Skype Accused Of Helping Chinese Censors

Bill Xia, former Chinese resident and now president of North Carolina-based Dynamic Internet Technology, Inc., has become a long-distance revolutionary, supplying hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens with DIT’s Freegate software to get around government censors.

He uses whatever technology is at his disposal: changing IPs to get around IP blocking; releasing new domain names where the software can be downloaded; posting links on forums; sending emails so people can find wherever DynaWeb (where Freegate is downloaded) is currently.

On September 13, 2007, DIT began using eBay-owned Skype so users could communicate with them directly. Xia says that ten days later, on the morning of September 23, Skype’s website began redirecting Chinese users to Skype.tom.com, a modified site created in cooperation with Chinese-based Tom.com.

Xia believes the sudden redirection is the result of Chinese government pressure and that Chinese Skype users are now at risk of being monitored and reported to authorities.

Xia told WebProNews of a process running in the background of the Skype/Tom.com collaborative website named contentfilter.exe that not only blocks access to certain content, but also censors text messages containing forbidden subject matter. Words such as "Falun Gong" and "dalai lama" will not go through in the messages.

"We’re sure it’s not a redirection from the firewall of the Chinese government but from Skype itself," he said. Xia believes Skype did so at the request of the Chinese government.

He also says that DIT recommended accessing www.skype.com, and using the simplified Chinese version of the US-based website instead, but users were still redirected to the Tom.com website. Xia says they can still access the US-based version, but only with a much longer URL.

A spokesperson from Skype was unavailable for comment and requests for comment made to eBay were not returned.   

The Battle For Independent Thought

Xia wrote a lengthy article that appeared in the Mercury News detailing some of the work he and his colleagues have performed to thwart China’s Idea War. In recounting the two-week effort needed to update DynaWeb to permit Chinese users to access the unfiltered version of Google, he noted it was time to speak out about the issue.

“I feel it is important to speak out for the estimated 300,000 people in China who rely on my services but who cannot make their voices heard,” he said. That stifling escalated around the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre.

When the ability to access Google.com and other Western sites vanished in the face of an all-out assault by China’s government.

“My colleagues and I spent two weeks, working round-the-clock, revising software that Chinese citizens could use to circumvent the censorship and gain access to the Western news and information sites the government sought to deny them,” said Xia.

That worked, and users can again get through to blocked sites. It’s a dramatic turnaround for Xia, who once disbelieved the tapes of the Tiananmen attacks he viewed while in the US in the late 1990s.

“Our volunteers have proved again and again that we can defeat even China’s costly technologies and its legions of Internet police. Chinese citizens are hungry for uncensored information. When we first launched, one excited user sent us a message that read, simply, “Thank you” — repeated hundreds of times,” Xia said.

The DynaWeb technology combines a network of intelligent proxies with peer-to-peer software. Although Xia noted about 90 percent of DynaWeb’s users are in China, a number of users in Myanmar and Vietnam also use the software.

Staying a step ahead of China’s authorities has been an ongoing challenge for Xia, once just another intelligent graduate student being educated in America, disbelieving the horror of the Tiananmen videos.

Now that he has been a practitioner of the banned religion Falun Gong, Xia said he is now a public enemy in China.

It’s important for our readers to understand how companies like search engines operate. There is more to them than just search marketing programs and keyword bidding processes.

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all want those online advertising dollars in the US. They also would like to receive them in China, as all three have operations in the country now, and abide by Chinese law as they state they must.

That makes fighting the Idea War a little more difficult.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.