I feel compelled to not even give any of you my skype because I really doubt it's a wise choice to make.
Also skype isn't a virus and you know nothing about the internet or computers for thinking otherwise.
Skype has never given me a single issue (virus-wise), so any issues you develop while using skype is just because you're stupid.
Also as for this "hurr wiretapping conspiracy" stuff, I wouldn't be surprised if that was true. Maybe if you kids stopped thinking Skype has complete privacy anyway (because it never did) and avoided doing stupid, illegal stuff, there would be no reason for them to do anything like that. I've seen some crazy stuff go down on skype that includes child research sharing and links to tons of other warez stuff. A good 90% of it was done by ignorant children thinking they were perfectly hidden behind a screen.
There is nothing anywhere that says Skype offers any good form of security whatsoever. You have an account, a password, and a way to talk to people over the internet, that's all.
It's not a virus; quit thinking you know all this stuff about software you probably barely touched at all and just got a virus because you don't know how to use a computer and just instantly blamed skype.
You people are about as dumb as all the extremist Apple fanboys.
Skype does act like a virus, it does various things that only a virus would do. (refer to my and Port's previous posts for that)
But hey, let's assume it's not a virus for the sake of the argument, then it'd still wiretap, and wiretapping should be illegal whatever the reasons. Even if there's criminal activity involved. Wiretapping is an invasion of privacy, period.
Having said that, everything that's currently happening with Skype and other centralized IM services is to be expected, because there is one central point of control in the network. You have to trust the central server for all your communications. This is a very bad situation for the end user, the central servers can abuse the user in any way that they want, and to make matters worse, the Skype client is closed source so there's no way for the user to get even the slightest grip on their situation.
The only way to resolve these issues is to move to decentralized and distributed IM services, because there the power is spread over the network, ultimately giving power to the end users, so they can't get abused by some central authority. Implementing wiretapping and any other kind of surveillance on such a network would be _extremely_ hard, so hard that it's next to impossible. This is because any potential authority that wishes to wiretap will have to convince every single server in the network to do their wiretapping.
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