China reveals weapons of mass PC censorship

happygeek 0 444 Views

Everyone knows that China is not exactly the most Internet friendly country, in fact the Chinese government pretty much hates it. Despite being a truly connected superpower, the Chinese government has already declared war on Internet porn. Of course, the Internet is a cool tool when used as a weapon by the army of Chinese government sponsored hackers against other countries.

Now it seems that the Chinese authorities are turning their weapons of mass censorship on all citizens. It seems that as from next month, every PC sold in China will have Green Dam software installed. Green what? Well, the software will be installed under the direct orders of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. What does it do, I'll give you one guess? yeas, that's right, it censors the Internet automatically. The blocking software is being touted as a simple pornography filtering tool, but just happens to be developed by a company called Jinhui Computer System Engineering which is thought to have ties to the country's military. A spokeswoman for the company, Miss Zhou, however that it will "automatically filter pornographic images and antirevolutionary content" and add that this was "very good news for users, so they should not uninstall it."

Yeah right.

As well as Green Dam, PCs will also come pre-installed with Youth Escort. This one filters out rude or "subversive" words. Nice.

Lenovo is said to be participating in the scheme, although it has been strangely quiet on the matter when it comes to press comment so far. Dell are said to be seeking clarification from the Chinese government. Given that China is now the largest PC market in the world after the USA, I suspect that most manufacturers will simply cave in to protect their positions and claim that users will be able to uninstall the software if they don't like it.

Did I say "yeah right" already?

Dani AI

Generated

This thread by flagged the Green Dam / Youth Escort story at the moment it broke — good call. The short version of what actually followed: heavy domestic and international pushback forced Chinese authorities to delay the blanket PC pre‑install plan days before the July 1, 2009 deadline, and the mandate for consumer machines was effectively shelved (the software lingered for some institutional contexts). (theguardian.com)

More important than the politics was the tech. A fast, careful analysis by researchers at the University of Michigan found multiple remotely exploitable vulnerabilities (buffer overflows in the network‑filtering component, insecure update delivery over HTTP, and other unsafe C string handling). The report showed the filter injected a DLL into networked applications and warned that any website could exploit the bugs to take control of an affected PC; the authors recommended removal. Security sites reiterated the same risk: mandatory client‑side censorware on millions of machines creates a massive attack surface. (jhalderm.com)

There were legal and commercial consequences as well. Analysts reported that several filter blacklists appeared to have been copied from a U.S. product, and that legal threats followed; at least one vendor later filed suit alleging code theft. The project also lost funding and was scaled back, with teams disbanding within a year. Those outcomes matter: the episode shows how technical flaws, IP issues and public pressure can combine to derail such programs. (wired.com)

Practical takeaways for anyone troubleshooting similar preinstalled software today: look in Programs and Features for the product name (or its Chinese name), check for injected DLLs (SurfGd.dll and related modules were implicated in 2009), inspect autoruns/startup entries and system folders for leftover log files, and – if uncomfortable editing the system yourself – image the disk and seek a clean reinstall. Back up important data before removing system components. Above all, mandatory client‑side filtering is both a privacy and a security risk; vendors and sysadmins should weigh that risk before accepting unwanted, privileged software on production machines. (jhalderm.com)

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.

Edit Preview