On 08/20/2014 09:06 PM, Always Learning wrote:

On Wed, 2014-08-20 at 10:26 -0400, James B. Byrne wrote:

...

My recent inquiries have raised the unsettling possibility that recent Skype clients may be designed to permit remote exploitation of host systems by unauthorised entities.

Generally entities, authorised by governments, have been doing back door entries over the Internet since at least 1995. Its staggering what has been happening, staggering how its done, staggering that every, so it seems, network hardware device has a 'backdoor' - sometimes it is mentioned in the documentation or discovered by chatting with service personnel.

Better never to touch proprietary closed-source software. Don't forget M$ Windoze with 3-knocks-and-anyone-is-in software. It caused a friend to get a nasty virus about 10 years ago just by being connected to the Internet and NOT downloading anything at all. He didn't even use his browser.

Skype piggy-backs on to a lot of different, and unknown to the caller, computer systems. Try the grown-up version called SIP. It has open source products and it caters for voice and video.

Big companies always fully co-operate with demands from Big Brother but never ever boast about their acquiescence. The encryption algorithm for GSM mobile phones was deliberately downgraded ..... We live in the Information Age and Big Brother wants information.

Put the tinfoil hat down and back slowly away from the mailing list.

Conspiracy theory (right or wrong) wasn't part of the original topic, so lets please try to not deviate too far down the road.

On 08/21/2014 11:23 AM, Valeri Galtsev wrote:

I'm sorry Mr. Jim Perrin, I'll disregard your request and I will stay on this side topic just for one more message.

Thank you.

Those [conspiracy] theories are reality not just theories, at least some (Mr Snowden, e.g.) put their life on line to tell us about it. If we do not care to listen, then we deserve to have what we have.

I don't disagree. This was why I added "(right or wrong)" to the message. The internet culture as a whole is one of constant surveillance. It's a common business model for online content distributors/marketers etc. There are numerous postings about this all over the internet.

I was quite displeased since quite some time ago that almost all web browsers, whenever I feed URL into location bar, do not go to that URL, but instead do the search with the search line that is that URL first. Not only when URL doesn't exist (for which case I too prefer not darn search but just an error message "URL doesn't exist"). Why would be that? What purpose does the search serve. You do your math. I still use often browsers with this "nasty" feature. I will mention one browser that doesn't to that unnecessary [unnecessary for me, of course] thing: midori. If someone has any other suggestions, please, let me know (you can e-mail me off the list if you prefer to respect Mr Jim Perrin's request). I also will mention one search engine that seems to be "clean" of nastiness to the best of my knowledge" DuckDuckGo:

My point, and I said this off-list as well to those who responded to me directly, is simply this:

I would rather keep the list technical and apolitical. I know we can't keep politics out of tech, but I would prefer to at least attempt to limit it on the mailing lists.

A discussion about alternatives and their technical merits would be fine and I have no problem with that. Derailing a 'how do I fix this' thread with a political discussion is something I'd like to avoid as a general rule.