This reminds me of the phrase, “Never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by incompetence.”

So the US government passes legislation that gives them permission to intercept certain forms of communication and two weeks later Skype is installing the software? I don’t think so. How long does it take to plan, code, debug, test and approve a major change to your product that it was never intended to have? Longer than two weeks I’m sure. Not only that, I’m sure a company would be putting up a little bit of a fight before caving in. Many of their employees would also have to know about it and they would be spreading the word too.

Captain Al - 20 August 2007 08:10 PM

So the US government passes legislation that gives them permission to intercept certain forms of communication and two weeks later Skype is installing the software? I don’t think so. How long does it take to plan, code, debug, test and approve a major change to your product that it was never intended to have? Longer than two weeks I’m sure. Not only that, I’m sure a company would be putting up a little bit of a fight before caving in. Many of their employees would also have to know about it and they would be spreading the word too.

Ah-ha! 

Accipiter - 20 August 2007 10:58 PM

Captain Al - 20 August 2007 08:10 PM

So the US government passes legislation that gives them permission to intercept certain forms of communication and two weeks later Skype is installing the software? I don’t think so. How long does it take to plan, code, debug, test and approve a major change to your product that it was never intended to have? Longer than two weeks I’m sure. Not only that, I’m sure a company would be putting up a little bit of a fight before caving in. Many of their employees would also have to know about it and they would be spreading the word too.

Ah-ha! 

Debugging and testing are usually done offline.

That is if they followed any sort of dev. protocol. I wonder if it is a really elaborate plot. Some people think they were putting in a back door because it went down, but others think that it’s way to obvious to really be what they were doing. Maybe ther foresaw that and calculated that those who thought it was way too obvious would outnumber those who really believed that was what they were doing?

Or maybe the government has had control and access all the time anyway so it doesn’t matter.  But when the law got passed they planned this in a short time so it would look too obvious.  And then when there were no further problems in a more timely manner everyone would forget about it.

Captain Al - 20 August 2007 08:10 PM

So the US government passes legislation that gives them permission to intercept certain forms of communication and two weeks later Skype is installing the software? I don’t think so. How long does it take to plan, code, debug, test and approve a major change to your product that it was never intended to have? Longer than two weeks I’m sure. Not only that, I’m sure a company would be putting up a little bit of a fight before caving in. Many of their employees would also have to know about it and they would be spreading the word too.

First: my personal jury is still out on this topic. I do not accept neither reject the option that this is what happened. What I do know however, is that I really have my doubts about the reasoning given by Skype, i.e. the cause being the rebooting of too many PC’s at once after the monthly Microsoft patch day. So, what do they want to cover then? One other option is that this was due to a deliberate DoS attack after all.

About what you write:

- There is no reason why work on it shouldn’t have been done already for some time before formal acceptance of this new law;

- Being owned by eBay, a US company, they are obliged to compel by law to cooperate, just as with normal taps on telephone by the FBI etc.;

- Things similar to this have remained hidden for some time before, nothwithstanding employees having to have been involved. For example, the dots secretly embedded on printed documents by certain printer brands to aid fingerprinting letters etc. to a specific printer. That had gone on for several years before it came to the open. Employees of the firms involved had to know that too, and they stayed silent.

- You don’t need many people involved to ad a component to software. It may involve only one or two. Most software today is modular, with different developers working on different parts.

On slashdot, several commenters are now pointing to the fact that the outage took place on Thursday the 16th, while Microsoft’s monthly patch day is on Tuesday the 14th.

A new law isn

LaMa - 21 August 2007 07:34 AM

First: my personal jury is still out on this topic. I do not accept neither reject the option that this is what happened. What I do know however, is that I really have my doubts about the reasoning given by Skype, i.e. the cause being the rebooting of too many PC’s at once after the monthly Microsoft patch day. So, what do they want to cover then? One other option is that this was due to a deliberate DoS attack after all.

Well, just because the company is lying about why there was a period of no service doesn’t imply that it’s some kind of government conspiracy or something.

The company is trying to save face and keep customers. And they blame Microsoft (a popular target).

I really think we need more information before we start blaming this on the Government.

(LaMa, I’m just adding to your thoughts, not arguing against what you said or anything.)

Well, just because the company is lying about why there was a period of no service doesn