Well the big Skype news this week is that a group of Chinese engineers have managed to reverse engineer the protocol used by Skype’s VoIP client. This item has been extensively covered in the last few days so I won’t bother to flog that horse further. But I will mention a few things that haven’t been overly flogged.
I doesn’t take a great leap of logic to infer that the Chinese government was behind this effort. Skype is well known for it’s ability to traverse firewalls and the Chinese are well known for their ‘Great Firewall‘ so it was inevitable that they would try to crack the code. Skype allowed those behind the Great Firewall to contact the outside World and get access to all that pesky Truth that the government there is so desperately trying to protect them from. Now that they know how it works they can shore up the Great Firewall to block it.
[sigh]
This is also an example of the weaknesses inherent of using a proprietary protocol. The use of proprietary technologies, rather than established standards, provides little, if any, protection. And it gets worse… this development now gives the Chinese the ability to listen to and block Skype calls.
Fabulous.
Oh, and just how much did eBay pay for Skype? Yikes!