I saw a news article somewhere during my travels in Hong Kong about China’s ‘Green Dam’ filtering software actually being stolen code from CyberSitter, developed by Solid Oak Software, a US software manufacturer.
I Bing’ed (But.It’s.Not.Google – BING! heh. I’m lame) Googled it, and found an article about it on PC Mag. My first reaction was sort of a laugh/chuckle- but I don’t know if it was out of disappointment, humor, or because I was thinking, “w.t.f mate?” (please see End Of The World flash animation for reference of that phrase). It probably was out of humor, since the developers of the Green Dam software didn’t even bother to change some of the code that is identified with CyberSitter’s name, and even used code that made requests back to Solid Oak’s servers for updates. Whoops! Even I know from copying homework in AP CS class to know how to copy code better than that! lol.
But on the other hand; this is really frustrating; c’mon China. I mean, what the heck is going on here? Not only was Microsoft China’s Microblogging platform Juku recently discovered to be blatantly stolen from Plurk, now the government backed ‘Green Dam’ was found to have stolen code too. There are just too many cases of China ripping intellectual property from international businesses.
Anyhow- end rant. I need to sleep. Definitely check out the articles though, it’ll be a fun read.
– PCMag
– BBC News
-Duncan
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{ 2 comments }
it is quite disappointing to hear all the time. you would think a country of a billion people, there would be enough innovative ones to come up with their own stuff that other people in the world would want to steal.
Yeah it is- I want to say that there are innovative individuals who come up with their own stuff; but I think there are just a whole lot more copy-cats that are giving the China innovative scene a bad name.
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