The order was dated 19 May 2009 and issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Finance and the office of the Central Guidance Committee on Ethical and Cultural Construction. Computers sold after 1 July were to carry the newest version of Green Dam Youth Escort, on the hard drive or on a disc in the box, and makers were to report monthly how many had shipped with it. The ministry had paid the developers, Zhengzhou Jinhui Computer System Engineering and Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy, 41.7 million yuan, enough for a year; buyers paid nothing. The stated aim was to protect "the healthy growth of minors". The Wall Street Journal reported the rule on 8 June; China was buying some 40 million personal computers a year.
Three computer scientists at the University of Michigan — Scott Wolchok, Randy Yao and J. Alex Halderman — published their analysis on 11 June. The software watched the websites a user visited and the words typed into other programs; when it met a banned word, obscene or political, Falun Gong among them, it forcibly closed the offending program and put up an error image. Its image filter hunted for expanses of skin tone. A specially crafted web address could overrun a buffer in its traffic inspector, and the filter lists, fetched over unencrypted HTTP, were read into a fixed-length buffer, so anyone posing as the update server could install programs of their own. "Any web site a Green Dam user visits can take control of the PC," they wrote, advising its removal at once.
The same report found blacklists from CYBERsitter, an American parental filter, inside Green Dam, with an encrypted file pointing to CYBERsitter's own site and a CYBERsitter news bulletin from 2004. Solid Oak Software of Santa Barbara, which made CYBERsitter, said an anonymous tip had led it to its own code and encryption methods. "They are stealing proprietary copyrighted material from us," Brian Milburn, its president, told Reuters. Bryan Zhang, who ran Jinhui, denied that anything had been copied. Solid Oak sent cease-and-desist letters to Dell and Hewlett-Packard. Filter updates on 12 and 17 June left the CYBERsitter lists on disk, and a patched program appeared at about noon GMT on 13 June; in just over an hour the Michigan team had found a new flaw in it that any website could exploit.
On 24 June the American commerce secretary, Gary Locke, and trade representative, Ron Kirk, asked China to revoke the rule; Locke said it put companies "in an untenable position". On 30 June, the day before the deadline, the ministry announced through Xinhua that preinstallation was postponed, citing manufacturers who could not comply in time; several shipped it anyway. On 13 August the minister, Li Yizhong, said makers need not ship it on computers sold for home or business use, though schools, internet cafés and other public places would still run it. Then the money ran out. In July 2010 the Beijing Times found Dazheng's project office shut and more than thirty staff sent away. "We hung on for a year now," the company's general manager said, "but we really cannot go on."
Seventy Per Cent of Normal
Iran voted on 12 June 2009; the next morning Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was officially declared re-elected, and the result was disputed. Text messaging failed on the eve of the vote. On 13 June mobile service in Tehran was cut, and Arbor Networks, with data from more than 100 providers, saw Iranian traffic almost vanish; by 16 June it was back to about 70 per cent of normal, which Arbor's Craig Labovitz read as a piecemeal shift onto filters. After a State Department official, Jared Cohen, emailed Jack Dorsey, Twitter moved maintenance planned for the night of 15 June to 1.30 a.m. Tehran time; the department, Biz Stone wrote, "does not have access to our decision-making process". Supporters abroad ran proxies and Tor bridges — the Tor Project's count of new connections from Iran climbed through late June — and activists flooded state news sites with junk traffic. On 22 June the Wall Street Journal reported that Western technology aided Iran's web monitoring; Nokia Siemens Networks said it had supplied lawful interception "solely for the monitoring of local voice calls", and no deep packet inspection. Protesters were killed in the weeks that followed.
No Backup Included
On Sunday evening, 7 June 2009, administrators at Vaserv, a British seller of cheap virtual private servers, noticed "strangeness" on the system; shortly afterwards someone with root access began deleting. The next day Rus Foster, a director, told The Register that data for as many as 100,000 websites had been destroyed through a zero-day flaw in version 2.0.7992 of HyperVM, virtualisation software from LxLabs of Bangalore. "This wasn't someone randomly scanning things," he said. About half the customers had bought unmanaged service, which included no backup, and some of their data, Foster warned, was probably gone for good. On 4 June exploit code for 24 flaws in another LxLabs product, the Kloxo hosting panel, had been posted to the milw0rm archive after, its publisher said, LxLabs had been slow to respond. In the days that followed technicians restored service for some customers, not all.
Blocked on Complaint
In a communication dated 3 June 2009 the Department of Telecommunications told India's internet service providers to block the website of Savita Bhabhi, a sexually explicit cartoon series. Later in June Open magazine found it blocked by providers including BSNL and Airtel and its traffic down by almost half; an expert noted that proxy sites went round the block, and the series' pseudonymous creator opened a Twitter account for readers. Late in June N. Vijayaditya of the Controller of Certifying Authorities, an office of the Department of Information Technology, confirmed the block to Reuters: "There were several complaints against the site. We have taken action under the relevant sections of the IT Act and blocked the site." Nobody, he said, had come forward asking to be heard, and he could not say whether legal action would follow.
Which sections, he did not say. The amended Act, with an express blocking power in a new Section 69A, had become law but would not come into force until October; rules notified on 27 October 2009 then required notice to the person or intermediary concerned, with at least 48 hours to reply, and "strict confidentiality" about every request, complaint and action taken. Section 69A's grounds were sovereignty, defence, security, foreign relations and public order, not decency: when the government's order to block 857 pornographic sites surfaced in August 2015, it cited the intermediary provision instead, and retreated within days. Orders to providers that take effect at once and are explained afterwards, if at all, run through this archive, from the thirty-two sites blocked at the turn of 2015 onward; the Supreme Court upheld Section 69A in March 2015.
Microsoft shows Xbox games without a controller
On 1 June 2009, at its E3 briefing in Los Angeles, Microsoft showed Project Natal, a prototype for the Xbox 360 whose camera, depth sensor, microphone and software tracked a player's whole body and recognised faces and voices. Steven Spielberg joined Don Mattrick on stage; players bounced balls at targets with their bodies, and Lionhead showed Milo, a virtual boy. No date or price was given. At the International Conference on Machine Learning in Montreal, 14 to 18 June, Stanford's Rajat Raina, Anand Madhavan and Andrew Ng reported cutting the time to train a four-layer deep belief network with 100 million free parameters from several weeks on a dual-core processor to around a day on one Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 graphics card. On 22 June Google's Jay Yagnik described a system that identified more than 50,000 landmarks in photographs with 80 per cent accuracy: "a research paper, not a new Google product". Natal went on sale as the Kinect in November 2010; graphics cards took their central place in AI with AlexNet in 2012.
Kaspersky shielded for blocking Zango
On 25 June 2009 America's Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Kaspersky Lab could not be held liable for blocking the programs of Zango, which offered videos, games, music and utilities to consumers who agreed to view advertisements. Kaspersky Internet Security classed them as adware, a type of malware, and warned users against downloading them; Zango sued for trade libel, among other claims. Writing for the court, Judge Pamela Rymer held that a provider of tools for filtering material that it or its users considered objectionable was protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Judge Raymond Fisher concurred, warning that a vendor might abuse that immunity to block content "for anticompetitive purposes or merely at its malicious whim". Zango itself had shut down in April. Two days before the ruling, on 23 June, Microsoft had opened a limited public beta of its free anti-virus, Security Essentials. In September 2019 the Ninth Circuit adopted Fisher's concern, ruling in a dispute between two security vendors that the immunity did not cover blocking a rival's software for competitive reasons.
⏳ Time capsule — June 2009
- On 3 June the Lok Sabha elected Meira Kumar its Speaker, unopposed and by voice vote. A former diplomat and the daughter of Jagjivan Ram, she was the first woman to take the chair, and held it until 2014.
- On 7 June Roger Federer beat Robin Söderling 6–1, 7–6, 6–4 to win the French Open for the first time, completing the career Grand Slam and equalling Pete Sampras's record of fourteen major singles titles. Söderling had ended Rafael Nadal's unbeaten record at Roland Garros in the fourth round.
- On 18 June an Atlas V rocket carried NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter from Cape Canaveral, with the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite riding along. The orbiter reached lunar orbit on 23 June and was still mapping the Moon more than fifteen years later.
- On 21 June Pakistan beat Sri Lanka by eight wickets in the World Twenty20 final at Lord's, Shahid Afridi making 54 not out, for their first world title since the 1992 World Cup and two years after losing the first final.
Where the filter lives
Green Dam's lasting lesson was about software rather than censorship: a program put on every machine by order makes every machine answerable to a crafted link, or to whoever can pose as its update server. China went on filtering in the network, and in March 2015 the Great Cannon showed a national chokepoint turned outwards; software shipped on every machine kept proving Green Dam's point, as ASUS's own updater did in March 2019. Solid Oak sued China, both developers and seven computer makers for $2.2 billion in January 2010, and the case was settled in April 2012. That November Bloomberg Businessweek reported that intrusions into the company, begun twelve days after Milburn first went public and tied by forensic investigators, through their malware, to a Chinese group, had stopped after the settlement.
Iran's June showed that a national network could be slowed and sieved rather than switched off, and that interception sold as ordinary telecoms equipment would be asked about afterwards. Egypt tried the blunt version in January 2011; a fraudulently issued certificate for Google, seen by a user in Iran, ended a Dutch certificate authority in September 2011; and the argument over what vendors sell to states moved on to intrusion tools, laid open at Hacking Team and in NSO's Pegasus. Vaserv's unmanaged customers learned what a missing backup costs, and Code Spaces learned it again in June 2014. India's blocking orders still go to providers under Section 69A, confidential by rule; and the Cyber Command Robert Gates ordered on 23 June began work the next year.