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.
Green Dam, spring break sorority girls, and Jaime Escalante (yes, there IS a connection.): I’m not a tech .. http://tinyurl.com/nsr4kc
“…with a certain admitted sense of schadenfreude”
Also guilty.
According to the BBC website, the Green Dam team have denied any wrongdoing. Naturally.
Yeah, when I taught basic math in a US university, once I caught a cheating in the final exam: the cheater was stupid enough to copy the other student’s name on his paper…
All I know is that when I search Baidu Images for geeky things like “顾恺之” or “汉代”, a few pics of naked ladies often get mixed in there somehow with the photos of the 阙 …I salute the limitless creativity of the horny Chinese teenager.
Why making all the fuse about this Green Dam thing? The Chinese government did not require to specifically install on your own computers. Meanwhile, there are similar practice in the US.
“US National Crime Prevention Council launches McGruff SafeGuard”
This piece software got a limited usability to tech savvy people. But you can NOT discount the good intention by the Chinese government.
Westerns need to know that many PCs are bought in China for education purpose of their young children, and most adults are not tech savvy to install or purchase this kind of software.
Shane,
You’re a smart guy, I’ll let you figure out the difference.
Frankly, for me, it’s the keystone cops approach to the whole thing that I find both fascinating and funny. If you’re going to be sinister, at least do it right. This is “information control” as run by Fredo Corleone.
Even the excuses from the Green Dam designers had an odd Godfather II (“I can handle things! I’m smart! Not like everybody says… like dumb”) ring to them.
Jeremiah:
Yes, I already figured out. This is a case of so-called “noble cause misplaced’.
The requirement is on new PCs, and most of these new PCs goes on sale in rural area, where the parents have to do hard labor day-in-day-out. They are not rich middle American with white collar office jobs, worrying about if their freedom are being censored, while seeing their kid mislead by decadent Hollywood types and street gangs.
I guess I’m just not as elitist as you are, nor as patronizing toward those born in rural areas.
Apart from that, you’re starting to sound either incredibly disingenuous or fairly naive. I’ll let you pick.
In any case, the required installation/not-required installation wasn’t the point of THIS post, it was, once again for the Yingwen-impaired, about the sloppy job putting it together.
Surely, the poor benighted denizens of China’s rural areas deserve something better to protect them from the insidious influence of Tila Tequila?
With due respect, not I am being naive. The whole paranoia around this Green Dam thing is a clear over-reaction i, another nitpicking on China, or a continuous political conspiracy by westerns.
If it’s paranoia you seek (I mean other than delusional fantasies of “continuous political conspiracies” perpetrated by “westerns” [sic] and carried out, quite possibly, with the help of the Decepticons or some other form of killer space robot) then I might direct you to essays and posts related to the political or censorship implications of the Green Dam software. Which was, for the THIRD time Mr. Reading Comprehension, not what the post was about.
Shane, you’re in grave danger of becoming a one-trick pony. You might want to expand your repertoire a bit.
“… a continuous political conspiracy by westerns.”
And there endeth the conversation. Jeez!
Jeremiah:
You didn’t read the ‘or’ there, did you? The intention is to let you pick and choose. Surely, you indeed picked the one that strike your nerve. Gotcha
My two cent: it is far better to spend your time to figure out why the State of California is going into bankruptcy, and why US and UK decided to invade Iraq (something UK is still trying to figure out
My three cents,
Other than that men over the age of 12 generally don’t use emoticons…
I don’t live in California, didn’t go to graduate school in American studies, and don’t teach UK history…
Therefore I think this is an excellent use of my time.
But thanks for sharing, I’m glad you’re down with the OTP.
I know this is off-topic (not that it seems to matter in this thread anymore), but I believe that this story, in Time, about a crackdown against human rights lawyers in China, is important:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905130,00.html?xid=rss-world-yahoo
Looks to me like the Chinese government has decided to “tighten things up a bit” again.
Oh, and BTW, the Chinese government had originally planned to make installation of the Green Dam program mandatory on all new computers; they only backed down after it was shown how easily the program can be breached.
As for the “good intentions” of the Chinese government, try a google search on “good intentions, road to hell paved with”.
And shane9219, you forgot to mention slavery, lynchings, the extermination campaign against Native Americans and the looting of the Yuanmingyuan.
“takes real genius to CHEAT and STILL screw it up”
Like cdesign proponentist.
http://skepticwiki.org/index.php/Cdesign_proponentsists
Jeremiah, how can it be “state-sponsored censorship” when end users are under no obligation to install or run this software?
There was never a mandate to force installation of this software. According to the original 5/19 MIIT announement, the software is to bundle on hard drive or CD-ROM.
