Skype

[seekermeister]

I was surprised when I just received an email notice from Skype that they had charged my PayPal account for another annual fee. I have never used Skype, because of problems with the telephone hardware that I had purchased. I didn't know that they would automatically charge this payment, and when I went to my account, the only thing that I could find was an automatic feature to keep a minimum balance for call charges, which I had never enabled.

Of course, it has been a year since I setup the account, and my memory doesn't work very well that far back, but I don't recall any provisions for an automatic annual payment authorization...was there one?

 

[Qdos]

You sure it's not a phishing mail? :huh:

 

[seekermeister]

Pretty sure. The email didn't require any response.

EDIT: When I went directly to my account, it verified that the charge had been made.

 

[Qdos]

Skype has changed ownership recently.

If you feel the charge is unjustified dispute it in Paypal and check your Paypal account for automated debiting authorities.

What made me amused with Skype was the fact a dev employee went public a couple of months back, revealing decryption codes which proved the program had a back door.

 

[seekermeister]

I just finished cancelling the subscrition fee at PayPal, and sent another message to Skype requesting them to cancel my subscription immediately. Hopefully, that is sufficient.

Backdoor! Any word about how it was designed to be used, and by who?

 

[Qdos]

Details are here...

 

[seekermeister]

That article makes it sound like a trojan, rather than a backdoor, but neither are good.

 

[seekermeister]

I had been thinking about uninstalling Skype for quite a while, but never got around to it...until now. Maybe my machine will boot faster now, because it seemed that Skype was always the longest and last to load.

 

[Qdos]

It's a program which a government agency, or anyone maliciously wishing to eavesdrop upon Skype users encrypted conversations, could exploit in order to gain information.

The fact it exists and that a former Skype dev blew the whistle means that Skype has a backdoor purposefully built into the software.

Whilst the program is not open source the dev couldn't legally blow the gaff by publishing the code which permitted this - however he could publish the details of the snoop program and expose its code.

You really need something like this to make yourself secure.

 

[seekermeister]

Thanks, I've bookmarked that page, but it sounds as though I would need some kind of VOIP software to be able to use it. Since Skype is now gone, I'm not sure if there is any other that I would use. Everything that I looked at in the past was either too expensive, complicated or I just couldn't make it work. I very rarely have the need to make toll calls, so I'm not going to pay very much for a service designed with this in mind.

 

[Qdos]

The privacy issues are heightened when the chat/voip programs source code is not published and the EULA prevents decompiling and disseminating details of what makes a program tick.

This is especially so when the software relies on it's own server gateways to route every byte of traffic as big brother can theoretically sniff packets at these servers - and if there's a decryption algorithm to hand then life's easy for the eavesdroppers.

You can find open source programs which run on a peer to peer basis, so do not traverse any central servers (and whose code can be seen of course) but they invariably require installing on all machines using the facility and can be tricky to set up initially.

Personally I wouldn't touch Skype with a bargepole... :shock: