Why Does Skype Read the BIOS?

Posted by kdawson on Tuesday February 6, 2007 @08:02PM from the phone-home dept.

pfp writes "Myria at pagetable.com, among others, noticed that Skype reads the machine's BIOS code on startup. This probably would've gone unnoticed if the operation didn't fail on 64-bit windows. From the post: 'It's dumping your system BIOS, which usually includes your motherboard's serial number, and pipes it to the Skype application. I have no idea what they're using it for, or whether they send anything to their servers, but I bet whatever they're doing is no good given their track record... If they hadn't been ignorant of Win64's lack of NTVDM, nobody would've noticed this happening.'"

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Fraud by samj · 2007-02-06 23:57 · Score: 1, Flamebait

This is almost certainly relating to fraud - sometimes Skype offer free credit and using something akin to a poor man's Trusted Platform Module (TPM) makes them sleep better at night knowing the hordes aren't running them up a big phone bill.

This is not to excuse this behaviour, both in terms of them for asking for the information and of the operating system for giving it to them!