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Newest Skype For Linux Enables SMS Text Messages From The Desktop (betanews.com)
BrianFagioli writes: Microsoft has delivered an incredible feature to Linux-based desktop operating systems by way of the latest Alpha version of its Skype client... The newly-released Skype for Linux 1.13 allows users to send SMS test messages from the operating system! True, web-based solutions such as Google Voice have long allowed the sending of text messages, but needing to use a web browser can be a chore. There is convenience and elegance in using the Skype for Linux client.
There is convenience and elegance in using the Skype for Linux client.
The Skype for Linux client has never been convenient or elegant. Have they made massive improvements of late?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I would much rather the devs at skype/microsoft take the time to fix the features that used to work, which has since the new "alpha" been broken like video calling, which was one of the MAIN features of skype and on of the few applications that allowed cross platform video calling.
This is much more desirable than sending messages via SMS.
Sanity is a majority vote.
I've got a paid up Skype account and I've been able to send text messages from the desktop client for years.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Don't believe Microsoft ever swore off this:
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
With the new administration getting appointments with folks who support mass surveillance and a CIC who stated he wanted to be able to spy on his political enemies, you have to wonder who will be in his crosshairs over the next 4 years. Things in this area are probably not going to get better. Best to assume any Skype communication will be stored by government forever, for future use and decide if you want to use this product from this company - whatever the "features" are.
Why does this summary read like sophomore year marketing homework?
Don't touch this, Trumpskys backers will have access to it soon.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/newly-published-nsa-documents-show-agency-could-grab-all-skype-traffic/
"A National Security Agency document published this week by the German news magazine Der Spiegel from the trove provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden shows that the agency had full access to voice, video, text messaging, and file sharing from targeted individuals over Microsoft’s Skype service.....The document details how to “task” the capture of voice communications from Skype by NSA’s NUCLEON system, which allows for text searches against captured voice communications. It also discusses how to find text chat and other data sent between clients in NSA’s PINWALE “digital network intelligence” database."
Thanks. I don't trust you. Not interested.
For SMS I just use my dumbphone.
The Skype client for Linux is built on Electron, so while you do not see a web browser, a slow and bloated browser engine is running under the hood.
How any developer can be satisfied with using Electron is beyond me.
Well systemd does, and pulseaudio, and avahi, and dbus, and iproute2, and udev, and wayland, and rust, and gnome, and the new kernel versioning scheme (are we at 5.0 yet in the 2.6 series?)
Seems like as a general rule, Linux users have poor taste in software.
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something like say: /
rm -fr
I already know that you hate systemd, so pulseaudio, dbus and udev gets thrown in as guilt by association but why on earth complain about Wayland?
It is an incredible feature. It is incredible that anyone is still sending SMS in 2016. It does, however, reflect Microsoft's grasp of the latest trends in mobile technology.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Wake me up when they make a JSON API available.
"There is convenience and elegance in using the Skype for Linux client." The same could also be said about NOT having to use a fat client, but via a web browser.
That's why I'm really looking forward to the thick-client version of slashdot. This web browser nonsense is rubbish, I really want to install a separate app for each website that I use, and I hope all of these thick clients implement the same features in a consistent manner such as back button browser tabs etc.
RTFM is not a radio station.
And not very good one, either. Dr. Goebbels would not have been proud. Once again, consider yourself middle-fingered, Microsoft.
The moron's name is Brian Fagioli.
are they faking it?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
It's strange because I'm using Skype 4.3.0.37 on linux right now.
Skype for Linux has been able to send SMS messages for 10 years or so. What's new about this?
If you Google the morons name you can see his picture. Yes, he looks like you would expect.
With webrtc now well supported in Firefox, Chromium, Chrome, Opera, I have completely ditched Skype, and I just send my relatives a simple web link to click on when I want to chat with them.
I think it is more reliable than Skype too.
guilt by association
Do you always jump to conclusions this fast? It has little to do with association. What makes it hard to believe that I might actually have individual reasons to dislike the mentioned projects? And how on earth would you omit avahi vom the "guilt by association" claim? Are you out of your depth here, again? :-)
why on earth complain about Wayland?
Because it perfectly matches the pattern?
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Maybe because it has systemd level hype with the same rabid attack by fanboys on alternatives but without the project maturity.
I wish they would hold off the hype until the thing is ready to use and the "X sux" misinformation stuff was beyond childish.
It is incredible that anyone is still sending SMS in 2016.
Some cellular carriers still offer plans that include talk and text without data, particularly for people who use a cell phone in addition to a landline as opposed to a replacement for a landline. In order to converse with someone on such a plan, you need to be sending SMS.
