Internet: June 2009 Archives

By Keith Bradsher | The New York Times
June 25, 2009

The Chinese Health Ministry on Thursday ordered sharp restrictions on Internet access to medical research papers on sexual subjects. It is the latest move in what the ministry calls an antipornography campaign that many China experts see as a harbinger of a broader crackdown on freedom of expression and dissent.

In the past month, central government officials have cited a need to control pornography in ordering that filtering software be preinstalled on all new computers sold in China starting July 1.

They have also forced Google to disable a function that lets the search engine suggest terms and on Wednesday night even briefly blocked access nationwide to Google's main search engine and other services like Gmail. Some users were still having problems accessing Google sites on Thursday night.

In addition, Chinese bloggers say they have detected evidence of a concerted effort to stain Google's image. They say that someone in Beijing manipulated Google's software to make it more likely to suggest a pornographic search term during a state television broadcast.

At the same time, the government seems to have stepped up harassment of human rights advocates.

Liu Xiaobo, one of China's best-known dissidents, was formally arrested Tuesday on suspicion of subversion, six months after he was detained for joining other intellectuals in signing a document calling for democracy. This month, the authorities refused to renew the licenses of more than a dozen lawyers after they agreed to represent clients in human rights cases.

The same public security agencies charged with fighting pornography are responsible for suppressing illegal political activity, said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch. The government's statistics for seizures of illegal publications tend to include both pornographic and political documents, he noted.

"The two are closely associated," Mr. Bequelin said. "These campaigns work hand in hand."

>> Complete report

By Dylan Bushell-Embling | BusinessWeek
June 15, 2009

The controversial new software blocks political and religious websites and is "far more intrusive" than other content control software, say OpenNet researchers

China's new Green Dam filtering program blocks far more content than pornography, despite the MIIT's claims, that it is to protect youth from obscene content, the OpenNet initiative said.

Instead the program filters political and religious content, and is "far more intrusive" than any other content control software the initiative has reviewed, OpenNet researchers said.

"[Green Dam is] a substandard software product that interferes with the performance of personal computers in an unpredictable way, killing browsers and applications without warning while opening up users to numerous serious security vulnerabilities," the researchers said.

The program actively monitors computer behavior, terminating a wide range of programs if sensitive keywords are entered, said OpenNet, which is a joint project between Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and other universities to monitor government internet surveillance.

For example, entering falundafa.org into browsers or even word processors such as Notepad results in these programs being closed automatically.

With just a single auto-update implementing a few changes to the code, Green Dam could be used to monitor personal communications and browsing behavior, the researchers said. Green Dam already creates log files, but these are stored locally.

OpenNet also called the plan to mandate the use of a particular software product a "questionable policy decision," despite China's decision to make the installation of the program voluntary.

Meanwhile, US software publisher Solid Oak Software is seeking an injunction preventing US companies from shipping software bundled with Green Dam, alleging part of the program was stolen from its CyberSitter filtering program.

Solid Oak has found pieces of its proprietary code in Green Dam, as well as a copy of instructions for updating the software, the company told Reuters.

The Chinese company behind the filtering software--Jinhui Computer Systems--denied any wrongdoing.

>> Original source 

A New York Times Editorial
June 12, 2009

China has accomplished remarkable things in the past 20 years, including building one of the world's largest economies. Computers helped speed that development -- and will be even more important in the future. So Beijing's decision to require that all new personal computers sold in China contain software that bars access to certain Internet content seems particularly self-destructive and foolish.

The new rules say all PCs sold in China after June 30 must include special software -- designed by a company with links to China's military and security agencies -- to filter out pornography and other "vulgar" material. Beijing claims that it is trying to protect children. Don't believe it.

In any country, such vague terms would be a frightening license for government intrusion. China's government, which fears the free flow of ideas, already vigorously restricts Internet content, including blocking access to Web sites on Tibet, human rights and other politically sensitive subjects.

Chinese bloggers, dissidents and even some state news media outlets are right to worry that the new software could be used even more nefariously: to collect personal data and spy on consumer Web habits.

The contract for the software, meanwhile, was awarded without industry input. There are serious questions about whether the product will even work.

The last thing China needs is to force the installation of software that could cause millions of computers to crash. That would feed new resentment against a government already accused of gross incompetence after thousands of children died in the collapse of shoddily constructed schools in the 2008 earthquake.

