Anonymous:
1. Any deal can be revised. As we write at the end of the story, Microsoft may be considering breaking their deal with Tom altogether (nor out of privacy concerns, though).
2. Many domains are indeed DNS poisoned. None of them resolve to a website that works, as far as we know. Skype's...
LoicAG: They could indeed be storing data selectively. You can't know what they are storing. Based on what we know about how Internet companies are run in China, we guess that they store everything. If they don't, and they authorities request certain data, they wouldn't be able to supply it and it...
Tencent QQ? It's a Chinese, it's solid (much better than any MSN or Skype) and because it's not made in the West it's probably more under the radar. Just my personal opinion, maybe I'm wrong.
1. MS bought Skype, Skype had a deal with tom.com, a deal is a deal
2. Redirection could be caused by GFW through DNS hijacking, you didn't investigate on that front.
3. What's the alternative? Break the local law and be forced out of China? Google did that, and that is no hero. Something is better...
"If the authorities make a request for communication data for a given user they have to comply. To comply, they have to store the data."
I disagree when you say they TOM has to store the data: the authorities could instead request the future communications to be recorded, such as has been the case...
Your test says that pinterest is not blocked, but it's redirecting to a Chinese search engine (either www.sogou.cn or o66.cn). Only been for the last 12 hours or so. And the captcha's not working on images...
- Bringing Transparency To The Great Firewall Of China
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