Green Dam Youth Escort
Trials rolled out to 10 more cities, including Chengdu, Shenyang, Harbin, and Qingdao. They recommended that users uninstall the software immediately for protection. Wolchok et al indicated the existence of buffer overflow vulnerabilities which they ascribed to programming errors.The software stores the MD5 checksum of the password in a text file disguised as a DLL (C:\Windows\System32\kwpwf.dll), thus the password can be arbitrarily set by changing the contents of the file. Jinhui s general manager, A Global Times article on 10 June replied to a media report viewing the software as spyware by quoting a number of officials; Liu Zhengrong, deputy chief of the Internet Affairs Bureau of the State Council Information Office said: The software is designed to filter pornography on the Internet and that s the only purpose of it .
Another update was released on 17 June 2009 to include OpenCV s BSD license into the software s help file to address the license violation issue. . The report mentioned that the MIIT invested 41.7 million yuan ($6.1 million) in the software and is the latest step taken by the government to clamp down on young people accessing porn and violent contents .
The U.S. Government is concerned about Green Dam both in terms of its potential impact on trade and the serious technical issues raised by use of the software, it said.
The decrypted configuration file references blacklists with download URLs at CyberSitter s website. The letter was signed by the heads of 22 organisations representing international businesses, including the U.S.
executables loaded on startup) cannot be removed by its own uninstaller, but most of them (either blogs or media reports) were removed according to the PRC government s request. On 11 June 2009, Scott Wolchok, Randy Yao, and J. Green Dam Youth Escort (simplified Chinese: 绿坝·花季护航; pinyin: Lǜbà·Huājì Hùháng) is content-control software developed in the People s Republic of China (PRC).
While the justification may be pitched as protecting children and mostly concerning pornography, once the architecture is set up it can be used for broader purposes, such as the filtering of political ideas. Colin Maclay, another Harvard academic, said that Green Dam creates a log file of all of the pages that the user tries to access. Reports in defense of the official stand appeared subsequently, with a commentary by the state-run Xinhua news agency saying support largely stems from end users, opposing opinions primarily come from a minority of media outlets and businesses . Zhang attacked the Wolchok et al report as irresponsible action and breach of his company s copyright, and said that Jinhui had been ordered to patch the weaknesses. In response to the public concern, anger and protest triggered by the government edict, China Daily put forward the case for free choice, saying: Respect for an individual s right to choice is an important indicator of a free society, depriving them of which is gross transgression. Further critical articles appeared in both the state-run Peoples Daily and the relatively liberal China Youth Daily, a paper run by the China Youth League of which Chinese President Hu Jintao was a member and current patron.
(simplified Chinese: 北京大正语言知识处理科技有限公司). A notice issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on 19 May stated that, as of 1 July 2009, manufacturers must ship machines to be sold in China with the software preloaded—either pre-installed or enclosed on a compact disc, and that manufacturers are required to report the number of machines shipped with the software to the government. In order to build a green, healthy, and harmonious online environment, and to avoid the effects on and the poisoning of our youth s minds by harmful information on the internet, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), Civilization Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and Ministry of Finance, in accordance with the Government Procurement Law, have used CPC financial capital to purchase one-year exclusive rights to use “Green Dam Youth Escort” Green Online Filtering Software (hereinafter referred to as “Green Dam Youth Escort”) along with related services so that the whole society may use it free of charge. is concerned about actions that seek to restrict access to the Internet as well as restrictions on the internationally recognized right to freedom of expression.
Buffer overflow may occur when the software performs URL filtering or updates its blacklist filter files due to the use of fixed-length buffers, and can corrupt the execution stack and potentially allow execution of malicious code. They are joined by Sony, and Lenovo. Online polls conducted by leading Chinese web portals revealed poor acceptance of the software by netizens.
We have asked the Chinese to engage in a dialogue on how to address these concerns. Jinhui claimed that Green Dam recognizes pornographic images by analyzing skin-coloured regions, complemented by human face recognition. On 11 June 2009, a team released a third-party tool aiming to provide users with options to disable the software, change the master password and perform post-uninstallation clean-up (i.e., removing files and registry entries left behind by the uninstaller). A BBC News article reported that critics feared this new software could be used by the government to enhance the existing internet censorship system.
