Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Then came the update that they pushed out last year. Now everyone needed a Microsoft ID to login. There was some kind of "improvement" in the way authentication was done. So I had to reset my password. This lead me into a hellish 3 hour ordeal. None of the reset passwords worked. I went through the process 14 times. I would ask for a new password, I would get sent an email, I would click the link, I would end up being told I now had a Microsoft ID, I would try to use it with Skype, it would not work. I read the How To documents, I searched Google for others who might be having this problem. I tried variations in the way I was doing things.
In the end, I had to give up. There was absolutely no way to rescue the account that I had used for most of 10 years. I had to get a new account. I believe I had about 10 euros on the old account, which is now lost forever.
I am a professional computer programmer. If I can't figure out how to reset a password on Skype, then what are the chances that a less technical person can do it?
I remain a bit astonished at how bad that upgrade was.
No, I am using the same id since Skype started. Never linked it to a Microsoft account.
This is not a Microsoft endorsement since Skype works really bad.
(maybe because I am using the old skype client for linux? But I also use skype on android)
I haven't tried to log into Skype in years and I don't expect to start. Live ID is the worst thing that they've ever done.
I've been locked out of my old hotmail account since they wanted my phone number. I'd like to just check if there's anything in there, then that's it for me with hotmail.
Had the same experience with the german postal service a few week ago. When you register there, you register for their shitty amazon-clone aswell. Turns out, you have only one account with one passwort, but the two sites have different password polices. My password had a '#' in it, witch wasn't allowed for the post part, but the passwort reset form didn't care, because it was allowed on the newer platform. You just can't login on the other and get no usefull error messages.
A few days before that another hoster updated its password policy and sent me a less secure password by mail. He also insisted that since he uses SMTP over SSL, there is nothing wrong with that.
And on a not related note: The technical support lead of my dedicated mail hoster does not understand DKIM.
I was trying to be reasonable and not focus on stuff others can do better, but it seems like you have to do everything by yourself if you want it done right.
I still use my very old skype account, not linked to any Microsoft ID.
The days of 'being good with computers' are gone. UIs change so rapidly that core skills are useless in comparison to daily use. You could be a linux guru with decades of database dev skills, but any 14yo youtuber will probably navigate a website better. I'm a lawyer. I know lots about tax law, more than most accountants. That doesn't help me navigate the tax office's website. My accountant is the expert there. (Actually, even she has someone who does the web stuff.)
I don't know if it's a matter of choice or aptitude, but we don't all ossify as we age.
The point was that you could be a linux guru who doesn't get daily use, then you wouldn't have those skills despite being a linux guru.
I blame that on the terrible UI of some websites. Especially government ones for some reason.
Vodafone Australia truncate passwords to 16 characters in their sign-up form. But they will accept a 20-character password in the login form. That is how I got my account locked.
Square Enix do something similar, but you can unlock your account using a secret Q&A. Unfortunately I had set my answer using a PS4, and PS4s have an input mode quirk that silently appends a space to strings. It took me two days to figure out that I needed a trailing space after my first car's maiden name.
Hilariously, with Square Enix you have to get the question right too, not just the answer. If you had a dog, and a car, and a mother, and a primary school, you might need a few tries...
As a result, they lost me as a paying customer.
I had even bought Skype compatible DECT wireless handsets, we ended up just using them for POTS calls.
Clearly didn't hurt them much. Hmm, maybe I should reconsider my business plan.
People will flee Microsoft because they fkup being an internet company or internet feature based company. They block their own customers and force them to flee away.
I'm assuming they are working on merging all accounts across their online products, but it's not seamless.
No kidding. If I get a skype message while my iphone is locked, when I swipe to unlock and open the app, those messages (all of them if there were several on the lock screen) are lost forever.
The UI always sucked (made me wonder why it has been mentioned as a positive example of software made outside the US) - but the basic message flow is broken now.
well in this particular case it seems to have been screwed over once an American company took over. Skype always worked fine before MS (and the US Government) took over.
My brother who is a streamer, was DOSed because his IP was leaked via skype. This can be a huge pain to anyone with a public image and they have to use security by obscurity to maintain the integrity of their IP addresses. That and VPN/VPS etc. Which honestly my brother has no clue how to set up or use.
I'm not saying that you should use Skype, far from it. But at least they will be closing some of their attack vectors based on this and individuals won't be DOSed because they used skype and some script kiddy found a way to get their IP (which is super easy fyi).
Those who really need security and privacy, know not to use Skype.
Everyone needs security, and privacy. If you're a company, you need security and privacy, and most will just assume that Skype provides it. And for the most part Skype provides them with the security they need. Most of the users of Skype just needs protection from snooping competitors and Skype provides that to a sufficient extend.
