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Software Privacy The Internet

Speak Freely To Be Withdrawn January 15 249

Posted by timothy from the you-can-still-freely-speak dept.
wrenhunt writes "The Speak Freely site has this: 'On January 15th, 2004, Speak Freely will be discontinued and removed from this Web site. Existing users may continue to use the program as long as they wish, but no further releases will be forthcoming. For details and the reasons why Speak Freely is being discontinued, please see the full end of life announcement.'" The reasons are various and interesting; it's graceful of the author to provide an explanation of why a piece of software is going away. Update: 01/11 19:22 GMT by T : As reader pi_rules points out, this story is a duplicate -- my apologies.
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Speak Freely To Be Withdrawn January 15 More

Speak Freely To Be Withdrawn January 15

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  • Dupe. (Score:5, Informative)

    by pi_rules ( 123171 ) * on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:03PM (#7945866)
    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/20/155625 3&mode=nested&tid=126&tid=185&tid= 95

    For God's sake, search for 'speakfreely' in your own engine. It returns ONE result! The same damned article!

    • Last chance to see (Score:4, Funny)

      by Scrameustache ( 459504 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:07PM (#7945903) Homepage Journal
      For God's sake, search for 'speakfreely' in your own engine. It returns ONE result! The same damned article!

      You're not thinking like a /. editor, to them this is their last chance to slashdot that server to oblivion!

      • Re:Last chance to see (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Why do you call them "Editors"

        They do not edit... Fuck, most of 'em can't even spell.

        They accept postings and link them to the front page. Remember, they provide no original content here, just relinking...

        it's a "Dynamic Bookmark" website for most of us.

    • sorry I missed it (Score:4, Informative)

      by timothy ( 36799 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:18PM (#7945971) Journal
      unfortunately for me, the program's author spells it as "Speak Freely" rather than "speakfreely," and as a result the search engine doesn't actually find that article when searching on the name.

      timothy

      • 1996 will be a very exciting year for the WWW. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:38PM (#7946077) Homepage Journal
        How about a Slashdot search engine that accepts boolean operators and phrases? Or searching on a phrase plus other fields in the comment/story's DB record, like author, date, topic/section? A better search engine would use less server resources when searching, and members could search their own post history to link a new comment to an old, but still relevant, point. Slashdot's server seems to use something like the ancient "swish" freeware. This post is practically a quote of a similar email I sent to a customer back in 1995! These features are coded by Slashdot users every day. Who will help me add it to the Slashcode? Who at Slashdot is interested in rolling it out at Slashdot? I'd rather code than complain.
      • Hey, this is off-topic, but I just wanted to say it's great that you replied, admitted the mistake and apologized. Seems like a little thing, but most of the time it feels like the editors don't listen to us, and direct interaction with us even in a little post like this is nice.

    • Posting this now is VERY appropriate (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:34PM (#7946051) Journal
      Dupe. ... For God's sake, search for 'speakfreely' in your own engine. It returns ONE result! The same damned article!

      That posting was last September.

      John is taking the archive down next Thursday. (Possibly Wed night - he's in Switzerland.)

      A reminder post now, when we still have a few days to grab the archive, is VERY appropriate.

      (Thanks, Timothy!)

  • Cheap routers.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Aliencow ( 653119 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:03PM (#7945873) Homepage Journal
    Why isn't it easier for people to open up ports on their cheap routers ? Tell someone to "Just forward your port 4893 to your computer" and they'll look at you like you're an alien, so why not include an application to do it that goes in their start menu (in addition to the web based interface) that would detect software trying to listen, and then asking if you want these to be open ? A bit like ZoneAlarm but controlling the router...

    • You lost me (Score:3, Funny)

      by radoni ( 267396 )
      ...at "Start Menu"

    • And we will call it... (Score:4, Informative)

      by DAldredge ( 2353 ) <SlashdotEmail@GMail.Com> on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:06PM (#7945895) Journal
      And we will call it, i don't know, Universal Plug and Play?

      HINT. Do a Google search on Universal Plug and Play. It does what you are asking. I do not use it, but the latest beta firmware for my WAP supports it.
    • He's referring to ISPs NATing off their customers, not customers being restricted by their own routers. Though honestly, I've never heard of an ISP doing this where I live (Ontario, Canada)... Maybe I just haven't been paying attention. Suffice it to say that if my ISP does it, they'll probably be losing me as a customer.

