There's a 2004 analysis by Columbia University of how Skype does its sneaky business here: http://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0412/0412017.pdf.
The JANET network in the UK didn't like what happened when it allowed a PC to become a supernode, as you can read here: http://www.ja.net/development/voip/skype&janet.pdf. They found in 24 hours it had talked to over 38,000 different IP addresses, maintaining 'over 660-690 open connections to different hosts'.
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It doesn't work on Vista any worse than it didn't work on Windows 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, NT and XP. (I'm using it quite unhappily on Vista RTM).
There's a 2004 analysis by Columbia University of how Skype does its sneaky business here: http://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0412/0412017.pdf. The JANET network in the UK didn't like what happened when it allowed a PC to become a supernode, as you can read here: http://www.ja.net/development/voip/skype&janet.pdf . They found in 24 hours it had talked to over 38,000 different IP addresses, maintaining 'over 660-690 open connections to different hosts'.
News is just rumours that have come true.