iadest@... 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