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On Sat, 23 May 2009, Richard Brown wrote:
Hi Guys Anyone heard of enum please? A fad or something worth investigating please? <http://www.nominet.org.uk/enum/>
Also see: http://www.enum.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EnumBriefly it's a way to translate telephone numbers into something that may be directly usable by a VoIP service.
So for example, you could lookup my number: +441364698123 and get something that may look like gordon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx, then you can use the latter to place a VoIP call to me, bypassing the PSTN. (Obviously the PBX or phone would do the actual lookup)
The lookup mechanism uses DNS, and there are now several (potentially competing) enum lookup services available.
However for that to work, you need to know which lookup service to use (or all of them), and my PBX would need to accept incoming calls from anonymous services and "trust" caller ID, etc.
And right now, I'm not prepared to allow anonymous incoming VoIP calls for fear of SPAM, so the system fails. (Damn you spammers - if you're going to call, at least pay for the call!)
I'm also not prepared to pay £350 a year just for the privilege of being an Enum registrar via Nominet. Odd that I can't find any existing registrars listed on Nominets pages ... Wonder why.... Actually, I have found one, so there is hope. £250 setup fee though.
Here's another scenario - a thief decides to resgister a banks phone number via enum, and manages to convince the enum registry that they are the bank (stranger things have happened - if scammers can steal whole domains, then they can pretend to be banks). Punter calls the bank via a new-fangled enum enabled phone system - gets through to the thief who then pretends to be the bank - "give me your details" they say ...
Gordon
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