Skype's Chinese censorware

Some good news and some bad news about Skype censorship in China. Since I last wrote about how Skype has admitted without apology that it allows its Chinese partner, TOM Online, to censor user chats with the joint Chinese-language TOM-Skype client, a lot of people have been downloading and testing the TOM-Skype client to try and figure out exactly what it actually censors.

I downloaded it myself and ran a couple of long lists of politically sensitive and obscene Chinese words through it. Nothing appeared to have been blocked. I asked some people currently in China to send messages containing words censored by other Chinese chat clients from their TOM-Skype client to one that I had installed on my machine here. Still nothing. So the good news is that the TOM-Skype client is not censoring much of anything at the moment.

Now the bad news: TOM-Skype installs and runs censorware on your computer without you even knowing. When Nart Villeneuve, the world's technical expert on internet censorship, started playing with TOM-Skype, he found that when he installed the client software, a piece of censorware called ContentFilter.exe also installed itself on his machine. When he logged in through the TOM-Skype client, the program downloaded an encrypted file called "keyfile" onto his computer (and he notes that the file remained on his computer after he uninstalled the TOM-Skype program later). Nart was unable to decrypt the file, but he writes on his blog that it appeared to be a "keyword list file of some sort." Nart ran all kinds of commonly censored Chinese words through the client but none was blocked. The only blocked word he came up with was f*ck, in English. He observes that the keyword blocking takes place on the side of the message recipient: any message containing the blocked keyword (sent by any Skype user to any user of the TOM-Skype client) fails to appear on the recipient's screen. Here is how he depicts his findings:

Here is what it looks like. I sent text chat from one Skype account using Tom-Skype on one computer to another with the same set-up. (I was able to make a Skype user name through Tom-Skype called “falun99″, I thought they may want to filter screen names, but they do not seem to.) When you receive any text — a word, a sentence or a paragraph — that contains a keyword, in this case “fuck”, the entire message is not displayed to the user using Tom_Skype.

The message sender, using Tom-Skype, can see the text, including the banned keyword. And if that message is sent to a normal Skype user, the receiver can also see it.

However, if a message with banned words is received by a Tom-Skype users (from a normal Skype user or a Tom-Skype user) the message will not be displayed at all.

 

    * Tom-Skype is bundled with ContentFilter.exe which makes two connectiopns to Tom Online’s web server, one appears to download a keyword file.
    * Tom-Skype message blocking is done on the client side while receiving messages, normal Skype users can receive messages from Tom-Skype users that contain banned keywords.
    * The total amount of keywords appears to be low, so far only “fuck” has been found.

Check out his blog post for more technical details and screenshots.

So the bottom line is: TOM-Skype doesn't censor much at all, but it is set up to censor whatever TOM Online employees plug into their "keyfile," at any time. And users (unless they have attained Nart's level of geekdom) have no way of knowing what is going on and why.

Let's hope that TOM Online and Skype do the right thing, which is: 1) Inform users that censorware is being downloaded onto their computers along with the Skype-branded chat client, and inform users exactly which Chinese law requires that this must happen.  2) Do not add any political or religious words to the "keyfile" unless forced to do so by written court order. 3) Make a list of those words added to the "keyfile" available to users so that they can be informed that any messages containing those words will not be received.

Comments

[China Law Blog]

Does this happen if you install Skype on your computer outside China and then use it in China to text with someone at TOM-Skype? What about from the US to someone at TOM-Skype?

[Hu]

Antagonistic to the people's transparency!

A good society depends on the free availability of facts and opinions, and on the growth of vision and consciousness - the description of what individuals have actually seen and known and felt. Any restriction of the freedom of individual contribution is actually a restriction of the resources of society.

China's attempt to try to stamp out any form of anti-government speech. Say what you want about the present US Government, the fact that you're allowed to say it here is something that makes us very different from them...

However, many people misinterpret the US government as a democracy when in fact it is a democratic republic. One of the strengths is that people are believed to have unalienable rights, rights given to them by their creator that cannot be taken away by any law. The point of this is not religious, but rather that no one can take away unalienable [loc.gov] rights. Thus the formation of a body (the US government) to protect these rights, versus in the case of many systems (ie a democracy), a government that grants rights.

Clearly, the all-pervading aim of the Chinese regime is not the conversion of the PRC into a pluralistic political system with a free market economy modeled after, and integrated with, Western institutions. Rather, its purpose is to perpetuate the Communist Party's rule.

[beefturbine]

that's the most stupid censor i've ever seen.

[wendy]

how come the news reported in FEB. 2006, mentioning this
http://www.secretchina.com/news/big5/articles/6/2/4/140385.html