i am seriously creeped out by skype

lexyeevee:

lexyeevee0:

ok i just gotta say

• the skype application is insanely obfuscated with like a dozen different traps to keep anyone from seeing how it works—i stress that i cannot name a single other application that tries so hard to hide what it’s doing, including actual malware

• one of the founders of skype was the CEO of kazaa, the application that as i recall pretty well started the adware plague—consider in light of the above

• anyone who attempts to build an alternative skype client gets nasty letters from lawyers, even though reverse engineering for interoperability is explicitly legal (not to mention that the taken-down code is presumably not owned by Skype/Microsoft anyway)

• some nerd suspects that a change to the skype network last year may have been to make skype wiretap-able

• and i guess there’s that recent debacle where microsoft was hitting HTTPS links sent over skype for some reason and gave a totally bs explanation

i’m not accusing anyone of anything—i am a big fan of hanlon’s razor—but suffice to say my nerd parts have been really uncomfortable since the beginning

(it’s fascinating to watch microsoft maintain a linux application though)

i was looking for this and hadn’t tagged it “skype” because i’m dumb so now i’m reblogging it and tagging it “skype”

but while i’m at it, some updates:

• today the EFF revoked its scorecard check for end-to-end encryption in skype, i.e., they believe it’s plausible that microsoft can see all your messages

• skypekit, their half-assed SDK, is now gone. so there is no officially-sanctioned way to use skype other than with skype programs, at all.

• it has ads now. are you serious? the whole point of skype is that it routes through other skype users’ computers, which means it doesn’t need much central server power. so what the hell are the ads paying for?

i’m super disappointed that skype seems to be becoming the AIM of the 2010s. i had hoped google talk would catch on since who doesn’t have a gmail account now, but the google talk app was only ever for windows and now google is fucking things up with hangouts. argh.

pidgin for gtalk still works for now at least

re-reblogging to add that, according to some folks I follow here, they’ve started rolling out in-call autoplaying video ads with audio