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http://www.speakfreely.org/

I made many international 'telephone' calls long distance free over a crappy 56k modem using this software. I'd lost the need to use it and moved to windows.

Development ended in 2002. Pity.

From http://www.speakfreely.org/ Speak Freely is a 100% software-based VoIP phone originally written in 1991 by John Walker, founder of Autodesk. After April of 1996, he discontinued development on the program. Since then, several other VoIP "phones" have cropped up all over the world. However, most of these programs cost money. Most of them have poor sound quality, and don't support some of Speak Freely's basic features such as encryption, the answering machine, or selectable compression.

"Speak Freely is a 100% software-based VoIP phone originally written in 1991 by John Walker, founder of Autodesk."

http://www.speakfreely.org/history.html

Another thing: the abstract talks about "A graphical representation of a telephone set or other telephone-related form is provided". So, those VOIP/telephone programs that don't look like a phone aren't violating this patent?

I could be wrong, but I am not aware of any vulnerabilities in SpeakFreely - http://www.speakfreely.org./ So, if you are worried about people intercepting your calls .. there are solutions. And, yes, it does run on Linux, or, if not, the source is there ...

I doubt SpeakEasy had Look Who's Listening servers from the start. The earliest reference I can find in the development log is 30 October 1995, though it's clear development of the feature began before this...

Speakfreely http://www.speakfreely.org/ is from 1991 and have Look Who's Listening servers.
(although I do not know if it had the servers right from the start)

I can remember Phil's PGPfone which was released before VoIP was "the next big thing." It used GSM speech compression and 3-DES/CAST/Blowfish cryptography "to give you the ability to have a 'real-time' secure telephone conversation" (directly over 14.4 Kbps (or faster) modem-to-modem, through the Internet, or through AppleTalk).

That died. It is good to see a new alternative that has adopted newer standards.

Another "oldy but goody" was Speak Freely.

Speak Freely?

Speakfreely Speex Codec.

Old Home Page?

Current Home Page

"The actual windows product hasn't been updated in a long time..." I don't understand that. The Sourceforge page says "(2004-02-04 16:00)".

Does anyone have experience with Speak Freely?

I have used this program before to make "secure" point to point voice calls with friends.

http://www.speakfreely.org/

How hard can it be to encrypt packets? How hard can it be to tunnel the VoIP through an SSH tunnel?

So, my free solution here would be to install OpenSSH (yes there is one for windows and its free) and putty. Then you just redirect the port of the VoIP thing and that's it. You just have another setup like that in the other end.

http://sshwindows.sourceforge.net
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

Now for a commercial SSH tunnel, use Tunnelier.
http://www.bitvise.com/products.html

Now, I know that in government or any private company or industry money MAY BE a limitation... This is cheap and it has good licensing schemes, so no "buts."

Your IP phones are belong to us... (the unencrypted ones at least) get it?

Have a good one.

FAQ: Is Skype secure?
Yes. When you call another Skype user your call is encrypted with strong encryption algorithms ensuring you privacy. In some cases your Skype communication may be routed via other users in the peer-to-peer network. Skype encryption protects you from potential eavesdropping from malicious users.

Policy: Please be informed that, notwithstanding the abovementioned, in the event of a designated competent authority requesting Skype or Skype's local partner responsible towards such authority, to retain and provide Personal and/or Traffic Data, or to install wiretapping equipment in order to intercept communications, Skype and/or its local partner will provide all necessary assistance and information to fulfil this request.

If you want real privacy, use SpeakFreely with your own choice of encryption library.

FAQ: Is Skype secure?
Yes. When you call another Skype user your call is encrypted with strong encryption algorithms ensuring you privacy. In some cases your Skype communication may be routed via other users in the peer-to-peer network. Skype encryption protects you from potential eavesdropping from malicious users.

Policy: Please be informed that, notwithstanding the abovementioned, in the event of a designated competent authority requesting Skype or Skype's local partner responsible towards such authority, to retain and provide Personal and/or Traffic Data, or to install wiretapping equipment in order to intercept communications, Skype and/or its local partner will provide all necessary assistance and information to fulfil this request.

