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Skype Goes After Reverse-Engineering
An anonymous reader writes "It appears Microsoft's Skype Division is cracking down on reverse-engineering of the Skype client. Skype recently rolled out a new set of APIs for integration into other desktop applications, but they have issued multiple DMCA takedown notices to a researcher publishing open-source code to send Skype messages."
Doesn't the DMCA have exceptions for interoperability purposes? Surely these would come into play for a communications tool...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Has this kind of crackdown on those who would reverse-engineer Skype's protocols always been around? Or has it only been elevated to prominence with the acquisition of Skype by Microsoft?
tl;dr can we hate on Microsoft?
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
Come to think of it, seeing as the EU required microsoft to publish protocol specs a few years back, would they now extend this requirement to cover skype?
I certainly think they should, proprietary unpublished protocols are extremely harmful to everyone else.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Oh Microsoft, it's just like you have never left.
If you're working on any kind of software that could piss off large corporations - console hacking, proprietary protocol reverse-engineering, DRM-breaking, etc - host the project on a darknet site anonymously so they can't send you takedown notices or sue you. This should be common sense by now.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Microsoft paid FAR too much for skype for them to stop wasting time, effort and more money on it now. Woe betide ye, FOSS clones... Time to look into this Google videoconferencing stuff.
Who wants to interoperate with their proprietary crap anyways.
SIP FTW.
Ahaha nice try, but that's a gaping goatse-hole.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
To all those people asking "Why do you hate MS so much?"
This is why.
When MS bought Skype I told people that Skype would die soon *because* MS bought it. Didn't know how or when but soon.
Now, MS will kill all the various clients that made Skype ubiquitous and useful. The new Skype will not run on as many platforms and (in true MS EEE fashion) will not work with previous versions either
Like Metalica, and Hurt Locker, Skype will now be shunned.
A new *open* protocol will take over.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Skype and their PR people are calling the project "malicious" and "nefarious", but it sounds like all it does is emulate Skype, so that you can send messages to Skype users while not having a proper account
They mention the possibility that it could be used for spam, but that sounds like blaming the tool. Is there some other way that this thing could be inherently "nefarious" that I'm not understanding? Because it doesn't look dangerous to me.
Unless you count the risks of an independent developer making something interoperable with, and potentially better than, the original product. We all know that's a grave and terrible danger to the safety of the free world.
Another program replaces Skype in the market and the resale value of Skype drops to $0.50 LOLOLOL
TinyChat Launches Dead-Simple Video Chat. But I can't tell if you need to connect through their site, and they already geo-located me, so maybe you should forget them, also. I'm looking for something with a direct connection between clients
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
An engineer buddy of mine was doing reverse-engineering work on the Skype protocol for a job he had a few years back, he would come to me with shock and tell me about how dumb and insecure the Skype clients are and how trivially easy it is to get any Skype client to work as an invisible proxy for you without that person's knowledge by just using the skype protocol.
If they're making such a huge deal about it, you have to wonder why. They've got some problems and they'd rather have security through obscurity. *sigh*
Does the DMCA really prevent cleanroom / chinese wall reverse-engineering? Damnit politicians just have no clue...
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
I ditched Skype ever since Version5 started an OS-level crashfest due to terrible video handling and essentially a "nofix" spat in my face. (not to mention that HUGE buglist)
And it has nothing to do with video chat exclusively, it has everything to do with the new terrible video canvas they are using in every single chat window by default.
I actually setup a script I could run to terminate the program instantly the moment I notice the same old glitch just seconds before it brings down the whole OS, but that only worked some of the time. So I got rid of it entirely.
Never had a program I have kept that brought down the full OS besides this and Flash. And that was an extreme corner case where I was setting Flash transparent inside a browser process. I reported it to Adobe and Mozilla, fixed in the next update, done.
They fixed it. Skype never even bothered. And I'd rather not have my OS die every time I want to chat. (which was pretty much every other day, if not every day, of the week)
Now this is another huge "fuck you" to the consumers.
Is this enough for you to want to ditch it yet?
Google+ has been a fantastic replacement so far (for me), have no complaints besides the silliness over the real names stuff, but they are dropping that now, so alls good.
I was just getting to look into Skype before M$ bought them, then I quickly thought twice once I heard of the deal. I knew that M$ would change the API to "improve" the product, and then do whatever they could to kick out other OS's from the list of supported hosts. Each, one by one, has come to pass. No surprises there, business as usual in Redmond.
Skype should really go after the morons for design their UI, because it has the worst possible user interface EVER.
The law forced Microsoft to provide them with the Windows Networking documentation: http://www.samba.org/samba/PFIF/
How this could or would apply to Skype . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
And I'm going to force all my friends who use skype to come with me.
Ever since Skype started emulating Facebook, I've just hated it.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
A more blatant violation of the !st Amendment you will never find.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Publish the FaceTime specifications and protocols already, as Steve said you would.
Commits to open source, then commits to extinguishing it.
http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/45131
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Skype may very well run on "Microsoft" operating systems, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it phased out on other platforms.
See what happened to RAV antivirus, and many others.
Embrace and extenguish.
No, the DMCA notice procedure says nothing about interoperability exemptions. And if you (and the people who modded up your question) had RTFAed you would see that is what the reference to DCMA was all about. This has nothing to do with anticircumvention prohibitions.