I'm actually trying to think of the use-case for SMS in Skype. As opposed to using the normal instant messaging feature I mean.
You want to SMS someone that doesn't have their phone number linked to Skype, but not using your phone? Am I missing something?
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
It is incredible that anyone is still sending SMS in 2016.
I dunno what you mean, I receive spam/scam messages all the time!
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
How did we go from Skype Version 4.3.0.37, which runs just fine on Linux, to Skype for Linux Alpha 1.13.0.3?
I'm looking at 4.3..... right now, and it has the option of sending SMS messages (probably for a pretty penny) to mobiles. And it does video.
i've been using ~email~ to send SMS messages from the desktop for 15 years
I'm actually trying to think of the use-case for SMS in Skype. As opposed to using the normal instant messaging feature I mean. You want to SMS someone that doesn't have their phone number linked to Skype, but not using your phone? Am I missing something?
I think you must be missing something :) Loads of people don't use skype at all, or do use it but aren't currently on a skype-active device. But most of them carry an SMS-capable device at all times. While you're at your desk, you want some way to message these people.
Could you use a different messaging service like Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp or whatever? Maybe, if you already know they have that app installed on their phone and it's set up for notifications. But SMS is guaranteed to always work.
I found it very useful about 8 years ago, before smartphones with messaging apps became so ubiquitous. I lived in France for a bit, then Ireland a little later and had a long distance relationship with a girl in Turkey. Using Skype to send the SMSes to her phone was considerably cheaper. Once I moved to Ireland, I got a cellphone contract which included "free skype to skype" and I could call her for free, just using my Skype credit. It was just a cheap feature phone, but the phone software somehow instructed the cellphone network to "call me" and then route the call over Skype from their network.
I haven't needed Skype credit in quite while now, I met a different girl ultimately who was local, but still have a little credit on my account.
These days I use iMessage and WhatsApp.
However the "X sux" is said by the X developers who is also the people who develop Wayland so one would think that they know what they talk about.
So what are your individual reasons to dislike these projects then? Because it still does look like the common denominator is LP considering that 56% of the items on your list are part of the systemd project repository. The Linux numbering scheme you can skip because that complaint is so silly I don't even fathom how you bothered to put it in there. However I'm mostly (still) interested in your dislikes of Wayland, a question that you have avoided so far.
The first stable release of systemd was 6 years ago. How long must it go before software reaches maturity in your world?
56% of the items on your list are part of the systemd project repository.
Funny, huh? I used to dislike the items even when systemd was the only item on that list that's part of the systemd repository. Not my fault systemd keeps absorbing software like that. That'd be ONE of the reasons I dislike systemd, since you were asking. If I want the integrated do-everything approach, I might just as well switch to Windows.
So there goes your guilt by association hypothesis. Now, since you asked so nicely:
pulseaudio: significant CPU usage, overly complex, written by the systemd guy (that's guilt by precedent (postcedent?), not by association)
avahi: thinks it owns the network stack. creates a pseudo interface even when it's not needed, assigns a link-local address and potentially brings it up. have seen it confuse the boot process on debian in nasty ways. Also written by our special friend, par for the course.
dbus: grown, not designed. used to connect desktop crap together, now abused as a general purpose IPC. doing IPC in userland is a shitty idea, mainly because of the possibility that the ipc userland daemon might not be running. even the systemd special experts have realized this and thus are pushing for kdbus.
iproute2: reason for existance: Linux's ifconfig is ill-designed and grew over the years to be pretty 802.3 specific. Instead of designing ifconfig and the driver interface cleanly, additional programs were thrown into the mix. iwconfig, iw, you name it. Meet iproute2 and command lines like "ip link set up dev tap0". In case you're missing the irony here, they redesigned it, but apparently intentionally chose the one actually annoying artifact from ifconfig - the nonstandard (non-getopt) invocation syntax. So cool. then there's the exit code issue that i've talked about in our other conversation.
udev: actually i don't know udev very much, it's just unnecessary stuff i tend to dispose of on linux systems. i get that it's useful for people who don't know how to load a driver into the kernel. or what drivers they need, for that matter.
wayland: i'm mostly meh about it. seems to me like its main selling point is that it's something new, and X11 is old. so far i see no reason why i could possibly want it. maybe when i feel like using something less flexible for a change.
rust: is actually a nice language and prevents programmer error and world will be safe. C's days are counted. provides universal basic income too.
gnome: huge, complicated beast. also i hate it for making me migrate my parents from gnome 2 to KDE.
happy now?
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I'm actually trying to think of the use case for SMS.
No that's it, just SMS. Here in the Netherlands SMSes are used by the government for 2 factor authentication and ... yeah that's about it. Wake me when Skype can send a WhatsApp message.
That lie again?
