11 ms·

Skypeopensource2 – Skype client based on reversing Skype 5.5

250 points by EvgeniyZh 10y ago

mariuolo 10y ago
Interesting. Any code commonalities with the pidgin skypeweb plugin?
marcv81 10y ago
IANAL but author should doublr check to stay clear of trademark infringements.
- ars 10y ago
  They should rename it to Sky.peOple
bdcravens 10y ago
"Commercial license also avaiable (sic) on request." Seriously?
- Sephr 10y ago
  I see absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to profit from this. You're not being forced to use a commercial license, and the LGPL is adequate for most open source use cases.
  - michaelmior 10y ago
    Reversing in the first place is almost certainly illegal if you were to check the Skype ToS. Making a profit off it is just asking for trouble. I could be wrong though.
    - _0ffh 10y ago
      I suppose it depends on where you are. IIRC some countries explicitly allow reverse engineering for interoperability. Which is arguably the case here. (Side note: That any kind of reversing is illegal anywhere at all is by itself a testament of the sad state most legislatures are in.)
      - janoc 10y ago
        Reverse engineering yes, straight reusing of the reversed code (as the code author did in some cases, by his own admission) no. You can't take a piece of someone's code, decompile it, use it in your own project and then claim you own a copyright on it.
    - PeterisP 10y ago
      ToS only applies to terms of continuing use of a service, if you're prepared to not be an user anymore, then the conditons of ToS are not worth the paper they're (not) written on, you can simply not accept those terms. Click-through and shrink-wrap licencing terms are not binding almost everywhere (they likely could be in USA, though). And while USA has DMCA, in most of the world copyright (as according to Berne convention) doesn't prohibit reverse engineering but only grants a limited monopoly on copying with some exceptions - often including interoperability, so you can do that even if the copyright holder disagrees.
      - michaelmior 10y ago
        If you're not going to be a user anymore, then what's the point in reversing the client anyway?
        PeterisP 10y ago
        For example, to distribute the system obtained by reverse engineering to your customers or include it in your product; none of this needs your engineers to be actual users of the (possibly competing) service. The interoperability exception in copyright laws is exactly for this purpose, to allow companies to distribute competing products that are interoperable with something that doesn't want others to interoperate. You're not required to make it easy for others to interoperate, but if they manage to do so, the government won't hold your copyright as a valid reason to forbid it. Violating a law is "illegal" in the sense that it may result in penalties prescribed in that law. Violating a contract is "illegal" in the sense that it may result in contractual penalties, generally limited to compensation of the damages, possibly with punitive tripling; but it may and should be done if the contract has gone so bad that it's better to face the consequences rather than fulfill the contract. Violating ToS (which is not even a contract) is "illegal" if you really stretch that term; it may result in losing access to that service, and nothing else (excepting certain US-only legal perversions like CFAA which happily don't apply for most people in the world), so you may do that if the benefit outweighs continued access to that service.
        10y ago
    - skypeopensource 10y ago
      Reversing are explicitly allowed in EU government as other based human laws. I mean, EU have a much more great priority then Skype TOS. If someone will add to Skype TOS "and please dont breath or dont go to toilets during use of our application". It will have zero effects in legal meaning. Because it break upfront law and United Nations based rights and etc. tldr; They just try to fear you with "dont do this" thing.
- goldenkey 10y ago
  I bet they used a cracked version of IDA too. Kind of sad to see the open culture of reversing violated.
andwur 10y ago
I haven't spent much time browsing through the source but the code quality and security is pretty dismal so far. Not to mention the confusing project structure. Magic numbers, ... and strings, all over the place [0]. Memory leak galore (debug code?) [1]. Probably buffer overflows all over the place, here's one I noticed [2]. I suspect others given the proliferation of opaque pointers and memcpy usage. [0] https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/blob/master/skycontact4_dll/skycontact4_dll/skype_login.c https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/blob/mas... [1] https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/blob/master/goodsendrelay3/goodsendrelay3/tcp_recv.c#L500 https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/blob/mas... [2] https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/blob/master/skyauth4_dll/skyauth4_dll/skype_login.c#L260 https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/blob/mas...
- sillysaurus3 10y ago
  "How dare you show your project when it has flaws!"
  - andwur 10y ago
    "How dare you comment on the flaws found in someone's project!" If issues are never brought to light then it's very unlikely they will ever be fixed. Would you rather everyone just stayed silent? I have great respect for someone that can put in the time and effort to reverse engineer Skype, and brave Microsoft's legal team in doing so, but in its current state this code can't be used safely and is far from easy to understand either.
