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[News] Skype is Dangerous, War on Liquids Comes to Trains

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I hate Skype. So Should You.

,----[ Quote ]
| Skype is a predatory virus that should be banned from your computer.
| 
| But don't take my word for it. Look at the facts. Skype can be and has been 
| hacked. This is exactly what you'd expect from proprietary software and why 
| using it should make you sick to your stomach.  
| 
| When you run Skype you don't know what it is doing and why. You don't know 
| why, for example, your load (as reported by top) has jumped from under 0.5 to 
| over 3.4. You don't know why you have a sudden jump in network activity. 
| You're unsure as to what data exactly Skype is sending out.   
`----

http://gnuru.org/?node_id=1370

Terrorist Fear Mongering Seems to be Working Less Well

,----[ Quote ]
| BART, the San Francisco subway authority, has been debating allowing 
| passengers to bring drinks on trains. There are all sorts of good reasons why 
| or why not -- convenience, problems with spills, and so on -- but one reason 
| that makes no sense is that terrorists may bring flammable liquids on board. 
| Yet that is exactly what BART managers said.    
`----

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/10/terrorist_fear.html


Recent:

Why eBay Should Open-Source Skype

,----[ Quote ]
| The great thing about opening up Skype is that it wouldn't affect its
| business model, which is already based on giving away the code, albeit in a
| closed form. Money could still be made from the outbound calls from Skype to
| ordinary phone lines. But freeing Skype completely would encourage wider use
| of both it and its protocols as an entire ecosystem grew up around them,
| leading to more users, and more opportunities to sell them subscriptions or
| pay-as-you-go plans. The only thing that eBay would lose are some of its
| problems....
`----

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/why-ebay-should-open-source-skype


Pools in security lather over shampoo

,----[ Quote ]
| "Pool guests who bring these items must allow them to be opened and
| inspected. Security personnel will smell them to see whether they are safe or
| not," a separate report posted on the city's sport bureau's website said
| (www.shsports.gov.cn).
`----

http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSPEK18633820080620


Bus-Spotter Labelled A Paedophile

,----[ Quote ]
| A bus-spotter says it is no longer safe to practise his hobby of 40 years
| after being branded a terrorist and a paedophile.
|
| Rob McCaffery, 50, is proud of his 30,000 photos of trams and coaches but
| after being interrogated twice in 12 months he fears the time may have come
| to hang up his camera.
|
| The credit controller, from Gloucester, says he now suffers "appalling" abuse
| from the authorities and public who doubt his motives.
|
| The bus-spotter, officially known as an omnibologist, said: "Since the 9/11
| attacks there has been a crackdown.,,"
`----

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/skynews/20080624/tuk-bus-spotter-labelled-a-paedophile-45dbed5.html


Skype says it was unaware of China message-logging

,----[ Quote ]
| Skype was unaware of a major privacy problem affecting Skype users in China,
| the company's president said Thursday.
|
| In a blog posting to the eBay subsidiary's corporate blog, Skype President
| Josh Silverman said his company had no idea that the Tom-Skype software,
| distributed to Skype users in China, was logging chat messages and storing
| them on a publicly accessible server. "It was our understanding that it was
| not Tom's protocol to upload and store chat messages with certain keywords,"
| he wrote.
|
| [...]
|
| Like all China ISPs, Tom Online has an obligation to monitor communications,
| Silverman wrote. But Skype believed that the Tom-Skype software was merely
| filtering certain words from chat messages, not storing them on a server, he
| added.
`----

http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/10/02/skype-says-it-was-unaware-china-message-logging


Chinese Skype spies on users, researcher says

,----[ Quote ]
| Text chats conducted using the Chinese version of Skype that contain keywords
| such as "Taiwan independence" and "Communist Party" are logged along with
| identifying IP addresses and usernames, then stored on insecure servers, a
| Canadian researcher said yesterday.
`----

http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php?id=1522242436&rid=-50


Hand Grenades as Weapons of Mass Destruction

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/10/hand_grenades_a.html


Strange Skype Network Activity - Even on Linux

,----[ Quote ]
| I have a few contacts with whom I still chat on Skype, so I still start it
| from time to time. Yesterday I started it in the morning, and then got
| distracted and forgot to stop it when the person I was looking for was not
| around (at least according to Skype's totally unreliable presence reporting).
| When I went back upstairs in the evening, I noticed the that the 5GHz LED and
| the Internet LED on my shiny new Netgear WNDR 3300 Wireless Router were
| blinking like crazy, and I really mean like crazy. I knew that there
| shouldn't be anything happening on my home network at that time, so I started
| investigating.
`----

http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10009019o-2000498448b,00.htm


Skype won't say if it decrypts VoIP calls

,----[ Quote ]
| To allay fears that the calls might not be secure from law enforcement, Skype
| should open its platform to evaluation by trusted, credible industry experts,
| he says.
|
| Endler says it's equally difficult to know whether commercial VoIP vendors
| leave open the possibility of turning encryption keys over to law
| enforcement.
|
| In the United States, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act
| (CALEA) forbids requiring that vendors build in back-door decryption, says
| Jim Dempsey, vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy &
| Technology. "CALEA expressly forbids requiring anyone to be able to decrypt
| anything," he says.
`----

http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php?id=1143568778&rid=-50


