Speak Freely

» see fourmilab.ch/speakfree as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Speak Freely ran alongside my entire early internet and I still never used it. In 1998 I was on a 33.6k modem in Turkey, where voice over a link like that was a demonstration rather than a phone call, and long distance was the thing you were trying to avoid paying for in the first place. By the time TTNet gave me enough bandwidth to actually try it, around 2006, MSN Messenger had a voice button sitting right there and everybody I would have called was already inside it.

John Walker co-founded Autodesk and wrote a large part of early AutoCAD, then spent the rest of his life publishing software and long essays from Fourmilab. He posted Speak Freely to Usenet in 1991 and kept it alive for the next thirteen years. There were builds for Unix and for Windows. Both were free and both shipped with source.

What it did was send digitized audio between two machines across the plain internet, with optional encryption using ciphers including DES and Blowfish. It spoke RTP so it could talk to other software. There was no account to register and no company that could switch it off. You needed the address of the machine at the other end, and that was the entire system.

That design is why it worked in 1991 and why it stopped working later. It assumed both computers were reachable, which was simply true of a machine on a university network or on a dialup connection that got a real address for the duration of the call.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the notice said ~

On 15 January 2004 Walker put up an end of life announcement rather than just letting the pages rot. His argument was that broadband had arrived in homes attached to network address translation, and that this quietly demoted every user behind a router from a peer on the network to a consumer of it. You could still reach out. Nothing could reach you without a company in the middle arranging it.

He also said the code needed a rewrite from the bottom up, six to twelve months of work, and that it would be irresponsible to keep handing people software built on an assumption the network no longer honored. The line everyone quotes from it is "The lights are going out all over the Internet."

~ whether he was right ~

Technically he was beaten within months. Skype shipped in 2003 and got two machines behind routers talking to each other anyway, using other users as relays and a pile of hole punching tricks. So the problem was solvable. The part Walker got right is what solving it cost: Skype needed a supernode network and eventually an owner, and each of those is a place where a call can be logged or stopped. He was not complaining that his program had become hard to write. He was pointing out that the fix required exactly the middleman his program existed to avoid.

I was one of the machines in his argument. The TTNet router in the corner handed me a private address and no way to accept an incoming connection, and I never once thought of that as a loss, because by then nothing I ran expected to receive anything. That is what he meant. The capability did not get taken away in an announcement. It just stopped being assumed, and a generation of software got written for the network that was left.

Fourmilab still hosts the announcement and the manuals, and the source for both the Unix and Windows versions sits on SourceForge with nobody maintaining it. The Internet Archive has the installers. It builds, more or less, if you are willing to fight it, and then you discover you have no one to call and no way for anyone to call you, which is the exact point the author was making when he stopped.

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