6 ms·

Ugh, people are still using Skype?

by ryanpcmcquen 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
GunlogAlm 9y ago
Yes, more people than ever.
- jdavdc 9y ago
  Did Skype for Business already have E2E encryption or no? Would seem like a no-brainer.
  - geofft 9y ago
    Depending 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 ago
      E2E doesn't mean no logs, your Skype logs can usually be exported locally.
      - geofft 9y ago
        Sure, but the compliance requirement is that logs need to be automatically exported and archived by the IT department, without an option for the user to avoid giving logs. What does E2E benefit you at that point? The message contents, which are what E2E protects, are being copied off to some separate server. (I'd buy the argument "You should design all your protocols E2E first, and then add logging/escrow, instead of designing them less secure and bolting E2E on later," but Skype for Business already exists without E2E so that's a lost cause in this particular case.)
        tremon 9y ago
        What does E2E benefit you at that point? Message confidentiality between businesses. Did you perhaps think SfB only works between users in the same organization?
        Dylan16807 9y ago
        > Did you perhaps think SfB only works between users in the same organization? Yes? Doesn't the client connect to exactly one server [pool], which hosts exactly one organization?
        caf 9y ago
        The servers can federate.
        geofft 9y ago
        Oh, that makes sense. What does it currently use to authenticate between businesses - MS accounts or public PKI or something? Or is it trust-on-first-use? I'm having trouble finding all the docs for setting up Skype for Business federation but it looks like the latter. Since "end" here I think means the business and not the individual user account (for the same reason - all the compliance logs, all the password reset abilities, etc. applies to conversations with other businesses), if they do trust-on-first-use certificate validation of the other business, isn't that already as E2E as you're going to get?
notatoad 9y ago
Anecdotally, Skype seems to be the go-to solution for talking to infrequent business contacts. If you don't want to give somebody your personal number or your WhatsApp or similar, and they're not on your slack, but you want something quicker than email then Skype is the usual solution. If you suggest some app they don't already know, it might feel like you're inconveniencing your contact. but everybody knows skype and it seems like there's an implicit understanding that if you aren't on skype you should be, so it's always the fallback option for chat apps.
- jhasse 9y ago
  What about something like https://appear.in https://appear.in?
  - notatoad 9y ago
    yeah, looks cool. never heard of it before.
  - detaro 9y ago
    Way less reliable, no persistent chat history, ... Helpful in some cases, but not a replacement.
chrisper 9y ago
Skype For Business shudder
alkonaut 9y ago
Still looking for something that is free, does (persistent) group chat, voice calls, file sharing, and group voice calls. Bonus if it shares screen. Have tried various alternatives but actually not yet found anything that works as good as skype, despite having terrible UX. The sound quality is second to none and file sharing etc usually "just works".
- ancientworldnow 9y ago
  Discord does all of this, though it's not E2E encrypted, and does it all with a fantastic UX.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    For some reason having the (non business) Skype is not hard to sell in a big "old school" enterprise, because it's microsoft. I'd have a much harder time selling Discord because of how they market themselves. They could make "discord for business" that is literally the same app and have great success. Other than that my only complaint is that it's a bit electron-y.
    - lev99 9y ago
      If your in a position where you could convince an organization to use Discord for Business you could probably convince them to use Slack or Hipchat, both of which are better than Skype.
      - alkonaut 9y ago
        Slack and Hipchat are pretty expensive, and I’m actually less annoyed by horrible UX and ads in Skype, than by the resource usage of Slack. But again - so long as slack and HipChat are $5k+ per year they need to be a lot better than the free options.
    - Kuraj 9y ago
      > They could make "discord for business" that is literally the same app and have great success. Discord is sometimes known as "slack for gamers" so you're effectively describing Slack :)
Bhilai 9y ago
Just curious, what do you use ?
temp-dude-87844 9y ago
Anecdotally, everyone I knew on Skype has already migrated somewhere else and their account is now dormant, with the most frequent destination being Discord, which has the same kind of pseudonymous usernames. Some were active in 'gaming' communities, but others just wanted to keep at least one service where you can still chat without having to give out personal details. With the decline and staling of old-style IM networks, Discord has infringed on this space and is where most growth is taking place. In most online communities, there will always be a place for an identity provider that doesn't require you to use a full name, and/or doesn't bind your login to your phone number. The addition of easy-to-use E2E crypto has been lagging among services like this, so this addition is welcome. Skype still has a lot of brand recognition and mindshare among the older generations, and a large installed base, and so it remains useful for incidental chat in scenarios that Discord hasn't actively pursued, or situations which people's assumptions and associations with Discord's perceived nature would hinder.
erikb 9y ago
You know that Skype is still the better cousin? Some of us have to use Skype4Business (previously Lync) at work. After you do that you get a boner at how good the consumer Skype is in comparison. E.g. in consumer Skype if you send a message you can be relatively sure the other party receives it!!!! What a great feature.
- smcl 9y ago
  It is insane how awful Skype for Business is. In a previous company we started out using some open source XMPP based server for instant messaging which was cheap and reliable. Every year or so someone got the bright idea to "upgrade" to something more corporate/enterprisey. Each time this happened we adopted something worse, more expensive and less reliable. A couple of different rebrands of Cisco Webex Connect, Lync and culminating in the worst of the lot ... Skype For Business. I cannot fathom how an IM app could be so poorly implemented, it seems almost intentional.
  - erikb 9y ago
    I think for the psychological development of a software developer it is very important to also spend some time in an Enterprise company. After 1-2 years of that you know exactly how such kind of software comes to be. In my team we are currently developing a software where not even we know what it should do. And in every release cycle we spend incredible amounts man hours just to be able to install it again. And still, in the company internal competition we often lose against teams with better political standings to the top, who haven't even written a single line of code yet for their competing product. I can see that there is a lot of money in Enterprise, and I can see how it's kept alive by each of these enterprises selling their non-functioning tools to each other. But I really don't know where the influx of money to that system is. Nobody with a brain would pay a million bucks for a software that is proud to be installable, if he could spend the same money on hiring an engineer for 10 years and let him learn how to apply an open source solution that everybody knows does what you want after you installed it.

