In the early evening of March 5, 2012, in Cairo Egyptian revolutionists attacked the headquarters The secret police sang the main security investigation (SSI) service, a building known as the “hell capital,” because the ruthless police officer gained a reputation as a torture of the prisoners.
Inside the protesters found a complete and crushed document, torture device, hard drive and CD and DVD. All of them documented the torture of nightmares and extensive surveillance.
Protesters I found a memorandum SSI executives wrote in Arabic and wrote about a mysterious software called Finfisher, created by a British-German company Gamma International.
Police officers reported that it is a “high -level hacking system” with various functions, including the ability to upload “spy files” to the target device, communication tracking, and “complete control” for the device of the hacked object.
In the early 2010s, Skype was the world’s most popular Internet phone call app as well as Egypt.
Launched in 2003, SKYPE promised to the user The unprecedented personal information made it impossible to read the chat and listen to the call while the internet hacker or spy traveled across the Internet by calling it “Very safe with end -to -end encryption.” That’s why Egyptian Spies were able to hack people’s computers with Finfisher to listen to the SKYPE call.
“SKYPE calls have excellent sound quality and are very safe because of end -to -end encryption.” SKYPE’s homepage Read in 2004.
Skype’s encryption was an innovative breakthrough at the time. In the mid -1990s, legendary encryption writer Phil Zimmermann created a privacy or PGP software that allows people to make files or emails private with end -to -end encryption. In other words, only the caller and the recipient can read the contents of the message. However, PGP is not included in the chat and apps that are easy to use foolish plaster.
Twenty years later, end -to -end encryption has been baked as an app used by billions of people, and most people may not be guaranteed by messages and telephone. Apple’s IMessage and Facetime, Facebook Messenger, Signal and WhatsApp are both end -to -end encryption.
But in 2003, Skype was the first Skype to provide this level of encryption and personal information.
After it began, Skype caused anger among law enforcement agencies around the world. In Italy, Polizia Postale (Postal and Communications Police) has requested a small cyber security consulting start -up hacking team that is in charge of conducting crime investigations on the Internet to build a telephone spyware that can bring Skype’s encryption among other staff.
The world has found a variety of ways to monitor Skype users. In 2008, Citizen Lab, a digital rights research group at the University of Toronto, is SKYPE Fixed to allow Chinese spies Collect exchanged messages throughout the service. In China, SKYPE was operated by Tom-Skype, a joint venture between Chinese wireless operators who owned Skype and EBAY.
A few years later, the secret file leaked by former US government contractor Edward Snowden said that Microsoft, which currently owns Skype, has revised the app to allow national security and other authorities. Collect telephones and messagesEffectively defeat the app’s vaunted encryption.
This week, Microsoft announced that it will close SKYPE on May 5, at this point, at this point, Skype is a fringe app. In 2023, Microsoft was still far from 300 million users with 30 million users.
Skype is mostly relics yesterday and will soon stop operating, but SKYPE’s legacy is a technology that guarantees communication of the most popular chat apps in the world. And thanks to the groundbreaking idea of SKYPE’s original developer’s privacy, the world is a safer and more free place.
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