Freedom Blog

My recent blog entries were about Skype and about how companies might eventually abuse the power they have over some of our technology. Many of my arguments against Skype also apply to Microsoft’s instant messenger. Now Microsoft gave one more example that this abuse actually happens. Ars technica writes:

Microsoft this week decided to turn off its Windows Live Messenger service for five countries: Cuba, Syria, Iran, Sudan, and North Korea. [...] The user is not informed as to the actual reason for the block. Currently, it’s not clear how broad the block is or how long it will last.

Although there are already workarounds that the affected users can use to regain access to the communication network, it is unclear how long they will work and whether Microsoft will use more advanced techniques to lock out certain users in the future. If the people in Cuba, Syria, Iran, Sudan, and North Korea would have used decentralized and open communication networks such as Jabber, Microsoft would not have been able to disable their access. Hopefully, the people that actually did use the Live Messenger don’t make the same mistake again and don’t fall for ICQ, AIM or Yahoo Messenger. Switching to one of those services might solve the problem in the short term, but still leaves them vulnerable to lock-out, censorship and spying. Jabber on the other hand allows them to chose a service provider for instant messaging that they can trust. If they don’t trust anybody they can even deploy their own Jabber server that only they control and still be able to talk to any other Jabber user. This works quite like Email that is from a time when information technology was still made to serve the people instead of enslaving them.

A vigilant reader of my blog challenged my earlier criticism of Skype thoroughly and even though I felt his remarks could have been tempered a bit, here is my thoughtful response. I am very thankful for all of the comments I receive and encourage more people to express their opinions here. It is only when our opinions are constantly challenged, are we forced to rethink them and are less likely to believe in aged and false dogmas. Below I intend to counter the main points of his argument, but only after I have refashioned and strengthened my main argument.

The Main Argument Against Skype

Skype’s software and service are already used by an increasing number of internet users, evidenced by the existence of the verb “to skype”. If it is not yet the de-facto standard for internet based communication, it is very close to become it. This assumption is very important to understand when you are talking about Skype. The closed nature of it’s service and the fact that more and more people are using it exclusively forces other people to use it. Social pressure is created to make them join. Most people will join eventually and those that don’t join could end up as outcasts, cut off from the mainstream. Just imagine a world in which almost everybody uses Skype to communicate and only a small elite is able communicate freely because it has set up their own communication infrastructure. I don’t want to live in such a world. That’s why I wrote the previous text. It was intended as a warning. It was intended to be a small counter balance against Skype’s power. My goal is to get people thinking and eventually to stop Skype from taking over the (internet) world.

In this light, the analogy of Skype as an almighty telephone and mail company might make more sense. It was chosen to give non-technical readers an idea of what Skype is or might become. Like telephone and mail companies, it delivers text and voice based communications. It is almighty in the sense that it owns the entire infrastructure and has total control over all communications and their contents. It owns the mailboxes, decides who is allowed to mail letters, whose letters are delivered and whose letters are opened, copied and archived. Free communication is essential for a democracy to function successfully. Skype is about to endanger free communication.

The argument that was sketched so far might appear to be very abstract and even paranoid. It is indeed abstract, but nonetheless important to point out and discuss. It seems paranoid because it portrays a danger of something really bad happening that doesn’t seem likely. To see why the argument can not simply be dismissed as paranoid, consider the following explanation.

Many nations have set up their political structure in a way that makes it very hard for somebody to misuse the power of the state. It may or may not be likely that misuse happens, but some nation’s systems had structural weaknesses and people were able to gain and misuse power that they were not supposed to have. Everybody will certainly agree that it is important to have a stable governmental system where there are checks and balances to make abuse of political power as difficult as possible. I argue that it is also important to set up our technical infrastructure in a similar way that does not allow abuse. This becomes even more important as technology plays a vital role in more and more parts of our lives.

