Enough already with the unwarranted attacks on Voxilla’s hometown.

They are coming by way of desperate politicians and their media mouthpieces who have settled on the vilifying phrase “San Francisco values” to instill ill-founded fear among voters in the redder parts of the US.

Their argument is obtuse and moronic. In campaign ads, political fundraising pitches, in the words of some newspaper editorials and out of the mouth of mean-spirited gas bags like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, the story is that if the Democrats win a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), she of “San Francisco values,” becomes Speaker of the House.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose “values” allowed him to leave his hospital-bound cancer-stricken wife for a Congressional aide and then refuse to pay child support, asks in an email money pitch on behalf of Republicans “will everything you’ve worked so hard to accomplish be lost to the San Francisco values of would-be Speaker Nancy Pelosi?”

Current House Speaker Dennis Hastert, whose “values” apparently include ignoring former Congressman Mark Foley’s advances on underage pages lest a safe GOP seat be put at risk, asks “Do we really want Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco values leading the culture war?”

What are “San Francisco values” anyway?

Editorial writers at the Augusta Chronicle in Georgia elaborate in an editorial by writing that, if Democrats gain a majority in the House, “Pelosi will be speaker and her far-left San Francisco values — gay marriage, cutting and running from Iraq, coddling terrorists, raising taxes, amnesty for illegals — will become the House agenda.”

I spit out my quad decaf latte all over my soy eggs benedict when I read this at the vegan espresso house this morning. Fortunately, Mohammed, who works and is appropriately coddled there, put down the molotov cocktail and rushed over to clean up the mess while uttering something about the infidels that had so offended my feminine side. I even made Sophia and Dylan, Frank and Tommy’s adopted kids from Somalia and Korea laugh. I was so embarrassed, I “cut and ran” out of there, but stopped long enough to sign a petition to increase my taxes by 200 percent on the way out. Then I drove my spinach-oil-guzzling hybrid over to the house paint store to remind the Spanish-speaking job-seekers there to vote — five, six times — on Tuesday.

OK, none of that happened. And it never would. Because, when all is said and done, San Francisco is not unlike most other American cities. Sure, most of us believe gays and lesbians should have the same rights as everybody and that a constitutional amendment on wedding ceremonies is unbelievably silly. But it seems to me that we’re right in line with the rest of the nation when it comes to the war in Iraq, terrorists, and taxes (we don’t like any of them).

It’s not my place to tell you how to vote (though it’s probably no secret how I will). But when you do vote (and you are going to vote, aren’t you?), don’t let “San Francisco values” sway you. The politicians and their media puppets attacking our hometown in their pre-election talking points are clueless.

San Francisco is a nice place, and our “values” are just fine. If you don’t agree, let’s discuss it over a Napa Cab and brie.

I won’t dispute my friend Andy Abramson’s assertion, later echoed by the knowledgeable Ted Wallingford, that Southern California Asterisk front-end reseller Fonality is better poised to bring the open-source PBX into the large enterprise space than even Digium, the company behind Asterisk.

I won’t because I long ago gave up playing Swami in the unpredictable world of IP communications and because I can see that Fonality has done an exceptional job of marketing its product, its company and its CEO, Chris Lyman.

Still, I wonder whether Fonality is indeed the right solution for businesses — particularly those businesses concerned about security.

The company’s products include a $1,000 “Standard” Asterisk PBX and a $3,000 “Call Center” edition that features unlimited call queues, recording and other bells and whistles.

Each of the offerings packs a well-designed front end that makes the notoriously prickly Asterisk easier to use. But, unlike a stock Asterisk installation, Fonality’s offerings require a constant — and potentially worrisome — connection to the company’s own servers.

Though one can use Fonality’s products with any SIP- or IAX-based termination services provider, the company builds a Virtual Private Network (VPN) back to Fonality from all its installed PBXes.

Ostensibly, there are good reasons for this, particularly that all upgrades to the product occur seamlessly and with no need for operator interaction. Also, because all configuration changes to an installed PBX are made by logging into an account with Fonality’s servers, and those changes are then pushed back to the local PBX, the risks of operator error are somewhat mitigated.

But there is reason for concern. Ease-of-use comes with trade-offs.

First, because the link is over VPN, it is possible for someone at Fonality to enter the local PBX in a virtually undetectable manner. An unscrupulous employee can then run a network sniffer on the PBX and, if the local PBX computer is part of the office network (as is likely to be the case in most offices), the employee potentially has access to all the computers on the network.

Second, the level of information logged by and maintained on the Fonality server is staggering. The PBX comes with a built-in IM chat client and all chats are logged by the central server. Any sensitive IM information within and outside the office through the local box is available to Fonality.

The central server also maintains a log of all call detail records (CDR). Fonality uses the CDRs when its customers want to see a calling history (i.e.: all outgoing sales calls made by an employee, all incoming customer support calls, etc.).

It can be argued, of course, that the phone company has a list of those calls (but not inter-office calls) as well. But Fonality is a hardware and software vendor, not the phone company.

