2005 – October Minutes
Irvine Underground meeting was held October 7th 2005, 8PM at Extreme Pizza. Irvine Underground would like to thank the staff and owners of Extreme Pizza for allowing us to meet at their establishment and stay open extended hours for our use.
The highlight of the meeting was the 45 minute interview with Phil Zimmerman, the creator of the popular PGP encryption program. Phil is working on a new product called zFone which aims to be an encrypted VOIP software phone.
The zFone will work in a similar way to the way that SSH works. On your first connection to someone you will choose to trust their host key or not. Once you’ve trusted it, you can trust all further communication with them just as SSH works. Additionally, in the future you can double check what the correct key is and retroactively know that your previous conversations were not man-in-the-middle’d. The encryption is planned to be at the data layer of the VOIP packets, which means that who you’re calling will not be hidden, just the contents of the conversation.
Most of the questions revolved around the technical side of the product as well as his future plans and what sort of programmers he’s looking for.
The evenings presentation was setup by DaMan and the interview was directed by Kallahar. Thank you to those who have supported the IVU raffles, because of your generous support we were able to purchase new A/V hardware that made it possible so we could present and archive the presentation.
