“It probably isn’t suprising to anyone that Tom-Skype is being monitored.” Well, I don’t know about “anyone” but I warned my students (at a college in mainland China) as early as 2004 against using the Tom version of Skype – not based on any ability on my part to look into the future but because even then it was already known that chat messages were being filtered by that version. They were being censored; were they also being recorded? I don’t remember.
The blogger at “The Dark Visitor” confesses to being surprised that the servers used to store the recorded chat messages were “accessible to anyone”. While this doesn’t seem to make much sense in the context of suppressing dissent (the Internet Nanny is in effect making censored content publicly available???), I can’t say I’m surprised by this level of carelessness on the part of the Chinese authorities. Why, the whole country is run in this way … Sure the authorities are evil, but they’re also stupid: isn’t that a kind of relief?
Links:
- How a Canadian cracked the Great Firewall of China (The Globe and Mail)
- Skype admits Chinese privacy breach (Yahoo/AFP)
- Skype admits Chinese privacy breach (The Register)
- Breaching Trust (PDF), the original report by Nart Villeneuve
- How safe is Skype in Germany? German cyberplods raid Pirate Party on Skype Trojan mole hunt (The Register)
