The Dark Visitor

One of the Chinese blogs I read had a post about this Baidu dictionary reference.

Loosely translated: Freedom of Speech – basically not in China. It gives a link to a board where it may have picked up this definition. The author, greysign, laments that there are rampant lawless anti-party elements slandering China. Is it really slander to say that there isn’t freedom of speech in China?

This is starting to get boring…

Lawyers for Cybersitter, the company that claims its intellectual property was ripped off by PRC companies that developed the green dam youth escort in home censorware are now claiming that they have been targeted in spear phishing style attacks.  Maybe the PRC companies didn’t get all of the code the first time.

Article here – linked from Danwei (one of my favorite China sites).

In what may be the most significant news posted to this blog in a long time, the Official Google Blog reports that Google will be working with the PRC government to deliver an unfiltered google.cn to users in the PRC.  If an agreement with the PRC government cannot be reached, google.cn may suspend operations.  From the blog post:

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

This move is in response to an internal Google investigation that revealed widespread targeting and surveillance of human rights activists with interests in the PRC.  The blog indicates that there are two distinctly different problems that were uncovered.  One involved the compromise of internal Google intellectual property and the other involved the accessing of gmail accounts by unauthorized third parties.

…we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties.

Google believes that the sophisticated attacks that resulted in the internal compromise of Google information have also hit more than 20 other organizations.

So what does this mean?  It is difficult to say at this point.  Perhaps it will draw attention to the censorship issue as well as the widespread hacking frequently attributed to the PRC government.  I think it will be unlikely that google.cn will be allowed to operate in the PRC without filtering its search results.  This may mean that google.cn will cease to exist or that it is operated outside of the PRC where it will probably get GFW’d.  Either way, Baidu wins.

It would be very cool if others (yahoo!, microsoft) follow suit.

My 中文 isn’t nearly as good as Heike’s (as demonstrated here) but I do believe that this pic posted to sunwear’s baidu blog says that the PRC Internet is the most free.  You might remember sunwear – he is the one that arp-jacked metasploit.com.

UPDATE:  Found this image (via @torproject) at http://www.rayfile.com/zh-cn/files/77930287-efc7-11de-bf31-0014221b798a/1236f674/:

Taiwanese organizers in Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second largest city, plan to show the controversial film, “Ten Conditions of Love” next month, sparking outrage in the Chinese hacker community once again.  Given the fact that it is Taiwan, it is doubly outrageous. 

The film’s showing in Melbourne last month sent Chinese hackers on a mini-rampage, see here, here, here and here.

Now all eyes turn to the Taiwanese film festival:

Anonymous hackers have attacked a Taiwan film festival over plans to screen a documentary on the US-based leader of China’s predominantly Muslim Uighur minority, festival organizers said Tuesday.

A message, posted on a blog run by one of the organizers of the Kaohsiung Film Festival, blamed Rebiya Kadeer for recent bloody unrest in northwest China’s Xinjiang region, which is home to the Turkic-speaking Uighurs.

“I don’t know if you heard about the violence (in Xinjiang) and if you know how many people were left homeless. It is all because of that woman,” said the message, referring to Kadeer.

This was posted by Scott Henderson (Trying to comply with the law of the land)

Green Dam, the censorship software that the Chinese government wanted on all PCs sold in China, turned out to be a flop. Beijing’s still keen on exerting greater control over the Internet, though, and Jonathan Ansfield has a good story in the New York Times about the censors’ latest tactic. According to Ansfield’s story, new “secret government orders” have been forcing popular Chinese websites to require new users register with their real names before posting any comments online.

Bingo, the Telegraph sums up the Chinese internet in the title of this article “China’s internet: the wild, wild East”

When it’s fun, the Chinese Net seems like a wonderfully anarchic playground; when it turns nasty, it’s a nightmare from Lord of the Flies.

In many ways, the Internet simply reflects the diversity of Chinese society offline: you can find everything from Internet groups dedicated to social and environmental causes to prostitutes who exclusively use the QQ instant messaging platform to solicit clients.

China has decided to delay implementing Green Dam software.  From the WSJ:

The Chinese government may be waving a white flag in response to all the criticism of its Green Dam filtering software.

Beijing won’t force the widespread installation of the Internet filtering program on PCs and other consumer products, China’s industry minister, Li Yizhong, said Thursday…

Thanks to everyone who showed up to the Dark Visitor meetup at DEFCON 17.  It was a lot of fun and I had a great time joking around and talking shop with everyone.  The only gambling that I did was deciding on the Korean BBQ place close to the con hotel – the food was pretty good and they reserved a nice area for the group (of 21) so I guess the gamble paid off. I hope everyone had as much fun as I did. There was a lot of praise for Heike’s book as well as the work we’re doing together on the blog – that was all very much appreciated. We need to convince Heike to come out to DEFCON18 next year… Come on, Vegas isn’t so bad.

I spent most of my time at the con attending presentations.  There were at least two presentations that featured a slide devoted to Xiao Tian and the Dark Visitor got mentioned in two presentations.  I think that we should setup a scholarship fund to sponsor Xiao Tian so she can come to Vegas next year and meet with us.

So I decided to put together a give away for people who attended the meetup and settled on a CD packed full of Chinese hacker papers and videos. I put a nice lightscribe label on all of them and included “The Dark Visitor” in Chinese characters. Well apparently I entered the characters rather hastily and instead of 黑客, I put 黑咯, which means Dark Cough (according to Ming Zhou). So at least I learned a new character and maybe that will be the name of the next big disease that comes out of Asia. Who knows? Maybe the flawed Dark Visitor CD will turn out to be the next ultra rare one-eyed beanie baby or something (I’ll start planting them on ebay tomorrow).

Heike and I have talked about having some TDV wearable stuff. Perhaps a Titan Rain Suit? Maybe a “Certified Great Firewall Engineer” T-Shirt? How about a Javaphile Coffee Shop baseball hat? Sunwear tanktop? Let us know what you think. We’ll think of something clever to do with the proceeds like buy Xiao Tian an HD webcam.

Now for a break from the Adobe zero day stream…

The censors in the PRC are now apparently blocking searches and taking down articles related to a recent bribery scandal over a multi-million dollar contract in Namibia.  The censors at baidu.cn got a little ambitious and briefly blocked any searches that contain the word Namibia so any search was filtered rather than just results that contained information about the scandal.  As of this post, it appears that baidu.cn searches for “纳米比亚” work just fine without any error message – news about the scandal still does not appear however.  Maybe next they will reach into Chinese Kindles to delete anything related to Namibia.

baidu.cn briefly blocked searches for 纳米比亚 (namibia)

Source: Open Net Initiative:  http://opennet.net/blog/2009/07/no-more-namibia-china-blocks-search-results-entire-country