Quote from: tree on April 26, 2013, 10:13 pmWhy would Skype be monitoring all your activity? Wouldn't it be easier if it was simply windows that did all the job? And I agree talking about SR on Skype or MSN or any conventional real-time chat client isn't a wise move, but if Skype went as far as keylogging, would it really stop doing so if you didn't let it run in the background? It's still interesting to know that Skype is monitoring your conversations, but I think they were basically telling you they were in their privacy policy, or they didn't tell you they didn't at least. Nobody should talk about about illegal stuff or the SR on conventional chat clients anyway, PGP or OTR should be used for that.Sure, you're right, I expect LE to have exploits for all popular operating systems, and they probably have off-the-shelf software from some private contractor that does this for Windows, with a nod and wink from Microsoft no doubt.But that isn't a news story and no tech people would ever raise an eyebrow at the thought of Windows having a backdoor.The thing is that Skype is on all platforms, especially Linux, which is regarded generally as being a lot more secure than anything else apart from BSD. Nearly every piece of software on a Linux box is open source. About the only propriety software you could count on being there, is Skype. So as such it's the perfect vehicle for leveraging a backdoor into a system, for this reason:If Skype was a piece of software running surreptitiously then it would definitely have been noticed by now. The key thing, the "gotcha" as it were, is that in practice Skype is running all the time anyway because most users like it that way. That always on software, therefore, has pretty much permanent access to your keystrokes whether or not they are intended for Skype, and unfortunately, as the article says, this is exceptionally tough to counter. It's the kind of thing I'd have expected SELinux to forbid, but apparently not according to the author. It's the perfect disguise for a state keylogger.Quote from: tree on April 26, 2013, 10:13 pmInteresting article pine, it could explain this whole Skype keylogging thing but as I said before, if it were doing it, it would also be doing it while you're not running it. And your article is only about Linux, does the same work on other OS's as well?I'm not sure, but I think it was said that windows Vista had some protection mechanism. Talk about irony. Don't recommend y'all install Vista! ;)