On 04/05/2008, peter nikolic
but the thing is no one ever uses them it's all skype , I cant for the life of me see why you are soi PARANOID about security you hiding national government secrets or similar either that or you got some serious stuff to hide from people ..
Not true. SIP telephony is widely used in businesses, even for handling hundreds or thousands of internal and external phone calls. Skype is mainly only used by home users. You can run your own telephony system with asterix, connect it to one or several telephony providers which will link it to the PoTS, using the cheapest provider for each call. The advantage of open protocols is what made the world wide web take off, everyone can interoperate. One of the reasons of moving to VoIP is to get away from vendor lockin of the PoTS. Skype on the other hand is a proprietary protocol that creates far more vendor lockin than the PoTS does in many countries. To communicate with another skype user you must be using a skype product and skype's network. If skype start charging everyone for doing skype-skype calls then there's nothing you can do about it. If skype were to triple their prices you could move to another provider... oh wait you can't. Furthermore, by using skype you are donating your computer's bandwidth, and CPU time to extending a proprietary network that can only be used for increasing skype's profit, have you read the EULA? Additionally, you are locked into using proprietary non-free client software which could be doing anything to your computer, there is already suspicion that it sends more information than is required or agreed upon back to skype, and skype could add any additional functionality that you would not know about to the client in future releases. So the choices are use SIP telephony which is widely used, there are hundreds of providers you can chose between and mix and match, and a huge choice of both softare and hardware phones. Or you could be anti-social and use skype, telling everyone they must lock themselves into using a proprietary protocol and proprietary software in order to talk to you. -- Benjamin Weber -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org