Charlie Paglee, the chief executive of a Chinese-American Internet telephony (VoIP) company called Vozin Communications has posted on his blog the news according to which Chinese engineers from a startup company have cracked Skype's protocol. Paglee claims that the team of Chinese engineers has reverse engineered the protocol used for Skype Internet phone calls and that they have already produced a software equivalent that can be integrated seamlessly with Skype technology.

"At present they only support placing Skype peer-to-peer phone calls and they have not yet implemented presence. They have plans to add presence, instant messaging, and a host of other features. Their end goal is to create a client 100% compatible with Skype. They sent me a screen shot of their software (below) and my IP address was 100% correct," remarked Paglee.

"Even if it was possible to do this, the software code would lack the feature set and reliability of Skype which is enjoyed by over 100 million users today. Moreover, no amount of reverse engineering would threaten Skype's cryptographic security or integrity," Skype stated.

It the facts reported are true, Skype will be able to do little to protect its intellectual property as the service is not regarded as legal in China.

"The advent of the release of this software raises many interesting issues. According to their CEO, their software will not support Skype's Super Node technology. Right now every computer with Skype installed on it can be used as a relay to carry data between two other computers when both of those computers are only allowed to make outgoing TCP calls. This means that very soon Skype users will have an alternative client which will not hijack their computer. This could eventually have a very negative effect on the Skype network if too many people choose not to act as Skype Super Nodes and the network starts to deteriorate," concluded Paglee.