There’s been plenty of talk that Microsoft’s purchase of Skype is hurting Windows Phone’s acceptance with carriers because they view Skype as a threat to their business. Recently, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop was quoted as saying that. But that’s only part of the story — Elop went on to say that Microsoft’s ownership of Skype will help Windows Phone, not hurt it.

The to-do about Skype hurting Windows Phone came about last week because of a blog post by Tomi Ahonen about the recent Nokia shareholder meeting. Ahonen said that a shareholder told Nokia CEO Elop that “Nokia seems to be having a problem with the distribution channel due to Skype,” and then asked what Nokia planned to do about it. Ahonen say that Elop admitted that carriers were reluctant to carry Nokia’s Windows Phone devices because of Microsoft’s ownership of Skype. Ahonen then quotes Elop as saying:

“If the operator doesn’t want us, it doesn’t want us. We will appeal to them with other arguments. We have more to offer to them. It is a good point to start the discussion from Skype.”

Why would carriers care about Skype? It’s because Skype could potentially eat into their bottom lines. When you make Skype calls, you’re using your carrier’s data plan, not its voice plan. Carriers charge more for voice minutes than for data, and so the more that people use Skype, the less revenue they get.

That’s the theory, anyway. But there are plenty of holes in the theory. Skype isn’t just available for Windows Phone; it’s also available for iOS and for Android. That clearly means that carriers wouldn’t discriminate against Windows Phone because it has Skype on it — all the big ones run Skype.

In fact, Elop went on to point out, Microsoft’s ownership of Skype could help Windows Phone with carriers, not hurt it. The MyNokia blog has a more complete transcript of what Elop said about Skype. Read the transcript, and you’ll see that Elop views Microsoft’s ownership of Skype as a competitive advantage, because Microsoft could work with carriers to ensure that Skype enhances revenue, rather than cut into revenue:

(Skype is) “on all Android devices, it’s on iPhone devices, it’s on iPad, it’s on all of those devices. So in fact what we’re doing with the operators is turning it around into an advantage. Instead of them just complaining about Skype on Android or Skype on iPhone, with Microsoft and Nokia, we can have a conversation that says “OK there, is this Skype thing, is there a different type of partnership we can do that recognizes that voice over IP like Skype is coming no matter what, but maybe we can do something creative that generates incremental revenue for you.”

In that case, carriers would favor Windows Phone over other smartphones because it would be the only operating system that generates revenue from Skype, rather than having Skype take away carrier revenue.

Although this might help Windows Phone, I don’t think it will make a dramatic difference. Windows Phone is still struggling to gain market share, and is around 2% or less in the U.S. Microsoft will need much more than Skype to make it a success.

Bad news for people who actually value their privacy and do not particularly trust the government. A new report says that secret terrorism and espionage wiretap requests actually increased in 2011. The report says that the Justice Department requested 1,745 secret wiretaps in 2011, an increase over 2010 by 239. While some people will say this isn’t a very big deal unless you are being targeted by the FBI or the NSA, the problem arises in just how you can land on the Justice Department’s radar. The NSA in particular is building a massive surveillance network and has gone on record as saying that “everyoneisatarget.”

Those who don’t want to wonder whether or not big brother is listening in, can’t be all that encouraged by numerous reports that talk about how laughablesome IP communications portals are when it comes to security. It seems conceivable that if the government is asking for secret warrants through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that there may be times when they aren’t taking that particular step as well.

The official numbers as to how many secret warrants were procured through the FISA courts were taken from correspondence to Congressional leaders and Vice President Joe Biden. In the letter, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich said, “During the calendar year 2011, the government made 1,745 applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (hereinafter FISC) …for authority to conduct electronic surveillance and/or physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes.”

The letter also goes on to state that of the numerous requests for secret warrants, 1,676 were for wiretapping. It is not known what the other requests might have been for, but the logical conclusion points to physically examining private property. Certainly there has been a great uptick of this kind of law enforcement behavior since they were given expanded powers thanks to the Patriot Act following 9/11. While the increase in the number of wiretaps may not be at a breakneck speed, the government does seem to be increasing their role both on the Internet and through voice communications, and this development should be watched.

A tool recently published on Pastebin allows hackers to infiltrate Skype 5.5. Hackers can see anyone’s vCard, get the person’s real user IP address and obtain their PC’s internal network card’s IP address.

“This is an ongoing, industry-wide issue faced by all peer-to-peer software companies,” Adrian Asher, Skype’s director of product security, told TechNewsWorld. “We are committed to the safety and security of our customers and we are taking measures to help protect them.”

According to researchers, the flaw could allow hackers to obtain users’ locations, digital files and identities. By tracking Skype accounts combined with geo-locator services, researchers were able to construct a user’s activities even when the person hadn’t used Skype for 72 hours.

To construct a person’s habits and whereabouts for weeks or months without the target’s knowledge, hackers could call the person over Skype and terminate the call immediately. They could also discover the digital files downloaded by the hacker by combining the Skype attack with the target’s file sharing activities over sites like BitTorrent.

By linking the data from VoIP systems to personal information on social media sites, marketers could create profiles on large numbers of people. In fact, marketers could track up to 10,000 people for about $500 per month.