    - EvgeniyZh 10y ago
      I believe that the best way to bring issues to light is pull request. Second best is the issue. Comment on Hacker News is somewhere down the list
  - showmustgoon 10y ago
    If these flaws are minor or inconsequential, then you might be right about your remark but if these flaws are flagrant or critical, then the OP had the right attitude to make concerns public.
EugeneOZ 10y ago
maybe they are just russian. Living in the country of thieves leaves some marks on mentality.
- postgeographic 10y ago
  That's a pretty bullshit generalisation about Russians. Or as it's. More colloquially known, racist.
  - EugeneOZ 10y ago
    My words are true. Our (russians) colloquial lexicon have tremendous amount of words from thieves jargon. Constitution in Russia have less meaning than thieves' laws. Our users, even programmers/hackers are trying to get free any software - it's kind of snobbery to use paid software in Russia. Maybe it's something wild for you, but it's reality in Russia.
    - mlvljr 10y ago
      Stop bullshitting our Western friends, pal :) The days of total piracy are quite long gone. To the degree of someone (not from Russia), living on mobile apps income, telling me, we are among his best-paying clients (apparently, preferring buying an app to watching ads :)).
    - nbaksalyar 10y ago
      I don't get your point. Why generalize over 140M people with your assumptions about illegal software usage and "thieve laws" in Russia in the topic about reverse engineering the Skype client? How does it even relate to Russia?
      - EugeneOZ 10y ago
        My reply was to comment about hacking culture. And it's not "assumptions" but experience.
      - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
elitistphoenix 10y ago
Downloading before M$ lawyers get to it
- kxd 10y ago
  IRC is leaking again...
elitistphoenix 10y ago
Downloading before M$ lawyers get to it
mrwizrd 10y ago
For more context and commentary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2611299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2611299
justinlardinois 10y ago
>> whether or not it is a clean-room reverse-engineered code, like Wine/ReactOS > No. Not clean room, not chinese wall. If it's not clean room, then there's probably copyright violations. For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design Also, offering commercial licensing? That's a good way to get a lot worse than just a DMCA takedown.
- wolfgke 10y ago
  > If it's not clean room, then there's probably copyright violations. This is the law in the United States. From the links given in the readme file the authors are probably from Russia.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Iv 10y ago
    As a non-US citizen, I can't wait to see a world where a whole IT industry will exist without caring much about merchandability in the US.
    - striking 10y ago
      Copyright extends beyond the US, due to certain treaties. But yes, Antigua's IT industry could get very interesting if they get to keep the whole copyright haven thing going.
  - janoc 10y ago
    Copyright applies in Russia too. There are bits and pieces straight "reused" from other software - by his own admission. So his claim that he is a sole copyright owner is patently false - this code could be trivially attacked as a derivative work. No sane person would touch it by a 10 foot pole.
    - wolfgke 10y ago
cmarschner 10y ago
I do hope that the Skype people see it as an opportunity to improve product rather than threat / opportunity to sue the hell out of this project. WhatsApp would not have been necessary if they had gotten their act together. But at the time they were seemingly too busy sorting out technical and political ramifications of the MS acquisition and overlap with Lync. A more open approach to clients could save it, especially in the light that people are looking for alternatives after facebook is now starting to monetize WhatsApp.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
cjg 10y ago
Big problem, the code includes stuff ripped straight out of the original Skype client: https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/issues/2 https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/issues/2
cjg 10y ago
Big problem, the code includes stuff ripped straight out of the original Skype client: https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/issues/2 https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/issues/2
PieterH 10y ago
My guess at the origins of this project... Firm somewhere far away where Microsoft's lawyers cannot reach (China?) wanted Skype capability in their product and paid this smart Russian guy to reverse-engineer the Skype client. Smart guy gets permission to open source it and publishes it with commercial license option with hopes of finding more such clients. Personally I'd not touch this with a 3-meter bargepole, because I live in a country where people use copyright and trademark law to take people to court, yet it's an interesting project.
- sargun 10y ago
  I doubt it. What prevents a Chinese citizen from installing Skype? Nothing. It's the payment and protocol that are blocked. Looks useful for command and control type applications though.
  - contingencies 10y ago