      • Re:Cheap routers.. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by uradu ( 10768 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @03:02PM (#7946196)
        > He's referring to ISPs NATing off their customers, not customers being restricted by their own routers

        His rant gives no indication either way, I don't know how you draw that conclusion. Your own experience (and mine, and most others') tells you that you've never heard of ISP-level NAT, so why would he mean that? He's just bitter about NAT for whatever reasons and venting by the most dramatic means he has: EOL-ing a fairly popular piece of software. Well, I know why he hates NAT, but that's hardly NAT's fault, that's similar to getting angry at the color Yellow for being so bright. Instead of pouting, he could think about or work on some generic method to overcome NAT's inherent weaknesses.

        In fact, since--as he himself puts it--NAT will be with us for a long time, even after switching to IPv6, it might be very worthwhile for him to think about methods of addressing private computers below the transport level, but above the application level. A universal method of sub-addressing machines would be very useful, since not all machines will ever be on the public internet, whether for security or address limitation reasons. Port mapping works well enough for some things but has inherent limitations (16 bit, many apps assume fixed ranges etc.), and ports were really meant to identify applications on a single machine, not machines on a network. It's really a hack, and you don't build future technologies on hacks.

        • Re:Cheap routers.. (Score:4, Interesting)

          by TheSpoom ( 715771 ) * <slashdot@ubermAA ... inus threevowels> on Sunday January 11, 2004 @03:51PM (#7946568) Homepage Journal
          Then it's time for a paradigm shift, since I've obviously been misunderstanding.

          Admittedly, NAT can stop inbound connections from reaching a computer that otherwise would receive all connections had it not been behind a NAT router. But my computer is no longer a peer on the internet; my NETWORK is now a peer on the internet, with ports opened and forwarded to multiple machines as I see fit. In one way of thinking, it allows me to use the computers in my home more as I would had I been running a corporate perimeter network, with different machines running web servers, FTP servers, and the like.

          Admittedly, Joe Sixpack has no idea why his computer won't allow inbound connections anymore after he's put a router on his network, but here's the thing: Joe Sixpack has no idea what an inbound connection is, nor, likely, does he even know SpeakFreely even exists. If Joe Sixpack doesn't want the feds snooping on his conversations, he'll find a way to forward his ports, like all decent home-level routers allow. If John Walker wanted to combat this NAT-related inability to use his software, why didn't he just post some documentation or links showing how users can forward the correct ports? The moment Joe Sixpack wants to use SpeakFreely, he could go to the site and see "hey, I have a Linksys router, and this link that says 'IF YOU HAVE A ROUTER CLICK HERE' shows me how to get around it!"

          IMHO this whole end of life thing seems a bit much if it's based entirely around home-level routers, as this issue is largely avoidable.
        • the purpose of nat "firewalls" (which is what most people run) is to make computers unaddressable.

          Take that out and you're fucked on the firewall part.

          • Re:Cheap routers.. (Score:3, Informative)

            by uradu ( 10768 )
            > the purpose of nat [...] is to make computers unaddressable.

            No, the purpose of NAT is to allow multiple computers to share one single public IP address. The firewalling is just a convenient side effect. You can still deny incoming packets even if they're addressed to a very specific machine, so just because internal machines are addressable doesn't mean you can't still have effective firewalling. It will just rely on other mechanisms.

        • His rant gives no indication either way, I don't know how you draw that conclusion. Your own experience (and mine, and most others') tells you that you've never heard of ISP-level NAT, so why would he mean that?

          Walker's announcement does give an indication:
          • But won't NAT go away once we migrate to IPv6?
            (If you don't know what IPv6 is, please skip ahead to the next question.) First of all, any bets on when IPv6 will actually be implemented end-to-end for a substantial percentage of individual Internet us
          • > Why would the "powers that be", such as ISPs

            The ISP bit is your interpretation, nowhere does his piece mention the word ISP or provider or whatever. It could also mean government regulators, or whatever, if you're of the tin foil hat crowd. In fact, one extremely strong point against your ISP conjecture is that broadband providers are starting to clamp down on NAT usage, instead wanting to lease you an IP address for every single machine on your home LAN. IOW, creating an artificially scarce IP addres
            • > Heck, if you consider that kind of work to be so beneficial,
              > how about doing it yourself? It might be very worthwhile.

