Companies appeal to China to drop Web filter plan

Top U.S. trade officials have called on Beijing to revoke the order requiring the filtering software, calling it a "serious barrier to trade" and citing security concerns. They said Beijing might have violated its World Trade Organization commitments by failing to give companies adequate advance notice and time to comment.

The conflict reflects the clash between the authoritarian government's efforts to control information and China's high-tech ambitions. China has assembled the world's most extensive system of Internet monitoring and filtering, but the new software system would take the controls to a new level, placing monitoring technology inside the individual's computer.

China is important to PC makers such as Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Inc., and Taiwan's Acer Inc. both as a major manufacturing site and a fast-growing market. It accounts for up to 80 percent of world production and sales.

The Green Dam plan has raised questions about whether the software, produced by a Chinese company, might cause technical problems, and how customers abroad will react to companies cooperating with Beijing's censorship.

Researchers at the University of Michigan who studied Green Dam say they found "serious security vulnerabilities due to programming errors" that could allow any Web site a user visits to take control of a PC.

A California company, Solid Oak Software of Santa Barbara, says parts of its own filtering software were used in Green Dam, raising questions about possible violations of intellectual property rights.

The Chinese manufacturer of the software has even received death threats. Workers at Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co. have received more than 1,000 harassing phone calls this month, Zhang Chenmin, the general manager of the company, told the official Xinhua News Agency. Zhang was quoted Wednesday as saying one caller had even threatened to kill his wife and child.

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