Sadly, this appears to no longer true – the creator of popular free tool Nmap has written a blistering attack on Cnet for wrapping his free program in what he calls their ‘trojan’ installer, including the dreaded Babylon toolbar/search engine/homepage combo. opt-out, not opt-in) and does its best to lead you into agreeing – most people will just click yes a few times as they would trust not to insert anything sneaky into someone else’s free program… It appears to be taking some installation files (that it hosts on behalf of a program’s developers) and ‘wrapping’ them in its own installation file which includes unrelated toolbars etc that can change the way you browse, your home page and your default search engine :-(Īlthough you can choose not to install such apps (if you read the small print and click the right thing), Cnet’s installer package sets them to install by default (i.e. I say ‘used to be’ because it has come in for a huge amount of criticism in recent weeks. This list of keywords is encrypted but he was eventually able to deconstruct the file into a readable text-based format, albeit in Chinese.Įven those communicating with those outside of China with a version of TOM-Skype are having their communications logged, showing the ability to potentially extra-territorially monitor communications by the Chinese authorities.CNET’s is a free download directory website established 15 years ago – it used to be a popular source for free downloads of thousands of legal programs. Knockel discovered during his research that every time he logged in to TOM-Skype, servers based in China would download an ever-updated list of keywords that would hook into the application and monitor his communications.
References to pornography are also actively monitored by the TOM-Skype application and censored at will. While results relating to the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 are filtered, as well as recent events relating to high profile politicians and suchlike, also in the selection of words are organizations that report on freedom of speech in the country, as well as seemingly random phrases, such as "Ferrari" and "Quebec".
0 kommentar(er)
