Phil Wolff

"@littletinyarmosaurus, I agree with you about verifying end-to-end encryption. If you can't do it yourself, independent auditors should be able to. Nine and a half years ago the end-to-end encryption was a big selling point. Safer than landline or mobile phone calls. No snooping by employers, secret police, or spouses. It helped Skype build adoption outside the US where eavesdropping was feared and assumed commonplace. Recall that Skype's founders came out of the Napster-era underground file sharing business. Privacy was a top feature in that market. So they launched with encryption and the p2p mesh as two ways they made it harder for others to find you, know who you talked to, and what you said." - Phil Wolff

"This has been true since before the Microsoft acquisition. A huge 2010 outage drove Skype to launch p2p supernode and relay instances in the Amazon and Azure clouds, just as Tony Bates became Skype's CEO. Skype suddenly had the ability to track many Skype-to-Skype conversations. Long before that, Skype issued feature-phone clients and ran servers in a thin-client/fat-server architecture. This offered a point of lawful interception under the control of telephone companies in the US and Europe. Skype's partnership with TOM Online allows Chinese Skype clients to ship with censorbots and any other code the PRC orders; and Skype's clients don't indicate if your client or those of others you talk to were issued by TOM-Skype. Going back even further, Skype stopped branding its products as secure a few years after first launch. Skype's senior marketers agreed that it wasn't even in the top ten reasons people wanted to use Skype and the lawyers didn't want to create litigation exposure. Skype..." - Phil Wolff

"This is the kind of small country where privatization means the phone company now belongs to the President and his friends. So details, like removing abandoned bricks, rarely enter the planning and approval stage for projects like this." - Phil Wolff

"Matt, was this mostly due to market forces? No new breakthroughs in technology or new discoveries?" - Phil Wolff

"No churn in this story! http://churnalism.sunlightfoun..." - Phil Wolff

"I like the idea of a "see dead people" obits app. Wander the streets and see where dead people died or lived, share Vine-style videos of the spot, text-to-speech the linked Wikipedia or NYT obituaries, adding a stream of ghastly places and place memory to our lives." - Phil Wolff

"Yeah, I'm looking for a stylus that's useful for writing. That means a fine point, responsive to small rapidly changing movements using minor motor skills vs. broad brush strokes. I prefer writing with a fine or ultra fine point pen and these styli feel like using a crayon or a fat marker." - Phil Wolff

"Was really hoping for paleolithic caramels." - Phil Wolff