However, according to a Southern Weekly article, the software is incapable of recognizing pictures of nudity featuring black- or red-skinned characters but sensitive enough to images with large patches of yellow that it censors promotional images of the film Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties. On Sina and Netease, over 80% of poll participants said they would not consider or were not interested in using the software; on Tencent, over 70% of poll participants said it was unnecessary for new computers to be preloaded with filtering softwares; on Sohu, over 70% of poll participants said filtering softwares would not effectively prevent minors from browsing inappropriate websites. The New York Times cited that human rights advocates and internet users in China have been especially critical, saying that while the software is ostensibly aimed at protecting users against pornography on the web, it is really a thinly concealed attempt by the government to expand censorship . A report by the OpenNet Initiative project acknowledged the broad global support for measures to help parents limit exposure of their children to harmful online material, published a detailed report on the technical and political flaws of this software and its implications. Internet citizens have created a manga-style Moe anthropomorphism named Green Dam Girl (simplified Chinese: 绿坝娘; traditional Chinese: 綠壩娘; pinyin: lǜbàniáng; Japanese: Green Dam Musume (グリーンダム娘, Gurīn Damu Tan?)), similar to the OS-tans.
They located various security vulnerabilities that can allow malicious sites to steal private data, send spam, or enlist the computer in a botnet and the software makers or others to install malicious code during the update process . However, files taken from CyberSitter continue to be present on the computer even after the update and are still used in a pre-update version of the software available from its makers website.
Many versions exist, but the common features are that she is dressed in green, wears a river crab hat, holding a rabbit (the Green Dam mascot) in hand, and armed with a paintbrush to wipe out online filth. denying that they stole anything, quoting Bryan Zhang as saying That s impossible . Hewlett-Packard and Dell have been sent cease and desist letters by Solid Oak Software, asking them to respond by 24 June, having determined without a doubt that Green Dam is indeed pirated, and using 100 percent of our code . According to an addendum to the Wolchok et al report published on 18 June 2009, makers of Green Dam Youth Escort silently patched the software on 13 June, addressing at the least the one particular buffer overflow vulnerability showcased in the original report.
They also discovered in the software a news bulletin published by CyberSitter in 2004, whose inclusion was conjectured by them to be accidental. Both the Wolchok et al report and a technical analysis released on Wikileaks indicated that software contains code libraries and a configuration file from the BSD-licensed computer vision library OpenCV. According to The Wall Street Journal, Solid Oak, which had been apprised of the infringement, announced it would file injunctions on US manufacturers to stop them shipping machines with Green Dam. Qin Gang said the internet had always been open in China and that it was the government s will to prevent the spread of harmful information in accordance with the law.
The ministry claimed that by December 2008, the software had been downloaded more than 100,000 times, and 3 million times since the end of March 2009. She also commonly wears an armband with the word Discipline written on it.
Five leading PC vendors in mainland China, Founder, Lenovo, Tongfang, Great Wall and HEDY, also participated in trial installations. Professor Jonathan Zittrain, of Harvard s Berkman Center said: Once you ve got government-mandated software installed on each machine, the software has the keys to the kingdom.. In spite of the patch, the software nevertheless remained vulnerable to more sophisticated attacks as demonstrated by a new example attack page included in the addendum, leading the authors to stand by their previous recommendation that users uninstall the software immediately. According to the same addendum, an update was released on 12 June 2009 to reconfigure the software s filtering blacklists files, which modifies one blacklist and disables the rest.
Chamber of Commerce, the European-American Business Council, the Information Technology Industry Council and other associations from North America, Europe, and Japan. In moves which the San Francisco Chronicle suggested were politically motivated by the quest for closer ties, Taiwanese manufacturers Acer, Asus, BenQ announced they were already shipping products with Green Dam as originally ordered. The report included a response by Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co.
Under a directive from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) taking effect on 1 July 2009, it is mandatory to have either the software, or its setup files accompanied on a compact disc or pre-installed on all new personal computers sold in mainland China, including those imported from abroad. As of 30 June 2009, the mandatory pre-installation of the Green Dam software on new computers has been delayed to an undetermined date. On 14 August 2009, Li Yizhong, minister of industry and information technology, announced that computer manufacturers and retailers were no longer obliged to ship the software with new computers for home or business use, but that schools, internet cafes and other public use computers would still be required to run the software. Designed to work with Microsoft Windows operating systems, the software was developed by Zhengzhou Jinhui Computer System Engineering Ltd. At the moment it s unclear whether that is reported back, but it could be. In fact, the current software filter contains about 85% political keywords, and only 15% pornography-related keywords. The computer industry advocacy organization, Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), said the development was very unfortunate .
