A California-based software company has accused a Chinese company of lifting parts of the Green Dam Youth Escort filtering software directly from its own CyberSitter program.
Solid Oak Software Inc. claims that parts of the Green Dam code, including "blacklist" files and code using "proprietary encryption methods," are identical to code used in its own Internet filtering software.
The OpenNet Initiative worked this week to evaluate the functionality of China's Green Dam software. In "China's Green Dam: The Implications of Government Control Encroaching on the Home PC," we review the functional elements of this new software and explore the possible effects of its implementation on a national scale. We conclude that Green Dam is deeply flawed and poses critical security concerns for users.
Today the French Constitutional Council declared France's "three strikes" law unconstitutional. The Council ruled that HADOPI, the agency in charge of administering the law, has the authority to warn Internet users who are caught violating the law, but not to punish them.
The latest news in the world of Internet censorship is about China's Green Dam software, which ostensibly protects Chinese children by filtering out pornographic Web sites.
In addition to blocking sites that include keywords such as "pornography" and, somewhat less justifiably, "touch" and "play," the software also filters out images that have a high percentage of "skin colored" pixels.
Less than a week after China blocked access to a host of prominent web services in preparation for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, multiple media sources are reporting that on July 1, 2009 China will begin requiring all computers sold in the country to come equipped with Internet filtering software.
In preparation for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre on Thursday, China has blocked access to Twitter, Hotmail, Flickr, MSN Spaces and several other web services.
China’s New Tang Dynasty Television has obtained a list of the words censored by Baidu.com, China’s largest search engine, according to reports in The Epoch Times.
Iranians regained access to Facebook and Twitter following a one-day government-imposed ban last week, CNN News reports. Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stated that he had not called for the ban, adding that he believes “in maximum freedom of expression.”
Dubai police are pursuing a plan to censor upwards of 500 search terms deemed offensive in an effort to block access to certain websites, AME Info reports. Though no progress has yet been made, according to Lieutenant General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, this follows the Dubai Police’s statement in April of their intention to protect the youth of UAE from “pornographic” and “anti-religious” video content on YouTube.
According to The Inquirer, German police have raided the offices of WikiLeaks.de, a website that publishes leaks of government documents, transferring control of the domain to German authorities and shutting down the website.
