China Says Its Okay For Users To Delete Its New Censorware

from the wasn't-expecting-that dept

Well, this is certainly something of a surprise. Earlier this month, China required new censorware be installed on all computers sold there. Of course, this upset a bunch of people and also raised serious security concerns. Still, we didn't expect the Chinese gov't to back down. However, a variety of lawsuits and public protests in China has resulted in at least some backing down by the government. The gov't is now saying that while the software will come installed on all new PCs, there's no requirement that it be used. Of course, it's not at all clear how easy it is to disable the software. The software is apparently uninstallable (or so the makers claim), but this new statement from the government makes it clear that there shouldn't be sanctions against those who do go through with the uninstall.

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China's New Censorware Software Has Serious Security Flaws

from the is-that-a-surprise? dept

This probably doesn't come as much of a surprise to anyone, but China's new mandated censorware that is required to be installed on all new PCs sold in the country has serious security flaws that put users' computers (and their data) at risk. Of course, censorware/spyware type software almost always does that -- and, it seems likely that the Chinese government isn't all that concerned about the privacy of citizens and their computer usage. Still, the bigger fear is that the security flaws can (and will) be used to basically hijack all those computers and turn them into a botnet. That should certainly be a bigger concern, especially given the Chinese governments' insistence that it wants to crackdown on the widespread use of Chinese servers for spamming operations anyway.

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Local Version Of China's Great Firewall Now Required On All PCs In China

from the yeah,-that'll-work... dept

There have been plenty of stories on the inner workings of China's "Great Firewall," whereby various ISPs are threatened with liability if they don't block "bad stuff." Yet, it's all been done at the ISP level. Apparently, that's about to change. A report is making the rounds that, as of July 1st, all PCs sold in China will be required to have client-side censorship software. You have to wonder if the censorship software also includes spying software.... Either way, you have to imagine it won't take long at all for people to figure out how to disable such software.

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Is Anyone Actually Surprised That China Has Blocked Social Media Sites For Tiananmen Anniversary?

from the great-firewall-at-work dept

To be honest, stories about China using its "Great Firewall" to block certain sites are hardly new. They've been happening for years. And yet, tons of people have been submitting variations on the news that China appears to have upped the blockade by including sites like Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail and the new Microsoft search engine Bing, recognizing that it's the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown which is (not surprisingly) expected to draw quite an online discussion. I wasn't going to write anything about it, but a few thoughts occurred to me, as more and more people submitted it:

• Is anyone actually surprised that this has happened? China regularly bans and unbans a variety of different sites, often based on what's happening in the news. To think that it wouldn't raise the gates for such an event seems naive.
• Does it really do any good for the Chinese gov't? It pisses off those who use those services who are in China, certainly, but it also serves to call more attention to the heavy hand of gov't censorship in that country. Now, many don't seem to care one way or another -- and so it doesn't impact those people either way. But for those who do care, it reinforces their feelings about it, but hardly stops news from spreading.

So in the end, I'm still left wondering what the gov't thinks it accomplishes in being so heavy handed in censoring such sites, other than thinking that if they stick fingers in their ears, they can pretend no one's talking about this stuff online.

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China Looks To Build Human Firewall With Fun, Prizes

from the snitching-pays dept

China's experiment with crowdsourcing internet propaganda -- in which it reportedly pays people 50 cents for each positive post they make about the government or its policies -- must be going well. The government there is now looking to engage citizens' help in purging the internet of porn and other undesirable content by giving people rewards for reporting porn sites. This follows the government's push to get search engines to try and prevent people in China from accessing porn by threatening them with punishment if they don't. While China's "Great Firewall" does manage to block a lot of content, it certainly isn't foolproof. And if people can find ways around it to discuss contaminated milk, one has to imagine that this latest hurdle won't prove too difficult for porn fans to navigate.

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Internet Companies Apologize To China For Being Too Good

from the in-the-future,-we'll-miss-more-stuff dept

We noted that the Chinese government had called out a bunch of search engines for allowing access to porn recently, and I find it amusing to see that pretty much all of the search engines called out have issued apologies. What I'm wondering is exactly what are they apologizing for? The fact that other people put pornography online? The fact that they're too good as search engines and are able to find that content?

