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Communications

A Skype Equivalent Without "Big Brother"? 73

Posted by Cliff from the conversations-without-prying-ears dept.
Slimy Devil asks: "News.com has recently reported on the FBI seeking veto power over PC software. This makes me wonder: is there a safe, provably secure VOIP-like technology out there? The recent buyout of Skype probably means that the supposed encryption will be of little value, if you are of the opinion that the FBI or other law enforcement agencies shouldn't be able to tap in on demand. So, for my question to the Slashdot community: is there a viable alternative that is free of such concerns?"
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A Skype Equivalent Without "Big Brother"? More

A Skype Equivalent Without "Big Brother"?

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  • There used to be... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FrankBlues ( 65853 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @11:51PM (#14110854) Homepage Journal
    There used to be PGPhone [pgpi.org], but development on it stalled.

    • The problem with PGP Phone is that it won't traverse NAT routers.

      However, I understand that now there is other software for that. For example, Open VPN [openvpn.net].

      Any other suggestions?
      • OpenVPN requires one end of the tunnel to be directly addressable, so its use remains limited by that fact.

        The Skype model, which seems substantially like the Gnutella network, might be one way of building such a system. Heck, why couldn't it be piggy-backed on the existing Gnutella network?

        The voice client could connect to the Gnutella network with a hash of the users userID (or some such). Want to find Bob_Robertson? A request for the SHA1 hash of "Bob_Robertson" goes out, my system sees the request and r
        • Bob,

          I don't think there is a problem with finding the other person, without using a network. Just have the other person send an email to you, and use their IP address, which is in the email header. That's what we did with free software called Dial something or something Dial, several years ago. It used software that displayed ads.

          The OpenVPN home page says that OpenVPN can:
          • tunnel networks whose public endpoints are dynamic such as DHCP or dial-in clients,
          • tunnel networks through conne
          • I don't see any limitation about needing one end of the tunnel to be directly addressable, but that makes sense. Otherwise how would they see each other?

            Yep. Port-forwarding does work, but then there still is a directly addressable machine accessable from the outside. As opposed to simple NAT. Someone has to open the connection, so they have to be able to reach the other system.

            The reason the Gnutella system works is that stable reachable systems automatically become core nodes that NATed machines can open
        • Port forwarding could help with the NAT problem. You could use a jabber to send the IP and public keys and then do a connect over forwarded ports. Just an idea.
    • Wouldn't it be easier to create a front end that would encrypt the voice stream and pass it off to any voip system. Both parties would need to be running the software, but could use any service provider.
  • voice over jabber. +ssl.

  • Open Source (Score:5, Funny)

    by Leroy_Brown242 ( 683141 ) on Thursday November 24, 2005 @11:53PM (#14110863) Homepage Journal
    Isn't this exactly what the Open Source community is all about?

    Someone contact sourceforge, someone else start coding, and someone send their SO to the store for Bawls, meth, and mountain dew!

    In a week, we'll have the more spasticly coded, but free VoIP software EVAR!!

    • <rms_mode>
      No, This is what Free Software is all about.
      Open Source is about a better software development methodology, that relies in a "gift economy" to generate software of a better quality at a lower cost-point.
      Free Software is about having freedom and sharing the knowledge.
      </rms_mode>
    • Ummm... I get my meth from that guy in the hoodie who hangs around the gas station.

      What store are you going to? And do they garauntee their product?
    • hehe, i wish we had a p2p VoIP GPG Phone software... but alas, we dont :)
  • This is again a sign of government paranoia. Bad guys will use some obscure/less known software for communication while the government will spend taxpayers' money on useless monitoring of those taxpayers...
  • I don't understand why the FBI is creating so much negative press for itself when it doesn't need to. They already have the power to perform "roving wiretaps" on internet connections, and any form of VoIP over said connections, unless it's heavily encrypted, is easy meat. This campaign for control is redundant.

