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Comment by canjobear | Hacker News Reader

When I was in China in 2010 you couldn't download Skype. If you tried you'd be redirected to something called "Tom's Skype".

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That's humorous. On a serious note though, Skype should be renamed to "Skype--" in the US. After MS bought it, it became a buggy piece of crap. Every new version had more useless features and was more prone to crashing/freezing up than the last. Screenshare and the other golden features became riddled with issues. Skype was once great. During the period in which it was down for "maintanence" many believe that spying measures were added. In any case, there are much better options these days considering how bloated and buggy the actual client-side software has become.

Agreed. And the way they try to push it on you in win10 is egregious.

Right. Most people will just assume that is the only version of Skype available for Win10. Skype has gotten worse..but not to be judged by the bundled metro app worse... Metro is just a total failure altogether, I haven't seen a metro app that convinced me otherwise. It's a must to use PowerShell to uninstall that version of Skype and instead install the normal win32/win64 executable.

AFAIR, they changed communication model from Peer-to-peer to client-server and then it all started. Why did they need all conversations to pass through their servers...? Something is hinted in the last paragraph of this article though:

https://www.lifewire.com/skype-changes-from-p2p-3426522

Clients server with message history on the server solves a lot of the weird message ordering things that would happen when you had conversations between multiple users each with multiple clients that were mostly offline. This is especially helpful for mobile, since always online mobile isn't realistic.

It certainly also enables some law enforcement use cases though.

The direct peer to peer connections are a patented ‘innovation’. Apple had to change FaceTime too.

This is interesting. Do you know who holds the patent?

This is the VirnetX patent case which is still partly ongoing. It's kind of difficult to find but it involves patents 6,502,135, 7,418,504, 7,921,211 and 7,490,151.

https://techcrunch.com/2012/11/07/u-s-court-orders-apple-to-...

That's just Microsoft's official local distributor for a long time now: http://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/1353906/micro...

This is still happening to this day.

They now redirect skype.com to skype.gmw.cn

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