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A Series of Tubes #63 — Networks as foreign aidSeptember 4th, 2008George McLaughlin learned about research networks the best way possible: inside AARNET for much of the 1990s. Since then, he’s taken his experience to the developing world. Before the end of this year, he’s due to start work on TEIN3, a project to deliver next-generation networking to an even bigger footprint. Richard Chirgwin talks to George McLaughlin about TEIN3, a project that’s even attracted the attention of the World Bank. In this week’s sponsor interview, Tubes talks to Nortel’s Marty Hatcher about how to talk IP communications to the SME market. Smart Call #31 — Inside the new National Health Call Centre NetworkSeptember 4th, 2008This week’s Smart Call is brought to you by Citrix Online. Our feature interview is with Marise Hannaford, IT Director at McKesson Asia-Pacific, who explains how the company is rolling out the National Health Call Centre Network. Marise outlines how she is outsourcing some functions and explores the challenges that come with a contact centre that has to employ registered nurses to staff the phones and is required to keep a record of all its calls for 25 years! Also this week, Dr Catriona Wallace gives us a preview of callcentres.net’s annual Contact Centre Industry Benchmarking Report. And if you have a moment, please complete our listener survey. We’d love it if you could spend five minutes letting us know what you think about Smart Call, to help us improve the show. Click here to find the survey. In this week’s sponsor interview, Barry Dacus from Citrix Online drops in to explain remote support and what it offers a contact centre. On this week’s show:
Smart Call is supporting the Australian Teleservices Association’s National Conference, For more information on the event, visit the ATA’s website. Big thanks to our founding sponsor NSC and Supporter CallDesign. Risky Business #76 — MythBusters mauled, BGP borked, MIFARE mangledSeptember 2nd, 2008We’ve got a great show this week, there’s been plenty happening in the infosec world. Our feature topic this week is BGP insecurity. There’s been some renewed hysteria around BGP and we’ll be getting to the bottom of it with Danny McPherson, Arbor Networks’ Chief Smart Guy. As it turns out, you really, really just can’t trust Internet routing. Seriously. There’s been a lot of news about RFID and contactless RFID insecurity over the last few months, and some very interesting video footage from the HOPE conference in New York has surfaced. It turns out a proposed MythBusters segment on RFID security was nixed when the credit card companies called in the lawyertrons to heavy Discovery Channel. Hear the show’s own Adam Savage address HOPE back in July. This week’s show is sponsored by RSA security — they slice, they dice, and they know Alice and Bob’s dirty little shared secret. RSA Security’s Greg Singh will be along in this week’s sponsor segment to have a chat about the MIFARE snafu, key management and other geeky crypto stuff. And as always, the greatest IT news editor in the world, ZDNet Australia’s Munir Kotadia, will be along with the week’s news headlines. A Series of Tubes #62 — What if we were nice to customers?August 28th, 2008Last week’s Tubes looked at how ISP customers can defend themselves from covert interference with their packets, using the EFF’s Switzerland software. There are, however, other ways to skin the “net neutrality” cat: what if, instead of punishing traffic they don’t like, ISPs found ways to help customers apply their own “premium service” decisions. Tubes discusses this with Parham Momtahan, VP of advanced technologies for subscriber management software vendor Bridgewater Systems. Tubes would also like to apologise for the absence of Nortel’s sponsor spot this week, due to an unexpected illness in our scheduled interviewee. Smart Call #30 — Meet the indigenous call centre, PLUS the ATA responds to mooted DNC changesAugust 28th, 2008This week Smart Call meets Bob Jones, call centre manager for Centrelink’s Indigenous Call Centres, which serve clients in remote indigenous communities. It’s a different clientele and Bob has interesting tales to tell about how to serve them. Also this week, we have a listener survey. We’d love it if you could spend five minutes letting us know what you think about Smart Call, to help us improve the show. Click here to find the survey. Also this week, we have Michael Meredith from the Australian Teleservices Association with reaction to the proposed Do Not Call changes. In news, we look at contact centre consolidations. On this week’s show:
