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The 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 centrali
by paule89 9y ago
The 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".
- DyslexicAtheist 9y agoOperators have no interest in being reduced to "dumb pipes" (as the industry calls it). So OP is correct, P2P overlay routing has traditionally caused headaches for network operators traffic shaping. Any P2P tech that reaches this kind of scale would run into serious scalability challenges due to operator throtteling. - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6488287/ http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6488287/ - https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/p2p/2008/3318/00/3318a177-abs.html https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/p2p/2008/3318/00/3... - http://www1.huawei.com/enapp/198/hw-079351.htm http://www1.huawei.com/enapp/198/hw-079351.htm
- geocar 9y agoIf all the mobile traffic is being routed through a single Microsoft-controlled "super-duper peer", then there is no P2P traffic. Or to put it another way: If I accept the choice is between routing mobile traffic to Microsoft, or no mobile-Skype support, I don't understand how it follows that all traffic needs to move through Microsoft, or no mobile-Skype support.
- mynameisvlad 9y agoBecause centralized and P2P architecturally are different beasts altogether. It'd be very hard to make a protocol that essentially did both, and centralization covers all use cases, so, as a company, it makes most sense to go with that. I'm sure there were other reasons involved in the decision, I don't pretend to know them, but from a business perspective alone, you choose one connection methodology and you stick with it. Anything more is wasteful of resources.
- geocar 9y ago> It'd be very hard to make a protocol that essentially did both They already had a protocol that essentially did both. Once you have forwarding/routing i.e. what Skype called "super-nodes", P2P is a clear superset of "centralised". Anyone who says different doesn't know what they're talking about. > I'm sure there were other reasons involved in the decision, I don't pretend to know them, but from a business perspective alone, you choose one connection methodology and you stick with it. Anything more is wasteful of resources. I'm not speculating. I've seen engineers do stupid things that don't make sense; I'm not arguing that there are stupid reasons for it, and I'm not going to argue that there's non-technical reasons for it. But technical reasons? I don't buy it. I need some convincing: If one protocol (the P2P one) does both use cases, then you don't need another protocol just to handle one use case. That's just not how protocols work.
- bitcoinusername 9y agoI think it was a patent issue. No one is allowed to use p2p for chat.
- jrhurst 9y agoIt does look like IBM does own a p2p instant messaging patent[1]. So I think this checks out. - https://www.google.ms/patents/US7675874 https://www.google.ms/patents/US7675874
- katastic 9y agoIt's remarkable that companies can "own" things so fundamental, and obvious in computing--even if they don't actually utilize their IP's. "Hey guys, I've got a patent for talking from one machine to another over a connection." (Don't give SCO any ideas.) The purpose of patents was to foster innovation, not squander it. What if Issac Newton and Liebniz had a "foundation" that owned the rights to every mathematical construct they discovered? How would the world function if we had to pay that foundation fees every time we used Newton's method, or Calculus? It'd be complete bureaucratic hell. And further, coming from another angle, I bet you money there are prior implementations of P2P chat long before... 2005.
- y04nn 9y agoSkype itself was founded in 2003, so I doubt this patent is valid.
- styfle 9y agoI was working for a large hardware company (I'm not going to name names) that typically files for hardware/firmware patents. There was a push for everyone to file more patents, even from the software teams. I was working on an app that had graph-like data so we decided to use a graph database...nothing super innovative. My coworker, who apparently had a couple patents, said that we could probably patent this algorithm. I looked at him and said, how can you patent traversing nodes and vertices... that's graph theory 101?! Big companies try to patent everything because its a metric they can use to show how amazing they are, and acts as blackmail (or cold war). If you sue me, I'll sue you.
- huhtenberg 9y agoThis doesn't explain why after the change Skype started routing calls between machines on the same LAN through Microsoft servers.
- mauriciob 9y agoThey made a decision to ditch P2P and route all calls through their servers. Local calls would fall into the "P2P" umbrella.
- afuchs 9y agoIt is difficult to make a p2p app on a mobile device work even between devices on the same LAN. A simplified explanation: Mobile devices will often ignore almost all incoming network traffic to reduce battery usage. The only way to reliably communicate with the device is through a centralized push notification service (e.g. APN and GCM).
