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You're right. It is possible to write a file but not to list or access any other files. So it is a security bug. You could "fix" it yourself though, by using a privileged account and copy any DLLs loaded by the Skype updater into the directory.. An unprivileged user would not be able to overwrite the files.

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Not sure, but based on the image in the stackoverflow link, it states that it has FILE_ADD_FILE, which translates in the GUI to “Create files / write data,” which I would assume means that overwrites are possible. Don’t trust my word on that though as I am no expert. Will try that a bit later and see what happens.

Given the name, you should assume that it specifically prevent from overwriting files.

The windows filesystem has more than a dozen specific permissions, similar to advanced acl on Linux, that allows very fine grained permissions.

This allows to have shared folders where users can do anything, except delete the directory itself or modify files created by other users.

You still can't overwrite files created by privileged users unless explicitly allowed to do so by the creator of the file. If you could, a lot more things would be broken in Windows.

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