Ugh, people are still using Skype?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

GunlogAlm 9y ago

Yes, more people than ever.

jdavdc 9y ago
Did Skype for Business already have E2E encryption or no? Would seem like a no-brainer.
- geofft 9y ago
  Depending 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 ago
    E2E doesn't mean no logs, your Skype logs can usually be exported locally.
    - geofft 9y ago
      Sure, but the compliance requirement is that logs need to be automatically exported and archived by the IT department, without an option for the user to avoid giving logs. What does E2E benefit you at that point? The message contents, which are what E2E protects, are being copied off to some separate server. (I'd buy the argument "You should design all your protocols E2E first, and then add logging/escrow, instead of designing them less secure and bolting E2E on later," but Skype for Business already exists without E2E so that's a lost cause in this particular case.)
      - tremon 9y ago
        What does E2E benefit you at that point? Message confidentiality between businesses. Did you perhaps think SfB only works between users in the same organization?
        Dylan16807 9y ago
        > Did you perhaps think SfB only works between users in the same organization? Yes? Doesn't the client connect to exactly one server [pool], which hosts exactly one organization?
        caf 9y ago
        The servers can federate.
        geofft 9y ago
        Oh, that makes sense. What does it currently use to authenticate between businesses - MS accounts or public PKI or something? Or is it trust-on-first-use? I'm having trouble finding all the docs for setting up Skype for Business federation but it looks like the latter. Since "end" here I think means the business and not the individual user account (for the same reason - all the compliance logs, all the password reset abilities, etc. applies to conversations with other businesses), if they do trust-on-first-use certificate validation of the other business, isn't that already as E2E as you're going to get?

notatoad 9y ago

Anecdotally, Skype seems to be the go-to solution for talking to infrequent business contacts. If you don't want to give somebody your personal number or your WhatsApp or similar, and they're not on your slack, but you want something quicker than email then Skype is the usual solution. If you suggest some app they don't already know, it might feel like you're inconveniencing your contact. but everybody knows skype and it seems like there's an implicit understanding that if you aren't on skype you should be, so it's always the fallback option for chat apps.