              And how do you know that I'm not? Network communications is one of my main areas of interest, and session initiation in a world of NAT *is* a problem, but there are solutions other than proxy servers or just giving up. That's just plain nihilism.

              I guess when he's been doing it for over a decade and given that he's already over 50 years old, the benefits for him no longer justify

    • Re:Cheap routers.. (Score:4, Informative)

      by JebusIsLord ( 566856 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:07PM (#7945909)
      that sounds a lot like Universal Plug and Play, which IS supported by Windows XP and many routers. For example, MSN messenger needs UPnP to open and close random ports within a NAT to send and recieve files... without UPnP this function does not work. There is also a free UPnP implementation for Linux NAT boxes out there as well.

      • Re:Cheap routers.. (Score:4, Funny)

        by kfg ( 145172 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:32PM (#7946041)
        Yeah, UPnP is pretty nifty. Just think about it. All you have to do is install a piece of software and it can give itself whatever firewall permissions it thinks it needs to do whatever deed it thinks it needs to do, and all without involving the user.

        And imagine never having to flash firmware again. The device simply keeps track of available upgrades and flashes itself.

        Why, Belkin could give us a new popup coded directly into firmware every week. That way you never have to get tired of looking at the same one over and over again.

        Sign me up.

        KFG

    • 'nuff said. Anything that can make ICQ work properly behind a NAT machine must be good.

  • Too bad -- design was obsolete (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:06PM (#7945899)
    Any protocol that isn't designed to accomdate NAT is incompatible with the modern Internet and is obsolete by design.

    Yes, in the stone ages, the Internet was "end-to-end". It's not anymore. Sorry for your loss.

    • Re:Too bad -- design was obsolete (Score:5, Informative)

      by Albanach ( 527650 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:21PM (#7945991) Homepage
      Then almost all voip and h323 software is "obsolete". Alternatively, perhaps you jsut don't know much about the protocols and why they're difficult to route over NAT. Don't you think is you could easily design coip to run through NAT everyone would be doing it? Even skype [skype.com] needs a non NAT box to work - if neither client can be used it'll use someone else in the middle.

      As has been pointed out, what we really need are easier solutions such as port forwarding - you could turn the port into an extention number. So your voip could be slashdot.org:5 and then a bit like VNC have traffic routed to slashdot.org port xxxx + 5. For that to work we'd need cooperation from router manufacturers.

      The other alternative is IPv6. VoIP might just be the driving force needed to see IPv6 deployed in the real world.

      • The other alternative is IPv6. VoIP might just be the driving force needed to see IPv6 deployed in the real world.

        I don't see that as a solution, for one basic reason... Why do most of us NAT/MASQ our connections in the first place?

        Yeah, some do it for the sake of firewalling, but most of us do it because our ISPs will only give us a single address, and at best will let us pay more for an extra two or three addresses.

        Using IPv6 won't change that. It would technically mean we have an abundance of add
        • I use NAT for one simple reason - NOT doing it would be one more opportunity for some twerp to try and break into my network. Until it becomes possible to narrow the source of an attack down to a single person or persons, the chance of losing control over my own networks is not worth the risk.
        • Using IPv6 won't change that. It would technically mean we have an abundance of addresses, but our ISPs would still pull the same BS, expecting us to pay more for the same level of service.

          Possibly not.

          Back in Ye Olden Days, IP addresses were free and easy to get. But they became a relatively scarce resource, and companies started charging because of that.

          When IPv6 takes off, ISPs will be able to give out as many addresses as they like without incurring significant costs. With even a modicum of competit
      • Bluntly speaking, yes, all VoIP and H323 software is obsolete for these reasons.

        People are confusing "end to end" applications with "end to end" mechanisms.

        When the telegraph was the latest technology, the 'application' and the 'mechanism' were practically identical -- pulses of electricity sent over a wire. Same with the initial voice and phone system. Over time, though, people started separating the 'application' (voice/information transmission) from the 'mechanism' (eletrical patterns on the wire.)

        • Re:Too bad -- design was obsolete (Score:4, Interesting)

          by mysticalreaper ( 93971 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @05:37PM (#7947227)
          Wow. I *completely* disagree with what you've just stated here. Allow me to explain why.

          First off, the internet was BUILT as an end-to-end network. You cannot just sweep this fact aside by saying it's "outdated". This principle is what MADE the internet successful. Without end-to-end, the internet would have gone nowhere. Really.

