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Dam Burst Tool Disables China's Green Dam Censorware
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."
Dont tell: you probably haven't RTFA????
The Chinese government originally mandated that Green Dam be shipped on all new PCs but this pre-installation has been delayed.
Can't you just install a clean OS?
C'mon. This is China. It's not like you can just walk to a street corner and get a copy of XP.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
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.
The Chinese government originally mandated that Green Dam be shipped on all new PCs but this pre-installation has been delayed.
The Chinese government never mandated that Green Dam be shipped "on" or "pre-installed". It mandated that it ship with new PCs. It was sufficient simply to stick a CD in the shipping box, although preinstalling the software was also OK. Manufacturers could decide how to satisfy the requirement. It was up to the end user to decide whether to use it or not. The idea was to give parents the option of using filtering software for their children. If they didn't want to use it, they didn't have to.
The software described in TFA is no more a blow for freedom than software that lets kids get around NetNanny.
"As a pleasant side effect, disabling the Green Dam components within a running process actually increases the security of the end host as the vulnerable code paths within the Green Dam software are no longer exploitable by an attacker. "
That being true, I want to install Green Dam so that I can use Dam Burst. Awesome!! Our benevolent brothers in China have helped to make teh intartubez secure!!!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br