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China Adds Search Engines To Its Censorship-By-Guilt Plan; How Will Google Respond?

from the fix-it-yourselves dept

It's well known that the Great Firewall censorship brigade in China employs tens of thousands of people monitoring what's said across the internet -- but perhaps far more effective has been the fear factor imposed on various ISPs by the government threatening them with punishment, if they don't ban unacceptable content. Of course, the government doesn't define what exactly is unacceptable, leading the ISPs to over-ban in order to protect themselves. Mostly, this effort has focused on internet access providers, but it looks like the government is now expanding it to search engines as well, after the government publicly named and shamed both Google and Baidu for failing to prevent access to "undesirable" content such as pornography.

This may prove to be an interesting test for Google, which was widely criticized for its original move into China, whereby it agreed to block content as designated by the Chinese government -- while alerting users to the fact that the content is blocked. That was Google's way of striking a compromise, while trying to call attention to the censorship (perhaps in the hope that it would eventually cause the policy to be changed). However, if Google is now getting pressure to be more proactive in determining what's "unacceptable," rather than just blocking specific content designated by the government, things could get a lot trickier for Google. Of course, some might point out that this was the slippery slope that Google put itself on when it first made the deal to get into China.

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China Says: If You Must Infringe On Copyrights, Use Baidu

from the interesting-strategy dept

Many people have noted over the years that with all of the effort that China has put into its Great Firewall, the country hasn't done much of anything to crack down on unauthorized file sharing. In fact, at times, it's almost seemed to encourage it. So some people were a bit surprised to find out that China's censors tried blocking traffic to various well known BitTorrent sites, such as Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay. However, what may be most interesting is that rather than blocking them outright, it appears that the system just redirects all that traffic to popular Chinese search engine Baidu.

This would be the same Baidu that first became really popular when China shifted all Google traffic to its site, and also the site that stayed popular because it made it easy to download unauthorized music. This would be the same Baidu that was also recently exposed to be fairly complicit in the music downloads it offers, potentially hosting the content itself through a revolving series of ever-changing domains. So, this hardly seems like an attempt by the Chinese government to crack down on unauthorized file sharing -- but an attempt to drive it all to a local company. It looks like the redirects only lasted for a few days, and are no longer in place -- but if the past is any indication, those redirects may come back at any time.

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China Realizes It Doesn't Need To Block All Of iTunes

from the just-the-stuff-it-doesn't-like dept

Following last week's news that China was blocking access to the iTunes store in response to a Tibet protest album that some Olympic athletes had apparently downloaded, it appears that China's Great Firewall experts have figured out ways to block on a per album basis. Yes, iTunes is now available again in China -- but that particular album remains off limits. Of course, you would think that if China had simply ignored the issue altogether, it would have received a lot less press. But that doesn't exactly seem to be how they think about things in the Chinese government these days.

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China Blocks iTunes After Olympic Athletes Download Pro-Tibetan Music

from the so-much-for-the-lack-of-censorship dept

So, while it turned out to be a myth that China would drop the Great Firewall during the Olympics, it's still a bit surprising to hear that China is apparently blocking at least some access to iTunes. Apparently, an organization put out an album of pro-Tibetan songs, and asked Olympic athletes to download the songs and put them on their iPods as a sort of quiet protest. Of course, then the group put out a press release, claiming that 40 Olympians had done so... and, suddenly folks in China are having trouble accessing iTunes. Not surprisingly, a "semi-official news portal" of the Chinese gov't claims that folks in China are denouncing Apple for even offering the music, and are calling for the musicians featured on the album to be banned from playing in China.

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So About That Plan To Drop The Great Firewall For Olympics Reporters? Yeah, Forget That...

from the whoops dept

Back in February, there were some rumors making the rounds that the Chinese gov't was planning to drop its "Great Firewall" of internet censorship, to make sure that reporters had full access to the internet as necessary. Then, in April, the International Olympic Committee specifically asked government censors to drop the filters during the Olympics. Even that request seemed sketchy, as the IOC said that leaving the filters in place would "reflect poorly" on China. I would think that having the filters in the first place (and putting them back after the Olympics) would also "reflect poorly" on China, but that's a separate discussion.

However, what really does reflect poorly is the news that China hasn't dropped the filters at all. Journalists are complaining, but apparently the Chinese censors and the IOC have come to a compromise: China won't censor any Olympics websites. Unless they mention Tibet or something. In other words, China hasn't really loosened the Great Firewall at all.

