Also, hopefully this will teach Skype to do more with open-source. I really hope they open the client up. This bug may have been caught, and things would definitely have turned out differently if Skype ran freely on other platforms. Maybe someone could even factor out a "Skype server" instead of an exclusive policy of client supernodes. Even serious torrenters rent a server somewhere to host their torrents -- P2P doesn't have to be strictly consumer-level connection, and really shouldn't be.
I've worked at places where management is completely gaga over Skype and would push me to support it despite the fact that I had no ability to block spam, troubleshoot messaging problems or integrate our IM system into existing Asterisk, SSO, monitoring and collaboration solutions.
IMHO, Openfire is far more flexible, extensible, secure, reliable and most importantly - manageable as a service.
http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/
disclaimer: I do not work for Ignite and have no vested interest in their business.
I used to use Ekiga for video chat and it was much shoddier than Skype, constantly dropping calls, refusing to release the audio or video device so that we couldn't call back, and other serious bugs. Skype "just works".
I really hope that someone comes up with a decent free software competitor, but it doesn't really exist at this point. The fastest way to solve this problem would be for Skype to become free software.
They'd better get a move on though, otherwise someone else (http://www.enrupt.com/index.php) is going to do it for them: http://www.enrupt.com/index.php/2010/07/07/skype-biggest-sec...
The trouble is that Skype is so closed and has been seemingly uninterested in open source and Linux, it's hard to find open source dev's who are interested in developing Skype related stuff.
I'm a big XMPP proponent (and Voxeo acquired my xmpp-based company) and we do use XMPP for a lot of things inside Voxeo (like Phono, our jquery softphone: http://phono.com/).
Every voxeo employee has an XMPP ID, but they don't tend to get used. People gravitate to Skype naturally. It's the user experience on the client side of XMPP that keeps people from using it extensively for internal communications. At any given time I've got 40+ group chats going on and we create and destroy group chats many times a week for specific needs. The ability to make a voice call to one or more participants of the chat is also a winner.
The fact that everyone on the planet has a Skype ID also helps. We can easily pull partners and customers into chats as needed. They're already on Skype, so we don't need to teach them anything new.
It's a lesson in usability, certainly. Create a client that allows users, without any assistance, to create groups, move seamlessly between text, voice, and video, and has a foolproof signup and setup process, and folks will use it.
Now, if most of your nodes are on machines directly connected to 10GbE, then that's a problem. But most Skype nodes aren't. (I do imagine there are a few connected to 100M+ connections. But only a few.)
Upgrading (relatively) untested software network-wide on what is essentially their critical infrastructure is bad news. If this didn't happen now, it would happen sometime. It was just a question of when.
If you are not firewalled or NATd you are a supernode automatically - on the plus side you get better sound quality for voice calls.
Normally the bandwidth used is pretty low since you are mostly forwarding text messages.
When they said mega-supernodes they meant machines controlled by them that do nothing else, and are on high bandwidth connections. (My bet is lots of amazon instances.)
3.3 Utilization of Your Computer: Skype Software may utilize the processor and bandwidth of the computer (or other applicable device) You are utilizing, for the limited purpose of facilitating the communication between Skype Software users.
Some bug in the new version is probably the likeliest explanation, but if someone deliberately attacked the Skype network, it would probably look similar, right?
Found this link lower down :-)
With that said, I've had a look-see in Skype's .plist and its various Application Support files, but oddly there's nothing "grep'able" to be found anywhere...
If you see thousands of connections on your Skype at home then there probably is some weird P2P problem going on.
Tech data shows version 5:
Faulting application name: Skype.exe, version: 5.0.0.152, time stamp: 0x4cb31516
Faulting module name: KERNELBASE.dll, version: 6.1.7600.16385, time stamp: 0x4a5bdbdf
Exception code: 0xe0fafafa
Fault offset: 0x0000b727
Faulting process id: 0xd20
Faulting application start time: 0x01cba1ea3b70b5ef
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Skype\Phone\Skype.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\syswow64\KERNELBASE.dll
Report Id: 4b2781d7-0de3-11e0-bbdc-005056c00008
I have evidence that suggests this is being done
by a ddos attack on the supernodes' object list
cmd parameter.-John