          We want the application to run end-to-end, because that is what make the application useful -- but folks have confused this with requiring the mechanism to be identical from end to end

          But now, in the new system, it requires that the network be AWARE of the application, and configured EXPLICITLY to allow this certain type of data to be transferred. Now you have to ask permission from the people who control the network to run your application. Now you have to make configuration changes in the network itself before you can run any new application. Gone is the open development environment of the internet. Gone are new applications that pop up that anyone can use immediately. (This is how the web started. Your NAT support would have made the web so difficult that it wouldn't have gone anywhere. Imagine the millions who would have had to configure their NAT to work with a new system of doubious worth.)

          You say that the network should be SEPERATE from the application, and then go on to promote the application being DEPENDANT on the specific configuration of the network.

          "like in the days of the telegraph, the mechanism and the application were synonymous. That is an obsolete model, though. Our needs and demands have gotten more varied and complex from the point of view of the applications -- the mechanism (IPv4) needs to be separated out from the applications."

          AND IT IS! That's the POINT, Bookwyrm. Currently, in the 'obsolete' model, the network is TRANSPARENT to the application. No specific configuration of the network is requried. The network is seperate from the application. However, NAT makes the application depend on the network, and thus makes the network and the application once again joined, like the telegraph, phone and cable TV networks of the past. That's a step BACKWARDS.

          Even now, because of NAT, we can observe the harmful effects of new development. VoIP doesn't work properly. File sharing applications are suffering massively because people can't share, even when they want to. Running a server of any kind, (a game server for you and your budies to play on) requires additional configuration, making it harder. People in certain situations, like in university, for example, have no ability to influence the functionality of the NAT, and are stuck being internet consumers. And don't forget that it's even MORE arduous to have multiple computers doing the same thing, like being a webserver, behind the NAT. Now you have to specify to the CLIENTS to use different ports for different servers behind the NAT. It begins to get so ugly that people give up.

          Your goals are noble, Bookwyrm, but your thoughts on the matter are misguided. This site [worldofends.com] might help shed some additional light on the situtation.

          And finally, the people who invented the internet for real though that end-to-end addressing was the best idea, and from their efforts, we have the most advanced communcation system humans have ever seen. To say that they are utterly wrong requires some guts, and also a LOT of backing up. In other words, the proof is in the pudding. Where is YOUR all NAT internet?

          • First off, the internet was BUILT as an end-to-end network. You cannot just sweep this fact aside by saying it's "outdated". This principle is what MADE the internet successful. Without end-to-end, the internet would have gone nowhere. Really.

            Rebuttal: First off, the initial gun powder weapons were BUILT as muzzle loading, single shot weapons. I can certainly sweep this fact aside as "outdated". This does not say that the black powder weapons were NOT successful in their time, but now, they would not

      • Re:Too bad -- design was obsolete (Score:4, Interesting)

        by uradu ( 10768 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @03:23PM (#7946356)
        > As has been pointed out, what we really need are easier solutions such as port forwarding

        What we really need is a generic method of sub-addressing machines. The public/private network paradigm is here to stay for various reasons, so we should shape our protocols to cope with that. We need another protocol between IP and TCP/UDP: IP addresses a point-of-presence on the internet, TCP/UDP a POP on a machine (i.e. an app), we need something that addresses a POP on an internal network. In fact, it could be a nestable protocol that replaces IP and allows for unlimited levels of private subdivision. That way a large company could have multiple internal NAT setups and you could still address a specific machine several levels down the hierarchy. I guess one could modify IP to be nestable, and IP stacks inside routers to be aware of it. Then you would address a private machine as a.b.c.d/e.f.g.h where a.b.c.d is the public IP address, and e.f.g.h the private one. The public NAT router would examine the next nested IP header (in this case e.f.g.h) and pass the packet to the correct internal machine (which could be another NAT box, ad infinitum).

        The downside of course is that we're then back to the old UUCP days where you had to explicitly specify the route to the destination machine, making the network more fragile. Still, given that for the vast majority of setups it would be just a two-tiered setup (public internet and internal LAN), it should be workable.
        • Okay, uradu, we already HAVE a system for doing that.