    • Phone encryption devices have been illegal in the US for ages, I believe. My mexican buddy claims they used to use them down south of the border, little boxes you would strap on a phone that was coupled to a mate on the other end.

      All the Fed have to do is outlaw encrypted internet traffic. How hard could that be?

      If they really want you, they will get you. Few people are Tempest-proof, so they can just park a van out front and screen read whatever you do.

      You have no privacy outside your home or on the int
      • All the Fed have to do is outlaw encrypted internet traffic. How hard could that be?

        Easy, if they don't mind stopping all internet commerce and severely impacting the bottom lines of countless companies (many of which are big enough to have considerable influence on the government.)
      • Phone encryption devices have been illegal in the US for ages, I believe.

        Bullshit. They are not illegal. You may not be able to use them on certain radio services, due to FCC regulations, but there is no law that prevents their use over the wireline telephone network, private data networks, or the Internet.

        What the NSA has done is to discourage the use of encryption, while staying within the law. This can be by friendly persuasion or vague threats of "problems" with other government agencies. That is

    • If you'll RTFA, you'll see that the FBI are not the source of this, but those sons of fun, the FFC. Now, maybe the DHSS leant on the FCC to claim this, but that's not confirmed.

  • Destroying inovation in the US. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RingDev ( 879105 ) on Friday November 25, 2005 @12:47AM (#14111105) Homepage Journal
    Is it any wonder why technology companies are fleeing the US? Why would a company release a VOIP solution from the US when they could relocate their company to another country and export the software via the internet with out fears of government persecution from the US. Encryption, communications, stem cells, etc... The US is headed down a bad road where the only people with money are the Lawyers.

    -Rick
    • Right On!! and the US Congress seems to be unwilling to do anything about the litigation problem which is seriously undermining the economy -- probably because they are mostly lawyers. Re innovation, I don't understand why a P2P operation doesn't set up offshore in a location untouchable by US Law. DRM is really getting out of hand!
      • DRM is not patent law. DRM is a nesecity to protect copy rights. I'm all for GOOD DRMs. In order to get what I would consider good DRMs, you need one of two things: 1) Unilateral agreement in all media production branchs, content providers, DVD/CD Player creators, PC Software, etc... or 2) A bohemoth monopoly that can market a single standard across all mediums with enough force to make it work.

        DRMs are a device that will help drive digital content innovation. With out DRMs there are tons of pitfalls for co
        • Rick, I agree with your comments. Unfortunately the DRM agenda is currently steered by people and companies acting in their own interest rather than our Public Interest -- and I include in this group our elected representatives in the House and Senate who are elected poor but exit their tenure rich, really rich. I spent a lot of time in the Washington political arena (communications and media); it was pretty much understood that the Congress was for sale -- and that many special provision of law could be
          • Best bet, get Google, Apple, and Sony together. Tell them the solution must be an open standard, source can be open/closed as the like, but it must be an open standard, it must work on all hardware (new car head units, home theaters, PCs, boom boxes), and must not get in the way of a definable list of acceptable customer activities (ie: loan to a friend). And watch what happens.

            -Rick
        • I disagree with your sentiment that widespread DRM would be a good thing. The rights afforded to IP are *not* natural rights. Widespread DRM would allow content makers essentially unlimited copyright. This, in the long term, would do *far* more harm than good, as content that has long since passed into the public consciousness and culture would still be directly controlled by whoever initially made it. This is a *bad thing*, and is directly against the objective of copyright.
          • I disagree with your disagreement ;) And I raise you one technical issue! Copyrights can be extended, so the owner could literally argue to unlimited copyright. The question then is how do you handle public domain, more specificly content that changes from copyrighted material to public domain. I see two clear posibilities; Option #1 is to set up the DRM to phone home to a CR/PD list and verify the rights of the consumer. This has a few major flaws, it requires internet access (not available in cars/home st

  • Shtoom! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gothzilla ( 676407 ) on Friday November 25, 2005 @01:34AM (#14111270)
    This site follows Skype's work with encryption.

    http://www.pgpvoip.com/ [pgpvoip.com]

    Zimmerman's work with encrypting VOIP is with this client:
    http://divmod.org/projects/shtoom [divmod.org]

    Forget about Skype ever being secure. It already has an encryption layer but since they've made "arrangements" with law enforcement, it cannot be assumed to give you total privacy.

