Skype makes wobbly return, offers compo to paying punters Skype is slowly coming back to life after suffering a major outage over the past few days and, in an effort to say sorry, the firm is offering to compensate its paying customers. Users of the VoIP service were unable to log into Skype on Wednesday, and the trouble has continued for many over the past 48 hours. The company's …
Why would a peer-to-peer system be routing calls through supernodes, unless it is to make it easier for the security services to monitor people. See the NSA helping Microsoft secure Windows :)
http://www.nsa.gov/ia/guidance/security_configuration_guides/operating_systems/microsoft_windows.shtml
Most Skype users are behind firewalls or NAT routers. The software CANNOT connect directly to another node because there is nothing to connect with. How does it even know the IP of the other person or if they're on/offline unless its registered on a central place? Instead both endpoints connect to a server which will play matchmaker and route messages from one to the other, or if possible provide a direct P2P path.
I expect traffic is encrypted to and fro, but if you were worried about backdoors then double encrypt your traffic or don't use Skype at all. For example use Jabber. Jabber also requires you connect to a server (for much the same reasons as Skype) but you may if you wish set up your own private Jabber server and even encrypt the traffic if you like. Wikileaks uses Jabber for example although I expect they far more reason to be paranoid than you do.
As for NSA helping secure windows, why wouldn't they help with that. If you haven't noticed Chinese, Russian, North Korean, Iranian hackers have a very strong motive to attack US systems. It's in the US governments national interest to make its computing infrastructure as secure as possible.
Tried calling my father several times for Christmas over the last hour.
He can hear me perfectly, however I only get a few words out of every ten from him.
Unusable. :(
He is (soon to be "was" I suspect) a paying customer. Their "support" people have been wasting his time and denying the problem exists. Wankers.
Obviously looking for alternatives now.
Their proposed "IPO" doesn't sound like such a good idea now either.
few people can criticise a failure particularly since it occurred on a major business break. Mind you, if you were travelling and needed to contact your travel agent you might be a little excised.
A tip of the hat for a great service, Skype.
Supernodes are inherent part of a lot of p2p networks. The advantage is you get better performance bootstrapping from a supernode than making every node a supernode - which would be painful for most users. It's a compromise between practicality and decentralisation. It's common to have supernodes/relay nodes on P2P networks.
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