Skype Protocol Has Been Cracked

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Sat, 15 Jul 2006 11:19:05 GMT  <== Computers ==> 

Charlie Paglee's VOIPWiki Blog - a Chinese company has reverse engineered Skype's proprietary communication protocol. They called Mr. Paglee with their Skype client. Quality was not as good as Skype's, but they claim they'll fix that. Skype earns their money with their added for-pay services, Skype In, Skype Out, Skype Voicemail, etc. So I doubt this will affect their bottom line. What it will do is provide an alternative client for people who don't want their computers and network to be hijacked as a Skype super node (whenever I log in to Skype, the internet becomes inaccessible for a few minutes as thousands of other Skype clients attempt to use my computer as a proxy, flooding my DSL bandwidth). It will also allow firewalls, e.g. the Chinese national firewall, to block the protocol completely, something that's been difficult until now. [slashdot]

Al Sacco's CIO Tech Informer article. Slashdot discussion.

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