China starts to get serious over cyberspace

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All new PCs shipped in China include a piece of software called Green Dam. =
This is supposedly to prevent children accessing offensive material. A repo=
rt by the OpenNet Initiative has found that Green Dam can monitor activitie=
s outside of web browsing, and can terminate applications. Professor Jonath=
an Zittrain of Harvard's Berkman Centre told the BBC that it can be used fo=
r "broader purposes, such as the filtering of political ideas". Recently it=
 has been in the news because of allegations that it includes pirated code =
from CyberSitter.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/8091044.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8101978.stm

IMHO this is very interesting. It was always going to be necessary for a to=
talitarian regime to take control of the client side as well as filtering a=
t the network level (which they already do, extensively although not yet wi=
th very sophisticated technology, including blocking access to freenetproje=
ct.org, and apparently the 0.5 FNP protocol too). According to surveys, 80%=
 of users won't have Green Dam, presumably mostly because they already have=
 computers and have no desire to add it, or are buying second hand hardware=
=2E But this will change over time. Currently it only runs on Windows. The =
next steps are obvious: Provided that Microsoft completes the implementatio=
n of TCPA in Windows 7 or some future version, and provided that Intel and =
AMD start shipping CPUs with the TPM integrated (which given the demand for=
 TCPA from laptops for the corporate market is likely, despite massive oppo=
sition from tech enthusiasts resulting in mail order desktop motherboards a=
lmost never having a TPM), and once all the old hardware has been retired (=
which will take a long time), China can lock down cyberspace completely, ex=
cluding any realistic long-term possibility of bypassing government filters=
 by requiring a state-approved operating system to connect to the Internet.=
 Whether similar things happen in the west depends on political trends, the=
 power of the entertainment industry, how much consumers care about DRM, ho=
w much of a problem spam and malware become, and so on.

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