eBay wisely offered a smaller payout if Skype did not hit targets. Is Skype really doing that poorly, thought. Maybe not worth $530 million - but who is doing better in this market?

Quoted: Thus, eBay will only pay $530 million of the potential $1.7 billion earnout (some small consolation).

Trying to use TotalRecorder to record Skype calls. I can't get it to work. The TotalRecorder driver seems to interfere with Skype's use of DirectSound so that the even the live audio from the call is choppy and completely unintelligible.

Quoted: Skype 3.x uses DirectSound.

I had a conference called scheduled today and had to resort to *GASP* the land-line!

While looking at a network monitor session, I noticed a bunch of UDP packed going to random places like *.ipt.aol.com, *.neo.res.rr.com, and *.abo.wanadoo.fr. Further, do a

netstat -o

to find process id information and correlating with Task Manager (displaying column PID), I found an establised TCP connection to *.hsd1.ga.comcast.net - > this was originating from SKYPE.

I'm not on a current skype call, but I'm wondering if I'm getting random scans through my firefall via skype running on my machine.

Higher end "professional" setup for recording Skype conference calls for podcasting. This is Leo Laporte's setup.

Good list of cheap/free options for recording skype calls to make podcasts.

Unfortunately, the product recommendations are just for Mac users (but some of the follow up user comments suggest some PC tools).

Quoted: Podcasting involves two distinct tasks. First you have to record the audio and prepare it for listening. Then you need to syndicate it via RSS so others can subscribe to your programs. In this tutorial, Glenn Fleishman shows you some nifty tricks for...

PC to PC still free. Will start to charge for calls to land-line or mobile phones.

Quoted: Judging by the numbers, Skype has continued its meteoric rise. The number of registered users, those who have downloaded the free Skype phone software, more than doubled to 136 million by Sept. 30 since the sale to eBay. That is more than half of the world's roughly 206 million broadband Internet users, according to International Data Corp. Each day, 250,000 people download Skype, compared with 130,000 before the sale.

Phil ZImmerman (creator of PGP) has a secure Voice over IP service.