          You propose a a.b.c.d/e.f.g.h addressing sheme. Where a.b.c.d is the connection facing the world, and e.f.g.h is the internal IP. How is that any better than our current set up of having e.f.g.h point directly to the host? You're still pointing directly to the host in both cases. Oh, perhaps you're worried about security?

          Well, if you have an office building with a single internet connection feeding all the computers, you can still put a firewall on
          • I laughed when i read this. What you just described is a router. A plain regular router of which thousands exist. I looks at the destination IP of the packet, and forwards it on to the correct place! Wow, what a concept!

            Not quite though. If you sent a packet to ip address 12.34.56.78 and port 5555, which NATed machine does it go to? Does it send the packet to 10.0.0.1 or 10.0.0.2 or ...? Can *you*, as the originator of the packet, specify what machine the packet is routed to given that there are multip
            • > Can *you*, as the originator of the packet, specify what machine the packet is
              > routed to given that there are multiple NATed machines listening in on port 5555

              How would "multiple NATed machines" "listen in" on the same port? A router normally forwards packets from ONE port to ONE machine, unless you've hacked yours to broadcast them instead on the LAN.

              The reason he doesn't get what I mean is that with current routers and IP you cannot directly send a packet from outside to address 192.168.1.3 on
          • > I laughed when i read this. What you just described is a router. A plain regular router of which thousands exist.

            You don't quite follow me, I'm afraid. In my example, the only public (and publicly routable) IP address is a.b.c.d, which as far as the greater internet is concerned, is the final destination address of this packet, and the payload of the packet is opaque as far as anybody is concerned. In our case it's actually the address of a router. Only this router cares that there is another nested p
        • What we really need is a generic method of sub-addressing machines.

          We already have at least two.

          One is IPv6. The other is VPNs. Instead of coming up with a completely new mechanism and getting it in the routers, we should go with one that we've been working on for a while and just get it deployed.
          • > We already have at least two.
            > One is IPv6. The other is VPNs

            IPv6 doesn't solve the problem of how to reach private addresses, it merely provides tons more public ones to eliminate the need for private ones. Except the lack of public addresses isn't the only reason for the modern use of NAT anymore.

            Regarding VPNs, it's an interesting way of bypassing the problem by making you a part of the private network, but you get other problems that way. You obtain an IP address on the destination network, an
    • Any protocol that isn't designed to accomdate NAT is incompatible with the modern Internet and is obsolete by design

      Wrong. You mix up different problems. There are 'evil' protocols like ftp or ipsec or sun/rpc or ... which are not compatible with single NAT (client NATed, server not). ie. they negotiate a random second port for a data channel like ftp does. These protocols are 'bad by design'. Some of them can be NATed if the nat box tracks the negotiation ("ftp helper module").

      But mr. Walker is speaki

      • Many propose "oh just configure portforwarding on your NAT box", but that does not scale. Imagine a bunch of workstations configured via dhcp behind NAT (typical setup in mid-range companies). How do you set up that?

        Give every machine a name, configure the NAT box to forward whatever port you want to that name instead of to a specific IP address. If you're using anything better than a home-type cable/dsl NAT box, then it most likely has support for this, for exactly this type of reason. More likely, you'r
        • If you're doing your job right, you're probably doing your best to make sure it is blocked at the firewall. It's a workplace, not the users personal playground. Not every application should be allowed to run inside your network. It's the companies' network, not the user's.

          That depends on what kind of company you're at. If workers are treated as machiery, that's probably true. For example, running a big call center, you might be able to argue that things should be locked down.

          But there are other kinds of

  • Speak Freely does hard encryption (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MichaelCrawford ( 610140 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:12PM (#7945933) Homepage Journal
    I can understand why development is stopping, but it's important to understand that Speak Freely is still a valuable resource to the community.

    Why? Because speak freely does voice over IP with hard encryption. I don't know of any other VoIP product that does that.

    So if you care about your privacy, and have the time and skill, get the source code while you still can, and make a new generation VoIP product that addresses the problems in Speak Freely while continuing to provide hard encryption.

    If you wonder why you should bother, read Why You Should Use Encryption. [goingware.com]

    Thank you for your attention.

  • One method... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by topham ( 32406 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:14PM (#7945948) Homepage

    One method which works on some NAT routers is pretty simple:

    Output a packet via UDP to a particular IP address and port number. The NAT setups I've used will log that, and subsequently allow incoming UDP packets from that IP address and port number. If both machines negotiate via a third party and then trade such packets blind they can then start communicating. Note: some of the UDP packets will be lost at the start of the process... doesn't matter, not a problem.

