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Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype
- Aissen 9y agoI can't help but read this with a cynical voice in my head: Skype used to have an incredibly bleeding edge P2P E2E encrypted protocol, and Microsoft threw it all away. Some might say for good reasons (mobile use case, supernodes straining routers, legal wiretap compliance issues); I'd respectfully disagree and observe that there's just going full-circle.
- pjc50 9y agoYeah, Microsoft moving to a model where "lawful intercept" is no longer possible would be hugely surprising.
- danjoc 9y agoThey can still lawful intercept. All they have to do is push a MITMed version to suspected law breakers. It's going to be closed source just like WhatsApp, so of course, it will be easy for LE to defeat while shedding crocodile tears publicly about how it's uncrackable.
- walterbell 9y agoHow could Skype target binaries to individual users?
- ancientworldnow 9y agoAuto updates to Windows users of interest (who Microsoft already track a plethora of data about making desnonymization trivial)? Many people use windows with a Microsoft account logged in making it even easier to identify.
- criddell 9y agoI think it's more likely that they just include another public key in the list of keys that are used to encrypt the symmetric key that is actually used to encrypt the call. That's just a guess though.
- cjalmeida 9y agoThey don't need it. They can simply turn a switch and disable E2E between parties under investigation. Remember this is closed source and you're using a central infrastructure.
- Severian 9y agoI would assume they would target using the machine guid windows uses for updates.
- squarefoot 9y agoCompromised software is no longer needed when backdoors can be built-in or injected in hardware or firmware/drivers.
- finkin1 9y agoBased on what do you respectfully disagree? I'd be curious to hear your reasons for thinking the "good" reasons you mention aren't in fact good.
- woah 9y agoDid they remove some e2e encryption or did they just start running the supernodes themselves/move closer to a centralized architecture?
- criddell 9y agoConsidering that they can comply with wiretap orders from law enforcement, I'd say there's no e2e encryption. Maybe e2msft2e. Also, I don't think they ever encrypt their chat. I remember a while ago where somebody showed that when you send a private web address to the person you are chatting to, that URL is visited by a machine with an IP belonging to Microsoft. That was a few years ago though and I think the explanation was that Microsoft was looking for malware.
- walterbell 9y agoSome ex-Skype developers created http://Wire.com http://Wire.com with open-source E2E encryption and mobile apps that are usable by regular people.
- tptacek 9y agoWire's cryptography is cribbed from Signal, so Skype's original crypto couldn't have been all that bleeding edge.
- AlexandrB 9y agoYou have to remember Skype is 14 years old. Skype's encryption was pretty cutting-edge in 2003.
- ShabbosGoy 9y agoIt was so cutting edge that they participated in PRISM!
- martimarkov 9y agoWasn't that after M$ bought them? (I might be wrong, just asking)
- ShabbosGoy 9y agoYes, you are correct. I guess people didn’t get my joke.
- Nuzzerino 9y agoI know it's popular to blame Microsoft for everything, but this was happening before Microsoft. http://news.softpedia.com/news/Skype-Provided-Backdoor-Access-to-the-NSA-Before-Microsoft-Takeover-NYT-362384.shtml http://news.softpedia.com/news/Skype-Provided-Backdoor-Acces...
- etiam 9y agoMy cynical voice says "Can't harvest the metadata if people leave to other options in order to protect their content". I'd still rather see Skype eaten by the untainted parts of the competition, but I suppose at least for people who will keep using Skype no matter what, this should be an improvement.
- ryanpcmcquen 9y agoUgh, people are still using Skype?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- GunlogAlm 9y agoYes, more people than ever.
- jdavdc 9y agoDid Skype for Business already have E2E encryption or no? Would seem like a no-brainer.
