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Re:China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve by tluyben2 on Friday December 21, 2012 @03:30AM (#4951990)
It's not entirely ontopic, but might help someone in China anyway; we have been looking for an alternative to Skype for a few weeks now. We are using Skype for communication between our offices because it is easy. Now someone told me to try imo.im for on the road, so I tried it out on my desktop (in Chrome) first; my Macbook pro NEVER had more than around 2.5 hours battery life since I bought it. I was already shouting I will never buy Apple again; I NEED long battery life. Skype client almost never was on top in top, so I never thought about it, but once I shutdown Skype and used imo my battery life jumped to over 6 hours. True story. I asked others to test and they have the same experience. This is a great show of the efficiency of the imo.im web client (it's for instance far lighter than gmail, even with 8 chat accounts (I even put my ICQ back :) open with active chatting). Anyway; i'm drifting off.

For speech/video, Skype client is much better than imo, so we still need an alternative for that and although I can find stuff myself; it is either not cross platform (we need Win, Lin, Mac, Android and iOS), too new (not working) or completely impossible to install (not all people using the client are computer wizards). Maybe someone here can advise something for a work situation where we have 3 offices in different EU locations which need to communicate all day with sight and sound? And encrypted ofcourse. After my Skype experience, open source is preferred.

Edit: thanks for Jitsi! Didn't know that one.

Re:China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve by mtgx on Friday December 21, 2012 @04:37AM (#4952102)
Use Jitsi, open source, and has OTR for chats and ZRTP for video calls:

https://jitsi.org

They were supposed to release version 2.0 by the end of the year, but if it's not out by now, it will probably arrive next year. There's also an Android version planned for next year.

iOS - it can't go there because it's a GPL Apple, and Apple doesn't allow GPL apps on the store. But as far as chatting goes, you can use any other OTR-enabled app like ChatSecure and so on, to talk to the Jitsi client on other platforms. And yes, Jitsi also works on Linux and Macs.

Re:China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve by 0x0 on Friday December 21, 2012 @05:06AM (#4952163)
(not an expert on this - but some observations I've made earlier: )

I don't think apple disallows GPL apps per se (in fact if you google gpl apps itunes, there's several hits).

I think it is more of a matter if the app publisher doesn't own the copyright of the work. In that case, other contributors may choose to raise hell regarding the GPL (which is what that Nokia employee did when VLC was briefly in the app store).

But if you own the copyright, obviously you wouldn't hassle yourself for publishing your own app in the app store.

Re:China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve by aw3c2 on Friday December 21, 2012 @04:52AM (#4952133)
Jitsi. https://jitsi.org/

FOSS, cross-platform (not mobile yet though, if you can throw money at that, it can be done), encrypted audio/video, in active development. You can use any XMPP account you like. It even has call recording built in which is very handy if you might need to remember or protocol things.

Re:China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve by rickmb on Friday December 21, 2012 @03:36AM (#4952004)
When everything is idling, my Skype client in OSX is almost always on top. It just seems to steadily eat CPU, not all that much, but all the damn time. I've learned to shut it down when I need to preserve battery life.