    If you want truly secure VOIP, follow Shtoom's progress. It's as close as it gets right now.

  • Calling all Americans (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This Big Brother shit has to stop.

    Will you spineless, willfully ignorant morons take your excellent constitution and stuff it collectively up your politician's and bureaucrat's asses. You all have no right to celebrate Thanksgiving in the current political climate - when everything you purportedly hold sacred is being murdered from within. "We the People" have become "we the impotent".

    You may say - "sort out your own country before criticising", You see the thing is - we have adopted major sections of US

    • yes, it is time to break out the guns, like in cryptonomicon...
    • As if Americans have any recourse? With a 98%+ re-election rate at the Federal level, Near that at state and local levels, a very well coordinated media blackout of viable candidates that offer alternatives (such as limited government of specifically enumerated powers, imagine that! Shocking!) and most people being focused on making enough money to both live and pay their taxes, rather than on silly pointless things like "voting", and what do you get?

      Bob-
      • There's one way to help fix things, limit the number of election terms an elected official can stay in office for. That way you get new blood and people can actually vote for who they want not just a party.
        Proportional represention also helps, even if the Nazi party get one seat that way because the lefties and the greens get seats too and it all balences out, just with a bit more variety then a two party system.
  • So now they may be able to wiretap your VoIP conversations. Not a big deal. They can only wiretap if they have a warrant or if they suspect you of being a terrorist. I'm sure that while they were at it, they would also wiretap your traditional phone, your ISP, and would be looking through your mail. The catch is, is that they have to have a reason to wiretap you in the first place.

    So unless you're committing crimes and are coordinating more crimes using VoIP, these agreements and rules typically mean nothin
    • Yeah, because " law [wikipedia.org] enforcement [wikipedia.org]" never does anything to people [wikipedia.org] who aren't breaking [wikipedia.org] the law. [wikipedia.org]

    • What's wrong? Everything. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Friday November 25, 2005 @02:50AM (#14111487) Journal
      the patriot act gave the DOJ to ability to monitor anything when they invoke a terrorism charge. We are not talking just Al Qaeda. they could declare that somebody is a risk to do a columbine, a mall attack, etc. and then have that as a reason for a warrent. Keep in mind, that if DOJ invokes the term terrorism with the warrent, very little evidence is required. If anything is discovered, that can be used against the victom. For all purpose, we now have the same system as the old USSR.

      Everybody has every reason to fear big brother, as this will allow for anything to be used against you.

    • Re:What's wrong with Big Brother (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yer kidding right? "Mostly Law Abiding", what's that? By the same logic we don't need the bill of rights, so lets get rid of them. Lets see. As long as I belong to a religion that other people don't find offensive, then who needs that right written down anywhere. As long as I don't say nasty things like "No Blood for Oil" on a bumper sticker on my car as I attend an "audience" with the President, then heck, why should I worry, no one will try to silence me. Habeus Corpus -- who needs that? If I'm in
      • The Federalists were against a Bill of Rights. Since the Constitution explicitly granted the Fed.Gov no power to establish a state religion, or prohibit arms, as a couple of examples, they argued that any "bill of rights" could not include everything, and might therefore in the future become confused, that those few rights enumerated were being "granted" to the people by that Bill, rather than pre-existing the new Constitution and being prohibited by the states (who came first) from any power of infringemen
    • Here in The Netherlands (a "free" country) we have seen Intelligence Agencies getting into organisations which were political opponents of the government. Being part of the leaders of political parties. Did any of those parties do anything wrong other then just being on the wrong side?