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Newest Industry To Be Crowdsourced? Internet Censorship

from the is-there-anything-that-can't-be-crowdsourced? dept

Wikipedia crowdsourced Britannica. Threadless did the same with graphic T-shirts. Amazon's Mechanical Turk helped crowdsource the search for Steve Fosset. Now, the Chinese Internet censors are using the process to aid in their control of information online. Since 2007, when President Hu Jintao called for the state to "study the art of online guidance and actively use new technologies to increase the strength of positive propaganda," China's Culture Ministry has regularly held training sessions for the so-called "50 Cent Party." These Chinese netizens get their name from the reported 50 Chinese cents that they are paid for each post supporting state policy that they make in popular forums and online portals. Rebecca MacKinnon, a noted Chinese Internet scholar and co-founder of Global Voices Online, says "it's clear that there's a lot more than censorship going on: in addition to censorship there's information management, message management, and "astroturfing.""

Although the propaganda posts seem to have been effective in the past, notably stirring up anger against CNN for its coverage of the March 2008 protests in Tibet, the fact that the government must pay these citizens suggests that the desired message is not supported as deeply as the opposition. After all, cyber-dissidents are not being paid to voice their opinions which place them in danger of legal troubles. Further, as has happened in the United States when "astroturf" campaigns are uncovered, will the knowledge that pro-government web content is potentially paid make it less compelling to the average reader?

Kevin Donovan is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Kevin Donovan and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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If China's Great Firewall Is So Effective, Why Can't It Stop All The Malware Hosted There?

from the questions,-questions,-questions dept

We all know about the "Great Firewall" of China that's designed both to keep certain website inaccessible from China, but which is also supposed to block certain content in China from reaching the outside world. While there already are some questions about how effective the Great Firewall really is, it does seem odd that the majority of "badware" sites are all hosted in China. Is it that China just doesn't care or is it that the Great Firewall isn't actually that effective? Perhaps the answer is somewhere in between. The Great Firewall definitely has some holes, and if the purpose of it is more focused on political speech than malware, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that the powers that be ignore the malware and let it go through. Or, of course, you could take the conspiratorial viewpoint, and say perhaps China blocks malware within the country, but doesn't care if others get it. Given the various rumors and reports lately about Chinese hackers breaking into computers in other countries, that last possibility may not be so far-fetched.

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Are People In China Happy With The Great Firewall?

from the some-of-them-appear-to-be dept

We've heard this argument plenty of times in the past, but a recent study suggests that 85% of people surveyed in China are perfectly fine with the Great Firewall, saying that they believe the government has a responsibility to "protect" them from dangerous content. Of course, this is always how the government has positioned the filter: not as "blocking" content it doesn't like, but as protecting citizens from "dangerous" content. Before people act surprised about this, take a step back and recognize that if you did the same study in the US, asking if the government should be protecting children from "bad stuff" online, many Americans would naturally say yes. That doesn't necessarily mean that either is okay -- but does suggest how different the answers are based on how the question is positioned.

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IOC: No Chinese Internet Filters During Olympics; All Other Times It's Fine

from the why-just-for-the-olympics? dept

Back in February, a New Yorker story claimed that China was planning to disable its "Great Firewall" for the Olympics, so it may not mean very much to hear that the International Olympic Committee is now demanding that China do exactly that. If the Chinese government was already planning on opening up the internet, it's pretty weak to then demand it anyway. Besides, there does seem to be something rather sketchy about the IOC demanding China drop the firewall just for the Olympics, saying it "would reflect very poorly" on the country. Does it not "would reflect very poorly" on China during the rest of the time as well? It's a cheap ploy for the IOC to demand the filters be taken down just for that period of time. It gives the IOC publicity as standing up to censorship, even though it doesn't care what happens when the Olympics aren't in town.

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China Starts Shutting Down Video Hosting Sites

from the so-much-for-leniency dept

Back in January, China put in place rules that effectively banned any video hosting/sharing website that wasn't owned or controlled by the Chinese government. However, after the law went into practice, China didn't do anything -- and many assumed that the government had been convinced that shutting down such sites would harm the entrepreneurial environment it's been trying to foster in China. Then, of course, things went nuts in Tibet. China banned YouTube, and suddenly remembered the laws it had put in place. It's now announced that 25 video hosting sites need to be shut down and another 32 will be "punished." No description of the "punishment" is provided. In the meantime, this should be a reminder to those investors rushing to invest in Chinese startups: the government can change the landscape drastically with little warning.

