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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."
Skype sounds so much like hype.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
Pop-up ads and spyware! Now when you mention the right world, it'll be replaced with an ad. "I'm going to go drink a soda" becomes "I'm going to go drink a refreshing ice-cold Coca-Cola."
Which, since it's from the same guys as Kazaa, I would certainly expect it to be.
Color me uninterested until accounts of user experiences pop up all over the internet with an overwhelmingly positive response.
I wonder how long til there's a Skype Lite out there..and how long before Google removes links to it. Grr.
The next wave of bell propaganda will be "If it's not copper, it causes terrorism".
Sounds like a good idea, after all Apple's trying to make video chat easy to use for the mases... Maybe Kazaa should also implement the same specs that Apple is with their iChat.
Now it's "Value-Added User-Profiling Ware"
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
If Kazaa is running this will my conversations be tapped into and downloaded to thousands of PC's in dorms across the nation?
the telecom industry still hasn't figured out that VOIP is going to take more and more $$$ away.
I wonder just when their lobbyists will get the US congress to outlaw or at least hamper the use of inter/intrastate VOIP?
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.
There are several similar applications out there, the oldest I can remember off-hand is Speak Freely which does secure p2p.
Right now we use Ventrilo internally at work - it's not secure, but we can do conferencing in super quality with VERY low bandwidth! It's excellent!
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
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.
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...
With this we are likely to see a new telemarketting trend if it takes off. Think about it, there's a no call list, but there's certainly no such regulations regarding this technology yet.
I just downloaded and set it up, and had a quick chat with a friend down in California. The quality is very nice and it's super easy to get working. Especially nice is the fact that, although we're both behind NAT connections, we were able to get connected with no problems at all - no configuration was necessary.
Personally, I'd be prepared to pay a fairly reasonable amount for a tool like this, if they decided to go down that route. I live in the US but my family is all back in the UK. I currently spend in the order of about $50/mo on international calls (and that's with a low rate international plan) so something like this could save a lot of money if it was priced reasonably. I've emailed my folks back in the UK to have them download it as well so I can test the latency and see how well it works.
The basically zero effort setup is what really makes this rule though. No worries about forwarding ports, etc. It Just Works[TM]. This may well turn out to be the killer VoIP app. Time will tell!
. 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.
An interesting editorial regarding this CNET story run yesterday on Voxilla.com.
Being one of the people singled out in the story the good news is that since the story ran, I spoke with Janus and Free World Dialup will be working with the Skype team in interconnecting our respective networks.
What concerns me more than this story is that last Friday it was first reported that Wisconsin
joined the growing list of US States that is taking action against VoIP.
Give me one single robust protocol and the apps to run on it can be many and slendid. Just make sure it has everything useful from all the other IM apps out there. Even if the execution quality is poor, lay out the groundwork.
a) decentralized
b) secure
c) video and audio
d) messaging
e) file transfer
f) file browsing
g) open protocol
h) whiteboard
i) multiple logins j) basic multiuser functionality(a la IRC)
I am certain I am missing something. But I really didn't expect things to take this long... I know hypertext took a long time to turn into the www, but that was a bit more pioneering. This is largely a technical issue, since every feature above is offered by On of the big IM's, Skype or Waste.
Obviously, the Major businesses are not intersested in developing an interoperable standard. However, it is the technophiles and pedestrian Internet Users who would benefit from this. So it should be seen to by us to create one protocol to implement such an awesome app. And even if you couldn't call POTS from it, it would catch on. Hell, if it was open, the major IM providers would probably build gateways to access it or eventually leave their existing systems to jion it, increasing it's already immense value.
At least then I wouldn't need to have Trillian, ChatZilla, IIP, Waste and Shareaza all at once (and Y! Messenger, MSN Messenger, AIM and ICQ installed) just to share a few annecdotes and family photos with friends!
Please, coder people! Help us out!
Looks good for your age..
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