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

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)."

Re:ouch

[EvanED]

"Pidgin" is just a fancy word for the low-class broken English that most American blacks speak. Look it up if you don't believe me. So as far as I'm concerned, it never had any credibility in the first place.

What? Way to project your own biases. "Pidgin" languages are any sort of conglomeration languages that develop when you have two peoples that don't have a common language who have to communicate.

In fact, the "low-class broken English that most American blacks speak" (let's even ignore the glaring inaccuracy of that phrase) is really not a pidgin language at all.

Re:How about some autoupdate?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure what platform you're on but that issue was related to the new version of nss turning off insecure hash algorithms, some of which are still used in MSN's cert. It just takes setting an environment variable to enable the hashes again.

As far as updates, the client can be set to notify you of new updates, but since only windows would need auto update no one's ever gone about writing the code to do it.

Re:ouch

[i.of.the.storm]

Err, the bug was already fixed and no vulnerable builds were even built for Windows. And incidentally, it'd be easier to just use the WinPidgin build environment fetcher script and cygwin or msys (I prefer msys) than try to compile it with eclipse, although once you have the environment set up eclipse should be able to use it as a Makefile project.

Re:2.5.9 and 2.6.1 are different releases

[Tenebrarum]

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.

To say the ruddy least. I've been trying to connect to friends' GTalk clients and it just doesn't work (although a couple of times I've managed to hear them).

Re:Mac Binaries

[nawcom]

Are not available yet.... :(

Bah, don't worry; Adium will quickly integrate support I'm sure. I don't know about you but I'd prefer Adium over the Pidgin design for ANY operating system any day. Unfortunately they use Mac only frameworks. Porting (and most likely using an easy OS independent toolkit like Qt) would be a great project for inactive coders. Dunno about you, but I find Skype's interface 20 times more attractive than Pidgin's. Skype uses Qt 4.