41–50 of 107 posts
With IP6 supernodes won't be needed for A/V traffic. Supernodes are only needed for NAT hacks. Skype succeeded because it worked in many different network environments. As contrasted with h323 and sip. Just to remind.
Think again; firewalling and NAT are coming to IPv6 whether they're needed or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or instead of engaging in conspiracy theores with zero proof we should look at whats going on here rationally. Skype is really unacceptable in any corporate environment. I don't want a random PC on my network to be a superpeer and suddenly use my 50mbps connection routing calls to the world. Run skype for a couple of mins, fire up tcpview, and watch calls come in and out. Not only is this a waste of my resources it a…
The bandwidth the whole Skype swarm can scale to in a matter of minutes will most certainly exceed what would be possible if you're running everything from a datacenter. Sure, have a few backup machines ready to takeover roles if super peers drop or something else is impacting the network. IT managers and IT buyers are obviously not the target market for Skype. They just buy that stuff from CISCO. Skype has invested…
I just wish they would update their Linux client.
Just so I understand this: they're switching from direct P2P messages between users (like MSN), to routing the messages through their own data centers first (like Facebook)? So in theory this will prevent any messages ever getting lost en route to the recipient? I can't tell you how many messages have gone undelivered between my friends and I when we used to use MSN messenger exclusively (even happens once or twice o…
If you and your peer are on mutually accessible networks the data will still be p2p in the same way (or not, as before).
Certainly helps solve the intercept problem for the American national security agencies. (Was that still a problem? My info is probably out of date, but skype being p2p was a pain in the ass for spying on customers a short while ago)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Others have argued that the real value of this is the improved user experience (and control over the user experience). That's almost certainly true. But more importantly, mining data from Skype would be of negative value to MS. Trying to gather any information that's utterly generic and innocuous would cause a massive PR scandal that would probably destroy Skype's credibility for ever, and possibly taint many other o…
Would this fall under wiretapping? Other IM services have blanket statements on monitoring all and any communication in their TOS, this just takes it to voice and video. I guess what I was thinking of was something akin to Google AdWords, not the "they want to control the world" conspiracy theory edge.
Serving ads to unpaid users is a good example of something that people probably wouldn't find too creepy (not too different from seeing ads on gmail). The problem is that since MS controls the client software, it's not something that they would need to do at the supernode level. They could just run the voice recognition / keyword selection on the client and then request the appropriate ads.
Even if they were planning on some more wide-ranging thing with adverts than that, it's unclear why they'd need intercept the conversations at the supernode rather than at the client. They'd also have the problems that they don't have a credible display ad service to use this data for, and that they can't correlate the data from a logged in Skype user to some random web user who isn't logged in.
If we assume MS is taking control of the supernodes for some observation purpose, the observation needs to be something that can't be done on the client, or that would look suspicious when done by the client. E.g. storing all the voice streams for later analysis, or transmitting summaries of conversations between paid Skype users to some MS address.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think again; firewalling and NAT are coming to IPv6 whether they're needed or not.
Who has ever said IP6 didn't need firewalling? That sounds insane... And where is this IP6 NAT you speak of??
Enterprise cannot leak their internal addresses, and, if they do, they want it to be something that nobody can make use of/route to.
Let me just make this very clear: you don't go from zero operating cost to multiple millions of hardware and colo space to do the very same thing, in a move so transparent that it needs security researchers to dig into your program to find out it has happened at all. I guess Skype (by extension, Microsoft) is growing interested in what people are speaking about. To get hold of that data you need to route it through y…
That's one possible explanation, and I think there's a healthy amount of skepticism required when analyzing moves like this, but it's not the only explanation. Keep in mind that a large part of Microsoft's business is in the enterprise, and voice is a huge application product for enterprise customers. Exchange has always had some form of voice integration. I haven't used it in years (since back when H.323 was big), s…
First, P2P networks to not have to be enormous. Drop your assumptions.
They can be small, and separated. (Think VLAN.) A P2P network can be set up so that any peer can volunteer to be a supernode. (Skype doesn't let you choose.) There must be at least one supernode to get a connection started but it does not have to be a company. It can be you, so long as you have a reachable IP.
And the supernode does not have to forward traffic. She can just function to set up the connections. And she can do so agnostic to the traffic. She only keeps a table mapping MAC's and private, arbitrary IP's. The supernode can disappear after the connection established; it won't break established connections. If two nodes are behind the sane NAT, then the supernode can forward to traffic to get around this impediment. Setting up connections is not the "magic". There's no need for MS to be a (or should we say, "the") supernode.
The "magic" in Skype is the way they handle the compression, encoding and decoding.
That is where one needs to focus.
Setting up P2P connections (for small, segregated P2P networks), reliably, and without snooping, is relatively easy. You or someone else in your contacts needs pulicly reachable IP. All the code you need to connect, which is not much- quite boring for the complexity lovers, has already been written.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
that's pretty interesting. do you have a link or something with some of the cost analysis?
Here's bandwidth pricing: http://drpeering.net/white-papers/Internet-Transit-Pricing-H... Let's say 100x drop in 10 years. (But broadband upstream certainly hasn't gotten 100x faster!) Determining the cost break-even point between P2P and client-server is more complex and I haven't seen any public analyses of it.
Something not mentioned by Ars is that the difference in cost between datacenter bandwidth and broadband has changed significantly in the last 10 years. Datacenter resources are now so cheap that P2P has little advantage. (I think the rise of cyberlockers are another manifestation of this trend.)