GNU Free Call Announced, SIP-based VoIP 145
andrea.sartori sent in the "development plan for GNU Free Call, an open source VoIP service based on the SIP protocol. According to the announcement, it 'aims to be as ubiquitous and usable as the proprietary Skype VOIP service.'"
Peer-to-peer module for Ekiga? (Score:2, Insightful)
In case you're not aware, Ekiga already exists and is a free-software SIP client implementation. See http://ekiga.org/ [ekiga.org] . At best this should be an extension for Ekiga, not an entirely new project.
-molo
Re:Drop the GNU. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Peer-to-peer module for Ekiga? (Score:5, Insightful)
In case you're not aware, Ekiga already exists and is a free-software SIP client implementation. See http://ekiga.org/ [ekiga.org] . At best this should be an extension for Ekiga, not an entirely new project.
-molo
Ekiga is a softphone client, not secure self-organized communication services.
This project aims to implement the entire VOIP network back-end, vaguely similar to how Skype does it (largely P2P).
Re:Unfortuantly... (Score:5, Insightful)
"This project’s definition of secure media is similar to Zimmermann’s work on ZRTP, in that we assure there is no forwarding knowledge by using uniquely generated keys for each communication session. Furthermore, we will use GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) to fully automate session validation. This will be done by extending the SIP protocol to exchange public keys for establishing secure media sessions that will be created by each instance of SIP Witch operating at the end points on behalf of local SIP user agents, and then verifying there is no man-in-the-middle by exchanging GPG signed hashes of the session keys that were visible at each end."
So there are encryption measures in hand. Even vanilla VoIP has SIP over TLS and SRTP to work with. ZRTP is reasonably well supported too. It also employs a Skype-style P2P routing system, which should help provide a comparable degree of anonymisation: "Our goal is to make GNU Free Call ubiquitous in a manner and level of usability similar to Skype, that is, usable on all platforms, and directly by the general public for all manner of secure communication between known and anonymous parties, but without requiring a central service provider to register with, without using insecure source secret binary protocols that may have back-doors, and without having network control points of any kind that can be exploited or abused by external parties. By doing so as a self organizing meshed calling network, we further eliminate potential service control points such as through explicit routing peers even if networks are isolated in civil emergencies."
So, which is preferable, transparency wise, a technology provided by a publicly traded company, or an open-source technology which can be administered by the end users if they so wish?
Re:Unfortuantly... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oooo. Wire tapping. Waste as many CPU cycles as you want intercepting my calls about grocery shopping, how your day went and what time we're meeting at the bar.
If I *really* wanted to kill the president, start thermonuclear war, blow up dirty bomb in New York City, funnel money to Al Qaeda, etc. I'd find much better means of communication.
There are dozens of 'free image sharing' websites. Pair that up with craigslist, steganography and some pgp and best of luck tracking all of that. If for nothing else the noise ratio is way too high.
So I plan on blowing something up. I take a stock photograph of a car and dump a pgp message into it. I post it to craigslist under something that doesn't exist. Like "Rare 1963 Ford Mustang" My friends know what to look for and maybe an area.
For example this image: http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/5563/steghide.jpg [imageshack.us]
Download, then run it through:
steghide --extract -sf steghide.jpg -xf message.txt -p bomb
Or there's python-stepic. http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/4907/stepic.png [imageshack.us]
stepic -d -i stepic.png -o jnk
And you can embed more than just short messages. I tested out a 20 paragraph ipsum.
http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/4911/ipsum.jpg [imageshack.us]
steghide, password 'slashdot'.
It's only the dumb criminals/terrorists that get caught. If people WANT to hide messages, it's not that hard.