Concerns regarding consumption of bandwidth and security have prompted some universities in the US to ban Skype. That's bad news for students looking forward to saving some of their lunch
money without forking out on hefty IDD or long distance calls. The latest University to face the ban is San Jose State University and the previous ones were University of California--Santa Barbara and California State University--Dominguez Hills. However not all VOIP software is banned as Gizmo or Wengo have not suffered the same fate.
It seems the problem stems from Skype's supernode feature that takes up too much bandwidth and it makes itself available to relay calls made by other users, thereby hogging up the broadband.
But a question comes up in my mind. How will the universities block Skype from being used as a ban like this will need to be enforced..I for one have been able to make it run on Port 80 on a very secure network in Netherlands before this.
Ars Technica says :
In a memo seen by Ars Technica, the SJSU Office of Information Technology says that Skype and other applications which use "grid-computing-like" networking capabilities are to be banned, but VoIP applications such as Gizmo or Wengo are still permitted for use. The memo also states that Skype's EULA is far too broad, requiring users to grant Skype general "usage rights" to the SJSU network—something that end users do not have the right to do, as it is not their network. OIT also says that the changes to the XP firewall "may prove to be an excellent vector for a worm."
Comment Preview