China Green Dam company accused of piracy
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- The Chinese company responsible for developing the latest piece of Chinese censor-ware has been acccused of piracy.
It’s supposed to be in all new PCS made or shipped by July 1, and is said to filter pornography.
The app, called Green Dam Youth Escort, and said to be seriously flawed, contained Solid Oak Software CyberSitter Internet-filtering code, “including a list of terms to be blocked and instructions for updating the software,” says Reuters, going on:
“Brian Milburn, president of the privately owned, Santa Barbara-based company, said it was studying its legal options but would seek an injunction against further shipment to China of computers using the suspected pirated software.”
“I look at it this way, if we were shipping iPods over to China and China says,” the story has him saying, adding »»»
‘We want all these pirated songs on the iPods when you ship them to us, don’t you think somebody would be up in arms about that?
It’s the same thing. They are stealing proprietary copyrighted material from us, sending it over to the U.S. and saying, ‘We want this on all the computers you send us’.
Just because we are a small company doesn’t make the theft of CyberSitter any less (wrong).
Green Dam developer Jinhui Computer System Engineering Inc, “denied stealing anything,” says the story,.
June, 2009
Green Dam Youth Escort – Green Dam of China censor software, June 8, 2009
seriously flawed – Green Dam censorware has ’serious flaws’, June 12, 2009
Reuters – U.S. company accuses China of stealing software, June 13, 2009
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
June 15th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
“Just because we are a small company doesn’t make the theft of CyberSitter any less (wrong). ”
you’re a small company up against US and Chinese corporations and governments. you’re toast. sorry.
June 15th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
So, this software. Impossible to uninstall and circumvent?
No… I didn’t think so.
When I first heard about this despotic adventure by the Chinese authorities I first thought it was going to be hardware based. Unless Ubuntu is also a filter keyword, this shouldn’t be hard to get round.
June 15th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
I’m on CyberSitter’s side.
For one company to steal from another is wrong, they can’t claim fair use on this one.
China will have to force their ISP’s to make installation of this product mandatory.
June 16th, 2009 at 6:44 am
Green Dam developer Jinhui Computer System Engineering Inc, “denied stealing anything,” says the story,.
of course they didn’t steal anything. the small american company still has their software, has they not?
Just because this time it is “evil” china and not an american musicdownloader does not make this copyrightinfringement by china anything like stealing anymore then the music downloading is stealing (which it is NOT of course!)
June 16th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
installation of this product is not mandatory. it has been clearly and officially announced from the beginning. it is mandatory, however, to include the software package in newly shipped computers, and the user will have the freedom to decide whether s/he wants to install it. i think the translators who first introduced green dam to westerners intentionally omitted this point, or do not understand chinese well to see the difference.
about the developer’s response: in one report the developer said that they did a search and found the data from the internet, and they also mentioned that data was leaked by some hacker (presumably they are referring the hacker(s) who cracked cybersitter open a while ago). so, even if they did not steal the sourcecode, they intentionally used something which they know is from some commercial product, and incorporated into their product as separate features. that’s stealing, of course.
in another report some head of the developer’s company said the databases might share similarities because the sites listed are all well-known porn sites – clearly he did not see the previous report at which the developer admitted they grabbed the leaked data from the internet.
too bad they included cybersitter’s 2004 security bulletin into their software, as well as urls pointing to cybersitter’s updated database – this makes any defending and denying pointless and funny.
they threatens to sue the professors who cracked their software open, by the way.
June 17th, 2009 at 9:57 am
Chinas fast rise is only because they spend nothing on development by “borrowing on a permanent basis” any ideas and technology or software that they want , spend nothing on safety , spend nothing relatively on wages , so this article isnt exactly news .