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Skype Is Working To Defeat the Reverse Engineering
ndogg writes "Michael Larabel of Phoronix was emailed a response to the reverse engineering of the Skype protocol from the VP of Skype's PR company, who said that the reverse engineering was done for the use of spam/phishing, and that it's an infringement of their IP, and that they are working to defeat it."
Since 'skype' is Britishism for obtaining by nefarious means skyping Skype seems rather appropriate.
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
I suspect that it depends on where they plan to slot Skype into their list of product offerings.
If it becomes part of some 'enterprise' offering, playing cat-and-mouse would likely not be a sensible strategy. Corporate/institutional customers hate petty version churn of the sort needed to keep constantly breaking 3rd parties and they have a fairly low likelihood of going with 'unofficial' software. They may well keep globbing on new features(as with Office document formats, Sharepoint tie-ins, etc.); but corporate customers are conservative enough that even the perception that 3rd party clients are not feature-complete and 100% compatible usually keeps them well away, and the few exceptions are likely to either be impecunious contrarians or competing titans(eg. IBM) large enough to make an issue of it if you play dirty.
If it becomes a "Live" consumer offering, playing cat-and-mouse is at least an option, since the consumer market has largely learned to suck up their auto-updates when told(and isn't behind a firewall that blocks them, and doesn't need to open a ticket with IT to install them...) It still isn't totally clear what their motivation would be(since they would still control the skype-out gateways, where the money is, and having third parties voluntarily make your network more popular among markets you don't feel like serving doesn't seem like an obviously bad thing(though they might keep the banhammer hovering, just to ensure that people license the rights to embed skype in wifi VOIP phones and whatnot from them, rather than go 3rd party...)
If it becomes a consumer-electronics thing, affiliated with xbox or Windows Phone, it seems to be some sort of ontological obligation to lock it down as hard as possible, just on principle, just because that is how they roll in console-land.
The Civilian Assistance to Law Enforcement Act mandates that all telecommunications service providers install and maintain back doors into their systems for the express purpose of enabling Federal law enforcement to intercept private communications. If you want your phone calls to be "off the record" you have to use VOIP and encrypt your traffic. If a closed source proprietary VOIP provider offers encryption, they are directly obstructing law enforcement agencies in the execution of their lawfully authorized surveillance activities. There is no question that Skype has been requested to provide back doors into their "secure" proprietary protocol - unless of course it has always been trivial snake oil crypto, always a strong probability with closed source commercial products.
Of course, the parent poster already knows all the answers, and we are lucky that he took a moment away from licking the boots of his beloved owners to favor us with words of wisdom.
Riiiight, and if the protocol was completely open like SIP we wouldn't have the problems with Robodialers like SIP because? The problem with mass communication protocols is there are plenty of assholes in legal nowherelands that can and WILL use anything and everything they can get their slimy hands on to hack, harass, spam, and generally act like giant fucking douchebags without regards to anyone but themselves.
One should never forget the universal truth that is Gabriel's Greater Internet Theory and then add in the ones that would be acting like douchebags because they could make money doing so ON TOP of the ones just being dicks for the sheer fun of being a fucktwit? It would be a damned mess and you KNOW this. The reason why everyone uses Skype is that it "just works" without having to worry about your video chat window suddenly popping up with someone's junk in it or getting called every two seconds from some automated voice trying to sell you herbal Viagra. While I think FOSS is fine in some places, in others it would be a BAD idea, and I'd say this here is one of the latter.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
<quote>It does some suspicious things too, like reading /etc/passwd. </quote>
I have a surprise for you:
strace ls -l 2>&1 | grep passwd
open("/etc/passwd", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 4