Dam Burst Tool Disables China's Green Dam Censorware

Posted by timothy on Wednesday September 30, 2009 @05:48AM from the dam-you-anti-social-coders dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The infamous Green Dam censorship software has suffered yet another blow. As ZDNet explains, Dam Burst, a tool released by security researcher Jon Oberheide, allows unprivileged users to disable the censorware by removing the hooks that enable it to monitor and block user activity, effectively restoring running applications to their original uncensored state. While the Dam Burst software is currently available at Oberheide's website, community mirrors will undoubtedly be necessary to avoid blocking by the Great Firewall."

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but you'd still be doing something illegal by lapsed · 2009-09-30 06:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

If Green Dam software were required in China (and it's not yet clear that it will be), disabling it might be trivial but the act of disabling it would open the user to prosecution. A Chinese user could 'accidentally' click on a site they should not have seen but it's hard to see disabling Green Dam software as anything but deliberate. Having said that, I think Oberheide's work is commendable.