More Skype Back Door Speculation

An anonymous reader writes "According to reports, there may be a back door built into Skype, which allows connections to be bugged. The company has declined to expressly deny the allegations. At a meeting with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian regulator on lawful interception of IP based services held on 25th June, high-ranking officials at the Austrian interior ministry revealed that it is not a problem for them to listen in on Skype conversations."

Comments

Re:Of course it is not a problem!

[OolimPhon]

Skype *is* P2P. I installed it last year to talk to my son, who travels a bit. Discovered it was bloated and slugged my machine, so got rid of it. However, since then I get all kinds of IPs from all over the world battering against my firewall, specifically trying to connect to the port I allocated Skype. I reckon Skype only uses central servers for the initial setup, then uses P2P for all further activity. It's leeching *your* processor and bandwidth!

Re:Open source VoIP alternatives?

[Standard User 79]

Nothing wrong with Skype, it is by far one of the best solutions available. Anyone who has actually dealt with sip and nat knows it is a complete mess. Skype also has an excellent set of codecs that can provide superior audio quality but also handle packet loss/jitter etc..

Re:Open source VoIP alternatives?

[westlake]

I don't use Skype (or VoIP for that matter) but I would be curious if anyone knows of any alternatives that is completely open.
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It doesn't matter if the alternatives are "completely open" if no one but the geek is using them. You might as well be a kid playing in the yard with two tin cans and a length of string.

Re:Open source VoIP alternatives: shitware

[uassholes]

I just tried to build IHU.

Configure says: checking for __gmpz_init in -lgmpxx... no configure: error: GNU MP not found, download at http://swox.com/gmp

Guess what? That link is a 404.

But with some searching it's possible to find the latest version of GNU MP (http://gmplib.org/), but even after sucessfully building that, you still get the same fucking shit trying to build IHU (I Hate You).

I'm sick to fucking death of that kind of horseshit.

And I'm GNU/Liunx's biggest fan. I've been getting my frustration fix downloading and building this shit since Linux kernel 0.11 in 1991.

But the dumb-fucking-ass fucktards that write some shit and throw it over the wall, and forget about it, piss me the fuck off.

Probably the same squirt who said 25 to 30 year olds were old-timers.

Maybe if you started programming when you were 3, junior.