    It's not blocked. However, if you download in China you get a version specifically compromised for Chinese government surveillance.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Telecommunications products should be based around open protocols. That Skype keeps their protocols to themselves should not be reason enough to send lawyers after software implementing interoperability after reverse engineering. Re-using the reverse engineered code is the problem, he should have simply used it to spec out the protocol and then use that spec to re-implement it.
  - PieterH 10y ago
    One team documents the protocol as a spec. A second team takes the spec and writes implementations. The advantage of this for open source is that when the protocol changes, it's relatively simple for that first team to update the spec, and safe for the second team to update their code. This is legal and safe. It is how the first clone PCs survived even IBM's lawyers.
besselheim 10y ago
I remember seeing an earlier incarnation of this around five years ago; I'm very impressed with the author's dedication to this project. I don't know if it is still the case now, but I recall that earlier versions of Skype were quite heavily obfuscated and contained anti-debugging mechanisms. So it would have been quite an intricate reversing effort to get past these, on top of figuring out the protocol. Over time, Microsoft has changed the Skype protocol significantly since version 5.5 so I do wonder how applicable this work is to the current crop of clients.
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  > I remember seeing an earlier incarnation of this around five years ago https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource
  - besselheim 10y ago
    The site I recall was Blogspot rather than Github: https://web.archive.org/web/20110602182718/http://skype-open-source.blogspot.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110602182718/http://skype-open...
    - skypeopensource 10y ago
      http://skype-open-source2.blogspot.ru/2016/09/first-in-world-skype-network-compatible.html http://skype-open-source2.blogspot.ru/2016/09/first-in-world...
- skypeopensource 10y ago
  > I remember seeing an earlier incarnation of this around five years ago Yes, its still up here: https://skype-open-source2.blogspot.com/ https://skype-open-source2.blogspot.com/
znpy 10y ago
I Hope this is better than the web version of Skype: it doesn't do the only thing it is supposed to do: phone calls.
fungos 10y ago
Developer is Efim Bushmanov, here an old interview about his first skupeopensource release: http://www.ewdn.com/2011/06/05/ewdn-exclusive-an-interview-with-efim-bushmanov/ http://www.ewdn.com/2011/06/05/ewdn-exclusive-an-interview-w...
brownbat 10y ago
As a reminder: https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumble_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumble_(software) I'm surprised the gaming chat programs don't get more crossover use. Well, I'm not surprised that a commercial project has a larger userbase than something that requires you to find a server. But I am surprised when, say, podcast hosts make jokes about lag or call quality on their Skype connections with guests. There are other applications that solve some of these problems, and I'd think if your main creative product relies on call quality for guests, you might look a few steps beneath the most ubiquitous option. (ie, If you're at the level where you're buying an uncommon specialist's mic, you could probably benefit from comparison shopping for voip implementations.)
- cinch 10y ago
  skype still has the best echo cancellation (that i've tried). you don't even need to wear headphones. according to a Tox developer: there aren't any comparable open source libraries.
  - eeZi 10y ago
    Can confirm that Jitsi Meet works fine without headphones in Google Chrome. Google spent a lot of time optimizing WebRTC.
- eeZi 10y ago
  Another reminder: Jitsi Meet https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet Try it here: https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/ It's a modern, WebRTC-based replacement for Skype, Google Hangouts and other video/audio conferencing solutions. And it's great. The company I work for is now using it exclusively for meetings and telepresence. The echo cancellation is outstanding and you can even connect it to a SIP server. No client is required besides Google Chrome or Firefox. There's nothing that comes close to it in terms of sophistication and quality. It works well for one-on-one and audio calls.
- giancarlostoro 10y ago
  I try to push Mumble over Skype, the main issue with Mumble is that it's not as easy to get into. You spend too much time configuring your client, finding a server, etc. Things that should be fairly trivial. Then you may spend more time figuring out why you're not being heard, or why nobody's hearing you. Mumble is great but there's too much friction involved. I prefer Discord[0] because it's so easy to use by comparison, to test it you don't even need an account, you just run it from your browser. I just wish Discord had a Linux Client. [0]: https://discordapp.com/ https://discordapp.com/
lootsauce 10y ago
Totally not negative on this but I'm not a Skype user so can someone please explain to me why anyone would want to go to all the effort to reverse engineer it? I get that its closed and should be open, I get that its security is in question but if you want a more secure communications platform I can't imagine Skype is the only way forward and must be reverse engineered. Why not contribute to an existing open source project?

