Starium?

[Tim May]

At 8:27 PM +0000 4/16/01, Dr. Evil wrote:
>  > 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.
>
>That is the best model, probably, but there are some intermediate
>models between "bump in the cord" and "compile SpeakFreely and figure
>out how to get it to work".  Starium is obviously the easiest to use.
>Plug it in, press one button, you're done.  However, with a small
>dedicated PC or a PDA, it should be possible to get closer to what
>Starium promises.

I encourage you to offer your design services, for sale of course, to 
Eric Blossom and Starium. They have been working on this issue for a 
number of years and don't seem to be close to the PDA yet. The 
"small PC" has more bandwidth, but mobile Pentiums and suchlike are 
not there yet. (Pablo Escobar will not likely become a gargoyle and 
wear a hip PC and glasses, at least not anytime soon.)
>
>>  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/
>
>Both probably could be tampered, but I guess a generic PC would be
>easier.

Indeed. And harder to show tampering with.

>
>I hope to have time to take a crack at doing Starium-on-a-PDA.

I encourage you. But it won't be a weekend hack. I doubt even an iPAQ 
has the horsepower, and certainly the Dragonball PDAs don't.


>  > 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.
>
>That's cool.

Yes, it was. IIRC, Hugh Daniel did most of the legwork to get it set 
up and running.

--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