Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Skype fixes security vulnerabilities

hub.zhovner.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 119 posts

Re: How Skype fixes security vulnerabilities

#91

Post by walrus01 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #62
walrus01 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes, exactly why it's a hard problem to solve.

The solution is simple: Hire support people - and both train and allow them to deviate from the usual support flowcharts. Oh, and check if they actually speak English well enough to communicate with customers. As a customer, I instantly notice outsourced callcenters.

The solution is not simple, if you're on the business management side and need to concern yourself with the fully loaded yearly office space, overhead, payroll/benefits cost of hiring hundreds of well trained, motivated, educated, english speaking customer support reps to support your 20+ million "free" customers...

Re: How Skype fixes security vulnerabilities

#92

Post by custo15 »

tomp wrote: post #10

> > We think that we gave enough information. You are piece of shit, live with it. I've no idea if this is real or not, but if it is, it's pretty damning for Microsoft. I hope the author goes to court and wins!

The original article is in Russian, and here for our mentality this is not such unacceptable sarcastic exaggeration. But it may be too strong for a Western reader. So this can be considered as a little translation glitch (IMO).

Re: How Skype fixes security vulnerabilities

#93

Post by codedokode »

walrus01 wrote: post #19
azernik wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been a lot of instances of this happening to feminist or LGBT groups on Facebook and YouTube. These systems are fantastically abusable.

If I were setting up an automated abuse-report-receiving system that could automatically disable accounts, I would run some sort of filter for "is the account reporting the abuse itself a newly created account, and/or one with suspiciously low and non-human looking usage patterns?". But on the other side, malicious actors can solve that problem by having clickfarm workers in bangladesh create 30 fake facebook account…

I guess this abuse reporting system was made to block spam via messages that are sent when adding a contact. But Microsoft doesn't check if the reported user is a spammer and whether he had sent any add requests.

Re: How Skype fixes security vulnerabilities

#95

Post by pmlnr »

zeratax wrote: post #82
marksamman wrote: post #48

I've been looking for a Skype alternative since the security of Skype was weakened after it was acquired by Microsoft. I've had my account stolen multiple times because their support has changed the primary e-mail address of my account, I had to use the same method the social engineers used to get my account back. Since then I've avoided sharing anything slightly sensitive over Skype, as chat history is synced with a…

You should definitely consider the matrix protocol ( https://matrix.org ) that is used with riot ( https://riot.im ). Matrix allows for a complete decentralization and both the the protocol and the client are open source. There are even many other clients as matrix also works with for example weechat. One of it's biggest strength are the support for bridges to other messengers like slack, irc and gitter. I personally…

Is matrix/riot ready for voice, video and conf video?

Re: How Skype fixes security vulnerabilities

#96

Post by ygra »

walrus01 wrote: post #67
zdkl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Requiring phone number or credit card is an extremely effective way to have a large class of (legitimate) users nope out of your service

requiring a credit card is a good way to stop 90% of the developing world from using your application... Stop a randomly chosen person on the street in a big city in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh and ask them if they have a visa or mastercard.

Heck, even in Europe they usually don't.

Re: How Skype fixes security vulnerabilities

#97

Post by gst »

Aissen wrote: post #81

From my sources inside of Skype, everyone is leaving, and Microsoft might be preparing to sell it. No wonder that nothing's changing.

This would explain why they don't allow anymore to link your Skype to your Microsoft account: https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA12060/can-i-link-or-unlin...

Re: How Skype fixes security vulnerabilities

#99

Post by [deleted] »

marksamman wrote: post #48

I've been looking for a Skype alternative since the security of Skype was weakened after it was acquired by Microsoft. I've had my account stolen multiple times because their support has changed the primary e-mail address of my account, I had to use the same method the social engineers used to get my account back. Since then I've avoided sharing anything slightly sensitive over Skype, as chat history is synced with a…

[deleted]

Re: How Skype fixes security vulnerabilities

#100

Post by bryanrasmussen »

andybak wrote: post #86

Mods removed "(They don't)" or similar from the title. Before they did this I think it more accurately reflected the intent of the original author as this is the prominent subtitle on the page. Without this it makes the article sounds much less interesting.

When I read the title without the They don't in it I thought sarcastically to myself "They don't".
Post reply on HN