If you want real privacy, use SpeakFreely with your own choice of encryption library.

...over.

Available at http://www.speakfreely.org/.

Has encryption built in. Been around since waaay before management-type boofheads through VoIP was cool..

At this point, all the tools needed to create an Open Source cross-platform VoIP system are easily available. The Speex codec is specifically designed for low-bit-rate voice, is BSD licensed, and is implemented in both C and Java. It would not be hard to take this codec, throw in some good sound libraries and some crypto libraries (OpenSSL perhaps) and roll up a VoIP client. In fact there is a Speex implementation for Java, so you could write one in Java, and yes, Java really is "write once run anywhere" these days. Someday when I have more time I might do this. As a Java applet it would be great because there would be nothing to install.

I am a little concerned, though, that this kind of technology might fall into the wrong hands. For instance, have the manufacturers considered the applications for which terrorists might use these? I hardly think that the NAH6 would like to see their products used to slaughter innocent Americans, or even Amsterdaminians. Encryption is certainly a worthwhile tool, but I think it's far more likely to be exploited by the wicked than the virtuous, as it's the bad guys who've got something to hind.

Real criminals have had access to, say, laptops connected to gsm phones that run speakfreely or simply any voip product over-ssh/ipsec/pptp/whatever for years..

Most importantly though, this cryptophone does nothing to conceal traffic data; i.e. "who's calling who". This information is not much use in corporate espionage, but worth its weight in gold in criminal investigations (and much easier to sort through than voice calls).

. So, if there is a free VoIP app out there (perhaps one with strong encryption too),

SpeakFreely is free (GPL'd) and works reasonably well even on dial-up, and offers encryption.

(Though when I last used it a couple of years ago, the encryption was difficult to set up, as it used an external and seperately installed PGP.)

Why didn't I use it more than just for testing? Most of the people I'd call don't use VOIP. It's the early adoption problem: "Nobody" else uses VOIP, so it's less than useful to use it.

There are several similar applications out there, the oldest I can remember off-hand is Speak Freely which does secure p2p.

Right now we use Ventrilo internally at work - it's not secure, but we can do conferencing in super quality with VERY low bandwidth! It's excellent!

...windoze and unix works well, requires only one firewall hole at the client, though you may want to have one of your guys run a "look who's listening" server - add a port forward for that one, and one for a reflector if you want to use one, but one of those suffices for all the clients. It's not polished - no voice mixing, for instance, but it is very solid.

On a related note, there is a GPL program that now takes place of PGPphone to some extent. It is Speak Freely.

There is in fact PGP fone which does just that: Link here There's aslo SpeakFreely available here. Both support secure encryption, so unless they really do ahve those factoring machines and we don't yet know it...

Isnt that what Speakfreely is about ?
Also available for Unix.
CLI based, but some front-ends are available too.

On a related note: if there are any other active projects for a netmeeting-type application (I'm aware of Gnomemeeting, but I'd like to avoid the whole directory/ILS business, and just do simple person-to-person calls, with possible encryption if desired), please post a link.

You *are* familiar with Speak Freely, right?

Speak Freely is a program for communicating between two computers. See the FAQ.

GNOMEMeeting lets you phone normal telephones.

Speak Freely is a program for communicating between two computers. See the FAQ.

GNOMEMeeting lets you phone normal telephones.

Speak Freely should do all you need. Plus, it's cross-platform; I have it on both my FreeBSD and Windows machines at home.

It used to be public domain. I think it's GPL now.

A while back Captain Crunch made a little bit of history by placing his first VOIP call with Speak Freely - from India, where VOIP has long been illegal and I'm pretty sure the ports are supposed to be blocked.

The way people can find what port to use for you is that you can have your name and IP address listed on a webserver. When people look you up they'll see your port. You'll have to instruct people you talk to to set the port, not just the IP address.

Used against 3rd world governments but works equally well against 1st world ones as well.

