VoIP News & Information

TOM-Skype, the Chinese chapter of Skype, has been caught filtering and archiving text messages. The Chinese VoIP service provider has eight dedicated servers for storing messages that contain certain politically contentious keywords, according to a report published by The Information War Monitor, a Canadian organization that monitors internet censorship.

Tom-Skype, a joint venture between eBay and China’s TOM Online, also stores the usernames of all those people that exchange messages containing such sensitive keywords. Also, the service provider actively censors any politically sensitive keywords - some as harmless as “milk powder” - in messages. TOM-Skype doesn’t restrict itself to Chinese users but freely records messages and usernames of other Skype users from across the world as well (only those users that exchange "obnoxious" messages with Chinese users). To top it all, all the private data is available publicly as it is hosted on unencrypted web servers.

eBay’s Skype VOIP telephony business adds some improvements to the second beta of Skype 4.0 for Windows, including the return of the compact screen and group contact capabilities. Reintroducing features from Skype 3.8 seems retro, but Skype needed to make the moves to keep its over 300 million users happy. Such improvements could lead new VOIP and telephony customers looking for free messaging and collaboration apps to Skype in a time of financial distress.

Skype on Oct. 1 will launch the second Skype 4.0 beta for Windows with improvements to the way users view and access their VOIP conversations, as well as better instant messaging alerts. Skype 4.0 Beta 2 will be downloadable here beginning Oct. 1.