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China To Disable Great Firewall For The Olympics?

from the firewall,-what-firewall? dept

While the Chinese government has, at times, been known to deny that it censors the internet, it's a well-known phenomenon. In the last year or so, more and more details have come out about how the process works. Last fall a disgruntled censor explained the massive bureaucracy that goes into determining what is and what is not appropriate. There have also been reports noting the tens of thousands of people who are involved in censoring the internet, and how the system also relies on "volunteers" to both look out for "bad" content while also adding good content.

However, most of those reports focused mainly on the people side of the Great Firewall. Reader Jon now points us to James Fallows' more detailed look at the technological side of the Great Firewall, and the different methods that are used to block sites. Apparently, China has gotten a lot more sophisticated over the past few years in blocking sites. All traffic in and out of the country is monitored, of course, and it's now possible for the system to ban specific pages or articles that have objectionable content, rather than blocking an entire site (as it used to do). There are times when it will still block entire sites, but they can be a lot more narrowly focused. Another interesting point is that China is now using that same Firewall in two directions: if it doesn't want outsiders to be able to access certain documents, it will block foreigners from reaching certain sites within the country as well.

Perhaps the most interesting revelation, however, goes back to the ridiculous denials by Chinese officials that the Great Firewall exists. According to Fallows' sources, during the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the Great Firewall will be mostly turned off, so that visiting foreigners won't notice any problems accessing foreign sites, and will (or so officials hope) tell people that the concept that China is blocking many popular sites is simply a myth.

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Chinese Gov't Scolds Baidu For Not Doing The Impossible

from the you-must-block-all-of-these-pictures dept

Over the last few weeks, there's been a big scandal in Hong Kong concerning photos of certain celebrities caught in various states of undress and various "adult" activities. The police in Hong Kong have had some trouble dealing with this, apparently first claiming that anyone possessing these images was breaking the law and then bungling an investigation into who leaked the images. Now, to top that off, the Chinese government is "censuring" the popular search engine Baidu for allowing people to find these controversial images. It's not entirely clear how the government expects Baidu to simply know that these pictures are illegal and to stop people from finding them, but as we've seen, that's the method by which the Chinese government enforces its censorship -- not by explicitly stating what needs to be banned, but by telling search engines and ISPs that they'll get in trouble if they allow anything "bad" to get through. That leads to aggressively blocking anything that the ISPs or search engines feel might get them in trouble. Of course, to make that work, the government occasionally does need to publicly scold some of the firms for failing, even in doing the impossible, as that gives increased motivation for everyone else to just keep on blocking stuff.

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China Likely To Ignore Its Own New Rules For Video Hosting Sites?

from the don't-want-to-scare-off-the-money dept

Just last week we wrote about China's new laws for online video sites that would require those sites to be government owned, as well as actively censor any content the government would prefer not be online. There was some fear over what this meant for all of the Chinese YouTube wannabes out there. However, it appears that most of the companies aren't all that worried, as they believe that China won't do anything to scare off venture capital money coming in to the various startups. If anything, those firms may need to "partner" with state-owned television stations, but otherwise should be allowed to continue moving forward. Of course, that same article says that the reason for this policy is that China is upset that people are watching online video rather than state-owned TV. If that's true, then it doesn't seem to mesh with the idea that the government will let things slide. Perhaps it just comes down to which is more important to the Chinese government: bringing outside venture capital into China, or trying to get more people to watch official government propaganda?

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Chinese Gov't Not A Big Fan Of User-Generated Video; Expands Great Firewall To License All Video Sites

from the bureaucracy-and-user-generated-content-don't-mix dept

It's well known that China goes to tremendous lengths to censor and block certain types of content online through a combination of tens of thousands of "internet police" combined with vague rules that are left up to various ISPs to enforce or face sanctions (meaning they tend to be even more quick to block than they may need to be). It appears that even that wasn't enough to deal with the rise of user-generated video sites in the country. The Chinese government has a new policy demanding that all video upload sites must get a license from the government, must be state-owned or state-controlled and (of course) must not allow any video that "involves national secrets, hurts the reputation of China, disrupts social stability or promotes pornography." As the article notes, this likely effects most Chinese YouTube clones (who are mostly private, rather than state-owned), though it's unclear how it will impact foreign sites, such as YouTube itself. The most likely outcome is that ISPs will soon start banning those sites completely in favor of the limited state-owned sites. Such is life on the internet behind the Great Firewall.

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