In the age of electronic communications, governments don't like to know that there are certain technologies that are beyond their control. With the traditional PSTN phone system, tapping a call was not a problem. You just need to monitor the line and there was an established procedure for contacting a telephone company for obtaining the call records. smart voip came in and changed all that.
There are many inherent problems when it comes
to tracing smart voip calls.
For one, it's over the Internet and so there's no telling what route an IP
packet will take unlike a regular landline telephone. Also, the legal framework
is not fully in place. smart voip providers may defend
themselves and say that they merely provide a service. How others use it is
none of their business. Nevertheless, governments have been able to obtain call
records from such services and many software developers are actively working on
allowing backdoor access. Skype is one famous example.
The true problem with tapping smart voip calls is technology.
Certain services like Skype enforce strict encryption policies which makes the
data completely unusable to an eavesdropper. Which is why the only recourse is
to turn to the service provider themselves. But even here, there are systems
allowing for completely secure encrypted communications inaccessible even to
the owners of the application. It's one of the reasons why a few countries have
banned the use of these encryption methods - futile as that may be.
The Internet and governments have always had
an uneasy relationship. Blackberry for example has had famous duels with
countries like India who cannot comprehend that some messages are just designed
to be secure from the ground up. The Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) system
is designed in such a way that only the owners of the system have access to the
messages. This means that any government requiring call content logs need to
apply to the firms themselves. This naturally doesn't sit well with those in
power
But what can you do about it? Nothing. And
there is evidence that these powerful tools are now becoming available to
regular customers as well. MyCelial Communications has released a software
known as "Spore" that integrates with the Android phone system and
allows for completely secure smart
voip calls that even MyCelial themselves cannot decrypt or track.
Many feel that customers are not really interested in secure communications,
but how long will it be before a popular smart
voip application incorporates foolproof security into its system from
the ground up? What will governments do then?
Much is being made of the recent Google Glass
project. Sergey Brin is the champion of Google's latest venture into wearable
technology. It's difficult not to get excited by the recent developments. When
analysts saw the initial mockups of Google Glass's capabilities, many
speculated that it was overblown and that reality could never match what was
shown. Recent real-life use case scenarios however have belied those
projections. Google Glass is indeed capable of most of what it promised and
we're just beginning to scratch the surface.
A few applications of wearable technology are
obvious - taking pictures, recording videos and making phone calls. That last
item will definitely change the face of the smartphone market and give a huge
boost to smart voip services.
This is because telecom carriers are generally slow-moving and a rapidly
developing technological front like Google Glass will be greedily lapped up by
the hundreds of smart voip service
is available today. It might even go a long way towards breaking the iron grip
that telecom carriers in the United States have over smartphones.
The developer's edition of Google Glass is
already out and a select few are in the process of testing them. One can be
sure that many videos and uses will emerge in the coming months and Google has
already projected a market release date at the end of 2013 - perhaps in time
for the holidays. Now that would be something!
The implications for voice applications will
be staggering. Smartphones will lose one of their core functionalities that
will be transferred over to the new wearable technology. What this will mean
for the future of smartphones is yet unclear. Most likely customers will still
need them for applications that require a bigger screen. Web browsing
immediately comes to mind. But so many of the immediate functions can be
seamlessly transferred over. Could we be staring at the demise of the
smartphone industry just as it's started to get going?
These are extremely interesting questions.
Handset manufacturers must be keeping an eye on the project warily wondering
how this will change their fortunes. Or it might so happen that Google Glass
never takes off in the first place - people might find it too geeky or
inconvenient to use. One thing's for sure - there will be at least some uptake
of this new technology and smart
voip will fill the gap of communication since it is unlikely that
smart phone carriers will be able to capitalize quickly on the new hardware.
