
On Sat, 13 Jul 1996, Harry Hochheiser wrote:
On 12 Jul 96 at 21:31, Arun Mehta wrote:
VSNL, my government-owned ISP (which also has a monopoly on all international traffic) made me sign that I will not use my Internet connection for voice traffic. Is there any way they could find out if I were using PGPfone, or rather, could I prevent them from finding out?
Most Internet telephony systems use UDP packets to transfer speech, since the lower overhead of UDP (as opposed to TCP) allows for better throughput. I assume (but I'm not certain) that PGPfone works the same way.
Unfortunately, most of your other TCP/IP communication will be based on TCP packets. Therefore, it's theoretically possible for your ISP to monitor your traffic, watching for large numbers of UDP packets.
Thanks for the input. Is UDP used for other purposes not related to voice that I might pretend to be doing? Or is there still some way of fooling them? Arun
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