Ever since Melissa (nom-de-blog: myria) posted Skype Reads Your BIOS and Motherboard Serial Number yesterday, the web has been alive with links to this post. Today we have learned that Skype has found that the Easybits software framework used for the plug-in manager was doing this as a form of digital rights management functionality.

To enforce these license agreements, the EasyBits framework attempts to uniquely identify what physical computer it's running on. One of the possible ways to do this identification is to simply read the serial number of the motherboard, which is oftentimes available through a public query to the BIOS.

Check out item 4 here for more details re DRM within the Skype Extras program.

As mentioned in today's Share Skype post linked above, Skype has "updated the version of their framework with one that no longer attempts to read from the BIOS." Download the updated version, 3.0.0.216 here. Kudos to Jaanus Kase at Skype for keeping all of us participating in the public Skype English Blog Chat informed in a timely manner; note that this chat has been running since mid-November.

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