Fonality may very well be a good solution for some businesses. But those concerned about keeping company secrets are probably better served by Digium’s offering. It may be a bit harder to configure (though Digium is working feverishly to make Asterisk more user-friendly), but Digium doesn’t require an outside computer to be listening in and keeping track.

TalkPlus believes its just-announced patent-pending plans to centralize voice services on the cell phone addresses many needs: privacy, mobility, accessibility and even “safe” dating.

Yes, it’s hard to market many of the new products in the so-called “Voice 2.0″ space because they don’t easily lend themselves to pithy press release descriptions (nor, as this story certainly attests to, concise journalistic presentation). So the San Mateo, CA.-based Talk Plus is launching the service and application it has been developing for two years in a way virtually anyone who has ever dated can understand.

“A woman at a bar doesn’t want to give her cell phone number to some guy she just met,” is how one executive at the company began explaining TalkPlus to me a few weeks before the company officially announced its product. “So she gives him a number she got from TalkPlus, and when the guy calls that number, it’s routed to her cell phone. If she calls the guy back, the number he sees on caller ID is the TalkPlus number.”

When she finally figures out the guy’s jerk, she just cancels the number, he said (and presumably goes to a bar in a different neighborhood next time).

This may not sound like a sure-winner in the increasingly crowded voice service world, but marketing approach aside, TalkPlus is poised to do something Cingular, Verizon, et al have not managed to do: make the cell the only telephone you need — at home, at work, at play and in between.

When fully rolled out over the coming year, TalkPlus customers will be able to:

* Sign up for multiple virtual numbers, all of which ring on a single cell phone and which can also be used as outgoing numbers;
* Add any phone number you have (i.e.: your home phone, office phone, etc.) to the service so that you can use it exactly as you would a virtual number;
* Maintain multiple telephone personalities through a “Personality Manager” accessible via a browser and through a cell phone’s dialpad;
* Store all the telephone numbers on your cell phone (support for Outlook and other contact managers to come) on the TalkPlus server for easy “click-to-call;”
* Make outgoing calls from the cell phone using low-cost IP-based services.

The service, says TalkPlus CEO Jeff Black, is set to roll out in beta form in early November, in association with (you guessed it) an unnamed “top-tier dating site” for $9.95 a month.

Here’s how it will work: You sign up with the service and get a virtual telephone number, which becomes an alias for your regular cell phone number. When someone calls that number, your cell phone rings.

If you want to call someone from your cell phone and have your TalkPlus number show up as the caller-ID on the recipient’s phone, you use a tiny TalkPlus application to make the call.

The TalkPlus app works with any WAP-enabled or Java-based cell phone. Symbian, Treo, Windows CE and support for others will be added in early 2007, said Black.

Authentication to prevent incoming call highjacking is an important part of the TalkPlus offering.

“An alias number, whether its virtual or one you already own, is a number you have authority to use,” said Black. “Let’s say I want to add my home phone number as an alias. I’m assigned a special authentication five digit pass code. My home phone rings and when I pick it up, I enter the pass code. The process is repeated three times at different times over the first month.”

While it’s relatively easy to mimic some of TalkPlus’ capability today simply by having calls forwarded to your cell phone, the concept of disposable virtual numbers and the ability to use such a number as the caller identifier are both unique.

But equally exciting is that TalkPlus, as Black said, will make it possible in a future release to easily make expensive overseas calls on your cell phone using cheap VoIP minutes. Yes, TalkPlus is stealing a page from the “Voice 1.0″ playbook by becoming a service provider.

“When you dial a number using our application, our server figures out where you are,” said Black. “So, say you are in the Silicon Valley and you call London. The server grabs a temporary phone number invisibly in about 1.5 seconds in the Silicon Valley. Your phone dials that number and the server connects you to London at about three cents a minute.”

Black added that TalkPlus will also allow calls made using SIP URI dialing, which, when combined with a corporate PBX (or even open source offerings such as Asterisk), permit the user to terminate calls using any IP-based calling service.

When fully rolled out, TalkPlus promises to trigger a significant change in the way we use our cell phone. In the meantime, you’ll be able to use it for worry-free date arrangements, at least until someone figures out how to market the service’s true power.

Martin Dindos has just filed a comprehensive “How-To” on connecting the new Nokia E-series phones (at least those with Wi-Fi capability) to Asterisk.

Before publishing it, I had a chance to follow Martin’s step-by-step instructions (I did edit the Asterisk files directly as our installation pre-dates the release of the whizzy-wigged Trixbox by a few years).

My verdict: Pairing the new Nokia “fusion” phones (the E61 in my case, this will not work with the brain-dead Wi-Fi-less imitation E62 Cingular is hawking) with Asterisk is unbelievably useful.

First, on the phone, I configured the four Wi-Fi hot-spots I am most often within reach of: office, home and my two favorite SF coffee houses (definitely not Starbucks) where I sit with the Mac and fuel the brain with espressos.

