Posted by MyLaowai on Sunday, July 22, 2007
First there was MSN Messenger, which was wonderful, because it gave Chinese office employees a reason to go to work. It also opened up an entirely new avenue for IPR theft, which of course is always a good thing here in China. The problem though, was that MSN Messenger was a foreign product, and therefore out of the control of the Party. So along comes QQ, the Chinese copy, which is obviously far better because it isn’t foreign. It still permits graft, has native Pinyin (Chinese language) support, and best of all automatically blocks anything the Communist Party deems dangerous.
Recently, some Chinese hackers located a document within the QQ installation package. The file contains over one thousand words, most of them in Chinese, which will be blocked by the service.
Owned by Tencent, QQ is China’s most popular Instant Messenger service. On a regular basis, tens of millions of users use their service. Because of its high traffic volume, it is technically much harder to build in the key word filtering mechanism on the server’s end. Instead, Tencent sneaked in a filtering program file in their installation package at the client end. When a client installs the QQ2003 software on their own computer desktop, a program file, called COMToolKit.dll, is automatically included. This file contains all the forbidden keywords, which will be automatically blocked when the client runs QQ. About 15% of the words are sex related, the rest are all related to politics. About 20% of the words are Falungong related, including [master] and [disciple]; about 15% are names of current officials and their relatives; about 10% are words used in the liberal political discourse such as “democracy”, “freedom”, and “dictatorship”; and about 5% are related to certain nationalistic issues, such as [defend Diaoyu Island], [Sino-Russian Border], [selling out the country] etc. About 15% of the forbidden words are related to anti-corruption, such as，[smuggling], [public fund]） etc. Other censored words include names of dissidents, writers, and intellectuals, and names of certain foreign publications.
The full list is below. Please note that it is no longer in text format, due to the adverse effect this has on my ability to view my own blog in China. Therefore, it’s a Hi-Res JPG. Download and view to see the list.
Thanks to China Digital Times for the list and heads-up.
UPDATE: Want to know which words are blocked? Check This Out!
Wo Shi Laowai - Wo Pa Shui 
Stranded Mariner said
Good idea mate, to condense the list like you did. I saw your post gone yesterday, and I wondered what happened.
ShanghaiUnderground.org said
Might be interesting to see how that list changes with each new update of QQ.
Wonder what else they’re trying to load onto people’s computers. Wouldn’t be surprised if the locally made routers for home/office use also have filtering mechanisms built in on the sly.