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I have been using skype on linux for a while now, but the Linux support is getting worse.

Skype does not support ALSA, causing all kinds of weird problems. There is a bug in skype that require a restart after any voice call (it does not close /dev/dsp after use). These problems should have been fixed a long time ago.

I am actively searching for a better solution.

Guillemot has a bundle with a headset and Skype, with 30 minutes of SkypeOut included. http://www.skype.com/company/news/2004/guillemotla unch.html/
Wasn't this available in the USA ?

If the headsets are the same as those being given out at my student union, they're just this. I don't know about the quality.

Dear ./ editors,

in upcomming articles about Skype tell us (=the readers) that Skype was aquired by eBay.

It's important to know that Skype has the multi billion dollar backing of eBay. Whatever Skype tries out, they never will run out of money for the next years.

It's not really about free speech here. It's just the chinese goverment protecting it's profits.

Of course it's about free speech, Skype is a point-to-point communication service that encrypts all data, from both voice and chat. Do you really think the Chinese Communists are going to allow a communication service which they can't eavesdrop at will on? The whole "protecting China Telecom's profits" argument may be another reason for doing this, but rest assured the real reason is the Chicom's continued oppression of free speech among the Chinese public.

Somebody go so annoyed with this that they wrote a wrapper to intercept the calls to the AOSS emulation layer to fix the seemingly trivial re-opening of the already open sound device. Look for 'skype_dsp_hijacker' http://www.skype.com/help/guides/soundsetup_linux. html Which leads to the closed source criticism.. But how many open source programs have been sold for $2.5B?
It now works fine and I've just had a very enjoyable conference chat with family in Australia and the UK, while here in the USA.

Only Linux/ALSA is supported.

Windows, Linux and MacOS is supported. On Linux, Skype uses OSS, not ALSA. ALSA support is in the works.

Audio is poor quality: only 8KHz 1 channel 8 bit sampling.

Audio quality scales with available bandwith/cpu power. Skype dynamically switches codecs depending on the available resources.

Encryption not turned on by default.

Really? All Skype calls are encrypted end-to-end by default - Skype to PSTN calls are encrypted until it reaches the PSTN network.

User interface uses harsh, unfriendly colours.

Subjective. The Linux version can easily be themed through QT, as it is dynamically linked to your QT library.

The ringing sound is kind of loud, and surprises you when you're not expecting it because you forgot to set your status to not interrupt you.

Not only can you change the default ring tone, you can download free ringtones from the Skype website...

So... What was the problem again?

Steve Bellovin reported to the cryptography mailing list that
Skype has released an external security evaluation of its product; you
can find it at
http://www.skype.com/security/files/2005-031%20sec urity%20evaluation.pdf
(Skype was also clueful enough to publish the PGP signature of the
report, an excellent touch -- see
http://www.skype.com/security/files/2005-031%20sec urity%20evaluation.pdf.sig)
The author of the report, Tom Berson, has been in this business for many
years; I have a great deal of respect for him.

Steve Bellovin reported to the cryptography mailing list that
Skype has released an external security evaluation of its product; you
can find it at
http://www.skype.com/security/files/2005-031%20sec urity%20evaluation.pdf
(Skype was also clueful enough to publish the PGP signature of the
report, an excellent touch -- see
http://www.skype.com/security/files/2005-031%20sec urity%20evaluation.pdf.sig)
The author of the report, Tom Berson, has been in this business for many
years; I have a great deal of respect for him.

Skype has a guide for network administrators, and there's also this analysis of the Skype protocol.

Skype uses a proprietary session-establishment protocol. The cryptographic purposes of this protocol are to protect against replay, to verify peer identity, and to allow the communicating peers to agree on a secret session key. The communicating peers then use their session key to achieve confidential communication during the lifetime of the session. I analyzed this protocol, and found that it achieves its cryptographic aims. Further, I explored the strength of the protocol against a range of well-known attacks, including replay attack and man-in-the-middle attack. I determined that each of the attack scenarios is computationally infeasible.

Has there BEEN any vulnerabilities reported?

Yes, and Skype even has a web page dedicated to describing them:
http://www.skype.com/security/bulletins.html

And all of the listed vulnerabilities there have been fixed.

Will this cool Skype's rapid progress into the business arena?"

Not if a first post on slashdot links to http://www.skype.com/

This will probably get bashed to high heavens, but Skype recently got their software reviewed by an independent security expert. Favourably.

