How to get free home phone service w/ Google Voice + OBi

If you are still paying for home phone service, you should to look into this. This blog will walk you through to setup a free, feature rich home phone service with no monthly recurring cost (except the cost of the OBi device you purchase one time). You can enjoy features like unlimited free local and long distance calling in US & Canada, $0.01/minute to India, unlimited call blocking of annoying telemarketer calls, call screening, call hour schedule, custom greeting, voice mail transcript to your e-mail and a boat load of other features. The only requirement is: you need have a decent internet connection. Interested? Then read on.

OBi110:

First you need to get a OBi110 VoIP device (for about $60 at amazon.com). Here is a link to it http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0045RMEPI

Google Voice (GV):

Next, sign-up to get a free GV number. Anyone with a g-mail account can get one by clicking the link below...just follow the instructions. If you don't have a g-mail account, no worries, you can create free account here http://www.gmail.com ; it should not take more than a few minutes.

https://www.google.com/voice

Number porting:

Skip this section if you are fine with the brand new phone number GV assigned to you. However, if you don't want new phone number and would like to keep your existing number, Google will happily port your number to GV service for $20. However, it gets bit complicated if your existing number happens to be a land-line number because Google will not be able to port land-line. The good news is, there is a way to port your land-line number to GV service by first porting it to a mobile provider (t-mobile) and when the porting is complete, then you can ask GV to port it from t-mobile. Just follow this link http://www.obihai.com/porttutorial that will walk you through that process. I took this route to port my land-line number since I had the same number for almost 18 years and I did not want to loose it … the total cost to port my land-line following the link was about $35 ($20 for Google + $10 for t-mobile prepay card used in the process to convert my land-line to mobile number).

Setting up OBi Device:

Once you got your OBi device, connect the internet port of the OBi to your internet router and power it on. Connect a home phone (corded or cordless base unit) to the port named “Phone” on the device (Note: there is also “Line” port there, I will explain later in this blog what you can do with it). Now, create an account at http://www.obitalk.com using your Google account credentials. After the account is created, login to obitalk.com and click on the “Add Device” link on the left of your dashboard, (Note: ensure that the check-box “I want to configure Google Voice on this device” is checked) and follow the prompts to setup GV service on the OBi. Have the home phone connected to the device handy with you as you will have to dial some codes to activate the device during the process. Once you complete this step, and if all goes well, your corded or cordless phone connected to the OBi will be active now and ready to make local and long distance calls. Congratulations, you are ready enjoy the free service!

To setup and use all that great google voice features (custom greeting, call blocking, call screening, ... etc), read the documentation at the link below. There are plenty of documentation available besides this on the web.

http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html

International calls:

If you just want the home phone for calls in US and Canada, you can skip this section as well as the rest of the blog. Otherwise, read on for to setup cheap calls to many countries especially India. This step is very simple, all you have to do is add money to your GV account! You can do that in GV webpage here: http://google.com/voice click the + link next to the word “Credit” on the left under your GV phone number and follow the prompt.

The rest of the blog is for optional things like skype integration. If you are not interested, you can skip the rest of the blog.

Skype integration: (optional)

Since many people use skype to make and receive international call these days, you can optionally integrate your skype account with OBi so you can call your friends and family overseas via your skype account bridged to OBi. The OBi110 device is equipped with two SIP lines. The first one (SP1) is already used for GV that you setup earlier and the second one (SP2) is free to do what ever you want with it. We can use the empty SP2 to link your skype client to OBi so your friends and family overseas who use skype can call your skype client which in turn will call your OBi which in turn will ring your home phone. Sounds good right? This step is bit complicated and you can potentially screw up your device but if you follow the steps carefully it should be OK. This skype integration is not needed if you prefer to use skype client and are comfortable with it. If that is the case, you can skip this section.

