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New VOIP App. Profiled
sniggly writes "Cnet News.com has an interview with Kazaa co-founder Janus Friis about their latest product Skype. Skype is a p2p VOIP technology that quote '... is addressing all the problems of legacy VoIP solutions: bad sound quality, difficult to set up and configure, and the need for expensive, centralized infrastructure.' Windows only beta client available."
use teamspeak: teamspeak.org
has excellent sound quality, is free, has windows and linux clients and servers...
Does Skype contain any advertising or Spyware?
No.
Link
It does claim to be ad-free. Is this synonomous with no spyware? Who knows?
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
I went to the Skype page. It says you can "Make free phone calls - all over the world!".
So I gleefully download the client and setup an account.
Wrong. No capability to actually call anyone's telephone.
Section 2c of their EULA states.."Skyper reserves the right to add additional features or functions to the Skype Software." I guess they leave it open to add it in there later.
In Soviet Russia, Nigel makes plans for you!
I've found that after the initial interest passes however, few people really want to use it to talk, but it is a nice replacement for MS Messenger (actually I use Trillian, but that might be kicked from the MS Messenger servers soon).
The only problem(?) I've found so far is that initially a bunch of total strangers felt the need to talk to me, but I found the privacy options and set the app to only accept calls from people in my list, after that it was much quieter.
Q1. key exchange?
And the key exchange is handled by... ? AES is a symmetric cypher, so there has to be some kind of key exchange. I'd like to know what that mechanism is, or if there's just one key and they can listen in on anything. After all, who'd need spy-ware if the whole thing was insecure by design? Oh, and if they've reinvented a bunch of cryptologic libraries, look out - there will most likely be fresh exploits to be had.
Q2. Why the lock-in?
Okay, so they're trying to make a buck or two here eventually, but touting a proprietary protocol as being a good thing is usually not a good sign. People buy Microsoft Office though, so I guess it's not that big a deal for the average person.
Suggestion. Would someone (or some group) restart development on Speak Freely?
Okay, so this is a bit of a sidetrack, but it's a valid point. There is a large body of tested code available for doing most of this kind of thing, and it's called Speak Freely. However, on the downside, John Walker (Mr. AutoCad to you) has decided to cease development, as of August 1 2003 (yes, that's in the past). All the code is at SourceForge, (both Unix and Windows) so you can go wild with it.
Something to think about.
Skype doesn't appear to have free VoIP->POTS (The ability to call regular phones from the VoIP product), so I fail to see how it's different from any of these other VoIP-only products. There's hundreds of them already...
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
. So, if there is a free VoIP app out there (perhaps one with strong encryption too),
SpeakFreely is free (GPL'd) and works reasonably well even on dial-up, and offers encryption.
(Though when I last used it a couple of years ago, the encryption was difficult to set up, as it used an external and seperately installed PGP.)
Why didn't I use it more than just for testing? Most of the people I'd call don't use VOIP. It's the early adoption problem: "Nobody" else uses VOIP, so it's less than useful to use it.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Just guessing here (well, I did sniff some packets with Ethereal) but I think that the negotiation is done using an open (3rd party) host -- so the call setup is not necessarily P2P. But, the RTP packets flowing between me and my callee were definitely end-to-end, P2P.
This is probably counting on the fact that most home firewalls use fully conic NATting.
I'm also guessing that the signaling and media are using the same port, unlike most (all?) other VoIP protocols. This saves the desginers from having to worry about keeping two NAT bindings alive.
I think they're going to try to build a viable revenue model around this - since they make the protocol proprietary there might be a lot of money that can be made by call forwarding such connections to a person within a large organisation and other such networking software. A potentially HUGE business for them and I dont see them spoil it with advertising.
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.