I have wireless broadband, and for a split second I WAS going to consider getting VOIP for local phone calls and such. Just last week, my dad and brother said they wanted to use Skype for audio (ie microphone) talk, so that the whole family (yes all 11 of us) could chat at once (possibly). I got this Skype thing (well Firefly has been around longer but anyway), and as SOON as I made my first call, the DAMN microphone didn't work! AAARRGH! So I found out that Skype automatically MUTED my damn microphone as SOON as I made a call or someone called me! Looking at the skype forum for an answer (http://forum.skype.com/search.php?mode=results&si d=83696fae9b3425f540f3148286a72448), I found out that heaps of other people have this problem too. The second person I ever rang up on Skype has the EXACT same microphone muting problem. My point is, what's the damn use of buying VOIP when it is STILL BUGGY! Btw, I tried a 3-way conference call, and there was horrible feedback and echoing occurring. So again, what's the damn use? Nothing! At least if I used a normal phone line (ie from PABX or whatever), I would still be able to call people, without relying on my wireless connection. Thanks to those lovely raindrops and the extra surface area they have, I can't rely on using VOIP during even a damn rain shower cause my wireless net would cut out. Ahhh dear..

In addition to the number of good IM clients for Linux (especially GAIM), if you want voice chat (VoIP) on Linux then you have a good selection too: PhoneGaim : http://www.phonegaim.com/ ( http://cockatoo.mozdev.org/ ( http://www.gizmoproject.com/ ( http://www.linphone.org/ KPhone : http://www.wirlab.net/kphone/ Skype : http://www.skype.com/ ( http://www.minisip.org/ SFLphone : http://www.sflphone.org/ SIPfoundry : http://www.sipfoundry.org/ Twinkle : http://www.twinklephone.com/ openwengo : http://www.openwengo.com/ Yate : http://yate.null.ro/ shtoom : http://www.divmod.org/projects/shtoom Best to get one that connects via 'SIP' and is entirely standard-compliant, then you can connect to anyone on other standard networks (except those in closed networks like Skype(???)).

Siemens already offer a USB Skype dongle in Europe to communicate with their Gigaset DECT phones.

Almost one year :-)

Here's the joint press release from Siemens and Skype:

http://www.skype.com/company/news/2004/siemens.htm l

There may still be a market because Gizmodo states that Siemens does not deliver their adapter to the U.S.:

http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/software/siemens-sk ype-usb-adapter-not-coming-to-us-025688.php

Ooops, here's a link Gigaset M34

I know because for the last year I have been using this very same phone, and wondering why there are no other alternatives. Could this extra recognition from manufacturers come due to eBay's recent purchase of Skype?

I am actually sympathetic to the basic idea here: New platform.

I'm newly skeptical of the approach of endlessly creating side-systems on the web browser.

There are amazing things that are possible when you make a new platform for integrating ideas.

For example, we can envision a world where you can watch people writing blog posts as they write them. We can imagine working on documents together with others in real-time. We can imagine social networks, we can imagine shared web browsing. We can imagine going to a web page, and seeing other people who happen to be browsing the web page at the same time as well. We can imagine looking at them, seeing what their affiliations are; There are all these things. We have seen voice communication. Within 10 years, good voice synthesis will be coupled, and we'll be able to look and sound like anybody.

Now, what we haven't seen, even in our imaginations, is all this stuff working together. Integrated into one platform.

Doing this stuff piece-meal, a little bit at a time, on the edge of the network, isn't going to work. It's just not. It'd take forever. Building new standards into the existing network just takes forever. There is no design team. Nadah. Nothing.

Where we see the cool stuff happening, really, is in these large behemeouth new platform.

Now, sure, we can get some milage out of AJAX. We can do sophisticated things with that.

But are we really going to make a 3D world with live document editing, voice & synthesis, presence, infinite versioning on everything, avatars, the whole thing, yadda yadda yadda, using just AJAX? Within 10-15 years? Hell no! It takes at least at least 5 years to make a new specification pretty much standard amongst users. Even RSS aggregators have only 10% penetration amongst blog readers.

What does this mean? It means that a new platform is in the works. Whether you know it or not, a new platform is in the works. Which of the new upstarts is going to be it, remains to be seen.

Sure, sure, sure-- there will be gateways between the world of Vanilla HTML + AJAX into these new worlds.

At some point, you can make a computer render pictures of the new world, and ship them off in AJAX. You can even play Lemmings in the browser now. (Well, you could have...) But the new world is going to be built in the new world. It's not going to be built piecemeal out here in weblandia. When we use browsers to access it, it will be a window into that world, but it will not be that world.

Why is the parent insightful? Skype does use encryption:
http://support.skype.com/?_a=knowledgebase&_j=ques tiondetails&_i=145

Where as something like Asterisk doesn't:
http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=SIP+e ncryption+for+Asterisk
even though there is a bounty to implement it:
http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Aster isk+Bounty+SIP+encryption

You might not like skype for a number of reasons, but lack of secure communication isn't one of them.

