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Comment by throwawaykf | Hacker News Reader

It really isn't that hard to test. Any of a million packet sniffing or network monitoring tools could be used to trivially settle this.

I cannot understand why none of the alarmist articles about Skype (some even by so-called "cypherpunks") has ever even bothered to run such a simple check.

FWIW, I ran my own simple test using netstat when Skype first centralized the supernodes. I walked away satisfied when I still saw primarily P2P activity during voice/video calls to an IP that belonged to the remote party. (It used UPnP port forwarding to traverse the NAT/firewall, if anybody is curious.) But then, I'm the trusting kind and dug no further. And it's been a couple years since. If there truly are "hackers" on here, I encourage them to try their own experiments and share them.

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>And it's been a couple years since. //

It was bought by MS in 2011. It's literally the last couple of years that people are concerned about. It's recent changes that have moved from distributed to central routing.

From the OP article (apparently by Skype [past] principal architect):

>"[...] people who were concerned about privacy -- including many of us in the security industry -- used Skype for secure communications.

>Both eBay and Silverlake maintained this architecture, as well as the Luxembourg HQ.

>Since being acquired by Microsoft, however, the service has been re-architected to run through MSFT-owned servers, rendering encryption functionally meaningless and making it just as easy as POTS to monitor.

>None of this -- neither the $7.5B acquisition itself, nor the decision to move to a datacenter model -- make strategic or business sense for Microsoft as far as I can tell." //

I believe that's a quote from another article that he seeks to refute. The article doesn't make sense, otherwise.

This article is written confusingly, but he's actually quoting some other person in that bit of text. He then proceeds to reply.

Right, I ran my tests shortly after reading that Skype supernodes were getting centralized, which was after the MS acquisition. I just handwaved with "couple of years" because I couldn't remember exactly when.

Back then my conclusion was that actual voice / video traffic was still direct P2P, although it kept connections open to other IPs, probably for signaling/stun/relaying. I haven't had a chance to run the test again because, well, I'm on a mobile device :-)

But my bigger point was that on a forum ostensibly for hackers, there should not be so much speculation and innuendo about something that can be pretty easily tested.

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