Activists Worry About a New "Green Dam" In Vietnam

alphadogg writes "Human rights activists are worried that new software mandated by Vietnamese authorities may lead to an Internet clampdown in the country's largest city. In April, local officials issued new regulations covering Internet cafes and service providers in Hanoi, ostensibly designed to crack down on hacking and other service abuses. Buried in the regulations is a mandate that service providers must add special software to their domain servers, used to authenticate systems on the network. Nobody quite knows what the software is, but activists in the US worry that it may be used to clamp down on Internet usage in a country that has seen more and more grassroots information-sharing on social networks over the past year. Last year China tried to force PC makers to ship Green Dam censorware with all computers sold in the country, saying the software would help crack down on online pornography. But Chinese authorities — already known for their notorious Great Firewall — eventually backed off from their plans after critics raised a host of privacy, security and system stability concerns, and Chinese Internet users showed no interest in installing the program."

Comments

Re:Laissez Faire Vietnam

[Doc Ruby]

I do hope you realize that wars are won or lost when one side surrenders. Which is what the US did. Many years after we should have left that country to its own civil war.

Thank you for demonstrating just why the Vietnam War was such a fiasco: even 40 years later, you're still fighting it, after we lost it. You think the killing was "the good part", and that the people who got you out of there were "almost treasonous". You and your war did more to undermine this country than practically anything ever done by it, up to its repeat performance in Iraq. The people who insist on fighting those wars for corporate crony war profiteers are the traitors.

Congratulations, you're an ancient stereotype.