Skype can't fix a nasty security bug without a massive code rewrite

[samcool55]

3 hours ago, GoodBytes said:

And this things sounds like an over-hype for attention by the discover... with statement like:

Sooooo a normal Administrator... true administrator is the highest level you can be on a Windows system. That is like saying "the malware will be root on steroid!!!"  on a Linux based system. It's root, there is no higher!. You have full access to all.

Tell that to TrustedInstaller... That twat usually denies you hard when you want to do something serious, even if you are admin.

[samcool55]

1 hour ago, Ryujin2003 said:

Skype is ending it's Enterprise version anyways, and I feel like the rest of Skype is going to be released by their Skype business replacement. So not fixing it is probably worth it if it's already reached end of life... But I don't use Skype, so not that big a deal for me. And the company I work for is transitioning to something else. Maybe team speak or something? Not too sure yet.

There is microsoft Teams, something nobody knows about, let alone using it.

Slack is also an option, imo it's something like "discord for business". I can be wrong tho but that's at least the sense i get from it.

[Canada EH]

4 hours ago, SC2Mitch said:

Skype

News organizations who are too cheap to send a real camera crew.

[spat55]

4 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

I still use Skype because I'm not going to bother switching to whatever chat client is the flavor of the month.  If it's not on iMessage, WhatsApp, or Skype then I don't need it.

Discord has been around for years, if you only use Whatsapp/imessage and Skype I won't be talking to you

[Techicolors]

i wonder how many lines of code it has 

[sof006]

I'll be completely honest I forgot Skype existed. I use WhatsApp for everything.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

4 hours ago, Being Delirious said:

Who uses Skype again? I last used that in 2012 lmao. Discord has way better voice and video quality. And the way in general they have it setup is great.

 

2 hours ago, Cheezdoodlez said:

Who uses Skype these days? Well. Tech companies and reviewers do. I've had contact with reps from various hardware tech companies and resellers over the years. Afaik LMG also uses Skype for stuff. Linus has complained about the separation issues with Skype and Skype for business on wan show atleast two times.

 

But is it a platform for personal use anymore? Not so much. 

 

7 minutes ago, spat55 said:

Discord has been around for years, if you only use Whatsapp/imessage and Skype I won't be talking to you

 

It's a 7-billion-people world out there. Compared to Skype, Discord is an obscure niche product.

Skype can be an inexplicably bad program at times, but the success of a communication service ultimately depends on the size of the network. If cell phones didn't had interoperability with landlines we might have continued hooked to the copper pair to this day...

 

[GoodBytes]

37 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Tell that to TrustedInstaller... That twat usually denies you hard when you want to do something serious, even if you are admin.

If you are admin, you can change permissions. A malware can have fun with that.

[GoodBytes]

37 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

There is microsoft Teams, something nobody knows about, let alone using it.

Slack is also an option, imo it's something like "discord for business". I can be wrong tho but that's at least the sense i get from it.

Actually MS Teams is a big success. And MS is working on it at full speed on it. It does what Slack can't, and offer pricing model that Slack can't compete for medium companies and up. Slack business model and target audience focuses is on startups and small companies.

[Guest]

6 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Actually MS Teams is a big success.

Wouldn't put it like that - it's barely got traction.

[GoodBytes]

37 minutes ago, Windspeed36 said:

Wouldn't put it like that - it's barely got traction.

Well it has many third party extensions, Git, Jenkins, Jira, Confluence, and more (I don't know the whole list, but I recall seeing screenshots with lots of apps.. sadly I can't find a page with the list of extensions (MS calls them Apps)).

 

On Android only, the app passes 500,000 downloads (the bracket range is 500,000 to 1 million, so it is in between the 2). Really good for new app that is not even a year old.

 

Note: I said big success, not a huge one.

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Well it has many third party extensions, Git, Jenkins, Jira, Confluence, and more (I don't know the whole list, but I recall seeing screenshots with lots of apps.. sadly I can't find a page with the list of extentions (MS calls them Apps)).

It can have all the third party extensions it wants but the truth of it is that next to no one has deployed Teams yet because it isn't a finished product to the point where India and Japan don't even have access to it yet.

 

https://skypeandteams.blob.core.windows.net/artefacts/Skype for Business to Teams Capabilities Roadmap.pdf

[Princess Luna]

A shit ton of business places still uses Skype, certainly for private IM there are a lot of better alternatives, myself ditched Skype as personal IM ages ago in favour of Telegram and Discord, however at my business as export manager the majority of my associates (different countries) only communicates through Skype rendering it needed still.

[Delicieuxz]

7 hours ago, SC2Mitch said:

Why are people still using Skype? It's fucking ancient 

Skype is a slow, uncustomizable, and bloated piece of crap - especially in Windows 10, where it can't even be minimized to the system tray while still running. I still use it because I haven't bothered to search for alternatives.

 

What other programs are better than Skype? Anyone can answer.

 

ICQ Lite is the best messenger I've used. For some reason, people kept migrating to worse and worse messengers, though - like MS Messenger, and then Facebook and Skype.

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, Delicieuxz said:

What other programs are better than Skype? Anyone can answer.

I would suggest discord, but there may be a better solutions depending on your use case.

[Taf the Ghost]

Can we pile on that Skype Desktop is also a terrible program that has barely worked properly for years?

[GoodBytes]

40 minutes ago, Delicieuxz said:

Skype is a slow, uncustomizable, and bloated piece of crap - especially in Windows 10, where it can't even be minimized to the system tray while still running. I still use it because I haven't bothered to search for alternatives.

