China insists on Internet control

The controversial anti-pornography Internet filter software, Green Dam Youth Escort, will still be pre-installed in all new personal computers sold in mainland China beginning July 1 as the government refuses to review the decision made early this month.

So far, Chinese manufacturers, including Lenovo and Acer, have installed the filter in over 52 million PCs, but few foreign brand PCs have followed suit. Dell and Hewlett-Packard both said it's still under discussion. Apple computers are not covered due to system incompatibility. The US government expressed strong concerns over the filter "both in terms of its potential impact on trade and the serious technical issues," said a spokesman of the US embassy in Beijing yesterday. Within China, overwhelming criticism and concerns are focusing on privacy violation. The government previously said users can remove the software anytime, but in fact, the spyware can't be completely cleaned once installed, as some IT professionals have said on network forums . Privacy concerns exacerbated after Chinese hackers accessed the keywords library of the poorly guarded software on June 11 and revealed only 15 percent of the key words are porn-related, while the rest are all about politically sensitive words including "June 4","Tibet" and "Falun Gong". A group of Chinese comics artists even created a Green Dam girl, whose image resembles girls in Japanese adult manga, to show their discontent. Green Dam is jointly developed by Zhengzhou Jinhui Computer System Engineering Ltd, a longtime loss-making company, and Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy Ltd, whose Shenzhen operation has over five million yuan(US$731,365) in tax arrears. A story which appeared on Shanghai-based Oriental Morning Post about how the two companies managed to get this 41.7 million yuan (US$6.1 million) order from the government was immediately removed. China has been tightening the control over the Internet. Two days ago, it disabled some of the functions of Google's Chinese language website and demanded the search engine giant to redesign the filter. By February, 1,911 websites had been closed down during a nationwide website clean-up campaign.