Tuesday, August 31, 2004
The Forbidden List
Here's to getting back on topic - to Asia and technology. This is a fascinating item about the discovery of an explicit list of words being blocked by China's most popular instant messaging program, QQ (run by company Tencent).
China Digital News: The words you never see in Chinese cyberspace
What's interesting is the bulk of PRC's Internet filtering happens at the server level - a proxy, a firewall or a content management system. It was anyone's guess as to what words were being "red flagged". Instead, this list is embedded in the client software itself, in a library file called "COMToolKit.dll." To even an average computer hacker, circumventing this filter is trivially easy. But what's more interesting is the insight this provides into what words are considered sensitive and what types of phrases are being screened out.
China Digital News: The words you never see in Chinese cyberspace
What's interesting is the bulk of PRC's Internet filtering happens at the server level - a proxy, a firewall or a content management system. It was anyone's guess as to what words were being "red flagged". Instead, this list is embedded in the client software itself, in a library file called "COMToolKit.dll." To even an average computer hacker, circumventing this filter is trivially easy. But what's more interesting is the insight this provides into what words are considered sensitive and what types of phrases are being screened out.
