Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 130 posts

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

#41

Post by mhurron »

m_mueller wrote: post #8

It's also gotten extremely buggy. Can't get reliably through firewalls anymore, constantly orders messages wrong or doesn't show messages that were sent by a different client (even though they were received by the other party correctly), has much worse voice quality than Whatsapp, can't handover between networks, takes ages to load on older iPhones, the list goes on. I'd move away to Whatsapp in a heartbeat if they o…

> It's also gotten extremely buggy.

No kidding. If I get a skype message while my iphone is locked, when I swipe to unlock and open the app, those messages (all of them if there were several on the lock screen) are lost forever.

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

#42

Post by meira »

dimino wrote: post #38
mrweasel wrote: 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…

> 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 somethi…

Actually, if everybody knew that a channel is insecure, it would make it a lot less dangerous. The problem is: most of people need it to be safer, and there is no real option.

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

#43

Post by imglorp »

Sylos wrote: post #26
arunc wrote: 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…

Click-the-link is a different usecase from click-address-book, really.

Only one of those furthers the new MS business model of collecting data on you.

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

#44

Post by kirkdouglas »

rincebrain wrote: post #23

I'm pretty certain that Microsoft already (mostly) made this backward-incompatible move several years ago, when they shut down the last of their (old Skype protocol) (MSNP24) gateways in 2014, so any Skype clients that predate the MSNP24 support being added to Skype no longer work. The thing they're doing now is probably either breaking Skypeweb backward compat or a rev on MSNP, depending on which mechanism the embed…

I've just read the blog post and it seems that they will migrate Mac client to Electron soon. That sucks, since I like native Mac client.

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

#45

Post by kuschku »

NetStrikeForce wrote: post #25
mrweasel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which are all terrible in a business setting. Facebook is block at my employer, because most people doesn't seem to understand that they shouldn't be on Facebook during work hours. Also many companies doesn't exactly like it when you use a private account for business related communication. Google Hangout is just horrible, and not only because I'm require to have an Google account (and I'm NOT using person accounts f…

> Facebook is block at my employer, because most people doesn't seem to understand that they shouldn't be on Facebook during work hours. Why is that? People's personal life doesn't disappear when they arrive to the office. I've seen employers blocking services and getting a spike in productivity... for the next day - then people find something else to do when they need to get distracted, rest their mind, socialize, e…

> People's personal life doesn't disappear when they arrive to the office.

It does.

Just like work life disappears the moment you leave the office.

Work is work, personal is personal, any kind of mixing always ends up with horrible results.

In many countries, the inverse - doing job related things at home or in general outside of paid time - is even highly illegal.

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

#46

Post by mixmastamyk »

dimino wrote: post #38
mrweasel wrote: 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…

> 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 somethi…

"I don't need free speech, don't have anything to say."

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

#47

Post by simfoo »

lkrubner wrote: post #18

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…

Same thing happened to me, after multiple resets I had to create a new account. Also, I was pretty sure I had tried the correct password and it was Microsoft that had forgotten the password/hash.

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

#48

Post by josinalvo »

wslh wrote: post #28
lkrubner wrote: post #18

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…

> Then came the update that they pushed out last year. Now everyone needed a Microsoft ID to login. No, I am using the same id since Skype started. Never linked it to a Microsoft account. This is not a Microsoft endorsement since Skype works really bad.

Me too

(maybe because I am using the old skype client for linux? But I also use skype on android)

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

#49

Post by ajeet_dhaliwal »

josinalvo wrote: post #48
wslh wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then came the update that they pushed out last year. Now everyone needed a Microsoft ID to login. No, I am using the same id since Skype started. Never linked it to a Microsoft account. This is not a Microsoft endorsement since Skype works really bad.

Me too (maybe because I am using the old skype client for linux? But I also use skype on android)

You can still use your Skype account at least on the Mac, iOS versions, I do, but they don't make it obvious, the arrow to change to Skype login is small.

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

#50

Post by wila »

rincebrain wrote: post #23

I'm pretty certain that Microsoft already (mostly) made this backward-incompatible move several years ago, when they shut down the last of their (old Skype protocol) (MSNP24) gateways in 2014, so any Skype clients that predate the MSNP24 support being added to Skype no longer work. The thing they're doing now is probably either breaking Skypeweb backward compat or a rev on MSNP, depending on which mechanism the embed…

Eeks, the one thing I depend on is dedicated skype hardware (eg Phones that have native skype support) Every time that "Skype is moving forward" things tend to break.

Last time that happened I had random calling problems for months and had to fall back on using computers for skype to phone support. Eventually that got fixed.

Frankly it has been quite good for a while, so ... suppose it is time again for some trouble.

Might want to look into SIP if it happens again. Would be a pity as Skype has pretty good deals for international phone calls.

Post reply on HN