Cut and pasting X code does not suddenly make the X developers who wrote the original copied code Wayland developers.
The only person who comes remotely close to what you are suggesting is Daniel Stone and he's been called out as being less than honest with his examples (eg. he suggested X is slow because gedit based on gtk3 is slow - yet the older version of gedit has not speed problems at all on X). He ported X to the Nokia N900 and did a bit of a code cleanup on a tiny part of X but he's not exactly an X guru.
Here's a thing - if X sucks so badly then why did the Wayland folks use the X video drivers instead of writing new ones?
The initial developer of Wayland was Kristian Høgsberg who has been a X.Org developer (he made AIGLX and DRI2 among other things). To this day I have not seen a single X.Org developer say anything but that Wayland is the future of X.
Funny, huh? I used to dislike the items even when systemd was the only item on that list that's part of the systemd repository. Not my fault systemd keeps absorbing software like that. That'd be ONE of the reasons I dislike systemd, since you were asking. If I want the integrated do-everything approach, I might just as well switch to Windows.
Well to be honest, putting different projects into a single code repository and putting common code into shared libraries is not really my definition of "absorbing software" or an "integrated do-everythig approach".
pulseaudio: significant CPU usage, overly complex, written by the systemd guy (that's guilt by precedent (postcedent?), not by association)
I've heard about the high CPU usage before but have not experienced it myself, have never seen it go above 0,x% on any of my systems. Compiz, X.Org or Firefox on the other hand (and that on idle!). Don't know if you remember the old days prior to pulse when every single project had their own incompatible sound server and how painful it was to get two programs to work together (oh so you use Amarok to play music, well then of course any flash-content from now on until you reboot will be completely silent).
avahi: thinks it owns the network stack. creates a pseudo interface even when it's not needed, assigns a link-local address and potentially brings it up. have seen it confuse the boot process on debian in nasty ways. Also written by our special friend, par for the course.
All those issues sounds like the zero conf functionality have been enabled on your system for some reason, since they are handled by a separate deamon (avahi-autoipd) it's probably started by something else like NetworkManager, avahi by itself should not bring this up afaik.
dbus: grown, not designed. used to connect desktop crap together, now abused as a general purpose IPC. doing IPC in userland is a shitty idea, mainly because of the possibility that the ipc userland daemon might not be running. even the systemd special experts have realized this and thus are pushing for kdbus.
Yes dbus is not something that I have ever liked, even though the main idea was somewhat good (reminds me about the Rexx interface we have on the Amiga) but the implementation does look way to overly complicated.
iproute2: reason for existance: Linux's ifconfig is ill-designed and grew over the years to be pretty 802.3 specific. Instead of designing ifconfig and the driver interface cleanly, additional programs were thrown into the mix. iwconfig, iw, you name it. Meet iproute2 and command lines like "ip link set up dev tap0". In case you're missing the irony here, they redesigned it, but apparently intentionally chose the one actually annoying artifact from ifconfig - the nonstandard (non-getopt) invocation syntax. So cool. then there's the exit code issue that i've talked about in our other conversation.
Yes and there are lot's of other linux-specific commands that use the same strange syntax, like mdadm. Have not really been that bothered by it though, possibly by having been put into how these commands work by both mdadm and svn so I always do the Cisco recursive command lookup style with "ip" and then "ip route help". Having worked with Ciscos IOS for years also probably have conditioned my into accepting this syntax.
udev: actually i don't know udev very much, it's just unnecessary stuff i tend to dispose of on linux systems. i get that it's useful for people who don't know how to load a driver into the kernel. or what drivers they need, for that matter.
Well I for one would not like to go back to the old days of the static /dev/, being able to put in all kinds of strange new hardware, let the children and wife plug in all kind of strange USB devices and not having to manually run mknod is a benefit in my book.
Well to be honest, putting different projects into a single code repository [...] is not really my definition of "absorbing software" or an "integrated do-everythig approach".
Then what is?
and putting common code into shared libraries
You won't see me complaining about this.
All those [avahi] issues sounds like the zero conf functionality have been enabled on your system for some reason, since they are handled by a separate deamon (avahi-autoipd) it's probably started by something else like NetworkManager, avahi by itself should not bring this up afaik.
Oh, right! I totally forgot NetworkManager on my list :-).
modern desktops
Don't get me started on "modern desktops"..
(And yes, I too have heard about some former X11 developers being among the wayland crowd. Do you know what's their proportion wrt. to the total amount of X11 developers? (I don't).
rust: [sarcasm]
[missing the sarcasm]
The part about rust was sarcasm.
