Slashdot Mirror
Why Does Skype Read the BIOS?
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.'"
I think he was talking about the company who owns it. They also made kazaa, which was full of spyware and other harmful malware.
While it is true that the developers were responsible for Kazaa, currently Skype is owned by eBay. They bought them on Oct. 14, 2005 for around $2.6 billion.
What is mankind really? Well, it's just two words put together Mank, and ind.
Actually, the original Kazaa (which WAS dev'd by the same people as skype) was -not- full of spyware and adware. Kazaa was made an atrocity by Sharman, who still owns it.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
I once read somewhere that the only identifying information that you could legally acquire, being installed on someone's computer, was MAC, IP, and Nickname. Anything else (Pentium 3 fiasco, anyone?) constituted a breach of privacy. Dunno if it's true, or not, but personally, I don't want you trying to identify what the hell makes up my system. Perhaps I'm building it SECRETLY for a fucking reason. You don't need to know what CPU or HDD I have installed - the only reason you would want to would be to directly target advertisements at their own users, concerning their own fucking hardwaer. If Skype did that, they'd lose not every bit of faith from me, but I'd go tell my company that I work for, which uses SKYPE on a regular basis. I can guarantee you that IT is so stupid they'd drop Skype and install Asterisk on a whim if I told them too, since I usually end up having to fix their intranet when it goes down.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
They could be referring to the time where Skype would only allow 10-way conference calling on dual-core Intel processors. Those running AMD processors could only have 5-way conference calls. At the time they cited the "technical superiority" of Intel processors over AMD ones.
Of course thie gave bad publicity to both Intel and Skype after AMD issued a subpoena against Skype and the fact that it was discovered that the software simply checked the processor ID and enabled the feature based on that. A patched version was also released which bypassed this artificial limitation.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Skype won't run if you have softice installed on windows. Pretty funny - I guess they don't want you to look.
Ollydbg still works though.
Reading your BIOS to determine CPU ain't gonna be useful. I doubt any BIOSes store info on which CPU is on the board.
As a former BIOS coder, I'll second that. Even if the BIOS did store some system specific info in Flash (on Embedded BIOSs sometimes this is done because CMOS is not reliable), there is NO way that Skype would know the format/place/meaning of this. It would be specific to a certain build of a specific BIOS for a specific board by a specific vendor.
In any case, the method described to dump the BIOS is not very likely to get anything close to the complete, original BIOS image to begin with. By dumping memory at F000:0000 through F000:FFFF, a 16 bit DOS program, under Windows, will get the memory resident part of the BIOS. Most BIOSs are far bigger than 64KB and the memory resident part is the decompressed runtime part, which is nothing like what the actual BIOS image looks like at boot time.
They are most likely using this in combination with other more or less 'unique' things to identify a specific machine. It wouldn't surprise me if after this some people would do a more in-depth analysis of their code and find out that it also reads the serial number of the harddrive and gets the MAC address of the Ethernet adapter.
http://www.recon.cx/en/f/vskype-part1.pdf
http://www.recon.cx/en/f/vskype-part2.pdf
Not entirely correct.
GetSystemInfo() in Win32 and GetNativeSystemInfo() in WoW64 will give you some CPU information:
It will tell you if your running on Intel, IA64 or AMD64, it will also identify 386, 486 and Pentium, Processor Level and Stepping and processor Revision. I think this will be sufficient in most cases to identify the CPU.
No, the really cool thing about Skype is that it works and works very well.
The audio quality over my MacBook, through a public WiFi network, through a very restrictive firewall, across the net, through another anally restrictive corporate firewall, across a nearly saturated WAN, to my client's desk is much, much better than using my digital mobile phone.
The ease of use is great. We whip together video calls or conference calls all the time and never have to worry about getting a third party involved to set it up for us.
Being able to call out is fabulous also. I've spent a lot of time in ICU's lately where I'm not able to use the mobile phone, but am able to use the WiFi network. It is very neat to be able to phone from an ICU to pretty much anyone (Skype or phone) with the option for video if they are on Skype also.
The Jabber community just hasn't gotten their stuff together quick enough. There was plenty opportunity to beat Skype to market, but no one else, using open protocols, got the job done. I wish they would have.
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
Fact 1: 0xF0000-0xFFFFF are the SHADOWED copy of BIOS on almost every BIOS. It's write-enable-able.
Fact 2: That's usually where the SMBIOS pointer is found.
Fact 3: It's easy (and the only way really) to scan for SMBIOS and find it.
Fact 4: SMBIOS *does* often contain serial numbers and hardware details.