From: Eric Hughes <hughes@soda.berkeley.edu>
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 93 11:01:34 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: building a sound sampler for cryptophone application...
In-Reply-To: <9308201356.AA07181@an-teallach.com>
Message-ID: <9308201757.AA04239@soda.berkeley.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


>Thanks for your time.  I hope this isn't considered too off-topic... (I
>mean, I *could* have posted an incredibly interesting piece about the
>Challenger disater instead, eh Eric? ;-))

Perfectly on-topic, Graham.

That said, I think that designing custom hardware for sound sampling
is a waste of time, given the abundance of multimedia cards that
already work.

The barrier to entry to solder up even the tiniest, simplest circuit
is enormous for most people.  Cypherpunks is not the Privacy League
for Hackers.  The solutions that we make should be to the greatest
extent available to all without special prerequisites.  That means
that hardware should be freely purchasable, since the resource of
money is more widely available that the resource of hardware skill.
It means that software should not require root for Unix machines, nor,
if possible, knowing how to operate a compiler.

While I applaud your enthusiasm, your effort toward getting usable
secure phones would be much betting spent writing device drivers for
various soundblaster-type cards.

Eric