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Comment by wting | Hacker News Reader

When MS bought Skype they changed supernodes from peers to company owned Linux boxes.[0] This change gives them the ability to eavesdrop on any conversation.

My friend "Alice" (a Chinese national studying in the US), recently sent a present to her friend "Bob" in the Chinese army and talked about it on Skype.

The Chinese Army found out that Bob was receiving a gift from the US and tracked down the relevant Skype conversation. Bob was interrogated about Alice and what the gift was for.

Microsoft complies with all governments' legal requests, as it should. I have no doubt the US government has made similar requests of MS.

Skype's original protocol made eavesdropping harder, but not after the changes Microsoft made.

[0]: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s...

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It has nothing to do with Microsoft and Linux boxes. They host headless Skype version for p2p network reliability: http://blogs.skype.com/2012/07/26/what-does-skypes-architect...

Your story is all about China. Skype for China is "special": https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2012/dec/china-listening-skype...

Regardless of their supposed intentions (which they could easily lie about--this IS a business we're talking about), the supernodes do allow very easy eavesdropping given a warrant.

> Microsoft complies with all governments' legal requests, as it should.

Microsoft can make such requests pointless if they choose to do so, by not having unencrypted data of people's private conversations in the first place.

> Microsoft complies with all governments' legal requests, as it should.

For governments from the set of countries that Microsoft has a presence in, or just from governments in general? I can't imagine they respond to DPRK requests, nor should they.

Microsoft has a presence in China. How else could they sell and support Windows to their enterprise costumers?

And because they have a pretense in China sure they cooperate with China. As far as I know they have no presence in the DPRK though, as they are not even allowed to sell there.

DPRK, North Korea you mean, I think. There's nothing very democratic about that place.

DPRK, its all about the branding.

There's no "sky" in "skype" but we still call it skype because that's its name.

Depends upon your definition of democracy.

Even in our "western" democracy, the right to vote is limited (whether age, residency, prisoner-status etc). In the USSR, only members of the Soviets (worker's councils) could vote, as the Soviets represented the people. In ancient Athenian democracy, only male citizens could vote. According to Plato, that was too wide-spread and only philosophers should vote, as they were the only people wise enough to make serious decisions.

But all of those forms fall under the name "democracy" - it just depends who you define as "the people".

Of course there isn't, but that is their name...

Are you sure Alice or Bob weren't using the TomTom version of Skype? From what I understand, that version is especially modified to comply with the regulations of the PRC.

Disclaimer: work for Microsoft in China but clueless about how Skype works here.

This is wrong. So tired of seeing this, how is this possible. This took individual people out of the pool of Super Nodes. This results in the same amount of traffic being TURNed as was being TURNed before and everything else is purely peer-to-peer. Flatly, you're wrong, please stop spreading that info.

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