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Does Your Employer Ban Skype?
neutralino asks: "This morning, we received an company-wide email stating that the Max Planck Society (a German government funded research organization) has outlawed the use of P2P software at all of its institutes (including ours). The statement specifically singled out the use of Skype for internet telephony. The reasons given for this were that 'the exchanged data cannot be controlled' (therefore it might be illegal) and that 'Max-Planck or research resources in general might be abused, if "only" for commercial purposes.' This caught us by surprise, since many of us use VoIP to communicate with friends and family and collaborators, in our respective home countries. Is it now standard practice for companies, government organizations, and universities to outlaw Skype? Should it be?"
I'm not going to tell you what company I work for but it is easily in the top 50 of the Fortune 500. And, yes, Skype is banned--my employer would never let anyone use Skype.
On top of that, I don't have administrative rights to install anything on my computer. I have to go through a large control process to achieve that which requires me to explain what the software will be used for (and it better be a company resource). Therefore, it's almost out of the question to ask for it to be installed.
My company (and I have the feeling that many others are like this, too) would far rather throw truck loads of money at AT&T rather than risk something going wrong with the P2P aspects of Skype.
Furthermore, any kind of free software scares my employer. Big time. I know Skype isn't necessarily free so this is about other software I may want to use. They have this fear that they would be a large target if whoever wrote said software decided to take legal action upon discovering that employees of company X all used it to complete their daily jobs.
Not even stadiums full of lawyers claiming that, due to some software licenses, there's nothing to worry about could convince them otherwise.
My work here is dung.
Any sensible admin would do that.
Skype eats network traffic, and when you multiply a Skype call by several hundred that's a lot of resources being consumed. Not to mention the impact on productivity and the security risk that is presented by unverified software.
Also, any corporate lawyer will tell you that no company wants to risk legal problems caused by employee misconduct. They certainly don't want to get blindsided because of a Skype call that they have no way of monitoring, tracking, or keeping record of.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
then it would be the perfect spyware.
The perfect spyware would punch through firewalls. Skype does just that for its legitimate purposes.
The perfect spyware would encrypt its outgoing communication. Skype does also.
The perfect spyware would be a program with plausible-sounding reasons to connect to unknown computers without notice. Skype has to do just that to take advantage of its supernode system.
The perfect spyware would be hard to reverse engineer. Skype refuses to run under SoftICE (apparently to inhibit development of competing clients).
In our own real world, Skype's been minding its own business. Nobody's lost a machine due to having Skype on it (at least not since the callto: buffer overflow). Nobody's reported suspicious activity in filemon while Skype was running. By normal standards it's trustworthy. But to a business which lives by "you can EXpect what you INspect" Skype is a terrifying unknown.
My employer bans it, and one of the reasons is that *any* type of VoIP system is banned in some of the countries we do business in (UAE being one of them). If the ISP in the region (effectively a state monopoly) found evidence of VoIP on their links, then they'd cut the links, simple as that. Interestingly, we examined the ToS of the link in UAE & we believe it's actually a criminal offence to use VoIP services on the connection we have.
Yes, Skype is blocked where I work. Ostensibly, this is primarily because it opens a hole in the firewall, thus making it a security threat.
It might also have something to do with the fact that we're a phone company.
If you read the EULA, you are agreeing to allow Skype access to your bandwidth should your machine become a supernode. Well, employees don't own the business's bandwidth and so are generally not in a position to accept those terms. In our case, they are absolutely not in a position to accept those terms.
Since our users cannot agree to the EULA, our organization has banned Skype. While I dislike the traffic, the deciding issue for administration was that the license was totally inappropriate.