"We just want to report what's going on," maintains the RFA's president, Richard Richter. "We're not trying to be provocative just for the sake of being provocative, because we'd lose our credibility."
Beijing counters the RFA's "propaganda" by trying to jam its signals. Richter says that only between 40% and 50% of programmes broadcast to China get through because of the persistent jamming. (7)
A happy computer programmer has reportedly confessed to planting a killer virus in thousands of copies of educational software in the Chinese capital's first apparent case of serious hacker sabotage.
The programmer, Zhang Wenming, faces a possible jail term of up to five years for bugging software sold to schools throughout Beijing to prepare students for a national computer proficiency test, the official Beijing Youth Daily reported Januay 19, 1999. The virus was designed to act up on the 27th of each month and was meant to ultimately wipe out a host computer's hard disk drive.
Zhang is the first Beijing resident to be prosecuted under laws, passed last year, governing crimes relating to information technology. His case comes as Chinese authorities are increasingly turning their attention to tracking down hackers suspected of committing technological and even political crimes, often through the Internet.
The stepped-up government efforts to control cyberspace follow an explosion in the number of China's "netizens" in the past few years; State statistics released over the weekend put the number of Chinese Internet users at 2.1 million, more than triple the 670,000 users registered in 1997. Experts believe that the real number of online Chinese to be even larger, because computer accounts are often shared by two or three people.
To keep out potentially "harmful" influences, Chinese authorities routinely block foreign news Website. Authorities are also worried about self-proclaimed "hacktivists" around the world who have vowed to tear down China's crude cyberspace defenses. A Hong Kong-based human rights group said that the government plans to set up computer crime investigation units in all of China's cities.
Zhang's case was cracked by one such investigative force, the information and communications department of' Beijing's eastern Chaoyang police precinct.(8)
