Hasta La Gadget!

Even though smartphones have been on the market for over 10 years, mobile phone users still preferred to use SMS texts in order to communicate with other cell phones, especially when carriers bundle text messages with certain plans. But it looks like instant messaging through a number of applications has finally caught up with SMS texts, and in fact, has overtake it according to Informa.

Research firm Informa believes nearly 19 billion instant messages were sent per day in 2012 through chat applications, which has finally overtaken SMS texts which only 17.6 billion texts were sent in the same year. The 19 billion instant messages were spread across six of the most popular mobile chat applications: WhatsApp, BlackBerry Messenger, Viber, Nimbuzz, Apple’s iMessage and KakaoTalk. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Angry Birds Wrecking Ball Spotted In Washington D.C. Construction Site, Google Now Available On iPhone, iPad As Google Search Update,

Only a handful of Skype users have reported this problem over at the support forum, but what they’re complaining about is pretty hair-raising. They say that, following an update in June, instant messages have repeatedly and unintentionally been forwarded to random people in their contact lists. In other words, third-parties are seeing stuff they were never meant to see, which constitutes a serious breach of privacy. Skype now tells us it’s aware of the issue and is working on a fix. Here’s the official response in full:

“We are aware that in rare circumstances IM’s between two contacts could be sent to an unintended third contact. We are rolling out a fix for this issue in the next few days and will notify our users to download an updated version of Skype.”

[Thanks, Kuldar]

Filed under: Internet

Skype confirms ‘rare’ bug that sends messages to unintended contacts, promises fix soon originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Jul 2012 09:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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