Felt bad lurking this forum, and I have a genuine question, so I’m here now.
Read title. It sounds odd as basically every category on this forum has atleast 1 working revival. I’d usually assume it’s a case of “The service is technically still alive, so why bother?”, but even Yahoo! Messenger, which is in the same situation, has a revival.
Yes, I know there are technically unofficial services that allow older Skype clients to access the modern services, but it’s really a glorified proxy, and besides being one hell of a security risk if the user is dumb enough to not use a burner hotmail account, is technically not a revival.
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Well for older versions, the elusiveness comes in the form of encryption spam with keys not yet dumped or preserved.
For Skype 7 specifically, MSNP (13 and above, especially 21, 22 and even much so 24, which is the one Skype 7 uses) sucks to write for, It’s possibly one of the most demoralizing protocols I’ve seen.
For Skype 8, literally nothing, it’s mostly just reasonably standard REST ordeals, which with a reasonable HTTP server implementation will probably get you by.
There, it’s probably easy to just change a URL, implement services, and be done with it.
In terms of voice and video, probably much worse.
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You’ve got good points, although I still feel like some dedicated soul could power through the demoralization of trying to reverse engineer a protocol.
For Skype 8, literally nothing, it’s mostly just reasonably standard REST ordeals, which with a reasonable HTTP server implementation will probably get you by.
There, it’s probably easy to just change a URL, implement services, and be done with it.
I feel like the main reason why nobody revives Skype 8 is simply just the unfortunate “Nobody liked it when it released.” or the slightly more understandable “It’s just not old enough for people to have nostalgia for it.”
In terms of voice and video, probably much worse.
To be fair, most probably don’t have to care about that as most of the time, people are using IM clients for text. (Seriously, have you ever seen someone complain that voice/video calling doesn’t work in Escargot?)
(Seriously, have you ever seen someone complain that voice/video calling doesn’t work in Escargot?)
Well… surly i seen around of 100+ users saying about that video/voice calls not working on WLM/MSN, in discord mostly, but after admins did explained voice and video will come on escargot 2.0, less people started to ask about it.
I’m sure that more would’ve complained as I don’t really think people would remember it (I certainly didn’t)
Wait, if part of the reason is encryption keys, what’s preventing someone from just patching skype’s encryption method on the clients?
In theory, not much to replace keys with different ones.
In practice, Skype’s executable was notoriously highly obfuscated, making static analysis way harder, and not to mention that the client usually has hundreds of checksum snippets just waiting to spin your CPU endlessly.
It’s probably possible, but unless someone was “crazy mad” for it, then I don’t see someone doing it.
That said, I remember seeing a semi?-deobfuscated Skype 4 binary somewhere.
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