Utility to kill off the Skype Plugin Manager.

Some people who think they "know" me, perceive some of my statements on certain Skype security issues endless rantings.

That may be the case, but these rantings are there for a reason. I try to look at things from the perspective of "what if it goes wrong, and where do these IM applications fit into environments where standard operating procedures, best practice, proof of concepts, IT policies are important and are not just words on paper.

I am certainly not the only one talking about issues such as :

• dual,triple login without notification (yeah boring, still the same unsolved topic)
• clear text password sending by the Skype mailserver
• public available password reset for virtually every Skype account that was ever created
• no notification or possibility to activate or check when a Skype account was created (via email notification).
• You can revert most of these problems (from this perspective) to the fact that anybody can create any account from anywhere without any real authentication whatsoever.
• most annoying is also that you cannot switch of historical rebuild of chats…

I don't see any bigger company (except Skype, Paypal and Ebay, being safe in their own AES-256 Voice fortress) feeling comfortable with the fact that on a server park somewhere in Estonia/London (and where else... with a bunch of supernodes in between ) a company user-list is running (over which you have no real control).

I wonder sometimes if Skype has any control over it. I mean : how do you manage such a supercloud. But maybe in the Skype business model that is not an issue, but it is certainly an issue if you go into enterprises or even individuals that value security, privacy. 

To round up : I think that first some bad things will have to happen before the above issues are properly addressed, which bring me to the Skype plugin manager (an even more scary thing for certain IT-managers, who don't know about the installer for Skype for business…). Those plugins that are running might be doing a little bit than you think. Maybe or maybe not. It's not really explicitely documented what specific traffic data are stored on the Skype Servers. I believe that the chats are not stored, but I am not sure what all those plugins of external companies are doing. This is the way of the web. Accept it. So we figured, yeah we want to run the Skypepm.exe (the do more thing) but we want to be able to shut it down to. It's my computer, it's my bandwidth, when I choose to be not sharing. Sometimes I share but not all time. Anyways : we (Mister C. and Mister J.)  share this utility to kill the process Skype plugin manager - skypepm.exe  See screen-dumps of what it does :

If you don't want to run the "skypePM.exe" (Skype plugin manager) then you can just run tiny executable in order to kill the skypePM.exe process  ;). Your computer still belongs to you, right ?

If you're running Windows XP Professional, you're lucky:

  * to KILL just double click "killSPM_WinPro.exe" download it here http://www.webtown.com.my/killspm

If you're running Windows XP Home, you've to do some additional work:

  * go to http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/pstools.mspx

  * at bottom of the page download "PsTools Suite"

  * extract "pskill.exe" and "pslist.exe" from the downloaded ZIP

  * put these two EXEs into the same folder as "killSPM_WinHome.exe"

  * to KILL just double click "killSPM_WinHome.exe"

In both cases:

  * to RUN AGAIN double click "skypePM.exe" inside the folder

    "Plugin Manager" inside your Skype installation

    folder (usually: "C:\Program Files\Skype\")

No support will be provided for the users of this program. We are just sharing what we think is useful.

Download it here : www.webtown.com.my/killspm/