[Intrusions] UDP traffic on port 48864

[Andrew Daviel]

On Fri, 30 Sep 2005, Jon Hedlund wrote:

> Skype is a peer-to-peer application, nodes may act as relays for other
> nodes and some nodes act as super-nodes, directing and representing all
> the nodes underneath it.
> If two nodes that are both behind firewalls that only allow outgoing
> originating traffic, such as most home NAT gateways, want to communicate
> they require a non-firewalled node to act as a relay between them. Skype
> creates a dynamic mesh network of nodes to route both presence information
> and the voice traffic itself.
>
> Jon

Thanks for the explantion; that is great!

I don't recall I got anything from Skype. I also don't recall this being
explained in the EULA when installing the application.

This somewhat annoys me; Skype are stealing our bandwidth (which we have
to pay for) without, it seems, asking. We had a similar argument with
a streaming audio service (which was much much worse), which was using
user's PCs as rebroadcasters if they had clicked "LAN" for their
Internet connection, ending up with maybe 10x the nominal traffic, and a
potential financial hit, if
someone left the application running over the weekend.

Not that I've anything against P2P per se, if it's explained what you are
getting into. BitTorrent for Linux does this, I think - "please be nice
and leave it running for a bit after you have your file".






-- 
Andrew Daviel, TRIUMF, Canada
Tel. +1 (604) 222-7376  (Pacific Time)
security at triumf.ca