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Typing 'http://:' Into a Skype Message Trashes the Installation Beyond Repair

Posted by Soulskill on from the bug-of-the-year dept.

An anonymous reader writes: A thread at the Skype community forums has brought to light a critical bug in Microsoft's Skype clients for Windows, iOS and Android: typing the incorrect URL initiator http://: into a text message on Skype will crash the client so badly that it can only be repaired by installing an older version and awaiting a fix from Microsoft. The bug does not affect OS X or the 'Metro'-style Windows clients — which means, effectively, that Mac users could kill the Skype installations on other platforms just by sending an eight-character message.

2 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. FIXED by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows-desktop-client/Skype-Fix-for-crashes-caused-by-bad-URL/td-p/3997463

  2. Re:Wow ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm not even sure I've heard of an error condition which required a full uninstall.

    I can guess why and I doubt an uninstall would help.

    All you really need to know is that Skype saves conversations and redisplays them when it starts. So you send someone http://:, that triggers the bug, and on restart, it reloads the conversation and crashes again.

    If that's the case, a reinstall won't help, because Skype will just re-download the missed messages and reencounter the bad URL and reenter the crash loop.

    (Presumably the bug is that they see the second ":", decide it's the start of a port, and leave the hostname uninitialized, causing a crash.)