Slashdot Mirror
Google Hacked, May Pull Out of China
D H NG writes "Following a sophisticated attack on Google infrastructure originating from China late last year, Google has decided to take 'a new approach' to China. In their investigation, Google found that more than 20 large companies had been infiltrated and dozens of Chinese human rights activists' Gmail accounts had been compromised. Google has decided to 'review the feasibility of [its] business operations in China,' no longer censoring results in Google.cn, and if necessary, to 'shut down Google.cn, and potentially [Google's] offices in China.'"
Couple this with Slashdot's coverage of a Baidu site hacker takeover and the constant claims of a "Don't be evil" violation for following Chinese censorship demands on google.cn... maybe there just isn't any money to be made there without problems that threaten Google's reputation that it cashes in with elsewhere. So much for free trade... this means info-technology war.
Google has been skirting the edge of their "don't be evil" policy with China since the start. If you have to censor your search results, it's not worth the trouble.
Google controls ~25% of the search traffic in China. Not the monolith they are in Europe or the U.S. but enough that everyone in China would know the government was blocking Google. On the other hand they are currently running a major crackdown on internet porn and could potentially try to use that (and google's "refusal to help protect Chinese children from western vice) as an excuse.
We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.
Oh so now they are going to discuss censorship with the Chinese. And they didn't decide to do this before? And it never occurred to them that the intelligence agencies of foreign governments would spy on them?
This all smells of some PR stunt. After investing billions in China and bending over violently for commie murderers, they still got their asses handed to them by Baidu. This is their way of pulling out of a losing market while looking like good guys.
The lesson is simple: Work with evil and evil will still screw you over. It took Google wrong enough to realize this. There's a real temptation to Godwin this with a comparison to Neville Chamberlain. But the result is clear: Google tried to cooperate with China in hope that some good with come of a compromise policy. The end result is that the Chinese still tried to infiltrate Google to serve its censorious, abusive ends.
While the impact for chinese people could not be that large, the impact for Google is huge. It is a really ballsy move from them to risk losing the enormous chinese market.
does a US company do business with regimes with poor human rights records?
specifically, does an internet company help such a government with restrictions on freedoms?
what if the company's motto is "don't be evil"?
score one for human rights
and score one for google's integrity
today is a good day
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free.
Clarence Darrow
Translation: "We were cool with doing business with you, even effacing our own corporate values, because your country is a lucrative market. But it wasn't enough for us to be cooperative -- you got in our servers and messed with our stuff. And you know what -- that'll cost us more in our reputation and business costs than you're worth, so goodbye."
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
IIRC, the URL is even encrypted in a HTTPS request and the ONLY things that are not are the IP and FQDN
Jesus Christ. It's not growing balls unless they ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING. If they don't do anything, then it's called POSTURING (aka: S.S.D.D.)
...I'd have pegged the Yes Men all over this story. As it stands, this may be a cynical business move, or this may be Google finally realizing just who they've been in bed with this whole time, but either way's a win.
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
I want to be able to know which addresses have connected to my account, or, more importantly, who *tried* to access it. The information is there. Why not show it? It would allow one to immediately find out someone's trying to break in.
Doesn't China make like almost all the computer parts? We are happy enough to get hardware from them. Hell, they make most everything we use nowadays. Are you ready to give all that up?
I agree. I have felt for quite some time that while Google is not "evil", they are a corporation and are not to be trusted. However, this action sheds a new light on Google. Google was willing to compromise with China and censor their results. However, Google considers that people's email accounts are not to be accessed by those not authorized to do so. It is clear to me from Google's reaction to the hacking of dissenters' email accounts that Google believes this was the act of the Chinese government and is willing to act as if that is proven.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I'm ready to stop buying Chinese, if possible. I've already stopped buying products manufactured in China if they are for my daughter. Anyone want to start on-shore manufacturing? Seems like German toys and French health products are the only alternative.
all the moral relativists will be saying you can't possibly be trying to extend american style rights and freedoms to china. that you have no right to do that and (my favorite part): trying to extend liberties in countries outside the usa is imperialism (!?)
<sarcasm>
you westerners can't possibly judge china because it has a complex history and culture you will never fully understand. you should be sensitive to interesting cultural differences that makes the world an exciting place, like: the chinese enjoy being slaves of the state. that the chinese don't like individualism. that's just a western thing. the chinese like being in a giant harmonious ant colony. the chinese are like worker robots and they like it that way. because of complex historical and cultural reasons you can never grasp. the mandarins of imperial china were highly bureaucratic and so you see the chinese like this highly regimented "harmony". so just accept it. ignore those pesky calls for human rights. clearly tools of western imperialism
</sarcasm>
what you need to do is suck up to the grumpy old technocrats in beijing, like every other kiss ass:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30292772/
thank you google, for not being that kiss ass, FINALLY
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Actually it could be large to China. Not so much in and of itself, but what it overall represents. China's policies risk creating a situation where there is the "China Internet" and the "Real Internet." That is going to be problematic for business. If China is all home grown, censorship based systems that are in use there and nowhere else, it'll make it a lot harder to do business in the world.
Also, it can cause loss of face and legitimacy for them. Remember that China is not like North Korea, their populace kept all at home, ignorant of the rest of the world. The Chinese travel a lot, they study and work in other countries. In the department I work for on campus we have tons of Chinese grad students. If it turns out that the Internet is totally different in China than the rest of the world, that China won't let you see most of what is out there, well then these people are going to start asking why.
