So, it's not "damned if they do, damned if they don't," from my point of view, they have to do it in the right place. Within Skype itself is absolutely not the right place.
L.O.L. Warnings are ignored so often they're practically useless.
What's wrong with scanning links in chat for malware on the Skype servers so that they can immediately stop such messages from spreading?
Chrome team does a pretty good job of finding malware themselves.
What's wrong with scanning links is the scanning part. A third party has NO BUSINESS in seeing any of the bytes in my conversation.
If I'm a political dissident in a repressive country, I don't want MS to have the OPTION of handing my conversation over to my government.
Unlike, say, FB messages, Skype has always felt so brittle and unreliable that I hoped it was peer-to-peer, and this news came as a bigger shock.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cooldeal
Maybe it's not you, but I bet it's happening.
If there is such a team on HN, they're doing quite a shitty job by the looks of it. Even a review of the Surface is routinely flagged off the front page for daring to be on the same page as a new Chromebook announcement.
They could ensure that clicking a link doesn't compromise your system.
There is no inherent conflict between privacy and security here, not like you're making it out to be.
A list of essentially every known malicious link on the entire Internet? I speculate that would be quite a few gigabytes in size, and would only get larger if they wanted to store the links in some data structure that could be scanned in a practical amount of time. And said list wouldn't be complete, either- it would only cover known links that Microsoft had seen before, and would only record their malicious state at the time of the last scan, not now.
> They could ensure that clicking a link doesn't compromise your system.
These sorts of vulnerabilities often come from obscure and surprising places (e.g., their TrueType font parsing code), from blocks of code that have been around for a decade or two without the vulnerability being noticed. Identifying security vulnerabilities is notoriously hard, even when you're not contending with the complexity and scale of Windows and all its associated applications.
There's an argument to be had about the acceptability of the privacy/security tradeoff Microsoft could provide by eavesdropping on your conversations, but your implication that such a tradeoff is mostly or entirely avoidable is untrue.
http://blog.alexyakunin.com/2010/03/nice-bloom-filter-applic...
Instead of worrying about how impossible this idea is, I'd suggest looking at how others are accomplishing it.
They're not damned if they don't do this. Not doing this would solve the problem. What's your point?
"New Skype malware spreading at 2,000 clicks per hour to mine Bitcoins" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5502028
One of the choice top HN comments:
"Why does Skype even have any clickable links in it at all if Microsoft can't be bothered to keep the obvious malware out?"
Another comment:
"Re the conclusion: to protect yourself, don't run an OS that will silently install software just because you clicked on a blue link in a program published by the OS vendor. Steve Ballmer should be jailed as an accessory for allowing this."
Damned if they do, damned if they don't.