Skype tightening security by reducing supernodes
A major change in the Skype network architecture has occurred two or three weeks ago (at the time I wrote this), and has gone unnoticed as far as I know. The number of supernodes has dropped from 48k+ to 10k+, and all the supernodes are now hosted by Microsoft/Skype. Promotion of random eligible nodes to supernodes has stopped (through the setting of the global boolean 33h).
Ironically, those remaining supernodes run on grsec'ed Linux boxes (I hope Spender gets a sizeable donation from Microsoft). They can host a considerable amount of clients, ~100000.
At the same time, the number of online Skype users jumped (http://skypejournal.com/blog/2012/04/23/skype-topped-41-5-million-concu…) and can now reach 41M at peak hours. This will likely ensure that former outages (http://articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/23/business/la-fi-skype-20101223) don't happen again, and gives MS a better control over the network.