I agree on the performance of the UWP app version of Windows 10. What a joke.. Funny thing is that when it was first released, it was nice, fast and responsive. It lacked many features, but you you had the core essentials up and running. It showed lots of potentials for the future. Then it felt like they outsourced the whole thing on the cheap, with people that never heard of the word "optimization", and got bloated mess.

 

However, for the minimize to tray, actually, when you close Skype UWP, it still runs on the background (assuming you didn't disable Skype from running on the background from the Windows Setting panels). You will still get messages (you'll get the notification pop-up). If you check Task Manager, you'll see it running. Also, you can use the People bar on the task bar, to have Skype there, and quickly chat to people you want. Basically you people on the task bar, pick them to chat, and get a notification on the icon when you get a message.

 

40 minutes ago, Delicieuxz said:

What other programs are better than Skype? Anyone can answer.

 

ICQ Lite is the best messenger I've used. For some reason, people kept migrating to worse and worse messengers, though - like MS Messenger, and then Facebook and Skype.

ICQ was great for chatting, but the infrastructure didn't consider the possibility to get millions of users. So using a simple user id increment to identify users, you had the early people with nice numbers like 1053, or 103... but if you were late to the party your user id was: 5123698520... yea.. fun at parties when you share ICQ numbers.. before smartphones, let alone cellular phone was a thing (pen and paper, was the best you had).

 

MSN killed ICQ using e-mail login instead. It made sharing easy and convenient, and the customization of your chat window, that everyone saw as they clicked on your name options is what attracted people to it (and very annoying). And MSN had primitive, but was something voice/audio chat. And then well Skype took over MSN due to the lack of customization (sounds familiar with how Facebook took over MySpace), and had excellent, at the time, audio/video system in place. Sadly, Skype didn't adapt, and still didn't adapt to the mobile world, where apps like Whatsapp forgo account creation, with using simple user phone number as login id (and open a lot of other problem, but people, so far, ignore them, such as change of phone numbers)

[JoeCoke]

While you're at doing a "massive" rewrite, rewrite the whole thing, it's garbage. I guess while you're at that just install Discord.

[You_are_a_cunt]

Uhm. Skype. That POS should've died ages ago.

[flibberdipper]

4 minutes ago, revsilverspine said:

Uhm. Skype. That POS should've died ages ago.

Yeah Skype is such a flaming heap of fish shit that it really needs to just stop existing.

[GoodBytes]

24 minutes ago, 2Buck said:

While you're at doing a "massive" rewrite, rewrite the whole thing, it's garbage. I guess while you're at that just install Discord.

Rewriting won't help unless you get the right people on it. Clearly Skype is not capable of doing this. No one would ever release a version of anything with sever performance issues. You better off waiting until the performance issues are fixed before being released. Sad to see Skype standard are so low. Then again... remember the Windows 8 Skype app.. you could not even send a picture. (and that was not a day 1 release thing... no... I forgot if they added it until the end of Win8 life, or never bothered.. that is 3 years!)

 

Worst part, is that Skype, the technology in itself, is there, fairly solid, and still good today to allow a great platform to be built on... but it is so badly represented by shoddy coding and lack of quality, that it is awful for the end user. MS should start hiring people with actual knowledge and expertise on that team. You want to laugh? Skype Win10 app got updated where depending on your setup, you would have the camera upside down, even Surface and Windows 10 Mobile products where affected by it. They didn't bother testing! And the worst part, is that this was reported A LOT on the feedback hub, but got ignored. It took the media to bring it out after several weeks of no fix (not including Insiders of Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile (recall both uses the same app, hence the original point of UWP apps), to have Skype team FINALLY fix it soon after.

[Arika]

the biggest piece of news here is; people still use skype?

[Crunchy Dragon]

8 hours ago, JuztBe said:

Then rewrite whole thing. It's piece of crap as its stand currently.

And revert to the old GUI while they're at it.

[Drak3]

3 minutes ago, Sierra Fox said:

the biggest piece of news here is; people still use skype?

It's the only IM and video chat client I use, so, yes.

[Taf the Ghost]

40 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Rewriting won't help unless you get the right people on it. Clearly Skype is not capable of doing this. No one would ever release a version of anything with sever performance issues. You better off waiting until the performance issues are fixed before being released. Sad to see Skype standard are so low. Then again... remember the Windows 8 Skype app.. you could not even send a picture. (and that was not a day 1 release thing... no... I forgot if they added it until the end of Win8 life, or never bothered.. that is 3 years!)

 

Worst part, is that Skype, the technology in itself, is there, fairly solid, and still good today to allow a great platform to be built on... but it is so badly represented by shoddy coding and lack of quality, that it is awful for the end user. MS should start hiring people with actual knowledge and expertise on that team. You want to laugh? Skype Win10 app got updated where depending on your setup, you would have the camera upside down, even Surface and Windows 10 Mobile products where affected by it. They didn't bother testing! And the worst part, is that this was reported A LOT on the feedback hub, but got ignored. It took the media to bring it out after several weeks of no fix (not including Insiders of Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile (recall both uses the same app, hence the original point of UWP apps), to have Skype team FINALLY fix it soon after.

Skype's client has always been some form of "bad" to "terrible". This stretches back before the acquisition by Microsoft. The complete inability for both companies to produce a stable, usable client that isn't some Eldritch Abomination has always suggested to me that it was both badly managed and had other priorities.