Smart Call is supporting the Australian Teleservices Association’s National Conference, For more information on the event, visit the ATA’s website. Big thanks to our founding sponsor NSC and Supporter CallDesign. Risky Business #75 — Red Hat gets pwned hard, RaceToZero wrapAugust 26th, 2008This week’s edition of Risky Business is brought to you by Check Point Software. In this week’s news segment we take a long, hard, disapproving look at the “Red Hat incident”. It seems the software-maker was fairly thoroughly pwned — the attackers managed to compromise the package signing boxes for both Fedora Core and Red Hat. Ouch. We also check in with RaceToZero virus obfuscation contest organiser Simon Howard. Until now the focus has been on the performance of the contest entrants, but how did the actual anti-virus software hold up? What’s good and what sucks? Simon is back from hosting RaceToZero at DEFCON in Vegas and joined the show by phone from New Zealand. Steve McDonald is this week’s sponsor guest from Check Point Software, and Munir Kotadia joins us from ZDNet Australia HQ for a look at the week’s news. If you’d like to read the Popular Mechanics interview with the MIT “subway hackers,” as mentioned on the show, it’s here. SmartCall #29 — G-Force wrap, PLUS possible expansion for Australia’s DNC registerAugust 22nd, 2008This week’s SmartCall is brought to you by a new sponsor, CallDesign, whose Managing Director Miles Stanton drops in to talk about how to get value from your service provider. We also bring you a summary of Genesys’ G-Force conference, with four big interviews. In news, we have a scary story: Australia’s federal government is thinking about giving businesses the option to include themselves on the Do Not Call Register. Dr. Catriona Wallace from callcentres.net analyses the potential impact on telemarketing. We also have a response of sorts from Stephen Conroy, Australia’s minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. And as we promise in the show, here’s a link to the site where you can learn more about the proposal. And in case that’s not enough for you, we also have news of the first Internet dating service for contact centre workers. On this week’s show:
SmartCall is supporting the Australian Teleservices Association’s National Conference, For more information on the event, visit the ATA’s website. Big thanks to our founding sponsor NSC and Supporter CallDesign. A Series of Tubes #61 — A Swiss state of mindAugust 22nd, 2008The EFF in America, long battling against carriers throttling traffic streams like Bittorrent, this month added a new weapon to its armoury: Switzerland. Switzerland acts as a kind of error-check on traffic, so you can tell the difference between what you thought you sent and what the other end of the conversation received - and its author, Peter Eckersley, found the time to talk to Tubes last week. In this week’s sponsor interview, Richard Chirgwin talks to ProCurve’s Fotios Kotsiopoulos about QoS management in the enterprise. Risky Business #74 — HOWTO: Make your own Elvis bin Laden e-passportAugust 19th, 2008This week’s Risky Business is brought to you by Microsoft and hosted, as always, by Vigabyte virtual hosting. On this week’s show we take a look at e-passport security. After 9-11, Chimp W Shrub decreed that foreigners wanting to enter the United States would soon need to carry new-fangled, biometric passports with embedded wireless RFIDs. The result was a rush job the likes of which you’ve never seen. This week’s guest, Peter Gutmann, has figured out how to modify the data on e-passport chips. He hasn’t broken the encryption scheme responsible for signing the data but that doesn’t matter — no one checks to see if the signing key is genuine and even if they do the implementation is so bad it’s easy to fool. The recent theft in Britain of 3,000 blank e-passports in a van hijacking is starting to make a lot more sense. ZDNet Australia’s Munir Kotadia is back this week to chat about recent news, and this week’s sponsor interview is with Microsoft’s Jeffery Jones who talks comparative vulnerability analysis. The music used at the end of this week’s podcast comes from Marshall and the Fro. Australians can buy the band’s album for $25 via Paypal (postage paid) here. Music used with permission. Smart Call #28 — Indian agents go home, PLUS the customer service secrets of the iPhone launchAugust 15th, 2008This week’s Smart Call brings you Optus’ Anthony Shiner, general manager of retail and direct sales. Anthony was in charge of the launch of a device you might just have heard about … Apple’s iPhone 3G. In this exclusive interview, Anthony tells us how Optus fired up its customer service team and its contact centers to ensure they could deliver the right experience on the day the iPhone launched. Before we get to Anthony, massive news from India, which has allowed home-based contact centre workers for the first time. Dr. Catriona Wallace from Callcentres.net analyses this innovation for us. On this week’s show:
Smart Call is supporting the Australian Teleservices Association’s National Conference, For more information on the event, visit the ATA’s website. |
