Reasons not to use Skype (2012) • Hacker News Board

Re: Reasons not to use Skype (2012)

#131

Post by sowbug » Sat, Jan 07, 2017, 3:55 PM UTC

danellis wrote: post #114

"The most obvious alternative is a long-distance phone card." What part of Stallman's position makes him fine with communicating and encouraging people to communicate using switches running proprietary software? For that matter, how does he justify using the Internet rather than anything other than community networks running open source routing software?

He explains here: https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Switches are OK because they're not computers he maintains himself.

Re: Reasons not to use Skype (2012)

#132

Post by drc0 » Sat, Jan 07, 2017, 3:59 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #15

What is a good solution that allows dialing to pots? Google voice and what else?

Piggybacking the question to state a general info:

There are voip operators like the italian mtalk that give you free local national numbers, free calls between users of the same provider, but the call is not encrypted.

This have the good thing that anyone can choose the preferred provider, you can receive calls also from "traditional" phones.

A phone number is like a mailbox, it's clearly provider independent, but sadly it's often non free calling between different operators.

Re: Reasons not to use Skype (2012)

#133

Post by RubyPinch » Sat, Jan 07, 2017, 4:10 PM UTC

danellis wrote: post #114

"The most obvious alternative is a long-distance phone card." What part of Stallman's position makes him fine with communicating and encouraging people to communicate using switches running proprietary software? For that matter, how does he justify using the Internet rather than anything other than community networks running open source routing software?

Via your mouth (for phones) or your browser (for the internet), you can control what information you give/send properly.

If you have code executing on your machine, you can not control what information that code will take (unless you know that it is 100% safely sandboxed)

And AFAIK, Stallman doesn't spend a lot of time "directly" connected to the wide web, as tracking leads to forcing the user to give information they don't want to give (short random distinct interactions with the internet are fine, as long as they are short enough to not allow for inferences to be made)

Re: Reasons not to use Skype (2012)

#134

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 07, 2017, 4:19 PM UTC

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #38

roesel wrote: post #5

I am not sure who this guy is, but he seems a little out of this world.

Stallman warned people in detail about the dangers of putting everything in "the cloud" years and years before everyone started putting their photos in the cloud, getting hacked, and celebrities' nude photos being leaked on the internet. If you think he's crazy about a topic just wait 5 years, you'll admit he's right.

[deleted]

Re: Reasons not to use Skype (2012)

#135

Post by Mister_Y » Sat, Jan 07, 2017, 4:29 PM UTC

janekm wrote: post #115

Reasons to use Skype: - you need to talk to someone, and by the time you've explained why you don't want to use Skype you could have already been done

We're talking about the long term here :D

One minute lost by saying you don't want to use Skype might give you the benefit of convincing another person to join you video conference platform choice!

Re: Reasons not to use Skype (2012)

#136

Post by dexterdog » Sat, Jan 07, 2017, 4:30 PM UTC

drc0 wrote: post #128

cryptarch wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal has voice calling as well. The bitrate is a bit low for my taste but it's pretty damned reliable, long distance as well.

the begin of the conversation is a bit lacking though, you need to wait few seconds and few "do you hear me?" tests. I don't use it often but happened not hearing the other side in the middle of the conversation, need to investigate this further.

I don't have connection problem with Signal when I use it. The problem I do have is that the call will almost always drop before a few minutes are up.

Re: Reasons not to use Skype (2012)

#137

Post by faragon » Sat, Jan 07, 2017, 4:34 PM UTC

And again, Stallman is right. Despite how much convenient, cheap, and easy Skype could be.

P.S. Is today the "day against Stallman" in Hacker News? Come on.

Re: Reasons not to use Skype (2012)

#138

Post by striking » Sat, Jan 07, 2017, 4:47 PM UTC

morganvachon wrote: post #125

RansomTime wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if it's a better choice for everyone. With mumble you'd need to maintain a server, for instance. If your primary concern is open source then mumble/jabber is probably your solution

Mumble's requirements are fairly low, you could get by with a $3/month VPS or even a RasPi. Maintenance is down to keeping the OS updated, which is trivial on pretty much any VPS Linux install, as well as Raspbian. If you're truly paranoid there's a Mumble port for OpenBSD, though that obviously wouldn't fit Stallman's definition of Free.

Last time I tried it, you had to do stuff like generate certificates and open ports and while it wasn't too much of a big deal and improved voice quality a lot, everyone wanted to stay on Skype.

Until we moved to Discord. Which has equally good sound quality, a fantastic chat and role system, and the ability for people to just jump into your voice call instead of having to be invited (which was what killed Skype for us, for any number of people over 3).

I'm part of a bunch of guilds for just hanging out and playing video games. But I also moderate two Discord guilds for programming, containing thousands of people.

Discord's pretty sweet, in a way that Skype and Mumble simply can't compare.

Re: Reasons not to use Skype (2012)

#139

Post by lightedman » Sat, Jan 07, 2017, 4:49 PM UTC

arrakeen wrote: post #126

lightedman wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Every one would be living in a little bit of a different world and all the computer tech guys would be living in a completely different world with out RMS." Someone else would've likely done the same thing sooner or later.

free software and the web both happened at the right place and the right time. do you really think the web would be what it is today if you needed to buy a $10k webserver from IBM to host a site? sure, someone else would likely have eventually come up with the concept of free software, but would it have missed the critical mass of the early web? the idea that free software didn't play a large part in the modern techn…

"but would it have missed the critical mass of the early web"

You should probably hold a slightly lower opinion of your fellow human. We're rather well-known to go after any possibility of free things, and critical mass was more along the lines of the days of Napster (when, hey, FREE MUSIC!)

Re: Reasons not to use Skype (2012)

#140

Post by tonyplee » Sat, Jan 07, 2017, 4:50 PM UTC

astrodust wrote: post #24

nkkollaw wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has been around for almost 50 years, though. They must do something right?

Microsoft has acquired very few products, and of those a shockingly slim number have succeeded. I can only think of Excel as being the real survivor here. Others, like SoftImage, were a fleeting acquisition. Many more were buried alive.

DOS is a acquired product, for $50k? :-)

They only finally disable cmd.exe in the latest update.

.bat files still run.