October 3rd, 2008

Skype In China: Big Brother Is Reading

If you happen to use a little add-on called McAfee SiteAdvisor with Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer, just try this while living in China.

Log on www.skype.com and you will be redirected automatically to http://skype.tom.com – no choice, this is the Chinese version of Skype. Then look at the color of the Siteadvisor icon on your web browser, it turns from green to full red which is a strong invite to leave the page. Asking more details at SiteAdvisor, you will then discover that the Skype Tom page in China is hosting Adware-BDsearch, a generic trojan considered as harmful to your computer.

I discovered this long ago adn advised friends to download Skype from the US site instead.

Yesterday, the New York Times revealed that surveillance of Skype messages was found in China. At last…

A group of Canadian human-rights activists and computer security researchers has discovered a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives certain Internet text conversations that include politically charged words.

The system tracks text messages sent by customers of Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and eBay, the Web auctioneer that owns Skype, an online phone and text messaging service.

The list also serves as a filter to restrict text conversations. The encrypted list of words inside the Tom-Skype software blocks the transmission of those words and a copy of the message is sent to a server. The Chinese servers retained personal information about the customers who sent the messages. They also recorded chat conversations between Tom-Skype users and Skype users outside China. The system recorded text messages and Skype caller identification, but did not record the content of Skype voice calls.

The researchers said their discovery contradicted a public statement made by Skype executives in 2006 after the content filtering of the Skype conversations was reported. At the time the company said that the conversations were protected and private.

So if you don’t want your private conversations log to be stored on a Chinese computer somewhere you don’t want it to be, make sure you use a US version of Skype and make sure you correspondent is doing the same as well.

Read the full article here.

Also in French from Reuters here. [Update] The previous link has been removed from Yahoo archives.

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