Party Vibe

it is perfectly possible to encrypt standard SIP multimedia VOIP or video calling traffic; using all open source procotols and with the encrypt libraries available for inspection/audit (it isn’t easy though and although those who do it share some of the info on blogs you need to know what you are doing, and supply your own hardware and brains.

the problems with all these services are ulltimately who funds them? Skype for instance has an ad engine smart enough to work out I am in the UK in spite of many of my devices being set in Dutch.

I’d suspect any commercial “free” service to be backdoored at some point where metadata and anonymised content is scraped to that ad networks can get at it; and that is of course where the feds get at it. At least GCHQ don’t telephone me and try and sell me tractors 😉

Another issue they’ve run up against is encryption reduces resilience if a connection is marginal; for instance the journalists were having problems on the signalling channel; whereas the old way of 90 volts at 17 to 25 Hz sent down two wires remains a very resilient way of encouraging people to pick up the phone (or even to give up their passwords; depending on where the wires are connected – managed to give myself a good jolt from a ringing magneto recently (I had dismantled and reassembled it to clean it up and re-grease it and wasn’t sure if it was working correctly).

@Tryptameanie 586816 wrote:

As for Skype I think it was when Microsoft got it’s grubby mits on it that the ad injection crap increased )or even began maybe?) but since then Team America have a sort of wiretap provision built into the software now anyway.

Apparently Skype was running out of cash as a free service, and the young European lads who devised it were reaching their 30s; and wanted more money/security. What concerns me more about services becoming dependent on “ad funded” models is how pointless they are for anyone over 30 (as this age group tends to only want the ad to provide a quick click though to a contact for a real human; which is too expensive) or if the device involved loses its internet connection.

As for much telecoms kit and “security”; the surveillance capabilities are baked into it and even used as a selling point. I build small VOIP telephone exchanges for work and they have all sorts of covert intercept/recording facilities; and many of the SS7 “vulnerablilities” in big exchanges are in fact parts of the system. The open source exchanges are US designed and their laws are basically whoever pays for a communications circuit can intercept or censor the content on it as much as they wish as long as they are not committing other offences (the same applies in the UK to some extent; although I have to every so often add my RIPA authorisation reasons to my emails/reports).

That said many intercept points are inserted into networks more for the benefit of telecoms engineers – we often need to check what is (or is not) going through a network and why to keep things running..

this is the “real” open source stuff going on BTW

https://dev.guardianproject.info/projects/ostn/wiki