Here are the steps to follow to link your skype client to OBi

1. Download the latest SipToSis (a program that creates a bridge between your skype client and OBi device) from here: http://www.mhspot.com/sts/siptosis_download.php Once download is complete, extract the archive to a folder named SipToSis. Execute SipToSis_win.bat (windows users) on a command prompt or SipToSis_linux (Linux users). When activity has stopped, terminate SipToSis.
2. Now, using notepad (or vi) edit SkypeToSipAuth.props file and add the following line at end of the file. In order to do this, first you need to find the IP Address of your OBi device. To find IP address, pickup your home phone, and dial ***1 and press talk button. Now your OBi will speak the IP address (and other settings) for you, once you note down the IP, you can hang up. I assume you know your skype_id :) Note, replace the appropriate entries on the line with out any angle brackets of course.
   *,sip:siptosis@<your_OBi_IP_Address>:5061,<your_skype_id>
3. Add a # in front of the line in the same file as shown below
   #*,play:clips/invalidDest.wav
4. Go to obitalk.com and enable expert settings (click the blue button for expert/advanced configuration, click yes at the warning and click enter to enable expert settings page). Under the expert settings, make the following changes.
   Service Providers -> ITSP Profile B -> SIP -> ProxyServer : 127.0.0.1
   Voice Services -> SP2 Service -> AuthUserName : (put anything here)
   Voice Services -> SP2 Service -> X_RegisterEnable : (unchecked)
   Voice Services -> SP2 Service -> X_ServProvProfile : B
   SP2 status should show : Registration Not Required
5. Start skype client.
6. Start SipToSis on the command prompt. (You should see the output similar to what I get on my machine shown below for reference)

Launching SipToSis

2014-11-01 21:47:25,062 Starting SipToSis v20130716

2014-11-01 21:47:25,065 Skype4Java Version 1.3.0.1

2014-11-01 21:47:25,065 os=Linux ver=3.13.0-37-generic arch=amd64 (8 core)

2014-11-01 21:47:25,065 javaVer=1.7.0_72 - Oracle Corporation (64 bit)

2014-11-01 21:47:25,091 Available Codecs: PCMU(0),PCMA(8),iLBC(98),L16/16k(102)

2014-11-01 21:47:25,091 DTMF rfc2833(101)

2014-11-01 21:47:25,092 initSkype - If stuck, check Skype online & API auth

2014-11-01 21:47:25,628 SkypeVer:172

2014-11-01 21:47:25,703 Attached SkypeUserId:aselvan

2014-11-01 21:47:25,713 Config - skypeClientSupportsMultiCalls:false concurrentCallLimit:2

2014-11-01 21:47:25,713 SipToSis contact_url=sip:skypests@192.168.x.xxx:5070

2014-11-01 21:47:25,713 via_addr=192.168.x.xxx realm=

2014-11-01 21:47:25,713 RTP Ports: 63200-63202 Local Skype Ports: 64432-64435

2014-11-01 21:47:25,713 jitterLevel=-1

2014-11-01 21:47:25,750 Registrar Server Domains=

2014-11-01 21:47:25,751 MaxCallTime: not limited MaxPSTNCallTime: not limited

2014-11-01 21:47:25,751 MaxDailyPSTNUniqueNumberCount: 48 MaxDailyPSTNMinutes: 350

2014-11-01 21:47:25,751 Loading Skype PSTN Call History

2014-11-01 21:47:25,756 WAITING FOR INCOMING CALL

...

At this point (assuming I haven't missed any steps) you have your OBi device bridged to skype client successfully. To test it out, you can setup a speed dial to your skype friend or skype test user “echo123” as shown below at obitalk.com speed dial setup (you can find it under the “Add Device” link).

sp2(<your_friends_skype_id>@<your_computers_IP_address>:5070)

sp2(echo123@<your_computers_IP_address>:5070)

Note: Replace <your_computers_IP_address> with the IP address of your PC running SipToSis and Skype client. Enter the above without the angle brackets in the “Number/Address” field of an empty speed dial entry, you can add a friendly name in “Name” field.

Once the skype speed dials are setup, you can simply pickup the phone and dial the speed dial number and press talk. This will make the OBi call SipToSis which in turn calls skype client which actually connects your home phone to your skype buddy on a voice call.

BTW: The speed dials are for anything, it can be skype friends or just any phone numbers. You can setup up to 99 speed dials

Bridging a land-line with OBi: (optional)

Finally, if you have an existing land-line and would like to keep it as a second line for home business or you just love to pay telephone company for what ever reason :), you can link that to OBi so you can take advantage of OBi features on that line as well. Remember the “Line” port mentioned earlier? that is where you connect your existing telephone service. Once connected, you need to go to your obitalk.com account and click on “Add Device” and follow the prompt (note: ensure that the check box “I want to configure Google Voice on this device” is unchecked this time). The only reason you may want to do this bridging is so you can use same phone to make calls using different services (GV or your land-line), and to take advantage of the OBi features. OBi by default will use SPI (your GV service) to make outbound calls. You can however change that on Obitalk.com settings.