There may have been confusion over the term “preinstall/bundle”, but both MIIT and the software maker have clarified this point as early as 6/10, that what is distributed is the setup file, and users are not required to install or run Green Dam (IMHO unfortunately ignored by the media at large, who seem to have opted for sensationalism):
a) http://www.taizhou.gov.cn/art/2009/6/10/art_76_36883.html
据新华社电 昨日，工信部有关负责人说
According to Xinhua wire yesterday [6/09], relevant MIIT leader said
…
这位负责人还表示，“绿坝”产品的有效识别率超过90%。考虑到不同层次用户的实际情况，“绿坝”软件运行环境对计算机配置要求低于目前市场主流产品，***并可由用户自行选择安装与否***，同时对用户上网行为不进行任何监控，也不搜集任何用户信息。
The ***end user can freely choose to install or not*** quote from MIIT offical is emphasized.
b) http://www.hngybz.gov.cn/news2.aspx?hyid=82644
绿坝预装只提供安装文件 用户可决定是否安装 – Green Dam “bundle/preinstall” only provide installation articles, end users decide install or not
工信部要求预装进电脑的只是一个软件安装文件，所以用户可以选择是否把它装进自己的电脑里让他运行 – MIIT asks “bundle/preinstall” on computer is only the installation, so end users can choose wheither to execute it to install on their own computer
c) http://news.qq.com/a/20090610/000087.htm
“工信部：上网过滤软件不监控网民 不强制安装”
MIIT: Online Filtering Sowftware Will Not Monitor Citizen, Will Not Force Installation (quote from software maker on MIIT mandate)
Charlie “The Spammer” Liu,
You’re fighting a rearguard action with Fredo Corleone as your commander…it’s sad, but quaintly keeping in character.
Read it again, boss. I didn’t call “Green Dam” state-sponsored censorship, but the debate over GD involved charges of censorship, and this piqued my interest to find out more.
This post (how you passed the GRE is beyond me) is about how the Green Dam is being designed/implemented by total morons.
But it’s nice to know that even morons deserve a little Charlie-lovin’.
Jeremiah, here what you said:
“I despise state-sponsored censorship, so I’ve been following the epic fail of the Green Dam software”
Please enlighten me what are you refering to? Granted English isn’t my first language, but I think I read this correctly.
I think I explained it already in my comment above. Do you want me to do it again using smaller words?
Your problem, Charlie, now, before, and likely in the future, isn’t your reading comprehension, it’s that YOU NEVER READ.
And you did it again here. You read the first line of the post and then skipped right to the comments section and began cutting/pasting away.
If you HAD read the post, you would have learned (Learn: Means to find out something new, not one of your strong points we know) that your comment was TOTALLY irrelevant to what the post was about.
You have to read more than one sentence. Come on, didn’t you learn any of this in those expensive test-prep courses you had to take so you could get into a decent US school?
Jeremy, I am responding to your first sentence, which clearly made the censorship implication against Green Dam.
Let’s get this one out of the way, maybe I’ll share with you my experience with Green Dam – yup, unlike your lot, I actually installed Green Dam and tried it myself.
Charlie,
Why would I WANT to install it? I’ve read the sufficient reports by trained technicians recommending that I not install it. I don’t have to try arsenic to listen to advice by doctors that it’s a bad idea to add it to my milkshake.
BUT if you want to review the software and post the results on YOUR blog, I’ll be happy to check it out.
Ps. You might want to add a post on why the Clippers ROCK as an NBA franchise, it’s a rough equivalent of what you’re trying to do, but, you know, knock yourself out.
BTW, now that you’ve got me thinking about this aspect (apart from the topic of “Jinhui’s software people are as dumb as rocks but not nearly as stupid as the government drones who hired them”), obligation or no, it does seem the State is pretty involved in the project:
From today’s edition of that bastion of Zhongguo-bashing western media propaganda, The China Daily:
I guess it depends on how you define “sponsor.” Again from TBOZGBWMP, The China Daily:
I dunno. Looks like a tough call there, ump.
Feel free to focus on the “state-sponsored” part, but the facts show end users are under no obligation to run this software – how can it be seen as censorship?
You seem like a smart guy, so I’ll let you figure that one out for yourself. But it’s fair to say that I have little patience for either the chronically disingenuous or the willfully naive.
Interesting, this guy is on CNR also…with the same arguments.
Green Dam is censorship when its user is under one impression about what it will do and it does something else. In this case, Green Dam is touted as anti-vulgar content, but it also conveniently filters out political content or other non-vulgar content deemed objectionable by the censor (the government).
Just because you can uninstall it or hack it doesn’t mean it wasn’t software that engaged in censorship, just as not going online in China doesn’t mean the internet isn’t censored in China.
Charles, your argument is flimsy and it may rest in your understanding of what “censorship” means. Look it up. Easy way: go to Google, type “define: censorship” and tap “enter”.
Kai,
This guy is everywhere, and always with the same arguments. Trust me, Charlie’s relationship with “original analysis” and “critical thinking” makes the union of Jon and Kate look like it was built on bedrock. He goes from blog to blog, reads the title or the first sentence, and if it fits one of his programmed “topics” he spews forth a prepared cut/paste job of links and half-assed arguments to defend the “motherland.”
Generally speaking, as with a drunk baby, it’s often rather disturbingly funny in its own special way.
Ah, the “motherland” stuff…
Just for the record, I ain’t from Mainland China, ain’t never been citizen of the PRC a day in my life.
I think your bigotry is evident – I’m American, moron.
Charlie,
EVERYBODY knows that. Because you mention it in almost every thread you pollute.
That’s why it was in “QUOTES” dumbass.