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For the last decade, US and Allied forces had searched for Osama Bin Laden, flushing out caves with cluster bombs, studying video evidence and looking for pins in a haystack of intelligence data.  Finally, closure was achieved for many Americans on Sunday night when Bin Laden was finally found, shot in the head and immediately chucked into the sea.

Unlike Saddam Hussein, who was hauled out in his underpants from a squalid underground lair, Bin Laden’s hideaway was positively “Five Star”.  The Al Qaeda figurehead had been enjoying the fruits of his labour in defiance, relaxing in what appeared to be an enormous, purpose-built Al Qaeda retirement villa in a quiet suburb of Islamabad, the capital city of Pakistan.

It seems Bin Laden had lost his marbles back in 2001 (the caves of Tora Bora are full of dark corners), as he had not even bothered to hide his whereabouts very well.  There is some merit to the “hiding in plain view” approach, but not when everybody can see you.

The obvious, picture-postcard terrorist hideout was situated in a sleepy suburb, just outside Islamabad.  The mansion was surrounded by 14-foot walls topped with barbed wire, basically suggesting a lack of cohesion with the neighbourhood.  The residents only entered and left the premises in an armoured vehicle, through high steel gates which closed immediately after. The mansion was built about six years ago, and locals had always been wary of it.  It had been busted at one early stage during its development, but that seems to have blown over.

In the words of Loyd Grossman, “Who would live in a house like this?” Indeed, the question had simply been “Which high-ranking terrorist lives here?”  The resulting intelligence exercise was perhaps a little like a special episode of “Through the Keyhole”.  A list of the usual suspects had been drawn up.  For reasons which remain unclear, after a process of elimination, the only name left had been Osama himself.  It seemed there was no doubt. Even James Bond evil villains know to hide their obvious lair inside a volcano, away from Neighbourhood Watch schemes.

Strangely though, it took them a while to find him. Perhaps the hideout was easy for the local council to tolerate - after all, the residents burned their own rubbish inside the perimeter, rather than burdening refuse collection vehicles.  It was fairly close to the military academy, so perhaps it was something to do with that.  Maybe the residents of the compound were just very nice people, making huge, generous donations to local causes, and hence didn’t warrant investigation. To be fair, ears had pricked in Washington when it was discovered that there was no land-line or internet connection to the mansion.  With no telephone line to tap, there could only be a devious, suspicious, terrorist-y purpose to the building, and it was time to do some homework.

However, all this leaves us wondering: “Why now?” Perhaps it’s significant that the recent Wikileaks release revealed the name of Bin Laden’s courier.  Within the week, Navy Seals were paying Osama a special visit. Obama could do with more support at this time, too. Anyway, now that the body of Bin Laden is reduced to fish food, perhaps his hideout could be used for other purposes?  Indeed, users of Google Maps have granted it 3 out of 5 stars, with username “Joric” claiming it is a “Nice little B&B if you want the rustic life and be completely off-the-grid, in complete privacy”. Future occupants may want to take advantage of the “Do Not Disturb” door hanger though, to prevent untimely Special Forces visits.

Out of curiosity, I recently installed the controversial Green Dam Youth Escort software on my (soon to be replaced) home computer.  This is the content filter software mandated by the People’s Republic of China, billed as providing a “green, healthy and harmonious internet environment”. 

It is currently aimed at restricting online pornography but could be used for … (sinister flourish) … other purposes. From July 1st 2009, all personal computers sold within mainland China (included imported ones) must contain this software either preloaded or packaged for easy installation.

This is clearly a far-reaching move, particularly because most people are unlikely to toy around with the software pre-installed in the factory, and are certainly unlikely to re-install the operating system (there is no option to uninstall GDYE in Windows Add/Remove Programs - perhaps native Chinese speakers can find an option somewhere within the program).

When launching the quaint, dated installer program, a cartoony splash-screen pops up which is clearly encourages us to “think of the children!”. This reminds me of the youth-centric motive behind this software - it must be installed on all computers bought within China, but there must be a way for adults to control its behaviour otherwise why limit it as a ‘Youth Escort’?  Unfortunately, I cannot test this with my limited powers in Chinese linguistics (how many people do you know who can even say the words for ‘hello’, or ‘yes’, let alone read them in their native typography?)

The remainder of the installation process is - for those unable to read Chinese - an exercise in intuition and guesswork.  Sometimes there are a choice of three buttons - presumably OK, Cancel, and … ? - labelled with characters my home computer is not even set up to display.

There is a licence agreement which, if you scroll down, has a translation in English.  This is a third-party package included with the GDYE - namely the Intel Open Source Computer Vision Library.  The original text of the licence shipped with this framework is faithfully reproduced (there is no licence agreement provided in English for the content filter itself).

The inclusion of this “Computer Vision” library is - at first - perplexing.  It is an image-processing toolkit, specifically aimed at “facial recognition, motion tracking and mobile robotics”.  A little imagination leads to fears that the software uses the on-board webcam most laptops today ship with, to identify the user of the computer.  But the truth is not as sinister - Green Dam ostensibly uses this library to detect images of nudity displayed in a web brower for example, and block them.

As the installation proceeds, several more chinese prompts are displayed and then there is a promising disappearence and system reboot as we gather the software has been successfully installed. Perhaps the contents of my home computer are now being long-hauled back to China?

I try a few URLs to test the pornographic filter (pure imagination of course, I don’t have them committed to memory).  I cannot get them to load in Firefox: successful block. I call up a few sites that are outside the advertised jurisdiction of GDYE’s content policies but may be considered sensitive by the Chinese government - Wikipedia, Amnesty International, Twitter, BBC News (including some pages about Tiananmen Square).  All loaded as I’d expect, however this is not surprising, as the sophisticated and comprehensive Golden Shield Project already exists in China to block censored information at the network level.

In a moment of disturbed clarity I run a command to find out whether the program has opened an information pipeline between my computer and China.  There were no unusual internet addresses listed, although this does not prove that the program does not periodically ‘phone home’, or whether a hidden back door has been left open on the latch.

From this very brief experiment, Green Dam appears to be just another page in the vast encyclopedia of Chinese censorship techniques.  Although the dam has its holes, these are more than adequately patched by a raft of strategies on many levels in China today.

I decide I’ve had enough fun with my colourful escort for today, so I take my usual route to remove a recently installed program.  But it’s not listed.  In all fairness, no less can be expected from a government-mandated content filter. I’m not sure which software I’d prefer installed on my computer - a virus hell-bent on identity theft distributed by a motley crew of hackers, or a program colourful in name and appearance originating from the Chinese government to protect children.

I’m glad I kept my recovery CD.

BBC News have an article suggesting that this year will be memorable for mobile technology, namely 3G. I have to admit, I feel like a Luddite in that I have no interest in 3G. How many people really need to make video calls? OK it’s great technology, but if you strip out all the marketing, I think very few people would really improve their quality of life with one of these handsets.