Microsoft May Add Eavesdropping To Skype 218
An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a Microsoft patent application that reaches back to December 2009 and describes 'recording agents' to legally intercept VoIP phone calls. The 'Legal Intercept' patent application is one of Microsoft's more elaborate and detailed patent papers, which is comprehensive enough to make you think twice about the use of VoIP audio and video communications. The document provides Microsoft's idea about the nature, positioning and feature set of recording agents that silently record the communication between two or more parties."
Time to switch to Zfone (Score:5, Interesting)
Zfone is a new secure VoIP phone software product which lets you make encrypted phone calls over the Internet. Its principal designer is Phil Zimmermann, the creator of PGP, the most widely used email encryption software in the world. Zfone uses a new protocol called ZRTP, which has a better architecture than the other approaches to secure VoIP.
* Doesn't depend on signaling protocols, PKI, or any servers at all. Key negotiations are purely peer-to-peer through the media stream
* Interoperates with any SIP/RTP phone, auto-detects if encryption is supported by other endpoint
* Available as a "plugin" for existing soft VoIP clients, effectively converting them into secure phones
* Available as an SDK for developers to integrate into their VoIP applications
* IETF has published the protocol spec as RFC 6189, and source code is published
[...]
http://zfoneproject.com/ [zfoneproject.com]
Re:GNU VoIP (Score:5, Interesting)
Give RedPhone [whispersys.com] a try. Best of all, it's written for Android, aka encrypted calls via a real phone. For added security, route it via Orbot [guardianproject.info] (Tor).
This is why it matters that we can legally root our phones.