Navigation Menu

[aranreck]

@Chike wrote:

O.K. so what do we need?
Server-client and inter-server(s) comunication protocols.
Video/voice protocols that are suitable for broadcasting to many users (assuming those exists already.)
Scalable databas(es)
Volunteers (a.k.a geeks,) that are experianced with all the above, plus kernel and distributed network programming.
Did I forget anything? (aside from money, i know, I’m sure such a project will find sponsors if and when it starts to show promissing results.)

I think that is a good start — it sounds interesting to me 😉

@Chike wrote:

Just think of all the posibilities. With a little vision and careful design such a project will be appealing not only to ISPs but also cellular and phone companies. In fact I’m convinced making such free software will be stepping on some investors toes.
And who knows, you might make a carear from such a project, just like many other free software developers did

I’m not quite sure I understand how the project would generate funds? Would there be a subscription required to use it? Would the client protocol be open, allowing anyone to create a compatible client for our network? I think it’s a good idea.

@Chike wrote:

And especially for you Aran I will personally see that a client with IRC look and feel will be developed.

LOL! I can see it now: /join video audio text #Admin

@Chike wrote:

Was that convincing? LOL Whatcha say?
BTW aren’t there projects like that going on already? Before we reinvent the wheel.

😉 I really haven’t looked, but I’m sure there must be. SourceForge would probably be good place to check first.

[aranreck]

@Chike wrote:

I can’t blame paltalk for charging money, in fact their user subscription is fairly cheap compared to the outragous rates of inspeak for instance.

There is no doubt that it takes money to operate any online service — this is especially true for data intensive services like streaming video & audio. I suppose Paltalk’s rates might be more appealing to me if I was hosting some type of video conference where I needed a service to rebroadcast my webcam video simultaneously to multiple viewers. Since I typically communicate one-on-one, I’m perfectly fine with direct IP-to-IP communication which is free to me.

I’ve seen references to Inspeak on this website — I’m not familiar with that service. What is it?

@Chike wrote:

I didn’t say our own network, I suggested a complete server solution. A solution that can scale up to platalk or even msn or yahoo messaging networks, capable of handling millions of users with thousands of chat/voice/video rooms. This will not be an easy task, AOL did not pay Mirabilis 400 million dollars for nothing, but I believe it can be done.

That was also what I was suggesting. In principle, it is quite simple to create a network that can support millions of users concurrently. However, as soon as your service begins to require more than one server, the complexity quickly increases as you must develop all the server software to operate within a distributed network infrastructure (such is used by any popular service). ICQ was notable for being the first instant messaging service that was capable of handling a large number of concurrent users. Mirabilis would have been foolish not to sell their service as there is no way they would be able to pay the bills to keep the service running if they didn’t. The success of ICQ mainly boils down to the fact that they were first to build a large user base. By today’s standards, it would take about 2 days to develop, from scratch, a server and client that could emulate all the functionality of ICQ at the time it was sold to AOL. AOL was interested in the users more than the software.

@Chike wrote:

The service I leave to those who know about providing services. The problem with those is thay do not always want to deal with developing the software, if there will be one that’s free and atractive I am sure some will use it. And where there’s competition rates go down.

Free is always the best price:) Developing software is cheap, but someone has to pay for the bandwidth and server time. Another thing to consider is ease of setup — a free way to transmit video will require clients to make client-client IP connections with each other. You can imagine the disaster and failure of the service when 99% of the users don’t know how to setup port forwarding or configure their firewall. There are also security risks (DOS, DDoS, etc) when other users have your IP.

@Chike wrote:

I guess you can say I am an old geek. But I don’t long for the good old days of vinyl records, DOS, or BBS. I like progress, and the future belong to video.

Same here 😉 I love my mp3’s, 32-bit software, and broadband connections. Whenever my co-workers start longing for the days of BBS, I just remind them how long it took to download that 1MB file at 2400bps…and then you waited to get raped by the phone bill.

Aran

[aranreck]

@Chike wrote:

Personally I think it’s a waste of time puting an affort to help paltalk, which they will probbably not see it that way.
Insetad team up to make a chat protocol that meets today and future needs that will be accompanied with server software solution, and possibly a runtime library for clients, so any one who wants to give such service can have it for free.
Providers can then compete on quality of service and fee.
Where all the geeks at? Don’t they like to video chat too?

Paltalk has already proven they are too stupid to recognize innovation when they see it. I agree with the comment someone else made about it being “all about the $$$”. Spyware, advertisements, colored nicks, sponsored rooms, cam viewing quality, number of simultaneous cams, etc. — they’re all just sales gimmicks. If someone else makes a program that adds functionality, they lose out on a chance to screw more users out of $$$.

