Green Dam Youth Escort (绿坝·花季护航)

» see lssw365.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

On 19 May 2009 China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a notice saying that every computer made or sold in the country from 1 July would ship with the latest version of a program called 绿坝·花季护航, Green Dam Youth Escort. The notice was published on 9 June. Three weeks later, on the evening of 30 June, the ministry postponed the requirement indefinitely, and that was the entire public life of the mandate: twenty-one days.

The software was older than the scandal. The ministry had bought it in May 2008, in a tender that paired a porn-image classifier from Zhengzhou Jinhui with a web filter from Beijing Dazheng for 41.7 million yuan, and its download site had passed 3.5 million downloads by April 2009 without anyone outside China noticing. The preinstall order changed that. Within two days a team at the University of Michigan had published an analysis that found remote-execution holes in the program and a blacklist copied from the American product CyberSitter. Its whitelist rule was so broad that it exempted lssw365.org, a site set up to oppose Green Dam. Their line was that they had found these problems with less than 12 hours of testing.

Ridicule at home and trade complaints from abroad are why the mandate died. The product died more slowly. The ministry had paid for one year and did not renew. Updates stopped on 20 May 2010, and on 13 July the Beijing Times found the project office on the North Third Ring Road locked and empty, its thirty or so staff sent home at the end of June.

~ the case file ~

~ 41.7 million yuan ~

The procurement notice is dated 14 May 2008 and names two winning products. Jinhui's was a system for blocking pornographic images, priced at 21.8 million yuan, and Dazheng's was the Youth Escort filter itself at 19.9 million. Zhengzhou Jinhui was a 1997 company run by Zhang Chenmin; Dazheng was a Beijing language-technology firm connected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The name is a pun of sorts: 绿坝 is a green dam, and 花季, the flowering season, is the usual phrase for the teenage years.

Xinhua reported on 30 June 2009 that the filter had been downloaded 7.17 million times and installed on 2.62 million school computers and 4.7 million in internet bars. Those were the machines the state could reach directly. The 20 million figure that the Beijing Times and the BBC used a year later counted the same schools and cafes. Home PCs, the target of the preinstall order, never got it in numbers anyone published.

Turkey watched this from a country that would try its own version two years later, at the network end instead of the PC. The regulator announced filtering profiles for every connection in 2011, and after a summer of protests the profiles ended up optional. I was in Ankara for that one. The Chinese version I read about like everyone else, in the June 2009 coverage, most of it about how bad the code was.

~ the cybersitter suit ~

Solid Oak Software of Santa Barbara, which makes CyberSitter, said within days that its blacklists were inside Green Dam, and Michigan had found csnews.dat, an encrypted CyberSitter news bulletin from 2004, sitting inside the Chinese installer. On 5 January 2010 Solid Oak sued the two developers and the Chinese government in a Los Angeles federal court for $2.2 billion, along with PC makers that had shipped the program, Lenovo among them. The claim that 56 million copies were in circulation was Solid Oak's. In February 2012 the company settled with the defendants for an undisclosed sum, and the case was dismissed two months later.

~ the office on the third ring road ~

The Beijing Times piece of 13 July 2010 is the closest thing to a death notice. It reported that the project office in the Huajie building had closed at the end of the previous month and that around thirty staff had been dismissed. Dazheng, it said, had been carrying the Beijing operation at about 7 million yuan a year with nothing coming from the ministry. The next day Dazheng said the office had only moved and that the service had not stopped for a minute, and Jinhui in Zhengzhou said it would keep supporting the software even if the ministry never bought again. China Youth Daily added the detail that mattered: no update had been offered since 20 May.

The installer, version 3.17 from November 2008, was still downloadable from lssw365.net in March 2012. The last live capture of the download page is 18 June 2012, and by 8 August the domain showed a parking frame. Jinhui's own site later advertised visual recognition and then stopped resolving. No official copy of the program is distributed anywhere now. The mandate lasted three weeks and the product about two years, which is a normal ratio for software nobody chose to install.

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