Skypetastic...

Question

Hi,I recently posted regarding being unable to connect in iChat with a Mac friend in Jersey. We could text, and his presence was there, but no audio or video - (basic error messages, insufficient bandwidth, user failed to respond, I failed to respond (?!)) etc... - Although UK Mac to Mac was sound.
Another (PC) AIM using friend in New Zealand just couldn't get things right at his end...
Until...
We all got Skype!
Excellent video quality, same with audio (as long as you have a set of cans) and no connection problems. It even does normal 'phone calls (fees apply..) Also has a rather nifty user directory, and Mac to PC problems just aren't there.
Maybe Apple should take note!
Although it's not quite as sexy as iChat, it's interface is a bit sparse (although apparently customisable...)
Anyway, you all probably know all this already, it's just this third party thing still makes me a tad paranoid though (echoes of a PC past maybe?) and I was wondering if anyone knew of any safety issues I should know about (spy/malware?)
Would I be right in saying iChat is only a client, and that they should maybe think about integrating a (similar) app like Skype into their own iLife suite?
Yours transatlantically,
mackers
iMac G5 20" iSight   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   1GB Nano - 40GB iPod3G - Airport Express - iControl
iMac G5 20" iSight   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   1GB Nano - 40GB iPod3G - Airport Express - iControl

Answer 1

Don't be scared by this. Skype is a telephone network
that is highly distributed. There are no central
servers that handle the telephone traffic.
Central servers handle telephone traffic when you're calling out to the old-style PSTN. They also handle both presence and IM.
Skype will attempt to create a peer-to-peer connection between the two users trying to establish a call. If that fails it fall back to using another Skype user's bandwidth and resources.
The many different SIP clients do exactly the same thing, except that they use servers they set up to do the proxying if a direct P2P connection can't be established.
So with a SIP client your resources are reserved for your own use, whereas with Skype you could be footing the bill for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other users. Since the OP is in the UK and many ISPs are now capping usage this could be a very real problem.
Every node
that is connected to Skype performs a small piece of
the control tasks of the network.
Without many users knowledge.
This methods keeps governements who try to listen in
to the conversations of their tax paying citizens at
least at some distance. Unless you have complete
trust in your government this is a good thing.
It makes no difference at all. A government could just as easily run Skype on a server with massive bandwidth and tap all calls it proxies, as it could tap one of your SIP provider's STUN servers (even easier probably since they wouldn't need warrants to set up a Skype server).
Although even if they did either of those it wouldn't really matter since encryption is available for both Skype and SIP-based services. The difference is that Skype's encryption hasn't been peer reviewed so would be less trusted by encryption specialists than the SIP services which tend to use the standard SRTP.
Anyway, to hopefully get a back on track a bit, apparently the first release of 10.4.9 has been released to testers and one of the areas they've been asked to test is iChat. So fingers crossed that it'll sort out the OP's (and many others) initial problem.