Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Creates Skype Lite Especially For India (cnet.com)
There's a new Skype app in town, and it is made just for India. According to a report on CNET: Microsoft is the latest US tech giant to help keep Indians connected. Skype Lite is a new version of the company's popular video and voice-calling app that's "built in India." Skype Lite functions much like its big brother Skype, but it's designed to work well on low-speed, 2G networks, which are still prevalent in India and many developing nations. It uses less data and battery power than the fully fledged app, and at 13MB it's around a third of the download size. Skype Lite, available for Android, also uses India's controversial Aadhaar biometric authentication.
Designated slapping streets?
Circumcision is child abuse.
For those of us who would be happy using less bandwidth stateside, can we choose to use it?
i knew it!
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
where would you jump the code to avoid that security certificate? Or just supplant Aadhaar with a DNS service and service to replace it with something else?
When my Skype Android install exceeded 110MB I weighed it as bloat since the app was 99% of that. I remember a Blackberry Curve app tgat once had Skype Protocol and Yahoo Messenger compatibility that i could alternate tween but thwy both broke within a month; I think that app was called Scooter or something like that.
A hacked Skype Lite looks like all we have with Micro Soft, other than that our dpmain is hardware purchases driven by bloatware.
At least update Microsoft logo to the newer one on the site.
When most of the world has to put up with crap connection speeds once they get out of the city.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
"Skype Lite functions much like its big brother Skype..."
This is what we call an "unintentional reveal", where the truth is accidentally shown alongside other stuff.
"Big brother" indeed, especially now that all Skype conversations will travel through Microsoft servers for data mining and keyword flagging purposes.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Data is gathered and sent encrypted and in a completely anonymous fashion
Unless an application is downloaded from a repository that builds from public source, such as F-Droid, the end user has no way to verify this.
at no time is personally identifiable data shared with marketing companies or sold.
The end user has no way to verify this.
There will always be the tin-foil hat crowd that attaches some type of nefarious motive to such product improvement efforts
I think the fear is that a hostile government could subpoena private information in crash dumps and the like for a fishing expedition.
You mean, specifically?
200% more bugs than Skype? So it won't even start? That is an improvement!
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Now I will be able to reliably communicate with the guy who will have my job soon, as I'm forced out because I'm 50 and make 8 times what he does? Yay!
The gods at Microsoft acquiesce to come down to the humble level of the Indians. Thank you, Microsoft. And consider yourself, once more, middle fingered.
For those of us who would be happy using less bandwidth stateside,
What part of "also uses India's controversial Aadhaar biometric authentication" did you not understand?
And you, what part of stateside didn't you understand ?
US citizen (and in my case european) aren't very likely to have their biometrics database in an Indian government database.
Users can still log-in using normal Microsoft credentials (as far as I know) and completely ignore that microsoft offers to Indian the possibility to log using biometrics they stored into a database that leaks private informations all over the place.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Please support our local spy industry and use the national Skype version. Be a good netizen.
Fuck Microsoft. Fuck Skype. This is the sort of megacorp retardo-logic that is fucking over the world. We figured out how to make our app more data efficient, but our users don't care and don't want data efficiency. We cannot figure out a situation where it might be helpful because we are morons who only live in areas where LTE is ubiquitous and everyone has an LTE capable phone and everyone is so rich that they all have unlimited data plans. So lets release our more efficient app only for Indians and take precautions to be sure no one else in the entire world can use it instead of our slow, bloated data-hog. Got news for you guys. Most people in the world don't have or use LTE and are lucky if/when they have 3G. To be fair though most of those people don't seem to use Skype very much. Viber and Whatsapp and other more phone centric software seems to be more popular.
This sort of logic is what makes Windows 7+ bloat to 50 GB of hard drive space because Microsoft retards cannot even imagine a situation where someone is not using at least a 1 TB hard drive with a single partition to install Windows on and they hate hate hate having to consider the idea of efficiency in any way. I'm guessing that just bringing up the idea at Microsoft is enough to get you fired on the spot. Their view is that bandwidth is as infinite as hard drive space. No need to optimize or ever to consider the idea of efficiency.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
|| Secret shortcuts: ALT-F1-1 for ordering samosas ALT-F2-2 for translating Engrish to English ALT-F3-3 for getting cow dung ALT-F4-4 for finding a woman to rape
|I find it particularly insulting you playing with our poor dung eaters.
| Please enlighten me more if I can specify the blonde hair and blue eyes in the woman-to-rape p2p network.
How about adding a key shortcut to buy curry and sweat eau de toilette?
And on exactly what basis do you make this assumption?
It's NOT an assumption. It's the personal anecdotal experience of what is running on my phone.
I'm not from India, I'm from Europe.
I have a Microsoft account and it's configured to use a time-based OTP as a second factor in the 2 factor authentication.
I don't have biometrics configured as a way to log-in.
I don't even have my biometrics data stored in the Aadhaar database.
I installed Skype Lite (note: like with Facebook's "Lite" applications, you need to side-load it manually, because inside the Google Playstore the app is geo-restricted and the store will refuse to install it on smartphone outside the target market).
App asks me my credential, app asks me my 2nd factor.
That's it, it works.
At no point in time did it ask me to upload my biometrics into the Aadhaar database, nor did it even consider using biometrics as an authentication factor.
So even if Aadhaar is apparently a leaky mess of privacy violations, I'm not concerned by it.
My fingerprints are not going to get pwnd and leaked to the net by Aadhaar as they don't have them.
So okay, I'm a single data point. Maybe there are other factors that I'm overlooking.
But still, my personnal anecdotal experience is a good sign that people outside of India could be using Skype without beeing affected by Aadhaar's "peculiar" relationship with personal information and privacy.
The only limitation that I've seen is the Playstore's own geo-locking, preventing non-Idan google accounts to deploy the app. (This can easily be circumvented by manually installing).
No practical limitation would prevent a US user, like the top poster, to use it in the USA (just like I did) and enjoy a skype client that only uses a fractions of the resources that the current mainstream android app uses.
The same is similarily valid with Facebook Lite and Facebook Messenger Lite.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]