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High-tech kowtowing: PC makers bow to China’s censorware mandate

In Beijing 20 years ago - One man vs. a line of tanks.

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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. – How sad that just as the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre passes private sector companies are kowtowing to Chinese demands that web filtering censorship software be installed on all PCs sold in that country.

Of course, these companies had little choice. Resistance is futile. Do it or cease doing business in country where a flowering democracy movement was crushed in 1989 under tank treads at Tiananmen - the “Gate of Heavenly Peace.”

China boasts about its “Great Firewall” of Internet censorship and monitoring. "Green Dam" is a key brick in a wall that seems to grow ever taller and thicker.

The latest company to give in to the demand is Morrisville-based Lenovo, which issued its first statement on the so-called Green Dam decree in an e-mail to Local Tech Wire on Wednesday.

China has waffled on the decree, which was supposed to take effect on July 1. After angry protests in China and elsewhere plus some protests from Washingtonn, the government backed off the mandate. But less than 24 hours later, a spokesperson said implementation is likely at a later date.

While Hewlett-Packard and Dell remain quiet, Lenovo stepped forward to say it would ship the software either on hard drives or as a CD. Lenovo, born in China 24 years ago and one of the country’s shining examples of its ever-deepening commitment to global business, is the top PC seller in China. Most of its operations are located there. And China is far from a democracy. What the government says, businesses and people do.

Ask Yahoo, Cisco, Google, Microsoft and a host of other U.S.-based high-tech firms that have tangled with the Chinese before over censorship and other issues. Green Dam is just the latest.

But one has to hope that someday businesses and the U.S. government will put freedom above dollars.

A University of Michigan review of “Green Dam” clearly labels the Chinese designed and manufactured software for what it is – “censorware.”

It is loaded with filters for images (especially nudity), URLs and text (political) – what the study calls “blacklists.”

“Green Dam intercepts Internet traffic and processes it to see whether visited web sites are blacklisted,” the Michigan authors wrote. “In order to perform this monitoring, it injects a library called SurfGd.dll into software that uses the socket API. When a user access a web site, this code checks the address against the blacklist and logs the URL.”

As the AP reported Wednesday, initial news that China was backing off the Green Dam mandate triggered some celebrations. The decision, the AP said, “highlights the rise of China's increasingly tech-savvy, vocal public as a factor in the authoritarian government's decisions.”

AP called the decision “a retreat” and “another significant shift for a Communist Party that is used to being the final voice in official decisions but is learning to accommodate a public that is growing more assertive as living standards rise.”

One protester wanted to call July 1 "Internet Day."

Then came the news that China is likely to implement Green Dam anyway.

Fortunately, the Michigan study found that Green Dam really isn’t all that good.

The thirst for freedom in China wasn’t quenched 20 years ago even though blood flowed across the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Green Dam won’t quench the thirst for freedom in cyberspace, either.

By the way, happy 4th of July.

The Skinny

WRAL Local Tech Wire Publisher and Editor Rick Smith dishes out tidbits from the local technology sector. Read more articles…