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Comment by snvzz | Hacker News Reader

I do remember how Skype used to be end-to-end encrypted.

I don’t know much about how it worked but I’ve heard it described more like obfuscation than encryption. It also used to be P2P but that ended under Microsoft’s ownership.

Funny enough, at one point Microsoft basically merged Skype and MSN, and the text chat parts of Skype started using “MSNP24”, a couple version numbers up from the latest MSN protocol, MSNP22. I never dug in to see how much it was really like MSNP from MSN because I lost interest in Skype not long after.

Once they ditched p2p the quality derailed. The worst thing was the Skype mobile app trying to sync on my phone. It never seemed to cache convos well enough, it also would not sync properly between devices in regards to notifications. Also Skype would try to pull in my entire history. I feel like some P2P concepts stuck deeply within Skype and thats what left it so awkward.

The mobile app is probably why they ditched P2P. As much as I love old Skype, it existed in a pre-mobile world, and never translated well to phones... and in fact, most P2P platforms won't translate well to phones, since you at least need centralization for the push notifications. Such is life.

Though to be clear, yeah, it didn't really fix the mobile app. It felt just as broken up to the moment I uninstalled Skype.

>most P2P platforms won't translate well to phones, since you at least need centralization for the push notifications. Such is life

This isn't a fact of life, this is a flaw in the API of most popular mobile OSes. Open source comunnity maintaned operating systems have solved the problem of providing a network service for handling push notifications (local or not) multiple times now and these companies have refused to implement them because it makes it much easier to create an ecosystem around their crap.

This gives them controll and controll can be traded for money, it has aboslutely nothing to do with technology. That's just life

I work for Google and use an iPhone so I can’t claim to be unbiased. (My eyes have been on the Librem phone, with some skepticism and lately mostly excitement, but I’m just not quite sold on it as a daily driver.)

However, even if you allow apps to run in the background basically indefinitely as Android once did (there were IRC clients that Worked, using only the phone,) it simply is bad for battery life. Having multiple push services that are blessed to run periodically is also just not good for battery life. The proof is in the pudding; I switched to IRCCloud for IRC on the go after noticing what a terrible battery drain it was.

Now, third party push services can certainly do better than IRC, but they’re still centralized. Decentralized networks are just not power efficient. It requires always on machines to be effective.

I’m not saying I love the status quo, but it’s unclear how to do better.

(Obligatory legal line noise: these are my own opinions and not those of my employer.)

If you need push notification, yes, it is going to cost (if its an Electron app, it'll cost you also RAM). Google provides such already, via GCM/Firebase.

I mean, you could just run IRC in a TUI (e.g. Irssi or WeeChat) and connect to that via Mosh plus Tmux. You'd have low latency, 24/7 uptime, resuming, low resource usage... but no push notifications.

Well, the way the chat history worked: it downloaded it from other devices. But it felt like it didn't cache it, and it tried to download your entire chat history. The mobile client would lag for a good minute as a result. Help you if you scrolled up.

P2P was really the key to Skype's privacy protections, AFAIK. I remember a lot of insanity in the P2P days, even when they had a bunch of their own supernodes holding everything together. Like photo shares and file sends not working if the person who posted them was offline when you finally saw them, which was especially annoying in group chat contexts. Skype's model was built really well for the world where everyone had a persistently-internet-connected desktop. But it's P2P nature was incredibly terrible once mobile became the norm.

Mind that this - as I understand it - about cases where the automatic translation is being used in Skype (while I wonder how "sexy" phone sex via automatic translation might be ... In my imagination (you want to hear about that, right?) these could be people trying "funny" things with the translation ... or I underestimate the quality.

And yes, doesn't mean MSFT doesn't have access to other communication and doesn't mean other cases aren't serious leaks of information to arbitrary contractors.

I always thought some three lettered agency must have encouraged MS to buy Skype from its foreign owners for precisely that reason. The first 10 years at least MS did absolutely nothing with the company, as if it never really wanted to buy it.

Of course they did! NSA issued an RFP for Skype intercept in 2009 [1] and everyone assumed that MS took them up on it:

>An industry source disclosed that America's supersecret National Security Agency (NSA) is offering "billions" to any firm which can offer reliable eavesdropping on Skype IM and voice traffic.

And then Snowden revelations confirmed that MS was intercepting Skype [2]:

>Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

>In July last year, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the NSA boasted that a new capability had tripled the amount of Skype video calls being collected through Prism;

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...

That’s pretty silly. For one thing, it was already owned domestically before MS bought it. Second, you think MS spends 8.5 billion plus untild engineering resources and overhead as a favor to the US government?

Why not?

That was immediately before O365, and at that point BPOS/Exchange online was starting to get traction with some governments. Microsoft was also ramping their OCS/VoIP business.

Government is a huge market for O365, they were able to get ATOs and go conquer most states and federal agencies. They also bought a huge VoIP play, learned how to operationalize it, quickly spun it into a service component that serves >100M people.

I don’t expect to change your mind, but this just isn’t how things work. MS are not a front for the government. Also, you are giving the government far too much credit in terms of how they are organized to even dream that a deal like that could work. Not to mention it would be a massive scandal when it inevitably leaked. This is the same company that famously refused to backdoor bitlocker and fairly recently has been suing the US government to fight against court orders to ha d over data. I suppose you think that’s all a charade to trick the public though...

I just said it was plausible.

Microsoft, like any company, isn’t good or evil, but will do whatever is in the company’s best interests, and they’ll act appropriately when their interests align with the government.

It's unlikely, while the US government had real leverage via contract negotiations, Anti trust issues, etc.

Skype looked like a solid investment at the time. Microsoft makes a lot of money from corporate clients so it's probably just another strategic acquisition that they did not know what to do with.

Yep.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...

That relates to court orders, which have been served on every company. It was also horribly misreported, with every affected company saying pretty publicly that this wasn’t accurate.

There is a difference between being compelled to spend billions on a company just to provide wiretapping for feds, and buying a company with a wildly successful product then being asked to handle wiretaps after the fact. One of those is ridiculous, the other is expected.

Obsolutely! At this point its just a matter of how big is government contract regarding scooping into Skype content. I could bet the billions MS soend have been easily recouped in first 2 years.

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