Microsoft to shut London Skype office putting 220 jobs at risk

What makes people trust the advertised E2E encryption is really happening when they most need? Faith in these companies?

There are many open source for teleconference these days, e.g. https://jitsi.org/ - I recall a few appearing on HN as well.

Unless you're using physical couriers and airgapped networks with TEMPEST protection. I say this unironically; these are facts people tend to brush away.

The cloud is at the end someone else's computer. No, I'm sure Microsoft CEO isn't interested in sabotaging my business just like I'm sure the POTUS doesn't actively decide to kill innocent civilians. However, they make compromises (something we all do in engineering) and some of those compromises could end up with us as collateral damage.

What I'm getting at is even if all government agencies have purest of pure hearts, someone somewhere will eventually leave a door unlocked. Nobody can tell me with 100% certainty that this won't happen in the US and I trust their competence more than some outside contractor working for the Qatari emir.

This is my point of view on why we shouldn't have a dragnet. I don't have to argue that my government is evil. I don't even have to say my government is incompetent. But who in my government will testify for the other 200+ governments and their agents?

OS X Skype seems to work the best. Android version seems to be using a random number generator for displaying contact list availability status.

Basically, insert classic XKCD org chart diagram here of Microsoft being in a Mexican standoff with itself, especially at that time.

From that perspective, (and also one of being a Windows Phone 8 and now 10 owner), I don't think Skype was bought for Windows Phone and I don't think Skype is part of why Windows Phone is currently seeming rather atrophied. Instead, I think its Windows Phone where we've seen some of the hardest fought "battles" in the "One Microsoft" movement to de-escalate the old "mexican standoff" at Microsoft. (Which makes sense in a strange way: Microsoft couldn't afford as many "casualties" on the desktop or in the enterprise, so phone/mobile has been the proxy war.)

I think wanting a VoIP competitor to Apple's Facetime efforts was a part of the overall agenda for at least one of the messaging teams. But in terms of a lot of the shifts in branding choices and app approaches, I think a lot more of what we have seen in Windows Phone has been Microsoft's most externally visible battlefield where it has been trying to figure how best to merge all of its messaging and communications teams and destroy the old fiefdoms and silos (and guns pointed at each others heads). (All while marketing tries to fight from accidentally burning down a brand along with some of the bridges...) Windows Phone was just a useful catalyst (battlefield) to force that confrontation, without impacting the desktop too much.

That's essentially what this announcement seems to be about to me: the crashing down of another silo as Microsoft truly starts to consolidate its many communications apps.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s...

Now, all of your actual communications are being stored in Microsoft's cloud infrastructure. This means the actual content is centralized, and can be delivered when the other client is not present, which will help a lot with mobile. It also means it's more able to be reached by government data requests, of course.

- Unemployment benefits, paid by the state if they don't get another job straight away;

- Their usual salary during the notice period, or pay in lieu of notice if they are sent home immediately (common in IT for security reasons);

- Redundancy pay.

The last one only needs to be paid in the case of dismissal "without cause". However, it's not called that. Redundancy refers to the fact that the job doesn't exist anymore. E.g., because the office closed down as is happening at Skype London. You can't just sack someone on a whim and say it is "without cause".

Where things get a bit more complicated in a case like Skype/Microsoft is that they have an obligation to offer their existing employees new jobs elsewhere in the company if possible. This isn't an especially strong obligation, but it does make things awkward if they keep, say, 50% of the staff, because there needs to be some reasoning as to why they kept that particular 50%, which needs to be seen as fair.

It's hard to see Matrix as a standard right now too, with only one server and one client even remotely complete. Would love to see a multiplatform native client!

Thanks for the work you do, I realllllly hope matrix attains some success.