> I have to ask What Skype tendencies????
> Hadn't heard anything bad, so never looked.

Skype is an aggressive secret sharer of your resources. As such it is 
also a major *potential* security risk although I'm not aware of 
anyone yet having used it's abilities for even more nefarious 
purposes. It knows how to 'tunnel' many firewalls unannounced and 
undetected and as new protections are put in place, some especially 
targeted to curb its proclivities, it learns distressingly quickly (no 
doubt courtesy of its dark masters) how to overcome the new obstacles. 
Not quite up to Skynet capabilities yet but not through want of trying 
or desire.

Once it finds its way to the world it can establish a supernode, using 
your system as a P2P routing point for others' traffic. How much is 
does this and how much say you have in the matter is hotly debated - 
including on this list in the relatively recent past, but as it makes 
every effort to avoid or fool the normal monitoring systems, any 
claims as to what it does or doesn't do should be judged with care and 
after taking note of the tools and credentials of the claimants. [[In 
that context, I'm me and I've used no tools at all and have never run 
Skype and will try very hard to never do so - so you have to take the 
word of the people "out there" who have convinced me. I leave it as an 
exercise to the student to find these people and to be similarly 
convinced :-).]] You have the ability to make a supernode voluntarily 
and may or may not have the ability and right to not do so.

Anything is does do is no doubt permitted by you by your having agreed 
to its fine print.

If you don't want to use Skype on a given occasion you may elect not 
to run it, but this is no guarantee that it will not want to use you 
(or your system) and choose to run you (or your system). If it does do 
so don't expect it to tell you and don't expect to be able to easily 
determine that it is doing so.

Skype was designed and is still AFAIK operated and ongoingly developed 
by the people who brought the original super P2P file sharing system 
to the net. It knows what it is. Makes sense.

Any of the above which sounds like advanced (or standard) paranoia may 
be checked on using the don't-be-evil search engine.



        Russell



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