Recently some Skype users experienced a strange behaviour: when they tried to send links to their contacts using Skype, the recipients did not receive it. In one case, it was found that Skype was filtering links to the popular Chinese Deal Extreme online shop. This means that Skype now controls what you are sending and modifies your conversation without your explicit consent or confirmation. Microsoft has been known to do this for Live Messenger too in the past.
The Russian site Habrahabr reports the following information below.
This kind of censorship affects only new versions of Skype. In recent versions, the message with the "censored" link is delivered to the recipient, but will be deleted immediately.
It looks like in new versions of Skype there is a bot or filter which "decides" what you should read, and what you shouldn't. Also, it might be the case only for Russian users.
The implementation is very poor, even if you insert a space or remove the "http://www" portion from the link, the message will be delivered without any issues.
The censorship isn't active yet for group chats.
Older versions of Skype like Skype 5.5 do not include the censorship engine and are not affected by this issue. You can read the following articles for further reference:
- How to fix the error about outdated version of Skype and continue to use older versions
- How to disable ads in Skype’s chat window
Actually, this is not surprising for me. In the past, Windows Live Messenger was killing links for my Russian blog and even ICQ messenger did the same. That is why, I prefer using Jabber these days. For those of you who don't know, Jabber is an open protocol. There are public Jabber servers through which your client app can connect but anyone can host a Jabber server on their own and your friend's client can connect to it provided you share the right authentication and credentials. Jabber doesn't have as full-featured and rich client apps as Skype with so many bells and whistles, but at least you get to use a trustworthy service.
Support us
Winaero greatly relies on your support. You can help the site keep bringing you interesting and useful content and software by using these options:
It’s not only dx.com.
So far, a check by a group of enthusiasts (habrahabr users) has resulted in the following shortlist:
http://www.aviasales.ru/
http://www.kinopoisk.ru/
http://www.wildberries.ru/
news.mail.ru/
http://www.indiegogo.com/
s.fishki.net/
Obviously, this list will grow. Blocking\not blocking also depends on client version as well as countries of sender\recipient.
Censorship is shit. Microsoft will lose their Skype user base.