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It has been a bad week and a half for press freedom in the world. Just thought our chapter members might be interested in some reports of what has gone on in three highly visible areas. Seems the threats to media freedom never made it into the regular reports from these areas.

China

The Chinese government ordered all computers sold in the country to include a program called "Green Dam" by July 1 and then backed off.

The program, it turns out, is based on code stolen from a US company's software designed to help parents restrict what their kids can view on the Internet.

Officially Beijing said the program was necessary to protect young people from pornography. The problem is that the leadership in China views open discussions of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 as pornographic.

The University of Michigan also found there were so many security leaks in the program that any system running it would be vunerable to an attack that could turn the computer into a zombie or even make any personal data available to the attacker. (Of course, many of us always thought this was one of the "features" that the Chinese government liked about Green Dam.)