Final thoughts:

OBi is highly configurable and comes with ton of useful features. In my opinion, it is way too complicated for ordinary folks to mess with all of them especially the inbound and outbound call routing rules, digitmaps, auto attendant etc. In order to play with all of them you need to spend a lot of time to read the manual (first link below) to learn how to do it. If you are happy with GV features (sufficient even for an advanced user), just don't mess with any settings on your OBi.

Enjoy your OBi!

http://www.obihai.com/docs/OBiDeviceAdminGuide.pdf

http://www.obihai.com/docs/OBiFeatureStarCodes.pdf

http://www.obitalk.com/forum/

http://www.obihai.com/tutorials-tips

How to spot phishing attempt - anatomy of a 'phishing' Email

If you consider yourself as someone who knows how to spot spam and phishing emails, you won't learn anything new here. Others who want to learn how to spot spam or phishing mails, especially if you are someone who simply can't resist clicking on links in your email no matter how many times you were told not to :)  read on …

Like most of you, every now and then I do get a phishing mail delivered to my inbox. Gmail usually does a pretty good job of filtering spam and phishing mails, however, this particular one shown here slipped through gmail spam filter because of my own filter (a discussion on why it slipped is outside the scope of this blog). Anyway, here is a screenshot of the phishing mail we will be dissecting in this blog. Apparently, citibank all of a sudden lost everything they know about me except my email address :). You can stop right here since it is clearly a phishing attempt, but for the purpose of this exercise, lets continue. At a glance, for a novice email user, it looks legitimate and it does appear to have come from citibank.com, and is instructing me to download the attachment called Citibank.html. It must be important since it is from citibank alert service and I should immediately download the file and double click it right? The first thing you need to understand is that the 'mail from' (i.e. in this case alerts@citibank.com) is the easiest thing to fake. To find out where it really came from you need to see the full email headers from the “show original” option. [Note: The screen shot below is from gmail but as far as I know all mail clients like yahoo, hotmail, outlook etc allow you to view the 'raw' content of the mail which will show all mail headers].

When you select the 'show original' as shown above, you can get the 'raw' mail content including all the mail headers (see annotated screenshot below).

From the above screenshot, you can clearly see google's mail server received this mail from decisiontreetech.com not from citibank.com (highlighted in yellow). Does this mean the decisiontreetech.com is the phishing source? The answer is No. In this case, it looks like someone from that company seem to be infected with a malware allowing a remote hacker to hijack their email account session to send phishing mail via that company's mail server. If you look further down you can see a remote host from France with a IP address 62.244.93.88 initiated this message. For many of you, unless you are in cyber crime division of law enforcement, at this point, it doesn't matter who the criminal is (we will discover shortly below), you know this is fake and you should simply delete this mail and go on with your life. You can continue to read if you are interested in dissecting this mail further ...

Now, we are going to examine the attachment the crook wants you to download so he can collect your information. Typically, you can view the raw mail safely with your browser to see what the attachment contains to make sense out of it as long as its not binary. In this case it is supposed to be a HTML file. However, the crook encoded the content of the HTML text to base64 encoding so it is not easy to view what he is trying to do and where he intend to send your information (see the screen shot below).

I can just download the file to let the browser decode the base64 encoded HTML for me or just simply copy the content and decode it myself. The following screen shot is a relevant part of the HTML file decoded using an online decode tool from www.base64decode.org

Finally, you can see they are posting your information to a webserver at 69.73.182.242 to eventually mail everything to two email address i.e. sammy78@iname.com and effeferegregregre@yahoo.com There you have it.

PS: As of this writing the above server is still up and running although the post action is no longer working.

Hope this blog helped you to learn how to easily spot phishing mails and protect your hard earned money. Bottom-line is, if you get a mail asking for stuff your financial institution should already know, its a fake, delete it.

