Skype is Evil
October 3rd, 2008
My friend and old colleague Nart Villeneuve has been up to his old tricks again. He’s discovered that the Chinese Skype has been censoring and surveilling its users. Conversations and personal information have been archived on a central server. Who knows what mean people have read this stuff and done to the users. It really scary stuff
You can read the published PDF report here.
Or read the New York Times article here.
Or, the Globe and Mail follow up here.
The story has also been picked up on slashdot and boingboing.
More reason to encrypt everything.
Nart is a digigod.
Skype is evil because Skype will permanently keep your Skype account no matter what. After the time-wasting hassle of sending e-mail concerns and sending e-mail complaints regarding account deactivation and account cancellation when I don’t need these guys, Skype is evil – because once you sign up, their genetically-engineered artificial toxic will preserve their names and their personal data so they will never decompose and will never corrode as they will linger throughout the servers of soul-less minds. If anything like this, Skype will end up becoming like a landfill full of unused accounts, making it not efficient and not good for the server environment.
So before you sign up at Skype, you better think of a good reason about why they will keep their account names for no reason. Skype is evil.