- geofft 9y agoDepending on your industry, E2E encryption is actively not a thing you want because you have legal requirements to keep logs of conversations. Also, it's not clear it makes much sense, even if you don't have that requirement - in just about every company, you want the helpdesk / IT department / some other central authority to be able to do password resets, which means that the central authority has the cryptographic ability to impersonate any user in the company. (Maybe this triggers logs, but protocol-wise, they can still read and write messages.) So E2E isn't really helping you; you might as well just encrypt all the messages to a key held by the central authority. E2E is great for conversations between members of the public, where there isn't a central authority that determines identities, and where if you forget your password, the right way to regain access to the conversation is to meet your conversation partner in person and re-exchange cryptographic identities with them, end-to-end.
- giancarlostoro 9y agoE2E doesn't mean no logs, your Skype logs can usually be exported locally.
- nakedrobot2 9y agoI guess I'll be downvoted to hell, but.... This absolutely stinks. Signal is most likely blessed by the NSA. This is a ruse to get people comfortable with using Skype again for confidential conversations. Ever since Microsoft bought Skype and completely gutted it, it's been an open secret that they only did so to fulfill an $8B RFP by the NSA to break Skype's encryption. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8106721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8106721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4254925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4254925 edit: added sources
- ReverseCold 9y agoYou can't make a claim like that and not cite any sources.
- fhood 9y agoYou know what else absolutely stinks? Skype in general. I cannot fathom why something so simple as remembering conversation history is beyond their engineers.
- GunlogAlm 9y agoBut... Skype does remember conversation history?
- fhood 9y agoNot the version I use for work. If you close the conversation, the history is gone, unless you fancy digging it up in Outlook, which of course you don't, because the way it is stored there is terrible.
- canadianwriter 9y agoThat's a setting. Your IT team may have chosen it.
- ygra 9y agoJust a guess, but you may be using Skype for Business, which is a completely different product with just a similarity in name.
- Zhenya 9y agoGreat news. More funding for Open Whisper to provide us Signal.
- mtgx 9y agoThey could get 100x the amount they've gotten so far from these companies if they had launched their own crypto-asset, which is probably by far the best way for an open source project to get funding.
- usaphp 9y agoWhile on topic of Skype: My God the latest Skype design update is abysmal, whoever come up with that horrible mess should be fired and never touch any design or management role at all. And it’s not only design but the ux is horrible too, when you switch between conversation - it does not focus on the chat box field so you can start typing right away, instead you have to click it first. This is a basic stuff for a chatting app and whoever missed that is apparently clueless about ux Edit: also if any of Skype iOS app developers is reading this - on iPhone X when you accidentally click top left corner of the phone where the clock is - for some inexplicable reason the whole conversation scrolls all the way to the top, which is incredibly annoying!
- fredleblanc 9y agoSince the update, I have no idea how to find people. I even type in their username on their and they're not found. I don't know how it works anymore.
- msutherl 9y agoSpeaking strictly about the "look and feel," I must say I love it. It's one of the most well-designed apps I've ever seen. Per-UX, I've found Skype very difficult to use since the last major redesign a few(?) years ago. I'm not sure if the update made it worse. I feel generally confused just the same.
- bsg75 9y agoThat update pushed me away from Skype to Signal.
- nolok 9y agoHave you tried the skype mobile app latest update ? It makes the desktop version look amazing. Somehow, they thought we wanted skype to be a clone of whatsapp stories or whatever. Nothing works properly, it's slow as hell, but goody you can like and put a smiley on each individual message ! I used to really like skype but it has now become one of the worst, and I'm still forced to use it due to several of my contacts being on it. Imho network effect is the only reason they aren't being mass dumped by users.
- legionof7 9y agoI made a request for e2e to Discord a while back. It became one of the most voted suggestions but got denied. Maybe this will push them to take another look.
- adornedCupcake 9y agoOn the other hand, I think they are trying to avoid the less nice usecases of communication by restricting themselves to gaming.
