Do We Need P2P Telephony?

from the how-long-until-legal-troubles-come-along... dept

From the folks who originally built Kazaa comes a new P2P telephony application called Skype. You might wonder why you would need to use "P2P" technology for internet telephony, and my guess is the answer is "for hype". More seriously, the idea is that they can better route internet-based phone calls based on what they learned in figuring out how to route requests for the latest pop single. That's nice, of course, but I'm not sure it's really that big of a deal. They're offering up an application that is basically a voice-chat product like so many out there. From their own description (which is probably a bit biased), they're trying to make it incredibly easy to use, while also being quite secure - which are both good things. How they'll deal with the eventual requests from folks in the US government to put in back doors so that calls on the system can be "tapped" is another open question. There's also no indication of whether or not the system comes bundled with fifty kinds of spyware like Kazaa. Update: Apparently the service got off to a bumpy start, as they weren't expecting so many people to start using it.

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