Live data from Hacker News

Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

arstechnica.com

31–40 of 130 posts

Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#33

A personal anecdote: I had the same account on Skype for most of the last 10 years. The same username. It was stable. Lots of people could contact me reliably. It was an account that was created long before Skype was bought by Microsoft. Then came the update that they pushed out last year. Now everyone needed a Microsoft ID to login. There was some kind of "improvement" in the way authentication was done. So I had to…

>I am a professional computer programmer. If I can't figure out how to reset a password on Skype, then what are the chances that a less technical person can do it?

Had the same experience with the german postal service a few week ago. When you register there, you register for their shitty amazon-clone aswell. Turns out, you have only one account with one passwort, but the two sites have different password polices. My password had a '#' in it, witch wasn't allowed for the post part, but the passwort reset form didn't care, because it was allowed on the newer platform. You just can't login on the other and get no usefull error messages.

Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#34
post #33

A personal anecdote: I had the same account on Skype for most of the last 10 years. The same username. It was stable. Lots of people could contact me reliably. It was an account that was created long before Skype was bought by Microsoft. Then came the update that they pushed out last year. Now everyone needed a Microsoft ID to login. There was some kind of "improvement" in the way authentication was done. So I had to…

>I am a professional computer programmer. If I can't figure out how to reset a password on Skype, then what are the chances that a less technical person can do it? Had the same experience with the german postal service a few week ago. When you register there, you register for their shitty amazon-clone aswell. Turns out, you have only one account with one passwort, but the two sites have different password polices. My…

Man that's bad. Enforcing password policies at sign-in seems like a terribly flawed idea.

Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#35
post #19
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Those who really need security and privacy, know not to use Skype. Everyone needs security, and privacy. If you're a company, you need security and privacy, and most will just assume that Skype provides it. And for the most part Skype provides them with the security they need. Most of the users of Skype just needs protection from snooping competitors and Skype provides that to a sufficient extend. Honestly no one wi…

>If you're a company, you need security and privacy, and most will just assume that Skype provides it. And for the most part Skype provides them with the security they need. Most of the users of Skype just needs protection from snooping competitors and Skype provides that to a sufficient extend. Aren't businesses supposed to use skype for business?

Is there any difference in security between business-skype and normal-skype?

Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#36
post #3

>Peer-to-peer connectivity also has some privacy issues; the exposure of IP addresses to peers was abused to perform denial of service attacks against victims, a problem that became distressingly common in the world of e-sports. My brother who is a streamer, was DOSed because his IP was leaked via skype. This can be a huge pain to anyone with a public image and they have to use security by obscurity to maintain the i…

Discord actually went as far as to add a streamer mode which adds on extra security & obscures names and the like. Handy.

Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#37
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you're a company, you need security and privacy, and most will just assume that Skype provides it. And for the most part Skype provides them with the security they need. Most of the users of Skype just needs protection from snooping competitors and Skype provides that to a sufficient extend. Aren't businesses supposed to use skype for business?

Is there any difference in security between business-skype and normal-skype?

Probably, since "Skype for Business" is a renamed Microsoft Lync and has basically no technology in common with Skype per se. (Its user experience is also terrible, but differently so.)

Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#38
post #7

Not sure about that elephant. Anyone using Skype still assuming their conversation is secure and private, is exceedingly naive. Those who really need security and privacy, know not to use Skype.

>Those who really need security and privacy, know not to use Skype. Everyone needs security, and privacy. If you're a company, you need security and privacy, and most will just assume that Skype provides it. And for the most part Skype provides them with the security they need. Most of the users of Skype just needs protection from snooping competitors and Skype provides that to a sufficient extend. Honestly no one wi…

> Everyone needs security, and privacy

I'm so tired of this, no I don't, at least not as much as so many people think I need. No, I don't care if my Netflix password is easily crackable, and no I don't care if the US government reads my Skype chats!

Why am I not allowed to make that choice, to use Skype and be okay with the convenience tradeoff? I agree that I should have the choice, but if I do choose to use something insecure with full knowledge of it's insecurity, can't I be free to do that?

Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#39

I would imagine Microsoft abandoned direct peer to peer communication because of patent trolling, just like Apple had to change Facetime to no longer support direct connections.

I've heard mobile -- they found that direct P2P was too taxing on (earlier) mobile devices.

Wimpy mobile devices have been a significant factor in pushing everything to the cloud.

Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#40
post #26
post #6

What stable alternatives do we have for a pure P2P? Tox still doesn't persist group chats, yet. I hope someone will come up with an implementation of Riffle.

The recent introduction of WebRTC to browsers could throw Skype off its throne. You pretty much just go on the webpage of such a WebRTC-service, start up a conversation, which generates you a link, then you send that link to your conversation partner and they just have to open this link in their browser to join the conversation. That's so incredibly simple to use, that it should be much less of a problem to get peopl…

It's "incredibly simple to use" only when the asynchronous use case you describe is desirable.

Consider this very basic use case: my mom and I want to be always able to call/interrupt each other.

- Skype fits the bill: I just double-click her name in the contact list. She hears the ringing, and answers.

- WebRTC-based services do not: I have to generate a link, email it, and hope she sees the email (she won't) then join asynchronously.

Put dryly, basic WebRTC-based services like Hello lack the notions of a contact and a presence mechanism. That's a deal-breaker for my use case.

EDIT: I see you mention "services surrounding video calls, for example a contact list". Agreed, but to me it's more than an additional service, it's a core feature.

Post reply on HN