Re: (#310) Speak Freely End of Life Announcement

> Message posted to the Speak Freely Forum
>   by John Walker on Thu, 31 Jul 2003 20:16:30 +0200 (MEST).
>   http://www.fourmilab.ch/wb/speak-freely.pl?rev=310
>
<snip>
> I shall not debate this decision, the reasons for which are completely spelled
> out in the document cited above.

One of the factors that play for us: Internet gaming. Many games use UDP
as bidirectional communication mechanism. They are also highly-sought-for
application for very large groups of users (see eg. number of Everquest
players). For a small example of ports and protocols used see eg.
<http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/answerstips/story/0,24330,3324625,00.html>
or <http://www.u.arizona.edu/~trw/games/ports.htm>.

We shouldn't forget the existence of commercial VoIP software providers.
Let's Dialpad.com be one of many examples. If they don't go under
en-masse, the situation can't be so critical for us too.

The vendors of SOHO hardware are well-aware of this need. I recently
configured D-Link DI-604 router/NAT box, which has a nice set of features
oriented towards Net gamers (which in turn caters also to the needs of
SpeakFreely users).

There are technologies that will help us. We don't need to develop the
NAT-handling approaches on our own; we can just copy the experiences of
game developers.

IPv6 *will* be a change. Proxying and NAT and other services pose
additional overhead for the cash-and-personnel-strapped ISPs, who will be
more than willing to get rid of them (and the associated techsupport
calls). Of course, the content providers are happy about current status
quo, and the ISPs resort to NAT because of the lack of IP address space.
NAT will go away in most places once IPv6 takes off; most of the
resistance we can expect from the ISPs that will in between become
subsidiaries of media-oriented megacorps (Disney, Sony, etc.). But again,
there is nothing that couldn't be successfully hacked with enough effort
spent. And again, because the underlying problem affects many more
technologies than just VoIP, it doesn't necessarily have to be OURS
effort.

For now, for the cases both users are behind NAT the only solution
available are the described bounce servers, a help-yourself solution for
the ones who have friends with suitable machines Out There. Again, we can
outsource a bulk of work to folks working on gaming technologies,
anticensorship proxies, and - last but not least - P2P networks.

SpeakFreely is old program. Old and (maybe because of that) fairly simple,
with straightforward architecture (judging from the source code of unix
version). Its well-done encryption support is one of the features rare to
be seen elsewhere. Its value can be even more enhanced using my patch
developed for unix version 7.6a, called sfParanoidPatch: see
<http://213.246.91.154/patches/speakfreely/>. The most recent feature,
reading the keys from a numbered file descriptor, was added after a
suggestion of one of the Nautilus cryptographic phone developers, in order
to allow easier usage of SpeakFreely as a module for larger secure
telephony system. Its relatively simple C implementation could allow its
port into J2ME, allowing it to run on future generations of cellular
phones or mobile terminals, allowing secure wireless telephony with
off-the-shelf equipment.

I personally have excellent experiences with long-term transatlantic use
of SpeakFreely with one friend in the USA, on a rather large ISP. I have
good experiences with using a port forwarding through a VPN, when my ISP
encountered problems with router configuration leading to my UDP comm
being completely dropped, while my VPN to an office on another ISP staying
up. Currently I am also experimenting with a VoIP-over-VPN setup with our
foreign offices, in the quest for both saving us some expenses (corporate
interest) and denying local Telco some of their international fee plunder
(personal interest - this is the best revenge for what they did to me).

We also shouldn't forget we rarely see here the reactions of the people
who use SpeakFreely without problems; only the ones who encounter problems
ask for help. So we get disproportionate amount of them.

This project still has hope. More hope than we could ever wish for.

WANTED: New project leader.


PS: Thanks to John Walker for his excellent work!


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