Any info on VOIP for a regular PC? I need international long-distance access. I saw this Ask Slashdot article that recommended Speakfreely, but I haven't had time to try it.

Any advice?

Speak Freely is a program that allows two or more people to conduct a real-time voice conference over the Internet or any other TCP/IP network. It supports a variety of compression protocols, such as GSM, ADPCM, LPC, and LPC-10. The cryptography-enabled version includes IDEA, DES, and limited PGP encryption capabilities for protecting the privacy of important voice conversations.
http://www.speakfreely.org/

Speak Freely is voice over IP software that runs on Windows 95/98/NT/2000/ME, Unix and Linux and interoperates between them seamlessly.

It uses encryption if you want it, too.

There's also VoicePGP if you want to talk to Mac's, and who knows what other software out there that I don't know about.

Bob-

You can even encrypt the voip using various encryption algorithms so all your other geeky friends around the planet can talk for free.

I use Speak Freely, because it is a great cross-platform application for for audio conferencing.

It has a lot of cool features, such as an enhanced answering machine, ICQ interoperability and it supports about a dozen compression algorithms, including GSM and 128-bit Blowfish.

SF is a very fine product, and it's available on Windows and Unix

It's very cool because it's licensed under the GPL, it's source code is available. And it has a cool name :)

Hi David,
There is actually an older program named Speak Freely. I've used it for a number of years and still love it. It runs on *BSD, Linux, Solaris, Windows and probably others. The windows version has a pretty well designed GUI, but the Unix version is CLI based. It comes with two GUI interfaces in the source's CONTRIB dir which are written in TCL. It has a number of encryption modes (4 I think) including using PGP to do the encryption. It also has many audio compression modes making it suitable for anything from High Bandwidth applications all the way down to a 2400bps modem (Really!). The codecs are GSM, ADPCM, LPC, LPC-10, and Simple. Simple just drops certian bits and can be mixed with any other codec. You can run it with out audio compression as well. If you're a fan of amateur radio, this program runs the links of the IRLP project. Very cool stuff.

My personal favorite way to run it is to have my linux box run a reflector and then have people connect to that and that way I can have multiple people in my conversation. The program is due for a bit of an update, anyone want to volenteer? (I looked at the TODO list and it's all beyond what I can do...)

--Josh

check out Speak Freely - its site is here

it supports encryption and is multi platform.

oh and if you're a windows developer the original speak freely site has lots of good points.

Speak Freely

If how about useing Speak Freely or Open Phone?

Speak Freely has been open source for 5 years. It been compiled on Win32 and Unix. Its cross platform.

Where the heck have these people been?

The url is www.speakfreely.org, but the server seems to be down right now.
I haven't used it for conferencing with more than one person, but I can agree that I like it in its simplicity :-) One nice thing is that it features various encryption standards (including PGP, using your already existing keys), and you can turn on more than one encryption type at once.

Speak Freely is a marvelous program, I have used it to save literally hundreds of dollars on long distance! It has been around for a long time, but hardly anyone new to unix these days seems to have heard of or use it.

It is a marvelously solid and robust package, supports 4 types of compression [even one which allows robust [4 duplicates of every packet] communication over a standard POTS 33.6 modem (albeit at less then ideal fidelity)], as well as GSM compression [at a mere 1.5KB/sec], which I find delivers notably better fidelity then your normal telephone link! [Maybe this is just a matter of the higher quality analog-to-digitial converters in modern sound cards plus better mics then normal phones]

It is available, under a BSD style license, for download at this site [full source]
Best of all [or pehaps not, depending on your degree of elitism] it is also available for windoze... which, although I hate to think of another example of the win32 world enjoying the fruits of hardcore unix ingenuity and altruism [they even slapped a bloody GUI on the thing for the win32 version...sigh...], nonetheless is cool because they interoperate.

This means that other less CSCI friends/aquantainences of mine can download it and talk to me for free. I doubt I could convince them that "well, you just need to install a copy of linux on your system to use this amazing product, come on, it's easy enough, I'll talk you through it!" heh [PS. not saying linux is hard to install at all, but it is for those people whose VCR's are still blinking 12:00]

An amazing program. Enjoy saving lots of money!

