China still plans to implement the controversial Internet access control software "Green Dam Youth Escort" as of July 1 on every new PC sold in the country. This is despite warnings from security researchers and concerns from the US Embassy, not just over the restriction of information, but the security implications of what appears to be such vulnerable software.
hina is filtering out criticism and diving in headfirst with its plan to roll out controversial filtering software on all PCs sold in China. The Chinese media quoted an unnamed source inside the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, saying that the software will still come with all computers as of July 1 despite the discovery of massive security holes and vulnerabilities by security researchers.
News came out about China's plan to implement Internet access control software, called the "Green Dam Youth Escort" earlier this month. The Windows-only software provides a mix of features, including whitelists, blacklists, and on-the-fly content-based filtering. The blacklists can be updated remotely, however, making Green Dam quite an attractive option for a government that likes to keep tight control over what kind of content its citizens are exposed to.
Unfortunately for everyone buying a computer in China after July 1, researchers at the University of Michigan soon discovered that Green Dam was plagued with serious security vulnerabilities. Not only can malicious websites easily take advantage of the security bugs to run arbitrary code on the user's computer, much of the blacklist content was stolen verbatim from commercial filtering programs sold in the US. Just yesterday, code to exploit the Green Dam software was published publicly on Wikileaks, thereby giving the entire world the ability to mess around with the software once it hits Chinese computers in just over a week.
None of this has stopped the Chinese government, though, who apparently told People's Daily that it will still mandate that Green Dam either come preinstalled or on a CD with every new computer. This, of course, continues to ruffle the feathers of US officials who not only condemn the filtering of Internet access on a government level but also share concerns about the software's security holes.
"We are concerned about Green Dam both in terms of its potential impact on trade and the serious technical issues raised by use of the software," the US Embassy said in a press briefing on Monday. "We believe there are other commercially available software programs which provide users with a wide range of choices for shielding minors from illicit or inappropriate internet contact—content, which is the ostensible rationale for this. We’ve also asked the Chinese to engage in a dialogue on how to address these concerns."
By Jacqui Cheng
No comments:
Post a Comment