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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."
"Making modifications to the Materials or creating derivative works based on the Materials is prohibited, as is using the Materials on any networked computer environment or other website."
Huh? Then how the heck can you use it?
I'd like one with vorbis and/or speex <ducks>
Belief is the currency of delusion.
According to their FAQ there is no spyware. However it suggests that there is an Skype to fixed landline phone / mobile phone feature on the horizon. So they're marketing plan is probably, create a viral product, get everyone to use it, add a valuable service ( make a cheap call to your friends mobile on the other side of the globe ). So I don't think they need the spyware this time, and the apps quality is quite good also, although I would like to see conference calls implemented. Just hope we'll get a linux client soon.
The 911 argument is and will come every time that VoIP is mentioned mostly due to the huge effort that went into building the system by alot of players. Getting the physical addresses changed and databased was big and kudos to those involved. This 911 effort is now built out and everyone is mapped so now all voice services can take advantage. Do not forget that every cell phone and telephone in the USA is required by federal law to be usable to call 911 out of the box and that no service activation or account holder is required.
Disclaimer: I use Vonage, turned off Bell South, and am a Geek.
Issues like 911 and power cuts are fairly trivial and are mainly being used as an argument against VoIP from the entrenched players.
while emergency calls are fairly rare, one still wants to have the ability to make them in the event of an emergency. getting rid of that capability would be a really dumb idea.
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IIRC, it was after they'd sold Kazaa that spyware started showing up in it, or at least after they started having legal problems.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
if it is kicked from MS serves shouldn't you consider using ICQ instead or some other IM? Why support them if they force you to use their client?
Agreed. They probably establish some sort of grid routing, such that machines that do have ports open will accept the connections from those that don't and somehow forward packets. I'm quite pessimistic about that though, since transmit capability is always small compared to the download channel of most home broadband connections. And unlike Kazaa where throughput is the only thing that matters, here latency is a very big concern, and throughput not so much. I'd think that one of the biggest challenges with this whole routing scheme would be ensuring that packets go to where they need to within a certain timeframe, otherwise it just doesn't sound natural.
Incidentally, Nullsoft's WASTE has a similar feature. Not voip, but rather the fact that only one person in the "group" needs the ability to accept incoming connections. THe traffic supposedly will route its way through the peer group in such a way so that A and B can still communicate directly even if they are both connected only to C (due to NAT of whatever.) Or something like that.
Chances are that behind most firewalls you are not going to encounter NAT'd and non-NAT'd systems that are going to mix. Sure as hell I'm not loading this crap on the non-NAT'd systems on a DMZ. Non-NAT'd systems anywhere else is just poor planning. So all those network will be islands where this stuff is unusable. Don't expect home users to figure out that they need a non-NAT system in order to get this to work; they think NAT is something you use bugspray on.
In fact, going with servers is exactly what is going to give us quality and quick-install access to the service. I'm still looking at services like Vonage that provide a box and a lower monthly cost. I don't want to have to rely on some bozo down the street to help my call go through. I don't think this is the answer.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Wait till people who like myself with a 3gig limit on broadband get their monthly bill. Lately I've been flat out changing friends over from Kaza to Kaza-Lite because of the extra bandwith Kaza (read GATOR) steals.
Their monthly bill tripled. Read the fine-print. I bet you have to let them use your bandwidth & CPU cycles & your monthly download bill will triple and your computer will grind to a halt if it's anything like kaza's network.
NAT and Firewalls are the two fundamental problems in making things like this work - they both interfere with SIP and Speak Freely and other peer-to-peer applications in ways that are fundamentally hard to solve, and since the Skype protocols are undocumented, I'm skeptical about how useful they are at home and more skeptical about how useful they are at work, and I don't know how to set up my firewalls to let their connections through.
As you say Key Exchange? - it's nice to know they're doing 256-bit AES, but how are they setting the keys? Microsoft's original PPTP had about seven things wrong with it, several of which were key-exchange related, rendering it totally insecure, as did 802.11's WEP. Diffie-Hellman with no authentication? D-H with some kind of SSH-like authentication persistence (User "Bob" has a different key than last time - are you sure?) Kerberos-like secret key server? How does it prevent man-in-the-middle attacks? Strong encryption doesn't help you if the keys are known.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks