Starium?

Tim May tcmay at got.net
Mon Apr 16 12:05:36 PDT 2001


At 6:33 PM +0000 4/16/01, Dr. Evil wrote:
>Peter,
>
>Thanks for the tip on that.  I'll be looking out for it, although at
>that price, it's cheaper to buy a dedicated PC and run SpeakFreely, as
>you point out.

There seem to be good market reasons for dedicated set up, especially 
one that ordinary phones attach to easily. The "bump in the cord" 
model.

For one, security. Which is more likely to have been compromised: a 
small sealed box implementing D-H forward secrecy or a PC which may 
have been tampered with by intruders, maids hired by the Feds, 
whatever/

Second, ease of use. Many of the intended users of the secure phones 
may not even be heavy users of computers, or may have various 
machines not supported by SpeakFreely or other programs.

Third, integration of the Starium-type chipset in cellphones remains 
the Big Win, right? What Pablo Escobar wants is a secure cellphone he 
can use on the run, in his villas, not some SpeakFreely program 
possibly bugged by the CIA or DEA.

>
>
>It's just a shame that we have encryption all over the place, except
>for the one medium which we probably use the most: voice.


It's been out there for years. Nautilus, SpeakFreely, etc. Just not 
much interest, hence not much development.

A Cypherpunks physical meeting was done with DES-encrypted audio 
links between Mountain View, Cambridge (MA), and Northern Virgina. 
This was in 1993. Impressive as hell.

--Tim May
-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list