skype

Meg Whitman's ascendency to CEO at Hewlett-Packard may be surprising, but this onetime eBay chief executive and California gubernatorial candidate is hardly unaccustomed to the limelight.

From building eBay up from a dot-com startup to an established Internet company, to her recent failed run to become California's governor, Whitman has proven herself as someone willing to take bold action, even if it doesn't always pay off. Having lived under the microscope of both Wall Street investors and the political media, she won't easily be deterred.

That's a good thing, because after a string of disastrous … Read more

A new security hole found in Skype for iOS could allow a hacker to access your entire address book, according to a blog post from security firm SuperEVR.

According to the post, "[a] Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability exists in the 'Chat Message' window in Skype 3.0.1 and earlier versions for iPhone and iPod Touch devices." So, what does this mean? Basically it means that when Skype users view a message, a hacker could have a JavaScript code that runs a check on a locally stored HTML file that is currently not encoded properly, revealing the user's … Read more

We now know that Americans blow billions of minutes each month on Facebook. It's no wonder folks get in a tizzy when a new feature rolls out.

This week has been a particularly busy one when it comes to Facebook-related improvements. Which of these shiny new features are you most enamored by?

Subscribe option: The subscribe button makes it easier to get just the information you want. Click on it and get updates from that profile in your news feed. This will even work for public updates from some profiles that you're not directly friends with.

Smart Lists: Smart Lists will automatically shuffle your gazillions of friends into groups related to school, work, city, and family. You can then make manual adjustments.

Skype adds Facebook for Mac: Mac users finally get the full Skype-loves-Facebook treatment that Windows users had already been enjoying. The Skype 5.4 for Mac beta lets you message friends, update your status, and read posts from within the program.

Less frequent e-mail alerts: Facebook e-mailed some users telling them to start expecting fewer e-mail notifications from the company. If you prefer to keep your e-mail alerts just the way they are, however, you can turn this new feature off.

Take a moment from updating your status to let us know what floats your social-networking boat. Which new Facebook feature are you most excited about? Vote in our poll and be sure to elaborate in the comments section.… Read more

Skype users on a Mac can now dive into their Facebook accounts courtesy of the same updates that the Windows version has offered for awhile.

The latest beta for the Mac--Skype 5.4 for Mac--integrates Facebook directly into the Skype software. This means that Mac users can IM their Facebook friends without leaving Skype. They can also access their Facebook pages to update their status and read and comment on their friends' posts.

The team at Skype recently published an infographic that shows the vast usage numbers associated with its free calling services.

According to the infographic, based on daily stats gathered in July, Skype usage represents more than 255 billion minutes (or 4.25 billion hours) of calls annually, which is roughly four times more than the service saw in 2008.

Despite the tremendous growth in usage, Skype may have as many detractors as it does proponents. Its services have suffered from a number of hiccups over the last few years, including a serious bout of downtime in December 2010.

For many … Read more

"Oh, hey there, Skype Home window. I was going to watch this movie but I see you've decided to randomly open a window over it instead. Thanks!" Sound familiar? If you're a Skype user who's updated to version 5.5, you've probably come across this issue (only happens if you use Compact mode). There isn't a way to disable the pop-up in the application (yet), so follow these steps if you'd like to get rid of it:

Step 1: Download and install the Kill Skype Home program from SourceForge.

Step 2: … Read more

A hacker known as Comodohacker has taken responsibility for the recent attack against Dutch certificate authority DigiNotar and is now threatening to release fake security certificates for other companies that he has hacked.

Beyond issuing a phony certificate for Google.com, DigiNotar has admitted that the attack actually caused the company to issue more than 500 fake Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates for a variety of major organizations, including the CIA, MI6, Facebook, Microsoft, Skype, and Twitter.

SSL certificates are used to authenticate secure Web sites to ensure that users are connecting to the intended site. Faked certificates are especially … Read more

Samsung announces the Galaxy Tab 7.7 and Note that blur the line between smartphone and tablet, George Lucas has made more changes to the original Star Wars trilogy for release on Blu-ray, and Apple loses yet another prototype iPhone at a bar.

Links from Thursday's episode of Loaded:

Skype just got so easy your great-grandmother could use it without having to know anything about a sound card or any other input/output doohickeys that are more convoluted than President Harding and his confounding Teapot Dome scandal! (Look it up, millennials...)

Actually, there is one doohickey, but once it's all hooked up it looks an awful lot like a regular old cordless phone--with VoIP hidden inside. (No need to tell great-grandma about that last part, it will only confuse her--apologies to all technologically astute great-grandmothers out there, BTW.) It's the Freetalk ConnectMe home phone adapter for Skype, which connects to any regular old home phone.

You'll need to connect your PC to set things up the first time, but after that, Skype says you'll just need to make sure your broadband connection and phone are hooked into the adapter. If you keep your landline, you'll want to hook that in too, because the adapter allows you to switch back and forth between Skype and a regular phone line.… Read more