Jan in Malaysia teases: Russian engineers reverse engineer Skype.

VoIP Hacks by MacVoIP's Ted Wallingford is shipping. It's a must-have if it's half as good as Ted's blog, or the other Hacks books.

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Incident Commander looks so cool. Sim City for crisis training. Can't wait to try it, to check out the multiplayer communication and collaboration. Any VoIP inside?

Stop Conflict Before It Starts. Temporary foreign aid that targets sharp drops in income may stave off civil unrest, says a Berkeley economist. imho, MetroFi and secure Skype should be part of aid packages that prevent crises.

Slideshare.net is kinda brilliant. Elegant, simple to use. I don't know how much knowledge (ignorance?) is trapped in slide shows, but people have been using PowerPoint for a generation. Can't wait to see how they pitched invasions to presidents, disastrous mergers to CEOs, disruptive startups (Skype) on the demise of the disruptees. Slideshare is history by bullet point. The social media elements aren't bad either: blog-like and YouTube elements are familiar.

eWeek compared three "conference" systems this summer. Elluminate Live, Interwise, and Sonexis. The cheapest is $100 per seat. How does that compare with Skype, Unyte desktop sharing and freeware?

U.S. telecom "reform" as an object lesson? Scott Bradner summarizes hard evidence that ILECs have no real competition, killing off contenders. Says there's hope for Canada.

Vishing. Phishing by VoIP. As if Spit, spam via internet telephony, wasn't bad enough.

Tracks in the Snow. Three measures of success come long after IT projects are deployed. Professor Nelson says key success measures include usage, value to the organization, and building an org's knowledge capacity.