Here’s an example of wearing your SF hat too much: Some years back, I was predicting that malware authors would create trojans that very quietly installed file-sharing nodes behind the screen of rootkit techniques, which would then search for sharable content on the machine and then open LimeWire-style P2P connections to the Net at large. We underestimated small things (computers) and way overestimated big things, like space travel and (yes indeedy!) flying cars. I’m an SF writer, and the futures I’ve tried to predict (as have many other, far more notable SF writers than I) have turned out to be a lot more dramatic and colorful than the future that actually worked itself out over the years.

There’s a tendency to love a great story, and we have to be careful not to read more into things than reality warrants. This suggests that Skype immediately stopped pushing installs once the crap started to fly online, which further suggests that Skype was in control and that it was a mistake rather than an attack. I thought the fact that it was still at SP2 might have made a difference, but I’ve heard from people who got the install on SP2 machines. It’s still running as I write, and there’s no trace of the EasyBits installer. I set up an old XP machine with Skype on it Saturday afternoon, and left Skype running in a window. So was it a mistake? Or was it an attack? The greatest weirdness of all is that we still don’t know. EasyBits is not obviously malware, but there were some weird EasyBits/Skype connections with malware last year, and Saturday’s install certainly acted like malware.

Skype has been almost silent on the issue, as has the firm that originated the software in question, EasyBits GO. After a strange reluctance to jump on the issue, the major news outlets have begun covering the excitement of this past Saturday morning, when untold numbers of Skype users suddenly found new software installed on their Windows PCs, without so much as a notification or request for permission from Skype.

Easybits software