The MIIT said it would keep on soliciting opinions to perfect the pre-installation plan. Ministry sources confirmed that the software had been patched, and that the government procurement procedure of the software had complied with China s Government Procurement Law, which was open, fair, transparent, non-exclusive, On meeting with officials of the MIIT and the ministry of commerce about Green Dam, American diplomats in China issued a statement: The U.S. (simplified Chinese: 郑州金惠计算机系统工程有限公司) with input from Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy Ltd.
Furthermore, the feature of automatic filter update opens door to the computer being remotely controlled by the software s makers and possibly third parties who manage to impersonate the update server because the updates are delivered via unencrypted HTTP. The report included an example page that exploits the buffer overflow vulnerability to crash the software. In addition to security vulnerabilities, Wolchok, Yao and Halderman also found that a number of blacklist files used by Green Dam Youth Escort were taken from the censorship program CyberSitter, from Solid Oak Software Inc. Zhang said: Our software is simply not capable of spying on Internet users, it is only a filter , and that the Wall Street Journal had falsely claimed that our software can be used as spyware without having a clear understanding of the product . On 10 June, amidst massive criticism circling within the internet about the software and the MIIT s directive, the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, the agency responsible for censorship, issued an instruction attributed to central leaders requiring the Chinese media to stop publishing questioning or critical opinions.
Its aim was to build a green, healthy network environment, to protect the healthy growth of young people . Trials commenced in Zhengzhou, Nanjing, Lanzhou, and Xi an in October 2008 after the ministry negotiated with the software suppliers and 50 web portals to make the software publicly available without charge, and more than 2,000 installations took place. The article also cited an expert saying that the software s misrecognition of inappropriate contents in applications including Microsoft Word can lead it to forcefully close those applications without notifying the user, and so cause data losses. On 11 June 2009, a BBC News article reported that potential faults in the software could lead to a large-scale disaster.
Alex Halderman from the University of Michigan published an analysis of Green Dam Youth Escort. This leads to the belief that support for the MIIT s directive was divided within the Chinese government itself. On the eve of the introduction of the mandatory pre-installation of the Green Dam software on new computers, it was postponed.
Ed Black, CCIA president criticised the move as clearly an escalation of attempts to limit access and the freedom of the internet, The CCIA is reported to be taking up a test case for American tech companies wishing to present a united front against censorship and it is calling on the Obama administration to intervene with Beijing over the requirement that manufacturers pre-install the software on all new computers. On 8 June, Microsoft said that appropriate parental control tools are an important societal consideration . However, In an unusual move, an international group of business associations expressed their concern in a letter to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, urging the government to scrap the Green Dam directive.
After comprehensive testing and pilot use, the software has been shown to effectively filter harmful content in text and graphics on the Internet and has already satisfied the conditions for pre-installation by computer manufacturers. A separate notice on the ministry s website required schools to install the software on every computer in their purview by the end of May. According to the directive, the aim is to build a healthy and harmonious online environment that does not poison young people s minds . This was ridiculed by some netizens as the software being crackable by elementary school students . Researchers from University of Michigan found the uninstaller appears to effectively remove Green Dam from the computer. While some sources states that part of the software (e.g.
Qin Gang, spokesman for the foreign ministry, said the software would filter out pornography or violence: The purpose of this is to effectively manage harmful material for the public and prevent it from being spread, adding that In June 2009, state-run Chinese media announced that the installation of the Green Dam Youth Escort would not be compulsory but an optional package. In 2008, under instructions from political leaders, the MIIT implemented a community-oriented green open Internet filtering software project with the support of the Central Civilisation Office and the Ministry of Finance. The report included comments by Isaac Mao, who said that there were a series of software flaws , including the unencrypted communications between the software and the company s servers, which could allow hackers access to people s private data or place malicious script on machines on the network to affect Also on 11 June 2009, a Netease article reported that the master password of the software can be easily cracked.
