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Pidgin Adds Google Talk Voice and Video Support (and a Vulnerability)

Posted by timothy on from the hey-sometimes-stuff-happens dept.

ottothecow writes "While various attempts at video and voice support have been in the pipeline since long before GAIM became Pidgin, fully functioning support over XMPP is on its way. Lifehacker reports that Pidgin 2.6 adds voice and video support for GChat (and presumably any other XMPP network) for Mac and Linux. Windows still has a few bugs but they are being worked on. Pidgin 2.6.1 is only available as source at the moment (but precompiled versions are available at getdeb)." Less happily, an anonymous reader writes "A remote arbitrary-code-execution vulnerability has been found in Libpurple (used by Pidgin and Adium instant messaging clients, among others), which can be triggered by a remote attacker by sending a specially crafted MSNSLP packet with invalid data to the client through the MSN server. No victim interaction is required, and the attacker is not required to be in the victim's buddy list (under default configuration)."

2 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. ummmm? by CRiMSON · · Score: 5, Informative

    2.6.1 is only available as source at the moment?

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/pidgin/files/Pidgin/pidgin-2.6.1.exe

    So that's magic? If you install that do the terrorists win?

    --
    oogly boogly!
  2. 2.5.9 and 2.6.1 are different releases by Laven · · Score: 5, Informative

    2.5.9 and 2.6.0 were both released Tuesday, August 18th addressing this security issue (CVE-2009-2694). 2.5.9 is 2.5.8 with only CVE-2009-2694 addressed and an unrelated crash bug fix. 2.6.0 contains CVE-2009-2694 in addition to many other bug fixes and the new Voice and Video support.

    Unfortunately, another security issue was discovered with sending URL's over the Yahoo protocol and 2.6.1 was released on Wednesday, August 19th. According to the pidgin developers, 2.5.9 was not affected by separate bug.

    Note: The Voice and Video support in pidgin-2.6.1 is a bit fragile. You MUST have the latest version of farsight2 and the stack of libraries it requires. You may also need to open ports on your firewall to allow it to connect.