In print journalism, it is not uncommon for headlines to prejudice the readers and convey an erroneous point of the story. Internet being a fast world, this happens routinely there. For example, it is indelible in the minds of VoIPers that VoIP is illegal in India. No amount of explanation will be enough. This morning Om Malik has fallen victim to this in a single post – twice actually.
In the post in question, Om discusses Skype 2.0. In the passing, he states, quoting Stuart Henshall, that some Skype customers’ passwords have been compromised. If you go to the source, Stuart concludes this based on an advisory issued by Skype Security System. If you read the email, they do not claim this at all and it much less dramatic. A sister site has not followed the security guidelines and so they have taken an extreme procedure. There is no evidence that some third party got hold of Skype logins and passwords. Their corrective procedure may have inconvenienced some users; but that is another story. The real story here is that Skype is the owner of your identity and it can keep you out of their world at anytime for any reason. It is not P2P in that sense – it is P2P only when it is beneficial to them. But this point may be esoteric and may not be so catchy.
The other item is related to the news item regarding Israeli Communications Industry directive requiring all ISPs to “ensure that their systems are not illegally supporting long-distance calls using voice over Internet (VoIP) technology.” Both Jeff Pulver and Tom Keating have discussed this story and have concluded that Israel blocks VoIP. A Ministry representative has to individually contact them to inform them that what is prohibited is illegal interconnection to PSTN, not even all forms of interconnection. But Om’s source goes one step further. Their headline states, “Ministry out to throttle free Skype calls”. In the body of the text, Skype is mentioned just once when they say that “[VoIP] allows companies like Skype to offer free international phone calls over the Net.” My request to fellow VoIPers is that if we really believe in the revolutionary nature of the technology and if we think rate arbitration is not really the point of VoIP, then let us ignore PSTN totally. Then any restriction on interconnection to PSTN will be a non-event.
On the other hand, we should pay attention to blocking open communication in the IP domain as reported by another story Om refers to in his post. It seems there is a company called Bitek International that can block Skype or any other designated application.
Posted by aswath at December 1, 2005 08:44 AM