Not only does Green Dam censorship software contain gaping security flaws, it also (allegedly) contains stolen code from a U.S. software company.  According to the Associated Press,  “Solid Oak Software of Santa Barbara said Friday that parts of its filtering software, which is designed for parents, are being used in the “Green Dam-Youth Escort” filtering software.” The company plans to pursue legal action, but is still “trying to assess” the situation.

Having been  “ridiculed for sloppy programing, possible intellectual property violations and… security holes,” Green Dam Youth Escort has turned into a public relations disaster.  An opinion piece in Forbes notes, “This move was so ham-fisted that it provoked exactly what the government doesn’t want: a raging public controversy about government censorship.”

Perhaps Green Dam is just a scapegoat, reflecting years of frustration about repressive controls on freedoms of speech and expression. Or maybe it’s the explicit nature with which the government has admitted its censorship of the Internet that created such an outcry. Whatever the cause, as Rebecca MacKinnon suggests, Green Dam is “certainly turining into the laughingstock of China.”

Company alleges Chinese software has stolen code [Associated Press, 6/13/09]

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — A California company claims that the Internet-filtering software China has mandated for all new personal computers sold there contains stolen programming code.

 

Solid Oak Software of Santa Barbara said Friday that parts of its filtering software, which is designed for parents, are being used in the “Green Dam-Youth Escort” filtering software that must be packaged with all computers sold in China from July 1.

Solid Oak’s founder, Brian Milburn, said he plans to seek an injunction against the Chinese developer that built the software, but acknowledged that it’s new legal terrain for his company.

“I don’t know how far you can try and reach into China and try to stop stuff like this,” he said in an interview. “We’re still trying to assess what they’re doing.”

A phone number for the Chinese developer could not immediately be located. A call by The Associated Press to China’s embassy in the U.S. after business hours Friday went unanswered.

China has mounted a vigorous public defense of the software, saying it wants it to block violence and pornography. But critics say it censors many more things, and does it on a deeper level than the Internet censorship China currently employs.

China has more than 250 million Internet users and employs some of the world’s tightest controls over what they see, often called the “Great Firewall of China,” which refers to technology designed to prevent unwanted traffic from entering or leaving a network.

Political sites and others the government deems offensive are routinely blocked, but that happens at the network level. Savvy users can get around it by bouncing through “proxy” servers in other countries, but it takes some sophistication. Blocked sites simply won’t load in users’ Web browsers.

The new software blocks sites directly from a user’s machine.

A report released Thursday by University of Michigan researchers who examined the Chinese software supports Solid Oak’s claim that the Green Dam software contains pirated code. The report also found serious security vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to hijack PCs running the Chinese software.

The report found that a number of the “blacklist” files that Green Dam employs were taken from Solid Oak’s CyberSitter program.

Blacklists are lists of Web sites that have been flagged as violent or pornographic or malicious or otherwise offensive. Web browsers on computers where blacklists are in use are instructed to block those sites.

The report’s authors — researchers in the university’s computer science and engineering division — also said they found another clue that Solid Oak’s code was stolen: a file that contained a 2004 CyberSitter news bulletin that appeared to have been accidentally included in Green Dam’s coding.

China Is Not A Kindergarten [Forbes, 6/12/09]

Beijing’s clumsy plan to get filtering software inside every Chinese computer has riled netizens.

If this was some official’s clever idea to show Chinese Internet users who is really in charge, it certainly hasn’t worked out as planned.

The story of the week in Chinese Internetland was the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s directive that computer makers must include a content-filtering program on all computers sold in China from July 1. Government officials say the policy is intended to protect children from pornography, which doesn’t explain why the software also bans sensitive political terms (and can be updated remotely to do much more). By trying to force such intrusive filtering on all Chinese consumers, authorities have angered Internet users who do not want to be treated like children.

“China is a kindergarten, that is the basic logic behind this,” says Michael Anti, a Chinese journalist and popular microblogger. “It’s stupid. It’s so stupid.”

This move was so ham-fisted that it provoked exactly what the government doesn’t want: a raging public controversy about government censorship. The anointed filtering software, Green Dam Youth Escort, has been ridiculed for sloppy programming, possible intellectual property violations and gaping security holes that would allow any Web site visited to take control of the computer.

“It’s certainly turning into the laughingstock of China,” says Rebecca MacKinnon, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre whose blog summed up many of this week’s critiques.

The emergence of an embarrassing government misstep is not in itself an earth-shaking development. The Chinese people are used to the government issuing edicts and then not enforcing them. Just as onerous and ill-conceived regulations are a part of life, so too is ignoring them. The same could be said of the filtering software itself–there is little doubt that any Chinese netizen who wants to access porn will succeed in their determination to do so, and the same goes for the much smaller minority who want to explore politically subversive topics.