- cuckcuckspruce 9y agoLess nice technically or socially? Speaking as someone who has played countless hours of competitive video games in my downtime after work, I assure you that, socially, 'less nice' is a charitable way to describe gaming chat, devolving into a constant torrent of abuse and harassment depending on your skill level, the sound of your voice, and the Dunning Kruger level of yourself and your other team members.
- dylz 9y agoDiscord is already being heavily used in the less nice gaming communities revolving around cheating, compromise/hacked accounts (not just game) selling/malware and game related phish/keylog. But incidentally the same people selling hacked spotify and netflix accounts also provide "support" over skype, so opsec, meet window I guess
- kenning 9y agoI'm not knowledgeable about this -- is signal's e2e encryption even viable for a service with N users, and one where new users are being added? Put another way, if I have a group with 10 users and it's encrypted and then another person joins and can see the old messages, was it actually securely encrypted in the first place?
- AgentME 9y agoI don't think Discord gives people access to past message history when joining a group. I don't know of any limitations of Signal's group chats that would be a problem for Discord's group chat behavior.
- fulafel 9y agoDoes mean the consumer Skype or the corporate Skype?
- freeone3000 9y agoArticle refers to consumer Skype, not SkypeForBusiness.
- tptacek 9y agoJust to get a sense of the track record here, Signal Protocol powers: * Facebook/WhatsApp * Google/Allo * Microsoft/Skype * Signal Signal is also the basis for the protocols for Wire (Proteus) and Matrix (Olm).
- fossuser 9y agoDo you have an opinion on how Keybase handles their encrypted chat?
- edraferi 9y agoI believe Keybase is different because they have so much of their own key infrastructure. I haven't heard anything about them linking up with Signal.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Shoothe 9y agoYou can add OMEMO (XMPP) to the list: https://conversations.im/omemo/ https://conversations.im/omemo/
- danjoc 9y agoSpeaking of track records, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants... Facebook Google Microsoft
- sattoshi 9y agoThey cut off 1 letter off the url by replacing "june" with "jun"
- dguest 9y agoI think you'd either want the full month name or all the months to be abbreviated to the same number of characters. You can't do 2 characters because of June and July, but three works. 4 would be sort of weird.
- anomie31 9y agoWill Chinese citizens be receiving this update?
- mtgx 9y agoThis is still an optional feature, so like 98%+ of the users will not use, and the other 2% probably won't use it all the time either. Right now only Signal and WhatsApp enable the end-to-end encryption by default. Microsoft should remember that they can't use the excuse that "they can't provide law enforcement with the messages" unless the users were also using the E2E mode/Private Conversations. It would also help if Microsoft stopped supporting voice calls in its main client, too, as that automatically qualifies it as a "telecom provider" in many countries, which means it automatically falls under the same lawful intercept laws that affect telecom providers. Unless these changes are made, then this news hardly changes anything in regards to Skype messages being intercepted.
- erikb 9y agoYou know, before Microsoft Skype had end to end encryption.
- hollander 9y agoThat's probably because before Skype, Microsoft had Ballmer.
- Whitestrake 9y agoFor a minute, I thought your comment had simply trailed off without finishing your thought. Then I realised it wasn't "Microsoft Skype", but rather, "before Microsoft, Skype had..."
- erikb 9y agoI see, thanks for the info. Comma setting in English is rather unexpected for me. It works different in German, but I'll try to adapt. Maybe in English you would also say "end-to-end encryption" rather than "end to end encryption", is that correct?
- Whitestrake 9y agoBoth are commonly used, although "end-to-end" is correct as it indicates a compound adjective - a phrase acting as a single adjective affecting the noun ("encryption") that follows it.
- throwawaymanbot 9y agoI love how the top voted comments talk about Skypes UX, and not about the actual article. Hijack a thread 101. Classic.
- Tacite 9y agoWhat’s the point ? There’s still backdoors in Skype anyway, lol.
- theprotocol 9y agoIndeed. The latter end of end-to-end may not be the end intended by the user.