I suspect that you are right on this, especially as Skype recently launched exactly what you describe (minus the PayPal tie in) - http://www.skype.com/company/news/2005/skype_voice services.html

Skype help page claims it to work with ALSA. something about USB headset and distros. No nitpicking here, but may be you haven't tried enough.

Skype help page claims it to work with ALSA. something about USB headset and distros. No nitpicking here, but may be you haven't tried enough.

Skype help page claims it to work with ALSA. something about USB headset and distros. No nitpicking here, but may be you haven't tried enough.

Skype for Linux requires glibc 2.3.3 or greater and Qt 3.2 or greater. ever heard of FAQs.
I am not advocating skype here, but do check your facts before posting.

As a metter of fact, it does

From Skype's Terms of Service
8.1
Further, as stated in the Privacy Policy, Skype and/or its local partners may need to provide such data to designated competent authorities upon request, or may need to enter into further activities due to local regulations, for example with regard to the interception of communications, if requested by such authorities.

So basically the government just has to send some kind of official request to Skype and they'll do all the legwork.

Could this have something to do with the fact that China Telecom charges close to $1 per minute for calls to United States and Europe?"

No, more likely it has to do with the fact that Skype calls and chats are encrypted, preventing the controlling communist government and party from eavesdropping on their populace via their state-controlled telcoms. Certainly such a thing is absolutely unacceptable for the Chinese Communist Party.

"Skype is currently the only provider to allow calls to landlines and cellphones." Actually, there are two other services right now that offer calls to landlines and cell phones. 1) Skype Out. This is one of the paid services from Skype whereby for a very low fee (about 2 cents per minute for US residents) you can use Skype to call out to landlines and cell phones anywhere in the world. 2) Gizmo Project which is a US based opened source version of Skype which many users say offers even better sound quality then Skype. Like Skype, they also offer a call out service called Gizmo Call Out which can also be used to call landlines and cell phones (for about 1.8 cents per minute for US users) anywhere in the world. http://www.skype.com/products/skypeout/ http://www.gizmoproject.com/call-out.html

http://share.skype.com/
http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/08/24/skype/inde x.php

SkypeOut calling rates are still cheaper than the Gizmo ones. Until something seriously threatening comes out from this Google-SIPPhone alliance, I'll be sticking to Skype.

More than that, it's quite a bother to push all your contacts to download another piece of software. With all the IM services (MSN, ICQ, AIM, etc.), it's easy: you have multi-IM clients like Trillian/Adium/gaim/whatever. But can we really expect a multi-VoIP client?

It just looked like YAIM to me until I read this:

You should also be able to use Google Talk at your company, since voice calls should work across any firewall or NAT.

If this is true, then it blows MSN Messenger, AIM, Yahoo Chat, iChat etc. out of the water.

Getting these kinds of applications to work is getting harder and harder due to all the broadband routers out there your NAT-lock you in - and making it pretty damn hard for Joe Sixpack to configure it to properly route incoming UDP and TCP connections.

For me, being on a campus network not allowing incoming UDP nor remotely-initiated TCP connections it's been impossible to you use any kind of voice functionality in IM clients (with the exception of Skype).

Has anyone tested this? Is Google Talk using a P2P approach similar to Skype to make this work?

Does that mean that skype is dead? http://www.skype.com/ Lars

Yes

http://accessories.skype.com/item?SID=5d9ba1d6cf62 52723dd960807ee8ad5ac20:4515&sku=3045PH

and btw, could you let me know how it goes ? I'd love to know how this thing performs ...

Umm...

From Skype's Terms of Service
8.1
Further, as stated in the Privacy Policy, Skype and/or its local partners may need to provide such data to designated competent authorities upon request, or may need to enter into further activities due to local regulations, for example with regard to the interception of communications, if requested by such authorities.
So, if you're using Skype for the privacy features, dump it and switch to SpeakFreely. Skype CAN wiretap you and never said that it wouldn't.

First file excange, now some guy/gal made a "music-on-call" bot... What's wrong with this world? Do you want it on to be legeal too?

Skype is already slightly crippled because of an M$ patent covering 'the other person is typing'. They have not put in this very useful feature even though other clients have it and Skype is based outside the USA.

They also have a system that is directly affected by this patent. You can type an emoticon in a chat session and Skype will interpret it and display a custom emoticon instead of what you typed. Hello from Picassa/Google does this too.