How to access your passwords anywhere

Have you ever forgotten the password to login to one of your many online accounts? It happens to me all the time so I save all my passwords to a file, encrypt it, and have a shell script to decrypt, search and spit the plain password whenever I don't remember the password. This is great when I am at home where I have access to my script and my encrypted password file. However, if I don't remember a password to a site when I am not at home, it is a problem. So I exposed a simple public interface on my webserver to securely decrypt my passwords online from anywhere. Feel free to use this tool to encrypt/decrypt anything (passwords, email, or just any text) and share a per message passphrase to other person to decrypt the message to its original content. Don't worry no one will be able to read unless you give them your passphrase. You can save the encrypted content (see a sample below) anywhere like google docs, dropbox, skydrive, or usb stick etc so you can easily access it anywhere. Feel free to use the tool (it is at the link below). There are many password manager tools like lastpass, keeppass etc available freely that does similar things but the only difference is, here you control how you safegaurd your encrypted file and in addition, you have simple web access to encrypt/decrypt any arbitrary text.

encdec tool: https://selvans.net/encdec/
NOTE: my webserver uses a self signed SSL certificate so your browser will complain which you have to ignore.

It is perfectly safe to store the encrypted message anywhere as it will be encrypted with strong AES-256 cipher. When ever you need to see the message content, all you need to remember is the passphrase you used to encrypt it. To get an idea, decrypt the sample content below using the passphrase 'th1s 1s coo1' without the quotes if you are interested to see how it works.

b97ca8a4928db1a7M5lbEofsXXYqTrvEQXyIYBwbJgqUo8S5iUZuzUuoX370OzoeIXiEbkX1KKprK02Z7n9ocnMx1JoEeB3cJdgqBxkpO84Pq+rQrSsUcgLtOp10xZnFM40EJX9RPyLD7Gyl1yKIzZ5nuWxrKIz29R5UFel6J6ZBGKCbWRP2lVbaQPKFZLJtgUQ7Vq7sKxffUOepPoBxeCWcpNYyhthj4IQ/t1WUl8asGSH7CUp0Rje3GJIaHBSciwUDA+g4euunb4NY6Kivq3O7FCyJ8REpZgZ9TIZuUgYFV0tjMi9xdAxWR4EUsJUaG4fC+5JfFA05cGZgcEkwc9VSdLKDc6L1p3Ku3L/3dRnBSlSC1hXZM0Shsdo=

How to block unwanted calls using Vonage and Google Voice

While most VoIP based telephone service providers allow features to block annoying telemarketers and SPAM calls, Vonage does not provide any feature to block calls but I still stick to Vonage for number of other features I really like. The following are 3 simple and easy steps to setup selective call blocking using combination of Vonage and Google Voice service. Not an elegant solution, but it does work, most importantly, its free :) I am using successfully for couple of years now.

Just follow the 3 steps below.

1. Get a free google voice number. Go to https://www.google.com/voice and follow the prompt to set it up with your home or cell (you should remove it later) and google chat as the forwarding numbers as shown below ...

Phones setting: http://selvans.net/vonage_scb/gvsettings.png
Calls setting: http://selvans.net/vonage_scb/gvcallsettings.png
Note: mine shows only google chat since I removed all forwarding numbers.

2. Login to your vonage account and setup simulring to ring your google voice as shown below
Simulring: http://selvans.net/vonage_scb/simulring.png

3. Login to your vonage account and setup voicemail timeout settings as shown below
Vonage VM timeout: http://selvans.net/vonage_scb/vmtimeout.png

After this, when ever you get an unwanted call, login to google voice, select history, find the unwanted number and select "block" from the pulldown menu under "more" as shown below ...
http://selvans.net/vonage_scb/gvblock.png

Note: Google does a pretty good job on its own blocking spam... as you can see, I did not have to block this 702-815-2394 number since google already did that for me :)

In addition, if you have a list of numbers to be blocked you can follow my original post below to setup a group of numbers to block.

https://forums.vonage.com/showpost.php?p=17184&postcount=56

Enjoy!

How to setup keybased ssh, scp to Transend WifiSD card

The following are steps to get root and ssh access to Transend WifiSD card to automate copying of files from the card. It is assumed that the user is familiar with some knowledge of Linux scripts and commands. It is also assumed that the user is going to use a Linux host to interact with the card although the setup can be easily used in Windows as well using tools like winSCP or cygwin or pscp.exe.

