Apparently I missed this when it went through the news, but Skype now has a Linux client. In general I have a policy against running anything that I don’t have the source code for, but I might have to make an exception to try this out. I have a few friends who really enthusiastically recommended the service. Skype allows voice chat, which a bunch of other products do, but the geeks have been really into Skype because it’s built on some pretty hefty peer-to-peer technology. Apparently not only are the calls direct from one client to another, with the option of full encryption. But the user info is stored in a distributed index as well. Sexy stuff.