China listening in on Skype - Microsoft assumes you approve (en.greatfire.org)

It's understandable given that all foreign companies face the same regulations . But what annoyed me for years was that Skype made it very government-friendly:

1) The redirects are made quite thoroughly. Even if you type something like us.skype.com you still get redirected to Tom-Skype, where there is no link to the international site.

2) When you've managed to get a Setup.exe from the international site, it still fetches and installs Tom-Skpe. FFS even the Chinese government can't make something this government-friendly!

Can someone tell me how is this news? Skype and Microsoft addressed this months ago.

I would have thought its common knowledge that Skype (since the acquisition by Microsoft) provides a surveillance interface to governments (because they do). Nothing new here, if you want privacy, there is no other way then to establish the end-to-end encryption yourself. There some solutions using SIP and GPG for instance. How can anyone expect a corporation to care for something like that? Why should they?

Unfortunately, I think this headline can be generally stated as the following and still be true in most cases:

X listening in on Y - Z doesn't give a shit if you approve.

Where X is any major world government, Y is any major commercial communication system and Z is the vendor of that system.

This isn't conspiracy theory stuff. The US government, for one, doesn't even really bother to hide the massive amount of general sigint scanning they do online anymore nor the fact that they routinely compel large carriers to be complicit in making this as easy as possible.

This was common knowledge for anyone doing business in China (since before the Microsoft acquisition). Here is an article from 2008 outlining it: http://www.informationweek.com/telecom/voip/skype-defends-vo...

XMPP + OTR + ZRTP to the rescue.

If you try to get 'vanilla' Skype in China you constantly get redirected to the TOMSkype download pages, even if you go via one of the popular download services like download.com. The only way I found round that is to go to one of the 'old software versions' websites and download a recent version of Skype from there.

Does anyone else feel sick about a title like this as I did? A nation can't do things; a government can.

God watches the watchers. God is just.

God says... sabbath day; and his disciples began, as they went, to pluck the ears of corn.

2:24 And the Pharisees said unto him, Behold, why do they on the sabbath day that which is not lawful? 2:25 And he said unto them, Have ye never read what David did, when he had need, and was an hungred, he, and they that were with him? 2:26 How he went into the house of God in the days of Abiathar the high priest, and did eat the shewbread, which is not lawful to eat but for the priests, and gave also to them which were with him? 2:27 And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: 2:28 Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.

3:1 And he entered again into the synagogue; and there was a man there which had a withered hand.

3:2 And they watched him, whether he would heal him on the sabbath day; that they might accuse him.

It's not entirely ontopic, but might help someone in China anyway; we have been looking for an alternative to Skype for a few weeks now. We are using Skype for communication between our offices because it is easy. Now someone told me to try imo.im for on the road, so I tried it out on my desktop (in Chrome) first; my Macbook pro NEVER had more than around 2.5 hours battery life since I bought it. I was already shouting I will never buy Apple again; I NEED long battery life. Skype client almost never was on top in top, so I never thought about it, but once I shutdown Skype and used imo my battery life jumped to over 6 hours. True story. I asked others to test and they have the same experience. This is a great show of the efficiency of the imo.im web client (it's for instance far lighter than gmail, even with 8 chat accounts (I even put my ICQ back :) open with active chatting). Anyway; i'm drifting off.

For speech/video, Skype client is much better than imo, so we still need an alternative for that and although I can find stuff myself; it is either not cross platform (we need Win, Lin, Mac, Android and iOS), too new (not working) or completely impossible to install (not all people using the client are computer wizards). Maybe someone here can advise something for a work situation where we have 3 offices in different EU locations which need to communicate all day with sight and sound? And encrypted ofcourse. After my Skype experience, open source is preferred.

Edit: thanks for Jitsi! Didn't know that one.

Halfway through the article it says that there is a special Skype version for China which listens in (Tom Skype). Of course if your chat partner uses compromised software then what you say can be monitored. Where is the news in that?

It seems the normal version of Skype doesn't transmit your call via China after all.