250 points by EvgeniyZh 10y ago

mariuolo 10y ago

Interesting. Any code commonalities with the pidgin skypeweb plugin?

marcv81 10y ago

IANAL but author should doublr check to stay clear of trademark infringements.

ars 10y ago
They should rename it to Sky.peOple

bdcravens 10y ago

"Commercial license also avaiable (sic) on request." Seriously?

Sephr 10y ago
I see absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to profit from this. You're not being forced to use a commercial license, and the LGPL is adequate for most open source use cases.
- michaelmior 10y ago
  Reversing in the first place is almost certainly illegal if you were to check the Skype ToS. Making a profit off it is just asking for trouble. I could be wrong though.
  - _0ffh 10y ago
    I suppose it depends on where you are. IIRC some countries explicitly allow reverse engineering for interoperability. Which is arguably the case here. (Side note: That any kind of reversing is illegal anywhere at all is by itself a testament of the sad state most legislatures are in.)
    - janoc 10y ago
      Reverse engineering yes, straight reusing of the reversed code (as the code author did in some cases, by his own admission) no. You can't take a piece of someone's code, decompile it, use it in your own project and then claim you own a copyright on it.
  - PeterisP 10y ago
    ToS only applies to terms of continuing use of a service, if you're prepared to not be an user anymore, then the conditons of ToS are not worth the paper they're (not) written on, you can simply not accept those terms. Click-through and shrink-wrap licencing terms are not binding almost everywhere (they likely could be in USA, though). And while USA has DMCA, in most of the world copyright (as according to Berne convention) doesn't prohibit reverse engineering but only grants a limited monopoly on copying with some exceptions - often including interoperability, so you can do that even if the copyright holder disagrees.
    - michaelmior 10y ago
      If you're not going to be a user anymore, then what's the point in reversing the client anyway?
      - PeterisP 10y ago
        For example, to distribute the system obtained by reverse engineering to your customers or include it in your product; none of this needs your engineers to be actual users of the (possibly competing) service. The interoperability exception in copyright laws is exactly for this purpose, to allow companies to distribute competing products that are interoperable with something that doesn't want others to interoperate. You're not required to make it easy for others to interoperate, but if they manage to do so, the government won't hold your copyright as a valid reason to forbid it. Violating a law is "illegal" in the sense that it may result in penalties prescribed in that law. Violating a contract is "illegal" in the sense that it may result in contractual penalties, generally limited to compensation of the damages, possibly with punitive tripling; but it may and should be done if the contract has gone so bad that it's better to face the consequences rather than fulfill the contract. Violating ToS (which is not even a contract) is "illegal" if you really stretch that term; it may result in losing access to that service, and nothing else (excepting certain US-only legal perversions like CFAA which happily don't apply for most people in the world), so you may do that if the benefit outweighs continued access to that service.
        10y ago
  - skypeopensource 10y ago
    Reversing are explicitly allowed in EU government as other based human laws. I mean, EU have a much more great priority then Skype TOS. If someone will add to Skype TOS "and please dont breath or dont go to toilets during use of our application". It will have zero effects in legal meaning. Because it break upfront law and United Nations based rights and etc. tldr; They just try to fear you with "dont do this" thing.
goldenkey 10y ago
I bet they used a cracked version of IDA too. Kind of sad to see the open culture of reversing violated.

andwur 10y ago

I haven't spent much time browsing through the source but the code quality and security is pretty dismal so far. Not to mention the confusing project structure. Magic numbers, ... and strings, all over the place [0]. Memory leak galore (debug code?) [1]. Probably buffer overflows all over the place, here's one I noticed [2]. I suspect others given the proliferation of opaque pointers and memcpy usage. [0] https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/blob/master/skycontact4_dll/skycontact4_dll/skype_login.c https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/blob/mas... [1] https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/blob/master/goodsendrelay3/goodsendrelay3/tcp_recv.c#L500 https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/blob/mas... [2] https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/blob/master/skyauth4_dll/skyauth4_dll/skype_login.c#L260 https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/blob/mas...

sillysaurus3 10y ago
"How dare you show your project when it has flaws!"
- andwur 10y ago
  "How dare you comment on the flaws found in someone's project!" If issues are never brought to light then it's very unlikely they will ever be fixed. Would you rather everyone just stayed silent? I have great respect for someone that can put in the time and effort to reverse engineer Skype, and brave Microsoft's legal team in doing so, but in its current state this code can't be used safely and is far from easy to understand either.
  - EvgeniyZh 10y ago
    I believe that the best way to bring issues to light is pull request. Second best is the issue. Comment on Hacker News is somewhere down the list
- showmustgoon 10y ago
  If these flaws are minor or inconsequential, then you might be right about your remark but if these flaws are flagrant or critical, then the OP had the right attitude to make concerns public.

