I once had a paid for account with Skype. One day I woke up with my account hacked into because of their poor security procedures, and the hacker having drained all the money (enjoying the automatic recharge), making international calls, until the limit of automatic recharges per day got exhausted.
I was curious about the break-in of my account because I always used good security practices, having a unique password for Skype, always logging in over https or the Skype client. Also I use a Linux distribution (Arch) so the chances of being infected by a virus of having a key-logger installed are pretty low. I found out that tools to expose any Skype accounts password were readily available online, so my security practices were pretty irrelevant.
Given that Skype's security is non-existent, I since assume that whatever info I put in my account is public and that there is no protection or security of my data whatsoever.
Since then, I revoked their access to my PayPal and my credit card. They are not trustworthy of my money, and I keep hearing from time to time about new huge security holes in their accounts. I do not recommend that anybody authorize any payment with them.
"After the first month, your subscription will automatically continue and payments will be taken monthly unless you cancel within 27 days of the start date."
Oldest trick in the book. They must be a bit desperate.
I can attest to that. I signed up the day the offer came on deals.woot just to find the destination I wanted to reach was not supported. Promptly cancelled. They say I still have the free month.
it is a bit sketchy that they don't accept amex though...
When I ran a retail shop in the US I never accepted AMEX because the fees were significantly higher, mostly because of the flat monthly fee and low volume of people using AMEX.
Frankly I don't know how they are still around. Since everyone with AMEX always has a back-up card there is no incentive at all for merchants to accept it.
The original way they did things was by being available only to rich people and then trying to get merchants to treat them extra nice. These days they charge merchants and bribe consumers with extra goodies. If you're into points or miles, you can usually get more on Amex or Diners.
"You've cancelled your Unlimited World subscription. You can continue to make calls until it expires on December 15, 2012.
No further payments will be taken unless you reactivate this subscription."
Great the cancellation page doesn't work for me. There's a confirmation step to confirm with a big "Ok, I'll stay" button and a small "I still want to cancel" link. The link brings me back to the same page, while the button works.
"If you want to cancel during your first month, that’s easy to do. Simply sign into your account and disable the subscription by clicking Subscription settings on the Call phones tab."
in fairness, the USA based baseball teams harvest players from all over the world. If you're at the professional level of skill and consistency, no matter where you live, you have a shot at playing in the majors in the states. The most recent world series teams provide ample evidence of this.
im not a fan of that either, but at least for voip i'd be pretty surprised if it was possible to bump into a soft limit without doing something obviously abusive like resale or using the circuit 24/7. Mostly the only thing they're worried about is losing customers to resellers. The worse i'd expect otherwise would be an occasional "mysterious" dropped call to limit calls that lack active participants.
it's interesting how well some established pricing models can hold up even as the underlying cost structure radically changes. even among this tech savvy crowd people will regard this as some kind of deal even while we all know optical data costs are approaching zero [1].
voice is of course just super low bitrate data with a legacy last mile that (sometimes) requires a DA converter. tricky? not at all. at least in the us and places with a similar regulatory environment it's awesome - actually way easier and cheaper than pushing pure bits, at least when you're up at a tier 1/tier 2 level. imagine if the government mandated free open access peering for local ip traffic - already tiny ip traffic costs would probably drop almost as much as the fiber glut caused. yet that's basically what you can do with voice in these markets, with some exceptions.
every all you can eat voip provider offers 30 days or more free, usually with a lot more features, inbound, no calling restrictions, etc. why not when it will probably cost them way less than a dollar (at least for outbound only) and whatever keywords they are buying on google probably cost several dollars (informed wild ass guess) and aren't anywhere near as qualified.
for comparison's sake if you want cheap US/CA outbound calls it is easy to find deals like 5000 minutes that don't expire for $5.00 and doesn't require any recurring billing.
Now obviously it doesn't matter too much since even overpriced anyone's voip is still a small fraction of an hours work, i just find it funny that people think a free month is some kind of deal yet wouldn't in a million years vote up a story about netflix offeraing a free month of streaming, something that probably costs them a couple of orders of magnitude more.
I understand the marketing, but I can't help but feel faintly irritated that I'm already paying for a Skype subscription. Should I cancel it and get my free month and then renew it again? ...
It's the same as all other companies. "Switch to our Halifax, and get £100 free. Offer only available to new customers". It's rare to see a company that rewards existing customers instead of disregarding them and focusing on the new ones.
Pleasingly some mobile networks in the UK are doing this, but that's only because they have an incentive to retain customers. I don't know of a good competitor to Skype. Google Voice, perhaps, except it lacks subscriptions and a nice native iOS app (to my knowledge).
What happened? Anything potential customers should know about? I appreciate the flaw recently, but I wasn't aware of a way a third party could steal my money or my card details...
It looks like a potential banana skin for customers.
Trial must be redeemed by 15/11/2012. Offer available only to existing Skype users who have been registered with Skype more than 29 days. To qualify for the offer, you must provide valid payment details. After the first month, your subscription will automatically continue and payments will be taken monthly unless you cancel within 27 days of the start date. Only one free Unlimited World subscription can be claimed per customer. Offer not available in China, Korea, Russia or Taiwan.
Is this smart? What if hundreds of millions of people now start doing hour long calls during this month? If the quality goes down, this wouldn't be good advertisement and would also anger existing costumers.
Is VoIP bandwidth so low by todays standards, that they can scale without problems if they have to?
Skype is peer to peer. That this THE clever invention that put them ahead of all competing services when they launched. They can scale without any significant additional bandwidth or server costs.
This is true only for Skype to Skype connections. Calls that have to reach The PSTN[1] need to be routed through telephony servers somehow, exposing the possibility to cause some stress on Skype's servers as FrojoS mentions.
yeah, its so low. im not sure what skype uses for a codec on pstn interconnects but it's probably better than most given that its easy to upgrade a closed ecosystem. Speex vbr at 16 is probably pretty middle of the road for voip, it doesn't sound that great but people put up with worse. leaving room for overhead and jitter still puts you over 5000 concurrent 16kbit channels, and id be surprised if they saw more than a few percent of their outbound customers active at any given time. standards based equipment is super cheap too as the protocols and such were designed to be managed by embedded systems.
>Trial must be redeemed by 15/11/2012. Offer available only to existing Skype users who have been registered with Skype more than 29 days. To qualify for the offer
I was curious about the break-in of my account because I always used good security practices, having a unique password for Skype, always logging in over https or the Skype client. Also I use a Linux distribution (Arch) so the chances of being infected by a virus of having a key-logger installed are pretty low. I found out that tools to expose any Skype accounts password were readily available online, so my security practices were pretty irrelevant.
Given that Skype's security is non-existent, I since assume that whatever info I put in my account is public and that there is no protection or security of my data whatsoever.
Since then, I revoked their access to my PayPal and my credit card. They are not trustworthy of my money, and I keep hearing from time to time about new huge security holes in their accounts. I do not recommend that anybody authorize any payment with them.