Random Musings

China's "Green Dam" filtering software

China has issued a directive that all computers sold as of July 1, 2009 must have their "Green Dam" filtering software installed giving the Chinese Government control over what internet sites the public can access.

All sorts of people have raised their voices in protest against government intrusion and control of the people's lives. I don't need to duplicate their outcries.

What I want to point out is the threat to the rest of the world. China is creating is a whole country network of personal computers the government and army can control. Alhough the current version 1 of the software is said to be crude and bug ridden, clearly that won't remain so. China has extensive software development talent. In the future China will be able to use the massive power of a billion or so computers to act in concert - possibly for cyber attacks or for tasks we can not imagine. Once the government controls software on every computer, it can download and run whatever it wants on as many computers it seems fit. Imagine a denial of service attack from a billion computers. They could cripple the world internet at will.

I hope our goverment, computer and tele-comm industries are taking the necessary steps to enable us to isolate the US internet network from the rest of the world or individual countries if and when it becomes necessary.

We need the ability to create a cyber ocean around the US in the event of a world cyber catastrophe.

Imagine if we were in something like WWII. Horrible to imagine but not impossible to happen. Will we just have to shut down our internet or will we be able to circle the wagons, so to speak, and continue with a purely national network?

posted by David Tyme @ 9:03 AM