Well I would say that KDE is a far more complicated beast
Yes, that's why I'm mad at gnome in the first place. If KDE was lightweight and simple, I wouldn't have made them use gnome in the first place. ... damn it didn't I ask you to *not* get me started on that?!
On my own systems it's either headless or i3, that way I can avoid the pain that is the "modern desktop" with all its brokenness and dependencies and
happy now?
Yes, thank you!
You're welcome.
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Seriously?
Wayland is not X.
It is very different.
It was never designed to be "the future of X".
It was designed to be something else to use instead of X.
So now you know a tiny bit about the topic. I suggest you learn a little bit more before you go around "correcting" people.
Well to be honest, putting different projects into a single code repository [...] is not really my definition of "absorbing software" or an "integrated do-everythig approach".
Then what is?
That would be if they really absorbed all that software, i.e deprecate each individual project and merge their code with systemd, but that is not what they have done, they have simply put all the different projects into the same git repository so that they (among other things) more easily can make simultaneous releases.
Well we can all think what we want about the modern desktop but there is where the majority of the users will be, tyranny of the majority so to speak. And since that will be the new playing field we better have a display server that can fill that space well.
among other things
See, my concern are those "other things", which would boil down to de-facto interweaving the formerly separate projects, adding dependencies from project A to project B, and project B to project A, which means, as you certainly know, that it's really more one project AB. I'll admit I'm not tracking changes to the systemd source repository, so maybe my concern has not become reality yet, but I think it's not very far fetched that this will happen, if it didn't already.
I mean what would you do, if you want to implement a fancy feature in your $pet_project, but unfortunately it requires $pet_project specific support in $dependent_project, and $dependent_project happens to be inside your own repository. Don't tell me that the reasoning would be "oh yeah, we better hold on and think of a implementation-agnostic approach to this particular issue rather than just committing this little patch". Not for most programmers, and especially not for special expert L.P.
Well we can all think what we want about the modern desktop but there is where the majority of the users will be, tyranny of the majority so to speak.
Yes. But is this what we actually want? I for one don't, and this isn't meant to sound elitist, but simply realist. Experience shows that if you let "the masses" in, things tend to become shitty and commerialized. Yes, I also thought, at some point, that it would be very cool if everybody used Linux. Unfortunately "using Linux" is pretty much pointless if you don't use the shell, and for that you need to be actually interested in the matter. Most people want to use their computer as an appliance, and this is what Linux (or real unix) has always sucked at.
If Linux is being made ready for the masses, and, looking at the current process of windowsification, it certainly is headed in that direction, it will become just that, another windows. yay. This is sadly why I don't try to "convert" people to BSD as I used to do when i was a fanboyish linux-advocating PFY. Demonstrate that you're actually interested in operating systems, that you don't mind sticking your nose in C source and that you don't wet yourself over lack of support for $latest_hype, and I'll happily show you the way (and walk it a bit) towards (what I consider) reasonable OS, is how I currently hold it.
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How about you take a look at the Wayland mailing list and actually get a clue about the topic to avoid any more ridiculous mistakes.
The guy who fucked up is calling me dense? How about learning about the topic instead of making me laugh at you.
See, my concern are those "other things", which would boil down to de-facto interweaving the formerly separate projects, adding dependencies from project A to project B, and project B to project A, which means, as you certainly know, that it's really more one project AB. I'll admit I'm not tracking changes to the systemd source repository, so maybe my concern has not become reality yet, but I think it's not very far fetched that this will happen, if it didn't already.
I mean what would you do, if you want to implement a fancy feature in your $pet_project, but unfortunately it requires $pet_project specific support in $dependent_project, and $dependent_project happens to be inside your own repository. Don't tell me that the reasoning would be "oh yeah, we better hold on and think of a implementation-agnostic approach to this particular issue rather than just committing this little patch". Not for most programmers, and especially not for special expert L.P.
Well that is what they have done so far (i.e going the implementation-agnostic approach), you might not like DBUS but for all the warts it does make for a implementation-agnostic approach so as long as the competition support the same DBUS messages then everything should work. You might not like that the different projects use interprocess communication like this but that would happen regardless of them sharing a code repository or not (just look at how i.e gnome depends on some DBUS messages from systemd-logind)
If Linux is being made ready for the masses, and, looking at the current process of windowsification, it certainly is headed in that direction, it will become just that, another windows. yay.
I don't see the windosification, in fact the "new" interface that Microsoft has put into Windows was first seen in Gnome3 and I have yet to see anything new in Linux resemble how things work in Windows. I know that a lot of trolls have claimed that systemd mad init work like it does in Windows, but those people have obviously never used the Windows System Services or programmed one (or the shitfest that is the EventViewer for that matter). If anything I think that GUI wise both Linux and Windows are looking more at Apple and Android than each other.