Skype To Take Action Against Reverse-Engineering

[Remco]

PS. And what is it about Skype's linux client? Am I the lucky one for whom it works or what?

Skype is riddled with bugs. More often than not, audio doesn't come through. It simply stays silent. The only audio chat protocol that consistently works for me is Google Talk through Empathy.

[yotambien]

Skype is riddled with bugs. More often than not, audio doesn't come through. It simply stays silent. The only audio chat protocol that consistently works for me is Google Talk through Empathy.

I blame pulse audio. And if you don't use pulse audio I blame you : D

Nah, seriously, that's pretty bad. I know it sucks saying "it works for me" but that's exactly my situation here.

[SunnyDrake]

"This unauthorized use of our application for malicious activities like spamming/phishing infringes on Skype's intellectual property. We are taking all necessary steps to prevent/defeat nefarious attempts to subvert Skype's experience. Skype takes its users' safety and security seriously and we work tirelessly to ensure each individual has the best possible experience."

Fraud, Scare tactics.... is it under M$ already.
Seriously it's a very clever email that not directly associate Reverse Engineer with event BUT MAKING YOU MICHAEL TO DO IT!.... and when sniffing own network traffic and analyzing it became illegal.
Btw: in recent weeks i noted 3 skype things.. it make almost constant segfault when i try to run it second time, new EULA agreement after published skype fix, and some skype spam texts..

[Remco]

I blame pulse audio. And if you don't use pulse audio I blame you : D

Nah, seriously, that's pretty bad. I know it sucks saying "it works for me" but that's exactly my situation here.

Well, at least Empathy now works. It used to crash whenever someone made a call to me. Still, when it works Skype has way superior audio quality. But I take working cracking audio over silence.

[Prescience500]

Between being bought by Microsoft and these new shenanigans, who wants to join me and boycott Skype?

[myxal]

We are taking all necessary steps to prevent/defeat nefarious attempts to subvert Skype's experience.

They're firing the team which designed win-Skype 4 and 5's UI? 'bout damn time. What an atrocity those are.

[yesterday]

fyi, MS actually never won against the lindows case, but the devs were basically told to change the name, probably because the court was tired of hearing MS bitch and moan. today, paying for linspire is to help cover their court costs.

You are mixing up completely unrelated things.

Lindows was a TRADEMARK dispute. And it is pretty obvious to be honest. I can't start a shoe company called Seebok, nor a softdrink company called Tepsi.

This has nothing to do with trademarks whatsoever. Reverse engineering isn't illegal, even in the US with DMCA which has a interoperability fair use exemption. The only thing they can do is change the protocol. Which they will do

[yoshi314]

skype has solid legal basis for making action over this.

because, apparently protocol was not really reverse engineered, but the executable was processed with disasseblers and debuggers. that makes it illegal.

a clean room reimplementation would be the right thing to do, law permits that.

[crazycheese]

We are taking all necessary steps to prevent/defeat nefarious attempts to subvert Skype's experience.


Skype experience?
Like...

Self-resolving invasive routing?
Anti-softice, anti-debug, anti-interrupt routines?
Encrypted runtime-decyphering binaries?
Complete blackbox?
Zero security?
Exposing of personal data, reading of system files?
Availability of bot-nets running on skype network?

What do they fear? The data showing up what they actually use p2p bandwith for?

[89c51]

i would prefer the resources that went into reverse engineering skype to have been dedicated in improving xmpp+audio/video plus doing more to make it more known.

even ubuntu/canonical doesn't try much in promoting this ie screenshots of Ubuntu chat chient (with video) connected to an android phone (or anything else for the matter) etc

similar to what apple did with facetime

anyway