Wednesday June 15, 2005

The Hype on Skype

It looks like the corporate world is starting to "discover" Skype. Separately, and literally within days of each other, the companies that Biow and I are currently with have had mandates passed down from corporate headquarters to use Skype instead of expensive IDD for calls. Heck, HQ even gave me my own headset to talk with.

These factors have probably helped :

1. All the hype on Skype - its astonishingly fast user-base growth. Like I told you before, companies (and our entire industrial society) respect "growth". And there's also the "121,161,994 downloaders can't all be wrong" (at time of writing) factor.
2. Free inter-country calls, replacing expensive IDD. That's the cost-saving angle that the hordes of companies and end-users are gunning for.
3. Ease of setup - even dummies can do it. Skype's firewall and NAT traversal algorithms make it look almost too easy.
4. Comparatively better voice quality compared to other free clients like Yahoo or MSN.
5. AES-256 encryption - just nice for the "mildly paranoid". The "deeply paranoid" who question the exact implementation, ask for source codes and peer reviews will never be satisfied (by any solution, actually).

And here are my own notes :

1. To turn Skype into an encrypted instant-messaging client, go to Tools, Options, General, and under "When I double-click on Contact or use the address field" select "Start chat" instead of "Start call". This way you can send IM messages Yahoo- or MSN-style.
2. Under Tools, Options, Privacy, under "Keep chat history" select "No history". The default is "Forever", which kind of defeats the purpose of encrypted communications, doesn't it.
3. It looks like you can log into the same account on multiple computers at the same time. It will not log you out on the other machine like Yahoo does or block you like MSN does. IM's will arrive at each machine where you have your Skype account logged in to. Not so sure about voice calls though, some report only the last machine will "ring", others say that all machines will "ring".
4. Another piece of "mildly paranoid" advice - turn off 80 and 443 (Tools, Options, Connection). Some ISP's may misunderstand and claim that you are running "servers" at these very well-known ports - well technically you are if you leave them open, but probably not what they had in mind. If you're behind a firewall, or perhaps multiple firewalls (like me), then it doesn't matter that much, but it's really a waste of CPU cycles and RAM for those extra listener threads, huh.

(2005-06-15 08:11:34 SGT) [Tech] Permalink

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