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.