Verizon To Allow Skype Calling On Its Network

The Verizon press release begins: "At the 2010 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Verizon Wireless and Skype today announced a strategic relationship that will bring Skype to Verizon Wireless smartphones in March." What used to be one of the most protective carriers anywhere has been opening up in major ways since the introduction of the Motorola Droid. Phandroid summarizes: "Starting next month, Verizon Smartphone users with data plans will enjoy free and unlimited Skype-to-Skype calls to anyone on the planet. And you’ll enjoy amazingly cheap Skype International calls as well. All this from Verizon Wireless’ 3G network." Some are wondering how the DoJ and law enforcement will react to a major upsurge in fully encrypted traffic.

Comments

Not so fast

[UndyingShadow]

From gizmodo.com: However, it appears the service is pretty gimped as you can't call Skype out to regular lines domestically in order to save minutes. Even on AT&T (of all carriers), the fring iPhone app allows Skype-out calling (even though the Skype app still technically does not). When Verizon allows domestic Skype-out, we'll celebrate in full.

Skype collaboration

[DrYak]

Specially since Skype are rather open about the fact they are ready to collaborate with governments if legally asked to.

Once again : the only *true* privacy/security is complete end-to-end (deniable) encryption where the encryption is under the control of the sender and the decryption under that of the receiver, and everything in between only transits in encrypted form.

Only opensource phones with publicly available and auditable source-code and that use ZRTP do qualify (like currently Twinkle. Probably Ekiga too at some point in future).
Being closed source and thus not auditable, Skype doesn't qualify as *under control of sender/receiver*, unless the data it self is already encrypted at the time it is fed into Skype.

(NOTE:
Off the Record plugin + Skype4pidgin plugin does exactly that on Pidgin/Adium with text messages : if both ends of a conversation have OtR running, the message will be encrypted before it is transmitted to Skype API - even if there's a backdoor inside Skype the only thing it sees would be already encrypted text. OtR works with other networks, given the proper plugin. But currently can't work with sound/video, because Skype only accept raw media that have to be compressed)