Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room [privacy]
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/skype-finalizes-its-move-to-the-cloud-ignores-the-elephant-in-the-room/ "Microsoft's rationale for the system change is fair enough. The new network topology probably does make sense for the kinds of clients that are proliferating, and it's plausible that it will make building new features and capabilities much easier going forward. I don't personally think the work is being done for any nefarious purpose, not least because I don't think such a thing is even necessary: that nefarious purpose--spying on Skype communications--appears to be adequately addressed by the peer-to-peer network. I'm sure the technical rationale is accurate. But the company's blog post completely ignores these concerns. Ctrl-F that thing for "privacy" or "security" and no results are found. Similarly "encryption." Nor do we see words like "specification" or "protocol." And in this day and age, it's not clear that any of this is really good enough." - - - By comparison, as far as I know, Google audio/video Hangouts use encrypted peer-to-peer for the actual communications channels whenever possible, unless technical constraints in a given case make that impossible. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): http://www.vortex.com/lauren Founder: - Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org - PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone. _______________________________________________ pfir mailing list http://lists.pfir.org/mailman/listinfo/pfir
