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Yes - Skype does attempt to use the technique in the article, but it's far more sophisticated than that... Skype was written by a bunch of the programmers from

by rufo 18y ago

Yes - Skype does attempt to use the technique in the article, but it's far more sophisticated than that... Skype was written by a bunch of the programmers from Kazaa, and the Skype network is essentially P2P; people who connect to the Skype network with especially good connections may become supernodes and will act as data relays for nodes having problems with other connection methods. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_Protocol has a fairly detailed description, for those who might be interested.

markbao 18y ago
Oh, wow. Now I see the Skype/Kazaa connection. Brilliant.
- andreyf 18y ago
  Brilliant on one hand, unethical on the other. By using their application, I consent they use my bandwidth to carry other people's phone calls?
  - schtog 18y ago
    Why not if it says so in the ToS? Or it doesn't?
    - rufo 18y ago
      I'm sure they've covered their bases. They're not negligent. I think they only very recently added a checkbox to opt-out of being a supernode though, the lack of which I found rather annoying.
- rufo 18y ago
  As an interesting aside, that's also why Skype claimed Windows Update caused their last major outage - they claim there was a bug that caused the P2P network self-healing code to work slowly, a larger-than-normal number of computers rebooted at the same time after patching and the P2P network took two days to recover from the "critical disruption".