(#500) Re: Skype good alternative to SF af

Message posted to the Speak Freely Forum
  by Bernard McG.... on Wed, 15 Oct 2003 10:37:56 +0200 (MEST).
  http://www.fourmilab.ch/wb/speak-freely.pl?rev=500

  Reply To: (#449) Re: [speak-freely] Skype good alternative to SF af
  Author:   Bill Stewart
  Date:     2003-09-16 20:43

On the subject of Skype.

I'm fairly new to this stuff but I'm wondering if Skype is doing anyyhing
reveolutionary with it's software or would be built upon the same type of P2P
technology as Speak Freely with some attention paid to FireWall/NAT
problems... and of course a stripped back 'easy to use' user interface?

Would anyone have any thoughts onthis?

Thanks

: Forwarded from the [email protected]
: mailing list: Skype is *not* open source
: software like SF - it's proprietary,
: so there's no way to trust it for more than
: casual use.

: You can download and run the binaries,
: but you can't get the source, so you can't
: validate
: whether it's secure in any meaningful way,
: and they don't document the protocols,
: either the key exchange protocols or codecs or
: anything,
: so you not only can't build compatible
: applications,
: you can't tell who it's talking to except by
: sniffing,
: and you can't validate whether the connections
: you sniffed are
: the only ones it makes or just the ones it's
: making now,
: and you can't tell if it's passing keys to an
: eavesdropper,
: and you can't tell if it's building connections
: to eavesdroppers,
: and you can't tell anything about its
: scalability,
: and you can't learn from any of the new ideas
: it might have.


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