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.

Comments

US release

[JoeMerchant]

For those of us who would be happy using less bandwidth stateside, can we choose to use it?

Re:US release

[Zontar The Mindless]

What part of "also uses India's controversial Aadhaar biometric authentication" did you not understand?

Re:US release

[sunderland56]

Yes, but even a Microsoft engineer should be able to remove that for a US release.

Re:US release

[green1]

You're implying that the Microsoft engineer didn't put it there on purpose in the first place. Seems somewhat unlikely that they "Accidentally" created a specific authentication system designed to prevent this from being used outside of India.

MS doesn't want anyone else to use this app. It probably has less spyware and tracking built in to make it lighter weight. They've decided they'd rather these people use it than use nothing (or worse, a competitor), but they don't want to risk anyone using this instead of the full garbage laden app.

It's the same mindset that makes software piracy ok in those countries, they'd rather people use their software without paying in those countries where the average person can't afford the ridiculous price of the software, rather than use a competitor and get used to working on a different platform.

Re: US release

[HornWumpus]

When I used Skype I used to dream of a skype app that would run down the battery. Assuming it has to connect to run down the battery, that would be a big improvement.

Re:US release

[Zontar The Mindless]

Hey, look, Ma--an MS shill posting AC.

Re:US release

[Zontar The Mindless]

Since it's a closed-source product, it might as well be. As if Microsoft are ever going to release anything of substance again that doesn't slurp of every bit of data about you that it can? Did you sleep through Windows 10?

NSA is still listening in though

[Ubi_NL]

big brother Skype

i knew it!

Why only for India?

[Zemran]

When most of the world has to put up with crap connection speeds once they get out of the city.

Re:Why only for India?

[thoughtlover]

When most of the world has to put up with crap connection speeds once they get out of the city.

Especially when the US has earned the moniker of being the world's Broadband Backwater.

Unintentional reveal

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"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.

Proprietary software makes anonymity unverifiable

[tepples]

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.

Re:Skype Street Shitter Edition

[HornWumpus]

200% more bugs than Skype? So it won't even start? That is an improvement!

How condescending

[OneHundredAndTen]

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.

Aadhaar vs US

[DrYak]

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.

Re:Aadhaar vs US

[Zontar The Mindless]

Users can still log-in using normal Microsoft credentials (as far as I know)...

And on exactly what basis do you make this assumption?

Indian Skype version

[ruir]

Please support our local spy industry and use the national Skype version. Be a good netizen.

100% Microsoft

[0111 1110]

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.

Not an assumption: actual non-India use.

[DrYak]

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.

Re:Not an assumption: actual non-India use.

[Zontar The Mindless]

That's good, and thanks for the info. But you could have actually said so in the first place.

I remain skeptical and suspect that MS will soon take steps to prevent this sort of thing, but we'll see what happens.