Chinese Schools Damn the Green Dam

Many Chinese schools that were ordered by the government to deploy the Green Dam Youth Escort content-filtering application on their computers have complained that it interferes with a lot of pieces of software required for teaching. Some of the unhappy administrators have even proceeded to removing it from their networks.

Back in June, the Chinese government mandated that all new computers sold in the country beginning with July 1st should ship with a content-filtering piece of software called Green Dam Youth Escort pre-installed. Facing significant criticism from international businesses and civil rights organizations, as well as foreign governments, the plan has been suspended.

However, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) still asked the schools, Internet cafes and public institutions to deploy it on all of their computers in order to block "unhealthy content." According to new reports from across the country, at least as far as schools are concerned, the decision backfired.

It appears that the educational institutions are quite upset with the software, as it is incompatible with a lot of other pieces of software vital to the teaching process or administrative tasks. Because of this, some of them, like the High School No. 50 in Beijing, have even started uninstalling it.

According to Reuters, some local newspapers claim that Beijing City's Education Commission allowed the schools to remove the software, but their inquiries were unable to confirm this. "We have received many complaints from schools about the problems in the software. It is really a contradictory situation for us," an official from the Chongwen District Education Commission told the news agency.

Green Dam has been the subject of a lot of controversy. Researchers from the University of Michigan, who analyzed the software, concluded that it had critical design flaws that resulted in remote code execution vulnerabilities. They also confirmed that it used proprietary code from another software called CyberSitter, whose developer had since opened legal action for copyright infringement in both the U.S. and China.

Some independent experts qualified Green Dam as censorware, because many of the keywords filtered by it referred to political content. Meanwhile, many antivirus products detect it as spyware because of its subversive nature and ability to monitor keystrokes.

The new developments put the Chinese government in a difficult position, having already awarded a $6-million contract to Jinhui Computer System Engineering, the company that created Green Dam Youth Escort. Its reluctance to renounce it once and for all is therefore somewhat understandable.