24 September 2006

In a move that has sparked protest from both students and professors, San Jose State University has become the latest California school to ban Skype from most of its campus. Citing
concerns regarding security and consumption of bandwidth, school administrators feel that the service is an unnecessary and potentially illegal waste of resources. The University of
California--Santa Barbara and California State University--Dominguez Hills have also recently banned the popular VoIP service.

In a memo seen by Ars Technica, the SJSU Office of Information Technology says that Skype and other applications which use "grid-computing-like" networking capabilities are to
be banned, but VoIP applications such as Gizmo or Wengo are still permitted for use. The memo also states that Skype's EULA is far too broad, requiring users to grant Skype
general "usage rights" to the SJSU network—something that end users do not have the right to do, as it is not their network. OIT also says that the changes to the XP
firewall "may probe to be an excellent vector for a worm."