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Goodbye Skype, Hello Gizmo

I got a call from my friendly neighboorhood network security technician today indicating that I had been pushing a fairly heavy bit of traffic and opening and closing UDP ports with abandon, over about a four hour period. Fearing the worst, we started ransacking my machine for spyware, but nothing obvious turned up. I fired up TCPView from SysInternals and started watching the activity on my machine, and lo and behold, Skype was doing all sorts of interesting things. It looks like I was turning into a supernode on occasion, which resulted in some odd traffic and port patterns. This tripped our edge triggers and I got a call.

I recently heard about a Skype competitor, the Gizmo Project by the guy behind mp3.com. Looks promising, so I installed it this evening and I noticed nothing in the terms about using my computer to route other folks calls. I’m not completely sure this is a better solution, but I’ll give it a shot for a while and see how it floats. If you want to reach me, I’m benlowery on Gizmo.

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