International manufacturers probably could force the government to reverse the new rules by threatening not to sell their products. But they have no history of standing up to Beijing. We hope they are making a stronger case in private for a rollback than was apparent in the anemic public statement issued by a coalition of American trade associations. They called for "an open and healthy dialogue" with the government but seemed to go along with the farcical claim that its intention really was to improve parental control.

If Beijing does not reconsider its foolhardy decision, the new rules would take effect on July 1. Our advice to Chinese consumers: Buy your PC now.

>> Original source

By Andrew Jacobs | The New York Times
June 11, 2009

China is facing a storm of protest at home and abroad over new regulations requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include software that can filter out pornography and other "vulgar" content from the Internet.

Industry executives, free-speech advocates and ordinary computer users have reacted angrily to the new mandate, which gives manufacturers until July 1 to preinstall the software on millions of new machines. The government presented the regulations to PC makers on May 19, but they were not released publicly until Monday.

"Mandatory installation of filtering software is simply acting blindly," said an editorial in the Wuhan Evening News.

Computer makers in the United States say it will be impossible to fulfill the requirement by the end of the month and have asked the Chinese government to reconsider the directive. They say it raises thorny questions about censorship and whether manufacturers will be liable if the software -- designed by a company with ties to China's military and public security agencies -- conflicts with operating systems or causes computers to crash.

"To be honest, nobody really knows what this software is capable of," said one executive at an American computer maker.

So far, the government has not shown any signs of backing down. On Tuesday, state-owned media and officials defended the new software, known as "Green Dam," and said suggestions it could be turned into government-operated spyware were exaggerated.

"If you have children or are expecting a child you could understand the concerns of parents over unhealthy online content," Qin Gang, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said at a regular news conference Tuesday.

Bloggers, dissidents and even normally cautious state media outlets have greeted the announcement with skepticism, questioning the software's reliability and wondering whether it could be used to censor nonsexual content. Some criticized the government's decision to spend 41 million yuan, or $6 million, on a program that was not solicited through an open bidding process.

China vigorously restricts Internet content, regularly blocking Web pages devoted to Tibetan independence, human rights issues and other politically sensitive subjects. An anti-vulgarity campaign this year has shut down thousands of pornographic sites.

"How do you prevent this from becoming a backdoor for the misuse of power?" asked an editorial on the Web site of Caijing magazine. "Up until now, officials have not answered these questions. The government can urge parents to take responsibility through a variety of mechanisms, but it can't become an omnipotent Big Parent."

Green Dam's designers say the program, which uses image recognition technology and text filtering to block material, is not capable of acting as spyware. Most important, they say the program can be disabled or erased by computer owners who don't want to use it.

The Beijing News devoted a full page to Green Dam and found its performance less than stellar. For example, an innocent math question that included the word "balls" was filtered out, as were apparently harmless photographs with yellow backgrounds.

Writing on Green Dam's own Web site, one teacher said sexually explicit images slipped through and another complained that it would not let her view pictures of pigs. "Pitiful little pig!" she wrote. "I was curious, so I looked up some photos of naked African women. Oh, they were not censored!"

In an editorial he wrote for the Oriental Morning Post, Wang Lin, an associate professor at Hainan University Law School, said the government should have consulted computer users and allowed other software companies to submit comparable programs. "They've made a decision affecting tens of millions of people without regard to their opinions," he said in an interview. "It's like you buying a car and the government telling you where you can drive."

Executives at computer makers, who last year sold about 40 million PC's in China, would agree with such sentiments, although none were willing to speak on the record for fear of angering a government they hope will change its mind.

Manufacturers and software designers have been working behind the scenes to convince officials to reconsider the directive, which was drawn up without industry input and without advance notice.

On Tuesday, a coalition of U.S. trade associations issued a statement that gently made their case.

"We believe there should be an open and healthy dialogue on how parental control software can be offered in the market in ways that ensure privacy, system reliability, freedom of expression, the free flow of information, security and user choice," read the statement, which was signed by groups including the Software & Information Industry Association and the Information Technology Industry Council, whose members include Lenovo, Dell, Apple and Hewlett-Packard.

By Wednesday, industry officials said a dialogue had begun and the American computer executive, speaking anonymously, said he had hopes that the rules might be eased.

