

Skype falls victim to text chat bug - SimplyUseless
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-32990725

======
djm_
Everyone will be wondering what the 8 characters are and the BBC fail to
mention it, so here we go:

“[http://:”](http://:”) (without the quotes) [1]

[1] [http://venturebeat.com/2015/06/02/these-8-characters-
crash-s...](http://venturebeat.com/2015/06/02/these-8-characters-crash-skype-
and-once-theyre-in-your-chat-history-the-app-cant-start/)

~~~
LiquidFlux
Android, iOS and Windows apparently fall victim, OSX does not.

Clearing local logs does not resolve the issue, you'll redownload the logs
from the server on launch, the culprit message needs to be deleted.

~~~
sancha_
Is this an article summarizer bot?

~~~
LiquidFlux
Nope, I tend to go straight to the comments to HN and Reddit threads for
context, criticisms, the likely important relevant information.

------
lalm
I think they're filtering messages through their server now. Half an hour ago
it worked, now it says "message removed". Implying they MITM our messages and
can censor them.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
I remember back in the day pre-Microsoft when Skype was unable to do that
because it had point to point encryption. Then Microsoft purchased them,
killed the Skype P2P infrastructure which was a massive cost saver for Skype
and instead had it use standard servers.

People have claimed, without much evidence, that the NSA helped finance the
purchase for Microsoft in exchange for making Skype easier to monitor but so
far as I said nobody has solid PROOF of that, just speculation.

But I will say what Microsoft did made little logical sense. The whole point
of Skype was to make running a network inexpensive and scalable, Microsoft's
changes made running Skype much more expensive (and what company WANTS a
product to cost more to run?).

~~~
ygra
That change came in a time where Skype ran increasingly often not on PCs but
rather mobile devices. And what tablet or smartphone user WANTS a chat
application to consume excessive CPU and bandwidth while running in
background?

That's the official version, anyway. You may choose to ignore reasons giving
by the people who made the change, of course. The infrastructure on which
Skype was built relied on most clients being PCs with decent internet
connections and CPU to spare. Something that's increasingly not true in
today's world.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Prior to Microsoft's centralisation, Skype was completely unusable on mobile
devices. I know, I tried it.

~~~
lmm
It still is though.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
It's still bad, but it's improved a lot from where it was.

------
lalm
This raises an interesting point: Skype downloads your chat log from their
server. They have your chat log on their server.

~~~
meowface
They have stored chat logs on their server for many, many years.

~~~
lalm
Why is there still a debate about whether the NSA have access then?

~~~
MichaelGG
The "debate" is whether the NSA has "direct access" via special backdoors, or
just via law and/or espionage. For instance, people were going off on Google,
til it turned out the way the NSA was accessing it was via tapping fiber
lines- that doesn't scream "direct access" in a cooperative manner.

Anyone who thinks the NSA can't reach MS is unaware how easy it is to turn
people. The KGB turned FBI/CIA agents for years, for paltry sums. Said spies
claimed their only motivation was money. The USG would be incompetent if they
didn't have agents working for all sorts of companies.

Between all their resources, it's possible the NSA has setup some way to copy
all Skype messages.

But I would be very surprised if Skype was knowingly sending all data to them
voluntarily. MS has denied this, and it'd require a lot of people to be in on
it.

------
Paul_S
Parsing URLs is hard. Writing tests to find potential segfaults is easier.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Web browsers seem to manage to parse URLs quite well.

Doesn't this suggest that MS were doing something funky with the URLs or had
some sort of code to operate on certain URLs differently? Why would simply
linkifying break the whole app?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
> Web browsers seem to manage to parse URLs quite well.

Somehow, I think web browsers' URL parsers might be a _little_ bit more
hardened...

~~~
pbhjpbhj
What happened to code reuse? Microsoft seem to manage to parse URLs in emails
fine too. Is it really that hard a problem that one of Microsoft's most
installed apps should find it impossible to do without crapping its pants??

------
reycharles
Does this affect the Linux client?

~~~
lalm
Nope

~~~
crdoconnor
Plenty of other bugs on the Linux client to make up for it.

