China: Green dam PC filtering
According to Wall Street Journal (June 8, 2009), the Chinese government has required international PC makers to equip their PC shipped to China with filter software from July 1 onward.
The new software, known as ‘Green Dam-Youth Escort’, would link PCs with an updated database of banned sites and block access to those addresses. Such kind of control could give government censors unprecedented control over how Chinese users access the Internet.
The government says the effort is aimed at protecting young people from ‘harmful’ content. However, foreign industry officials who have examined Green Dam say that personal information could be transmitted through the software and that it will be difficult for users to tell what exactly is being blocked. Moreover, the software could cause PCs in China to malfunction, and could make them more vulnerable to hacking.
In the past, the internet censorship practices operate mainly at the ISP, data center and content provider levels, netizens can access blocked sites by proxy servers. The ‘Green Dam’ software is a new monitoring mode.
Full report at WSJ.
Rebecca MacKinnon pointed (via twitter) to the official website of ‘Green Dam-Youth Escort’ [zh]where you can download the software.
15 comments
What a mold,especially for kids, totally unbelievable.
I wonder where that is going to lead these people.
yap, and even if the software was clean when the manufacturer installed them, you never know what kind of spyware would be installed automatically when it got update; even if one uninstall the filter, the spyware might still be active. so it is not only dangerous in terms of info control, it can be developed into a CCTV, watching an individual all the time.
The user interface of this software contains some pics which were assumed taken from the site Hope Garden | BSD Medical.
Check out the banner of this pic:
http://i2.sinaimg.cn/IT/2009/0610/200961002255.jpg and the website of Hope Garden, you will find it out.
How can there be censorship when end users aren’t even required to install or run this software?
“preinstall” in Chinese means “bundle”. The end users were never reuqired to install or run Green Dam.
Take this 6/12 ZDNet article citing WSJ:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=19688
As to what Green Dam will filter, it is configuable by the user. How can this be twisted into censorship is beyond me – perhaps anti-sinoism?