Still, he said one possible compromise -- allowing PC manufacturers to simply drop a Green Dam disc into the box of every new computer -- would not be ideal. Preliminary tests by software technicians at a number of companies, he said, have revealed significant software tics that could affect a computer's operating system or other programs.

Bloggers, many of whom face occasional government censorship, have been especially incensed by the new rules. Wang Xiaofeng, a popular blogger, said a friend who downloaded the software was unable to view his satirical writings. He said he is especially bothered by the way Green Dam has been introduced to, or rather, foisted on, the public.

"It's like a bully forcing people to do what they want," he said in a telephone interview.

Still, he said he wasn't overly concerned the software would have a lasting impact on Internet freedom. The government is continually trying to ramp up Web restrictions, and each time, those restrictions are circumvented by the wily and the persistent. "People will always find a way to break through these firewalls," he said. "It's just a shame the government has to keep spending taxpayer money to build them."

Xiyun Yang contributed research.

>> Original source

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN and JEREMIAH MARQUEZ, Associated Press Writers
via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
04 June 2009

BEIJING - In Tiananmen Square, police were ready to pounce at the first sign of protest. In Hong Kong, a sea of candles flickered in the hands of tens of thousands who vented their grief and anger.

Two starkly contrasting faces of China were on display Thursday, the 20th anniversary of the military's bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators -- from Beijing's rigid control in suppressing any dissent, to freewheeling Hong Kong, which enjoys freedoms all but absent on the mainland.

Tiananmen Square was blanketed by uniformed and plainclothes security officers who were ready to silence any potential demonstration, and there were few hints that the vast plaza was the epicenter of a student-led movement that was crushed on June 3-4, 1989, shocking the world.

Police barred foreign journalists from entering the square and threatened them with violence, even barring them from covering the daily raising of China's national flag.

Chinese and foreign tourists were allowed in Tiananmen as usual, although security officials appeared to outnumber visitors.

Dissidents and families of victims were confined to their homes or forced to leave Beijing, part of sweeping government efforts to prevent online debate or organized commemorations of the anniversary.

But in Hong Kong's Victoria Park, a crowd chanted slogans calling for Beijing to own up to the crackdown and release political dissidents. Organizers estimated its size at 150,000, while police put the number at 62,800.

"It is the dream of all Chinese people to have democracy!" the throng sang.

Hong Kong is one of the few places in China where the events of June 1989 are not off-limits, because the territory -- returned by the British 12 years ago -- operates under a separate political system that promises freedom of speech and other Western-style civil liberties.

"Hong Kong is China's conscience," Hong Kong pro-democracy lawmaker Cheung Man Kwong told the demonstration.

In the candlelight, speakers recalled the terrifying events in Tiananmen, where a military assault killed hundreds who had gathered for weeks in the square to demonstrate for freedom and even erect a makeshift statue of liberty. Those killed were eulogized as heroes in the struggle for a democratic China, their names read aloud before the crowd observed a minute of silence.

"Hong Kong is the only place where we can commemorate, and we have to repeat this every year so our younger generations don't forget," said Annie Chu, 36, a Hong Kong tourism worker who says she has attended every vigil for the last 20 years.

Earlier in the day, the central government ignored calls from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and even Taiwan's China-friendly president for Beijing to face up to the 1989 violence.

The extraordinary security in Beijing came after government censors shut down social networking and image-sharing Web sites such as Twitter and Flickr and blacked out CNN and other foreign news channels each time they showed stories about Tiananmen.

"We've been under 24-hour surveillance for a week and aren't able to leave home to mourn. It's totally inhuman," said Xu Jue, whose son was 22 when he was shot in the chest by soldiers and bled to death on June 4, 1989.

Police were also stationed outside the home of Wang Yannan, the daughter of Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party leader deposed for sympathizing with the pro-democracy protesters, according to the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy. Wang has never been politically active.

But Zhou was celebrated in Hong Kong. Tape recordings of Zhou recalling Tiananmen, used for his recently released posthumous memoir, were played over loudspeakers next to his portrait. One former student leader, Xiong Yan, stirred the crowd with predictions that "democracy will arrive in China."

Another student leader from 1989, Wu'er Kaixi, was forced to return to Taiwan on Thursday after flying to the Chinese territory of Macau the day before in an attempt to return home.

In Washington, Clinton said Wednesday that China, as an emerging global power, "should examine openly the darker events of its past and provide a public accounting of those killed, detained or missing, both to learn and to heal."

Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou urged China to lift the taboo on discussing the crackdown. "This painful chapter in history must be faced. Pretending it never happened is not an option," Ma said in a statement.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang attacked Clinton's comments as a "gross interference in China's internal affairs."

"We urge the U.S. to put aside its political prejudice and correct its wrongdoing and refrain from disrupting or undermining bilateral relations," Qin said in response to a question at a regularly scheduled news briefing.

Qin refused to comment on the security measures -- or even acknowledge them.

"Today is like any other day, stable," he said.

Beijing has never allowed an independent investigation into the crushing of the protests in 1989, in which possibly thousands of students, activists and ordinary citizens were killed. In one famous moment of resistance, a lone man holding shopping bags defiantly stood in front of a column of tanks on a street near the square.

Young mainland Chinese know little about the events, having grown up in a generation that has largely eschewed politics in favor of raw nationalism, wealth acquisition and individual pursuits.

But the issue still resonates with Hong Kong's younger generations.

"It's time for China to take responsibility for the killings," said Kin Cheung, a 17-year-old Hong Kong student who attended the yearly vigil for the first time Thursday. "They need to tell the truth."

Bodeen reported from Beijing, Marquez from Hong Kong. AP Writers Min Lee and Dikky Sinn in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

>> Original source

By Michael Wines and Andrew Jacobs | THE NEW YORK TIMES
June 3, 2009

China's government censors have begun to block access to the Internet services Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail and Micarosoft's live.com, broadening an already extraordinary effort to shield its citizens from any hint of Thursday's 20th anniversary of the military crackdown that ended the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement.

People in China who tried to gain access to the blocked Web sites on Tuesday instead encountered an error message saying the sites' servers had unexpectedly dropped the Internet connection -- a standard indicator that access has been blocked.

Weeks earlier, censors blocked Chinese users from viewing all videos on YouTube, and in recent days some television viewers have reported that BBC World News reports related to the Tiananmen anniversary were being selectively blacked out of broadcast programs.

Government censorship of political material on Internet bulletin boards and Web sites is common in China, but this is the first time Twitter has been blocked. Some well-known political activists, unable to post comments on Chinese blogs or chat sites, had switched to Twitter in recent months as an uncensored outlet for their views.

A number of foreign-based sites that have hosted Chinese bloggers, including blogspot.com and the Chinese-language version of wordpress.com, have also been blocked in recent weeks.

The South China Morning Post, an English-language newspaper based in Hong Kong that has frequently featured articles on Tiananmen and other sensitive issues, has also seen its distribution on the Chinese mainland curbed in advance of the anniversary on Thursday. And some Beijing readers of last weekend's edition of The International Herald Tribune discovered that an inside page of the newspaper with an article on the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious leader, was missing.

The anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown, in which army troops killed hundreds of student demonstrators, workers and ordinary citizens, is one of a series of politically sensitive dates this year that have provoked sweeping security measures by Chinese officials.

In recent days, the government has detained a number of political dissidents seen as threats to public order during the anniversary period, including one who had released an open letter complaining about economic hardship visited on former Tiananmen demonstrators who were jailed after the crackdown.

The dissident, Wu Gaoxing, was seized Saturday at his home in Taizhou, a coastal city south of Shanghai, according to the New York advocacy group Human Rights in China. Mr. Wu was among five men, all once jailed for their roles in the Tiananmen movement, who released a letter last weekend charging that former prisoners have been singled out for economic hardship long after their prison terms ended.

Human Rights in China said Mr. Wu was taken away and his computer confiscated about an hour after the letter, addressed to President Hu Jintao and other senior leaders, became public.

Mr. Wu, a writer and former educator, was taken into custody in 1989 and imprisoned for two years after he joined protests in his home province of Zhejiang against the military crackdown on Tiananmen demonstrators. "In this society that claims to be harmonious, we have become 'citizens of the three have-nots waiting to die': we have no regular jobs, no pensions, and no health insurance; if we get sick, we can only wait to die, and all this just because 20 years ago we were sentenced for political reasons," the letter says.

The men, among them a former Communist Party member and a factory worker, said they had been denied pensions, health care and regular employment since taking part in local rallies that were inspired by the protests in Beijing. One of the signers, Mao Guoliang, said he had been fired from 17 schools since he served a four-year term for "counterrevolutionary activities."

>> Original source