Banning Skype, in my opinion, would be like banning the web ten years ago. Like Skype, people use the web for profit, for buying and selling and for other uses that have nothing to do with university business. Could you imagine where this university would be today if we had banned the web ten years ago? Is that where you want this university to be ten years from now?
If SJSU banned the web 10 years ago it would have reversed the bad 7 or 8 years ago. Taking a move to ban Skype now can always be changed in the future.
It has been argued that the current design may be a violation of the legal use of state computing resources. In my opinion, if the use of Skype violates state or federal law then the appropriate agency to take action should be the Chancellor's Office or the State's Attorney General. If what Neal alleges is accurate, I wonder why that has not happened?
If Bob Neal thinks this is true, he needs to act. He cannot sit back and wait for the State AG to act.
Thanks to Skype, we are able to have easy and free international communications with colleagues.
Free because other people are picking up the charged. There is a cost here, but it is hard to figure out what it is.
Thanks to Skype, we are able to have easy and free international communications with colleagues.
Free because other people are picking up the charged. There is a cost here, but it is hard to figure out what it is.
No it's not. Speaking from a university IT standpoint, you're costing them a lot of money in bandwidth charges, if the Ars Technica article is to be believed. They state that anecdotal evidence shows that bandwidth consumption "can increase by as much as an entire gigabyte per month" for users that enable Supernode capabilities in Skype.
If we're conservative and say that it's only 25% of that total, then multiply it per user (given the current SJSU fact sheet of 2100 on campus residents, let's figure Skype is as popular as you say. Call it 80%, thus 1680 users).
1680 x 250 megs per month is 420 gigs of bandwidth, in a conservative bandwidth estimate. If that's solely off-campus traffic, that's damn near a metric shitton.
I don't dispute that Skype is a useful tool, and our campus hasn't thought about banning it at all (as far as I know, usual disclaimer applies of course), but the sheer bandwidth that can be generated by such Supernodes is staggering.
Skype's bandwidth usage is not mere speculation on Ars Technica's part. Skype mentions as much in their own license agreement and technical FAQ. However, there are additional reasons for not using Skype. If that's not enough, have a read through this in-depth debunking of Skype's security features presented at Black Hat Europe last March. There are plenty of alternatives to Skype -- including Phil Zimmerman's Zfone which is open source for peer review of both the application's code and its security model.
John, That is just what I meant by someone else it picking up the charge. To the user it appears to be free, but the University is picking up costs in some other way.
Commenting by HaloScan