When the censorship is more low key, more invisible, things like the Chinese Google just having different search results on things, it isn't the kind of thing many will notice. After all Google localizes results everywhere, that certain ones are omitted in China is harder to notice if you aren't looking for it. However if it is a situation where they discover that these services everyone else uses are available AT ALL in China, then they start to wonder why.
This still doesn't work. SSL is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, if you control enough of the flow of information in a country. If you have 100% unfettered control over the network traffic on a single machine, you simply make the browser thing the cert you're seeing is certified by (insert cert authaurity here) but in reality the key they get is one generated by (evil group here), then after traffic is encrypted by the computer in question, it is decrypted at the roadblock then re-encrypted using the proper key to the SSL protected server. The other direction is similar.
Since China owns every route of traffic in/out of their country and has control over it, and any CA's within china, it can most likely see the plaintext of all of that traffic anyway. Hell, if a CA operates in China, they probably are being forced to hand over their private keys to China for packet sniffing. SSL isn't all that secure when someone has complete control over your traffic. Nothing is really, except maybe quantum cryptography (for now).
I don't know how much of my comment history is available at present, but it doesn't seem that long ago that I was commenting that Google is not to be trusted because they are a corporation and they are all about advertising revenue. The fact that they have capitulated to China in the past was reaffirming to my perspective.
But if this story plays out and Google pulls out of China based on the Chinese government's persecution of descenters, opposition and critics, then I have to say that Goggle will actually start changing my mind about them after all. And I have to say, just like many others, changing my mind about something is not particularly easy to do -- but if they do this, I will be PLEASANTLY surprised.
In addition to that, any U.S. company that fails to take a similar approach to dealing with China is simply without balls by comparison.
I think you are giving google far to much credit if you believe their reasons here are human rights. Google has failed miserably in china, just about every search engine has kicked their arse, especially baidu, more likely google has realised they need to pull out of the their and by using this PR stunt they can do so and come out looking like the good guy rather than just another failed business venture.
it does not override, modify, or negate basic human rights
if there is in fact as aspect of culture, any culture, western, indian, russian, whatever, that is an aborgation of human rights, then it is up to you, if you consider yourself someone with a sense of principles, to oppose it
i'm not saying that the chinese should eat mcdonalds, i'm saying- hell, the CHINESE are saying (as in, the actual chinese, not their autocrats) that the chinese deserve HUMAN RIGHTS
there's a reason its called HUMAN rights, and not american rights or western rights
you are truly one deluded fool if cultural differences excuses gross violations of basic human dignity
what is your take on clitorectomies? is that west african tradition something to be respected, or fought? if you fight it, are you simply a cultural imperialist, an ethnocentric westerner?
do you believe that if you cross the straights of bosporus or the straights of gibraltar or the rio grande and *snap*, magic! human beings are fundamentally different and gross violations of human rights should be respected as quaint local custom?
i am not an american. i am a human being. it is in fact, those who think of themselves as american first, and a human second, or a brazilian first, and a human second, or a muslim first, and a human second, or whatever, that is the source of all the suffering in this world. what random arbitrary tribal boundary you are born within is a far, far secondary consideration to your allegiance to your HUMANITY. or, at least it should be. too many in this world have that backwards, and they are the source of our problems
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm certainly an advocate of freedom of speech, but branding China as "evil" is some serious overstatement. It's a country that has historically struggled with providing basic necessities and a reasonable standard of living to its ridiculously huge number of people.
It shouldn't be a surprise that China, preoccupied more with material matters than information, has lagged in catching on to the importance of intellectual property and freedom of speech.
That's a very weird way to put it. One doesn't need to "preoccupy" oneself with freedom of speech; freedom of speech is what you have in the absence of specific regulation, "by default"!
Instead, China specifically "preoccupied" itself with censorship, despite struggling with providing basic necessities etc.
And, yes, that is evil (as in, deliberately malicious).
Might be the largest amount of people, but likely not receiving the largest amount profit from.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
It is to Google's credit that they finally figured out the truth about China.
Of course, even truthier is the fact that China wants them gone anyhow, since they'd prefer to build their own little world inside their own little internet.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
I for one welcome our new BAIDU overlords.
Interesting, but what would happen to their current business model? (which has proven HIGHLY profitable since its inception.) How many ads do you see on Amazon.com? None, because they sell just about everything. Also, it would take Google many years and billions of dollars in capital to switch their business model. They would have to build up a distribution infrastructure, cut deals with suppliers, develop marketing tools, etc. True they have money to burn, but why, when they're doing OK as it is?
In the end, Google is pretty good at being Google, and doesn't really need to crack into a completely different market, like selling everything, at least, not yet. Maybe years down the road, or maybe they could sneak into it very slowly, but I just don't see this as a practical business move any time soon.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Gotta admit, Chimerica has a ring to it.
Google had 20-30% of search market in China. They have been losing market share to Baidu, which has pretty much all of the rest.
One theory is that the Chinese censorship rules were being jockeyed so as to make google.cn a miserable search engine, thus training the Chinese market to prefer local brands over Google. Rather than play a loser's game in the world's biggest market (defined, as Google surely does, by the number of people staring at screens), Google is out on their own terms now, with the possibility of reentry, brand intact, should the politics change.
It's also entirely possible that the idea of Chinese security services (the obvious but unproven culprit) hacking Gmail so they can arrest and torture human rights activists is so repellent to Google execs that strategy has gone out the window. "They're messing with our guys? F those guys, let's do some damage." So far, they have sought maximum publicity (delaying decisions, etc), which suggest some scorched earth is the goal.