Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Govt Spyware Puts Computers At Risk
Ihmhi writes "China's mandatory 'Green Dam Youth Escort' web filter software apparently has a series of severe flaws. In addition to not working on Linux or MacOS, traffic between the software and its servers is unencrypted."
I'm sure it only gets better after that.
So does that mean that selling computers with Linux or OSX installed is illegal? Or will they get away with "installing" the software on those computers even though it can not function?
after all the slating given to china over censorship, it would be interesting to be able to browse from behind such a filter and see how much it would affect the surfing of a typical westoner
No, not a good thing. You see in the authoritarian/communist society which is China, the government owns or has major influence in everything. So even with OSS projects that have a commercial vendor (like Red Hat) the government could convince the company to poison the source repos and the binary repos with modified versions. So in the end you have an authoritarian Linux system that even pirated Windows would be looked at by dissenters as "more free" because it doesn't run into the poisoning of OSS.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
From the article: "One blogger posted a screenshot of the software purportedly blocking an attempt to visit a porn site using Microsoft's Internet Explorer. But, he said, there was no problem accessing the site using the Firefox web browser. "
not as an excuse to defame a government for trying to give parents more tools to protect their children.
"protect" them from what? From the evils of porn? This isn't 1995 here people, and its pretty hard to not know your going to a porn site today especially if you use a search engine to find sites. If your kid is searching for porn then obviously they aren't as "innocent" as you think they are. And whenever their censorship is under the guise of "protecting" the people from such evil ideas as human rights and alternate ideologies, it gets quite suspicious whenever they try to mandate more controls.
Again, if you do not wish to use this software, please feel free to uninstall it -- it's only there for those who want to use it.
Thats nice, but why install it in the first place? There are loads of internet "protection" filters out there, mandating the installation of one, especially from a government that constantly abuses its citizens should be cause of concern or alarm. Don't you think?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.