D.B.:

Generally, you are right in suggesting that anything that requires people to crawl behind their computers, attach new cables, purchase and debug a sound card under Windows, and generally engage in techno-weenie hardware manipulations will have less appeal than something plug and play.

hey, how about this: remember all the plans for "blue boxes" etc. that got circulated all over the place during the 70's? I propose creating the schematics for a "Purple box". the box would have, dangling, those little rubber cups that can fit over phone receivers, like on the modems. it would be called the "purple box" because I have not heard of any other devices called "purple boxes" (i.e. this string in the "colorful" hacker namespace does not seem to be used up yet) and also the famous WWII compromised japanese diplomatic codes were called Purple. the way it would work is that both the caller and callee would have to agree to use the purple box. they would say "purple" over the phone after they called up and then both hook up their little gizmos. the neat thing about this is that if it catches on, people would end up buying and selling them and improving them. actually, as I recall a long time ago someone proposed on this list doing something very similar except using the devices as a kind of "kids toy" that would introduce children to encryption. it would allow them to talk through the device like a bullhorn, and the receiver would hear gobbledygook unless they had a decoder next to their ear. now I am serious, this could be a *really* fun toy for kids. you know how they love to keep secrets and play around with the idea of communicating among their friends amidst their enemies. someone who has an entrepreneurial nose, I bet you could create a *hot*fad* out of this, and sell perhaps a fraction as fast as Pogs!!! (you'd be a zillionaire at even 1% the penetration!!!) one of the problems is that serious crypto chips are pretty expensive. but an analog scrambler would actually be a decent start on all this, and I bet it could be built pretty cheaply. I volunteer to find a place to *archive* (webify) any of the plans that people write up and successfully test, including GIFs or whatever. ~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^ \ / ~/ |\| | | |> | : : : : : : Vladimir Z. Nuri : : : : <vznuri@netcom.com> \/ ./_.| | \_/ |\ | : : : : : : ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/vz/vznuri/home.html