Slashdot Mirror
Skype Blames Microsoft Patch Tuesday for Outage
brajesh writes to tell us that Skype has blamed its outage over the last week on Microsoft's Patch Tuesday. Apparently the huge numbers of computers rebooting (and the resulting flood of login requests) revealed a problem with the network allocation algorithm resulting in a couple days of downtime. Skype further stressed that there was no malicious activity and user security was never in any danger.
If this really is true reason behind the outage, you can't really blame Skype! How on earth could you anticipate this failure mode?
And that's really the point. This is why a software monoculture sucks. Suddenly the security of each node on the network has the potential to affect the reliability of every other node.
This would be just as true if everyone ran BSD or everyone ran Linux or everyone ran OSX. It's not so much the product (although none of the operating systems available today were designed with security in mind from the start) that's the problem but the fact it forms a monoculture.
A hard-nosed person might say the real solution is to design a secure OS. The problem with that approach is that an OS is very complicated. There's an adage that it takes a certain amount of effort to write some code, it takes the square of that effort to debug it. I want to add to that and say it probably takes the cube of that effort to get security; possibly more. In light of that , designing a secure OS is uneconomical and maybe even impossible.
This is why breaking the monoculture is important was to reduce the damage a defect can cause; it allows us to divide the risk across many separate implementations.
Simon
OK, even if the flaw was on Skype's end, it would be nice if the linux version was reasonably in sync with the windows and mac version. Maybe if more people were able to use all of the features of Skype on alternative OS's, they wouldn't have to worry about getting hammered and taken out due to an event like this. I still don't understand why Linux support is in version 1.4 while windows is up to 3.5 and has "amazing" features like video support. Oh well, until they at least try to get it right I'll stick with something else (Ekiga, Kopete, Pidgin).