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Microsoft To Can Skype API; Third-Party Products Will Not Work
Mark Gibbs writes "If you've recently fired up Skype you may have noticed a dialog box with a warning appear briefly (at least on OS X) then vanish. If you're fast enough to catch it you'll find that it's warning you that some application you're using that works with Skype will stop working in December, 2013. This applies to all sorts of software supporting headsets, cameras, ... you name it."
Third world countries use skype.
Everybody else has an IPhone or Android that will let you voice chat or video chat anywhere in the world for nothing.
Skype is a household word as is Kleenex, and people want to get rid of both as soon as they have used it.
Skype is backdoored and nobody but love struck teenagers use it any more.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
> Everyone uses Skype. Every other product in the field is a niche compared to Skype.
I think you're right. And everyone (especially old people) at one point thought AOL was The Internet.
That's not a totally fair comparison because at one time Skype was, you know, good. But you know as well as I that this move by Microsoft will have the direct result of making alternatives more interesting, and a name will eventually replace Skype in our lexicon, just like certain names replaced Internet Explorer. (Nothing specific replaced AOL in our mindshare because everyone realized that a generic broadband connection gave them everything AOL had to offer and more, included with the price of the connection.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Okay. So I get they are cutting support to many webcams and headsets on the desktop and competing platforms like OS X as stated in the article and from Android based on the comments posted here.
Crazy theory here. Could they be trying to focus Skype for use with their Windows Phone to try to give people a compelling reason to switch over to their mobile OS?
Thoughts?
Who still uses Skype? There are better alternatives now, and a lot more open, too.
Like what? I dislike skype and want to stop using it, and for the usage I do have, I -can- get the other people to switch.
However, switch to what is the question?
I need something that works x-platform: mac, pc, android, ios, and windows phone 8). Linux would be a bonus for me, but not a requirement. At least we don't need BB support.
It needs to do voice, group voice (at Least 5-6 people), IM chat, and group IM chat (unlimited people), and have contacts. Voice quality needs to be good, low latency, no echo, no breathing, no push-to-talk.
I'd like it to be open, but at the very least it HAS to be less privacy invasive than Skype. I'm not ditching skype for Google+ Hangouts or Facebook Messenger or something like that.
I'm actively looking for solutions but the VOIP stuff tends to be poor at the IM chat side, and everything else seems to suck at the voice or being cross platform enough.
Right up until find yourself fighting a patent infringement lawsuit, I fear.
You really think Microsoft (and Skype before them) didn't make damned sure their patents were filed and recorded for this stuff? Or that they wouldn't be so over-broad as to encompass the entire concept?
I'm not so sure.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If you use skype for calling telephones, you're getting ripped off horribly. Their rates are 3 to 10 times higher than good VoIP providers (personally, I recommend Diamondcard or Callcentric which both have good rates and service quality, but you can get even cheaper if you look around for lower-quality VoIP carriers), especially once you figure in the "connection fee" they added which often gets applied even when you call doesn't really go through. It's not as bad if you have a monthly plan (which waives the connection fees and has unlimited calling to selected countries) but unless your usage is really high you can still get better prices paying per-minute with other carriers (and, for some countries, you can even get cheaper unlimited plans with other carriers).
Right, I guess Microsoft also killed off Windows and Office as well.
Schmuck.
Agreed, I'm using up the last of my SKYPE balance, still use it for calling 800 numbers(which are still free), but that's about it.
Just got Google chat to phone via gmail working, which took some doing to get around the browser id check. Now, I can call phones in the USA for free, while skype charges $0.049 to connect and $0.023/min.
Except to a lot of people, they don't realize it's a brand. To the non-tech savvy, there's no difference between a branded service (like Skype or Twitter) vs. an open service (like email). Notice the GP mentioned old people going into Best Buy and asking for the tools to "Skype" not the tools to "video chat on the web".
All they know is that there's some kind of thing you can do on computers, and they want to make sure they can do that thing with the people on the other end that are important to them. They don't know (or care about) the difference between a proprietary toolchain vs. an open one.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
3rd party tools to use skype but add encryption...
Like pidgin's "Off the record" or the even better one-time-pad version "Pidgin-paranoia"
The whole point of forcing people to use skype clients is to make sure they all use the backdoored code. Then they said, well you have to use our client, but we'll let your client use scripting to work with ours....
So we implemented encryption in our 3rd party clients, and now they just wont have any of that.
Cue the tiny violin.
Through my teen years, long distance voice cost roughly $20/hour for anything that wasn't a local call - and much more for international.
Also remember that those were 20 real dollars, when a good new car could be had for less than $10K, gas was (shockingly expensive at) about $1.20 a gallon, and minimum wage was $3.35/hour. Let's not even talk about real-estate...
Perhaps Apple will grow some wisdom and open up FaceTime in response as they promised to years ago.
I'm not sure if this is score nothing, score funny, or score insightful. Apple to save the day?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Well, the article linked asks the question of whether or not it is backdoored based upon a test that proved SOMETHING was leaking:
Now are they just hoovering up the skype IMs via the new microsoft central server architecture having back doored skype client to no longer have end2end encrption (and feedind them through echelon or whatever) or is this the client that is reading your IMs and sending selected things to the mothership.
I'd be curious to see if there's a query against a phone number sent via skype, vs a url. That would back up the claim of a backdoor much more solidly than the work that has already been done. It would be harder to verify, though.
"In the end, there is simply no weapon more devastating than the truth, delivered in just the right way." - tnk1
As previous posters have mentioned, if you open a web browser page to your Gmail account, there is a telephone option. If you have a suitable headset and microphone you can type in a landline phone number. In the USA, calls are free to USA locations.
I use the Gmail phone for every possible call I can make from my desk because local toll and long distance calls are charged on a per-minute basis. The deep advantage of all the internet communication methods is the connection is per packet, not per minute.
I played with the Asterisk scriptable phone and communications engine (also known as a PBX or private branch exchange). I was looking for a fast local and free communications solution for facilitating just-in-time ride sharing. There are little fragments of the solution scattered around.
At the risk of being a little impolite: Except for amateur radio (which is very circumscribed in its usage), the American communications game consists of continually figuring out more and more mutually incompatible and progressively more expensive ways of selling tiny dribbles of two way communication bandwidth for progressively higher and higher prices.
It seems to me that a series of communication solutions could exist. The key is to change the terms of sale of cell phone bandwidth. Present policy, I guess, sells a radio band x geographic area x population to the highest bidder. What the people would benefit from is selling the reciprocal of that relationship: The federal price would go down as the total bytes transmitted increases. The user charge would be an asymptote like function that as usage increases the price approaches the basic cost: (cost is like: price of transmitter electricity + amortized cost of transmitter + monthly fiber optic access + profit) divided by count of users. Dollar sums point to a cell site: $20,000 per month, 5,000 users; $5 per month each.
At present, jaw dropping sums of money have to be bid by huge organizations of national scope to get a communication franchise. With this fixed annual cost, franchise winners have to charge for every byte transmitted. The franchise winners have to charge a spectrum of prices that avoids the perception they are charging "all the market will bear". Remember all that linear programming you studied in college? The bandwidth is chopped into a blather of services that obscure the basic price per byte. How much does Tracfone pay for a three minute call thorugh an ATandT cell tower? That manufacturing cost recovery reality in turn means no anonymous users and no free data transit. Unlike the land line phone, incoming calls are not free in the cellphone business.