Technology, Video Chat | featured news

Police in Singapore have warned men to be more careful regarding to whom they talk using webcams, reporting an alarming increase in the number of men who've been lured into nude conversations with "foreign" women, only to be blackmailed with video-chat recordings.

Skype says it has resolved a flaw with its password reset tool that could be used to hijack users' accounts on the chat tool.

The European Commission approved Friday the proposed $8.5 billion acquisition of the Internet phone and video communication provider Skype by Microsoft Corp., saying the deal would not significantly impede competition in Europe. The approval appears to be the final step in the technology company’s effort to acquire Skype. The European Commission is the EU’s executive branch.

Skype has moved quickly to fix sign in and service problems that hit users all around the world.

Chatroulette is plotting another comeback! The Russian website that allows complete strangers to jump from one awkward random video chat to the next was all the rage among the Web’s tastemakers in the first half of last year, but it seems like everyone’s now pretty much moved on. The fact that the site was – and is still – frequently used by creeps who couldn’t seem to keep their pants on didn’t help much in that regard.

After Juniper, we have another research company exploring the prospects of the mobile video calling services. It’s In-Stat which has found that this market’s total revenues will exceed $1 billion by 2015.

It seems more than a little odd to us that Apple hasn't bothered to make FaceTime compatible with its own longstanding desktop video chat service, iChat, but we've at least supposed that it's an inevitability with whatever upcoming Mac OS X update or software bundle that Apple deems appropriate. Now Mac4Ever, who was spot on with a pile of rumors last year, but hasn't succeeded with its recent prediction of an iLife '11 launch in August, is saying that Apple is prepping FaceTime both for Mac and PC.

Purported picture of a future iPad in testing with a front camera capable of FaceTime video calls.

At one point the Chatroulette V.2 anticipation was so thick over at TechCrunch HQ that even we were, how you say, premature. But not as premature as the folks over at Chatroulette themselves, who ominously lured us in yesterday in with, “The experiment #1 is over for now.

Chatroulette has announced that it is going to take steps against the worst offenders on its service, threatening people who expose themselves to minors with the police.