From: "Harry Hochheiser" <harry@tigger.jvnc.net>
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 03:56:08 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: PGPfone Beta 7 Now Available for Download
Message-ID: <199607131454.AA13554@tigger.jvnc.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


On 12 Jul 96 at 21:31, Arun Mehta wrote:

> At 23:38 10/07/96 -0700, Will Price wrote:
> >ANNOUNCEMENT: PGPfone Beta 7 Now Available for Download
> 
> Sorry if this has been discussed before (please point me in the
> right direction if that is the case), but VSNL, my government-owned
> ISP (which also has a monopoly on all international traffic) made me
> sign that I will not use my Internet connection for voice traffic.
> Is there any way they could find out if I were using PGPfone, or
> rather, could I prevent them from finding out? 


Arun:

I can't give you a definitive answer here, but I'll take a shot.  
Most Internet telephony systems use UDP packets to transfer speech, 
since the lower overhead of UDP (as opposed to TCP) allows for better 
throughput.      I assume (but I'm not certain) that PGPfone works 
the same way.

Unfortunately, most of your other TCP/IP communication will be based 
on TCP packets.  Therefore, it's theoretically possible for your ISP 
to monitor your traffic, watching for large numbers of UDP packets.  



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Harry Hochheiser           harry@tigger.jvnc.net
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