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

Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 77 posts

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#51

Post by ocdtrekkie »

_Understated_ wrote: post #22
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically, you should realize anything that companies say is done with "AI" is probably in some part done by poorly paid contractors. And not always on the analysis end, for example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2019/05/28/25-of-go... There's something incredibly dystopian by using humans as part of a process you literally tell people is entirely machines.

Haha, I never realised it was that immature. As an aside: Being a tech I have been asked numerous times by non-techs "What actually is AI?" I usually answer "a lot of if-statements" :)

It is probably something akin to "a lot of if-statements generated by an automated system that we neither understand nor can explain, which seems to more or less output results we wanted".

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#52

Post by google2342 »

xthestreams wrote: post #49
_Understated_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, I never realised it was that immature. As an aside: Being a tech I have been asked numerous times by non-techs "What actually is AI?" I usually answer "a lot of if-statements" :)

AI researcher here. While industry doesn't usually find the need for huge complex models, I don't think your statement is fair, nor accurate. Can you provide some examples of AI tech that in your opinion is "a lot of if statements"?

How do you expect someone to justify a statement that's not true? I suppose you could say that it's a fair characterization of a basic decision tree but that doesn't describe modern ML methods.

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#53

Post by _Understated_ »

xthestreams wrote: post #49
_Understated_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, I never realised it was that immature. As an aside: Being a tech I have been asked numerous times by non-techs "What actually is AI?" I usually answer "a lot of if-statements" :)

AI researcher here. While industry doesn't usually find the need for huge complex models, I don't think your statement is fair, nor accurate. Can you provide some examples of AI tech that in your opinion is "a lot of if statements"?

If you're meaning me, I probably should've ended my comment with /s

I was making a joke :)

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#54

Post by rhacker »

darkcha0s wrote: post #19

>Although Skype's website says that the company may analyze audio of phone calls that a user wants to translate in order to improve the chat platform's services, it does not say some of this analysis will be done by humans. I'm sorry, but isn't this just nitpicking? Just because they don't say how it's analyzed doesn't make this a scandal.

Well, going back to the origins of skype it was advertised as encryption that not even employees can read or listen to your calls. I know that broke around (or probably before) MS purchased it - but I just find it funny how much humanity is willing to let things slide. So much so that we go from the most secure peer to peer architecture ever to - oh yeah contractors are listening to skype calls.

You know what I guess I am corrected - they said "employees couldn't read or listen". It's a contractor loophole!!! -/sarcasm

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#55

Post by _Understated_ »

azinman2 wrote: post #27
_Understated_ wrote: post #4

I think we have to assume at this point that all online communication tools owned by for-profit mega-corps are compromised and that they can and do listen/analyse everything. I have long assumed that with Whatsapp... I honestly don't believe that it's as secure as it used to be: Facebook'a raison d'etre is all about data gathering. Also, when I read a WhatsApp message on my phone, it's unencrypted as I see it on the…

Compromised by what? Whom? Listening / analyzing for what? These stories are really overblown. All these companies are doing it in order to make voice recognition better. It’s simply not possible to do with some QA... you have to know what people are actually saying vs what the system recognized.

I have nothing to back this statement up...

I am sure they are "training" their AI. I don't doubt it but they have access to masses of data. Some mega-personal I would imagine and also some that can provide insight into other businesses and markets and so on.

The temptation to "use" that data would be absolutely enormous and the financial pressures to use it to provide whatever advantage would be equally enormous.

I recall years ago reading about the FB app spying on users' usage of other apps on phones (My Google-fu is broken right now but I'll keep looking for it and update if I find it).

Imagine if has data from one purpose/system that could provide a massive leg-up to them. Do you think they would ignore it? Perhaps in regulated industries like finance (I happen to work in finance and we have systems and procedures in place for this kind of thing) they may have to destroy it once it's been used for a very specific purpose but we're talking about Skype.

The best scenario is if the data doesn't exist or can't be read... it removes the possibility of temptation and financial pressures to use it.

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#56

Post by 317070 »

jasonmorton wrote: post #39

Can anyone recommend a good open-source chat and call solution? I'm looking for something I can run on my own server to support friends and family, with an iOS and Android app. It doesn't have to support more than one or two video calls at a time. I figure this is sadly the long term solution.

I use jit.si as replacement for Skype. It's in browser, encrypted, p2p and EFF approved.

I don't know if they have apps, but as far as I know their server code is on github.

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#57

Post by jasonmorton »

317070 wrote: post #56
jasonmorton wrote: post #39

Can anyone recommend a good open-source chat and call solution? I'm looking for something I can run on my own server to support friends and family, with an iOS and Android app. It doesn't have to support more than one or two video calls at a time. I figure this is sadly the long term solution.

I use jit.si as replacement for Skype. It's in browser, encrypted, p2p and EFF approved. I don't know if they have apps, but as far as I know their server code is on github.

Thanks, looks like this is: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#58

Post by Fnoord »

jchw wrote: post #50
swiley wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>most P2P platforms won't translate well to phones, since you at least need centralization for the push notifications. Such is life This isn't a fact of life, this is a flaw in the API of most popular mobile OSes. Open source comunnity maintaned operating systems have solved the problem of providing a network service for handling push notifications (local or not) multiple times now and these companies have refused to…

I work for Google and use an iPhone so I can’t claim to be unbiased. (My eyes have been on the Librem phone, with some skepticism and lately mostly excitement, but I’m just not quite sold on it as a daily driver.) However, even if you allow apps to run in the background basically indefinitely as Android once did (there were IRC clients that Worked, using only the phone,) it simply is bad for battery life. Having mult…

If you need push notification, yes, it is going to cost (if its an Electron app, it'll cost you also RAM). Google provides such already, via GCM/Firebase.

I mean, you could just run IRC in a TUI (e.g. Irssi or WeeChat) and connect to that via Mosh plus Tmux. You'd have low latency, 24/7 uptime, resuming, low resource usage... but no push notifications.

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#60

Post by est31 »

317070 wrote: post #56
jasonmorton wrote: post #39

Can anyone recommend a good open-source chat and call solution? I'm looking for something I can run on my own server to support friends and family, with an iOS and Android app. It doesn't have to support more than one or two video calls at a time. I figure this is sadly the long term solution.

I use jit.si as replacement for Skype. It's in browser, encrypted, p2p and EFF approved. I don't know if they have apps, but as far as I know their server code is on github.

Note that jit.si is only encrypted in the sense that Skype is encrypted, aka transport stream encrypted. The server needs access to the decrypted video stream so that it can do split screen. See this thread for details: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/409

I personally use jitsi because it is FLOSS software and it's less likely to send conversation contents to the NSA or other dragnet surveillance entities. But it's not end to end encrypted.

Post reply on HN