The key feature of Skype for me was always calling international numbers and/or home numbers while travelling.
Since they’ve killed this feature, I have requested a refund of the money still in my account, and of course keep being ignored. I’ve now escalated this to consumer protection in Germany, luckily we got some institutions with teeth.
Back in the day, where I worked, the corporate firewall was really locked down. My team had special less-restricted access, but it was still ridiculously locked down.
The other things my team had were exclusive permission to use Skype due to working with a specific contracting company and an employee with a propensity to circumvent restrictions. (It was me. I was the guy who circumvented restrictions.)
Skype for Linux had an obscure P2P API that would let you make connections from a program to the Skype client and request that the client send a message to another specific user’s client. So, set up the Skype client in headless mode on one of my personally computers on my home network and wrote programs that would establish a SOCKS proxy on my work machine through which I could send arbitrary network traffic over Skype to my home network where the receiving end would just proxy the request on to its intended destination.
It mostly worked, but would cut out sometimes for a while. I think maybe Skype limited the traffic. I was gratified I got it to work at all, though. I’ll spare a thought for Skype tomorrow.