Then, I made a few minor changes to sip.conf and extensions.conf on the Asterisk end (these are detailed in Martin’s story).

Done.

Now, when I step into any of my four haunts, all calls to me arrive on the IP side of the cell phone, and all calls out are pure-VoIP. If I’m in the car, calls in and out go over the cell side.

One phone. One phone number. Find me anywhere.

Mobile cell/IP convergence has most definitely arrived. Still missing though is seamless call hand-over between Cingular’s cells and Asterisk. In other words, if I leave the java joint while on the phone, the call will still disconnect when I get in the car.

I imagine that we’ll be able to traverse the two services soon. Cingular will fight it, of course, in a futile effort to keep every last cellular penny. Eventually — and thankfully — technology trumps the dollar, and the mobile players will have to join in on the fun.

There’s probably little data tracking this, but the PBX is no longer limited to the business setting.

It’s a safe bet to say that many of the thousands of installations of the popular open source Linux-based Asterisk PBX) and off-shoots such as TrixBox, FreePBX and others, are chugging away in private homes helping to create a fledgling internet phone connectivity system that is poised to give pricey international carriers the fits.

The home PBX is not yet simple enough for the casual computer tinkerer, but given the pace of development, that day is probably not far off.

Or it may have already arrived.

It’s still a bit of a secret, but some users of the Communigate Pro (CGP) internet communications server have discovered that the recently released version 5.1 of the powerful system is now free for up to five users.

This means home users (and micro-businesses) now have full use of Communigate’s suite of communications tools (including an industrial-grade email server, contact server, calendar server, XMPP-based IM server, PBX, Flash-based online access tools and full-fledged web server) that can be installed on dozens of different platforms, including Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OSX (install it on a Mac Mini, as we did a few weeks back, and prepared to be impressed).

Jon Doyle, Communigate’s VP of Business Development, confirms that the company, well-known for its email server solutions among large enterprises and internet service providers, has decided to make a five-user version available for free, though “no official announcement” will be made until November.

“We’re doing the Community Edition for two reasons,” Doyle said. “Communigate Pro comes packaged with several open applications and a simple but powerful programming language and we expect that there will be a lot of interesting uses and capabilities added by the community.”

“Just as important, though, is that we see the future as having a domain for any house,” Doyle said. “All communications, including phone calls, will go to that domain.”

It’s all part of a future Communigate sees built on open communications standards.

In time, Doyle predicts, “there’s no concept of tolls or location-based services as there is in legacy communications networks or closed networks such as Skype’s. User@domain is the address space, or identity, for all forms of communications on the internet; whether it be email, voice, video, presence information, instant messaging or web sites. It’s all open standards communications, whether in your business, your home or in your car.”

To Doyle, a household computer server is the natural progression of the growth in recent years of home networks. He envisions the Communigate Pro Community Edition server to be the backbone for all communications in a home where it is installed.

And because CGP version 5.1 includes a software-based session border controller, which overcomes the sticky NAT difficulties that has hindered the VoIP-standardized SIP protocol, it allows for remote registration of devices right out of the box.

“It means you can send a low-cost ATA to Brazil,” Doyle said, “and have it register with your CGP box in San Francisco. Calls between the two locations are free.”

The way CGP treats a user account is different than how Asterisk is configured. In Asterisk, any device that registers with the server is addressed separately, and no two devices (IP phone, ATA, etc.) can have the same log in credentials or share the same extension (though macros can be used to direct incoming calls to more than one device).

CGP, on the other hand, allows multiple devices to register with the same credentials (usually, the same as the user’s email credentials) and to share extensions. What this means is that a single account can have various devices attached to it (i.e.: a phone at home, one in the office, a WiFi enabled mobile, or an IM client running on a laptop connecting to CGP’s built-in Jabber-like server). The user sets his or her extension as an alias to the email address, and when someone dials that extension, all the devices attached to the account will ring.

Another aspect of CGP that differs is how voice mail is handled. Besides managing voice mail over the telephone, a user can listen to messages sent to his or her email account, and can forward or delete the messages (which erases them from the server) on an email client such as Outlook or Mac Mail.

Doyle believes that CGP’s built-in web server will also be of great use in the home. “We think that people will quickly develop tools to easily publish home photos or a family blog, without need for an outside server.”

In order to facilitate use of the CGP Community Edition in homes where broadband internet access does not include a static IP, Doyle said, a plug-in is available that allows seamless interaction with No-IP.com, a service that allows a URL to point to changing dynamic IP addresses.

It may seem a stretch for a company like Communigate to move from the enterprise space and the ISP right into the home. But Doyle points out that more than 125 million around the world are now end-users of the CGP email server, and “the leap into the home is not that great.”

“CGP has shown that’s its architecture scales up cleanly, with less resources, and less administration than any other platform,” Doyle said. “It also scales down because of that same architecture.”

Doyle expects that a series of documents to help new home users of CGP will be available on a community web site at the end of November.

Communigate Pro can be downloaded for free at http://communigate.com/download.