jhasse 9y ago
What about something like https://appear.in https://appear.in?
- notatoad 9y ago
  yeah, looks cool. never heard of it before.
- detaro 9y ago
  Way less reliable, no persistent chat history, ... Helpful in some cases, but not a replacement.

chrisper 9y ago

Skype For Business shudder

alkonaut 9y ago

Still looking for something that is free, does (persistent) group chat, voice calls, file sharing, and group voice calls. Bonus if it shares screen. Have tried various alternatives but actually not yet found anything that works as good as skype, despite having terrible UX. The sound quality is second to none and file sharing etc usually "just works".

ancientworldnow 9y ago
Discord does all of this, though it's not E2E encrypted, and does it all with a fantastic UX.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  For some reason having the (non business) Skype is not hard to sell in a big "old school" enterprise, because it's microsoft. I'd have a much harder time selling Discord because of how they market themselves. They could make "discord for business" that is literally the same app and have great success. Other than that my only complaint is that it's a bit electron-y.
  - lev99 9y ago
    If your in a position where you could convince an organization to use Discord for Business you could probably convince them to use Slack or Hipchat, both of which are better than Skype.
    - alkonaut 9y ago
      Slack and Hipchat are pretty expensive, and I’m actually less annoyed by horrible UX and ads in Skype, than by the resource usage of Slack. But again - so long as slack and HipChat are $5k+ per year they need to be a lot better than the free options.
  - Kuraj 9y ago
    > They could make "discord for business" that is literally the same app and have great success. Discord is sometimes known as "slack for gamers" so you're effectively describing Slack :)

Bhilai 9y ago

Just curious, what do you use ?

temp-dude-87844 9y ago

Anecdotally, everyone I knew on Skype has already migrated somewhere else and their account is now dormant, with the most frequent destination being Discord, which has the same kind of pseudonymous usernames. Some were active in 'gaming' communities, but others just wanted to keep at least one service where you can still chat without having to give out personal details. With the decline and staling of old-style IM networks, Discord has infringed on this space and is where most growth is taking place. In most online communities, there will always be a place for an identity provider that doesn't require you to use a full name, and/or doesn't bind your login to your phone number. The addition of easy-to-use E2E crypto has been lagging among services like this, so this addition is welcome. Skype still has a lot of brand recognition and mindshare among the older generations, and a large installed base, and so it remains useful for incidental chat in scenarios that Discord hasn't actively pursued, or situations which people's assumptions and associations with Discord's perceived nature would hinder.

erikb 9y ago

You know that Skype is still the better cousin? Some of us have to use Skype4Business (previously Lync) at work. After you do that you get a boner at how good the consumer Skype is in comparison. E.g. in consumer Skype if you send a message you can be relatively sure the other party receives it!!!! What a great feature.

smcl 9y ago
It is insane how awful Skype for Business is. In a previous company we started out using some open source XMPP based server for instant messaging which was cheap and reliable. Every year or so someone got the bright idea to "upgrade" to something more corporate/enterprisey. Each time this happened we adopted something worse, more expensive and less reliable. A couple of different rebrands of Cisco Webex Connect, Lync and culminating in the worst of the lot ... Skype For Business. I cannot fathom how an IM app could be so poorly implemented, it seems almost intentional.
- erikb 9y ago
  I think for the psychological development of a software developer it is very important to also spend some time in an Enterprise company. After 1-2 years of that you know exactly how such kind of software comes to be. In my team we are currently developing a software where not even we know what it should do. And in every release cycle we spend incredible amounts man hours just to be able to install it again. And still, in the company internal competition we often lose against teams with better political standings to the top, who haven't even written a single line of code yet for their competing product. I can see that there is a lot of money in Enterprise, and I can see how it's kept alive by each of these enterprises selling their non-functioning tools to each other. But I really don't know where the influx of money to that system is. Nobody with a brain would pay a million bucks for a software that is proud to be installable, if he could spend the same money on hiring an engineer for 10 years and let him learn how to apply an open source solution that everybody knows does what you want after you installed it.