Skype under Fedora-10

[Veli-Pekka Kestilä]

Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
> Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> writes:
>   
>> And their system has plenty of other unsavoury aspects to it.  The
>> more anyone reverse engineers their closed system, the more
>> disagreeable things are found out about it.
>>     
>
> Normally one just has to worry about theoretical problems with trojans
> hidden inside binary programs like skype.  In this case, it is quite
> clear from looking at the traffic that skype was stealing user's
> bandwidth for carrying totally unrelated 3rd-party voice traffic by
> looping it into and out of the user's system.   
Well as far as I know it's stated that Skype uses p2p-protocol which 
uses computers of other people to route the calls to get better voice 
transport and one of the reasons I don't keep it running except when 
making calls to other countries landlines. As far as I can remember they 
were quite upfront about it from the start.

That feature actually is one which is missing from sip, if someone would 
make opensource voip-solution which would be secure and use p2p as 
transport we could maybe see real alternative to skype. Truth is that 
there is a lot of computers which cannot act as a server and no-one will 
want to host voip server for free (in large scale) so that two of these 
behind nat computers could talk with eachother.

And because of abundance of free but closed source alternatives like 
skype, msn, yahoo no one will be willing to pay for the service either.

-VPK