Free Pink!
“Green Dam Youth Escort (??·????: L?bà·Hu?jì Hùháng) recognizes pornographic images by analyzing skin-coloured regions, causing the barring of this image of pink color pigs.”
The Chinese government has mandated that, beginning July 1, every PC sold in China must include a censorship program called Green Dam. This software is designed to monitor Internet connections and text typed on the computer. It blocks undesirable or politically sensitive content and optionally reports it to authorities. Green Dam was developed by a company called Jin Hui and is available as a free download…
5 Comments ↓
1. nitrofurano
Jul 7, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Well, some indian and african skins are not properly pink… is this algorythm that powerful? And it’s very weird seeing a japanese manga in a chinese-related news since they used to still hate each other (such as Nanking massacre and other historical sad issues)
2. Nicolas
Jul 7, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Thanks Yi.
It is absolutely relevant to raise the question of how computers “understand” colors in this blog and the political conclusions that are derived from their findings. Green Dam, although scarry, is a large scale experiment in this respect as well as the new features in Google image search that let you filter images by color or by type (photographic, faces, etc).
3. yi
Jul 7, 2009 at 1:19 pm
The chinese government propobly ignore some other continents as mentionned above. From the report issued Netease on 11 June 2009, “…the master password of the software can be easily cracked by changing the contents of the file…” Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy Ltd refused to be interviewed on this subject and The company JINHUI had no comment.
For the japanese style manga, same mystery…
4. Andy Fitzsimon
Jul 8, 2009 at 5:17 pm
As someone living in China,
I can tell you this is not going to eventuate. (to anything other than fantastic anti green dam parties)
There is noticably no Linux or Mac version of the software and savvy windows users will as always install their pirated uncensored windows professional copies over the crippled chinese version of windows home.
the policy is riddled with technical issues and the only vendor to act on it so far is sony. the deadline has been moved once already
5. nitrofurano
Jul 28, 2009 at 12:17 am
someone living in China can test if it works on youtube videos! 😉 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfHsYTb7yCI