Re: Purple Boxes

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

At 10:30 PM 8/15/95 -0400, Dave Emery wrote:
>	I reiterate my suggestion of a few months ago that
>one could quite easily adapt the firmware on one of the new simultanious
>data and digital voice on the same phone line modems to incorperate
>encryption, and quite possibly encryption/key exhange interoperable
>with some mode of PGPphone.   Doing this would relieve one of the
>need to develop or manufacture any hardware at all - all that would
>be required to have a portable "bump in the cord" encrypter widely
>available for a low price would be creating a new version of the
>downloadable flash ROM image that did encryption and PGPphone
>key exchange.

Most modems I've seen only have one set of audio interfaces,
and a bump-in-the-cord phone needs two (one for the voice side,
one for the modem line side.)  (Having two jacks doesn't count.)
So you'd need at least two modems, one straight and one re-educated,
and you'd probably need lots more flash ROM than the average modem has.

On the other hand, laptops are increasingly getting multimedia capabilities
like built-in sound cards, and if there's a microphone jack you're in 
business (uh, well, for $3K or so)   Or a cheaper laptop with two PCMCIA modems,
if you can re-educate one, which also lets you move the non-audio parts
of your secure phone program into the PC.  Of course, if you want long
conversations from the airport, you'll still need to find a payphone
within 4-6 feet of an electric socket and not located under a MegaMuzak speaker,
but that's easier than trying to balance a TI Silent 700 under similar
conditions :-)
#---
#                                Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281
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