Skype censoring: Mechanism discovered
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Remember Skype censoring messages to China? Niklas Zennström didn’t deny the blocking. But somehow, besides the words from the Skype CEO and its TOM partner in China, no one could witness what was going on.
And even if “Skype is not being transparent about the filtering functionality that has been introduced,” it’s different now, some mechanisms have been discovered by the ICE. The secret to block is named ContentFilter.exe, a program that bundles Tom-Skype voice client.
“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.”
Some more details:
“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.”
Jun 24, 2006 | By Nuno
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