    • Re:One method... (Score:2, Informative)

      by danknight ( 570145 )
      Yea.. But he is not talking about your NAT box, he is talking about the trend of ISP's using NAT and giving users non Routable IP addresses. Sort of like AOL. I Suppose you could just call your ISP Customer service and ask them nicely to open up Port XXXX on thier NAT for your 192.168.X.X IP that they assigned you :)
    • I was just wondering about that..

      particularly, I was wondering this; if both ends swap IP and port numbers via a third party such as the LWL server, they should be able to blindly send syn and and packets at each other as if they were setting up an outbound connection from both ends. The NAT devices (router, ISP firewall, whatever) both think they opened the connection and once it's open it's all just packets, right?

      • I guess you would have to swap a few more things than IP and port numbers if there is a proper firewall in the way, but I believe that it should be possible - I am not sure if it would work with a standard TCP/IP stack though as you would have to send a SYN/ACK withouth having received a SYN. What would need to happen is the following. You have two computers behind NAT that want to speak to each other, A and B. You have an "enabling" public server C. A and B exchange IP addresses/ports and the ID of the
    • I've thought about trying that one, but the problem is this: Let's say that you have two networks, A and B. Say you send a UDP packet from a host on A that has source port 100 and destinatio port 5000, NAT firewall A will translate that to some other source port, say 535. That packet will then bounce off of NAT firewall B because a connection hasn't been opened yet on port 5000. When a host on B goes to try to open the fake UDP pathway, how is it going to know to use port 535 on the A NAT firewall that

      • I guess you could have the third party machine get the fiewall source port of A (if you send your opening packet to it instead) and pass that on to B, but wouldn't most NAT firewall writers check to make sure that all mapped ports are remote address specific? That is, if 23.34.55.66 is where my host A sent its original UDP packet to, I'm not going to accept responses from some other IP address.

        Well, you use a third-party server to find out the IP address and local port of the other side - and then you ju

        • Well, you use a third-party server to find out the IP address and local port of the other side - and then you just start sending UDP packages. The first few will be lost, but then it should work.

          No, it can't work if both are NATed. Here's why:

          Start with the case of one NATed box (call it A) and one with a real IP address (B). They meet on a real server, and B gives its address and port. Call it 12345. So A sends B a packet from port 10000 to B's port 12345. A's NAT box notices this, remaps 10000 to, say
    • There are a number of ways to handle this. On linux, a custom iptables module could be constructed. On just about any Unix net filtering package, mangling rules could be used. On linux, or assorted small router devices, one could use uPnP, which while not secure in any way is certainly functional. (There is a upnpd for linux; it works, though not amazingly well last time I checked.) There are the rules you suggest. There are permanent port forwards.

      Giving up simply because people are having problems with

  • This could happen to any OSS software. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by perotbot ( 632237 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:15PM (#7945953) Journal
    If Linus said "I've got my family to raise, and a life to lead without being called Messiah by everyone jumping on the bandwagon,and this isn't fun anymore. you know what? I'm done. " We (/. and others) would be doing two things, one mourning the lost of our "leader" and secondly, trying to find a way to keep development going without said leader. SpeekFreely is the work of one person, if someone else thinks they can fix the problems identified (NAT issues. major code rewrite), then by all means grab the CVS code and fork another project away from the original, that's the point of OSS, you can STOP and if someone thinks it's worthwhile, they'll continue it.
    • The difference between this and what you describe is that if Linus decided to step down, the community would spontaneously force an election of someone to take his place. Some of the people I could think of off the top of my head include Andrew Morton, Alan Cox, and maybe Dave Jones.

      Sure, Linus quitting his role as the titular developer of the Linux kernel would be pretty bad, but it would never lead to an EOL of the Linux kernel.
    • You should read "Illusions" by Richard Bach. It's kind of campy Christian fiction, but its from the Vatican council II days, so it's a lot more optimistic and progressive thinking than today's evangelical christian pulp. It's central character is a Messiah who on his second time around decides this isn't fun anymore and quits. The wording and style of your post immediately made me think of the book, though I haven't read it in years.

  • Do not despair, gentle readers (Score:5, Funny)

    by aardvarko ( 185108 ) <webmaster&aardvarko,com> on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:35PM (#7946057) Homepage
    Your right to speak FREELY has been revoked. Your right to speak in DUPLICATE, however, is still flourishing wildly!

