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Cybersitter Sues over Stolen Code
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Well in an interesting twist in the sage that is the “Green
Dam” project. Cybersitter LLC is suing Sony, Acer, Asus, BenQ, Levovo and The
Chinese government itself over the former (and still pending) requirement for
machines to be pre-loaded with the “Green Dam” software.
To bring everyone up to speed, the Chinese government began
by making it a requirement that the “Green Dam” software be installed on all
computers sold for in China. This software is billed as a child protection
suite which was supposed to limit the exposure to potentially harmful sites.
This it itself does not sound all that bad. The catch is that the software
automatically is configured to download a new filter list; this list will not be
publically available. The concern of course is for China to misuse the software
to filter out any sites that it deems harmful.
Now how does Cybersitter come in to this? Well the
University of Michigan performed a security analysis of the software and found
that some of the code was stolen directly from the Cybersitter product. Since
this software was mandated to be installed on all of the Chinese market OEM pc’s
they pre-installed it and thus installed software which had stolen code in it.
At this time the mandate has been put on hold but all pc’s which already had it
installed on are still being marketed and sold. The law suit itself is asking
for 2.2 billion in rewards and has made major headlines mainly because of the
inclusion of the Government of China being listed in the suite directly.
As a side note, the makers of Cybersitter have taken this opportunity
to perform a major rewrite on their software to distinguish between the two
codebases. This is supposed to be giving
the product a more streamlined interface and operation, having not used the new
interface I would say make sure to test it well before implementing it as it is
a new product.
-sean
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