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Chapel Hill Computational Linguists Crack Skype Calls

Posted by timothy on from the hookt-on-fon-iks-indeed dept.

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."

1 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Huh? by tthomas48 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?