These 8 characters crash Skype and leave it unable to reopen

[Borg 386]

People who rely on Skype’s Windows desktop, iOS and Android apps should be aware that receiving a message of “IIS Windows Server (without the quotation marks) will cause the app to crash. When they try to restart the app, it will crash again on startup, locking them out of the service. If there’s a silver lining, Skype’s Mac app and Modern Windows app, which is available for download through the Windows Store, seem unaffected by the bug.

The problem was first spotted by users on Skype’s community support forums. According to a report by VentureBeat, a user who goes by the handle “Giperion” posted about the issue first, noting that deleting the chat history on a device didn’t help, because Skype would automatically download it again from the cloud after starting back up, and then promptly crash again. That thread has since been deleted for reasons that are unclear.

These 8 characters crash Skype and leave it unable to reopen | PCWorld

 

[Anak]

Borg,

This is curious; Had you noticed the 8 character link - http : / / : - in the PCWorld (PCW) article was changed by the SevenForums server to IIS Windows Server in your quote when you posted it, but it doesn't in mine?

People who rely on Skype’s Windows desktop, iOS and Android apps should be aware that receiving a message of “http://:” (without the quotation marks)

And looking at it further, when you hover over the link no matter where it is, either PCW or here at 7F it comes up as http://xn--:-rhn/ in the lower left corner of the browser window.


http://xn--:-rhn/ shows in my post as a link, but it doesn't show in the lower left corner. Google safebrowsing diagnostic and Virustotal can't resolve it, calling it error 400 bad request and an invalid URL respectively.



In a related matter: Microsoft stamps out Skype-crashing bug

A Skype spokeswoman said in an email that the issue first became apparent on Tuesday, but didn’t disclose what about the string caused the crash. A post to the Skype community forums called the string a “bad URL.” The spokeswoman also said that the issue didn’t compromise a user’s personal information in any way.

 

[Borg 386]

Interesting indeed. Wonder why it did that? :huh: Well, glad they fixed the problem with Skype.

It looks normal over in Ten Forums & hovering over the HTTP gives you a redirect-to box but not the above mentioned characters as it does here.

 

[Anak]

Could be it had something to do with how the server was setup, Yes, it didn't take long to get it fixed.

Doing a search for h t t p://xn--:-rhn/ results in an xn--rhn IDN availability and there are quite a few references to red hat network because of the rhn. Spaces added to http to stop the server resolve.