Upcoming Windows 11 builds cannot install without internet and Microsoft Account

And for what? Make number go up? If it's just another data collection scheme the at least I could understand why.

Because the NSA pays them to.

Why did they do to Skype what they did (first turn it from p2p to centralized and spyable and then just ignore it and let it die)?

Same reason.

i wonder if some Estonian could justvrerelease the p2p originals . After all as america deteriorates its own influence , at some point the lawyers of the big 4 will be seen as barely disguised tendril of a hostile power in Europe . Who cares about your sales contracts if the president goes for Greenland . We might see a SkyEarthFireWater-Open source re-release one day. Just another tradewar anecdote .

(Opinions are my own, I have no inside knowledge.)

I vaguely remember hearing that P2P Skype was the bane of sysadmins' existence. Skype would elect clients on high-bandwidth networks as supernodes. This tended to be business customers - the very organizations MS wanted to attract. Skype's prodigious hole-punching ability made it difficult to throttle, so it got banned from a lot of enterprises. MS essentially hosted the supernodes on Azure, which centralized it.

As for encryption, on the other hand, Wikipedia says MS specifically added the ability to eavesdrop for law enforcement agencies, though apparently Skype had already added a backdoor for the NSA before MS bought them: https://news.softpedia.com/news/Skype-Provided-Backdoor-Acce...

This [1] is one of my favorite leaks from Snowden revelations, and I regularly bring it up anytime people try to downplay what PRISM is. That's a user manual for NSA agents on how to spy on Skype users (including video and text) in real time. It's informative and also amusing at times. For instance in the FAQ one issue a confused spook might run into is why they're being spammed with the same messages repeatedly. It turns out that when a user logs on to a new device, the recent messages Microsoft sends to the user are also directly forwarded to the NSA, which can result (from their perspective) in messages being repeated.

[1] - https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/Guid...

America deteriorates its own influence? wut?

The big 4 will be seen as a hostile power within Europe? The big 4 ARE (mostly) European. What are you talking about?

Sales contracts? What do you mean in what context?

I agree that it would be cool if the original p2p Skype somehow resurfaces, but I can't make any sense of the rest of your post or what it has to do with the subject at hand?

Join us back in the real world with no Trump derangement syndrome and you'll find out that European governments want an airtight control on companies so they can surveil them and people absolutely.

They want narrative control and squashing rising political opposition.

FANG is definitely not European .

I remember the old supernodes p2p app, was good times.

I used to leave an extra old laptop on with it running, maybe 15 years ago, on a public address.

During the arab spring, tons of traffic could be seen connecting clients in north africa. It truly did route around things.