- ddorian43 9y agoMy skype broke (empty everything) on ubuntu,android,web and only works on windows old installation with upgrade.
- lovemenot 9y agoSame here. Until now, I assumed I'd somehow screwed up my registration on Android.
- qwerty456127 9y agoDoes this mean Skype will stop cooperating with governments demanding chat history disclosure?
- usuallymatt 9y agoThey'll still cooperate but they'll have much less data to provide.
- kwindla 9y agoOver the last couple of years, there's been huge progress in making end-to-end encryption practical for "real world" apps -- especially stuff running in web browsers. Signal is part of that, of course, as is WebRTC, a standard that to its great credit did an excellent job with the encryption pieces from the very beginning. We built our video calling app, Daily.co, on top of WebRTC and so we could relatively easily include end-to-end encryption from the day we launched. A few things make e2e harder as you scale up. One is that metadata gets more and more important, for a lot of reasons, as you add features and try to grow a business. As has been pointed out here, Skype was end-to-end encrypted in the pre-Microsoft days. Another challenge is that it's a lot easier to build e2e encryption for mesh network topologies than if you're routing things through central servers. For video calling, mesh networking breaks down as you add more users to a call. For us, that means we're e2e encrypted up to 4 people in a call. After that, we're forwarding video streams through our servers in the cloud, and we don't do e2e encryption anymore. (Not that we wouldn't like to, it's just a much heavier development lift.)
- jmiserez 9y agoWhy not just forward the e2e encrypted video streams through your servers? Encrypted or not, wouldn’t the amount of traffic be the same?
- VirtruTyler 9y agoIf you wouldn't mind, what server framework are you using to route video? Did you custom roll one? Using a service like twilio for calls with more than a few people?
- Jeaye 9y agoSkype is proprietary software. Even if it encrypts my messages E2E, it still needs to display them with its proprietary UI and see them in plain text. There's no way I could trust that or recommend anyone else to. The thing about E2E encryption is that you still need to have reasonable trust in each E.
- Digital-Citizen 9y agoI concur. It's interesting that so many people who claim they understand what the software is doing don't appear to understand that proprietary software is always untrustworthy. Users have no real control over proprietary software, no matter how technical and willing they are to change their copy of the software. Therefore it doesn't matter which apps are installed on a proprietary OS. The proprietary OS (or possibly some hardware beneath it) is untrustworthy. Every keystroke, drag/gesture, location change, camera/mic input, and more pass through proprietary software before they get to the ostensibly trustworthy app.
- mangix 9y agoHell has frozen over
- wilhil 9y agoNow if only they can partner with someone to get chat working as well as it used to or get syncing between multiple devices working...
- antimatter 9y agoThis. I wish Signal's own native apps had the user experience of Telegram.
- rickycook 9y agoor that telegram just used the signal protocol; either is fine in my book
- antimatter 9y agoYes, that would be great as well but I’ve long since given up on that happening.
- est 9y agoTelegram clients are open source, I think Signal could just fork it patch the protocol and be done with it. Or better, support dual account logins.
- j_s 9y agoThey're hiring: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16054356 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16054356
- lucb1e 9y agoI'm not sure I'd want to work for a company that makes compromises at every turn and works together with companies that have their user's privacy definitely not at heart (but claim to by using this encryption publicity stunt).
- simplify 9y agoHow does Signal's chat security compare to Keybase.io's chat? Keybase has more features, but if it's not as secure, then it doesn't matter.
- pilif 9y agoKeybase doesn’t support forward secrecy. The signal protocol does, though I can’t say whether that’s true for Skype's implementation of the protocol
- oconnor663 9y agoSome docs here: https://keybase.io/docs/crypto/chat https://keybase.io/docs/crypto/chat To add a little bit, avoiding forward secrecy was a design decision. We wanted to support adding and removing devices from your account (including removing all of your original devices, if you want), and we wanted new devices to be able to read your message history. I think those two things put together are in conflict with forward secrecy. That said, we'd like to allow you to turn off history for some messages, and it would be nice if you got forward secrecy for those messages when you did that. We're currently in the middle of figuring out how that's going to work. One of the open problems is this sort of situation: If I have 5 devices, and one of them is a laptop that's been in the closet for 3 years and won't ever rotate its keys again, how do we avoid making that laptop a giant hole in my forward secrecy guarantees?