Honestly no one will care the slightest that Skype has become less secure, because in their eyes it hasn't.
But yes, most users for Skype are pretty naive, about security at least.
Aren't businesses supposed to use skype for business?
I'm so tired of this, no I don't, at least not as much as so many people think I need. No, I don't care if my Netflix password is easily crackable, and no I don't care if the US government reads my Skype chats!
Why am I not allowed to make that choice, to use Skype and be okay with the convenience tradeoff? I agree that I should have the choice, but if I do choose to use something insecure with full knowledge of it's insecurity, can't I be free to do that?
You'll have to elaborate on how this is A) true, and B) there are no options. I can think of a dozen better options than Skype.
When you allow yourself to be vulnerable to others with power over you especially the government, eventually they will take advantage. Whether you or someone unluckier, and we should protect the weak. This has been recognized for centuries, try reading some Locke or Jefferson.
Just because I can post a bulletin on a public poster board, doesn't mean I can't also write a private letter. There are no "weak" people here, and plenty of better battlefronts to wage this war. Every single messaging platform doesn't need to be completely secure, that's absurd.
Just to back up a second, what is it you think I'm advocating here? That we not have privacy??
WhatsApp is used by 1 billion people worldwide, so no, this is completely false.
But you are free to do that, aren't you? Last time I checked, cyber-police wasn't going around and giving people fines for not using a TOR client.
As a matter of fact, given that you are at least aware of the concepto of "convenience tradeoff", you probably are in the minority that is qualified to exercise such freedom responsibly. You may still make a mistake and land in the "too little" (or, less likely, "too much") camp on any individual decision... but most of the time you should be making the right calls more often than not.
When people in the know say "Everyone needs security and privacy", they are not talking about you. They are talking about the guy who has seen the Swordfish movie, though it was an embelished but otherwise accurate depiction of reality, and believe that a hacker is a younger version of Wolverine with super powered intuition that can type some gibberish @500wpm until they happen to run into your password. This people is not knowledgeable enough to reason about the tradeoffs (even if they know how to reason, the lack of priors and the wrong but otherwise sensible assumptions just kill them).
We are talking about having minimally secure defaults, for the sake of those that cannot (or will not) set their own configurations.
BUT there is of course things that could be done better. While one-to-one calls work well, I feel that on the group calls with many participants (say 5+) are not so good.
I think Microsoft is missing a huge opportunity when they are not taking Skype further and adopting some features from Slack and Google Hangouts. Most of the technology is there, they would just need to tweak it a bit to better match the requirements. Some things I would like to see: the concept of organization and associated rooms. Possibility to push messages to these rooms from outside systems (think CI and other notifications). For group calls I prefer the way Hangouts, GoTo meeting and WebEx works. Somebody sets up the meeting and then others join. The message history and search should be improved. With Slack you start relaying that you find the old stuff from there, in Skype the search is bad and the message history does not go very far.
Now that Microsoft also happens to have LinkedIn, they would be in pretty good position to create a communication solution that would span organizations.
I'm aware about Skype for business, but also a bit suspicious about how this will turn out. Lync feels more or traditional enterprise stuff that you run inside your own network and not something for the Internet.
They dominated the market. Tons and tons of people had Skype accounts and, to this day, "Skype" is informally used as a generic verb for videoconferencing.
The problem is that the quality has fallen substantially over time. Now things like http://appear.in are much better solutions for basic videoconferencing and Slack has eaten the communications space which Slack should have owned.
I think you accidentally a word :)
The thing they're doing now is probably either breaking Skypeweb backward compat or a rev on MSNP, depending on which mechanism the embedded clients use. Quickly reading the actual blog post that the Ars article is about [1] (which I couldn't find an obvious link to in the article) makes me think it's probably Skypeweb they're breaking.
[1] - http://blogs.skype.com/2016/07/20/skype-the-journey-weve-bee...
Last time that happened I had random calling problems for months and had to fall back on using computers for skype to phone support. Eventually that got fixed.
Frankly it has been quite good for a while, so ... suppose it is time again for some trouble.
Might want to look into SIP if it happens again. Would be a pity as Skype has pretty good deals for international phone calls.
I hope someone will come up with an implementation of Riffle.
You pretty much just go on the webpage of such a WebRTC-service, start up a conversation, which generates you a link, then you send that link to your conversation partner and they just have to open this link in their browser to join the conversation.
That's so incredibly simple to use, that it should be much less of a problem to get people to use it instead of Skype.
And it's end-to-end-encrypted.
And for example Mozilla offers such a service (called Firefox Hello [0]) for free.
The only thing where Skype could compete here, is by offering services surrounding video calls, for example a contact list, file-sharing, support for businesses etc.
