News 2008
04/14/2008
The TOM.com version of Skype (the "Official Chinese Version" as they claim, http://skype.tom.com) has obviously integrated the censorship functionality into skype client. The ContentFilter.exe, which did content filtering in older version of Tom Skype, is no longer a part of Skype installation (3.6.4.150). Instead, the keyword file is downloaded by Skype client. At this point, many of the filtered keywords are related to politics and religion. For example, the Chinese name of the news paper and news web site The Epochtimes is one of the words that triggers filtering. When a filtered keyword shows up in a message, the whole message will be dropped. The download URL of the keyfile is http://skypetools.tom.com/agent/newkeyfile/keyfile. It contains multiple lines of encoded data. Skype, how far do you want to go? Are you also sending user IDs to Chinese Police?To defeat this, add this line in file c:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts then restart skype:
127.0.0.1 skypetools.tom.com
