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Speak Freely To Be Withdrawn January 15

Posted by timothy on from the you-can-still-freely-speak dept.

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.

9 of 249 comments (clear)

  1. Dupe. by pi_rules · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!

  2. And we will call it... by DAldredge · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Cheap routers.. by JebusIsLord · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  4. Re:Open-source it? by TheSpoom · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  5. Re:Open-source it? by TheSpoom · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  6. sorry I missed it by timothy · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  7. Re:Too bad -- design was obsolete by Albanach · · Score: 4, Informative
    Then almost all voip and h323 software is "obsolete". Alternatively, perhaps you jsut don't know much about the protocols and why they're difficult to route over NAT. Don't you think is you could easily design coip to run through NAT everyone would be doing it? Even skype needs a non NAT box to work - if neither client can be used it'll use someone else in the middle.

    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.

  8. Re:Speak Freely does hard encryption by gnu-generation-one · · Score: 3, Informative

    "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!

  9. Speex + NAT support recently added by ooloogi · · Score: 3, Informative

    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