18 Jan
2016
18 Jan
'16
7:41 p.m.
iadest(a)o2.pl wrote:
Thanks for alternatives. About a year ago I was
looking for open
alternative for Skype (voice connections). Unfortunately, I found that
no such thing exists for connections which are not a server-grade
(with public IP). I'm behind a router, then another one (ISP NAT), with
some port blocking, then probably another one (I'm not sure), and I
cannot use anything except server-based solutions. I haven't found any
open-source solutions working. Half of these just couldn't connect
(throwing illogical errors), the other half tried to manipulate router
which is not mine.
Well, after researching about Skype and how its internals are
protected far more beyond normal copyright (do they try to mask
backdoors this way?), I decided not to go with it and not use voice
communication at all.
MCbx
No skype is not using any backdoor, rather it has comprehensive mechanism to
try and find a way to get the connection to the other part.
There was a nice article years ago, about the internal structure and how
people tried to reverse engineer it. If you can use etherape or alike
(wireshark) you can see what is going on when you are behind NAT and in a
less protected network.
We did a test with very restrictive network and it had a callback channel
via some skype server - I think it finds out which port is open and uses
this port to get the communication via some skype server.
The problem with using alternative is also related to what your counter part
would use. The bigger problem here is incompatibility of protocol
implementations, so that you are not free to decide but use whatever the
counter part uses to have a communication.
I recently read more about OTR, which seems to be implemented AFAIR also in
TDE or some patch for KDE3 - I don't know exactly now. Unfortunately there
is no similar voice/video solution to encrypt the stream ... well there are
some kinds of encryption, but I don't think anything was implemented on
unix bases and still your peer must use the same or similar application ...
that is the problem (with democracy) ;-)
regards