Maybe the technology will never be misused (in such a way that it would cause severe problems for society). But why should we take the risk? If we have the possibility to create and use a technology that no single entity can control and misuse, why not do it? If we allow companies to control our technical infrastructure and grant them the ability to use it against us whenever they like, then we take an unnecessary risk for the sake of convenience. Nobody knows how the world will change in a few years, how some governments evolve and who will be in control of Skype then. Freedom isn’t something that magically exists forever. Freedom has to be constantly fought for. If you stop fighting for it, you might lose it sooner than you think.

Why Not Just Using Skype Anyway

It is true that most free alternatives to Skype lack behind in terms of functionality and simplicity. Using Skype is just easier, convenient. If you use it, you just surrender control over all your communication you make with it. This is something you might be able to live with, because you probably consider misuse in your personal case unlikely. For many Chinese Skype users this is not unlikely anymore and shows that Skype is already misusing its power leading to the imprisonment of people whose only crime is to think differently.

But by using Skype you not only give up your freedom, you also become personally responsible for weakening democratic structures in technology and more important in society. You stay in this system, implicitly signaling your friends that it is ok to stay in. You are giving them no incentive to switch to a free system. If everybody just uses Skype, nobody will improve and work on free alternatives. The more people don’t use Skype, the more people will support free alternatives and help making them as convenient as Skype. If you don’t stop using Skype, why should anybody else? If everybody is just waiting for others to prevent Skype from locking us all in, nobody is going to rescue us.

Another thing you could do is not to use the term “(to) skype”. I generally dislike that company or product names go over in ordinary language, but in this case you are not just helping people to buy certain products. By using skype as a verb you support a specific technology that is dangerous to society and that should not be used by anyone.

Secondary Arguments

Some of my other arguments said that Skype is insecure, gets around our firewall and is unreliable. Getting around our firewall is actually a feature and I was wrong using it as an argument against Skype. It is also true that other programs might be insecure and unreliable, too. But that doesn’t make Skype more secure or more reliable. With free alternatives to Skype we have at least the option to make them more secure and reliable ourselves. Be it by kindly asking programmers to make improvements or by directly paying some programmers for it or by organizing a fund-raising for this purpose.

We as a society also have the possibility to check what free software alternatives to Skype actually do on our computers. We can also let independent security specialists analyze free software. We can not do this with Skype. And one single in-house study that didn’t even look at higher level code from the year 2005 can not replace this. In fact, Skype’s security still relies on the principle security by obscurity that was proven wrong so many times already. It might even be possible that third parties already can eavesdrop on Skype conversations as the Austrian government claims. Of course nothing is a 100% secure, but at least we would have the ability to make things as secure as we want instead of relying on Skype to make their program as secure and reliable as they chose to.

It is also still true that Skype prevents competition and locks us into its service by allowing no competitors on their closed network and by using locked down non-free software. One counter argument was that there would be no business model for Skype if they would set their software free and open up their network. This is not true. If Skype were to make profit it would solely make it through paid calls to landlines and cell phones. Freeing their software and opening up their network wouldn’t prevent them from doing the same. All it would do is allowing competitors to enter their market. Maybe Skype would even make less money then. But this is not our problem. Skype is denying us essential freedoms because it hopes to make more money. I don’t see any reason why we should tolerate this. If they can not do business without giving their customers freedom, they should reconsider their business plan.

A similar argument applies to the justification of Skype’s censorship and eavesdropping. It was claimed that Skype has to respect Chinese law, if they want to do business there. This might be true. But why should we trust a company that is obviously willing to spy on their customers just to stay in business in a certain market. If they do it in China, what should prevent them from doing it in your country as well?

Most of these arguments were all secondary, but they might be easier to understand, so I was focusing on them in my earlier article. This was maybe a mistake and I hope that this article clears things up a bit and might convince some people to stop using Skype.

If you want to understand what Skype actually is, it might help to picture an almighty telephone and mail company. This company can not only spy on your private conversations and has total control over them, but it also forces you to use it. It owns the telephone lines and all mail transportation and does not let other companies use them. At the same time, you are bound to only use their telephone and mailboxes. Despite of these facts, more and more people are using Skype and even begin using the word “to skype” as a general term for talking and chatting over the internet.

