Thursday November 20
 
15:39
 
Bolloxroom

“An error occurred when attempting to change modules.”

And it was all going so well…

Wednesday October 22
 
10:03
 
Skype Exposes Kids To Porn II

Finally this story has been picked-up by the media – though it doesn’t look like Skype has any intention to do anything about it.

Of course the first comment on the article was “He has SkypeMe set!” which, of course, I don’t – and the article explicitly says I have status set to “away”. I told The Reg to point that out in the article explicitly.

Skype (kinda, sorta) shields Mac kiddies from VoIP smut
The missing ’sexy dirty b*tch’ filter

When Alan Scully switched from a PC to a Mac earlier this year, he thought it would bolster his online security. For the most part, it has – with one notable exception. His Skype client, which he relies on for international calls, has churned out a demonstrable increase in obscene messages that he’s powerless to stop.

Skype for the Mac, he soon found out, lacks two features found on Windows versions that keep some of the most offensive content sent by strangers from being prominently displayed. As a result, as long as he has Skype open, he is regularly exposed to fleshy pics and obscene come-ons from fellow Skype users (usually pornographic spammers) requesting to be added to his contact list.

“While these requests are annoying for me, the real danger is for anyone who has a family Mac that kids might use for homework, internet, etc.,” Scully, a UK expatriate living in Tokyo, writes in an email to El Reg. “When I have friends who visit me, their kids use my Mac sometimes while we are talking. Each time that happens, I have to remember to ensure Skype is not running.”

Scully sent us screenshots demonstrating that the preferences section of his Skype client is as locked-down as possible. His status is set to “away,” and he permits online calls and chats only from people on his contact list. And yet he regularly receives requests from perfect strangers asking that he add them as a contact. User names have included “sexy dirty bitch xxx,” “sexy mari.kemp” and “sexy horny webcam & juicy tits sex webcam.” More often than not, they include pornographic pictures.

“I have told them over and over about this and they take no action,” Scully says. “It is dangerous for any children using the computer because the default is to accept the contact request and add the contact – hence immediately being vulnerable to pornography, paedophiles.”

Skype has plans to partially fix the problem, but it won’t happen overnight. In the next week or so, the company will release a new beta version of Skype for the Mac that will allow users to strip out photos from contact requests. A Skype spokeswoman said a stable release won’t be available for a month or two after that.

But the move only goes so far. Skype for Windows allows users to receive contact requests in their system tray, rather than much more intrusive popups. So far, there has been no talk about adding such a feature to the Mac client.

More to the point here is Skype’s steadfast resistance to letting users decide whether they want to receive contact request messages at all.

“When people sign up for Skype, they don’t know who’s on Skype and who isn’t,” spokesman Hani Durzy says. The contact request feature “is something that Skype users overwhelmingly want because it helps broaden their contact list of people they want to connect with.

“It’s in everybody’s best interest to continually try to find that line between protecting people from offensive content being sent to them and not going so far past the line as to completely neuter the effectiveness and usefulness of the technology in the first place.”

In other words, for your own good, Skype has no plans to offer you more control about whether perfect strangers can contact you. AOL Instant Messenger offers such functionality (in its Windows client, at least), and that program seems perfectly virile to us. And of course, traditional phones can be unlisted or put on do not call lists, and no one seems to complain about that.

The bottom line is that while the new Mac client may remove the obscene images from the popup, people can continue to send you or your kids highly suggestive popups and there’s nothing you can to do stop them.

“Which means,” Scully says, “that children using a family Mac which has Skype installed can have their children’s game-playing interrupted by anal sex slut at any time, with the default being to accept the request for contact details.”

Actually, one way to stop the popups is to turn the program off. What a concept! ®

Thursday October 9
 
14:14
 
Macs Just Work?

Yeah, like my ass just works.

Two minutes before I’m about to leave for work, Lightroom is uploading to Flickr and at the same time there are some files copying from VMWare. I accidently knock the mouse and the pointer shoots up the screen to the menu bar – and then the whole Mac freezes.

Moving the mouse to the menu bar causes the Mac to crash?

Forced reboot.

Of course I couldn’t leave the damn thing and just go to work. I had to work out what had been copied and what was still being worked on, and of course check that VMWare was still working – half the time a Mac crash ends up corrupting Windows, losing files in the process (most likely due to VMWare caching file writes).

Apart from Lightroom failing to start due to a corrupt library (which it recovered by itself), everything seems fine though – with the exception of being 15 minutes late(r) to the office this morning. But Macs just working? I’m not quite sure Steve Jobs meant it as “the way your ass just works when you’re on a long bus journey a week into arriving in India”, but that’s sure what it seems like.

Monday October 6
 
18:06
 
Photo Organisation On Macs 3 – The Ultimate Workflow

I am in heaven. After 5 months I finally have found the ultimate photography workflow for my Mac – including complete 100% integration with Flickr. Read about my joy here..

Tuesday August 5
 
22:58
 
Skype Exposes Kids To Porn

I am really getting sick of getting these pornographic “Contact details requests” on Mac Skype. It wouldn’t be so bad if they actually wanted to shag me but they only want to use me for my money.

Seriously though, I cannot find a way to prevent these appearing on Skype on my Apple Mac – unless I hide myself from being online altogether or choose Do Not Disturb, which means friends cannot contact me.

I wrote to Skype support and they gave me Windows only instructions on how to block contact pop-ups – stupid arses, given that they know my version of Skype is Mac. When I followed that up with “There is no such configuration option for Mac”, they ignored it.

While Windows users have an option to block these pop-ups, Mac users don’t. I don’t have Skype-Me set, so I am not receiving them because of that.

There is a serious side to this: If this was a family Mac and children were playing games or using iPhoto, the “calienter mujer – sexy dirty bitch xxx” pop-up could appear at any time. That’s bad enough, but since the default is to let dirty bitch see my computer is online and allow contact, kids could very easily get exposed to pornographic chats by just clicking OK.

I’ve tried raising this again with Skype and they didn’t respond. I contacted the news desk at The Register, The Guardian, and The Sun and only The Register responded – however it seems they then got sidetracked with the latest iPhone rumour and stopped following it up.

Skype exposing kids – and innocent me – to pornography. It’s only a matter of time before pedophiles catch on and I hope then that Skype gets sued to the heavens in a high profile case – because if they ever claim they didn’t know, I’ll be the first one providing evidence that they did know they were exposing children to sex and refused to do anything about it… and I’ll be keeping my emails to show The Register, The Guardian, and The Sun also ignored the issue.