- caf 9y agoIt seems like a reasonable design decision to have a time horizon beyond which a device which has been out of communication loses access to more recent messages. That could be significantly less than 3 years - probably a week or two is fine.
- mwcmitchell 9y agoskype had this already before ms. ms opened skype up to government ages ago so this doesn't mean much of anything, there are backdoors. https://youtu.be/J1q4Ir2J8P8?t=2880 https://youtu.be/J1q4Ir2J8P8?t=2880
- devy 9y agoYeah, I was gonna say Skype communication protocol was proprietary and encrypted until Microsoft bought them and rewrite a lot of it.
- aplorbust 9y agoWikipedia: "Signal relies on centralized servers that are maintained by Open Whisper Systems." Would it be possible to use the same open source proto and crypto that Signal chose, but in a way that does not rely on third parties to run servers, such as OWS, WhatsApp, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc.?
- chrisballinger 9y agoYep. You can use Signal Protocol over XMPP by using an OMEMO-compatible client [1]. You can pretty "easily" host your own XMPP server using Prosody [2] on a Raspberry Pi. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMEMO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMEMO 2. https://prosody.im https://prosody.im
- ReverseCold 9y agoYes, but decentralization is a difficult problem. I think eventually it will become like email, where everyone just uses GMail. NAT, Firewall, etc all make it very difficult to do true P2P as well.
- figgis 9y ago>I think eventually it will become like email, where everyone just uses GMail. Or Outlook(Office365), Ymail, Zoho, GMX, iCloud, Yandex, Proton.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- newscracker 9y agoOr Posteo, Mailbox.org, Tutanota, Riseup.net, etc.
- tho9Ohx1eo 9y agoOr self-hosted.
- dmitrygr 9y agoSkype complies with at least court-ordered wiretap requests (they were forced to when MS bought them). How exactly will that work without "e2e but with key escrow"? And "e2e with key escrow" is basically the same as "plaintext"
- paule89 9y agoThe thing is. How will Microsoft and Skype handle backdoors now. As far as I understood the reason Microsoft broke Skype so badly was because they used centralised servers with backdoors for countries who wanted them. Not always the good countries. But this. This baffles me. Deeply.
- randomerr 9y agoWikipedia: "Signal relies on centralized servers that are maintained by Open Whisper Systems."
- mikeokner 9y agoTotally uninformed comment. Signal the app relies on centralized servers to route messages & discover contacts. Signal the protocol (which is what Skype is rolling out) is a messaging encryption library that encrypts messages on the client using the other client's public key. Central servers (and anyone else in between the two clients) only sees encrypted gibberish, never plain text.
- Systemic33 9y agoMicrosoft used centralised servers because the Skype prior to that was a curse to mobile devices running on battery power. Particularly cellphones. Skype worked as a p2p network, where some peers where marked as super peers and would help with peers behind firewalls (UDP-holepunching), and routing through the super peer. If your phone became a super peer, you could expect to essentially work like a server, with the "benefits" of increased bandwidth usage and power usage. Not exactly what you want as a mobile user. So Microsoft had to change the architecture (which wasn't designed with mobile devices in mind) into a more centralised approach that could work with mobile devices.
- geocar 9y ago> So Microsoft had to change the architecture (which wasn't designed with mobile devices in mind) into a more centralised approach that could work with mobile devices. As an engineer and software developer, I find this to be extremely unlikely. If "super-peers" can already route traffic for others, it seems very likely they could simply route all traffic for Mobile users through some "super-duper peer", instead of routing all traffic for all users through some "super-duper peer".