Concentrating a lot of power in one single uncontrolled entity always leads to abuse of those powers, and Skype is not an exception. The following ten arguments should convince everybody to boycott Skype once and for all.

1. Skype Gets Around Your Firewall

It has been found out that Skype uses cracker techniques to circumvent your firewall. There may be security problems introduced by the holes Skype punches in your firewalls. If you are an administrator of a network for instance, you may have a hard time keeping it secure and Skype out of it.
Update: It has correctly been pointed out that many other programs also use this technique and that it might be legitimate behavior.

2. Skype Uses DRM

Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) is used to put restrictions on the users of technologies. These restrictions control what you can and cannot do with your computer and your files. The feature Extras Gallery of Skype uses this DRM and accesses confidential data which identifies your computer for this purpose. Skype is also helping developers to employ DRM. This alone is already a good reason to boycott Skype.

3. Skype May Slow Down Your Internet Connection

More and more universities are trying to ban Skype because it can become a so-called “supernode” and relay traffic from many Skype users over your computer. This way all your bandwidth will be eaten up which means that your computer and your internet connection will get really slow. Just by using Skype you agree to that policy in paragraph 4.1 of the Skype EULA.

You hereby acknowledge that the Skype Software may utilize the processor and bandwidth of the computer (or other applicable device) You are utilizing, for the limited purpose of facilitating the communication between Skype Software users.

4. Skype Prevents Competition

The hardware manufacturer Logitech conspired with Skype and gave users with non-Logitech products worse video-call quality. Another big company, Intel, cut a deal with Skype to provide advanced conference-calling features exclusively on PCs that run Intel chips without any technical reason. Its competitor AMD filed a lawsuit against Intel.

But Skype does not only provide “better service” for users that buy at certain companies. It also does not allow competition in its own field of telecommunication. There is no Skype for many mobile devices or for other operating systems like GNU/Linux on different computer architectures. And even for normal phone calls, you cannot use a different company. Thus, there is no competition, high prices and bad service.

5. Skype Restricts Our Communications

The Financial Times reported that Skype had admitted back in 2006 that it has been censoring text messages in China. If Skype is able to censor certain messages, it also knows the contents of the messages we send. Nobody knows what messages they are going to filter or archive next. This not only restricts our communications, but also raises substantial privacy issues.

As stated in paragraph 2.5 of the Skype EULA, they also can decide to exclude you from using Skype:

You acknowledge and agree that Skype, in its sole discretion, may modify or discontinue or suspend Your ability to use any version of the Skype Software, and/or disable any Skype Software You may already have accessed or installed without any notice to You, for the repair, improvement, and/or upgrade of the underlying technology or for any other justifiable reason, including but not limited to, circumstances where You, at Skype’s discretion, are in breach of this Agreement

6. Skype is unreliable

The Skype service relies entirely on some secret peer to peer structure. This structure can cause severe problems up to failure of the entire service. That happened in August 2007 when Skype was unavailable to the majority of its users for approximately three days. The official Skype blog blamed the Windows Update Service and Washington Post quotes a Skype executive saying “that the problem was caused by a flaw in Skype’s four-year-old software and that it was unclear why the problem had remained dormant until this week”. Others speculated that Russian hackers might be responsible. The real cause of the outage was never revealed.

7. Skype is Insecure

Since Skype came into existence, multiple security vulnerabilities have been reported. In the beginning of the year 2008 the video chat feature had to be blocked completely in order to protect computer users. Many security holes enabled attackers to execute arbitrary code on the Skype user’s computers, thus taking complete control over them. There are also many worms that dug their way through the Skype network and stole user passwords.

Of course, other programs have also security vulnerabilities, but Skype not only refuses to make independent security analysis possible, it even works hard to prevent such analyses (PDF). Recently there were a lot of speculations about a back door in Skype, because the Austrian government officials admitted it is easy for them to eavesdrop on Skype conversations.