The setup outlined here is based on the information and code shared by the original author (Glen) at the following link/blog.
https://www.pitt-pladdy.com/blog/_20140202-083815_0000_Transcend_WiFi_SD_Hacks_CF_adaptor_telnet_custom_upload_/

DISCLAIMER: Use it at your own risk. I am not responsible for any loss or damage to your property.

STEPS:

0. Use the Transcend tools (andriod app or ios app) to configure your card to connect to your home wifi network; while you are at it, change admin user, cards wifi ssid, passwd etc. Make sure your card successfully connects to your  wireless network and note the IP address assigned to it by your home wifi router.

1. Download and extract http://selvans.net/public/custom.tar.gz in your desktop computer and edit the autorun.sh file to uncomment the line below for telnet access, i.e. remove '#'

   telnetd -l /bin/bash &

2. Edit the access.sh file and change "trusted_network" variable to match yours

   trusted_network="your_routers_ssid:your_routers_ip:your_router_mac"
   example: trusted_network="myrouterssid:192.168.1.1:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff"
 
3. Insert your SD card in your computer and copy the entire custom/ directory from step #1 above to the root directory of SD card. In addition, also copy autorun.sh to root directory of SD card.

4. Remove card and reinsert it into your computer.

5. Now you should be able to telnet to your card from your linux box, i.e. telnet <your_card_ip>
In the examples shown below 192.168.xxx.xxx is my WifiSD card  and 192.168.yyy.yyy is my ubuntu desktop

   arul@cheetah:~$ telnet 192.168.xxx.xxx
   Trying 192.168.xxx.xxx...
   Connected to 192.168.xxx.xxx.
   Escape character is '^]'.
   # ls
   bin             home            lost+found      sbin            usr
   config_value    init            mnt             sys             var
   dev             lib             proc            tmp             www
   etc             linuxrc         root            ts_version.inc

6. Once you are logged in via telnet as shown at #5 above, you need to create dropbear hostkeys and copy them to your desktop to include in /custom directory on SDcard.  Note: I have included two dummy files in /custom directory you need to replace them by creating your own key files. i.e. follow the example below but use your IP address and your user name of course.
 
   # dropbearkey -t rsa -f /tmp/dropbear_rsa_host_key
   # dropbearkey -t dss -f /tmp/dropbear_dss_host_key
   # scp /tmp/dropbear_* arul@192.168.yyy.yyy:/tmp/.
 
Now, copy the 2 files from your /tmp directory to the custom/ directory on the SD card  by replacing them.

7. Create (or copy if you already have a dsa public key) in your desktop to  the /custom directory as authorized_keys. Note: I have a dummy authorized_keys  file that you need to replace.

   ssh-keygen -t dsa
   cp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub custom/authorized_keys

8. Once you update all the key files in custom/ directory in the card, unplug your card and plug it back into your device (computer or camera) one last time. Once the card boots, you should be able to ssh into your card or scp files, or setup automated scripts to copy files from card to your desktop... and pretty much do everything you can do with ssh!
 
   example: 
   arul@cheetah:/tmp$ ssh root@192.168.xxx.xxx
   # cat /proc/cpuinfo 
   Processor : ARM926EJ-S rev 5 (v5l)
   BogoMIPS : 421.06
   Features : swp half fastmult edsp java 
   CPU implementer : 0x41
   CPU architecture: 5TEJ
   CPU variant : 0x0
   CPU part : 0x926
   CPU revision : 5

   Hardware : KeyASIC Ka2000 EVM
   Revision : 0000
   Serial : 0000000000000000
   
   # date
   Sat May  3 16:13:53 UTC 2014
   
   # /sbin/busybox-armv5l uname -a

   Linux (none) 2.6.32.28 #137 PREEMPT Fri Mar 22 18:21:52 CST 2013 armv5tejl GNU/Linux

   # exit
   Connection to 192.168.xxx.xxx closed.

   arul@cheetah:/tmp$ scp -r root@192.168.xxx.xxx:/mnt/sd/DCIM/* .
   DSCN0254.JPG                                          100%  836KB 278.8KB/s   00:03 


Have fun with ssh/scp on your Transend WifiSD card!

TOOLS:
   This is where I got the prebuilt busybox and dropbear binaries for reference. They are already in the custom/ directory for convenience.
   arm5l busybox: http://busybox.net/downloads/binaries/latest/
   arm5l dropbear: http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html