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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.'"
Or you buy a Mac.
Pros: You don't wind up with a corrupted registry and DLL hell because every app ships with its own copies of the libraries it needs.
Cons: Every app is, to all intents and purposes, statically linked. (OK, it isn't, but in terms of disk space it may as well be). Takes up more disk space.
With disk space being measured in cents/gigabyte, who cares?
I wonder what gizmoproject is reading on my sys?
Skype is evil! Skype is SkyNet in a diminutive disguise!
And your BIOS is totally a unique identifier of You (well, your machine). Ever noticed that your disks hardware etc are all listed there?
I don't know about you but I don't like the idea of giving all my preferences/traits/consumption habits to big corporate interests who might have the voice recognition software set on words like "money" and "bill gates" and "kill"... it just doesn't bode well for my future. The reality is that the amount of data you could glean from what a person talks about is worth a tiny amount, but when you have that data for a million people, it's a survey, and suddenly it's worth billions of dollars of investment revenue.
Investors, not lawyers, are the devil. Lawyers are your friend.
(Bill Gates, I'm coming for You...)