Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft May Add Eavesdropping To Skype
An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a Microsoft patent application that reaches back to December 2009 and describes 'recording agents' to legally intercept VoIP phone calls. The 'Legal Intercept' patent application is one of Microsoft's more elaborate and detailed patent papers, which is comprehensive enough to make you think twice about the use of VoIP audio and video communications. The document provides Microsoft's idea about the nature, positioning and feature set of recording agents that silently record the communication between two or more parties."
So, when they install tools for our government to spy on us, it's supposed to be a good thing.
And when they do it to help other governments we don't agree with, it's an enemy to democracy and helping to undermine the ability of peaceful protest.
Love the double standard inherent in this. Maybe we can use the stuff the US is working on to stealthily deploy an internet in places to get around 'oppressive regimes' to prevent wholesale, un-tracked monitoring of our communications.
Oh, right, if you call yourselves the good guys, it's all OK. But, make no mistake about it ... this will help the 'Bad Guys' as much as it will help the 'Good Guys' ... China wants to listen to your VOIP too.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Yes, let's encrypt some audio before running it through Lossy Compression, and hope that we can get some recognizable signal afterwards.
In other news, Microsoft may:
* add image processing [to Skype]
* add remote document scanning [to Skype]
* add virtual machine technology [to Skype]
* add clustering capabilities for seriously big high definition video technology [to Skype]
I'm quite sure Microsoft has patents on all the above, but none are alarming enough to mention. This article is FUD. Absolutely no link has been drawn between the Skype product and this patent, except that Skype does voice transmissions and this patent is for a system that intercepts them.
Also, I believe Skype uses a peer-to-peer method for communicating between nodes, which would make it hard to apply this patent to Skype anyway. The peer-to-peer nature of Skype is why the last big outage took quite a while to resolve. They couldn't just "reboot their servers"; updated software had been deployed to the nodes (ie. you) and was malfunctioning.