I’m not a tech guy, but I despise state-sponsored censorship, so I’ve been following the epic fail of the Green Dam software with a certain admitted sense of schadenfreude. The whole thing has been a disaster from the start which is rather amazing given the usual attention Chinese state-owned companies pay to such things as “innovation,” “product quality,” and “transparency.”
Nevertheless, it took Associate Professor J. Alex Halderman and a team of students from the University of Michigan approximately 12 hours to uncover a dizzying array of security vulnerabilities and programming errors.
The full report is available online. Allow me to summarize: The sloppy programming job on this piece of crap software means that if it is installed, you’ll leave your computer more open to exploitation then a group of sorority sisters when the Girls Gone Wild Spring Break crew crashes “Free Tequila for Tiny Tops” night in Cancun.
On top of that, it’s one thing to screw something up on your own…it takes real genius to CHEAT and STILL screw it up.
“Halderman and his team discovered evidence that Solid Oak Software code may have been lifted and placed in Green Dam. It wasn’t just that “blacklisted” URL addresses appeared to be copied directly from Cybersitter; “a news item, almost like a press release that Cybersitter sent to customers was included in the shipping version of Green Dam software,” Halderman said. “It appeared to be copied into Green Dam by mistake.”
It reminds me of a speech I once attended by the well-known educator Jaime Escalante (Stand and Deliver) who began the evening with this anecdote:
“One class I had two students: Johnny and Jimmy. They sat next to each other and as I was grading the first test, I began to suspect they were cheating. So I called their parents in to the school for a conference. They all denied their sons had cheated, so I put the papers on the desk to compare them.
Question 1: Johnny was right. Jimmy was right.
Question 2: Johnny was wrong. Jimmy also wrong.
Jimmy’s father said, ‘That doesn’t prove anything.”
You are right sir, but on question three, Johnny wrote ‘I don’t know’ and Jimmy wrote ‘Me neither.’
Ladies and Gentleman, Yoooourrrrr Green Dam software team.