  • IPV6 and NAT (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LinuxInDallas ( 73952 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:35PM (#7946060)
    He mentions that with IPv6, NAT will not be required because the address pace will be so much bigger. Does anyone know if the costs in obtaining your own static IP would then drop dramatically? I mean, will it be financially feasible for most of us to get a static IP when IPv6 is in full use? Most of us would need at least several.
    • The problem is getting IPv6 distributed all the way down to the last mile while simultaneously eliminating all of the legacy hardware and n00bish software that won't allow it. With enough time, energy, and money, I suspect that in 10-15 years IPv4 will be dead.
    • I currently have a /64 of ipv6 space, totally free. I probably could give every bit of ram in my home a private ipv6 address. (that's an obligatory remark)

      Of course it's trough some tunnel broker (thanks sixxs!), but it works.

      I think if ipv6 penetrates the enduser-market in native mode (won't happen 'till cisco and MS say so), most isp's will give in.

      After all, they're currently denying you a static ip (if they are) because they're short of them themselves, and a pool of dynamic ip's can serve more users
      • I think if ipv6 penetrates the enduser-market in native mode (won't happen 'till cisco and MS say so), most isp's will give in.

        Cisco and MS said yes to IPv6 a while ago, but it's still not here, so there must be some other reason.
    • Businesses only RAISE prices. They typically don't lower them. The notable example is technology. But even then, they typically just cycle the older stuff into "value" categories while the newest stuff gets the premium price of the previous generation.

      IP addresses are a commodity. From that standpoint the price will go down for ISPs and Backbone providers to buy IP addresses. But they must upgrade their equipment to IPv6, thats a BIG investment.

      The likely scenario becomes that they will RAISE the cos
    • IPv6 addresses are practically free, but "consumer" ISPs still won't give them to you.
    • There is absolutly no good reason what-so-ever why a static IP should cost any money at all. All IP addresses were created when the tcp/ip protocol was developed and the _ONLY_ reason they can be dynamic is because the DHCP server was designed. It costs extra to run DHCP over statics - but in some cases it may be a little more convieniant, like in a large company where you juast wnat to be able to plug a machine in.

      In the begining the IP address blocks were just handed out to whoever asked for them - for
  • What's the difference between geeks and nerds? Are nerds better communicators? This "goodbye" letter from SpeakFreely's inventor is good form, even useful documentation. It would be perfectly appropriate on the , but there's nothing. The farewell will be lost to those just picking up this orphaned project. So they won't know its heritage, its allergies, or its Dickensian origin. While a bit tearjerking, those mysteries will also contribute to the demise of this worthy contender in the VoIP evolution game. A [sourceforge.net]

  • That's too bad (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Do not eat ( 594588 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @02:52PM (#7946141)
    SF is a great program. It's not graphical bloatware, it supports many compressions, it's somewhat modular ... I've spent countless hours getting a stable 2-way voice comm over a 33.6 dialup link, back in the days, and it actually worked at some point (the rest of the time it didn't, which prompted me to change from AOL to an Internet provider. Thanks SpeakFreely!)

    When I discovered I could have a voice converstaions with anybody in the world, I was so excited I picked up my phone to tell my friend!

  • Wake Up, folks!! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by luck-is-for-rabbits ( 623743 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @03:13PM (#7946275)
    John Walker, the creator and for years the principle maintainer of Speak Freely, posted the EOL message months ago, and since then the Speak Freely community has been organizing ways to continue the project and extend the lifetime of the software.

    As a long-time user (since 1997) of Speak Freely, I can attest to the care, overall quality and highly useful nature of this package. It has not merely saved large amounts of money, but changed the very nature of the way I conduct communications with friends and collaborators around the world. I am sure it has done so for a great many others as well. New mailing lists have been established to replace the old, and at least one online forum has been offered as another place to carry on discussion about Speak Freely.

    Overall, news of the demise of this package is greatly exxagerated. While the founder is leaving, it has already found new homes, with three projects on sourceforge, and developers working on other efforts as well.

    This is a natural development in many OSS projects, the orginator sees less utility in the project than others do, and they are free to pick it up. Rather than mourn the loss of this excellent software or wring my hands over the end of OSS, I believe this is in general a healthy develpment, and I'm looking forward to more years of using this package.

