Obviously don't use it if you care about privacy. Same reason you shouldn't use gmail, facebook, twitter, etc. I hear the folks over at https://whispersystems.org/ are working to fill in the gaps. But even the peer-to-peer version did not protect privacy so nothing lost, nothing gained here as I see it.
Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room
81–90 of 130 posts
Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room
#82Stopped Using Skype years ago, now with slack and google hangouts ... who needs Skype. Got slower and slower with every version.
Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room
#83Skype was originally using p2p for everything, then moved to Linux Microsoft owned servers for supernodes[0] and now they outsourced to "the cloud"?
0: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s...
Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
I wish password policies would be standardized, but then we'd have something like this happen: https://xkcd.com/927/
Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room
#85A 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…
Autistic engineers gonna autist.
Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room
#86A 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 had the same exact issue but even more trouble, with Xbox Live, and an old email account.
Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room
#87It'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…
or they had a real desktop client.
They do have something for chat, but it's a bit quirky - pairs with your phone somehow.
Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room
#88Earlier 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?
Skype for Business, aka Lync before the idiotic rebrand, uses TLS and you can set your own certs if you run your own server.
Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room
#89It'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.
I've the opposite issue. Skype keeps redelivering messages. Even after I've read and responded. Sometimes 8 hours after.
The UI always sucked (made me wonder why it has been mentioned as a positive example of software made outside the US) - but the basic message flow is broken now.
Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room
#90Earlier 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 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?
But you are free to do that, aren't you? Last time I checked, cyber-police wasn't going around and giving people fines for not using a TOR client.
As a matter of fact, given that you are at least aware of the concepto of "convenience tradeoff", you probably are in the minority that is qualified to exercise such freedom responsibly. You may still make a mistake and land in the "too little" (or, less likely, "too much") camp on any individual decision... but most of the time you should be making the right calls more often than not.
When people in the know say "Everyone needs security and privacy", they are not talking about you. They are talking about the guy who has seen the Swordfish movie, though it was an embelished but otherwise accurate depiction of reality, and believe that a hacker is a younger version of Wolverine with super powered intuition that can type some gibberish @500wpm until they happen to run into your password. This people is not knowledgeable enough to reason about the tradeoffs (even if they know how to reason, the lack of priors and the wrong but otherwise sensible assumptions just kill them).
We are talking about having minimally secure defaults, for the sake of those that cannot (or will not) set their own configurations.