The things michael_m91 is saying are pure as it happens in the real world, in practice.
quote:
Originally posted by NoName
And no, Your instant messages are sent accross a server to the other persons computer, UN-ENCRYPTED. Anybody who intercepted these messages could read them.
I'm constantly surprised how paranoid people are... No hacker will seriously think about hacking into a server to monitor the traffic and to split out all the interesting stuff just to be left with your specific messages! They have 'better' things todo. And yes, you must be a realy very impressive professional hacker to pull this off.
The only exception would be if you're on a local network, where monitoring traffic from another computer is 'easy'. Easy enough for a somewhat experienced hacker. But 99,99999999999% of people out there are NOT on a local network, or at best on a local network in their own home. So, are you so paranoid that you think your 10 year old sister is going to "hack" you and monitoring your conversation with your schoolmate? come on.....
As michael_m91 said, the thing that can probably happen, and what you must fear the most, is that somebody in the family is reading your logs (although even this is rare), so simple encrypt them in that case...
Don't get me wrong, encryption can be a good thing (eg: companies), but don't get sucked into the "OMG They're watching me" paranoid stuff... For the average (and even pro) user, encryption of something like MSN Messenger is useless...
Ha, I even bet that, when I have access to your PC, there are tons more interesting and unprotected/un-encrypted stuff to read then some MSN logs...
(eg: a copy of the registry is enough, thank you
)
So bottom line, don't get all paranoid people, encrypting is nice, but most of the time not needed at all, unless you're talking about bank account data and that sort of stuff...
/ 