If somebody has a web page that you don't like (for any reason, it could be copyright infringement, it could be voicing a negative opinion, or it could be about a product that is compatible with yours), check to see who is hosting them. If it's someone who immediately folds upon receiving DMCA notices, then send 'em one. Silenced. That's what happened here: the Skype-compatible guy was using Google's blogger site, and Google is too big to be able to deal with counter-notices.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
and start pointing non-technical people to it. The sooner Skype dies, the better.
1. Run on bash:
wget 'http://github.com/downloads/skypeopensource/skypeopensource/Epycs.zip' -O epycs.zip
unzip epycs.zip
cd Epycs/sources/skypkt
echo $((0x`echo $USER | md5sum | cut -d " " -f 1`)) | while read x; do
files=`ls *.c *.h | tr " " \n | wc -l`;
file=`expr $x % $files` ; file=`expr $file + 1 `;
file=`ls *.c *.h | head -n $file | tail -n 1`;
echo $file.gz:
cat $file | tr -d \\t | grep -v ^// | grep -v ^$ | gzip --best -f - | base64 | tr -d \\n\\r
done > tshirt.txt
2. Print tshirt.txt on to your T Shirt.
3. Find other people who printed the other files.
4. Fun and profit!
...has a typo. It should be "since '95" instead of "since 95'". Since it talks about product quality, I figured it was worth pointing out.
Microsoft employing lawyers instead of developers again. Keep the crappy software and on some systems, old software or no software at all but bully and make money from anyone who wants to improve that pathetic situation.
It is time to move from Skype to SIP. With Skype, you pay for a Skype In number. With SIP you can get several for free. My SIP account is free, includes a free INUM number. Linking a free DID from IPKall or other provider is a piece of cake. With a free DID and Google Voice, calls to all the US and Canada are free. Worried about Skype compatibility? The SIP provider has had a SIP-Skype gateway for several months now. It is free too.
If you want Skype to ring a phone, you have only one option for hardware. If you want SIP to ring a real phone, any SIP compatible VOIP phone or SIP ATA will work fine with it. Traveling? I can have up to 3 SIP phones connected in several locations at the same time. First one answered takes the call. The Multi Presence is free too. Great for a business line at home and work.
Man this sounds like an infomercial. I won't mention any free SIP providers by name. Google them. There are several.
The truth shall set you free!
rendered on this Skype nonsense a waste of time. Talk to ten at a time, with video, using Hangout on your FireFox or Chrome browser. Kiss proprietary binaries good bye.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Remember when microsoft reverse engineered AOL's protocol so that their MSN client would interoperate with it?
That pissed off AOL and Microsoft justified it .. and kept working around the fixes AOL would try until finally a judge slapped Microsoft.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/12982/aol_and_microsoft_have_a_spat_over_chat.html
That was about 12 years ago, when AOL was the leader in instant messaging.
Microsoft = unscrupulous crooks, if it was OK for them to do it .. why is it bad if others do it?
MS buying Skype for that sum of money is among the five most stupid events ever in the history of human beings, perhaps even among three of them.
Rather than spending valuable developer resources on a lame red-queen issue like this, I'd advocate that the Skype people devote some resources to making a Mac version of Skype that doesn't totally blow goats. The new Skype for Mac is the only version of any piece of software that I have actively gone and downgraded back to an older version, and now, if I want to upgrade my Mac to Lion I need to 'upgrade' to the new, horrible version of Skype for Mac.
Now Google Talk handles calls to phones, and G+ allows multi-user hangouts I find I have less and less use for Skype thank heavens.
Please Skype people, I want a buddy list where I can actually list my contacts and see their names —is that too much to ask?
I want to be able to screen share part of my screen again, like I used to be able to.
Fixing those two things would make me come back to Skype.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
You are looking at the wrong end of the problem, the client is not the real problem... The real problem is the infrastructure which is expensive to obtain and maintain.
Skype runs servers in almost all countries, servers that provides SkypeOut and SkypeIn calls for a local fee, a free alternative would need that kind of service too.
Is it a top secret information that Skype uses XMPP/Jabber protocol for text messaging?
I'd like to take this opportunity again to highlight how,
I still think a place to host and develop projects protected in the same way as speech like Freenet is important.
It could just be an eepsite, mirrored to Freenet.
There is probably partial answers to this but something as convenient as Google Code, sourceforge & github is called for
A blog I run for the wealth
And I don't see why anyone else continues to use it. When I heard of the MS buyout of Skype, I immediately closed my Skype account and deleted the software. I want nothing to do with the criminal monopoly that owns it now.
Web RTC Site
It's what Google Hangouts uses. I would love to set up some sort of Web RTC server on my own system to use.
Nimbuzz is better and for a while offered Skype service (a good indication of an interoperability disposition).
Plus the added scariness of M$ becoming involved means I heartily recommend it, even if it wasn't already just plain better and cheaper.
It's run by a company out of the Netherlands (EU. Legal protection, information and privacy respect + support for most IM networks + Available for all major platforms).
Let's not do MSN again; no storage of sent messages, no privacy, crappy client application, split up community (ICQ, Jabber, AOL, Yahoo!, ETC.).