I am not surprised that any communication with somebody inside China is monitored by the government. Who would expect otherwise?

I've always believed this to be true. They do it in US, too, and probably in a few more countries like India and Saudi Arabia, and maybe some African ones, too - and possibly even UK. It's just too bad they aren't going to come out and admit it, and say which governments asked them to do this, and how many requests for people's logs have they received - the way Google does it. As a company that's supposed to be beholden first and foremost to its users, that's the least they could do.

This is why to me Google is still a much more trustworthy company than Microsoft. Microsoft with all of this and all of their hateful campaigns against competitors, and hiring other companies in secret to throw dirt on others either in public or to convince politicians about something. It's just a much shadier company. I wish they would change. But I'm not seeing that happening anytime soon, at least not until Ballmer, the "salesman", is out and they get a much different CEO with different kind of thinking and ethics.

Correct me if mistaken, but isnt Skype voice transmission peer to peer? Wouldn't it be burdensome and very expensive to transmit the voice data back to a central server in order to be warehoused?

Glad to see this getting attention, but it really should be obvious to anyone in China.

I wrote about it 4 years ago here:

http://blog.stacktrace.com/2008/10/02/chinese-monitor-tom-sk...

I recall an older release of Skype used the penultimate scene from Orwell's 1984 (where the protagonist finally gives in) as sample text used to preview font preferences.

At the time I saw this as a rather clear signal.

So the iOS version of Skype, does it also have a Tom version for China?

If somebody made a secure distributed alternative to skype, how many people will switch to it?

The article gives every indication that Microsoft inherited all these behaviors via their purchase of Skype. This completed a little more than a year ago.

It would be hard to argue that providing a backdoor as Skype did, was a good thing. On the other hand, one would be hard pressed to see cutting the Chinese market off from Skype as a good thing, either.

While there are viable individual options suggested by the author, no plausible alternative courses for Microsoft are given. In my opinion, this is because over the short term, none are obvious.

It is only over the longer term that it is reasonable to expect positive change via an evolution of the interpretation of Chinese law and the implementation in the software.

To put this story in perspective, government backdoor access and special software versions were the decisions made by a startup in order to gain traction and market share. These were choices made by Skype's founders, not Microsoft.

Microsoft's decision was to continue a successful product, warts and all. That is the basis upon which their business should be judged.

If you're calling from computer to computer, you shouldn't need a service like Skype. VOIP providers help you make calls to non-VOIP phones if necessary, but you should be able to "call" from one computer to another just using audio encoding and IP packets. And you should be able to encrypt it from end to end.

Do any of you already use desktop software like this?

The Tom version of China has been here for as long as I remember and I've always assumed that my communications in China, save for SSH connections and few others, were monitored by the government.

Sadly, it is the drop in quality experienced around the time they moved away from a true P2P architecture (http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s...) that decided us to drop it. That and what I consider being one of the most unusable UI I've ever had to use.

We've used Facetime successfully for the past few months, after months of trying really hard with GTalk.

It's an old story about Tom Skype. I have known Skype has two different versions for China and other countries for years.

Why do you so emphasize Microsoft in the title? Because it's Microsoft?

We need to start building crypto in, from the beginning. The crypto should be just another feature--totally transparent to the user.

That way, when it is later decided that everything has to be monitored for commercial, or security, purposes, it now has to be explained how a feature--which the user has been taking for granted--will now suddenly disappear.

The hope, of course, is that this would be more difficult for Acme Inc. to do, as opposed to just silently handing out the keys to the backdoor.

I also believe that this way of doing it--essentially announcing that privacy is ending when cryto is removed--might cause a bigger outcry. It is pretty clear, by the lack of reaction to threads like these, that the user already expects to be monitored.

We need to change the default back to a world where the user is not being watched.

Hey how about a blog post from the OP about how the major democratic countries (US[1], Canada, UK) all collect emails, phone calls, chat logs, ISP logs, and such for balance? China spying on its citizens is not even surprising.

[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...