About China, Skype's management acknowledged in a Financial Times interview that they had forked the client so a version distributed by their Chinese business partner filtered p2p chat against a list of words that came with the client, but that nobody was listening in and end-to-end encryption of pc2pc calls/chats was not affected by this compromise.
The German version of the FBI sought permission about a year ago to tap PCs because they could not intercept Skype calls using available over-the-net tools.
The recent Austrian conference may signal this has changed or that they have learned how to promptly/easily find either end of a Skype conversation and install listening tools.
While they share some of the same founders, Skype uses a different network with the same technology. See JoltID about the network. See the Skype Developer Zone for more on the APIs.
Slashdot Mirror
About China, Skype's management acknowledged in a Financial Times interview that they had forked the client so a version distributed by their Chinese business partner filtered p2p chat against a list of words that came with the client, but that nobody was listening in and end-to-end encryption of pc2pc calls/chats was not affected by this compromise. The German version of the FBI sought permission about a year ago to tap PCs because they could not intercept Skype calls using available over-the-net tools. The recent Austrian conference may signal this has changed or that they have learned how to promptly/easily find either end of a Skype conversation and install listening tools.
While they share some of the same founders, Skype uses a different network with the same technology. See JoltID about the network. See the Skype Developer Zone for more on the APIs.