- KeitIG 9y agoMaybe a good opportunity to remember what is the main mission of Signal/Open Whisper Systems: they realized at the time that it was extremely complicated for non-technical people to use tools secure enough and respecting your privacy (PGP...), and that the tools used by everyone (Whatsapp, Messenger...) were popular because they were fun and easy to use. They believed that everyone should be able to have an easy way to communicate with everyone, with a nice UI/UX, AND have an app secure and respectful of your privacy. And this, leaded to the Signal protocal and the Signal app .
- lucb1e 9y agoWhile on the topic of things to remember, also remember that they're making compromises in order to keep things hidden from users. The Signal protocol may be sound, but as we've seen with today's WhatsApp news, there are still implementation-specific compromises being made. Not to mention that many of those companies ship a closed source product. They could publish a spec of what should be going over the wire to make it auditable without needing to go all open source, but they don't do that either. Things are really kept closed. I am not sure whether it's a net positive or a net negative when another user joins WhatsApp or a similar service, versus Telegram where encryption is opt-in but at least it's open source and not leaking metadata to BigCorps whose profit model is knowing you.
- KeitIG 9y agoThough I understand your points, Signal is a protocol, you can implement and build things around it the way you want. Sure you can say that WhisperSystems should enforce a secured architecture around it, but it is not their job, and I doubt Whatsapp, Messenger and Skype would be using Signal if they were forcing that. And I would definitely not say Telegram is the best tool here [1][2]. If you want something really secure, I would recommend the Signal app [3]. In the end, it is always who you decide to put your trust in. [1] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegram-secure#49802 https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegr... [2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf [3] https://signal.org/ https://signal.org/
- peter_retief 9y agoI abandoned Skype after Microsoft bought them out, I don't miss them even a little. If Microsoft could buy Linux they would probably break it as well, thank goodness its not for sale
- fwn 9y agoIt is probably opt-in and a crippled version of the default chat interface. This way the few users of the feature will be visible like a Christmas tree in a dark forest and the general userbase will think it's their laziness not to use encrypted Skype. That's also how Facebook implemented it in messenger.
- romanovcode 9y agoWould be cool if MS would just drop Skype and adopt Signal.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- 0xADADA 9y agoSkype is part of X-KEYSCORE, so NOPE>
- sarah180 9y agoDoes this mean I'll need to give Skype a verified phone number and some version of all my contacts for … reasons. Reasons that are, trust us, so important that we can't let you opt out of them, but that have nothing to do with us keeping your phone number. I like everything else about Signal, but won't use it as long as they mandate that you tie your account to a verified, non-throwaway phone number. That's asking for more trust than I'm willing to give.
- derefr 9y agoI would presume that, whatever they say, the real reason for that is account deduplication. To block spammers in a social network, you either need messages to be expensive to send (ala the old e-stamps concept) or you need 1. identities to be expensive to acquire, plus 2. the ability to ban identities. The simplest way to make identities expensive is to require that each account be tied to some sort of real-world scarce token that you can prove possession of, like a phone number. If, when you ban a user, you also ban their token from being used to create new accounts, most casual users are stymied from "re-making", and professional spammers have their potential volume (and therefore potential ROI) lowered by an order of magnitude because they need to pay for phone numbers (at e.g. $1 a pop on Twilio) to in order to register the spam-accounts, and each of those spam-accounts (and therefore phone numbers) will be banned quickly enough that they won't have made $1 back by the time it happens. The fact that account-deduplicating like this helps them get more accurate active-subscriber statistics is a nice bonus. What this probably isn't, is a KYC measure. They don't care who you are; they just care that—whoever you might be—you only have one active account. (If you can think of a better way to achieve that without asking for potentially-identifying information, I'm all ears! Something something proof-of-stake? Make registration require you to burn an hour/day/week mining a token?)
