Skype Trolls Coming To An End
While trolling was carried out by people for harmless fun, it has recently become a form of online revenge. Online games have given some players the opportunity to bring down the connections of fellow gamers who are better than they are. Unfortunately, this was all too easy with Skype, for example, as the Microsoft service provided IP addresses in clear language on the site so that gamers could quickly use them and create a Distributed Denial of Service (or DDoS) attack on fellow gamers.
Fortunately, Skype has decided to do something about this gamer culture by committing to hide IP addresses by default. The company said in a blog post on January 21st:
“Skype is a fully committed to delivering as safe and secure of an experience as possible to our customers. We have recently introduced the ability to hide a Skype user’s IP address and we’ve set this as a default status in the latest versions of Skype. Starting with this update to Skype and moving forward, your IP address will be kept hidden from Skype users. This measure will help prevent individuals from obtaining a Skype ID and resolving to an IP address,”
This IP address-by-default update is Skype for Linux version 4.3, and is only available for Android (it will come to iOS at a later date; the exact date is unknown). For now though, Android smartphone users can be relieved that their devices will be protected from gamer trolling and abuse.
Have you downloaded the new Skype IP address-by-default update? If so, let us know. If you’ve been the victim of gamer trolling before, feel free to share your terrible encounter. And as always, don’t forget to protect yourself with an excellent VPN for your Android Device.
