Curse Voice wants to protect you from ‘Swatters’

Curse Voice, an upcoming VOIP solution for gamers, wants to help protect you from having an armed SWAT team sent to your door. ‘Swatting' is a dangerous prank and it has become more prevalent recently, with big streamers having their homes raided live on Twitch for no good reason.

The company behind Curse Voice thinks that traditional services like TeamSpeak or Skype, are simply not secure enough for those streaming or playing games online. So what sets Curse Voice apart from the other bits of software? Well Skype is based on a peer-to-peer network, while Curse uses a cloud based system.

Using one connection to Curse's cloud servers limits the number of ways an attacker could find your IP address, work out your general location and send a SWAT team to your door. It could also help defend against DDOS attacks. Speaking with Polygon, Curse's chief technology officer, Michael Comperda, did note that it isn't working alone and has been seeking feedback from streamers to ensure that it creates a service people will want to use:

“We work with a lot of streamers. We’re all gamers, so we’ve actually experienced DDOS’ ourselves. Our websites included. People attempt to DDOS our websites pretty much every day. And the reason that I lump together swatting and DDOS is because … both of those are intrusions, and they are affecting a person’s virtual life or real life.”

“Frankly, something has to stop here. It’s gotten out of hand. So, I don’t know if Curse Voice is the answer to all of these things, but I think it’s a disruptive product. I think it has a huge benefit to any gamer that wants to try it out.”

The Curse Voice tool won't have ads and will remain free to users, although eventually it will be integrated in to the Curse client, which is supported by adverts and offers a premium subscription. It also doubles as a mod manager for a number of games, including Minecraft and Skyrim.

You can read the full interview, HERE. 

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Swatting has become a big issue for streamers but Curse Voice still isn't a proven solution to the problem. However, it is a good start and will hopefully lead to more people working on the problem to ensure that swatting stops for good. 

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