Russell McMahon wrote:

>> I think you're right in that there is a risk, but I also think it is at
>> about the same level as with any application that is connected to the
>> internet and is not open source, especially most of the other IM
>> clients.
> 
> Not according to the articles I cited. It sounds like Sype is an order 
> of magnitude or maybe 2 better at bypassing firewalls than any normal 
> well behaved software, P2P or other.

This is only about VoIP. Yahoo or MSN Messenger for example don't seem to
have a problem communicating /data/ through firewalls. From a security
point of view, the specific difficulties of firewall and NAT router
traversal of VoIP connections don't really matter.


>>> Any node with a public IP address having sufficient CPU, memory and
>>> network bandwidth is a candidate to become a super node
>> 
>> This is what I read several times. To me, this almost means that it is
>> wrong to say that your PC may become a supernode without your consent
>> -- it kind of expresses your consent if you put a PC directly on the
>> internet with Skype installed on it and not properly firewalled :)
> 
> If you skimmed through those references you'll have seen that:

... there is little hard data. I'm not saying that there isn't a problem,
but I've read more references than you cited, and didn't find much "well
documented" stuff. Besides, the problems of company and university networks
are interesting but not necessarily relevant for a home user. In such an
environment, the admin sometimes has to work against the user. In a home
environment, you usually can assume that the users collaborate with the
admin. Client side configuration, for example, can be used to solve a
problem in a home network, but not necessarily in a corporate network.

Gerhard

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