(2009-06-08) China Requires Censor Software Pc

China is requiring Censorship software on all PC-s sold in the country. PC makers who serve the Chinese market, among them Dell Computer, Lenovo and Hewlett Packard, said they were studying the new rules and declined to comment. But privately, industry executives in the United States said they were upset by the new rules, which were issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology with no consultation and no advance warning. Beyond the nettlesome issue of abetting government censorship, they said six weeks was not enough time to shift production on such a large scale... The software will be provided free, paid for by the government, and according to the official Green Dam website it has already been downloaded 3.2 million times. That number includes thousands of schools that were required to install the software by the end of May... In recent months China has tightened its Internet restrictions, including an "anti-vulgarity" campaign that has closed down thousands of pornographic sites but also shuttered nonsexual sites, including some of the most popular bulletin boards and blog hosts... This is not the first time that foreign companies have been enlisted in government efforts to police the Internet. Google already blacks out politically sensitive results yielded by its popular search engine, Microsoft allows censors to block content on its blog service and Yahoo was widely criticized for turning over information that was used to jail a journalist. How far will these companies let China push them? I think we already know the answer...

Jun16 update: it sounds like they're backpedalling a bit.