5 reasons why firms should ban mobiles...

Voip-news Australia quotes a report released by Info-tech which lists 5 Reasons to ban Skype.
So, if you're an IT manager with a Napoleon complex, here's 5 reasons why you should ban mobile phones (listed alongside the reasons to ban Skype in grey)

1. It’s too firewall-friendly. Skype's proprietary closed-source VoIP protocol - which does not employ accepted VoIP standards like H.323 and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) - allows it to traverse corporate firewalls and symmetric NATs. An unknown and unsanctioned VoIP protocol freely roaming the network - without IT's approval or assessment - poses an unacceptable transgression of IT's authority over the corporate network and computing resources.

1. It's outside IT control - with current 3G phones, any amount of data and voice can be occurring entirely outside the corporate network, but linked to it through laptops or desktop syncs or flash memory cards. The software for this is not standardised and varies by manufacturer. Unknown and unsanctioned software!

2. It has too many vulnerabilities. Buffer overflow vulnerabilities are known to exist in Skype. And since Skype travels the network as data packets, conversations are prone to capture. Problems also exist with Skype's encryption format: First, it doesn’t prevent a man in the middle attack and secondly, if it becomes infected with a worm (which it one day will), the worm could hide in the encryption during transmission, undetected by anti-virus software. Because the encryption is closed source, there are some unanswered questions about how well the keys are managed. Finally, Skype recently announced that all of its VoIP clients – including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Pocket PC – suffer from bugs that leave PCs prone to crashes and open computers to takeover by a hacker.

2. The GSM encryption has too many vulnerabilities. Software with phones such as Windows CE is prone to buffer overflows
..blah, blah (I could quote from security reports too!)

3. It poses a communication barrier with other countries or institutions. Countries like China and Oman have banned Skype already [China and Oman banned unregulated VoIP!], as has the rest of the United Arab Emirates. Many post-secondary institutions in North America have banned Skype as well, in addition to most other P2P and file sharing applications.

3. The cost to the firm of mobile calls is likely to be one of the biggest expenses, but what value are they getting! Look at your roaming costs, they could be described as a communications barrier. But let's all do what a minority of post-secondary North American institutions do, because our users are just like a bunch of students.

4. It violates established legal requirements. For example, securities brokers operate under a mandatory requirement to record and track all telephone calls. Unsanctioned usage of an application like Skype would put a brokerage at severe risk of prosecution if caught using telephony that is undetectable, untraceable, and unauditable.

4. Eh, ditto?! [use a 3rd party recording device!]

5. It's one more type of communication to secure, monitor, store, and archive. Enterprises are already struggling with records retention rules imposed by HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, and other laws. In addition, the question of whether VoIP calls constitute a business record or not is a legal quagmire in and of itself. Throwing Skype into the communications mix will only further cloud the issue.

5. Nope, I can't think of any other reason either...

They probably started the piece as 'Top 10 reasons...' but gave up after 5.
By the way, if anyone is taking me literally, I don't advocate the banning of mobile phones OR Skype.
The more observant will have noticed that most of the links were to Australian sites, so Info-tech didn't even look on their own doorstep, or maybe they think that phones are not subject to the same scrutiny as Skype (or VoIP). Or maybe they don't want to offend the hand that feeds them?!