[I missed this the first time around. The topic is Speak Freely, but the implications of John's essay are far broader. It's worth a read. --Declan] http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/ Speak Freely End of Life Announcement by John Walker January 15th, 2004 The time has come to lower the curtain on Speak Freely. As of August 1st, 2003, version 7.6a of Speak Freely (Unix and Windows) was declared the final release of the program, and a banner was added to the general Speak Freely page and those specific to the Unix and Windows versions on the www.fourmilab.ch site announcing the end of life. No further development or maintenance will be done, and no subsequent releases will be forthcoming. On January 15th, 2004 all Speak Freely documentation and program downloads, along with links to them on the site navigation pages, were removed from the www.fourmilab.ch site, and accesses to these files redirected to this document. On that date the speak-freely and speak-freely-digest mailing lists were closed and their archives copied to off-line storage and deleted from the site. In addition, the Speak Freely Forum will cease operation, along with the Echo and Look Who's Listening servers previously running at www.fourmilab.ch. Ports 2074 through 2076 will be firewall blocked for the fourmilab.ch domain, with incoming packets silently discarded. As of January 15th, 2004, all queries, in whatever form, regarding Speak Freely will be ignored. An historical retrospective on the program may eventually be published on the site. Questions and Answers Why did you do this? The time has come. Speak Freely is the direct descendant of a program I originally developed and posted to Usenet in 1991. The bulk of Speak Freely development was done in 1995 and 1996, with the Windows version designed around the constraints of 16-bit Windows 3.1. Like many programs of comparable age which have migrated from platform to platform and grown to encompass capabilities far beyond anything envisioned in their original design, Speak Freely shows its age. The code is messy, difficult to understand, and very easy to break when making even small modifications. The Windows and Unix versions, although interoperable, have diverged in design purely due to their differing histories, almost doubling the work involved in making any change which affects them both. To continue development and maintenance of Speak Freely, the program requires a top to bottom rewrite, basing the Unix and Windows version on an identical "engine," and providing an application programming interface (API) which permits other programs to be built upon it. I estimate the work involved in this task, simply to reach the point where a program built with the new architecture is 100% compatible with the existing Speak Freely, would require between 6 and 12 man-months. There is no prospect whatsoever that I will have time of that magnitude to devote to Speak Freely in the foreseeable future, and no indication that any other developer qualified to do the job and sufficiently self-motivated and -disciplined to get it done exists. In fact, the history of Speak Freely constitutes what amounts to a non-existence proof of candidate developers. Even if I had the time to invest in Speak Freely, or another developer or group of developers volunteered to undertake the task, the prospects for such a program would not justify the investment of time. What do you mean--isn't the Internet still in its infancy? If you say so. The Internet, regardless of its state of development, is in the process of metamorphosing into something very different from the Internet we've known over the lifetime of Speak Freely. The Internet of the near future will be something never contemplated when Speak Freely was designed, inherently hostile to such peer-to-peer applications. I am not using the phrase "peer to peer" as a euphemism for "file sharing" or other related activities, but in its original architectural sense, where all hosts on the Internet were fundamentally equal. Certainly, Internet connections differed in bandwidth, latency, and reliability, but apart from those physical properties any machine connected to the Internet could act as a client, server, or (in the case of datagram traffic such as Speak Freely audio) neither--simply a peer of those with which it communicated. Any Internet host could provide any service to any other and access services provided by them. New kinds of services could be invented as required, subject only to compatibility with the higher level transport protocols (such as TCP and UDP). Unfortunately, this era is coming to an end. One need only read discussions on the Speak Freely mailing list and Forum over the last year to see how many users, after switching from slow, unreliable dial-up Internet connections to broadband, persistent access via DSL or cable television modems discover, to their dismay, that they can no longer receive calls from other Speak Freely users. The vast majority of such connections use Network Address Translation (NAT) in the router connected to the broadband link, which allows multiple machines on a local network to share the broadband Internet access. But NAT does a lot more than that. A user behind a NAT box is no longer a peer to other sites on the Internet. Since the user no longer has an externally visible Internet Protocol (IP) address (fixed or variable), there is no way (in the general case--there may be "workarounds" for specific NAT boxes, but they're basically exploiting bugs which will probably eventually be fixed) for sites to open connections or address packets to his machine. The user is demoted to acting exclusively as a client. While the user can contact and freely exchange packets with sites not behind NAT boxes, he cannot be reached by connections which originate at other sites. In economic terms, the NATted user has become a consumer of services provided by a higher-ranking class of sites, producers or publishers, not subject to NAT. There are powerful forces, including government, large media organisations, and music publishers who think this situation is just fine. In essence, every time a user--they love the word "consumer"--goes behind a NAT box, a site which was formerly a peer to their own sites goes dark, no longer accessible to others on the Internet, while their privileged sites remain. The lights are going out all over the Internet. My paper, The Digital Imprimatur, discusses the technical background, economic motivations, and social consequences of this in much more (some will say tedious) detail. Suffice it to say that, as the current migration of individual Internet users to broadband connections with NAT proceeds, the population of users who can use a peer to peer telephony product like Speak Freely will shrink apace. It is irresponsible to encourage people to buy into a technology which will soon cease to work. [...] _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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