Skype Facts

What Is Skype?

Skype is a medium of voice communication which can be used with the aid of the Internet. Skype has been designed based on the Kazaa file sharing program. The headquarters of Skype is in Luxembourg and France.  It also has offices in many other parts of Europe, Asia as well as the United States of America.

In 2019, major privacy concerns surfaced with added veracity as it pertains to Skype.  Microsoft employees and contractors were caught eavesdropping on Skype conversations which obviously raises major privacy concerns.  

In October 2005, Skype was taken over by eBay. There are two main kinds of machines which will be used as a part of the Skype network. One is known as the ordinary host or the Skype client while the other is the super node or SN. Any normal person who is making use of Skype will be considered as an ordinary host which has been connected to the super node. These super nodes are the names which have been given to the various servers of Skype which can be found in many different parts of the world.  Bitcoin as an example has users that run their own nodes as well.  

However the Skype client should also be aware of the server to which the connection needs to be established. Every Skype client will have a table which will contain the IP addresses and port numbers of all the super nodes which are available. This is also known as the host cache and it will be found in the windows registry of the Skype client. Every time, a user logs into Skype from his computer, the data from the host cache will be read first and the first IP port will be selected. Then the Skype client will connect to that super node.

It is not possible to conduct a trace of a Skype client very easily. However if a policeman or a law enforcement officer has managed to obtain a court order then the people working at Skype will be forced to reveal details which can be obtained from their logs starting from the name and address of the user to the time at which the call has been made. A lot of people decide to make use of vouchers in order to make Skype payments. But some people will provide a false name and address when they are making these voucher payments on Skype. But these false names and addresses will definitely appear on the Skype logs.

It is also possible for law enforcement people to obtain a court order and ask the Internet service provider to provide the name and address of the specific person who is being investigated. It is not possible to trace a Skype user who has provided a false name and address in order to create a Skype id and paid using a voucher. He/she can make a Skype call from an Internet cafe which has the facility of Wi-Fi. There is no method of tracing the original user of the Skype id when the call has been made in this manner. More than one billion people have downloaded Skype onto their computers during the year 2008 and now Skype has become one of the most popular software applications which is being used by people all over the world. 

Update: Skype was bought in 2011 by Microsoft Corporation for staggering $8.5 billion. It is hard to see the possible return on investment since new technologies are emerging like Viber. To make things even worse, Microsoft had to invest millions in re-modeling shady programming structure that Skype had in place at the time of purchase. So why purchase?  In 2019 The Motley Fool asks if it is time for Microsoft to try and spin off Skype.

Mostly because Google and Facebook wanted piece of this software. Some conspiracy theories involve such ideas such as that Skype is used as spying tool for U.S. government and other corporations willing to invest in such endeavour.  It is difficult to determine and prove how much the government interacts with Big tech, but we still can ask and find out why don’t people own their own data and then have the ability to sell it to Big Tech and the government of they choose to do so?