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

Great. Skype is down.

thenextweb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 69 posts

Re: Great. Skype is down.

#21

Post by mike-cardwell »

jedsmith wrote: post #17
michaelchisari wrote: post #12

Although generally Skype is very reliable, I think this does make a case for open, distributed systems, at least when it comes to something that many, many people and organizations are reliant on.

People make this argument every time something quietly critical fails or doesn't work the way they want it to. As a recent example, look at the completely false FUD about ICANN "seizing domains"; there were nearly instant calls for an "open, decentralized" DNS. It's almost as if these proposed solutions wait for the slightest problem to occur, then everybody rushes to pitch a Tor utopia. I personally would greatly fe…

We already have a distributed voip platform. "distributed" in the same way as email is at least. Just set up a sip server with appropriate SRV records in the DNS. I'm not sure what Tor has to do with anything.

And as michaelchisari said, we already have distributed IM via the magic of XMPP federation.

Re: Great. Skype is down.

#22

Post by jimboyoungblood »

jessriedel wrote: post #20
jnovek wrote: post #8

Why are we down on Skype for their first outage in three years? My cable internet, electricity and cell phone service all fail more frequently than that. Once in three years seems pretty damn reliable to me, especially considering that I pay literally nothing to use Skype.

My cell phone service has never failed in my home.

My AT&T iPhone has never failed to fail in San Francisco.

Re: Great. Skype is down.

#23

Post by koenigdavidmj »

michaelchisari wrote: post #12

Although generally Skype is very reliable, I think this does make a case for open, distributed systems, at least when it comes to something that many, many people and organizations are reliant on.

With Skype, only the login/online status service is actually centralised. Actual calls are peer-to-peer.

Re: Great. Skype is down.

#24

Post by AgentConundrum »

I didn't know what the hell was going on. I got a message a couple hours ago saying that Skype had crashed. Not that it couldn't connect or anything, but a "Unhandled Exception blew the sucker up. Feel free to totally fail to load this in Visual Studio" message.

I didn't try to restart it, since I very rarely use it anyway, but I did find it quite odd since I've never seen that happen to Skype.

Re: Great. Skype is down.

#25

Post by zeedotme »

jnovek wrote: post #8

Why are we down on Skype for their first outage in three years? My cable internet, electricity and cell phone service all fail more frequently than that. Once in three years seems pretty damn reliable to me, especially considering that I pay literally nothing to use Skype.

honestly, you're right. It was just my initial reaction and the first words to come to mind when I wrote the title in my haste to get it out.

Re: Great. Skype is down.

#27

Post by viraptor »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #21
jedsmith wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People make this argument every time something quietly critical fails or doesn't work the way they want it to. As a recent example, look at the completely false FUD about ICANN "seizing domains"; there were nearly instant calls for an "open, decentralized" DNS. It's almost as if these proposed solutions wait for the slightest problem to occur, then everybody rushes to pitch a Tor utopia. I personally would greatly fe…

We already have a distributed voip platform. "distributed" in the same way as email is at least. Just set up a sip server with appropriate SRV records in the DNS. I'm not sure what Tor has to do with anything. And as michaelchisari said, we already have distributed IM via the magic of XMPP federation.

Sorry you missed some steps there:

- Just set up a sip server with appropriate SRV records in the DNS.

- Discover that you also need A records (that now collides with webserver on your domain), because not every client supports SRV. (and some also need NAPTR)

- Discover that half of the phones are not compatible with your server out of the box.

- Discover that to support vendor A you need to enable X and to support vendor B you need to disable X.

- Discover that you cannot call users on network xyz.com because you're not authorized to.

XMPP, email, etc. are nice and well defined (yes, even email with all its problems) compared to SIP. SIP works ok-ish within one limited domain and one set of (clients-servers). It does not work between unrelated people. Additionally big internet telephony "supporters" like Cisco will do a lot to make sure your phone works correctly only with their gateway and almost nothing else (voip non-supporters like MS will do the same).

Re: Great. Skype is down.

#29

Post by mike-cardwell »

viraptor wrote: post #27
mike-cardwell wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have a distributed voip platform. "distributed" in the same way as email is at least. Just set up a sip server with appropriate SRV records in the DNS. I'm not sure what Tor has to do with anything. And as michaelchisari said, we already have distributed IM via the magic of XMPP federation.

Sorry you missed some steps there: - Just set up a sip server with appropriate SRV records in the DNS. - Discover that you also need A records (that now collides with webserver on your domain), because not every client supports SRV. (and some also need NAPTR) - Discover that half of the phones are not compatible with your server out of the box. - Discover that to support vendor A you need to enable X and to support v…

Yeah. I also didn't supply server setup instructions and service configuration examples. Sorry.

We do have a distributed voip network. But yes, it does need work to improve it. Skypes simplicity is what makes it so popular.

Re: Great. Skype is down.

#30

Post by vital101 »

rayvega wrote: post #10
jnovek wrote: post #8

Why are we down on Skype for their first outage in three years? My cable internet, electricity and cell phone service all fail more frequently than that. Once in three years seems pretty damn reliable to me, especially considering that I pay literally nothing to use Skype.

>> ...This is getting tiresome; trusted services going down... That statement from the OP rubbed me the wrong way. Trusted services going down are a fact of life. It is going to happen. I agree Skype's last outage was three years ago which is a good track record compared to more traditional services that you might pay a lot more for. Other "trusted" services like electricity, water, heat, transportation fail from tim…

The statements by the OP rubbed me the wrong way as well. We always preach here that you should have a backup system in case a service fails, why should this be any different for real life? Network not available? Store updates locally and transmit them when it is. Skype down? Find an alternative for a few hours until it's back up. It's not the end of the world. Think of it as an opportunity to explore new products.

Note: I know some people rely on Skype for their businesses, and that it sucks that it went out. All I'm saying is that most people should have some sort of contingency plan for when this situation occurs.

Post reply on HN