Does Your Employer Ban Skype? 154
neutralino asks: "This morning, we received an company-wide email stating that the Max Planck Society (a German government funded research organization) has outlawed the use of P2P software at all of its institutes (including ours). The statement specifically singled out the use of Skype for internet telephony. The reasons given for this were that 'the exchanged data cannot be controlled' (therefore it might be illegal) and that 'Max-Planck or research resources in general might be abused, if "only" for commercial purposes.' This caught us by surprise, since many of us use VoIP to communicate with friends and family and collaborators, in our respective home countries. Is it now standard practice for companies, government organizations, and universities to outlaw Skype? Should it be?"
Re:And make sure to keep it to work. (Score:3, Informative)
So someone spending all day chatting with friends about things is in clear violation of this policy, but someone checking in on a sick mother or to arrange something that requires then to call some place "during office hours", is ok.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Legal implications of Skype's EULA (Score:5, Informative)
Since our users cannot agree to the EULA, our organization has banned Skype. While I dislike the traffic, the deciding issue for administration was that the license was totally inappropriate.
Oposite (Score:3, Informative)
Skype Banned (Score:2, Informative)
How Do You Ban Skype? (Score:1, Informative)
My employer does ban Skype but goddamn it's hard to stop. The latest version tunnels over HTTPS and even autoauthenticates (with NTLM) against the proxy. It's like fricking magic. I have read the mailing list entry where somebody suggested banning all CONNECT statements to IP addresses (using a simple regexp in Squid) but that's no good for any Fortune 500 because there is so much going on that banning all IP addresses will almost certainly break an important application; our own audit found dozens of examples of legit B2B traffic using IP addresses in the CONNECT statements and we'll be buggered if we can identify them all. Also that strategy is doomed because you just know the next version of Skype will do a reverse lookup and CONNECT to the hostname.
The desktops aren't locked down well enough to stop people installing Skype and that's unlikely to change in the near future. The desktops are not even my department so it's not something I can directly influence. I have influence over the proxies, the firewalls and the routers. I'd love to know how to effectively ban Skype. Please tell me.