So you should now assume that ALL your skype calls are being recorded and monitored and anything of interest to the US authorities is now available to them ?
Are you doing anything in the US that might be considered naughty - like online gambling, tax 'optimization', overly-fair use of some recorded entertainment?
Do you work in a foreign company that competes with a major US oil/aerospace/defense/financial concern?
Do you supply to any of the above?
If you wouldn't forward an email about it to the DHS should you now still talk about it on Skype?
"So you should now assume that ALL your skype calls are being recorded and monitored and anything of interest to the US authorities is now available to them ?"
Unless the network is secured by you end-to-end (e.g., encrypted tunnel and you're the private key holder), you should assume that your call can be intercepted and recorded. In the context of Skype, that was never true, so nothing has changed.
So yes, there have been significant changes, but all the concerns you outlines are fringe issues at best. Skype was never any kind of secure communications system where you were safe from persecution by overreaching governments.
IIRC with the original design the supernodes were only used to discover where users were and so tunnel through firewalls . Once the end points of a call had been discovered the voice traffic was direct caller-caller.
Assuming that Skype hasn't been a front for the illuminati all along, then the big change of having all the supernodes under one roof is that all the call endpoints can be routinely monitored and so if there was a future requirement to tap all the voice data it would be easier to pick which links to monitor.
And wrongly so. You still logged in through Skype servers (username/password is centrally managed) who would direct you to a supernode near you, and could equally direct you to an intercepting supernode.
You have just made the fallacious argument of security through obscurity.
> Once the end points of a call had been discovered the voice traffic was direct caller-caller.
Do you know that, or just assume that? Do you know that this hasn't changed with different versions?
> Assuming that Skype hasn't been a front for the illuminati all along,
Blackberry insisted that they can't decrypt end-user communication ... right until the Indian government threatened to make it illegal to use Blackberry in India, and magically it became possible to eavesdrop on BB comm.
Corrupt governments are enough, don't need to invoke the illuminati.
> then the big change of having all the supernodes under one roof is that all the call endpoints can be routinely monitored and so if there was a future requirement to tap all the voice data it would be easier to pick which links to monitor.
It's not any different. The voice links were (mostly) P2P, and I guess they still are. The supernodes (discovery/comm links) were centrally managed, and still are. The only difference is now they are both centrally managed and centrally owned - that's a very little difference.
a) datacenter bandwidth is now much cheaper than it was 10 years ago, to the point that the cost saving from using p2p is not that significant anymore. (Skype did not have zero operating cost, and contrary to the article, they did operate their own supernodes - few tens to a few hundreds at least).
b) Microsoft is going to change the business model, e.g. no more free calls (or, no more free conference calls, or something like that), and if they are going to charge money, they need to guarantee a level of service - which they cannot with a P2P infrastructure.
c) The marginal cost for Microsoft (who already have data centers etc) is actually LOWER than running a p2p, with everything (including end user liability) is taken into account. Running 10,000 servers in existing data servers would cost ~$1M/month. May seem a lot to you, but it's a rounding error for microsoft (and certainly, at a $8.5B total cost, 4 years would make this ~$8.55B from Microsoft's side. Rounding error)
d) Microsoft is planning some kind of integration with their other properties (hotmail? live? office live?) for which hosting everything is essential.
I would guess (c) or (d), although the parent's guess is not without merit.