Interesting. Skype’s security guru has come out to allay our fears about Skype peeking around in the BIOS of Wintel machines:

One of the new feature in Skype for Windows is the Extras Gallery, which is managed by a plug-in manager software framework developed by EasyBits Software and used under license. The EasyBits software includes a form of digital rights management functionality intended to protect commercial software, such as plug-ins, from illegal redistribution or unlicensed use. To enforce these license agreements, the EasyBits framework attempts to uniquely identify what physical computer it’s running on. One of the possible ways to do this identification is to simply read the serial number of the motherboard, which is oftentimes available through a public query to the BIOS.

Damn DRM… This does create a bit of a problem for Skype, though. One user lost his shit in the comments:

Hey Skype! Why do you lie to your customers? Why haven’t you inform about this DRM-Plugin? Now we have to decide if we will use you software in future or not. How can we be sure that there are no more other such Plugins in your client software? We can’t believe you anymore, sorry!

Your own commitment/words: http://www.skype.com/download/adwarefree/

Clicking that URl brings you to the page on Skype’s “promises” to customers. In it, we read this one, which I think is the one he lost it over:

What is Spyware?

Spyware relates to software that becomes installed on computer without the informed consent or knowledge of the computer’s owner and covertly transmits or receives data to or from a remote host. For example, spyware may monitor a user’s behaviour and pass on details of a user’s activity (for example their user names or passwords) to a third party

Well, by that definition you could make the case that Skype is collecting data without the user’s knowledge or consent.

I understand the need for DRM, especially with plugins that companies make money selling, but at least disclose the fact to your customers. I’m glad they patched it in the latest version, but they added it and removed it without saying anything. Sorry if that sounds a bit sneaky to me.

Skype’s a great product, but a little transparency from Ebay wouldn’t kill them.

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