A personal anecdote: I had the same account on Skype for most of the last 10 years. The same username. It was stable. Lots of people could contact me reliably. It was an account that was created long before Skype was bought by Microsoft.
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.
>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?
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.
My hoster introduced a web firewall, which thought my password was a SQL injection and gave me a plain 403 but was disabled when authenticated so allowed me to change my password to something offending again. Had a funny conversation with them where they insisted that this was beneficial, because SQL injections can happen as humans make mistakes.
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.
It can also happen if the API call to create the user on the other system is asynchronous and/or not checked for errors, and the API enforces the same (differing) password policy.
Microsoft is incredibly messed up on passwords and logins. Office 365 is password hell. They ask to login with a Microsoft account and I login with an Office 365 account, and they reject it. I stopped using my Hotmail account because their password problems blocked me. I had to take my Surface into their Geneius bar because I couldn't login because of password reset problems. I couldn't use my Surface at all for 4 months because of password problems and I gave up on it.
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.
You can still use your Skype account at least on the Mac, iOS versions, I do, but they don't make it obvious, the arrow to change to Skype login is small.
Two more credential-related UX disasters for the archives:
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...
>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?
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.)
Hotmail basically locked me out of my account because I won't give them a phone number or an alternate email address (they say "Help us protect your account")... I can edit the URL to get out of this requirement but it probably won't last forever... I probably had this email address for 15 years or more...
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.
I have a similar issue with Minecraft every few months. I have a Minecraft.net account and a Mojang.com account. I'll spend 15 or so minutes setting passwords across both accounts, never really sure where I should put things. Maybe Microsoft will make it one account instead of three.
Good its not just me. My minecraft logins are screwed up regularly too.
I also have had problems with logging into live.com based .edu account I got at college as well as my xbox live accounts. I know its not me messing up the passwords as I save them in keepass. Its like Microsoft can"t figure out how to maintain a simple login system. Its to the point where I just automaticly go to password recovery when I use a MS run service rather than seeing if it will take my password this week.
Happened to me too. The Microsoft ID login method did eventually work for me but it was something like 2 hours lost over trying to get a new password through a Skype interface and website, which was a futile approach, at the time at least.
Same thing happened to me, after multiple resets I had to create a new account. Also, I was pretty sure I had tried the correct password and it was Microsoft that had forgotten the password/hash.
I had the EXACT same experience, and also lost my balance (<$10) on it. I now use hangouts for video & whatsapp for voice calling, and skype only when there's no other option.
It's also gotten extremely buggy. Can't get reliably through firewalls anymore, constantly orders messages wrong or doesn't show messages that were sent by a different client (even though they were received by the other party correctly), has much worse voice quality than Whatsapp, can't handover between networks, takes ages to load on older iPhones, the list goes on. I'd move away to Whatsapp in a heartbeat if they offered group calls and paid calls to phone numbers.
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.
I've the opposite issue. Skype keeps redelivering messages. Even after I've read and responded. Sometimes 8 hours after.
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.
> positive example of software made outside the US
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.
>Peer-to-peer connectivity also has some privacy issues; the exposure of IP addresses to peers was abused to perform denial of service attacks against victims, a problem that became distressingly common in the world of e-sports.
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.
>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.
Aren't businesses supposed to use skype for business?
Probably, since "Skype for Business" is a renamed Microsoft Lync and has basically no technology in common with Skype per se. (Its user experience is also terrible, but differently so.)
An endless source of confusion. What's even more fun is that the two clients almost, but don't really, interoperate, when the stars are in the correct alignment. Peer-to-peer calls and instant messages tend to be okay, but things go sideways when they get stepped into an n-way. It's buckets of fun trying to figure out why some calls get dropped by a Lync-based chat application, only to figure out that the customer was using the wrong client.
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?
a) False, privacy is exactly what we're talking about. b) irrelevant.
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.
In the general, yes, we're talking about privacy, but specifically, no, it's not what we're talking about -- we're specifically talking about Skype's need to be completely private, and how if it's not, we're somehow losing the battle for privacy everywhere, as if Skype's insecurity will make people unable to use PGP or some other good encryption.
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??
No, but the freedom to have "no privacy" is not a problem anyone has. There is no privacy online and no alternatives to Skype that we can get anyone to use.
> 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?
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.
Actually, if everybody knew that a channel is insecure, it would make it a lot less dangerous. The problem is: most of people need it to be safer, and there is no real option.
A) if you and your contact knows that a channel is compromised, you'll be able to adapt if needed. But if one thinks it is safe, the other don't care about its safeness and it happens to be a compromised channel, the first guy might be in trouble. (B) If the default option was something architecturally safer (like encrypted decentralized mail), they would be able to trust it without need to fully trust the other parts envolved (contact and service).
