Secondly, the government cites that Skype has shared its codes with the US and China: it has not. It never has. It has shared source-code with itself in China (
Skype?????????-??????????), much in the same way that an Indian subsidiary would receive necessary source code to build a project for a foreign entity. It just so happens that, like India, China requires foreign entities to have a Chinese partner. Skype does not have any such subsidiaries or partners in India.
One would assume that Skype would have given a special authentication code/algorithm to China, not the one that the rest of us use. To do otherwise would be ludicrous.
I think it was Austria who took another route and developed a trojan to get around the encryption.
But in any case, if the government did end up blocking Skype for the reasons of encryption, they would have to block ALL forms of secure transport: HTTPS, FTPS, SSH etc, which would be a big annoyance for people like me who need to do things like access their internet banking facilities overseas.
I'm still not clear on whether the security agencies in the US & China can actually intercept encrypted conversations with Skype ?
By your statement above, one would assume they can do so, just not exactly in the same manner the article you quoted would have us believe but these govt.s are no less capable either.
We had something similar to this with the blackberry a yr ago if i'm not mistaken. Then it suddenly went quiet. Wonder why ?