EugeneOZ 10y ago

maybe they are just russian. Living in the country of thieves leaves some marks on mentality.

postgeographic 10y ago
That's a pretty bullshit generalisation about Russians. Or as it's. More colloquially known, racist.
- EugeneOZ 10y ago
  My words are true. Our (russians) colloquial lexicon have tremendous amount of words from thieves jargon. Constitution in Russia have less meaning than thieves' laws. Our users, even programmers/hackers are trying to get free any software - it's kind of snobbery to use paid software in Russia. Maybe it's something wild for you, but it's reality in Russia.
  - mlvljr 10y ago
    Stop bullshitting our Western friends, pal :) The days of total piracy are quite long gone. To the degree of someone (not from Russia), living on mobile apps income, telling me, we are among his best-paying clients (apparently, preferring buying an app to watching ads :)).
  - nbaksalyar 10y ago
    I don't get your point. Why generalize over 140M people with your assumptions about illegal software usage and "thieve laws" in Russia in the topic about reverse engineering the Skype client? How does it even relate to Russia?
    - EugeneOZ 10y ago
      My reply was to comment about hacking culture. And it's not "assumptions" but experience.
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago

elitistphoenix 10y ago

Downloading before M$ lawyers get to it

kxd 10y ago
IRC is leaking again...

elitistphoenix 10y ago

Downloading before M$ lawyers get to it

mrwizrd 10y ago

For more context and commentary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2611299 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2611299

justinlardinois 10y ago

>> whether or not it is a clean-room reverse-engineered code, like Wine/ReactOS > No. Not clean room, not chinese wall. If it's not clean room, then there's probably copyright violations. For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design Also, offering commercial licensing? That's a good way to get a lot worse than just a DMCA takedown.

wolfgke 10y ago
> If it's not clean room, then there's probably copyright violations. This is the law in the United States. From the links given in the readme file the authors are probably from Russia.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Iv 10y ago
  As a non-US citizen, I can't wait to see a world where a whole IT industry will exist without caring much about merchandability in the US.
  - striking 10y ago
    Copyright extends beyond the US, due to certain treaties. But yes, Antigua's IT industry could get very interesting if they get to keep the whole copyright haven thing going.
- janoc 10y ago
  Copyright applies in Russia too. There are bits and pieces straight "reused" from other software - by his own admission. So his claim that he is a sole copyright owner is patently false - this code could be trivially attacked as a derivative work. No sane person would touch it by a 10 foot pole.
  - wolfgke 10y ago

cmarschner 10y ago

I do hope that the Skype people see it as an opportunity to improve product rather than threat / opportunity to sue the hell out of this project. WhatsApp would not have been necessary if they had gotten their act together. But at the time they were seemingly too busy sorting out technical and political ramifications of the MS acquisition and overlap with Lync. A more open approach to clients could save it, especially in the light that people are looking for alternatives after facebook is now starting to monetize WhatsApp.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

cjg 10y ago

Big problem, the code includes stuff ripped straight out of the original Skype client: https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/issues/2 https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource2/issues/2

cjg 10y ago

PieterH 10y ago

My guess at the origins of this project... Firm somewhere far away where Microsoft's lawyers cannot reach (China?) wanted Skype capability in their product and paid this smart Russian guy to reverse-engineer the Skype client. Smart guy gets permission to open source it and publishes it with commercial license option with hopes of finding more such clients. Personally I'd not touch this with a 3-meter bargepole, because I live in a country where people use copyright and trademark law to take people to court, yet it's an interesting project.