I was hoping you'd prove that most people consider Skype to be secure, for A, because that's what you claimed. As for B, there are many other options, I don't really know what you mean by "they would be able to trust it without need to fully trust the other parts envolved (contact and service)." Are you saying PGP is backdoored? Do you know something we don't?
I feel that if a users assumption of privacy was based on skype being peer-to-peer and are now concerned their calls are being routed via the cloud, are in a bit of a misunderstanding about how intercept/collection can work.
I'm a bit surprised about how many issues people are having with Skype. I have been using Skype quite heavily for couple of years and I'm not really seeing these issues. For me the sound quality feels really good, as long as the internet connection is ok. The messaging seems to be realiable, I haven't see lost messages or messages coming in wrong order. I'm running on multiple platforms, OSX, iOS and Windows.
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.
Skype is my go-to example of why software quality matters.
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'm pretty certain that Microsoft already (mostly) made this backward-incompatible move several years ago, when they shut down the last of their (old Skype protocol)<->(MSNP24) gateways in 2014, so any Skype clients that predate the MSNP24 support being added to Skype no longer work.
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.
Eeks, the one thing I depend on is dedicated skype hardware (eg Phones that have native skype support)
Every time that "Skype is moving forward" things tend to break.
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.
Am electron app is 100x better than the "native" windows 10 Skype app. Seriously, the native windows apps are so thoroughly non native it blows my mind that Microsoft still employs a UI team.
The recent introduction of WebRTC to browsers could throw Skype off its throne.
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.
It's "incredibly simple to use" only when the asynchronous use case you describe is desirable.
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.
But nothing prevents people from building such a presence mechanism as an app, or using browser notifications. The point is that with WebRTC the hardest bit is taken care of. The number of people who have the skills to meaningfully innovate on the surrounding UI and capabilities is vastly greater than the number of people who'd be able to come up with usable video calling.
But how do I send that link to people? That doesn't address the issue arunc mentioned of persistent group chat.
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.
Several webrtc services offers persistent chats at a URL you define. There's plenty of room for improvement there, but webrtc lowers the barrier dramatically by solving many of the hard parts.
What are people using for video chat? I use it so rarely (maybe once a year) that every time I do, I have to learn some new software, install stuff, sign up for accounts, etc.
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.
My (small) gaming group recently migrated from Skype to Hangouts for both in-game stuff (voice) and minor tech support (screen sharing).
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. :/
Hangouts is an easy goto, but it uses a ton of system resources.
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.
Google Hangouts with people who have it and where it works (not a given), and talky.io (webrtc) with my mom (we tried repeatedly to get Skype and Hangouts to work between her and my computers, and neither worked properly).
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.
Not really related, but I have Skype for Business on my phone (so not really skype at all) and every time I launch it, it crashes at least once on launch, sometimes twice.
Which are all terrible in a business setting. Facebook is block at my employer, because most people doesn't seem to understand that they shouldn't be on Facebook during work hours. Also many companies doesn't exactly like it when you use a private account for business related communication.
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.
> Facebook is block at my employer, because most people doesn't seem to understand that they shouldn't be on Facebook during work hours.
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 :-)
You can create a Google account just fine with your work email too. If Skype works for you that way there's no reason why using Hangouts has to be any different.
Hangouts is the most godawful piece of software ever.
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've long thought the idea of Hangouts was good, and on the few times I've attempted to use it (1:1 calls mostly), it's been acceptable.
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.
It is pretty much assumed by almost everyone out there that Skype is fully under surveillance and intercepted. If you care in the slightest bit about security, don't use Skype. Other than that I find it useful for keeping in contact with friends and family. For gossip and inane chatter it works well.
I think risqué Skype calls are the more common concern: long-distance relationships (and teens) outnumber moustache-twirling villains by millions-to-one
I would imagine Microsoft abandoned direct peer to peer communication because of patent trolling, just like Apple had to change Facetime to no longer support direct connections.
I'd really like to see a secure (-enough) video chat app which integrated well with mattermost & murmur/mumble (which I wish integrated really well with one another). It'd be even better were it end-to-end encrypted of course, and while I'd (of course) prefer excellent security, I'd be willing to trade a little of that for good-enough-to-resist-public-WiFi-threats.
Obviously don't use it if you care about privacy. Same reason you shouldn't use gmail, facebook, twitter, etc. I hear the folks over at https://whispersystems.org/ are working to fill in the gaps. But even the peer-to-peer version did not protect privacy so nothing lost, nothing gained here as I see it.
Looks like a hipsterized version of Cisco Jabber to me. I hope it doesn't share Jabber's huge list of bugs, but looking at Jabber, I don't have much hope.
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.