Skype is getting reverse engineered

FREELANCE RESEARCHER Efim Bushmanov has outlined his goal to make Skype open source by reverse engineering it and has made his source code available for download.

Let's make it clear that the reverse engineering of Skype hasn't been completed. Bushmanov's blog reads, in all its ungrammatical splendour, "My aim is to make skype open source. And find friends who can spend many hours for completely reverse it."

He said that most of the hard work is done already including the 1.x, 3.x, and 4.x versions of Skype, including rc4 and arithmetic compression. There are three .zip files available to download including binary and source code.

Furthermore he has working "send message to skype" code based on Skype's old 1.4 version protocol. If the project reaches completion then users could totally avoid using Skype, which recently suffered a major crash.

Skype told The INQUIRER, "This unauthorized use of our application for malicious activities like spamming/phishing infringes on Skype's intellectual property. We are taking all necessary steps to prevent/defeat nefarious attempts to subvert Skype's experience."

None of us hacks at The INQUIRER are legal experts so we're not sure whether Bushmanov is breaking any laws or not, but his activities are bound to cause controversy, to say the least.

We don't think Microsoft will be too happy about the news and will probably go down the legal route to thwart the project after revealing last month that it intends to buy Skype for $8.5bn. µ