, you would be able to put in Costco's phone number and your phone would ask "what method do you want to use to contact Costco" and present all these options

so again - we CREATED THE FRAMEWORK FOR THIS. IT'S THERE. IT WORKS. And we don't use it. Here are the reasons

I'm not sure why, but North Africa and China have a massive problem with phone fraud. Maybe phone calls are just frighteningly expensive over there. If you connect a PBX to the internet, you will get owned in under a minute.

That is to say - right now, your IP, your actual internet connection, is being hammered with UDP and TCP SIP INVITEs on port 5060. This is happening, you just don't know about it because your router/firewall protects you implicitly. *Everyone* is being scanned from RIPE addresses

Capitalism caused this. If phone calls weren't fiendishly expensive in some places, nobody would be frantically trying to steal service. As a result, every PBX has to be locked down like a prison

If you're smart, your PBX is behind a hardware firewall that passes traffic on ONLY port 5060, ONLY established sessions and ONLY from 2 to 4 IPs and NOTHING else. Trust me. This is my job. If you aren't doing this, you should be.

Next: Who wants to run a PBX in 2018, am i right folks???? Well actually the backlash started in the 2000s, and gave rise to this somewhat cursed 2010s nightmare version of Centrex called Clo ud P B X

This concept is where a company runs your PBX *for* you. And, well, Bell System Rule Of Acquisition #1 is All Customers Must Be Billed, so the pricing for this is pretty much what it was in 1971

if you run your own PBX you can have infinite calls for free. seriously - and I've thought about this - we could turn up a few Asterisk (or something better) instances on a rented VM, register softphones to them, and have our own queer phone network

it would be a flat rate based on whatever the VM cost to run and you just need a softphone (there are free ones) that you point at an IP and specify a username and password and you're in. We have our own phone number system. Your friend circle has extensions.

You want a number you can call into to have a multiuser conversation? someone makes a conf bridge. its' just software. it's free. just costs CPU time and a little bit of bandwidth.

but if someone runs your PBX FOR you, you get billed
- per line
- per number
- per minute
- per month
STRICTLY and with no mercy. and, well, if the calls don't go through the cloud PBX, how can they be billed?

Suddenly you can't call costco.com because if you did, how would it go through your phone provider so they can bill you for it?

Capitalism created problems of trust and profiteering that prevent us from having a utopian phone system that, in ways, would be more robust than the current PSTN and provide a wealth of features that even ISDN can't beat.

basically it continues to burn my ass that all the online calling services, discord, skype, whatever the fuck, unless you have more than one person in a call *they are not providing a service*, at least not one that should exist

i continue to be on my bullshit about this because it frosts me like the arctic that the internet is like two people walking into the Great Commons and crossing like 1200ft of ground, together, to ask the same guy in stereo if they can talk to each other

It's all about trust. The internet never solved the trust problem, it solved it through brute fucking force - don't let ANYONE talk to ANYONE, a big fuckin ANY>ANY = DROP policy set for the whole God damn contraption. top down. bottom up. fuck you, this isn't For You

you only get to talk to corporations. your computer is not allowed to speak or be spoken to by anyone who doesn't have a business license and presence in a colo. but like. that's. that's not necessary, you know

you give me your IP, i give you mine, we tell our firewalls to allow each others addresses. now we can talk. but that doesn't make anyone money. letting us do that doesn't get a Cloud Service Provider an invoice to bill.

we can IM, we can hear each others voices, we can share files, we can stream video, we don't need anyone to allow this. we can just do it. i can send you data, right now, without it going through a corporate server

but because of NAT, and unnecessarily dynamic IPs, and the *absolute drop-dead termination of all development in this sector in 1999*, we can't do that. it just frosts me. it makes me Agnry