“There’s a lot more at risk than simply IP disclosure,” said Randy Abrams, a security consultant. “The ability to redirect to another Web page implies the ability to frame someone for accessing child pornography, among other non-trivial attacks, for example.”

Researchers who investigated the Skype flaw have suggested several tactics for sealing the breach.

First, VoIP service providers could prevent an IP address from being revealed to callers unless the recipient actually answers the call. Second, users could block calls from anyone not on their contact list. This, according to researchers, was basically the concept of Caller ID in reverse.

Finding someone’s location and ISP through their IP address is as simple as using a service like Whois, which provides information on registered users or assignees of domain names or IP address blocks. According to researchers, the hack could be perpetuated by a sophisticated hacker of high school age.

Simkl for ICQ now available for Android phones.

You’ve been asking us for it – and now it’s here. Simkl is now available on a wide range of Android phones, so you can chat over ICQ on Android and all your conversations will be saved in the cloud on Simkl servers.

To archive your ICQ conversations, simply use the the best ICQ messenger on Android: Jasmine IM. All you have to do is change login.icq.com server to our server i-icq.com. You can find a detailed instruction with images for Jasmine IM at our forum or in your account settings at http://history.im.

After the earthquake on Tuesday, today we are under another weather attack. Hurricane Irene has reached our datacenter today.

We’re constantly monitoring situation with the datacenter and currently we had to take offline one of our servers responsible for simkl.com part (only website) because of the cooling problems in the datacenter.  IM history logging and Simkl proxy servers are still Online and all your chat history is still recording. 

Due to the weather, high winds and flooding  electricity is turned off in most places around the datacenter, but don’t worry, backup diesel generators are up and running without any problems. We expect at least an hour or more until the situation is resolved and backup fans brought to location.

UPDATE: Everything is up and running.

Best regards, Simkl Team.

A new version of Simkl IM Chat & Voice Recorder (v 2.1) has been released, and this one includes some bug fixes for Skype recording.

What’s new in Simkl IM CVR v2.1:
- New recording engine for Vista\Windows 7 (a lot less Skype crashes).
- Bitrate sync fixes (recording is more clear, without speed up in some cases. Option to manually change bitrate in Windows options).
- New beautiful popup message that is displayed when the voice recording is in progress (Now you know exactly when your conversation is recorded and when it’s not).
- Some other minor fixes.

Go ahead and Download a new version from http://download.simkl.com

* Simkl IM CVR is a recording addon for Skype.

Dear Valued Client,

Please note that our data center will be performing a reboot on our aggregation router slightly before 01:00 EST Thursday 4/21/2011.  During the time of the maintenance you may experience up to 15 minutes of downtime however we expect the downtime to be closer to 3-5 minutes. This should resolve any lingering issues and restore the failed aggregation router stack to full redundancy.  Thank you for your understanding in this.

Warm Regards,

Simkl Team

Dear Valued Client,

Please note that our networking team will be performing scheduled maintenance this weekend for router IOS Upgrades. Although we expect the upgrade to be brief, we are scheduling a network maintenance window from 1AM to 5AM EST on Monday, February 21st. Thank you for your understanding.

Warm Regards,

Simkl Team

Pidgin and some other ICQ clients are not working again. ICQ protocol change has affected Simkl as well. We are working on resolving this issue.

Update: After couple hours, ICQ resolved this issue.

At Simkl, we recognize that security is important to our users and partners. This blog post explains some of the steps we take to protect your security along with tips on things you can do to have a more secure Simkl experience.

Using Passwords on the Simkl website.
When you first load the Simkl homepage the content is unencrypted, but when you click the “Enter” button on Login page our JavaScript code will encrypt your login credentials (including Login and Password) and then send the encrypted version to Simkl using 1024-bit RSA keys such that only Simkl can decrypt them.

How does Simkl store user passwords?
Simkl never stores your IM passwords on its servers. To make Simkl more secure we do not store your Simkl password for your Simkl login in raw text on our servers. We use proprietary encryption technology to encrypt your password before creating your Simkl passport in such a way that your Password is saved on Simkl servers as gibberish, random text. There is no way to decrypt your password by looking at it on Simkl servers. This means that Simkl staff or anyone else will never know your real password except you.

Is there an https version of Simkl?
No. While Simkl does not provide https version of its sites, Simkl provides secure 1024-bit RSA based logins. There are a lot of drawbacks to using https. Https is not as secure as you might think, there is still a risk that a malicious person could intercept your credentials through a so-called “man in the middle” attack – see related NYTimes article. Looking at chat history using Https might feel a lot slower than current non-https version of Simkl. A rough estimate is that it takes 2-5 seconds longer to load the history.im homepage and login when using https. The impact could be even greater if you’re located outside of the United States. The reason – Simkl uses a highly distributed website using CDN which means that Simkl website is actually located at more than  50 different servers world wide and that makes opening your chat history extremely fast. Using https requires Simkl to serve our website, chat history and images from a single server sometimes far away from your home country which makes everything much slower. We are constantly looking into new security methods and website optimization techniques to make Simkl more secure and faster and perhaps we will add some sort of Https/SSL option in the future.