Skyping In China? You Are Being Watched

Skyping In China? You Are Being Watched

Ewigen Zyniker, Oct 03, 2008 0903 hrs IST

What? You're surprised?

Canadian researchers have reported that when people in China chat on Tom-Skype--a collaboration between Skype and Hong Kong's Tom Group--words like "Taiwan independence" and "Communist Party" get logged, complete with their IP addresses and usernames. Researchers at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto have found a bunch of computers in China with millions of such messages stored them.

We've come to expect this. The Chinese have been very particular when monitoring their denizens, which is why Google delivers different results for Google.cn than it does for the rest of the world. And then there's the case of the journalist who was jailed for leaking state secrets because Yahoo gave the Chinese government his details. Generally, when in China, watch what you say.

But here's the sad part: while Skype admits that some words will be censored in chats, they also say, "If the message is found unsuitable for displaying, it is simply discarded and not displayed or transmitted anywhere."

Right.

A spokesperson from eBay, who now owns Skype, pins blame on the Tom Group: the data goes to Tom Online's servers. Worse, these servers clearly have very poor protection. Bottom line: when in China, shut up.



Source: ComputerWorld



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