8. Skype Locks You In

The company behind the Skype service does its very best to prevent other companies and interested individuals to understand how it works (PDF). Indeed, they want to keep the total control over the service and not having competitors which could offer better programs and devices. By doing so, they almost managed to establish a monopoly for modern telecommunication over the internet; if you have a monopoly, you can stop caring about your customers.

A discussion thread in the official Skype forum indicates that the Skype company blocked the accounts of many paying customers for no apparent reason. Another thread highlights, that most GNU/Linux Users are fed up with Skype, because Skype only released unstable beta software full of bugs for GNU/Linux. Unfortunately, most of them think that they still have to use Skype, because all of their friends are using it.

What Skype does to you is called vendor lock-in: they lock you into using their products only. You are limited to either using proprietary software phones or very expensive Skype hardware. Both give total control to Skype and prevent free communication. Therefore, it is time that people stop ask their friends to “skype” with them and stop using Skype themselves.

9. Skype Spies On You

Only a small error in the 64-bit version of Skype revealed that it has been reading our Computer’s BIOS and Motherboard Serial Number. An analysis of researchers from Columbia University (PDF) has shown that Skype makes your computer contact a Skype server at least once after the program has started. It will submit your IP address and program version that can be used to personally identify you. Another analysis of Skype (PDF) demonstrates that it is using a lot of sophisticated techniques to conceal what it is really doing with your computer. Not knowing what a program does with the information it processes is a huge problem for privacy. There is no way to know if there is or if there will be a back-door in the program.

Skype has the keys to decrypt our calls and conversations. In October 2008 the New York Times reported that Skype had built a huge surveillance system in China that monitored and archived Internet text conversations sent by its users. They were searching for politically charged words related to Falun Gong, Taiwan independence, the Chinese Communist Party and milk powder. Texts containing these words were censored and sent to a central server where they were saved for further investigation by the censors. According to the New York Times, the server archived more than 166,000 censored messages from 44,000 users in two months and also recorded international conversations. Without the initiative of Canadian human-rights activists and computer security researchers nobody would have ever known about this.

10. Skype Does Not Respect Your Freedom

If the program Skype would be Free Software it would respect your freedom as a user of technology. Then it could be democratically controlled by a user community that would have not let all these current issues of Skype arise in the first place. If a problem would arise, it would immediately be fixed because a user community acts for the greater good. This is something Skype is not doing. Skype is about maximizing profits without respecting user’s rights. Free Software on the other hand is about first maximizing user’s rights and then still allowing profit.

Because all Free Software has an “open source” code, it allows for independent security analysis and enables everybody to fix problems. If the software Skype would be Free Software, knowledgeable users could legally remove nasty “features” of Skype such as spying and censoring users. It would also be opened to competitors. The service would improve considerably and our privacy would finally be respected. So use one of the many Free Software alternatives to Skype!

Free Alternatives to Skype

There are already existing services similar to Skype that are based on Open Standards such as SIP. They just have to be used more widely. With them you can choose what telephone software you want to use. Wikipedia maintains a list of Free Software internet telephones. If you are using GNU/Linux, Ekiga is a good choice. Windows users might want to try QuteCom or the SIP Communicator.

This open nature enables competition and improves service. Hundreds of different companies are competing around the SIP standard of VoIP internet telephony. All of them offer gratis calls inside the internet and make money with very cheap calls to landlines and mobile phones. In countries like Germany and France you can even have a normal landline number connected to your computer’s SIP phone and receive calls no matter where you are. Phone calls using these services are also a lot cheaper than with traditional phone companies or Skype.

If you are just using Skype for chatting and not making voice calls, then you should switch to the free, standardized and decentralized Jabber Chat service. Many SIP programs also support Jabber. But there are also a lot of other good chat programs like Pidgin for GNU/Linux and Windows, and Adium for MacOS.

Give yourself a push, try one of the many alternatives to Skype. Tell all your Skype friends to change too and point them to this text. Then you can uninstall Skype and make your computer more secure. Enjoy chatting and talking to your friends in private without being censored and monitored.

Update: In response to some criticism in the comments, I wrote the follow-up article Brave New Skyping World Revisited.

