Monday, November 12, 2007

Leopard firewall breaks Skype

Apparently, Skype.app on Mac self-modifies its application package. Leopard OTOH digitally signs application packages after you download them from the net and allow them to run, and also when you allow them to accept connections through firewall. Skype's self-modification causes the signatures to get invalidated. After this, Skype will completely fail to launch. It'll bounce twice in the dock, and that's it.

Options: (a) don't use Skype (b) disable firewall. Damn. I'm going with (a) until Skype fixes this. Actually, I tried disabling the firewall, and for me even that didn't help. Double damn.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is the pain really worth it? Why not just switch to Linux? Should run like a blast on those MBPs! Plus you can use Java 6 with all it's new libraries.

Heinz

Attila Szegedi said...

I wouldn't switch to Linux for several reasons, most important of them being that I'm too big of a snob to not use Mac OS X.

There, now that the real reason is out of the way, I can discuss the other points.

(Really, is there a Linux distro that can synchronize my address book and calendar with my Sony Ericsson W850i over Bluetooth out of the box?)

As for pain: there's no pain. This is an experiment. I decided to be an early adopter of Leopard. I have a full offline backup of my machine's drive before the upgrade, so I can easily bail out of it bacl to Tiger if I decide it's not worth it; I just need to update my home directory in the backup.

Tiger worked perfectly for me for two years, no pains. Leopard and all apps on it will also work well given a bit of time.

Yes, some application developers were a bit unprepared, i.e. Skype. They'll catch up. That's what you get for using your apps on a new OS almost from its day zero.

As for Java 6: all software systems I write for living are currently deployed on Java 1.4, few of them on 1.5. I'm (fortunately) not missing Java 6. That's not to say it wouldn't be justified to have it available already -- I can fully understand those people who need it and are suffering from the lack of it. I'm just lucky to be personally unaffected.