Maybe the Ebay/Skype personnel shuffle — Skype’s “nightmare before Christmas” as Om Malik called it — has to do with other people’s nightmares about what Skype might be doing to their networks.

While the controversy about Skype on academic networks has made the mainstream media in recent months, there’s also been a controversy brewing — mostly surfacing in the business press — about Skype use on business networks.

Back in 2005, Gartner Group was warning against Skype. And last May the industry analyst advised companies to “ditch” Skype because of its inherent security risks and the traffic that the peer-to-peer VoIP service puts through the network — even when no Skype calls are being made. Skype describes this as ’symbiotic” but corporate IT departments are more likely to use the word “parasitic.”

One major U.S. aerospace company is actively blocking the ports that carry Skype traffic and an employee of the company, who declined to be identified, says that other organizations are following suit. “Peer-to-peer is seen as a bad neighbor by corporate IT departments,” the employee says.

How risky is Skype? Consider this. Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that the computer system at the Naval War College was brought down by what some believe to be Chinese hackers. And last summer the blogosphere was abuzz with reports that a Chinese company had cracked Skype’s proprietary protocol. The combination of the two could add up to a perfect storm — typhoon? — for corporate networks.

Last June, Bit9, a Cambridge, MA-based security firm listed Skype as Number 3 in its list of the top security risks in corporate environments. What took first place in this software rogues gallery? Firefox 1.5., with Apple iTunes 6.02 and Quicktime 7.0.3 tied in second place.

Loren Baker, the editor of the respected Search Engine Journal, is convinced the short-lived item on the official Google blog that purported to announce the cancellation of the Google-eBay “click-to-call” partnership is a hoax.

We’re very much inclined to agree.

Baker writes that “such a message would not come from Google blasting eBay, nor would it be full of misspellings, unsigned or end with the ‘This message has been translated using Google language tools’ line.”

The item in question was deleted from the blog less than an hour after it appeared (you can see a screen shot of the item here). And it is inconceivable that such an announcement would be made in a poorly written blog post that calls the month-old agreement “monopolistic.”

So was the Google blog hacked? It sure looks like it may have been.

Ironically, the blog item posted before the “click-to-call” cancellation note, entitled “Our Security Stance” and posted by Heather Adkins of Gooogle’s security team, asserts that “Google takes security very seriously and designs all of its services and applications to protect your privacy and data security.”

“We keep the bad guys out of our systems,” wrote Adkins.

Well, not all the “bad guys.” Chinese government censors seem to have free rein. And so do, apparently, “monopoly”-bashers.

[ADDED AFTER ORIGINAL POST]

Om Malik, the journalist/blogger (whose work, thankfully, tilts more to the left part of that slash) at GigaOm writes that Google has confirmed the post to be a hoax.

According to the spokesperson who contacted Malik, “A bug in Blogger enabled an unauthorized user to make a fake post on the Google Blog claiming that we have discontinued our AdWords click-to-call test. The bug was fixed quickly and the post removed. Our click-to-call test is progressing on schedule and we are pleased with the results thus far.”