Voice crypto: the last crypto taboo

[Tim May]

On Monday, August 6, 2001, at 09:05 AM, Eugene Leitl wrote:

> On Mon, 6 Aug 2001, David Honig wrote:
>
>> And nautilus and PGPfone.  Maybe on a pocket PC if they have
>> decent audio.  How do you make money on this approach, though?
>
> By selling wireless bandwidth? Hardware? Leather accessoires and GUI
> skins? Consulting?
>
> I don't think the apps themselves should be commercial. It only leads to
> featuritis, lousy code and backdoors.
>
>> Interop with an existing PC/Mac based tool might help.
>
> Definitely. There are, supposedly people out there who do VoIP from 
> their
> desktops, but I never met any.
>

I have. I've been telephoned by people who used Internet telephony for 
part of the long-haul, reaching a local line at my end. Sounded slightly 
tinny, but was OK.

And a friend of mine here in California routinely calls his relatives in 
Chicago over such a link. They can talk for hours at no cost to him.

And there was at least one meeting of the Cypherpunks, in around 1993, 
where three scattered sites (Mountain View, Northern Virginia, 
Boston/Cambridge) were linked with an "M-bone" voice-over-Internet 
conference call. Better yet, DES-encrypted. That was 8 years ago.

--Tim May