| Computerworld > Skype: hazardous to network health? That was quite a scare story, but it was also full of half truths and downright lies. Your corporate desktops and notebooks are the peers that are consigned as Skype pleases to relay traffic and function as mini-servers in the Skype universe. If your PC is directly connected to the net with no intervening firewall then there is a possibility of it becoming a supernode. That eliminates every corporate PC. Have you ever seen a corporate network with no firewall? According to Skype — and validated by our research — a VoIP call will consume between 24 and 128kbit/s. When a Skype station is functioning as a relay the bandwidth is doubled. If your PC becomes a supernode, you will relay switching traffic and not voice traffic to an expected maximum of 5kbps, according to Skype staff on the Skype forums. Go ahead and do the tests to prove them wrong. And, lest you think that you can stop all this by exiting Skype, think again. You might not be using Skype but it might be using you. Skype continues to run in the background unless you uninstall it or kill the process. If you quit Skype it does not leave anything running on your PC. There's a lot of FUD about how Kazaa was riddled with spyware so Skype must be. Try this. Quit Skype and then look at Task manager. Is anything left running? I don't think so. If Skype did leave anything running, don't you think there would be a completely justified witch hunt against them? There is an article to be written that digs into Skype's Supernode architecture and it's security but this definitely isn't it. You have to wonder whether this article is a shill for some competing VoIP company or Telco. As a moderately respectable publishing house, IDG should be ashamed. And as for the Tolly Group who apparently did the study and wrote the article, would you trust anything else they wrote? |
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[ 05-Oct-05 7:17am ] [ Skype
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