Learn from the mistakes of others

smh.com.au TECH
China to tighten internet controls
June 30, 2006 - 11:07AM

China's internet minders have vowed to step up controls of internet content, especially in the most active areas of blogs, bulletin boards and search engines, state media have said.

"As more and more illegal and unhealthy information spread through blogs and search engines, we will take effective measures to put the BBS (bulletin board service), blogs and search engines under control," Xinhua news agency quoted Cai Wu, a government spokesman as saying Thursday.

China was taking steps to make registration mandatory on millions of blog sites and BBSs, or sites where internet users can converse online, Cai said.

According to a report by Tsinghua University, quoted by Xinhua, China currently has up to 36.8 million blog sites, a figure that could grow to 60 million by the end of the year.

The number of search engine users had reached 97 million, or about 87 percent of all Internet users, the report said.

"We will speed up the technology development to safeguard the network management and do more research on the Internet security issues triggered by the new technologies in blogs and search engines," the report quoted Wang Xudong, Minister of Information Industry, as saying.

China has for years been waging an online battle to censor the internet of pornographic and violent content, while also stifling political and religious material that it believes could spark social unrest.

Two years ago all Chinese web portals were required to register with the government, while they also signed on to government issued regulations to self-police their sites for "unhealthy content".

Rules at the time also required all Chinese internet cafes to register web surfers and not allow them to download or upload any content onto or from personal devices.

Human and media rights groups say China's leaders are tightening their control over the internet and traditional press amid increasing social unrest and regularly jail journalists and Internet commentators who post anti-government material on the Web.

AFP

At some point the sheer number/volume of individual entities that have to be monitored may break this.

smh.com.au TECH
China to tighten internet controls
June 30, 2006 - 11:07AM

China's internet minders have vowed to step up controls of internet content, especially in the most active areas of blogs, bulletin boards and search engines, state media have said.

"As more and more illegal and unhealthy information spread through blogs and search engines, we will take effective measures to put the BBS (bulletin board service), blogs and search engines under control," Xinhua news agency quoted Cai Wu, a government spokesman as saying Thursday.

China was taking steps to make registration mandatory on millions of blog sites and BBSs, or sites where internet users can converse online, Cai said.

According to a report by Tsinghua University, quoted by Xinhua, China currently has up to 36.8 million blog sites, a figure that could grow to 60 million by the end of the year.

The number of search engine users had reached 97 million, or about 87 percent of all Internet users, the report said.

"We will speed up the technology development to safeguard the network management and do more research on the Internet security issues triggered by the new technologies in blogs and search engines," the report quoted Wang Xudong, Minister of Information Industry, as saying.

China has for years been waging an online battle to censor the internet of pornographic and violent content, while also stifling political and religious material that it believes could spark social unrest.

Two years ago all Chinese web portals were required to register with the government, while they also signed on to government issued regulations to self-police their sites for "unhealthy content".

Rules at the time also required all Chinese internet cafes to register web surfers and not allow them to download or upload any content onto or from personal devices.

Human and media rights groups say China's leaders are tightening their control over the internet and traditional press amid increasing social unrest and regularly jail journalists and Internet commentators who post anti-government material on the Web.

AFP

At some point the sheer number/volume of individual entities that have to be monitored may break this.

The New York Times reported last Thursday (22nd June 2006) on a flawed attempt to prevent disclosure of "sensitive material" in a court case. Prosecutors presented documents in PDF format to court with sections "blacked" out. Those sections, when copied into a text editor, say MS Word, disclosed the supposedly suppressed text ... oops.

The report includes a picture that demonstrates how easy the disclosure process was.


This was such a simple thing to avoid - one extra step in the process could have ensured that this was never going to happen.

Once more, the tool is blamed for blatant user error. Though I suspect the oversight can be sheeted home to a lack of education and awareness of how the tools actually work. I can empathise with the poor intern or junior who got stuck doing the cut and paste and./or file conversion - been there, done that. But hitting "Print to PDF" was not enough here - the "blacked-out" text really ought to have been replaced not just covered up.

WYSIWYG has made people lazy (lazier?) when it comes to creating documents. What You See Isn't All of What Is Actually There. Just because it looks fine on the screen and on the print out, and just because the PDF version doesn't include all the stupid MS metadata, doesn't mean the original data - the data that was actually important to cover up - was adequately masked.

Computers do exactly what you tell them to do, and nothing else. Covering text with black background/foreground really only makes it unreadable - it doesn't replace the text. You have to explicitly replace the text.

The New York Times reported last Thursday (22nd June 2006) on a flawed attempt to prevent disclosure of "sensitive material" in a court case. Prosecutors presented documents in PDF format to court with sections "blacked" out. Those sections, when copied into a text editor, say MS Word, disclosed the supposedly suppressed text ... oops.

The report includes a picture that demonstrates how easy the disclosure process was.


This was such a simple thing to avoid - one extra step in the process could have ensured that this was never going to happen.

Once more, the tool is blamed for blatant user error. Though I suspect the oversight can be sheeted home to a lack of education and awareness of how the tools actually work. I can empathise with the poor intern or junior who got stuck doing the cut and paste and./or file conversion - been there, done that. But hitting "Print to PDF" was not enough here - the "blacked-out" text really ought to have been replaced not just covered up.

WYSIWYG has made people lazy (lazier?) when it comes to creating documents. What You See Isn't All of What Is Actually There. Just because it looks fine on the screen and on the print out, and just because the PDF version doesn't include all the stupid MS metadata, doesn't mean the original data - the data that was actually important to cover up - was adequately masked.

Computers do exactly what you tell them to do, and nothing else. Covering text with black background/foreground really only makes it unreadable - it doesn't replace the text. You have to explicitly replace the text.

There's a paper in this, I just know it ...

Senseless censorship gets a hippy hippy shake down
March 28, 2006
Who's policing the web's thought police, asks Graeme Philipson.

( Read more... )

There's a paper in this, I just know it ...

Senseless censorship gets a hippy hippy shake down
March 28, 2006
Who's policing the web's thought police, asks Graeme Philipson.

( Read more... )