[1] http://www.apple.com/macosx/mountain-lion/features.html#mess...
The only way for fully encrypted conversations is to use a plugin that encrypts messages themselves, or use an ecrypted P2P IM network.
From wikipedia: WASTE is a decentralized chat, instant messaging and file sharing program and protocol. It behaves similarly to a virtual private network by connecting to a group of trusted computers, as determined by the users.
* Secured through the trade of RSA public keys, allowing for safe and secure communication and data transfer with trusted hosts.
* WASTE can obfuscate its protocol, making it difficult to detect that WASTE is being used.
* WASTE has a "Saturate" feature which adds random traffic, making traffic analysis more difficult.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE_again
edit: Added relevant details
[1]http://wiki.milkfish.org.sipwerk.com/index.php?n=TheMilkfish...
Making Skype less convenient (by means of censorship) would mean that open and decentralized alternatives like XMPP get more attention, and that's a good thing IMHO.
In the Netherlands 'Brein', one of the rights organizations has done more to promote the pirate bay than the pirate bay ever could have hoped to achieve by themselves.
This is the biggest case of disruption that I've witnessed in my life so far and even though the outcome seems all but certain it remains to be seen how much damage the wounded bear will be able to inflict before finally keeling over.
edit:
This prompted me to post a thing I wrote a while ago but didn't publish: http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+death+throes+of+an+industry
What makes you think that pattern has finished?
The RIAA and MPAA make deals with artists to distribute their music, and you want to interfere and just steal it instead. It's dishonest, it's juvenile, and it's eroding at the basis of society (equality under the law, property rights, basic respect and goodwill towards others, etc.).
These are not the same. Most people do not support the concept of "intellectual property". But for a property to exist in practice, you need majority support, otherwise your property is either just imaginary or you need a totalitarian police state to enforce it.
> the basis of society
The concept of imaginary property is neither supported by a majority of population not in any other way democratically backed. Nobody on this planet has ever voted on it. From its early beginnings, it has been enforced from the top down, decided in shady deals behind closed doors between corrupt officials and industry stake holders and then enforced against the majority.
> steal it
To steal it, you must first reckognize that it is somebody else's property first. But what if you dont consider it property in the first place?
No, I suspect it has not.
Now I cannot link to those albums in Microsoft software because they censor all links?
That my friend is as anti free speech as it gets, and this censorship really erodes society not the sharing and copying of files.
It's not a destruction of property rights. It's the beginning of something new for people that make a living creating things people like to hear and watch.
Speaking as a musician who has had dealings with the RIAA, I won't miss them even one little bit.
Most HNers probably believe some sort of property rights for software (or even blog designs). May here would argue that the GPL is a great license and violators should be punished.
You can also often read that Hollywood and the Music Industry are producing worthless crap, but yet The Pirate Bay is dominated by commercial entertainment, not by Creative Commons content.
Much of it is certainly an emotional reaction to the aggressive behavior of RIAA/MPAA, but it really is sad to see so little capacity to see things from a different perspective.
1) they consider their communications private
2) they think that what they type into an IM client will pop out on the other end unchanged
3) they believe that their relationship with the facilitator of their communications media should not be subject to relationships that provider has with other commercial parties.
Where does it end? Being unable to share the link of your favourite restaurant because it hurts the interests of your communications provider?
The amount of modification of any messages by two parties that trust each other enough to engage in one-on-one communications should be set to '0' by default, unless they request otherwise.
More seriously, chat should work so that the client signs and encrypts each message, hiding it from the provider and anyone other than the intended recipient.
Forget the need for deep-packet inspection. If major web services stop users from linking to TPB and other sites, MPAA etc. will have accomplished their goals of restricting legitimate users' activities. Who else is going to follow their lead now?
Between blocking messages "for users' own good" and other technical issues (80% of message I send to certain users are dropped silently), MSNM is by far the least reliable messaging system out there. Nobody should be using that piece of shit in the first place.
http://www.conceivablytech.com/8108/products/microsoft-may-a...
a) it will do nothing to stop piracy, and b) it will reduce usage of Live Messenger
You could argue that it's for the user's security. Torrent sites do have a lot of sketchy cruft.
I've chosen to chat with you, and you've chosen to say something. Normal human trust mechanisms apply. Censoring our conversation because you think you know what's best is ridiculous.
The minute I thought a chat client was actively thwarting my conversation, I would uninstall it.
Who would believe that argument?
> Apparently, the company is actively monitoring people’s communications to prevent them from linking to sites they deem to be a threat.
