I love free stuff. At the top of my list is a program called Skype. I’m sure many of you have heard of it, but for those that haven’t, it’s basically a piece of software that runs on your computer and lets you make calls to other Users of Skype for free, anywhere in the world. If you want to call someone on their regular phone, it’s as simple as putting a few dollars in your Skype account. Each minute costs less than two cents, so the $10 US I put in has lasted me for quite awhile. Skype works really well on pocket PC’s too. I only use it on my laptop because it has an integrated mic and speakers. Literally, I can make speaker phone type calls on my laptop from anywhere in my house with my wireless network. (I also have a headset in case I don’t want to be on speaker) If you look around, you may start seeing new handsets that plug right in to your computer via the USB port. That gives you full Skype access and acts just like a phone. You can even buy cordless phones from companies like Linksys, which give you full untethered capabilities all over your house. There will also soon be an appliance (phone) that lets you use Skype even if you don’t have a computer. My estimation is that as these devices get cheaper and cheaper, you’ll see more and more people completely bypassing the old telephone system.
So, anyway. Where was I? A few nights ago, I was messing around on my laptop while I was chatting with a friend of mine down in Portland. I was using yet another cool utility that gives you a transparent command line that just sits on your desktop, when I decided to type the command “netstat”. This command lets you see all the processes that are using your network card. It’s kind of handy if you are troubleshooting different problems. Well, when I typed this, I noticed that I had one session that was routing to a trade school in Taiwan. Well, since I’m not currently enrolled in a trade school in Taiwan, I freaked a bit and my first thought was “Virus or Spyware”. I did a bunch of troubleshooting such as checking every process to be sure I knew what it was, and shutting down apps to see if any of them were causing this connection. Well, to make a long story short (okay, somewhat shorter anyway), it turned out that Skype, for some reason, had this connection open. I can only imagine that either someone in Taiwan had added me to their contact list or some of Skype’s servers are hosted there. Moral of the story: If you are going to be cheap like me, you might have to go through a few episodes of paranoia as you notice things like this.