---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 09 Mar 2003 02:35:08 +0100
From: John Walker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Speak Freely Mailing List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: [speak-freely] for Windows 7.6-A2 pre-release now available
This announcement is addressed to experienced users of Speak
Freely for Windows interested in testing experimental
releases. Users of Speak Freely for Unix or Windows users
inexperienced in testing pre-release software need read no
further.
Speak Freely for Windows pre-release 7.6-A2 (Alpha 2) is now
available for downloading:
Ready to run executable:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/windows/download/7.6-A2/speakfb.zip
Complete source code (for Visual Studio .NET):
http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/windows/download/7.6-A2/speakfs.zip
These are "classic" zipped archives--no installer is included.
The executable archive simply unpacks into a directory
containing the SPEAKFRE.EXE program, help, and audio files.
The source code archive must be unpacked with options set to
preserve directory structure and using a utility which
preserves long file names.
In addition, source code may be checked out from the public CVS
(Concurrent Version System) archive on Source Forge:
https://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=72602
Developers interested in modifying Speak Freely source code and
submitting their changes for integration in a future version
are encouraged to discover the many benefits of configuration
management with CVS. An excellent place to start is:
http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/cvsbook.html
Summary of Changes
==================
Here's an overview of changes in this release. For a detailed
description of all changes, please consult the development log,
which may be found in the References section of the help file
or as the file Htmlhelp\html\log.htm in the source archive.
Changes in 7.6-A2 are as follows.
AES (Advanced Encryption System)
--------------------------------
The FIPS-197 Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is now
supported. This recently-adopted standard supports encryption
with 128, 192, and 256 bit keys, and is free of all patent and
licensing constraints. Speak Freely permits you to specify 128
or 256 bit keys with one or two key phrases, or 128, 196, and
256 bit keys directly in hexadecimal. AES will eventually
become the mainstream encryption mode supported by Speak
Freely. For additional information on AES, see:
http://csrc.nist.gov/encryption/aes/
Persistent Window Geometry
--------------------------
As suggested by Dennis Antonisin, Speak Freely now remembers
the window size, position, and normal/maximised modes from
the last run and restores them the next time it's launched.
GPG Session Key Exchange
------------------------
GPG (the GNU Privacy Guard, http://www.gnupg.org/) may now be
used to exchange session keys as an alternative to PGP. You
select which public key encryption package you prefer with a
new Options/Public Key Package menu item. Unless you're very,
very careful how you install the packages and generate your
keys, you'll probably have to select the same public key
package as the person you're communicating with in order for
key exchange to work.
Answering Machine Improvements
------------------------------
If the user has specified a name and E-mail address in the
Phonebook/Edit Listing dialogue (or with the corresponding
SPEAKFREE_* environment variables in the Unix version), they're
shown when displaying calls in the answering machine, along
with the fully qualified domain name of the host, assuming it
can be resolved from the IP address. These items appear
regardless of whether the calling party has published them on
an LWL server.
Per Dennis Antonisin's recommendation and subsequent discussion
on the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list, the answering
machine now provides three mechanisms for returning calls. You
can either launch a connection directly to the IP address (for
a fixed IP user), by looking up the host name (for fixed IP
users or floating IP users who register their IP address with a
DNS registry service such as DNS2Go <http://www.dns2go.com/>),
or by looking up the user's E-mail address (or whatever
identity they entered in that field; there's no need to
disclose your E-mail address if you don't want to, and plenty
of excellent reasons not to) on the currently selected Look
Who's Listening server, which permits finding on-line users
with dynamic connections wherever they happen to be. If the
information required by a given button to return a call wasn't
specified, the button is disabled.
Assorted Bug Fixes and Minor Tweaks
-----------------------------------
If compression mode was set to Simple+CELP, buffer overflows
could lead to crashes. Fixed.
There's now an item on the Help menu which takes you directly
to the "Quick Start Guide" in the help file.
Setting the voice activation level by dragging the "thumb" in
the level scroll bar didn't work. Now it does.
Cleaned up keyboard navigation in the Options/Connection
dialogue and the Answering Machine dialogue, where keyboard
focus could get trapped on a disabled button, shutting down all
keyboard shortcuts.
Encryption mode is now displayed correctly in the connection
window when multiple encryption modes are selected
simultaneously.
Session key generation with the Options/Create Key menu item
no longer uses the IDEA encryption package and is hence now
free of patent constraints and enabled even in "No Crypto"
builds.
Replaced .PIF files for launching PGP (and now GPG) with .LNK
(Shortcut) files. As these files contain absolute pathnames,
the user must create them in the Speak Freely installation
directory. Otherwise, PGP and GPG will be executed from the
PATH as usual. The SFPGP.PIF file formerly included in the
binary distribution is no longer supplied.
Windows/Unix Interoperability and Upward/Downward Compatibility
===============================================================
The respective 7.6-A2 releases for Windows and Unix should
interoperate completely without any restrictions, and should be
compatible with earlier versions of Speak Freely on any
platform as long as no subsequently added features (for
example, CELP compression, AES encryption, and GPG session key
exchange) are used. Previous versions of Speak Freely should
be 100% compatible in establishing connections to 7.6-A2.
There are no changes which affect interoperability with
existing Echo, Look Who's Listening, Conference Reflector, or
Voice On Demand servers.
HTML Help File Issues
=====================
Commencing with the earlier 7.6-A1 release, Speak Freely for
Windows uses the Microsoft HTML Help engine to display its help
file, replacing the earlier (and now essentially impossible to
maintain) WinHelp mechanism. The vast majority of Windows
users will have no difficulty viewing such help files.
Users with early versions of Windows 95 and 98 may lack system
components (DLLs) required to display help files in this
format. If you have trouble accessing the help file in this
release, you can download an installer provided by Microsoft
which is supposed to upgrade your system accordingly. You can
download this package from:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/speakfree/windows/download/3rdparty/hhupd.exe
This is a Microsoft product (which they grant third parties the
right to redistribute); any catastrophes which result from your
using it are between you and Microsoft--I'm making it available
solely because the download link on the Microsoft site has been
broken for a while.
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