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A Call to Boycott Skype

Listening



Summary: More sites call for a boycott of Microsoft Skype, especially after Microsoft's admission that Skype facilitates surveillance

THE controversy behind Skype has given us a lot of attention recently, including mentions from some rather famous people.



FSFE folks promote this new list of 10 reasons to "boycott Skype" and the opening remarks go like this: "If you want to understand what Skype actually is, it might help to picture an almighty telephone and mail company. This company can not only spy on your private conversations and has total control over them, but it also forces you to use it. It owns the telephone lines and all mail transportation and does not let other companies use them. At the same time, you are bound to only use their telephone and mailboxes. Despite of these facts, more and more people are using Skype and even begin using the word “to skype” as a general term for talking and chatting over the internet.

"Hotmail as a brand is now dead.""Concentrating a lot of power in one single uncontrolled entity always leads to abuse of those powers, and Skype is not an exception. The following ten arguments should convince everybody to boycott Skype once and for all."

One sure thing is, Microsoft's ownership of Skype did the software no good. The same thing happened after Microsoft had bought Hotmail. Hotmail as a brand is now dead.

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