- Saturday, 21 November 2009
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You can't run a $30 billion company on games - Bob Colwell, former Intel architect
Chinese censorship software nicked
A US INSECURITY COMPANY is claiming that the controversial Internet filtering software the glorious Chinese government wants preloaded on every computer sold behind the bamboo curtain was half-inched.
Solid Oak Software of Santa Barbara told the AP that parts of its filtering software designed for parents tipped up in the code of China's "Green Dam-Youth Escort".
The company is trying to get a court injunction against the Chinese software development firm that built the 'Green Dam' software, but it admits that obtaining that could be a bit tricky.
China says that it wants to block violence and pornography. But critics say it censors many more things. Some researchers have also charged that it creates serious security vulnerabilities.
University of Michigan researchers who examined the Chinese software found the stolen code.
It was not exactly difficult. There are "blacklist" files in the Chinese source code that were obviously taken from Solid Oak's CyberSitter program. One file in the source code includes a 2004 CyberSitter news bulletin. µ
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Of course the Chinese Gov had to steal the software: all their good programmers are too busy hacking into the rest of the world's governments to help. That counts as a good reason, right?
Hardly suprising, in fact I'd be floored if it was novel, worked properly and so on.
You can get a good insight into the PRC mindset by the way that they're obsessed with Windows (the "offical" PC softwre) but piracy of same is rampant. You'd have thought with the intellectual resources at their disposal (and their reluctance to pay for software) that they'd have embraced FOSS big time. Maybe the problem is that its just a little bit too 'free' - as in 'free of the wrong sort'?
If they don't write their own sheeple software, maybe they didn't invent bubbles in space (snicker).