Wednesday, 12/14/05

Howard French's NYT story about China suppressing news of the government's violent crackdown on rural protesters is an interesting capsule of a story usually addressed only in broad, vague terms (usually referring to the "great firewall of China"), but it hints at technical details that are new to me. For example, emphasis mine:

Until Tuesday, Web users who turned to search engines like Google and typed in the word Shanwei, the city with jurisdiction over the village where the demonstration was put down, would find nothing about the protests against power plant construction there, or about the crackdown. Users who continued to search found their browsers freezing. By Tuesday, links to foreign news sources appeared but were invariably inoperative.

Granted, this is not an area I've been following at all closely, but I wasn't aware that they could tailor their interdiction of traffic from specific search engines -- I thought they had to go to the impractical extreme of banning a Google outright.

The crashing browsers are an even more interesting detail. Not having heard much about substantial Chinese market penetration for Macs or Firefox, I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of browsers in China are running versions of IE. If Microsoft had added a "panic button" allowing web servers or the government's interdiction protocols to crash a browser, it would almost inevitably have become news, but it seems entirely plausible that a well-funded adversary could assemble a repertoire of IE bugs, triggered by markup, to bring any version of Microsoft's browser to its knees. It doesn't seem out of the question that older versions of any browser could be compromised, though IE would be the richest and easiest pickings.

Setting aside the difficulty of implementation without the extraordinary-sounding Chinese snooping infrastructure, would a similar strategy in the US even be considered illegal? 09:36AM «

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