Results tagged “citizenlab”

The New York Times broke a story on Sunday that has since stirred up some local interest (and some national interest as well): Toronto researchers Greg Walton and Nart Villeneuve of the U of T Munk Centre for International Studies' Citizen Lab were, along with Ottawa-based consultancy SecDev, instrumental in ferreting out some very shady spy activity happening on at least 1,295 computers around the world, approximately 30% of which were owned and operated by so-called "high-value" targets, including journalists, embassies—even the Dalai Lama. A lot of the data necessary for the investigation was gathered abroad, but the brunt of the analysis happened right here, in Toronto, under the aegis of U of T.

Do you use Skype? Are you...in China right now? Oh, good. Because researchers at University of Toronto's Citizen Lab revealed yesterday in a report [PDF] that chat messages sent over Skype's Chinese service, TOM-Skype, were being actively monitored, censored (for keywords like "democracy," hah), and stored on publicly-accessible servers, where the Citizen Lab researchers got their hands on them. Skype said today that they were "extremely concerned" about the practice, and had no knowledge it was going on. Stay classy, China! [via Boing Boing]