Everything passes through their servers, it's not P2P and never has been, doesn't everyone know this about WLM? It's how they're able to support offline messaging.
Maybe one of the big players (Google?) will join this battle for free speech and an open internet. Most of us do not want to be censored in any way.
The Unstoppable Force vs The Immovable Object.
If you like propaganda that justifies pirating, keep reading the Torrent freak blog with their red herrings like censorship and their "battle for free speech".
Microsoft is exercising their rights just like we get to exercise ours. It's a private company offering you free software (as in no money exchanged) and they don't want to let you share torrent files and for good damn reason. I'd do that too if I were Microsoft!
Anyone who claims the Pirate Bay is a place to share cool new media that's released for free is just kidding themselves. Look at their most popular downloads. It's primarily all copyrighted music, movies, and software that are being shared without the owner's consent. Sure, there are a decent number of artists sharing their work via TPB and the Pirate Bay do a lot of promoting of that stuff. But make no mistake, the majority of people are just downloading a bunch of free, copyrighted work.
It would be censorship if Live Messenger were the only or one of few viable options for IM but that's far from being the case. I sincerely doubt Microsoft cares about you downloading albums for free. They just don't want you sharing Windows 8 over their app (when it finally ships, that is) that's all.
Is that not a legitimate concern? To try to stop people from getting your product without paying you? That's reasonable. They put a ton of time and money into developing software and they don't do it for their health. Just because it's digital and takes zero effort to copy doesn't mean that after the first copy is sold everything else should be up for grabs.
Whenever the torrent people start yammering about censorship and free speech and try to sound all hip, smart, and progressive, it's just a distraction. It's really about continuing to operate while ignoring IP laws. Whether you think copyright is okay or not is irrelevant because the laws are on the books and enforced. If all you do in protest of those laws is pirate music and movies you're really just creating more problems for yourself. Piracy alone as a protest only creates more censorship and restrictions of free speech as Torrent Freak would call it. If you really believe in all those nice sounding ideals you have to get up from behind your monitor and write a letter, make a phone call, or actually show up somewhere and do something.
This article was downright laughable. This is just a PR war and damn easy one to win too. It's easy to hate "big evil corporations" and to love getting shit free with little to no effort needed.
Not at all true. Free speech is free speech. Where do you draw the line? This establishes precedent, and frankly it's pretty creepy to think that M$ is monitoring all your communications.
Solution: tell M$ that you're dropping all of their products over this, and actually do it. Then set up XMPP and dump their messaging service.
I don't need Microsoft to "protect" me by not allowing me to see something. At most what they should do is warn me that it might contain malware, which is something they used to do with file transfers, too. But today I believe they just outright block most of them - even .rar files, unless they are scanned with some special MSN software of theirs that you need to download.
No thanks, Microsoft.
TPB is probably being censored by the software because some automated process to ingest and aggregate threating sites flagged that site as hosting malware. This is just like Google stopping you from clicking thru to sites which they know host virii / trojans. Calm down.
I would love to see this idea in court.
OTOH, who can be sure they do not store IP and login (or other personal information associated with the Live profile) and hand it to anyone with the proper court order?
xmpp/jabber for example are easy to setup, federation is supported by some major parties (google talk for example) and use OTR (or PGP if you can convince your friends) encryption whenever possible.
Pidgin, Adium and others support it out of the box or through easily installable plugins and even your [mom] can use it since the key generation and handshake can be automatic, requiring only optional authentication if you are paranoid.
Microsoft is a private company acting on their own will. This censorship is one I might not agree with, but it could just make the case for another uncensored client to become popular.
As long as this type of behavior isn't forced by a government, I actually like it in the long run. I think companies should take a stance on things, and seeing Microsoft act this way just makes me more happy with companies who take the opposite stance. If that favorability change happens with enough people, theoretically Microsoft could hurt financially. This would then make it more profitable to be open and uncensored.
So, in a nutshell, I've seen comments elsewhere about this that were SUPER negative and hateful. I understand them, but at the same time, I think this is just another signal to instead focus on and promote those platforms that focus on and promote freedom. And a big signal, to boot.
(Google's safe browsing database disagrees with me here, though.)
Also, as behavior like this increases in frequency, we'll finally be forced to address the current usability issues with point-to-point cryptography and adopt it more broadly. Microsoft shouldn't be able to read anything you write unless you choose to share it with them.
A world where all communication is encrypted requires more software development effort, but ends up better for everyone in the long run. Calls, emails, text messages - none of them should be intelligible to anyone other than the parties explicitly involved.
