It has such a stupid name, it doesn’t actually sound like software: it sounds like a deliberate attempt to mock a totalitarian government that tries to use software; like someone’s brought George Orwell back from the dead (just one more job, mate …); nevertheless, the Chinese government is pretty serious about its Green Dam Youth Escort package, through which it aims to control individual access to porn sites on the internet. A press release on Monday detailed three Chinese computer companies who had vouched to pre-install the software (no foreign ones as yet), and said it had already been installed in 52.7m units.The immediate worry, reported by this newspaper’s correspondent in Beijing, Jonathan Watts, is that it will be used to restrict access to dissident sites, not just pornographic ones. He elaborated: “What they have at the moment is a fairly crappy, easy to uninstall piece of software. But you have to remember that this is stage one, once you enable the authorities to censor at machine level, the software will get better and better. So my feeling is that this is an attempt to shore up the great firewall which doesn’t work a lot of the time.” Chinese bloggers are currently concentrating on that crappy aspect: it is a terrible programme, apparently, with a hair-trigger that blocks access on the basis of innocuous phrases like “touch-ball”, unsophisticated enough to block not just pornography but all news articles that mention pornography.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/10/china-firewall-internet-pornAlso see:Tests Show Political Side of China Web Filter [sub req’d]
Web-filtering software that the Chinese government will require on all new personal computers includes data files containing political keywords and Web addresses, suggesting it could block more than just pornography, say people who have studied the program.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124474567529507107.html
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