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Tox, a Skype Replacement Built On 'Privacy First'
An anonymous reader writes: Rumors of back door access to Skype have plagued the communication software for the better part of a decade. Even if it's not true, Skype is owned by Microsoft, which is beholden to data requests from law enforcement. Because of these issues, a group of developers started work on Tox, which aims to rebuild the functionality of Skype with an emphasis on privacy. "The main thing the Tox team is trying to do, besides provide encryption, is create a tool that requires no central servers whatsoever—not even ones that you would host yourself. It relies on the same technology that BitTorrent uses to provide direct connections between users, so there's no central hub to snoop on or take down."
Decentralized services are a great idea, but there is one big flaw. Not enough people care about it to get a critical mass of users. Virtually everyone outside a handful of tech geeks will keep using the centralized services, so to talk to people out there in the real world, you'll need to use the centralized services too. Or, restrict yourself to these decentralized networks and find they are mostly empty, maybe several thousands of users across the whole of the world.
And good luck trying to explain to Joe/Jane Sixpack how to use them. You have to fight against the centralized data-mined services that came preinstalled on their devices, and that's a non-starter for most people.
It fails not for technical reasons. It fails because of widespread tech illiteracy in the general population.
I can attest to Skype doing this. A friend away moved away for graduate school and we would communicate using Skype, so I started just leaving the desktop application open. My computer is located in my bedroom, with a switch next to it. I woke up like 3am, see the lights FLASHING going all sorts of nuts on my switch, which was weird as I had nothing on my pc open at the time. I check net stat... i see a inbound and outbound connection, one to some SBC DSL user in Atlanta, another to a Comcast user somewhere else, forgot where, but some other state. I kill Skype. BAM, connections close, traffic resumes normal operation. Skype was using my computer as relay service, since I have active UNPN, and the other two client presumably had some sort of firewall blocking direct communication. To this day i tell *EVERYONE* who uses the Desktop app to close it as soon as they're done to prevent this as most home connections now have meters. (Charter's is 250gb/mo for 30mbit, which I hit 150gb+ some months when I was toying around with AOSP and downloading the entire repo a few times after screwing up a VM or something).