Bill Kearney

New p2p voice telephony?

Anyone out there using Skype yet? Supposedly it's a p2p telephony application with sound quality that's better than even landline phones.

It's from the developers of Kazaa however. One has to wonder with how horribly Kazaa wrecks your computer, will this be just as bad?

The agreement seems reasonable, Section 3, for instance:

3. Permission to Utilize. In order to receive the benefits provided by the Skype Software, you hereby grant permission for the Skype Software to utilize the processor and bandwidth of your computer for the limited purpose of facilitating the communication between other Skype Software users.

But then the next paragraph states:

You understand that the Skype Software will protect the privacy and integrity of your computer resources and communication and ensure the unobtrusive utilization of your computer resources to the greatest extent possible.

Just what utilization are they talking about here? Are they talking about plain p2p exchange where you computer helps the Skype traffic along, in a p2p fashion? If so, that's fine. But are they instead talking about using your computer to do other proccessing work not related to voice traffic? That's what other p2p efforts have tried before, hijacking the use of your computer to do something entirely unrelated; often in a way that slows your computer down.

Section 13 goes on to say:

Skyper reserves all rights not expressly granted herein. Skyper may modify this
Agreement at any time by providing such revised Agreement to you or posting the revised Agreement on its website located at www.skype.com.

Note the use of or posting. They're basically saying we may tell you or we may put it up on the website without telling you. At install time you may be agreeing to one thing but they could, at any time, change the terms by posting to their website without telling you.

The troubling parts are failing to clearly set out what they're going to use your computer to perform and not having a clear notification policy. Other p2p efforts have played this game before, give you the software for free, make you think it does one thing and then have it secretly start doing another. Those other functions have even ended up being a service they sell to 3rd parties leaving you with nothing.

p2p has amazing potential for harnessing and distributing computational and network workloads. But not at the expense of keeping people in the dark.

Thanks got out to Charles, for letting me know about Skype.