> Skype keeps ignoring people who complain or are having issues with Linux client All 234 of them!
All 234 of them... who are left?
Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client
411–420 of 483 posts
Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client
#412Skype worked far, far better 10 years ago than it does today. From all indications I've seen, Skype is getting dramatically worse all the time. From a personal standpoint, it crashes for me multiple times a day and I can rarely get group calls working on the first try. Often Skype requires a force-quit and then it crashes twice more when it is being restarted. This is on Mac and Android. Fun fact: I have a friend who…
> Skype worked far, far better 10 years ago than it does today. From all indications I've seen, Skype is getting dramatically worse all the time.
Yeah, I suspect it was originally written by people who knew what they were doing and now it has gone through years bottom-dollar maintenance to cut engineering costs.
Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've given up on the NSA not reading my stuff. The NSA collects pretty much anything they can get their hands on. It's a losing battle. If there's something I don't want the NSA to know about, I use Tails.
>If there's something I don't want the NSA to know about, I use Tails. This is a nice thought, but probably not realistic for a variety of reasons. Perhaps most relevantly, I would expect that a large quantity of major Tor exit nodes are tapped by the NSA. I would also expect that most servers you talk to are either already tapped by NSA in one way or another or can be tapped by the NSA trivially if they decide they…
Tor is vulnerable to adversaries that monitor Tor exit nodes. But this assumes for such adversaries to also control the destination service.
The attack is effective if the adversary is setting up its own fake websites and then luring users in (with child porn, etc.), correlating their traffic. But for hot services, like Gmail, even if the NSA has the potential to track Gmail's traffic, the noise and the false positives are too great.
And for services outside of the US jurisdiction, the NSA isn't able to legally coerce companies into giving them the keys needed for mass surveillance. Sure, they can reach agreements with local intelligence agencies for wiretapping and exchanging of information, but it would be an international disaster if it got out that foreign companies were forced through legal means by an US agency to hand over control. And this extends somewhat even to US-hosted servers of foreign companies. Yes they have physical access to US-based servers, no, it's not necessarily easy for them.
What this means is that the NSA is not able to control and measure many popular Internet services. It's also all a matter of cost. Raise the cost significantly and it will get too expensive to do mass-surveillance, even for the NSA.
Of course, if they target you directly, then all bets are off. Though in such a case they can just wiretap your home and office and hear everything you do or speak. But in the meantime if I use apps like Signal for communications, or PGP for my very private email, or SSL for connecting to my web server, I can be sure that the NSA is not tracking me because I'm not a target, I'm not a US citizen, I'm not interesting and it's probably expensive for them to track me through those channels.
Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client
#414I'm glad it still works.
Web skype is my fail-safe, but of course it will have no audio or video.
Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've actually had skype deployed in multiple locations as a way to do super cheap monitoring solution. 1) old laptops from ebay(probably paid $100 for each) 2) microsoft 3000 webcam 3) linux. Each laptop was configured with its own skype account, would start it on boot, audio out completely disabled, and set to pick up calls from friends automatically. Why not use a regular CCTV solution? I knew I could call that sky…
What kind of monitoring are you talking about, if I may? That solution, unless you haven't told the whole story, doens't record anything, so unless I'm watching closely just when they're robbing my hose it will be all for naught.
It's not recording, you are correct :-)
It was mostly to have a live preview from few locations, accessible anywhere, with sound. It wasn't used to stop thieves :-)
Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client
#416What I don’t understand is - Why is there not a serious competitor to Skype? If there was a cross-platform Skype clone that worked on OSX, Linux, Windows, iOS and Android that was stable and secure - the whole world would jump onto it. All it has to do is not be a bloated piece of crap like Skype. Instead, everything else out there is fragmented. We’re all waiting, get on it already!
There was an open-source competitor once... called Ekiga last I checked. Seems to be alive still.
Seems like it could be a good base for a company to sponsor. They could make money on the back-end phone system fees.
Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client
#417I'm surprised people still even use Skype, I went really down hill around 5 or so years ago. It's slow, bulky, closed source and it has been disclosed by Edward Snowden and Wikileaks to have ties directly into the prism program with the NSA.
My thoughts exactly. There have been better alternatives out there for a few years now. Whenever a client or customer requests a Skype call these days, there are always a few raised eyebrows.
And what are they?
Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client
#418Facebook for work will be #1 in a few years
Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client
#419The deep irony of this is that I prefer the linux client to the windows one (or did until it broke, haven't tried to make a call recently), because it is ad free, clean and simple. I wish there was a reverse-wine I could use to run it on windows.
I don't think you should ever try, but you can give cygwin a shot. You can, supposedly, get most linux packages running on Windows with Cygwin, but it would be almost as much work as Linux From Scratch.
I don't think I can do this without source access to skype, unless I'm missing something?
Re: Dear Skype/Microsoft: Problems with Linux client
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Fun fact: I have a friend who worked for Skype in Prague. He said the codebase is a true horror, an extreme mess, and that soon it would "reach a singularity" Being a developer, I read this and think, what developer thinks any existing codebase is NOT a mess. It's the number one developer complaint ever. They (we?) all think we know a better way.
I think I know a better way because I run a 7 figure a year project and the codebase isn't a mess. :/
In my experience it mostly just boils down to having the right processes and being strongly motivated to do things right rather than push things out the door as quickly as possible. Assuming superiors have your back, this is doable. It's when they don't or when the developers lose or completely lack motivation that things start to fall apart.
Lack of motivation often means lack of process, lack of process often means lack of testing and maintenance, lack of testing and maintenance often means lack of quality. It's a vicious cycle too - once you start down the road it's harder and harder to get motivated about your product again.