sargun 10y ago
I doubt it. What prevents a Chinese citizen from installing Skype? Nothing. It's the payment and protocol that are blocked. Looks useful for command and control type applications though.
- contingencies 10y ago
  It's not blocked. However, if you download in China you get a version specifically compromised for Chinese government surveillance.
jacquesm 10y ago
Telecommunications products should be based around open protocols. That Skype keeps their protocols to themselves should not be reason enough to send lawyers after software implementing interoperability after reverse engineering. Re-using the reverse engineered code is the problem, he should have simply used it to spec out the protocol and then use that spec to re-implement it.
- PieterH 10y ago
  One team documents the protocol as a spec. A second team takes the spec and writes implementations. The advantage of this for open source is that when the protocol changes, it's relatively simple for that first team to update the spec, and safe for the second team to update their code. This is legal and safe. It is how the first clone PCs survived even IBM's lawyers.

besselheim 10y ago

I remember seeing an earlier incarnation of this around five years ago; I'm very impressed with the author's dedication to this project. I don't know if it is still the case now, but I recall that earlier versions of Skype were quite heavily obfuscated and contained anti-debugging mechanisms. So it would have been quite an intricate reversing effort to get past these, on top of figuring out the protocol. Over time, Microsoft has changed the Skype protocol significantly since version 5.5 so I do wonder how applicable this work is to the current crop of clients.

0xmohit 10y ago
> I remember seeing an earlier incarnation of this around five years ago https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource https://github.com/skypeopensource/skypeopensource
- besselheim 10y ago
  The site I recall was Blogspot rather than Github: https://web.archive.org/web/20110602182718/http://skype-open-source.blogspot.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110602182718/http://skype-open...
  - skypeopensource 10y ago
    http://skype-open-source2.blogspot.ru/2016/09/first-in-world-skype-network-compatible.html http://skype-open-source2.blogspot.ru/2016/09/first-in-world...
skypeopensource 10y ago
> I remember seeing an earlier incarnation of this around five years ago Yes, its still up here: https://skype-open-source2.blogspot.com/ https://skype-open-source2.blogspot.com/

znpy 10y ago

I Hope this is better than the web version of Skype: it doesn't do the only thing it is supposed to do: phone calls.

fungos 10y ago

Developer is Efim Bushmanov, here an old interview about his first skupeopensource release: http://www.ewdn.com/2011/06/05/ewdn-exclusive-an-interview-with-efim-bushmanov/ http://www.ewdn.com/2011/06/05/ewdn-exclusive-an-interview-w...

brownbat 10y ago

As a reminder: https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumble_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumble_(software) I'm surprised the gaming chat programs don't get more crossover use. Well, I'm not surprised that a commercial project has a larger userbase than something that requires you to find a server. But I am surprised when, say, podcast hosts make jokes about lag or call quality on their Skype connections with guests. There are other applications that solve some of these problems, and I'd think if your main creative product relies on call quality for guests, you might look a few steps beneath the most ubiquitous option. (ie, If you're at the level where you're buying an uncommon specialist's mic, you could probably benefit from comparison shopping for voip implementations.)

cinch 10y ago
skype still has the best echo cancellation (that i've tried). you don't even need to wear headphones. according to a Tox developer: there aren't any comparable open source libraries.
- eeZi 10y ago
  Can confirm that Jitsi Meet works fine without headphones in Google Chrome. Google spent a lot of time optimizing WebRTC.
eeZi 10y ago
Another reminder: Jitsi Meet https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet Try it here: https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/ It's a modern, WebRTC-based replacement for Skype, Google Hangouts and other video/audio conferencing solutions. And it's great. The company I work for is now using it exclusively for meetings and telepresence. The echo cancellation is outstanding and you can even connect it to a SIP server. No client is required besides Google Chrome or Firefox. There's nothing that comes close to it in terms of sophistication and quality. It works well for one-on-one and audio calls.
giancarlostoro 10y ago
I try to push Mumble over Skype, the main issue with Mumble is that it's not as easy to get into. You spend too much time configuring your client, finding a server, etc. Things that should be fairly trivial. Then you may spend more time figuring out why you're not being heard, or why nobody's hearing you. Mumble is great but there's too much friction involved. I prefer Discord[0] because it's so easy to use by comparison, to test it you don't even need an account, you just run it from your browser. I just wish Discord had a Linux Client. [0]: https://discordapp.com/ https://discordapp.com/

lootsauce 10y ago

Totally not negative on this but I'm not a Skype user so can someone please explain to me why anyone would want to go to all the effort to reverse engineer it? I get that its closed and should be open, I get that its security is in question but if you want a more secure communications platform I can't imagine Skype is the only way forward and must be reverse engineered. Why not contribute to an existing open source project?