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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."
I am the first one to beat everyone to the punch!
i heard this listening in to taco's skype
The country is called AustraLIA not Austria!
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!
While any such communication could, in theory, be bugged, I doubt that anyone with access has any interest in your scatological conversations with your mistress, and I doubt that anyone who is interested has access (unless your name is Sarkozy). Security is a matter of putting up a barrier that would cost more to surmount than the protected information is worth. For at least 99.999% of conversations Skype's encryption is good enough.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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..
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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.
Nothing wrong with Skype,
Except that it might have a backdoor... which was kind of the point of this article in the first place.
So what? What could anyone ever learn from listening to Skype conversation? Two homos setting up a date to jack off together? Not exactly a state secret.
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.