Slashdot Mirror
Speak Freely To Be Withdrawn January 15
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.
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!
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.
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.
Jeremy
It is open source :^)
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
And yeah, I use Windows for the most part, the Unix version is here.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
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
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
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.
"Because speak freely does voice over IP with hard encryption. I don't know of any other VoIP product that does that".
You do now!
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 :)
wanted: one clever sig,apply within
> 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.
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 speaking about the double NAT problem: if client (the peer that initiates a connection) and the server (the peer that receives that initial packet) are located behind NAT boxes you are lost. NO protocol is compatible to that situation.
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? What are you doing as netadmin if everyday another P2P protocol pops up?
Mr. Walker's rant is sad but true. The only solutions i see are
I am sure that we all would use VoIP now if there were no NAT.
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 back in the league of the alternatives. So basically, it doesn't need much to keep it up to date.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/wb/speak-freely.pl?read=50 1
http://www.fourmilab.ch/wb/speak-freely.pl?read=50 9
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 companies out there. Any software development shop, for example, that locks things down excessively will lose good developers at an astonishing rate. In fact, pretty much any company where you have people needing to do creative work, there's benefit to locking things down as little as possible.
If there's a legitmate reason to allow an application access to the network, then you can configure the network to allow it. Otherwise, the network's firewall should be blocking it by default. That's what a good netadmin does. Duh.
If a network is of the size and resources to afford a good netadmin who isn't overworked, then that makes sense. I'd guess that covers, say, 5% of the computers out there. For the bulk of the population, we need better solutions.