- qznc 9y agoSyncThing seems to do fine on my smartphone in my home LAN.
- Whitestrake 9y agoOne thing that might explain this is that your phone could be pulling data from your computer, rather than your computer trying to connect to your phone to push data to it.
- huhtenberg 9y agoQuit the b/s, will you. It's not difficult at all. You use a central server to do the discovery and bootstrap the connection between two devices. For each device it looks like they are connecting out. This works for UDP and this works for TCP. It works both for NAT'ed and LAN peers. For the latter it works 100% of time. This is a 10 year old tech. It worked back then and it works now.
- 9y ago
- amatwl 9y agoYup. The whole P2P and Supernode architecture didn't just fail when it came to mobile devices. The Christmas 2010 outage was also caused by the reliance on supernodes.
- aaron_m04 9y agoThat doesn't sound like the correct explanation. It's not as if 90% of Skype users stopped using it on desktop computers. Other explanations that seem plausible: * IBM patent, as other poster pointed out. * ability to monitor/censor users more directly (to stay in government's good graces) * problems with peers invading privacy or taking other malicious actions
- tobylane 9y agoWhy were mobile devices candidates for superpeers?
- ju-st 9y agoI suppose the Skype client won't become open source with reproducible builds.
- MikeHolman 9y ago>the reason Microsoft broke Skype so badly was because they used centralised servers with backdoors for countries who wanted them. That seems like pretty unreasonable tinfoil. There is no reason for Microsoft to want to give information to governments. I assume they don't pay, and the cost is consumer trust. Makes a lot of sense to rearchitect such that you can't give in to government demands.
- rapind 9y agoIf only consumers cared. As it stands there's very little downside to handing information over to government(s), and I would assume some upsides (back scratching). Apple might actually be making consumers care in an odd way by making it such a public issue.
- tonyztan 9y agoIn some jurisdictions, even Apple unreasonably hands over data. https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/apple-sets-date-for-china-data-handover-1515578949 https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/apple-sets-date-for-china-d... https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/business-42631386 https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/business-42631386
- rapind 9y agoAbsolutely. I'm just referring to the high profile news around specific events that might have made people think about it briefly. Possibly more effective than any hand wringing we might do.
- mirimir 9y agoIn retrospect, much "unreasonable tinfoil" has turned out to be fact. Assuming collusion is the safest bet, these days.
- glasz 9y agoriding ockham's razor is a religion for some. but that's ok.
- abdias 9y ago> As far as I understood the reason Microsoft broke Skype so badly was because they used centralised servers with backdoors In fairness, it was eBay that first bought Skype [1] in 2005 centralizing the data. eBay then sold it to a private investor group which Microsoft then bought Skype from [2] in 2011. Following the Snowden leaks as well as the information from Bill Binney, NSA scoops up the data regardless.. 1: https://www.pcworld.com/article/122516/article.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/122516/article.html 2: https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/ https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/
- throwwwwaway9 9y ago>>How will Microsoft and Skype handle backdoors now Backdoors require quite a few MSFT people with--way more than--FU money agreeing to it. I would bet that something like this would leak. All it takes is one to annon leak a screenshot or a memo
- ChrisRus 9y agoNeed to know. Members of the kernel team generally have zero knowledge of what happens in the build lab between the sources and the product that's released to the world.
- otakucode 9y agoThat was my first thought. This is how they kill Signal. It was how they killed Skype. Take a P2P communication system that is difficult to spy on, give Microsoft a big pile of money on the sly to buy it and re-engineer it to be a centralized system and restore spy-ability. It almost seems so laughably obvious as to be childishly unwise to attempt.
- heypete 9y agoHow would Signal working with Microsoft to implement the Signal protocol in Skype somehow kill Signal? Signal (the organization) has worked with other companies, like Facebook and WhatsApp (owned by FaceBook, I know), to implement the Signal protocol on their respective messaging services. It appears that's precisely what they're doing with Skype in this case. It's not like Microsoft is buying out Signal.
- bufferoverflow 9y agoEasy. You leak the keys from the clients to the centralized servers.
- QAPereo 9y agoWhich are “the good countries” in this context?
- Paraesthetic 9y agoThe ones with the governments full of corrupt politicians, you know, first world ones