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Unlikely Entanglement
Headquartered in a converted Victorian house, Milburn’s small company seems an unlikely candidate to become entangled in an international feud with China, except for one thing: it was a market leader in the U.S. for software that lets parents and schools block objectionable web content, like pornography and violence.

China was looking for software to do the same thing on a national scale. In May 2009, Chinese officials ordered web-filtering software called Green Dam Youth Escort installed on every computer sold in the country. They touted the software’s ability to protect young Internet users by filtering pornography. Critics in China, who identified more than 6,000 political keyword filters, branded it an extension of China’s censorship regime.

When University of Michigan researchers examined the program in June 2009 to see how it worked, they discovered that thousands of lines of code directly matched Milburn’s software, which has 1.1 million active users. Included, apparently by mistake, was a CYBERsitter upgrade announcement -- the “smoking gun” that the software had been pirated, according to Milburn.

Copied Code
An independent analysis later found that four of the five active filters were copied almost verbatim from CYBERsitter and that Green Dam could not operate correctly when those filters were disabled. It’s possible the code was stolen in an earlier hack, but Milburn believes the thieves simply bought a copy and broke the encryption protecting the code.

In interviews with reporters, he said he was considering a lawsuit and vowed to pursue an injunction.

On June 24 -- 12 days after Milburn went public with his legal intentions -- the hackers made their first appearance. Working from her home office 150 miles south of Santa Barbara in Orange County, Jenna DiPasquale, 39, who is Milburn’s daughter and Solid Oak’s one-woman marketing department, received a carefully forged e-mail containing hidden spyware.