3 Alternatives to Skype Surveillance with End-to-End Encrypted Calls
CoinTelegraph reviews three of the most promising alternatives to Skype that guarantee end-to-end encryption and greater privacy for its users. Skype will go down in history as one of the most popular and disruptive fruits of the Internet. It has enabled people from all over the world to build and sustain relationships in a more humane way than the straight forward but faceless and voiceless chat, or the mail formats still used today in email and forums. This famous voice over IP platform rose to fame thanks to incredibly low cost for international calls, blowing away its Telecom....
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Freedom of association. Privacy. Free speech. Basic rights that many of us take for granted are under increased governmental scrutiny in today’s digital age. Private emails, phone calls and now web-based video calls are all routinely inspected in the name of national security, at least in Western cultures like the U.S. and Great Britain. The Guardian reports that Skype has provided “backdoors” to state-run surveillance programs like PRISM for years. In light of these disclosures, the tech and cryptography communities have stepped in to develop encrypted alternatives designed to preserve....
Continuing the search for secure, cross-platform, end-to-end encrypted chat and VoIP communication software, this article is part 2 of a series on encrypted Skype alternatives. Skype, Microsoft's voice over IP (VoIP) software, has been shown to be insecure on various levels over the years. The Snowden leaks have revealed it to be more of a mass surveillance malware than a secure communications platform. Secure communications like those between you and a friend as you sip coffee in your backyard are the ideal of end-to-end (E2E) encrypted online communications. We want the same security, if....
Late on Tuesday, I received a very sad email from Gavin Stevens, founder of Solid Cloud, and creator of Bitphone, the first-ever encrypted, Bitcoin-accepting online video calling service. The contents were sad, but the tone was not of remorse, but of anger and frustration. They had contacted me, as a Bitphone user on their list, to alert me that they were shutting their digital doors for good due to “regulatory requirements.” Broke Bitphone’s Launch 18 Months Ago. Having gotten to know Stevens since the launch, interviewing him, and connecting with him on LinkedIn, this is a very sad event....
On June 2, the USA Freedom Act that legalizes and simplifies the collecting of phone metadata for the NSA passed the Senate. Meanwhile Skype continues to collect voice, chat, video and other data, and deliver it to the Five Eyes international spy coalition. CoinTelegraph reviewed three of the most promising alternatives to Skype that guarantee end-to-end encryption and greater privacy for users: Tox.im, Bleep and Silent Circle. "Previously released documents from the Snowden archive describe enormous efforts by the NSA during the last decade to get access to voice-over-internet content....
While Skype has proved to be a great leap in telecommunications, a new service called Bitphone is attempting to reinvent and improve how we communicate by using bitcoin as low-cost infrastructure and payment method for encrypted calls right from your browser. The telephone has actually made a lot of progress over the last generation. Remember back in the 1980’s when you had to deposit US$0.25 to make a call on the payphone? You had to share a phone, and its germs, with who-knows-who, if you could find a public phone that wasn’t broken. Common pay phones didn’t take dollars, pennies, or....