Many of us knew already that Facebook’s Terms of Use are unacceptable and that nobody should ever use Facebook, but work on a free (as in free speech) alternative to Facebook.

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook changed their Terms of Use again without notifying its users. It basically grants itself an “irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license” to do anything they want with all our data. This license never expires and all your data will never be deleted, not even when you delete your account. The Blogosphere covers this in many places.

Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg defended the new terms in the official blog of Facebook. I wrote a comment to counter his poor arguments and was surprised to find that my comment was not published. I just received a message thanking me for my comment. Thankfully, I saved my comment before sending it, so I can now publish it here:

If you need a license to show our data to the other people we’ve asked you to share it with, why don’t you ask us to give you exactly that license?

Why do you require us to accept a license that grants you an irrevocable universal right to our data that never expires?

If I want to delete (not deactivate!) my account and all my data, I also want you to delete my messages from the inbox of my friends. What is the problem with this?

If you think that is not the way Facebook should work, why don’t you give us both options? Make it possible to deactivate AND delete our accounts.

You give email as an example. But Facebook is not email. If I send an email to a friend, my friend may keep the message forever, but neither he nor some private company has an unlimited right to my message. The message might not even be stored on a computer under the control of some company as it is the case with Facebook.

I would be glad to have answers to my question.

Thank you!

Let’s see if there will be any response. I doubt it. The sole fact that they don’t allow public comments on their blog clearly shows how they treat their users. A blog without the possibility to comment is not a blog. They essentially suppress free speech and public discussion in the medium they control.

Help us to free communication and digital social interaction by creating a community that works on establishing free alternatives!

The Mozilla Foundation just released native support for the free (as in freedom) audio and video codecs Vorbis and Theora in Firefox. These codecs are possibly the best free codecs existing. Encoding (producing) and decoding (consuming) audio and video files using these codecs is unrestricted by EULAs or license fees for patents.

Currently, the largest archive of free audio and video material is Wikimedia Commons. They will greatly profit from this move. The Wikimedia Foundation applauded to Mozilla’s announcement. They see great potential in free media codecs:

This could never make it into the mainstream without the groups developing and promoting these free codecs — particularly Xiph.org, spreadopenmedia.org, and the FSF’s PlayOGG campaign. The W3C’s policy of only accepting royalty-free technology has played an essential role by not allowing encumbered codecs as part of the standard, but there has been a stalemate in the adoption of a useful, royalty free baseline codec set.

It now seems to be really possible that free codecs make it into the mainstream and become a standard for audio and video content on the web. This is because even the non-free web browser Opera supports these free codecs with a experimental version of their browser. Two major browsers are going to support HTML5’s <audio/> and <video/> tag with free formats. The HTML5 working group at W3C earlier backed down from Nokia’s and Apple’s pressure and rejected Vorbis and Theora in the HTML5 standard. But now there’s the possibility of Ogg and Theora to become the de facto standard. Especially since Microsoft and Apple still have not agreed on a common format. Neither Internet Explorer nor Safari support the new HTML5 media tags at the moment. Thus it will be interesting to see how this turns out and whether freedom will win in the end.

As of today, users with old or non-official ICQ Clients are no longer able to log into the ICQ Network. They received no prior notice and just get the message that their client is too old. The reason for this is still not known, but it has been speculated that it is due to ICQ wanting all users “upgrade” to the new ICQ6 Client. Many users reported the problem in the official ICQ support forum and the first fixes for the problem already appeared in the net.

This incident clearly shows once more that we should not surrender our freedom to communicate to a single power. We should not trust and rely on a proprietary network such as ICQ, AIM or MSN because all our communication can be monitored and restricted by them. If we use such a service, they are able to effectively control a part of our daily communication. That is why everybody should consider switching to the decentral and open Jabber (XMPP) chat network. It’s the community, not some greedy corporation that is in control of this chat service. Everybody can host and control his own Jabber server or choose one that he considers trustworthy. Creating a Jabber account is very easy and there are several free clients out there. Go and get Jabber now!