      Unless secret services are being controlled, they operate on their boundaries or just outside. But the problem is : who can control a secret organisation?
  • There's a open source project called Speak Freely that implements strong cryptograhpy and can interface with gnupg for key exchange and authentication. The actual windows product hasn't been updated in a long time, but the linux API may be useful.

    Recently the speak freely API was used as the basis of the IRLP amateur radio linking project. IRLP needs strong authentication (but not crypto) and speakfreely + gnupg provides it.

  • Dunno if it does decent crypto on its own or not, but even if not... wrap the connection in a openvpn or ipsec tunnel, and be done with it. Of course, the "phone over broadband" commercial service is out of the question at that point.

    What I want to know, is if we all hook up our asterisk servers together, and allow them to place local unmetered calls, could we get decent coverage of the US (or even the world) ?

    Could we even allow people without computers/internet to call us locally, and route their calls ar
    • my ISP uses Asterisk and I can use http://www.gizmoproject.com/ [gizmoproject.com] to call them.

      Bah, until I looked again then I thought Gizmo was OSS
  • First, you have to ask your self what capability does the NSA have for monitoring outside of the USA? After you answer that, then realize that the GWB (via his un-patriot act) gave that capability to the FBI.

    From there, you next need to ask if you were the FBI, what type of data are you going to be looking for? After you answer that, then you have to realize that current stuff will not work.

    Instead, a better way is to create a p2p connection using an audio stream with an embedded (regular|encrypted) pho
    • Well, since the NSA is about 200 years ahead [milk.com] of the rest of the world in theoretical maths, I'd say their capabilites are significantly greater than those of the Open Source/Free Software community, unless we have some little gray men of our own to help us out.
  • It shouldn't surprise anybody that the FBI and the other usual suspects are out there trying to control software: They tried it -- and out side the U.S. they did it for decades, nay, centuries -- with books. America has been spared most of that because of the genius of the Consitution, but unfortunately, software wasn't on the agenda back then any more than privacy. And the Bill of Rights just ain't getting any longer.

    As somebody else has posted, this will just send people packing to Europe and India. The

  • http://www.philzimmermann.com/EN/background/index . html [philzimmermann.com]

    Everyone should take a moment and read the story of the PGP creator. Strong crypto is the only thing that will keep people from reading your packets, and the only thing that will guarantee you have the ABILITY - forget having the right - to have privacy in your communications.

    This wasn't always the case.

    People listening isn't a problem. You should ASSUME they are listening. Run crypto point to point if you want to be private.
  • Here's a page with a list of Open Source VOIP applications, both clients and servers [voip-info.org].
  • This is exactly what PgpFone was supposed to provide. AFAIK, PgpFone was written by Phil Zimmerman, and the project was hosted at MIT [mit.edu]. As you can see, not much happening here. However, the rights apparently went to NAI, but I don't think they currently offer the product.

    I was able to find this link to pgpi.org [pgpi.org] where it looks like you can find old source and binaries for PgpFone. I don't know what the copyright status of these are.

    In the face of the Patriot Act,etc, it would be great if someone star
  • http://www.cryptophone.de/index.html [cryptophone.de]

    Not exactly VoIP, but it works over landline or GSM network, and it's actual phone to phone encryption, not just phone to tower. They have several devices/software available, and full source code.
  • this may meet your needs

    http://www.gizmoproject.com/ [gizmoproject.com]
  • If you dont approve of being monitored by our government you must be evil.

    Therefore, if any encrypted traffic is detected from you that doesnt have the proper backdoor, you will be assumed guilty and sent directly to jail.

    Note: This is sarcasm. However, i can see us heading in that direction since they cant stop every little encryption project out there. Just make its very use illegal, and they wont have to worry about finding out content.

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