Frankly, in light of the recent trashing of EU software patents I wish that Skype would just go ahead and put this feature in. Why should everyone in the world have to suffer crippled software because the US has a morally bankrupt patent office handing out nonsense patents like candy?

TA mentions audio features so I guess you could use skype to get the phone features working.

But the device uses an ARM chipset instead of the usual x86. Skype would have to be recompiled to support the ARM chip and while Skype is a great application, the source is not available requiring us to depend on the vendor to recompile it. I would love to have Skype on my Zaurus but the ARM chipset is not supported though there is a scream for it.

The problem is landlines. You can't connect to them using this software unless you pay extra ? I understand alot of people will save on long distance using pc to pc Voip but connecting to landlines offers no big cost savings.

Verizon long distance per minute USA to Slovakia: $3.69

SkypeOut rate per minute USA to Slovakia: euro 0.055

I'd say there's a bit of savings there.

Yabutt, if you want to call another PHONE, you need to subscribe to SkypeOUT which adds anohter layer of cost http://www.skype.com/products/skypeout/rates
Still not as expensive as a second plan, but FAR from "free"

... have to pay $60/month minimum for two-phone wireless service and 2c a minute to termine the call at a real phone.

You've met "free-as-in-speech" and "free-as-in-beer" -- now meet "free-as-in-really-expensive"! Yayyyy capitalism!!

http://www.skype.com/products/skype/linux/

http://support.skype.com/index.php?_a=knowledgebas e&_j=questiondetails&_i=70&nav2=General

Why is Skype better than Net2Phone, ICQ, AIM, MSN, etc?

Because it works! Most Voice-over-IP applications don't work from behind firewalls and NAT (Network Address Translation) devices. Nearly all broadband users are behind a NAT or firewall and so they cannot use VoIP applications. Skype is not a typical VoIP application - it's P2P Telephony! Because of its advanced design, Skype works behind nearly any firewall and NAT!

all you really need is a speaker and a microphone. my thinkpad has both of them built in, so i just talk straight at it. you can also just use the regular headphone and microphone inputs and outputs on your soundcard.

skype have also teamed up with a number of 3rd parties to bring, as you mention, usb-based handsets & headsets out that support Skype. you can find them here. the headsets may look a bit ridorkulous, but a colleague (developer) at the office here uses one and swears by it. he can code and talk at the same time without getting shoulder cramp from holding a headset to his ear. just checking now, they have a "Starter Kit" for like £4.50 which includes a hands-free thing as well as some free SkypeOut credit. i may even get one!

in terms of what Skype does, it's a really well designed and easy to use PC-based VOIP solution. you install it and it just works. skype-to-skype calls are 100% free, but obviously the SkypeOut calls to traditional phone systems are paid-for. i've been using SkypeOut myself for a few months and i find it's cheaper than most of the other low-cost phone thingies. friends of mine have got SkypeIn and Skype Voice Mail going on (also paid-for) and rave about them.

anyway, an interesting company to watch.

Can anyone give a quick explanation of what exactly skype is?

First link on Google:

http://www.skype.com/

In summary: Talk for free to all other Skype users on the net all over the world using a headset, with great sound quality. Better than normal phones in my experience. Call to ordinary phones all over the world from the net for a small fee (how they make money).

Client available for many Linux distros, Windows etc. Swede Niklas Zennström also man behind Kazaa (though I think he is an entepreneur rather than a programmer). This time he promises clients are adware/spyware free. Don't know if it is, but seems to work fine for me and I haven't seen anything strange from the firewall. I'm no security expert and in theory I guess it could wait and send sneaky information together with the sound data while you are making the calls...

I thought of this sometime last week. I was astonished to discover no results when I queried Google. I suppose someone out there is knocking together an IP over Skype stack and has yet to unleash it on the world... but at least I wasn't unsuspecting. I wonder if IP over Skype might win the 5000 EUR award for the Skype API Competition

Skype is a proprietary protocol and nobody has reverse engineered it yet.
You use the API Skype provides.
Since asterisk is a PBX exchanger the way to deal with skype is simple, you run skype calls though the handy dandy api, and then feed the audio data back into asterisk, where it can then handle the rest of the call routing etc etal.

Feel lucky they don't have a -1 'wrong' moderation ;)

Is Skype fairly reliable/stable? How often does it drop calls?

I've never had a problem with Skype. I only have a cell phone and Skype at home so when I'm out my wife has to use Skype as the primary phone. Neither of us prefer to use it though because of the slight delay in voice (which is common with voip.) Never had it drop a call on me though. Overall Skype is pretty good with great quality voice and never dropped calls. Purchasing a phone for it would probably make us more inclined to use it.