    • I would suspect that university profs could set their students in motion as part of their classwork.

      If there is one group who can benefit, it's geeks who have absolute control over POWERFUL hardware. They can save their department long distance $$$ and use it to pay grad students and project students.

      Hence it becomes a self sustaining endeavor. The money saved through Speak Freely is used to subsidize more Speak Frely development ;-)

    • John Walker is playing it on the safe side, and just warning users that he can no longer guarantee support as he will not be providing it himself. It is fairly mature software though, and doesn't need much updating with time, so that's why there hasn't been much development over the past few years.

      Since John has withdrawn from development though, developers have been working on the NAT issue, and have a solution for many circumstances. Also the Speex codec has been added, so the quality/bitrate is now ba

  • DNS vs. NAT-castaways (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @04:14PM (#7946697) Homepage Journal
    John Walker' jeremiad for the Internet claims that pure peer-to-peer archtecture (not client/server) of the Internet is being pushed to extinction by NATs. Behind NAT routers, hosts have private "IP" addresses, which are not routed (or visible) to the Internet. That makes John say, in effect, that it's not the "Internet", which is true by definition: a network of networks, with all hosts visible.

    But that's just a definition - finite, by definition (forgive my recursive pun ;). I remember "bang paths" for mail routing on (D)Arpanet (forgive the cryptic pun ;). The Net is now more defined by names than by numbers, which shows the humanization of the tech into a medium for people, rather than a device for machines. The DNS space is unified. Perhaps IPv6 might have forestalled the rise of NATs, with its larger/flexible address space and security. But NAT gives me the freedom to treat my entire network as one multiprocessing host. And its nobody's business, from my broadband ISP, to the person calling me, to the FCC, what I'm running in my closet. NAT+DNS preserves the open Internet, while giving me control of my appearance on it. SpeakFreely's code, by John's own admission, is not translating well through time and revisions. It's not adaptable enough to evolve. But the Internet is. And hopefully the features of SpeakFreely will move through the Net at least as memes, if not as code, in terms people can perpetuate.

  • Skype shows the way. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @04:28PM (#7946780) Homepage

    Skype [skype.com] Shows the way to upgrade Speak Freely. I've been using Skype behind a hardware firewall and NAT that is locked down tight. When Skype found that its preferred port was not open, it simply used Port 80.

    The sound quality is better than telephone. I talked to a friend in France for 2 hours yesterday.

    But... It would be much better if there were an open source alternative, that could connect directly to the other person's IP, like dialpad.com did. This is a huge need, and I hope someone will accept the challenge. Otherwise the U.S. government's surveillance departments may one day control all communication: Feds Want to Tap VoIP [slashdot.org].

  • Massively overestimating bandwidth requirements (Score:3, Interesting)

    by harlows_monkeys ( 106428 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @05:02PM (#7947006) Homepage
    Hmmm...the author of the page cited in the story seems to allow two NAT users to communicate would require that the entire communication take place through a server, and that would use more bandwidth than he's got.

    However, that's not correct. A server is only needed to tell each user the other's IP address. Once each side knows the other's IP address, there is a simply workaround for NAT.

    Each sends a sacrificial UDP packet to the other. This serves to open up the sender's NAT to receiving UDP packets from the other side.

    At that point, they can do peer to peer UDP.

    Note that the server is only involved at the start, to tell each side the other's IP address.

  • I see. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Effugas ( 2378 ) on Sunday January 11, 2004 @05:25PM (#7947161) Homepage
    Isn't there some clever way to work around these limitations?

    There will be.

  • Speak Freely SHOULD be discontinued (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Wesley Felter ( 138342 ) <wesley@felter.org> on Sunday January 11, 2004 @06:25PM (#7947561) Homepage
    Speak Freely was great when it first came out, but now we have a standard protocol for VoIP (SIP), and SF doesn't support it. Rather than keep SF alive, why not work on adding crypto to SIP clients?

    • Working alternatives? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ooloogi ( 313154 )
      The thing is that Speakfreely does Linux--Windows with crypto, an efficient codec (speex), and some NAT traversal right now. I don't know of an working alternative. Do you know any other combination that will even do linuix-windows over a 33k connection now? I can only think of the huuuge open-h323, and my experience is that it doesn't perfom anywhere near as well with less-than-ideal connections.

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