Re: China starts to get serious over cyberspace

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 03:54:31PM +0100, Matthew Toseland wrote:
> All new PCs shipped in China include a piece of software called Green Dam. This is supposedly to prevent children accessing offensive material. A report by the OpenNet Initiative has found that Green Dam can monitor activities outside of web browsing, and can terminate applications. Professor Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard's Berkman Centre told the BBC that it can be used for "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 totalitarian regime to take control of the client side as well as filtering at the network level (which they already do, extensively although not yet with very sophisticated technology, including blocking access to freenetproject.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. But this will change over time. Currently it only runs on Windows. The next steps are obvious: Provided that Microsoft completes the implementation of TCPA in Windows 7 or some future version, and provided that Intel and AMD start shipping CPUs with the TPM integrated (w
 hich given the demand for TCPA from laptops for the corporate market is likely, despite massive opposition from tech enthusiasts resulting in mail order desktop motherboards almost 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, excluding 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, how much of a problem spam and malware become, and so on.

After a sustained campaign in the press, a legal challenge and several security holes being discovered, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has clarified that "The use of this software is not compulsory". Those who uninstall it will not face prosecution.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8106526.stm
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