🚀 go-pugleaf

GuyD@world.net wrote:

[stuff about cyptography ban deleted]

:       ******* And now for the juicy bit ********

: It is a fact that Telstra had a software development project in
: progress in early 1995, who's aim is to monitor and log phone connections
: through their exchanges, to determine:-
:   a) Which calls are voice, and which are modem.
:   b) If modem, what baud rate and protocol.
:   c) Given (b), to determine whether the link is using encryption.
:   d) Lastly, given a positive (c), to attempt to analyse what _sort_
:      of encryption it is.

Come on! Certainly a ban on cryptography is a stupid and unenforcable
law, but claiming that THEY are monitoring all our phone calls to check
if people are using encryption is absurb. I would guess that in the order
of 10,000,000 phone calls are made each day in Australia (note that this
is just a guess, and could be an order of magnitude different from the
real value). All these calls would have to be monitored from start to
finish to make sure that nobody started transmitting encrypted data 
part way though the connection, or switched from a voice to modem
connection. Surely this would be incredibly computationally expensive.

Furthermore, is it even possible to tell the difference between
encrypted and non-encrypted data? A good encryption scheme could 'hide'
cyphertext in some other data, such as an image (steganography). Or you
could develop your own encryption system that has no well known header
that would identify it.

[rest of rant deleted]

An interesting urban legend .. but not much more.


 - Jamie