Skype

Microsoft has rolled out a new version of the desktop Skype client that should make users of its service a little safer from denial-of-service attacks. The Skype client has long leaked IP address information, allowing other users on the network to determine which IP address is being used by an account. A number of online services of various degrees of shadiness offer instant IP address lookups, and historically at least, these have worked effectively.

Although video calling has become a thing of norm, in 2006, Skype was one of the pioneering platforms when video calling was in its infancy. Although hard to believe, the video calling service is celebrating its ten-year anniversary in 2016.

At its core, Skype still offers video calling, but has evolved and expanded its service to meet the ever-evolving needs of its users. Skype will continue to do so on this milestone occasion by deploying group video calling on Android, iPhone, iPad and Windows 10 Mobile.

Skype users, beware. There are nefarious links being spread around through Skype, and if you click them you will be presented with a lot of adware. However, there are good news, and bad news here.

Researchers at the security behavior management company PhishMe have identified a campaign in which Skype was used to distribute adware, SC Magazine reported on Wednesday.

The threat was first discovered when one PhishMe user received a message over Skype, where the other party tried several times to contact him.

A new bug appears to crash Skype when a short string of text is sent as a message across the service — and the effects are so bad that it requires a reinstall to get things working hitch-free again.

Skype for Windows desktop has shed the beta tag in its latest version and is now available for download.

Earlier in the month, Microsoft made a preview version of Skype for Windows and Mac OS X available, which introduced a new user interface similar to that seen on Skype's mobile apps, closely following Microsoft's modern design language while making it look a bit like MSN/Windows Live Messenger.

The web forum 4chan is known mostly as a place to share juvenile and, to put it mildly, politically incorrect images. But it’s also the birthplace of one of the latest attempts to subvert the NSA’s mass surveillance program.

When whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that full extent of the NSA’s activities last year, members of the site’s tech forum started talking about the need for a more secure alternative to Skype. Soon, they’d opened a chat room to discuss the project and created an account on the code hosting and collaboration site GitHub and began uploading code.

British intelligence agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), appears to be able to intercept most functions of Microsoft's Skype voice and messaging application, according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

Published by The Intercept, the documents state that the GHCQ's Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) has made it possible for government agencies to surveil Skype communications in real-time without users of the application being aware of it taking place.

Last year, Ars documented how Skype encryption posed little challenge to Microsoft abuse filters that scanned instant messages for potentially abusive Web links. Within hours of newly created, never-before-visited URLs being transmitted over the service, the scanners were able to pluck them out of a cryptographically protected stream and test if they were malicious. Now comes word that the National Security Agency is also able to work around Skype crypto—so much so that analysts have deemed the Microsoft-owned service "vital" to a key surveillance regimen known as PRISM.

Microsoft rolled out a new version of Skype for "Modern" (a k a Metro-Style) Windows 8.1 users on May 7.
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Just as the operating system group did recently with Windows 8.1 Update, the Skype team also is focusing on making the app easier to use for those using mice and keyboards. From a blog post announcing the new 2.8 version:

Today, Skype announced that the telephony service would immediately make group video calling free for all Windows/Mac desktop users, along with Xbox One Live Gold subscribers. The feature, which was limited to Skype Premium subscribers, brings Microsoft's service closer in cost parity to Google Hangouts, which offered free group video calls beginning with its launch in 2013 (and even before that when Hangouts were embedded in the original Google+).