[pulseaudio-discuss] Accessing audio as root

[Bill Cox]

On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 6:57 AM, Lennart Poettering
<lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
>> And this is the problem because it works with alsa, simply add every
>> user you want to give audio access to the audio group and it worked.
>> Even with OSS this worked. But PA breaks this behaviour.
>
> First of all, we broke exactly nothing. You can always bypass PA and do
> stuff like this.
>
> Secondly, allowing access to the audio device to all users is a
> security hole as I tried to explain quite a few times. Allowing that
> means a user can evesdrop into your voip calls, he can even completely
> monitor whatever you say when you sit in front of your computer.

How can I "bypass PA" on a Ubuntu Karmic or Lucid?  If I disable
user-land pulseaudio, several applications break, including the volume
control.  PulseAudio has been Vulcan mind-melded into the system.  If
you know of a realistic way to bypass PulseAudio, by all means, please
state it!

If sound were just for music, this wouldn't be a big deal.  Speakup
needs to route speech to the sound card, regardless of who is logged
in, and in parallel with whatever music or speech they are playing.
PulseAudio has broken Linux accesibility for the blind quite
seriously.

I'm a C coder, willing to help.  Got any ideas for a solution?

Bill