more privacy on the net

Following up on my piece ‘the private net’ from last week, some further thoughts on secure communications and a call to action:

One secure way of communication, supposedly, is Skype. I have heard law enforcement people in Switzerland talk about their problems with Skype: They can’t monitor and eavesdrop on the encrypted communication. But is it really true? Some people I have talked to suggest that the price EBay paid for Skype a few years ago was way way more, than the business was worth. Might it be, these people speculated, that US agencies had an interest to get Skype under US control?

A few months ago, there were speculations on a backdoor. And just recently we found out, that Skype is censcored in China and that there is a security breach too.

I know of at least one P2P alternative to Skype: GridIM(but haven’t gotten that too work yet). Are there others? There must be, and it would be good, if we would start using the alternatives. Preferably Open-Source… Lazyweb? Any pointers?

And finally the call for action: If you are in Berlin for Web 2.0 Expo, hunt me down and let’s talk. Maybe there is a movement waiting to be born: Take back the net.

If you don’t have a ticket for Berlin yet, you can register here (use discount code ** webeu08gr14** for a 35% discount)