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posted by janrinok on Wednesday March 28 2018, @09:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the they-are-listening dept.

Microsoft, which purchased Skype in 2011, will soon increase its monitoring of Skype and other services. Starting May 1st they will further examine ostensibly private communicatiosn for 'offensive language' and 'inappropriate content' for the purpose of blocking. The changes are rolled out as part of a new terms of service advisory for the company's many services.

Microsoft will ban 'offensive language' and 'inappropriate content' from Skype, Xbox, Office and other services on May 1, claiming it has the right to go through your private data to 'investigate.'

From IDG's CSO : Microsoft to ban 'offensive language' from Skype, Xbox, Office and other services.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @07:25AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @07:25AM (#659877)

    This is inline with my hypotheses that Microsoft was told to buy Skype so that the US Gov could read the communications.

    Skype was P2P and kinda encrypted before Microsoft bought it. Back then if you tried to send messages while your recipient was offline the message would actually be stuck on your client and only when both of you were next online at the same time would the message be sent. This probably made it too inconvenient for people trying to snoop on the communications.

    But this changed not long after Microsoft took it over. Your sent message would sit on Microsoft's servers and be delivered when your recipient was online ( http://techrights.org/2012/08/02/skype-admissions/ [techrights.org] ).

    With this latest news either Microsoft is filtering at the client level or the server level. To me it's more likely it's at the server. Think about it, which is more likely, Microsoft rolling out the offensive content lists to clients making it more likely that nosy people will figure out what Big Brother doesn't want the sheep to talk about (potentially causing lots of negative publicity) or Microsoft just having the official and secret lists stay at the servers?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @09:21PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @09:21PM (#660203)

    i agree

    the day there was that first major skype outage -- we joked that was when skynet came online, or the lawnmower man had his 'birth cry' on the net. it was truthfully when the taps went into skype.

    you want secure, do ssl or ipsec based email without imap if you dont have high tech. pull the content and delete from server. imap leaves it there. imap is what most everything defaults to now, for a reason.