Harsh criticism has targeted VoIP company Skype both for its handling of a critical security hole and supposedly ignoring users' bug reports.Skype has managed to fix quite a serious security gap in the latest version of its Windows VoIP software, which could have had bad consequences for PC users as it would have made possible for some fraudulent websites to load and run malicious code.
The URI handler skype4com, which the Skype software creates to deal with web addresses, is liable to failing during short strings handling, generating a memory violation that opens to code writing to memory.
According to security website Heise Security, Skype has undoubtedly fixed critical holes in secrecy without letting its users know.It is thus recommendable for those still using older versions of the software to step up with the latest version of Skype — version 3.6.
Secunia, a security research firm, comes with a solution in the form of a Software Inspector that should establish whether a PC is vulnerable.Still, the point is , Skype received the thumb down from its users for supposedly not responding to bug reports.
Taken from a Skype forum, apparently Skype was generating 10,000 page faults per second on a user's PC, stated Jamie Watson, applications development professional and ZDNet.co.uk member. For a while, Skype wanted everyone to believe that the software was meant to produce such a high number of faults. However, in the end, the VoIP company seemed to admit the origin of the error to have been a thread, which Skype programmers installed for debugging but then forgot to remove.
At the time of writing this in his blog, Skype could put out no reply to Watson's remarks and it seems that lately the VoIP company has got a bit behind with its popularity.