Honestly, I don’t really care for Paltalk’s network or “services”, but I do find it interesting how virtually everyone there is living in a bubble. The Paltalk admins are arrogant, feeling they can ban anyone at anytime for anything and the user admins are equally arrogant and power hungry towards the use of their bounce and mic-mute functions. This makes it all the more fun to develop software which shows their “power” can’t do squat :]

You’re absolutely correct — building our own chat network with our own protocol, servers and client software would be the more effective approach to take if we wanted to build the ultimate communication service. Unfortunately, while developing the protocol and software (server & client) is very easy and innexpensive, hosting the servers can get quite expensive fast. The biggest (and most expensive) headache I have for a couple of my networks is defending against DDoS attacks.

Aren’t you a geek? 😛 I spend more time on IRC in a day than I’ve spent on Paltalk my entire life.

Aran

[aranreck]

@Spyinfo wrote:

hey guys , specially programmers , was thinkin about if we can build an exe for paltalk , i mean rebuild the paltalk.exe so you can add option which allows the third party word to join paltalk rooms bu using proxy , i mean you open paltalk then there is option where you can put the proxy and the port of it , like internet explorer and yahoo , msn also , if thats possible also , thanks and btw happy new year yall

Happy New Year to you too :] I’ve never agreed with Paltalks policy on blacklisting entire IP address ranges merely because they belong to “third world countries”. It’s like they’re deciding who I should be allowed to chat with and who I can’t. Absolutely pathetic. I’m sure their intention is to prevent anyone who is not governed by a particular subset of laws (comparable to US laws or treaties) from using their service — otherwise they would be powerless to enforce anything they saw as a “violation”.

While the current Paltalk software does not directly allow you to specify a proxy server, you can “trick” it into using a proxy server by using a tunneling client.

Once I finish analysing Paltalk’s protocol I plan to build clients for Linux, OSX, PocketPC (Windows Mobile) and Windows. These clients will at first only have text-chat capabilities, but I do plan to expand them all to include audio and video. Most importantly, all the clients will allow you to easily craft your own packets to more easily explore the Paltalk server software.

[aranreck]

@Chike wrote:

It’s simple, software cost a lot to develop and there is not enough Linux users to make it profitable. They hardly manage to fix all the bugs in the Windows’ version, you can’t expect them to start messing with Linux for a few geeks.
As for the servers, it’s very economical to use Linux, and you can even change the kernel to fit particular needs, which make Linux the right choice for any kind of servers.

Regarding your project, I would think making Paltalk protocols filters for Wireshark is the best way to start with.

Quality software requires time and effort — this can represent a significant financial investment, but often many people from the software development community are willing to donate their skills and time to bring about the desired software. This is the core idea behind many open source projects such as Linux. Linux used to be comprised of a “few geeks”, but today it is more widespread than ever. Many Universities teach software engineering exclusively for *nix based systems — in turn more and more businesses turn to it for both server and everyday workstation needs. If you’ve never tried it before, I encourage you to give it a shot — is one of the more popular packages and it is literally just as easy (if not easier) to install and use than Microsoft Windows.

And good point on the filters for Wireshark — I normally use a homemade sniffer, but just wanted to explain the basics of Wireshark for anyone looking to explore.

Aran

[aranreck]

@The_Nekkid_DJ wrote:

I am greatly excited to see someone working on this, because, if you have a linux client, then you can also most likely have an OSX client, which is what I am really after. Paltalk has mentioned that they are creating an OSX client…which I am sure can be dissected and help with a plain Linux version.

You would think they had a Linux client, since their servers are all Linux on teh backend….

-DJ

You are correct — once we know the protocol we can create a client for any platform. Paltalk is wise to use Linux for their servers, but I don’t understand their lack of wisdom with regards to not publishing a public client for Linux, OSX, etc.

On a positive note, I have met a couple people who have experience with Paltalk’s protocol. Paltalk uses GSM to encode audio and transmits it using the real-time transport protocol (RTP). I’ve also identified the “key” that Paltalk is using during their authentication sequence. Now, I just have to sift through some assembly code to make sense of how their algorithm works so I can implement it in a C++ program that generates the appropriate responses.

[aranreck]

You guys can disregard this — I finally located the file I was after 🙂

Thanks!

[aranreck]

@Ghost wrote:

Even if anyone still had it, it wouldn’t work. Try running Paltalk under Wine. (Assuming you’re on *nix, that is.)

yes, i’m fully aware that it will not work, however I need the file libpaltalk.so (from /lib/gaim). I’m creating a new client for Linux — i don’t want to use Paltalk for Windows.

Thanks

[aranreck]

@Chike wrote:

As I saw posted in this form before, it’s development have been seaced. Apperantly for a good reasons (my huess is egal reasons but I may be wrong.)

Thanks for the reply. I saw that the development had ended, but I was hoping someone still had a copy of it somewhere 😉 Feel free to anonymously e-mail attachments to a.ranreck [at) yahoo (dot] com :]

Thanks!

[Author]

Posts