Backdoor in Skype? We need an open-source replacement

,----[ Quote ]
| Deliberate or just flawed?
|
| So, assuming for a moment that the claim of the Austrian police is correct,
| there are two possibilities now: (a) Either Skype made a mistake somewhere in
| the implementation of their encryption algorithms and thus allowed a
| successful attack on their protocols. Or (b) they have deliberately provided
| a backdoor for law enforcement or other agencies.
|
| [...]
|
| And of course, Skype is ubiquituous. If you want to talk to people, you need
| to use what they are using. And everyone is using Skype.
`----

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/foobar/5472


Speculation over back door in Skype

,----[ Quote ]
| According to reports, there may be a back door built into Skype, which allows
| connections to be bugged. The company has declined to expressly deny the
| allegations. At a meeting with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian
| regulator on lawful interception of IP based services held on 25th June,
| high-ranking officials at the Austrian interior ministry revealed that it is
| not a problem for them to listen in on Skype conversations.
`----

http://www.heise-online.co.uk/news/Speculation-over-back-door-in-Skype--/111170


Open Source Skype Scuppered

,----[ Quote ]
| First, obviously, that such a flaw should be built in is bad. It weakens the
| product - crackers of the world are doubtless firing up their Skype programs
| even as I write - and suggests an extremely patronising attitude to users.
| But I think there's another, less obvious, problem with this revelation.
|
| For some time, people have been talking about getting Skype to go open
| source: you can now forget that.
`----

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2008/07/open-source-skype-scuppered.html


Compressed VoIP leaves eavesdropping clues

,----[ Quote ]
| Eavesdroppers might be able to gain clues about the content of encrypted
| conversations even without breaking the cryptography.
|
| VoIP services such as Skype encrypt conversations but law enforcement
| agencies, most notably in Germany, have complained this can hinder law
| enforcement investigations.
`----

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/23/compressed_voip_traffic_analysis/


Pirate Bay bitchslaps Swedish law with SSL

,----[ Quote ]
| The Pirate Bay plans to offer encryption services to people who use the
| BitTorrent tracker site in a direct attempt to combat a new controversial
| snoop law passed in Sweden last week.
`----

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/23/the_pirate_bay_ssl/


Why are European governments able to do more for less when it comes to National
Security?

,----[ Quote ]
| Fon has to comply with RIPA an act so strict that makes the Patriot act look
| simple. Fon has to provide special VPN tunneling technology in the UK for the
| UK secret services to investigate suspected criminals and terrorists when
| they log on to our WiFi signal. But this is not of course only Fon. Every UK
| ISP from BT down, Carphone Warehouse, Virgin, Sky, all have to provide this
| capability to the UK government.
`----

http://english.martinvarsavsky.net/general/why-can-european-governments-do-more-for-less-when-it-gets-to-national-security.html


Skype: We can't comply with police wiretap requests

,----[ Quote ]
| There's no guarantee that Skype's AES encryption is implemented properly or
| that there aren't lingering security flaws. A 2006 presentation at the
| BlackHat Europe conference in March said the right algorithms were being
| used, but that there's "no way" to know if a backdoor for eavesdropping
| exists. A Skype-commissioned independent evaluation, however, gave it a
| thumbs-up.
`----

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9963028-38.html


Related:

Beware of Skype

,----[ Quote ]
| The Skype network has been a concern of government intelligence agencies
| since its inception because it provides a worldwide network of encrypted VoIP
| calls to potential “terrorists”. So how coincidental is it that 10 days after
| Bush signs into law a Bill giving the government authority to track foreign
| calls that go through U.S. networks that Skype, for the first time in its
| existence, undergoes a massive worldwide outage?
|
| [...]
|
| But there are FOSS alternatives to Skype people really should start
| considering now. One is the OpenWengo Project. Businesses, and even
| individuals, should also consider setting up their own Asterisk servers with
| encryption.
`----

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/node/2479


Why proprietary code is bad for security

,----[ Quote ]
| Tho Skype is using an encrypted protocol, it’s still their own, non-disclosed
| code and property. So we don’t know what it contains.
|
| [...]
|
| It’s time to stop accepting that we are the bad guys, and to stop consuming
| things we just don’t understand (and cannot, because they are proprietary,
| closed-source systems).
|
| Say no to companies, or even governments who treat you like this. Start using
| open sourced products and protocols wherever you can. Even if you could
| still never understand the code used in these systems, there are still lots
| of people who can, and who will examine it. The magic word here is “peer
| review” - your friend or buddy or neighbour may be able to understand all
| that, and to help. No, not with Skype or Windows or any black box from Cisco.
`----

http://wolfgang.lonien.de/?p=394


Cryptome: NSA has access to Windows Mobile smartphones

,----[ Quote ]
| First time in history Cryptome.org has released information about the
| characteristics of NSA’s network surveillance.
`----

http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/1028


Dual_EC_DRBG Added to Windows Vista

,----[ Quote ]
| Microsoft has added the random-number generator Dual_EC-DRBG to Windows
| Vista, as part of SP1. Yes, this is the same RNG that could have an NSA
| backdoor.  
|
| It's not enabled by default, and my advice is to never enable it. Ever.
`----

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/12/dual_ec_drbg_ad.html
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