For years the Chinese government has relied on the “Great Firewall” to censor its citizens’ access to the internet, primarily by filtering packets based on keyword detection and blocking IP addresses of sites the government dislikes (Falun Gong, pro-democracy sites, etc.). But the firewall has never been as watertight as the government would like, and the next phase was supposed to be the mandatory installation of a piece of software called “Green Dam” on every new computer sold in China. Interestingly, Chinese computer users are fighting back and apparently winning:
In a last-minute climbdown, the Chinese government announced today that it will delay the launch of censorship software that was supposed to have been sold in every computer from tomorrow.
….The Guardian struggled to find a single retailer who had Green Dam either installed or bundled with computers. Adding to the mystery, Lenovo, Sony, Dell and Hewlett Packard refused to comment on whether their PCs are now being shipped with the software, as the government ordered them to do last month.
….A group of bandit hackers, known as Anonymous, declared “war” on Green Dam and threatened to attack it tomorrow.
According to a source close to the group, they plan to create a remote computer ‘bot’ that pummels Baidu, Kaixin and other mainland websites with data requests containing forbidden or sensitive terms, such as expletives, Falun Gong, Dalai Lama and “Fifty-cent party member” (the derogatory name given to people paid to post pro-government comments online). They hope the volume of dirty traffic will clog up the keyword filters.
I don’t have any special comment about this. It seemed like a quixotic plan from the start, and I’m not all that surprised that it’s been delayed at the least, and possibly abandoned. It’s just hard to see how it can work in the long term. Still, as with the twittering in Iran, it’s interesting to see yet another case of how technology can be simultaneously both servant and bane of autocratic governments.
