> What i liked about PGPfone was that you could directly connect to your > communications partner, without any servers involved and it was super > easy to use. You simply put in the (current) IP Adress, connect and then > read some displayed letters to each other, to prevent MITM, and then > communicated. There was no learning curve involved.
In the era before NAT, this may have made sense. In today's NAT-pervasive era, not so much. Under NAT, your IP address is hidden from the rest of the internet. The address my router gives me is not one the outside world can use to route information to me; and if I go to a website that lists my IP, that's actually my router's IP, not mine. I won't go into how NAT works except to say that under NAT, connections cannot[1] be made from one peer to another. You need a server that's not NATted in order to facilitate connections between peers. So -- I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the architecture of the internet has changed dramatically since PGPfone was released in ... what was it, '94? Today, one of the major purposes of these servers is to facilitate traversing NATs. [1] It's technically possible to do peer to peer behind NAT, but beyond the technical capabilities of the vast majority of users. _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