- mynameisvlad 9y agoThis is Signal the E2E protocol (also used by WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Google Allo), not Signal the app. The number requirement is part of the app. I assume your identifier in Skype will be your Skype name/MS Account.
- Exuma 9y agoThis means we can still trust Signal right? That's the app I use because some large security experts said it was one of the best.
- jlund 9y agoNothing about Signal itself is changing. This is Microsoft adopting the Signal Protocol for a new feature in Skype.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- beaconfield 9y agoyeah... um. Why would Signal (OpenWhisper) sully their name by coordinating efforts with MS? MS doesn't have a great track record at being an advocate for privacy or user security...
- ethics_gradient 9y agoConsidering they partnered with facebook, they don't quite see it that way, instead looking at it as a way to bring good e2e crypto to millions of people. It's a tradeoff.
- qznc 9y agoThe mission of OpenWhisper is to bring e2e encryption to the masses, not to make Signal the messenger the dominant IM tool. They succeed spectacularly by making the popular IMs adopt Signal the protocol.
- k3a 9y agoThey will get paid probably plus it gives them free marketing for Signal. It's a win win situation. :)
- _memcpy 9y agotoo late, microsoft.
- nofilter 9y agoWhile they are it, could they make the Skype application an actually reliable one? I find WhatsApp video and call quality far superiour to that of Skype, which has years on WhatsApp. Not only is the video and call quality subpar, the app itself often behaves in odd ways. Personally, I've come to dislike Skype greatly.
- somberi 9y agoIf anyone from Skype product-team is reading this - Please bring back the ability to dial from the local contacts, without having to Sync my entire address book. This is my minimum request. If possible, just put the old Skype interface back. The new design with all its jazz-matazz and sparkles have made the product unusable. It is not a first-world unusable I am talking about. The product is not usable, as in I am moving away from Skype after being a customer who has given thousands of dollars in business over the years. How did the new Skype design pass user feedback reviews? Honestly asking to learn.
- nyolfen 9y agoit's unbelievable how badly skype functions as a PC IM client. it just keeps getting worse and worse. there's zero reason an IM client should be using hundreds of megs of ram and a hideous, garish UI that you can't turn off. the only workaround i found was the pidgin skype-web plugin, which can be a little buggy, but it's far preferable if all you use skype for is IM.
- javindo 9y agoNot sure if it's the same client, but the Skye for Business client is also just as bad. I used to work on a virtualised Windows machine (work mandated) and the only usable accessibility option was a high DPI setting. The old Lync client worked perfectly with this, obviously dating back to an age where they cared about accessibility. Skype for business completely ignored system DPI settings, made certain things huge with other things being tiny. The spacing was the biggest issue - literally 30-40% of my 43" monitor would often be taken up by spacing around icons etc on the app. It really felt as though they just stopped putting as much effort into UX, accessibility, usability. Lync felt like a professional IM client, Skype for Business felt like a half baked bodge.
- beli3ver 9y agoWill there a way to encrypt Group Chats and Group Video Calls, too?
- aplorbust 9y agoMore than a few comments trying to rationalize why Skype is different under Microsoft. (Supernodes are controlled by Microsoft, not users.) Also some comments exhibiting misconceptions about the relative feasibility of peer-to-peer networking today compared to the past. Some users want peer-to-peer networks that are controlled by users, not third parties such as Microsoft, Facebook, etc. It seems that corporations are also interested in such networks. But they just want the users, not the ability to exclude third parties (they are a third party). What is important for these interested users is that Skype changed and how it changed, not why changed. No explanation, rationale or excuse is a substitute for a peer-to-peer network that is controlled by its users, not third parties. We know why these user-controlled networks get acquired (or copied) by companies: because they work and they attract many users.
- voryzen 9y agoScrew Skype. That is all
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Markoff 9y agoI would much more prefer if they would fix such basic things as missing front/rear camera switch in video call or inability to send more than one photo at same time.