Chapel Hill Computational Linguists Crack Skype Calls

mikejuk writes "You might think of linguistics as being interesting but not really useful. Now computational linguistics [PDF of original paper] has been used to crack Skype encryption and reconstruct what is being said in a VoIP call. What is surprising is that though they are encrypted, the frames that make up a Skype call contain clues about what phonemes are being spoken."

Speach recognition

[city]

My Google Voice voicemail transcription gets about 1 out of 4 words correct. Can Google please buy this company already.

Huh?

[tthomas48]

No, I find linguistics pretty useful. Especially since it has some pretty 1:1 relationships with computer programming. And Larry Wall was a linguist. And what kind of lead in is that?

Linguistics not really useful. The ignorance

[jmcbain]

The ignorance of the statement "You might think of linguistics as being interesting but not really useful" is simply astounding. Linguistics provides the foundation and formal frameworks for grammar, syntax, morphology, phonetics, and semantics that allows us to better understand language. From that basis, computational linguistics is seen simply as an application of linguistics, and computational linguistics of course leads to information retrieval, automatic speech recognition, text classification, and other fields that are among the most important computing topics of the 21st century. Ignorantly saying linguistics is interesting but not useful is like saying physics and chemistry are interesting but not useful.