P.S. Did I mention that it also natively supports high-grade encryption for all conversations? ... comes with full integration of IDEA, DES, Blowfish cyphers, and can call pgp to exchange a key with someone else if they have pgp installed too.

P.S. I am in no way affiliated with the fine group that has developed speakfreely. I just think that the program rocks.


---
man sig

And I recall that he placed this call from inside of India, I think to the U.S. (although I'm less sure of the destination).

This works because you can configure Speak Freely's UDP port, so it gets through VoIP-blocking firewall software.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

You'll find some discussion about interoperability here.

Also see Speak Freely's development plans.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

You'll find some discussion about interoperability here.

Also see Speak Freely's development plans.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

The bandwidth required for a voice quality phone call that has been compressed by a modern voice compression algorithm (such as one of those available in Speak Freely) will be much less than someone using Napster, Gnutella or browsing an, uh, "image archive".

A good voice over IP product will work fine over a 28.8 modem. I know this because this is how I used to talk to my brother in law from California to Newfoundland.

You do occasionally suffer some dropouts or delays, but it's pretty tolerable, especially if you have a higher bandwidth connection, like at least dual-channel ISDN or 128 DSL. But still that's pretty modest as net connections go these days.

Probably your biggest concern is to make sure your ISP's connection to the internet is fat enough to support all their customers. Once it gets on the backbone its insignificant.

What I would like to see is voice over IP where the compression algorithm was streaming MP3, and we could have high-fidelity audio speech conversations at 16 bits and 44 khz. There's no reason we should have to deal with crappy 8-bit voice with 3 khz bandwidth in this day and age. But even this wouldn't require a terrible lot of bandwidth.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

In many respects it is the best VOIP package available, because source code is available (public domain, which doesn't fit the stricter definition of an open source license), it allows a choice of both transmission protocols and compression algorithms, so you can adjust each for your particular setup to get the best results, and it offers strong encryption (a non-encrypting download is available for places where that's illegal).

The main disadvantage is that because of all the options it is rather difficult to use. And because of some architectural features of Linux, it's hard to get working at all under Linux (but it can be done).

Usually what you need to do is learn how to use it, then get someone on the other end at a computer where they have both the telephone and internet available at the same time, and talk them through it. But I have worked with Speak Freely with novice users after giving them a little while of instruction.

It also has ICQ integration and if you have a full-time net connection you can use it in answering machine mode.

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc

SpeakFreely is a multi-architechture open source program that deserves mention. It supports crypto and is primarily designed for voice chat but also includes IM type messaging.

Tip: the Digital Telephony Act has been around for years mandating built-in wiretaps in phone switches, but Speak Freely is free, includes source, and provides your choice of strong encryption methods.

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

LinuxTelephony
openphone.org
Packetizer.com
SpeakFreely.org
Voxilla.org
___

As for conference calls, I know the windows version of Speak Freely (open source voice-over-IP software IIRC) lets you do conference call type things. Don't know about the linux version. Currently the only linux version is command line only and I dont know whether it has the same features or not, but a nice X one is in the works.

Regarding your bandwidth concerns, I use Speak Freely to talk to my friend in Korea (I'm in Australia) and its clear and very fast. I am connected by 33.6 modem with an ISP notorious for latency woes. Speak Freely has a range of compression algorithms to use, so there's little worry there. I'm not affiliated with them by any means of course.. just a happy user :)

http://www.speakfreely.org

• It is free
• It is open source
• It has strong encryption, and comes from Switzerland
• You can set the UDP port number so it can't be blocked
• It runs on Windows and Unix (including Linux) and I'm tinkering with a BeOS port
• It offers a wide choice of voice compression and transmission protocols.

It takes a little figuring out to learn how to use it. It's pretty tricky to get it work on Linux but I understand they've done a lot of work to address that.

Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com

A good site for Speak Freely info is www.speakfreely.org.