p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Beijing human rights advocate Li Fangping (right) wants China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to allow hearings on the “lawfulness and reasonableness” of the country’s censor software, scheduled to be installed on all PCs as of July 1.

“Li’s demand, and denunciations of the plan from Chinese rights groups, have expanded a public battle over the ‘Green Dam’ filtering software, despite a state media effort to promote the software as a welcome way to prevent children being exposed to pornography,” says Reuters.

“Many citizens worry such software and other measures are being imposed to deter discussion of sensitive political topics, especially in this year of controversial anniversaries, Li told Reuters.”

Chinese human rights and gay advocacy groups, “have demanded the software plan be immediately quashed,”  says the story, adding:

“A statement from five groups sent by email said the software threatened to cripple access to many of the gay community websites that have flourished in recent years.

“The software works by judging whether website pages may show large amounts of exposed flesh.”

And while the debate rages on whether the software should be installed at all, “Experts have warned of serious security flaws” which could “open the door to hackers creating huge botnets,” says ZDNet UK.

Programming errors are at the root of the flaws, according to experts from the University of Michigan, says the story, going on:

“The researchers said that after only one day of testing Green Dam, they discovered programming errors in the code used to process website requests. These would result in buffer over-run conditions on all computers running the software.”

Follow p2pnet on Twitter.

censor software – Green Dam of China censor software, June 8, 2009
Reuters – China Internet filter challenged in rights uproar, June 11, 2009
ZDNet UK – Experts: Chinese censorware carries botnet risk, , June 12, 2009