Consider this very basic use case: my mom and I want to be always able to call/interrupt each other.
- Skype fits the bill: I just double-click her name in the contact list. She hears the ringing, and answers.
- WebRTC-based services do not: I have to generate a link, email it, and hope she sees the email (she won't) then join asynchronously.
Put dryly, basic WebRTC-based services like Hello lack the notions of a contact and a presence mechanism. That's a deal-breaker for my use case.
EDIT: I see you mention "services surrounding video calls, for example a contact list". Agreed, but to me it's more than an additional service, it's a core feature.
Only one of those furthers the new MS business model of collecting data on you.
These days with a lot of people I do text chat on skype and we hop onto discord for audio. There's no good single program that can do everything yet. The "I want a pony" contender would have: text chat that can work asynchronously and let you view history offline, voice and video and screen sharing, the ability to do end-to-end security, and it wouldn't break all the time, on desktop and phone.
Facebook messenger is great for talking with my niece, but that's not appropriate for business. I ended up using Facetime most recently. That only works if I bring my personal computer to work.
I had the same experience as @lkrubner when I tried Skype. I didn't spend anywhere near two hours on it - I gave up after ten minutes.
The screen sharing is vastly superior compared to Skype, and text is actually readable (1080p screens on both ends), and I would assume that that translates to video calls as well!
For the in-game stuff the kicker was that one day my computer stopped getting notified of the group calls existing at all. But after the transition even the most reluctant one commented on how much nicer the sound quality was.
Of course, I'd have preferred to use Mumble where possible, but somehow I suspect that that would have been an even harder sell. :/
Zoom is amazing for video chat, even with hundreds of people on a call. The screen sharing works well too, and even offers remote control. It uses a lot less resources to run too.
If you only need voice, Discord is quite nice, and they have a web client so you can just send a link and the other party can just start chatting with you.
talky.io is great as long as you have a new enough browser, especially as you can pass people a link and they won't need to install anything new.
0: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s...
Google Hangout is just horrible, and not only because I'm require to have an Google account (and I'm NOT using person accounts for work related communication). Whenever I get an invitation for a Hangout "call", I ask that they call the phone on my desk.
Skype works because people are just asked to create a Skype account using their work email. It's not perfect, but at least when someone leaves you can reset their Skype password and get the reset-password email.
Here's where you can sign up: https://accounts.google.com/SignUp?hl=en
Click on the "I prefer to use my current email address" and you're good to go.
You don't have to use that account for anything else and the same thing about someone leaving the company holds true.
Why is that? People's personal life doesn't disappear when they arrive to the office.
I've seen employers blocking services and getting a spike in productivity... for the next day - then people find something else to do when they need to get distracted, rest their mind, socialize, etc
Also, it's terrible to apply technical solutions to education issues. If your employees are spending way too much time on Facebook, first you need to have a conversation with each of the offenders, second you might want to look deeper into the issue as you might not be feeding them enough work to do. Your processes might be broken, so your supply chain and productivity would be impacted by design, not purely as a consequence of people slacking off :-)
It does.
Just like work life disappears the moment you leave the office.
Work is work, personal is personal, any kind of mixing always ends up with horrible results.
In many countries, the inverse - doing job related things at home or in general outside of paid time - is even highly illegal.
It's yet another piece of GoogleAbandonware.
They tried to force everyone into New Hangouts at least once, I'm not sure what came of that, or if I'm using it now, or what.
The biggest offense is their inability to offer a proper windowed experience; instead it relies on a browser-as-a-window-manager nightmare. You can't use your OS's window manager to deal with it in a rational/sane way, the rules of how and why you might get a sound notification for a message are impenetrable. I can't mute a conversation on the computer but leave audio notifications on my phone. I can't login/logout on my phone without a number of slow actions (I really wish I could schedule my availability), it's just.. ugh.
I'd like to be able to fully disable video. Not sure that's an option, but for bandwidth-limited situations, it should help.
The account requirement, though, is the absolute killer. It seems to have arisen from Google's desperate effort to push world+dog to G+, despite exceptionally strong reluctance and/or resistance to do so.
If instead they'd followed the WebRTC mode described above (first I've heard of that -- someone's failing to market), with the call coordinator / originator needing an ID, but no other party, then it might actually have taken off.
I've found the implementation, integration with other tools (it's where I don't want it, it's not where I do, it keeps activating when I don't want it, for a long time it was impossible to log off, etc., etc), name, and pretty much everything else to be pants. The idea, however, is capital.
Sad, really.
Wimpy mobile devices have been a significant factor in pushing everything to the cloud.
Something like self-hosted Signal for video.
[0] https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/ or pidgin-otr in the package manager of your choice.