“Groovy Motherfucker”

Interesting post-mortem on the Skype downtime last week. Due to a bug in the client version used by 50% of their users (which had already been patched in a newer release), a small server overload feedbacklooped into taking out their entire P2P system.

An increasing number of services are forcibly updating their users clients (most notably, Google Chrome, which pushes releases to users without notification or interaction). How long until we reach a point that this is the norm?

US Skype users can now use it to phone anywhere in the US or Canada. This is going to be painful for the mobile companies — I’m sure a large part of their money comes from people using the “free” longdistance that your minutes bring.

Reverse-engineering the heavily obfuscated Skype binary and protocol.