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Security VS Privacy
Would you hate it if you knew that someone listening to your phone calls in the name of national security and war against terror ? do you think that they have time to listen to your girl friend flirting to you ?
I’m all with free software and open sourcing every single bit of software on this living earth and make it free too; but yet this doesn’t mean I will say that every single closed source application is evil nor be aware of X or Y closed source application unless I have a point that I can prove.
I do not mind my calls to be monitored as long as they do it under the name of security, I don’t want them to say Only if we were monitoring those bloody VOIP calls that shit wouldn’t happen
if it’s for security then please go ahead, I don’t mind it, break my privacy please.
on the contrary I can’t really understand why they’re assuming that terrorists would coordinate their operations through Skype ? how about normal cell phones which is harder to trace especially when anyone can buy it with a fake ID?
I do love Ekiga and I respect Open Wengo but the matter fact I have single contact in my Ekiga account and never been able to register with Open Wengo.
On the other hand Gizmo has a competent voice quality and pricing and actually I do use it more than Skype for calling land and cell phones especially because it Gizmo is actually smoother than Skype on Nokia N800.
Skype is the most popular Internet telephony application with the largest network compared to Gizmo and Wengo and the cheapest one too and I can’t see any reason why one should stop using it especially when there is no better or same quality and pricing alternative to it and by the way you don’t use Skype just for internet telephony but text messaging too and I’d say (Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ) IM era has gone and I chat with almost all of my friends using Skype IM.
Maybe I should make it clear that I’m not defending Skype here as much as defending a good application, network and telephony pricing and be sure I’d do the funky chicken dance and upload it to youtube if we got a better open source alternative to Skype.
Tags: open wengo, internet telephony application, living earth, matter fact, war against terror, application network, nokia n800, source application, skype, voice quality, fake id, gizmo, girl friend, text messaging, national security, contrary, voip, terrorists, cell phones, nokia
August 26th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
The problem with Skype isn’t that it’s closed source per se; it’s that the network it uses to communicate is closed. So, as far as I’m aware, you have to use Skype’s software (on one of the operating systems they choose to make it for), or you can’t communicate with people using Skype.
Contrast this with SIP and H.323 (and Jabber), which can be freely implemented by anyone, and so allow communication between any number of different platforms.
August 27th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
[...] Security VS Privacy – Don’t Say Geek! Say Syntux! – Your freedom is worth more than you think. Tak… Counter-weight to the Free Software Magazine article – not particularly well articulated, but the general argument seems to be “Skype’s got more users, and I have no reason not to trust them, especially since the alternatives are nothing to call home abou (tags: skype openwengo criticism) [...]