Raul Aranda post 9

This article comes from Newsweek and talks about how China is attempting to put new control measures on PC’s in China. The government is attempting to install a program called Green Dam that filters pornography and other content that it deems unsuitable. The article talks about how the program is also designed to not only keep users from seeing unwanted content, but also help in prevent it from being made. If something you are typing for instance contains to many illicit words, then the program would shut down your word processor. The program is also self updating, keeping it up to date with any new unwanted contents that may arise. The program sounds like it will be an incredible leap towards control on the internet, but the program still has many bugs that do not allow it to properly filter content, for instance it filters out images of light skinned porn stars, but for some reason skips over dark skinned ones. Not only things like that, but the program also makes the pc’s it is installed in more prone to being hacked, so due to these flaws many doubt the program will do well at all. I found this interesting because I know that China already blocks a lot of the content on the Internet anyways such as with “tank man” and what happened at Tiananmen Square. I found it stranger that the government was attempting to put even more control on what the society could view, even attempting to limit what one could type on their personal computer. The surveillance that the government is attempting to instill here seems to be a little overboard because to limit what one can type even on their own computer seems a little overboard. Either way, it is all in an attempt from the government to monitor its society and “keep it in line.”

http://www.newsweek.com/id/202867